Horror films - 2014
| The Babadook | Godzilla | Oculus |
| Only Lovers Left Alive |
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What if a normal, single mother, with a a troublesome child and few friends, was faced with a malevolent, supernatural entity bent on acquiring her son? This is the premise of the Australian film The Babadook.
The story centers on Amelia, a woman living a life derailed. She had once had dreams of being a writer. She had been happily married and living a comfortable life in a middle-class neighborhood. The couple were expecting a child. A car accident on the way to the hospital turned her into a widow and a single mom. As her son, Samuel, nears his seventh birthday, Amelia is a woman exhausted. Her will is nearly sapped. Samuel has behavior issues – he acts and speaks impulsively and has an overactive imagination. He frequently awakens his mother at night due to imagined terrors. He fashions weapons to fight the monsters and creates trouble by taking a home-made crossbow to school. Her single status and her problem child make Amelia something of a social outcast.
One night, for Samuel's bedtime story, he selects an unfamiliar book . . . Mister Babadook. Told in the fashion of a child's pop-up book, it describes the very type of creature designed to give a child nightmares. Samuel's behavior problems soon escalate out of control, and given his past, it is reasonable for everyone to believe the problems are all in his mind, until Amelia becomes the one being haunted. Infestation leads to oppression. Oppression leads to . . . awful things. Amelia and Samuel both have to summon up what strengths they have to fight back.
This film has been critically-acclaimed and won the award for best first feature for producers Kristina Ceyton and Kristian Moliere from the New York Film Critics Circle. It has been nominated in several categories, including Best Film, Actress, Direction, and Original Screenplay with the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. Essie Davis shines in her role as Amelia. One feels for her situation and her growing despair as her predicament grows steadily worse. Writer/Director Jennifer Kent does a masterful job of building tension and feelings of anticipation throughout the film up to its bizarre climax. Noah Wiseman, as Samuel, gives a very animated performance as Amelia's 6-year-old son. If the film has a weakness, it is the sheer unlikability of this character, but the director may have chosen to depict him in just this way. It's a substantial role for someone so young to take on.
All in all, I recommend this film. If you enjoy well-paced suspense and good performances, you should enjoy this. Release of the film in the United States has been very limited, but it recently became available on Amazon video on demand. You can order it in the Horror Films section of our store or by clicking on this link. The Babadook
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A character with great fame and name recognition is a terrible thing to waste. Godzilla shares this with Superman and Mickey Mouse. Everyone knows who they are but it doesn't make them any easier to write for. Sometimes it actually makes things harder. Perish forbid one come up with a story that goes against anyone's preconceived notions of who or what they think the character should be.
In the promotional materials for Godzilla much was made of the mammothness and unstoppability of the creature. He was THE unstoppable force. One of the slogans in the trailers mentions - "Nature has a way of maintaining balance." The implication was that the appearance of Godzilla was nature's response to humanity and our pervasive influence as we over-populate and run roughshod over the globe. I guess earthquakes, fires, and floods would be too subtle.
But this wasn't actually the case. The main threat in the film was posed by a pair of other beasts, named MUTOs (a ridiculous sounding acronym I won't even repeat). As giant movie monsters go, these two were more from the modern mold - alien-shaped heads, glowing eyes, and tentacles. As a biologist friend remarked, "unlike anything that has ever appeared on Earth." Godzilla, at least, is patterned after creatures that have actually existed.
Godzilla appears (not often or soon enough) only to do battle with the MUTOs. That, it seems, is the balance he is meant to provide. He is surprisingly amiable around humans, even bizarrely swimming along with the navy to engage the "bad" monsters.
The military's only ideas for stopping the creatures who feed on radioactivity is to nuke them. Seriously? I believe I'd have at least given nerve toxins and biological weapons a chance.
The humans in the film are either wasted or in the way. They are only there because we really would be bored just watching giant monsters stomp around for two hours. Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche's roles are reasonably well-played but too short-lived. Ken Watanabe mostly stands around looking awed or horrified. David Strathairn has little to do except look determined in the Toshiro Mifune (military commander) role. One gets the feeling these name actors were just placed in the cast list to give the film a little added credibility. The actors with more screen time, to give us the "human element" were the younger Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen. They made a pleasant and earnest enough young couple with a son, but the contribution they made could have been accomplished with less screen time taken away from the real star of the movie. Their characters were also so two-dimensional that it was really hard to have more than a passing interest in them.
