THE CRUSH 1993

The Crush is Trash Cinema in its purest, most uproariously unregenerate form. For try as I might to ascribe seriousness of intent to this overheated opus involving a neglected teen’s serial attachment to surrogate father figures; accredit forethought to the extended Frankenstein metaphor wherein accelerated physical and intellectual development fatally presumes a corresponding emotional maturity; or even shoehorn in an indictment of our culture’s tolerance for the sexualizing of adolescent girls…it’s all for naught. The Crush is never more than what it aspires to be in the moment, and utterly what it appears to be on the surface: a 100% empty-calorie, all-cheese buffet with nary an ounce of socially redeeming value to be found in its economic (nay, rushed) 89-minute running time.

The MTV-era lovechild of Cinemax and the Lifetime Network, The Crush is a high-concept, low-class I Was a Teenage Fatal Attraction cash-grab calculated to ride the crest of that ‘90s wave of benign-appearing-psychopath erotic thrillers popularized by Basic Instinct, Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Poison Ivy. A campy (sometimes I could swear it's intentional), by-the-numbers suspenser about a precocious 14-year-old who develops an obsessive crush on the 28-year-old journalist renting her parents’ guest house, The Crush is sleazy as hell, yet manages to show—for an exploitation film, anyway—a surprising degree of restraint. Sure, its pervy screenplay mines every wish-fulfillment “jailbait” cliché known to man, yet it somehow manages to avoid falling prey to the kind of distasteful explicitness and easy vulgarity its porny premise suggests (or its producers would have liked).

In lieu of explicitness, The Crush instead opts for a kind of moral schizophrenia that's committed to playing both sides of the film's Penthouse Forum scenario. On the one hand, the film aggressively sexualizes the character played by 16-year-old Alicia Silverstone and invites the viewer to share its leering, ogling gaze. On the other, the film tries to convince us that it also condemns the hypersexualization of young girls and their bodies. The latter, none too persuasively.

The feature film debut of Disney Channel (wouldn't you know it?) director Alan Shapiro, The Crush--which has the feel of one of those straight-to-video erotic thrillers with Shannon Tweed or Richard Grieco--was filmed in Vancouver, B.C. on a budget of $6 million and a paucity of marquee names in the cast. But its timing was good. Rising star Alicia Silverstone was making her film debut, and arrived star Cary Elwes, who was somewhat hot at the time having appeared to favorable effect in The Princess Bride (1987), Hot Shots! (1991) and Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)...but it's hard to know if The Crush represented an ascension or a downturn in his career trajectory. 

What the film lacked in bankable names it made up for in topicality: The Crush came out at the peak of the public’s feeding frenzy fascination with the sordid Joey Buttafuoco /Amy Fisher “Long Island Lolita” sleaze-fest dominating the tabloid headlines in 1992. The scandal spawned three TV movies, but The Crush was the only feature film and work of (semi) fiction to capitalize on the public's apparently insatiable interest in teen seductresses.  

Cary Elwes as Nicholas Eliot

Alicia Silverstone as Adrian/Darian Forrester

Jennifer Rubin as Amy Maddik

Having landed a plum writing gig at trendy Pique Magazine, hotshot investigative journalist Nick Eliot (UK-born Cary Elwes, ever on the losing end of a battle with an American accent) packs everything he owns into the back of his vintage Plymouth Valiant convertible and moves to Vancouver, Wahington...which I think is standing in for Seattle). Anyhow, in short order he rents a picturesque above-garage apartment in a tony suburban neighborhood from a busy professional couple with a precocious 14-year-old daughter named Adrian (Silverstone)...or Darian if you’re a lip-reader...who almost immediately develops a crush on the new tenant. Adrian's adolescent flirtation starts out innocently -if invasively- enough with the besotted teen gifting Nick a set of clip-on sunglasses (sweet). Then it moves on to her surreptitiously rewriting one of his magazine articles for the better (out of line). It comes to a head when she gets him to drive her to a secluded spot where she can pour out her heart to him about how tough it is to be a pulchritudinous, 14-year-old virgin who's also a genius, a piano prodigy, a seasoned equestrian, and an expert in entomology (creepy).

For his part, Nick goes from flattered, to annoyed, to empathetic...ultimately settling in somewhere around dumbfounded. The latter allowing for things with Adrian to go as far as finger-sucking (who among us hasn’t let an infatuated middle-adolescent tongue our cuticles?) followed by a wildly inappropriate kiss. Snapping to his senses, Nick is quick to establish firm, distinct boundaries for the teen…but only after circumstance and his own profound stupidity have him sneaking into Adrian’s house, catching a gawking glimpse of her discarded panties, and “accidentally” watching her fully undress from the vantage point of his hiding place inside her louvered door closet.

Now more convinced than ever that her feelings for Nick are fully reciprocated, Adrian the Equestrian comes to regard his eleventh-hour protestations and capitulations to propriety as little more than what they probably are: guilt-based, locking the barn door after the horse has bolted ploys (or zipping the fly after the…well, you get the idea). Alas, by the time Adrian’s feelings have grown so strong that she feels comfortable greeting the judgment-impaired writer with a cheery “Hello, Nicholas darling!” Nick has moved on past unintentional teen-teasing and has embarked on a more age-appropriate romance with an associate from work, photojournalist Amy Maddik.

