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.

In announcing his status as a young director to be reckoned with, Dario Argento couldn’t have picked a more provocative opening gambit, one that unapologetically, if surreptitiously, seeds his future career into one scene. Witnessing a silent murder attempt in an art museum, protagonist Sam Dalmas (Tony Muante) runs to the aid of the wounded woman, only for the would-be murderer’s ghostly-gloved hand to push a button, trapping him in between the two glass panes in the museum entrance. Neither in the museum nor outside, all he can do is hopelessly watch an imminent demise he cannot even hear. Both of these people do leave the scene of the crime alive, but for the moment, Argento lets us linger in a liminal zone between reality and art, life and death, sound and silence, helpless and unwitting voyeurs to a killing that appears to be posed for him – and painted like an art object for us – but which he can only tenuously interfere in.

Positioned between Mario Bava’s earlier Hitchcock riffs and Lucio Fulci’s (and Argento’s own) later, lurid arias of psychedelic blood, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage also feels like a liminal realm for Italian horror in general. In 1970, Argento was clearly a director poised to move the genre from hell to purgatory, from brutally experimenting with society’s sins to exploring the very limits of narrative consciousness in a miasmic middle-ground. But Bird is not as demonic, nor as speculative, as his imminent, genre-transforming works. He’s still the lizard cleverly stalking his prey, not the shape-shifting chameleon daring us to join him in the abyss of cinematic solidity itself. The opening’s portrait of embroiled masculinity and helpless passivity obviously recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and The Bird with the Crustal Plumage never quite escapes the Hitchcock obsession of the earliest giallos (and the likes of Brian De Palma), nor achieves the infectiously fractal vision of a completely broken world that Mario Bava unleashed with Bay of Blood one year later.

Yet Bird, like many great horror films, is already marvelously holding a knife to its own throat, achieving a kind of perverse self-awareness about its own debt to cinema history and the limits of its moral imagination. This is a film that knows how troubled it is, that senses its own participation in modernity’s foibles all too well. It opens with a man witnessing a helpless woman about to be murdered, framed as an art object worthy of the classics, and it closes with a reminder of just how blind he truly is. If the film, too, is myopic in many ways, it also exhibits the genre’s gleefully cruel ability to remind us that we, after all, are the ones who clicked play. The film, like most giallos, seems like a sledgehammer or a machete. We don’t notice it sneaking up on us with a scalpel, hellbent on disfiguring both its genre and our viewing habits, reminding us of the consequences of our inattention.

Night Train to Terror is undeniably trash, but its pleasures, paradoxically, are entirely intellectual. In its own unintentional, mercenary way, it severs the tension cord linking high and low art. It is, finally, only really valuable as a theoretical exercise, a strange cinematic mad science experiment (a connection that runs deep in cinematic history) in which several unfinished older films have been sliced and diced to pieces and reassembled into walking corpses of their ostensibly living selves. Born out of the forgotten remainders of unfinished horror pictures, this is an avowedly monstrous exercise in revivifying films that, as Frankenstein’s Monster himself once said, “belong dead.” That the film itself admits that this undertaking may itself be an immoral act – “bodies for money,” one character remarks in the first short film – is simply part of the fun. Night Train to Terror is a strange kind of cinematic meta-archive that salvages films while also working as proof for both the argument that this very salvaging is a heroic act and, conversely, that the films should have never been salvaged in the first place. It is, in the most literal possible sense, hack work.

All of this is to say: Night Train is probably an un-reviewable cinematic object. It feels like outsider art, so anything like a conventional standard of textual coherence or roundness seems essentially meaningless for parsing it or accessing its soul. Make no mistake, though: this is no labor of love. Its only investment is ensuring that scraps of lost and found footage might make a few dollars when unleashed on the unsuspecting, or on those who have deluded themselves into thinking this is a real movie, or on people like me who, apparently, hate themselves. For director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, this is self-evidently an attempt to salvage a collection of films that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cohere the first time around, footage that, as if by some demonic force, simply would not coagulate into a stable form.

William Castle wasn’t a natural artist, but he was certainly an organic showman of the P.T. Barnum tradition, a skillful and wily craftsman with a populist’s canny sensibility for manipulating without upsetting the status quo to his liking and a magician’s eye for how to do more with less and play in the realm between appearance and reality. Case in point, Strait-Jacket, a self-evident Alfred Hitchcock knock-off with no new ideas, and which doesn’t even try to pretend like it has any actual ideas, but whose successes still, through some magical sleight-of-cinematic-hand, somehow feel entirely its own.

