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Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.06 miles, 9’06”/mile, 01:04:16 (recovery run)

 

In case it wasn’t totally obvious by now, I live under a rock. It’s a cozy rock, nothing fancy, but it has a “ROCK SWEET ROCK” embroidery on its face and protects me from seeing or hearing anything about what any of you humans are up to, so I like it and it’s mine.

 

What this means, of course, is that I frequently find myself in amusing circumstances like the following: “Oh hey, let’s see if there are any good horror movies I can run to on Showtime: seen it; [swipe] seen it; [swipe] looks dumb; [swipe] …hmmm, “The Witch.” Sounds kinda generic, maybe another time. Oh, wait, it expires TODAY? Okay, guess I’ll give it a shot, whatever. How bad could it be?” And that, friends, is how I finally came to watch a movie that some have called the greatest horror film of the current millennium, that others have dubbed the apotheosis of the genre, and that I personally might have heard mentioned once or twice but I may be thinking of something else.

 

So: The Witch. It’s about a 17th-century English family who gave up their well-to-do life to emigrate to the Plymouth colonies and has recently been banished by the elders over some religious dispute. So William and Katherine take their kids Thomasin, Caleb, and twins Mercy and Jonas and set up a little farm on the edge of the Big Evil Woods™, where Katherine has another baby, Samuel. One day, while Thomasin is playing peekaboo with little Sam, the baby just disappears in a really impossible and disquieting fashion, and that’s when this little game of life switches from HARD mode to NIGHTMARE. Katherine is understandably inconsolable, on top of the family’s other woes: William feels increasing stress to provide for his family, the adolescent Thomasin feels unjustly blamed for Sam’s disappearance, Caleb feels like he’s being treated like a little kid, there’s drama about a missing silver cup (Thomasin is low-key blamed when in fact William secretly sold it to buy traps in hopes of catching meat for the family), and the twins are acting out, as young twins are won’t to do, I guess.

 

Where is the witch in all this, you ask? Well, we do see her onscreen after Sam is taken, but the glimpses are fleeting and it’s uncertain whether we’re meant to take them as literal truth or as a representation of what the family fears; most of the film is like that, and one could make the argument for an interpretation utterly devoid of any supernatural presence or actual-factual witch at all, in which the family’s downfall is due entirely to their own interpersonal suspicions, lies, and communication breakdowns, colored ever darker by their religious beliefs. But yeah, that said, we do see the witch doing horrifying things to little Samuel—and then seducing young Caleb in the woods, after which he is found alone, naked, and ill. Meanwhile, the twins are also holding conversations with a goat named Black Phillip, which isn’t at all suspicious or anything.

 

Anyway, it’s not long before the family is accusing Thomasin of being a witch and the ultimate cause of the family’s problems (sure, blame the teen), whereas she feels compelled to defend herself by accusing the twins, what with their Black Phillip games and all. We’ll leave off the narrative there, because that’s when the real fun begins. I’m probably not spoiling anything to say that if you’re a happy-endings kind of person, maybe give this one a miss.

 

As you no doubt already know (unless you, too, are a rock-dweller—hi there! Let’s get coffee after the next club meeting), The Witch is a damn fine film. Critics absolutely lost their minds over it, heaping praise on it like they were hucking cheese on their baked russet at the potato bar. Moviegoers, on the other hand, had mixed feelings; apparently The Witch was marketed as a straight-up horror movie, which is most decidedly is not, so people expecting lots of jump scares, gore, heads twisting around, and kids spider-crawling on the ceiling were disappointed. The Witch is more a 90-minute art-house exercise in the painstaking building of a psychological bonfire, which finally gets lit in the final act. In hindsight I took it as a study in family dynamics, trust issues, and the ways in which people can be subtly set against each other, especially if someone might be, say, grooming a young teen for any of a number of nefarious reasons. (By the time the credits roll, you might have a different idea of the identity of the witch in the title.)

 

If you’re a film buff who likes horror, you’d be sure to love this—but who am I kidding? You’ve already seen it. If you’re more a genre horror fan, you might be a little bored by the lack of machetes and hockey masks, but if you adjust your expectations, there’s a lot to like. The look and feel of The Witch is off the hook (apparently they only used sunlight and candles for lighting, I mean COME ON), everyone in the cast is stunningly good, the story is slow-moving but gripping, and the sparing use of horror imagery is very effective. I don’t think I found the movie quite as scary as some others—Stephen King famously said it scared the hell out of him—but if you don’t get at least a little creeped out watching it, you’re dead inside.

