Latest / Outskirts Film Podcast / #020 - Enter The Nightmare: The Cinema of Wes Craven

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#020 - Enter The Nightmare: The Cinema of Wes Craven · Outskirts Film Podcast

• 0:17
  Christopher Small: Welcome to the Outskirts Film Podcast.
• 0:19
  Christopher Small: I'm Christopher Small, and today on our final spooky episode of the Shoctober season, I'm joined as ever by my two co-hosts.
• 0:31
  Alonso Aguilar: Hi, I'm Alonso Aguilar.
• 0:32
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: Hi, I'm Freddie Krueger.
• 0:33
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: Oh, I'm sorry, I'm Oku.
• 0:36
  Christopher Small: Today we will be discussing the master of the nightmare, the Scream King of the Waking Dream, Mr.
• 0:44
  Christopher Small: Wes Craven.
• 0:45
  Christopher Small: After getting his start cutting and even directing, yes, hardcore pornographic films in the late 1960s and early 70s.
• 0:53
  Christopher Small: I mean, this wouldn't be the outskirts film podcast if we didn't talk about someone with a pornographic association.
• 0:59
  Christopher Small: Wes Craven made a notorious start in the world of the grindhouse, teaming up with Sean S.
• 1:05
  Christopher Small: Cunningham of later of Friday the 13th fame on the bleak, uh somewhat actually hardcore adjacent rape revenge film Last House on the Left.
• 1:16
  Christopher Small: Even at quite a modest scale, that film scandalized audiences with a depiction of really sadistic sexual violence, and thus drew quite significant attention to literally a first-time filmmaker.
• 1:28
  Christopher Small: A few years after that, Wes Craven repeated the effect in a similar way with The Hills of Eyes, another exploitative exploration of wanton cruelty visited on a family unit.
• 1:39
  Christopher Small: In these early films, already there was the visible the twin face of Wes Craven's obsessive interests, the horrifying world of dreams, and just as ferociously the horrifying world of the family.
• 1:53
  Christopher Small: Those two ideas probably found their most iconic expression in one film in 1984's classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, which would inspire a franchise, but it would resurface again and again throughout Craven's body of work.
• 2:09
  Christopher Small: By the 90s, he adapted himself again and was actually kind of ahead of the curve with respect to his meta appetites.
• 2:19
  Christopher Small: First was New Nightmare, which I think was the seventh film in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.
• 2:25
  Christopher Small: Probably most famously came the flippant and self-referential Scream films, four of which were directed by Wes Craven before he died in 2015.
• 2:34
  Christopher Small: In New Nightmare, Wes Craven, who's playing himself, uh stated bluntly, these films come from nightmares from the fairy tales that our minds weave subconsciously, and everything else that Wes Craven does is scaffolding to get to that point.
• 2:49
  Christopher Small: So why don't we start from A Nightmare on Elm Street?
• 2:53
  Christopher Small: Since I think it's kind of the locus classicus of his oeuvre.
• 3:00
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: Whatever film I watched from his filmography, I think A Nightmare on Elm Street was like an anchor point from which I compared the others.
• 3:08
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: It has such a strong imagery, it condenses everything Wes Craven made up up until that point and will make later on.
• 3:16
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: It's also the film in which we sense the elasticity of the mise en terms of dreamscapes, nightmarescape, maybe we can call it in this context.
• 3:29
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: How we're never in a secure environment in terms of narrative.
• 3:35
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: The narrative can evolve, unfold in such unexpected ways that you never know what you see is real or uh a nightmare, and it doesn't really matter, at least while you're watching the film, you don't clearly understand the logic of this nightmares.
• 3:51
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: It just happens in a very spontaneous and primal way.
• 3:56
  Öykü Sofuoğlu: And I think I loved being in that state.
• 4:00
  Alonso Aguilar: Yeah, I do agree with that.
• 4:01
  Alonso Aguilar: Um I mean it's pretty low-hanging fruit, but like the 2010 uh remake with director Samuel Veyer.
• 4:07
  Alonso Aguilar: Kind of is like that's the main failing to me of that.
