Hollywood Ripper Guide to Jack the Ripper On Screen

Jul

wargames 25th anniversary event

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary, LOST and Reviews

It was the coolest movie trailer in the summer of 1983. A robotic synthetic voice asked “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” as the words themselves spooled out across a computer screen. And a nearly unknown Matthew Broderick (character name: David Lightman) answered back: “How about ‘GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR’?”… unleashing a phantom Soviet missile attack and chaos inside of NORAD.

OMG!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!

Okay, so ordinary people didn’t scream Internet (or even mundane) slang in all-caps back then. Actually, nobody I knew had ever even been online… except maybe those guys who kept round-the-clock vigil inside the university computer lab and spoke amongst themselves in Elvish. But for the rest of us, David Lightman’s hack in to the ARPANET was our first entry into the world of hacking, personal computers, dial-up connections and extremely large floppy disks.

Young America packed the theaters, Roger Ebert gave the film a rousing thumbs-up, and computer science majors must have tripled that Fall after the summer movie Geekathon! Even a decade later, I got a special WarGames rush when I opened the back of a new PC, installed a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem, and then dialed my first number, heard the handshake and logged in.

The movie rocked my world. So what did I think when I heard there would be a special 25th Anniversary big screen presentation? I was: 1)Thrilled. 2)Worried.

Worried? Yes. What if it didn’t hold up after all these years? I really hadn’t seen the film since Matthew Broderick (like us) was still a fresh-faced kid. And the technology involved could—you know—be called a little… old. I mean, the first Mac didn’t even come out until a year later. And now? In a single day, I can confront two unique virus threats to my work PC, conduct business by email with prospective magazine contributors located anywhere inside the English-speaking world, send an article typed from a prone position on my laptop to an online magazine that could be housed literally anywhere in close enough proximity to Earth, and practice lightsaber technique, Backgammon and advanced Sudoku on my iPhone. If you’re reading this, you are already online and can add your own litany of everyday computer marvels.

So how did this seminal and award-winning film hold up after all these years? Astoundingly well—and definitely worth a shout-out on its Silver Anniversary.

Pre-event photo taken on iPhone

To celebrate the landmark, MGM Studios teamed up with Fathom Events to create a satellite broadcast airing Thursday, July 24 at 7:30 pm local time in select theaters nationwide. The theater selection, though, was fairly broad—at least in major markets. Virtually all of the multiplexes on the Virginia side of the Washington DC Metro Area offered tickets, including my local theater, where I had just seen this summer’s blockbuster, Dark Knight, a few days before.

The short feature preceding the main event contained standard made-for-DVD feature fare (film footage, on-the-set stills, interviews with major cast and crew) plus a look inside the real NORAD (the military command center featured in the film).

Did you ever see that Star Trek documentary in which LeVar Burton got folks at NASA and the scientific community to talk about the aspirational impact Star Trek had on their professional lives? That’s what the interviews with NORAD personnel were like. The interviewees adored WarGames, but were quick to point out the fantasy elements of the film in light of NORAD realities. For example, they didn’t even have full-color displays back in 1983. WarGames gave the folks at NORAD technology they could aspire to—though not (and never!) technology that could go around crucial human decision making.

After the short documentary (which I will just bet is on the 25th Anniversary DVD!), they rolled out the trailer for War Games: The Dead Code, set for straight-to-DVD release on Tuesday, July 29. The new movie does not continue the adventures of David Lightman (though the character list does include a “Dr. Stephen Falken,” the scientist who programmed the WOPR computer that wanted Lightman to play a game). Rather, the film is a cyberterror update, featuring a new fresh face wanting to play games with a seemingly benign piece of particularly pernicious code.

The warm-up over, WarGames itself finally hit the big screen for one special show. It was kind of like catching up with an old friend from 20 years ago. I couldn’t always see what was coming, but I remembered it when I saw it. Among the pleasant semi-surprises:

