Halloween feels a bit redundant this year, no?
I’ve been in a heightened state of stress for somewhere between 8 and 48 months. I’m good on the creepies and the spookies and the heebie jeebies and all those other words that sound vaguely like slurs. I need something to feed my soul, not rattle it.
But how’s a stressed out girl supposed to get with the freaky Hallo-vibes when she can’t even parade around in a costume that is low effort yet clever yet sexy but not in a way that makes you think that I’m trying to be sexy, I just can’t help but be hot and I don’t even know it and [Zayn voice] that’s what makes me beautiful?
She puts on her favorite slipper socks, grabs her Model-UN-branded snuggie, and fires up the following horror double feature:
HIGHBROW
House is less of a horror film, and more of a campy psychedelic horror-fantasy-comedy. In some ways, it’s about teenage girls venturing into a haunted house. In other ways, it’s about bitterness and pain borne of loss during wartime. And in yet another way, it is lo-fi special effects porn.
House tells the story of seven girls with names like Snow White’s dwarves. Gorgeous is the pretty one, Prof is the smart one, Melody is the musical one, and so on and so forth. They all venture to Auntie’s house for summer vacation. But little do they know of the horrors that await them beyond the vine-covered gates…
For all its nightmarish events, watching House feels more like falling into a dream. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi (who transcended to the next plane of existence earlier this year) builds his own ethereal world where everything is a little too cute, a little too saturated, a little too “backdrop at the 1-hr photo studio.” Crazy shit goes down, yes, but it’s not scary. It’s marvelous. I marveled.
Visually, people call House “psychedelic,” but narratively it’s more like “your first time taking an edible.” You’re like “whoa this is so weird! cool!” and then you’re like, “hey it’s actually getting weirder.” And then at some point you’re like “hey, this is actually maybe too weird for me, can someone please take me home?” and then at some point (you can’t remember why or when), you fall asleep. The point is, being a little bit confused and scared is what makes the experience special.
On its surface, House is a beautiful psycho-fairytale. And on that plane alone, it’s a triumph. But for Criterion Channel subscribers, I highly encourage that you watch the filmmakers talk about the production of film. I learned that the movie was originally a radio play, that the story was essentially co-written with Obayashi’s pre-teen daughter, and that, at its core, House is about the generational divide between the Japanese women who experienced great loss in WWII, and the young girls who only know a post-war Japan. She said style and substance for me, please!
You can watch House on Criterion Channel or on Amazon Prime (you can rent it now for $2).
LOWBROW
I want to make one thing very clear. I do not like Ma ironically. I like it for very much real.
People say it’s bad because of its weird pacing, its unnecessary use of stylized shots, and its “no one needed this story”-ness. I say, in some circles that’s called Art House Film so shut up.
Like House, Ma is a genre-blending story disguised as a horror film. It appears to be of the “local weirdo picks off hot teens one by one” school of horror. But I believe, at its core, Ma is, above all else, a supervillain origin story. Let me explain.
The basic plot of Ma is this: teens are in a small town, they want to underage drink, they ask Sue Ann aka “Ma” —Octavia Spencer in a career-defining performance—to buy them booze, trapping them in an inappropriate pseudo-friendship with a woman their parents’ age. You’ve got all the markers of a classic horror caper. But then the movie becomes less about the teens and more about the woman terrorizing them. Things quickly go from funny fucked up to weird fucked up to really-sad-and-honestly-maybe-too-fucked-up fucked up.
Sure, there’s a little blood here, a bit of vehicular manslaughter there, and assorted mutilations sprinkled throughout. But the true horror of Ma lies in its brutal confrontation of trauma.
Now, I will say this is very much my interpretation based on my experiences that I have yet to bring up to my therapist. I’m not sure if director Tate Taylor, who somehow also made The Help, was necessarily going for this, but here’s my take: Ma is about the inescapable isolation of being a Black child in a White space transforming into something much more noxious in adulthood. The more we learn of Sue Ann's own story, of the cruelty—both deliberate and passive—she faces, the more we understand her actions. So in my mind, Ma is an anti-racist supervillain origin story disguised as a teen horror flick. Sue Ann may be the supervillain at the center, but there are no heroes in Ma. There are just the villains that get punished and the villains that get away.
Anyways, I could probably write a 2000 words about the socio-political implications of Ma but that would literally be for no one. So instead, I encourage you to spend your Halloween watching Octavia Spencer be absolutely perfect.
Ma is oddly very hard to stream. If you’re the one Cinemax subscriber, you can watch it there. If you have Prime, you can do what I did and sign up for a Cinemax free trial. Or you can buy the movie for $10
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Happy Halloween, my lovelies! May you spend yours how I always end up spending mine—eating sugar, getting drunk, and looking slutty but ultimately having no sexual contact.
And for my Americani, you can find your early voting/election day info here: https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/.
I—along Miley Cyrus, Josh Duhamel, Vinny from Jersey Shore and the entire cast of Glee—can not stress enough how absolutely critical it is that you rock the vote by November 3rd.
xoxo,
Simone