• 4:10
  Alonso Aguilar: It's kind of like a film that's very 2010 horror in a way that's like, oh, we'll find like explicit explanation of like the trauma that Freddie had to experience to like justify why he's in nightmares, and it's kind of like uh not only Nightmare on El Street, but just like the whole like craven experience, like looking for that like logical explanations to like grounding that.
• 4:25
  Alonso Aguilar: And even in some of his films, actually, I do still feel like there's some tension when he tries to anchor things too much on the real world.
• 4:31
  Alonso Aguilar: Because to me, when he's like at his prime, I speak, is precisely as Oiko was saying, the moments in which like reality is kind of like collapsing around it, but it's still like some semblance of reality, it's kind of this uncanny valley which he always like traverses.
• 4:42
  Alonso Aguilar: I guess also that really relates to his form of prowess.
• 4:44
  Alonso Aguilar: For example, this first dead in Nightmare Elm Street.
• 4:46
  Alonso Aguilar: I was kind of like uh telling you guys that I had forgotten how vicious it is, how like spoiled it it is, and kind of like when then you look back into the Hills of Eyes and Halas House on the left, that impulse uh more like a grind house, uh also permeating like in a mainstream film, fully mainstream film that was playing in multiplexes, and still going back and seeing like, oh no, this film actually has a very ugly elements that are kind of like taking for granted as it's kinda once it like merges into pop culture.
• 5:12
  Speaker: I feel like nowadays we know how the horror film works, like we know the mechanics of a horror film uh in terms of storytelling.
• 5:20
  Speaker: So at least I while I was watching this film, I sense that something will happen, something will erupt, someone will be killed.
• 5:28
  Speaker: So you you expect that it's gonna happen, but in Vessa's direction, there's this expectation of how he'll stage that.
• 5:36
  Speaker: Because in his films, the image is very porose.
• 5:39
  Speaker: Any material that you see within the frame can provoke terror.
• 5:44
  Speaker 6: When you get on board, this kind of elasticity of reality, this sense that you get like, how is he gonna do this?
• 5:50
  Speaker 6: How is this bed going to be shown?
• 5:52
  Speaker 6: How is this room gonna be shown?
• 5:53
  Speaker 6: How is this kill going to be shown?
• 5:55
  Speaker 6: He does have that, but he's not John Carpenter.
• 5:58
  Speaker 6: He's not someone who has a kind of a super clear individual style.
• 6:01
  Speaker 6: So it took me a while to get into him.
• 6:03
  Speaker 6: Once I did, and especially now when revisiting the films, I was really kind of blown away by the way that they really not only kind of operate like dreams, but seem to have been sort of conceived in a dream-like way.
• 6:16
  Speaker 6: Part of what's scary about the film is that there is no division between this like world of nightmares and the world of living.
• 6:22
  Speaker 6: And a lot of the these films work that way, I would say.
• 6:24
  Speaker 6: They they they sort of like push themselves up to an edge at which you feel like maybe he's kind of holding himself back.
• 6:32
  Speaker 6: And then beyond that point, it's like the rules are suspended and you can see anything.
• 6:38
  Speaker 6: And I think that's also kind of this grindhouse exploitation angle that you mentioned, uh Alonso.
• 6:43
  Speaker 6: That like before this, his two most famous films, uh The Hills of Ice and Last House on the Left, really did work that way.
• 6:50
  Speaker 6: Essentially, like promise a premise, which is like family stuck in the desert and cannibals, or woman and her friend are kidnapped and raped and tortured.
• 6:59
  Speaker 6: And within that, that's really like that is the outline of the film, and the film will just like push that to the absolute unbearable limit.
• 7:07
  Speaker 6: Whereas in Nightmare on Elm Street, there is that effect, but it's also filtered through this kind of like almost psychedelic pursuit of unusual images.
• 7:18
  Speaker 6: In the sense that like you're just like plummeting into a a nightmare abyss, and within that abyss it's like only the nightmare logic that is dominating.
• 7:26
  Speaker 6: So when you see Johnny Depp's kill in this movie where he just kind of like gets sucked into a mattress and there's like fountains and fountains of blood.
• 7:35
  Speaker 6: It's like one of those essential Wes Craven images because it's scary, but it's not it's an image that you can't quite wrap your head around.
