You always do a good job of articulating a general feeling I’ve had about a piece of media I’ve consumed. Watching Longlegs reminded me of how the critic Mark Fisher defined the terms “weird” and “eerie”. Being weird requires a situation that defies taxonomy, and being eerie evokes a feeling of presence in emptiness, or vice versa. Longlegs seems to try to subvert both forms of unsettlement. The evil is contained by Christian imagery, and the emptiness is given presence in the form of the “evil doll” presents Longlegs creates. You’re completely spot on in suggesting that adult horror isn’t being chased by some kind of bogey with traits that can be observed and fought. The kind of horror that works on adults is the kind that suggests that everything you love and cherish is held up by a few rickety poles that aren’t up to load bearing strength. I remember reading “Ubik” and “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” with a sense that both of those books infect reality, and your thought processes in horribly unsettling ways. Thanks for the candid and thoughtful review.
I don't know if Kiyoshi Kurosawa has strong feelings about Freud's essay on the uncanny, but I think his films are wonderfully based in the ideas Freud explored there. Speaking of weird/eerie. Also, thank you!
I don't know if you saw Oz Perkins' Gretel & Hansel, but I think he makes similar mistakes in that one as well. The terrifying part of that fairy tale is not the witch in the woods. It is that one day your mother might leave you in the fucking woods where there is a witch. A lot of misplaced attention in his work.
This is also how I felt about Babadook. That movie is theoretically pretty "adult" - a mother under immense stress and grief, with repressed anger and resentment of her own child, maybe becoming or manifesting a threat to the child itself - but it still left me kind of cold. I couldn't tell whether the script was too unsympathetic to the mother (would placing blame on a child really be the immediate - unconscious or not - reaction to a woman suddenly losing her husband in contemporary times?) or not sympathetic enough (Does her rage only bring up terror & pity because its about the death of her husband, not some other, maybe even more self-interested, source?). It was nice to see a horror movie that took the ambivalent parts of motherhood seriously, but I just didn't really love the way it utilized that theme.
also I think Babadook, while genuinely scary and having some good moments, is also the turn toward the literal in horror. the monster is a manifestation of her grief? yeah, okay. easy to “dissect” in a think piece, etc. I think there is more of interest in Babadook than what followed, but there is something just so neat and tidy about the ending that bothers me.
Yep I agree completely. By turning a metaphor into a contained “monster”, you drain the film of its power to work on the viewer. The best horror suggests that there isn’t really a boundary between the consumer and the creator, that the world of David Lynch or Philip K. Dick etc. are our world too, if we choose to burrow beneath the surface comforts we rely on to get through the day. I’m thinking of the ear covered in ants hiding in the perfectly manicured suburban lawn, at the beginning of Blue Velvet.
Se7en is my favorite serial killer movie and the only one I really connect to personally. It’s not perfect, and I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the ending, but overall it successfully captures the feeling of having been abandoned by God. I think there is an argument to be made that God is the ultimate villain in that story-Spacey’s character imagines himself as a wicked tool of judgment, used by God and then destroyed in his turn like the Babylonians in Habakkuk, and how do we know that he is wrong? Silence, Zodiac, and Cure do not hit me in the same way, but they are all serious movies with something to say and I can see how they could get under someone’s skin.
Longlegs, by comparison, is basically weightless. I can recognize the thought and effort that went into it on a technical level (although I don’t really understand how the ‘negative space’ stuff is any better than reliance on jump scares-it’s all mechanics), but as far as I can tell it is fundamentally just not about anything. As you say, recognition of the fact that truly horrific violence can and semi-regularly does take place within the family should be brain-breaking, and if you are going to make a movie about that phenomenon you ought to be able to say something about what it means or why it happens or at least depict it with emotional force. What Longlegs gives us instead is a story where men murder their families and themselves because they are being controlled by Satanic dolls (????????). I am open to counterargument but I don’t see how this means anything at all. I don’t understand what real fears or preoccupations are being addressed, and I don’t understand how anyone could be honestly afraid of a ‘Satan’ (as you say) who exists purely on the level of imagery.
Angela Jade Bastien is one of the few actual movie critics left. I don’t always agree with her, but that’s not the point of a critic- something her peers have completely forgotten.
Sometimes I wish I could watch horror movies. They're just too damn scary, but for a while I've wanted to write a probing, revelatory essay about how the novel Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown (set in Philadelphia) is notable not because it starts with an extraordinary event of spontaneous combustion but because it ends with the ordinary-ish event of a man murdering his whole family because he thinks God ordered him to do it. That's the starting point of Anglo-American literature for you.
