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Death, Decomposition and the Maiden

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The Shrouds

by Hope Madden

Cronenberg’s gonna Cronenberg. Isn’t that why we love him? Whether it’s 1983’s Videodrome or 2022’sCrimes of the Future, Dead Ringers (1988) or A Dangerous Method (2011), 1996’s Crash, 1986’s The Fly,  or his first feature, Shivers (1976), David Cronenberg is fascinated by the human body, sex, technology, and conspiracies in a way distinctly his own.

Even as you can kind of expect the expected in his latest, The Shrouds, the film is simultaneously more personal and less like a David Cronenberg movie than anything he’s made.

Vincent Cassel is Cronenberg’s stand in, Karsh Relikh, a man who, like Cronenberg, once made industrial videos but now creates opportunities for those who are interested to watch bodies rot. Karsh owns GraveTech, cemeteries with tech built into shrouds that wrap bodies. The shrouds contain micro xray cameras that allow mourners to see their loved ones—on a screen placed in the headstone, or conveniently on their phone.

It was Karsh’s overpowering grief after losing his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) that inspired the technology. But this being a Cronenberg film, the tech can’t be trusted.

Because Cassel is so clearly, right down to his hair style, playing Cronenberg’s avatar, it’s only fitting that Cronenberg plays with that idea. Hunny, an AI personal assistant programmed by Karsh’s former brother-in-law, Maury (Guy Pearce) even looks like Karsh’s late wife (also voiced by Kruger).

But is Hunny friend or foe? And does Maury have anything to do with the recent vandalism of the graves? Or is Becca’s sister (Kruger again) right in thinking it’s all a medical conspiracy?

The intrigue feels vaguely like Scanners or Videodrome, while the chilly sexuality pulls from the same preoccupations that fueled Crash. But Cronenberg leans more on dialogue and Douglas Koch’s precise cinematography to tell this story than any outright horror.

The Shrouds is not the kind of body horror usually associated with Cronenberg, but his corporeal obsession is more pronounced here than maybe any other film. Karsh is fixated on his wife’s body—the pieces lost during her struggle with cancer, its fate under the ground. It all feels like the filmmaker is asking us to accompany him on his own journey, not just through grief but through his reflection on his own preoccupations as a filmmaker.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for an especially compelling or exciting movie. The pace is slow, the performances stilted to match the dialog, and the resolution is nonexistent. The Shrouds has a grotesquely beautiful dreamlike quality, and it teems with notions both weird and fascinating. It just can’t pull that pull it all together into an entertaining whole.

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Your Roots Are Showing

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Frewaka

by Hope Madden

It’s 1973. Men in black suits with wicker cages on their heads lead a goat up a path to a wedding.

“Who invited them?” asks the bride.

“Nobody invites them. That’s the whole point.”

OK. I am in. Writer/director Aislin Clarke’s Frewaka—Irish folk horror told in the ancient tongue—grabs you early and clings to you like a melancholic Irish ballad.

After the wedding prologue, the film jumps to present day with a limp, a song, a lot of rosaries and a bang. Then Shoo (Clare Monnelly) takes a homecare nursing gig out in the countryside, caring for Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), who might be a little mad. She talks gibberish of listeners, a house below her house, and of being abducted on her wedding day by mysterious folk.

Clare has her own problems, but the longer she’s with Peig, the weirder the world becomes.

I dig a good Irish horror show and Frewaka (Irish for “roots”) delivers a trippy experience rooted in the fears, history and earth of Ireland. Clarke links generational trauma to Ireland’s traumatic history in a story about the upside-down world of mental illness and the fear of becoming your mother.

Wicker Man moments inject something insidious and sinister into the fable. Monnelly and Neachtain share a natural chemistry. Their performances are never showy, and that low key authenticity grounds the uncanniness of the story.

Clarke’s 2018 feature directorial debut The Devil’s Doorway tread some similar ground, upending the exorcism genre to expose Ireland’s caustic relationship with Catholicism. Her second feature is far more assured, far less predictable, and it boasts a richer and more layered composition.

There’s something obvious and unsatisfying in the climax that limits the film’s impact. Clarke opens strong and her cast keeps you guessing and engaged for as long as they can, but in the end, it feels as if she clung too closely to tales we already know. That can’t erase the mounting dread and nightmare imagery, though.

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Excellent Day for an Exorcism

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Shadow of God

by Hope Madden

To Michael Peterson’s credit, he tried something new within the exhausted exorcism subgenre. Working from a script by Tim Cairo, Peterson’s Shadow of God wonders whether God’s will is really such a great deal for humans.

