Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide feels like a strange dispatch from a cinematic mist that was and a gathering darkness that would be. It emerges out of that odd schism called the early ‘60s cinematic landscape, at once an ephemeral phantom of noir and an early tremor of the new uncertainty called the New Hollywood. It has a loose, oneiric, wandering sensibility that was a distant descendant of French poetic realism and its American poverty-row counterpart, the cinema of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. At one point, the camera tracks through a forsaken coastal town bar and exposes a Night Hawks for the post-Old Hollywood generation, a community of aimless men and women in perpetual passage from one place they’ve been and another they’re going, adrift between a cinema of the past and a cinema not yet. When Dennis Hopper’s Johnny Drake walks down a flight of stairs, his journey is elongated by the camera into a passage into a new realm. He is in flight to a desire that he cannot contemplate, and a love he is both waiting for and not ready to contemplate, much as Hopper himself would become a poster child for the untold inner chaos of a psychedelic cinema that American cinema couldn’t yet formally imagine, as of this film’s release year of 1961, but which seem to haunt this text like a ghost from the future, a fate Night Tide is inevitably building toward. Like its protagonist Drake, like the doomed woman Mora (Linda Lawson) he falls for, Night Tide seems trapped between other things. It is liminal cinema par excellence.

A man lurches into frame from the side, and a declamatory text card threatens us with both the immanence of a thoroughly violent stranger and the danger of a thoroughly didactic film. But while the 1953 crime drama The Hitch-Hiker loudly proclaims its message in the first minute, the film as quickly abstracts itself into a slurry of chaotic uncertainty. As if recognizing its own apparent obviousness, The Hitch-Hiker soon descends into a fog of poetic gestalts. Ambling feet wandering down the road. A scream. A flashlight on a car. Two dead bodies, their faces invisible, in a postmortem tableau. Lights like strange forces in the desert, and then a car. We’re told what and how to think and who to watch out for, but director Ida Lupino still finds ways to project the disorientation of the world on the disquiet of the screen. The title freezes over an image of a gun, with the words “the filmmakers present” over it. This is a pistol whip of a film, a raw, steel shot that festers like tetanus.

The Southwestern desert, as many scholars have claimed, lingers in the cultural imaginary as an otherworldly region of the mind, a relatively unclaimed invitation to possibility as well as a brutal crucible where the supposed iron-clad reality of the rule of law is tested and contested, exposed as a harsh, shifting ground beneath presumptuous displays of harmony. The Hitch-Hiker, fully aware of this ambiguity, is a rural noir that doesn’t submerge us in the cloistered chaos of a city but into a netherworld that once feigned as America’s frontier heaven on earth. Beware of wanderers, the film suggests, but the highway road seems to imply that we’re all wanderers in this nebulous world.

Watching the cinematic adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, it’s hard not to feel the ripple of James Baldwin’s and Ralph Ellison’s critiques of the celebrated author. For Baldwin and Ellison, although they never fully shunned their forebear, they claimed that Wright was a merely “sociological author,” one who was too invested in a mechanical image of African Americans as an environmental distillate, or those of subsequent critics who emphasize the way he can only imagine unmodulated oppositions between protagonist and environment.

But Wright’s was a moral materialism, a tragicomic vision of the heroic quest to survive in a brutal and unforgiving world that weaponizes us against ourselves and metastasizes even those avenues we prepare for our liberation as new modes of oppression. Wright’s friend and fellow author and expatriate Chester Himes ambiguously and unresolvedly labelled this “the notion”: that trick which mutates the impulse toward freedom into a mechanism of control, that turns desires for agency into easily manageable fantasies of command and dominance that are alternatives to real power.

Native Son cannot escape the notion. It doesn’t offer much, really, and it is more of a curio than a fully fleshed out feature film. As a protest against society, its modes of vocalization are somewhat superficial. As an artistic statement, it is wan and limited. Its failures, however, are not those of a mute cog in a machine or a prophet of resignation, but of a film, perhaps unaware of itself, producing itself as an avatar of its own limits. Native Son cannot escape the world around it. What it can do is visualize its own entrapment.

With The Wizard of Gore, cinematic raconteur Herschell Gordon Lewis created both his ideal interpreter and his own undertaker. The titular Wizard, Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager), is both a carnival barker of cinematic proportions, a canvas for Lewis to voice his own frustrations, and a self-destructive, film-killing force. He embodies cinema’s life-force – the illusion of reality presented for us – and its death-drive – its interest in peering back beyond the illusion, exposing itself before us.

