Brain Drops Keep Falling From My Head

Concluding our series on the modern follow-ons from The Blair Witch Project. This one has the strongest connection of any of them…

ICONIC TALISMAN: Yes, though only glimpsed for a moment.
MOMENT OF SNIVEL: Yes.
POV RUNNING THROUGH WOODS: Yes.

For years the standard response to the success of The Blair Witch Project was limited. There were parodies, of course, but the wave of found-footage movies that followed weren’t much more than superficial parodies themselves. Reality television seemed to get into the phenomenon a little bit deeper, but the lesson they took away from Blair Witch went awry: they saw…

1. that with enough footage, you could tell any story you wanted, and tell it very convincingly;
2. that POV video could make you a lot of money from a very small investment;
3. that overmarketing will kill a brand, but it’ll also make the producers rich… so who cares?
4. and that while people no longer believe that “pictures don’t lie”, they are much more likely to suspend their disbelief if a movie camera is hand-held.

These are all interesting lessons, but they’re not really enough. So while there’s a line to be traced directly from Blair Witch to Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, the really interesting developments that should have followed Myrick and Sánchez’s work took almost a decade to appear. I guess it’s only fitting that one of the best of the current crop of movies that bear an obvious relationship to Blair Witch should come from none other than Eduardo Sánchez himself.

Lovely Molly starts with a knowing reference to the most famous moment from the 1999 movie: the heroine sits in front of a camera, sobbing in despair, apologizing for the horrible things that have just happened. Yes, says Sánchez, I made The Blair Witch Project; let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? The first second or two of this introductory scene feels like a quick wink from the director. But enjoy the moment: a split-second later, things get very unpleasant indeed. The movie doesn’t wink again. It maintains a steady, ice-cold stare and doesn’t look away for a moment.

Money is tight for the couple, so they are relieved that Molly’s family’s old house is available for them to live in for the first few years. It’s actually a very nice old farmhouse, far bigger than anything they could hope to afford… but it’s an old house, and subject to all sorts of inconveniences. It’s also the place where Molly’s father met a messy end when she was just a child. Molly herself has had issues related to her father’s death: she’d become addicted to drugs as an adolescent, and had spent some time in an institution… apparently for more than just detox. There are definitely bad memories hanging about the place. But in Molly and Tim’s position, the troubled past must make way for the troubled present.

Almost as soon as the movie’s been set up for us, the couple experience a terrifying midnight break-in at the old farmhouse. When the police arrive, they don’t find anybody on the premises, but Tim and Molly know they heard someone moving around in the pitch-dark house. It’s never made clear if the break-in has anything to do with the sinister events that play out through the rest of the film, but that doesn’t matter. The break-in puts us immediately in sympathy with Tim and Molly — reminds us of their vulnerability by putting them in a realistic situation with which we can identify very easily.

Shortly thereafter, Tim has to leave on an unexpected job. It’s good he’s getting work, since the couple needs the money. Unfortunately, this means he’ll be out of town for Molly’s birthday. Molly’s hurt by this at first. Eventually she makes peace with Tim (over her cellphone), but she’s still pensive when her vivacious older sister Hannah comes to celebrate with her.

Things start to go bad when Hannah unthinkingly shares a joint with her sister over slices of birthday cake. Hannah immediately regrets her action, remembering Molly’s substance abuse problems. Molly simply brushes off her sister’s concern. But that night — coincidentally or not — the disturbances begin for Molly as she tries to sleep, alone, in her father’s old house.

It certainly feels as though there’s someone in the house with her… particularly in her father’s old study, with its peculiar wall-full of horse pictures. Is that really a voice that she hears whispering fiercely to her? Are those the sounds of footsteps coming from downstairs? Or is she just imagining things in a house full of bad memories and bad floorboards?

After a few troubling incidents, Molly casually approaches her sister at work and asks her of she could, maybe, score her a little weed to help her relax. This sets off all sorts of alarm bells with Hannah — as well it ought. In the meantime, Molly continues to lose sleep as the strange events continue at the house. The light in the bedroom she shared with her sister growing up seems to turn itself on every night. Molly’s even awakened by the sound of a child sobbing from that room. The strange occurrences are accompanied by a high-pitched ringing sound, like the buzzing you get in your ears sometimes (for example, before you faint).