One of the most infuriating things the director, Gareth Edwards, chose to do was to cut away from the scenes with Godzilla in them. The audience has to wait about an hour before the title character and star of the film finally appears. He roars and engages another giant creature and then the camera cuts away. I assume this is because we are supposed to be much more interested in the people running away than we are in the giant monsters fighting. (Or are actors cheaper than CGI?) This is done every time the creatures engage until the climactic battle at the end of the film.
Godzilla made enough money that there is already a trilogy planned. (Why does everyone love trilogies so much, especially when third movies are usually so bad?) I hope that if this is so, they can put a bit more emphasis on the title character next time and improve on the human characters and sub-plots.
- JC
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A word of advice that will go unheeded (at least by characters in horror movies): When confronted with a malevolent force with powers over your perception of reality, don’t play with it. Run away. But then, where would our story be?
Oculus, a film directed by Mike Flanagan and written by Flanagan and Jeff Howard, tells the tale of two siblings, 12-year-old Kaylie and 10-year-old Tim, whose world was slowly destroyed by an antique mirror their father hangs in his study.
The film jumps back and forth in time. We are introduced to Tim at the beginning of the film as he is released from a mental institution after eleven years. When his older sister picks him up, he has been convinced through his therapy that the traumatic events that led to his confinement had no supernatural aspect. He believes what the authorities concluded, that their father cheated on their mother, she suffered a breakdown, he shot her, and then Tim shot him. However, Kaylie remembers things differently. That everything that happened was caused by the influence of the mirror. While Tim was locked away at the institution, Kaylie spent her years researching and tracking down the mirror. Her research reveals a sinister past and just as Tim is released, she uses her position in an auction house to gain access to the mirror after a recent sale. She asks him to help her in proving the mirror has supernatural powers and to fulfill the promise they made to each other as children – to "kill" it.
Flashbacks to the events from their childhood are interspersed with the story in the present and as the mirror warps what they see and hear, the line between past and present blurs. The story, complex and frightening, unfolds as a horrible puzzle. One knows the picture will come into focus eventually, but dreads what will be seen.
There are familiar themes in this film that reminded me of others – bending reality so the lines between what is real and what is illusion are lost as in The Shining, an attempt to use reason and technology to attempt to quantify and control a supernatural force as in The Legend of Hell House, the mystery as to the evil’s intentions and the limits of its power as in The Ring.
I would recommend this film to anyone who prefers their horror built gradually and with a plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering how all this can possibly end.
- JC
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In the past few years, tales about vampires ceased to be mere lurid tales of blood-sucking undead creatures that seduced and fed on the living. Now they are depicted more romantically as immortal, superhuman versions of ourselves. They are just people who happen to be stronger and faster than the rest of us mere mortals. Their sensibilities are sharper than ours too. Ann Rice's books make much of the vampire's much keener perceptions of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Sure, they drink blood, but is that much worse than us eating meat? The vulnerability to sunlight and the need for concealment of their nature seem the only real drawbacks.
Only Lovers Left Alive offers us a tale of two vampires, lovers for centures, but living in separate cities as our story begins; he in Detroit and she in Tangier. She is a lover of books and literature. He is a lover of music and science. Imagine what it would be like, to live for hundreds of years, with an attractive appearance and a sharp mind, and to have known some of the finest minds in history.
However, Adam has become despondent and thinks of ending it all. Even an immortal can grow weary of the world, it seems. Eve, sensing his mood, goes to Detroit to be with him. Shortly after, Eve's sister, also a vampire, shows up uninvited. Though Eve still has warm feelings for her, she is nothing like them and soon spins their lives into a turmoil.
This film, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, is no typical horror or adventure story. It is more of a character study of how monsters live. Adam and Eve are played perfectly by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. John Hurt is good, as always, as their friend Christopher Marlowe (yes, that Christopher Marlowe) and Mia Wasikowska is painfully perfect as the sister-in-law from Hell.
If you wonder why you haven't heard of this critically-acclaimed, quirky dark fantasy, it is because this film was only released in Europe. However, Amazon has it on disc and streaming video. If thoughtful adult vampire fiction intrigues you, I heartily recommend this film.
- JC