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.

The Black Pit of Dr. M opens on a scientist’s rotting manse, its architecture crumbled and malformed into forbidding Xs: a bare geometry of egotism brought to its knees. When we see the building in its prime, though, its pretensions already seem pathetic. Pivotal early shots of the scientist’s laboratory present the impossible-to-describe location with natural outgrowths hovering just into the frame, fraying the clean edges of this image of modern science failing to keep the forces of nature at bay. The clarity of the frame itself, or rather the lack of clarity, becomes an evocation of the film’s critique of scientific hubris, an insidious reminder about the dangers of “the impossible … always within the realm of the possible.”

When it begins, The Black Pit of Dr. M seems almost fearlessly classical. Its major theme is horror’s ur-concern: the exploration of scientists searching beyond the pale of knowledge. We begin with two esteemed men of science promising one another that when one dies, they will find a way to inform the other about the secrets of death, the mysteries of the universe itself, from beyond the grave. When Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) does indeed pass away, his first ghostly call is to his daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés), a more intimate encounter that will only figure in to the story much later. When Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) is finally visited, though, the elusive nature of their encounter comes with unexpected consequences that expose the fault-lines of his quest to frame the essence of life as a question of rote knowledge of death.

1968 was a year on the edge of eternity, a transformational vortex of social revolution and political stress. Hammer Horror was, to put it kindly, not a company fit to weather the storm. Their moral universe was mostly conservative (in the small “c” sense). Their films, skulking with fiendishly recalcitrant minor currents though they could be, were fundamentally about staving off the forces of darkness, typically equated with dissent. While their films drew new blood from old horror chestnuts, they were very much playing the classics. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, horror cinema became very much contemporary. Anxiety about nuclear catastrophe and new technologies of mass destruction produced modern-set horror films with distinctly present-tense fears. The late ‘60s, meanwhile, would thrash horror into the future: influenced by the post-modern fragments of shattered reality coming from Europe and the acid baths of ‘60s psychedelia, they erupted the social canvas rather than creeping in the background. Hammer Horror’s heyday was in between these channels, the late 1950s and early 1960s, racing against a tide of history that would wash the company into oblivion.

The company’s most adept conduit of that fear was director Terrence Fisher. One of his final films with the company, The Devil Rides Out, is perhaps the paradigmatic ideal of a mainstream British horror film negotiating the Apollonian pull of order and the Dionysian energies teeming underneath society. The film exhibits a brutal, stone-faced rigidity, the product of obvious fear about the world coming undone around it and its own attempts to straight-jacket those tremblings. In its fear, perhaps without intending to, it also gives voice to that uncertainty, becoming a herald of an unquiet society. That it can’t fully appreciate its own tensions, can’t quite admit to its own inner restlessness, is all the more potent a suggestion that it knows the complexities of the world around it, and needs to deny them to survive.

For many film viewers, Ishiro Honda’s legacy rests almost entirely on one film. More populist than the Japanese masters like Ozu or Mizoguchi, less frenetic and frazzled than, say, Seijun Suzuki, and more sober and sophisticated, and thus more chaste, than the exploitation pictures riding in his wake in the 1970s, his films, eminently corporate in their way, can be parsimonious in doling out satisfaction for auteurists looking for the trademark stamp of a recalcitrant, personal touch. Functionally, this means that his straight-and-narrow sensibilities sometimes flatten his oeuvre out for an audience who mostly remember his epochal 1954 celestial howl Gojira and forget that the man who unleashed that scathing, wounded critique on the world had a career lasting several decades. While his style was more streamlined than many other concurrent Japanese directors, Matango serves him well: it boils down his populist horror sensibilities to the bone, perhaps because it is about the streamlining of humanity into a smooth paste of consumerist pulp. While Gojira lets the blood run raw, demanding to be witnessed in all its sublime monstrousness, Matango cauterizes the wound, slowing things way down for examination. And then it picks at the scab. It simmers down the former’s cosmic canvas of international panic for a seven-person cast waywardly trapped on a forgotten island of the soul.

