Leaden Whimsey and Rural Noirs

"You get a universe, and you get a universe. You all get universes!"

The queer is liberating in the new adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's juvenile classic A Wrinkle in Time directed by Ava DuVernay. The Mrs. Ws, spirits of light and hope, shake up the unhappy world of Meg (Storm Reid) and her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), to enlist their help in fighting The IT, a malevolent force that is beginning to gain a foothold on Earth. Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) describes the IT as a manifestation of all sorts of horrible things, including low self esteem. As examples, she shows Meg that the bully who's been tormenting her at school is starving herself to meet the standards of beauty set in women's magazines and her friend Calvin's father berates him for only getting Bs in school. Only light and, as we will learn, love, can destroy The IT and put an end to the torments this kind of essentialism inflicts on the world. Normally, my little liberal heart would stand up and cheer over such a message. In this 2018 film, however, it's delivered with such a plodding, heavy hand that the battle between good and evil isn't a liberating triumph of queerness over essentialism; it just seems like a contest between two different kinds of stupid.

L'Engle's novel has been through a lot: a Canadian television film that she hated, three stage adaptations, a graphic novel and an opera. Now, it's been Disneyfied, and I'm not sure that it can survive. This new version is so big and heavy-handed it seems to have been directed not by a major talent like DuVernay, but rather by The IT itself (or is that ITself?).

It seems almost unfair to blame DuVernay for the film. There's nothing obtrusively wrong with the direction. Most of the scenes are shot efficiently, and she does a terrific job with the three young actors, particularly McCabe, who's almost frighteningly dead-on in his line readings. But it's been adapted with too heavy a hand. Every time it starts to get an effect going and you think you're about to soar the heights of imagination, something happens to drag it all back into the dust.

The children aren't just saving the universe; they're trying to find their father (Chris Pine), a scientist who vanished while exploring the use of tesseracts in interstellar travel. The Mrs. Ws take them to the first planet he visited and tell them to question the flowers that float around there, because flowers are natural gossips. And the flowers speak by rearranging their petals because, as Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) explains, they speak in colors. That's a great concept. But they only have two colors. It's bad enough that there's no real visual punch to the sequence. You can't help wondering if talking in colors just means using binary code, which any computer science student will tell you is the ultimate in drudgery. Later, when the children set out to explore the planet, Witherspoon transforms herself into a giant flying leaf. Again, it's an idea with lots of potential, but the leaf's face is stuck in one expression. After watching Witherspoon dart from one thought to another in the flesh, her CGI form is another letdown.

In L'Engle's novel, the three Mrs. Ws are elderly eccentrics whose doddering behavior masks their power as eternal expressions of universal light. For this film version, they're younger, and in two instances it works. Witherspoon draws on her comic skills to make Mrs. Whatsit an exercise in mercurial whims. She knows how to shift moods and thoughts at lightning pace without shortchanging anything her character's going through, and the performance is reminiscent of her witty work in Pleasantville (1998), Election (1999) and her HBO miniseries Big Little Lies. Mrs. Who, who speaks almost entirely in quotes, could be a one-joke character played by an actress less resourceful than Mindy Kaling, whose love of all those quotes is almost infectious. And the design team has created a great visualization for the character's referentiality. The Mrs. Ws get new clothes every time they teleport, and Kaling's are like a romp through costume history. She doesn't let herself get swallowed by her succession of saris, mantillas, panniers and ruffles. She embraces them just as she does the quotes.

Mrs. Which is the earth mother of the three, the dispenser of timeless wisdom. This could be deadly in the hands of a really good actress (though I think a Shirley MacLaine or a Judi Dench would have had the wisdom to temper the bromides with a little acid). Winfrey, however, treats all that dispensed wisdom as if she were hosting one of her more inspirational TV episodes. She doesn't thrill; she lectures. With her billowing costumes, geometric hair and bedazzled makeup, she comes across as an overdressed pedant, the spirit of life transformed into your worst college professor.

On a more positive note, Zach Galifianakis takes on the role of the Happy Medium. Instead of L'Engle's vision of a woman in a ball gown and carrying a crystal ball (which always seemed a little too literal), he looks like a hipster yoga teacher, complete with man bun. Galifianakis got his start doing stand-up and has become a darling of the gonzo comedy genre, but it turns out he can really act. He has some touching moments connecting to Meg when she starts to get a sense of her purpose in the universe. It's a nice transition from the comic moments that open his sequence. He has an original, improvisatory rhythm that lifts the film for most of his episode. You may find yourself wishing that he and Kaling had written the film, instead of laboring to bring someone else's leaden conceptions to life.

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Not completely good and far from entirely bad — Alice Fay (with Dana Andrews) and Linda Darnell shake up the traditional film noir binary in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel.

Outsiders invade the coastal town of Walton, California, in Otto Preminger's 1945 Fallen Angel, intended to follow up on the success of his earlier Laura (1944), one of the screen's great film noirs. When it turns up in film noir, small-town America usually functions as either an idyllic refuge from the corrupt world of the city or a facade masking the decadence invading every aspect of human life. In Fallen Angel, Walton may have its secrets, but it's more idyllic than not. For the most part, it's a place of good people living honest lives that keep getting screwed up by interlopers from the big city.

Walton has been invaded previously by a con artist who made off with much of the fortune the late mayor had left to his older daughter, Clara (Anne Revere). More recently, their police detective (Charles Bickford) arrived from New York. Though he claims to have been worn out by the big city's harshness, he's brought it with him, making him the perfect film noir cop. At one point he beats up a murder suspect not because he thinks he could be guilty, but because he had a face Bickford just wanted to hit.

