Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17 is obviously indebted, at least in part, to Joshua Oppenheimer’s generation-defining The Act of Killing. Yet it is far from a delayed echo of a masterpiece. In The Act of Killing, artistic generation signals a deeply ambivalent, forever-incomplete form of moral reckoning, one that offers no reprieve from past wrongdoings and only tenuously implies anything like real acknowledgement of complicity. But the film is absolutely about the desire to atone, or at least one’s desire to believe one has a desire to atone. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, artistic self-fashioning – one’s capacity to relive one’s most horrible acts – becomes a grotesque purgation of one’s past. The evacuation of self, the spilling of the soul, suggests a need to believe in indemnity if not a genuine willingness to engage with and confront the consequences of one’s actions. The characters at the center of The Act of Killing want to believe they can escape their past, even as they seek it, and celebrate themselves through a past they vaguely seem to despise themselves for.

Bisbee’ 17’s literal and figurative fault-lines are much more diffuse and, in some ways, more complex. The effects of a reprehensible incident and a moral failure seep through the cracks of a town over a full century, and they trickle into every crevice of its being, but it is much harder to get a bead on what any one in the film wants to think about it, let alone whether they should be affected by it at all. This is not an account of individuals believing they are coming to terms with something who are, in turn, coming to terms with the dubiousness of their coming to terms. Bisbee asks us a perhaps harder question: are these people responsible for anything at all? With the sense of blame unmoored from typical Enlightenment-derived notions of individual culpability, we are forced to question how we are supposed to feel toward any of these people, and, indeed, whether we even want to care about a form of reckoning that, the film suggests, may merely just be cashing-in on a legend.

Still, while culpability is displaced through the generations in Bisbee ’17, both films ask similarly prickly questions about the value of historical confrontation and the limits of artistic witness. Each film examines the ghostly after-image of a horrific incident as it metastasizes in the mind of its perpetrators, or their lineage, and as it evaporates into the sheer raggedness of history. In both cases, cinema is tasked with saving the present from its unacknowledged past and recovering the past from the present’s refusal to acknowledge it.

Most of all, though, both films task cinema with meditating on its own capabilities. When we leave either film, we are hardly sure that anything has been achieved, or that any past has truly been acknowledged. What film itself can do, in the face of abject horror, is a serious question mark in both texts, one that each film recognizes will gnaw down those who ask too hard. For The Act of Killing, the question was national, genocidal, and deeply historical, an awful grandness that warps an entire country’s history – the entire world’s history – by insisting on humanity’s capacity for brutality, and humanity’s ability to seek forgiveness for that brutality in the eyes of others without actually wanting to fully wrestle with it. For Bisbee ’17, the question seems much smaller. The event in question was more localized, and there’s little sense that anyone outside its direct descendants ever heard of it. But for the people who come and go in this film, it has the capacity to become everything. Like an underwater whirlpool, it’s both invisible and gravitational, a century-old violence that is both a chthonic tragedy to confront and a taxidermied memory to curate and ornament. The people of Bisbee seem all too willing, in a manner less overtly reprehensible but no less troubling than the mass murderers of The Act of Killing, to remember the violence only insofar as it suits them.

Mute Witness begins with a self-consciously showy, bravura gesture, but it takes a few minutes to really set itself apart. Opening on a breathy, lascivious, leering POV outside an apartment window, the camera sways, shimmies, and then strikes as it, and we, get closer to its, and our, inevitable prey. Soon enough, our reflection in a bathroom mirror informs us of our obvious identity, a stocking-ed killer on the prowl. It’s a ghoulishly effective opening, but it isn’t what separates the film from the chaff. Nor is it the inevitable reveal that this is all a sequence from a film-within-a-film being presently shot on a film set. Opening in precisely this way, even a moderately experienced horror film viewer will already be expecting someone to yell “cut” from the get-go. This kind of “film-within-a-film” opening from a first-person perspective dates back at least as far as Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. And the concept itself is just Hitchcock’s Rear Window with an inability to use one’s legs traded for an inability to speak, both signaling an increased attention to the eyes. Mute Witness is, if nothing else, decidedly comfortable with its thorough-going lack of conceptual originality.

No, what separates the film is how it brings down the veil. Instead of the usual director’s voice yelling “cut,” the killer stabs his prey and simply saunters off to the corner of the room to observe his handiwork, taking out a cigarette before another hand simply pokes into the frame to light it as he watches with a smirk on his face. Then another hand enters with a swig of alcohol, all struggling to batten down a laugh. The “dying” lady is really over-selling things, making a spectacle of herself, making a real meal of the demise, flopping around every which way. What we assumed was a shot within the film-within-a-film is now just a shot within our film, Mute Witness. There is no “cut.” We aren’t shocked into another, critical perspective but surprised that we’ve nonchalantly sidled into one without even realizing.

