In the month of winterfylleþ, 'the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead'. To honour the run-up to Halloween I'll spend this month focusing on horror films, from esteemed classics to tawdry schlock. Above all that'll mean resuming that Mario Bava series, but I'll find time for other films too. Today's entry falls firmly on the 'classic' side of the spectrum: so much so, perhaps, that we're inclined to forget it's above all a superb piece of genre filmmaking. Roman Polanski is perhaps the greatest purveyor of genre fare since Hitchcock, whether it's noir (Chinatown), thriller (The Ghost) or Oscar bait (The Pianist). Rosemary's Baby (1968), then, is a perfect paranoia thriller with higher aspirations. A young couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), move into an apartment building in New York. Rosemary doesn't like their nosy and eccentric elderly neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), but Guy soon becomes fast friends with them. When Rosemary becomes pregnant, it's at first an occasion of joy for the couple. But the mother-to-be soon becomes suspicious. At the advice of the Castevets she has switched to a new obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who refuses to take seriously her concerns over an increasingly draining and troubled pregnancy. What's more, the Castevets seem to have Guy on their side as they move to isolate Rosemary from her friends, give her suspicious drinks in lieu of prenatal vitamins and have her wear a malodorous pennant containing tannis root, a plant associated with witchcraft according to Rosemary's elderly friend Hutch (Maurice Evans). When the previously healthy Hutch falls into a coma and dies after investigating the Castevets, Rosemary begins to suspect that her neighbours are involved in witchcraft and have made a pact with her husband to take her baby from her. Feministreadings of Rosemary's Baby have pointed out that the film is about a woman constrained by patriarchy. Guy is a patronising jackass from the start, regularly infantilising and objectifying his wife. When she finds scratches on her body, he nonchalantly explains that he raped her in her sleep. Any bodily autonomy is taken away by the Castevets' witches' brews and Dr. Sapirstein's belittling of her fears. In Rosemary's Baby Polanski empathises with his protagonist's anxiety about a living creature growing in her body, and attacks a system that negates women's personhood by reducing them to the role of carrier.
But the film is also a broadside against the bourgeois culture of the sixties, caught between the stuffy respectability of the Castevets and the hip appeal of a younger generation. Early on Rosemary goes for a Vidal Sassoon haircut, in what would be product placement - if every other character did not immediately (and unfairly) opine that it looks terrible. Beyond a veneer of befuddled harmlessness, of course, the honourable personages of the older generation turn out to be members of a satanic conspiracy. Not that that dampens their enthusiasm for housekeeping: in one of the film's finest scenes, Minnie disarms a knife-wielding Rosemary, then checks to make sure the blade hasn't damaged her parquet floor.
It is only in the film's final minutes that the script clarifies whether the all-encompassing witches' coven preying on Rosemary is real or a figment of a disempowered housewife's imagination. Before that Polanski refuses to tip his hand, emphasising the extent to which male domination mirrors the demonic possession of folklore. 'Patriarchal' is decidedly the right word: the film is about the rule of old men more than men per se, be they naturally aged like Roman or only seemingly old, in the way Guy artificially constructs an age difference to his wife by infantilising her.
All of that, and I haven't yet praised Rosemary's Baby as a near perfect example of the paranoia thriller. Polanski makes the most of images of satanism and witchcraft. It's no coincidence that the film provided much of the imagery peddled both by respectable society and rebellious youth culture during the infamous satanic panic of the following decades. Then there is the terrific, terrifying score of longtime Polanski collaborator Krysztof Komeda.
A supremely accomplished horror film, then, and at 96 minutes leaner than most prestige pictures know to be in our decadent age. It set the stage for the explosion of lurid diabolical cheapies at the turn of the seventies (The Brotherhood of Satan, Mark of the Devil), and the slightly more respectable religious horror that followed (The Exorcist, The Omen). But Rosemary's Baby is smarter and more aware than its imitators, and it's as fresh now as it was in 1968.
I've been listening to Watain recently. My journey into black metal had previously kept me on the melodic, viking metal end of the subgenre's spectrum (Falkenbach, Forefather). I knew Swedish bands were generally more melodic and polished than the Norwegian scene, so I decided to ease into a harsher, more chaotic style than I was used to with Lawless Darkness. To my considerable surprise, I loved it.
In Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, Sam Dunn calls black metal 'raw, yet also epic and atmospheric'. Virtually all Hessians - outside grindcore, anyway - are drawn to the epic nature of metal, the liberation from the strictures of radio-friendly three-and-a-half minute songs musicians enjoy. A ten-minute metal composition twists and turns, it repeats itself, changes, evolves and comes full circle. The strength of Iron Maiden's albums since Brave New World, for example, is precisely that willingness to explore, to create vast soundscapes.