The film opens with the arrival of another outsider, Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews), forced to stay in Walton when he can't come up with the extra $2.25 to get him to San Francisco. The titles play out as road signs seen through the bus' front window, so except for a few scenes without Andrews, Joseph La Shelle's cameras pretty much are Stanton. They prowl through the town with him as he looks for some way to survive, particularly after he falls for hash-house waitress Stella (Linda Darnell). When he realizes that all she wants is someone to fulfill her dreams of domesticity, he sets his sites on Revere's younger sister (Alice Faye) and her $25,000 trust as the ticket to winning Stella. Faye's character adores him, but he spends the wedding night chasing after Stella, only to have her turn up dead the next morning. Corruption has come to the small town, and if you pick up on the clues in the filmmaking, you'll know whodunit before the big reveal.

To do that, of course, you have to avoid getting sucked in by Preminger's filmmaking expertise, which is a tall order. From all reports, Preminger wasn't too thrilled about doing another murder mystery after his success with Laura. On the plus side, however, he enlisted much of that film's production team for the return bout — LaShelle, composer David Raksin, most of the art and costume departments and leading man Andrews. Together they weave a powerful spell that adds some dimension to a script that's not quite up to Laura's level (the climax, in particular, seems to come out of nowhere except the film's style). The greasy spoon where Darnell works, for example, is the perfect place for secrets to hide. It's on the ground level of an apartment building, with steps on one side leading to Stella's room. Preminger and LaShelle work the angles and shadows there to build suspense, first as Andrews stalks her and later as he and the police try to find the clues to her murder. When Andrews decides to put the moves on Faye, he drops in on her while she's rehearsing for a church organ recital. She's improvising, and the music Raksin supplies for her is dark, with surprising dissonances that suggest there's more to her character than her bland blonde surface. There's also a great contrast between two seaside dates Andrews has with his leading ladies. When he takes Darnell out the camera points inland. All you get in the background are the backs of buildings and a bit of boardwalk, which creates a tawdry, closed-in feel for the relationship. By contrast, his date with Faye is shot with the camera facing the ocean. It's so bucolic you know which woman he'll end up with in the long run.

Faye and Darnell represent the standard roles women take in film noirs, the Madonna and the whore. Preminger tries to shake this up by suggesting a dark side to Faye's good girl and a positive side to Darnell's femme fatale. There isn't much he and Faye can do, however, with the bland scenes she has to play. Although known as a musical star (this was her only starring role in which she doesn't sing, though she recorded a song that was cut), Faye had some pretty decent acting chops. She even managed to steal a film from Shirley Temple, Stowaway (1936), something nobody except Jane Withers had ever managed to do, and Withers was a kid, so it probably shouldn't count. In Stowaway, however, Faye had a character with some dimension. Here, the writers have made her such a goody two shoes there's not much she can do, and a lot of her readings fall flat. The character is so relentlessly virtuous that even when she suspects Andrews is after her money she doesn't care. Now that they're married, it's his, too, even if he leaves her penniless. Faye has two good moments, however, one when she loses her patience with Andrews and another when she defends him to Bickford. That's not enough to build an entire performance around, but it suggests she could have made the transition to non-musical roles. Faye had great hopes for Fallen Angel. When she screened the picture and realized her best scenes had been cut so the film could better showcase Darnell, she left the studio and didn't make another movie for almost 20 years.

By contrast, Darnell and Preminger work a minor miracle with Stella. After years of playing young innocents in thankless roles, she had turned heads playing a seductive vixen on loan to United Artists for Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944). Twisting her virginal smile into a smirk and posing provocatively in a hay loft turned her into a top pin-up and also revealed she had a real talent for femme fatale roles. Her Stella is more than just a vamp, however. Even though her entrance, all decked out for a failed romance, almost screams "Isn't she cheap?" and she blithely pockets money from the hash house till when she thinks nobody's looking, she's not the heartless schemer she seems. When Andrews comes on to her, she says she wants more than just a few tawdry gifts in return for sex. She's looking for a man who'll make a home for her. Fleecing Faye is entirely his idea. When he suggests his plans, she does nothing to lead him on. She even tries to get rid of him. It's a great turn on the femme fatale role, and it would work even better if Faye's character were a more suitable opposite.

There's one other small triumph in the film. As Darnell's lovestruck boss, Percy Kilbride is a revelation.  Three years before he was forever typed as the country bumpkin in The Egg and I (1947) and the Ma and Pa Kettle films that followed, he shows how much he could do with a different type of role. He makes his devotion to Darnell so touching there's never a question that he could be the killer. And in the big reveal scene he pulls off some impressive dramatics when he realizes who stole his love. Performances like that are among the treasures of Hollywood's golden days, when the studios built up stock companies of character actors like Kilbride and Bickford.

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William Talman (center) queers Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O'Brien's already off-kilter fishing trip.

Traditional values were beginning to crumble by the time Ida Lupino directed her signature film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953. That rot was apparent in the film's production history. Although he made major contributions to the script, Daniel Mainwaring received no credit because RKO head Howard Hughes suspected him of Communist sympathies (Mainwaring was never blacklisted, but he served as a front for Paul Jarrico on a few films). On-screen, the tale of two buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) whose fishing trip is hijacked by an escaped serial killer has a fascinating subversive side. The two have told their wives they're vacationing in Arizona, but they've come to the Baja, partly because O'Brien dreams of going back to the Mexicali bars and reconnecting with a woman he had met there years earlier. When they get to Mexicali, it's a nightmare drive through crowded streets where strange men come up to the car to lure them into the nearest bar. Although O'Brien panics and drives on, it's clear he's not some cookie-cutter family man from '50s TV. This guy is looking for an escape, even if he ultimately lacks the courage to go all the way. For Lupino, the scene is a tour-de-force in low-budget filmmaking. She shoots mostly inside the car, with the camera just behind O'Brien's head as the men come up to the window. She's clearly setting the viewer up for more attacks on the bubble of imagined safety within the car.