Getting a quick look inside the Minuteman Missile silos. I didn’t know it until about a decade after my dad retired from his top secret job negotiating contracts for the Air Force, but those silos put food on my table when I was a kid. By the time I got to college, I’d concluded that dad had bought Minuteman nukes for a living, but he corrected me when asked, saying: “No. I bought the silos.” WarGames gave me at least a fictionalized look into what my dad had wrought.
The film score and sound design. I never knew just how far I could wax nostalgic over sounds from the video arcade! Using a combination of military-style march music and 1980s computer bloops and bleeps, the film score struck a perfect balance between the worlds of NORAD and David Lightman. Not surprisingly, “Sound” was one of three categories for which the film received an Oscar nomination. Alas, “Soundtrack” was not another.
The intelligent and nuanced nature of the script—another category for which the film got nominated. The screenplay for WarGames could have gone for any number of clichés. For example (skip ahead of you don’t want spoilers!):
1. The commanding general could have been a bloodthirsty redneck warmonger.
2. The resolution could have used a classic deus ex machina straight out of Star Trek to disable the computer.
3. The script could have given us dialog making a direct comparison between young Lightman’s skills and Falken’s long-dead hopes for his now-deceased son.
Instead:
1. Colorful as he is, the general is the voice of reason, arguing with government civilians that humans, not computers, should control the warheads.
2. The tic-tac-toe game does not halt the launch of WWIII by blowing the computer’s circuits in grand Star Trek: TOS style, but rather helps the artificially intelligent computer to reach its own conclusion that mutually assured destruction is a pointless gaming strategy.
3. We can read the excitement and pride in Falken’s face as Lightman finds the solution, but the script never bashes us over the head by making explicit comparisons with Joshua.

Yes, of course, the movie also has elements that appear incredibly silly today. Network security is almost non-existent. A world-class computer scientist has a backdoor password into NORAD’s WOPR war-strategy computer that anybody who’s read his bio could hack. It’s easy today to laugh at such nonsense, but as far as I can tell present-day network security (and password) standards resulted from hacker exploits. It didn’t precede them.

One other point of amusement: all those great shifting lights on the WOPR computer? Those were controlled by a guy sitting inside the box, hooked up to the interface with an Apple II (that’s pre-Mac, for you young folks!).

All in all, the WarGames 25th Anniversary Event was well-executed and a great deal of fun. Too bad it wasn’t better advertised.

And just remember the next time you see some cinematic hacker unleash a bit of cyber-havoc… David Lightman may not have been the first-ever hacker on screen, but WarGames‘ breakout success did make “the hacker” a standard movie character type.

Jul

regarding blondes, psychics and abberline’s
crutch (part 2)

By ripperlady 2 Comments

Categories: Reviews

Ally Ryder asked about the evolving themes in Ripper cinema. It’s a great question, and one that I don’t think I answered adequately. So here’s to a more in-depth explanation…

Early Ripper Films (1917-1954)
Early Ripper movies tended to use literary antecedents: Wedekind’s Lulu saga (3 plays condensed into a single film) and The Lodger. Between 1917 and 1954—a period of nearly 40 years—there are three movies based on Lulu and five based on The Lodger (if you count Room to Let, which I do). Waxworks is the odd man out.

The first Ripper film to feature Jack the Ripper as a central character doesn’t come until 1944—about 30 years into Ripper cinema. In the Lulu story, the Ripper (when he appears—which he doesn’t in the 1917 version) only appears in cameo. In The Lodger, the killer is supposed to be a central character, but in the two Novello versions, the lodger is actually an innocent “wrong man.” The actual killer is offscreen for all of the Hitchcock film and for all but a few moments of the 1932 film.

So in early cinema, the Ripper story is dominated by two strands—one telling the story of a fictional Ripper victim and the other telling the story of an innocent family unknowingly housing the Ripper under their roof. But the early Lodger movies are squeamish about putting the monster in the house. Once this threat had been fully realized in the 1944 Lodger, though, later adaptations followed suit.

The early English-speaking productions are equally squeamish about making the women prostitutes. I don’t know the cause of this squeamishness for the British films, but for the American movies it’s largely a result of Production Code restrictions and the censors.

Transitional Ripper Cinema and Television (1958-1968)
Television becomes a major force in this period, and new themes emerge. We routinely begin to see supernatural or other fantastical elements (at least in television)—first, a psychic; then an occult ritual used to maintain life across the ages; then waxworks possibly coming to life; and finally, a formless entity who kills so it might feed on the fear of its victims.

In the films, we see police procedural (including the first Sherlock Holmes confrontation) and yet more Lulu. (The Lulu story doesn’t die out until 1980).

One thing about all of these instances… none of them is terribly violent. True, the 1959 Jack the Ripper has that blood-red final scene in the elevator (the film had been in black and white). But on-screen violence was not yet commonplace in the Ripper cinema.

