Succession?

Film: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I’ve been going through Mike Flanagan’s multiple NetFlix miniseries. With The Fall of the House of Usher, I have now seen four out of the five, and mentally, I think I need a little break from Flanagan before I watch the one I haven’t seen. The reason is simple: Usher, despite being shorter than both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, takes a much bigger toll on the viewer. This is angrier than Flanagan’s other series, and perhaps that’s a function of the way the story went.

Unlike Hill House and Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher is not focused specifically on a building. In this case, “house” is referring to the family or lineage of a family called Usher. The story is vaguely based on the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name (no surprise), but with a substantial amount of license taken. In Poe’s story, the Usher family is down to a couple of members who are preparing for their demise. In this version of the story, the Ushers are fabulously wealthy, connected to a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, and also preparing for their ultimate demise.

Country House

Film: The Haunting of Bly Manor
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

Horror, in general, is a short-form genre. It’s hard to maintain fear for a long period of time in media. As long as we care a little bit about the characters and they are in danger, we’re going to have something at stake in the way the story plays out. There’s a reason, though, that the longest horror movies tend to be anthologies, and a lot of them are 90 minutes or shorter. That makes the idea of a horror miniseries (like American Horror Story) kind of anathema, and it’s one of the reasons I find AHS to be vastly overrated in general. Mike Flanagan seems to have found the formula, though, and The Haunting of Bly Manor is a solid entrant into the genre.

The biggest knock against The Haunting of Bly Manor is that he hasn’t ever matched the power and the horror that he managed from his first mainstream horror miniseries, The Haunting of Hill House. Flanagan also did Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Midnight Club. I haven’t seen the latest two of those, but I almost certainly will. While Hill House is his best work (that I’ve seen) in this genre, it’s also the best work anyone has done (that I’ve seen) for a horror miniseries. That this is a step down is no insult; almost anything would be.

Home (Un)sweet Home

Film: The Haunting of Hill House
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

Most horror movies, or at least a significant majority of horror movies, are short. Thers’s something about the genre that fits with keeping things short and sweet. You give the audience a little bit of information about the potential victims, providing enough for empathy to keep the audience emotionally involved, and then you ramp up the scares. It’s hard to maintain that. Building something that deeper takes a lot of work, and we don’t always have the patience for it, both as creators and as consumers of media. The Haunting of Hill House is an exception to this, and it’s one hell of an exception.

That fact is truly exceptional. I look at a series like American Horror Story as an example of this. I tried with that show; I really tried to watch it and like it for what it was and it always ended up disappointing me. The problem with AHS is that it always tried to do too much. There would be a main story, but then something else would be shoehorned in almost as a way to bulk the story up so it could justify the length. Because of that, it always disappointed me and I didn’t make it past the fourth season.

Ten Days of Terror!: Absentia

Film: Absentia
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

One of my favorite bands is a group from Dayton, Ohio called Guided by Voices. While there are several GbV discs that have great production values, there are a bunch that sound like they were recorded in singer/writer/erstwhile guitarist Rob Pollard’s basement. There’s a particular charm in these lo-fi recordings, an earnestness that simply can’t exist in more professional sessions. Absentia is like that. This is a movie made for $70,000, and it’s far better than a great many horror movies made for 100 times that.

Tricia (Courtney Bell), is a pregnant woman living in a seedy neighborhood in Glendale. Her husband Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown) has been missing for seven years, and while her pregnancy is clearly evidence that she has moved on in some respects, there is a part of her that is still wrapped up in trying to finally close that door and tie off that loose end in her life. Her sister Callie (Katie Parker), a former (and possibly current) addict arrives at her house. Callie is there to help Tricia declare Daniel dead in absentia, find a new place to live, and move on with her life.

Redrum

Film: Doctor Sleep
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

One of the problems with sequels is that there are a lot of expectations with them. John Carpenter wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into an anthology, with a completely different story every year. He tried with Halloween III and got buried for it, even though now, decades later, it’s considered a pretty good horror movie. Often, a sequel happens after a movie gets a great deal of acclaim, and the sequel is frequently a disappointment because of those expectations. So how do you do a sequel after 40 years? Well, they did it with Halloween from 2018, and did it pretty well. Doctor Sleep attempts to do the same thing with The Shining.

Before we dive head-first into Doctor Sleep, I want to discuss this idea of sequels and what Doctor Sleep does right in that respect. A sequel to what is widely considered one of the greatest horror movies ever made 40 years after the fact is, honestly, a big ask. What we expect, of course, is that we’ll spend the movie at The Overlook dealing with the unquiet ghosts of the past. The truth is that we do get there eventually, but not until the third act. Doctor Sleep wants us to earn that return to Room 237. So, we’re going to deal with something entirely different that is going to lead us back to that doomed hotel. By the time we get there, we’ve had an entirely new story to get us there.

Ten Days of Terror!: Oculus

Films: Oculus
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

It’s been a pretty constant mantra on this blog that I tend to like horror more when it doesn’t go for gore but goes for genuinely scary instead. Sure, there are exceptions to that, but it’s a lot harder to genuinely scare an audience and it’s easy to gross them out. Gore is fine when it makes sense or, in those rare cases when it’s clearly the point of the movie. Oculus is a movie that eschews gore and goes for creating an atmosphere of dread and terror. It does this by never really letting the audience know what is going on at any time, or just giving us glimpses here and there. It’s all about the atmosphere here, and all about using that atmosphere to keep the characters (and the audience) off balance.

Oculus takes place in two different timelines that are of roughly equal importance. There is a current timeline that takes place in roughly the film’s present of 2013. The earlier timeline takes place in 2002, focused on much younger versions of our two main characters. Rather than jumping back and forth here, it’s probably easier to handle the stories in a more linear fashion. The truth is that the early timeline story exists mainly to give us context for the present-day story, so it’s actually pretty quick to understand.

Wait Until Silent

Film: Hush
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

When I look at a movie like Hush, there are a few ways I can take it. This is a straightforward slasher/thriller with an interesting twist in that the main character is deaf. On the other hand, this isn’t too different from Wait Until Dark aside from the idea that we’re dealing with someone deaf and not blind. Aside from the deafness, this is really a standard stalker/thriller in a lot of respects. Isolated woman, psychotic bad guy…you know the drill.

That said, this was a film I’d been intending to watch for some time. The last few years have been pretty good for horror, and Hush got pretty good press and decent acclaim from other bloggers. Tonight just seemed like the right time to get to it, since I was relegated to the basement this evening without a working DVD player.