When they stop to pick up a hitchhiker having car trouble, their limited walk on the wild side takes a queer turn. Though the camera hasn't shown his face to that point, we've seen the man (William Talman) commit other murders as he's hitched his way to the Baja. Once he's in the car, he pulls a gun on them, and basically takes over their lives for the next 60 minutes of screen time. He derides their failures to get away, forces Lovejoy to take turns with him shooting at a tin can O'Brien has to hold up and rails about his life of anger and rejection. That life story makes him a queer figure. Talman points to one eye that refuses to close all the way. It's been with him since birth, leading his parents to reject him. But it's also one of his strengths. He warns the men that they'll never know if he's asleep or not, so there's no chance of escaping in the middle of the night.

Lupino shoots all this in a nightmare landscape, most of it in Big Pine and the Alabama Hills in California. There's flat desert and an abandoned airfield, but most if it is a jumble of rocks, reflecting some natural order beyond the characters' comprehension. The few times they venture into civilization, the locations are cluttered, breaking up the visual field as much as had the rocks. The only really clean compositions come when Lupino cuts to the police trying to find Talman. It's a welcome relief from the tension of the scenes in the desert, but it's not entirely hopeful. The closer they get to figuring out where Talman is, the more likely he is to kill his two hostages.

There's an absurdity to the plot that adds to the suspense as well. Talman's plan to get to a town on the Gulf of California so he can ferry to the mainland doesn't make a lot of sense. Because of his eye condition, he can't exactly blend into the crowd. And he boldly tells Lovejoy and O'Brien that he'll kill them before he gets on the boat to the mainland and probably kill the pilot and crew before they land. He's killing his way to freedom he'll never find.

This was Lupino's next-to-last feature as an independent producer, which is a pity. She had a great sense for matching images to action. The rape scene in Outrage (1950) is a visual tour de force, all dark streets and jarring angles, with the camera pulling upward as the leading lady is finally cornered by her assailant. At the end of Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), Clare Trevor finally loses her hold on the tennis champ daughter she's been ruthlessly exploiting. She's left alone in a deserted tennis court, with the wind blowing debris around, a powerful visual expression of her sense of loss.

Lupino was also a whiz at getting performances out of people. She developed a lot of young talent in her independent films, and actors like Mala Powers, Sally Forrest, Robert Clarke and Keefe Brasselle were never as good as they were working with her. With pros like Trevor, Lovejoy, O'Brien and, especially Talman, her work sings.

Talman was so convincing as the vicious Emmett Myers, a character based on real-life killer Billy Cook, he was once punched by a fan who had taken the film a little too seriously. With his strong jaw and lined face, he seems to be part of the film's perverse landscape. It's an intense performance, and it hasn't dated a bit. To a contemporary viewer, he seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of toxic masculinity. And when he forbids Lovejoy to converse with the locals in Spanish because he doesn't speak "Mexican," he seems to embody a school of thinking that's holding the entire country hostage at the moment.

Horrors!

In his Film Comment column, "Queer & Now & Then," Michael Koresky calls horror the film genre that most "consistently menaces the heterosexual lifestyle. More than anything, the villains in those films, monstrous males or fatal females, are interrupters; essentially their most heinous act is to insert themselves between male-female couples, acting as a threat to their bond. This in turn becomes a larger social threat, a tear in the fabric of the status quo." For him this renders the genre particularly queer, and in his insightful article on The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), he zeroes in on the particular appeal of early 1930s horror films, where stars like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Charles Laughton not only queered heteronormative society but often did so in ways that made their characters more compelling, attractive and even sexual than the film's straight leading men and women.

In horror something outside the norm threatens the normal world of comfortable binaries. Classic horror films from Hollywood's golden age usually view the normal as heterosexual society that is inevitably queered by the presence of vampires, werewolves and man-made monsters. Over time, however, the genre seems to have lost faith in the normal world so disrupted. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) suggests that the horrors represented by Norman Bates are just a reflection of the world he invades (or, really, that invades him, since all the horror springs from people entering his world). By the time George Romero made Night of the Living Dead (1968) it seemed the only thing separating the supposed humans from the monsters was the fact that they hadn't started eating each other — yet. This gives rise to a string of fatalistic horror films in which the queer is never totally banished. The monsters keep coming back at the end (or in the next sequel).

In the way it defines the normative world and the monstrous, queer other, the horror film can also comment on its society. Is it any surprise that last year's most successful horror film, Get Out (2017), set a racially diverse normal world against a group of monstrous "liberal" racists out to colonize black bodies? There is even a subgenre of independently made gay horror films like Make a Wish (2002), Hellbent (2004) and The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror (2007) in which the norm is a world of sexual diversity invaded by murderous, often homophobic psychopaths. The queer is the norm invaded by what had once been the dominant culture.

