Am I a Film Snob Now?

Stuff I'm Thinking About

I’ll admit that one selfish reason for making a Substack was having a reason to type out what I think about the movies I watch, rather than letting those thoughts just burn out in my head. But hear out my argument—I’m a fiction writer, and spend a good portion of my day thinking about stories. Stories that I’m reading, stories in the video games I’m playing, and, of course, stories in the movies or shows I’m watching. That’s the root of my passion, after all, love of the story. So, flimsy as it may be, that’s my excuse to nerd out about what I’m watching.

That and I recently subscribed to The Criterion Channel after waffling on the idea for the last year (the recently added 90s Horror collection was enough to sweeten the deal). But I think, dear reader, or at least I hope that you, too, will find something worthwhile here. And if not, I’ll have another free story next time.

The first movie I watched was Andrew Fleming’s The Craft (1996). I was somewhat familiar with The Craft already, though I hadn’t seen it—I knew the basic plot and what I was getting into. And it seemed accessible, a movie that would let me to slip into the shallow-end of Criterion’s collections. The Craft follows Sarah Bailey, a new-to-town high school student with supernatural abilities. Sarah gets involved with a group of (student) witches, and they start using their newfound power to retaliate against bullies, change their hair, and better their lives. As expected, I found The Craft to be incredibly fun, and was surprised at how vicious the movie gets.

As I watched, the obvious comparison for me was 2004’s Mean Girls—they share some of the same tropes—social tribalism in high school, an outsider integrating into an in-crowd, romance, comedy, yada yada yada. But The Craft is so much meaner, darker. Rochelle’s bully’s hair falling out (deserved though it may be), the attempted rape scene, the witches tricking Sarah into thinking her parents were killed in a plane crash were all pretty affective and intense scenes in what I felt had otherwise been a lighter horror-comedy.

The movie’s a little campy, the soundtrack was cool, and all of the actresses are so good. And Fairuza Balk is cool as hell.

Next, I picked a movie I had never heard of—Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971). Duel is a super spare film based on a Richard Matheson story, in which a salesmen, David Mann, is chased and terrorized by a large, rusted semi-truck. As I watched, I found myself jokingly pitching the movie slightly differently: it’s about a blue-collar union man (or woman! we never really see who’s driving the truck!) humbling a misogynistic yuppie. This isn’t how it goes, of course, the misogynistic yuppie is the movie’s protagonist, but it ends up being an incredibly entertaining ride anyway, and Spielberg, with his very limited budget ($450k), pulls off some really neat narrative tricks.

The majority of Duel is shot on various California highways. With the exception of a few gas stations and a very strong act in a diner, the film’s main focus is a deadly game of tag played between Mann and the truck. The truck. Not the driver. Spielberg goes through great efforts to obscure the truck’s driver in Duel. There are brief moments in which we see the driver’s boots, others in which we see a figure in the truck’s Riverside window, but much of the film’s suspense (and, I’d argue, the dread) comes from the driver’s anonymity.

It feels coincidental that I’m watching Duel not too long after finishing Stephen King’s novella, “Mile 81,” another horror story in which a vehicle becomes a character. This isn’t new territory for King, of course, but it’s something that he does especially well. Like King, I think Spielberg did a really fantastic job making the truck a character without anthropomorphizing. The truck has so much personality—six front license plates, each from a different state; the dirty, blood-red rust; even the menacing “FLAMMABLE” warning printed across the back of the truck’s trailer hints at the vehicle’s volatility.

My favorite act in Duel takes place in a diner and feels like a masterclass in writing paranoid, anxious characters and scenes. There’s a little bit of dialogue, but most of what we hear is Mann’s inner monologue as he spirals deeper and deeper down a hole of anxiety. Mann is at the diner composing himself after the truck runs him off the road. He splashes water on his face and sits down to eat but finds that the truck is now parked, driverless, in the diner’s lot. While he waits for his food, Mann alternates between trying to rationalize the situation and trying to identify which other customer is driving the truck. His thoughts become more and more paranoid, he tries to match customers’ boots with the boots he saw the truck driver wearing, and eventually confronts and (wrongly) accuses a man who then attacks him. The scenes feel so well crafted and simple and efficiently shot, and I loved how uncomfortable and tense it got.

