That 1992’s Sleepwalkers was the first film Stephen King wrote directly for the screen is both a promise and an enigma. The idea suggests an unadulterated slab of Stephen King, the pure, uncut thing, untempered by the guiding hand of a translator. Watching the film, though, I can’t say I have any idea of what King thinks cinema is, or what its relationship to the written word is supposed to be. Sleepwalkers is quite a bedeviling monstrosity itself, actually. On one hand, it feels like a shredded expanse, the forced tightening of a larger, deeper, book-length text, the kind of thing that people refer to as the result of badly adapting an “unfilmable novel.” On the other hand, it feels equally like the product of King in the full grips of his drug-infused mania, badly grasping at half-finished ideas before they fade into murky nothingness.

In a literal sense, this film is neither of these. He was sober when he wrote it, and it was not, apparently, based on a larger text. But it feels like both. There are both too many and no ideas within it. It feels both overworked and entirely unfinished. It suggests the offspring of a man in the apparent full command of his own artistic invention who nonetheless doesn’t understand the core of what he has produced. It is a film whose genesis is as opaque as its final state. This is, charitably speaking, not a fully fleshed-out storyline. For all the flesh that gets ripped, shredded, broken, serrated, and corn-cobbed (read on), there’s very little meat on the film’s bones. It has the patina of a man who isn’t quite remembering why he has released this into the world, or where he wants this to go. The film accretes in, and is best remembered in, a fog.

Godmonster of Indian Flats is like its titular creature in more ways than one. It shares its unruly, mercurial nature, its frustrated friction. It comes out of nowhere, from the abyss of an American id, or from some dim region of consciousness. And, above all, it has our souls on its conscience, the weight of the world impressing upon it. This is an alien being, a wonderful cinematic monstrosity that looks and sounds like nothing else, that feels like nothing else, and that was bequeathed to us, lost children in need of salvation, at the twilight of one period of American growth to teach us the error of our ways and offer, in the ugly, beautiful, grotesque, revolting fact of cinema, a shock that might help us see through the darkness, to see our darkness. In spite of it all, the film says, art, with all its misshapen curiosity and lumpy monstrosity, remains.  

But saving us, the film posits, may mean destroying us. Godmonster of Indian Flats projects no beautiful harmony with the earth, no romantic image of art as a channel for grace. It is angry with us, a forgotten creature born unto this earth to witness our failings and prey that we might do better. It is an impossible creature of a film, a truly mad object, the prodigal creation of a nation and the scion of a mad scientist of an artist trying his hand at cinema. Writer-director Frederic Hobbs, was by day a wild bricoleur stitching solar energy and nomadic errantry and mid-century ideas about ecology and technology into something called Art Eco, one of those micro-artistic mid-century forms that resonated with a constellation of ‘60s modes, from the ever-curious, ever-deflationary termite art of Manny Farber to the more purely explosive tornadoes of internal energy produced by Jackson Pollock to the anti-technocratic romanticism of Frank Herbert’s Dune to the collective eulogy for a myopic world that was Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. All of these frameworks, mechanisms of social critique and machine-work for a more humane world, invite us to rethink our relation to the rhythms of the cosmos, to expend less energy, or expend the right energy, to appreciate the irreducibly uncertain nature of reality and the horizontality of our diffuse formations and strange interconnections with one another.

Hobbs’s paintings celebrated this sensibility. His film, however, seems much less sure of our worthiness for salvation. We begin with a spirited journey to the margins of the nation, a group of youths on the path to adventure, “lighting out” to the territories, as they used to say. Cut to them pushing in on the camera, like a zombified parade of the damned, soon driving to nowhere, on the edge of an abyss. Perambulating into an uncertain future, this is the American road trip not as a long night of the soul but a night of the living dead. Promising a bounty of possibility, this Nevada-set film only offers a parched desert permafrost, a harbinger of a national thaw.