And all the while, the narrative flow is interrupted by brief cuts to hand-held video camera footage taken by Molly herself. Why is she singing to herself in that eerie, girlish voice? Why does she seem drawn to her neighbor’s house, to look through her windows… to spy on her children? What is the meaning of the curious horse-headed talisman Molly takes from its hiding place in the cellar?

Of course, the main demon of her childhood was her own father. The sobbing that she thinks she hears coming from the closet in her old childhood room? That’s the ghostly echo of her own sobbing, a long time ago, as she hid in the darkness while her father did unmentionable things to Hannah (and later, to her). And the Thing that eventually comes clomping up the stairs at night, chanting Molly’s name over the clatter of approaching hooves, is her father’s evil spirit.

Is it real, this uncanny horse-demon? Is it truly banging on the door to be let in? Has it really knocked the key out of the keyhole and demanded entrance? Molly’s POV video camera says yes: it is, and it has…

…but can we trust the video? Later on, when Molly’s employer shows her surveillance camera footage that seems to show her having a seizure, we discover that what Molly sees in the same footage is herself being raped by a dark stranger. When the boss blames Molly for what he sees on-screen, not realizing Molly sees it so differently, it drives the already-distraught girl into pure raving hysteria. Clearly we cannot trust what we think we’re seeing through Molly’s eyes… or even through Molly’s video camera.

Gretchen Lodge, as Molly, does a fantastic job of portraying a woman gradually succumbing to mental illness. The central tragedy, the core of Molly’s deterioration, is that she has been corrupted by her father. She has a horrible affinity for his abusive nature — whether through some hereditary illness, or just as a result of the perversion of the natural bond between father and daughter, she is becoming like him… and the strain is destroying her. It’s a brave performance in what appears to be a brave film… a film that doesn’t shrink from showing us a truly damaged psyche… a film that keeps us sympathizing with Molly, even after her collapse has made her a monster; a film that doesn’t bother to suggest the haunting is real, but shows us instead how irrationality leads to stories of ghosts and demons.

At least, that’s what I thought I was watching.

But then… after I’d watched the brutal, uncompromising story of a woman destroyed by the demons of her own mind… I saw the movie’s brief coda. And then I watched the DVD Special Features. And then I went on-line to see what others, including Eduardo Sánchez himself, had said about the film. And boy, was I ever surprised.

Because it turns out this superbly unambiguous study of Haunting as Mental Illness was actually supposed to be a genuine Demon Possesion film.

Huh.

Tell me, if you like, that Citizen Kane is a film about sledding. Tell me that Titanic was an educational film about boating safety. Tell me anything. But please! By Azazel, by Samael, by Jor-el and Kal-el… by Baphomet, by Calumet, by Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen, don’t try to tell me that Lovely Molly‘s about genuine demon possession. I mean, they’d done so well, up until the coda! It’s as though they watched Uruguay’s La Casa Muda and thought, “Yes, very interesting — but that’s not the way mental illness really works; we can do this better.” Sánchez & Co. gave us a sensitive portrayal of Molly as young woman with deep psychological problems… problems that just happened to manifest themselves as some kind of supernatural visitation. They showed us how trauma and substance abuse lead to Molly’s break with the real world, into a terrifyingly real-seeming hallucination that eventually destroys her life (and the lives of those around her). They showed us a harrowing illustration of the cycle of abuse. There was absolutely no need to drag the Devil into it.

And in fact, dragging the Devil into it cheapens the whole story. I’ve already had enough of Pat Robertson and his ilk on my TV screen, blaming the latest natural disaster on gay marriage and unwed mothers — some evangelical yob insisted the hurricane that tore through my town and my state in 2012 was God’s warning, because the evil liberal northeast was too soft on the sodomites. With this foolishness still ringing in my ears, the very last thing I want is another movie suggesting that some serious, tragic problem — like mental illness — is actually demonic possession. Are you kidding? Demonic possession is almost cosy compared to the alternative.

Now, if you want to think of Lovely Molly as such a conventional horror film, you can. There’s enough leeway in the telling of the story to support either conclusion, if you absolutely must have some ambiguity about the supernatural. Until the coda. The coda ruins everything by tacking on a hackneyed “it isn’t over” epilog — actually, now that I stop to think about it, it isn’t even the coda in its entirety so much as it is one gesture: one spoon-fed piece of information left out for us (and for one of the surviving characters) in an obvious place, to let us know the whole story’s been stage managed by Ol’ Scratch.

