Exit the Halloween Hangover...Enter...um, THE HALLOWEEN HANGOVER!

One keeps changing one's goalposts, doesn't one? Revising a blown deadline, extending a due date to buy oneself more time? I do so unashamedly, for a number of reasons. When I last posted, I was miffed by how Halloween sneaked by with so little fanfare, and swore to extend the celebration of horror into November, taking the 21st as the true end of Halloween.

The 21st was the night the Castro Theatre unleashed a lovely 2fer of British horror: Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (from a print brought over from the British Film Institute) and Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness, a highly regarded cult film I'd been eager to check out for years. I attended that lovely double feature (accompanied by good friend & editor Michael Guillen - go read The Evening Class, will ya?), and yet still can't just put the damn Halloween season to bed.

Especially not since the Castro's unleashing an even-more-glorious horror 2-fer this month, pairing Argento's Suspiria (which I've seen there before and elsewhere on 35mm, but dammit) with Mario Bava's final film Beyond the Door II (aka Shock), and under-the-wire-but-surely-welcome participation in this, Mario Bava's centenary.

So I'm not pronouncing horror season done until that date (and its accompanying movies) are behind us. As for the movies mentioned above...

--Don't Look Now was basically an unknown quantity; I'd seen it on video back in college but hadn't revisited it since. Even knowing the terrifying ending is coming (and it's still a hell of a jolt, and a heartbreaker, besides), the details of the story remain engrossing. Though Roeg feels like he's keeping himself distant from his story, in which Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie mourn their dead child (retreating to Venice, where something strange among the canals seems to stalk them as insistently as their memories), it's as if Sutherland and Christie are able to spread out inside that distance and really explore the depths of sadness, intimacy, alienation, and desolation. For all its penetrating realism there's more than enough touches of the uncanny to propel the thing into the realm of horror. And I wonder now as I did when I first saw it if its visual linking of one scene to the next was lifted directly by comics scribe Alan Moore.

--Daughters of Darkness stretches a low budget and limited resources really, really far, or spends a huge budget to convey that impression. John Karlen (who shot this between Dark Shadows projects - Kumel's casting must have been deliberate) and Danielle Ouimet are newlyweds who find themselves stuck at a desolate Belgian hotel, with only a bizarre countess (Marienbad's Delphine Seyrig, semi-slumming it here under Resnais' encouragement) and her Brooksian secretary (Andrea Rau). It's decadent and dreamy, never quite solid enough to cohere into something truly great but never running out of strange details with which to beguile us. And it gets a lot of mileage out of Seyrig, her costumes, and those interiors, as well.

More soon(ish) on other movies seen in the post-post-Halloween season, including a video or two.

BYZANTIUM

On the basis of the evidence here, Moira Buffini is my kind of playwright. Like many of my favorite British artists, she rejects the kitchen sink realism so prevalent in that country's cinema and theatre in favor of a more fanciful maximalism. At the same time, she uses genre and fantasist tropes to address and explore contemporary social concerns as diligently as any naturalist. It is no surprise then that Byzantium (adapted by Buffini from her play A Vampire Story) should address gender politics, family relations, the frailty of the body, and our relationship to our history within its story of a mother-daughter pair of vampires on the run from undead elders. What is pleasantly surprising is how entertaining and moving Byzantium turns out to be.

Buffini's script is gorgeously realized by director Neil Jordan, an old hand at adapting vampire literature by female authors. In the opening moments of the movie Jordan effortlessly balances two plotlines, as daughter Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan) gently comforts an old age pensioner she's about to kill, while across town mother Clara (Gemma Arterton) is chased on foot from a neon-lit strip club through a shopping mall skylight to a dingy apartment by a mysterious but dogged pursuer. This kind of parallelism seems to run through the entire movie, and Jordan proves incredibly perceptive of many dualities running through Buffini's story: mother/daughter, past/present, living/undead, female/male, sex/violence. (Many of these seem to land during a stunning early moment in which Eleanor finds herself on a beach, face-to-face with her 19th-century self). The thing flows gorgeously, and the tale of the Webbs' vampiric origins unfolds deftly as their present-day difficulties escalate.

As commonplace as vampires seem to have become, it's no mean feat playing one well. Arterton, perhaps unsurprisingly, plays the now familiar blood-letting, leather-clad, ass-kicking female vampire with sleazy grace, but she's just as strong conveying the weariness of centuries in hiding, and the endless reservoir of love of an undead parent for her child. Ronan is just as strong in a quieter but equally deep role of an undead but ethical blood drinker, her pangs of conscience as strong as her thirst for blood, her need to tell her story sitting hand-in-hand with a longing to simply, finally connect. Buffini's depth & generosity extend to her male characters as well - Sam Riley and Jonny Lee Miller are strong as men who figure prominently in the Webbs' long lives; Daniel Mays and Caleb Henry Jones bring keenly felt (and very different) vulnerabilities to their roles as mortal men in the women's orbit.

Sean Bobbitt (cinematographer for some of last year's finest movies, including The Place Beyond The Pines and 12 Years A Slave) seems to capture an otherworldly luminosity unleashed by the Webbs in the dreary, everyday world they inhabit. I complained a while back that digital photography and presentation undermined the gothic atmosphere so desperately sought by the makers of The Woman in Black; perhaps I'm finally getting used to seeing such tales being told in this medium. Perhaps Bobbitt is simply a great cinematographer. The visual strengths of the movie are matched by its music, as Javier Navarette's score boosts the story with knowing, gentle intensity.

The whole thing feels like one of the best movies I've seen in recent memory. Byzantium finds new life and energy in the vampire story, and, finally, makes a compelling and persuasive case for the vitality of the 21st century horror movie. Long live the Webbs.