Representing Denmark: Häxan (1922)

From http://karlails.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/haxan_poster_final.jpg

Dir. Benjamin Christensen

As much as it's a product of its era, with aspects that have dated, the uniqueness of Häxan is still rich, and the ideas are (sadly) still of importance in the current era. People who do not follow a conventional viewpoint will be ostracised. Those who are different - minorities, those of a belief opposite from the religion or atheist mindset with most influence, etc. - will be looked at suspiciously by those who do not take into account the complexities of individual personality, and not necessarily on purpose, but because of a presumed idea they are left in the vicinity of without any sense of full knowledge of it, from the accusers to the defenders of such groups. Women, regardless of the attempts of feminism, are frowned upon still in certain areas when they are too "ugly", too "weird", too independent, or even if they fit the stereotypes put upon them (pretty, sexually open, motherly) too much to the point they make it their own. Rationality and logic, based on scientific logic, or if you are spiritually or mystically inclined, is abused, both science and spirituality victims equally, when someone wants what they want done, to the point any cockamamie concept, as shown in scenes in this film, can be used as evidence against someone. And unfortunately, real people were murdered using these arguments, and considering the last century, with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and assaults against groups for their gender, sexuality, beliefs, social standing or race, we've yet as a species gotten the message we should have learnt from the witch burning. As much as Häxan is pure, phantasmagorical entertainment, it was made with an important message, and when you actually connect the  content to reality it is a grim reminder. Häxan does feel naive in its wonder of its subject of witchcraft, buts its virtuous naivety that wanted to learn from its subject, and still realised, and reminds the viewer, that what it is based on was reality.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUydlGpqqAl6i88tBziPPFyyq-K4uWPtMi9dn1_sqzUfPaQHksSQZ50WP_Bxq9S3ZIWJ8FEF6QqoOWh11xDpBlkTg29X_wFVkTblX5abIAIlctU1CaH2CkVic43toSXGtew6zFFwsj0Ywy/s400/HAXAN-2.jpg

Separated into seven parts, Häxan is a docu-fiction silent era film about the subject of witchcraft, the persecuted witches, the beliefs practiced, and how the trials played out. As phantasmic cinema, it's still full of incredibly surreal and bizarre images, and from some of the illustrations shown, the director was likely basing it all on real concepts people believed. Women dancing with bipedal pigs, witches riding upside-down wooden benches as well as brooms, a whole manner of weird images. The primitive nature of the effects, the superimpositions and costumes, adds to the raw imagination and fantastical tone of it all, (like with Viy (1967) the Soviet supernatural film), giving it the sense of the otherworldly. However it's still carrying said important message. The recreations, particularly one about an old woman who is accused as a witch only for it to affect many others, shows the absurd and disturbing sides of humanity. That any vague notion could find someone guilty. That even the accuser could become the accused if someone got back at them or did so to save themselves from the pyre. Even if it's very melodramatic, it's still rewarding to demonstrate this through drama, with intertitles bringing additional information with them.

From http://www.opasquet.fr/wp-content/uploads/haxan2.jpg

Häxan still to this day has no real predecessor or any film which directly took from its particular melding of fiction and document. In terms of imagery, it's not surprising a sixties recut was made with William S. Burroughs narrating it. A catalogue of perverse images are seen, from pornographic use of a butter churn to a "Kiss My Ass" club for Satan long before some people required it for their followers and lackeys. But the sobering truth is still there. The last segment shows how the things women were accused of being witchlike or possession were then contemporary mental issues like sleep walking or hysteria, with even the latter eventually removed from medicine for more accurate diagnosis. It shows how so much had changed, but Christensen does leave on a note that, while no longer violent, there may not be much difference between a shower in a health club and a pyre that burns witches. Even now this causes one to step back. Even if we have care for the mentally ill, the physically and mentally disabled, the neglected or old, they're still treated as others. Even now, more so with how images paint what perfection is, those who do not stay within a web of conformity - act like everyone else - is seen as standing out usually in a negative way or as weaker. We have gone beyond use of thumbscrews, but Christensen's dramatic scenes are as much about straw man arguments, emotional blackmail, and complete cheap evidence to prove a point, which we still have. While as much a head-trip still, it shows as much now the horror of the content, the true horror, is not Satan, ridiculous and imp-like as he flickers his tongue continually and seems to be the only being who will physically love and hold the decrepit and lost. The fear of evil is the true horror because it can become evil itself. Human behaviour turns out to be scarier because without the Devil actually making his prescience known, many millions can dies under the belief of doing the just and sanctified. Häxan is still rich for a film over ninety years old, and proves to be more than a mere curio for this humanitarian morality melded alongside the incredible work to realise it.

