English Dept.
One of the more memorable scenes in 2004's The Incredibles (still the best Pixar film, sorry folks) occurs at the very end, when a supervillain called The Underminer (voiced by John Ratzenberger) drills his way out of the ground, sparking a supercharged Parr family team-up. The Underminer may be vanquished, but he pops up again at the beginning of The Incredibles 2, bombs, robot hands, and vacuum machine intact — proving, yet again, that you can’t keep a good Underminer down.
The Legend of Hell House, or as I like to call it, Florence and the Machine, it's like a charming little Christmas movie. And it has an uncredited appearance by Michael Gough as Emeric Belasco, who effectively serves to pull Hell House into a lineage of Hammer and Amicus horror pictures that have brought us up to the point at which this was released. But this is, I think, very different from those films.
I think what I appreciate most about this movie is that the filmmakers are clearly in love with what they're doing. And they even seem to be trying to create a unique mythology for this film. There are strict and binding ghost laws. They created the Arcanum, the book that all of the instructions come from. We get references to Basileus and a black zodiac of unholy archetypes. We get a phalanx of spirits who were created with sort of fairly elaboratelv detailed backstories. And we have the invention of the best infernal machine.
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.
I think the goal in making a Lovecraftian horror film is a kind of balance. With Lovecraft, if something is hard to think about, then it's hard to put into words. And if it's hard to express verbally, then it's nearly impossible to show. Fabulous creatures tinged with a hint of sci-fi with a story that conjures the internal emotions and abstract themes of like a Bergman film. It's Buñuel with slime from the intersection of time and space.
Sinister is, ostensibly, an occult crime story. It is set in Pennsylvania, where I come from, though not in a real place in Pennsylvania; but I find it to be a taut, muscular, visceral fright fest. It requires no deep thinking or excavation. It is a scary, scary movie, perfect vintage Blumhouse at the height of its ethos and power: spend a very small amount of money and maximize every dollar's worth of scare.
There's very little bad language, there's no nudity, there's no sex. What little violence occurs, we only really see the after effects. This seems to be a specialty of Wan’s and Whannell’s. The same holds true for Insidious and The Conjuring. And it yields truly scary, but ostensibly family-friendly, genre fare.
