Welcome to Jump Scare Issue #1, a (maybe, quite possibly) weekly newsletter in which I will be writing about horror movies.
Horror has been my favorite genre since I was way too young to be watching horror movies. In the 1980’s, my preadolescent, sponge-like brain sucked up every drop of schlock my neighborhood video store (shout out Heights-Terrace Video in Hazleton, Pennsylvania!) would allow me to rent. And because the guy who worked there was an absolute maniac, that meant anything in the store was up for grabs (even after my friend Duane threw up all over the horror aisle just from looking at a movie’s cover art). How old were you when you saw Chopping Mall for the first time? I was 7.
Over thirty years later, while some things have changed–I now loosely resemble an adult and, sadly, the number of video stores in which Duane might still be able to barf is rapidly approaching zero–some things have stayed the same. Horror is still, by far, my favorite genre. The good, the bad, the shot-in-portrait-mode to resemble a Snapchat video even though nobody uses Snapchat anymore… I devour all that shit.
As I sit here now, hair graying, wondering if the world outside my window will soon be destroyed by pandemic, late stage capitalism, climate change or all three, it’s hard not to get misty-eyed, thinking back on those innocent days of my youth. It’s like a Don McClean song or something, when a third grader could simply walk into his neighborhood video store with $2.12 clutched in his sweaty little fist and walk out with a carefully considered recommendation from the wingnut behind the counter, like 1988’s American Gothic, a low budget slasher featuring a corpse raping scene described by one reviewer as “A stultifying career low for all involved.”
Maybe together we can turn the clock back to those good old days, even if it’s just for the amount of time it takes you to read this newsletter. Dear reader, let me be your wingnut.
Anyway, the subject of this week’s newsletter is Bryan Bertino’s 2020 film The Dark and the Wicked. Let’s get into it.
Bertino is probably best known for 2006’s The Strangers, a modern classic of home invasion horror starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, which took home $82.4 million from the box office on a $9 million budget. So even if you haven’t seen it, you get it–it’s one of those horror movies that pretty much everyone willing to see a horror movie saw that year.
His two directorial follow-ups, Mockingbird and Monster, didn’t get much attention (which you probably could have gathered from the movie poster above still referencing only The Strangers). Mockingbird was an unremarkable found-footage flick and Monster, which features Zoe Kazan in the lead role and garnered a largely positive critical response, totally ate it at the box office--earning $74k on a $3 million budget.
So, here we are at The Dark and the Wicked. The film was scheduled to have its world premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, which, sadly, was cancelled along with every other thing you were looking forward to in 2020, due to COVID-19. At the time of writing, the film is available for rental on Amazon Prime and holds a 90% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too shabby! (If you’re a Shudder subscriber, it’s scheduled to premiere on the streaming service sometime in January 2021).
What Kind of Movie is It?
Well, it’s from the writer and director of The Strangers, just like it says on the poster. Time to strap in for a good old fashioned home invasion horror and hope nobody comes knocking at the door with a burlap sack over their head... right?
No. Not even close. If you’re looking for a movie where you get to spend 90 minutes rooting for the main character to outfox a band of anonymously evil murderers… this ain’t it. I’ll attempt to name the specific subgenre a little later when I get into my interpretation of the film. (When I get into my interpretation of the film… could I be more up my own ass?) The Dark and the Wicked isn’t so much a movie about what happens, but instead about how it feels.
Seeing as how this is the first issue of this newsletter, I still haven’t settled on a simple rubric for describing what kind of horror movie this is, but let’s start with this:
Jump Scares: Yes
Body Horror: Mild
Spooky Children: No
Sexual Violence: No
(If you have any other “if a movie has X, I’m out” criteria that should be added to that list, feel free to reply and let me know.)
What’s It About?
Warning: Spoilers abound. I’m not kidding. I’m just going to tell you everything that happens.
Brother and sister Michael and Louise, played by Michael Abbott Jr. and Marin Ireland, respectively, return to their childhood home, a farm in rural Texas, to spend what time is left with their father, who lies on his deathbed. Their mother, who has been caring for their ailing father, does not welcome their return. At first, she is dismissive of their presence, telling them there is nothing for them to do there, but we soon find out the real reason she didn’t want them to return.
The film’s setting--a goat farm that appears largely inactive save for the occasional goat that stares straight down the barrel of the camera’s lens--was director Bryan Bertino’s childhood homestead and it makes a perfect backdrop for such a quiet and sad story. Every step creaks. Every doorway and every corner provide opportunities for something to lurk in the shadows. Each actor chews on every bit of the dark and claustrophobic scenery with a slow-talking, Texan drawl.
There are a few ancillary characters: Charlie, the farmhand, the nurse who comes by each day to sit with the bedridden father and the priest, played by Xander Berkeley, who, despite a fairly expansive career, will always be John Connor’s dickhead stepdad in Terminator 2 to me.
Ironically, the family’s patriarch, who spends a majority of his time on screen lying motionless on his deathbed, somehow manages to be the most successful at evading death over the course of the film.
Things pop off one night when Michael and Louise’s mother, while chopping vegetables at the kitchen counter, begins chopping the fingers off of her own hand. Michael and Louise wake up the following morning to find their mom’s fingers on the bloody cutting board in the kitchen and her body swinging from a noose over a herd of goats chilling in the barn.