Horror has always been profitable, but it didn't become big business until The Exorcist (1973) rose to the top of the all-time box-office list and even picked up a raft of Oscar nominations. Although the genre continues to produce critically respected award-winning films like Getting Out and The Shape of Water (2017), a horror-sci-fi-fantasy hybrid, the genre also flourishes in low-budget, often independent films that don't even need a successful theatrical release to turn a profit. Some of these films are particularly interesting in terms of a queer genre analysis. I want to look at three horror films I saw recently, one probably more science fiction than horror but with horror elements nonetheless, all of them disappointing from a variety of perspectives, including the queer.

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Natalie Portman as ex-G.I. Jane in Annihilation.

Like Sunshine (2007), which Alex Garland wrote, the writer-director's loose adaptation of Annihilation, the first book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy has divided audiences. People I respect have hailed it as a fascinating look at identity and isolation and all sorts of other cool literary topics, but I have to confess I found it slow, frustrating and at times bordering on absurdity. Some people's experiences of the movie remind me of my responses to the films I consider truly visionary works of science fiction, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and "La Jetee" (1962). I want to respect those openions but have to confess what when people compare the film to Virginia Woolf's novels or call it a metaphor for Freudian theories, I'm reminded of Edith Sitwell's assessment of Woolf's writing as "no more than glamorous knitting. She must have a pattern somewhere."

So what is the pattern in Annihilation? The film opens with a shot of a meteorite crashing into a lighthouse, seemingly the use of the camera as omniscient narrator. The action then jumps a few years to show Lena (Natalie Portman) sitting in isolation behind a plastic wall as scientists in HAZMAT suits question her about an expedition. She's not very helpful; she can't remember much of anything. The bulk of the film reconstructs what she can't remember, jumping back to just before the expedition to show her in class talking about cancer cells. A colleague invites her to a party, mentioning that she's been in some kind of mourning for the past year after her husband disappeared during a top-secret government mission. Then her husband (Oscar Isaac) returns, unable to explain what happened to him. When he takes ill, she tries to get him to the hospital, but government agents waylay the ambulance, taking him and Lena (at her insistence) to Area X, a secret facility set up to study "the shimmer," an expanding area of strange biological manifestations that seems to have grown from the earlier meteor. To find out what happened to her husband, Lena joins the first all-woman expedition into the shimmer. As they investigate and ultimately fall victim to whatever is going on there (the group's physicist suggests the area acts as a prism refracting genetic materials, including theirs), we continue to flash back to Lena's earlier life. Scenes depict her happy relationship with her soldier husband, his departure for that fatal mission and her affair with the colleague shown earlier.

The meteor has queered the area around the lighthouse, but this isn't the liberating queering of the best screwball comedies or modern LGBTQ films. Rather it's the horror film trope of the queer as threat to the natural order. The shimmer hasn't just upset the genetic makeup of all life within it. It's also destroyed Lena's marriage. It seems to have queered an open-minded, contemporary world in which homosexuality is more accepted. Lena finds out about the new expedition when she's approached by the paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), a lesbian who seems to have developed an interest in her. Anya is friendly and capable, but after exposure to the shimmer she develops a paranoia that jeopardizes the mission.

The problem, in my view, is that once the mission falls apart, there's not a lot of logic to what goes on around them. Like Doctor Who, Annihilation uses science fiction as magic. Once we're in the world of the speculative anything can happen as long as the plot moves along. That's fine in Doctor Who, which is more a vehicle for showcasing its lead actor and exploring its alien, un-aging protagonist's interactions with humans (particularly when David Tennant and Catherine Tate were teamed as Doctor and companion; the whole shebang spun around their inventive performances). In Annihilation, however, it often seems that Garland is throwing out whatever effects he thinks will keep us guessing or enthralled. Enthrallment may be difficult for some given the film's lethargic pace. Early in the expedition, the sights of altered vegetation and animal life (deer with feathery antlers; bushes shaped like people) are captivating. As the action goes on, however, the slow pace kills all that. We don't need lengthy shots of crystalline trees to get the point that things have altered here. We need something to tie the story together.

The problem seems to lie in Garland's approach to adapting the novel. In interviews, he's said that he was drawn to the book after reading it but didn't reread it while working on the script. The film is less an adaptation than a dream inspired by its source material. That leads to another major issue -- the casting. So, here's where I wear my liberal heart on my sleeve for a moment, but don't peck at it just yet. In the trilogy's second novel, Authority, VanderMeer reveals that Lena, who's actually never named, is Asian-American. The psychologist who leads the expedition, played in the film by Jennifer Jason Leigh in her broody, withdrawn iteration, is half Native-American. In the film, both characters are white. Garland's explanation is that he didn't read the rest of the trilogy before making the film. That seems more an excuse than an explanation and a pretty disingenuous one at that. All three books came out in 2014, and Portman didn't become involved in the film until a year later. Moreover, the film incorporates plot elements, most notably cloning, that don't appear until the second and third books in the trilogy. Admittedly, Garland had discussions with VanderMeer, though neither has disclosed exactly what was discussed. That could explain the similar plot points. But you can't help thinking Portman was cast for name-recognition. If so, it didn't work. The film is failing at the box office (and the concept of stars' drawing power in today's film market is in question after a spate of flops whose marquee stars didn't insure strong openings).

Even absent the whitewashing controversy, Portman seems all wrong for the film. It's not that she's a bad actress. She's done a lot of good work, particularly as Zach Braff's quirky obsession in Garden State (2004). And she certainly can't be blamed for her somnambulistic performance in the second Star Wars trilogy. Those scripts were so bad they weren't worth waking up for (though at times I kept wishing there'd been a way to cast Carrie Fisher as Leia's mother; her wit would have undermined the whole sorry mess). In Annihilation she's cast as a biologist who served seven years in the military. With her doe eyes and wispy voice, Portman seems too insubstantial to hold down a sandwich counter at the Hollywood Canteen. She looks like she'd just melt away in combat. Indeed, when the script calls on her to shoot down a mutated alligator, she seems almost laughable. The casting just doesn't make sense.

