'“The kids are very much not alright”— Alisha’s July Cinema Club Recommendations
It’s something deeply, viscerally upsetting when children become endangered in a horror film. If a mainstream film does include the suggestion of children being harmed, it merely remains just that — an oblique suggestion, perhaps a technical or ideological/symbolic depiction meant to convey that matters have become truly dire. Because kids are meant to be that one pure thing, that one safehold within society; kids not only are too young to have earned any karmic badness, they also carry hope, hope that evil can, certainly will, be triumphed over. We, for the most part, like our endings to be hopeful. It’s for this reason that most horror films tend to not irrevocably endanger children.
But if and when the innocence of kids is infringed upon within a film, it means shit has horrifyingly hit the fan; it means the particular evil is the most vile imaginable. Remembering our own naivete and relationship with the frightful as kids, remembering our younger selves’ desire for safety and love, we watch films like Skinamarink and The Woman in Black through trembling fingers. When the sacredness of childhood is endangered, it means nothing is safe, nothing is salvageable, anymore.
The following horrors all endanger kids in a deeply nuanced and uniquely terrifying way: they not only pursue the innocent, they have the evil possess them, using them as agents for destruction, destroying cultural and societal hope — insurance for a future — in an irretrievable sort of way. I love the following horrors because they are doubly frightening. They take the traditional good versus evil dialectic that most horror films swivel about, and lace it with an insidious kind of poison, corrupting the good and thereby making the evil all the more terrifying. Here, you’ll find kids subverting and polluting our ideas of safety and innocence, here you’ll find a festering kind of horror; here you’ll find evil that knows no bounds. Enjoy!
Sinister (2012)
This film is a stunner on so many levels. Helmed by Ethan Hawke, who’s pitch-perfect as a writer desperately trying to recreate the success of his first bestseller, Sinister grates and burrows. Becoming increasingly unsettling with every frame, thanks in part to an unforgettably haunting original score (by Christopher Young), this Scott Derrickson-directed film proffers up a blood-curdling original demon that ranks with Freddy Krueger as being the most frightening monsters I have ever seen. Sinister certainty puts children in danger, for Bughuul, the Pagan deity at the core of the film’s lore, literally consumes children, but it also turns them into scepters of doom and carnage.
So many of the mundane and milkily innocent aspects of childhood — innocuous and quiet moments spent with family, sleep, the safety of kin — are invested with an indescribably horrific aura in this film. But prime among the defiled sacred is the corruption of film and photographs. Film becomes conduit for evil, the medium through which Bughuul moves. Home videos, those tools we use to document the sweetest aspects of our lives with our family, contain, are witness to, so much horror. This profane use of film and photography, in concert with the corruption of children, the soundtrack, Hawke’s tender and terrified performance — all this makes for one of the most original and irksome, ultimately successful, horrors of present day.
Goodnight Mommy (2014)
This one is a quiet and unassuming slowburner. It follows twin brothers Lukas and Elias as they come to increasingly suspect that their mother, who’s returned to the boys with a bandaged face after cosmetic surgery, is not really their mother. Deftly edited, stunningly performed, and written with a keen understanding and love for the thrill of suspense, Goodnight Mommy feels like a snake coiling tighter and tighter within the pit of your stomach. The film volleys culpability, malignancy, between the boys and their mother, and it’s literally, deliciously, impossible to pick a side until the film’s final moments. Through an interrogation of the moral goodness we attribute with ostensible beauty and clean wealth, Goodnight Mommy delivers a simmering and, honestly, beautiful depiction of the seldom-dramatized ways in which grief matastasizes and calcifies and frightens. This film is a tour de force.
The Brood (1979)
You probably saw this one coming. Written and directed by David Cronenberg, The Brood follows a man striving to protect his daughter from her institutionalized mother. Skewering the oftentimes absurdly performative and hypocritical leanings of new-age psychoanalysis, ineffective talk around trauma, and traditional, gender essentialist notions of the mental fitness of parents (for example, the societal and judicial idea that the mother, as opposed to the father, is best suited to providing for her child), this film takes a no holds barred approach to exploding the toxicity of the nuclear family and the culture that cradles it.
