He Doesn't Like You Watching Us: Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

For someone who might have either actually read this blog since its inception, or happens to have trolled through all the posts I have made, will know that I am a huge supporter of the original Paranormal Activity film, citing it both as one of the major works in the horror genre, while also defending it as one of the best films of the year of its release.  Now, since then, I have managed to keep up with the franchise, not counting its foreign spin-offs, although I plan to hunt them down eventually and while I did not blog about them due to time restraints, or more likely a lack of an internet source during their respective viewings, I have decided to return to this film, for what I thought would be the final installment in the series, but as I have come to realize there is purportedly a fifth film in the works, one that seems to be focused n a family of color, which is both revolutionary in terms of sub-genre horror filmmaking, but also ripe with the possibilities of poorly executed narrative.  Either way, Paranormal 4 is a moderately successful addition to the franchise, paling in comparison to the original and falling short of the VHS based restrictions of the third film, but certainly trumping the second film which is outright the least realized of the series.  Here, in what begins to be an obvious set up for the next film, viewers are rushed through a narrative that is at times genuinely scary, but still wraps together far too quickly and manages to build upon nothing established in the first films, aside from the continual connections of one character.  The tricks are minimal and aside from a rather visually stunning use of the Xbox Kinect sensors playing heavily into the plot this was a surprisingly simple and predictable entry into the series.  This is particularly a shame since the extra heavy reliance on digital here in this film could have provided for a new level of paranormal invasion, perhaps even a complete destruction on the panoptic, surveillance like look at the movement of evil through a fractured household.  Paranormal Activity is certainly not a bad film, I was thoroughly scared throughout, but in the same sense I was always aware of how uninspired this film proved to be.

Paranormal Activity 4 begins by showing the through line of all the films Katie (Katie Featherson) playing with her infant nephew, whose name in the earlier film is Hunter, also showing her stealing the child before a card explains that the two remain missing to the point where this narrative jumps off.  The film now beginning on October 31st of 2011 looks at the life of a family, most specifically the daughter Alex (Kathryn Newton) who is attempting to deal with the fracturing relationship of her parents Doug (Stephen Dunham) and Holly (Alexondra Lee) while also proving a decent big sister to her younger brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).  Furthermore, Alex is also interested in a neighborhood boy named Ben (Matt Shively) despite his rather obvious one-track mind and the condemnation of his presence by her parents.  When new neighbors move in however, things get a bit unusual when the young boy Robbie (Brady Allen) begins showing up inexplicably at their house at all times of night, first scaring Alex when he appears in the corner of their tree house late at night.  What follows is far more disturbing, when after an accident Robbie stays with the family for an extended period of time.  It is during this time that unusual events occur, things such as weird spectral presences emerging, or Wyatt and Robbie staring blankly for hours before talking to what appears to be nothing.  It is not until chandeliers begin nearly killing Alex, or knives that had gone missing begin falling from the ceiling that the remainder of the family takes notice.  However, at this point, Wyatt has become fully involved with the entity that has invaded their house, a small child that is indeed captured on the laser projection.  When attempting to uncover truth about the events, at the neighbors home, Alex runs into Katie who begins inquiring about Wyatt and his well-being.  This moment leads to Wyatt explaining that he is actually named Hunter, an issue that when brought up by Alex to her parents leads to them chastising her inquiries as being in bad taste, and when she has a final traumatic encounter with the paranormal while her parents are at dinner, things become irreversible as her mother and Ben are attack while she is at dinner with her father, upon returning and discovering the problem, she quickly runs to the neighbors home, only to find things far more disturbing than she could have imagined.