This is how I felt about "Hereditary". It was basically built off a lot of allusions to Rosemary's Baby and a few other, much better horror films, but when the movie was over I realized I really didn't like it at all, and I felt stupid for how much it had scared me (and it did genuinely scare me with all the images of the demonic grandmother, but it also made me scoff). Over and over and over again - because my low opinion was so unpopular - people cited that it was genuinely scary to justify it being a good film. When I brought up that none of its apparent themes added up to anything substantial (the vague gender expression of the youngest child being inelegantly "explained away" with the subplot of demonic possession; That "generational trauma" didn't really seem to stick as a theme given that the reaction of Toni Collette to the sudden death of a child and her family being cursed was entirely reasonable and not I think anyone's definition of insanity; That the theme of religious guilt applied to a family that didn't seem to have any particular religious affiliation just didn't work) I mostly heard: "It scared me, Toni Collette is a very good actress, and it was 'cool'."
That movie (along with The Witch - a movie I liked a lot more than Hereditary) is basically what turned A24 into a powerhouse for acquiring self-financed indie projects and distributing them, and aligning itself with "elevated horror" (a term I hate). It also seemed to set the tone for a lot of the films they distribute - movies full of references to other films that don't have much to say on their own.
I enjoyed Hereditary but I also think the most effective, specific moment of horror was Charlie’s death. Mostly because I have a peanut allergy.
That terrible chain of events *is* possible - it’s an escalation taken to its most grotesque conclusion and that’s why it blows the other jump scares out of the water. And I enjoy the jump scares! But very few horror films make me feel like I am also dying. There’s really only the Charlie sequence and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
A lot of these ‘elevated genre’ artists use their speculative fiction elements as a copout to avoid more interesting narrative questions. It leaves the audience with the worst of both worlds. The horror elements don’t get explored beyond the first handful of tropes we’ve already seen done better. The emotional/moral core of the story is left wanting.
And quite frankly this seems like the laziest way to engage with the concept of family annihilators. The devil made him do it! He’s a nice guy who just snapped one day!
These are already the go-to explanations for family annihilators in real-life. A more curious director would use horror to complicate this narrative, not replicate it as-is.
You always do a good job of articulating a general feeling I’ve had about a piece of media I’ve consumed. Watching Longlegs reminded me of how the critic Mark Fisher defined the terms “weird” and “eerie”. Being weird requires a situation that defies taxonomy, and being eerie evokes a feeling of presence in emptiness, or vice versa. Longlegs seems to try to subvert both forms of unsettlement. The evil is contained by Christian imagery, and the emptiness is given presence in the form of the “evil doll” presents Longlegs creates. You’re completely spot on in suggesting that adult horror isn’t being chased by some kind of bogey with traits that can be observed and fought. The kind of horror that works on adults is the kind that suggests that everything you love and cherish is held up by a few rickety poles that aren’t up to load bearing strength. I remember reading “Ubik” and “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” with a sense that both of those books infect reality, and your thought processes in horribly unsettling ways. Thanks for the candid and thoughtful review.
I don't know if Kiyoshi Kurosawa has strong feelings about Freud's essay on the uncanny, but I think his films are wonderfully based in the ideas Freud explored there. Speaking of weird/eerie. Also, thank you!
I don't know if you saw Oz Perkins' Gretel & Hansel, but I think he makes similar mistakes in that one as well. The terrifying part of that fairy tale is not the witch in the woods. It is that one day your mother might leave you in the fucking woods where there is a witch. A lot of misplaced attention in his work.
I’ve tried two of his movies, so I probably won’t watch Gretel and Hansel if it has the same issues. His movies have that nepo-auteur vibe.
This is also how I felt about Babadook. That movie is theoretically pretty "adult" - a mother under immense stress and grief, with repressed anger and resentment of her own child, maybe becoming or manifesting a threat to the child itself - but it still left me kind of cold. I couldn't tell whether the script was too unsympathetic to the mother (would placing blame on a child really be the immediate - unconscious or not - reaction to a woman suddenly losing her husband in contemporary times?) or not sympathetic enough (Does her rage only bring up terror & pity because its about the death of her husband, not some other, maybe even more self-interested, source?). It was nice to see a horror movie that took the ambivalent parts of motherhood seriously, but I just didn't really love the way it utilized that theme.
also I think Babadook, while genuinely scary and having some good moments, is also the turn toward the literal in horror. the monster is a manifestation of her grief? yeah, okay. easy to “dissect” in a think piece, etc. I think there is more of interest in Babadook than what followed, but there is something just so neat and tidy about the ending that bothers me.