From http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdreviews10/haxan/haxan_PDVD_00501.jpg

Representing the USA: The Lords of Salem (2012)

From http://cdn.bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/1-lords-of-salem.jpg

Dir. Rob Zombie

With Halloween II (2009), Rob Zombie got interesting as a director. It was, reflecting back on it since covering within the first months of this year, a frustrating film but this was where the meatiest, fascinating pieces were, the parts that made the film more rewarding than straight forward horror movies praised by those who trashed Zombie's film. At this point, Zombie intends to make The Lords of Salem his last horror film for at least a while, which could expand his directing skills but could affect whether his work is just as interesting from beyond now. The Lords of Salem admittedly is more frustrating, out of his work this time, but that doesn't mean virtues aren't there.

From http://cdn.bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/2-the-lords-of-salem-060712.jpeg

The problems with this film really surround the fact that the stereotypical Satanism and evil witches being drawn from cinematic history are not that interesting in this film's context. Considering how the symbolism in Halloween II was in no way as interesting as having the gall of making Laurie Strode, once played by Jamie Lee Curtis, an incredibly damaged character, the really interesting aspects of two-thirds of this film is the incredibly casual nature of it all. Set in Salem, a radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie) finds herself, along with her co-hosts, with a recording from an unknown band from the town called The Lords which, from the moment it is first played to her, throws her into a slowly distorting world linking back to a mass witch burning that took place there and connects to her. The film for most of it scraps pass fully with an ominous mood more engaging than other movies. It's not really a "horror film" in the traditional or perceived sense of it as in recent times. Jump scares linger far too long, showing too much, but it feels purposeful, as much the eliciting of a jump from the viewer but far more creepy in how, say, a living corpse waits impatiently in the corner of a kitchen wall for when the evil curses of the town eventually get the control back. It says a lot about the film that the cursed song that sets it all off is a languid, ambient percussion piece, not black metal with lyrics straight from Dimmu Borgir that is almost satirised in one of the first scenes. You're introducing Captain Obvious to the film by saying perverse, evil witchcraft and demons will eventually raise hell, and the first three quarters of it embraces this fact. The references too establish this and are removed from the usual Texas Chainsaw Massacre aesthetic Zombie has used before. Song choices lay more with The Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs, slow, dense sensual strings, disturbingly calm. Its referencing silent cinema and showing black-and-white crime thrillers on the televisions in scenes. The obsession with long corridors and densely patterned wallpaper is à la The Shining (1980). It sets up a compelling tone.

From http://cdn.bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4-the-lords-of-salem-060712.jpeg