Released a decade after Gojira, Matango depicts a recovering Japan, or one that never actually bothered to ask what genuine recovery would mean. It begins with a newly resurgent, distinctly modern bourgeoisie, twenty years on from the war and, apparently, relatively untroubled by and weathered from the immediate shock of absolute destruction. Although we know, beforehand, who the designated “survivor” of this story is, there’s little sense in which psychology professor Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo) is a protagonist, other than being slightly more level-headed than the other characters, all of whom, finally, prove susceptible to the call of another life beyond the one humanity has made for itself. Each, in their way, is entirely amenable to the siren song of a scientific homogeneity that presents itself as a radical otherization but, in fact, simply marks the blasé hollowness they’ve already accepted as their daily livelihood.

Early on in Roadgames, Patrick Quid (Stacey Keach), a lonesome truck driver presently cutting a path across Australia’s perilous and forbidding Nullarbor, is wasting away. The unmoving, apocalyptic expanse of pitiless landscape refracts the fatalistic hopelessness of his unceasing existence. The night before, he nearly missed an opportunity to pick up a nameless hitchhiker (Angie La Bozzetta) on the road and to preempt the man (Grant Page) who did. In the meantime, we’ve witnessed that man, face still unseen, emerge from a steamy shower and slowly creep up on the hitchhiker from behind as she plays a guitar, the camera cutting just at the moment he seems primed to strangle her with piano wire. Soon enough, Patrick will pass the hitchhiker on the road, mysteriously burying something in trash bags in the outback. Because we haven’t seen him, and because Quid only sort of wants to see what the man is up to via his binoculars, and because writer-director Richard Franklin was a protégé of the late Alfred Hitchcock, we can’t miss that we’re suddenly being strangled by a Rear Window riff.

Strangled, I wrote, and technically Roadgames concerns whether this strange other man did in fact kill the woman. But Roadgames is also Hitch liberated, set out on parole, adrift in the cosmic reflecting pool that is the open frontier of the Outback. Indeed, quicker than you can say “The Trouble with Harry,”or “Frenzy,” Roadgames reveals itself as a murderously ironic deflation of Hitch’s own icy brutality, a film that isn’t really interested in tightening around us but in suspending us over a void. While Brian De Palma was twisting Hitchcock’s voyeurism and autoerotic exploration of mastery and impotence into increasingly perverted, masochistic spaces in the early ‘80s, director Richard Franklin (who would next direct a sequel to Hitchcock’s seminally serpentine Psycho) unravels Hitch. Instead of tightening the vise, Roadgames fills the parched purgatory of the Outback with a mordant, off-kilter mischievousness, moving us from episode to episode as it proposes a kind of wry question: can a hang-out road movie, with its vague digressions and ambling waywardness, become the template for a claustrophobic thriller?

Latching onto Hitch’s self-amused self-mockery, Roadgames turns Hitch’s sardonic undercurrent of wry malevolence into a bone-dry comedy of missed communication, not so much between the people in the film but between the film and us. To that extent, Roadgames refers more to the game the film is playing with us than the game the characters play with each other. We aren’t privy to some conspiratorial match between one malevolent force and an unsuspecting everyman, one in which the character’s lack of knowledge exposes the void around us. In this case, the force is the film, and we are the everymen, unprepared for how disinterested this film is in thrilling us, how little it seems to want to use and abuse us and how comfortable it is drifting about. It seems to be doing everything in its path to not transform into the horror film it has generally been advertised as. It is paradoxically not by treating us as Hitchcockian playthings, puppets of a camera impresario, that the film is really having its way with us. Franklin twists the knife in by taking it out, letting the wound breathe and the entrails flail all over the ground.

