The Rule of Jenny Pen: A Geri-Horror Masterclass

There is a growing trend within the horror genre in which aging is being employed as a mechanism of terror. Geriatric horror—or, abridged, geri-horror—is taking the inevitably of aging (frightening in its own right) and factors closely associated with growing older (dementia and cognitive decline, physical deterioration, isolation and loneliness, communities for the elderly such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities) and examining them through the context of the horror genre.

Geri-horror is the natural successor to the hagsploitation movement in film of the 1960s and 1970s in which former Hollywood starlets would play deranged old women. The formula was simple: glam it down and camp it up. This subgenre—also known as “hag horror” or “grand dame Guignol"—captured Hollywood's seeming disdain for older women at the time yet, in an ironic, subversive twist, gave some of these actresses the best roles of their later careers. Think Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or Davis (again), Olivia De Haviland, and Agnes Moorehead in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) or Crawford (again) in Straight-Jacket (1964) or Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) or Shelley Winters in both Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and What's the Matter with Helen? (1971).

In geri-horror, expectations that elderly people are kind and harmless are upended. Take Minnie and Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for example, who turn out not to be frail elderly neighbors but satanic cultists and master manipulators in the plot to bring the Antichrist into being. Keeping with the satanism theme, there’s the entire community of senior citizens in the film The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) who are turning the children of a small California desert town into Satan worshipers or the eccentric Ulmans, played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, in Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009) who lure a young babysitter into a sinister trap. In 1988, The Legend of Hell House director John Hough employs silver screen legends Yvonne DeCarlo and Rod Steiger to play the unhinged parents of a weird, murderous family in the slasher American Gothic. Earlier, Lassie actor Arthur Space and television actress Mary Jackson played deranged proprietors of a sham resort where vacationing college girls were lured, fattened up, and then (literally) served up on platters in the lurid Texas Chainsaw Massacre cannibalism precursor, Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972).

At other times in geri-horror, old age itself is the source of the horror. In the film adaptation of Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story (1981), a group of elderly men calling themselves the Chowder Society are plagued by guilt-ridden nightmares stemming from an impulsive act in their collective past. In the film Late Phases (2014), werewolves preying upon the residents of a retirement community become a metaphor for struggling to relocate a physically challenged parent against their will into a retirement community. This one is stacked with a fantastic over-60 cast that includes Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island), Rutanya Alda (Mommie Dearest, Girls Nite Out, Amityville II: The Possession, The Dark Half), Caitlin O’Heaney (Savage Weekend, He Knows You’re Alone), Karen Lynn Gorney (Saturday Night Fever), and Tom Noonan (Wolfen, The Monster Squad). In M. Night Shyamalan’s pandemic-era Old (2021), the acclaimed director adapts the French-language graphic novel Sandcastle written by Pierre Oscar Lévy from France and drawn by Frederik Peeters from Switzerland, taking the body horror route to show aging as grotesque and inescapable—much in the way 2024’s The Substance does. Shyamalan’s other geri-horror contribution—2015’s The Visit—offered up a pair of sinister grandparents whose increasingly bizarre and disquieting behavior is cleverly couched within the Alzheimer’s symptom of “sundown syndrome.” Dementia takes centerstage in Relic (2020), an Australian gem of a cinematic metaphor about how the disease not only wreaks havoc on the victim but also on those closest—often caregivers.

In yet other works, aging is a badge of honor—and a weapon in confronting horror. In She Will (2021), Alice Krige plays an aging actress who goes to a healing retreat after a double mastectomy, where she discovers that the process of such surgery opens up questions about her very existence, leading her to start to question and confront past traumas. Likewise, Jamie Lee Curtis stepped back into her iconic role as terrorized babysitter Laurie Strode for David Gordon Green’s trilogy Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2023)—only this time her PTSD has fueled her preparedness, making her an AARP card-carrying survivalist and Final Grandma. This theme of “Don’t Fuck with Old People” is carried out again in Don’t Breathe (2016) and VFW (2019).

Requisite history lesson aside, The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)—directed by James Ashcroft and written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent, based on the short story of the same name by Owen Marshall—is the latest, and perhaps most fully realized contribution to the geri-horror subgenre to date. This haunting, malicious New Zealand-lensed psychological tale of elder-on-elder abuse features Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush as Stefan Mortensen, a judge who suffers a stroke, mid-sentencing, from the bench. He finds himself admitted to a nursing home (or “care home” as is the geographic idiom) for rehabilitation. His character, seemingly friendless, is the epitome of an entitled elite—dismissive toward women, caustic, and outright rude at times. The post-stroke wheelchair he finds himself in does little to humble him. Enter multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner and two-time Academy Award nominee John Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a fellow resident who’s as kooky as he is dangerous. Before becoming a resident, Crealy was the longtime handyman at Royale Pine Mews and that familiarity with the facility and its grounds gives him a different type of entitlement. He’s a geriatric bully—commandeering other residents’ food when the well-meaning if inattentive staff isn’t looking, aggressively shoving other residents out of the way during a dance activity, and—worst of all—paying nocturnal visits to his fellow residents’ room in the middle of the night to terrorize them with an eyeless hand puppet he calls Jenny Pen. The scenes in which Lithgow demands a pledge of allegiance to the titular doll that includes “licking its asshole” (thankfully, just the underside of Lithgow’s wrist) are chilling to the bone. Ashcroft wisely uses Lithgow’s towering 6’4” frame to powerfully frame the power dynamic between him and his frail elderly counterparts.

Crealy’s cruelty to the nursing home’s other residents varies from the humiliating (dumping a urinal full of pee onto Mortensen’s crotch while in bed) to the downright sadistic (tugging violently on the newly-inserted catheter of Mortensen’s roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare) or leading a demented woman who spends the majority of her screen time looking for the family about to pick her up and take her home any minute out of the gated grounds where tragedy befalls her). Although Mortensen reports the abuse, the nursing home’s administration does little to investigate, dismissing his concerns as part of his adjustment disorder. As Mortensen’s rehab fails to progress, he gradually loses his voice to the endemic ageism that sees the institutionalized elderly as ignorable. Still, Mortensen is determined to bring Crealy’s reign of terror to an end—using whatever means necessary. The film gradually builds in a tense game of cat-and-mouse before the two geriatric foes finally square off.

Ashcroft and company do a superb job of portraying life in a nursing home—from the near-drowning Mortensen experiences when left unattended in a bathtub when the aide leaves to retrieve towels to the way the center’s staff is portrayed as generally caring more about completing tasks than listening to what their elderly charges try to tell them. There is an intrinsic sadness hanging over Royale Pine Mews even as festive activities take place in the background and the residents’ care needs seem tended to adequately enough. It’s here—in the loneliness and social isolation at the end of one’s life, when autonomy is slowly lost and hope abandoned—that the geri-horror aspects of The Rule of Jenny Pen really kick in. There can be no happy ending because even if the villain is defeated, the audience knows that there is no escape for Mortensen from the decay aging brings.

Circling back to our de facto history lesson at the beginning of this review, The Rule of Jenny Pen is also notable for subverting the rules of the hagsploitation subgenre—here enlisting two Hollywood males of a certain age (Rush, 73 and Lithgow, 79) and placing them in the psycho-biddy cinematic scenario usually reserved for women. Ashcroft ably proves that the horrors of growing old in an ageist society aren't reserved just for women. It’s just another bit of the understated brilliance of this film that will likely go on to have a long shelf life.