"Nick, I've been there. You have to be the adult. You can't blur the line."

Stinging from the potential threat of Nick’s new girlfriend (“Oh, don’t worry, Amy. Some guys really like girls with small breasts!”) and seething with resentment over Nick’s rebuff of her advances (“Too busy kissing ass to care about me, is that it?"), Adrian Forrester is left with no choice but to go full Alex Forrest (her homage namesake Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction) on the pair.

Consistently silly and flagrantly derivative (it’s Fatal Attraction by way of Lolita and The Bad Seed ) it perhaps goes without saying that I find The Crush to be also ceaselessly entertaining and irresistible as all get-out. Serving up sizable chunks of cheese, sleaze, and lurid camp, The Crush is absolutely fabulous without ever really being any good. It's a film that cries out for the MST3K treatment, and proves to be a film whose entertainment value increases exponentially in direct proportion to how many other people you see it with. It's a guaranteed good time so long as you take care not to allow certain things to intrude upon your viewing experience that might tend to spoil your fun…like your brain.

Adrian and her friend Cheyenne (Amber Benson) spy on Nick.
Teenage crushes have really come a long way since The World of Henry Orient (1964)

I didn’t get around to actually seeing The Crush until it was released on VHS cassette in 1995, by which time not only had word got around that the film was a tawdry hoot, but Alicia Silverstone had gone on to become the queen of MTV by way of a trio of heavy-rotation music videos she appeared in for the band Aerosmith. The Crush wasn't very popular on initial release (it has since developed a cult following) but MTV's shameless hyping of Silverstone was instrumental in her landing two MTV Movie Awards (Best Villain and Best Breakthrough Performance) for a movie nobody saw. Things picked up for Silverstone when she was cast in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), and just as quickly went south for her when she appeared as Batgirl in the deservedly ill-fated Batman and Robin (1997).

While Adrian's crush on Nick appears to be the focus of the film's plot, the fact that Adrian's body is the most consistent object of the camera's objectification reveals that the film is really about Nick's response to Adrian's crush on him: we're supposed to identify with his vulnerability and fear of entrapment.  We're granted just one scene in which we're invited to share Adrian's POV: as she spies on Nick naked in the shower. 

I wasn't terribly surprised by how much I liked The Crush, for I'm one who never got over Mamie Van Doren’s retirement, mourned the demise of the Reform School Girl B-picture genre, and pine for the days when underground films by Andy Warhol and John Waters spoofed Hollywood trash. Happily, Silverstone's pouty pariah seems to be channeling Ann-Margret in Kitten With a Whip (1964) by way of Joey Heatherton in Where Love Has Gone (also 1964. It was apparently a very good year for bad girls). And while the menace of Silverstone's characterization never reaches the delirious heights of kung-fu Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls; by way of compensation, we get to marvel at the many ways she's been directed to perpetually tilt her head and peer over the top of her sunglasses.

In the VHS copy of The Crush I watched several years ago, Silverstone’s character was named Darian. That's because director/screenwriter Alan Shapiro based The Crush on an actual experience he had in 1982 when he was a struggling writer renting a guest-house from a family in Beverly Hills. When the family’s teenage daughter (actually named Darian) developed a crush on him, his snubbing of her attentions resulted in the retaliatory act of her carving an obscenity into the paint of his car (a scene recreated in the film). Shapiro left the house not long thereafter, but he used the incident as a springboard for his screenplay. Even going so far as to keep the girl’s name the same (understandable, given how it suggests Damien, the name of the Antichrist in The Omen).

What's in a Name?
This digital transformation of D.F. to A.F. is smoother than the sound dubbing.
None of the original actors were brought back to rerecord their lines.

But verisimilitude has its price. Especially when said teen is depicted as homicidal and seriously off her nut. Sometime after the film's release, the parents of the real-life Darian hit Shapiro and Warner Bros. with a libel lawsuit, a resultant term of the out-of-court settlement being that the character’s name had to be changed in all subsequent prints. Thus, in future VHS copies and once The Crush began showing up on TV, Laserdisc, and DVD, Darian became Adrian, and all references to and appearances of it in the film had to be dubbed over or digitally altered. I can’t imagine this costly development went over well with the studio --"You mean to tell me you used the girl’s ACTUAL NAME?!"--which may explain why Shapiro’s directing career came to a grinding halt after directing just one other feature: Flipper (1996).

"Some friggin' kid will be standing there with a hardon sticking out of his pants!"
Kurtwood Smith as Adrian's father engages Nick in a cringe-creepy conversation about how his daughter has "blossomed physically" over the past year and how he dreads the day suitors come a-courtin'.  Men feeling proprietary about a girl's sexual agency (in a way we never see with boys) starts with dear old dad. 

Before I saw The Crush, the purposeful evocation of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) in both its marketing campaign and the casting of Sue Lyon lookalike Alicia Silverstone had me wondering (fool that I am) if perhaps the thriller might be some kind of a subversive upending of the whole Lolita Myth (the sexually predatory child who looks and behaves older than their actual age). Maybe even a parable indictment of our culture’s endorsement of the sexual “adultification” of adolescent girls (à la Brooke Shields and Nastassja Kinski) and blaming them for enticing hapless, innocent men. 