The film is far more interesting, like with Halloween II, when it tries to be more subtle and goes against the expected horror tropes, the potential to become something spectacular there as it builds up to the final act.  When it starts bringing in a potential romance between Heidi and fellow DJ Herman 'Whitey' Salvador (Jeff Daniel Phillips), and Heidi's history of drug addiction.  The slow pace. The bizarre, tiny demon with flippers like a penguin in a scene that melds Federico Fellini, Ken Russell, black metal corpse paint and potential tentacle porn in a strange centrepiece. The fact that the real villains of the piece have reasons to be as angry as they are, and are so nonchalant in their behaviour, like villains in a Hammer movie at their best, that when they bludgeon someone to death, they shrug it off and fancy another pot of tea afterwards. Then the finale of the film takes place, when The Lords play a concert, and it sadly becomes a disappointing conclusion to a movie that needed a good ending to actually work as a whole. The problem with the choice of material eventually cannot be ignored - the po-faced, black metal version of Satan is frankly silly. It goes against what the silent docu-drama Häxan (1922) did, bringing the reality of witchcraft out and pushing the fantastical further than the per usual. Considering some of the interpretations of Satan, including one where his sin was loving God too much and developing ego and jealousy from it, making the version depicted here, in a very serious film, this comic book and music video take on it feels out of place. Its sticking a cartoonish goat devil in a film that could all be a metaphor, if altered a little, of Heidi's mind falling to pieces, and psychological and drug effected psychosis. The shift to completely abstract, heavily edited images is when the film loses its point, what I don't expect as someone who wishes films did this more often, as it becomes completely uninteresting and generic in what it actually shows. Undead cardinals masturbating red, gummy penises is too obvious and feels out of place in a film that is trying to be subtle rather than a crazed, heavy metal film with a sense of humour.

From http://cdn.bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/6-lords-of-salem.jpg

As a result of this, it's difficult to say whether The Lords of Salem was any good. Unlike Halloween II which ended very well, The Lords of Salem unfortunately moves Rob Zombie closer back to the uninteresting films he made like House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil's Reject (2005). Those films were about shocking the viewer and music video aesthetics without any sense of impact to them. Halloween II  left you sad, depressed and melancholic with real emotional weight in it, taking a franchise that got terrible or at least completely uninteresting when Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) was rejected for safe slasher scares, and turning it inside out with some power. With The Lords of Salem however, like a lot of films being released this year in Britain alongside the few great ones, the promise it has is squandered by the ending, doing everything expected of it without any interest and failing to live up to the virtues of the rest beforehand. It's still better than most horror films, but the failure in its end leaves me with a conflicted view of it that hurts immensely.

From http://www.zekefilm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/16-the-lords-of-salem.jpg

Representing The Soviet Union: Viy (1967)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlGkpsFlAJvKfzcH232B9gxxd2u2niO0kCw2LjUM80CUr5jXtVzTbDP3uJpFXDfcaPspeJ4upKIjBHLiTAiWH8XBG-jhMX8NeV68kZAFyvLuDZ94UJSAAteLE2pgKFW0KMjTeN0Yo40iM/s1600/Viy__1967_.jpg

Dirs. Konstantin Ershov and Georgi Kropachyov

To quote a user on YouTube, Viy is not a horror film, something I am guilty of viewing it as too all these years being enticed by its existence. It's really a mixture of comedy, the supernatural and a moral tale based on a short story by Nikolay Gogol, (who've I've been pleasantly introduced to in September of 2013 through Dead Souls), which is based on Ukrainian folktales. It just happens to have a flying coffin at one point though, more than enough to qualify it for such a series with the rest of the films covered. Viy very much plays out like a short story if it was transferred through the cinematic medium of film, adjustments to the vastly different art forms taken into account. Its brisk at seventy or so minutes, no fat on it and with a clear goal structure to each part of the plot in contrast to the more complicated areas a full length novel would reach with its length let along having more plotting and/or text. Viy's favour is that it never feels pointless nor wasting time, and baring in mind seeing a Soviet supernatural film from the Sixties is inherently catnip for a cineaste like me, it's pretty special in how not a lot of films can be compared to it. A philosophy student Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov) finds himself caught up within a series of unexpected events. A student that is learning at a monastery, he's forced to use his religious education for once when the dying daughter of an important landowner requests him, to the surprise of everyone, to do her funeral rites for her soul's salvation. Even when she dies before he gets there, Khoma is forced by her father to pray for her soul, for three consecutive nights until the crack of dawn, locked in the church her body is laid in. Things are not that simple by the context of this being including in this season of films reviews about strange, potentially gruesome things happening, and in that, to reference Dead Souls despite being different in tone, no one can succeed in having a truly meaningful life unless you're prepared to be selfless and willing to deal with such hard tasks, something Khoma is clearly not willing to do. And finishing Dead Souls, it's also clear that while Gogol strives for inherently moralistic, nationalist values that rejects pretension and celebrates rural, ordinary life, he had a tendency for his characters to make things difficult for each other and themselves, already a problem before you would have to deal witchcraft and a flying coffin as Khoma has to.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikV6f3dcdBBLgNFuC3BS3h3qHPbrajw0zsNfX7BVnKEAiA9IOSvnBeHN823IrowPlaWs4QOqFUHJ8QSLmn-mwzJw24mVSVR5voteEDrw2owVJnW37-jYtoZfiH4agw3TTtT3WjbPtiy6c/s1600/viy_aavi_000723960.jpg