Buckets of Blood and Gerontological Madmen in 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'

Horror fandom is a curious thing indeed. This week’s bemusement has been watching the horror faithful on social media extolling the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—the story of young people from out-of-town trespassing on other people's property and getting butchered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac named Leatherface—as a virtuous classic while in the same breath decrying the new TCM—a  story about young people from out-of-town trespassing on other people's property and getting butchered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac named Leatherface—as the stupidest thing they've ever seen. It's literally the same plot, just updated. It’s hard not to laugh out loud at the computer screen some days. I’m reminded of the tagline from Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie…’”

So, let’s unclutch those pearls and talk about the latest installment in the franchise that began with Tobe Hooper’s gritty 1974 slasher. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the ’22 film drops the “the” from its title) is directed by David Blue Garcia, with a screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin, from an original story co-written by Fede Álvarez (also a producer on the film) and Rodo Sayagues. Originally, the production began with brothers Ryan and Andy Tohill (who directed 2018’s The Dig) at the helm, but the directors were replaced with Garcia after studio displeasure with the footage they shot. That’s never a good sign.

Ripping a page from the playbook David Gordon Green used for his 2018 relaunch of the Halloween franchise, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre serves as a direct sequel to the original film—however it doesn’t necessarily retcon the sequels the way Green’s film trilogy does, with Álvarez stating in interviews that it's up to audiences “to decide when and how the events of the other movies happen.” Fair enough—and who cares, anyway, right? To tackle direct sequel problem #1—the 2014 death of Marilyn Burns, who played TTCM Final Girl Sally Hardesty—the filmmakers cast Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, an especially accomplished stage actor with about a dozen movie and TV credits each to her name. It’s excellent casting and Fouéré does the best with what she’s given; unfortunately, she’s not given anything other than a watered-down version of 2018’s Laurie Strode. To tackle direct sequel problem #2—the 2015 death of Gunnar Hansen, TTCM’s original Leatherface—Mark Burnham was cast in the role of the iconic horror villain. Burnham does a most respectable job given the big shoes he has to fill, but of course his character’s agility and stamina at (at least) age 70 requires a huge suspension of disbelief. Suffice to say that 2022 Leatherface is one fast, strong-ass motherfucker.

The new film opens as San Francisco speculators Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore)—with Melody's sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) and Dante's girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) along for the ride—travel to the remote, long-abandoned Texas town of Harlow. Melody and Dante plan to auction off the town’s properties to create a trendy, heavily gentrified area for hipsters of every persuasion. Why, you ask, would said trendy hipsters with ample cash to burn pick an out-of-the-way, hot-as-Satan’s-ass locale like bumfuck Texas as an investment opportunity? No one really knows—and Lila even questions it aloud at one point in the film.

Upon the foursome’s arrival, they discover that one of the buildings—the town’s orphanage—is still occupied by the elderly Mrs. Mc (a welcome cameo by the wonderful Alice Krige) and a silent, towering older man. While enjoying some sweet tea provided by the congenial Mrs. Mc, a kerfuffle over who holds the rightful deed to the orphanage breaks out—and ends with Mrs. Mc suffering a heart attack. Fearful of the bad publicity, Ruth offers to accompany the sheriff and his deputy as they transport Mrs. Mc—and the not-so-mysterious hulking man—to the hospital. En route to the hospital, things go awry—so much so that hulking mute guy goes ballistic, kills almost everyone in the emergency rig, and peels the face off one of them. Leatherface is back—and he’s pissed. Cinematographer Ricardo Diaz shines in this gorgeously shot scene that has Leatherface standing in a field of dead sunflowers, holding up the skin of his new face. Ruth, who’s injured but alive, witnesses the rebirth of Leatherface and manages to get a radio transmission off before she’s (literally) gutted by him.

As Leatherface makes his way back to Harlow, a charter bus full of potential investors arrives and the property auction ensues. As word of Mrs. Mc’s death makes it back to Melody via Ruth’s last text before Leatherface’s ambulance ambush, local contractor Richter (Moe Dunford) hears her and Lila talking about it and takes Melody and Dante to task for causing Mrs. Mc’s heart attack and subsequent death. He confiscates the keys to the bus and their sports car, demanding proof that they had the right to evict Mrs. Mc before he’ll give them back. Discovering they don't have the deed showing they own the orphanage after all (oops!), Melody and Dante return to the creaky home for wayward boys to find it. Elsewhere, Sally Hardesty—her long grey hair and tank top giving us immediate Laurie Strode vibes—takes a call from the local gas station clerk who received Ruth’s last radio transmission, and he informs her that Leatherface is back. She arms up and heads out, adding an awesome cowboy hat to her survivor ensemble to perfect effect.

It's not giving too much away to say that Leatherface makes his way back to Harlow in what seems like record time and resumes his titular massacre once again. There are some over-the-top set pieces here—one of them pushed to the point of pure camp—and gorehounds will delight in the plethora of practical special make-up effects. The film is lean (at one hour and twenty-three minutes) and meaner than a rabid dog in the midday Texas sun getting poked repeatedly with a big stick. It’s all a heck of a lot of fun, even if the creative forces miss the boat almost entirely with the Sally Hardesty character. What could have been an awesome final chapter for survivor Sally is reduced to a mere sidenote, largely wasting Fouéré’s considerable talent. If anything, Texas Chainsaw Massacre reminds us how very important—crucial even—writers are to what we see and experience onscreen.

No, none of the characters are particularly memorable nor do we care when it’s their turn to meet the end of Leatherface’s chainsaw. No, making this film’s Final Girl a school shooting survivor adds nothing of note to her character or the plot. No, Leatherface’s speed and agility don’t make a lick of sense in the context of his chronological age. But 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a lot of fun despite its myriad flaws—in that kind of mindless Saturday matinee, popcorn movie kind of way.

How best to enjoy this latest entry in the venerable horror franchise? Let go and let Garcia. 

Mob Mentality and the Sidelined Final Girl of ‘Halloween Kills’

Let’s get this out of the way early: Jamie Lee Curtis is largely relegated to a hospital room in Halloween Kills. Her iconic final girl, Laurie Strode, gets no kick-ass action sequences battling perennial boogeyman, Michael Myers. She winces (a lot) from her injuries sustained in the 2018 installment, threatens to go hunt Myers down, and waxes philosophical about the nature of evil—but gets to do nothing beyond these trivialities. Knowing that Halloween Kills is the bridge film between Halloween and next year’s Halloween Ends, one suspects that director David Gordon Green is reserving Curtis’ genre capital for a climatic showdown for the ages in the last film—but that does little to alleviate the feelings that something’s missing from this film; namely, the lynchpin of the Halloween franchise.  

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, we can move on and assess Halloween Kills on its Strode-less merits. I’ve watched the film twice; the first time as my ten-year-old self who’s still enthralled by the boogeyman in suburbia, the second time with a more deliberate critical eye. Like any film in the venerable franchise, Halloween Kills is a mixed bag, hitting some of its marks with brutal precision while missing others completely.