• 7:42
  Speaker 6: It's like so disturbing and unusual in a way that like kind of only Wes Craven would deliver in a sort of mainstream context.
• 7:50
  Speaker 6: You know, we've we've b we've essentially dropped ourselves in this conversation right into the middle of Wes Craven's career because Nightmare on Elm Street was a film, like now it seems like an inevitable film in some ways because it spawned so many sequels and became such a kind of iconic part of horror culture.
• 8:05
  Speaker 6: But it was a film that basically rescued Wes Graven's career from the toilet.
• 8:09
  Speaker 6: Yeah, he made those first two exploitation films, as I said, but then he he was kind of lost.
• 8:14
  Speaker 6: You know, he he received some level of uh welcoming into quasi-mainstream filmmaking.
• 8:22
  Speaker 6: Those projects that he embarked on, one is Deadly Blessing, and the other one uh Swamp Thing, as well as some other films, including Hills of Eyes 2, all kind of blew up in his face.
• 8:33
  Speaker 6: Either were critically reviled or even he disowned them.
• 8:36
  Speaker 6: By 1983, he was about to lose his house, he couldn't uh make his mortgage payments, he had to call friends to uh help him pay his taxes because he was really, really completely broke.
• 8:49
  Speaker 6: And basically, this film kind of came to him influenced by images of among Vietnamese uh refugees who were dying in their sleep.
• 8:58
  Speaker 6: This script came together, no studio wanted to make it, and then this small studio, New Line Cinema, which was also struggling, uh, funded the film for a very small amount of money, and then that film was such a huge success that it essentially saved the studio and saved West Craven's career.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: And also interesting what happened afterwards, which almost immediately like the Nine Mare Almost Street series just became this machine, kind of like uh shorting out like sequels.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: So I have to say, some of them in a very different way to the Intendant are very interesting.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Starting from the third one, they become this kind of like a psionic high fantasy thing of like uh dream warriors going to the realm of Freddy, which totally is totally totally different.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Once New Nightmare comes, he still like takes some inspiration from that in a way.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: It's more like much more heroic film than like Nightmare on the Street, which um kind of like speaks a little bit to that flexibility, like despite having those like classic films, he was always like willing to try new things and like dialogue with like new tendencies in horror.
• 9:50
  Speaker: I don't know if it's like uh an intention from his part or more like a logic of the industry that he was like thrown into, but that's that's maybe a parallel that we can make between the the non-logical progression in the dreamscape or nightmarescape and non-existence of the authorist perspective that when we try to apply to his career.
• 10:12
  Speaker: When I try to like categorize or understand his filmography, it's just islands, and I can't make connections between them about the previous films, the exploitation films.
• 10:22
  Speaker: What I sense when I compare them to Nightmare on Elm Street, that it's much more a timeless film while being strongly connected to the 80s imagery, whereas I feel like he was kind of using the whole Vietnam American society, culture, family thing as a even like a as a way to promote to that imagery.
• 10:45
  Speaker: So it's it's I think it's much more a conscious decision to attach that uh ideas to the film to kind of make them work or like make them topical in such a way that nowadays I feel like they feel much more outdated than soft suburban imagery of nightmare on Anth Street.
• 11:06
  Speaker 6: As you said, we're kind of looking at this body of work, which in which there's a few films that have become basically pop culture objects in some way.
• 11:14
  Speaker 6: Like retroactively we're trying to impose a certain kind of order on a body of work that is just like very, very scattershot.
• 11:20
  Speaker 6: So in that sense, Uko, I kind of know what you're saying about those early two films.
• 11:25
  Speaker 6: I mean, they're really like they also have been made pop culture objects.
• 11:29
  Speaker 6: When you watch them, they are much more kind of difficult films to fully make sense of.
• 11:36
  Speaker 6: Maybe we can talk about Last House on the Left as a way to begin.
• 11:38
  Speaker 6: But you know, in in that film, for example, like this whole like slapstick plot about the cops, which is like interwoven with like this horrible rape revenge plot, which also has this like acoustic guitar music over like the worst rape scenes ever.
• 11:52
  Speaker 6: I read about those early years of Wes Craven, the kinds of films that he was editing with Sean Cunningham, this work with hardcore pornography.