 

Incidentally, The Witch still appears on Showtime and the expiration date no longer shows up (not sure what that was about), so check it out there if you’re so inclined. Climbing back under my rock now. I recently added some moss on its north face; it’s nice.

Watched on: Shudder, but it’s also on Amazon Prime

Ran: 9.42 miles, 8’44”/mile, 01:22:24 (long run)

 

It was Long Run Night! And for longer treadmill runs I’ve found that what I really need is an old favorite, something that will engross me so the miles don’t drag on forever, but also a story that I know pretty well so that if I zone out while running and miss a line or two I won’t be lost. I settled on Ginger Snaps, which has been a solid fave-rave of mine for a couple of decades now. C’mon, Canadian goth girls and lycanthropy as a metaphor for menstruation? What’s not to love?

 

Brigitte and Ginger are 15-year-old sisters with a bad case of the suburbs and a preoccupation with death (which is a natural symptom of a bad case of the suburbs). When we meet them they’re shooting a photo essay of staged graphic death scenes for a school project. Soon after, Brigitte gets bullied by a normie named Trina during gym class; how should Brigitte and Ginger get revenge? Well, there’s a mysterious beast on the loose that’s been killing neighborhood dogs, so they decide to fake Trina’s dog’s death with leftover gore from their photo essay. But on the night of the caper things don’t go quite as planned: first Ginger gets her first period (bummer), and then she’s attacked and mauled by a werewolf (arguably worse), which is then splattered across the grille of a van driven by Sam, the local drug dealer. I mean, a lot is happening.

 

Brigitte manages to get Ginger home and finds that Ginger’s wounds already seem to be healing, which is, y’know, great and maybe not so great. Over the next few days, Ginger deals with menstrual cramps and also coarse grey hairs sprouting from her healing wounds. Oh, and she’s growing a tail. Like I said, it’s a lot. Meanwhile, her personality has been changing, too—she gets stoned with boys, seduces Trina’s jockish boyfriend, eats the next door neighbors’ dog (if you see a dog in a werewolf movie, that dog is probably not going to have a good day)… just all the kind of stuff that’s putting distance between two goth sisters who used to be so close. Brigitte enlists the help of Sam the drug dealer in hopes of finding a cure, but Ginger’s control is slipping fast. Meanwhile, mom and dad are usually pretty oblivious, but now they’re finding body parts in the yard…

 

What can I tell you? I love this film. I fell hard for it no more than three minutes in, when Ginger caresses her wrist with a kitchen knife before proclaiming “wrists are for girls. I'm slitting my throat.” What follows is montage of the girls’ death scene pictures, comprising one of the most beautiful and memorable opening credits sequences I know. Now seven minutes have elapsed and this flick has my heart on a chain for life.

 

I’ve mentioned the puberty / lycanthropy parallel, which is pervasive and some aspects are a bit subtle, like Brigitte keeping track of the days until the next full moon by using the free period-tracking calendar that came with Ginger’s first box of pads. In addition, you get some interesting sex-as-murder/murder-as-orgasm themes, as well as a soupçon of welcome feminist perspective. And mostly what makes it all work is that Ginger Snaps has three really solid female performances: Emily Perkins as Brigitte, Katharine Isabelle as Ginger, and the always-great Mimi Rogers as their mom, who really just wants what’s best for her girls, whether that’s pre-treating Ginger’s gore-soaked underwear or covering up her murders by blowing up the house.

 

There are only a few weak spots. One is a plot point that relies on either the longest mommy-daughter sex talk or the most efficient chest freezer ever, because corpses don’t freeze solid that fast. (Ask me how I know!™) Another is the same weak spot in pretty much every werewolf movie I’ve ever seen, which is… the werewolves. The effects aren’t super-great, but honestly, werewolf effects never are. And the last is a minor quibble, which is that after the beginning of the movie does all this bold and interesting stuff, the final 20 minutes or so is a fairly standard cat-and-mouse hunt through a dark house. But even that is done better than most; it’s genuinely tense, with some real scares.

 

Bottom line: this is one I come back to again and again. If you haven’t seen it, give it a whirl. And if you like it, in many ways the sequel is even better—but more on that after another run.