There's another scene that doesn't make sense (OK, there are a lot of scenes that don't make sense, but with the film still out in theatres, I'm not going to stray into spoiler territory). At one point the group is attacked by a mutated bear. They take it out with a semi-automatic. The critter is right on top of them. You see loving close-ups of bullets ripping through its head. But none of the bullets ever touch the women right next to it. That's not artistic vision. That's laziness. It's a moment that can destroy your faith in a filmmaker, and from that point it's hard to give much credit to anything his vision wants you to see.

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Mumblegore darling Adam Wingard (center) with the improbably cute cast of his Blair Witch.

If you're a fan of mumblegore — that hybrid of mumblecore's low-budget, naturalistic, improvisatory features with horror film conventions — you look forward to each new film from directors like Adam Wingard and Ti West. That's probably why I added Wingard's 2016 Blair Witch to my Netflix queue when it came out a few years ago. By the time it got to me, however, I'd forgotten who directed it or why I had even put it down in the first place. I had just moved it to the top of the list for Halloween with a group of other horror films I didn't get around to because sue me, that's my life.

The original The Blair Witch Project (1999) has been credited and blamed for introducing the "found-footage" sub-genre of horror. Before it was over used to the point of cliché, the found-footage format worked well with the horror genre. The stark video images provide a strong naturalistic feel that then gets queered as the horror elements — witches, ghosts, demons, even aliens — intrude. One of the standard found-footage tropes, the degeneration of the image as the horror takes over, provides a great visual correlative for queering.

The Blair Witch Project's greatest strength, however, was in its depiction of the three central characters in search of a mythical supernatural being in the Maryland woods. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams (all named for the actors who played them) weren't the picture-perfect teens populating most low-budget horror films. They had weight problems and bad complexions. Their hair kept flying out of place. They looked like real students. They acted like them, too.  They represented a generation raised with unquestioning faith in themselves and little real knowledge of their world. Heather's repeated "Nobody gets lost in America" was more than just foreshadowing; it was the watch cry for characters who were lost before they ever went into the woods. Their behaving stupidly, even down to keeping the cameras going as they tried to escape things that go bump in the night, was pretty much a given.

The film's profits were so impressive it generated an immediate follow-up pseudo-documentary, "Curse of the Blair Witch" (1999), that's inoffensive but also rather unnecessary, and a virtually unwatchable sequel. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) is about a group of young people researching the Blair Witch after seeing the original film, but that's where the connection ends. The original film's directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, were credited as executive producers but had little to do with the film. Instead, it was the work of the documentarian Joe Berlinger, whose Brother's Keeper (1992) and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) were among the best pictures of their years. Book of Shadows was his first fiction feature and his last to date. That's understandable. The picture doesn't use the found-footage format, and its characters seem less connected to the real world than to the movies. They're more attractive than the original Blair Witch trio, more like the cookie-cutter characters in a standard horror film. The picture doesn't seem to be about anything, and with its shifting realities and inconsistent narration it's pretty hard to follow. It falls into the trap of a lot of genre films. There are no rules behind the supernatural events. Instead, the supernatural becomes an excuse for sloppy plotting, for anything that creates a quick scare. With no real cohesion, however, the film doesn't have any lasting impact. The fantasy world of a good horror film stays with you. The shocks of a Book of Shadows are over in a minute.

That wasn't the end for The Blair Witch Project. In 2016, Lionsgate Films decided to attempt another sequel. This time, they assigned writing and directing to Simon Barrett and Wingard, respectively, two filmmakers who had worked together successfully before. Their low-budget A Horrible Way to Die (2010) made a lot out of very little. Barrett's script was an inventive take on the slasher film, and they cast the film with darlings of the mumblegore movement like Amy Seimetz, AJ Bowen and Joe Swanberg, who can really act. They scored again with You're Next (2011), a home invasion thriller reuniting the earlier film's stars (albeit with Seimetz in a smaller role) to good effect. Both films are creepy commentaries on contemporary emotional life.

By contrast, Blair Witch (2016) doesn't seem to be about anything. The main four characters are more attractive than the kids in Book of Shadows. Even digging through the mud doesn't seem to dim their good looks. They have a stronger connection to the fictional world of the original — James (James Allen McClure) is Heather's younger brother — but they lack the original cast's edge. James has found a video of the Blair Witch house that offers a glimpse of his sister, so he interests student filmmaker Lisa (Callie Hernandez) in doing a documentary on his search and gets two other friends to come along for the ride. As they drive to Burkittsville, the town formerly named Blair, the landscape around them transitions from city to country, with shots of houses under construction as they move further into the wilderness, a brief invocation of the city-country dichotomy you find in horror films like The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2003) and the classic rural fright fest, Deliverance (1972). Once they get there they meet with Lane (Wes Robinson), the local who found the footage in the woods and posted it. Lane and his girlfriend (Valorie Curry) are less put together than the city kids, and he has a Confederate flag hanging in his living room. That sets up some tension with the others; James' friends are African-American. But it's all quickly forgotten as they head into the woods for a night of shocks and scares.

The brief road trip and the flag suggest some story potential. This new group of wanderers is as clueless about lives outside their urban cocoon as their predecessors were about the landscape. But there's no follow-up. Nor do Wingard and Barrett do much to set up a sense of what's normal before the horror disrupts things. We only know James and Peter (Brandon Scott) are childhood friends because they say so. Otherwise, there's no real sign of closeness in the writing or the acting.