Turn off the movie just before the epilog, and you’ll be left with a near-masterpiece. You’ll see a convincing portrayal of evil as an inside force: something that results from poor choices and poisoned opportunities, something that’s passed down across generations like a disease. Something that forces us to hallucinate demons and ghosts to externalize the horrible pressures within. Something tragically human.

Watch it to the very end, though, and all you’ll see is another average horror movie.

This is not to say that there aren’t other problems with Lovely Molly, too — principally its male characters. The preacher-man, Pastor Bobby, is way too easy a target — I say this aware that I might be accused of contradicting myself in my outlook on religion in this film. But seriously: Pastor Bobby is much too much the cliché of the venal priest. Furthermore, Tim — who is in every other way the picture of a loving and long-suffering husband — does something thoughtless and stupid in the course of the story. Not only is what he does out of character for the man we’ve seen so far, it’s also brought into the story so abruptly, with such inadequate preparation, that a common reaction in viewers is to look back and question whether it was really Tim in those scenes. Worse, it feels as though the only reason this lapse was written in was to give Molly some sort of twisted justification for what she does to him. I’d like to think we’ve reached a stage where we can allow strong female characters to stand on their own — even as monsters. There’s no reason to weaken the male characters just to build some sort of misguided sympathy for a strong woman.

Continuing our examination of recent horror movies that make a serious attempt at extending the subgenre made famous by The Blair Witch Project more than a decade ago…

ICONIC TALISMAN: Yes, sort of: a rag doll and a Polaroid camera.
MOMENT OF SNIVEL: Not really.
POV RUNNING THROUGH WOODS: Almost.

A surprising number of people took the whole “found footage” aspect of The Blair Witch Project seriously — just ask the beleaguered residents of Burkittsville, MD. Today we’re going to look at a gimmick movie of a very similar kind: not a “found footage” flick, but a movie that hid its real import behind a technically innovative surface; a movie that extended the ideas presented in Blair Witch, and forced us to think carefully about how much we trust the camera to tell the truth. It’s not just the distance in time that makes La Casa Muda so interesting: it’s also the distance in geography. For it wasn’t Hollywood that came up with such an interesting follow-up. It was Uruguay.

Not that Uruguay hasn’t been producing cine fantàstico for years now: Ricardo Islas may be working in the US these days, but he got his start with microbudget horror films in his native country. Then there’s Maximilian Contenti’s very bizarre horror-comedy Muñco Viviente V (“Living Doll V”, 2008 — though there are no parts I through IV), in which the Killer Doll’s motivation really must be seen to be believed. And perhaps you’ve heard of Fede Álvarez, who directed the 2013 Evil Dead remake? He’s from Uruguay… and his magnificent short Ataque de Pánico! (2009), which he made for $300, manages in its 5 minute span to outdo the whole Jerry Bruckheimer Transformers series with its Giant Robot mayhem.

But 2011’s La Casa Muda is the first Uruguayan horror film to get widespread attention in the United States, if only because it was picked up for a remake by an American producer. It may seem like a dubious honor, to have your work remade for an American audience… as though you hadn’t done it right the first time; but that’s often the only way for the original version of a movie to get attention in the US marketplace. It’s a curious paradox, but in La Casa Muda‘s case a paradox is very appropriate.

The film was advertised as being shot in one continuous take. It’s not the first film to be structured like this, but it’s still a remarkable technical feat. However, almost immediately, critics began to complain that this couldn’t be true. La Casa Muda was shot using a reasonably-priced still camera (manufactured by Canon) which also had the capability of capturing high-quality video… but it could only shoot 12 minutes’ worth of footage at a time. To shoot the entire film in one unbroken take, the nay-sayers pointed out, would be physically impossible. In fact, there are places where the darkness of the image allows for takes to be edited together seamlessly (and that seems to be what the film-makers did). But the film had its defenders, too: they pointed out that it would actually be possible to attach a hard drive to the camera to enable it to shoot longer takes. And what’s more, they pointed out, even if the film was put together from several takes, it still seems to play in one continuous shot, so the technical achievement is still impressive.

Besides, since when is it a bad thing to make it look like you’ve done the impossible?

But as interesting as the single-shot technique may be, the really interesting thing about La Casa Muda — and the aspect of the film that leaves audiences either impressed & thoughtful or totally infuriated — is its approach to its narrative. And it’s here that the movie invites comparison and contrast with Blair Witch and its successors.

