A DJLE Christmas Chronicle: 10 Hipster Horrors

It’s starting to feel a lot like Christmas!

Okay, a month till – almost too early for it – but who here hasn’t wished Woolworths, Spar et al would hang their baubles and tinsel wreaths, and we all be done with 2020 already?

The innocent promise of New Year, always hopeful of a turning of the dog-eared page, presumptuous of a clean slate of conscience, fearlessly made promises that may or may not become commitments (resolutions, in the common speak), that illusory desire for the horrors of yesteryear to dissolve away at the stroke of 00:00. Alas, we’re still going on November; who even had a notable October?? It’s been a vast blur of a narrower set of life events, and a few too many lost holidays …

Hipster Horrors: 10 Alternative Theatres Of Dread

Halloween has never generated much momentum in South African culture. There remains conservative resistance to what is still perceived by many to be a day of pagan frivolity. The holiday’s more subversive dimensions have been diluted into scantily clad nightclub gyrations and sporadic bands of trick or treaters (often mistaken as potential intruders). The COVID outbreak renders the evening more obsolete than ever. So, this is my attempt to stabilise the barely perceptible heartbeat of this non-holiday. With grim predictability, many film scribes and YouTube critics have started to dish out their top 10 horror film lists. It’s a safe piece of easily digestible content at this time of year. But I’ve noticed that horror films have a specific effect on the collective psyche that can make these lists redundant.

No one who has seen The Exorcist can in good conscience keep it off their list. The image of Regan administering her own passion play is singed into popular culture. Likewise, it’s impossible to dismiss that image of Leatherface at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His wild chainsaw slashes remain cinema’s most vivid depiction of unconsummated sexual rage (with what is surely the most dangerous phallic substitute this side of Seven). And don’t get me started on the gleeful Satanists of Rosemary’s Baby, tiptoeing around that apartment like drunken teenagers at a slumber party. You see my point. Perhaps there’s some Jungian dynamic at play; these films reflect archetypal fears that reside in the collective unconscious. There’s just little value in me rehashing the oedipal significance of Psycho at this stage.

So, I have decided go off the beaten track, compiling a list of ten films not generally considered horror pictures. They evoke similar feelings of dread and unease without slavishly adhering to tired tropes. I have narrowed the focus to films released post-2000 to give the list a sense of immediacy. The films are listed in chronological order, and I hope it offers a point of departure for those readers looking for unconventional horror thrills.

Happy Alternative Halloween!                   [* Spoilers Ahead!]

Mulholland Drive  (U.S.A.) – 2001

David Lynch has cornered the market in intangible dread. His unique oeuvre, steeped in dream logic and Freudian psychodynamics, is often too impenetrable for mainstream horror audiences. But I can think of nothing more disturbing than the splitting of the psyche and the slow descent into madness. Sure, the Winkies Diner scene is likely the most conventionally terrifying entry in the Lynch canon (Frank Booth aside). It’s the return of the repressed, violently threatening to rupture Diane/Betty’s neo-noir fantasy. But that moment of genre homage is actually a release from all the unexpressed horrors that permeate this film. Just think of Watts’s audition sequence, the unbearable intimacy of that leathery skinned embrace. Naomi Watts delivers a tour de force depiction of psychological disintegration. Lynch’s film is also a savage indictment of the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’, a monstrous money-machine whose internal logic of complacent entertainment is anathema to Lynch’s unyielding artistic vision.

Irreversible  (France) – 2002

Like fellow enfant terrible Lars Von Trier, Gasper Noe wants to push buttons. His cinema is at the vanguard of the New French Extremity movement, a deliberately transgressive brand of cinema that included such exercises in endurance as Inside and Martyrs. Irreversible is undeniably his pièce de résistance, a dark treatise on the concept of fate boldly told in reverse order. Noe’s thesis seems to be this: if fate – and by extension, God – is to be followed to its logical conclusion, then playing these events in reverse order changes nothing. The sustained rape of Monica Bellucci is at the heart of this film. It’s necessarily revolting, implicating an audience who already know the bloody aftermath. The traditional narrative of rape in cinema (be it Last House on the Left or Deliverance) ultimately defines their victims through that experience. Noe’s reverse chronology allows him to deepen Bellucci’s characterization and redefine the concept of victimhood. It is also interesting to note how Vincent Cassell’s benign misogyny is a subtle precursor to the horror that’s yet to come.

