#035 - Arcadian (2024)
Hello and welcome to my weblog. Last week I walked over to the little arthouse theatre in the historic speakeasy district and watched Arcadian (2024).
Welcome to werewolf month. Welcome to the season of ripping off the legs of your jeans, growing fangs and claws, and thinking too much about the moon. As I type this out, I am myself wearing cutoff cord jeans and a flannel shirt, five days unshaven (so as not to accidentally reopen a small cut at the corner of my mouth). This is the first of two werewolf movies I plan to watch this month, where the word ‘month’ serves to define a stretch of time that may extend into May or June depending on when I get around to watching the next one.
I realized while writing this that I am not sure if I like horror. I like to think I like horror because I spent so much of my formative years watching campy schlock horror, B-movie zombie affairs from Blockbuster that weren’t so much scary as just grotesque, ridiculous even. I like bad, cheap horror movies because they are the realm of total weirdos.
Given the choice, I end up watching something other than horror most of the time. One of my all time favorite movies is Dawn of the Dead (1978) but my affection for it has more to do with the costuming, the use of color, and the idle fantasy of building a cozy little home in the ruins of a shopping mall than any of the qualities that make it a horror movie. I maintain a self-image of someone who likes horror without much in the way of recent supporting evidence. I don’t think I like the fear, the anxiety, which is arguably the main thing about horror. I guess that’s where the name comes from, lol. I think I am drawn to the narrative possibility in horror; things can happen in horror movies that mostly can’t happen in other genres. If you go to watch a romantic comedy, for instance, there’s a sort of unspoken contract between you and the filmmakers that the main characters aren’t going to be ripped apart by wild dogs in the third act. Horror is about trying to elicit specific kinds of nervous system responses from the audience and to this end, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that can happen with light, shadow, sound, character, scene, etc. that in other genres might be considered unsubtle. In horror, there’s less room, or tolerance, for nuance. If I am making a horror movie, then I am trying to make you nervous, and I am using whatever tricks I can to that end.
Horror movies subvert the norms and expectations of the other genres and cheap horror movies often subvert the expectations of horror, either by design or more often by just the quality of production. Anything can happen in a low budget horror movie but you don’t tend to forget that you’re only watching a movie; there’s not typically the level of immersion that triggers the fight or flight reflexes. They’re spectacular, often trying to do the most possible with a shoestring budget. A real triumph of human accomplishment. Fuck the Apollo Program, give me a Roger Corman movie about zombies.
There are a couple of different approaches—philosophies—for how to make a scary movie monster but in my opinion, the most effective is just making a weird little guy who can move too fast. Arcadian does this well. It’s a movie about elfin teens who create Home Alone scenarios in a cottage-core werewolf apocalypse. The film opens with a long shot of Nicolas Cage escaping a fortified city and it lets you think that this is going to be a movie about Nicolas Cage but his presence keeps receding, like a tide going out, until you just have teens riding around in UTVs and blowing up their house.
Note - A couple of weeks ago, shortly after sending out the last of these emails, I discovered that I had been spelling Mr. Cage’s first name wrong for the last two years; it turns out that there’s no ‘h’ in ‘Nicolas’. Oops! Sorry, Nic!