Phone, aka Pon (2002)

This effective ghost story from South Korea approaches overkill but doesn’t go over the line. It also presents one of the best creep-out performances from a child, ever.  

Ji-won (Ji-won Ha) is a reporter who has just completed a series of articles about a ring of pedophiles. A man who is outraged by the stories (we assume because he’s close to, if not a member of, the ring) keeps bombarding her with threatening phone calls. Her best friend Ho-jeong (Yu-mi Kim) invites her to move temporarily into the new house Ho-j has just finished decorating and in which she and her husband Chang-hoon (Woo-jae Choi) will soon take up residence. Ji-w accepts, hoping to hide from her tormentor. 

But after the move, something odd happens. Ho-j’s young daughter Yeong-ju (Seo-woo Eun) answers a call on “Aunt Ji-won’s” mobile phone. Whatever she hears shapes her face into a mask of terror and she begins screaming.  After that, she fluctuates between happy little Yeong-ju and something else, something that develops a creepy, sexually charged affection for her father and bitter jealousy for her mother. Note here that the Yeong-ju can’t be more than six years old. 

As the air grows thicker and the story moves toward its grotesque finale, we learn that Ji-won’s mobile phone as been assigned a number that was given previously to a couple of people who died violently. There seems to be something in the number 6644. There are the ghost of the teen Jin-hie (Ji-yeon Choi), a girl who seeks vengeance because of a sordid, failed love affair; lots of rainy nights, and enough sudden apparitions to satisfy the most fervent lover of K-horror. The scene when Jin-hie succeeds in possessing Yeong-ju is terrifying not only within the context of the story but also because of the intensity of young Seo-woo Eun. You won’t believe what you’re seeing. 

The film was written and directed by Byeong-ki Ahn, and it is a masterful piece of work. If you’re not already familiar with the South Korean horror renaissance of the 1990s-early 2000s, this is a good place to start getting acquainted.

Violette Noziere (1978)

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Violette Noziere (Isabelle Huppert) as a character in Claude Chabrol's film is that she is so ordinary.  The real Vilolette was no beauty; as you can tell from her story, she was no evil genius. She was just a plain girl in her mid-teens who lived a somewhat awkward life with her lower-middle class parents in Paris in the early 1930s, who slipped out and pretended to be older so she could carry on with older men. She met a slick, useless young man with whom she fell completely in love and to whom she gave money and emotional support. When he threatened to leave her, she poisoned her parents, killing her father and nearly killing her mother.

Her story is the kind of sordid affair that frequently inspired fiction by James M. Cain, whose protagonists also found themselves tied up with emotional Gordian Knots. But Cain's hapless lovers/killers were snakes, beguiling us with the intensity of their stares as they looked in each other's eyes—Violette is a lizard, a dully colored Gila monster crawling along from moment to moment. She fascinates us not because we wonder how she can escape her fate or what will happen when her passion finally bursts forth, but because we know that she is neither imaginative nor smart enough to avoid slouching toward the guillotine.

The film moves along with the same relentlessness. The crime is not presented in the larger than life manner of a Bonnie and Clyde shootout, but just as another episode in another day in another life of silent desperation. Mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) seems to be always on the verge of admitting to herself that something is wrong in the way her husband, Violette's father Baptiste (Jean Carmet), relates to the girl. (We see Violette and Baptiste chatting casually as she is topless and he has a hard time controlling his eyes.) Violette visits her doctor, who tells her she has syphilis. When her parents find out about it, she convinces them that the only way she could have contracted the disease was by inheriting it at birth from them. They swallow her story and what she tells them is medicine. It's the poison.

We also spy on Violette with some friends of near her own age. They claim to be students but they do have plenty of time to hang out at cafes—the mall?—sipping drinks and conversing about nothing in particular. This is how she meets Jean Dabin (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the counterfeit millionaire who soon reveals his need for money and his entire lack of interest in earning it. Violette supplies it by stealing from her parents and blackmailing older men of her acquaintance.

It's remarkable that Chabrol is able to bleach all the sensation from what was one of the most sensational crimes of the Parisienne1930s and still keep us fascinated. Written by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, and Frederic Grendel, based on the book by Jean-Marie Fitere, the film is not an overheated crime, but a clinical autopsy. Director of photography Jean Rabier and production designer Jacques Brizzio remind us that things and places are not colorful and exciting merely by virtue of being historical.