Someone asked why I thought that the Ripper case had been so sanitized. Largely censors, I think. The sanitization in this period, though, stopped applying to the issue of prostitution. In A Study in Terror, the victims are not only prostitutes, but they are given their real names on screen for the first time. This never does become an actual trend. Most Ripper television and cinema continues to create entirely fictitious victims. Notable exceptions include: Murder by Decree, Jack the Ripper (1988) and From Hell.

The Violent Era (1971-Present)
In the late 1960s, the US film industry abandoned the old Production Code and relaxed censorship standards. I’m not sure about the actual impact on world cinema (the Italians had been producing proto-slasher giallo films since 1965!). But from this time forward, Ripper cinema becomes increasingly violent, or at least the Ripper’s eviscerations are discussed if not shown.

I’m not going to provide a complete litany of violent movies. But the actual modus operandi of the Ripper killings finally gets on the table during this period. It’s discussed in the Michael Caine Jack the Ripper. It’s shown, to some extent, in From Hell. And it’s graphically (though boringly) displayed in the Tom Savini Ripper (1985). (No way did Tom create those utterly lame gore effects!).

The larger trend, though, has been just to exploit violence for shock value, regardless of the Ripper’s modus operandi—a trend started by Hammer Films in 1971 with the release of the mildly gory films Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (in which the killer does take female internal organs, though not onscreen) and Hands of the Ripper.

Thematically, pretty much anything is now fair game—from strict police procedurals to the most outrageous supernatural, science fiction and sheer shock plotlines.

Well, I hope that answered Ally’s question a little better! And sorry this is taking so long (the podcast is now two weeks old!). I’m just having to do a lot of shuffling these days. And I hope I didn’t bore everybody with all the detail!

Jul

michael emerson’s 5 creepiest characters of all time:
hour of the wolf

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary, LOST and Reviews

In his “creepiest performances” video, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus on LOST) gives a nod to Max von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman:

Another great one is, if you watch Ingmar Bergman movies… Max von Sydow did a movie for Bergman called The Hour of the Wolf, where he plays a sort of standard tortured Swedish artist who just can’t stop killing young people. It’s kind of awful. —Michael Emerson

Most people don’t go looking to Ingmar Bergman for their “creepy fix.” But obviously they should—and Michael Emerson (almost apologetically) does. It would be hard to come up with a better pick. Hour of the Wolf, Bergman’s lone”horror” movie, practically defines “creepy.”

The film shows the disintegration of an artist’s mind as strange phenomena occur on the remote and isolated island he inhabits with his wife. We never know quite whether the phenomena are objective supernatural disturbances or subjective mental ones. (sound familiar?) But demonic figures (alternately referred to as “cannibals” and “ghosts”) do interact with the couple either objectively or subjectively, and seek to “claim” the man as their own—driving him toward murder and madness, and most likely to his own death.

Stephen King, obviously, ran with this concept in The Shining. But Stanley Kubrick’s film version of that novel relies on a visual style nearly opposite Bergman’s. Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel is full of light and color, a stunning contrast to the dark drama surrounding Jack Torrence.

Hour of the Wolf (shot by legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist in black and white) uses chiaroscuro techniques to bring the faces of the characters out of the surrounding darkness (and to darken their faces when surrounded by light).

Not to belabor the point (such lighting has become so commonplace), but compare the shadows on Von Sydow’s face with the shadows often used to frame Emerson’s character, Ben Linus:

It’s easy, of course, to make superficial comparisons with LOST. After all, Bergman’s film is set on a remote island where we don’t always know what’s real and what’s not, while Von Sydow’s artist, Johan Borg, is almost always shot in partial shadow. But Hour of the Wolf is really more like what would happen if the unutterable humiliations found in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf were visited upon an insomniac already on the verge of a mental breakdown… and visited upon him by supernatural monsters. All I can say is that, psychologically, Bergman must have been having a pretty bad year.

As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman dealt with his personal anxieties and demons by turning them into movies. So Hour of the Wolf is not merely a brooding meditation on the theme of madness. It is actually a very personal film. Von Sydow is largely standing in for Bergman, who had himself suffered (and been hospitalized for) a significant mental breakdown only couple of years earlier. While Bergman grappled with the darkness, Von Sydow (a frequent Bergman actor) had been playing Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, one of the last all-star biblical epics.

