Cabin
Fever (and Streaming the Horror)
No,
not Cabin Fever the film, cabin fever as in cabin fever – being
locked up indoors for long periods of time without much relief from
the situation. Anyone experiencing the wet cold winters in Canada (or
those who have seen The
Shining a
thousand times) will know what I'm getting at. Many years ago, barely
into my double-digits age, there was a long summer that was just as
wet as any winter Vancouver had ever seen, and I'd spent my days –
quite literally, every
day that
August month, walking back and forth to the local video store and
spending a few dollars on one or two tapes at a time, trekking
through the rain to bring them back to my house where I'd hole up in
the basement den and watch movies like Out
of Bounds and
Friday
the 13th
Part V. The
downstairs den wasn't really in a basement – not quite. We lived in
one of those architecturally unique Vancouver homes where the foyer
was the only part of the house that was even close to ground-level.
Then you'd have to choose your destination: upstairs, a
storey-and-a-half over the driveway, or downstairs, half-buried into
the ground, where all the windows were half-height and set closer up
to the low ceilings so that you could see over the grass on the front
lawn. Anyway, it was down in that sort-of basement that I'd spent
that wet summer getting an education in exploitation cinema. However,
it isn't 1985 anymore, and you should consider yourself lucky if you
still have an actual operating video rental store near where you
live.
And
now some really good horror can be found on most of the mainstream
VOD streaming services now – the only problem, I find, is often how
the search algorithms are set up on these platforms (not very
horror-fan-friendly, in my opinion), but we'll get to that soon. For
right now I thought it might be cool to feature some of the horror
gens I've found streaming directly into my own home, especially for
those downpouring days where you really don't want to leave the
house.
Taking
Netflix for a spin, while I have come across a few said gems, this is
actually the streaming platform that I find the most frustration when
it comes to its search options. However, the ones that I have
discovered have been unexpectedly good – the Netflix “Original”
slowburn gothic horror film I
Am the Pretty Things that Lives in the House has
a palpable Stephen King / Shirley Jackson literary-horror feel to its
central ghost story and outlaying flashback scenes, making for a
worthwhile entry in the haunted house canon. Another good haunting
lies in the indie arthouse horror film Darling,
a
quick Larry Fessenden-produced romp that gives us its ghost story
laced with madness and generous helpings of dark humour. The
Bottom of the World, unavailable
on any physical home media format in North America so there's no
other choice but
to
stream it, stars Jenna Malone (from Neon
Demon) in
a similarly hallucinatory narrative as she becomes wrapped in a maze
of subconscious and other-worldly realities; it's another quick
arthouse genre film (around 80 minutes) that feels like an inspired
collision between Twin
Peaks, Psycho, and
Jacob's
Ladder. Bottom of the World is
actually one of my favourites from Netflix, along with the weirdly
erotic and murdery Sun
Choke, which
stars classic genre fave Barbara “Re-Animator” Crampton in what I
think is one of her best screen performances ever. One of the best
straight-hitting horrors on Netflix, though, in terms of sheer
intensity and suspense, is Hush,
which
takes place all in one night when a deaf and mute woman is terrorized
by a violent and clever home invader.
The
streaming platform Crave TV is, as you'd probably guessed with the
name, focused on television series – some old, and a lot that are
very new. Here you'll find the Stephen King / JJ Abrams supernatural
horror series Castle
Rock, and
while Stephen King did not write any of the series' episodes (it's
based on a world created by King in his horror literature), the first
10-part season is, appropriately, very Stephen King in feel and
atmosphere, as the 10-part story rolls out itself much like a novel.
But it was David Lynch's return to Twin Peaks that really floored me
– this 18-episode limited series from 2017 takes place 25 years
after the last time we were invited to visit the town of Twin Peaks,
and everyone one of those 18 episodes was directed by Lynch himself.
This hallucinatory, genre-bending return to Twin Peaks does boast a
couple of episodes that are outright horror, and horror underlies
most of what's going on in a very emotional level where Lynch brings
us his subconsciously deep view of loss and agony, to an ultimately
haunting conclusion. One professional critic had opted to maintain
that the return to Twin Peaks was some of the best “cinema” of
our time, stating that in this age of digital streaming, the lines
between “television” and “cinema” continue to blur closer
together.
Continuing
my recent TV-series obsession, Amazon Prime has the first seasons of
Preacher,
which
I've been wholly addicted to (based on the graphic novel series by
Garth Ennis). I have a preference to the Amazon VOD platform for two
reasons: 1.
Unlike most of the titles available through Netflix, there are tons
of horror and giallo films that date earlier than 2015, and you can
also find a slew of wild independent genre films like the
over-the-top Peelers,
and
the giallo-inspired Glass
and
The Editor.
And reason number 2,
the
search-links are similar to what we're used to seeing on Amazon's
shopping website, so if you see a title that looks interesting, it's
easy to open up a whole line of selections that other “Customers
Who Watched This Also Watched”, and thereby accessing hundreds of
titles that may have gone unrepresented in the initial homepage
categories. Through this somewhat intuitive browsing mode, I found a
couple of inspired independent horror films – from 2012, a German
take on the cannibal subgenre titled (very appropriately) Cannibal
Diner, which
admittedly
does
not have a high rating on the imdb, but I personally found it to be
fast-paced and very enjoyable with an engaging (and nearly
all-female) cast of characters, and it relies so heavily on the
genre's tropes that it's almost impossible not to find it bloody
charming. Not a lot of violence until near the end, which I didn't
mind, and what there was was fairly gory – the story is basically a
young woman who finds herself lost in the woods runs afoul of a Texas
Chainsaw-type
of family in an abandoned chemical factory.
I
feel compelled to mention that Amazon Prime is one of the only places
you'll find Spike Lee's gorgeous and thoughtful vampire remake of the
70s cult film Ganja
and Hess – Lee's
version re-titled Da
Sweet Blood of Jesus. Also
on Amazon's streaming service we'll find another Larry Fessenden
indie film (actually, we'll find a lot of things, from the films of
Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci to the crazy flicks of Charles Band's
Full Moon) – called Silver
Bullets, and
despite what Amazon will tell you, Silver
Bullets was
not
produced
in 1970; rather it's a modern low-budget erotic and existential movie
from 2011 that eventually turns into a horror movie, after folding
dream- and nightmare-fantasies over its own neo-realism and into the
fantastic cinema of, well, werewolf films.
A
lot of the independent horror films featured on these streaming
services came from film festivals like SXSW, and now without the
video stores of yesteryear to bring them in front of genre audiences,
a lot of them are leaping directly from the festival circuit to
Video-On-Demand platforms. And while it's probably abundantly clear
that a large chunk of these personal horror selections lean towards
the kaleidoscopic, I have found something hugely engaging and even
inspiring with each of them, whether they're 75 minutes or 18 hours
long. Follow this list and you'll certainly be in for a mindbending
end to your winter months.
-Vince
D'Amato
https://darksidereleasing.com
(Cannibal Diner)
(Da Sweet Blood of Jesus)
(Darling)
(Hush)
(I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the Walls)
(Silver Bullets)
(Sun Choke)
(Twin Peaks -- Revisited)