Extreme metal is set apart by extreme vocal and instrumental distortion. In effect, the musical landscapes metal creates become uncomfortable, alien. The music is many things, but never pleasant. A track like 'Wolves Curse' or the titular 'Lawless Darkness' creates a vast, hostile and alien wasteland musically; and the lyrics are an important part of that, as in 'Death's Cold Dark':
To dare what's lit sole by the friar's lantern Through labyrinths so desolate and dark to travel far in solitude and silence 'cross thornclad deserts vast To witness the erection of a temple At the place where order dies and chaos unfold Its tower shall lean out over the precipice O the wonders those that mount it shall behold For there the waves of Absu smash the rocks of definition And feast upon them with erosive force Yes there the ancient giants of primordial waters Are hunting in the twilight near the shores
No, I don't know what that means either. But that's unsurprising: this is surrealism, and the parallels to psychedelia like Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets are worth noting. It's a dark version of apocalyptic literature like the Book of Revelation or - probably more accurately - the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. Watain fancy themselves satanists, but Lawless Darkness doesn't exactly overflow with blasphemy. Instead, the lyrics' obsession with imaginary geography indicates the fascination with exploring strange landscapes that characterises so much metal, and if that exploration is harsh - there's a lot of shred guitar and blast beats - it's so much the more fascinating for it.
I can't pinpoint the exact moment I became a metalhead, but as for so many young men of my generation my gateway drug was Linkin Park.
Within the metal scene this is not considered a cool thing to say, to put it mildly. These days I merrily dismiss nu metal as nothing more than gentrified grunge mixed with hip hop, a bunch of whingeing poseurs ripping off Rage Against the Machine with none of the revolutionary politics or musicianship.
But those of us in our mid-twenties now headbanging to blast beats? We liked Linkin Park. We liked Korn. Some of us, God help us, listened to Limp Bizkit. On this now famous graph, we all started on the far left. When I was fourteen, nu metal was the heaviest, angriest music I'd ever listened to.
The point is that I can't possibly approach Metal: A Headbanger's Journey neutrally. Thankfully, director Sam Dunn doesn't just recognise that: he comes from the same place. Dunn got into metal with Metallica, Maiden and Slayer in the eighties, and has been a metalhead ever since. His film is thus openly, enthusiastically partisan: just like the genre, it wears its heart on its sleeve in a big, proud and sometimes embarrassing way.
Dunn travels the world to speak to metal musicians and producers as well as attending Wacken in northern Germany, the world's largest metal festival. The interviews are almost entirely delightful. Dunn himself - an immensely likeable, gentle man who nonetheless likes some of the heaviest music on this middle-earth - has a lot to do with that: he's a sympathetic but smart interviewer, always giving his subjects room to breathe, never cutting them off or leading them.
Anyone still clinging to the aggressive, even brutish image associated with metal will be flummoxed by the sheer friendliness of the musicians - from Tony Iommi to Alice Cooper - that Dunn talks to. The tiny, wonderful Ronnie James Dio (of Black Sabbath, Rainbow, and Dio) and Iron Maiden's warm, articulate frontman Bruce Dickinson stand out, but for my money Rob Zombie is especially baffling. Here's someone who's directed some of the nastiest horrorfilms in existence, and he seems like a great chap to have a pint with. (The gentlemen of Slipknot, who put forth intelligent, well-argued viewpoints while wearing horror masks, are another highlight.)
There are two interviews which are not what you'd call successful in ordinary terms, and both are with black metal musicians. First, Dunn tries to talk to Mayhem at Wacken, and only succeeds in provoking Necrobutcher to a profanity-laden drunken tirade against... something, while Blasphemer just sits there peacefully. The second odd encounter takes place in Norway, where Dunn speaks to Gaahl, then vocalist for black metal band Gorgoroth. The interview is worth watching:
DUNN: What is the primary ideology or primary ideas that fuel Gorgoroth's music? (Pause.)
GAAHL: Satan. (takes sip of wine) (Pause.)
DUNN: What does Satan embody, what does he represent? (Pause.)
GAAHL: Freedom.
This is theatre. Gaahl is controlling the scene by the setting, his Pinteresque pauses and laconic answers. He's presenting Dunn with the most evil man in Norway. (Wish to hear Gaahl discuss fashion and art? Here you go, provided you read German.) What I can't figure out is whether it's a serious performance - a genuine attempt to impress the ideology of black metal on Dunn - or whether he's pulling the film crew's leg, contemptuous of the media's feeble attempts to comprehend the scene from the outside and thinking he might as well have some fun.