Okay, so now I’ll ‘fess up before I bore you with an endless stream of Bergman and Von Sydow trivia. I “found” Bergman during the requisite “post mortem” viewing of what I assumed would be a medicinal dose of just one or two of the director’s films. I’d been avoiding his work my entire adult life because of the whole “tortured Swedish artist” thing that Emerson mentions. But with his death, I decided it was time to see at least one Bergman film.

And so I saw The Seventh Seal. And then I watched Virgin Spring. And then I watched Wild Strawberries… and Persona… and Through a Glass Darkly... and Winter Light… and The Silence… and Shame… and Hour of the Wolf. I just couldn’t get enough. Bergman was nothing like what I expected. Yes, he was full-on arthouse and full-on tortured, but man was he compelling!

For me, finding Bergman was like a huge relief. Here was somebody making well-crafted movies that asked the big questions, and asked them honestly—not as a chance to pontificate but as an opportunity to explore. It was exciting to see films this courageous and probing—a cinema of ideas. And oddly, Bergman’s exploration of the darkness was not nihilistic, but often strangely hopeful.

But there’s not much hopefulness in Hour of the Wolf. The darkness of the title (the hour between night and dawn) permeates the fabric of the film. Von Sydow delivers a magnificently tormented performance as the doomed artist, and Liv Ullmann is spectacular in her part of the grief-stricken wife. You could say that this is a “creepy” favorite of mine. And I’m delighted to find that it’s also a favorite of Michael Emerson’s.

This article first appeard on Blogcritics.
It has also appeared on the LOST site Room 23.

BTW, if you want to get a sense of the film, you can find the American trailer here. It does contain partial upper nudity.

Jul

michael emerson nominated for an emmy!

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Information

Well, just as I’m about the start writing on Michael Emerson’s third creepy character (Max von Sydow in Hour of the Wolf), and Emerson goes and gets himself nominated for an Emmy!

His reaction to the nomination is just priceless!

Here is Ben’s reaction to Alex’s murder in “The Shape of Things To Come” (the episode that got everybody buzzing about Emerson’s Emmy chances):

$Ben reacts to daughter\'s murder$

Congratulations, Mr. Emerson! The nomination is well-earned!

Jul

regarding blondes, psychics and abberline’s
crutch (part 1)

By ripperlady 2 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary and Information

I had the opportunity to appear this week on Episode 22 of Rippercast, a wonderful podcast for all things related to Jack the Ripper. This week host Jonathan Menges and a panel of Ripperologists took some time to discuss Ripper movies with me. What fun! It was an international Skype call (first time I ever used Skype), with participants spread out from Kansas to England.

The name of the episode is “Blondes, Psychics and Abberline’s Crutch.” I’d link to it, but the Rippercast site is experiencing technical difficulties. It’s also available on iTunes for easy download, which is how I got my copy.

Y’know, when you listen to an actor on one of those DVD commentary tracks, you’ll frequently hear comments like “Oh, they shot the wrong side of my profile” or “My nose is way too big.” (we’re all so vain).

For me, listening to this episode is kind of like that. I’m thinking: “Whoa, I sound like I’m talking over him, cutting him off. I hope they didn’t all think I’m rude.” Or… “Well, that was a missed opportunity. I could have mentioned…” Anyway, just thought I’d provide a little elaboration on some of those missed opportunities.

#1 Jonathan asks me what my favorite Ripper movie is, and I come out of the gate with the apparently controversial 1988 production with Michael Caine. So let me clarify what I meant when I said that it “tells the case the way it really was.”

First, I think that serious students of the case (let’s call them “investigative Ripperologists” for short) and serious students of the movies (that would be me!) can have different perspectives on what makes a good Ripper film… or even what constitutes “verisimilitude” in a film about the Whitechapel murders.

I have seen, well, just about all the movies listed on this site. A significant percentage of them (90%? 80%?) are highly fanciful. So… along comes the 1988 Jack the Ripper, and the film is set in the real world (not in outer space or in some parallel supernaturalized universe or in some sanitized London). It does a very realistic job of recreating the 1888 East End. It names the real victims, gets the modus operandi correct, includes numerous well-known incidents from the investigation into the case. It shows the potential for social unrest. Heck it even gets down to showing the weird Richard Mansfield wrinkle. Most Ripper movies don’t even try to name the real victims, much less use the killer’s authentic modus operandi, much less try to recreate the East End!