Strait-Jacket is certainly a copy-cat, but then, the writer Robert Bloch did write the story upon which Psycho was based, so it’s hard to criticize him for that. Plus, while Strait-Jacket shares Psycho’s lurid morbidity and fascination with the darker regions of America lurking beneath the facades of normality, Castle’s film mostly wants to play with us rather than to play us, as Hitch always essentially did. This is an essentially democratic film. Rather than exercise a cruel, conniving, beautiful mastery, it invites us in to a strange corner of America for a little while and then lets us leave. Straight-Jacket’s raison d’etre, certainly, is the sudden success of Psycho, which sent a dark chord down the spine of an already decaying Hollywood and threatened America with the sudden fragility of notions like “protagonist.” But Castle’s soul was that of a playful huckster just delighted to show us how he can, technically, show several heads being lobbed off in 1962 because they look cartoon-y enough to get by the censors, who don’t really seem to care when the film is this off-brand. That may be a gross reduction, even a debasement, of Hitchcock’s seminal masterpiece, but it isn’t exactly a rip-off.

First things first: a film that begins with a thank you to the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia, immediately propositioning the audience with a fantasy of verisimilitude and access, and then immediately cuts to a totally opaque, ethereal non-space while an elderly John Huston, fresh off of voicing Gandalf in the animated Rankin & Bass The Hobbit,  appears as an unknown prophet on an alien planet that looks like Mos Eisley, isn’t ever going to lose me completely. We seem not to be in Kansas anymore, and this high up in the sublime tornado of chaotic-evil cinema, we’re probably doomed to fall.

Yet, amazingly, The Visitor holds up its end of the bargain. It is only when we cut to a basketball game that the real mystery of the film reveals itself: how is it that essentially unknown director Giulio Paradisi never made another horror film, and his subsequent two films were apparently easy-going Italian comedies, before he unceremoniously never directed again?  The Visitor’s opening basketball game is a beautifully opaque textual object, a killer opening to a film that is a bricolage of genres and textures and uncanny thematic and technical juxtapositions revealing a director of real mettle and a vision of extraordinary curiosity. This is a stupendously unsettling game of hoops, a cut-up event in which the camera floats around with haunting observational acuity, like a deconstruction of a sporting event from a ghost’s alienated perspective.

Perhaps even more interesting: a latter combination gymnastics event/bullet-removal surgery sequence (you know, one of those type-deals) clarifies that much of The Visitor is an experiment in mobilizing giallo-style filmmaking for primarily non-kill sequences. While some of the set-pieces do technically result in dead bodies, as in a phenomenal bird-in-a-car dive bomb, even they are far-removed from the giallo’s usual stalking ground. Instead, we explore everything from public sporting events to overcrowded hospitals to an abandoned apartment building to the innards of machinery scaffolding, each of which the film turns into a genuinely ethereal cinematic experiment in sheer observation.

Twenty-five years after his last genuinely worthwhile non-animated film, it’s hard to not see any Tim Burton film, even the best ones, as anything other than a walking corpse on an inevitable path to the director’s premature artistic demise. Burton’s style has become a transparently corporate product, an obvious manifestation of Hollywood’s ability to cannibalize anything that might challenge it. Burton’s story is really a tragedy. One year after 1988’s Beetlejuice, his box-office-bludgeoning, trend-setting Batman would reveal that beneath the oddball hell he could raise and the anarchy he could unleash, he always really, only, just wanted to be loved by the masses. Love, the desire for beauty, would kill the proverbial beast in him.

A couple of masterpieces like Ed Wood and one nihilistic blockbuster in Batman Returns aside, Burton’s parade of cinematic renegades now feels like a procession of the damned, a carnival of once-living, gleefully-manicured monstrosities having become a wax museum.In this sense, Beetlejuice’s sympathies are perhaps a telling metaphor for Burton’s internal tensions. He obviously self-identifies with the protagonists of Beetlejuice, the Maitlands, two everyday people who take irrepressible joy in the capacity to tinker in the attics of America, who hide pleasure and play within the carbon-copy domiciles of suburbia. But it’s hard not to see him as the interloping Deetzes, so fascinated with a facsimile of weirdness and its capacity to be monopolized for personal gain that they sell their souls for a simulacrum of adoration. Burton’s soul is laid bare, two entangled forces warring in the same Hollywood house. Over the past quarter century, the man has become a corporate shell cynically selling the very thing he once genuinely loved. Viewing it from 2024, 1988’s Beetlejuice can be depressing stuff. 

In 1988 though? I mean, Jesus. Burton had already lovingly skewered mid-century iconography and narrative structure with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the most spirited tale of mid-century America’s love affair with vehicular culture this side of John Carpenter’s Christine. Looking forward rather than back, Beetlejuice feels much more radical, like an open canvas for a diabolical energy eager to be unleashed. Instead of seeing it as a prelude to Burton’s later misfires, it can be read along the likes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona, scions of another America, an alternative 1980s trying to escape from the corporate world around it. These pop versions of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas suggest a wandering America both trying to cut itself off from its past and hopelessly being drawn back. Rather than itself being trapped, Beetlejuice seems to recognize that we’re all trapped in an American dream that became a nightmare.