Stephen Bjork

Robert Altman was a filmmaker who stubbornly followed his own muse wherever it might take him, and he didn’t give a tinker’s damn what anyone else thought about that. He pursued the projects that he wanted to pursue, and while there’s no doubt that he was happy when audiences came along for the ride, that was never his primary concern (or even his secondary or tertiary concerns, for that matter). After the smash success of his landmark war comedy M*A*S*H, he felt no desire to rest on his laurels. Instead, he immediately turned around and made the offbeat Brewster McCloud, a film that was pretty much guaranteed to repel most of the audiences that had flocked to see M*A*S*H. Then, he gleefully deconstructed the western genre with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and followed that up with the psychological thriller Quintet, a film that baffled critics and audiences alike. From there, he ended up deconstructing film noir and private detective fiction with The Long Goodbye, before finally making another detour to deconstruct Hollywood crime dramas with Thieves Like Us in 1974.

Godzilla Minus One (aka Gojira Mainasu Wan) has become a genuine phenomenon even in America, where it quickly became the highest-grossing Japanese language film of all time. That’s impressive by any metric, especially for the 30th live action installment in a seventy-year-old franchise. While Godzilla movies can be a little divisive, with everyone having their own favorites, the reaction to Godzilla Minus One has been uniformly positive. It’s been something of a revelation to many people, which is interesting considering that it’s undeniably derivative of all the films that came before it. The genius of writer/director Takashi Yamazaki is that he took all those familiar elements and combined them in a way that manages to feel fresh, even to hardened fans of the franchise. It’s more of a refinement than a revelation, and where Godzilla Minus One really shines is in its execution rather than its conception. Yet the key to making all of that work is still a conceptual choice on the part of Toho and Yamazaki.

When RKO Pictures assigned producer Val Lewton to their horror unit in 1942, no one could have possibly predicted the astounding legacy that he would leave behind. From 1942 to 1946, Lewton gifted RKO with nine idiosyncratic and poetic films, all of them based on the principle of leaving most of the horror to the imaginations of viewers. RKO would give Lewton a lurid title to work with, but as long as he stayed within a limited budget, they also gave him relative freedom to create whatever he wished. It wasn’t complete independence, as the studio did occasionally interfere, but for the most part he was able to achieve his own personal vision for each film. The results speak for themselves, and while they weren’t always successful at the box office, every one of Lewton’s horror films has something unique to offer.

Carlo Ledesma’s The Tunnel was the first Australian horror movie to land at the intersection between two different modern cultural trends: “found footage” films and crowdfunding efforts. It was hardly the first Australian found footage film, of course, with others like Lake Mungo having broken that ground previously. And just like Lake Mungo before it, The Tunnel doesn’t use the found footage conceit as a mere stylistic affectation, but rather weaves it into the fabric of the film itself. That’s because both films are full-fledged mockumentaries that use found footage material as part of a retrospective examination of previous events—supposed footage from those past events is incorporated into a “new” documentary structure. In all other respects, however, The Tunnel is pure Blair Witch Project, with more than a whiff of Gary A. Sherman’s debut feature Raw Meat thrown in for good measure. It’s a journey to a dark destination where the participants end up finding more than they bargained for. It’s really the crowdfunding angle that sets The Tunnel apart, at least from a behind-the-scenes perspective, but more on that in a moment.

Five years before directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein pointed their sights at the world of fantasy role playing games with the delightful Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, they took aim at the broader gaming culture in general with Game Night—and they took a few pot shots at David Fincher in the process, too. That’s due in no small part to the fact that writer Mark Perez’s story for Game Night is a pretty blatant riff on John Brancato and Michael Ferris’ script for The Game. Yet while Fincher had used their idea of a live action role-playing game run amok as a vehicle to explore personal trauma, familial guilt, and rampant paranoia, Daley and Goldstein stripped away the layers of metaphor and took the concept at face value. Game Night is a tale of deception set in a world where deception is an inherent part of good gamesmanship, so it openly celebrates the ability to take others by surprise. All’s fair in love and war, but anything goes when gaming sessions are involved.

