What To Watch This Week
Those Damned Scandinavians Again, A Return to a Prediction I Made, Three Streaming Gems: Creepy October Part Two, and Some Chilling Reading Suggestions
The Chestnut Man
If you've been alive for the past decade or so, you're probably aware that for some reason or another, Scandinavians have a real talent for telling scary stories about killers and the cops who try to catch them. Why is this? Everyone probably wants to talk about the fact that it's snowy and cold up there close to the Arctic Circle, and really dark for a lot of the year, and everyone lives in austere modernist surroundings, and other stuff like that, but I say, Who cares why it is? Why not just sit back and enjoy it?
So it was a pleasure this week when a Danish show called The Chestnut Man popped up in my Netflix queue, and I turned it on, and found it to be quite good. Based on a novel of the same name, it tells a requisitely dark story about women who are being murdered by someone who leaves chestnut men at the crime scenes. What's a chestnut man? Glad you asked. Apparently it's a little sort of figurine that kids in Denmark are fond of making (and this could be entirely invented, I have no idea) by sticking matches or sticks into chestnuts. And there's even a song that goes along with the tradition, kind of like "Ring Around the Rosie." Who knew?
Anyway, it's a great trope for a serial killer thriller, because these little chestnut men are eerie. And beyond that, the show is quite well put together. The disillusioned cop chasing the killer (it's a little-known fact that the countries in Scandinavia got together and passed a law stating that all cops who hunt serial killers must be disillusioned) is played pretty straight by Danica Curcic, but she's given a great partner (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), who got in trouble at his real job working for Europol (like the FBI of the European Union), and doesn't, at first, appear to give a damn about this new gig. The other side of the story is cleverly structured as well. It involves a politician whose daughter was abducted and murdered the year before, and who is now getting pulled into the Chestnut Man killings for reasons that we, at first, don't quite understand.
The whole is well-plotted, moves briskly, and contains some nice red herrings and surprises. It also sits at the nearly-perfect length for book adaptations of this sort – six hour-long episodes – which prevents it from either rushing through things too quickly or slowing down too much. And it's possessed of nice technical chops as well, with a strong ability at creating both tense sequences and that overall air of northerly menace that pervades the best of these works.
Will this run of great cop and killer storytelling made by tall folks in cold climates ever come to an end? Perhaps someday, but for now I'd advise climbing aboard and enjoying it. Available on Netflix.
A Return to a Prediction I Made
Several weeks ago, in a piece about Clive Barker's amazing 1987 horror flick Hellraiser, I noted that a remake was soon to be released, and made the following prediction:
[T]he new Hellraiser will, I suspect, probably be different from the original in a very specific way. My guess is that, insofar as the remake will have a thematic element to it, that element will operate in a contemporary mode, one which I like to think of as issue-driven. In other words, I suspect that the viewer will be able to identify quite directly what in-the-contemporary-mind issue the film is tackling, and what political angle it takes.
Now, the internet is full of people making predictions about things, and not so full of those people returning to those predictions to judge their accuracy. So, having watched the new Hellraiser, I thought I'd do just that.
And in my (admittedly and happily non-scientific) judgement, I got that prediction about 15% right.
The "insofar" does buy me a little wiggle room, but it's definitely clear that I thought there was a strong chance that the new film would put a message about a contemporary hot-button topic at its heart. In that, I was clearly wrong.
There are a couple of thematic punches thrown in the movie, more or less at random. Our heroine, Riley (Odessa A'zion, who does a great job) is struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction, but the tale never really tries to make itself into a meditation into this, or if it does so, the attempt is so poor as to be unnoticeable. She gets tangled up with a "bad boy," as well, but there's not much here on the nature of relationships or vulnerability. And there is a wealthy bad guy who sees other people as disposable, but there aren't really any other elements of the film that give it any cogent thoughts on the pernicious effect of the wealthy on American society or anything like that.
So what is the film about? The story is a reprise of perhaps the least interesting element of the original Hellraiser, in which a young person finds a magical box that has the power to summon creatures from another dimension (let's just call it hell, but there's so little relationship to religion here that it might as well just be "a place where bad things happen") who revel in causing pain. The young person then has to figure out a way to appease these creatures before they kill her in one or another of their favorite nasty ways. Pretty standard fare for a horror flick, but what's interesting here is that this film manages to be about virtually nothing at all.
This is tricky to do, and it's accomplished so magnificently that the movie starts to threaten to be about things that it absolutely does not want to be about. Consider the following misguided sequence (and I'm about to spoil something that happens in the film, so be warned). Early on, Riley's brother falls into the clutches of the hell-minions because of her shenanigans with both drugs and the puzzle box. She spends the next few minutes of screen time feeling guilty, while the film builds our understanding that she's going to have to try to save her brother by confronting the mystical bad guys. The structure of the film, that is, makes us feel as though her her relationship with her brother is the primary one with which both she and the film are concerned.