Boy, was I barking up the wrong tree.

Alicia Silverstone was 15-years-old when cast in her debut film (16 when production began)
Sue Lyon was 14-years-old when cast in her film debut (15 when production began)

The truth is that The Crush is like the Reefer Madness of The Lolita Myth. Female and male are vixen and victim in a stacked-deck narrative that has the character of Adrian depicted as a child only when the film wants to play up the taboo, schoolgirl fetish angle of the story (her ultra-girly bedroom, overflowing with stuffed animals and floral patterns, looks like it belongs to a 10-year-old). In all other ways, the viewer is encouraged to see her as a woman.
Because we never see her interact with boys her own age (ostensibly because they find her intelligence off-putting) and because her attractiveness and healthy interest in boys/men are never contextualized, Adrian's budding sexuality is never framed in terms of adolescent normalcy.

Attractive Nuisance
The Crush understands and exploits (but has no opinion about) the fetishizing
of youth and how it feeds into the taboo allure of adolescent sexuality

The non-logic of The Lolita Myth never faults the tempted...men...all blame falls to the object of desire, as though men's sexual feelings are something they cannot be expected to control. A young, attractive girl who dares recognize and own her sexuality is seen as a risk and a threat simply by her existence and proximity. Even without action on her part, a woman or girl's body is imbued with the power to bait, tease, lure, and tempt. Never mind that her sexualization is something fabricated exclusively in the mind of a man via his own gaze. The Crush ratchets up the absurdity of this misogynist conceit into a worst-case scenario fantasy in which assertive female sexuality is not only toxic, it's homicidal.

The photo of Nick's journalist grandfather is actually The Crush's cinematographer Bruce Surtees with his grandchild (judging by the different lighting, I'd guess with the head of Elwes as a child grafted over the little boy). The late Oscar-nominated Bruce Surtees (Lenny - 1974) also shot the films Night Moves, Play Misty For Me, and Sparkle

While the film plays fast and loose with making Silverstone look girlish or womanly depending on what message they're trying to send to males in the audience (alternating between "You lucky dog!" and "Better stay away from that young stuff, they're nothing but trouble!"), its treatment of Cary Elwes is pretty consistent: he's a dope who gets duped.

Though Nick has the professional reputation of being a bulldog investigative reporter (suggesting shrewd intelligence and a certain assertiveness), Adrian is the one with all the guile and cunning. Outfitted with goofy spectacles and dressed in oversized clothes that make him look like a little boy who's raided his father's closet, Nick may sneak peeks at Adrian sunbathing, or need to take a shot of vodka to clear his head after getting all hot and sweaty after a don't-stand-so-close-to-me encounter with a girl half his age; but in the lunatic confines of this thriller, he's the one seen as Little Red Riding Hood, she's The Big Bad Wolf.

In a nod to Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951),
a merry-go-round figures into the climax of The Crush

Guileless to the point of being a bit of a dunderhead, it’s made clear that Nick has no real interest in Adrian (her crush flatters his ego), just as it’s also obvious he finds her attractive: Nick - “If you were 10 years older….” Adrian - “You’d what?”

But the film sympathizes with Nick in a way it never does with Adrian, its attitude being: what’s a healthy, red-blooded, American-British boy to do when confronted with a steady stream of provocatively exposed flesh accompanied by shy flirtations?: “Nick…ever do a virgin? I know you want to.”

Movie tradition allows for leading men to wear glasses only when a character is called upon to look older, smarter, or vulnerable. Cary Elwes' owlish spectacles have the effect of making him appear harmless, bookish, and younger. He reminds me of the animated character Milo Thatch from Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Were The Crush a better-made movie, I think I’d have found its alarmist view of female sexuality obnoxious. There's a real story hidden here somewhere, about how girls who scare boys of their own age by being smart, attractive, and self-possessed, can feel abandoned (or drawn) to the inappropriate attentions of older men. But the female-phobic, male-centric focus of The Crush dooms the story to a social cluelessness it never overcomes.
 The Crush reminds me of the time when I was a kid and my baby sister sought to extend the play life of her older, balding, Barbie doll by removing its head and replacing it with a newer one. It's hard to be offended by The Crush because it isn’t really about anything; it’s just Fatal Attraction with a younger head attached.

Possession Obsession
An homage to Fatal Attraction's iconic "lamp switch" scene. 
Complete with stuffed bunny rabbit 

BONUS MATERIAL
If you're a fan of thrillers and are in the market for a movie that head-on confronts all the subtextual creepiness The Crush sidesteps, I'd recommend Hard Candy (2005) starring Elliot Page and Patrick Wilson. Not for the faint of heart, but a real jolt of a suspense thriller.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 -2019

RETURN FROM THE ASHES 1965

Independent of what one might ultimately come to feel about Return from the Ashes after seeing it, no one can say it isn’t a bargain. Helmed by Oscar-nominated director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone -1962, Cape Fear - 1962, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud - 1975) and written by Julius Epstein (Oscar-nominated co-writer of Casablanca - 1942), the stylish and undeniably entertaining Return from the Ashes gives you three movies for the price of one: 1) A drama about a Holocaust survivor readjusting to society after 5-years internment in a concentration camp; 2) A deception melodrama with a couple persuading a lookalike stranger to impersonate a deceased relative in order to claim an inheritance; and 3) A romantic crime thriller involving a love triangle, a fortune in money, and a complex murder plot…complete with double-crosses.

