Posts Tagged ‘horror’

The New Lurid

February 8, 2024

The idea that we hoi polloi see the ruling class who lord over us as louche, overindulgent, perverse, and dangerous is nothing new. It is, after all, as clear how Edgar Allan Poe felt about Prince Prospero and his revelers as it is how Mike Flanagan feels about Prospero Usher and his. But in the main, television’s swipes at the ultrarich have been satirical and visually straightforward, and have preferred to keep violence to a sanitized minimum. Succession is a very nice-looking show, as is The White Lotus (2021– ), but they don’t feel as though the depravity of the characters has seeped through into the stuff of the filmmaking itself.

The New Lurid, by contrast, gives television auteurs and viewers alike a new narrative and visual vocabulary, one commensurate with the degeneracy of our overlords as represented by the characters to which they often directly correspond. Like a televisual vanitas, it is sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Dead Ringers, and a genre I like to call “The New Lurid” — overheated, oversaturated, oversexed tales of depravity and violence among the entropic elite and its interlopers; think “Saltburncore” — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“True Detective” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Two: “Night Country: Part 2”

January 22, 2024

The real reason I don’t want True D S3 to go for broke in that direction is this: I don’t think this show has the chops to be genuinely frightening. It’s jumpscared me a few times — the mystery man still running around the station at the beginning of episode 1, the first appearance of Travis (Erling Eliasson), the car crash, various characters pulling jumpscare pranks on various other characters, and of course the fact that one of the frozen scientists turns out to be alive and screaming. But to dig deep into the true black, the cosmic void, the annihilating evil at the heart of all truly great supernatural horror? I don’t see The Exorcist or Under the Skin or The Shining or The Blair Witch Project or Skinamarink in here. I don’t see Twin Peaks or The Terror or Channel Zero here — or True Detective Season 1, for that matter. I don’t think this season’s horror, such as it is, is going to horrify me, and that’s important.

I reviewed this week’s episode of True Detective for Decider.

We ask that you refrain from talking about your experience inside the structure

January 19, 2024

The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!

“Monarch” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Birthright”

December 31, 2023

Some of the best, sweetest, sexiest, most convincing romantic storytelling being done on TV this year is happening on — get this — Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I know! I didn’t see it coming either! But first with May and Kentaro, then with Kei and Lee, and now with Kei and Billy, this show has given the blossoming of romance the kind of casual intimacy and heat that makes you crave the stuff in the first place. That this week’s expert demonstration of yearning and desire involves the younger version of a crackpot character played by John Goodman and eaten by a monster in a film called Kong: Skull Island is part of the fun.

I reviewed this week’s Monarch for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “Will the Real May Please Stand Up?”

December 23, 2023

In short, this is good stuff, written and acted and directed (by Hiromi Kamata) by people who believe this goofy science-fantasy universe can be used to tell human stories that are actually compelling, not just quote-unquote human, and who work with full commitment to this idea. I’m not ready to use the A-word as an overall comparison just yet, but no doubt about it: That’s Andor-coded behavior.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

History Shows Again and Again How Nature Points Out the Folly of Man

December 16, 2023

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Terrifying Miracles”

December 15, 2023

Now look here, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: I came here for giant monsters. What gives you the right to spring a Mad Men–style storyline about explosive romantic chemistry in the workplace and the way desire can cause us to lose the things we hold dearest? On top of a bunch of totally awesome shots of Godzilla doing cool shit? At least give me a heads up next time!

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Monarch for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “The Way Out”

December 8, 2023

That’s the other thing: The whole concept of people who go into the ruins, collect photos and stuffed animals and other personal effects rather than valuables, and attempt to contact their owners to return them is just one of the artifacts of post-Godzilla life that crop up tantalizingly this episode. There’s the airport signage admonishing travelers to “respect the authority of ALL first responders,” the kind of uptick in low-grade authoritarianism you might expect in the aftermath of a literal monster attack. There are the underground bunkers for rich “tech bros” our heroes see advertised on airport TV. There’s the economy of state violence and military graft that determines who can and can’t trespass in the forbidden zone. There’s the constant drumbeat of denialism, of people who think it’s all a hoax to “burst the real-estate bubble,” as one kid puts it.  It’s all thoughtful, even provocative stuff.

Then there’s my favorite moment of all, one of the scariest split seconds of television in a long time. After an administrator admonishes Cate to take the warnings about the titans seriously and then departs, another woman is briefly seen running down the hall just before we cut away from this flashback. We know why: She’s seen what’s coming, and she’s about to tell a classroom full of children that their death awaits them. The show doesn’t lean on this at all, doesn’t even draw your attention to it. It’s just…there, hidden in the background by director Mairzee Almas. 

It’s a little uncomfortable texture in a world that, based on this episode, benefits from uncomfortable textures greatly. If Monarch can get to the Andor point, where you don’t need to be bombarded with capital-F Franchise stuff to feel what it’s like to live in that Franchise’s world…well, let’s not count our MUTOs before they’re hatched.