Elephant  (U.S.A.) – 2003

Gus Van Sant has straddled the contrasting worlds of commercial and arthouse cinema with aplomb. The Kodak-moment sentimentality of Good Will Hunting was a far cry from the taboo-breaking My Own Private Idaho. But none of his films can match this sharply observed commentary on suburban malaise. In response to the 2001 Columbine massacre, Van Sant decided to create a highly subjective account of the myriad pressure-points that could inform such a tragedy. There are no forced conclusions, just detached observations of this prosaic environment. He cleverly avoids the Larry Clark reductionism of putting all the responsibility on absentee parenting. The way the camera pans the corridors is mimetic of Carpenter’s voyeuristic gaze in Halloween (though this is the least satisfying slasher film you’ll ever see). There’s no ‘Final Girl’ to avenge the fallen. There are no gleefully orchestrated kills such as Rose McGowan’s demise in Scream. This is dispassionate execution, a reptilian response to a world slowly denuded of its humanity.

Dogtooth  (Greece) – 2009

This is what would have happened if Michael Haneke had directed The Truman Show. Yorgos Lanthimos’s second feature works as a chilling depiction of isolationism. It seems amazingly prescient given the current political theatre, where orange demagogues are empowered to create their own realities (and whose supporters are willing participants in their own deception). This Kafkaesque slice of absurdism reveals (through acts of Pavlovian perversity) the limitations of free-will. It makes you shudder to think just how many of your relationships are shaped by external forces. That shocking final shot of the older daughter trapped in the car provides a stark counterpoint to the aforementioned Truman Show. In true Hollywood fashion, Truman Burbank is able to free himself from the artificial prison that has come to define him. Dogtooth subverts this notion, suggesting that true liberation is a fallacy, much like the Hollywood movies that the daughters use as models for their rebellion. David Lynch refers to this as a ‘fantastic comedy’. That tells you all you need to know.

The White Ribbon  (Germany/Austria) – 2009

The full title of Michael Haneke’s bleak magnum opus reads: The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story. There must have been a few bewildered families leaving cinemas early that year. Haneke’s intense examination of the fictional village of Eichenweld is an excoriating critique of pre-World War One Germany. It examines the inner-workings of puritanical power structures, showing how violence is systematically instilled into children’s lives. The film takes on the dimensions of a folkloric mystery, with strange, seemingly arbitrary events occurring around the fringes of the drama. The children clearly represent incipient Nazism, but much like Van Sant in Elephant, Haneke isn’t looking for specific causalities. Rather, he depicts the village’s authoritarian milieu and asks “what else did we expect to happen?” The final scene with the children in the church looks like the birth of an alien species, as clearly defined from their forebears as Kubrick’s bone-wielding monkeys.

Blue Valentine  (U.S.A.) – 2010

Ari Aster recently plundered the fertile horror of crumbling relationships in his sophomore effort Midsommar. Derek Cianfrance’s more grounded approach comes even closer to capturing the horror of romantic ennui. Intercutting between the past and present of Dean and Cindy’s relationship is really at the heart of what makes this film so painful. The Super 16mm used to shoot their pre-marriage scenes is alive with the raw texture of American 70’s cinema. The Red One film used for the post-marriage scenes loses that grainy texture of possibility. There is nothing left to the couple to glean from one another. Dean’s hopeless romanticism, once heroic, is rendered pathetic in his attempts to defibrillate their dead marriage. Cindy is more pragmatic, but is nonetheless trapped by the patriarchy that has defined her entire life. Anyone who has been in a committed relationship can relate to these everyday horrors. Things change. Hairlines recede. Passion wanes with the passage of time. It’s those thousand little deaths the movie charts so agonizingly and that anyone can recognize. Like the whirring fireworks in the closing scene, romantic love is as ephemeral as it is beautiful.

