Fact, fiction and the space between.
Jovial serial killers, Violent Unexplained Events, mothers who just love gardening, teens who never leave the house. This must be the Sunday Scaries!
To die——to really be dead——that must be glorious.
~ Dracula (1931)
Here we are on the other side of Hallowe’en, crawling inexorably towards the end of the year. Festive! I hope the Great Pumpkin was good to you and your trick-or-treaters, and that you enjoyed some chills and thrills wherever the evening took you.
I spent the night up in my home office watching the little-known, weirdly funny and deeply unsettling Japanese mockumentary Saiko! The Large Family. At the surface level, this appears to be a modest ‘family issues’ TV documentary about changing values in Japan, centred around interviews conducted by Canadian documentarian Veronica Addison with the ‘large family’ of the title—a pleasant yet controlling mother, a jovial but disrespected stepfather, and numerous boisterous children.
As a long and troubled family history is revealed, the interviewer remains utterly clueless about the real story unfolding in front of the camera’s eye, leaving it to us to piece it together for ourselves. This is a delightful slow-burn horror satire with some genuine shocks and subtle hair-raising moments. As I watched it, I thought of several other creepy faux-documentaries that blur the lines between fact and fiction and use the form to comment on how easily we can be led around or away from confronting or understanding the inexplicable events in our everyday lives.
Of course, the unsung masterpiece in this subgenre is Joel Anderson’s extraordinary 2008 film Lake Mungo. Barely released and little seen until recent years, and now available for a brief time on the Criterion Channel, this film delves into the unexplained occurrences haunting a family shattered by grief in the wake of their eldest child’s death. The parents seek the help of a psychic who learns that the dead girl had a secret double life—but the shocks and surprises don’t stop there. For most of its runtime, this is an eerie and absorbing account of a family driven to extremes by the grief they can barely express with each other and the hidden lives they struggle with, until one particular hair-raising moment jolts you right out of your seat and takes the film to a whole other level.
Speaking of unsung masterpieces, not nearly enough people have watched the intensely unnerving 2005 cosmic horror film Noroi: The Curse, about a now-missing documentary filmmaker who connects a vast array of seemingly unrelated paranormal incidents into an elaborate web of terror with an ancient and terrifying demon at its centre. Dread-filled from start to finish, with some images you’ll wish you could unsee.
While the notorious 1992 French mockumentary Man Bites Dog is exceptionally well-made, a ruthless and timely pitch-black satire of the complicity between the media and its most objectionable subjects, it is hard for me to recommend to anyone but those with the strongest stomachs. Content warnings abound for all manner of extreme physical and sexual violence as a documentary crew follows a prolific and charismatic serial killer and is ultimately drawn into participating in his heinous and gruesome crimes. Perfectly executed, pardon the pun.
There are so many other films in this subgenre that I love for so many reasons—
What We Do in the Shadows, Ghostwatch, The Legend of Boggy Creek, The Conspiracy, The Bay, Frogman—but I’m going to finish by going way out into left field (rare sports reference as a nod to our grieving Blue Jays fans) with Peter Greenaway’s incredible 1980 experiment The Falls, which for three hours relentlessly recounts the experiences of a small sampling of survivors (those whose last names begin with F-A-L-L) of a Violent Unknown Event which we can only ever grasp through inference but appears to have something to do with birds. A remarkable exercise in formalism taken to the Nth degree, it defies you to watch it from start to finish and to piece together the catastrophe at its core. Exquisite, in the same way that certain forms of torture might be described.
Currently watching: Celebrity Traitors UK winds up this week and my bestie Alan Carr is still in the game. Fingers and toes all crossed! And we are well into the second season of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Titans which, in its own meta way, has taken the traditional psychodrama forever festering among the participants and ensnared the crew and the hosts into its sticky web.
Cool Story, Bro: New Brian Evenson story? New Brian Evenson story?? YES! A new Brian Evenson story, Totensonntag, about a tradition we don’t celebrate. Read it for free at The Dark!
This Week in Horror: This week we lost another film legend, the incomparable and irascible Peter Watkins, himself a master of the docudrama and the mockumentary. He never worked directly in horror but several of his films had horrific elements, most notably The War Game, Punishment Park and Culloden. Brilliant works all. I highly encourage you to watch them, but my personal favourites are the 1974 docudrama Edvard Munch and the 2000 French short-series La Commune (Paris 1871), both subtitled in English at these links, and both of which feature his favourite conceit: a film crew anachronistically inserted into a time period where no such thing could be possible, and using it to upend the dynamic of a more traditional narrative treatment. Utterly devastating in their impact, they continue to be powerfully influential across cinema and beyond.
That’s it for this week! Here in St. John’s we have Fogfest coming up—our annual local horror film festival, now in its fifth edition. I am happy to be a sponsor this year, so I will be turning up in various places including the festival program, the pre-show reel and of course in several seats! Screenings include an Indigenous horror spotlight, premieres of the Adams family’s Mother of Flies, Hangsashore, Foreigner, Deathstalker (by the director of Psycho Goreman, among many others), and a big-theatre showing of the Canadian classic Ginger Snaps, a longtime favourite of mine and probably yours as well.
Until next time, remember: “I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn't reached me yet but it's on its way.”
Help me. Help me be human.
~ The Fly (1986)