English Dept.
My favorite horror movies have always been ones about witches. I love a smart film and I love a feminist film. And sometimes it happens that films about witches, when they are made well, are both smart and feminist. So between its ethos and its execution, I was basically hooked from the first dreamy, dreamlike frames.
Unlike many of the spookers that we talk about in this hallowed lecture hall, Les Yeux Sans Visage is not one that I discovered walking behind the rows at my local VHS rental shop when I was nine. Instead, I was shown this for the first time by one Micah Bucey, a former New York actor who is now the pastor of Judson Church in Washington Square, when I was somewhere in the post-Vassar but pre-Drama Desk years of my early adulthood. And like a clinical Cocteau film that is an indictment of the French bourgeois society, which can't confront the horror and trauma of its not too distant past and is loaded with callbacks to the Nazi occupation, the story of a month in the life of the Genessiers unfolds in almost exactly 90 visually poetic, dreamlike, melodramatic, gothic fairy tale minutes. It explores the psychology of darkness from a complex moral point of view.
I think Jennifer's Body rides a lot of lines. It's a little nostalgic in terms of its tone and its story. It's a little post-modern though in its execution. I think the characters reflect and refract one another. There's sort of a kind of “reverse menstruation” idea at work. And there's an exploitation of the fear of female or feminine power and empowerment. I think it's got a view of high school that's so saturated with meta-commentary that it seems like it has been made by a team of artists who probably barely survived high school and then really triumphed afterward.
It starts with the opening strains of Philip Glass' extraordinary score, which immediately gets under your skin. And throughout, it's one part Anton Bruckner ecclesiastical music and one part Phantom of the Opera. And then very beautiful, measured aerial photography of the arteries of Chicago locates us instantly. It's evocative both of insects crawling and it kind of insinuates that we're going to ascend from the quotidian to something like the sublime.
The overall quality of Ready or Not is extremely high, especially when considering the relatively modest budget. Yet this yields is a bounty of extremely stylish design and fabulousIv eccentric architecture. It might be my favorite horror movie mansion, and it looked like real rich people lived in it. I think that in another film, in another story that happened to be set in this location, you could easily say that the house is a character in the film, which is a song our listeners have heard from me more than once.
Rhoda is a sociopath or psychopath, depending on who you ask, and she's, as her mother says, an adroit liar and a kind of inveterate con artist. She's preternaturally mature; her teacher and her classmates are the only ones who can sniff her out, but nothing stands in the way of Rhoda getting what she wants.