If a film could contract tetanus, it would be Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. The people who consider this a lesser retread of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, worse, an unsympathetic revelation of the limits of that earlier film’s imagination, are losing their minds. They are not, as they say, down with Hooper’s peculiar way of rendering the American sickness. This is a nasty piece of work, a cinema of morbid fixations, of the fragile emaciation of the American body as it thought it had been fashioned, and as it was apparently unfashioning itself in the mid-‘70s.

If anything, Eaten Alive is more uncomfortably disconcerting than Texas Chainsaw, more unwilling to privilege accepted divisions between center and outsider, urban and rural, digital and analog. While Chainsaw takes us to the margins of America, Eaten Alive seems to fold center and margin in on one another. While the intrepid heroes of Texas Chainsaw venture into the margins of modern America, out of their comfort zone, Eaten Alive collapses distinctions almost entirely. We move from an apparently urban brothel to the film’s forsaken bayou cottage without any sense of the passage of space or time. The film retroactively seems to be infused with the need to demarcate spaces, as well as the failure to do so, uncannily underlining the limits of American dominance.

The feral fecundity of the early ‘80s slasher boom, before the genre had codified into a morass of corporate nothingness, was ironically a time when the swamp of slasher cinema excreted genuine difference. In the very early ‘80s, slasher cinema could be a metastatic thing, maliciously destabilizing the cinematic body, or simply following whatever ramshackle impulse the people making it happened to divine while making it.

Usually, this meant slightly more competent cinematic products, crafted by thoughtful journeymen who hadn’t yet been conscripted by the reduction of the mold for a quick cash-grab. In the case of Just Before Dawn, it’s closer to the excavating of a cinematic fossil, the discovery of some unfathomable, primordial thing. I’ve been making the comparison between Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre for a decade now, but, apparently, writer-director Jeff Lieberman got to it long before I was born. This is a horror sublime, a transcendental text about the limits and aporias of human transcendence through reconnection with the region one construes as “nature.”

For Anthony Perkins, Henry Jekyll could have been a role to kill for. Going all-in as a malnourished, overworked bastard child of Victorian modernity, he evokes the politically ambiguous high of misplaced hedonism as an individualistic revolt from the demented domesticity of modern life. He is a fugitive Dionysian, alive to the otherness beneath the mundane, attentive to the constrictions of the society that bred him. Perkins was promised a beautiful career in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, an offer undone by being a mainstream outsider. His rise reflected a youth-obsessed America where inner resistance took the form of unleashing libidinal anima, a compulsive frustration bristling at the complacency of the world and the unearned hubris of a nominally maintained composure. Now at the end of his life, having spent decades lost in the fugue of modernity, Perkins plays Dr. Jekyll as the man who didn’t, a soldier of scientific progress who went right into the middle of the road and who, in a sudden flash of dark discovery, realizes what accepting one’s otherness might have looked like. In one of his final roles before his HIV diagnosis, he allows his body to summon the dangers of a science unable to acknowledge its inattention to humanity.

Essayed in Edge of Sanity, he’s a diagonal man, a cracked mirror of a fellow who seems to sidle easily through the canted angles of the camera and the warped streets that are refractions of an askew personality. His character is an outsized parody of heterosexual culture lost in a frenzied, foggy haze between its inner energies and the norms policing its modes of expression. Jekyll’s laboratory is an antiseptic, an encasing emptiness that, lit with soap opera luminescence, makes the height of modern knowledge look all the cheaper and more artificial, no honest way for a soul-bearing human to make a living. Mr. Hyde’s life, conversely, is scintillating and sensual, a toxic deluge of rampant feelings and sinister, Dionysian urges run amok over societal pretension and uncritical domesticity. He’s Adamic, an incantatory vision of a new man as a sidewinding flaneur who smuggles in individual lust as a contraband craving for knowledge, an impulse for truth beneath the calcifications of middlebrow culture.

Murder by Decree begins with a somewhat staid, formalistic opera scene, something that could feel at home in any prestige-caked period piece. Just as the viewer is being lulled into a historical stupor, the film intercuts a POV shot of an apparent killer on the path to fresh meat. It’s not just a juxtaposition but an incision. The film sneaks up behind us to cut our throat. Just as we feel straightjacketed by bourgeois society, Murder by Decree unleashes its repressed id.

