Horror, Not Horror (again) pt 4: six weeks later

"Horror, Not Horror" movies are those that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan, but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see.

Anna and the Apocalypse - 2017, d. John McPhail - Netflix

The Girl With All The Gifts - 2016, d. Colm McCarthy - Netflix

Color Out Of Space - 2019, d. Richard Stanley - Netflix

Take Shelter - 2011, d. Jeff Nichols - AmazonPrime

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I tapped out on zombie stories a long time ago, and generally anything that smacks of zombie or zombie-like-flavouring gets a hard pass.  Every now and again I trip into a zombie story, either a show using a zombie pastiche or a comic book taking a sudden turn into the subgenre but I don't seek them out. 

 

So it may seem weird that I have two zombie movies to cover in this one post, but the simple reason is I completely forgot to note that I had watched Anna and the Apocalypse and promptly forgot about it until about 2 minutes ago when I searched this here blog for "zombies" and came across Toasty's review.   So it turns out, based on my Letterboxd recordings, that I watched a year ago.  I thought perhaps because it was Christmassy that I watched it amid our Hallmark-glut last year, but no, I watched it just before starting my Tarantino rewatch, for some reason.

 

Being so long ago, what could I possibly recall. I recorded no thoughts on the film in Letterboxd, just a 3* rating, so it wasn't all bad, and my lingering impression, now that I remembered I watched it, is that it wasn't all that bad.  I believe I confused this for Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter , at least a little bit.  The music was enjoyably peppy, but unmemorable, the scares were non-existent, and the horror sits below Shawn of the Dead in horrific-ness (which is to say, not very horrifying, mild intensity at best).  

 

There's a definite charm to a song-and-dance interpretation of genre films, but as Toasty pointed out, since Buffy The Vampire Slayer's "Once More With Feeling", genre has gotten all kinds of song-and-dance numbers on the regular, so a feature film needs to really punch it out.  Anna... comes close but doesn't ever flex past feeling like a one-off television episode of some teen dramedy (arguably, the quality of TV programming has been at amazing high for the past few years, the equal to most cinema in production values and talent on board).  If I'm less than plussed with Anna... I think it mostly has to do with it falling so readily into the trappings of zombie movies, perhaps even leaning into them purposefully.  It's like the production team thought "zombie christmas musical" as a premise was innovative enough and falling into rote teen drama and zombie cliche was as simple as it had to be.  

 

That's where The Girl With All The Gifts (watched only last month, not last year!) excels.  It presents a brand new take on zombies (at least, brand new to me, a non zombie-aficionado).  It's almost a half hour before we meet zombies proper, but that time is spent getting to know Melanie (an amazing debut for Sennia Nanua), the protagonist of our story, one of many children who were born infected with the zombie-creating fungus but not mentally incapacitated by it.  We follow Melanie through her routine for a few days, each day getting a different level of insight into what she is, and how she is different.  Melanie and her kind live in isolated cells on a military base, and once per day they are strapped to a specialized wheelchair and taken to class where Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton) treats them like real children and tries to teach them like a real class.  The children adore her, but as Sergeant Parks (Paddy Considine) points out, set free, and without the "blocker" cream they apply to mask their scent, these children wouldn't hesitate to feed on her.  

 

The point though is Melanie is distinctly different in her desire to restrain her inhibitions, and her ability to control her cravings (if only temporarily). Because she's so special, Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) wants to dissect her, believing she can find within the cure for the fungus that's spreading rapidly across the globe.  Before any further testing can be done, though, our small band (plus a few more) are on the run and survival will require even more dependence upon Melanie and her unique view of the world.

Based off a short story and developed into a book concurrently with the screenplay, notable comics scribe Mike Carey (Lucifer, Hellblazer, the Unwritten) has turned the zombie cliche on its head with this one.  It twists away from the non-descript virus of most zombie stories, and by turning it into something even more organic, a fungus that has almost symbiotic properties but also its own drive to spore and expand.  This unique pathogen creates an even more unique world to build, the zombies as we normally know them don't play by the expected rules, so there's more discovery here than I'm used to in a zombie movie.  

There are still obvious tropes that are inescapable even with the change in origin, but the film negotiates these tropes astutely, the characters always acting sensibly with never an instance of "no, don't do that!"  Everyone is competent at what they do, they have an ability to learn and grow, to change their mind and their behavior.  Sergeant Barnes certainly starts looking at Melanie a different way than he did before (he would wake them up, slandering them at all times, calling them "bloody abortions".  When later he hears Melanie quote this back to him, he feels regret for his treatment of her). This isn't a film that wants to jump scare you, it wants you to be intrigued, curious, even a little repulsed by what's happening.  By giving us Melanie as our point-of-view character, we're not as invested in killing all the zombies, or stopping the plague, so much as hoping she finds her place in all this.  It's wonderfully captivating, incredibly well made (evoking the world they've designed perfectly), certainly the best "zombie" picture I've seen in a very, very long time.

 

But are they horror?
Anna and the Apocalypse is horror-adjacent as it genre mixes and conveys a more jubilant tone, rather than scary one.  Girl With All the Gifts is just on the horror line.  It has so many established horror conventioms, but it breaks almost all of them.  It's almost more drama than horror.

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Color Out Of Space marks Richard Stanley's return to feature directing  after a 25 year absence following the debacle of The Island of Dr. Moreau (see the fascinating documentary on that - Lost Soul).  It's a weird selling point for a movie starring Nic Cage based on a Lovecraft story, but it's how the film was promoted.  Not really keeping up in horror chat rooms or wherever such fans congregate, I can't really say if Stanley has become a kind of legend at this point or not, the lost potential of a possible great horror director in certain people's eyes, but I do wonder if enough people know the tale or believe in Stanley's output from 30 years ago to put that much stock in marketing a film around him.  The more interesting part of his story is how he couldn't handle the pressure and got really weird, and not so much his creative storytelling or directing.