There's a creeping ennui to Violette, a lethargic dullness which allows us to see life through the girl's eyes. Before she meets Dabin she feels trapped in her parents' bog of an existence and nothing really seems to matter to her. After she falls in love—if that is really what it is and not just a desire for love that is so strong because everything else is so weak—she has to follow the path of least resistance because that is the only way she knows how to go.

It's a fine and observant film, and an exhausting one, with its horror residing just under the surface.

 

Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)

Murder in the Red Barn was the perfect vehicle for Tod Slaughter’s introduction to movie-goers. It was one of the Victorian melodramas in which he had been barnstorming the provincial theaters for years, the play having been based on an actual 1828 murder case. Since he had been portraying the villainous Squire Corder so long on the stage, Slaughter had made the hypocritical landowner one of his signature roles.

The film is introduced as if it were a play. A host walks on stage from the wings and offers to introduce the characters. Each is greeted with applause. Even Corder takes a bow under the proscenium to the approbation of the theater audience. This literal stage-setting, which will never be referred to again, only adds to the film’s time-machine feel. Just as the movie’s creaky plot and characterizations take us back to British neighborhood cinemas of 1935, the faux theatrical introduction would have removed audiences of 1935 back 70 years to the days of mid-Victorian melodrama.

At the village dance, Squire Corder appears to be the very soul of amiable generosity. Surely then as now audiences knew not to trust any man in a melodrama who seems to be that pleasant and courtly. He will certainly prove to be Up to No Good. Actually, you can see it in Slaughter’s body language. He stands stiff-backed, head erect, arms held oddly in front of his torso looking for all the world as if he were a praying mantis.

All goes well for Corder at the dance until he makes the mistake of allowing a gypsy woman—where would these pictures be without gypsy women—to read his palm, in which she sees death and the Squire hanging from the end of a rope. Talk about your buzz kills . . .

Next we cut to a humble cottage and see the lovely village maiden Maria Marten (Sophie Stewart)—where would these pictures be without lovely village maidens—telling her mother that she is off to choir practice. But—cue the organ—she is really sneaking off to Corder’s manor house because the cad has been promising her a life of luxury and respectability in London when he weds her, which he has absolutely no intention of doing after he gets what he wants from her. Have some Madeira, m’dear.

When Maria’s father (D.J. Williams) finds out that there was no choir practice that night, they gypsy lad Carlos (Eric Portman), who is smitten with our heroine, lies to Farmer Marten and says that he was with Maria. He’s trying to protect her but it isn’t made clear why spending night time hours with him is better than anything else she could have been doing.

Livid, Farmer Marten calls on the Squire and asks him to run the gypsies out of town.

This scene is a grand one for Slaughter as he gets to scale the heights of justified hypocrisy. He paces back and forth in his parlor, his steps stiff and forced as if he were counting “one, two, three, stop, turn, speak, pace back, one, two, three.” He dabs gently at his nose with his handkerchief, then paces to the bell cord, tugs on it manfully, and deliberately paces back. It’s stage movement of the most mechanical sort but it is oddly mesmerizing.

Slaughter is like the modern computer generated Scooby-Doo at the heart of the drama. He’s too large for the other actors. He stands out because he doesn’t seem to be quite real, and yet all the other characters in the movie accept his presence. His hand-wringing and eye-rolling, his way of underlining every laugh and condescending lip-curl are the most unsubtle ways of virtually commanding center stage. This is a Tod Slaughter film the way John Wayne’s later pictures belonged entirely to the Duke. He exists on his own plane, and the spotlight follows him wherever he goes.

Now we cut to a gaming room in London where Corder is experiencing a terrible run of bad luck at the dice table, losing toss after toss to a dandified Dennis Hoey (later Inspector Lestrade to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes). So busted does Corder become, he determines to marry a wealthy, plain, psalm-singing old maid for her money. When the winner of his fortune gives him but one month to pay up, it becomes clear that poor Maria is old news.

Of course all sexual action has taken place off screen but we can tell by Maria’s shamed demeanor that she and the Squire have been involved with some slap and tickle, and soon it will become obvious to the entire village. Her father, declaring her a “wanton,” throws her out of his house. She hastens to the manor to claim what is her due by former promise, but Corder dismisses her distress with a delicious “I meant what I said at the time.”

“You shan’t kick me into the gutter,” she cries, thinking her despair will melt his cold heart. So certain is she that Corder will do the right thing, she drives away the love-struck Carlos, who offers to marry her.