We are reminded that the name on the tin is Bob Clark, here repurposing one of his most famous, fiendish cinematic innovations, the Steadicam killer-POV from Black Christmas. Clark, on the path to the milquetoast ‘80s triviality of his later works, has recast his passage from scabrous social critic to mundane social chronicler into a single-scene conundrum. It’s as if his earlier style – lacerating, lonesome – is here present not as the bones of the film but the invasive species. The conformist, commonplace mausoleum of a film style Clark would soon adopt has been ransacked by the live energy of his younger self, a dangerous outsider wandering the Canadian wilderness and scouring for signs of decay. The dark flight of the killer signals a disruptive force, the intrusion of a homeless, cast-aside horror film into the propertied world of a mainstream costume drama. Clark, precipiced between his earlier cinema and his later cinema, turns the very tipping point between them not only into a return of his own repressed cinematic past, but, when we eventually come to question which figure – the lone killer or the structure of decorum – is able to cause more harm, a moving meditation on the limits of the horror genre itself. If we’re so afraid of a killer stalking modernity’s streets, the film ponders, will we recognize the violence of the men who built them?

American Gigolo is usually described as a key neo-noir text. It strikes me as a kind of anti-noir, not a text that skirts the shadows of a seemingly bright modernity but a film that has accepted how the shadows themselves aren’t as threatening when the light is so obviously hollow. American Gigolo treats noir as banal, unequipped for the violence of the modern world. This is a world that has made peace with its shadows and lacquered them in a façade of beauty.

The key moment, to me, is an encounter where protagonist Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) accosts a threatening conspirator in front of a movie theater, dwarfed by a poster of The Warriors. If that film was the apotheosis of the New York of Schrader’s most famous script, Taxi Driver, murder as a spontaneous, bodily, nocturnal emission, this film is L.A. warfare: cold, calculated, and all-too-mechanical. That 1979 film cavorts with denizens of a social netherworld, caged creatures of a modern void looking to escape it in ways they haven’t fully fathomed. They lived by the images they paint on, the masks they wear, second skins as authentic selves. They form entire sub-cultures, leaping into jeans and leather pants and each other’s personal spaces with the ramshackle, reaching energy of unbridled youth. The Warriors pounces on everything. American Gigolo is always knowingly keeping a distance from itself, aware that it lives in a world that is completely alienated from itself. It can only live in that gap, slowly stalking prey that gets trapped in the space between truth and fiction.

Kaye, too, is being stalked by this film. He is rendered background, wallpaper, a hastily-put-together man of disposable, posable parts sitting with leering torso images behind him. “You were frameable,” Bill Duke brutally intones near the end of the film, something the text wisely never underscores as double entendre, but it’s clearly the governing motif of the film’s mise-en-scene. A key image of him looking at himself in the reflection of a chic print writes his fate in an image. Gere’s Kaye is a walking specter of a person here, a mannequin violently controlling his self-image, manicuring every moment until he finds himself lost in an honest-to-God narrative outside his control. The trouble is that, while the narrative he steps into has its sights set on him, it is also very much the world he wants to inhabit.

Surfaces shape this narrative. They both bind it and unravel it. Kaye is a high-priced male escort for upper-class older women whose life funds and determines his lifestyle, a mode of being that he protects with a devotional fervor that borders on divine ardor. Yet he seems essentially opaque, a blank space whose zealotry is unthinking. It’s hard even to call it blind belief. He doesn’t seem to believe anything, and his reaction to being framed for a murder entangled in his work is less anger than robotic curiosity, as though saving his name is simply his automatic response to the machinery of his world being interrupted. Kaye is little more than a cog of the machine working to set itself right.