Shot in atmospheric, close-up intensive, high-contrast B&W by veteran British cinematographer Christopher Challis (Two for the Road – 1967, Evil Under the Sun - 1982), Return from the Ashes drips noirish élan and mystery from every frame. And why shouldn’t it? Its delicious mélange of a plot is essentially A Woman’s Face meets Mildred Pierce meets Vertigo meets Anastasia meets Diabolique meets The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Ingrid Thulin as Dr. Michelle Wolf

Maximillian Schell as Stanislaus Pilgrin

Samantha Eggar as Fabienne Wolf

Herbert Lom as Dr. Charles Bovard

A gripping pre-credits sequence establishes the place and time as postwar France, 1945 (make sure to drink it all in, for it’s the first and last instance of the film making any kind of serious attempt to accurately depict the era) while simultaneously setting the tone for what will be the film’s dark exploration of moral relativism, solipsism and survival, and the ways in which our experiences shape who we become.

On a train traveling from Germany to France, a child in a crowded compartment is making a nuisance of himself by repeatedly kicking an exit door and fiddling with its latch (Mother: “[pleadingly] If I give you another bar of chocolate, will you stop then?” child: “[kicking intensifying] Perhaps”). When tragedy strikes in the form of the door giving way and launching das schrecklich kind out into the darkness, the passengers all react with appropriate shock and horror. All but one.

The individual closest to the now-yawning chasm that claimed the little brat…er, boy, is a gaunt, graying woman whose face bears a scar, upon whose wrist are the tattooed numbers of a death camp, and whose haunted eyes stare without seeing…a past witness to horrors far worse.

The Holocaust survivor and titular Phoenix returning from the ashes of Dachau is Dr. Michelle Wolf, a Jewish radiologist en route to Paris in hopes of reclaiming her earlier life. Presuming, of course, that there’s still a life to reclaim, for everyone who knew her now presumes she is dead. 
She's gone but not forgotten by confidant and medical colleague Dr. Charles Bovard (Lom), a plastic surgeon whose feelings for Michelle run deeper than friendship. She's recalled (less than fondly) but not missed by the rancorous Fabienne “Fabi” Wolf (Eggar), Michelle’s estranged, neglected step-daughter from an earlier, widowed marriage. And she's unmourned but thought of with gratitude by her handsome, penniless younger husband, Stanislaus “Stan” Pilgrin (Schell), freelance chess master and master freebooter who wed Michelle mere moments before she was seized by the Gestapo (suspicious, that), granting the otherwise homeless fortune-hunter legal access to Michelle’s now-vacant home. 

Well, not vacant for long.

Out of shared grief (not), Stan and Fabi take up residence as lustful cohabitants driven mad with frustration by a law prohibiting them from collecting on three hundred million francs bequeathed to the presumed-to-be-dead Michelle due to the absence of an identifiable corpse.

Michelle’s return from the ashes may not be swift—transformed internally by her ordeals in Dachau, she waits until she can be transformed externally by plastic surgery to restore her former beauty—but when it happens it is most definitely seismic. With scores to settle and amends to make, Michelle’s return sets into motion the labyrinthine machinations and stratagems outlined earlier. Schemes Stan himself describes as “Bizarre, grotesque…” leading Michelle to feel “Revolted, curious, shocked, even thrilled…all at the same time.”

Which just so happens to be exactly what some critics felt about Return From the Ashes in 1965.

You Had One Eye in the Mirror

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

A problem I once had with the glut of sound-alike, ersatz film-noir erotic thrillers that sprang up like weeds in the ‘90s in the wake of Body Heat, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct, is that they always seemed to happen in a kind of void; never occupying a recognizable world nor appearing to be tethered to anything other than the absurd, gimmicky requirements of the genre. 

Return From the Ashes is just as convoluted and far-fetched as those erotic thrillers, but for some reason, it works so effectively for me and never feels as contrived as perhaps it should. Maybe this is because one accepts a certain level of artifice with older films, or maybe it's due to the fact that everything about the film's construction—from its visual style to its setting to its characters—is indeed arch, but of a thematic whole. The characters and the world they inhabit appear to be an extension of one another.

Chess, the activity that brings the two lead characters together, is used as both metaphor and symbol. 

Through a flashback, we learn that on an evening in 1938, while most of Paris is off listening to news of the French Prime Minister’s meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich, Michelle and Stanislaus meet in a near-deserted chess club. The two individuals are thus linked in their mutual self-interest and apathy.

The good/bad morality contrast (and Michell's willingness to flirt with darkness) suggested by the black and white chessboard are stylistically referenced in Michelle's expensive clothing (which contrasts with Stan's modest pullover and tie). When invited by Stan to play a few games for money, Michelle (exposing and embracing her dark side) removes her stark white evening jacket to reveal its jet-black lining and her elegant, funereal frock.