Early on, when Montag cuts a woman’s head off in what is apparently an illusion, her head falls off, and in a dissolve, we see the bloody stump, before the camera starts spinning around like a washing machine, which becomes Montag himself, joining with and celebrating his whirlwind of spectatorial dismemberment. He then conjures a flower that kind of looks like the bloody stump, just for kicks. Cinema, scholars have long noted, is a magic trick, an art form that works to convince us of its own holism and to hide the seams that render it a singular, internally-bonded object rather than a collection of disparate footage. The problem of a filmed magic trick, of course, is that the filmmaker can edit the trick together, making it all too easy to convince the audience and, thus, all the more difficult.

And yet! Lewis still cannot get the job done. When Montag performs the trick, the film’s editing is simply not up to the task of “convincing us” that what we’re seeing is anything like real magic. At every stage, the film’s cut from prop to person, object to another object, is so glaringly obvious that the film’s credibility crumbles before us. Lewis’s film is awful, essentially incompetent anti-cinema, a true travesty of the contract that cinema makes with its audience, its promise of an authentic, self-same, cohesive entity presented before us as an unquestioned reality. The Wizard of Gore completely fails itself within the first scene.  

But what if it also transcends itself? The Wizard of Gore musters the absolute bare minimum of effort – making the film “about” magic basically makes it obvious for the audience – that it seems to ask us whether the legitimacy of the magic-film comparison can survive on sheer charisma. This film has absolutely no game. It is an entirely guileless object, a work that presents its ideas with the cunning of a five-year-old. But what, the film wonders, are other movies really doing that this one isn’t?

Despite its sterling pedigree, Intruder is an unjustly forgotten late ‘80s slasher, the unfortunate victim of a genre in the process of cannibalizing itself to death, even if the entrails produced something as deliciously necrotic as this. A kill crazy picture that is both too straightforward to qualify as experimental and too grimy, strange, and exploratory to qualify as pure trash, it’s the Skid Row of slashers, a terrific product that is mostly content to color within the lines but does so with too much elan and energy to write off easily. Despite the slippery, nervy direction and sinister, potent script by Scott Spiegel, who co-wrote Evil Dead II and clearly learned a thing from Sam Raimi (who appears here in a small role), and the co-production by Spiegel and Laurence Bender, who would soon translate this film’s playfully macabre spirit into producing Reservoir Dogs and then several later Tarantino films, Intruder has not lingered in society’s imaginary at all.

That’s the world’s loss, but it also makes the film all the more conniving and conspiratorial, a cinematic wolf in sheep’s clothing. Despite lacking the obviously labored-over dialogue and post-modern narrative chicanery of Bender’s future productions, Intruder nails the nervous exhilaration of Tarantino’s first film. While it lacks anything like a gimmick or a concept worth a damn, indeed while it may seem to lack even a film on paper, Intruder radiates euphorically disreputable, gloriously low-concept energy. It’s sloppy and basically empty on the surface, and while that diagnosis is technically correct, the film knows how to sneak up on you while you’re overlooking it. It’s a shiv of a movie pretending to be a meat cleaver.

And shiv it does, even before the cleaving starts. Even before the nominal killer enters the late-night supermarket that serves as the film’s combination morgue and display case, this is phenomenal stuff. Spiegel introduces us to the supermarket on a trolley of the damned, the camera being carted beyond its control into an open-air consumerist prison. The camera then cuts to the outside world, presented as a void that sequesters the supermarket off as a penitentiary that these workers must also make into a home. Or, at least, into a refuge that becomes a family, one presented with a surprisingly humanistic and empathetic eye by a script whose early scenes ease into an unexpectedly naturalistic mode. This is a script that exhibits real compassion for this impromptu community, and a camera that displays real compassion for the lonely surrealism of the night shift as it splits the difference between a groggy dream and a wayward, late-capitalist nightmare.

Strange Days opens with a remarkable moment of cinematic voyeurism, a morbid act of willful complicity disguised as sheer kinetic pleasure. In first person, we watch as a would-be robber is frantically chased out by the police, ultimately falling to his death. Soon enough, we’ll learn that we’ve been watching a virtual memory, one that can be felt and experienced through a proto-VR headset, and one that is sold by nebulous street urchin and creature of the night Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes). We will also learn that Nero is tormented by his own memories of ex-flame Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), who now runs with bigger fish crime lord Philo Gant (Michael Wincott, so you know it’s a mid-‘90s film). He, like the film’s opening, is willing to run head-first into a violent world, and he is only held back from his darker impulses by a platonic but ambiguous relationship with extraordinarily competent bodyguard and driver Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett). These relationships will expand and knot and inflame and fold in on themselves over almost 150 minutes of screen-time, but, for the first few minutes, we are in a blissfully neurotic and disturbingly ecstatic cinematic present-tense, a scene which impels us to look and to look away in equal measure, and during which we can think of nothing else.