The new film begins with a very clever prologue that continues the 1978 film’s storyline—the pursuit and capture of Michael Myers. It involves a young Officer Hawkins (Thomas Mann) and a life-and-death decision that changes the trajectory of far too many lives to count by now and an encounter between Myers and young Lonnie Elam (Tristian Eggerling). It also features an impressive—if improbable—cameo by a character from the original film. Green and company really shine in this sequence, which possesses both the look and feel of Carpenter’s original, and ably set the mood for what’s to come. After this pre-credit sequence, the film picks up where the 2018 film ended: Laurie’s compound engulfed in flames and its intergenerational trio of final girls—an injured Laurie, daughter Karen, and granddaughter Allyson—jostling down the road in the back of a pick-up truck en route to Haddonfield Memorial.

After giving the audience a reasonably plausible explanation for how he survives the fiery deathtrap Laurie rigged for him, a slightly charred and very pissed-off Myers goes on a rampage, slicing and dicing his way back to Haddonfield proper. Myers is angry in this movie—with the kills brutal beyond anything seen in the franchise since Rob Zombie took his one-two crack at it. While Mikey takes out the majority of Haddonfield’s fire department and a drone-flying interracial couple, the audience is re-introduced to the survivors from the original film—Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), nurse Marion (Nancy Stephens), and a grown up Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet)—who gather at a dive-bar for an annual commemoration of the tragic events of Halloween night ’78 and to toast Laurie. Elsewhere, Lonnie’s son and Allyson’s on-the-outs boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold) happens upon a critically injured Officer Hawkins (Will Patton). As the parties converge upon Haddonfield Memorial, news that Myers has somehow survived and is killing his way back to town gets out. The survivors—led by a baseball bat-wielding Tommy—decide that “evil dies tonight!” and a vigilante mob is formed to hunt Myers down once and for all. Otay, Panky.

If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in Halloween Kills, it’s because there is. Green is firing on all cylinders in this one, his many story threads mirroring the growing chaos of the mob outside Haddonfield Memorial. Karen (Judy Greer), who’s given far more than the yeoman’s work she had to do in the last film, is convinced that Myers is coming to the hospital to kill her mother. Allyson (Andi Matichak) ignores her mother’s directive to sit vigil at her grandmother’s bedside, instead arming up and joining Cameron and Lonnie in their hunt for Myers. Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey, also returning from the last film) tries—albeit unsuccessfully—to control the mob tensions about to tragically spill over at the hospital, even getting into verbal fisticuffs with Haddonfield’s former sheriff, Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who’s now head of hospital security. And Michael Myers? He’s making a beeline for his former family home on Lampkin Lane, now inhabited by an affectionately quirky gay couple nicknamed Big John and Little John and played by MADtv’s Michael McDonald and The Mick’s Scott MacArthur. Suffice to say that Myers reaches the ‘ole homestead before the ragtag crew of would-be vigilantes does and is not a fan of the new color scheme. Or charcuterie.

The film’s third act coalesces in a weird, dreamlike, violent denouement—complete with voiceover by Laurie from her hospital room—the sole intention of which seems to be setting up the next film. It’s in this final sequence of events where Green is either going to succumb to the same fate as all previous sequel directors or rise above it in spectacular fashion: Explaining how and why Michael Myers “transcends” human mortality. It’s clear after the Haddonfield mob puts Myers through his paces that he’s something…beyond a mere mortal man. How Green will expound on this in Halloween Ends will ultimately cement his standing in franchise history.

Halloween Kills isn’t a perfect film and suffers from middle-child syndrome, the degree to which won’t be evident until it can be held up within the context of the full trilogy of films. As purely a sequel, it’s briskly paced with some exceptionally well-executed sequences, like the parkside SUV assault, and some less so. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Big John and Little John.) The nostalgia factor here with returning characters is high (hell if I didn’t get misty-eyed when Cyphers first appears on the screen), with surprisingly strong performances from Richards and Longstreet. Matichak, too, is exceptionally good. Disappointingly, Hall’s Tommy Doyle is a misfire. With his bellowing and menacing baseball bat stance, it’s as if he were channeling Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan from The Walking Dead here. Chalk this up to the film’s inconsistent writing, which Green shares with Scott Teems and Danny McBride. For every well-written scene (like the one in which Greer’s character attempts to help one of the escaped Smith’s Grove patients who’s been mistaken by the hospital mob for Myers), there are two that suffer from cringe-worthy dialogue and weird pacing. Even the big twist at the end of the film feels off, illogical in the context of time and what’s going on just outside the Myers house where it occurs. Elsewhere, Green makes at least one surprising choice in which a character most would peg as a goner early on actually survives their Myers encounter, which leaves one wondering if said character will have a part to play in the final film. On the plus side, John Carpenter (with son, Cody, and Daniel Davies) delivers another outstanding soundtrack that manages to sound distinctive while remaining true to his original ’78 score.

Like its predecessor’s commentary on generational trauma, Halloween Kills works better in a broader sense with its depiction of the dangers of mob mentality. When the hive mind overrides rational thought and reason, Green and company postulate here, the resulting consequences can be worse than the original trigger. The denizens of Haddonfield rise up—collectively—to defeat their longtime boogeyman. It’s a noble undertaking to want to reclaim their home, but Green is there to remind us that sometimes evil wins—especially if you’re the lady who brings an honest-to-God iron to the street fight. And, sometimes, there’s collateral damage. Halloween Kills gives us the collateral damage in spades. This Curtis-light entry in Green’s Halloween trilogy may be short on the Strode but it’s heavy on the brutality. Its breakneck violence works best when viewed as the (fast) moving part to a whole not yet fully in view.

Narrative choppiness aside, Halloween Kills ultimately delivers the slasher goods. Michael Myers is the soulless killing machine we’ve all come to know and love over the course of 40+ years in eleven films (with a twelfth on the way) and a body count now over 150. Best advice: Turn off your brain, grab some popcorn, and just ride the waves of slasher nostalgia. Let the armchair critics of the world argue pointlessly over the film’s merits—or lack thereof—and just lose yourself in the seasonal slaughter. There will be plenty of time for more serious discourse and analysis once we see what kind of bow Green slaps on his trilogy with Halloween Ends.

Rest up, Laurie Strode—we expect big things from you in the next one.

‘Underwater’ Keeps Its Head Above the Déjà Vu

Movie audiences have been long conditioned toward preconception and expectation based on a film’s release date. It’s become generally accepted that films released just before Memorial Day and July 4^th are expected to be the big-budget summer blockbusters—those box office juggernauts whose special effects budgets are eclipsed only by their marketing costs. The more serious, arty films are released between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with the expectation of garnering awards nominations. Then there is January—that post-holiday cinematic graveyard when studios unceremoniously dump films for which they have little to no expectations into theaters where they sink or swim. Deep-sea actioner Underwater neither sinks nor swims—it dogpaddles.

As far back as The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), there’s been a fascination with what lurks beneath the depths. Like deep space, the deep sea holds an element of the unknown and limitless possibility for all manner of imagined terrors, and filmmakers have been mining these creative waters since the early years of the Cold War era. I can trace my love of these underwater-set creature features all the way back to my childhood and one film, in particular—1966’s Destination Inner Space, in which a group of scientists aboard an undersea laboratory do battle with an extraterrestrial amphibian monster.

