Thursday Movie Picks - Halloween Edition: Body Horror

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come play with us! All you have to do is pick three movies that fit the week's theme and write a bit about them.

Yes, it's true! At long last I have returned to the land of the living, having finally recovered from the big apartment move. I was so exhausted the past couple of weeks that I don't know how i managed to stay awake most days, but I'm finally all moved in and unpacked in my new place (save for some books that need a place to go - I have so much more space I don't know what to do with it!), and it feels GREAT! I love my new apartment something fierce and I'm so glad to be getting back to "regular life" stuff like my blog.

And speaking of moving into a new place and taking up residence there: BODY HORROR. This week's Thursday Movie Picks theme. I'll be honest. Body horror isn't really my thing. I don't do well with creepy crawlies and gore. That being said, there are some movies that I LOVE that do kinda fall into this horror subgenre. Bear with me, as you consider....

Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014) If you've seen this, you know exactly why it's here. If not, you may be confused as to how a movie about an alien with Scarlett Johansson's body seducing men for unknown nefarious purposes fits into body horror. Well, except for one scene, it's mostly subtext. What plot there is in Under The Skin concerns itself with, more than anything, this alien creature coming to grips with her outer shell of a body and what it means to be human. But this is NOT a movie that is very concerned with such silly things as "plot" - Glazer is more concerned with images and what they can do, how they can tell a story with only the barest bones of dialogue. Make no mistake: This is a slow burn of a slow burn movie, but it is so utterly hypnotizing that it remains one of my favorite theater-going experiences. If the gorgeous, frame-worthy images don't draw you in, then Mica Levi's haunting experimental score will. Under the Skin, especially that score, burrowed its way deep into my subconscious on first viewing, and has yet to make its way out. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007) You know all those stories about how mothers find superhuman strength when their babies are in danger? Well, what if a teenage Christian abstinence group spokesperson did something similar when a man tried to get near her lady parts? Well, that's what happens to Dawn (a star-making performance from Jess Weixler) - after a friend tries to rape her, her vagina sprouts teeth and... well... you can guess what happens from there. This black-as-pitch comedy follows Dawn's journey to owning her womanhood in a new, exciting way. It's kinda gross, kinda scary, and pretty damn funny - a true underseen gem.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) If you don't think this falls under body horror, then you've never been a dancer. By now, I'm sure you know the plot: Technically proficient but emotionally stunted dancer Nina (Natalie Portman in an Oscar-winning performance) wins the coveted lead role in her ballet company's production of Swan Lake. She perfectly embodies the virginal white swan, but has trouble with the more aggressive, sexual black swan, and her anxiety manifests in increasingly baroque, scary ways, especially after free-spirited company member Lily (Mila Kunis, perfectly cast) is made her alternate. A psychosexual thriller set in the ballet world starring Natalie Portman and directed by Darren Aronofsky... and with Barbara Hershey as Nina's terrifying stage mother? Yes, this movie was clearly made in a lab just for me, and this is one of very few movies that surpassed my impossible-to-keep-down expectations. The entire thing is ingeniously shot, edited, and scored, with tremendous performances from everyone. Yes, my friends, Black Swan is, in a word, "perfect."

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Under the Skin

Despite the fact that I have no time (because I'm dancing too much), I couldn't not participate in this week's episode of Hit Me..., since I'm pretty sure it was me (right here) who inspired Nathaniel to choose Jonathan Glazer's uniquely unsettling mindfuck Under the Skin for the series. It's a film that has refused to leave my mind ever since I saw it in April (with my man, who declared it even worse than "that one about the creation of the universe", referring to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, which I dragged him to and lost movie-choosing privileges for a month as a result). I'm not sure if it's a great film or not, but it's certainly unforgettable, and probably the first film I've seen in a theater that can honestly call itself a true "art film".

It's a simple enough film to describe - Scarlett Johansson is a presumably-alien something in a human body who picks up Scottish men to do... something... to them, who slowly but surely becomes more and more intrigued by humanity, even as she is seemingly destroying it. But Under the Skin is so much more than that description, and each time I return to it in my memory, it becomes something different, ever shape-shifting into a completely different film although all its elements remain the same. The film defies categorization in a way entirely unlike anything else I've seen. Is it a parable of female empowerment? A moody science fiction noodle? A fable of "the other"? It is none of these, all of these, and more. On this most recent viewing, it became an existential horror film, the scariest film of the decade. Jean-Paul Sartre, of the "hell is other people" play No Exit, would have loved it.

But, just as when I first saw it in that darkened cinema (absolutely the ideal way to see Under the Skin, and I am so glad I did), what hit me hardest was the film's unbearably, uncomfortably creepy sound design. I will hear the strings of composer Mica Levi's stunning score (which, in a perfect world, would win every award in the known universe) in my nightmares for decades to come. The cinematography is entirely on point (thank you Daniel Landin!), but it's that damn score that really got under my skin... Worse than nails on a chalkboard, every beat of it makes me want to curl into myself, to somehow go beyond the fetal position until I am literally just a ball of humanity.

The images often help with this feeling, though. The opening sequence perfectly sets the mood (and caused more than one person at my screening to walk out), almost completely inscrutable in its presentation of circles and dots converging and and coalescing eventually into a giant eye. It never lets up from that moment on, but by far the most viscerally terrifying sequence (if not the most horrific) is when we see what actually happens to Scarlett's victims. It begins in the above image when her most recent victim reaches out to touch the previous one, and something just at the edge of the frame is not quite right - the skin of a young man shouldn't wrinkle like that, should it? And then, we see it all ripple away, in a simple, perfectly framed and lit shot.

What is left of this man? Just his skin, the rest of him having been drained away, stolen somehow by the inky black void this seductive alien woman led him to. What does it all mean, what does it symbolize? We could debate for hours, days even. But this shot gets at the deepest fear of all human beings, one that our alien protagonist comes to feel all too well by the end of her journey: What makes us human? What is under our skin?

The answer, as posed by this shot? The most frightening idea of all:

Nothing.

BUT, the shot is held for so long that it stops being grotesque and starts becoming beautiful. It hits that meeting place of horror and beauty known as the sublime, and hits it hard. It's also held long enough to give you space to think, to let your mind wander (there are many such moments in Under the Skin, and they're quite possibly the film's greatest strength). Watching this dancing ribbon human skin I started thinking about death, about nothingness - can death, can the very lack of life, something we normally think of as something to hide from sight, be beautiful? I'm not sure, but in this film (here in this shot and again at the very end), director Jonathan Glazer comes up with a pretty good piece of visual evidence that it might be.