ALIEN 1979

When I think of the films that have given me the most memorably fun scares of my movie life, my mind goes to Wait Until Dark (1967), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The Omen (1976), and Alien. In another category entirely are the films I consider to be scary because they are disturbing and unsettling (like Rosemary's Baby which I saw in 1968 when I was still an impressionable Catholic School kid). Those movies are memorable cinema experiences, but too shattering to be labeled "fun."
But Alien was another matter. Ridley Scott's science fiction monster movie masterpiece was structured like the classic monster movies of my youth, a movie manufactured to deliver solid, old-fashioned thrills, suspense, and excitement. Seeing it for the first time on opening day in 1979 was a fun, thrill-ride movie experience I've never forgotten. 

Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley

Tom Skerritt as Captain Arthur Dallas

John Hurt as Executive Officer Gilbert Kane

Veronica Cartwright as Navigator Joan Lambert

Yaphet Kotto as Chief Engineer Denis Parker

Harry Dean Stanton as Engineering Technician Samuel Brent

Ian Holm as Science Officer Ash

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

In my earlier essay covering Alien’s opening day at Los Angeles’ Egyptian Theater in 1979, I mentioned how I wasn’t initially all that keen on seeing the film because sci-fi flicks—like westerns, sports films, and war movies—are not generally my cup of tea. This wasn’t always the case.

When I was young, television (all three channels of it) was virtually non-stop westerns, sporting events, military combat shows, and sci-fi programmers. And broadcast movies were only more of the same. I remember liking them a great deal when I was small, but after years of exposure to these formulaic, male-centric entertainments, I grew weary of their elemental sameness. What they all seemed to share was a strict adherence to the fundamental format of your average western: evil force terrorizes a township or isolated group, only to be confronted and eventually vanquished by a solitary, lantern-jawed hero (always white, always male) while the women shriek helplessly on the sidelines and the weaker men resist taking action.

Having this macho myth recycled endlessly in films and TV shows over the years may have done wonders for bolstering the egos and fueling the fantasies of adolescent boys of all ages, but the combination of predictability and patriarchal pandering only led to my developing a strong, broad-strokes antipathy toward films that fit into any of the above-named genres.

I never stopped enjoying being pleasurably scared by a good sci-fi thriller or monster movie, but how I longed for some kind (ANY  kind) of deviation from type. Then I saw the advance trailer for Alien. Its biggest appeal being that it didn't tip its hat and give away its surprises. Indeed, what initially attracted me to Alien was its having the confidence and self-assurance (conveyed by its subtle ad campaign) to simply tease. It didn't give away any of its surprises, and by withholding so much, it seemed to promise even more. 

I was immediately drawn to Alien via the comfy familiarity of its setting and premise. It reminded me of Creature Features sci-fi programmers like The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Green Slime (1968). Just two years earlier George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) had spectacularly updated those Saturday matinee adventure serials of the ’30s and ‘40s, so the idea of Alien being a throwback to the tradition of those space invader films of the ‘50s I used to watch on TV as a kid struck me as both welcome and promising. 

And Alien did, indeed, live up to its promise…exceeded it, in fact, by emerging as both a throwback and a work of canny originality. For all its harkening back to the sci-fi monster movies of my youth, Alien, by merely tweaking some of the more careworn clichés of the overly-familiar genre, proved that innovation doesn’t always require redesigning the wheel; sometimes it’s simply a matter of getting that wheel out of a rut. 

Described aptly (if a tad dismissively) by many critics at the time as “Jaws in space,” Alien, at least on a superficial level, does appear to be a film with but one objective: scare the bejesus out of the audience. But the means by which the film goes about achieving this not-so-simple goal is why memories of the original Alien remain indelibly etched in my mind, while the numerous sequels and prequels in the franchise all seem to converge and coalesce into one derivative, pedantic blur.

