Recent viewings:
Black Death As someone with more than a glancing interest in the Middle Ages, I was curious and skeptical about this 2010 horror movie from Christopher Smith (who made a nasty, scary little horror flick called Creep back in 2004), much as I was about Game of Thrones (TV show, not the books) prior to diving in headfirst. Despite the appearance of Sean Bean (who I'm pretty sure lives somewhere in medieval Europe when he's not working) and Carice van Houten as a world-weary knight and pagan sorceress, respectively, and certain aesthetic similarities, Black Death is a different animal from Game of Thrones (which offers a different smorgasbord of pleasures). For one, it's not fantasy, a point it reinforces by de-mysticizing, and boldly undermining, its horror conceits in a way that feels both historically plausible and organic within the narrative. And it's much smaller in scope, like a sliver of the fourteenth-century preserved on film, not a Tolkien-esque medievalist epic. This is not to say that the film is "historically accurate" (whatever that actually means...), but like Nicholas Winding Refn's superb Valhalla Rising, it is imbued by the everyday affects of visceral griminess and extreme religiosity in a way that registers as largely credible. (John Boorman's underrated Excalibur did this, too, and few other films, Hollywood or otherwise, have succeeded nearly so well in this measure.) It also feels appropriate that Black Death's protagonist is not actually Bean's knight, but a monk, overeducated and underexperienced, who questions his faith as rigorously as any Bergman hero. The denouement is as perverse as it is haunting--again, rather like that of Valhalla Rising, though these conclusions themselves are otherwise dissimilar--dramatically recoloring and qualitatively elevating all that preceded it.
The Innkeepers Not as wholly successful as Ti West's previous film, the thoroughly terrific House of the Devil, this follow-up is still quite enjoyable, if not ultimately all that scary. Though maybe that's the point. It's a horror movie for people who want to live their lives inside a horror movie--in this case, a pair of twentysomethings (the pitch-perfect Sara Paxton and Pat Healy) working at a supposedly haunted inn that looks like the one Lorelai managed in the earlier seasons of Gilmore Girls. In this regard, The Innkeepers can't help but feel personal given what we know of West from his oeuvre; where House of the Devil wore its affection for the genre in pastiche form, this one opts for a kinder, gentler, less aggressively post-modern variation on the Scream route. When all the talk and portent finally turn to real danger and ostensible scares, it almost feels beside the point or somewhat perfunctory.
The Woman in Black This is surprisingly, quietly quite fine, and such a pleasant antidote to the kind of loud, frenetic, in-your-face filmmaking that seems so ubiquitous and dominant of late (the kind of the thing that Mike Archibald rightly bemoaned in our Dark Knight Rises chat). Daniel Radcliffe still probably can't act, but he's so perfectly cast that this point is neither here nor there. As a pale, bookish, sad-sack young widower in Victorian/Edwardian England (the precise time-period is unclear and also probably moot), Radcliffe is precisely as good as the props and costumes and locations that surround him in a determinedly old-fashioned ghost story that does almost everything that you expect and hope such a film will do. Really, it's like director James Watkins was working from an expertly compiled checklist of all the specific ingredients that the English haunted mansion movie should contain, and then diligently complied top to bottom. This is not backhanded praise. Far too many horror films fail to deliver what you actually want out of them, whether through squandering a good premise, under-utilizing chilly atmosphere, neglecting to build suspense, or missing the mark on the best potential scares. Or the most common bad habit in recent years (blame J-Horror): adding twist after twist after twist, then spending the last twenty minutes over-explaining said twists. That The Woman in Black avoids all of these traps is commendable. It's not groundbreaking or even especially memorable, but it's elegant as hell without feeling wooden; and entirely satisfying in its unironic straightforwardness and uncommon formal fidelity.