The Squire tells Maria to meet him that night at the red barn and they will slip away to London. When they meet, a storm is raging. Where would these pictures be without raging storms? Maria senses that all is not well with Corder. Slaughter allows his shoulders to hunch as he hisses, “Didn’t I promise to make you a bride? You shall be a bride, Maria. A bride of death!”

She screams. He shoots her with a dueling pistol. He digs a hole in the barn and buries her as thunder and lightning crash and flash. Director Milton Rosmer even places his camera in the grave so we can watch Corder as he shovels dirt onto our faces.

From this point on the movie hastens to its close. Maria is missed by her grieving parents. Carlos is tracked down and accused of causing her disappearance. He remembers seeing her with the Squire on the last night anyone saw her. The town officials take Corder and Carlos to the barn where Corder’s dog Tiger begins to sniff around a patch of disturbed earth. Corder offers to dig around to prove that there is nothing amiss and he digs up the pistol he had inadvertently dropped in the grave.

When the corpse is exposed—not to us but to the characters on screen—Slaughter give us a nicely overwrought mad scene right out of Edgar Allan Poe. “Don’t stare at me like that, Maria,” he gibbers. He is finally led away, barking mad, by the authorities.

But he has one last horrible indignity awaiting him as he is led to the gallows. He doesn’t see it coming—if people in old-fashioned melodramas like this had an ounce of imagination or self-restraint, there wouldn’t be any old-fashioned melodramas like this—but you’ll spot it as soon as you hear that the hangman is too sick to attend to his duties and so a “volunteer hangman” has been procured for the day.

As it is with other of Slaughter’s lead roles, in the end there’s a grandeur in Squire Corder’s evil. He covers all the bases: snobbishness, vanity, lechery, violence, greed, hypocrisy—he’s the complete villains of Charles Dickens all rolled into one. Slaughter is sui generis, and you wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

House Hunting (2013)

It’s a tale of two families—Hays and Thomson.  Charlie Hays (Marc Singer) has his hands full with a new(ish) wife, Susan (Hayley DuMond), and a teen daughter, Emmy (Janey Gioiosa), who hates her.  Biological mom ran off with another man.  Charlie works for a company (bank? investment firm?) that foreclosed on a farm, house and 70 acres, and Dad is taking the family out to look at it, thinking he may want to buy. 

Other family.   Don Thomson (Art LeFleur) is a grouch who is being dragged from one open house to another by his wife Leslie (Victoria Vance) and his teen son Jason (Paul McGill).  As he stands, smoking, in front of a suburban mediocrity that looks pretty much like the one they just left, a man wearing one of those hideous arctic hats with earflaps—mukluks for the head—and leading a dog on a leash approaches him.  They agree that the neighborhood sucks and the man gives Don a card with an address on it, an address for the perfect place, a farm on 70 acres. 

The Hays family arrives at the house first, but they are immediately followed by the Thomsons.  The two men appraise each other as rivals for the property, but neither of them goes into the building beyond the foyer, and then they decide to leave. 

As Charlie drives away from the house, a young woman rushes from the woods in front of his car.  He smacks into a tree, but gets out and goes to her, sees that he didn’t hit her but that still she is covered in blood. 

Don pulls up behind him.  Since Charlie’s car is too scrunched up to drive, Don offers to take him and the young woman back to the house so they can call for help.  The young woman, Hanna (Rebekah Kennedy), tries to flee in fear.  When they ask her why, the families discover that she has recently had her tongue cut out. 

All seven people cram into Don’s car and head back to the highway, but end up every time they try back at the house.  Which apparently doesn’t want them to leave.  In the pantry, they find seven cans of beef stew.  They think they see the man with the hat walking his dog, but when they shout at him to stop, he disappears. 

A month later, a month of no communication with the outside world, there continue to be seven cans of stew on the shelf every day. 

Until the day there are only six. 

The film was written and directed by Eric Hurt, who plays around nicely with the devices of the traditional ghost story.  What he does best is suggest a meaning for what the families are going through while keeping a definitive explanation just out of reach.  The best ghost stories don’t tell you what you you need to know in order to make the oddness understandable.  That’s not the way ghosts work in real life (so they tell me).  It’s said that the difference between a fictional ghost story and a real one is that the fictional haunting makes sense and the actual one doesn’t.  Hauntings don’t always happen out of a need for spectral revenge, or for the completion of some unfinished business. 

If you need an explanation in this case, imdb says that the film’s script is loosely based on Sartre’s play No Exit.  You can extrapolate a meaning from that. 

The acting is fine and production values are good.  There’s not a lot to be said yay or nay about either thing.  The real pleasure comes from watching a contemporary ghost movie that looks further back for inspiration than last week’s episode of some ghost hunting show on cable TV.

