Haiti and Horror Movies

"Haiti and Horror Movies" is a six-minute video made by Rot & Decay Films that we hope you will watch and let us know what you think.

Scorsese and Horror

FEARnet recently posted an article on The 12 Scariest Moments in Scorsese Movies in anticipation of "Shutter Island." A creepy trip through memory lane worth checking out.

Myths Obscure Voodoo, Source of Comfort in Haiti

Dismissive attitudes follow a history of misrepresentation in American journalism and popular culture.

Shindo on Shindo

Below is an excerpt from an interview between Kaneto Shindo and Joan Mellen.

The prolific Japanese director talks about his whole career. Below he discusses the social elements at work in his supremely eerie horror folktale, "Onibaba" (1964).

Mellen: I find the social dimension of your films very complex and interesting. Would you describe how in your films you depict the class struggle as it appeared both in history and society?

Shindo: Speaking about Onibaba in particular, my main historical interest focuses on ordinary people... their energy to carry themselves beyond the predicaments they encounter daily. I wish to describe the struggles of the so-called common people which usually never appear in recorded history. This is why I made Onibaba. My mind was always on the commoners, not on the lords, politicans, or anyone of name and fame. I wanted to convey the lives of down-to-earth people who live like weeds.

Mellen: In the setting of Onibaba I noticed that the people seemed very small, moving around a lake where the reeds were very tall and imposing.

Shindo: Yes, the tall, swaying reeds are my symbol of the world, the society which surrounds people. In Kuroneko bushes are used for the same symbolic end. Tall, densem swaying reeds represent the world in which these commoners live and to which the eyes of lords and politicians do not reach. My eyes, or rather the camera's eyes, is fixed to view the world from the very lowest level of society, not from the top.

Bushwick and the Housing Crisis

Eva Sanchis of El Diario has published a series of articles for the newspaper on how the foreclosure crisis has impacted Bushwick. The Brooklyn neighborhood has been one of the hardest hit by the housing recession and Sanchis's slate of articles just go to show which New Yorkers are taking the worst toll in this damaged market.

Here is a link to an English language digest of what was a three article report (our Spanish speaking readers can find the first of the original articles right here)

Additionally, The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC hosted Eva Sanchis. This is the link to a podcast of that interview.

Get Our Free Bumper stickers!

Our bumper stickers have arrived! We're sending out two to each of the first fifty people who send us their addresses at info@ghostsdontmoveout.com. Send us at the same email address photos of where you place them. We'll post the winning five photographs and send the winners a Rot & Decay Films t-shirt.

"Peeping Tom" and First-Person Horror

The Criterion Collection recently announced that they are discontinuing a slate of StudioCanal owned titles. They’ve lost the DVD rights to films like “Grand Illusion,” “Pierrot Le Fou” and Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy.

(They are having an Out of Print Sale, linked here)

I was dismayed to see “Peeping Tom” on the list. I can think of few films so essential to our understanding of contemporary horror.

The film follows the murderous exploits of Mark Lewis, a solitary photographer who preys on women. Sometimes posing as a documentarian, Mark gets his victims in front of his 16mm film camera, he kills them with his tripod immortalizing their death throes on film.

The viewer is thrust into the point of view of the camera’s viewfinder, forcing us into identification with both the deadly mechanism and the deeply disturbed Mark. We become both the murderer and the means. Even more disconcerting is the allegorical significance of this approach. The viewer is confronted with their own voyeurism.

“Peeing Tom’s” first person aesthetic takes on a new significance when we consider the current horror film fixation with POV. Camera phones, video messaging, and other portable media have provided a new awareness of the first person field of vision that the modern horror film exploits. Movies like “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” mimic familiar digital platforms as a foray into traditional zombie/infection and monster films respectively.

These are standard genre movies but they are always seem to be reaching to a higher level of verisimilitude. Their approach assumes that the familiarity of the first person digital viewpoint is what incites fear in the viewer. The limited range of vision offered by this approach can be genuinely terrifying (see "[REC]") but a film like “Peeping Tom” exposes an oversight these recent horror films make. They do not realize that identification with the monster is far more horrifying than relation to the victim. When we are forced to identify with the monster, we are faced with out own unrepresentable dark side.

John Carpenter’s "Halloween” aligns us with the central monster to great effect. The opening tracking shot gives us the POV of Michael Myers as a child.

The power of this opener is that it gives us a greater understanding of his monstrous pervasiveness. When we find ourselves yelling at the screen at some nubile slasher victim-“Don’t go into that house, whatever you do, don’t go in that damn house!”- it’s because we have this special access to the monster that Carpenter provides.

(please refer to this great explication of the opening of “Halloween” on Jim Emerson’s Scanners website: Opening Shots: Halloween)

This does not mean that victim identification and pro-sumer video are useless as horror strategies. Perhaps more successful than the strict video mimicry of a film like “Quarantine” is the hybrid method of “28 Days Later" which replicated the lo-fi look of broadcast style video without tethering the film to a visual conceit. The flip side of this aesthetic discussion is the practical use of video. "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" -despite all their flaws and even- made their limitations a narrative virtue, far outstripping production costs upon release.

Interview Project - David Lynch

Interviews with Americans made over the space of a road trip...

Rising FHA default rate foreshadows a crush of foreclosures

By Dina ElBoghdady and Dan Keating

Washington Post Staff Writer

The share of borrowers who are falling seriously behind on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration jumped by more than a third in the past year, foreshadowing a crush of foreclosures that could further buffet an agency vital to the housing market's recovery....

NEW YORK CITY IN SOUND

"Manhattan Symphony" by Walter Murch and "New York from the 34th floor overlooking Central Park - The soundtrack for a film set in New York – circa 1970" by Michelangelo Antonioni
click ...

No Help in Sight, More Homeowners Walk Away

By DAVID STREITFELD

Published: February 2, 2010

In 2006, Benjamin Koellmann bought a condominium in Miami Beach. By his calculation, it will be about the year 2025 before he can sell his modest home for what he paid. Or maybe 2040

Click here to read full article

Robin Wood and American Horror

With the recent passing of the great film critic Robin Wood, I’ve taken to revisiting his articles. While he was a scholar, he produced articles and books with the swiftness of a journalist.

I’ve just reread my favorite piece by Wood: “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” This was the first Wood article I encountered. I have a special place for it because he writes so passionately and insightfully about horror. Horror is so often belittled or entirely overlooked by critics. Wood shows us just how vital horror is and how meaningful it can be.

Here is a link to the full-article. Below is an excerpt that lays out some of his ideas.

I have been laying the foundations, stone by stone, for a theory of the American horror film which (without being exhaustive) should provide us with a means of approaching the films seriously and responsibly. One could, I think, approach any of the genres from the same starting-point; it is the horror film that responds in the most clear-cut and direct way, because central to it is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the Other, in the figure of the Monster. One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses: its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for the terror, the “happy ending” (which exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression.

"The Shining" at IFC

The IFC Center in New York screens midnight movies almost every weekend. The Shining is coming up at the end of the week. Here is a link for more info.