The good thing about watching horror films at home on your laptop is that you can hit pause whenever you can’t handle the tension. Or whenever a lobotomy’s about to happen in Ratched.
Another trick is to hit mute, magically rendering the visuals impotent.
During my stay-at-home small-screen viewing sessions, I have closed my computer and run panicking to the kitchen to do nothing more meaningful than stare into my fridge. I’m not sure what I’m looking for in there, but there’s some cold comfort from the light that illuminates food and frosty libations.
Of course, this is cheating. And when you cheat in a horror movie, you are only cheating yourself. Denying yourself that agonising yet cathartic moment when some terrible, terrifying trauma happens on screen while you, the viewer, get away with life and limb intact.
A cinema’s public setting makes cheating more difficult. For me, horror films watched with crowds of strangers invariably mean squirming in the dark, hands over eyes, my fingers forming slits to watch through. Because some demented logic says it’s more distancing to cover your eyes with your fingers than to simply shut your eyes.
For some, the public setting inhibits out-loud screaming, but I have been known to make heads turn with my ninny outbursts. At least you won’t catch me nipping out of a cinema to peer into my refrigerator. I really do need to see what happens next. Horror films are, after all, about terror’s ominous push-pull, the satisfying of some inexplicable sadomasochistic streak.
Resilience does, theoretically, improve with age. It’s been years since I was spooked enough by a horror film to stay up all night with the lights on. I was barely a teenager when, back in the 1980s, I watched The Omen on video (it’s what came before DVD – google it) and then spent the rest of the night upright in bed with a Bible open in front of me.
Years earlier, though, my life-defining horror film moment resulted from watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The nightmare that followed was so real and terrifying, I recall it vividly to this day. In it, I played Jack Nicholson’s son and spent most of it being chased by him, through a maze, as he brandished the movie’s famous axe. Weirdly, in the dream I knew I was in a movie and the nightmare’s most disturbing detail was that, despite my pleas, the film crew refused to help me. They were busy shooting, they said. That meta-narrative twist utterly ruined me.
Richard Green, the adult who directed Tokoloshe: The Calling (renamed An African Curse overseas), watched The Shining too. And then he tried to copy bits of it scene for scene before having an editor cut it incomprehensibly together. The resulting mumbo jumbo must qualify as the most appalling film ever to find its way into the Durban International Film Festival.
Watching it as part of the festival’s online programme last month, I hit pause frequently – not to escape the horror, but to get a break from its scintillating awfulness.
I spent every moment of it wondering what went wrong.
The answer: everything.
It’s a wreck of a movie so unfathomably bad, so abstract and incoherent, the filmmakers didn’t even notice that they’d left out a few key ingredients. Such as a tokoloshe. Or, in fact, anything vaguely scary.
It’s a shame, because even a trashy, low-budget scary movie can be entertaining. They’re the stuff of after-midnight viewings when horror fans gather to laugh at the guileless cruelties meted out in the tawdriest of schlock narratives. Even a piss-poor horror film can find an audience if it manages to tick a few essential genre boxes.
And if it doesn’t scare us, then it should at least make us laugh, either ironically or by virtue of its incompetence. But it does need to make an effort.
The good, the bad and the awful
Green’s incompetent Tokoloshe is by no means the first local dud horror film. Veteran director Darrell Roodt, known for Sarafina! and the Oscar-nominated Yesterday, has helmed plenty of B-grade flops. His horror film bombs include Cryptid, with its farm murders subplot; City of Blood (a back-from-the-dead tribal witch doctor is a serial killer); and the ultra-cheapskate not-so-scary sci-fi horror Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness.
The latter was thrown together on the set of another movie that had finished shooting ahead of schedule, leaving Roodt three days to make his film. He himself said: “It’s awful, it’s wonderfully awful!” Less cheerfully, one critic wrote: “Dracula 3000 is a shining example of complete filmmaking ineptitude. You can look all you want and you won’t find even the slightest hint of intelligence on any level … It sucks. It makes Leprechaun 4: In Space look like Alien.” Harsh, but there is some cheerful absurdity about a film that takes the vampire myth into outer space in the 30th century.
Of course, Roodt is actually a very capable, skilful storyteller. His Siembamba (aka The Lullaby), about a 19-year-old’s postpartum depression turning into such extreme paranoia that she becomes convinced that her baby is possessed, was nominated for eight Africa Movie Academy Awards, including best film. And film review site Rotten Tomatoes ranked it 2018’s 17th-best horror film — it’s seriously spine-tingling stuff.
Also watchable (especially if you’re a teenager), is Rage, made for Showmax and dropped during lockdown. In it, youngsters hole up in some backwaters hamlet for their post-matric romp and find themselves being picked off one by one by some sinister evil. Despite budgetary constraints, it’s filled with gore and frights and enough bloodletting and ghoulishness and jump scares to qualify as a legit horror film. It’s not perfect, but it is at least full of ideas.
And it’s witty too. So while it plays out in the realm of classic horror — blades being sharpened and knives slashing through the air, menacing shadows and pagan rituals — it’s also half-winking at us, reminding us that we’re meant to be having fun while witnessing the mayhem unfold. And we get to stitch together its playful cross-referencing of the horror film canon.
It even comically summons the legendary “virginity rule” established by John Carpenter’s Halloween series, and — by pitting the Gen Z victims against a tribe of Mzansi hillbillies — possesses shades of Deliverance.
