Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! I’ll admit right from the start, today’s film selections are some kind of Frankensteinian abomination, the cobbled remnants of several weeks’ viewings. My inconsistent approach to building a review buffer has resulted in some odd temporal anomalies – for example, this week features the Texas Chainsaw revival film that inspired our “further research” from a few weeks ago. Fortunately, this also grants me the luxury of actual curation, allowing me to construct a sort of meta-reflection on the evolution of horror in film. Also, Texas Chainsaw aside, the rest of this week’s films are really good, so I’m eager to share them with you. Let’s get to it!
Our first feature was the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre revival, a film that felt perpetually unsure of itself. We start off by getting introduced to a group of eminently hate-worthy social media influencers, who’ve parlayed their success into the funding of an entire influencer pop-up community built on the bones of an old Texan town. This is all well and good; influencers have essentially become the victim-du-jour of modern slashers, with their constant self-promotion and obliviousness standing in for prior generation’s hedonism as the justification for murdering them.
With a few ornery locals also in attendance, the stage seems set for a very traditional contrast of new values and old chainsaws. At this point, the film begins to complicate its moral arc, revealing some shades of gray in both the original owners and the interlopers to this town. This nuance is welcome (even if it directly contradicts the film’s earlier characterizations), but short-lived – Leatherface soon arrives, and basically chainsaws all of the film’s moral questions to death. Then, once the film’s switched focus again to be more of a sisterly bonding narrative (complete with ill-placed school shooting backstory), they introduce an entirely superfluous “past survivor returns to kill the beast” narrative, which basically goes nowhere. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, it feels like a different hand takes hold of the script, and decides to veer the story off in an entirely different direction.
All of this makes for a profoundly unfocused film in both narrative and thematic terms, but frankly, the incoherence of the narrative isn’t even my greatest complaint with it. Far more frustrating was this film’s insistence on treating the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as an event of mythic proportions, a larger-than-life catastrophe featuring a larger-than-life monster. The horror of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was that nothing about it was larger-than-life; it was just an incidental act of senseless violence, performed on some kids who happened to break down on the wrong stretch of the road. The idea that monstrous violence isn’t special, that it could be lurking behind every corner or window, is precisely the threat that made the original film so frightening. To lose that is to see a genuinely engaging concept be undone by allegiance to Canonicity, that great enemy of original art.
We followed that up with one of our few unwatched horror classics, the fascinating Don’t Look Now. Released in 1973, Don’t Look Now almost feels too pretty to be a horror film of that era; barring outliers like Hitchcock and Polanski, the genre generally didn’t look as stately as this, nor proceed with such nuance of emotional acuity. Based on an excellent short story (also found in The Weird, a collection I recommend to everyone), the film follows a couple who travel to Venice in the wake of their daughter’s drowning, hoping to bury their grief in beauty. Unfortunately, the wife (Julie Christie) ends up running into a pair of old women who assure her that “her daughter is right there next to her, smiling brightly.” Christie is allured by the promise of these spiritualists, but her husband (Donald Sutherland) sees them as con artists, until supernatural happenings begin haunting him as well.
There are two locations that define the essence of Don’t Look Now: the alternately enthralling and alienating corridors of Venice, and the assuredly smoke-filled chamber of Don’t Look Now’s own editing room. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that was so driven by its cross-cuts; in essentially every moment of great drama, Don’t Look Now partitions itself across two sequences of action, cross-cutting between them with uncanny grace. Rather than the sense of disorientation you might expect from such a technique, the ways movement and form are retained between the transitions is actually electrifying. Through this technique, the film visually expresses its central thematic thrust: the idea that all things are in some way interconnected, and that every aspect of our lives is a reflective facet of the whole.
With few outright scares, the film extracts tension through implication, using the often lonely corridors of Venice to wondrous effect. The sense of an unknowable, seemingly malevolent force guiding the drama is palpable; this is truly a story in the “weird tradition,” where the world seems stranger than our capacity to describe it, and our own actions are but the motions of pawns on a larger board. Capped off with a dynamite giallo-reminiscent finale, Don’t Look Now is an “elevated horror film” before that self-conscious moniker was invented, and a marvel of editing artistry.
Our next feature was proudly weird as hell, the defiantly sharp-edged Titane. Titane is about a girl named Alexia, who had a metal plate fitted in her head after a childhood car accident. As an adult, she performs dances on cars, and seems to also have sex with them? Anyway, she has sex with a car and gets pregnant with a car-baby, and after killing her parents and everyone she was staying with, she elects to disguise herself as the long-lost son of a local fireman named Vincent. As she attempts to hide her identity and rapidly progressing car-baby, an awkward bond develops between Alexia and her new “father.”