After finding their mother’s body, Michael discovers her diary, wherein she describes the presence of a “devil” that is determined to claim the soul of her ailing husband. The two siblings start seeing weird shit everywhere, like their dead mom or their nearly dead dad, who hasn’t opened his eyes up to this point in the film, wandering around the house at night. Soon after their mother’s death, a deranged priest shows up on their doorstep, telling them that he had been helping their parents through the father’s illness because their own children weren’t there to do it. Yikes.
The priest gives them his phone number and tells them to call if they need help in the future. Louise then tries to call the priest using the number he gave her, but instead reaches a random old man in Chicago who tells her she sounds exactly like his late daughter. Double yikes.
After all this, Michael is basically like, “Yo, fuck this, mom was right. I’m out,” and leaves, driving through the night to return to his family, without even telling Louise that he was bouncing.
Back at the farm, the party continues. Charlie the farm hand’s granddaughter comes knocking to inform Louise that Charlie blew his brains out. Louise invites her in and no sooner than she crosses the threshold of the house, she starts saying creepy demon shit and then disappears. Then, the kind day nurse who has been coming by to sit at the father’s bedside shows up. Just as Louise manages to get Michael on the horn who tells her that she should leave immediately and save herself, the nurse stabs herself in the face with a knitting needle and starts babbling about demons. She grabs Louise and bonks her head off the wall a few times. Louise folds like a cheap lawn chair and while she’s out cold on the floor, the nurse stabs her own eyes out.
When Michael arrives at home, he finds his wife and children dead in an apparent murder suicide. Overcome with grief, he slashes his own throat with a pocket knife, only to realize as he is bleeding out that it was all a hallucination.
Louise wakes up and it’s now nighttime. She hears her father struggling to breathe. She says “I’m sorry” and attempts to flee the home, but falls down the porch stairs. From outside, she hears her father coughing and struggling to breathe. Unable to leave him, she returns to his bedside where she assures him that she won’t leave him. From outside the room she hears her brother’s voice calling out to her and then her mother’s voice. She tells her father that she loves him and that she won’t leave. When she turns her head to look out toward the rest of the house, we see her father’s eyes open for the first time and in the film’s final jump scare, a demon, having taken the place of her father, sits up and grabs Louise.
And that’s it. Some real uplifting stuff.
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
If you’re the kind of viewer who requires that a movie follow the Save the Cat beat sheet, you’re probably going to walk away from this movie wondering what the hell you just watched. But as I said earlier, this movie isn’t about something happening, it’s about a feeling. And that feeling is grief.
There are many subgenres of horror--body horror, found footage, slasher, torture porn. Depending on how granular you want to get, the list can go on and on and on. After finishing this movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about a thematic similarity to 2014’s The Babadook. Both films are about a family coping (or not coping) with the loss of the patriarch. In The Babadook, the loss occurred six years prior to the opening scene of the film. In The Dark and the Wicked, the father is technically still alive, but his death is a foregone conclusion. In both films, the characters are faced with a type of grief that is cosmic in scale and the hauntings experienced by each character are the consequence of how they have chosen to relate to that grief.
Get ready, I’m going to name this subgenre… Grief Golem.
Okay, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I think you probably get what I’m driving at here–the monsters in each of these films are grief personified. In The Babadook, the family’s grief takes on the form of a weird little ghoul in a top hat (who would, briefly, go on to become a queer icon). In The Dark and the Wicked, the family’s grief becomes the “devil” named in the pages of the mother’s diary. The Babadook ultimately ends up being a tale of redemption as the mother and son are forced to face the Babadook head on, allowing them to neutralize its power and move on with their lives.
The Dark and the Wicked is far more fatalistic. No matter how each character reacts to the “devil,” the devil ultimately wins. The mother cares for her ailing husband and even accepts help from a priest despite Michael’s insistence that they were not a spiritual family. In the end, however, she must accept that no attempt at control will be great enough to prevent the inevitable. I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more obvious visual metaphor for “letting go” than chopping one’s own fingers off. Having let go, there is only one last way to escape this devil–swinging by her neck from a rafter in the barn.
Michael tries to deny the devil by turning his back on it and fleeing. If there’s any one thing you should take away from this newsletter, it’s this: you can’t out run a Babadook, you can’t outrun a devil and you sure as shit can’t outrun yourself. Michael learns this the hard way and is left with the same terrible, final option as his mother.
The only other fatality in the film that I’m concerned with is that of Louise. Because the film’s gaze is clearly attached to her, and maybe loosely attached to her brother, I’m not sure we can trust that the other characters, like Charlie or the nurse, die–or even exist at all.
The ending is ambiguous, but it seems safe to assume that Louise does not survive. However, I’m not sure whether she lives or dies really matters as it pertains to the film’s grief metaphor. What we do know is that Louise doesn’t die by her own hand like the other characters. The reason for this is that in the film’s final moments, when faced with the overwhelming grief of hearing her father’s last gasps, despite the feelings of guilt with which she and her brother struggled and the hopelessness that consumed her mother, Louise still chooses to run to his bedside, to tell him that she loves him and to face the devil head on.
That’s it for my first newsletter. If you enjoyed it, feel free to let me know, or maybe recommend it to another horror fan in your life.