But then the film then immediately gives this a sexual valence. How? Well, she's having sex with her boyfriend, looks over, and sees one of the bad guys from hell standing there. In the film's rather muddled sensibilities, this is (maybe?) because the bad guys from hell are somehow connected to sex; but to the viewer who's wondering what all of this is "about" it really seems like the equation goes like this: brother goes to hell → sister feels guilty → sister has sex and is thinking about brother in hell. In other words, if we were to don our academic film-reading hats, we might suggest that it's about her desire to have sex with her brother, a desire so illicit that it can only come out through a vision of hell and yet so concrete that her brother has already been punished for it.
So is this somehow an incest film? Absolutely not. It's just a sloppy one, so haphazardly structured that everything points in confounding, random directions.
And its even worse sin is that it's dreary. A good deal of it is slow as molasses, and it possesses a frame of reference stretching not much further than the gloss of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story, the more torturous sensibilities of Game of Thrones, and the oversized theatrics of Denis Villeneuve. There is a lot of furious energy here, sure, but it's mostly put to the ends of making sequences that drag on interminably, alternating with a vicious little delight in showing human pain.
I know that a lot of people do find something scary (or thrilling) in the the latter. But unless you're the kind of horror fan who watches everything that comes down the pike, or a Hellraiser franchise completest, I suspect you can find better things to watch. Available on Hulu.
Three Streaming Gems, Creepy October Part Two
All October, I'm suggesting Halloween-themed films that are available to stream. Find part one here.
Kill List (2011, Ben Wheatley)
How about kicking it off this week with something pretty damn bracing? A hard-edged crime/horror flick about a contract killer who gets tangled up in an assignment that's at first unnerving and then a whole lot more, Kill List is British director Wheatley's second film and might be his best. It's bleak in the way that some of the lower-budget American horror fare from the early '70s could be, but also shows a real ability to slither over into nightmarish psychological terror. If you like the kind of contemporary horror movies being put out by people like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers and haven't seen this, it's definitely worth your time. Available on AMC+, Roku, and elsewhere.
Roadgames (1981, Richard Franklin)
Recommended to me by friend of the site and attacking midfielder extraordinaire Scott Johnson, Road Games is a delightful little Australian thriller with American stars. The story involves a truck driver (a fantastic Stacy Keach) on a long haul across the continent, who starts to suspect that a man in a green van is picking up female hitchhikers and killing them. The truck driver soon picks up a young hitchhiker of his own (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the two of them decide that they're going to stop the man in the van. The film is virtually gore-free, well put together, wonderfully written, and has a really sly sense of humor. It should delight fans of off-beat thrillers, as well as fans of the 1986 American cult classic The Hitcher, which employs almost exactly the same plot. Available on Tubi for free, as well as the Criterion Channel and other places.
The Most Dangerous Game (1932 Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel)
Clocking in at just over an hour, this one is a great trophy for your roots-of-the-macabre showroom. Probably more rightly termed an adventure film than a horror one, it delves into one of the great pulp tropes of all time. The set-up goes like this: a big game hunter (Joel McCrea) is riding along in a yacht off the coast of South America, talking with the other passengers about whether he'd ever want to change places with the animals he hunts…then the yacht crashes, he swims ashore, and finds himself in the clutches of one Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), who gets his thrills by hunting human beings. It's a wonderful yarn, but a lot of the fun here comes from watching the pre-code filmmakers lace the whole thing through with Freudian innuendo and come up with fabulous ways to shoot things – like a ship wreck – that would seem to be beyond the range of their budget. Available on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Pluto TV, and all over the place.
Bonus Content: A Pair of Chilling Novels For Your Long October Nights
The term "cosmic horror" is a wonderful one, playing as it does on two different connotations of the word "cosmic": the astronomical and the existential. Which is to say that works in this genre tend to feature monsters and mysteries that descend from other realms of the cosmos – alternative dimensions, spaces across the vast reaches of time – and at the same time to try to instill in the reader a sense of foreboding or terror that is massive, otherworldly, almost incomprehensible, and a real threat to reduce us puny humans to something less significant than dust.
H.P. Lovecraft is probably the most famous American practitioner of the form, but if you're looking for something to read in the lead-up to Halloween (or any time, really) I'd suggest a pair of novels from William Sloane that were re-released several years ago in one volume by the New York Review of Books press. The book is called The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror, and it contains the novels To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water.
The first is about young men on a weekend visit to their alma mater. They decide to drop in on their favorite professor – an astronomer, of course – and discover that he is…well, that's for you to find out if you read the book. The second is about a mad inventor who holes up in a small town in Maine and begins to build something large, and secret, and that devours huge amounts of electricity, in a closed-off upper room of his house.
Although neither is very long, these are not up-tempo books that contain lots of thrills and bloodshed. Instead, Sloane builds events at a measured, menacing pace that really gets under your skin. And he has a real knack – reminiscent of someone like Paul Bowles, although in a less literary way – for putting language to the feeling of coming into contact with something so different and inexplicable that it resists utterance. If this kind of book sounds like your jam, I'd recommend it highly.
Available from the NYRB site here.