“Abberline’s crutch” (part of the title Jonathan gave to this Rippercast episode) does highlight a potential point of contention between the traditional investigative Ripperologist and a student of film—i.e. the portrayal of Abberline, chief investigator on the case. I did a doubletake, sure, when I first saw him portrayed as a drunk. But I’ve seen movies that portray the victims as glamor girls and the Ripper as a supernatural monster who transcends time! So portraying Abberline as having a crutch (in this case, an alcohol addiction) did not register very high on my “egregiously unrealistic” meter… though I guess it certainly registered for Abberline’s family. For me, none of that hurts my enjoyment of the movie, given Michael Caine’s wonderful performance and all. But it is enough to get an investigative Ripperologist fuming!

Nothing wrong with that. We’re just looking for different things. He’s looking for absolute accuracy while I’m giving the film marks not only for being an excellently crafted, well-acted production but also for happening to be the most accurate non-documentary film on the killings that I know of. 100% accurate? No. Most accurate? Yes.

So, if you’re an investigative Ripperologist who’s shocked by what I said about the movie, just remember that I come at the films from a movie angle (i.e., do they make good cinema?). “Most accurate” Ripper movie is good enough for me! “Well acted” Ripper movie is good enough for me. Heck, even “supremely entertaining though preposterous” Ripper movie is good enough for me. (Hey, I like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde.. and yes, I do know better!).

So, that’s where I’m coming from when I list the 1988 MIchael Caine movie as one of my favorites.

Jul

michael emerson’s 5 creepiest characters of all time:
the maltese falcon

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis and Commentary

In his EW video on the creepiest performances of all time, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus on LOST) reveals that Sidney Greenstreet creeps him out:

Another über creepy performance, I think, is Sidney Greenstreet’s in The Maltese Falcon. He’s one of those characters who’s so civilized on the surface, and yet you hope you’re never left in a room alone with him.—Michael Emerson

The Maltese Falcon Movie Poster Well, that’s one performance I didn’t see coming! Greenstreet’s character, Kaspar Gutman (a.k.a. “The Fatman”), is probably the most affable character in The Maltese Falcon. But of course, as Emerson points out, it’s all surface. Below the surface, Gutman has no compunction about having his henchman bump off people who get in the way of his objective—just as he has no compunction about selling out his henchman to the police only a moment after claiming that the young man is “like a son” to him.

What I find odd is that Emerson honed in on Gutman when there are really so many creepy characters in The Maltese Falcon to choose from. How about that leering lech of a partner who gets himself killed by the crafty dame? How about the effete crook who offers Bogart’s detective $5000 for the return of the bird? How about the dame herself who plays schoolgirl innocent while concocting murder?

When I see this movie, my money for creepy is on the femme fatale—the dame. She is a serial confabulationist who the second she gets caught in one lie starts creating a new one without missing a beat. By the end of the film, we’re not certain that anything she’s said is true. She seems as substantial (or insubstantial) as Keyser Söze.

Yes, Gutman is a sociopath (like so many of Emerson’s choices). But I still find it curious that Emerson finds the disjunction between civilized surface and murderous interior so über creepy. Is this one of those factors that Emerson brings to his own creation of Ben Linus—a character who appears so civilized on the outside but who helped The Hostiles annihilate the Dharma Initiative (the community he grew up in) and personally killed his father as part of that purge, seemingly without a second thought?

(This is putting aside, of course, the fact that we still don’t know the whole story of the Dharma Initiative, why they couldn’t get along with The Hostiles, how/why the purge occurred, or Ben’s complete role in that event. What we do know is that Emerson played Ben throughout Season 3 of LOST as a hyper-civilized sociopath—an interpretation that reached its pinnacle in “The Man Behind the Curtain” episode’s flashback to the purge.)

So allow me to speculate that perhaps Michael Emerson’s unease with Kaspar Gutman is one of those factors that he draws on (consciously or unconsciously) to make us uneasy with Ben Linus. After all, an actor can find inspiration in the strangest places. It’s well known that Anthony Hopkins’ characterization of Hannibal Lecter was inspired in part by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey!

Speaking of which, let me add that the “off-the-grid” choice of Sidney Greenstreet tells you everything you need to know about why Michael Emerson is qualified to play creepy… and why I’m not. I would have gone for a perfectly obvious creepy performance and probably selected Hannibal Lecter for this slot. Emerson’s choice, on the other hand, is so unexpected that it’s inspired.

This article first appeard on Blogcritics.
The LOST site Room 23, found it on Blogcritics and re-posted it on their site. Thanks guys! Nice to get a nod from the Losties!