Without even so much as a cut to separate the film-within-a-film from the film, the prey from the predator, one layer of audience from another, we’ve moved into an entirely different imaginative universe, one in which we aren’t unwilling coconspirators the camera’s penetrative gaze but giddy co-compatriots with its capacity to hide and reveal, deny and expose, to play and replay. We’re made to notice that what we are watching is a theater of perspective in which knowledge and power are always thorny and unstable, and we’re invited along for the ride.

North by Northwest lacks Vertigo’s deliriously unhinged inner excavations, or Psycho’s id, or The Birds’ nihilistic opacity, or Rear Window’s playful self-contemplation, but it may be as wry and wiry as Alfred Hitchcock ever got. In inching toward the sleek, aloof, maximalist delights of high-gloss, haute-couture 1960s pictures, North by Northwest isn’t necessarily nervier than it otherwise would be, but it certainly does provide an impish new spin on Hitchcock’s wickedly self-amused sense of self. It’s superficially glossy feel somehow makes its observations all the thornier, like a razor wrapped in cotton candy. That Hitchcock’s most overtly pleasurable film so smoothly and surreptitiously smuggles in so many minuscule wrinkles and devious intimations that all is not right with America may even be a surer display of his astringent talents. Figured as a grand confidence act at the end of the 1950s, it feels like the last time Hitch could celebrate the delirious excesses of modernity, and pungently dissect his own complicity in it, before Psycho and The Birds took him into the cloacal core of terror and abjection respectively. It’s far from Hitchcock’s cruelest film, but something about its chipper demeanor feels uniquely nasty nonetheless.

For North by Northwest is very much a sly deconstruction of America, one that practically announces itself with its famous final set piece, a suggestion that America’s national monument, and its pretensions of greatness, is really just a home base for conniving and cheating one another. Climaxing atop Mt. Rushmore, Hitchcock’s hilarious planned Lincoln-nose sneezing gag never came to fruition, but there is something amusing about the censors only allowing advertisement executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) to slide around between the faces rather than on them, as though the film is playing around in the crevices and shadows of American monumentality but never quite getting to the core of the matter, either because America is too dense to really know or too shallow to be worthy of exploration. Atop an edifice of stone, a monument of national lies and hubris, we find only a slippery conspiracy of ne’er do wells that runs on battery acid. North by Northwest is the ur-film, the apotheosis of Classical Hollywood, a cinematic snake oil salesman that sells us on itself even as it tells us what kind of poison we’re about to drink.

With Ti West’s new film X both returning him to the horror genre for the first time in almost a decade and turning him to the backroads of America’s past, I thought I might return to the film that made his name all those year ago, a film that then felt like a genuine conjuration from cinema’s dark and demonic history.

One of the first films in the horror “mumblecore” genre of the late ‘00s and early ‘10s,  Ti West’s The House of the Devil explores the nexus point between American independent cinema in the ‘00s – scruffy DIY filmmaking, investment in human minutiae, openness to momentary fluctuations of emotion, relatively indeterminate and non-tendentious scripting designed to invite receptivity to human complexity – with horror’s emphasis on the ultimate unclarifiability and uncanniness of human experience. There’s a poetry to the thinking: both mumblecoreand horror feel around in the strangeness of experience, the odd excesses, the unexpected aporias, the potentialized gaps, the wounds within the surface that, when picked at (or even just noticed in passing), open up spaces for reconsideration, exploration, and even possibility. The House of the Devil was released in an era where horror was increasingly nasty-minded and vicious, emphasizing a certain kind of Grand Guignol precision and vicious craft. While West’s film alternately emphasizes ethereal ambience, slow-building atmosphere, and morbid curiosity, it still feels authentically disturbing and psychically dismembering. Through quotidian dread and an almost astonishing reduction of narrative and character matter to a brute, experiential portrait of human uncertainty, it manages to open a portal onto the world and into the mind that we cannot easily close.

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam”: even director Francis Ford Coppola’s (in)famous reflection on the making of Apocalypse Now reeks of American egotism. Nonetheless, the film really does feel like Coppola’s accidental-intentional replay of the Vietnam War, a psychedelic maelstrom of American excess searching for an answer to a problem it invented, a solution to mask the film’s own complicity in problems it refuses to acknowledge. A literal theater of war, Coppola’s film is cinematic maximalism at its most perverse, an enormous, egotistical portrait of egocentrism that doubles back to a stunning sort of critique via self-immolation. Fully criticizing and even more fully replicating the imperialistic gigantism of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now becomes that which it critiques, and it devours itself in the process.

