Blu-ray Review: American Horror Project: Volume Two on Arrow Video

With American Horror Project: Volume Two, Arrow Video and curators Ewan Cant and Stephen Thrower continue the endeavor they started in 2016 with American Horror Project: Volume One, restoring obscure horror films and according them the respect and prominence of a lush box set with all the trimmings. The existence of such sets is aesthetically and historically symbolic, correctly suggesting that certain films relegated to drive-ins and video stores are worthy of the respect and consideration of tonier productions that are preserved by, say, the Criterion Collection.

At the forefront of this project’s concerns are complementary notions of preservation and cultivation. These sets reacquaint us with low-budget films that can be made around and about a small rural area and still potentially attract national attention, while also reminding us of an analogue era, when such films, denied the slickness that can now come at the touch of an iPhone button, practically convulsed with the efforts of their strapped and scrappy creators. These films are urgent testaments to the cliché of necessity being the mother of invention, as their scarce resources and naïveté beget explorations of madness and alienation that are stripped of the implicit assurances of luxurious, self-effacing studio-style production values.

Cant and Thrower don’t have a taste for the formulas that dominated blockbuster American horror cinema in the 1970s and ’80s—formulas which have been rejuvenated via producers like James Wan and Jason Blum. They prefer gnarly studies of atmosphere that question the boundary between fantasy and reality, which is often blurred by flirtations with the occult. The films in these sets also reacquaint us with the notion of horror as a state of mind rather than as a game of hide and seek that’s staged with knives and squibs. And the three roughly hewn, intimate, intense, and beautiful films in Volume Two also refute conventional narrative structure and expected cinematic formalities in frequently jarring and disturbing fashions.

This set kicks off with John Hayes’s Dream No Evil, which opens with a little girl named Grace (Vicki Schreck) in an orphanage, crying about a dream of her father. This leads to the wandering of sparsely lit hallways—a recurring image of the films in this set, which is often frightening for the impression it imparts of instability—as in, “This is as much light as we could afford.” There’s a sense of catching as catch can in such images, and so one never quite knows when something is going to show up in the frame, either intentionally or inadvertently.

The 1970 film’s voiceover tells us that Grace was adopted by a church that’s devolved into a faith-healer carny act. The voiceover is one of the film’s most haunting touches, as its awkwardness often serves as an eerie alienation effect. We’re directly told halfway into the film that the adult Grace (now played by Brooke Mills) is about to succumb to insanity, in a device that defies the expectation that suspense be derived via a game of guessing what’s real and imagined. We’re led to ponder less the mystery of this world than the stature of Grace’s emotional trauma as she wanders first into a whorehouse, where she meets a pimp (Marc Lawrence) who doubles as an undertaker, and later into a morgue. The images of the whorehouse and the morgue are sparse, dark, and grungy, with odd and haunting touches, exuding a simultaneously banal and otherworldly aura that can now be described as Lynchian.

Dream No Evil then morphs into a domestic psychodrama with Edmond O’Brien as Grace’s nonexistent father, who goads her into initiating a cycle of murders in the key of Norman Bates. Especially bone-chilling is a quick cut in which Grace’s dream house is momentarily shown for what it is: a dirty and rotting building that’s playing host to her downfall. Plumbing Grace’s delusions, Dream No Evil reveals itself to be a riff on male oppressiveness, as the protagonist yearns to be a pure and devotional daughter—a role she chooses over the possibilities of her reality, in which she could play a pure and devotional wife.

Martin Goldman’s 1976 film Dark August opens in medias res, immediately conjuring notions of evil and suppressed bitterness. A dark Vermont landscape segues into close-ups of an old bearded man (William Robertson) reciting a spell. There are also close-ups of talismans and a fade into an image of a girl wandering a countryside. A piercing scream soon erupts, intensifying an aural tapestry that includes the old man’s voice and a throbbing score. Just to repeat: This is the opening of the film, which offers a context-free emotional climax that casually disregards the slow builds of not only horror cinema, but most cinema in general.

Dark August slows down after this bravura beginning, becoming a character study with supernatural undertones. Pushing 40, Sal DeVito (J.J. Barry) is in Vermont trying to make a career as an artist after a failed marriage. The old man from the film’s opening has a way of appearing in Sal’s yard and following him around town, physicalizing Sal’s midlife crisis. It’s eventually revealed that Sal accidentally hit the old man’s granddaughter on the side of a road with his car, killing her and triggering the elder’s revenge and isolating himself from a rural town that already distrusts new residents. As the tension of this situation taxes Sal’s relationship with Jackie (Carolyn Barry), the old man increases his harassment, conjuring shadowy figures who loom in the periphery of Sal’s woods.