There have been no shortage of terror-under-the-seas flicks since—from 1973’s The Neptune Factor to 1998’s Sphere and 2005’s The Cave. 1989 seemed to be a particularly robust year for underwater monster mayhem with Leviathan, The Abyss, Deepstar Six, Lords of the Deep, and The Rift (aka Endless Descent) all released to varying degrees of success. Sometimes, the underwater terror made its way to the surface in films like Humanoids from the Deep (1980), Deep Rising (1998), and The Rig (2010). Other times, amplifications of familiar sea creatures—sharks, killer whales, piranha, octopus, even crabs—skimmed the surface to wreak havoc on fictional seaside communities.  

Underwater is the latest entry in this dubious tradition of sub-genre, a stylized big-budget film whose price tag (estimated at $80 million) can’t hide its B-movie pedigree. Sharing more plot-wise with Deepstar Six and Leviathan, Underwater takes place seven miles beneath the ocean’s surface on the bottom of the Mariana Trench at an underwater mining operation owned by one of those nefarious-sounding, faceless corporate entities called Kepler. The audience is barely introduced to aquatic engineer Norah (Kristen Stewart) before all hell (literally) breaks loose and much of the undersea complex is damaged or destroyed by (cue the ominous Marco Beltrami/Brandon Roberts score)…something. The deep-sea action is relentless, with Norah making her way through the ruined, leaking complex toward the central command of the drill and picking up a few survivors along the way—including Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), Paul (comedian T.J. Miller), Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel), research tech Emily (Jessica Henwick), and computer engineer Liam (John Gallagher Jr.). Ragtag team of survivors assembled, it’s on to full-tilt aquatic misadventure—the requisite blocked escape routes, imploding bulkheads, risky underwater excursions across the sea floor, and the Lovecraftian sea monsters picking off the survivors one by one.

Sure it’s derivative, another submerged riff on Alien that wears its Lovecraftian influences rather conspicuously. But Underwater is also lean and very mean, pushing the accelerator to the floor from its opening moments and never taking its foot off the gas. The aggressive pacing contributes to a breathlessness to the whole affair that helps the film rise above its unoriginality. Director William Eubank hones in on the sensory elements of his setting, using tight spaces, limited oxygen reserves, and the disorientation of the ocean bottom’s zero visibility to heighten the claustrophobic tension.  What the film lacks in narrative depth, it compensates for with its respectable visual aesthetic—courtesy of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, who also stylishly lensed Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993), The Ring (2002), and A Cure for Wellness (2016).

Kristen Stewart, who’s spent quite a few years trying to painstakingly shake the trio of Twilight movies that have long dogged her career, ably carries the film. She commands and holds our attention, no easy feat when the character is very clearly—and unimaginatively—drawn as an Ellen Ripley surrogate. (If the close-cropped hair and bomber jacket weren’t enough, the writers even find a way to have the character unnecessarily running around in a sports bra and panties by film’s end.) To her credit, Stewart goes all in with her performance, rising above the sub-par material to fashion a respectable science-fiction/horror heroine. With little from the script itself to aid in her character’s development, Stewart instead shows us who Norah is through a series of conflicting emotions as the situation on the ocean floor worsens. She’s simultaneously terrified and panic-stricken, pragmatic and resilient—an everyday nobody who transforms into a durable, kick-ass heroine.

Underwater knows what it is and never pretends to be anything but. It’s a pure B-movie creature feature throwback to 1989—slick schlock that understands the rules and never tries to break or bend them (for better or worse).

Revisiting 'Amityville'

Among the sequel craze that started in the 1980s with Halloween and Friday the 13^th, many might be surprised to learn that the modern-day horror film franchise with the most films to its name is The Amityville Horror. With a canon of 21 associated films (including sequels, reboots, and in-name-only knockoffs), The Amityville Horror franchise has eclipsed both Halloween (with 11) and Friday the 13^th (with 12).

So it might come as a bit of a surprise when noted genre veteran Daniel Farrands—whose credits include screenplays for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and the 2007 adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, directorial work on a number of notable documentary features on film franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Friday the 13^th, and numerous producer gigs—would mine the Amityville archives for his feature film directorial debut.

The Amityville Murders, which Farrands also wrote and produced, goes back to the real-life events that led to the original horror: The six gunshot murders at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, carried out by Ronald DeFeo on the night of November 13th, 1974. DeFeo, in court testimony, claimed that voices coming from within the house drove him to kill every member of his immediate family. Although DeFeo was sentenced to (and remains in) prison, a mythos developed around the house itself when the Lutz family, who moved into the titular residence in late 1975, fled after less than a month because of the alleged supernatural events that served as the source material for Jay Anson’s bestselling 1977 book of the same name, which was based on about 45 hours of tape-recorded recollections from the Lutz family. The book became the ’79 film starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder, and Rod Steiger that went on to gross $86.4 million on a $4.7 million budget. In one of the longest-running acts of source material cannibalism, The Amityville Horror story has been artistically excavated, twisted and reconfigured, retold, and expanded upon for nearly four decades—with varying results.

Enter Farrands. Wisely, he opts to return to the scene of the crime—literally and creatively. Rather than add to the convoluted Amityville mythos, he chooses to revisit the story of Ronald DeFeo in what amounts to a proper prequel to the ’79 film. Diehard Amityville aficionados will note that 1982’s Amityville II: The Possession also attempted to loosely prequelize the pre-Lutz events, but Farrands’ outing is a more faithful retelling, coated with a nice period piece sheen.

The 1974 DeFeo’s are a suburban Long Island family whose outward picture-postcard success belies the dysfunction within. Patriarch Ronnie (an excellent Paul Ben-Victor) is the quintessential abusive husband and father, offering intimidation and beatings in private and paternal hugs in public. Wife and mother Louise (Diane Franklin) is that typical abused spouse who walks a fine line between trying to keep Ronnie’s rage at bay while facilitating some semblance of normalcy for her children. Eldest son Ronald (nicknamed “Butch”) is a directionless slacker and drug user while eldest daughter Dawn (Chelsea Ricketts) is smart, pretty, and protective of her older brother. There are three other siblings—Alison, Marc, and Jody—but they’re largely relegated to the periphery here, with Farrands choosing to focus his narrative on the DeFeo parents and their two oldest offspring.

Farrands spends time painting his cinematic picture of the DeFeo’s and their dysfunction—from Ronnie’s shady mafia dealings to Ronald Jr’s drug use and the especially volatile relationship between the two. At some point early on, both Lainie Kazan and Burt Young (who, in a nice wink to franchise fans, was also in Amityville 2 with Franklin) show up as Louise’s parents—with grandpa Brigante gifting Ronald and Dawn new cars on their shared birthday and Nona getting her hackles up when Louise casually mentions a possible West Coast relocation. “You’re going to sell my house?” she asks, practically drooling ill-omen. These early scenes are outstanding, even if the Long Island accents are a tad too exaggerated and the family’s Italian-Americanness bordering on caricature at times.

It’s revealed that Ronald Jr. and Dawn also mess around with the occult down in a little basement crawlspace with red cinderblock walls (aka the infamous “Red Room”). At some point, the dark forces within the house (it’s purported to be built upon land where the local Shinnecock Indian tribe had once abandoned their mentally ill and dying, an idea rejected by local Native American leaders) start their whispering through the walls and take possession of Ronald Jr. that culminates in the murders. The supernatural foreplay is effective although most of the visuals and set pieces will ring familiar to anyone who’s seen a Paranormal Activity film. Recycled but competent scares abound as the tension escalates.