Early in Anthony Mann’s seriously neurotic and starkly severe Reign of Terror, a sinister hand excretes from the border of the frame and reaches up to choke the man we have thus far assumed to be our protagonist. The camera suggestively observes who we take to be our hero in a mirror’s gaze while an unknown assailant stabs the man in the back. Within a minute, this film not only reintroduces the man wielding this phantasmic appendage as our real hero but shatters the accepted vision of historical cinema that would believe in clear gazes and untroubled viewpoints to begin with. Both Orwellian and Wellesian, this is a historical anti-epic that entirely disfigures historical cinema’s own panoptic “epic-ness.”  It erects an edifice of cramped people who can barely see where they’re going down the cloistered, blinkered hallway of history. If cinema often promise to reflect the past to us, Reign of Terror offers an ever-cracking mirror.

Poetically, this marks Reign of Terror as a hell of a text, not a milquetoast, straight-laced historical suit-and-tie but a full-on expressionist straight-jacket.  Politically, it means that the film has little use for historical grandstanding, and that its politics can verge on drowning revolutionary potential – the hope of a genuinely better world – in a swamp of what passes for “complexity” but may simply be confusion. Released in 1949, Reign of Terror is a transparently fearful text. It is a Cold War casualty fully in line with the politics of the time. Its opinion is that revolution is often more foolhardy than not. It resonates with what Lionel Trilling would call the liberal imagination’s fear of dogma and its metaphysics of calibrated uncertainty, Isaiah Berlin’s appreciation of “negative liberty” as a bulwark against what he perceived to be the excesses of totalitarian solidity, and Hannah Arendt’s belief that the Soviet revolution was merely an extension of the French Revolution’s inevitable slide into dictatorial control. The film’s portrait of Maximilien Robespierre is as a self-important monomaniac exercising autocratic dominion, a God-like puppet-mater who calmly intones things like “I made the mob. They are my children, they won’t kill their own father.”

Yet Reign of Terror evidences a deliriously morbid, at-times nearly erotic fascination with death regardless. It is conservative, in the small-c sense, but Reign of Terror is also troubled and tormented in a way that is never less than fully fascinating. While the “history film,” in 1949 as it does now, promises an unceasing access, a panoptic gaze, Reign of Terror turns the limits of its micro-budget production into a boon to its imagination, warping conspiratorial gloom into noirish modernism. This is a history with precious little stable ground, and whatever it lacks in moral clarity, it recovers in aestheticizing the experience of having your sense of historical meaning – of history as a divine arc – swept out from under you. Heroes who seem like dark angels partitioning the frame later feel like shadowy wraiths ready to do away with us.

A special holiday addition of midnight screenings, for mother.

In one of cinema’s more fortuitous twists of fate, Psycho II is essentially a re-adaptation of 1964’s Straight-Jacket, William Castle’s Psycho rip-off that, itself, only relied on the concept of Psycho to drastically reconfigure its thematic texture and imaginative logic. Like that film, Psycho II ruminates on the tortured pull of past, on whether cycles of violence inextricably perpetuate themselves or whether they diffuse and eventually decay, whether they emanate from individual souls or via cycles of society, as the unfortunate tragedy of vicious circumstances, or as the unknown endpoint of some sort of cosmic gravitational pull. Like Castle’s film, Psycho II can only play silly for long before revealing its secret: it genuinely cares about the soul of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the troubled man who, twenty-five years before, murdered a few trespassers and cleaved linear cinematic storytelling in half along with them. Under the sway of Norman’s own psychological self-splitting, Hitchcock proposed that the medium itself could not stand stable anymore.

Psycho II bristles with the consequences of that history. It trembles with disquiet not at the murderous power of a seemingly self-composed man but at what it would mean to put himself back together again, to recompose the soul of a broken man. In the original film, Bates was essentially a cipher for a fragmented world. This film posits that the society unleashed by that world does not want him to find a home in it, that it would rather ossify its instabilities in him than acknowledge them as distinctly social distortions. This film’s portrait of Norman is not a malevolent individual force. He is a lost soul tormented by unseen energies he cannot name in a film trapped by a history it does not want to claim.