Alexx's Journal

Today, Kestrell and I finished watching an absolutely bonkers werewolf movie from 2001 called Brotherhood of the Wolf. It's in French, though a decent English dub is available.*

The story is based on a real historical event, the Beast of Gévaudan, where a wolf-like creature ravaged the French countryside for a few years in the 1760s. Many historic details are faithfully recreated in the film, though it veers into extremely fictional territory as well. It's historical romance, it's horror, it's action movie, it's mystery, it's political conspiracy thriller, it's Enlightenment versus Catholicism, it has all the tropes.

Our hero, Grégoire de Fronsac, a soldier by profession but a naturalist by vocation, has been sent by the king, not to catch the Beast, but to taxidermy its corpse (once caught) for return to the court. But Fronsac has his own ideas about what he should be doing. His independence is evidenced by the presence of his right-hand man and blood-brother, Mani, the last survivor of an Iroquois tribe. Mani is pretty awesome, but he is undeniably a Magic Indian, with all the baggage that entails.

Fronsac has relationships with both a Good Girl and a Bad Girl. The Good Girl's brother is our token disabled character, and somewhat of an antagonist for much of the film. There are more tropes throughout, but I don't need to list them exhaustively (and several are major spoilers).

The horror scenes are pretty effective, and the action scenes largely well choreographed. I only cavil because the final fight in the film *seriously* broke my suspension of disbelief. I can accept a hero handily defeating dozens of minions while shrugging off near-fatal wounds, that just goes with the territory. But that final fight almost edges into anime territory for sheer over-the-top gratuitous weapon-fu.

The film's pacing was... odd. Along with all the different genres, there was some unusual storytelling choices. Several times during the film, a major piece of the mystery plot gets off-handedly revealed to the audience in a scene that none of the protagonists are privy to. One of which is the question common to a notable minority of werewolf movies, "Is there really a werewolf here at all, or is there a more mundane explanation?" I won't answer that for you, but I will say that the answer was complex and surprising.

While set in the 1760s, the story is embedded in a frame set during the French Revolution. This has more significance to the plot than is at first apparent. One of the historical details the film adopts is that the king's failure to remove the threat of the Beast damaged the king's political standing. In an age where The Divine Right of Kings is starting to be questioned, but still official dogma, werewolves can be a surprisingly political issue.

Content warnings: Lots of gore and violence, including violence to and by animals. One distressing (though brief) rape scene. Death of some protagonists. A fair amount of R-rated-level nudity, of both men and women (though for most of my readers, I expect that's a plus). Racism (albeit frowned on by the script). Misogyny in the typically casual French way. Mocking of organized religion.

[It occurs to me, as I compose that list, that this story could be an Assassin's Creed videogame with relatively few changes. Right down to, "The final confrontation is ludicrously implausible."]

Not a great movie, but solidly entertaining. Recommended, with caveats.

* I also had the subtitles on and, as is often the case with foreign films, the subtitles and dubbing didn't always agree on how to translate. Usually in minor ways, but I was struck by a pronoun issue. The dub referes to the Beast as "it", whereas the subtitles use "she". The Beast's gender doesn't much matter to the plot, but I felt it gave a very different flavor to the story.

First things first: despite the “based on” this is NOT Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It has some substantial quotations from Jackson’s text, and considerably more paraphrases and echoes. Nonetheless, the plot, characters, and even tone are all significantly different. While this TV show is undeniably inspired by Jackson’s novel, it is not an “adaptation” in the normal sense.

Despite that, Writer/director Mike Flanagan has yet to make an unsuccessful story. This is the first time he’s made anything of this length (10 episodes of about an hour each), and you might worry for the first few episodes that the pacing was too slow. It is a slow build, but a steady one, as he puts all his pieces in place, including many that you don’t realize were there until hours later. By the midpoint, there were no more complaints about pacing. If anything, some sequences bordered on the too intense.

The show is an ensemble piece. There are seven main characters and many more supporting. Pleasantly, even most of the small parts get their moment in the spotlight. While Flanagan is certainly capable of bravura, show-off direction (one episode features some astoundingly long takes), he’s also fond of giving characters significant monologues where he simply puts the camera in front of them and lets them act. One of them in particular struck both Kestrell and I as the equivalent of Quint’s speech from Jaws; it came out of nowhere and just completely transformed the tone and raised the stakes.

The one thing that I would say is completely shared between the novel and the show is that they both posit a world which definitely contains scary, unexplained supernatural things – but in which the supernatural is not remotely as terrifying as the experience of lonely human beings attempting to connect with one another (and all too often failing). Many of the most harrowing scenes contain little or no supernatural element, just human dynamics taken to extremes.