Snowtown  (Australia) – 2011

This is the true story of the ‘Snowtown’ murders that ravaged the rural hinterlands of Adelaide in the 90s. Justin Kurzel has come as close as anyone to capturing pure evil on film (documentary footage aside). Watching John Bunting become the Pied Piper of this depressed rural community is perversely hypnotizing. He doesn’t possess charm in the David Koresh sense of the word. He is a tuning fork, sensitive to feelings of social neglect and systemic sexual abuse. But it’s the way that he is able to manufacture consent that truly appals. He holds court in shabby kitchens, where professional and non-professional actors vie for his approbation. His gospel of vigilante justice is merely a pretext to enact his sadistic fantasies. His Svengali-like grip on the young James Vlassakis is one of the most corrosive relationships ever committed to screen. In The Departed, Jack Nicholson said: “you can learn a lot, watching things eat.” Seldom has that been truer than in this depiction of John Bunting. He stuffs his face with the same thoughtless egocentrism that defines his murders. Never has evil felt so banal.

Under The Skin  (U.S.A.) – 2013

To call this the cerebral version of Species would be something of an understatement. This film – much like its otherworldly protagonist – balances glacial beauty with utter inscrutability. Jonathan Glazer owes a debt to the cold sterility of both Tarkovsky and Kubrick. Scarlett Johansson seduces and then obliterates Glaswegian men with robotic efficiency. This subversion of conventional ‘seduction’ confronts male audiences with their own casually predatory habits. This is also an immigrant story, with Johansson ferried around by her ‘handlers’ with little conception of her own identity. While Dogtooth challenges notions of free-will, Under the Skin looks even deeper, interrogating the burden of consciousness itself. It’s only after her attempted seduction of a horribly disfigured man that Johansson’s character begins to change. A sense of self is awakened by this aesthetic juxtaposition as she internalizes mankind’s superficiality. Her growing self-awareness and path towards consciousness ultimately leads to a vicious death. It almost begs the question: is that abandoned baby on the beach one of the lucky ones, free from the existential conundrum of mortality?

Nightcrawler  (U.S.A.) – 2014

This is Nosferatu for the 21^st century. Our protagonist – Lou Bloom – even possesses the cadaverous features of Schreck’s Count Orlok. Much like Murnau’s iconic creature of the night, Bloom is possessed by a nocturnal bloodlust that cannot be sated. While Orlok’s desires can be understood within the framework of intense physical addiction, Bloom’s motivations are much more sinister. Initially driven by pure monetary concerns, Bloom becomes increasingly obsessed with the aesthetic possibilities of his horrific tableaux. It’s a wonderfully scathing critique of the ‘artist’s’ moral responsibilities. It’s also a revealing portrait of society’s relationship with the most prevalent found-footage horror films: news stories. If you weren’t completely disillusioned with the Academy Awards before 2014, this would have broken you. Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t so much disappear into his role as his very persona is abducted. Those lugubrious eyes, so effective at generating puppy-dog sympathy, transform into empty cameras that see all but reveal nothing.

Deepwater Horizon  (U.S.A.) – 2016

Rereading The Terror, Dan Simmons’s epic critique of human folly, I was reminded of this ocean-bound parable of mankind’s hubris. On the surface, this painstaking depiction of BP’s offshore drilling disaster doesn’t scream horror. But look below the surface. Despite knowing the inevitable course of events, Peter Berg is able to sustain a level of tension reminiscent of Wolfgang Peterson’s submarine classic Das Boot. It has all the tropes of a classic haunted house film. The oil-rig creaks and yawns like a living thing, a great leviathan oblivious to the humans that call it their creation. And its ultimate retribution is as merciless as it was predictable. And the environmental aftershock of these tragic events reminds us that real-life ‘hauntings’ – much like cinematic ones – leave a trace. But not one bathed in sentimental afterglow à la Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House.