There will, clearly, be several follow-ups to our Project Fear blogathon, not counting Brexit itself. The fact that the general election results, which will go some way to settling the issue, will come in on Friday the thirteenth is pretty irresistible.
First of these slight reprises comes from me old mucker Scout Tafoya — five sparking video essays on subjects as close to our collective hearts as a sturdy stake. European horror, European-influenced horror, and Euro-genre stuff. Float off into Scout’s atmospheric ruminations…
“The tenacity of Hansen has borne fruit. A heartbeat, a cry, the homunculus is born!”
From HOMUNCULUS (1916). HOMUNCULUS, which deals with a man without a soul, created by chemistry, is a strange film, and time has treated it… strangely. Asides from the chunks which remain missing, there are passages in which film decay and tinting and toning appear to have interacted willy-nilly to produce psychedelic solarisation effects unknown to both the Kubrick of 2001 and the Jack Cardiff of GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE. While clearly not what Otto Rippert likely had in mind, these unintended effects are certainly beautiful:
I would like to wander through these chrono-chromatic effulgences, so long as I could do it without, you know, getting any on me. I’m not sure it washes off.
Some of the original colour effects do survive, at least in part, and are stunning:
My blog-voodoo spell may have worked — it seems as if Boris Johnson’s dark pledge to effect Brexit by Halloween, via a magickal ritual known as the Westminster Working, has been thwarted. You’re welcome. But we must see this thing through to the end. Project Fear will continue to celebrate the dark side of European filmmaking — which still includes Britain — for one week.
“Take me… to her!” Here’s Faust in Murnau’s FAUST responding appropriately to a sexy vision.
“Your wife has a lovely neck.” NOSFERATU gets frisky. Have European horror films always been sexier than American ones? I want to say YES. Hammer would be a prime example — lustier than the Corman equivalents, though Hazel Court in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH does not lack in what Billy Wilder called “flesh-impact.”
And finally, Contrad Veidt in THE MAN WHO LAUGHS reacts to the sight of his beloved dog, which has the most problematic name of any screen canine outside of DAMBUSTERS.
PROJECT FEAR is probably only a quasi-blogathon, but I think it still ought to have some banners. It’s quasi because very possibly most of the guest writers will be posting here, rather than on their own blogs, which they don’t have.
Since this is a quasi-blogathon not only about European horror movies, for Halloween, but also (subtextually) about Brexit, for Halloween, these banners can all be read as depicting the state of the nation in a hypothetical post-Brexit world which I still hope isn’t going to occur.
Will Britannia be a terrified woman sinking to the floor, disemboweled from within, under the horrified eyes of her loved one, or a stunted zombie outside looking in with the cold eyes of a vengeful corpse? Or else a lonely immortal, knitting in solitude? Or just an eyeball?
Only time, the courts, parliament, and the deeply psychopathic leaders of the Conservative Party, will tell.
I’m still happy for folks to jump on board this thing with contributions. Just let me know at some point. It runs, as the banners hint, between November 27th and the Day of the Dead.
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