"You have the advantage."

And indeed, she does. All the game-playing strategizing and manipulations of chess serve as both motif and thematic through-line in Return From the Ashes. As the two strangers play their first game, the charming and penniless Stanislaus (who, significantly, has the black pieces) thinks he is fleecing yet another unsuspecting older woman. But it is Michelle--essentially making a down payment--who is setting the cash bait necessary to lure the handsome young man. Audiences who know Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin from her many films with Ingmar Bergman are apt to find this sequence an inferior reminder of Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and its iconic scene of a medieval knight playing a game of chess with Death.

"If there is no God, no immortality, no heaven, no hell,
no reward, no punishment...then everything is permissible."

Indicative of her own deeply flawed character, Michelle begins to fall in love/lust with Stanislaus (she strokes the hell out of that candle) as he expounds on his amoral personal philosophy, paraphrased from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

Return From the Ashes is a melodrama that utilizes the stark contrast of black and white to tell a story of stark evil and moral relativity. Set in the era of WW2 and German-occupied France, the sociological fallout of Hitler's dominance forces the collision of ethical principles and survival instincts. In a world where clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong have been blurred and minimized, the film asks us to look at its dissolute characters not solely as individuals inherently good or bad, or even victims; but as individuals imbued with free will who are shaped, scarred, and perhaps reclaimed by their circumstances.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Return From the Ashes takes place roughly between the years 1938 and 1947 (just how much time transpires between Michelle's release from Dachau and eventual return to her former life is rather murkily conveyed), but the film is almost hilariously disinterested in making any of the lead characters look remotely period-appropriate. Michelle's lacquered flip hairstyle and pale lipstick recall Sixties-era Dina Merrill; Fabi's long, flowing locks are pure Carnaby Street Jean Shrimpton: and Stan walks around with a traditional pomaded '60s Rat Pack cut that makes him look like John Cassavetes in Rosemary's Baby.

Although the practice of setting a film in the past while wholesale ignoring historical accuracy in everything but automobiles and dress extras is very common in sixties films, it still plays havoc with one's suspension of disbelief and the ability to lose oneself in the narrative. I found I had to keep reminding myself at crucial points just when all this was supposed to be taking place.

Let's Do The Time Warp Again
SS agents from 1940 confront a stylish couple from 1964.
This reminds me of that musical number in  Xanadu where the '40s blend awkwardly with the '80s.

PERFORMANCES

With the characters in Return From the Ashes all fairly morally repugnant, it serves as no small compensation that they are all at least so strikingly beautiful. I’ve always liked Ingrid Thulin, an actress possessing an intelligent beauty that conveys both self-assured dignity and vulnerability. Her Michelle Wolf is a surprisingly modern character, written in a dimensional manner that allows her to be independent, smart, selfish and self-possessed, weak, willful, and ultimately empathetic.

Return From the Ashes was released four months after Samantha Eggar made her star-making (and Oscar-nominated) appearance in William Wyler's The Collector. As the delightfully devious and unhinged Fabienne Wolf, Eggar is all petulant malice and emotional greed. She makes for a dangerously unhinged romantic rival while managing to bring a pitiably wounded quality to her character's rigid self-defensiveness. 

In the key role as the unapologetic cad so charming that two women are willing to overlook his black heart and shameless narcissism, Oscar-winner Maximillian Schell (Judgement at Nuremberg - 1961) gives an assured, witty, and utterly fascinating performance.

Capturing all the ambiguity the role embodies, his Stanislaus is a real charmer who is never all villain, never all hero, and always maddeningly hard to read...though the always-welcome Herbert Lom has Stan's number from the start and never passes up an opportunity to let us know.)

Vladek Sheybal as Paul, the chess club manager
Familiar from several Ken Russell films, Vladek Sheybal, portrayed
 chess master Tov Kronsteen in the Bond film From Russia, With Love (1963) 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Return From the Ashes wasn’t a success when released, and I suspect it disappeared from theaters rather quickly. It most certainly seems to have disappeared from people's minds. Studios tend to bury underperforming films when it comes to TV broadcasts, and Return From the Ashes bore the double burden of having been marketed as a film for adults, so perhaps that's why I have no memory of it cropping up on The Late Late Show when I was a kid. I don't even know if it ever even had a home video release. 

I do, however, remember being scared out of my wits by the TV ad that ran when it opened in theaters in 1965. YouTube reveals it wasn't all that explicit, but I was only about 8-years-old or so at the time and distinctly remember hearing the sinister-sounding title and leaping to the conclusion that it must be a ghost story or vampire movie. All other details had previously remained vague save for the kindertrauma warning "No one may enter the theater after Fabi enters her bath!" and a shot of a shadowy figure opening a bathroom door. Yikes!

Taking a page from the William Castle promotion playbook while drawing intentional parallels to both Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Clouzot's 1955 film Diabolique (Clouzot initially owned the rights to the 1961 novel upon which this film is based Le Retour des Cendres by Hubert Monteilhet) Return From the Ashes was misleadingly marketed as a shocker. Moviegoers expecting edge-of-your-seat thrills and a Samantha Eggar bubble bath equivalent of Janet Leigh's shower must have felt duped when served a somber crime drama instead. 