Yep I agree completely. By turning a metaphor into a contained “monster”, you drain the film of its power to work on the viewer. The best horror suggests that there isn’t really a boundary between the consumer and the creator, that the world of David Lynch or Philip K. Dick etc. are our world too, if we choose to burrow beneath the surface comforts we rely on to get through the day. I’m thinking of the ear covered in ants hiding in the perfectly manicured suburban lawn, at the beginning of Blue Velvet.
Se7en is my favorite serial killer movie and the only one I really connect to personally. It’s not perfect, and I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the ending, but overall it successfully captures the feeling of having been abandoned by God. I think there is an argument to be made that God is the ultimate villain in that story-Spacey’s character imagines himself as a wicked tool of judgment, used by God and then destroyed in his turn like the Babylonians in Habakkuk, and how do we know that he is wrong? Silence, Zodiac, and Cure do not hit me in the same way, but they are all serious movies with something to say and I can see how they could get under someone’s skin.
Longlegs, by comparison, is basically weightless. I can recognize the thought and effort that went into it on a technical level (although I don’t really understand how the ‘negative space’ stuff is any better than reliance on jump scares-it’s all mechanics), but as far as I can tell it is fundamentally just not about anything. As you say, recognition of the fact that truly horrific violence can and semi-regularly does take place within the family should be brain-breaking, and if you are going to make a movie about that phenomenon you ought to be able to say something about what it means or why it happens or at least depict it with emotional force. What Longlegs gives us instead is a story where men murder their families and themselves because they are being controlled by Satanic dolls (????????). I am open to counterargument but I don’t see how this means anything at all. I don’t understand what real fears or preoccupations are being addressed, and I don’t understand how anyone could be honestly afraid of a ‘Satan’ (as you say) who exists purely on the level of imagery.
Angela Jade Bastien is one of the few actual movie critics left. I don’t always agree with her, but that’s not the point of a critic- something her peers have completely forgotten.
Sometimes I wish I could watch horror movies. They're just too damn scary, but for a while I've wanted to write a probing, revelatory essay about how the novel Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown (set in Philadelphia) is notable not because it starts with an extraordinary event of spontaneous combustion but because it ends with the ordinary-ish event of a man murdering his whole family because he thinks God ordered him to do it. That's the starting point of Anglo-American literature for you.
write it for TCWD!!!!
Well shoot, maybe I will. Huh.
This is how I felt about "Hereditary". It was basically built off a lot of allusions to Rosemary's Baby and a few other, much better horror films, but when the movie was over I realized I really didn't like it at all, and I felt stupid for how much it had scared me (and it did genuinely scare me with all the images of the demonic grandmother, but it also made me scoff). Over and over and over again - because my low opinion was so unpopular - people cited that it was genuinely scary to justify it being a good film. When I brought up that none of its apparent themes added up to anything substantial (the vague gender expression of the youngest child being inelegantly "explained away" with the subplot of demonic possession; That "generational trauma" didn't really seem to stick as a theme given that the reaction of Toni Collette to the sudden death of a child and her family being cursed was entirely reasonable and not I think anyone's definition of insanity; That the theme of religious guilt applied to a family that didn't seem to have any particular religious affiliation just didn't work) I mostly heard: "It scared me, Toni Collette is a very good actress, and it was 'cool'."
That movie (along with The Witch - a movie I liked a lot more than Hereditary) is basically what turned A24 into a powerhouse for acquiring self-financed indie projects and distributing them, and aligning itself with "elevated horror" (a term I hate). It also seemed to set the tone for a lot of the films they distribute - movies full of references to other films that don't have much to say on their own.
I enjoyed Hereditary but I also think the most effective, specific moment of horror was Charlie’s death. Mostly because I have a peanut allergy.
That terrible chain of events *is* possible - it’s an escalation taken to its most grotesque conclusion and that’s why it blows the other jump scares out of the water. And I enjoy the jump scares! But very few horror films make me feel like I am also dying. There’s really only the Charlie sequence and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
A lot of these ‘elevated genre’ artists use their speculative fiction elements as a copout to avoid more interesting narrative questions. It leaves the audience with the worst of both worlds. The horror elements don’t get explored beyond the first handful of tropes we’ve already seen done better. The emotional/moral core of the story is left wanting.
And quite frankly this seems like the laziest way to engage with the concept of family annihilators. The devil made him do it! He’s a nice guy who just snapped one day!
These are already the go-to explanations for family annihilators in real-life. A more curious director would use horror to complicate this narrative, not replicate it as-is.