One of the smartest things Alien does is immediately establish a sense of realism via its Used Future look. Alien envisions a recognizably grungy 2122 devoid of 2001: A Space Odyssey sterility and (mercifully) lacking in self-consciously futuristic attire like bodysuits, spandex, or metallics. There’s none of the shiny optimism of Mid-Century Jetsons streamline that flatters our illusions of progressiveness. Instead, the future looks very much like industrial now.

Which leads to the next great thing about Alien’s setup.

In lieu of adventurers, space explorers, Colonial Marines, or other interstellar travelers who knew the job was dangerous when they took it, Alien gives us a motley crew of laborers ill-equipped and ill-suited for the events that await them. The seven-member crew of The Nostromo, a commercial towing vehicle, are essentially space truck drivers who…like your average working stiffs…spend their time getting on each other’s nerves, quibbling about their salaries, and griping about the quality of the food. They have zero interest in anything but finishing their jobs and going home.

The characters are well-delineated in an ensemble-cast sort of way, fleshed out in minimalist detail by the talented actors in a way that sidesteps the kind of war movie shorthand of Whitman Sampler archetypes that marred Aliens (1986) for me. The flinty crew of The Nostromo come across as comfortable with each other, relaxed and natural in their behavior (crucial to rooting a fantasy film in a recognizable reality), and, at first glimpse, refreshingly non-heroic.

The latter goes a long way toward infusing Alien’s disarmingly uneventful early scenes with a great deal of suspense. I like that when ordered by MU-TH-UR, the mainframe computer responsible for running The Nostromo, to investigate a possible SOS signal on a nearby planetoid, everyone is of a different mind about it. No one, not even the captain, leaps to hero mode; they do so more out of professional duty (fear of forfeiting their pay shares) than moral obligation. And since we’ve ready had a foretaste of their workplace fellowship (Parker and Brett are in a clique, Ripley and Lambert have an unexplained friction between them, and nobody seems to care for Ash) throughout the expedition—from exploration to alien infestation—there’s absolutely no certainty of what to expect from any of them.

H. R. Giger’s designs for the rapidly-growing alien and that creepy derelict spaceship are as iconic as they are nightmarish, but it’s chiefly through the film’s ability to get me to identify with and relate to the human characters…to get me to see them as real and care about their fates…is where Alien triumphed and succeeded in becoming a genuinely scary movie experience. 

PERFORMANCES

I know others feel differently, but when I’m watching a science-fiction or fantasy film, the details of set design, accuracy of the science, or the sophistication of special effects aren’t nearly as significant in creating a sense of verisimilitude as the characters. If the characters are written with complexity and dimension, cast with actors capable of inhabiting a role and bringing it to life with minimal dialogue and screen time, if they behave and relate in ways consistent both to the character and recognizable human psychology; most any situation or setting, no matter how fantastic, can be made believable and convincingly real. (1978’s Superman: The Movie comes to mind.)

Alien is blessed with an uncommonly talented cast providing a level of ensemble acting I think is uncommon in many genre films. The way each creates a full-fledged character whose life I can envision beyond The Nostromo reminds me of some of the personal, small-scale performances in the films of Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph that have remained etched in my memory.

Perhaps due to the fact that at one time or another I've had co-workers similar to The Nostromo crew, and I always gravitate to the Lambert type (a little high strung and prone to bellyaching), I have a particular fondness for Veronica Cartwright in this film. It’s not just that I’d behave EXACTLY like her character in this situation, but as Tom Skerritt once stated, Cartwright gives the best performance in the film. And I absolutely agree.

With Sigourney Weaver commanding the screen with assurance and staking her claim for movie immortality in this, her star-making feature film debut (not counting a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it bit part in Annie Hall), the strength of the performances of the women in Alien play no small part in it being my favorite sci-fi thriller of all time.

Jonesy the cat is cute and all, but he's a bit of a jerk
and is responsible for far too many deaths and close calls 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Not being one of those mainstream film critics of the ‘70s conditioned to ignore the contributions of Black Cinema, I was aware of both Pam Grier (Foxy Brown – 1974) and Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones – 1973) as trailblazing female action movie heroines long before Sigourney Weaver blasted that alien “The fuck out into space.”  Yet, factoring in the widespread success and influence of the whole Alien franchise, it’s hard to over-emphasize the impact the character of Ellen Ripley has had on the depiction of women in action and sci-fi films.