• 12:00
  Speaker 6: Like when I when I see Last House on the Left, it does actually seem like a cousin of hardcore pornography in some way.
• 12:06
  Speaker 6: In the way that scenes are conceived, in the way that it's constructed, like the kind of images in that film.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Like it it feels like a hardcore film.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: When I think of to explain to people what exploitation is, I think that's one of the films.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: It has a very simple premise, and then we'll make the sensationalist aspect of that premise uh is the selling point at the end of the day.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: To see that in relation to like the last film I saw, which was the Fireworks Woman.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: The logic, those two films to me, are like a perfect match.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Uh, also because they kind of like seem to be conceptually all about like just saying.
• 12:34
  Speaker 6: What are you talking about?
• 12:34
  Speaker 6: The fireworks woman was directed by Ape Snake.
• 12:36
  Speaker 6: Wait, Craven never directed pornography.
• 13:03
  Speaker: I think I prefer the last house on the left.
• 13:06
  Speaker: I agree that the atmosphere of Hills have the Hills of Eyes is much more potent and effective and dreadful imagery of being alone and helplessness.
• 13:16
  Speaker: But at the same time, in Hills of Eyes, it's just you know, with the whole cannibal community living in the Sali, I feel like there is a an effort to give them a background, but it doesn't really work.
• 13:30
  Speaker: Whereas I think the nihilism of the youth culture in The Last House on the left, when you think of Charles Manson, we have m more strong reference points to that that sort of nihilism.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: To me, I guess like the element that like the Hill Survives to me sticks a little bit more.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: It's nastiness, perhaps, is more like pervasive throughout the film.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: You just like see it like randomly, uh just like I don't know, chopping like shopping the head of like canaries at some point, which there's like consistently grueling throughout the film, which kind of like to me it's a kind of a proto approach to that like a descending nightmare that you then see like more developing other films.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: But yeah, also like the iconography of the Hill Survives to me is a little bit stronger.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: I guess like the planes do a lot of like heavy lifting, like design of the mutants and like this kind of like weird like family conjunction they have.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: That's on the on the left like has its own like virtues as well.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: I just think it's like I think that cohesiveness isn't there for me.
• 14:16
  Speaker 6: I also think it's always interesting to me to think of this guy who who was raised, I think, Episcopalian.
• 14:22
  Speaker 6: As I understand, it wasn't shown any movies until he was like an adult, until he was in his twenties, and lived in this kind of uh yeah, repressed and repressive uh household.
• 14:33
  Speaker 6: Moves to the city to study English literature, becomes an English teacher, and then kind of somehow basically falls into editing hardcore pornography because he he buys a camera and he decides that he wants to make films and then he knows a guy who hooks him up with this and that and basically falls into this world.
• 14:50
  Speaker 6: He was a guy who was like interested in literature and interested in this kind of like yeah, tradition of of of of uh English language writing, and I think approach these films first and foremost as a screenwriter.
• 15:03
  Speaker 6: But when you watch them, like it's they really do seem like this sort of like pure id in a way.
• 15:10
  Speaker: I don't agree because I feel like they feel calculated, but m maybe miscalculated, or at least like I think he aims for something, but like he's definitely playing for the shocks, so there there is some intention.
• 15:22
  Speaker 6: But it's like cynical and not sophisticated, I would say.
• 15:25
  Speaker 6: You know, like it's you you never feel in the last house on the left that he's like putting himself above the material, like he's also he's really in the gutter with the film, you know, like there's not a lot of like high-minded condescension about the like vile subject matter.
• 15:43
  Speaker 6: It's like really like truly and purely exploitative.
• 15:46
  Speaker 6: It's also unusual that like Last House on the Left is really his like first film.
• 15:50
  Speaker 6: There is this like primal angry quality to the film, but it's also clumsy in various points.
• 15:56
  Speaker 6: I mean, in a way, that's also what makes it special.
• 15:59
  Speaker 6: But for example, the kind of transition to the second half where the parents start to wreak revenge on the on the rapists and killers, it's not well handled.
• 16:09
  Speaker 6: I mean it's like kind of inexplicable why, for example, this mother would think that she would give a blowjob to the man who the man who has just raped and killed her daughter.