Opposites though they might be in their attitudes toward minimalism and maximalism, Coppola’s Godfather films and The Conversation are remarkably perfect objects: precise, manicured, and controlled machines which are, of course, about the precise and all-controlling machinery of American capitalism. Apocalypse Now, comparatively, is a mess. The film hits so hard and with such ferocity that it collapses from exhaustion, so much so that it took all of three editors (Lisa Fruchtman, Walter Murch, and Gerald Greenberg) and three years to release a finalized version that was, even then, only tenuously legible as a self-contained, discreet object. The film’s edits are war wounds and battle scars, lesions that are also stitches connecting and breaking disparate material and threatening to re-open the film even as they try desperately to close it up into an analyzable text. It opens itself to the ghosts in its (and capitalism’s) machine-work, etherealizing itself and diffusing us into a non-space that is troublingly divorced from empirical context. It echoes the myopic access endemic to American imperialism, indexing its subjects’ hubris and its creators’ maddened attempts to replicate it. All these years later, Apocalypse Now still feels unfinished, hovering around a center it cannot find, slowly expanding and moving on screen like magma.

In 1982, the world received a horror holy grail: George A. Romero and Stephen King got to work together. The gruesome twosome, one perhaps the largest cultural force in horror over the last 45 years and the other the director who changed the path of horror filmmaking forever in 1968, were already namesake figures in 1982. Neither had anything to prove, and both are clearly having a ball here. The film they made, Creepshow, cheerfully casts off the weight of expectations in every way but one: it’s supremely well made. It wasn’t going to redefine horror, although one could make a case for its cinematography: it features some breathtaking high-contrast color that absolutely nails Italian giallo cinema’s particular mixture of fluorescent energy and subzero chilliness, which has no real precedent in Romero’s preference for grimy allegorical realism. But, outside that, Creepshow is largely content to amuse its creators and itself. All that really matters is that it lets us in on the fun.

Rekindling the classic horror omnibus anthology films, then most recently popular as a series of British films by Amicus Productions, Creepshow follows the Amicus style by compiling five shorts into one feature length film. While the Amicus productions literally adapted stories from mid-century pulp horror comic books, King and Romero conjure their own out of thin air, pulling a couple of King short stories and adding three new King screenplays to the mixture. Each story is fairly slight, even vague, functioning somewhere between a half-remembered dream and a fable that comically, ruefully enjoys punishing its protagonists for their obvious, caricatured flaws. More accurately, each story feels like a Saturday morning cartoon version of horror, almost like King and Romero woke up and jotted down the outline of a dream they had about writing a short story instead of actually thinking the story through. In general, I mean this in a positive way.

Given the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre film, the latest in a long line of misbegotten diminishments and perplexing variations on director Tobe Hooper’s seminal, genre-defining destruction of American mythologies, I’ve decided to look at one of Hooper’s stranger and more bedeviling films, one of the many that has contributed to his unfortunate reputation as a one-hit-wonder, even a cinematic accident whose career-long death slowly trickled out film after film. Like most of them, 1985’s well-budgeted Lifeforce reveals a director who was less in full command of his talents than one who was willing and receptive to asking how little in control any of us are.

For perhaps the only time in his life, Lifeforce found director Tobe Hooper playing with a leg-up. Having just directed Poltergeist for producer Steven Spielberg, he was for once and only once in Hollywood’s good graces. Even with Hooper’s name somewhat besmirched by critics who simply can’t recognize images, allowing themselves to believe that Poltergeist was, in fact, the result of Steven Spielberg’s directorial eye, producers were still willing to back him to the hilt for another film, before abandoning him yet again when Lifeforce flopped. A far cry from his grotty off-road Americana The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Lifeforce was, fully, a major cinematic production, an attempt to cash-in on the science fiction craze of the 1980s. And this ostensible Alien rip-off had Alien’s screenwriter Dan O’Bannon as a co-writer, to boot!

But Hooper just wasn’t going to play ball. Perhaps expectantly giving Hooper’s chaotic and ununified cinematic history, Lifeforce is almost remarkably fugitive to itself, going out of its way to not be a self-same object. Instead of tonal or generic coherence, Hooper’s film invests in its own self-destruction. It feels not only like four movies in one but a film that is defiantly proud of the fact that it shuttles us across often-competing thematic registers and follows strange, alluring tonal energies to its heart’s content. It’s hard to say whether Hooper was a principled self-saboteur who felt that every film needed to travel the path of most resistance, to intervene in its own existence, or whether Hooper was just unlucky and really wanted to make mainstream motion pictures. But, warts and all, Lifeforce feels like it could only have been directed by Hooper.