Little Otik (2000)

Little Otik (Czech title Otesánek, sometimes referred to as Greedy Guts) is about bringing the punitive moral logic of old European folk tales into the modern world. In those stories, no macabre retaliation is too over-the-top for a perceived slight against universal propriety, any deviation from tradition or against common sense justifying a horrendous course correction inflicted on people guilty and non-guilty—to most people hearing those tales today, they come across as horrors whose purpose is hidden under layers of sadism. There is some darkly humorous joy to be derived from these things, with their distinct lack of proportion, and Little Otik even amplifies the surrealistic and disturbing aspects by couching its story squarely in one of the most vulnerable aspects of humanity: birth and parenting. As with most of the work of Czech stop motion animator and director Jan Švankmajer, who made this movie with design work from his wife and fellow surrealist artist Eva Švankmajerová, what we experience is an artistically impeccable nightmare.

Lamb (2021)

It was last year’s film festival circuit that really delivered the most interesting subject matter for this series, and I always like finding stuff outside traditional genres and styles. Reading some of the brief reviews of the Icelandic film Lamb, directed and co-written by Valdimar Jóhannson (the other writer is frequent Bjork collaborator Sjón) really made me wonder what kind of tone to expect here—after my viewing, I’m not really sure why it’s classified as a “horror” movie in some circles, because it’s a pretty straight drama, a melancholy fairy tale with a fantastical elevator pitch. But, at least to me, the type of weird that one would expect hearing that elevator pitch (“what if a couple adopted a lamb with a human body as their own child”) is not the weird that the movie is trying to deliver. It is a story based in folk tale or dream logic, but that’s often tempered by down-to-earth performances and a deliberate pacing that never stoops to predictability, but also rarely attempts to shock. Once the fantasy of the movie settles in, you can really focus on the emotional lives of the characters, with all the joys and anxieties that come from being given an unusual, and probably accidental, gift from the universe.

The Lure (2015)

We’re now on the third and final sample of Creature Canon Contenders found on The Criterion Channel, and since we were on the topic of deconstructionist monster stories: The Lure, a Polish horror/musical/fantasy recreation of the eighties directed and co-written by Agnieszka Smoczynska, is a highly deconstructionist take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Do you consider mermaids to be “monsters”? Well, this movie certainly does—in this, mermaids have a tendency to rip throats out and eat human hearts, which is slightly different from the norm, but not that far removed from their mythical origins. BUT, aside from being dangerous, flesh-eating demi-humans with beautiful voices (whose existence in the hyper-stylized world of the film seems to be not necessarily common knowledge, but no one seems to have their mind blown by it), they are also a metaphorical representation of how women are exploited, and how they try to change themselves to better fit societal expectations. Moving between flashy choreographed musical numbers and a grungy depiction of urban Europe in the eighties, you can really see both sides of the central argument: is this really a world worth giving up heart eating and underwater merriment for?

Monster Multimedia: When I Arrived At The Castle (2019)

Welcome to October. I usually use this series to examine older things, but as a change of pace, here’s something from this year that fits…

When I began writing these posts, I made the decision to leave out certain kinds of monster stories from the material I’d be analyzing, and it was mostly the most well-known ones: vampires, werewolves, the undead. I wanted to focus mostly on the nebulous “miscellaneous” category, because that is usually what falls into my wheelhouse, and I thought that was where I’d find ground that was not nearly as well-trodden. There’s only so much you can write about the potent symbolism of vampires and werewolves that hasn’t been written thousands of times before—that comes with the territory when you’re that ubiquitous in the culture. Even so, sometimes I make exceptions.

Emily Carroll’s comic When I Arrived At The Castle has a vampire in it, but also a cat-person, although for a few reasons I’d say that the cat-person is sort of analogous to a werewolf (at least it provides the same animalisic contrast that a werewolf would.) While utilizing some of the most well-worn horror tropes on the surface—beginning with a dark castle on a stormy night—the book has a distinct take on them, one that combines fairy tale storytelling, body horror, and interpersonal violence to tell a story about guilt, abuse, and the terrors that lurk deep within ourselves. Both the characters here are split between their surface humanity, rendered in monochrome, and red-drenched monstrosity that’s simmering beneath—this is all about the dual nature that lies at the heart of these things, rendered in all its gruesomeness.