There are also attempts to play with time. After their first night in the woods, the city kids get into a fight with Lane and kick him out of the group. He and his girlfriend take off for home, but they keep turning up, each time claiming to have been wandering in the woods for days even though the original quartet had only left them a few hours earlier. Again, however, this goes nowhere.

Instead, the film degenerates into a series of empty scares. Sure, when you hear creepy noises in the dark, it's unsettling. When a character has a tree fall on him, it's a quick shock. But horror demands more than that. Without a point of view, the film feels empty. That makes it easy to question the characters' actions. Why do they keep their cameras running as they're trying to escape whatever's tormenting them? Just so we can get a bunch of shaky shots of the landscape flying by? Why does a woman with an injured leg decide to climb a tree? Obviously, so she can fall.

The film returns to the found-footage format of the original, but with adjustments for new technology. Lisa doesn't just have a handheld camera. She has earpiece cameras each of the party can wear as they wander around. There's even a drone camera for aerial shots. That suggests another avenue for generating shocks that mean something; an exploration of conflicting perspectives. For the most part, however, it just means that Wingard can employ conventional cutting in some of the scenes. Even that doesn't work, however. There are shots that don't seem to come from any of their cameras. That's a common flaw in found footage pictures: shots that don't make any sense within the film's style. In that light, the whole movie doesn't make sense. If, as an opening title announces, the film was assembled from digital recordings found after they had all disappeared, how did anybody get it all together. By the film's end, the quartet has dispersed to goddess only knows where. Who the hell could have found all their cameras, four of which are on their bodies before they disappear, and put all of it together? That's more powerful witchcraft than anything else going on in the Blair woods.

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With its saturated colors and prowling camera, Michele Soavi's first feature, StageFright (1987, also known as Deliria, Aquarius, Bloody Bird and various combinations of those titles) is a visual knockout. The thing pops and glides across the screen. When one character starts feeding her fish, it can't just be a goldfish or a guppy, it has to be a lion fish, an exotic thing with brightly colored tendrils that fit the film's color scheme. There must be a plot that could live up to that, even if Soavi's writers didn't come up with one. Certainly he got closer a few years later with The Church (1989) and pretty much nailed it with Cemetery Man (1994).

A notorious serial killer escapes from the world's worst psychiatric hospital (but then, if it weren't, there wouldn't be a plot) and holes up in a theatre where a troupe of actors and their temperamental director (David Brandon) are rehearsing the world's worst musical (but if it weren’t, it wouldn't be such wicked fun to watch). It's a turgid thing called The Owl Man about a serial killer wearing a large owl's mask. When the killer takes out their costumer (everyone's a critic), the publicity convinces Brandon to change the plot to make their new show about the real thing.

Were the musical intentionally, wittily bad, the whole thing would be a lot more fun. Yet it's still good for a snigger watching a murdered prostitute leap back to life and start dancing with the Owl Man, who swoops and hops around the stage with an amateur's abandon. It even makes some kind of demented sense that the dancers are pretty atrocious. In one number a woman dances in the kind of dress that gets you aufed from Project Runway, a strange affair with a shapeless bulky top and a bubble skirt that will cause flashbacks for anybody who survived '50s haute couture. Most of the women seem victims of the worst of '80s fashion, though that seems to only add to the insane visuals. The leading lady, who had danced as the dead hooker, takes off her costume and suddenly transforms into the final girl. It doesn't matter that she slept with the director to get the part. She looks like a young virgin, and that's how the plot treats her. It's fashion as destiny.

As in Annihilation, this is another film where the horror comes from the queer. The killer doesn't just disrupt the bad production; he destroys all the film's couples. Even though one of those couples is the exploitative pairing of director and dancer, it's all a part of the normative world of theatrical production depicted in the film. The troupe's gay actor (John Morghen, aka Giovanni Lombardo Radice) is an accepted part of that world. In addition to dancing as the killer, he provides a comforting shoulder to the female dancers. His death could almost be a comment on toxic masculinity. The killer dresses exactly like him, then places the dancer where everybody expects the killer to be. The poor gay guy ends up killed by his exploitative heterosexual director.

As a director so over-the-top abusive he would have been at home on the late, unlamented series Smash, Brandon is the film's one saving grace. He growls and smokes his way through the performance as if beating against the absurdity of the plot. At one point, he's so wrapped up in his own genius, he doesn't notice the killer has stepped into the number and is really killing his dance partner. I've worked with directors like that. I'm embarrassed to admit that occasionally I've even been that director.

A QUEER TIME IN THE OLD TOWN TONIGHT

The three faces of Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild.

As Theodora Lynn, first daughter of the sedate small town of Lynnfield, Connecticut, Irene Dunne is a liberated woman waiting to happen. She seems to exist totally at the service of the town's older, more conservative forces, living with her two single aunts and their cat, and attending meetings of the local literary circle. Their latest agenda item is a stinging condemnation of a salty novel, The Sinner, currently serialized in the local paper. During a New York trip a few minutes into the film, however, the audience learns her secret. She wrote The Sinner under the pen name Caroline Adams. She isn't happy with the situation. After the fuss at home, she informs her publisher that she plans to quit writing.