Mark O’Brien (Ready or Not) is Father Mason, an exorcist forced to take a leave of absence when his colleagues begin dying during their rituals. He is forbidden to perform an exorcism until the church can investigate. So, I guess it’s too bad he’s so convinced that his dad (Shaun Johnston) is possessed.

There’s a lot going on with Fr. Mason’s dad, not the least of which is that he died of a gunshot wound years back when police raided the cult he led. Pretty surprising, then, when Dad turns up at the cabin.

Here’s what you’re working with: Catholic priest, undead (resurrected?) father, cultists, isolated small town, cabin. Lucifer (Josh Cruddas, Anything for Jackson) makes an appearance, plus there’s lust in Fr. Mason’s heart for his old friend Tanis (Jacqueline Byers, Prey for the Devil). She’s a war veteran and psychologist, so the battle between divinity and psychology gets a nod as well. Plus, loads of childhood trauma.

Quite a mishmash of horror mainstays. Peterson and his cast make a valiant attempt at keeping it all afloat, but Shadow of God would probably have been better served by a bit of streamlining. The film’s big revelation, a subversive idea that certainly merits its own film, deserved a tighter focus.

Instead, enormous leaps in logic paired with wholly irrational decision-making obscure the mystery that might make the big revelation more intriguing.

The FX are bad. The Raiders of the Lost Ark moment is silly. But in terms of reconsidering exorcism tropes, Shadow of God has some big ideas. They don’t entirely work, but at least it’s novel.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Best Canadian Horror

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We love Canada! As that nation’s proud neighbors to the south, we were thrilled to welcome Joey from horrorfacts.com to Fright Club to parse out the 5 best Canadian horror films. What makes it Canadian? It has to be directed by a Canadian, shot in Canada and, to the degree it’s possible to tell, set in Canada.

5. Red Rooms (2023)

True crime culture. Serial killer groupies. The Dark Web. Does all of it seem too grim, too of-the-moment, too cliché to make for a deeply affecting thriller these days? Au contraire, mon frère. Québécois Pascal Plante makes nimble use of these elements to craft a nailbiter of a serial killer thriller with his latest effort, Red Rooms.

Plante expertly braids vulnerability and psychopathy, flesh and glass, humanity and the cyber universe for a weirdly compelling peek at how easily one could slide from one world to the other.

His real magic trick—one that remarkably few filmmakers have pulled off—is generating edge-of-your-seat anxiety primarily with keyboard clicks, computer screens and wait times. But the tension Plante builds—thanks to Juliette Gariépy’s precise acting—is excruciating. They keep you disoriented, fascinated, a little repulsed and utterly breathless.

4. Pontypool (2008)

Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s shock jock horror film is best appreciated as a metaphor on journalistic responsibility and the damage that words can do. Radio air personality and general pot-stirrer Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) finds himself kicked out of yet another large market and licking his wounds in the small time – Pontypool, Ontario, to be exact. But he’s about to find himself at the epicenter of a national emergency.

McDonald uses sound design and the cramped, claustrophobic space of the radio studio to wondrous effect as Mazzy and his producers broadcast through some kind of zombie epidemic, with Mazzy goosing on the mayhem in the name of good radio. As he listens to callers describe the action, and then be eaten up within it, the veteran McHattie compels attention while McDonald tweaks tensions.

Shut up or die is the tagline for the film. Fitting, as it turns out that what’s poisoning the throng, turning them into mindless, violent zombies, are the very words spewing at them. It’s a clever premise effectively executed, and while McDonald owes debts all around to previous efforts, his vision is unique enough to stand out and relevant enough to leave an impression.

3. Possessor (2020)

Brandon Cronenberg’s created a gorgeous techno world, its lulling disorientation punctuated by some of the most visceral horror to make it to the screen this year. There is something admirably confident about showing your influences this brazenly.

Credit Cronenberg, too, for the forethought to cast the two leads as females (Jennifer Jason Leigh playing the remarkable Andrea Riseborough’s boss). The theme of the film, if driven by males, would have been passe and obvious. With females, though, it’s not only more relevant and vital, but more of a gut punch when the time comes to cash the check.

Possessor is a meditation on identity, sometimes very obviously so, but the underlying message takes that concept and stabs you in your still-beating heart with it.

2. Ginger Snaps (2000)

Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).

On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches.

Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore.

1. Videodrome (1983)

Videodrome was the last truly Canadian film in David Conenberg’s arsenal, and it showed an evolution in his preoccupations with body horror, media, and technology as well as his progress as a filmmaker.

