for those about to rock

the haunting of me

if you have comcast cable, you're probably familiar with the on demand service, a tivo-style feature that allows you to view a bunch of stored programs and free movies. you can find an awful lot of fun stuff on there, and the number of free movies on tap is surprisingly generous.

so this past saturday night, it was time for a little creature double feature.

first up was the devil's rejects. i remembered hearing some good things about it, and i was hoping i was in store for a fun, freewheeling romp with lots of carnage and a bevy of one-liners as charming as they would be lame.

nope. what i got instead was a movie that plods along, step-for-step, the tracks laid down by the old texas chain movies and spends altogether too much time congratulating itself for delivering debauchery that is neither as effectively shocking nor gruesome as it would have you believe. i do get why horror fan boys would dig the movie and the clear homage it pays via throwback, though, and i have to admit i enjoyed watching bill forsythe once again tear into the role of depraved character with his usual relish, this time playing a self-righteous small town sheriff with a bone to pick with titular characters. looks like diamond dallas page had fun in the small role he played, too.

the second movie was a ghost story called the haunting of julia (aka full circle).

i'm kind of a sucker when it comes to supernatural horror flicks from the seventies. there's something hardwired into this kind of movie that stirs me up on some level ... maybe it's in their soundtracks and the queasy feeling those typically rubbery synths induce, or maybe it's in silences (muted soundtrack, no background noises) that can cause small eternities to seep into your mind, or maybe, at the risk of getting too heady for my own brizzitches if i'm not doing so already, it's in the tint of the visuals, which gives these films' characters and environments a weird verisimilitude.

even a BAD 70s ghost movie can be strangely compelling to me, and the haunting of julia would probably be just that -- a straight from the mold, tepid thriller with forgettable characters and scares coming squarely on the usual beats -- if it weren't for a couple of things:

1 -- mia farrow, who plays julia, is terrifying to look at. only sissy spacek (thinking 'carrie') and shelley duval (thinking 'the shining') could give her a run for her money, and

2 -- the movie is bookended by two incredibly unsettling scenes.

within the first 3 minutes of the movie, we get to watch mia farrow's young daughter choke to death on a piece of apple at the breakfast table. this is an agonizing scene to sit through, and it only gets worse when julia attempts an improvised tracheotomy as a last resort. much of this scene is up on youtube if you'd like to upset yourself.

for the sake of limiting spoilers, i won't get too much into the details of the last scene, but the fact that the majority of users on the imdb page make reference to it is testimony to its power. the camerawork and the final lingering shot that it sets up are gripping, and absolutely worthy of hitchcock.

that last scene is pretty unforgettable, even in spite of my best attempts to do so. see, when i watched it this past weekend, i remembered that i had actually seen it before ... about 20 years ago. when i was around 8, i was flipping through the television channels one day and landed on this last scene as it played out. i was mesmerized, even though (or perhaps because) i was missing the context of having seen the rest of the movie leading up to it. and for a good few weeks after seeing it, i remember, i played it out in my mind over and over again, hoping that chewing on it for long enough would eventually make it lose its terrible flavor.

i guess i managed to bury that memory somewhere down the line, but not so deep that seeing that scene again didn't pull it right out of the grave. it's that affecting.

still, seeing it in context and with maybe a little bit more wisdom under my belt, i was able to detect a poignancy to it (just as some of the folks on imdb have), and, taken in its proper perspective, this boogeyman has finally ceased to be.

posted by jomilkman @ 8:41 AM