Three Films Make A Post: Based on a true story....that isn't over yet.

The Entity (1982): In Asian horror, movies with rapey ghosts are a dime a dozen, but western cinema has generally shied away from this particular combination of the crassly exploitative and the supernatural. Whereas this particular unpleasantness usually tends to be an extra bit of extremely icky titillation in those Asian movies, Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (at least based on something of an actual case which of course doesn’t make anything of this true) puts this element of its plot front and centre, very much to the film’s detriment. The problem here is Furie’s direction that eschews the subtlety this theme would need if you really wanted to treat it seriously, replacing it with sledgehammer shocks so primitive, they make The Conjuring look reserved. This is one of those films that think that, as long as they present a deeply unpleasant idea, they magically become effective horror movies, as long as the soundtrack bleats loudly when the audience is supposed to be shocked. There are attempts here at providing the tale with a more psychological level, but those are doomed by the preposterousness of the script’s theories as well as the film’s vapid idea of horror.

Mermaid: The Lake of the Dead aka Rusalka: Ozero myortvykh (2018): Despite also having a bit of interest in sex of the not terribly consensual sort Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s movie about the kind of business a rusalka gets up to and the transcendent power of complicated rituals to get rid of supernatural creatures is rather less tacky than Furie’s film. It is not as if this were the height of contemporary horror, but it certainly is not as extremely generic a film as Podgaevskiy’s earlier Queen of Spades, which might as well have been called “PG-13 Horror: The Movie”. The director again merrily mixes Creepypasta-style ideas about rituals with folkloric elements but puts quite a bit more of an emphasis on the reworked folklore, which makes things at the very least more interesting. There’s also actual thematic work concerning the relationships of the main characters in connection with the supernatural threat going on, also giving the film some resonance the director’s earlier one lacked. The horror sequences themselves are still not exactly original, but they do show a decent sense of timing as well as a tendency towards the surreal, which all together does make the whole film quite a bit more interesting to watch than I feared going in.


Guests aka Gosti (2019): Staying in Russia, let’s finish on Evgeniy Abyzov’s tale of a group of tweens doing a guerrilla party in the wrong house. For my tastes, this is probably the best of the three films in this post, seeing as it is the most effective one at creating the proper mood of Crimean Gothic you’d hope for in a horror movie set there. It’s a bit slow, but its slowness is part of an approach that really is more interested in this being a character based bit of horror than the ghost fest you’d expect. Of these three film’s it is certainly the best at connecting its shocks and its characters; with its use of mold and decay as a sign and method of the supernatural, it is also the most effective there, even though about half of its set pieces still tend to be a bit too generic for my taste. It also has a bit of dark melodramatic romance on offer, and who doesn’t prefer that to ghost rape?