James Woods plays sleazy TV programmer Max Renn, who pirates a program he believes is being taped in Malaysia – a snuff show, where people are slowly tortured to death in front of viewers’ eyes. But it turns out to be more than he’d bargained for. Corporate greed, zealot conspiracy, medical manipulation all come together in this hallucinatory insanity that could only make sense with Cronenberg at the wheel.

Deborah Harry co-stars, and Woods shoulders his abundant screen time quite well. What? James Woods plays a sleaze ball? Get out! Still, he does a great job with it. But the real star is Cronenberg, who explores his own personal obsessions, dragging us willingly down the rabbit hole with him. Long live the new flesh!

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Hellhound on My Tail

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Sinners

by Hope Madden

Ryan Coogler can direct the hell out of a movie, can’t he?

For Sinners, he reteams with longtime creative partner Michael B. Jordan to sing a song of a 1932 Mississippi juke joint. The Smokestack twins (Jordan) are back from Chicago, a truckload of ill-gotten liquor and a satchel full of cash along with them. They intend to open a club “for us, by us” and can hardly believe their eyes when three hillbillies come calling.

Jack O’Connell (an amazing actor in everything he’s done since Eden Lake) has a brogue and a banjo. He and his two friends would love to come on in, sing, dance, and spend some money, if only Smoke would invite them.

He does not.

The night becomes a standoff between those inside the club and those outside, but by the time Act 2 sets its fangs, Coogler and his terrific ensemble already have you invested in everyone inside.

The great Delroy Lindo effortlessly charms as bluesman Delta Slim. Wunmi Mosaku (His  House, Lovecraft Country) works with Coogler’s direction to turn the horror trope “supernatural expert” (the one person who can explain to the others what’s going on and how to stop it) into the film’s broken heart.

Newcomer Miles Caton shines as the young blues guitarist whose voice is so sweet it can conjure the devil.

The setting and period suit the film beautifully, giving Coogler room to play with ideas of religion and redemption, music and temptation, and everything else that offers hope to the powerless. Every character carries a rich history that you can feel.

Jordan impresses in dual roles, carving out unique but dependent characters. O’Connell delivers lines and lyrics with a lived-in magic, twisting together Coogler’s insightful ideas about how prayer and song are often tools of the oppressor.

It’s scary. It’s sexy. The action slaps. It’s funny when it needs to be, sad just as often. It looks and sounds incredible. And there’s a cameo from Buddy F. Guy, in case you needed a little authenticity.

When Ryan Coogler writes and directs a vampire movie, he gives you reason to believe there is yet new life for the old monster.

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Beauty and the Beatings

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The Ugly Stepsister

by George Wolf

Are we done clutching our pearls about the recent Snow White update? They’re about to get plenty gooey.

Really, writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt doesn’t care either way, she’s too busy infusing her feature debut with an impossible-to-ignore blast of sharp wit, subdued rage, and grotesque bodily horrors.

Yes, The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) the latest new angle to a classic tale, but don’t expect it follow the trend of humanizing misunderstood villains. Blichfeldt makes sure there are plenty of bad guys and girls throughout this Norwegian Cinderella story, punctuated by grisly violence surprisingly close to what’s in the 17th Century French version of the fairy tale penned by Charles Perrault.

As her mother Rebekka (Ane Del Torp) is set to marry the wealthy Otto (Ralph Carlsson), braces-wearing, teenage gawk Elvira (Lea Myren, amazing) dreams of one day marrying handsome Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). But not long after Mom, Elvira and sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) move into Otto’s manor, he drops dead and new stepsister Agnes (the awesomely named Thea Sofie Loch Næss) drops a bomb.

Otto was the one trying to marry for money. They’re broke.

You know the plan that’s hatched: Elvira has to marry Prince Julian. If she can prove herself to be the most beautiful and charming of the “noble virgins” assembled at the upcoming ball, Elvira can secure the family’s future. Neither physical imperfection nor that slut Agnes is going to get in Elvira’s way.

As Elvira learns that “beauty is pain,” Blichfeldt’s aesthetic recalls both Cronenberg and Fargeat, with wince-inducing procedures, the oozing of bodily fluids, and a proud, unflinching satirical lens. This is Blichfeldt’s reminder that these impossible beauty standards have a long history, as do slut shaming, compromised nobility and the limited options of desperation.

Plenty of ugliness to go around.

Myren carries the film with a transformational performance that parallels the impressive physical changes. Elvira arrives as a shy, impressionable child, but when she begins to resemble the required standard, the toll to keep it – while not quite as garish as in The Substance – is equally destructive.

The Ugly Stepsister is fierce, funny, gross and subversively defiant. But is one feature film enough to immediately put Blichfeldt on the watch list of cinema’s feminist hell raisers?