Jul

hollywood ripper will be on rippercast podcast this week

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Information

This is just a quick update. I will be a guest on this week’s Rippercast podcast, which tapes tomorrow. This is the podcast for all things Jack the Ripper. We’ll discuss Jack the Ripper movies, of course!

Also, the next creepy character installment is finished. I’ll post it as soon as it publishes on Blogcritics.

Jul

more creepy characters on the way!

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Information

Yesterday, I published the first installment of “Michael Emerson’s 5 Creepiest Characters of All Time.” I just want everyone to know that I plan to publish the other four installments within the next couple of weeks.

Right now, I’m waiting for that little red envelope to bring Emerson’s next favorite creepy performance to my doorstep.

Since I’m taking the movies in the order Emerson lists them, you can see for yourself just what’s in that little red envelope. It’s not a performance I would have thought of. But then, I don’t ever have to look for inspiration on how to play creepy…

I’ll have the envelope tomorrow. Should be fun!

Jul

michael emerson’s 5 creepiest characters of all time:
nosferatu

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary and Reviews

“Creepy” is the first word viewers use to describe Ben Linus, former leader of The Others on LOST. Some time back, Entertainment Weekly got Michael Emerson, the actor who plays Ben, to reveal who he credits with giving the 5 creepiest performance in film and television history. EW later posted the video on YouTube.

So who creeps Michael Emerson out? First up is Max Schreck in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

I don’t think that anyone that’s even seen a still from that movie can argue with him being something really horrifying.
—Michael Emerson

I saw Nosferatu for the first time when I was in college. It was during a fundraiser for the Dallas PBS station, KERA—the same station that first brought Monty Python to the U.S. (as they were fond of telling us whenever they wanted us to open up our wallets).

On that Saturday night, KERA played a double vampire feature, starting with the 1974 BBC Dracula starring Louis Jourdan. It floored me. Jourdan’s Dracula was so handsome, so sexy, yet so dangerous. Not to mention that the production, unlike all the others I’d seen, was largely faithful to the Bram Stoker novel.

But the Jourdan Dracula was not to be the evening’s big event. KERA was saving its “special” vampire feature for the wee hours: the 1922 German silent movie that kicked off the whole cinematic vampire trend. Nosferatu. At that time, 30 years ago, it was largely unavailable and infrequently seen.

Directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu adapted Bram Stoker’s Dracula, playing up the creepy and eerie qualities of the tale. Alfred Hitchcock, who learned about storyboarding from Murnau during a 1924 assignment in Berlin, regarded Murnau as the master of “pure cinema”—i.e. visual, rather than strictly narrative, storytelling.

But regardless of Murnau’s credentials or Nosferatu’s place in vampire movie history, I frankly didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t really what I would call a “scary” film. It didn’t have any sudden shocks or screams, no blood or gore. Instead, it slowly unfolded its eerie atmosphere and mounting sense of doom.

I had no framework for it. Most vampire movies since the 1930s played up the vampire’s romantic, or at least sexual, angle. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula seduced victims with physical beauty, magnetism, and charm. Christopher Lee’s Dracula overpowered them with a hypnotic quality coupled with a sexually charged animalistic ferocity. But this?

$The vampire sucks his victim\'s blood$ Nosferatu’s Count Orlok was animalistic all right… but in a repulsive, rodentlike way. He had long claws for fingernails, pointed ears, a bald head, sunken eyes, and fangs replacing his incisors rather than his canine teeth. He looked like a giant rat—and not surprisingly, rats accompanied his coffin. Here there was no romance, no sexuality. Just an instinct-driven thirst for blood.

This was hardly my first silent movie—or even my first German expressionist one. In fact, I already regarded The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as one of my favorite films. I think the confusion I experienced that night over Nosferatu came from the sheer shock of it. I had loved cinematic vampires since I was a kid, and this movie subverted everything I thought I knew about them. It was a little much to handle at the time.

$Count Orlok\'s shadow on the wall$ It did leave an impression though. Once the initial shock wore off, the brilliance of Murnau’s “Symphony of Horror” became clearer. For years afterward, I remembered the repulsiveness of the vampire. But most of all, I remembered the shadow his long fingernails cast on the wall as he crept slowly through the house towards his victim. Nearly 65 years later, long ripping nails would become a staple of the hopping Chinese vampire movies.

