"Watch Out" and the way humor works in horror

Humor and horror can make for a queasy mix. Too many straight-ahead horror movies treat human lives like trash, thanks in part to the "Saw" and "Hostel" franchises but going back to Z-grade slashers and gorefests from many decades past. Trying to blend humor with horror tropes can make a fairly insensitive, dehumanizing horror flick seem downright mean-spirited.

When dark humor works well in horror, however, the results can be thrilling, as in remarkable films like "The Cabin in the Woods" and "Get Out" and honorable mentions such as "Ginger Snaps" and "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil." In the best-case scenario, humor makes the horror more palatable while also developing and humanizing the characters and delivering a more memorable, and meaningful, narrative. When horror-comedy works, it really works; when it doesn't, well, sometimes we get "Leprechaun in the Hood."

"Watch Out," a short film available on Hulu via the NBCUniversal Short Film Festival ("a bicoastal program seeking the next generation of writers, directors, producers and actors, while celebrating innovative storytelling from diverse backgrounds"), isn't "Cabin in the Woods"-level awesome -- but hey, few movies are. However, it deftly presents itself as one thing -- straight horror -- before downshifting to some surprisingly light-on-its-feet comedy, then lingering in the Venn diagram overlap space for a bit longer than you expect.

"Watch Out" takes a simple premise -- definitely a "Why didn't I think of that?" kind of setup -- and makes considerable hay. The film succeeds primarily because it follows the No. 1 rule of horror-comedy: Violence itself is rarely funny, but people's responses to violence, and its direct aftermath, definitely can be. Situational and/or character-based dark comedy goes a much longer way, most of the time, than trying to make plain ol' gore hilarious.

"Dawn of the Deaf" is quite something

British filmmaker Rob Savage's 12-minute short "Dawn of the Deaf" is gutsy, efficient, and hard not to think and talk about. It swiftly winds together four separate narratives that converge when a mysterious pulse has a devastating effect on the hearing population of a city. I want to avoid giving away more than I need to, as the film's brief run time includes a remarkable number of surprises and twists. It's not for the faint of heart, more due to some difficult subject matter than because of gore, but if you're a horror or sci-fi fan, it may well be worth your time. Also worth checking out: Savage's other shorts "Absence" and "Sit in Silence," both similarly refreshing takes on familiar horror subgenres.

Reflecting on a step forward for local Jewish-Muslim relations

On May 12, 2017, Temple Beth Shalom invited Spokane’s Muslim community to an evening Shabbat service and dinner. At the time, SpokaneFAVS reported on this extremely well-attended and inspiring event, so I don’t intend to rehash the facts. A little more than a week later, on May 20, a significant contingent from the Jewish community attended SpokaneFAVS and the Spokane Interfaith Council’s “Meet the Neighbors” event at the Spokane Islamic Center.

At “Meet the Neighbors,” members of the Muslim community showed the same degree of hospitality the Jewish community had displayed the previous weekend. There was a presentation on some basic elements of Islam, a Q&A session, and a delicious and bountiful meal. For Spokane, two opportunities for Jews and Muslims to break bread together in less than 10 days is a big deal. As far as I know, such intentional interfaith bridge-building has never happened here between these two communities.

I am heartened by these events particularly because I have witnessed firsthand, at times, the opposite of such open-mindedness in Jews’ views of their Muslim neighbors. A couple days after the Shabbat service and dinner, a Jewish friend of a friend expressed skepticism that Jews and Muslims can find common ground. He even went so far as to say that Muslims don’t love their children as much as Jews do.

Although he claimed to have personal experience that supported his point of view, this person’s comments sounded sadly familiar to me. Especially when the topic is Israel/Palestine, it’s not uncommon to hear comparisons of Jews and Muslims that purport to stand up for one group by dehumanizing the other. It’s no more productive for Jews to engage in this behavior than it is for Muslims to do so. Nobody wins when we follow this path.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policymaking, and some Inland Northwest organizations promote Islamophobia under the banner of “national security.” Despite these destructive forces, my hope is that something new, powerful, and promising blooms from May’s two interfaith events. And I think there’s reason for hope: After all, these were instances of unprecedented connection between communities that have so often, and so profoundly, misunderstood each other.

"Ouija: Origin of Evil," or: The Horror Trope That Really Freaks Me Out

I'm not sure why, but distorted faces freak me out. I learned this the hard way back in 2003, when a friend and I rented the American remake of "The Ring." Note to self: Don't watch a horror movie on DVD if it's about a cursed VHS tape. It doesn't take much for a "Ring"-addled mind to worry that a DVD has just as much power to kill its viewers as any videotape. I insisted we take the foul object back to the Blockbuster store (remember those?) whence it came. To be specific, here's what did me in: the film's jolting, unexpected, second-long reveal of the corpse of the teen girl killed in the film's opening minutes: cowering in a closet with, as my friend put it, a "boiled face." Just thinking about it still gets to me a little.

