Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Curse of the Cat People!

Spoilers for Cat People entailed.

Last time we checked in with Oliver (S.F. Guy) and Alice (Jane Randolph), they were fighting for their lives against the ambiguous feline menace of Irena (Simone Simon). Years later they're married, confirming, somewhat hilariously, her worst fears. But has Irena returned as a spooky ghost to haunt their autistic daughter? Despite the title, this surprising sequel isn't so much a retread of the original's classic-horror atmospherics as a charming, redemptive coda with a wholesome festive vibe, its horror elements played even subtler and relegated to the merest frisson until they resurface in key scenes. Yes, Curse is the first and last horror sequel to shift gears into Christmaskino.

"Happy holidays" sayers on even more suicide watch than usual.

But as the movie opens, Oliver and Alice are troubled over their daughter Amy's (Ann Carter) apparent fantasy life. Amy daydreams, posts letters in a hollow tree, hangs out with a weird old lady and her live-in carer daughter, and, most disconcertingly of all, announces that she has a new friend, who turns out to be Irena. Is she an imaginary friend, a real benign spirit, or a vengeful ghost posing as Casper to lure Amy to her doom?

Sorry WitchTERF4968, under Project 2025 all women will be required to wear these fairytale gowns with the long drooping wizard sleeves. I don't make the rules!

Of course, to answer would be to spoil. Perhaps because it veered so far from the perfectly judged horror template of its rightly esteemed predecessor, Curse was a commercial flop and remains largely unknown. But if you've exhausted your oh-so-nontraditional Christmas movie fare with Die Hard and Batman Returns, and if you followed my orders and watched the original this Halloween, Curse might be the seasonal gem to see you through your Christmas evening. Either that or revisit The Mothman Prophecies. Maybe make it a double bill.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mothman Prophecies!

Cryptid flicks might well be the most bargain-bin of all genres. Abominable was a neat riff on Hitchcock that memorably featured Tiffany Shepis being yanked spine first through a (rear) window, and Willow Creek was a top shelf Blair Witch Project ripoff that did little to disguise its plagiarism. But you've never heard of either, and it's way downhill from there on in, with one remarkably kino exception.

We're going uncharacteristically classy this Halloween.

What makes The Mothman Prophecies go so hard is the effortlessness with which it transcends its lowly underdog status as cryptidcore. If such cryptozoological heavyweights as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot can barely scrape together more than one watchable title, who would have thought the fucking Mothman movie would be any good?

The schizo art coffee table book market remains sadly underserved.

Yet Prophecies is not content to meet us halfway with a blend of gory shlock and the odd good scene thrown in as a treat. From start to finish, it's a slickly shot and edited, oddly philosophical mood piece, taking the 1960s sightings of a winged, mysterious creature and the book from which it takes its title as a springboard to delve into realms of atmospheric kino more akin to David Lunch's oneiric ouevre than your average horror fare. Richard Gere stars as the everyman drawn into the rabbit-hole of Mothman lore by a fateful encounter that leaves him with questions and traumatic memories and troubled dreams. Laura Linney is the local cop who introduces him to the Mothman witnesses in the town of Point Pleasant, WV. In the movie's most audacious twist, the West Virginians themselves are not portrayed as the monsters.

Average West Virginian according to average Californian (Wrong Turn, 2003)

But I shall say no more about the plot because it's the atmosphere and visual style that retain their brooding impact. Questions linger. Closeups portend. Airborne cameras circle. Electric lights suggest.

A bird's eye view...or something else???

If you want a beer & popcorn flick for Halloween, you have a string of options, from the enjoyably retarded to the great. If you're alone and want to ponder the cosmological nature of the unknowable, watch The Mothman Prophecies.

1982's "The Snowman" is a Cosmic Horror Christmas Kino!

If your parents weren't disgusting crackheads, you will have grown up watching short animation kino The Snowman at Christmas time. No doubt your young heart will have thrilled to the innocent joy of creation, the bravura flight around the world, and the whimsical dance sequence.

But it will also have been cruelly punctured by the ending, which I will spoil for the crack babies (the snowman melts), because it's far too late for them now. I'm here to rectify that, by revealing that the snowman is a servant of the dark Elder God Cthulhu, who even now slumbers at his cyclopean house in sunken Rl'yeh.