Popcorn (1991)

Popcorn makes the major mistake of placing high-camp burlesque versions of 1950s-style horror and science fiction movies—the kind using outlandish ballyhooish gimmicks to sell tickets—in the center of a quasi-legit slasher movie. The slasher part of the whole is not entirely serious as it’s a black comedy, but the parody movies-within-the-movie creamy filling are flat-out silly and so much more obviously funny than the chocolate coating that the whole thing melts in your hand.

Jill Schoelen (who had co-starred in the Robert Englund Phantom of the Opera in 1989) is Maggie, would-be screenwriter. She is a college student still living with her mom Suzanne (Dee Wallace). When Suzanne finds out that the struggling campus film department wants to put on an all night horror-palooza to raise money, she suddenly hesitates and asks Maggie not to get involved. Maggie wants to take part in the fund raiser. After all, they intend to run three schlocky gimmick flicks, recreating the original William Castle-ish stunts—shockers in the seats, a giant mosquito that buzzes the audience, and foul odors pumped into the theater to accompany a Japanese import called The Stench. Yeah, who’d want to miss that?

Ray Walston delivers a high energy cameo as Dr. Mnesyne (he remembers the good old days of motion picture promotion), proprietor of a movie memorabilia shop and owner of all the artifacts the students will need in order to pull off the promotional stunts. Walston is very much like the Devil in Damn Yankees.

While going through cases of stuff, one of the students finds a film can bearing a warning Not To Open, which is, of course, immediately ignored. A small reel of film is inside and when they project it they discover it’s part of a notorious movie made 15 years previously by Lanyard Gates, indie director and professional wacko. The movie was called The Possessor. To get revenge on everyone who ever doubted his talents, Gates presented his final film without an ending—an ending he intended to create live on stage by murdering his wife and daughter and everyone else he could. Somehow the theater caught on fire and Gates, as well as several people in the audience, were killed.

When she sees the remaining snippet of The Possessor, Maggie realizes that she has been dreaming it and quickly jumps to the conclusion that she is, in fact, Lanyard Gates’ daughter. How she wasn’t killed by the evil genius is explained in a quick bit of we-better-tell-the-audience-what-the-hell-really-happened-or-they’re-going-to-be-pissed exposition. And it seems that Gates is still alive, too, and plotting to kill everyone in the film department, a move that will spare future audiences hours of dreary independent art cinema.

The rest of the cast includes Tom Villard as Toby, the nerdiest of the class movie geeks; Elliott Hurst as Leon, the one in the wheelchair; and Freddie Marie Simpson as Tina, department flirt and student kootchymama (“people wonder how I manage to make straight A’s”) to department chair Mr. Davis (Tony Roberts). Derek Rydall is along as Mark, Maggie’s sort-of boyfriend and ineffectual hero.

To save some money on production costs, the picture was shot in Kingston, Jamaica. It’s based on a story by Mitchell Smith and screenwriter Alan Ormsby was set to direct until he lost the job after about three weeks of shooting and was replaced by Mark Hellier.

The film is a watchable failure, never generating anything like thrills or chills. That it has a cult following tells you more about movie cultists than it does about quality cinema, and I suspect people get a kick out of the movie parodies—I suspect this is where Ormsby’s heart really lay. You can watch this one once, but you’ll go back to Joe Dante’s Matinee, which also contains a burlesque movie-within-a-movie, over and over again.

The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)

There is one comic bit of surreal silliness in TBMWGY that endears it to my heart. Peter Lorre stars as Dr. Lorentz, who is town coroner, sheriff, mayor, justice of the peace, and just about everything else. He is the grandest of Pooh-Bahs and wears a black frock coat and stiff hat with a short crown and wide, circular brim. And he never goes anywhere without putting a Siamese kitten in his inside coat pocket.

Fortunately, no explanation is ever offered for this nuttiness, nor is the kitten ever put to any use—not even as a paperweight, as is the one in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

Boris Karloff is Lorre’s co-star. King Karloff plays Prof. Nathaniel Billings, a crazed but amiable scientist who works in a “B” movie lab in the cellar of a rapidly fading colonial inn. He uses traveling salesmen in his experiments, attempting to—it’s been a week since I last saw this movie and damned if I can remember what it is Prof. Billings is trying to do. Doesn’t matter. It’s just silly.