The basic setup for the story is this: a young woman named Laura is taken by her father to an abandoned house somewhere in the Uruguayan countryside. The house belongs to her father’s friend Nestor, but he plans on selling it. Before the house can be sold, though, it needs to be cleaned up — and that’s where Laura and her father come in. Nobody’s lived in the house for several years; Nestor warns them that the upper floor is falling to pieces and is too dangerous to be worked on. He leaves the keys with Laura’s father and says goodnight. Laura’s father locks them in for the evening and settles down to get some sleep. He advises Laura to do the same, since they want to get an early start on the cleanup in the morning.

But Laura is not comfortable in the house. From the very first time she caught a glimpse of it, she seems to have been taken aback. She peers around the dark old house and its dismal, unkempt grounds, but in her explorations she acts more like someone stepping back into a bad dream than someone naturally curious. Unable to sleep, she thumbs through an old photo album in the gathering dark. Something about the album disturbs her — or rather, something not in the album, since the thought seems to strike her when the photos stop. She looks up from the album at her sleeping father, then back at the album. What could it be?

And suddenly, there is a crash from upstairs.

Distressed, Laura wakes her father, who tells her it was nothing and that she should go back to sleep. But then the sound comes again: deliberate, purposeful, not in the least furtive. Eventually she’s able to convince her father that something’s really going on upstairs. He promises to go check, as long as she promises that she’ll be properly asleep by the time he gets back. The old man goes grumpily up the steps…

There is a brief pause. Then, a short, sharp scream, followed by a thud. And then the dragging noises begin.

What follows is a long, harrowing game of cat-and-mouse between Laura and whomever (or whatever) is in the house with her. It’s a game in which the bound & bloodied corpse of her father keeps popping up in impossible places. The other playing-pieces in the game seem to be an old rag doll and a Polaroid camera, which also have a habit of disappearing and reappearing. And then there are the keys — Laura’s father had the keys of the house in his pocket when he went upstairs, but even when Laura is able to find his body (it’s not always where she thinks it is), the keys stay lost. The game’s also played in near-darkness — Laura must often turn out her feeble lantern, as it’s an even bigger giveaway to her position than her ragged, panicky breath. The Intruder is seen only as a pair of feet or an out-of-focus shadow, but his (its?) presence is palpable even when we can’t see him clearly.

Laura does eventually manage to break out of the house, but even outside strange things continue to happen. Something seems to be following her — something she can’t quite get a look at — and when she finally sees the eerily-illuminated figure of a little girl standing in the road, she’s almost run down by Nestor’s car.

Naturally, Nestor is a little concerned to see Laura, covered with blood, standing in the road a good distance from the old house. Poor Laura stammers her explanation, but Nestor can’t believe it. He insists on going back to the house to look for Laura’s father. Laura begs him not to go back, but he insists. Leaving the girl sobbing in his truck, he dashes off into the house… only to re-emerge a few minutes later and practically drag her back inside. There is nothing, and no one in the house — living or dead.

Why? Why must it be so?

We know better in Real Life. We know that those Photoshopped pictures of 100-pound cats in their owners’ arms are clever fakes. We can see when a “photojournalist” has copied and pasted explosions from one place in his cityscape to several others. We may not know exactly who that grinning airbrushed corpse on the magazine cover might be, but we know it can’t really be Paula Deen. Why, then, are we so inclined to trust what we see on video — especially if it’s shot with a hand held camera? Heck, it doesn’t even need to be a Point-Of-View camera… as long as it’s slightly shaky and has the feel of having been shot on somebody’s phone, we’re already half-inclined to believe what we’re seeing.

And this is especially true of a movie that lulls us further into its spell by playing out in real-time. What do we even mean by “real-time”? The word “real” in that respect is misleading… and the fact that people got mad at the movie for not having been shot in a single take shows they didn’t appreciate the subtle misdirection that the advertising implied.

La Casa Muda calls us on our complacency. It turns out that pretty much everything we see for the first two-thirds of the movie is hallucination. In fact, the whole setup of the movie is revealed to be so unreliable that even the last third can not be trusted. The film forces us to think about the presentation of reality in the movies. We are manipulated ruthlessly in the beginning of the film; then we’re pulled equally far in a totally different direction as the movie concludes.

So kudos to the film-makers for coming up with a movie whose story subverts is technique (and its marketing). Or maybe I meant that the other way around… it’s a little confusing. But as interesting as the experiment may be, there are some real problems with the movie as a finished product.