I admit that I felt conflicted about the final 20 minutes. A surprising (to me) number of the characters got happy endings, to an extent that I don’t feel was quite earned. But that’s not going to stop me from watching it again (after some recovery time). I wholeheartedly recommend this show to the discriminating horror fan, or for fans of highly emotional drama.

I spend a *lot* of time providing on-the-fly descriptive tracks for Kestrell. In that time, I have gotten great utility out of a technical term I picked up from Buffy scriptwriters, "Baitcam". This describes the frequently-used shot where the camera starts looking at the protagonist and/or potential victim from behind concealing foliage, usually from the middle distance, implying that something dangerous is hiding in the bushes. (There usually is, but sometimes it's just a fake-out.) This is, as you can see, complex to describe, but sufficiently quick to establish visually that it's very handy to have shorthand for it.

After the third time in a week that I found myself pausing a video to say: "They're doing that thing with the protagonist in the middle distance and suddenly an indistinct outline figure dashes across the camera in the foreground," I decided I needed a new piece of shorthand. After some thought, I decided that "Forezoom" did the job nicely, being evocative, and only rwo syllables.

Having used it successfully for a month or so, I've decided to share it with the world :)

Kes wanted to see this movie because it seemed to be in the sub genre “evil trees”. It wasn’t EXACTLY that, but it satisfied, nonetheless.

A young English couple moves to a remote forest in Ireland, to help prepare for an upcoming logging operation. The locals warn them that these woods belong to “The Hallow”, fearsome faery-like beings. Our protagonists, sadly, do not appear to have any genre-savvy, and write this off as rural superstition. Viewers who ARE genre-savvy, especially fans of real-world biological horror, will see a lot of what’s coming as soon as the word “Cordyceps” is uttered.

Plot-wise, there aren’t a lot of surprises, but the direction and acting are excellent. Stylistically, the film moves through a half dozen or so classic horror sub genres, frequently adding a new bit of spin to what our not-so-heroic protagonists have to deal with. It starts calm and slow, but there’s some truly disturbing body horror by the end of it.

Speaking of ends, if you do watch this movie, stay for the very end of the credits. Several of the last few credits are amusing in and of themselves. And in the final 90 seconds or so, music plays over them which slyly re-contextualizes the entire film that came before it. Recommended for horror fans.

I really like this indie horror film (though Kestrell was “meh”). It’s sort of a mix of M.R. James’ “Casting the Runes” and an 80s slasher flick. The protagonist is being followed by an implacable monster that is guaranteed to kill them unless they passed this curse on to someone else first – by having sex with them. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a sexually transmitted CURSE.

I thought it worked well on a number of levels. It’s a scary horror movie, obviously. It’s also in some ways a meditation on inevitable mortality, and the ways in which we try to avoid it; In a move that reverses the 80s trope that sex equals death, in this film sex is the only mechanism by which you can (temporarily) avert death. And it’s a great example of rules-based storytelling.

Being who I am, I feel compelled to analyze the rules in some detail. Naturally, this involves heavy spoilers.( Read more... )

I said some of this in conversation recently, and thought the analogy worth expanding upon.

He produced a great deal of work in genres and formats that were widely considered to be lowbrow, disposable entertainment for the lower classes. Most of his work wasn't

collected during his lifetime. Shortly *after* his death, some of his literary disciples started getting his work collected and reprinted, marking the start of the genre and form being seen as (at least *capable* of being) "literature".

Some of his political attitudes are not in fashion today, which some readers can't get past. And he had stylistic quirks (including a fondness for long words) that are easily parodied (and arguably became self-parody in his own lesser works).

Of his prodigious output, about the top 5% consists of enduring classics, works that influenced *everything* that came after them in their "home" genres, and had considerable influence even outside those genres. The next, say, 10% of his output was also very good, though not quite *as* enduring as the first-rank material. After that, the work ranges from "good" down to "wretched".

Although only the cream of his work is widely influential, devout fanboys of his work (starting with his first reprinters) have been completists, including everything they could get their hands on, indiscriminately. This has inadvertently led to a dilution of his mass appeal. People often hear great things about his work, but are then exposed to (sometimes quite large) pieces of his work that is not at all impressive. This is, IMO, why so many people are willing to say, "I'm not a fan of his stuff", even if they generally like the genre he helped make respectable. I believe they *would* be fans of his if they read his best works, and avoided the vast sea of mediocrity around it.

[Of course, countless arguments could be made about *which*, exactly, the best works are. But if you compiled a list of many people's opinions, I don't think many people would put works in the top tier that anyone else thought weren't at least second-tier.]

I once had a conversation in which I drew a few comparisons between Shakespeare and Neil Gaiman. While there's still some validity there, when I look at the *whole* of the description above, the name Jack Kirby leaps out at me as the Shakespeare of superhero comics.