In spite of my fearful awareness of the film as a child (between this and Psycho, the family bathroom became a chamber of horrors for me...I have no idea how my mother ever got me to bathe at all), I didn't get around to actually seeing Return From the Ashes until it became available through made-to-order DVD around 2011. But even now it's rare that I come across someone anyone familiar with the title, rarer still to meet someone who's seen it.


BONUS MATERIAL

Hubert Monteilhet's novel makes for only the first third of the film adaptation. Many of the film's most sensational elements are the invention of screenwriter Julius Epstein. If you're interested in how the film deviates from its source novel, check out a breakdown of the novel HERE, where you'll also find information on a 2015 feature film remake/adaptation titled Phoenix.

Talitha Pol as Claudine

A year after appearing in Return From the Ashes, actress/model Talitha Pol wed John Paul Getty Jr. and the pair became major style icons of the hippie-chic jet-set '60s. The color pic is from a 1969 Vogue photoshoot of the hard-partying couple by Patrick Lichfield. Pol died of a heroin overdose in 1971.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2019

HEREDITARY 2019

"When you get older, there isn't a lot left to be frightened of."

Mrs. Ada Quonsett  Airport (1970)

I was an easy scare as a kid. Afraid of the dark as well as my own shadow, I posed little challenge to older sisters who loved to leap out at me from closets and around corners; their shouts of “Boo!” eliciting a shriek of terror or tearful outburst (often both), followed by the usual threat-yelled-in-retreat, “I’m gonna tell mamma!”

Paradoxically, when not being terrorized by siblings, I did a pretty good job of terrorizing myself. I'm not sure why, but being a dyed-in-the-wool scaredy-cat proved no deterrent to raiding my sister's horror comic book collection (resulting in nightmare-filled bouts of sleeping with the bedcovers pulled all the way over my head), or watching scary anthology TV shows like Thriller or The Outer Limits. Programs that taught me no good can come of exploring the source of a mysterious noise, and that fear comes with its own soundtrack. Just hearing the first few notes of Gounod's Funeral March of the Marionette (aka, the theme from Alfred Hitchcock Presents) was enough to make my skin go all gooseflesh. Similarly, John Williams’ nerve-jangling Suspense Theater theme and that hair-raising whistling intro to Journey to the Unknown.

Toni Collette as Annie Graham

Gabriel Byrne as Steve Graham

Naturally, this masochistic desire to have the bejesus scared out of me extended to movies, too, but by the time big-screen psychological thrillers replaced the atomic monsters and vampires of Saturday afternoon TV,  I'd developed a better understanding of what I was after: the emotional jolt of the safe, vicarious scare. The payoff was that my naturally jittery nature meant that I got more bang for my buck.

I came to enjoy the sensation of sitting in the dark and surrendering myself to whatever reality these films presented; the deeper I immersed myself, the more thrilling the ride. But with the waning of the 1960s, the make-believe horrors of movies like Wait Until Dark (“What did they want with her? What did they want with her?” screamed the film's poster ad copy to my abject terror) and Rosemary’s Baby (“What have you done to its eyes?”) couldn't keep pace with the real-life terrors served up every night on the TV news. Fiction proved no match for the horrific reality of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; the unsolved mystery of the Zodiac Killer; or the nightmare of the Manson Family. So when feeling frightened became a way of life instead of an escapist outlet, I knew it was time to give horror movies a rest.

Alex Wolff as Peter Graham

Then came the '70s, and with it, a slew of new-fangled sources of anxiety: Watergate, the Vietnam War, inflation. All led me to reflect on the inadequacy of Roosevelt's oft-paraphrased, "There's nothing to fear, but fear itself." No, fear itself is plenty to be afraid of. With civilization edging ever closer to resembling those disaster films that were so popular at the time, I once again found myself seeking the sanctuary of scary movies. Happily, the '70s presented no shortage of films offering ample opportunities for primal scream venting: The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976),  Burnt Offerings (1976), and The Sentinel (1977).

Milly Shapiro as Charlie Graham

While I don’t tend to think of myself as a horror movie fan, I obviously consumed enough of them to start to take notice of the clichés, the repetition, and the recycling of themes. Instead of offering up the unanticipated and disturbing, horror movies began to pander to their audiences by following box-office-driven guidelines geared to giving the horror fan everything they expected.
The more market-friendly horror movies became, the more they needed to resemble product. Goodbye, to the unexpected, and hello to by-the-numbers horror plotting and slasher villains armed with quotable quips and taglines.

The Graham Home
As haunting a presence in Hereditary as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining

Which is a shame, because now that I'm no longer the easily-scared kid I used to be, finding a horror movie that gets me to believe in the unbelievable is hard enough; finding one that's actually frightening is becoming a near-impossibility. Gore, jump-edits, loud noises, and a heavy metal song played over the closing credits does not a horror film make (which should come as news to Elie Roth and Rob Zombie). For a movie to really scare me, it at least has to come from a place that is emotionally honest. Hopefully, while tapping into some elemental, suppressed anxiety rooted in human vulnerability and the fear of mortality.

