Every month, Establishing Shot brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | Near Dark (1987)
One of my favorite things to do every October is rewatch my favorite horror films. I love to revisit some of the classics in the genre, whether they’re older films such as Suspiria (1977) and The Ghost Ship (1943) or newer ones such as The Witch (2015) or Hereditary (2018). One such touchstone that I like to revisit is Near Dark (1987), which brilliantly combines elements from the western and horror genres to subvert conventional gender dynamics and be very entertaining.
Near Dark is about a young man in Oklahoma named Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar). One night, he meets a beautiful woman named Mae (Jenny Wright). She eventually bites him on the neck, revealing that she is a vampire. Mae and her vampire “family” take a weakened Caleb with them and decide to give him a week to learn how to be a vampire. But Colton’s conscience and his family’s search for him threaten to ruin his new life.
A major part of this film consists of its subversion of traditional societal expectations. Colton is depicted in his first scenes as a typical “macho” person who fights with his male buddies and tries to seduce women. You could easily take this version of Colton and place him in a classic western. But even in these early sequences, director and co-writer Kathryn Bigelow hints that she is going to subvert these clichés about men. For example, when Colton tries to throw a lasso around Mae, he is surprised to discover that she is stronger than him. Bigelow further subverts ideas about gender after Mae bites Colton. His transformation into a vampire leaves him weak, unable to protect himself, and eventually forced to feed off Mae like he’s an infant to survive. Colton later regains some of his confidence, but those sequences of him struggling — and the film’s strong female characters like Mae and Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein) — define this film as one which offers incisive criticism of traditional ideas of masculinity.
But this is not to say that Near Dark is solely about offering subversive commentary on traditional gender norms. It threads those intellectual critiques in between a story that offers the traditional pleasures of the horror and western genres. This film has some great iconic vampire moments, such as when Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen) spits out a bullet and gives it to the man who shot him or when Severin (Bill Paxton) gets severely burned twice. Bigelow and her cinematographer Adam Greenberg fill this movie with great shots of the western countryside, some of which are of stunningly beautiful sunsets. The sheer number of great sequences — including a memorable bar scene and a tense yet inventive gunfight — make you feel like you’re getting a two-for-one deal while you watch this vampire western.
Director and former IU Cinema guest Karyn Kusama has talked about how she likes that this film could have been shown in both art houses and multiplexes. This is due to the fact that it never forgoes its interest in critiquing traditional gender roles or need to impress the audience with great horror set pieces. Instead, it manages to excel at doing both. Today, its combination of intellectual commentary with the action-packed thrills of two genres remains a potent one.
Jack Miller, contributor | Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974)
Remember when they made horror movies in color? As distinct from the horror cinema of today, which so often seems to have the color palette of wet cement, as well as the great Universal horrors of the 1930s and ‘40s with their special black-and-white look, the horror cycle produced by Hammer studio in the UK beginning in the late ‘50s remains distinctive for its vibrant hues and careful lighting effects — a series of vivid, colorful nightmares. The best of the Hammer directors was the great Terence Fisher, author of such beautiful works as The Gorgon (1964) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), and he seems to have been a key influence on later auteurs of Italian horror, Mario Bava in particular. I recently caught up with Fisher’s splendid Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974), the final entry in the Hammer Frankenstein cycle and also Fisher’s swan song as a filmmaker, in which Peter Cushing plays the mad Baron von Frankenstein, long thought to be dead, but actually hiding out as director of an insane asylum where he continues his experiments in the unholy resurrection of dead matter.
This film has a really special visual texture: very soft, glowing lighting effects combined with a color tone that resembles Flemish painting. Fisher likes to maintain continuous space without cutting as he guides us carefully through the chambers of the asylum, gradually gesturing the viewer closer to the dark secrets contained therein. The relaxed, elegant tone of Cushing’s performance is great as it strategically conceals the madness and emotional violence at the heart of his character: the doctor’s desire to assume the role of a kind of god-like creator-figure remains the aspect of the Frankenstein myth that seems to attract Fisher to the material. The strange and melancholy aspects of this story have rarely been brought to the screen so intelligently and with such a perverse eye for detail.
Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell can be rented from YouTube or Amazon Prime, and is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Shout Factory.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Sylvie et le fantôme (1946) and Mr. Sardonicus (1961)
Every year, my spooky watchlist gets longer and longer (I still have about 20 films I haven’t gotten to!), and this month was full of great first watches, but I’ll just highlight two.
Whimsical and wistful, Claude Autant-Lara’s Sylvie et le fantôme is a coming-of-age story unlike anything I was expecting. Enchanted by the story of Alain, the dashing suitor of her grandmother who was killed in a duel, Sylvie (the beguiling Odette Joyeux) is convinced that his ghost roams the chilly halls of her family’s estate. Knowing his daughter’s infatuation, Sylvie’s father decides to hire someone to impersonate the ghost for her 16th birthday to help her forgive him for selling a cherished painting of Alain. Who he winds up hiring are two young men who have both recently met and fallen for Sylvie, her charm and sincerity instantly leaving them lovestruck. Unbeknownst to them, though, is the fact that Alain’s ghost (played by Jacques Tati in his debut!) really is present, watching over Sylvie with a benevolent fascination. Airy, bright, funny, and deeply romantic in a variety of ways, Sylvie et le fantôme is a film I can’t recommend enough, so check it out on the Criterion Channel if you can!
While Autant-Lara’s film is like a dream, William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus is definitely more of a nightmare. We open with Castle himself walking through 1880s London in the fog as he welcomes us with the perfect line: “Hello again, my homicidal friends.” From beginning to end, Mr. Sardonicus drips with dread and atmosphere. Who is the mysterious Baron Sardonicus? Why does he want our protagonist, the esteemed doctor Sir Robert Cargrave, to come to his home in Gorslava (an obvious rip-off of Transylvania)? And more importantly, why doesn’t Sardonicus show his face? I hesitate to say any more because I went into this movie knowing just this basic plot and it was absolutely the right thing to do. There are so many dark, creepy reveals that I wouldn’t want to ruin them for you — do yourself a favor and be careful if you decide to Google this one; I saw plenty of spoiler-filled images when Googling it myself, which, thankfully, was after I watched it.
As with so many of William Castle’s films, there’s a great gimmick attached to Mr. Sardonicus where you get to “decide” the fate of the title character, a complete illusion as only one ending was ever filmed, but it’s still fun. Although his showmanship is what he is best known for, Castle was also an interesting, funny, morbid filmmaker and I think Mr. Sardonicus boasts some of his best directorial work. Plus, like Hitchcock, the man knew how to make a trailer!
Note: I couldn’t find a trailer for Sylvie, and this seemed to be the only semi-decent clip available.