All in all, Michael Emerson’s choice of Max Schreck in Nosferatu is an excellent place to begin any discussion of creepy characters. The role is so legendarily creepy that it inspired the Oscar-nominated movie Shadow of the Vampire to postulate that only an actual vampire could have pulled it off. Ergo, Max Schreck could be nothing other than a real vampire playing the cinematic role of vampire!

This article first appeared on Blogcritics.
Room 23, a very cool site devoted to LOST information, re-posted it on their site. Thanks again, guys!

Jul

why the happening doesn’t

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary and Reviews

The RipperLady blog is not limited to Ripper movies. Here we takes a look at M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, and how it stacks up against the movies it’s taking on.

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is known for creating twist endings. What he should be known for is twisting conventional genres. Sometimes it works—as it did in The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable. And sometimes it just falls flat.

In The Happening, Shyamalan plays off a couple of different genres, but most obviously he works with “nature gone wild”—a subgenre of science fiction and horror with a resumé dating back at least to 1954’s Them! In its science fiction manifestation, “nature gone wild” usually involves genetically altered species of animals or insects: giant irradiated ants (Them!), giant chemically mutated bunnies (Night of the Lepus), giant irradiated brain-eating talking crabs (Attack of the Crab Monsters). You get the picture.

In its horror manifestation, “nature gone wild” sometimes involves natural breeding gone dangerously out of control (The Swarm), but most often it involves some kind of malign natural sentience. That is, some element of nature, without any mad science assistance, has developed an apparently conscious will to kill humans. The two most famous examples involve: 1) a lone shark preying in shallow waters, and 2) the interspecies flocking of homicidal birds (c’mon, you know the titles!).

In The Happening, Shyamalan blends “nature gone wild” with what I jokingly refer to as the “siege on a farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania” subgenre of horror—i.e. the George Romero Dead movies and their descendents, including the British Dog Soldiers and Shyamalan’s own Signs. (Curiously, the original “siege on a farmhouse” movie took place in Bodega Bay, CA… and involved the interspecies flocking of homicidal birds).

In addition to alien invasion movies and Swedish existential ones, Shyamalan’s Signs took on Night of the Living Dead (arguably the most famous film by a Pennsylvania filmmaker) and did a credible job of it, turning flesh-eating zombies into aliens cultivating humans as food and directly assaulting the protagonists’ farmhouse over night. The Happening pays homage more to Dawn of the Dead, as the protagonists flee the city into rural Pennsylvania, hoping to find a safe haven from the assault, only to find a string of abandoned, hostile or semi-abandoned farmhouses… and no abandoned shopping mall!

The most obvious similarity between The Happening and Romero’s zombie movies lies in what happens to the infected. They don’t become flesh eating zombies, of course, but they do become something equally alien and horrifying to the non-infected: suicidal automatons, often wreaking (or seeking) havoc on their own bodies. The Dead films are not just about zombie noshing. They’re also about loss of will and becoming one’s own worst nightmare.

Shyamalan intentionally, even strategically, inserts The Happening into the lineage of some of Alfred Hitchcock’s and George Romero’s greatest work. So how does it match up?

In The Birds (Hitchcock’s first motion picture after Psycho), the master is at the top of his form. The Birds is sort of an apotheosis of the “nature gone wild” film. In it, birds mass and mount inexplicable (and unexplained) assaults on humans, attacking children as well as adults.

The Birds takes its time in revealing the threat. Starting out as a sort of screwball comedy about the wacky interactions between a wealthy socialite and a young lawyer, the first bird attack— a single swoop down on the socialite— comes at least 20 minutes into the film. The attacks build and build, though, until swarms of birds are racing down the farmhouse chimney, pecking their way through ceilings and doors, and massing for what seems like miles around the farmhouse. In the end, we don’t know the cause of the event. We don’t even know if it’s isolated to Bodega Bay and environs or if it’s the first wave of a worldwide apocalypse.

Night of the Living Dead similarly paces itself. An isolated attack in a graveyard leads to the discovery of an abandoned farmhouse, which leads to the grisly discovery of a mutilated corpse, which escalates towards a full-scale assault. We get the news in waves. The living, first in ones and then groups, descend on the farmhouse. Then come the dead. The film is well underway before we hear the first newscast explanations for this epidemic of homicide.

But the slow, deliberate tease is not necessarily crucial to the genre. Drawing on the mythology of its antecedent, Dawn of the Dead places us already in the middle of the crisis, opening with a SWAT team trying to take down zombies while talking heads try to explain the phenomenon.