Overall, The Amityville Murders hits its marks. Caveat: I’ve not seen a single Amityville film since the three-dimensional third so I may not be as jaded or franchise-weary as many reviewers seem to be. Farrands’s direction is solid, his pacing tight, and he really knows how to strikingly frame his shots. He also gets some major props for giving Diane Franklin a role befitting her talent. She’s been too-long relegated to shorts and subpar material in recent years for an actress of her stature and talent.

The standout here is John Robinson who does most of the film’s heavy lifting as Ronald Jr. He convincingly portrays a man slipping into madness, seamlessly shifting from anger and rage to vulnerability and melancholy with all the requisite raw emotion. It’s actually in considering Robinson’s performance where one might realize that Farrands missed a golden opportunity to muddy the waters a bit and aim higher with his franchise contribution. Instead of presenting the audience with a predetermined supernatural origin to Ronald Jr’s slip down the rabbit hole, layer in some ambiguity to suggest it might have been the drugs or PTSD from years of mental and physical abuse or even an undiagnosed mental illness like schizophrenia (the onset of which would correspond with the character’s age)—perhaps a combination of all these internal and external factors. When you make a movie based on real-life events and your audience knows the story’s ending from the outset, you need something else to make your mark. Leaving the audience pondering—and ultimately deciding for themselves—the origin of Ronald DeFeo’s eventual murderous snap would have added a decidedly cerebral element that would have elevated The Amityville Murders beyond the limits of its well-trodden zip code. 

‘Suspiria’: An Exercise in Arthouse Existentialism

Director Luca Guadagnino’s interpretation of Suspiria, Dario Argento’s 1977 cult-classic, supernatural horror film, is ambitious, overstuffed, and dazzlingly convoluted—in other words, it’s brilliant. The film—as an overarching metaphor for insurrection and the transference of power—works on almost every level and establishes itself as less a remake and more a companion piece to Argento’s classic.

Guadagnino’s take is set against the riotous backdrop of a wall-divided, post-war Germany circa 1977, terror-ravaged by Red Army Faction bombings and background news reports chronicling the hijacking of a commercial airliner. Into this sociopolitical bedlam—which is largely superfluous to the film’s narrative—enters Susie (Dakota Johnson), a talented but inexperienced dancer (and former Mennonite) from Ohio who shows up at a legendary all-female dance company in Berlin for a long-shot audition. As luck would have it, a roster spot has opened up after another dancer goes MIA, and her subsequent impromptu audition draws both the attention and tacit approval of the company’s enigmatic artistic director Madame Blanc (the unrivaled Tilda Swinton in yet another memorable role…or three). The preternaturally gifted Susie quickly ascends the ranks as Blanc's protégé, earning her the role of the protagonist in the company’s upcoming recital of Volk, which we quickly surmise has all manner of consequential otherworldly implications.

While most of the hallmarks of Dario Argento’s original giallo are present and accounted for, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich add a new character named Dr. Josef Klemperer, who is introduced in the updated film’s first few minutes. One of the elderly psychotherapist’s patients is a student from the dance academy named Patricia (whose mania is played well by Chloe Grace Moretz) who rants about a coven of witches that controls Markos Dance Academy and the evil of “the Three Mothers”—a witch mythology Argento refashioned from the writings of Thomas de Quincey—in a nice meta-tribute to Argento’s original trilogy. Klemperer—haunted by the wife he lost in World War II and stricken with an all-consuming survivor's guilt—is particularly invested in helping Patricia. The character is played by a first-time actor credited as Lutz Ebersdorf—but it’s largely known now that the role is played by Swinton in drag. There could be much said here about Guadagnino’s choice with this bit of stunt casting in terms of feminist themes and gender fluidity, but the casting largely misfires because he’s generously peppered the entire film with so much thematically elsewhere. One legacy of the reimagined Suspiria that’s a given: The film will give film scholars and other academics years of material to dissect.

On the surface, Suspiria is an odd choice for the Italian director after the blockbuster success of his plaintive coming-of-age romance of last year’s sublime Call Me by Your Name. Trading in the sun-dappled Italian vistas of his previous film for the darker muted tones of the grittier, concrete jungle of post-war Berlin here, Guadagnino—aided by the superb camerawork of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom—creates a purposeful contradiction to the Technicolor palette and deep jewel tones of Argento’s original. He opts for a severe and dispiriting look, its colorlessness periodically punctuated by vivid slashes of blood red to excellent dramatic effect. Mukdeeprom’s abrupt, purposefully clumsy whip-zooms charging toward the actors and the unexpected acceleration of cuts during otherwise unhurried scenes lends the film an authentic 1970s aesthetic that unites the two set design approaches.

Argento’s original Suspiria vision established tone largely through set design; Guadagnino opts to use dramatic choreography (mad props to choreographer Damien Jalet) to establish mood and escalate tension. Early on in the film, there’s a gut-churningly intense set-piece in which Susie’s feverish Salome-esque dance for Madame Blanc is juxtaposed against another dancer—whose attempt to flee the academy is thwarted by witchery—whose body is tossed around an adjacent dance studio and contorted in the most unearthly ways until she’s nothing but a protuberance of broken, misplaced bones. Aided by Walter Fasano’s precision-point editing, the scene is a strikingly gross yet captivatingly poetic bit of body horror.

Likewise, Guadagnino opts to choose his own fork in the road instead of following Argento down the same path he took with the original film’s score. That score—by Italian prog-rock band Goblin—was an intense wall of sound that blended screaming guitars, synthesizers, and wordless vocals to create an almost-deafening sound that matched the off-kilter, horror-schlock ambiance and garish visuals of Argento’s film. For his Suspiria, Guadagnino counters by engaging Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who ably captures the idea of descending into madness with his intricately languorous and brooding updated score.

Suspiria ’18 is a bold revisionist interpretation of Argento’s unassailable masterpiece, a refreshingly challenging film infused with an almost existentialist sense of dread. It’s a hypnotic exploration of the catharsis of female rage in which witches cast their spells through dance and, in the end, the ugliness of destruction is offset by the beauty of unexpected absolution. It’s a film that demands repeat viewings, if only to unpack its layers of themes. Loyalists are certain to appreciate Guadagnino’s inclusion of a touching cameo by Jessica Harper (the original film’s heroine) but fans expecting jump scares and a clean, linear narrative should look elsewhere; Guadagnino’s modern re-telling is a dense and cerebral slice of arthouse that’s as satisfyingly trippy as the original in its own right.

Revisiting Haddonfield in 'Halloween'

It seems that the promotional machine behind the new Halloween hasn’t stopped since star Jamie Lee Curtis took to Twitter in September of last year to announce that Laurie Strode was headed back to Haddonfield. From the earliest teaser photo of Curtis standing on a leaf-strewn porch in the same babysitter garb she donned in the ’78 film with nemesis Michael Myers looking on, the franchise’s sizable fan base has—quite literally—gone along for the ride from pre-production to premiere. Momentum grew in earnest after the first trailer dropped and reached fever pitch after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The promotional buzz has been deafening, and Curtis has so often and so eloquently now articulated both her gratitude for the career that Carpenter’s original gave her and the new film’s feminist timeliness in the #MeToo era that diehard fans could probably recite her answers to interview questions like lines from a script.