Then she meets Michael Grant, the book's illustrator (Melvyn Douglas), and a transformation begins. He refuses to accept her prim exterior — all sensible hats and Peter Pan collars — and starts goading her to let her inner self out. At first it's perfectly innocent. She has too much to drink and lets him take her home to his bachelor apartment, only to run out before too much can happen. Then he follows her home to Lynnfield. Pretending to be a homeless man looking for work, he moves into her family's guesthouse and upsets their routine until she falls for him.

This is all the stuff of screwball comedy. James Harvey, author of Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, has called Theodora Goes Wild one of the models for later genre entries (including one starring Dunne, see below). Much has been made about screwball comedy as the province of the idle rich, but in truth, it's more about the liberating power of comedy. In screwball films (and it's primarily a film genre), the romance occurs when a free spirit sets out to liberate someone of the opposite sex in need of freedom. Katharine Hepburn's Susan in Bringing Up Baby (1934) saves staid paleontologist David (Cary Grant) from a life of boredom, while reporter Peter Arne (Clark Gable) in It Happened One Night (1934) shows spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) how the other half lives. In My Man Godfrey (1936), the ersatz hobo played by William Powell takes on Carole Lombard's entire pixilated family.

As such, screwball comedy has a powerful potential for celebrating queerness. In many of the genre's films, the liberating force upsets the traditional binaries of male-female, respectable-shameful and conservative-progressive. Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941), in particular, take on aggressive male roles, acting upon their more passive leading men (Grant and Henry Fonda, respectively). It's no surprise when Grant turns up in a frilly nightgown in Bringing Up Baby, which he can only explain by announcing, "I just went gay all of a sudden." Writer-director Preston Sturges shoots a lot of the love scenes in The Lady Eve with Stanwyck clearly in the dominant position. Even without that sexual role reversal, however, the object of screwball comedy's liberating forces often starts out as an incomplete person. He or she has to be queered, forced out of traditional binaries, to find the joy in life.

Bringing Up Baby is probably the most popular screwball comedy with contemporary audiences, partly because it's completely devoid of sentimentality. Director Howard Hawks keeps things moving so fast that even when Hepburn falls for Grant and thinks she's lost him, she has no time for self-pity. She just keeps pecking away at him until he gives in. Nor is there any return to normalcy at the end. When Susan's chaotic presence destroys the dinosaur fossil David's been working on for years, they're left hanging precariously on a scaffold, with only their love to keep them aloft in a world of destabilized norms. By contrast, Frank Capra's screwball films, though hardly without their charms, spend a lot more time on romantic disappointment. Even with actresses as good as the young Colbert or Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can't Take It With You (1938), modern audiences haven't got time for the tears. In addition, the endings reinforce traditional norms. It Happened One Night concludes with a new norm. Gable and Colbert are married, able share a motel room without a wall of bedclothes separating them. The fall of the Walls of Jericho, as they call it, provides a great punch line, but it's still a return to tradition.  They may have upset the social apple cart by marrying across class lines, but they're still entering a traditional marriage.

There's another reason for Bringing Up Baby's popularity. Having the female character be the aggressor plays better with contemporary sensibilities (as does the presence of feminist icon Hepburn). By contrast, during the first part of Theodora Goes Wild, Douglas' efforts to break down Dunne's reserve reek of chauvinism. Even as the film pokes fun at her conservative small-town existence, his invasion of her life borders on harassment. When he tells her that he's going to keep at her until she tells the world she's Caroline Adams, you may be wondering who the hell he thinks he is.

Fortunately, the film's plot turns the tables on Douglas. Once Dunne confesses her love, he takes off. Then it's her turn to invade his life, particularly when she finds out he's trapped in a loveless marriage because of his father's political ambitions. She moves into his apartment and reveals herself to the world as Caroline Adams. The film is constructed as a series of journeys. Theodora goes from the country to the city, Michael follows her back to the country, she follows him back to the city, and it all winds up back in Lynnfield. With each trip, the characters become more liberated, as Michael helps Theodora express her passions, Theodora frees Michael from his stifling family life, and the whole town comes out to welcome the woman they now know — and love — as a creature of scandal.

The title Theodora Goes Wild says it all, as first Michael queers Theodora's life and then she queers his, at the same time queering her small town. One key element of this is a series of masquerades. At the start, Theodora is already living in disguise, pretending to be the perfect conservative while unleashing her pent-up passions in her writing. Michael uses his disguise as a homeless man to break her out of that stolid conventionalism. Then she creates a masquerade as Caroline Adams, donning outrageous costumes and playing the flirtatious sophisticate. Her clothes calm down as the film goes along, until she's tastefully chic, still a far cry from her mousy costumes when she was just Theodora. Queerness has rendered the once fragmented Theodora/Caroline a complete person.

She does much the same to Lynnfield. At the start, the town is dominated by the retrograde literary circle. Their hold on the town's morals is so great, they even push the newspaper editor to cancel his plans to serialize The Sinner. Yet it's clear from the start that the women who rule the town aren't really happy. One of the members of the literary circle begs for a copy of the paper, so she can read at least part of the book for herself. As the group's leader and the town's chief gossip, Spring Byington manages to evoke both shock and titillation as she breathlessly reads The Sinner's first chapter to the club and later passes on each new tidbit of gossip about Theodora and her wild doings in the big city. When Theodora comes home at the end, she tells the women to stay away from the train station, but still turns up, eager to see their town's first real celebrity. She can barely suppress her delight as the band plays  "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" to welcome the new Theodora home. It's as if she and Lynnfield were just waiting for something to come along and queer things up.

