The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, September 9, 2015 — 5A
By JAMIE BIRCOLL
Daily Film Columnist
I should be upfront: I am
not the biggest Wes Craven
aficionado. So maybe I’m not
the best person to write about
him and the horror genre
that he helped elevate into a
unique combination of art and
commercial filmmaking over
a 20-year period. Still, in the
few films of his I have seen, I’ve
found something creative yet
manipulative, self-deprecating
but dead serious, terrifying and
downright funny. Craven is a
unique director for a unique
genre, and sifting through the
pools of blood and gore that
smother his films, I have come
to recognize just what it means
to watch a horror film.
In my experience, filmgoers
split down the middle in a love-
it-or-hate-it sort of way in their
appreciation of horror, but I
have more of a hate-that-I-
love-it mentality. I was exposed
to horror films at a young
age and they messed with my
head, really badly. When I was
eight or nine, after I saw “The
Shining,” I thought every time
I turned a corner , some eerie
twin girls would stop me in my
tracks and stare me down. And
after “The Sixth Sense,” I knew
I would one day wake in the
middle of the night to the creak
of a floorboard and slowly open
my eyes only to see a sickly pale
ghost as she vomits on the floor.
These thoughts haunted me,
scarred me for years, but still
I would watch and shiver and
jump, then watch some more.
I realized I loved the thrill of
it all, the sensation of my heart
pounding heavier and faster
with each passing second as the
protagonist slowly walks down
a
darkened
hallway,
floors
screeching as if warning him
to turn away, the camera still,
stalking the character. And
I loved the jump scares that
pumped me with energy, like
John Travolta just stabbed me
in the chest with an eight-inch
needle of adrenaline.
But when the lights come up
and the energy dies down, you
leave the safety of the theater;
it’s the real world now, a world
with its own monsters and
unexplained phenomenon. And
sometimes you feel like you’re
being watched, sometimes you
feel like you’re being followed.
“It’s just a movie,” you tell
yourself, so why do you feel so
disturbed?
At least, that’s how I felt —
still feel — when I watch horror
films. They infect my brain like
a cancer, send terror down my
spine — I’ll feel a hand brush
against my shoulder, I’ll hear a
faint sound, a whisper. I turn
but nothing is there. They mess
with my mind: it’s a pretty
unique effect.
There’s an art to terror, to
digging under the skin to tap
into a primal fear. The director
must take a seemingly ordinary
event and twist and deform
it into something physically
or morally wrong, sometimes
both at once, but make it at
least
somewhat
believable.
Sometimes that manifests itself
in a zombie apocalypse, as in
George Romero’s “Night of the
Living Dead.” Sometimes it’s
a scientist’s experiment gone
horribly wrong as in David
Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” or a
chameleonic alien that invades
a settlement on Antarctica like
John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”
But
with
all
of
those
aforementioned
films,
the
protagonists
happen
upon
these monsters and situations:
an
alien
just
happens
to
crash land on Antarctica, the
characters just happen to be
at the mall when the zombie
apocalypse starts. These are all
outside scenarios from which,
theoretically, you could run. In
“A Nightmare on Elm Street,”
Wes Craven did something
different — something twisted.
He made the subconscious,
dream itself, the battleground.
Think about it: the one safe
place in this insane world, the
one place where you can find
solace and peace and absolute
freedom becomes corrupted,
cruel, evil. You can neither run
nor hide from sleep. Craven
turns it against you; every
waking hour marks one step
closer to sleep, to death.
In
“Elm
Street”
the
characters’
happiest
dreams
devolve,
descend
into
Hell
itself, Freddy Kreuger’s boiler
room: we feel the heat burning
off the screen, the screeching of
metal on metal pierces our ears.
And suddenly there is Freddy in
the shadows, taking his sweet
time, toying with his victims,
torturing them. And then he
tears them apart.
In his best films, Craven made
the enemy not some unknown,
foreign entity like an alien or a
zombie. The enemy always lives
close to the protagonist in some
way: dreams in “Elm Street,”
classmates
and
boyfriends
in “Scream.” And that makes
it
personal,
because
the
protagonist’s safety – our safety,
becomes
threatened.
Those
fears remain after the film ends
— it’s the stuff nightmares are
made on.
And though many of his
films have lost much of their
punch with the desensitization
that
naturally
occurs
with
the passage of time and the
improvement of new effects
and techniques, there remains
something
profoundly
disturbing in them. I know
this because the night before I
wrote this column, I watched
“A Nightmare on Elm Street”
immediately before sleep; it
was not a particularly restful
one. Maybe I just scare easily
(though I’d like to think not),
but maybe the film holds up,
too.