Whether Gaahl's technically accomplished performance in this scene is effective depends on whether you find the ideology of Norwegian black metal compelling. I for one haven't laughed so hard in a long time, and Alice Cooper gently pokes fun at the Norwegian bands' constant attempts to be more evil than everyone else in their rather serious devil-worship. (Gorgoroth split up at least in part because of theological differences between Gaahl and Infernus, the latter insisting Satan is a real, divine being, not a symbol of the self.) But there is a more serious point, evident when Dunn asks about church burnings. Says Gaahl:
Church burnings and all these things are, of course, a thing that I support one hundred per cent. It's something that should have been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace [of] what Christianity and the semitic roots have to offer this world. [...] Satanism is freedom for the individual to grow and to become the superman. Every man who is born to be king becomes king. Every man who is born to be a slave doesn't know Satan.
As Rolf Rasmussen, an assistant Lutheran minister at a church attacked by people associated with the black metal scene in the early nineties, points out, this is an uncomfortably elitist proposition. Though Gaahl is no fascist, the extreme individualism, worship of strength and associated contempt for other human beings associated with the scene help explain why there is a vocal neo-Nazi substratum in black metal.
Dunn rightly insists that outside the Norwegian scene, metal musicians have used satanic imagery primarily because it is transgressive and shocking, not because of any actual belief in the occult. (In Dunn's new television series Metal Evolution, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are wonderfully frank about the use of occult symbols as a marketing ploy.) But I already knew that, and hence I was much more fascinated by Dunn's exploration of gender in metal.
Dunn observes that musicians and fans have historically been overwhelmingly male, but he doesn't stop there. As Dee Snider of Twisted Sister says, metal has tended to be both grotesquely macho and intensely homoerotic. (In all-male environments homophobia, machismo and anti-effeminacy often go hand in hand with all-out homoeroticism: watched 300 lately?) Rob Halford's leather outfits - generally preferred by metalheads to seemingly effeminate glam garb - originated in gay culture. Metal, Snider points out, creates a space in which men can still be men, by having another guy shake his nether regions at them.
But to say that metal is male is to ignore the women who've made their way into the culture over the years. Pamela Des Barres, 'the world's most famous groupie', rejects the claim that she was 'powerless' and 'objectified' because 'they're exactly where they want to be' - which may be true but nonetheless shows us the face of patriarchy. (Imagine the groupie gender-flipped.) Perhaps more positively, Dunn interviews Doro Pesch as well as members of Girlschool and Kittie on the pressures they've faced to be 'more feminine' and emphasise their looks.
Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy states that her tough stage persona as a death metal vocalist is important to her and has inspired young women. This is great, but I think Dunn is being a little too pat here, moving on to the next subject while leaving us with the impression that the gender divide has broken down. He observes that ultra-masculinity is associated with freedom, which should be the start of a debate - why is freedom gendered male? - rather than its end. As I see it, gender archetypes in the metal scene are still strong, with women encouraged to like symphonic metal and similar genres considered 'softer', while extreme metal is still overwhelmingly male. There's progress yet to be made, people.
A lot of time is devoted to the mainstream media's maligning of metal, the attempt during the eighties to brand the style as satanic and likely to inspire teens to foul deeds. While the footage of Dee Snider's testimony before congress is quite wonderful - and it's worth recalling a Gothic cathedral contains more images of demons, death & doom than any Cannibal Corpse cover - , my issue with this stretch of the film is that Dunn doesn't acknowledge that institutional attempts to suppress metal effectively ended in the early nineties. But the notion that metal is marginalised outsider music is hugely important to fans' and musicians' self-image: metal's counterculturality is constantly (re-)constructed, and those mechanisms would be deserving of their own documentary.
Dunn concludes that metal 'confronts what we'd rather ignore; it celebrates what we often deny; it indulges in what we fear most'. I think he's right. Metal shares that with horror (a reason, no doubt, why Rob Zombie is drawn to both genres). It deals with the ugly and abject, often transgressing boundaries and inverting established values: reckless abandon over the careful composure that would help our CV, aggression in a society that has monopolised violence. There is thus a countercultural core to metal: it is the Jungian shadow of a carefully maintained status quo, the garish reflection of societal aggression.