In a sense, it’s not much of a narrative then. There’s little contingency or chance. It’s a mood pretending to be a narrative, mocking us with how little is really going on in the story we’re being told to watch out for, and how much is being slipped in between the frames. The camera looms from above, something Schrader would metastasize in his next film, 1982’s Cat People. But here it evokes less a negligible line barely covering a nebulous depth – a thin strand holding a black hole at bay – than a flat, planar surface with no depth at all. It seems to watch, from above, as the world empties itself out of possible meaning. Light tries to peek in, but shutters, also from above, break up the illumination into violent black and white lines, silently fractalizing Kaye into light and shadow, deconstructing him into his component parts. The light through the blinds seems to be breaking the facade apart, fissioning the image of the man into pieces, and he either doesn’t know how to respond or can only cope with it by doubling-down on his alienated sangfroid.

The film is, in this respect, not unlike The Warriors after all. Walter Hill and Paul Schrader were two of the bastard children of the New Hollywood movement, birthed within it but in search of their other forebears, namely the chilly art-house ennui of European avant-garde cinema. The dominant texture of the ‘70s New Hollywood was spontaneous, cobbled-together, and live-wire, a vision of brutal and ragged reality tearing through the façade papering it over. Men like Hill and Schrader fold in a cryptic and impressionistic gaze that seems unsure of what breaking through the images that consume them might really mean. These directors engage modernity’s conundrums not with the ravenous, mischievous human vivacity of the ‘70s directors but with a near-apocalyptic loss of self. Where earlier films unleashed something vital and rotten underneath the surface of an apparently accepting, compassionate society, American Gigolo is all surface.

Thus, the film is all tone and texture, a collective act of stylistic theft in which the depth of the text, the possibility of a world with layers, is stolen by a cabal of conspirators insisting on the emptiness beneath their efforts. Giorgio Armani’s costumes are stark and warmly forbidding, inviting but entrapping like a Lycra straight-jacket. Ferdinado Scarfiotti’s cannily controlling production design is an open-air prison. Most devious of all is Giorgio Morodor, a man who would help redefine a decade of cinema music by turning to smooth, brittle sounds lost between analog pasts and digital futures. Here, they mark the film as a febrile commentary on modernity itself. Even the exquisite Greek Chorus of Blondie’s “Call Me” feels like an ambivalent, absolutely iridescent refrain: how much can the film do with so little, and is this a manifesto of artistic imagination or a statement of creative death?

Gigolo is too good a film to not make the case for imagination, but it requires serious moral rectitude, one that, Schrader suggests, isn’t going to come easy.  In the film’s final scene, one woman sacrifices everything that her life has been building to, her entire social and public image, for a moment of personal grace. Whether or not Julian has come to understand the value of this sacrifice, after all he’s been through, remains a question mark. Putting their hands on a glass protrusion between them, one surface that finally, explicitly literalizes their separation from one another, they try to transform a canvas of alienation into a forge of redemption, a zephyr of personal authenticity to cut through the surfaces that is nonetheless formed by those very surfaces. In a deliciously ambivalent frisson, Schrader asks whether the image itself can become a weapon of something that looks quite a lot like absolution, at least on the surface.

Score: 9/10

Whatever else can be said about Paul Schrader’s 1982 adaptation of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 shadow cat of the same name, it is a wonderfully interesting film of contradictory textures, a fiendish, feral text that is also a cold and mercurial thing. It feels like looking at fog condense on glass: a text of lustful energies clamped down on hard. Its director, Paul Schrader, so abstract and theoretical in his inclinations, is perhaps the worst man to take up the original’s suggestively cinematic mantle, but his discomfit benefits the material. He seems fundamentally alienated from this film. The camera floats around the humid streets of New Orleans like a disembodied spectre, or a trail of smoke. Ethereal and animalistic, the film feels like it could either diffuse into the atmosphere or lash out at our throats and splinter in our eyes at any moment, like it either wants to dissipate from this world or to seek revenge on us for bringing it into being. Much like its central protagonist, this Cat People seems unsure of its own ability to settle down in the world it depicts.