Another scene that I can’t stop thinking about happens early in the movie and seems pretty inconsequential (though it did inspire my pitch). At one point, Mann calls his wife, who is upset because of an argument the night before—Mann did not intervene when a (male) friend was being inappropriate towards her. The scene is short, and the wife and conversation are never resolved or even mentioned again. Probably I’m reading into it too deeply, but between this and a few other character traits in Mann, it sometimes felt like maybe Mann was getting his just deserts. A little puzzling, but fun to think about, and it worked for me. Ever since he wrote it, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lincoln Michel’s post, “The Unnecessary Is the Only Thing Necessary in Art,” which is a response to discourse about unnecessary sex scenes in fiction/movies, but more generally, urges readers to evaluate how they think about art. For me, the unnecessary is what makes fiction real. So much in life is unnecessary, but it can be the unnecessary that makes life rich. And so it goes in art.

The Unnecessary Is the Only Thing Necessary in Art

I also watched Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), which, like Duel, feels pretty minimal. I didn’t really know what I was getting into with this one. Even after watching it, I’m not really sure I know. Aguirre… follows a band of conquistadors searching for the mythical El Dorado, but the story descends into a paranoid fever dream. The lush Peruvian rainforest and tributaries are gorgeous here, a stark contrast to the chaos and violence that orbits Aguirre, and that lends a sense of (literary) naturalism that I really appreciated. The jumpy, shaky filmography helps evoke the uncomfortable, and I really started getting into the film once Aguirre’s descent into madness gets deeper and the more hallucinatory aspects show up, but that doesn’t really happen until the end. For my personal tastes, I would have liked seeing more of that throughout, but alas. I think what’s really going to stick with me after Aguirre is Klaus Kinski’s intense, haunting performance. Unforgettable.

This is a film that probably deserves multiple viewings to truly understand, but unfortunately I caught it on the last day it was available, and I don’t really see myself going out of my way to watch it again soon.

(I planned to only talk about 3 movies here, but I watched John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994) at the same time I’m writing this and it’s whips ass)

A confession: I find H.P. Lovecraft’s prose to be a sedative. The ideas are great (well, you know…), and his particular brand of horror hits a sweet spot for me, but every time I actually read more Lovecraft, I find myself slipping into an REM state. But if every Lovecraft story was adapted into a campy 90s/00s horror movie, I think I’d watch them all. In the Mouth of Madness isn’t technically a Lovecraft adaption, but it’s very obviously in conversation with Lovecraft—the title is an allusion to a novella, and the monsters are obvious homages to Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, tentacles and all. Which is to say, this is a Lovecraft movie. (On a side note, I also recently watched Dagon (2001) which accomplishes much of the same)

It’s campy and the CGI is dated but In the Mouth has some genuinely creepy scenes and a meta apocalyptic ending that’s pretty bleak. It follows John Trent, a freelance insurance investigator, as he searches for a missing horror author, Sutter Cane. Cane’s editor, Linda Styles, joins John, and the two experience a series of surreal incidents while driving through the night in search of Cane. Eventually, Trent and Styles wake up in Hobb’s End, a fictional town from Cane’s books. The town, the people in it, they are all replicas from the fiction. From this point on the movie gets more and more surreal until it culminates in Trent going mad. Yeah, a Lovecraft movie. This was the movie that really made me subscribe to Criterion and it was so worth it.

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In other news, I’m working my way through McSweeney’s new horror issue and it’s fantastic and gorgeous. I mean… look at this—

I’ve really loved everything I’ve read so far, but I particularly enjoyed Mariana Enríquez’ “The Refrigerator Cemetery.” Much of the horror in this story is based in reality, in tragedy, but the supernatural creeps in and the ending left me chilled. Megan McDowell’s translation from Enríquez’ Spanish is fantastic, and the prose is so sharp.

Our last few hex stories have been bangers, too. We published Shome Dasgupta’s “A Shine of the Tin” this week. It’s a beautiful riddle of a story, and I was so stoked to see that people loved it. And the week before that we had the incredible privilege of publishing a new story from (Best Microfiction winning) Parth Shah, “I Once Was a Blanket.” Like “My Uncle Lived in the Future,” Parth’s newest is wondrous and the imagery is so beautiful. And we still have so much in store for you. I’m really excited to share these next few stories (and the next and the next…).

I think that’s about all. I’ll post another story next, maybe something unpublished. Thanks for hanging around if you did, and see you next time.

-Dan

P.S. If you’re into this and you think someone you know would also be into this, please share!