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.