Distorted faces in horror movies still freak me out, damn it. "The Ring" was only the beginning. In 2005, a different friend basically dared me to see "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" in the theater. Like the "Ring" remake, "Emily Rose" has its flaws, but it's genuinely creepy at times. The moment that a recently possessed Emily glances at a classmate and thinks his face is melting? 😢 To my supreme chagrin, for quite a few nights after that fateful trip to the theater, I woke up at 3 a.m., supposedly the terrible hour that possessions happen (because Christ was crucified at 3 p.m. and this is the inversion of that, hence Satan's time, blah blah).


And then there's "Ouija: Origin of Evil." At this point, I think it's safe to say I'm a Mike Flanagan fan. I've now seen three of the writer/director's horror movies: "Hush," "Oculus," and "Ouija," and at some point I'll figure out how to watch "Absentia," an earlier work. Like the rest of his oeuvre, "Ouija" features smarter writing and better character development than the average horror film. It also includes a chilling scene in which an unsuspecting teenager is reaching for something inside a basement wall while a possessed little girl watches intently, standing just far enough away to be a little out of focus. And then her face gets all weird and her neck bends and her mouth starts opening and closing ghoulishly.

Stupidly, I watched this while my wife, Liz, was out and the baby slept in the nursery -- at night. The moment her possessed, distorted face started moving around, I stopped the movie, but it was too late -- I was freeeeeaked out. Later, in the kitchen, I looked over my shoulder nervously as I did some dishes. I glanced at the darkened window between the kitchen and laundry room. I hoped my wife would get home soon.

Why do distorted faces freak me out so much? Why are the one of the only reliable horror movie tropes to really get under my skin? I talked about this with Liz once. She suggested it might have something to do with the baseline unnaturalness of seeing a human face warped into strange, boiled, stretched, or otherwise out-of-whack variations. True, it's unnatural, but so are a lot of things you see in horror movies: compound fractures, whitened eyes, flesh-eating -- that sort of stuff.

What is it about melty faces that gets me? I'll have to keep thinking about it. For now, though, I wish the MPAA would consider making an addition to its rating reasons. Can't you just picture it? "Rated R for violence and disturbing images, including melty and/or stretchy faces."

"This Is She"

Just a quick plug for Grace Rex's 2014 short "This Is She," an enigmatic piece that uses some horror tropes but is more of a mystery/drama (dramstery?) than a fright flick. More obliquely and cleverly than many filmmakers have, Rex uses an unexplained, shape-shifting blob on the unnamed protagonist's apartment wall to represent depression.

We get small hints of this symbolism throughout the film's 10 minutes. For example, a person we assume to be the woman's mother calls to make sure she's doing okay, using a tone and language that implies she's recovering from some kind of difficult, or even traumatic, experience. At one point, the woman scrolls through pictures of, presumably, her previous apartment, which looked horribly colonized by some kind of black mold... which bears a resemblance to the little blob she's currently interacting with. When you move, from a chapter of life or an apartment, or both, a little bit of your depression inevitably follows?

After she breaks a mirror by accident, the woman picks up a piece of the shattered glass and contemplates it for a moment. But perhaps it's her interactions with the strange blob during the film that clues us in the most. Initially startled, then curious, the woman soon decides to do battle with the blob, covering it up and pretending that means it's gone. Ultimately, she comes to a relatively peaceable arrangement with her odd little housemate.

"This Is She" reminded me of "The Babadook" in its suggestion that even if we can't completely shed our most deep-seated demons, we can at least learn to live more harmoniously with them. Ideally, we can accept that a smaller, more manageable version of them is somehow part of us and will therefore be with us, in one form or another, forever.

Home Invasion 101

I recently watched two home-invasion horror/thrillers that focused on homeowners with significant sensory impairment: "Don't Breathe," about a blind military veteran who lives alone in a broken-down part of Detroit, and "Hush," about a deaf author (who also can't speak) who lives in the woods with only a cat and a few neighbors for company. "Hush" is the superior film, not least because it doesn't go for over-the-top shockeroos but instead focuses on the basics of a prolonged but suspenseful cat-and-mouse pursuit.

