Larry Cohen is one of the great cinematic provocateurs, but Bone is one of his few films worthy of being considered genuinely troubling. Cohen’s films are intrepidly amusing and almost always mischievous with their grasp of truth, but Bone, his debut, tilts normality in a subtler, and ultimately, more forceful manner. In the image of married couple Bill (Andrew Duggan) and Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten) lounging outside by their pool, Bone frames a horridly bland image of bourgeois suburban domesticity. In the image of Yaphet Kotto (Bone) appearing out of nowhere, dressed like an escaped criminal and ready to move to a decidedly more banal prison. Lasciviously grabbing a rat out of the pool, he impishly winks  “you wanna touch it.” The sexual joke is funny, but Kotto’s wryly menacing eyes and shit-eating grin makes it truly uncomfortable in a way that, say, The Stuff simply isn’t, even when the characters are exploding into morasses of liquid sludge. Cohen’s screenplay is working at a higher level than The Stuff because it goes lower, right into modernity’s cloaca.

“Is there anything I can do for you all?,” Bone asks with playful gruesomeness that exposes him as a hilarious perversion of the “magical Negro” stereotype, the black man as cosmic force who intrudes on the normal order of things in order to reveal the middlebrow monotonies and manicured calculations of their bourgeois lives. Rather than salvation, though, the titular Bone offers destruction. He comes not to absolve them of their existence, but to corrode the strictures of their being, to filter their sanity through a prism of psychological erosion. He’s the existential specter they need, a cinematic wraith who emerges, as if out of the liminal undulations of a cinema of the id, the infested impurity of their pool itself, to clarify their fears and catalyze their anxieties. When Bill walks through the city on a mission from Bone, he passes a sign that says “new adult theatre open.” You said it, buddy.

Burn, Witch, Burn, directed by Sidney Hayers and based loosely on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, follows Norman Taylor, a newly appointed psychology professor at a quaint British school whose professional identity rests entirely on self-confidently deconstructing irrational beliefs. An arbiter of post-enlightenment skepticism, he, and his subject position, necessitates that superstition be seen as a relic of primitive, pagan thinking. Taylor’s position reflects a characteristically mid-20th-century confidence in scientific rationalism, a worldview the film subtly interrogates as it evokes the early 1960s – a moment poised between postwar solidity and the creeping resurgence of countercultural forces. To those invested in the sanctified stability of mainstream forms, these new energies seemed to rekindle an occult past that had been only apparently foreclosed by the hegemony of rationalism.

In this film, however, these energies were only superficially dormant, less absent than silently constitutive of the very reason that Taylor grounds his identity in. An identity the film finally destabilizes, disfiguring Taylor’s self-enclosure by slowly exposing the protective influence of his wife Tansy. Her charms, written off by Taylor as trivial superstitions, ultimately prove entirely essential for maintaining the subterranean order beneath the internecine rivalries and bristling anxieties of the modern academic world, which claims that it thrives on order but can clearly not sustain itself without tensions and complexities it must superficially disavow.

When Taylor discovers these threats – in the form of his wife’s protective superstitious charms hidden throughout the house – he destroys them. His sense of self depends on this destruction, but this very act begins to scrap away the veneer of rational stability that had granted this practical man of mid-century academic affairs, and the social structures he represents, legitimacy. These seemingly irrational currents which he must deny are ultimately exposed as the hidden backbone of the system that must excise them to the margins in order to preserve its identity, revealing a science that is more vulnerable, and ultimately more fragmented, than it is willing to admit.