Yes. The shoe fits.

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Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman

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Dead Mail

by Hope Madden

Welcome to Peoria, IL sometime in the mid-1980s. A little mystery has taken hold of the post office. Letter sorters found a necklace in an envelope with the wrong address on it. It looks valuable, so that means Jasper (Tomas Boykin) will put his skills to the test to try to sleuth out who the jewelry belongs to and return it to its rightful owner.

There’s also this torn, bloody piece of paper about a kidnapping.

Filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s thriller Dead Mail builds on a wildly unrealistic concept: smalltown post offices with super-secure back rooms where pains are taken and spies may be accessed to solve mysteries behind lost mail. And yet, their analog approach to this period piece gives it a true crime feel you never fully shake.

The authenticity is not just in the lo-fi look—although the set design, costumes and hair are spot on. The wholly convincing performances, especially from two of the cast mates, pull you in.

Boykin’s low key, unflappable turn as the dead letter investigator quietly anchors the film—so quietly that the machinations around him are more likely to draw a “huh, I had no idea the Peoria post office went to such pains to track down lost mail” than they really should.

But the bulk of the film is carried on John Fleck’s shoulders. As Trent, the seemingly harmless organ enthusiast who has a man trapped in his basement, Fleck’s delivers magnificent work. There’s a beautiful loneliness in his performance that makes Trent irredeemably sympathetic.

DeBoer and McConaghy (Sheep’s Clothing), who co-write and co-direct, invest in character development enough to complicate your emotions. You’re genuinely sorry to see what happens to some of these characters, and yet, you just can’t hate Trent.

A couple of characters are there more for comic relief than anything, but even they are somewhat delicately drawn. And though the premise on its face is outlandish, every detail in the film convinces you you’re watching nonfiction.

Filmmaker and cast investment pays off. Dead Mail is clever, intriguing and wholly satisfying little thriller.

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I Dos and Don’ts

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The Wedding Banquet

by Hope Madden

Back in 1993, Ang Lee scored his first Academy attention when The Wedding Banquet was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. The marriage of convenience farce reimagined rom-com tropes and landed emotional hits thanks to nuanced direction and generous characterizations.

A generation later, director Andrew Ahn reimagines once again. His sweet film reexamines the same culture clash and romantic comedy tropes, this time with more of an insider’s viewpoint in an allegedly more progressive world.

Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a wealthy Korean man in the US, making art and living with his commitment phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang). The couple stays in the guest house behind the home of their friends Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), long-committed partners living through the heartbreak, hope, and financial burden of IVF.

Min’s student visa is about to expire, and his grandmother (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) has decided Min needs to return to Korea and take his place in the family business.

So, Min decides to marry a sex worker…no, wait. That’s a different movie. No, when Chris refuses Min’s sincere marriage proposal, he proposes something different. He will pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF if Angela will marry him to keep him in the country.

What follows is a dear if too broad comedic fable about found family, acceptance, and forgiveness. There’s no way Ahn—working from a script co-written with Lee’s original writing collaborator, James Schamus—could have foreseen the sinister cloud that hangs over immigrants, IVF patients, gay marriage, indigenous women, the entire LGBTQ+ population, and essentially every human represented by a character in this film.

The Wedding Banquet already feels nostalgic for a time when disapproving grandparents and medical bills were the only things a gay couple had to worry about.

That aside, Gladstone, You-jung, and Ang Lee regular Joan Chen (as Angela’s mother) are true talents. They do what they can to bring depth to their roles.

Yang struggles with the dramatic needs of his character while Tran has trouble with the comedic, but there’s charm in the mess. Ahn conjures a bubbly, romantic confection and maybe that’s needed right now.

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Fatherhood of the Future

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Daddy

by Rachel Willis

In a sterile conference room, a man speaks to a disembodied voice coming from a speaker. The voice is trying to determine if the man is the right kind of person to go on a government retreat that will decide if he would make a suitable father. If he’s not chosen, he will instead receive a vasectomy. So begins the dystopian comedy, Daddy.

Writers/directors Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman have crafted a new kind of hellscape with their look at toxic masculinity, the fear of vulnerability, and the competition that springs from the kind of scarcity that would lead a government to screen potential parents.

As four men arrive at the scenic mountain home, we’re given bits and pieces of the world that has given rise to such a scenario.  Mo (Pomme Koch) tells the others his girlfriend is at the female version of the retreat. The two decided to be screened at the same time. But while the men are housed in the lap of luxury, the women are apparently put through a more intense screening process. The subtle details that we pick up during the film’s run time make what we see on screen more interesting.

