What To Watch This Week
Let's Hear it for Mike Flanagan, Three Streaming Gems: Creepy October Part Three, and What Should Be the Most Widely-Read Poem of Our Moment
Let’s Hear it For Mike Flanagan
To continue our October theme of recommending scary stories on television, I thought I'd mention the work of Mike Flanagan, who has of late accomplished something rare and beautiful in the film world.
After starting out as an indy-horror director – he self-financed his first film, Absentia (2011) and filmed it in his own apartment – he moved up to making sequels of bigger budget films (Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), and then to adaptations of Steven King (Gerald’s Game in 2017, and Dr. Sleep in 2019). That's not a bad career arc in less than a decade.
All of this is impressive enough, but in the last several years, Flanagan has done something that's perhaps even harder: made several television series for a major streaming service, Netflix, that are not only (unlike a great deal of fare on that channel and elsewhere) good, but also easily identifiable as his.
In part, his success in this regard is technical. Flanagan loves to use wide lenses to shoot indoor sequences that are framed such that the full bodies of the actors are visible. This has the effect of making the rooms around the actors feel just the slightest bit too small, and at the same time it grounds his characters in an actual space – as opposed to the implied space that exists around them when we only see them in medium or close shots and the rest of the room isn't visible. He's also a great lover of darkness. By this I mean actual, visual darkness that takes up a good deal of the frame, in place of the overly-lit compositions that litter so many other scary shows and movies. All of this gives his work an idiosyncratic, and effective, visual feel.
But maybe the most interesting thing Flanagan has done is make Netflix bend to his will in terms of the way he writes. This is perhaps the most clear in what to me is the most fascinating show he's made for them, Midnight Mass. (The others are The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Midnight Club, by the by.)
The story involves characters in a small town on a small island off of the East Coast, who get two things at once. The first is a new parish priest, and the second is the slow emergence of a rather monstrous presence that enjoys the taste of blood. No, it's not a werewolf or a mummy or a plague of zombies. Keep guessing. Anyway, how will these two things play out? Well, that's one of the topics of the show.
Importantly, while it's developing its bloodsucking tale, it also manages to be both a character study and a meditation on religion. These are not phrases I throw around lightly; everyone and their uncle are always talking about 'character studies' when a show is boring, or claiming that it has 'things to say' about a topic like religion when it does little more than throw in some half-assed symbology.
But in Midnight Mass, Flanagan actually succeeds in doing these things. While spinning out its yarn, it creates a feeling that is somewhat 19th-Century-esque in its devotion to the slow, deliberate (but not boring!) development of is characters and situation; at the same, it teases out a lot of connections between the vampire myth and the Catholic belief system. And in the process, Flanagan lets his characters talk. For someone who's interested in both television and writing, the dialogue here is fascinating: three or four minute monologues are not uncommon.
But unlike something like Amazon's The Old Man, in which the pretension of the dialogue writing was matched only by the soporific spell it thrust onto the viewer, Flanagan here uses dialogue to actually allow his characters to expose themselves, often by speculating about the mysteries and horrors with which they're being confronted. Does it work in every situation? No. But in its intelligence and almost experimental nature – which in some sense are the same thing, for anything intelligent is almost definitionally experimental in today's entertainment world – it shows that even the biggest media behemoths can be forced to be interesting by the right person.
So if you want to check out something interesting and always a bit off-beat this Halloween season, check out Flanagan's work for Netflix, and Midnight Mass in particular.
Three Streaming Gems: Creepy October Part Three
All October, I'm suggesting Halloween-themed films that are available to stream. Find part one here, and part two here.
Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
The J-horror moment of a few years ago made it onto the radars of the American cinema through things like Ring from 1998, and The Grudge from 2002. Cure doesn't seem to have made as much of an impact, although it a lot of ways it's a far more interesting film. The story is about a string of gruesome murders; the trope is that the people who commit the murders are easily located and have no memory of what they've done. This isn't a new idea (one should note the obvious parallels to 1981's Strange Behavior/Dead Kids, which a fascinating in its own right, and also has the distinction of being remade as the bomb Disturbing Behavior in 1998 with virtually no acknowledgement that it was a remake) but in director Kurosawa's hands, the story finds levels of intensity that one only finds in the best horror. There is some clear Tarkovsky influence here, if that means anything to you, and it's used to fantastic and creepy effect. I almost hesitated to list Cure in this space, as it's not widely available, but then realized it's on the Criterion Channel. If you like great eerie, heavy-toned thrillers, it's certainly worth your time.
A Bay of Blood (1972, Mario Bava)
If you're interested in modern horror, sooner or later you're going to have to come to terms with the Italians, particularly in the persons of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Why not start with A Bay of Blood (also wonderfully titled at various points Ecology of Crime and Twitch of the Death Nerve)? The plot here is, like so much of the giallo genre that Bava helped to create, the kind of thing Agatha Christie might think up if she'd really enjoyed adding theatrical and gruesome killings to her dark little poison-pill plots. It centers of a valuable estate and the people being murdered in pursuit of the title to it; it's pretty violent, yes, but there's an overwrought, oversaturated, wonderfully-stylized, almost balletic inventiveness to it that can be hypnotizing. Certainly not for everyone, but if names like Black Christmas and The Last House on the Left and The Witch Who Came From the Sea mean anything to you – or sound intriguing – this is a must see. Available on Kanopy (for free!) and AMC+.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Siegel)
There's a lot of reasons to love this film. Don Siegel is a masterful director, Sam Peckinpah worked with the actors and has a small part, and it's flat-out one of the best and most influential scary movies of the 1950s. The tale has gone on to be so widely disseminated as to feel as though it's as old as time itself, but it's not. It comes from a 1954 novel by a guy named Jack Finney, and is about a group of aliens that is invading earth and replacing human beings with clones who have no free will…and believe that's the best way to be. Read it as an easy (if devastating) allegory to '50s American conformity if you will, but also note the strong connections to works usually considered to be "higher art" – the films of Nicholas Ray, for one, and the output of the Beats, for another. Looking for a great old sci-fi romp the implications of which run right through up through our culture to the present day? This one should do the trick. Available on Paramount+, the Roku Channel, and Amazon Prime.
Bonus Content: What Should Be the Most Widely-Read Poem of Our Moment
I'm sorry if you're only tuning in for the fun and entertaining film content and I keep throwing socially and politically distressing things at you, but such is life in the modern world.
What you will notice, if you look for a more than a few seconds at that world, is how closely it resembles other moments in which epochal disruption was on the march. Maybe the best example of this are the parallels between our contemporary situation and the situation that produced the Modernist artistic movement in the first decades of the last century. Then, as now, there were enormous economic and psychic dislocations; then, as now, these cataclysms were produced by massive disparities in wealth, the rapid emergence of new technologies, and accelerating cultural shifts; then, as now, there were bad actors and abhorrent, dangerous people who took the opportunities created by that chaos to consolidate political power and establish oppressive regimes by preying on people's fears.
What's missing now, unfortunately, is a serious artistic movement arising in response. The reasons for this are of course complicated, and rather than debate them now, I'd like to suggest that, if you want to find works expressing an adult response to what's happening around us, it's worth looking back a century.
If you have any questions about what I mean, you might consider reading William Butler Yeats' so-famous-that-it's-almost-not-read-anymore poem "The Second Coming," which was first published in 1919, but very much feels as though it was written yesterday, on the 18th of October, 2022.
It's not an encouraging poem, but it certainly feels like a prophetic one. And perhaps this is the kind of prophecy we need – the kind that art specializes in – in order to wake up to the gravity of what's happening around us.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
/
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
/
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?