Horror and Sci-Fi films old and new, weirdo trash, arthouse, forgotten gems, well loved classics, and I'm watching the original Dr Who from the beginning.
The Love Witch is not just an intoxicating homage to both 1970s sexually charged exploitation films, and the dreamlike psychological thrillers of the Giallo genre, or Vertigo era Hitchcock. Beneath the lush colours, nudity and violence, writer / director Anna Biller has also crafted a thought provoking exploration of female identity. Elaine (a breakthrough performance by Samantha Robinson) is a beautiful, self-absorbed witch who breezes into a Californian town to find a new husband to replace her previous murdered one. Her search leads to men falling at her feet - and then falling down dead. As Griff, the police officer investigating the deaths gets closer to the truth, will he be next to fall under her spell? The heady intoxicating world in which all this takes place looks like a mix of classic Hollywood Technicolor and a perfect pastiche of the rich colours (and hairy characters) of sixties and seventies European exploitation cinema. This is all complemented by the sort of soundtrack of lush strings and female solo voice often found in those sorts of films. Writer/director/editor/producer Anna Biller has Wes Anderson levels of detail in creating her completely self-contained cinematic universe, which, like Anderson's, feels both real and completely imagined. When late in the film, one character pulls out a mobile phone, the effect is jarring, making you wonder if the whole thing is set in contemporary times after all, albeit completely re-imagined in Elaine's mind. The story is pulpy, melodramatic and absurd but works better for taking place within this slightly artificial environment. The acting style ranges from (deliberately) am-dram to understated, all of which seems inexplicably chilling, as artificial and persuasive as a nightmare. Beneath the masses of style is substance too, in the examination of some of the stereotypical roles men and ascribe to themselves and each other. Elaine in particular seems to have swallowed the idea of presenting herself as a sex object for men to take care of. This buys her some power over them, but when they crave an emotional connection, she seems to find the cognitive dissonance between fantasy and reality too much to take.
Night of the Demon is a wonderfully wry supernatural story, with the chills coming from the ambiguity and atmosphere, and the tension and drama coming from the battle of wits between the human lead characters.
Psychologist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews) comes to England from the US for a science convention at which he plans to expose renowned occultist Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) as a charlatan and a cult leader. On arrival he finds that not only has his research partner, Professor Harrington, has died in a mysterious accident, but Harrington was growing increasingly afraid of the powers he thought Karswell possessed. Holden is having none of this however, even when Karswell tells him he is going to die in three days time. But as increasingly strange incidents keep occurring, Holden is forced to question whether the supernatural does exist - and whether or not his days are numbered.
Andrews does not totally convince as a scientist, but one thing he does bring to the role is a forcefulness and an unshakeable faith in rationalism that makes him a believable opponent to Karswell, an equally strong character supposedly based on the so-called “wickedest man in the world”, real life occult guru Aleister Crowley.
The tension between the two is palpable as the cat-and-mouse games escalate, but it also found an off screen parallel in tensions between this film's producer and director. Hal E Chester originally wanted to make a straightforward monster movie rather than ambiguity and atmosphere, and shot the scenes involving the demon without the director's knowledge. With little money in the budget, the end result is a little bit silly. The appearance at the beginning of the film sets completely the wrong tone for what is to follow, and the appearance at the end almost undoes the hard work that the director and actors have done up to then - almost,but not quite.
Director Jacques Tourneur had built a career on spooky and atmospheric horror classics such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. He takes a similar approach here, with the end results feeling wonderfully spooky, rather than actually terrifying, with a ghoulish sense of humour thrown in, and much as the incidents affecting become ever more baffling they never truly spill over into the supernatural.
In addition, in all three of the demon's appearances, there are no external witnesses so it could still be argued that there is some ambiguity as to whether it makes it into the real world or whether it is simply a demon of the mind.