Ann Dowd as Joan

Two recent films effectively and memorably accomplished such a feat. The first was in 2017 when Get Out, the impressive feature film debut of director/screenwriter Jordan Peele, hit me where I lived by using the daily microaggressions of soft racism as the core of its horror premise. The second time was in 2018 when director Ari Aster, another emerging filmmaking talent, made his directing / screenwriting debut with Hereditary. While Get Out was unsettling in a thoroughly unique and personal way (the Black experience of racism as terrorism has always been ripe fodder for the horror genre), Hereditary bridged the above-stated "near-impossibility" gap by reacquainting me with the almost-forgotten, old-fashioned, pleasurable unpleasantness of simply being scared shitless by a motion picture. 

The Dollhouse Effect
Hereditary manipulates the viewer's sense of perception. Many scenes begin with our being 
uncertain whether we're witnessing real life or merely looking at one of Annie's miniatures. 

I came to Hereditary not knowing anything about the story; all I knew was that it was a movie starring Toni Collette, an actress (like Laura Dern) I could watch in anything. I’d just finished binge-watching Collette's limited BBC One series Wanderlust on Netflix, and her extraordinary performance in that program left me clamoring for more. Always intrigued when an actor of her caliber appears in a horror movie, I purposely avoided reading anything about Hereditary beforehand, preferring to dive in blindly with eyes wide open, curiosity piqued, and with a great deal of enthusiasm.

I wasn’t disappointed.
In fact, I’m not even sure it's possible to be disappointed by Hereditary, for it's a film that has, as its primary defining characteristic, a dogged refusal to deliver anything remotely resembling the expected.

Portrait in Black

The death of a family matriarch is the catalyst event sparking an interlinked eruption of remorse, reflection, and revelation that ultimately sends an already loosely-tethered family spiraling horrifically out of control. Annie (Toni Collette), whose mother died in hospice after a long, grasping illness, is an artist whose method of coping with her traumatic childhood is to recreate the most painful events in breathtakingly disturbing miniature dioramas. And with a history involving a mother who suffered from dissociative identity disorder; a clinically depressed father who starved himself to death; and an older brother with committed suicide when she was just a teenager, Annie is not exactly at a loss for traumas to draw upon for her work.

Small Worlds

Understandably, Annie's family legacy of mental illness hasn't left her unscathed. In fact, her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is the psychiatrist who saw her through a nervous breakdown. No longer his patient and largely managing to handle her issues with her late mother, a dark cloud hangs over the family due to a terrifying sleepwalking incident two years prior, in which Annie doused herself and her two sleeping children in paint thinner, awakening only as she heard herself striking a match. As a result, Annie's relationship with her now 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff) has grown strained and contentious. At the same time, her 13-year-old developmentally disabled daughter Charlie—who shared an unnaturally close relationship with her deceased grandmother—also channels her emotional dissociation into creating art. In her case, the creation of creepy, pagan-like figurines.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Afflicted with a lethal allergy to nuts, Charlie's sweet tooth and love of chocolate
turns every member of the family into around-the-clock sentinels 

Hereditary presents us with a dysfunctional family caught in the aftermath of a tragedy. As each is faced with the difficult task of processing loss, a series of disturbing, seemingly random events threaten what appears to be the hard-won calm of the household. Charlie's bereavement over the loss of her beloved grandmother manifests in the peculiar concern that no one is left to take care of her. Steve takes to drinking as he grows stressed and overburdened with always having to be the family's steadying force. Juggling complicated feelings of maternal mistrust, blame, and resentfulness, Peter numbs himself with drugs. And Annie, anxious about her own sanity while plagued with guilt over what role, if any, her genes and history have played in the fates of her children. Sensitive to the stress all of this has already placed on her marriage, she isolates herself--both physically and emotionally--while suppressing resentment over feeling she has no one to whom she can unburden herself.

Intimate Strangers

What I like most about Hereditary is that it is essentially a dark family drama cloaked in a horror film. Using the constricted, hemmed-in spaces of dollhouses as a visual motif, the film presents us with a family coping with unbearable trauma. Yet, they persist in shutting themselves off from one another. And not because they want to; they simply lack the tools to do otherwise. Barely speaking, struggling to communicate when they do, each remains in their separate, insular spaces, victims of their own severely-flawed coping mechanisms. It's a rarity for a horror film to put human conflict and emotional incapacitation so front and center, but the brilliance of Hereditary is that once the narrative dives off into almost grotesque levels of horror, our hard-earned investment in these characters makes everything that happens all the more terrifying.

Contents Under Pressure

Like the sinister sculpture perched near the stairwell of the Graham house--another of Annie’s grim works of art, it’s a depiction of three deteriorating houses sinking, one atop the other, deep into the bowels of the earth--Hereditary presents us with a family enveloped in personality pathology sinking under the weight of the kind of crisis and catastrophe that's worthy of Greek Tragedy. As horrific events multiply and natural threats take on a preternatural cast, the film's pervading atmosphere of dread makes even the most startling, mind-bending developments feel somehow inevitable.

