Love and Monsters, Part 3
Nov. 1st, 2019 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreThe Final Four! If you missed the earlier entries in this set, here's Part 1 and Part 2. I hope I've boosted some titles you may not have heard of before. That's one reason I make lists like this: to create a fandom around a thing that I wish more people had heard of. (Someone please love Twixt with me!)
That said, there aren't many surprises left in this batch if you've been following me for awhile. Here goes!
4 - Sleepy Hollow (1999)
One of a handful of movies I simply must watch every October if I have the time. (Yes, I rewatched it this year already.) I have grown a little weary of Tim Burton's signature German Expressionism Lite style, and my feelings towards Johnny Depp these days are . . . ambivalent at best, but none of that has dampened my love for this movie a bit. This has little to do with Washington Irving's story apart from the legend itself, in which the horseman was a prank without any supernatural trappings. In Burton's version, the ghosts and magic are all real, and Ichabod Crane is now a squeamish forensic detective instead of a gangly school teacher. The colors, apart from a few splashes of bright red, are so washed out it's almost in black and white, and a sickly fog permeates every inch of the Western Woods. This is the only Burton movie that both legitimately scares me, and makes me laugh, sometimes in the same scene.
3 - The Crow (1994)
I've written about this movie a few times now, always favorably, always with a sense of mourning over Brandon Lee's most iconic performance also being his last. The atmosphere here is more contemporary, and like Sleepy Hollow more focused on the entire city than one particular location. However, Eric and Shelley's loft apartment has the same brooding, decayed elegance of any haunted mansion, and the idea of true love reaching beyond death is a feature of any given Edgar Allan Poe poem. Eric even quotes Poe at one point in the movie, and his delivery gives you a sense of what Eric is going to be like as a revenant. Namely: snarky, erudite, and merciless. And it is wonderful.
2 - A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Another Korean thriller circling the life of a teenage girl navigating the sticky relationships of her broken family, this time from Kim Jee-woon. It has a twist I won't give away, but it makes you see every scene differently when you go back a second (third, and fourth) time. Loosely based on a folk tale called "Rose Flower, Red Lotus," this movie tracks a few days in the life of a young girl after she returns from a stay in a mental institution. Or perhaps before she's sent to the institution. It plays loose with time, and I'm still not sure how it all lines up, but that's one of the things I love about it. She doesn't get along with her stepmother, she's fiercely protective of her younger sister, and she's haunted by the specter of her real mother, and at least one other ghost. Maybe. The ghosts are real, but almost all the characters are unreliable narrators, showing us a filtered view of reality. Not as filtered as when the subtitles are inaccurate, as they are in this trailer, but it's still worth watching:
1 - Crimson Peak (2015)
Yeah, this was always going to be Number 1. I love this movie so much even I'm sick of hearing myself gush over it. Just kidding--I could NEVER be sick of this movie in any capacity. This is Peak Gothic Fanservice at its most excessive, melodramatic, and delirious. It's so overwrought that it loops all the way around to FABULOUS, so meticulous in the finer details that I've seen vloggers devoted to periodic accuracy in costume dramas point to this movie as an example of how to do it right. Gorgeous costumes, gruesomely mutilated ghosts, and a crumbling, labyrinthine mansion atop a snowy hill that bleeds--it's perfect. Everything here is outwardly beautiful but straining at the seams with rot and ruin. The candlelight waltz is dazzling on its own, but what's remarkable is how all the elements are now in their places: Edith falling for the charming baronet despite her defenses, Thomas breaking social conventions with just enough vulnerability that the audience wants to trust him, Alan getting suspicious enough to start digging, and Lucille seething from every pore. There's an undercurrent of tension and betrayal running through the room, but it's absolutely gorgeous on the surface:
That is what the Gothic formula means to me when it works: the underlying currents that sweep the characters into the story, that lock them into their roles so completely there's nothing you can do but get carried away along with them.
I hope you've enjoyed this mini-countdown.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
That said, there aren't many surprises left in this batch if you've been following me for awhile. Here goes!
4 - Sleepy Hollow (1999)
One of a handful of movies I simply must watch every October if I have the time. (Yes, I rewatched it this year already.) I have grown a little weary of Tim Burton's signature German Expressionism Lite style, and my feelings towards Johnny Depp these days are . . . ambivalent at best, but none of that has dampened my love for this movie a bit. This has little to do with Washington Irving's story apart from the legend itself, in which the horseman was a prank without any supernatural trappings. In Burton's version, the ghosts and magic are all real, and Ichabod Crane is now a squeamish forensic detective instead of a gangly school teacher. The colors, apart from a few splashes of bright red, are so washed out it's almost in black and white, and a sickly fog permeates every inch of the Western Woods. This is the only Burton movie that both legitimately scares me, and makes me laugh, sometimes in the same scene.
3 - The Crow (1994)
I've written about this movie a few times now, always favorably, always with a sense of mourning over Brandon Lee's most iconic performance also being his last. The atmosphere here is more contemporary, and like Sleepy Hollow more focused on the entire city than one particular location. However, Eric and Shelley's loft apartment has the same brooding, decayed elegance of any haunted mansion, and the idea of true love reaching beyond death is a feature of any given Edgar Allan Poe poem. Eric even quotes Poe at one point in the movie, and his delivery gives you a sense of what Eric is going to be like as a revenant. Namely: snarky, erudite, and merciless. And it is wonderful.
2 - A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Another Korean thriller circling the life of a teenage girl navigating the sticky relationships of her broken family, this time from Kim Jee-woon. It has a twist I won't give away, but it makes you see every scene differently when you go back a second (third, and fourth) time. Loosely based on a folk tale called "Rose Flower, Red Lotus," this movie tracks a few days in the life of a young girl after she returns from a stay in a mental institution. Or perhaps before she's sent to the institution. It plays loose with time, and I'm still not sure how it all lines up, but that's one of the things I love about it. She doesn't get along with her stepmother, she's fiercely protective of her younger sister, and she's haunted by the specter of her real mother, and at least one other ghost. Maybe. The ghosts are real, but almost all the characters are unreliable narrators, showing us a filtered view of reality. Not as filtered as when the subtitles are inaccurate, as they are in this trailer, but it's still worth watching:
1 - Crimson Peak (2015)
Yeah, this was always going to be Number 1. I love this movie so much even I'm sick of hearing myself gush over it. Just kidding--I could NEVER be sick of this movie in any capacity. This is Peak Gothic Fanservice at its most excessive, melodramatic, and delirious. It's so overwrought that it loops all the way around to FABULOUS, so meticulous in the finer details that I've seen vloggers devoted to periodic accuracy in costume dramas point to this movie as an example of how to do it right. Gorgeous costumes, gruesomely mutilated ghosts, and a crumbling, labyrinthine mansion atop a snowy hill that bleeds--it's perfect. Everything here is outwardly beautiful but straining at the seams with rot and ruin. The candlelight waltz is dazzling on its own, but what's remarkable is how all the elements are now in their places: Edith falling for the charming baronet despite her defenses, Thomas breaking social conventions with just enough vulnerability that the audience wants to trust him, Alan getting suspicious enough to start digging, and Lucille seething from every pore. There's an undercurrent of tension and betrayal running through the room, but it's absolutely gorgeous on the surface:
That is what the Gothic formula means to me when it works: the underlying currents that sweep the characters into the story, that lock them into their roles so completely there's nothing you can do but get carried away along with them.
I hope you've enjoyed this mini-countdown.
Happy Halloween, everyone!