We're three days into October, and I've only watched one proper horror movie. What's wrong with me?
Movies
An exceptionally cool movie whose ending takes one of the clumsiest nosedives into stupidity that I've ever seen. Before that, though, it's a very stylish little bit of light sci-fi about a girl with night terrors going to a sleep study—complete with some fantastic dream sequences that indicate that somebody was paying close attention to Possessor last year (though it's never as cerebral as that other, superior film). Solid, even top-shelf stuff, until lordy, the ending. Though to be fair, it's not as if the movie doesn't have its warning signs earlier on: most notably, the supposed-to-be romance between the protagonist and some thirtysomething dude, the only thing about which you need to know is that there's barely a single line of dialogue separating this high school girl's declaration that she's eighteen years old and the jump cut to the two passionately humping in bed. Yikes, movie. Grade: B-
A pretty engaging crime thriller with buttery smooth direction from Steven Soderbergh—the kind of direction he can probably do in his sleep by now (exactingly precise yet somehow hangout-y, with light experimental touches), but oh boy, does it scratch an itch in my brain. Really great, surprisingly winsome villain performance from Peter Fonda, too. Grade: A-
It's really hard to say anything about this movie that isn't expressed to such perfection in the movie itself that it would be profane to try to explain it. An unspeakably pained, unspeakably beautiful work of art. Grade: A
There are very few pop works of religious skepticism that both take religious claims seriously while also keeping a critical edge—the New Atheism movement, for example, has always felt somewhat anemic to me because it largely refuses to consider religion as anything except its ostensibly obvious contradictions with scientific materialism; there's of course value in critiquing the limitations of religion's ability to explain the world, but there's a stubborn literalism in the obsession to prove religion "wrong" that itself feels stuck in fundamentalist apologetics' binaries. This is maybe one of the reasons that Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy stuck with me as a young evangelical Christian over, say, Christopher Hitchens: it actually engages Christianity on its most basic terms, which makes the grip of its critiques that much tighter. The Rapture (a movie that would have absolutely ruined my year if I had watched over the same summer I was reading The Golden Compass) does something similar. It takes with complete sincerity a woman's arc of conversion and radicalization into a post-Jeus-Movement charismatic Christianity during what turns out to be the actual for real for real biblical End Times, and I truly don't think I've ever seen anything like it outside of actual Christian films. I could nitpick about the depiction of theology here: there's a curious emphasis on "loving God" over "accepting Christ," which maybe I could chalk up to a difference in milieu from my own upbringing, which was Baptist-y and Southern instead of the Pentecostal-y and Californian world of this movie. But I dunno, there's something about the film's understanding of the emotional realities of the Christian faith (or at least the born-again variety depicted here) that feels more powerful than whatever hairs I could split about the theology: the way that Christianity provides a framework of meaning for unspeakable tragedy, the striking transformation of the converted into someone with an almost unrecognizable personality, the mingled grief and joy in the face of death, which separates loved ones on earth but reunites them in heaven. The movie walks this incredibly fine line between accepting these emotions are true while also problematizing them: giving actual believers a ring of recognition followed by a bleak chill. And that goes doubly for the titular event at the movie's climax, which is nothing less than a completely straight depiction of the Premillennial understanding of the Second Coming, and throughout the entire sequence, I was incapable of picking up by jaw from the floor. Growing up, I was never part of a church that explicitly taught Premillennialism, nor would I have said I believed in it myself, but this stuff was so thoroughly infused in the water of '90s/2000s conservative Christianity that even now, when I am further removed from Premillennialism than ever, watching that imagery of trumpets and horsemen and people talking about "wars and rumors of wars" and being "caught up in the air" made my hair stand on end with a shock of deeply rooted familiarity. The Rapture understands what I think few explicitly Christian media will admit, which is that eschatology—particularly the Premillennial kind—is really, really scary: the idea of the earth suddenly flooded with these mysterious cosmic forces whose purpose is to purge humanity is not that far removed from Lovecraft, and I remember this sort of stuff being seriously spooked about this as a kid, even if that feeling was confusingly mixed with the excitement of seeing Jesus and going to heaven (unless you were, per one of the most chilling verses in the Bible, one of those unfortunate people who only thought they were a Christian before being told by Christ that "I never knew you"). Left Behind popularized a kind of stupid (and honestly materialist) understanding of the End Times where the locusts in Revelation are Apache helicopters or whatever, which I think was in-part an attempt to soften the terrifying otherworldiness of Revelation (and the end of the Book of Daniel) by grounding it in a known "reality," but The Rapture has no interest in softening anything, becoming something that feels more in the vein of Frank Peretti's eerie novel The Door in the Dragon's Throat (a children's book, no less—evangelical Christianity is weird), where an archeological dig discovers an unopenable door behind which dwell the buzzing hordes of supernatural forces to be released on Judgement Day, only unlike in Peretti's novel, we actually get to see those forces released here. The Rapture is nothing short of a horror movie by the end, both in terms of what we see onscreen and in the ideas about God and Christian belief that its ending confronts. Its horrors are so grounded in the specifics of a certain kind of understanding of the world that I wonder if people without any background in these beliefs are going to find it effective or even conceptually horrifying (instead of silly, which it also kind of is at times). But wow, did it work on me. Frightening, incredible. Grade: A
I only knew what was going on like half the time, but it looked pretty cool, and the gore effects were incredibly gnarly. Looks like it's an Italian horror film! I don't really have a lot to say about it. I liked it, and people say this is one of the best Italian horror movies, but honestly I'm not sure I could tell a significant difference in quality from the other Italian horror I've seen, except maybe that the gore was a little more extreme. Grade: B
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