For a film so adrift and evanescent, to have a director so tortured by the limits of human freedom in the world, and perhaps so uncertain of his own capacity to exist in that world, ends up being an oddly perfect fit. Schrader’s points of ingress into the material are so esoteric. Here is a man who really never has anything to say about gender adapting a seminal text of feminist (or anti-feminist, depending on your analysis) horror. The screenplay by Alan Ormsby, the unsung, nefarious accomplice of horror director Bob Clark in the mid-‘70s, implies that the original was also a film about alienation more broadly (of obvious interest to Schrader), about one’s attempt to create oneself in the world and finding oneself occupying spaces with thick histories that one feels fundamentally disconnected from. Finally, the material becomes a folktale, an age-old fable about our un-fitness for a world we can’t refuse.

Cat People begins in America’s most exceptional – as in, abnormal –  city, New Orleans, essayed here as a sort of old-world summoning, a place out-of-time and, thus, the only space in which protagonist Irena (Natassja Kinski) might feel home. Recently transplanted to the U.S. in search of her estranged brother Paul (Malcolm McDowall), she finds herself in a phantasmagoria of thoroughly uncoupled spaces. Schrader sees the city as America’s closest linkage to European sensibilities but frames the tension between America and Europe as a subterranean pressure fissuring the film apart at the seams. Geography seems to break again and again. Within a cut, we’ve moved from seemingly antediluvian scaffolding barely holding chthonic forces at bay to a confrontation with a grotesque caricature of Marilyn Monroe. Another cut, and we’re in a thoroughly unclarifiable building that looks like a gaudy, iridescent Emerald City castaway (marking this film as a darker cousin to Coppola’s One From the Heart and beating Lynch’s Wild at Heart absurdist Wizard of Oz by nearly a decade), before finding ourselves hovering over a candy-coated floorboard, as though we’re witnessing a polymorphous Americana’s dreams of itself. John Bailey’s cinematography is phenomenally suggestive: lurid giallo colors washed out into hazy afterimages, like the fire of hell dulled but expanded by the passage of time into a smoky effusion forever suspended between states of being, drifting between kinds of matter. One of the most sensual sequences occurs in an airport, perhaps the most liminal of spaces, but this is always a film travelling from station to station.

The first two minutes of The Tall Target are more inventive than the entirety of any average Best Picture Oscar winner. The credits creep slowly but surely, with a stately, methodical gait evoking both a reportorial matter-of-factness – a ripped-from-the-headlines present-tense – and a fatalistic timelessness, as though whatever is about to happen is on an inexorable march to eternity. This credit crawl tells not of a galaxy long ago and far, far away that still feels like the future but, rather, a century of American history compressed into the tightest cloister and pushing, like a piston, right up against America’s present.

The train on which the film is set functions as a kind of metaphor for modernity itself: an intersection of inevitability and contingency that marks the vehicle as both a beacon of an imminent, impending, unavoidable modernity and, paradoxically, a herald of an uncertain world and a country whose obsession with national redemption and unearned consensus had been fissured and cracked open.

The Man from Planet X is certainly not the greatest work of director Edgar G. Ulmer, but it may be his greatest work. The Black Cat and Detour are stone-cold minimalist masterpieces. The former is an enigmatic, lacerating post-mortem of World War I’s phantasmagorical hold on the 20^th century, a past that was no past at all. The latter is a soul-crushing existential excavation of an aimless present, a portrait of mid-century Americana going around and around to nowhere. Man from Planet X turns the dial forward to a new decade and a new set of concerns: a ‘50s film about ’50s anxieties done up in ‘50s Poverty Row ramshackle-ness, a sci-fi potboiler about an alien creature lost amidst foreign souls. This being, the titular Man from Planet X, has nothing to survive on: he can’t even communicate with anyone around him, yet he manages to command dozens of people nonetheless. This abject outsider, working with nothing yet exercising unexpected power nonetheless, could be a melancholic echo of Ulmer himself, and his alienated entity of a film.

Perhaps the most primordial display of his talents, The Man from Planet X stands, literally, on only Ulmer’s skill and nothing more. This film barely exists, and its bareness is poetic, a mise en abyme of reality laid bare, an abyss with absolutely nothing up its sleeve. “Yet they have a grim beauty of their own,” a character remarks, and you can see Ulmer’s dejection about his career trajectory slowly etch into a grin at a description of his own oeuvre.