His money running short, Billings sells the inn to perky Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell), who wants to turn the place into a working hotel. She is followed by her ex-husband Bill Layden (Larry Parks) who wants to talk her out of the deal but then decides to stick around, Nancy Drew style, to uncover The Secret of the Old Inn.

Assisting the professor as house and groundskeepers are Amelia and Ebenezer (Maude Eburn and George McKay), she obsessed with the chickens she doesn’t have and he with being mysterious.

When Bill stumbles over what he takes to be a corpse in the basement, he calls the local police and Lorentz shows up. By the time the official gets to the inn, the body is missing.

From this point on, the action is farcical, nothing makes much sense and it doesn’t matter.

Karloff and Lorre seem to be having a good time spoofing the kinds of films they were better known for, although my teeth start grinding every time Karloff had to stoop and pick up a corpse—he had severe back problems from Frankenstein on. Parks, who later became one of the actors most damaged by HUAC when he admitted to having belonged to a Communist cell from 1941 to 1945, is boyish and was undoubtedly held in adoring awe by junior high girls. Donnell, whose second film this was, continued as a “B” movie queen until she moved to TV in the mid-1950s. And “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom adds his trademark air of punch-drunk je ne sais quoi.

The movie was directed by Lew Landers, who followed Donnell’s career path and ended up directing over 150 “B” films and TV shows. He’d partnered with Karloff on The Raven in 1935. Landers (who worked under his birth name--Louis Friedlander—for his first 9 pictures, 1934-36) is one of the few guys in Hollywood who turned out so much product with so little inspiration. Only Bela Lugosi’s over-the-top raving and Karloff’s understated masochism in The Raven give that sole Landers’ effort a chance at immortality.

As for TBMWGY, well, this one is for old school horroristas on holiday and small children who want to see “a scary movie” that isn’t really scary at all.

Horror Hotel (1960)

Here’s a nice little gem that hides in plain sight. It’s a public domain picture that can be viewed via the Internet, and that shows up frequently as part of those 100 Horror Movies for $20 DVD sets you find in second hand book stores, nestled into discount bins, and at truck stops. I suspect its very ubiquity is what keeps people from watching it, let alone taking it seriously.

That, and the fact that it’s over 50 years old, in black and white, and was made on a budget that probably didn’t exceed $40,000.

The movie is Horror Hotel, aka City of the Dead. It was the first film made by Vulcan Productions, which would soon change its name to Amicus and become Hammer’s most serious rival. It was released in 1960 and featured Christopher Lee, who was already a star in Europe.

Lee plays Prof. Alan Driscoll, who teaches classes on the history of witchcraft at a university on the American east coast. The picture’s prologue is his tale of Elizabeth Selwyn, burned at the stake in the village of Whitewood in 1692. Right. As IMDB reminds us, witches weren’t burned in the New World . But so what? This is Horror Hotel, not a History Channel documentary.

Driscoll convinces one of his students—an attractive female student—to spend her vacation time in Whitewood so she can do some first hand research, absorb some local color, and maybe get sacrificed to Satan. Nan Barlow (Venetia Stephenson—her name is actually “Stevenson,” misspelled in the credits) goes to Whitewood, checks into the Raven’s Inn , chats with the innkeeper Mrs. Newless (Patricia Jessel, who would play Domina in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), and then quickly disappears. Her brother Richard (Dennis Lotis) follows to find out what happened to her, and then finds himself needing to rescue book store owner Patricia (Betta St. John) from the clutches of the local witch cult.

The script is by George Baxt from a story by Milton Subotsky, whose name in the credits is the best hint that we’re in Amicusland. Director John Llewellyn Moxey shows us just how much can be done—or disguised—with lights and a fog machine. When Nan first arrives in the village and drives by a cemetery that is under a thick layer of fog, we agree completely when she mumbles, “Spooky, isn’t it?”

As she strolls along, no one ever seems to enter the frame in front of her. People materialize from the shadows behind her, stop, and watch her silently. This is a Puritan Massachusetts of the mind, with an almost Lovecraftian aura of clamminess. In one shot, hooded choristers glide through the fog. Yes, it sounds corny, but somehow it works. This may all be hokum witchcraft, mocking the church and not predating it as real Wiccan does, but Moxey makes us believe it. In Whitewood, at least 50% of every shot is black; when the light is in the center of the frame, it is being crushed.

The template for the script is Psycho—young woman on a quest comes to an isolated hotel; when she vanishes, a sibling comes looking for her; sibling meets another attractive young woman and comes to her rescue. There’s even a decaying old woman in a chair for the dénouement. The picture was released in the UK about four months after Psycho, more than enough time in the world of low budget filmmaking to be heavily influenced.