If, as I suggested, the first film is about the fall out of a relationship between two people played out as a metaphor of paranormal haunting, then this the fourth film is the first to truly look at how such a extended issue might affect a child.  Alex is a person suffering from finding an identity and certainty in the face of her parents failing marriage, always hyper aware of how things might affect the sensitive Wyatt, but also using this protection to mask her own insecurities, which are played out rather brilliantly in her relationship to Ben, one that is awkwardly sexualized, but never one of forced consummation.  It is clear that she is initially hesitant to embrace Ben, because he does not support her fears regarding the paranormal invasion of her house, or by extension understand her suffering at the sight of her parents fighting.  With this in mind, it is interesting to see how things shift when Ben is made aware of the reality of the paranormal, or by extension comes to understand the tense relationship between Doug and Holly and is particular witness to the incredibly unhealthy relationship between Wyatt and Robbie.  In fact, the invasion of Robbie into the space of the film, also takes on a shade of the metaphoric as many relationships attempt to fix their domestic issues by adding a child to the equation, here, as is usually the result, the act fails miserably.  The metaphor goes to the somewhat implausible by making it result in incredibly violent events, but this does serve as a nice parallel to the traumas faced by children born into such divisive households, ones where argument and anger prevail out over mild temperament and well-reasoned dialogue.  One could read Alex as the figure capable of doing precisely this, however, her inability to speak against the emotive is double through her being incapable of proving the presence of the paranormal to her skeptical and detached parents, each having their own mocking indifference to her concerns, perhaps because they refuse to validate the existence of the paranormal, or, more likely, because they are far too preoccupied with their own marital sufferings to create a space of dialogue for Alex and Wyatt.  As such, Alex finds herself forced to be a maternal figure to her younger brother a burden that weighs heavily upon her and is evidence very intensely in the last few seconds of the film.

Key Scene:  The real surprise her is how well Brady Allen, the child actor playing Robbie, delivers his performance.  Usually creepy kids rely on looks alone, but when Robbie stares into the camera in this film, it is all the more intense by Allen's great delivery.

This is on Netflix in both an R and unrated version, I am uncertain as to the difference in the two, perhaps a few less boob-based pieces of dialogue.  Either way, watch this and the other films in the franchise, which I believe are all currently available for streaming.

All These Beautiful Things That Were Destroyed...I Could Restore: The Mystery Of The Wax Museum (1933)

For the final post to the enjoyable and brilliantly put together TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon, I decided to go in the direction of a film I had never seen, as opposed to revisiting works for which I knew I already had a deep affinity.  This is always a gamble, considering that I could turn out not to enjoy the movie at all and would be left writing a blog for a blogathon that is anything but celebratory about the work in question.  Fortunately, The Mystery of the Wax Museum is an incredibly watchable film that manages to be one of the creepier and haunting film I have ever encounter, despite being made in 1933.  Images of melting wax faces and the chiaroscuro expressionism that generally influence the narrative of this film are some of the best of the era, existing in a wonderful middle ground between the nightmarish work of Fritz Lang and the dreary desolation of the film noir works of the forties.  Indeed, The Mystery of the Wax Museum could have gotten away on looks alone, the added enjoyment of some great acting and a relatively engaging plot make for an all around great cinematic experience.  Since this is a blogathon concerning the "Featured Star" of the day, I must give brief mention to Glenda  Farrell who is wonderful in this film and is indeed the reason this film was take upon by me, even if blindly.  Knowing very little about her (and highlighting her in the synopsis), I thought it worth mentioning  Fay Wry whose presence reminded me that she was the famous girl from King Kong, as well as in the criminally under-viewed 1932 adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game.  Along with her presence in The Mystery of the Wax Museum and a ton of other horror films, I am considering that argument that Fay Wry might be the original scream queen, or at the very least the grandmother of genre films.  Her presence in this film is decidedly within her more traditional roles, but given the manner with which bodies double and layer upon one another through wax duplications, her presence also takes on an ethereal quality, adding to the already eerie nature of the film.  The Mystery of the Wax Museum is not a grand stroke of horror through barrage, but instead; is a subtle repetition of creepy moments that come together to really leave an unsettling feeling in the viewer long after finishing, much like Dead of Night or The Blair Witch Project.  This is the ideal horror cinema.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum begins with Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) completing yet another work in his prized London wax museum, centering around his incredibly lifelike statue of Marie Antoinette.  His moment of happiness is quickly stifled when he is visited by his parter Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell), who explains that the museum is proving to be a huge loss financially and that the only way to recoup the losses is to burn the entire place down for the insurance money.  Ivan attempts to stop Joe from his act but fails to do so.  The film then fast forwards twelve years to New York, where the city is receiving its own wax museum, overseen by Ivan, who must use apprentices to do his work, considering that he no longer has hands to sculpt with after they were severely damaged in the fire.  Ivan is particularly frustrated with the new work, blaming much of the trouble on hiring a recovering drug addict named Professor Darcy (Arthur Edmund Carewe) and a deaf-mute named Hugo (Matthew Betz).  Regardless, the museum is slated to open soon so Ivan pushes through with his work at full speed, even receiving a new statue in the mail whose life like qualities are quite uncanny.  Centering this female statue as the center of his exhibit as a Joan of Arc recreation, Ivan slips into a maniacal push for perfection.  Meanwhile, up and coming journalist Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell), while investigating a murder, comes to realize the similarities between a recently deceased woman and the new statue, as well as a similarity between a few other missing bodies and some of the other additions to Ivan's collection.  Hoping to warn others, particularly her roommate Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray), Florence takes it upon herself to make the connection between the dead bodies and the new statues, coming into contact with a deeply entrenched bootlegging scheme in the process that is run by none other than Joe Worth.  This, however, does get the attention of the police, who agree to meet Florence at the museum a decision that proves quite fortuitous because they arrive only moments before Charlotte is to be "embalmed" by the maniacal Ivan, who believes that she will provide the final piece de resistance for his collection.  In the end, Florence saves the day with her persistence and because the film was set in the early thirties, her reward is nothing more than marriage to a man she only remotely likes.