Don't Be Afraid

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When film critic Pauline Kael titled her 1965 collection of reviews I Lost it at The Movies, she was (wittily) referencing the subtle loss of innocence that happens each time one watches a film. It's a slow maturing process that begins with being so unfamiliar with the vocabulary of cinema, everything elicits a strong response because it is all so fresh and new. As we grow more accustomed to the tropes of narrative structure and film's visual language, our experience of moviegoing becomes more enriched, but often at the cost of our ever really being able to recapture that sense of awe and astoundment born of our movie innocence. I readily admit that each new film I see brings the hope of reclaiming a trace of that lost innocence. Even if it's only for the length of one scene.
Hereditary brought a lot of those feelings back for me. Everything about the film caught me off guard. So much so that watching it became a little unnerving for me. It brought back that long-forgotten sense of feeling on edge long after a film ended, my mind carrying around a vague apprehension that resulted in an over-awareness of noises and a wariness of shadows.

"You never even cried as a baby- you know that? Not even when you were born."

A movie like Hereditary makes suspension of disbelief terribly easy, for in addition to being skilled at keeping the viewer off-balance, it's a story told on its own terms, in its own unique voice, and benefits from a distinct, fully-realized world view. And in a horror film landscape increasingly dominated by the box office-friendly predictability of franchises, a movie as audaciously bizarre and off-the-rails as Hereditary feels like a revitalization of the genre. 

The visual motif of low ceilings, narrow corridors, and confined spaces reinforce themes of emotional confinement and the notion that the Grahams (by heredity) are manipulated like dolls in a dollhouse by fate.

With each frame crammed to overflowing with information, clues, and foreshadowing, Hereditary is a film that practically demands a second viewing. If only to discover all the pieces of the puzzle that had been laid out, hidden in plain sight, from the first go-round.

PERFORMANCES
It's accepted that horror films, like comedies, rarely get any respect come awards season. For every Sissy Spacek Best Actress nomination for Carrie (1976) or Ellen Burstyn for The Exorcist (1973), there are far too many Mia Farrow (Rosemary's Baby - 1968) - Deborah Kerr (The Innocents - 1961) snubs.
Toni Collette, all exposed nerve-endings and bottled-up tensions, gives the performance of her career in Hereditary. But, unfortunately, she's so inarguably brilliant, her being passed over for an Oscar nomination feels more like a voter response to what can charitably be called a "difficult" film than an oversight regarding one of the most compelling screen performances of the year.

Hereditary boasts superb and sensitive performances from its entire cast, but Toni Collette pushes waaaay beyond the usual boundaries, inhabiting a complicated, dimensional characterization. Equally impressive, to a heartbreaking degree, is Alex Wolff as the son. Not since Timothy Hutton's agonized (and Oscar-winning, I'd like to point out) performance in Ordinary People (1980) have I seen such a movingly recognizable depiction of adolescent grief. There's an unforgettable moment in Hereditary where Wolff, at a point in the story when family relationships are at a peak deterioration point, is standing silently by his bike outside the front door, trying to muster up the courage to simply enter the house. It's a heart-wrenching example of how Ari Aster somehow makes the small moments pay off as powerfully as the large scale.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Singular-vision films like Hereditary and Get Out--both amplifications of the day-to-day terrors of contemporary life--do a great job of injecting some much-needed vitality and blood (literally) into a genre grown anemic over the years of tapping into the same worn-out vein of horror tradition. It took Aster five years to get Hereditary to the screen, directing from his own screenplay, and, from all accounts, finalizing every detail of the production before even a foot of film was shot. The end result is one of the most effectively scary horror films I've ever seen. An uncompromising work of individuality that still manages to pluck the nerves of universal anxieties. 

Annie's art installation dioramas were created by Steve Newburn, and Hereditary's stunning production design was by Grace Yun. Everything from Colin Stetson's shivery musical score to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski's eerily burnished images, combined with Aster's sculptural blocking and emphatic use of stillness, turns the characters into mannequins--work in concert to formulate Hereditary's blue-hued world of haunted interiors.

The members of the Graham family move about from one isolated space to another. Even when they leave the confines of their homes, they merely find new places to be alone.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

 For me, the mark of a truly effective horror film, a quality evident in favorites like Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, or Don’t Look Now, has always been its ability to make me feel something for the characters. To get me to relate to and/or empathize with their circumstances to the degree that I care what happens and I’m engaged in whatever conflicts—emotional or psychological—arise.

In the equally-bereaved Joan, Annie finds someone outside the home to whom she can confide.
Or has she? 

Horror films are hollow films if they don't feature characters with whom you can identify or situations whose outcomes you can become invested in. Hereditary goes to places that even fans of the genre find disturbing, but the darkness feels at one with the world Aster has created.
I don't know what kind of mind could come up with a movie like Hereditary, let alone the genius capable of pulling it off so tremendously. But my hat is off to Ari Aster for taking so many chances, and in the process, reminding me what a thrill it is to be scared at the movies again. 

Unsafe Cinema
Nothing's more terrifying than a horror film that takes death, loss, and grief seriously.

BONUS MATERIAL
Hereditary father and son Gabriel Byrne and Alex Wolff played father and son in the HBO series In Treatment from 2008 to 2010.

Psychologist Paul Weston and his son Max

Modern Family / Ordinary People 
The original cut of Hereditary ran 60 minutes longer than the theatrical release.
The original shooting script is available to read HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 20019