A xerox of a xerox of movies you’ve seen before, the greatest sin of X, the 2022 horror smash, is that it’s fundamentally boring.
Look, I don’t make the movies, I just watch them, and when you’re drawing obvious comparisons to your own movie, in the movie, and you choose to draw the audience’s attention to Psycho (which I happened to have just watched), you’re soft-breaking the cardinal movie rule of not showing a better movie during your own movie. But, yes, the movie is a slow build for literally the first hour of people making a porn film in a rustic cabin on some farmer’s property in the middle of East Texas nowhere, with some light hints that something is up with the elderly owners of the farm/ ranch-land where the filming is taking place.
The problem with this, imho, is that Writer/ Director Ti West is under the impression that by borrowing Psycho’s slow build and pivot, which he calls out, he’s doing the same thing. But we’re 62 years on, we’ve all seen a lot of movies, and at this point I was looking at my watch instead of the movie when we don’t get our first kill til 58 minutes into a 105 minute film. I don’t know how to tell Ti West - my man, Hitch did this 30 years into perfecting tension in movies. This ain’t that.
The actors are good enough, with only one of them doing anything resembling a Texas accent, and the rest doing movie-southern. I won’t get into the nuance of Houston accents, because that’s tedious, but I will point out the suggestion is that they’re in Houston at the start, but Ti West means Pasadena, where they filmed Urban Cowboy around the same time.
Weirdly, the movie is filmed in New Zealand, doubling for East Texas, and it’s a surprisingly good match, if you’ve driven through that region. Flat with patches of tall trees and plenty cleared for farming and ranching. What I can’t buy is that a building built in the 1920’s, let alone during the Civil War, would still be standing without major restoration effort, given the weather and mold of Texas anywhere within 3 hours of the Gulf.
The pitch of the movie is essentially “old people are scary, and more so if it’s clearly low-budget old-age makeup”. What drives the elderly woman, Pearl, to murder, is that she’s horny, and unable to sate her endless desire as she once did with her husband, and, we assume, many other lovers. I’m unsure if we’re supposed to find old people having sexual desire frightening - I personally don’t, and am perfectly aware old folk’s homes can basically have the the same amount of hanky panky happening behind closed doors as freshmen dorms.
Why lust turns to homicide, I can’t say. And the movie doesn’t care to make it clear. But we’re told that seeing Maxine, played by new indie film darling Mia Goth as both Maxine and Pearl (under makeup) and catching bits of the filming, her desires are stoked, and when she’s rebuffed, she gets stabby.
It’s an interesting decision. The way Pearl is played is as a frail old woman, and its kind of tough to buy she or her husband can do much but shuffle around the house hoping not to break a hip. There’s no magic or anything, just a misdirected libido and a too-understanding husband.
But, yeah, you’ll watch the movie and say “huh, that's Boogie Nights. That's Lake Placid. That's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That's Psycho.” and so on and so forth. In it’s way, it’s just another “ooooOOOoooOOoooo people who live in non-urban places are creeeeeepy” movie. But the cast is small, they’re all written to be morons. It takes *forever* to get from death to death as the movie *finally* gets around to being a horror film. But none of its that interesting (I did have a laugh at the reference to the actual farmer’s daughter joke reference in the movie, even if it made literally no sense).
I think maybe West is trying to say something about sex, but it’s kind of like - nothing particularly interesting. So.
Anyway.. it’s fine. If all you’re looking for is a movie where people get murdered, this is that. I won’t watch it again, but go nuts on your fandom here. I found the pacing absolutely deadly, and the attempts to repackage better films kind of ill-conceived.
Oh, yeah, this also has Jenna Ortega, who is having her breakout year, and she’s pretty good! As is the entire cast, I guess.
So, it’s not really worth talking too deeply about Psycho (1960) here at Ye Olde Film Watch Journal. The movie is one of the most written about, discussed and analyzed flicks that one is likely to see. So I won’t get into plot, analysis, etc… Y'all can chase that around on your own.
I hadn’t personally seen it in probably two decades, so I decided to give it a whirl as part of our Halloween spooktacular cinema series.
Probably my foremost comment is that the movie actually lives up to the hype. Some movies do. Lawrence of Arabia. 2001. The Godfather Part II. I can go on listing great movies, but just assume I agree with you as you fill in your own blank here.
Maybe those movies show signs of age or that they were made in another time, but there’s nothing about them that doesn’t pull you in and hold you. And Psycho - minus the weirdo psychoanalysis at the conclusion - is kind of a perfect film. Every line has weight or double meaning, every shot provides you with information about the story and characters, and the sound and atmosphere are on point.
Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, and from the moment Janet Leigh picks up the money, the movie never really lets up. That it breaks deeply ingrained narrative tradition and bumps her off - now one of the most famous scenes in cinema - is still a mental jolt. You’re all in on Marion’s flight and plight by the time she decides to get clean (itself a double meaning).
I can only imagine how audiences felt in 1960. You’ll hear it pitched as the first 30 minutes - but the car sinks at about the 1 hour mark of a 110 minute film. To actually have a victim built up as a protagonist, it just naturally seems she should survive - something that Leigh’s own daughter would perfect in Halloween. And the beautiful leads almost always survive in horror pictures - drop a comment to name a movie where one doesn’t, prior to 1960.
It’s also impossible to say enough about Anthony Perkins in the movie, who possibly did *too* good of a job and got himself planted in the world’s consciousness as Norman Bates, no matter what other roles he took on. But, man, not a false note in the film, and putting in a performance utterly ahead of its time. This role is closer, timelinewise to Dracula by 30+ years than it is to today, 63 years on. Absolutely unreal. And if you were only partially there with Norman, the final moments of the film are one of the great selling points.
I’ve seen and enjoyed the direct sequel - but I’m not sure it ever should have had one. That final shot should have been the end capper.
I’m not clear on the production of the film. I know the studios didn’t want to make it, and it seems like a good 1/3rd of movies that go on to be genre-busting classics come for very passionate filmmakers studio execs want to out guess. I know you wind up with some duds from letting name directors chase their bliss, but sometimes you wind up making one of the most important films of the century.
Psycho has its sequels, a TV show and it’s been endlessly referenced, ripped-off, homaged, and a good chunk of films are now a xerox of a xerox of the original. And for good reason. A lot of horror would learn its tricks from the movie and how its framed, how Hitch used the stairs and sets and camera placement. Montage would tell us more than actually just showing the thing in the shower sequence. Reveals that show us things are endlessly more f’d up than we first expected when we find Mother in the cellar.
I don’t know that simply dipping back into the well is able to recapture what’s there. It’s the Hitchcockian synergy of all the elements working together, and that’s lightning in a bottle. That some can do this over and over is just amazing fortune for audiences.
If you listened to our Texas Chainsaw Massacre podcast, you’ll be aware that I recently finally Googled the murders of real life psychopath Ed Gein, which partially inspired TCM, Psycho and portions of Silence of the Lambs. There’s a whole lot to unpack there, and it’s absolutely horrible, but turns out the author of the original book that Psycho is based on lived near Gein, so you can see how he’d have some inspiration.
I don’t really have much to say on it, and I don’t particularly think you’ll sleep better actually reading up on Gein, so don’t. But it’s also fascinating that one guy seems to have spread his personal horrors out through so much culture and pop culture.
Jamie and Ryan are transparent in their madness about this 1930’s cinema classic! It’s a ghostly good time as they get wrapped up in a conversation that makes it clear, you can see right through them when it comes to their enjoyment of this film.
Every year during the spooky season I try to give Frankenstein (1931) a watch. The past several years, I’ve double-billed Frankenstein with Bride of Frankenstein, usually the night before - or night of - Halloween.
But this year I wanted to give the movie a bit more time to percolate and watch it as its own thing.
It’s a movie I’ve seen *a lot* and so I can spot the places where the dolly shot bounces on the tracks, and I can see the literal creasing in the backdrops used in the forest scenes. I laugh with anticipation at the jokes and know which bits work best as scares.
I make a lot of notes about how Dracula movies don’t match the novel, because there’s usually some adherence to the book and seeing where and why they diverged is a curiosity. But by the time you get from the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel in 1818 to the play and the movie, this story was well over 100 years old, and folks were going to do their own thing.* There’s barely any of the novel left in this film. Themes. Some names. Some settings. A wedding.
So I tend to separate them and consider them their own thing, and it’s usually in subsequent adaptations that I look for whether they’re borrowing from this film or from the novel or doing something entirely new.
Even if the film is nearing the century mark, it still plays. The creatures’ pathos is as real as the novel, if reduced to a child-like state of confusion rather than a sort of existential crisis of existence. The performances are of their time but would absolutely put fire in a modern adaptation. You simply won’t beat Colin Clive going mad in the moments of success after the monster is lowered from the tower.
The look is borrowed from German Expressionism, and between the Gothic horror of Dracula’s settings and this film, we get a language for how the best sets and scenes should look in horror that will be endlessly copied, parodied, stolen from and refracted for the next 90 years. That’s not to say this was the final word, but the starting line and the thing to which everything else can draw comparison.
Further, the themes of “who is the real monster?” would echo throughout horror and science fiction, and are often the best part to chew on in a film (and something zombie movies picked up and ran with). But I think this movie does the best job of bringing a Dr. Frankenstein to life who really thinks he shut the door behind himself and his experiments, only to have it come roaring back.