The Happening tries it both ways—starting off fast, but teasing it out slow. Like Dawn of the Dead, The Happening opens with a large-scale crisis. Mass suicides occur in Central Park and nearby. But by the time Philadelphia hears, the only questions are how large the crisis is and what’s causing it. Our awareness of the size of the catastrophe, like the characters’, develops slowly, while our sense of the cause evolves over the course of the film.

Regardless of characters’ theories, the film never unequivocally adopts a single explanation. In fact, the “wrap up” at the end is actually The Happening’s most direct tribute to Dawn of the Dead. This is not a categorical summation or pronouncement but an intentionally comic explication of the event by an “expert”… and the exasperated reaction by the show’s host. If you want to get the joke, watch Dawn of the Dead and pay close attention to the talking heads. But herein lies a problem. Should we really need to familiarize ourselves with a secondary film in order to “get” the equivocal nature of Shyamalan’s ending? Not in a mass market movie! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up a bit.

Like Romero in Night of the Living Dead, Shyamalan does do a reasonably good job with building up the sense of danger, from rumor to reality to panic to mass death and the potential for apocalypse. But he gets his film too tangled up in secondary mechanisms (not to mention other people’s movies) to give his threat the immediacy it deserves.

In The Birds and the Dead movies, the threat is immediate and visceral. Birds or zombies attack. The characters defend themselves or die. In The Happening, the threat is more conceptual. Neurotoxins are released into the air by an unknown agency (the trees? the government?), and those infected kill themselves. (Technically, they lose their self-preservation instinct, and for some reason, this translates into an immediate and fatal burst of self-destruction).

Shyamalan did a nice job with the unseen threat in Signs. But there was always a physical bulk behind the invisibility, and that physical bulk could be fought. Here, the struggle is against something insubstantial (the wind) and microscopic (the neurotoxins it carries) and the destruction is ultimately carried out by a secondary agency (the infected individual against him or herself). This pestilence cannot be fought. All anyone can do is try to outrun it (or find an antidote!). And this makes the struggle seem less immediate, even passive.

By riffing off Hitchcock and Romero, Shyamalan creates certain expectations about the kind of threat his protagonists face and how they will fight it. Of course, Shyamalan lives to subvert expectations, but in order to do so successfully, he needs to create a work that at least nearly equals the ones he’s challenging. The expectations established by these films have, after all, seeped in to our collective cinematic unconscious.

So does Shyamalan pull it off? The concept he’s dealing with has potential. In “nature gone wild,” the things we take most for granted are typically the things that turn against us. And what do we take more for granted than the air we breathe? (No matter the cause of the crisis, air is the common denominator here). The concept can work, but it will need strong characters to drive it and actors who will sell it.

Characters do drive The Birds and the Dead movies. The Birds starts with strong characters and develops them more fully through the crucible of an apocalyptic nightmare. In the Dead films, Romero cuts straight to character development through crisis. Unlike Hitchcock, he can’t pay for for A-list actors or a lengthy prelude, but he makes up for these deficiencies in the raw urgency and passion he gets from his cast. Audiences care when major characters go down in Romero films. Romero’s actors, regardless of acting skill, always sell their situation.

In The Happening, though, Shyamalan sacrifices character to situation. Mark Wahlberg’s is the only well-realized character among the major cast. A few small players – the soldier and horticulturalist in particular – manage to make their characters resonate. But most of the cast has trouble getting the audience to care deeply about their characters’ plight or even their deaths. Whether this is a function of the writing or the acting, it is ultimately the responsibility of the director.

Shyamalan loves to present himself with tricky problems that he tries to solve in unique ways. But instead of high concept that can be distilled into a single sentence (eg. “tell a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost who does not come across as a ghost”), The Happening gives us multiple concepts that get tangled up in each other: 1) “transform the ‘nature gone wild’ subgenre from animal/insect threats into vegetation/environmental threats while remaining equivocal that the threat even has its origin in nature,” 2) “transform the end result of the toxin so that the infected do not attack the uninfected but the infected attack themselves,” 3) “transform pestilence movies from scientists racing to find a cure to characters racing against the wind,” and so forth.

The Happening ambitiously attempts to refresh old subgenres. It would like to be The Birds. It would like to be Night of the Living/Dawn of the Dead. But without the boldness of high concept, and without actors who can really sell its overly tangled and abstract threat, The Happening doesn’t ever quite happen.

This article first appeared on Blogcritics.