Cronenberg — here obsessed as he so often is with the ways in which our bodies are sites for the most beguiling grotesqueries — offers and traverses new avenues when it comes to the idea of children containing and causing terror. Trauma takes on the operativeness of physical sickness, and sanity becomes something that can be leeched to cure insanity. Here, insanity is something like a physical disease that one person can pass onto another — intergenerational trauma’s velocity is externalized and literalized (one can catch insanity like a cold, exhibit trauma on the skin like hives) to chillingly and immediately mark and dramatize its transmission, its psychic damage. Cronenberg offers not only one of the most compellingly dire and grim depictions of the oft-memed adage that hurt people hurt people, but also maniacally offers children up as the actual and potential arbiters of destruction that they have been for as long as abuse, unfortunately, has taken place.
Kill, Baby … Kill! (1966)
Directed by Mario Bava, Kill, Baby … Kill! contains one of the most frightening ghost girls I have ever seen, with so many frames functioning as immediate nightmare fuel. This folk-horror follows a doctor and a medical student working to get to the bottom of why people keep turning up dead in a secluded Carpathian village. They learn that the entire village is terrified of the ghost of a young girl, and as they work to uncover the girl’s and the town’s secrets, a local witch works to protect the villagers. This is a deeply trenchant and often sympathetic look at the workings of superstition, mob mentality, and a compelling (for how respectful of its benefits it remains) interrogation of the arrogance and insensitivity of those who laud the advancements of science to the detriment of cultural beliefs. This film is lush, captivating, dizzying, and unnervingly creepy. Bava’s camerawork is bewitching and irreverent, joyously kinetic and therefore all the more engrossing. Replete with creepy Gothic toys, dust and cobweb-mired austerity, and the kind of sinister, human evil that precious few are able to escape, Kill, Baby … Kill! is a damned fun time, not to mention a testament to the indelible creepiness of Gothic children.
“Stripper Flicks” — Veronica’s July Cinema Club Recommendations
Showgirls (1995)
Showgirls is mostly a story about the beautiful, intense, loud, Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) taking absolutely no shit. She arrives in Las Vegas with switchblade in hand, a wild and carefree dancing style, and a readiness to do whatever it takes to make it. Starting at a crappy, tacky, sexy strip joint and clawing her way up to one of the major Vegas nudie dance shows through her special wild, intense, chaotic style of dancing, Showgirls is all campy, tacky, chaotic, icky, glorious grit.
Magic Mike XXL (2015)
Perhaps the only film in the category of “feel good himbo stripper road trip movie”, Magic Mike XXL is a joyous stripper fantasy. Not relegated to a strip club, but oozing out into gas stations and beaches and Southern mansions, Magic Mike XXL brings the stripper fantasy to domestic and even boring spheres of our lives, opening up the possibility to play in desire wherever you are.
Shakedown (2018)
Using archival footage of the “Shakedown Girls” — a group of strippers who hosted wild, beautiful, unabashed lesbian strip nights in the early 2000s in Los Angeles — Leilah Weinraub brings forward an important and previously unknown slice of queer stripper history. Ultimately destroyed by police looking to repress such a vibrant and joyous expression of lesbian female sexuality (which often worked hand-in-hand with male queerness and drag), Shakedown is a eulogy for this beautiful flash-in-a-pan moment in stripper culture.
Hustlers (2019)
Based loosely on a New York Magazine article, Hustlers follows a group of strippers who use their ability to sell sex and fantasy to finesse more money out of men than they ever have before—albeit through shady means. Nuanced, loving, and more about the unspoken intensity of platonic female love in such loaded, sexualized, and often risky spaces than anything else, Hustlers is a celebration of women’s ability to know how to make it work in a multi-layered system that tries to hold them down and deem them objects.