By now, most everyone knows that Warrant Officer Ripley was originally conceived as a man; a gender switch regarded at the time as just another unexpected thriller twist for the audience. As it turns out, having a woman be the sole self-rescuing survivor in a traditionally male-dominated genre came to rank right up there with the hiring of H.R. Giger to design the creature as among the sharpest of Alien’s pre-production decisions. 

Having Ripley be a woman (the role allegedly not altered in any significant way in the transition) adds all manner of intentional and unintentional layers to Alien. For example, the otherwise typical workplace resistance to authority exhibited by engineers Parker and Brett (Kotto & Stanton) has a double meaning when the figure of authority they're resisting is a woman. And although we later learn why Ash behaves as he does, Ripley’s interactions with Ash likely resonate with any woman who’s ever had to deal with men making no secret of their resentment at having to answer to a female superior.

As this pertains to the scene where Ripley orders the infected crew members to be quarantined, it begs the question as to whether or not there would have been such swift resistance to the command had it come from Dallas or Kane. 

A pet peeve of mine is when screenwriters assume they have created a strong, feminist female character when they have really just created a woman who behaves in a macho manner (say, like the hot-rodding women in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!). Sure, it's important when a woman has agency in a film and her actions propel the plot, but simply ascribing aggressive male characteristics to a woman and declaring "feminist!" only signals to me the writer has little understanding of either.

Ellen Ripley may have evolved into an action-hero type over the course of all those sequels, but in Alien she’s just a no-nonsense type, good at her job and not prone to panic. For all her resiliency, she’s an incredibly empathetic, good-hearted, and sensitive character. Just check out Weaver's reactions during the chest-bursting scene…Lambert is horrified and in hysterics (again, me) but Ripley’s face (and it’s the most amazingly subtle thing) conveys both alarm and compassionate anguish for what Kane is going through.

While I fully understand the well-taken criticism, but I'm one of those "nudity is not always sexual" guys. I'm in the camp that doesn't find Ripley's controversial strip to her underwear sexualizes her. It feels like a connecting link to the opening scene where John Hurt awakens from hypersleep and the camera lens lingers on him in his underwear. Both scenes emphasize the vulnerability and humanity of the characters against all that space technology. The contrast of human flesh and the part-machine/bio-organism design of Giger's creature is a visceral underscoring that is chilling.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Much in the way Twyla Tharp's loose-structured dance designs made her the ideal choreographer for Miloš Forman’s adaptation of Hair, Alien (and, indeed, the entire science fiction movie genre) owes an unpayable debt to the biomechanical nightmare designs or Swiss artist H. R. Giger. 

It’s not often that one encounters the unimaginable (thank God), but Giger’s exceptionally strange, sexualized, body-horror designs for the film are what set Alien apart from any other film I’ve ever seen. The unsettling blend of the mechanical with the organic—in which both structures and organisms share the same solid/soft, vulnerable/impenetrable contrasts—transport the primal shocks of the average monster movie to places so dark (male rape, impregnation, and violent birth) you feel slightly queasy. Thank goodness Ridley Scott chose to keep shots of the fully-formed alien to a minimum. I was plenty unsettled by the facehugger, the chest-buster, and the ribcage/vertebrae interior of that creepy ship they explore.

Giger's magnificent, ugly-beautiful design work--triggering subliminal impressions of sex, flesh, metal, and machine--heighten Alien's ick factor by making the unimaginable not only possible, but credible. And once a horror film succeeds in making the impossible credible, you're a goner, for then you know you're in a place of the unstable and unpredictable where anything can happen.

In space no one can hear you scream.

I've intentionally left out behind-the-scenes trivia and information pertaining to the making of Alien because the internet overflows with a veritable treasure trove of information, scripts, production notes, and all manner of details relating to the production. Here are links to a couple of my favorites.

Alien Explorations

Alien Images

"This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off."

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2019

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

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