It's amazing to thing, while Viy is so different than them in many ways, that the film managed to evoke Evil Dead II (1987), A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), and Sergei Parajanov at the same time. It's clear that Viy must have been made as a spectacle for its day in its simplistic presentation and its bombastic practical effects, but it feels completely different from being a mere shiny bauble to distract people. The effects have a real, crafted-by-hand magic to them, and even if the back projection and costumes are obvious, the noticeable flaws (unlike most computer effects) actually make the film better and more stronger, adding to their otherworldliness. The connective tissue to Parajanov is very obvious in just the fact that you're seeing something, despite being made in the Soviet Union, that is not really "Russian". The Iron Curtain housed many different nations, and as I'll slowly go through the cinema by all those countries, this'll become more obvious in terms of the drastic cultural differences. It's quite amazing that Viy is how it is in terms of depicting Christianity and folk law, considering how traditional culture and religion were frowned on by the Soviet State. Maybe in Viy's favour was that 1) Gogol is a celebrated author in Russia who influenced later masters of the country's literature, to the point tampering with his work would be seen as blasphemous, that 2) Viy is effectively entertainment, not a "political" film in the perceived idea of that type of movie, but placing neglected traditions through a palatable slice of genre filmmaking, and 3) even the central Soviet power structure would have had to let countries like Ukraine, which this film is as much a celebration of, be able to see their own individualist cultures onscreen, including those against modernist, "rational" socialism, to avoid cracks in the structure when animosity could have taken place. Parajanov, unfortunately attacked by the State and imprisoned for a long time at one point, nonetheless managed, befitting his cross-national upbringing, to make a series of films based on the individualistic cultures of nations within the Soviet Union - Armenia with The Color of Pomegranates (1968), Azerbaijan with Ashik Kerib (1988), Georgia with The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), and the important one for this discussion, Ukraine with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), Gogol born in Ukraine and drawing from Ukrainian culture for this story. The aesthetic seen - the clothes, the music, the colour - is drastically different from anything else as much in Viy as with a Parajanov film, and Viy adds so much to this type of cinema just because of doing this.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlmrx1sRy7FBQYIV33imrfoRfsfi_gR_LuOXL5BANqNfpLeZpVdCuUqG7WZllZcsG5FdTdImrNOs9416qjDEs7cb3A_sBEWkShYir7GpwgoGjI43cCNtNnKaJ0yEm_45P1-4JXMOJkY78/s400/193032_Viy1967-1.jpg

It's a fun film. Legitimately fun. Not a difficult one. You can take away its key idea, from the ending, but the spectacle of the fantasy is whole heartedly worth the viewing of it and its made very well. Instead of empty ideas cribbed from watered down myths, this is based original ones directly, and the sense of texture and creativity to them is more than matched by the film's virtues.

Sorry, I couldn't resist the GIF
[From http://www.20three.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/witch05.gif]