The men begin to descend into paranoia, leading to a certain amount of comedy as they try to decide what will make them seem like they’d be good fathers. The discovery of a realistic baby doll amps up the comedy.

Each actor brings a certain rigidity to their character that plays well with the idea that men have a hard time embracing their emotions. Scenes when the characters do display some vulnerability feel awkward – perfectly encapsulating how difficult some men find it to open up to other men.

When the film remembers that there is humor to be mined from such a situation, it shines. When it forgets, it becomes tedious.

However, it’s not hard to imagine this world, and Kelley and Sherman have fun wondering how men might react to the absurdity of it all.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Female Rage in Horror Movies

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Some of the greatest films in horror do not dwell on women in terror, but women in the throes of righteous fury. Ginger Snaps, Revenge, Alucarda, Possession, Teeth, Jennifer’s Body, The Love Witch, She Will, A Wounded Fawn, Immaculate, Ms. 45, The Craft, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, The Substance, American Mary—it’s a long list, each film on it more than worthy of attention.

Alas, we had to boil it down to 5. Here, recorded live with a fantastic audience at Gateway Film Center in Columbus, OH, are our picks for the 5 films that best channel female rage.

5. Watcher (2022)

If you’re a fan at all of genre films, chances are good Watcher will look plenty familiar. But in her feature debut, writer/director Chloe Okuno wields that familiarity with a cunning that leaves you feeling unnerved in urgent and important ways.

None of the beats are new, and as events escalate, others are pretty clearly telegraphed. But it’s the way Okuno (who helmed the impressive “Storm Drain” segment from V/H/S /94) slowly twists the gaslighting knife that makes the film’s hair-raising chills resonate.

Even as Julia pleads to be believed, the mounting indignities create a subtle yet unmistakable nod to a culture that expects women to ignore their better judgment for the sake of being polite.

4. Carrie (1976)

The seminal film about teen angst and high school carnage has to be Brian De Palma’s 1976 landmark adaptation of Stephen King’s first full length novel, the tale of an unpopular teenager who marks the arrival of her period by suddenly embracing her psychic powers.

Sissy Spacek is the perfect balance of freckle-faced vulnerability and awed vengeance. Her simpleton characterization would have been overdone were it not for Piper Laurie’s glorious evil zeal as her religious wacko mother. It’s easy to believe this particular mother could have successfully smothered a daughter into Carrie’s stupor.

One ugly trick at the prom involving a bucket of cow’s blood, and Carrie’s psycho switch is flipped. Spacek’s blood drenched Gloria Swanson on the stage conducting the carnage is perfectly over-the-top. And after all the mean kids get their comeuppance, Carrie returns home to the real horror show.

3. The Other Lamb (2019)

The first step toward freedom is telling your own story.

Writer C.S. McMullen and director Malgorzata Szumowska tell this one really well. Between McMullen’s outrage and the macabre lyricism of Szumowska’s camera, The Other Lamb offers a dark, angry and satisfying coming-of-age tale.

The Other Lamb does not simply suggest you question authority. It demands that you do far more than that, and do it for your own good.

2. The Nightingale

A mother’s grief is something many filmmakers see as the pinnacle in pain, the one emotion almost unimaginable in scope and depth and anguish. That’s why brilliant filmmaker Jennifer Kent begins here, using this one moment of ultimate agony to punctuate an almost unwatchable scene of brutality, to tell a tale not of this mother and her grief, but of a nation—a world—crippled by the brutality and grief of a ruling white male culture.

What happens to Clare (Aisling Franciosi) at the hands of Leftenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), the British officer to whom she is in service, is as brutal and horrifying as anything you’re likely to see onscreen. It’s the catalyst for a revenge picture, but The Nightingale is far more than just that.

Kent’s fury fuels her film, but does not overtake it. She never stoops to sentimentality or sloppy caricature. She doesn’t need to. Her clear-eyed take on this especially ugly slice of history finds more power in authenticity than in drama.

1. Audition

The prolific director Takashi Miike made more than 70 movies in his first 20 or so years in film. Among the best is Audition, a phenomenally creepy May/December romance gone very, very wrong.

Audition tells the story of a widower convinced by his TV producer friend to hold mock television auditions as a way of finding a suitable new mate. He is repaid for his deception.

Nearly unwatchable and yet too compelling to turn away from, Audition is a remarkable piece of genre filmmaking. The slow moving picture builds anticipation, then dread, then full-on horror.

By the time Audition hits its ghastly conclusion, Miike and his exquisitely terrifying antagonist (Eihi Shina) have wrung the audience dry. She will not be the ideal stepmother.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?