For a film that is an early work in horror/thriller filmmaking, I did not expect to be able to pull a lot from work critically.  However, from the moment Ivan lingers on the female statues in his London museum, which cinematically are clearly played by actresses (one's who will later play characters in the narrative) it becomes clear that the film takes on a second layer of objectification of the desired body.  Objectification and looking at bodies in cinema are nothing new to theory and criticism, indeed tying most prominently to Laura Mulvey and her idea that the gaze in cinema is that of a male viewer that objectifies the woman on screen as an other.  While this theory has been reconsidered, altered and contested over the years, it, nonetheless, stands as the language used to describe the female body on display in film.  However, while these bodies are desired in the film, it is precisely the double layer of the "fake" body and the real that causes viewers to reconsider how they constitute the objectified body passively and what happens when the active body is forced into passivity, or in reverse what happens when a body, like the film's opening image of Marie Antoinette later becomes the character of Florence.  This is a wild notion of movement through a space by a body, one that is, as Mulvey would suggest, in a constant state of cinematic desire, whether to be objectified by the male gaze or longed for as a thing of cinematic beauty by the women who look at the ethereal presence of the wax versions of Wray and others.  Ivan represents a maddened version of the gaze in the diagetic world of the film, enacting his artistic objectification of bodies, both male and female, taking dead corpses, who are no longer active and proceeding to make them even less human, by making them posthumous objects of artistic desire.  The fact that Ivan himself is a crippled figure adds another layer of disability in relation to the ideal body as a point of desire and thus objectification.  In that he is no longer human, indeed relying on wax to pass as visually normal, he could be read as a vengeful disabled body that seeks "justice" upon the able-bodied individuals he encounters, housing them in a shell of wax, to deny their ability, while making his wax visage no longer the disabled figure, but that of normalcy.  This is all happening in a film from 1933, it is quite amazing that it has not gained the same level of notoriety as its counterpart from the same year King Kong.

Key Scene:  The opening fight in the London Wax Museum is really creepy, in a I might have nightmares from melting wax faces kind of way.

The DVD I have is not the greatest of version, particularly since it appears to be stuck between full colorization and black and white scenes.  Nonetheless, it is a magnificent work and well worth tracking down in an alternative format.

Finally, I would once again like to thank Jill (Sittin' On a Backyard Fence) and Michael (ScribeHard on Film) for letting me be part of this wonderful blogathon.  This last film was a great discovery and my previous revisits of Spellbound and The Blob were equally enjoyable.

My Dear, You Cannot Live In Isolation: Carnival Of Souls (1962)