Logically, with such buildup comes expectation. And meeting those expectations would be a monumental task for any director of any film—let alone an unproven genre director who’s boldly taken on an iconic horror franchise with a fiercely loyal (and hyper critical) fanbase. Even with the blessing of the film’s original director and co-screenwriter and the all-in participation of, arguably, the most popular and recognizable scream queen in film history, success in the age of the armchair critic and Internet mob rule will be an uphill battle for David Gordon Green’s Halloween. For as eager as fans were for a new addition to the venerable franchise, they’re also loyalists and experienced genre veterans. Just as film scholars have come around to give Carpenter’s Halloween its rightful due, horror movie fans who grew up on the ’78 film and its countless knockoffs have hardened, grizzled a bit, and, perhaps, become slightly more discerning in their tastes.

The last time we visited Haddonfield, Michael Myers got a backstory, someone else was playacting Laurie Strode, and fans were polarized—like Clinton versus Trump-level polarized. Indeed, Rob Zombie’s revisionist take on Carpenter’s source material in 2007, and then again in 2009, is still the stuff of much debate and deliberation—and sometimes raw emotion. Prior to that, we endured the largely unwatchable Resurrection outing in 2002—helmed by the original 1982 sequel’s director, Rick Rosenthal—that saw Laurie Strode die within the first ten minutes of the movie and Myers go on to terrorize Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. That trainwreck was preceded by the decidedly more watchable—and arguably one of the best—H20 installment. That film came 20 years after the original and took on much of the narrative that Green’s Halloween takes on two decades even further in—how does Laurie Strode fare after the fateful events of Halloween night, 1978? Going back even further than Halloween: H20, there were another four direct sequels to Carpenter’s film and one weirdly standalone film when Carpenter and Halloween co-writer/producer Debra Hill had thoughts of the series branching into an anthology series centered around the titular holiday—long before American Horror Story revolutionized the anthology concept. The Halloween franchise now consists of eleven films and stands—pre-release of the 2018 outing—as the fourth highest-grossing domestic horror franchise at approximately $668 million.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but David Gordon Green—who shares co-writing credit with Danny McBride and Jeff Farley on the new Halloween’s script—had his work cut out for him long before the cameras rolled. History, expectation, and nostalgia are strong forces in the universe of fandom. So, how’d he do? Let’s examine.

The first smart choice Green makes—and, ironically, his most controversial—is to fashion the new Halloween as a direct sequel to the ’78 film. That’s right: No hospital massacre, no sibling ties, no Jamie Lloyd, no faked death and headmistress gig, no fall off the sanitarium roof. Just Laurie sobbing on the floor declaring to Dr. Loomis “It was the bogeyman” and a forty-year flashforward. Interestingly, it’s not the first time the franchise retconned a timeline; H20 jettisoned the events of the fourth, fifth, and sixth films. This retroactive continuity allows Green and company to reset the clock and imagine a new series of events not mired in the myriad inconsistencies and questionable creative decisions of previous films in the series. And—color me crazy—but I find it vaguely comforting to know that Nurse Chambers never met the end of Michael’s butcher knife after all and picture her chain-smoking on a porch somewhere with a faithful Golden Retriever at her feet while she waits for a carload of grandbabies to visit(!). 

In the 2018 version of Halloween, we’re re-introduced to the two central figures in the series—Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. Myers is revealed to have been apprehended and captured after the events of ’78, locked up in Smith’s Grove Sanitarium ever since. For all intents and purposes, his life and murder spree ended as if someone hit the pause button. Conversely, Laurie has lived forty years’ worth of life—she’s married and divorced twice, had a daughter, and now has a granddaughter—but it’s been a life irrevocably altered and affected by what’s come to be largely forgotten and relegated to an anecdotal footnote in Haddonfield’s history. Myers may be the one physically imprisoned, but Laurie’s been mentally held captive by the trauma of “the Babysitter Murders” for four long decades.  We see the toll her PTSD has taken—from her estrangement from the daughter taken away from her to the labyrinthine compound of traps, triggers, and panic rooms she’s rigged together. She’s a woman lying in wait, confident in her intuition that Myers will come for her again—even if everyone else from the local townsfolk to her own family have come to discount such certitude as the ravings of a damaged woman. She’s like the survivalist version of the neighborhood crazy cat lady.

Green chooses to re-introduce us to Myers first during a gorgeously shot sequence in the enclosed courtyard of Smith’s Grove. Two ill-fated British true-crime podcasters are there to interview him on the day (aka Halloween eve) he’s to be transferred to an out-of-state maximum-security facility. We’re introduced to his new psychiatrist, Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer)—or the “new Loomis” as Laurie snarkily dubs him later—who’s a poor stand-in for Donald Pleasance. After inciting everyone but Myers with his old mask and histrionic pleas to “SAY SOMETHING, MICHEAL!”, the podcaster pair set off—post-opening credits—to interview the lone survivor of Myers' murderous rampage. Deep in the woods, locked behind sliding gates, steel-reinforced doors, and more deadbolts than you can count, we get our first look at this older, damaged version of Laurie, who’s apparently as short on patience as she is on cash.

We eventually meet the other key players, including daughter Karen (Judy Greer), son-in-law Ray (Toby Russ), granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), and Allyson’s assorted besties—Vicky (Virginia Gardner), Vicky’s boyfriend Dave (Miles Robbins), her boyfriend Cameron <wink-wink> Elam (Dylan Arnold), and Cameron’s best bud Oscar (Drew Scheid). Introductions are cursory at best because—as horror diehards know well—cast of characters in a slasher film is little more than code for body count. And Green doesn’t disappoint in that facet of the film.

Laurie is barely finished with her Annie Oakley-style target practice (complete with every leftover mannequin from the prop closet of Tourist Trap it seems) when Michael’s transfer goes not-shockingly-but-necessarily awry. Carpenter’s updated iconic score kicks in and Myers is back on the streets of Haddonfield, slicing his way through town before an incoherent, annoyingly convenient, and completely out-of-left-field twist delivers him to Laurie’s well-lit doorstep to kick off the film’s third—and most satisfying—act. Suffice to say that it takes a village—or at least three generations of well-armed women anyway—to bring Myers’ reign to its simultaneously inevitable and questionable end. It’s kickass, well-paced, and loads of fun; the audience I saw it with was screaming and cheering.

Curtis delivers the goods and is the heartbeat of the film. This is a movie about a victim weary of being a casualty of her shared history with her aggressor. Laurie has painstakingly prepared and patiently waited for forty years—at great personal sacrifice—to reclaim her narrative, and Curtis’ performance reflects that well-worn resolve. She’s nothing short of a marvel—particularly in a scene where she waits outside the sanitarium in her pick-up truck, gun in one hand, booze in another, and watches until Myers is loaded onto the bus and pulls away. Her face conveys everything the character has suffered and lost—pain, rage, vulnerability.

There are three standouts in the supporting cast: First, Andi Matichak who does a competent job essentially portraying Laurie’s younger self. As Allyson, Matichak embodies the quintessential high school girl—an updated Laurie Strode, if you will—with enough presence to be memorable without overshadowing the character she’s modeled after. Although this Halloween doesn’t give her the screen time that the original gave Curtis, she still manages to leave her mark. The second standout is veteran character actor Will Patton. As Haddonfield’s current lawman Officer Frank Hawkins, Patton is given a sizable role on point with that of Charles Cyphers, who played Haddonfield’s original sheriff in the 1978 film. He’s believable and likable and really lends solid support, especially in his scenes with Curtis as you see his reluctant transition from someone who fell squarely into the camp who dismissed Laurie as an eccentric to someone who now—with equal reluctance—realizes that she was right all along. Finally, Judy Greer gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Laurie’s adult daughter, who herself has been the victim of generational trauma. On the surface, it first appears that Greer is given yeoman’s work here but watch a little closer and you’ll see an exquisitely subtle rendering of a daughter grappling with the necessity of self-preservation against the strength of familial bonds. It also doesn’t hurt that Greer gets, arguably, the best line and cheer-worthy moment in the movie.