Here, in the first minute, director Kathryn Bigelow updates her breathtakingly fluid-frenetic chase sequences from her prior apex Point Break, itself a story about how an audience-surrogate is tempted by the anti-social thrills the promise of escape offers, into a deliciously disturbing treatise on the uncanny thrill of cinema itself. Demanding that we participate in the act only to have the violence turned on us as we fall to our doom, the film opens with a self-implicating gesture that serves as Bigelow’s fullest statement of art not as a beautiful getaway but an elegant trap that invites and disfigures us in all its grueling and emotionally invigorating but disturbing and self-assaulting complications.

While this isn’t without its tensions and difficulties, even what we might call failures, and arguably the film’s overall interest in technological voyeurism is more notable for its vigorousness than its originality (given that the theme received such a consistent showcase in Hitchcock’s films, among many others), Strange Days is a pretty nervous, pulsing stylistic and conceptual workout that remains far more legitimately troubled about more serious topics than most films of its budget would even know what to do with. A pungent fulfillment of what her ex-husband James Cameron more than a decade before called “Tech Noir,” Strange Days explores themes of voyeuristic addiction and self-flagellation by playing around the boundary between filmmaking, fetishism, and observation in a way that borders on cinematic autoerotic asphyxia. It feels like the film is trying to destroy itself, dazzlingly so at times, but never loosely nor arbitrarily. This is throat-knot political popular cinema of the finest variety.

With the release of Robert Eggers’ apparently very good remake of the most seminal of horror films, let’s look at the last time they also, somehow, managed to do it right.

Remaking one of the seminal films of the 20^th century isn’t likely to win you any critical favors. However, for Werner Herzog, a filmmaker of unnatural receptivity to the world and general skepticism to the people who inhabit it, the film seems to have called to him nonetheless. Faced with the unenviable task of divining the original Nosferatu’s spirit rather than merely upholstering it for a new era, of being a necromancer rather than a cryptkeeper, Herzog seems to have done neither. Beckoned not by the surface or the soul of the original film itself but an unclarified possibility latent within it, his film is neither a remake nor even really a re-envisioning but, rather, a malevolent force that vibrates to an entirely different frequency, a tone poem that stalks the corridors of the unknown only to finally implore us to recognize our very selves.

Herzog is no stranger to films about men on strange journeys, impelled by the delusional hopes of a soul haunted by the belief that they can test the mettle of the cosmos and emerge unscathed. In his most famous, and best, film, Aguirre the Wrath of God,Klaus Kinski’s impenetrable and monomaniacal explorer believed he heard the siren song of a divine, heavenly order that was, finally, merely his own desire for control. Here, this film’s version of Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is not an impossible id but a bourgeois bastion of modernity attempting to colonize the world, to partition it into parcels of private property that attempt to compartmentalize the cosmos. In doing so, Herzog fears, the world invites its own destruction in the process.

Yet it is not the bland Harker, finally, who captures the film’s soul, but, rather, its melancholy, banal Dracula. If Herzog worried, with Melville-esque apprehension about the fate of modernity, Klaus Kinski was, of course, his Ahab, a once-in-a-lifetime conduit for Herzog’s divine and demonic sorcery, his own doomed attempts to channel and best the world with monomaniacal monstrousness. Casting Kinski, an actor who seemed to barely be able to bear the weight of the cosmic flux around him, as the creature would seem to finally set him up as the very force of nature he so desperately wanted to be, to become a literal embodiment of the quest for containing the universe that tortured him. When he sets off for the East to sell a home to Dracula, we are immediately cast into the realm of Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” a portal of exquisite otherness that the man-creature is, nominally, the corporealization of. It’d be as though he had finally broken open his mortal shell and achieved an ecstatic sublimity of sheer resonance. The physical instability of the world, the very thing that had exposed Kinski’s cavernous ego in the stiflingly humid air of his own excessively imperialistic self-importance in Aguirre, now seems to warp around him as he wields the darkness of a world where reason long ago failed to extend to the depths and explore the breadth it promised to.

The Weird Western was born out of the very myth of the West itself. In American lore, the frontier of the Southwest was never not an invitation to mythologize and a call to speculate. Its material reality was both shot through with and held up by an imaginative topography that cast its expansive eye on to the nation’s iridescent understanding of itself. Already in the 1860s, Edward S. Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies’ suggested the paradox of mystical machinery in the West: frontier living was a nominal revolt against civilizational order that was, finally, a harbinger of it. By the release of Curse of the Undead in 1959, nearly a century later, the Western frontier had thoroughly suffused the American mindscape, and the Weird Western understood the West as a mental canvas on which America’s vision of itself could be shot through a dark carnival mirror.