For the final film of my Halloween oriented cinema spook-fest, I decided to go with the indelible cult classic, Carnival of Souls, which has become one of the premier scare movies that is....well, criminally under-appreciated.  For some time Carnival of Souls fell the way of dubbed copies and public domain twenty set movie releases, only to get somewhat of a resurgence after being shown at various independent theaters, as well as making constant appearances as a midnight movie.  In a matter of no time, Carnival of Souls became the movie to watch if you thought you were cool and knew the classics of horror, and deservedly so, Herk Harvey's only feature length work is something to be witnessed.  As is the case with many a b-movie, it starts off quite bland with some lees than stellar action shots and some of the worst dubbing imagined in a movie where the actors are speaking the same language.  However, less than ten minutes into this cinematic wonderscape, it becomes very apparent that Carnival of Souls will not be your run of the mill work and exists as something far creepier and thoroughly inexplicable.  It is hard not to see the clear influence this film has on directors like David Lynch and Steven Sodergbergh who love taking a completely normal scenario and inserting incredible amounts of absurdity into them without the characters seeming to completely fall apart in the wake of said deconstruction of the natural.  It could be argued that Carnival of Souls has very few scary moments within its entire seventy or so minute narrative, but I would contest that it is a far greater thing than simple scares when it comes to Carnival of Souls, for the entire diagetic world created within this film is scary, the landscapes defy logic, the characters interact in a vapid and disconnected manner, often engaging one another with such levels of paranoia that it is hard to feel comfortable.  Not to mention we are watching a woman slowly fall into such a existential mentality that her sanity begins to blatantly betray her, it is scary in a way many films are not, it does not provide you with explanations as to why ghost A is showing up or why ghost B is so damn mean, it simply places you in media res to a horror story directly consuming on persons life, and in this case Carnival of Souls may have been the first to commit such an approach, and is certainly yet to be challenged.

Carnival of Souls follows a young woman named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) who is still centering her world after being the sole survivor of a rather unfortunate accident in which a car including her and her friends goes spiraling off the side of a bridge.  Shortly after her lucky survival Mary discovers that she will be taking a job in Utah as a church organist, something for which she somehow managed to get a college degree.  Upon her arrival to the small town things seem underwhelming with the exception of a rather contentious land lady and a incessant neighbor who feels it necessary to hit on her at what appears to be literally every waking moment.  During a trip to work, she notices a carnival in the horizon, which causes her to experience heightened states of paranoia, something that was initially signaled by her seeing a ghostly deep-eyed male apparition.  During a day of shopping, Mary experiences a delirium in which nobody seems to acknowledge her existence, despite her yelling and calling attention to herself.  This inspires her to investigate the carnival she previously saw on the road, an event that takes her through a bizarre house of illusions and on one of the most decrepit boardwalks ever filmed.  All the while she attempts to travel through her daily life, eventually being fired from her organ job after falling into a daze dreaming about the carnival and playing what the priest describes as profane music.  Furthermore, she has a falling out with the neighbor who takes her on a date and complains about her cold demeanor and disconnect, taking particular disdain in her refusal to to drink the beer that he paid out of pocket for her to have.  Eventually after another bizarre vision of being unable to contact the living Mary returns to the carnival only to find herself being chased by ghastly apparitions from the carnival.  After falling into the sand, the scene cuts to detectives as they attempt to track down Mary's body, noting that she seems to have just disappeared into the sand, while we are then shown Mary's corpse being extracted from the river, along with her friends in the car of the original accident.  It may be an overused plot twist at this point in film, but I can imagine it was quite the twist fifty years ago.

Carnival of Soul's in notable in its approach to a uniquely female experience of haunting and paranoia.  While the film does problematically incorporate notions of hysteria a bit more than is justified, it does manage to make it quite distinct that much of the experiences of horror plaguing Mary are a result of her  detachment from society based on gender.  To some degree, one could incorporate Simone de Beauvoir's notions of "the second sex" in order to explain why Mary is so distraught.  Sure she is seeing ghosts, but all of the threatening ghosts are notably male and could represent a means of patriarchal oppression, which relegates her to a position of lesser being and therefore irrelevant to societal discourse.  If we consider Mary as an other in the context of this film, it helps to explain her moments of being ignored by society as not her being a ghost, but rather; a being who realizes that in the context of the early sixties that her body is not only defined as lesser than a male, but also so arbitrary that it is literally overlooked by males who do not want to lose their point of power, as well as by women who have internalized the notion that they are lesser than their penis bearing counterparts.  Even the scenes of Mary's interactions with her neighbor reek of the sexual assumptions of the era, in which a man is able to traipse about sexually preying upon women and chastising them when they do not put out, going so far as to call Mary cold, a clever play on her being deceased, as well as a common term for a woman who even remotely cared about her sexual identity during the time.  Sure the film is absolutely a ghost story and a very good one at that, but it is not impossible to read heavily into the revolutionary questioning of gender constructs and performance within the text, after all it was a B movie that is where one could break free from the mold of normalcy with great success.

Key Scene:  There is a particular scene in the dance hall involving sped up dancing that is, factually, the scariest thing ever put on film.

Buy this movie, I would love to tell you that Criterion is going to re-release the work in high definition, but it tragically does not appear to be the case.  As such the DVD will have to suffice.