The main problem is the seriousness of the subject matter that’s suddenly introduced, without preparation or explanation, as the movie draws to a close. There are some things you don’t use as plot conveniences, unless you’re prepared to deal with the implications. Sexual abuse is pretty close to the top of that list. In the case of La Casa Muda, we’re never given enough of a clear insight into what’s happened to make sense of it. The only thing of which we can be certain is that Laura has been raped at some point, and that her father was somehow complicit in the act. The twist in the story comes as a considerable shock, but let’s face it: this is the sort of thing that should never be used purely for its shock value.

The movie’s other problem is structural, and is a consequence of the risks it takes by breaking all the narrative rules. The twist in the plot leaves us with no frame of reference. The only way the second part of the story can be taken at face value is… if the entire first part of the story is considered pure metaphor.

That’s a little much to ask of your audience, and it’s the aspect of the movie that’s left most people angry and bewildered. Viewers try to find the point at which Laura’s hallucination begins (and they usually identify it as the moment when she looks up from the photo album, as the noises begin upstairs). But if you take any of the opening literally, the whole movie falls apart. It’s impossible to believe that Nestor would leave evidence of a heinous crime lying around on the second floor of a house he’d abandoned a long time ago. It’s ludicrous to think that Laura’s father would bring her back to the scene of that crime (in which she’d been involved), and expect her not to remember it. But if we take the images at the end of the film as the key to the deciphering the movie, the “ruined house” is more than just the scene of the crime. It’s also a symbol of what Nestor and Laura’s father have been involved in… a situation that has fallen apart, and must now be “cleaned up”.

The house is also an obvious symbol of Laura herself. It’s not just that the dusty and abandoned rooms represent the closed-off parts of her mind, where she’s hidden her bad memories, and where dangerous figures lurk. There’s another, nastier side to the symbolism: it’s Laura who needs to be “cleaned up” by Nestor and her father. Apparently she had become pregnant with Nestor’s child (or possibly her father’s; the photographs we see hint at this, but Laura may not be able to admit it to herself), and the two men have conspired to make the “evidence” go away. Laura thinks her child has been murdered: this probably means they coerced her into aborting the baby, though there’s also the faint possibility that the men have killed the child after it was born. The baby may also be purely symbolic, in spite of what Laura says. The ghostly child may represent Laura’s own ruined childhood, rather than an actual child. There’s really no way to tell for certain: the mysterious and terrible events in the house are very likely all part of Laura’s nightmares, after she’s rebelled and killed the men who abused her. The Intruder, the doll and the Polaroid camera may all be fragments of her psyche.

But the house is also The House: a real place, where Laura killed two men. If Nestor’s dying words are to be believed, the real reason Laura was brought back to the house was for some kind of rapprôchement, or to assume the worst, a continuation of the old activities (and this may have been enough to tip Laura over the edge of madness). But Nestor’s words should not be believed — or at least they should be viewed with suspicion. According to Nestor, the Polaroids Laura found don’t exist. Then again, the text at the beginning of the (first set of) credits state that “disturbing photographs” were found at the scene, even though we see Laura burning them before she walks off into the wilderness. The “disturbing photographs” may not be the pictures we see of Nestor with Laura… they may only be the Polaroids Laura has taken of the butchered men. And the ghostly little girl, who (we know) doesn’t really exist, actually shows up, semi-transparent, in one of the Polaroids we do see. It is completely impossible to untangle what’s actually happening — what’s real and tangible — and what’s in Laura’s imagination.

And for this same reason, we shouldn’t trust Laura either. All the way through the movie, we’ve been goaded into taking Laura’s point of view on the story. Our deepest instincts compel us to believe her, since she is clearly the original victim and has clearly been driven insane. But as far as the action on screen is concerned, we’ve been manipulated: first through the conventions of scary movies, then by bringing up abortion and rape and murder — issues which it’s virtually impossible to remain neutral about. Even when the camera glances into a mirror, and reality (as we believed it to be) shatters like silvered glass, we’re still inclined to believe Laura’s literal point of view. But it’s useless to try to sort it all out, because the literal truth is not there to be found. We cannot trust what we see.

So what’s real? Well… the bodies of the two dead men, and a handful of photos — exactly what the movie’s press materials say was found in a real country house in the mid-1940’s, in the event that inspired the film itself. Only the house is witness to what else may be true… and la casa muda isn’t giving up its secrets.