Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Scary Films
COLUMN | ISSUE THIRTEEN | SPOOKY
Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist
Anguish (Bigas Luna, 1987)
If you’re queasy about eyeballs and pupils, then either steer clear or work up the courage. In fact, to my fellow ommetaphobics out there, let me encourage you to test your mettle. What I really want to say about Anguish, a gloriously languid-paced fever-dream about film-induced hypnosis, is that the less you know about it going in, the better, yet I’m aware this is a terrible case for a film recommendations column to make. The film is an assault on the senses, a rollicking nightmare of whispers, tears, screeches, and drooping eyelids. Anguish is formed of two ‘layers’ of movie that feed off one another. In the first, an obsessive mother (Zelda Rubenstein) appoints her neurotic son to go out and collect as many of a certain organ from all kinds of victims, animal or human. In the second, a theatre audience watches it happen (like us), reacting accordingly. The eventual merge between these two layers is deliciously surreal, and for the organ-taker it is especially a treat. There might be no better place to harvest his mother’s organ of choice than from a captive populace who cannot stand to watch, and yet cannot look away…
Joshua (George Ratliff, 2007)
Has a baby’s cry ever sounded this close to the roaring of a buzzsaw? At the time of writing, this film sits at a sub-3.0 average rating on Letterboxd. I can’t believe I put this on a couple years back after finding out it was on Disney+; I was completely rattled. The titular Joshua, the prodigal son turned devil’s child, is a well-educated, nine-year-old psychopath who harbours resentment towards his parents over the birth of his baby sister. An early piano recital performance of ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ melts into an atonal litter of the ‘wrong notes’ and demonstrates a particular kind of parental anxiety that Joshua isn’t becoming the son they envisioned or recognised. While a movie like Orphan (2009) – good, tasteless fun – might plead on the side of the parents against its evil adolescent, Joshua manages to harness sympathy for all of the family members, even the ones we might regard with suspicion. Abby’s postpartum depression; Brad’s fear upon realising he might be an inadequate father; even Hazel’s Christian conservatism and being easily frightened that her family is veering towards sacrilege. Their affluent, spacious New York apartment, with enough rooms for every member, begins to feel forbidding, even suffocating, and collapses after a truly horrifying game of hide-and-seek (in which the oven is, unbelievably, not off limits). No more safe places to hide.
Writhing Tongue (Yoshitarō Nomura, 1980)
For its subject matter, this might be almost unrecommendable, since I think a lot of us have experienced the hurt of seeing a family member either hospitalised or surviving a terrible (or terminal) illness. Writhing Tongue is about a five-year-old girl, Masako, who receives a tetanus infection that leaves her incapacitated in the hospital, and whose parents spend nights watching her writhe and splutter through medical procedures in the hope that she’ll recover. And yes, this is a horror film; its style is curiously gothic. It is largely set in the patient unit, cloaked in expressionist shadows, and offers a few beguiling shots of birds and butterflies as mortal symbols. It is in fascinating dialogue with The Exorcist – to say nothing of that movie’s unnerving hospital scene – and it is a damn miracle that it works. Perhaps it is that the movie doesn’t barrel towards tragedy, or give the sense of a downward spiral; it simply finds an unnerving psychological state for the parents to occupy, and holds you there for a very, very long time. Both mother and father reassess their own assumptions about the purpose of parenthood, and emerge on the other side with greater love for not only their child but themselves. There is one incredible, off-hand scene where the father, sprinting for dear life to pick up cans of juice for his family, slips over in the corridor. He gets back up and keeps running. He doesn’t care.
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