Dunne had never starred in a comedy before Theodora Goes Wild, and she initially turned down the role. Once she gave in, however, she threw herself into the comedy (reportedly with a lot of help from director Richard Boleslawski, one of the first teachers of the Stanislavsky System in the U.S.). She has a way of playing with her teeth, baring them in moments of distress, that's very funny, and a gift for making some of her silliest lines sound like improvisations. Douglas had done mostly serious roles as well, but he plays against his good looks to generate some appealingly antic moments when Theodora starts messing with his life. In his earlier scenes he also has a surprising grace as he sets his sights on seduction. He's so smooth, you get the sense that this could have been just a momentary conquest if she hadn't gotten to him romantically. While he's queering her life, she ends up queering his.

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Femininity = frivolity when Dunne tries out a new hat, one of the many tiresome sexist tropes in Together Again

The small town in Together Again (1944), another Dunne film packaged on the same DVD as Theodora Goes Wild, is ripe for the queering, too, but the journey isn't anywhere near as satisfying. With the success of the earlier film, Dunne got to star in more comedies, including two classics for Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth (1938) and Love Affair (1939). The latter teamed her for the first time with Charles Boyer, one of her favorite co-stars (and a good friend off-screen). They reunited the same year for the more serious When Tomorrow Comes and then five years later for the aptly named Together Again.

The film repeats more than the star pairing; there are distinct similarities to Theodora Goes Wild as well. Again, Dunne comes from a conservative small town that's invaded by an artist (Boyer), this time hired to build a statue in honor of her late husband, the town's former mayor. There's little in the way of masquerade and what there is (her father-in-law's faking an attack of gout to get out of a civic presentation or Dunne's faking interest in her daughter's suitor when the daughter falls for Boyer) is more standard comic plot contrivance than screwball liberation. The changes in Dunne's appearance are subtler as well. As she falls for Boyer, she lets her hair down (though its just a move into the long hair Dunne usually wore in the early 1940s). When she travels to New York earlier to interview Boyer for the job, she buys a new hat at her father-in-law's urging to try something more feminine, which seems to mean more frivolous.

And therein lies the rub.  Dunne isn't just hiring the artist because she's a widow. When her husband died five years earlier, she took over as town mayor. In the one scene set in her office, she seems to be doing a pretty good job of it, taking on a garbage collector who's left one portion of her town swimming in swill and balancing the other demands of her job. Yet that's not enough for her father-in-law, or just about anybody else. The fact that she doesn't have a man in her life somehow makes her less of a woman. And, according to the town's newspaper publisher (Charles Dingle), the fact that she's a woman makes her less of a mayor.

When she shows up at Boyer's building in her new hat, the elevator operator (a teenaged Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer), comes on to her, and it's treated as normal male behavior, as if trying to be more attractive turned her into a piece of meat. Later, when she finally admits her attraction to Boyer and they start planning a life together, there's no question of her remaining the mayor. Though he claims he wants to take her away to free her from her stifling small-town life, it's also pretty clear that he wants to take her away so she can stop working at a job she seems to like.

In fact, the whole universe seems to be rigged to get her out of one man's job and into another man's arms. They need the new statue of her late husband because a lightning strike decapitated the first one. Her father-in-law claims it was some kind of message from the deceased to force his widow to get out of town and find a new life. Rain is pouring when Dunne goes to interview Boyer in her studio. When she tries to use that as an excuse not to go out to dinner with him, the rain suddenly stops, clearing the way for their first date. He takes her to a dinner club whose star performer is a stripper (a page out of the Travis Bickle dating book, no doubt). Not only is the club raided, but also when the police catch Dunne in the lady's room without a dress (after an accidental spill at the dinner table), they think she's the stripper and haul her to the paddy wagon right past a conveniently placed photographer. When Boyer uses the potential scandal to blackmail her into letting him create the new sculpture and even move into her garage to do it, it seems as if the long arm of coincidence has conspired to keep her in his crosshairs.

As was the case with Douglas in Theodora Goes Wild, Boyer has to fight against the script's chauvinism. Fortunately, he has a light, technically assured touch with romantic comedy that makes him immensely appealing, and a lot of his scenes float along almost effortlessly. In better material, he'd be the perfect man to liberate someone.

Dunne, by contrast, seems to need liberating from the script. The comic bag of tricks that felt so fresh in Theodora Goes Wild and her McCarey films seems to have congealed in this picture. She can still play a simple scene honestly, and at times she really connects with Boyer and her other co-stars (Charles Coburn as her father-in-law, Elizabeth Patterson as her housekeeper, Mona Freeman as her stepdaughter). When the comic complications arise, however the script doesn't give her anything real to latch on to. She ends up playing comedy instead of objectives, and her efforts to keep the thing afloat fall flat.

She doesn't bear all the blame. The script is so mired in sexist binaries it never really makes it to the level of screwball comedy, no matter how hard it tries to imitate other screwball films. For contemporary audiences, it barely makes it to the level of comedy. This is particularly disappointing given that the film is produced and co-written (with playwright F. Hugh Herbert) by Virginia Van Upp, who also produced the film noir Gilda (1946), a picture swimming in queer subtext. Of course, a lot of that has been credited to Gilda's cast and director Charles Vidor (though they've told conflicting stories about how much of the queerness was intentional). And Vidor also directed Together Again. From other films, it's clear that he wasn't a bad director. He did very strong work on films like Ladies in Retirement (1941), a wonderfully creepy female-dominated thriller, Rhapsody (1954), a heady romance containing arguably Elizabeth Taylor's best performance, and Love Me or Leave Me (1955), a musical bio with an interesting script by proto-feminist writer Isobel Lennart. But he's also had his share of clunkers, and, sadly, Together Again would seem to fall under that heading.