I reviewed today’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Parallels and Interiors”

December 2, 2023

I can’t remember who, but someone once said that a title like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than a title, it’s a promise. In that light, I expect a show called Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to do certain things. So I’m really not sure where I come down on “Parallels and Interiors,” the show’s knowingly pretentiously titled fourth episode. On the one hand, you have an effectively sketched-out romance between characters with believable chemistry. On the other hand, there’s only one monster, and it’s not even a new one or a famous one. I’m not sure that’s a trade I’m comfortable making.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider. The inclusion of a strong, sexy, convincing romance storyline marks a turning point for the season, though I didn’t know this at the time I wrote the review. Stay tuned!

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Secrets and Lies”

November 23, 2023

It can be a cheap trick for a popcorn flick or its TV equivalent to mine real-world tragedy for pathos. It’s so easy for the relative tastelessness of that kind of entertainment, much as I love so much of it, to read as defilement of something that should be held sacred. When it goes wrong, it does so in spectacular fashion: Marvel attributing the authorship of Hiroshima to one of its Eternals, say, or Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing over the memorial for Emmett Till in Lovecraft Country

These are not accusations you can level at any project in the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla is inextricably linked to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, and to the threats of nuclear war and environmental devastation generally. So when the third episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depicts a Japanese woman trying to physically stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb while screaming in terror and grief, all I can do is respect it. With a paraphrase of “My God, what have I done,” writer Andrew Colville and director Julian Holmes underline what’s really going on here, though they respect you enough to catch it without anyone bringing up Dr. Keiko Miura’s nationality. In this franchise, they shouldn’t have to.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Departure”

November 17, 2023

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “Aftermath”

November 17, 2023

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty): The Spectacle of Carnage in Game of Thrones and Shin Godzilla

November 11, 2023

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

City in Dust: How ‘Cloverfield’ Brought Horror Back to the Giant Monster Movie

October 27, 2023

And the thing looks so expensive. The casual ease with which it depicts the most expensive place to film in America getting completely destroyed by a gigantic entity and the United States military is mindblowing, especially after 15 years of bland destructive spectacles in superhero movies shot either on streets in Vancouver or in warehouses in Atlanta. I watched it with my 14-year-old kid, who at times literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “How the hell did they film this?” he asked, completely baffled — and awed.

I wrote about Cloverfield, an excellent and extremely effective giant-monster horror movie that deserves reappraisal, for Decider.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” thoughts, Episode Eight: “The Raven”

October 17, 2023

Copenhagen Cowboy, Dead Ringers, The Idol, Foundation Season 2: It’s been a great year for the lurid and the florid on television, maybe the best I can remember. The Fall of the House of Usher fits right alongside them, glowing and buzzing like a gorgeously lit, expensively dressed corpse. 

I reviewed the finale of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” thoughts, Episode Six: “Goldbug”

October 17, 2023

As was the case with T’Nia Miller last episode, Samantha Sloyan is outstanding as an extraordinarily wealthy and well put-together woman coming apart at the seams. The way she almost physically wills her presentation back on track after stumbling out on stage shouting the f-bomb at a nonexistent person, with the camera never flinching from her high-cheekboned, anxiety-ridden face, is a wonder to behold. She handles the explicit sex stuff in the sex tape with the practiced frankness of a woman confident in asking for what she wants. (As much as her fetishes represent a deeper dysfunction, I don’t think Usher is presenting the fetishes as a dysfunction in and of themselves, any more than Chuck Rhoades being a sub on Billions is supposed to indicate he’s an unethical prosecutor.)

I reviewed episode six of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” thoughts, Episode Five: “The Tell-Tale Heart”

October 16, 2023

True, the episode may lack keep-you-up-at-night scares — the occasional flash of a corpse in a place where corpses shouldn’t be isn’t enough — but it makes up for that in intensity. It’s like an Evil Dead movie in that regard: I don’t think anyone has a hard time sleeping because of anything Ash slices up with that chainsaw hand, but none would deny that Evil Dead 2 is horror, because it was clearly made by filmmakers dedicated to shotgunning outrageous fucked-up violent gross over-the-top shit at your face every thirty seconds. From its rich assholes’ long Glengarry monologues about their own awfulness to the deliberately cruel demises of all the Usher kids, that’s obviously The Fall of the House of Usher’s intention too. You could say that’s its beating heart.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” thoughts, Episode Four: “The Black Cat”

October 14, 2023

It’s my kind of catty, my kind of blunt, my kind of gross, my kind of show.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” thoughts, Episode Three: “Murder in the Rue Morgue”

October 14, 2023

And so we continue with the recipe that’s worked so far: Graphic violence, sexual fetishism, actors having fun playing heel, and the unwavering belief that the ultrawealthy should be brutally punished for their crimes. What, honestly, is not to like here?

I reviewed episode 3 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.