The first sign something is amiss is when the snowman turns his head as the young boy observes him through the glass of his front door, in what horror film viewers will recognise as classic horror film grammar. Compare the moment in Scream (1996) where Drew Barrymore sees Ghostface from behind through the window and he turns around to face her. Something-seeing-you-from-behind-glass is horror grammar, and the animators know it, as they are professionals. This is why only patricians can appreciate art.

This happens at the witching hour, by the way.

The snowman then proceeds to gain the boy's trust so he can take him as a sacrifice to his dark master. The second clue to his true nature is that the cat shits its pants when it sees him. As we know from Stoker's Dracula and others, animals can sense the presence of the uncanny. In fact all the animals in the picture run away from the snowman or behave wildly in confusion, except for the owl, and the owls are not what they seem.

One day I shall write at length on the connections between the Lovecraftian and Lynchian branches of cosmic horror.

The snowman then takes the boy flying around the world, and we get the only lyrics in the whole picture (silent cinema, as you will know, is preferable wherever possible). These include the following:

Suddenly swooping low on an ocean deep

Rousing up a mighty monster from its sleep

That sounds like Cthulhu to me. The kino shows a whale, and the plebeian will interpret that as the "monster" of the lyrics, but it's evident to me that true kinographers know to suggest the presence of the true horror through environmental signifiers. Consider Spielberg's use of the water ripples to suggest the T-rex in Jurassic Park; Park is a very good film, but it would be kino had he never shown the dinosaur at all.

In other words, the presence of the whale indicates the forces arising far beneath the surface: it is driving even massive creatures to the surface in flight.

Absolutely eldritch.

Given just one more day, when the stars were right, the snowman would have sacrificed the boy to bring about Cthulhu's rise. The day is still coming when he will rise up from the sea. His vast wings will black out the stars, and all the Earth will tremble in horror and terror as he walks upon the land!

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

A Very Bastard Christmas

The strangest thing happened last night. I had just been fired from my job as desk clerk at Mr Potter's nuclear power plant for impersonating a clergyman, and was taking out my frustrations the usual way, by helping the blind beggars cross the road onto the middle of a roundabout, and leaving them.

Then for no reason at all, a bunch of youths started harassing me. They said "hey, that's not cool", and "don't do that", very aggressively, so I ran a safe distance and called the police. I explained what happened to a great big fat desk sergeant, who seemed to think I was joking. It's like there's no justice anywhere in the world. What if I had been violently beaten, or gored to death? It was pure typical victim blaming. Calling the police officer a fat fuck, I handed the phone back to the gentleman who'd kindly let me borrow it, and ran across the road, causing a cyclist to swerve and skid into a lamppost. This made me lel so much I started coughing, and coughed up blood all over the pavement.

I was looking for a doctor, but it was Christmas Eve and the lines were round the block. I decided if I was to get treatment, I would have to outdo some of these malingerers with their gaping neck wounds, so I hurried off to the theatre store to grab some fake blood, only to find that it had closed down and moved. Pouting in anger, I hurled a lady's small terrier at the deserted husk of a store, and spun on my heel, which caused me to slip and fall on the slick ground. Then the lady, totally unprovoked, started wailing on me with her umbrella like a dervish. I defended myself in the manner I've been taught by social media: by screaming and crying and playing the victim. A group of passing thugs heard my cries and hauled off the lady, who protested vehemently. In the confusion, I tied two of the thugs' shoelaces together and fled.

Bedraggled and potentially dying of consumption, I staggered onto the bridge, where I looked down at the icy river below. I contemplated ending it all by jumping, calculating that if I hit my head on a rock, I would probably only feel horrific agony for a few seconds, whereas if I missed I would likely die a slow death of pneumonia, unless I could remember to hold my head under the water long enough to drown, my lungs filling intolerably up with water. But no! That would be the coward's way out!!! So I had determined to live, when an angel appeared at my side. He said "no dude, you should totally jump. Heaven is totally unanimous on this".

Was he right? Should I have jumped? Fuck that, why am I asking you? The world needs me. I've seen the light! It's a Christmas miracle!! I'm going to live forever!!!!23$%*.