For better or worse, Wes
Craven made films that stuck
with me, and that’s all I can
really ask from a film. Sure there
are days when I need to kill some
time, so I watch a run-of-the-
mill action or comedy movie, but
in general, if I’m investing my
time, I want to gain something
from it. Wes Craven didn’t teach
me any lessons; he didn’t help
me learn anything about myself
beyond a tolerance for spilled
blood, but he did scare the shit
out of me, a lot; those images
of a young Johnny Depp being
devoured by his mattress and
regurgitated as a pool of blood
or of a lifeless Drew Barrymore
dangling from a tree will forever
remain in my mind.
I think he would consider
that a profound success. I know
I do, because I can still hear it
now: one, two Freddy’s coming
for you …
Bircoll is hiding under the
covers. To send him pictures
of bunnies and sunshine,
e-mail jbircoll@umich.edu.
I can still hear
it now: one, two,
Freddy’s coming
for you ...
FILM COLUMN
Wes Craven, I’ll
see you in my
nightmares
By REBECCA LERNER
Daily Arts Writer
“Do what you gotta do,” says
David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel,
“Sex Tape”) when confronted
with the tape
recorder of his
interviewer.
The recorder is
a physical rep-
resentation
of
the
emotional
divide between
the two men,
as
one
tries
to
present
a
respectable version of himself
and the other has an obligation to
tear him down. The other man is
Rolling Stone reporter David Lip-
sky (Jesse Eisenberg, “American
Ultra”), who chose the assignment
of travelling with Wallace for the
last five days of his 1997 book tour
for Infinite Jest.
Based on Lipsky’s memoir,
Although of Course You End Up
Becoming Yourself, this tale of two
Davids, like both men, is full of
beautiful contradictions. Wallace
has finally obtained recognition
for his work, but with it comes fear
and self-doubt. Lipsky, however,
has also just published a novel, but
the indifferent attention it received
does not compare to the love given
to Wallace’s masterpiece. Lipsky’s
desire to interview Wallace stems
from this jealous admiration, pre-
senting Wallace with a challenge
– to prove himself to the world, but
especially to his fellow writers.
Unsurprisingly, this roadtrip
film is mostly dialogue. But with
James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular
Now”) as director, the aimless con-
versation meanders into the most
compelling of areas. When Lipsky
arrives at Wallace’s snowed-in
house in Illinois, they quickly go
deep into his fears, loneliness and
failure to recognize the greatness
he has achieved. In his cluttered
house with two big affectionate
black dogs, Wallace has built a hid-
ing place from a world that loves
him so much that he even unlisted
his phone number.
When they go out on the road,
Lipsky has a chance to immerse
himself in his jealousy. He watches
as Wallace reads to a packed crowd,
appears on public radio and speaks
to Lipsky’s girlfriend on the phone
for almost half an hour. Instead of
basking in this glory, Wallace is
haunted by the same sadness and
loneliness that would provoke his
suicide 11 years later. Segel plays
this side of Wallace with contained
ease. His elusive mannerisms and
subtlety conveys the power of the
man and the tempestuous side that
he tries so hard to hide. Playing
well off Segel, Eisenberg uses his
trademark acrimony to highlight
the false friendship of this inter-
viewer-interviewee relationship.
But the depth of the relationship
goes beyond friendship to admi-
ration, disgust and even close to
hatred. Considering the goof-off
parts that these actors have chosen
in the past, it was a pleasant shock
to see them handle these roles so
thoughtfully.
One of the most interesting
parts of this film is how much
its subject would have hated it.
Wallace’s family has objected to
the movie’s creation, stating that
“David would never have agreed
that those saved transcripts could
later be repurposed as the basis of
a movie.” To be diminished into a
cinematic parody of himself would
be embarrassing to anyone, but for
Wallace, whose self-consciousness
knew no bounds, it would have
been crushing.
So out of respect for Wallace and
his brilliance complemented best
by his “regular guy-ness,” we must
take this film as a vague adaptation
of what he was like. But it’s a fantas-
tic vague adaptation, and it is lucky
to have such a great man at its roots.
A24 FILMS
“They let ME be David Foster Wallace?!? Are you sure???”
‘Tour’ a tour de force
A
End of
the Tour
A24 Films
State Theater
FILM REVIEW