Dario Argento has long been renowned as one of the master visual stylists in the horror genre, with his prowling camerawork and elaborate color design working together in his own trademarked fashion. Of course, he’s also a master aural stylist, making use of driving prog rock scores from the likes of Goblin in order to support these distinctive visuals. With Argento, sound and image work together in perfect harmony. While that harmony hasn’t always extended to the thematic level, it did so just as perfectly in his 1987 film Opera (aka Terror at the Opera). It’s a story that revolves around a production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Teatro Regio opera house in Parma, Italy, yet it’s as much focused on the act of seeing as it is on the act of listening. It’s also focused on the act of Becoming, but more on that in a moment.

While there have been plenty of horror films throughout cinematic history that have been landmarks of the horror genre, only a few of those can be considered as broader cultural landmarks that have transcended genre and tapped into something more universal. The Exorcist is one such film, since its cultural reach far transcended the bounds of typical horror fandom. While Warner Bros. had no faith in the film (no pun intended) and tried to dump it in late December on a small handful of screens, The Exorcist quickly became a phenomenon that lasted for a whopping 105 weeks at the box office, forcing the studio to expand its release in order to keep up. Audiences were lining up around the block to see it, quite literally so, regardless of how unpleasant that the winter weather may have been. The Exorcist was the “It” movie of 1973 that remained an “It” movie for the next two years as well. Yet to understand why this religious-themed horror film touched that kind of cultural nerve, you need to turn not to original novelist William Peter Blatty, but rather to Stephen King. We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s start with Blatty first.

Clint Eastwood was one of the biggest global box office draws during the Seventies and the Eighties, but at the time, he never quite got enough credit for his willingness to explore different kinds of material. Even when he stayed within familiar genres, he freely pushed the envelope of his own persona; the likes of Ben Shockley in The Gauntlet and Wes Block in Tightrope couldn’t possibly have been farther removed from his signature character of “Dirty” Harry Calahan. Yet while he was frequently associated with cop movies and westerns, he never let himself get limited by genre. From The Beguiled to Paint Your Wagon to Bronco Billy and Honkeytonk Man, he wasn’t quite as easy to pin down as some people thought that he was. While he never really looked back after making his auspicious directorial debut with Play Misty for Me, he was still willing to take a chance on working with other filmmakers, arguably never more so than when he gave the young writer/director Michael Cimino an opportunity to make his feature film debut with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

On April 10, 1952, Elia Kazan sat down before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in order to provide amended testimony. He had first appeared before the Committee back in January, but while he admitted that he had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1934-1936, he refused to name any other members. His resolve broke quickly, and just three months later, he returned to deliver a sworn affidavit that named eight other former members of the Group Theatre collective (including Clifford Odets and Paula Miller). He also implicated several party officials and a few members of other groups like the League of Workers Theaters and the Theater of Action. He didn’t stop there, either; two days later, he took out a defiant ad in the New York Times that offered the following justification: “I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts (about communism) has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency.”

When Ti West and Mia Goth traveled to New Zealand in order to shoot X, they never intended it to form the foundation for a trilogy. The misadventures of the ambitious Maxine Minx (Goth) while filming an adult movie in rural Texas during the Seventies was supposed to be a self-contained story, with Maxine barely escaping the gruesome fate faced by her fellow filmmakers. Yet Maxine’s elderly nemesis Pearl (also Goth) proved to be a compelling (if somewhat cryptic) character, so West and Goth decided to explore her backstory with the prequel Pearl. That film helped to establish parallels between Maxine and Pearl that went far beyond just having the same actor playing each part. They both shared dreams of stardom as well as a willingness to do anything in order to overcome any obstacles that were in their way. What they didn’t necessarily share was success in achieving their dreams, so after the yin and the yang of these dual personalities clashed in X, it was perhaps inevitable that West and Goth would collaborate on a follow-up that explored the impacts of this conflict in MaXXXine.