Center of Gravity

Three! Spooky! Movies!

I’ve been out and about! This summer is shaping up to be very pulpy, for better and for worse. Lots of surface area, lots of planning. All the while, I’ve felt the season shift. It’s getting hotter before it cools down, but in a so-cal kinda way that feels more like fall than anything. I’m ready for spooky season. Once I found some time, I hit the pictures hard. Settling into these three felt like a nice return to form. It was also good to clear out my watchlist a little bit; it’s getting seriously big. I think I have like 200+ movies on there.

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

I feel like horror movies are uniquely positioned to benefit from subversion of expectations; oftentimes, to be frightened is to be surprised. This is the apparent meta-premise of The Descent, the beginning of which is such droll prefab horror that the twist (creature feature with a genre-twist into survival horror) hits like a pickaxe to the ACL. I love horror where the characters aren’t helpless. Here you get the best example of that: a bunch of lesbian frenemies with killer survival instinct and nothing to lose. I didn’t sit down to this expecting full combat scenes, but wow did I get them! Also, for taking place in a cave, there were some really great setpieces. A favorite is the initial reveal: a scarlet flare reflects against dripping cave walls, revealing dozens of freaks crawling and hissing like so many cockroaches. I actually went “EUGH!” out loud. Also, I was surprised by the quality of the performances. The two final girls had my investment in a way that’s rare for the genre. Awesome watch, 3.5 stars.

Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998)

Long time coming for this one! Fall is approaching fast and for this year’s horror marathon I wanted to get more into Japanese offerings. This was an educational watch. About a third of the way in, I realized I don’t care much for detective style mysteries. There are exceptions to every rule of course (Shutter Island, Se7en, The Batman) but the procedural investigation genre is decidedly not in my lane. I connected the dots when I realized how similar The Wailing is to this, which I also gave a middling rating (and which, notably, has a strong following of mystery-horror lovers). Why is this? I’m trying to figure that out. I’m definitely not a slow-burn hater, I adore movies that are about sitting in a vibe. I think it might be the structure of the narrative itself, the step-by-step nature and genre-specific proclivities of the characters/archetypes. I’ll give it up, there were some iconic moments, and I enjoyed how it picked up in act 3 with the well-emptying and the plot twist, but otherwise this was mostly a miss for me. Elucidating, 3 stars.

Noroi: The Curse (Koji Shiraishi, 2005)

Remember 30 seconds ago when I said I didn’t like procedural mystery horror? Yeah, that’s like ALL This was. I felt a creeping sense of dread as, 20 minutes in, I realized it was the most by-the-books detective-style horror I’d ever seen. Dry as a DESERT. Noroi is told as a lost documentary on a cursed village. What’s unique here is verisimilitude; Unlike a lot of found footage horror that I’ve seen (paranormal activity, blair witch), there is close to zero allowance for cinematic flair. It’s meticulous, grainy, and most of all, boring. I mean that as technical praise: Noroi’s dogged dedication to the bit make it special. The standard, even. For me personally though? I got an actual headache because it was so slow.
Like with Ring, Noroi forced me to reckon with my own taste and what about it exactly that bothered me so much (too soon, but we make lemonade) and I think this time it was the total absence of character work. For me, the appeal of horror is less in the scare itself and more on its implications re: the human condition. I want to see characters forced into stressful and interesting situations! I want to see relationships bend and break! I got none of that, and was sad for it. 1.5 stars.

Try, try again

This blitz was a prickly reminder that the moviegoer life is one of discovery. That means a lot of misses. That said, I wouldn’t say I wasted my time with these. I learned something important about my taste, and I explored a new subgenre. Not nothing! Sometimes learning what you don’t like is just as important. And anyways, after watching Noroi, I saw Weapons with my dad and it fucking ripped (4 stars, I won’t elaborate).

I feel this blitz did a great job of bringing in the horror season. Sure, there’s still a month of summer left, but it’s never too early. I’ll be hitting the watchlist again soon.