That said, "Don't Breathe" boasts sharp performances from "13 Reasons Why" star Dylan Minnette and Jane Levy, who went from the smart sitcom "Suburgatory" to the grisly horror of Fede Alvarez's "Evil Dead" remake without missing a beat. Alvarez also directed "Don't Breathe," and the newer film shares the remake's willingness to take the audience to uncomfortable places. As the vet, whose mind has been twisted by sorrow, Stephen Lang gives a chilling and very physical performance. It's tautly directed and well acted, and not too predictable, but its secrets end up being perhaps a bit more unsavory than they needed to be.

The twist of making the homeowner in a home-invasion thriller the villain and the invaders the protagonists is interesting. Nonetheless, as a Detroit-area native, I was sad to see yet another stereotypical depiction of urban rot. Detroit seems to have been chosen as a setting (I doubt the film was shot there), as it has been so many times before, to convey blight and emptiness. Within the horror genre, "It Follows" used (actual) Detroit locations in a more nuanced and less cliche way.

"Hush" may or may not be writer-director Mike Flanagan's best film so far. You could make an argument for "Ouija: Origin of Evil," which is much more lavishly produced than the bare-bones, pedal-to-the-metal "Hush," which looks like it was filmed on a budget of about a buck twenty-five, some fake blood, and a few donated prosthetic and makeup effects (albeit very good ones). As others have noted, Flanagan knows two things that are key to making good horror: 1) Developing actual characters, about whom we have actual feelings, matters; 2) It's a very good sign if partway into the movie we'd be enjoying it even if it weren't a horror movie, and if it's actually hard to tell what genre it belongs to. (Another good example of both points: Ti West's "The Innkeepers.")

"Hush" thumbs its nose at some horror and home-invasion conventions while adhering, in a lively and imaginative way, to others. Two moments in the film are standouts for me. In the first, John Gallagher Jr.'s truly upsetting psycho killer threatens the life of a cat, with delightfully unexpected results. In the second, the killer thinks he has Kate Siegel's deaf fiction writer, Maddie Young, right where he wants her: His hands are, at long last, around her throat. Though we pretty much know what the outcome of the scene will be, Flanagan uses a flash of images to suddenly add great poignancy and weight to what might otherwise have played out as a routine thriller finale.

Siegel took on a great challenge in playing a deaf woman who also can't speak, due to an adolescent case of bacterial meningitis. She co-wrote the screenplay with Flanagan, her partner in life as well as filmmaking. So this is very much the story both of them wanted to tell, told in the way they preferred. "Hush" has much in common with "Wait Until Dark," "The Strangers," "You're Next," and other noteworthy home-invasion films, but it avoids falling into some common traps of the subgenre. For one thing, it doesn't treat human lives as worthless, as many movies with much higher body counts do.

"Hush" also refuses to turn the main character's mistreatment at the hands of a monstrous villain into an excuse for all-out, stomach-turning gore -- the kind of thing we saw, or maybe turned away from, in "The Last House on the Left," "I Spit On Your Grave," and other such bloody revenge fantasies. Maddie needs to defend herself, and that does mean trying to harm her assailant, but she isn't a merciless sadist (unlike her attacker). She's just a traumatized woman trying to survive.

At first I questioned the calm note the film ends on, thinking that someone who had been through what Maddie had would be hypervigilant, unable to relax for even a moment, and would make a beeline for the approaching police cars. But, after some reflection, I'm not sure I know what the survivor of such an ordeal would think, feel, or do in its immediate aftermath. I do know that "Hush" provides well-matched opponents, a consistently tense mood, and a resolution that's considerably more satisfying than those of many thrillers that operate on a similar premise.

"XX"

The buzzed-about new horror anthology film "XX" recently made its way to Netflix, and I jumped at the chance to finally see it. Like pretty much all anthologies, it's uneven, but unlike "Holidays," it isn't wildly, maddeningly inconsistent. It's closer to "Southbound" (but not as memorable) and "V/H/S" (but not as scary). Creepiest: "The Box," which will surely join the new (non-horror) Marti Noxon film "To the Bone" as part of some film studies course on disordered eating and body image in cinema. Most compelling overall: "Her Only Living Son," which melds a feminist take on single motherhood with the "Something's terribly wrong with Billy" horror subgenre (see also: "Joshua," "The Omen," etc.).

Not every film in the set packs a wallop, but all show signs of having been made thoughtfully, which is more than one can claim about, say, Kevin Smith's awful contribution to the aforementioned "Holidays." As all the hype assured us it would, "XX" does showcase some talented/promising female writer/directors in the genre. I was especially pleased to see work by Karyn Kusama, who directed both the excellent "The Invitation" and the unfairly panned "Jennifer's Body." It also leaves out a few notables who might be a great fit for "XX2," including Leigh Janiak ("Honeymoon"), Sarah Adina Smith ("The Midnight Swim"), and Jennifer Kent ("The Babadook").