Village / Cabin / Cemetery
This week, eerie children, a dwell magazine horror, and a graveyard labyrinth (spoilers for the first, light spoilers for the rest) . . .
From the Grave.
Three ideas from horror cinema's past.
◆ Village of the Damned, dir. Wolf Rilla 1960.
- We are the weirdos, mister. Are the blond-headed kids in Midwich with strange eyes and telepathic powers really alien—aliens? There’s speculation that they are, that they result from an “electrical impulse” reaching earth from outer space. And they all seem to have been conceived during an unexplained “timeout” when every person and animal in Midwich fainted. They each have an unnerving, affectless manner. Even so, they’re all born of women. They look like people. There’s even the suggestion that their bizarre powers are in all of us. As one of them, David, tells his “father” Gordon, “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are.” If there’s an unsettling un-humanness to the children, there’s an unsettling humanness too. They seem to be responsible for several deaths in the village, but the violence we see looks self-protective (if over-the-top). We are left with children who are unusually different—but also with a village rejecting difference in ways not unusual at all.
- We have some news. After the “timeout” results in many pregnancies, the people in Midwich are afraid. Some are terrified that they’re pregnant—it's unexpected, it's happened when a husband was out of town, it has no rational explanation. Some are terrified, once the common origin is clear and abnormalities begin showing in tests (e.g. a five-month embryo looks like a seven-month embryo), about their pregnancy. Both kinds of fears, of course, are not unusual. The fears felt in Midwich are heightened and communal—but they're the fears that can often accompany the discovery of a pregnancy and its course. Alien "electrical impulse" or not, this is scary stuff.
- Impositions. We live in an era of wild, computer-powered effects, often used ineffectively. Village of the Damned makes potent use of one the simplest, oldest cinematic tricks: the superimposed image. A psychic struggle between Gordon and the children has a brick wall superimposed over Gordon’s face, and we see it crumbling as the struggle intensifies. Later, when the children are destroyed in a fire, we see their strange eyes superimposed on the image of the burning building, and we watch the eyes drift away. In this latter scene, the superimposed image seems to depict directly a concrete event—alien "souls" dispersing—while the former scene's effect—the brick wall—harnesses a capacity unique to superimposition. The wall makes metaphorical meaning—giving visual form to an invisible struggle.
Right Behind You.
A thought on horror's present.
◆ Keeper, dir. Osgood Perkins, 2025.
- Pleasure under pressure. Osgood Perkins’s Keeper presents a world that’s tempting to sink into. Perkins’s deliberate, weightless camera offers a polished home tour of its cabin in the woods—less Evil Dead, more dwell magazine. Its woods are verdant, its river a gratifying soundtrack. Its needle drops are classic, sweet earworms. The horror in Keeper is in sharp contrast with the sensory pleasures of its world. This is not a new experience in horror, but its intensity asks us to think about how we it makes us feel. How does the balance of pleasure and horror effect us—emotionally and bodily? How do we respond when we feel good, but there's the creeping sensation of horror seeping in?
Living Deliciously.
A recommendation.
◆ Iron Rose, dir. Jean Rollin, 1973.
- Perfect first date. Iron Rose is not for everyone, but if its brilliantly simple concept captures your imagination, it might be for you. A couple on a first date wanders through a cemetery. During an amorous interlude inside a tomb (yes, underground in a tomb), the sun sets. When they surface, they cannot find their way out of the cemetery, which seems to have become a beautiful, misty labyrinth. Aside from the mutating shape of their relationship, there’s not a lot of story here, but its quiet surrealism makes a hypnotic, hypnagogic (soporific for some) experience. Iron Rose is an undeniable oddity, though an unforgettable one. Watch it with a cocktail or project it on the wall at a party.
I'm traveling and away from movies starting today, so there will be no newsletter next week. I'll be back on December 1.
Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. This last week, the federal government focused its immoral immigrant brutalization machine on Charlotte, NC. The moment to resist fascism is now.