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.

Compared to director David Cronenberg’s Videodrome from the same year (or any film he had previously made), The Dead Zone initially feels like a populist slab of straightforward, uncerebral, hip-fired entertainment, an attempt to make his name by getting on the Stephen King bandwagon. Unsurprisingly, then, Dead Zone feels ever so slightly alienated, as though itcan’t quite commit to its themes, can’t fully enter into its own world and explore it, as though it always exists at an imaginative remove from its content compared to Cronenberg’s earlier works, so obviously passion projects he was fully invested in. Something about the work seems to exist at a remove from its narrative, as though it is hovering slightly above or looking at it through a tear in the fabric of the universe it can see through but cannot quite invest itself in.

Yet, this is also a perversely well fit for the film’s themes, adapting King’s book about a Maine schoolteacher who awakes from a five-year coma with a form of second-sight, suddenly able to see beyond his present world into the future, and who has to find his way back to a present that has seemingly abandoned him and which he can no longer cope with. The Dead Zone is all about alienation, about falling below society’s threshold for engagement and perception, about fumbling, half-hearted attempts to rhyme with the rhythms of a society that you feel you are ever-so-slightly askew from. Much like the film’s protagonist Johnny, there is a clear sense that Cronenberg’s film feels, sees, and experiences in ways that are more receptive to strangeness than those around him will allow themselves to, and the mis-match between theme and director paradoxically becomes a match. The Dead Zone’s odd gambles and lurching half-steps come to suggest the difficulties of marrying personal sensibilities with the flow of everyday social life clearly resonate with Cronenberg’s own attempt to make a Hollywood product, to engage in the kind of personal self-sabotage necessary to produce a film that was almost certainly lorded over by producers. More philosophically, The Dead Zone seems to be reaching for ideas that it cannot express in clear terms, glimpsing fragments of a world that it does not have complete access to.

With Judas and the Black Messiah one year in the rearview mirror, I decided to look back on a much more full-throated critique of American modernity, a vicious screed and an acidic reminder of how far we haven’t come.

Uptight wears its frustration right on its sleeve, palpitating and sweating and threatening to tear apart the screen. Indeed, it might have been torn apart before release. Focusing on government attempts to internally dismantle black radical organizations, seeding them with informants, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, the film crew itself included at least one unknown FBI informant in a case of life imitating art imitating life. Uptight thus justified its existence in the act of its very production. For African American writer-actors Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield and white writer-director Jules Dassin, the film resonated with their own experiences as leftist organizers, especially Dee’s work with the SCLC and CORE. Mayfield and Dassin’s own respective exiles to France (for Dassin’s membership in the Communist Party) and the recently liberated Ghana (for Mayfield’s work with NAACP local leader Robert F. Williams, who famously resisted the NAACP’s non-violent philosophy and provided a crucial link between liberal integrationism and Black Power) also haunt the film, potentializing it with awareness of how much is at stake in resisting the status quo. Uptight was the product of organic intellectuals who invested their personal energy into a film that kindles and threatens to overflow. It feels electric, like it could explode at any minute, but also weary and anxious, encroaching on exhaustion, like it knows that it might not be able to sustain itself, looking both over its shoulder and into a foggy future, worried about what comes in the hazy oncoming 1970s.

Set in Cleveland, Ohio, Uptight nonetheless begins with Dassin’s own guerilla-shot footage at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As diegetic images ostensibly placing us in Atlanta reveal groups of Cleveland radicals observing the funeral on television, Uptight immediately foregrounds viewing and perception as key fulcrums of collective engagement with a national consciousness. Concerning increasing friction in black organizing after King’s assassination, Uptight nonetheless makes clear the shared bonds of frustration that resonate with every character on-screen. The narrative through-line concerns Tank (Julian Mayfield), asked by his brother Johnny (Max Julien), leader of a local organization chapter (implicitly a chapter of the Black Panthers but not named as such), to accompany them on a night raid to steal guns. Shook by the death of King, he initially refuses. Although he gestures, perhaps disingenuously, toward joining at the last minute, Johnny doesn’t hear, ultimately killing a guard in the raid. The rest of the film concerns the police’s attempts, largely through black informer Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne), to convince Tank to inform on Johnny, and, once Tank gives Johnny up, the organization’s attempts to track him down and resolve their problem.