Overall, Green delivers the requisite slasher goods. The film’s post-Myers’ escape pacing is spot-on, and the body count is suitably upsized from the film’s 1978 counterpart, which is cleverly acknowledged as being tame by today’s standards in the film. He does an exceptionally good job of liberally sprinkling in Easter eggs for the franchise’s faithful—almost two dozen by count—without pulling the new Halloween out of the present and into the past. This reviewer isn’t sure that the casual viewer (or even the diehard fan for that matter) will realize what a tricky balancing act this is. After all, with forty years of history, it would be a missed opportunity not to pay tribute in some way to what precedes Green’s film; conversely, done too obviously or without careful regard for tone and pacing, viewers could be pulled right out of the film. Wisely, Green limits most of his Easter eggs to visual references—sheets hanging on a clothesline, familiar rubber Halloween masks, a closet with louvered doors, a memorable tombstone, a hastily drank glass of wine—and eschews actor cameos (with the brilliant exception of one vocal cameo by a member of the original film’s cast). Sure, I still think Kyle Richards’s adult Lindsey Wallace bumping into Curtis’ character on the street while trick-or-treating with her kids would have been brilliant, but I give Green credit for resisting the easy and obvious stunt cameos.

Again, with forty years investment in the franchise—its characters, its storylines, its hits and misses—it would be easy to nitpick the hell out of the new Halloween. After all, who knows the film better, more intimately than its loyal fanbase whose affection for the series rivals the generational affection of any sports fan for a particular team? I’ll limit my criticisms to those I felt actually detracted from the film—as made—versus any personal projection of what should have been done/included.

My chief grievance is the film’s uneven editing. There are scenes—important scenes like the one with Curtis, solo, in her truck—that are cut so abruptly that they’re jarring. It leaves the finished film feeling like there was too much to cram into some subjective studio-mandated running time constraint. No doubt the film’s future home video release may shed some light on what was cut and how—or even if—the trimmed footage changed the movie’s original footprint. My second beef is the inclusion of too many unnecessary characters—chief among them Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey) whose wholly pointless presence seems purposed only to fill an arbitrary diversity quotient and whose ridiculous cowboy hat to remind us that we’re in the Midwest. Third, Green’s film has been woefully shortchanged by the film’s marketing. Too many trailers showing way too much footage (including some footage that obviously fell victim to the editor’s hacksaw). Forget what I said a moment ago about ruminating on the should’ve, could’ve, and would’ve. The studio should have literally let Curtis talk the movie up the way she has with virtually nothing but perhaps a single trailer with flashes of images. Less would have been infinitely more here. Audiences know—or can easily deduce—the entire storyline going in. That lends itself to the problem of expectation mentioned earlier. Truly brilliant marketing would have been to let audiences walk in blind, having only Curtis’ well-articulated treatise about post-generational trauma in their heads as they settled into their multiplex seat to watch the movie.  

Lastly, and ideally, I would have liked to have seen a new Halloween that was relentlessly grim and frightening. Yes, I know in the post-Scream era that horror films—especially slashers—are required to infuse humor in between the murder and mayhem. But why? As films like The Descent and The Witch and The Babadook and Hereditary have shown us, it’s ok to just go for the jugular and scare the living shit out of an audience. Horror audiences are a durable bunch who don’t need chuckles sandwiched between the jump scares. Halloween, circa 1978, worked so well and has endured because Carpenter understood that. Any laughter elicited was nervous laughter. Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace added to the tension with their childhood fears, not detracted from it with precocious one-liners like (the admittedly adorable) Jibrail Nantambu’s Julian does. His Webster-like comedy schtick just undermines what should have been a horrific, traumatizing scene.

And there you have it: David Gordon Green’s Halloween is an enjoyable, if imperfect, roller-coaster ride that does what it sets out to. Buoyed by a franchise-best performance from Curtis, some impressive set design and cinematography that captures the essence of the titular holiday, and an altered timeline that simplifies matters and brings the proceedings back to the spirit of Carpenter’s original, the new Halloween is a respectably solid addition to the Michael Myers mythos. Like time proved ultimately kind to Carpenter’s original—hey, even The New York Times recently gave the original film a proper review after a forty-year oversight—years and endless analysis will ultimately give Green’s film its rightful ranking within the franchise canon. For now, go see it—have a laugh, scream a little, cheer a lot. There’s something cathartic about watching a woman long-scorned taking names and kicking ass in this revitalized feminist age.

Plus, it’s Halloween—everyone’s entitled to one good scare, no?

Flanagan Wins 'Gerald's Game'

Although I’m sitting down to craft a proper review of the new Netflix film GERALD’S GAME, I suspect it may turn into a love letter to the film’s director, Mike Flanagan. We’ll see how it goes, but don’t say you weren’t forewarned.

GERALD’S GAME is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Stephen King. In a nutshell, it’s the story of a married couple who—hoping to plug some of the widening crevices in their marriage—travel to their remote vacation cabin for a weekend of romance and reconnecting. Oh, and a sex game that leaves the wife handcuffed to a bed and the husband dead on the floor following an untimely heart attack. The book is one of King’s most underrated works—and this writer’s longtime personal favorite. It’s essentially a character study of the protagonist, Jessie Burlingame, and how a hopelessly desperate situation triggers a stress response that manifest in a cast of internal voices that include "Goody” (a somewhat Puritanical version of herself), an old college friend named Ruth Neary, and Nora Callighan, her former psychiatrist. Adding to the horror of her isolation and encroaching death, she seemingly hallucinates a deformed apparition whom she dubs “The Space Cowboy,” a manifestation of death that carries a fishing basket filled with jewelry and human bones, and experiences the bonus repulsion of a stray dog that wanders into the cabin and begins to devour her husband’s decomposing corpse.

The novels in King’s expansive canon of work fall primarily into three categories: the sprawling epic (i.e. The Stand, It, The Dark Tower); the small town visited by something evil (i.e. Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, Under the Dome, Desperation, THE TOMMYKNOCKERS); and character-focused psychological studies (i.e. Dolores Claiborne, Misery, The Shining, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones). Arguably, although everything is a subjective matter of preference, he excels in writing the latter. Like grieving widower Mike Noonan, or wrongfully accused domestic servant Dolores Claiborne, or aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance, GERALD’S handcuffed housewife Jessie is sent on a (largely) psychological journey that dovetails with the physical threats. It’s the character’s ultimate arrival on the other side of their psychological hauntings that will either save or destroy them in the end.

Anyone who’s ever read GERALD’S GAME was likely left with the same feeling as I was: This was a book that could never be adapted for film. Single setting,  single character—in her underwear—talking to voices in her head, sexual fetishes with trigger potential, incest (another trigger)—all  elements of the book that would appear to render this an un-filmable GAME.

Enter Mike Flanagan.