Twenty-odd years on, the satanic panic of the eighties - the days when a sinister cabal of devil-worshippers controlled the world through rock music and Dungeons & Dragons - seems almost quaint. Millions willing to believe obvious falsehoods that, if true, made the world a much worse place than it seems on the surface: ridiculous. Aren't you glad we've outgrown such silly superstitions?
While the panic originated in America's cloistered, hysteria-prone evangelical subculture, it spread to society at large - even across the pond: growing up in Germany in the 1990s, I remember our out-of-date textbooks referring to it. It produced cultural artifacts beyond Chick Tracts, and Hollywood played a big part in that. In the growing tide of retro-horror, it was only a question of time until someone revisited that more primitive age.
After this blog ran into a particularly dire example of abject failure in the realm of retro-horror, I was ready to dismiss the subgenre altogether. That would've been premature, though. 'If I find in horror one righteous among the directors', I thought to myself, 'I will reconsider all the genre for his sake.' And behold, Bryce Wilson arose as one crying in the wilderness, saying, 'Check out Ti West'.
Well, I'm darn glad I did. West's career hasn't been a smooth progression and isn't free of hackwork, but his best-loved film so far is nothing short of brilliant. The House of the Devil, made on a shoestring budget and never able to get more than a limited release, didn't exactly rake in the cash. Barely crossing the $100,000 mark domestically (fun fact: it made just £407 in Britain, being shown on exactly one screen), I'd be surprised if the film broke even. But it was critically acclaimed, and it really deserved to be.
The House of the Devil opens with text providing nonsensical tongue-in-cheek 'information' on the satanic panic and promising that '[t]he following is based on true unexplained events'. It's a lie (which, delightfully, they had to clarify in the final credits), but it's also a wonderful send-up of the old true story trope that originated, if I'm not mistaken, with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ti West wastes no time establishing that we're watching a period piece set in the eighties.
As the film proper begins, sophomore college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is closing the deal on a new place. She has trouble coming up with the money for the first month's rent, though, and decides to respond to a campus flyer advertising a position as a babysitter. After some complications, she eventually arranges to babysit the same night, and her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) drives her out to her employer's spooky large house in the countryside. There, they meet mild-mannered, nervous Mr Ulman (Tom Noonan) and his wife (Mary Woronov).
Mr Ulman admits that the job isn't actually for a babysitter, but to watch over his elderly mother. Samantha is reluctant to stay, but they eventually settle on the exorbitant sum of $400. Megan leaves, as do the Ulmans, and Samantha is left in the house with precious little to do but order pizza and listen to her walkman. And from there, West is content to slowly ratchet up the tension, with precious little happening at all: Samantha wanders around the house, discovering clues as to their employers' weird nature, and becomes increasingly spooked.
It's not until twenty minutes from the end - 75 minutes into a 95-minute film - that our heroine finds herself in the hands of satanic baby killers at last. But even before that point the film is so goddamn terrifying that we don't much care that the details are satanic boilerplate (Buffy: 'It turns out everybody loves a good goat's tongue. Rock groups, covens and Greek cookbooks'). I'm not much of a scaredy-cat and watch a lot of horror films, and while I find many of them unsettling, it's been a while since a film has put me into the state of blind terror The House of the Devil manages just by little details and slow, slow tension-building. I was just about ready to give up the ghost even before the first Luciferian appears.
As Bryce notes, West achieves some of this suspense by breaking unwritten rules: there's one scene, for example, in which the camera suddenly wanders to the other side of a locked door Samantha can't open, to show us the terrors she is at this point totally unaware of. Another hugely important part of the film is Jeff Grace's excellent string-heavy score and the exceedingly authentic period music. If Machete pretends the grindhouse era never ended and Hatchet reminds us why it's a good thing it did, The House of the Devil is the first retro-exploitation film to really look, feel and sound like it might have been made in 1983.
Good casting has something to do with that: Donahue is beautiful in a decidedly old-fashioned way, reminding me of Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas. In a film that is so deliberate and low-key in building its tension, a lot rests on the actors, and Donahue acquits herself very well, although the standout performance is Noonan's, who is a mesmerisingly unusual horror villain. (His wife is much more conventional, which leaves West open to charges of misogyny - domineering woman dragging a weak husband to evil - that I'm not going to discuss here).
It looks great, too, shot by Eliot Rockett to resemble an early-eighties film as closely as possible without sacrificing beauty. After Bryce's review, though, the next thing that made me sit up and take notice was the atmospheric poster, which is great pastiche while not feeling old at all. It's gorgeous and spooky, and when you compare it to horror posters these days you do have to ask: why don't they make 'em like this anymore?