But the Weird Western signaled no default orientation. Its logic was a poetics of amplitude. The sacred frontier of untampered moral, spiritual, and economic progress could become a bastion of interstellar possibility in the Space Western. On the other hand, America’s history of genocide and material extraction could malevolently rematerialize as a cruel and unforgiving terrain wracked by violence and spectral presences of uncertain origin in the Gothic Western.

The latter, as a subset of the Weird Western, was still a rare breed in 1959 though, an  uncommon wraith haunting the cinematic scenery, so much so that Universal Studios, near-monopolistic purveyor of horror cinema in the U.S. during the Old Hollywood era, nearly waited until their own demise to cast their shadowy eye on the American West. One ought not be surprised. While Westerns were perennial features of the Old Hollywood landscape, even the most sober, critically-minded work in the Old Hollywood genre seldom exposed the metaphysical terrors that doubled as the negative side of the desert’s eternal strangeness. If the Wild West promised an otherworldly poetics of dreamy becoming, it was also haunted by a netherworld of settler brutality.

The original cinematic adaptation of Children of the Corn was one of the early casualties of the early Stephen King explosion. Like a good many of the man’s early texts, the story is a crazy-quilt of different fabrics and textures, an uncanny divorce from reality tethering together themes and questions without always trying to develop them. King’s story is a vision of corruptible children and generational trauma that also examines a wheezing, necrotic marriage and triples as an early exploration into a genuinely cosmic horror. In its short span, though, you mostly get the sense that King himself simply wasn’t sure about settling down into the pleasantly banal domestic sphere that, the story suggests, was at once a conduit for unholy forces and a way of denying them.

The presence of so many themes does not, as it would in another author, suggest a truly deliberate mind exploring the interweaving truths of many seemingly separate terrors. Rather, if they remind us that King could turn almost anything into horror, they also suggests that horror, somehow, wasn’t what he was most interested in after all. King was not a man tormented by suggestions of otherworldly forces, as say, H.P. Lovecraft was, or terrified by humanity’s capacity to channel them, as was, say, Mary Shelley. This was a man deeply bruised by alcohol and unsure of his relationship with the people who ostensibly loved him most. “Horror” could, for all the man’s reputation as a hell-raiser, often simply be window dressing for essentially sentimental stories that happened to channel emotions that slipped into the darker side of the world and didn’t pay too much attention to the reality principle. What, precisely, was horrifying is whatever happened to enter King’s mind that day. If parts of Children of the Corn could be filed next to Cujo as among King’s most quotidian horrors, its abutment of the inexplicable and the mundane are also indication enough that the author was willing to treat the genre more as a playground, or a toolkit, than a mission statement. His horror was, finally, an act of bare survival, not an existential vision.

“Alleged horror,” remarks a youtube description of the long-forgotten, once-lost Incubus. The poster seems to intend this as a criticism, but the film itself begs to differ. Incubus seems to delight in not being very upfront about the horror it wishes to unleash, including, quite literally, having to convince a Church that they were not making one in order to get the film made. It’s as though the film itself is afraid to call itself horror, or perhaps doesn’t want to be, all the more potent for a text feeling itself out in the moment, and that doesn’t want to stick around to let us figure it out. It’s a subterranean film, so much so that the actor playing the titular demon awakened late on, and who seems none too pleased about being back on this earth, would be back in the grave before the film’s release.

Incubus is a work that makes a virtue, or demon, out of necessity. It stalks our pretensions of perfect cinema. Written on the fly so that Leslie Stevens could keep up the momentum of the recently cancelled television masterpiece The Outer Limits, the brilliantly exploratory show that he unleashed upon the world and that, more importantly, conjured cinematographer Conrad Hall right out of nowhere and on a path to redefining color cinematography. To thin the membrane between cult American television and European art house cinema, it was filmed entirely in Esperanto, an entirely artificial language with no organic connection to any lived community, and it was framed as a folk horror film despite the “folk,” in this case, not existing. While other critics have pointed out this paradox as a simple curiosity, it’s really more of a thesis statement. While the “folk horror” genre purports to channel a group’s fears, Incubus almost – if you squint right – investigates the very idea of the genre: it implies an organic effusion of a single culture’s growth, but it, in fact, reminds us that “single culture” itself is entirely constructed object.