For the uninitiated, Flanagan is the writer, director, and editor of five feature films—all genre fare—including the well-received HUSH, OCULUS, and OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL. He’s also been tapped amidst much fanfare to write, direct, and (yes) edit the upcoming television series adaption of Shirley Jackson’s seminal THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE.  Even within this admittedly modest catalog, Flanagan has established himself as a filmmaker who wears his movie influences proudly on his sleeve while subverting those inspirations to create wholly unique films. In 2016’s HUSH, for example, he took his adoration of WAIT UNTIL DARK, the 1967 thriller in which a blind Audrey Hepburn evades—and ultimately does battle with—a trio of drug smugglers-turned-killers who’ve infiltrated her home, and explored how an alternate sensory deficit—this time deafness—would impact a similar narrative set-up.

He’s also proven himself as adept at rising to a challenge. Case in point: Taking on the task of crafting a sequel to OUIJA, an inferior 2014 studio horror movie that lacked everything a genre film should have—especially suspense. By opting for a period-piece prequel, Flanagan was able to pull off an unlikely feat; namely, creating a far superior film to the painfully bland original and giving the property a genuine franchise potential its predecessor couldn’t. He had Hollywood’s attention, and they were taking notes.

What sets Flanagan apart from his genre brethren is that he understands the difference between startling an audience and scaring them. It’s in this idea of establishing a pervasive sense of dread and tension that builds steadily without release in favor of stringing together sequences of jump scares that Flanagan has captured the admiration and adoration of increasing hard to impressive—and even harder to scare–horror loyalists.

And that brings us to GERALD’S GAME, Flanagan’s reverent—if not entirely faithful—film adaptation of the unadaptable novel referenced earlier. In crafting the film treatment, Flanagan (with co-writer Jeff Howard) makes some interesting—and always logical—tweaks to King’s source material that pay off artistically without sacrificing its emotional center.

In terms of variances between book and film, college roomie Ruth and former shrink Nora from the novel are excised in favor of trimming the cast of internalized characters. It’s clear that what drives much of the escalating tension in Flanagan’s film version is the sense of claustrophobia inside the lake-house bedroom and the isolation in which Jessie finds herself trapped. Flanagan wisely choses to keep the people—even the imagined ones—to the bare minimum here, so he opts to limit Jessie’s internal dialogues to her titular husband and more assertive self, with her father and younger self filling in some blanks via memory flashbacks. Likewise, the book’s “Space Cowboy” is still a threatening presence; here, he’s reimagined slightly as a similarly misshapen “Moonlight Man.” In lesser hands, the whole affair could have come off as an overcrowded stage play or—worse—some cartoonish, second-rate episode of HERMAN’S HEAD; fortunately, Flanagan knows the occupancy limits in any given scene and knows where to seat his dinner guests around the table.

Flanagan also opts to make Jessie less complicit in her husband’s poorly-timed demise. In the novel, she’s triggered by his aggression as the rape fantasy begins to play out and kicks him in the chest, thus sparking the heart attack that leads to his fall off the bed and deathblow to the head. In the film version, prescription Viagra deals the fatal cardiac arrest. Besides the timeliness and greater plausibility a medication-caused arrest brings to this pivotal scene, it also makes Jessie a victim of her circumstances in the truest sense of the word and reinforces what a weak man Gerald really is at heart (no pun intended). Speaking of the titular character, those expecting a balding, pot-bellied Gerald may be surprised when Bruce Greenwood shows up in full-on DILF mode here, complete with sexy black boxer briefs. Objectification aside, Greenwood lends excellent support as the husband—menacing when alive, taunting when dead. He plays the character skillfully right up to the edge of that line separating sanity from insanity, sliding effortlessly between a desperate, arrogant man-child in the grips of a mid-life crisis and full-blown misogynistic psychopath with a decidedly dark side.

But make no mistake: The film belongs to Carla Gugino. She embodies just the right amount of vulnerability and strength to make Jessie authentic, her actions credible. Her powerhouse performance is compelling; it’s hard to tear your eyes away from the range of emotions she displays as the direness of her predicament becomes clear and she struggles between survival and surrender while skirting precariously close to the cliff of madness as the hours tick by.

Flanagan has outwitted the static premise of the source material with aplomb by seamlessly weaving together Jessie’s bedroom predicament with the more sensitive repressed childhood assault narrative. He ably compensates for what appears on the surface to be restrained physical motion with a narrative fluidity—a stellar achievement in pacing that should be applauded.  Even during extended monologues with and between the projections of Jessie’s overtaxed—nearly fractured—mind, Flanagan manages to ratchet up the tension, using them as vehicles to peel back layers of her past and her psyche. Flanagan uses well-paced, back-and-forth snippets of dialogue between the two manifestations of Jessie’s mind—with Greenwood representing the crippling self-doubt that has trapped her since her tragic loss of childhood innocence set against the backdrop of a solar eclipse years before and Gugino pulling double-duty as a stronger, more resilient version of herself that she’s clearly had to rely on to get her out of unsafe situations before—to personify her at-odds thought process. It’s an effective device that works admirably and without detracting from the physical horrors at hand.

Flanagan also demonstrates a clear affection and respect for his genre audience as evidenced by several well-placed Easter eggs sprinkled throughout GERALD’S GAME, lending to an “in-crowd” kind of feeling for those eagle-eyed fans while not excluding those who may not pick up on the myriad winks to other King works woven throughout the film or those who might miss the design similarity between the mirror in OCULUS and the Burlingame’s headboard or nightstand copy of the Maddie Young-penned MIDNIGHT MASS, a nod to his HUSH heroine.

In a year that brought both a disappointingly lackluster King adaptation (THE DARK TOWER) and a runaway success (IT), GERALD’S GAME skews heavily toward the latter. Unlike the recent IT adaptation, in which elements of the epic had to be scaled down to the intimate, GERALD’S GAME needed to expand upon the intimate, opening scenes up to breathe—without losing the suffocating tension. It was a loftily ambitious high wire act to pull off, but Flanagan does it. He even scores points for his brave choice to remain faithful to King’s lopsided, narratively disjointed ending. Much of the criticism leveled at King’s novel-length works over the decades have zeroed in on their weak endings, so surely Flanagan would have been forgiven—maybe even lauded—for changing it up a bit here. But he proves himself a loyalist and manages to do as respectable a job with the intact ending as any director likely could. He explained the reasoning behind his choice in a recent interview with the website Bloody Disgusting:

“It was something when I read the book that I loved. I know it was polarizing with fans of the book, so the people that hated that epilogue in the book are going to hate it in the movie. I fully expect that [the epilogue is] going to be the lightning rod for people to be like ‘Oh I was so into it and then (groans) that ending.’ But that’s what happened in the book. There was never a time where it felt right to do the film without that ending, for better or worse.”

Owing more to King’s earlier—and equally claustrophobic—CUJO (complete with a female protagonist trapped in an isolated, confined space and racing against time, dehydration, and flesh-munching dog), Flanagan’s cinematic take on GERALD’S GAME streamlines the source material without cutting too close to the story’s bones. It’s a gripping psychological thrill ride anchored by Gugino’s riveting performance, strong support from Greenwood and E.T.’s Henry Thomas (as Jessie’s father), and enhanced by cinematographer Michael Fimognari’s exquisite interior shots that are alternatingly languid and frenetic and in perfect sync with Flanagan's pitch-perfect narrative pacing.