Meet it at least halfway and Horror Hotel works. Just don’t bring too much baggage.

H6 (2005)

Superficially, H6: Diario de un Asesino (Diary of a Serial Killer) resembles Eli Roth’s Hostel, but look a little deeper and you’re likely to see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer under the surface resemblance. Besides, the release of H6 predated Hostel by eight months.

I suspect the similarities are coincidental. An abandoned “guest house,” or hotel, becomes the scene for torture and murder in H6, just as a youth hostel was the trap luring students to their doom in the Roth film, but the impersonal nature of hotel rooms make them practically perfect locations for the deaths of lonely people.

Fernando Acaso stars as Antonio Frau. We meet him first as a young man ripping into a frenzied argument with his girl friend. She wants to leave him because of his unrelenting jealousy. When threatening and pleading fail to change her mind, he strangles her.

Cut to a lawyer’s office 25 years later. Frau has been released from prison and is signing the papers that will let him take control of some property he’s inherited from an aunt he never knew. The property is an urban guest house—actually, the attorney tells him, a brothel. With a plain front facing onto a narrow street, the building appeals to Frau, who sees in it an opportunity to carry out his great work.

His first night there, he finds a vagrant in one of the rooms, a young man who claims that he just slipped in to spend the night before leaving town the next morning. Frau offers him something to eat and drink, and his guest winds up dead and dragged into a room the walls of which are decorated with paintings of over-sized skulls. The place may have been a brothel, but it appears to have entertained a clientele with peculiar tastes.

Frau marries a woman he’s known for two weeks. Francisca (Maria Jose Bausa) doesn’t love this 42-year old, odd but not-quite-too-odd man—how could she?—but she is 35 years old and wants to escape her smothering father. Her wedding day marks the first time she has been inside the guest house. Frau tells her that he doesn’t have keys to all the rooms, including H6, which seems to her to be just another strange but not suspicious element in her new life.

Yes, the locked room that is off limits to the new bride is a deliberate reference to the story of Bluebeard. Frau’s guide to murder is the real life French serial killer Henri Landru, known as Bluebeard for his habit of killing his wives. Landru kept a damning diary, a habit, among others, Frau emulates.

He suggests that Francisca keep her nursing job on the night shift of a hospital. She is willing as she has been having an affair with a married doctor there for years. Adultery is not murder, of course, but we quickly see that Francisca is not quite the desperate old maid in distress we thought she was.

So while maintaining a relatively normal relationship with his wife, Frau is inviting prostitutes into the guest house at night, temping them in with a smile, a genial manner, the promise of something to eat, and easy money for satisfying his desire for a kind of sex he doesn’t want to mention to his wife. He has a talent for sizing up the working girls and telling them just what they want to hear. Once in the building, they soon find themselves being taken to room H6. Yes, the walls and floor are covered with sheets of plastic, and the table in the center of the room has straps on all four corners, but hell, this guy admitted to being freaky. What’s the harm? A girl’s gotta make a living.

First time writer/director Martin Garrido Baron knows what few people working in this genre want to admit—that to a certain extent, the victims of monsters like Frau are complicit in their fates. Not that they know and welcome what’s in store for them, but that they allow their needs and desperation and experiences with pretenders to override the warning signals. Allowing a stranger to strap them down in what could easily be a torture chamber may be dismissed as being just part of a day’s work, but it’s also the first step towards a tragic inevitability. We watch what happens with the same grotesque voyeurism Roman audiences brought to a play by Seneca.

As in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, H6 isn’t explicit about what Frau does when he cranks up the old 18 inch Craftsman—the story is told in screams and blood splatter—but we do learn from Frau’s diary entries that he likes to continue having sex with his victims even after he has amputated their legs—and that may tell you more than you want to know about this guy and this movie.

The film is dark and claustrophobic, physically and psychologically, but after the oppressive morbidity that permeates the action, the end delivers a black humored shock that you won’t see coming. The real surprise is that it drags human nature to a lower level even than that displayed in room H6.

The curious thing about most American horror films is that they contain an odd optimism that allows the audience to leave the horror in the theater. It’s that whew-I-survived reaction that students of the genre mention so often in interviews. But H6 shows us again that films from other countries don’t necessarily play out that way. Think of Audition and The Vanishing and Wolf Creek.

As Frau tells Francisca, there are a lot of evil people out there. And they won’t kill you because they hate you. They just don’t care about you.