The Night Has Teeth

Dracula.

If there were just one word to sum up the concept of 'evil', it would likely be Dracula.

In the pantheon of western literature's best and brightest villains, Dracula sits high on some dark Olympus, if not at the apex, then comfortably close. Barely on screen in Bram Stoker's eponymous novel for more than a few chapters, nonetheless it is Dracula who drives the book. It is Dracula who drives the films which bear his name, who drives the action in every appearance.

He's the sort of antagonist that brings out the best in a hero, which may account some for his popularity. He's all of humanity's fears and hates and loathings rolled up into one handy package. He embodies themes as varied as cannibalism, rampant sexuality, the 'other' and the fear of death and the dead, as well as more esoteric concepts (the Faustian bargain, necromancy, plague, taboo animals, etc.).

But is that all there is to it? Just some smelly themes and subconscious symbolism?

No. Dracula is the outsider, always scratching at our door, looking for a way in. The thing at the back of the cave, or waiting in the forest. The omnipresent Night, with teeth. The themes and symbols which trail after him like a cloak are but manifestations of his ultimate identity-that of the Thing That Scares Us.

It's why we go back to him, again and again, much as his victims did. We invite him in, even knowing what he is, foul breath and all. We invite him in with books and films and plays and all variety of entertainments, pitting him against ourselves and our archetypes (Dracula Vs. Sherlock Holmes, Dracula Vs. Billy the Kid, Dracula Vs. Superman, etc.), destroying him again and again, but like the Night, he always returns. We mock him in cartoons and commercials, we make him into comic books and video-games, but the savagery never diminishes, the fear never entirely goes away.

It's the fear that we can't do without. The terror of being hunted. We can't forget it, even with all of evolution at our back, with our science and religion and civilization. Some part of us always remembers the cave, and thing that we saw there, waiting to pounce out of the darkness.

We can't get rid of him, just like we can't rid ourselves of the atavistic fears handed down by our primordial ancestors. No matter how much we try to dislodge him, to remake him or remold him, Dracula clings to us, he is in the back of our head. In our blood.

*Edited to add-if you're interested in seeing more about my thoughts on Dracula check out DRACULA MONTH on my blog*

Momo and Ernest

So you got two thugs, Momo and Ernest, sitting in a car, discussing matters of love and the dick. Seen it before? Could be a Tarantino flick or the latest Guy Ritchie work, nah, you got classic Francois Truffaut circa 1960. The film is Tirez sur le Pianiste, aka Shoot the Pianist. A slice of American pulp noir from author David Goodis, adapted into a lowlife Parisian setting by New Wave French director Truffaut.

Differentiated only by a bowler hat and a slouch Kangol style, the two smoking pipe men chase down their prey, brother of main character, Edward Saroyan. Thing is these two guys are fuck ups. They can’t even catch a fat thief when they’re in a car, and he’s on foot. They can’t catch him in a crowded restaurant, and later they can’t catch anyone, until one says to the other show him we mean business. Then they show their guns. Classic thugs, and a classic film scenario, only done French new wave.

Whilst in a car hurtling towards certain doom for a kidnapped Sagoyas and his newly found love, the pair decide to talk about women (See above). The story could use only one person to convey their points of view on life, women they all want it, they ain’t no good cept for one thing, but they compliment each others point of view. With two hostages and all this nasty talk, the hostages might override the degrading point of view, here it becomes a democracy. The thugs even manage to sway their captures into agreeing with them on some points. Power in numbers.

Then there’s the lying. Yeah, they lie. Later on in the film when they kidnap the youngest of the brothers they start boasting about their goods, one wears this and the other that. He boasts about how he wears an apparent Japanese scarf woven so fine that it is made out of metal, but feels like material. The brother disbelieves him. Nope! Swear it is metal or shall my mother drop dead. Truffuat shows the mother dropping dead on the spot.

Finally the shoot out. They shoot everyone, but the people that they’re aiming for.

Atleast they dress nice…

Asami Yamazaki

When a lonely middle-aged film producer, Shigeharu Aoyama, decides to audition potential wives under the guise of casting a new movie, he gets more than he bargained for in Takashi Miike's ground-breaking horror flick, AUDITION.

Before the auditions are held, Aoyama picks out the resume of Asami Yamazaki as his favourite. Of all the demure young girls smiling prettily for the camera, Asami is the one he likes best. Aoyama's confederate warns him that there is something not right about the girl, but after the auditions are held he maintains that she is the one for him. And he seems to be right.

Romance blooms between Aoyama and Asami, but the girl has a dark past and when she finds out that the Aoyama's auditions were a pretext to meet girls she not only takes it badly, she decides to wreak bloody vengeance upon him.

It's not the setup of this classic horror story that is remarkable, it's the execution at the hands of Miike and the actress Eihi Shiina. Miike discards most of the techniques of the slasher genre: there are no jumpcuts, no mysterious shadows, no claustrophobic tracking shots. Miike's camera (in this film) is very still, every shot is lovingly-lit and in-focus. He builds a terrifying atmosphere out of all of that stillness, silence and light. (Textbook example is the burlap sack in Asami's apartment. The sack lies in the foreground by the telephone for a long interval while nothing occurs. Then the phone rings and the sack lurches and screams--there's a man in it. Neither Asami nor Miike's camera react.)

The film is also remarkable for its sudden divergence into David Lynch-style surrealism. Once we understand a little about Asami's dark past the film cuts into a sequence of flashbacks and do-overs in which her past is revised in different ways, as is her relationship with Shigeharu. Is it a dream sequence? Who is the dreamer? There are any number of compelling reasons that Asami could have become what she did. She is somehow able to insinuate her story into the lives of her victims; actually winding her different versions of her own backstory into theirs; rewriting scenes that we have already seen, but always leading to the same conclusion. There is no escaping Asami Yamazaki.

J-Horror is not unique in popular culture say that it relishes the destruction of young girls. This is a staple of fiction in many other genres:suspense, thrillers, crime, mystery and even superhero narratives are filled to overflowing with abused girls, and AUDITION plays right into that. The varying levels of abuse Asami may or may not have suffered in the past have caused her to become this monster, but this film presents those scenarios with the same clear-eyed impassivity that it does every other sequence, rather than fetishizing it in the way of 'torture porn'. AUDITION is far more interested in the vengeance that Asami wreaks upon her (mostly male) victims than in what was done to her. With her ambiguous backstory, Asami can in many ways be seen to represent the vengeful spirit of all of those girls degraded and butchered in decades worth of cheap movies. Aoyama, the protagonist, is presented as pathetic and helpless in this film in a way that Asami never is.

That said, Miike denies that his films have 'messages' and I think it's important to take that into consideration: he is not necessarily criticizing those other movies.

But if all that isn't enough to convince you that Asami Yamazaki is a great villain, the final scene certainly will. Watching her chanting as she works on Aoyama with the wire saw is perhaps the squirmiest scene committed to celluloid. If you haven't seen the film, see it. If you have, I have only one thing left to say to you:

IKI IKI IKI

-- JF