Titane’s first half is certainly an interesting sequence of images, but didn’t do anything for me dramatically. Alexia herself is less a person than a force of nature; she picks actions seemingly at random, has no moral values beyond self-preservation, and lives in a world where her lunatic behavior somehow results in an impromptu adult adoption. I’m not really into films that are just a series of unique images, so my interest in the film only picked up when Vincent entered the picture – a sad, desperate man who felt as carefully realized as Alexia was obscured.
There’s plenty of vivid body horror imagery in Titane, but I found its celebration of bodies in space to be even more compelling. The film is littered with extended dance sequences, where either Alexia or Vincent surrender themselves to the joy of music and motion, and in these moments they are transcendent. In a film where bodies are imperfect at best, and more often actively antagonistic to our survival, Titane’s dance sequences find something glorious in their uncaged movements, when all thought of presentation is lost, and the music gives rise to your soul’s voice. A proudly abrasive and inconsistently glorious film.
Our final feature was an absolutely incendiary watch, a film I’ll surely be thinking about for some time: Targets, the directorial debut of Peter Bogdanovich. Targets presents two contrasting narratives, as we are first presented with “Byron Orlok,” who is essentially Boris Karloff playing himself. Disillusioned with his career and intimated by this new era of anonymous spree killers, Karloff is intent on retiring, but is persuaded into one last appearance by young director Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich, also basically playing himself). While the two of them wind towards an appearance at a local drive-in movie theater, we also follow Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a young man with seemingly no major problems in his life, who is nonetheless about to embark on a merciless killing spree with his collection of rifles.
The creation of Targets is almost as interesting of a story as the film itself. Producer Roger Corman apparently had Karloff on the hook for precisely two days of shooting, and offered that opportunity to one of his favorite proteges. Bogdanovich took that narrow opportunity and ran with it, weaving in footage of Karloff’s old films in order to create a self-reflective exploration of horror in film, how films impact our lives, and what we really ought to be scared of.
Watching Bobby Thompson slowly maneuver towards his killing spree is one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever sat through. Bobby’s bright-faced lack of connection with everything in his life, his cheerful distance as he sets all of his affairs and weapons in order, make the experience far more off-putting than if he were more coherently villainous. Bobby is simply empty; he’s followed his family’s orders all his life, but can speak to no one in his life with any sort of honesty, and might not even have something to say if he could. He is the vacuum at the core of mid-century suburbia, rough clay formed into the shape of an old-fashioned man, but with the mind of a disinterested child. The film’s title clearly refers to his full mental assessment of his fellow humans: when they finally catch him, his first comment to the police is “but I sure barely missed at all, didn’t I?”
An entire film spent following Bobby would probably be too suffocating to survive; fortunately, the lit fuse of his narrative is balanced by the humor and humanity of Karloff’s material. Karloff is lovably petty and righteously tired, having not-inaccurately concluded that the modern world has no use for the ghouls and goblins of classic Hollywood. “High camp, they call me,” he bitterly remarks, voicing a frustration that Bogdanovich undoubtedly held some sympathy for. Classic Hollywood might have been ornate and unreal, but was that such a crime? And what is replacing it – the faceless sociopathy of a sniper in a tower, with no motivation, no personhood at all? At least in Karloff’s Frankenstein, there was pathos and humanity – in fact, it was perhaps the awkward, lurching humanity of those old monsters that made them so great. In the humanity of a monster, we find a sense of solidarity – in the inhumanity of mankind, we see only alienation and destruction.
Bogdanovich gracefully weaves these reflections on horror into a larger critique of cinema and the audience, with his authorial avatar at one point complaining that “all the good movies have already been made.” Filmed eighteen years after Sunset Boulevard, the last embers of classic Hollywood have at this point settled to the ground, leaving not even the potential for a cathartic noir throwback. Instead, Targets’ climax is all New Hollywood pandemonium, as a drive-in theater promising old-fashioned scares becomes a lightning rod for the new age’s latest fears. Karloff’s triumphant final act could well come from one of his own classics, improbable and dramatically convenient as it is, and serves as a capstone of sincere love on a film wrought with cynical anxiety. Try as he might, Bobby’s monstrousness cannot steal the essence of horror from the dreamers, the weirdos, the starry-eyed production assistants. We scream at the screen to feel less alone, and though fashions may change with time, each new Karloff will surely find their appreciative Bogdanovich.