But Siembamba and Rage are exceptions. Too many locally made horrors get their wires crossed – and they fail to deliver the scares they’ve promised.
Take 8, which Netflix released during the lockdown after local cinemas refused to screen it. Another shot at evoking the tokoloshe as some sort of Africanised bogeyman, it’s a gloomy yarn about a sinister character who must source human souls to feed his demon daughter, whom he carries around in a sack.
Trouble is, despite its creaking floorboards, its convincingly uncanny soul-eating monster and a clever final twist, it’s all delivered at a plodding pace.
And, if the boredom doesn’t get you, the cringeworthy soft racism will. For starters, you can’t claim to be making a film steeped in African folklore and then make up all the mythology. Sadly, 8 does just that, exploiting various “exotic” cultural elements presumably to con foreign audiences.
The film unwittingly falls back on that old racist trope in which the black characters are treated as the exoticised “other”, brought in as the source of menace that creeps in and disrupts the civilised world of the white folks at the centre of its story.
Worse than its spurious cultural misappropriation, though, is that it can’t seem to bring itself to scare us. While wholly unfrightening, it’s also too earnest, too solemn.
What 8 lacks is that witty wink, that understanding of the inherent relationship between horror and comedy that made a film like Jordan Peele’s Get Out such a huge breakout success in 2017. Peele, you see, understands that laughter and fear are both impulsive responses – you get them by engaging our emotions.
Get Out, which unapologetically highlights the link between slavery and the pervasiveness of modern-day racism, was revolutionary on several levels. Apart from phenomenal commercial success (making more than $250m from a budget of $4.5m), it earned Peele a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and it attracted significant cultural kudos, not least for its clever mining of racial paranoia.
In other words, it goes straight to the gut of a very real human anxiety.
While the film niftily harmonises many of the genre’s familiar tropes, its ultimate evil is bigotry itself — and the bigots who keep it alive are its monsters. It manages to say so much about the absurdity of race that is unsayable; in an interview with The Guardian, Peele said: “That’s where I love to start with a horror story: ‘What is this primal thing that’s affecting me in a way I don’t quite understand?’”
The real horror, in other words, is human. “To find the darkest monster of all,” Peele says, “look no further than the mirror.”
A horror film’s real trick is to assail us not only with terrors from the realm of the unknown and the uncanny, but to creep us out and make us uncomfortable by showing us those bits of ourselves that are murky and unreliable. In that way, as our underlying beliefs and our relationship with the status quo are thrown into disarray, the very cells in our body begin to panic. Because the reality that’s familiar to us is thrown into question.
And once that happens, not even covering your eyes or running to the kitchen can save you from unravelling.
Halloween highlights
You can see Get Out on October 31 — Halloween — and again on Friday the 13th (of November) at the new GoDriveIn cinema, which was launched on October 23 in Salt River, Cape Town. There are screenings (mostly of established hits) every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Doors open at 5pm and movies start at 7.30pm; you can pre-order hot food (as well as your popcorn and snacks) from Truck Norris when you book your tickets.
Opening on October 30, Antebellum is about a modern-day African-American author who mysteriously finds herself trying to escape from a life of slavery on a 19th-century Southern plantation. Though Time magazine deemed it enthralling, not least for Janelle Monáe’s star performance, most advance reviews have labelled it lacklustre, with most critics complaining about the meh ending and the exploitive portrayal of plantation brutality. Still, there’s loads of vengeance meted out on the entire slavery project.
Also coming to cinemas on October 30 is the Korean zombie apocalypse action flick Peninsula, which was due to have screened at this year’s cancelled Cannes Film Festival.
Opening on Friday November 13, Freaky is one of those teen spoof comedy horrors about a teenage girl who swaps bodies with a serial killer. If for nothing else, it’s worth watching to see Vince Vaughn channelling a high school cheerleader.
Or you can simply stay home and binge-watch HBO’s 10-episode Lovecraft Country on Showmax. With Peele among its producers, the movie follows three African-Americans on a road trip during the Jim Crow era, which brings to the surface the reality that simply being black in the US can be a source of deep-seated anxiety. It cleverly mixes a history of racism in America with a variety of horror tropes.
If you know where to find them, keep watch for Halloween Kills, once again pitting Jamie Lee Curtis against Michael Myers, and — gulp — Swallow, a body-horror shocker about a woman who eats things she shouldn’t: marbles, pushpins, syringes … It’ll have you running for the fridge searching for cold comfort — and something to calm your nerves.
And, if you happen to be planning to hire a holiday home this summer, maybe put off watching The Rental, a slasher film with an Airbnb theme, directed by Dave Franco.
Finally, for a pandemic-inspired nerve-jangler, there’s Host, which is what might be called The Blair Witch Project of the lockdown era. It’s about a group of friends who hold a seance via Zoom. And you thought the video conferencing portal couldn’t get worse!
A festival of nightmares
The pandemic has moved most of Cape Town’s 16th annual SA Horrorfest online this year. There’ll still be a theatrical screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (November 1) at the Labia, where you can also watch Sky Sharks (yup, flying sharks controlled by zombie Nazis), Fried Barry (an alien abduction joyride through Cape Town), The Last Word on the Last House on the Left (a doccie about the Wes Craven classic) and a sneak preview of Freaky (November 12). The rest of the programme of over 40 titles — covering everything from demonic possession to Japanese monster movies and silent classics — is online until November 13.