The best film in the set, Dark August deserves far wider prominence. It’s a family affair, as the two married lead actors co-wrote the screenplay with Goldman, who acutely utilizes the occult motifs as symbols of a man’s encroaching guilt and fears of irrelevancy. Most evocative is a sex scene between Sal and Jackie, which begins tenderly but goes awry when Sal is controlled by unseen forces and nearly driven to hurt his lover—a development that suggests how feelings of estrangement can materialize into violence. Meanwhile, jump cuts—stitching together the death of the little girl and, later, the bookending death of a dog—are examples of limited means yielding aesthetic gold. The filmmakers probably didn’t have the resources to stage elaborate set pieces, yet the shards of incident that we see on screen suggest emotional violence without providing the catharsis of action scenes. The jump cuts suggest a literal splintering of normalcy, which is complemented by the lovely yet unnerving Vermont countryside, and by the sturdy performances of the lead actors.

Robert Voskanian’s 1977 film The Child might be the most casually insane production in this set, which is saying something. It opens with an explosion of gothic tropes, as Alicianne (Laurel Barnett) attempts to find an old family estate that’s out in the middle of nowhere. After her car breaks down, Alicianne navigates a thicket of storybook woods, as a lush synth score works up a steam of dread. (During this stretch, The Child suggests a reprise of many film versions of Dracula, with Alicianne in the Jonathan Harker role.) Alicianne eventually finds the home, which is governed by the patriarch, Nordon (Frank Janson), who lives with his young daughter, Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), and adult son, Len (Richard Hanners).

Alicianne is to care for Rosalie, and the Nordons prove to be hilariously unlikeable, particularly Rosalie and the father. When Alicianne asks Nordon if the dinner she’s prepared is acceptable, he can’t rouse himself to answer her with any more than a shrug. The performances here are less accomplished than those in Dark August, but Janson and Cole deliver their lines with a visceral sense of aggression that occasionally recalls the acting in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or in any Rob Zombie film.

The star of The Child, though, is the atmosphere, namely the rustic woods and the cemetery that help Rosalie to express her fantasies of vengeance. As Alicianne discovers the truth about Rosalie, The Child morphs into a demonically tinged siege film, with decrepit creatures that suggest albino versions of a Lucio Fulci zombie. American Horror Project: Volume Two ends with a bang, then, providing monsters of the literal variety, though the figurative monsters—the monsters of Dream No Evil and Dark August—are the hardest to exorcise.

Image/Sound

All three films in this set were scanned in 2K resolution from their original 35 mm negatives. As expected of productions made either quickly or sporadically over a long period of time, the image and sound are of varying quality. Given the circumstances, the images here are generally miraculous, especially in terms of restoring the lurid vibrancy of bright colors, though skin tones can be shrill and shadows murky to the point of obscuring information—a problem that’s most intrusive during a pivotal murder scene in The Child. Yet this is an inherent issue with the materials, which were fashioned by people who didn’t always value conventional coverage. Given this context, it’s hard to image these films looking better, though the sound mixes appear to be improvable. The dialogue, especially in Dream No Evil, is sometimes so muddy that I resorted to using subtitles, though the scores and various supporting sound effects in each film are rendered with superb clarity and dimensionality.

Extras

This set has been outfitted with a cornucopia of extras that provide an immersive history of each selection. Each film has at least one audio commentary, most notable of which are the ones by Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighanon on Dream No Evil and by director Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashian on The Child. Both tracks provide an encyclopedic portrait of the ends and outs of cult cinema and of producing a film via shoestring methods. (Voskanian and Dadashian tell a familiar story of being screwed over by producers, which they partially blame for The Child’s obscurity.) Each disc also has an appreciation by curator Stephen Thrower, and various interviews with people involved in each film. Cant and Thrower have found people who’ve been largely ignored by pop culture, allowing them to speak their peace, poignantly according them long-delayed kudos. Perhaps best of all is the book that comes with the set, including essays by Amanda Reyes, Stephen R. Bissette, and Travis Crawford that discuss the films in contexts ranging from American gothic to Vermont folk horror to the rural horror that was fashionable in American horror in the 1970s.

Overall

With its second volume, the American Horror Project continues to expand our grasp of the horror genre as well as of American independent cinema at large.