Based on John Ford and Dudley Nichols’ 1935 classic The Informer, itself adapted from Liam O’Flaherty’s novel about an IRA member who defected, Uptight retains the same narrative spine but alters both the thematic focus and the style. Ford’s film is an early American gloss on German Expressionism and a noir progenitor, resonating with Depression-era works like You Only Live Once in depicting social renegades lost in a quagmire of confusion and uncertainty. Dassin inherited those sensibilities in his early classic 1948 film The Naked City, which thoughtfully combined neorealist and film noir styles and, in doing so, suggested that shambolic non-structured realism and shadowy expressionism were, despite being ostensible antitheses, both expressions of post-war malaise and rampant social oppression. Uptight finds an analog for these anxieties in Dassin’s grimy hyperbole for Ford’s astonishingly misty chiaroscuro. Formally, Uptight most closely resonates with Dassin’s astonishing London-set Night and the City, a similar story about a fumbling, sweaty mass of nerves being pulverized by the film’s very ontology, throwing him down circles of stairs and spinning in circles around his head. Dassin turns the dial way back to these earlier days in Uptight, before he spent much of the ‘60s sprucing up some truly phenomenal but more collected works like the glistening Topkapi, films that were generally more elegant and anointed than Dassin’s hungrier, earlier works. Uptight, conversely, feels like a cinematic raw nerve, a clammy, live-wire film, flexing wiry muscles in nearly every scene, all the more brazenly direct in light of the fifty-three-years-later Judas and the Black Messiah, a fine film about similar themes that is not as politically astute and not nearly as formally accomplished or thornily textured.

At times, Uptight feels like it’s at its own throat, being torn apart by competing impulses. Perspiring and grubby, a New Hollywood hot-house of a film rejecting the niceties of Classical Hollywood, it is also nonetheless very much in the tradition of mid-century theater of morals. Drawing from Dee’s and Mayfield’s own theatrical backgrounds, everything is stylized and tilted toward a layer of heightened abstraction, from the stage-like streets to the somewhat manicured acting. Yet the contrast produces sparks, threading the needle between characters as people and figures as ideas, staged with a heavy, just-barely-invisible Proscenium that emphasizes the performativity of radicalism, the way in which being seen and not being seen can inform the fate of any situation, or, as the Panthers themselves put it, the “shadow” of the gun, the threat of violence and the pressured, organized capacity to resist, means as much as the gun itself. This tension, between grimy workaday reality and mannered unreality, lends Uptight an almost dialectical tension, the film pitting internal and external selves, realities and desires, off of each other.

Of course, the film’s focus on Tank, a wayward, excommunicated soul who sells out a community, has enough history in U.S. cinema, with the likes of On the Waterfront and High Noon obviously dueling it out with subliminal HUAC themes, conduits for their creators’ frustrations with telling or being told on. But Uptight poses difficult questions that twist the knot of depoliticized individualism that many of those films rely on. Rather than a nearly metaphysical question about individual purity and goodness, Uptight is thickly enmeshed in the social status quo, beginning with black Clevelanders mourning Dr. King’s death in the streets and several film characters reacting in a slurry of mixed emotions. Self-aware about the layers of interrelation that inform the radical activity, Uptight threads multiple intermeshing levels of conspiratorial activity and perception around Mayfield’s character, his long night of the soul resonating with multiple layers of social reality as the film pushes us to empathize with multiple perspectives without sympathizing with Tank’s tragic willingness to sell out his comrades.

Many of Dassin’s classic mid-century noirs explore the lonely individual just barely eeking by in the maelstrom of a modernity where city spaces are increasingly populated but all the more anonymous, where every site is a potential crowd for disguising oneself or being discovered, where new forms of collectivity are generated that nonetheless lack conventional or a priori group identities or similarities around which to congeal themselves. Uptight latches onto this implicit theme in many noirs, more often tackled in classic works like The Killing by focusing on teams gathered together to commit crimes, and explores what it means for politicization and organized revolt. Communities seem always in motion between connecting and diffusing, every presence soon a potential absence just as much as every absence holds the space for a potential presence. Uptight never loses this friction, but it does catalyze sparks. Johnny’s death is staged as a social theater affecting the entire neighborhoods, metaphorically (and literally) tilting the film off its axis, a more-than-360-degree camera turn unraveling the film’s tightly coiled energy as Tank’s collapsing star is subsumed into a metaphorical carnivalesque. Dassin’s work as a crime and noir director turns the film in on itself, the city becoming a distorted and confused space that breaks, mid-film, into a fun-house mirror. Slightly later, Tank visits his old job at a steel mill and has a nearly incandescent mental communion with it, industry figured in its mid-century guise as a sublime and world-altering radiant power. At the film’s end, Tank’s fate recalls another noir classic, 1948’s White Heat, mentally prefiguring the ‘70s and ‘80s as a desperate tumble. The same sublime power Tank wished to return to mid-film now drowns him out. Coal and soot and industrial malaise blanket the screen in a toxic fugue of post-industrial confusion, a dark harbinger of neoliberal notions of unregulated free-market capitalism and self-help soon to displace revolutionary urges that, as Uptight reminds us, were less failed than consciously corrupted and distorted by the powers that be.

Score: 10/10

John McTiernan’s Predator is a real bait-and-switch: a colonialist venture where the bottom falls out and seven masculine archetypes are stranded in a territory they know much less about than they assumed. As a critique of American chauvinism and pretensions of access and visual mastery, it’s a frankly startling inversion of American blockbuster cinema, action tightening into suspense before curdling into something approaching horror in the ‘80s slasher movie mold. A post-Vietnam parable not fundamentally different from Walter Hill’s 1981 film Southern Comfort seven years before, it’s a too-tight tourniquet of a film, sopping up the bloodlust of an audience too excited to notice they’re losing circulation in their limbs.