Anyway, Color Out Of Space is a gorgeous-looking hot mess of a film.  The titular colour from space is an ethereal electric purple that, following a meteor crash, slowly starts to seep into, and out of the farm land and its inhabitants where Nathan (Cage), Theresa (Joley Richardson) Gardner and their three kids are trying to make a new life.  They had retreated from the big city following Theresa's battle with breast cancer.  She's struggling with dodgy internet and cellular connections trying to retain her big city career, while Nathan has alpacas and is attempting to farm food.

Stanley does a good job in establishing the family, the dynamics between them, and the effect the transitional period they are in is having on them.  Cage, particularly, shows good restraint and is near-believable as a caring father and husband, that is until said colour from space's effect on him manifests by turning Nic Cage, professional actor, into Nic Cage, professionally unhinged presence.  When Cage first flies off the handle, it's the end of "acting" for him and he goes into a seeming fugue state where he's just a mess of crazy eyes and unscripted yelling.  In one scene Richardson tries to meet him at his level, and you can tell she regrets it instantly but still commits for the remainder of the scene.

Beyond its familial set up, and the creeping unease for the first, let's say half of the film, it's actually a pretty engaging picture, and it's cinematography from Steve Annis is really quite wonderful, but the second half seems to forget most of what made the first half work.  The familial connection and the unease broaden right out into assailing terror but it's largely ridiculous.  A character we meet very early on, Ward Phillips (a hydrologist in town surveying for a new dam), has very little influence on the story and remains peripheral throughout, as if Stanley just never really knew what his purpose was.  Plus, he's obviously a working professional so trying to draw a meet cute between him and teenage Lavinia Gardner -a practicing wiccan- seems highly inappropriate.  The whole wiccan thing is just a really bizarre sub-sub-plot which never feels appropriately integrated.  Then there's Tommy Chong, a hermit hanging out in a hommade cottage on the back of the property, a real conspiracy nut, who again seems there to set something up, but does absolutely nothing except be found dead later.

There's a complete loss of competent storytelling happening in the second act as "events" become the dominant force of the movie.  You're no longer watching characters react to things, rather you're seeing things happen to the characters, and there's a difference in how invested you can be when a story is presented that way.  I could see, say, Bong Joon-Ho making a real character-heavy meal out of this.

Perhaps it's Lovecraft's source material.  Having never read any of his work I don't really know if his stories tend to work out that way, abandoning character and mood for incidents of horror, or if it's just Stanley's adaptation that does it.  

 

I went into the film with an optimistic attitude, and came out thinking that Nic Cage should never be allowed to act in anything else ever again.  I'm sure he's starred in 12 things since the making of this movie.  Hopefully they're nothing I was hoping to see.

 

Is it horror?  Yeah, it actually is.  But is it any good?  A little bit... a little bit good, a lot not great.

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Take Shelter is a film I've been meaning to watch for a very, very long time.  So long, in fact, that I've forgotten entirely the reason why I'd been meaning to watch it...whether it was because of my increasing admiration for Michael Shannon, or to see Jeff Nichols' earlier work, or if it was just one of those movies I saw on a streaming service that intrigued me so I added it to a list (which originally was Netflix, but is now on Amazon Prime).

I know I had flagged the film before watching Midnight Special but it was after seeing that picture that I knew I had to go back in Nichols' filmography.  I did a pretty crappy job of it though (I still haven't seen Mud or Loving either).  I really dug Nichols' handling of sci-fi, very earthy and grounded.  He does sci-fi in a way that I would have hated as a kid, when I wanted flash and excitement, but love now, where it's teased out and blurs the lines between reality and metaphor.

With Take Shelter, Curtis (Shannon) starts having dreams, often daydreams, which shake him to his very core.  He's seeing things which start to affect his sense of reality.  Living in small town Ohio, he and his loving, devoted wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) have a calm and simple life, even with the complications of their young, deaf daughter.  But these visions - rain of oil, swarms of birds, foreboding clouds - he can't ignore.  He borrows construction equipment from his place of work and starts building an extension to his storm shelter.  But his fervent belief in a coming apocalypse is tainted by his awareness of his family history of mental illness, his mother a diagnosed schizophrenic. 

Even with knowing that he's possibly having issues mentally Curtis can't help but tear apart his life, so fearful for the enduring safety of his family.  His wife is equally furious at his actions but sympathetic to the fact that he may not be well.  For its fantastical trappings, the upsetting visions he's having, this is a story of mental illness and the effect it has on one's sense of self, and how destructive it can be to one's life.  The approach Nichols takes is one of compassion and empathy, and it sides with Curtis as a victim of his disease, while similarly showing us the fallout his actions have, and they're pretty detrimental to the life and plans of his family.

I like that the film doesn't muddy the waters, playing the "is it mental illness or is it reality" game.  It's clearly mental illness.  And it's a far better movie for it.  What doesn't work then is the ambiguous final mement which seems to imply that Curtis, while yes, suffers from mental illness, was also right about an apocalypse coming.  That's just kind of a slap in the face.

It's a very engaging, challenging film, portraying the rural sensibilities with equal parts appreciation and condemnation.  The "stoic man" of rural America leads to more problems than good solutions, but that's not to say that the steadfast stoic nature isn't admirable in its own right.

Is it horror? No, not really, but it does have its intense moments.  And I think paranoid schizophrenia is one of the scariest afflictions, not being able to discern imagination from reality is terrifying.