• 16:20
  Speaker 6: She bites the penis.
• 16:22
  Speaker: Like, how did you come up with that?
• 16:24
  Speaker: You were a housewife.
• 16:26
  Speaker 6: Exactly, but I think he wants to get to the West Craven wants to get to the point where she's biting my guy's penis off, but is not so sophisticated enough to like think of the path, like make it plausible why she would do that.
• 16:39
  Speaker 6: It's it's strange because it's both purposeful and also feels like id in a way.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: In a way, it's almost kind of like a couple out doing like uh nightmare stuff because then you don't have to explain those things.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: It's uh yeah, yeah, just like someone just like you can just like work with the in the realm of imagery, which I think is also like very rich in that you can just like bypass like all those plot concerns and it's like it happens because it looks creepy and cool and we'll have it in the film, and that's beautiful.
• 17:01
  Speaker 6: You know, if I imagine that a guy who is like literary style person, someone who like really came up through that way, who's like, ah yes, uh Ingma Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, yes, let's make a version of that.
• 17:15
  Speaker 6: You would think that there would be more sort of condescension to the material, but it's not.
• 17:19
  Speaker 6: It's like very raw and ugly.
• 17:22
  Speaker 6: Also, maybe an apprenticeship of a few years cutting hardcore pornography and hanging out with scumbags probably probably helped.
• 17:29
  Speaker 6: You both did your homework and you saw his well, sorry, Ape Snakes pornographic film, The Fireworks Women.
• 17:36
  Speaker: Yeah, that was my first film that I watched.
• 17:39
  Speaker: I started with the Fireworks Woman.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Kind of like the boss baby meme, like afterwards, you're like, oh, this is like you can see fireworks woman in all of the What's Divine films.
• 17:47
  Speaker: I don't think he's a good pornography director.
• 17:50
  Speaker: Like I don't think his sex, the hardcore sex scenes were interesting.
• 17:54
  Speaker: I think the dream sequences in the beginning, the whole opening is quite evocative and the fantasies she's having with her brother is quite interesting.
• 18:04
  Speaker: But when it comes to actual sex, I found it quite uninspiring.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I would have to agree with that.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: I don't think he's aiming at making the sex appealing, uh, also by virtue of like what the sex sequences are, and I hope that many of them, at least in the first half of the film, are just violent in a way.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: And he's kind of playing with like again like that morbosity of the I guess the intended audience for this film, uh, which we have to say uh is like a film the fantasies Oiko is referring to is this woman having fantasies about like uh it's actually fantasies with her, brother.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Who is uh a priest, by the way?
• 18:35
  Speaker 6: Uh so I'm making talks right now.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: So you want to talk about uh salaciousness and exploitation.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Uh I think West Graven uh understood the assignment quite well.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: He's this was just like exploitation film that happens to be hardcore, uh which are very different despite being semi-aligned in like production practices, very different like that um realms to me.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Sequences to me that like uh catch my eye more are those like fantasies and when she's like on the confession uh box they have on church, and I heard like her brother is just like uh being all intense and like uh about like the kind of connection they have and like the repressed desires, uh, which kind of like there's like a melodramatic impulse there, which to me is adult with the rest of the film.
• 19:14
  Speaker: And also another interesting part is the way some transitions are made within the film because she crosses the path of some people while she's drifting away from her brother, and those confessional scenes opens first with the voice of someone, like we first hear their voice in different images than the than the actual scene, and then we go back to the we see the actual person speaking.
• 19:41
  Speaker: So there are some interesting formal elements like thrown in uh I don't know if you noticed that those things, but maybe not from your face, no.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: It definitely has some interesting, like a lot of like weird crossfit as well, which uh kind of feel yeah, not really part of his filmography, and almost accidentally has some interesting iconography, like uh particularly there's uh this like uh accident like blow it up scene and then immediately transitions towards like a cuts to like a seagull going on the on the ocean.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: And I'm thinking it's like psychoanalytically, there's something there.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Like I feel like the way he frames bodies in the hardcore scenes is almost like like disembowel bodies.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Do you only see like like very close close-ups and you don't never get like a geography, like I get like a like any similar grammar?
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Topography of bodies.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Like it's like very like amorphous, which I guess like has its like interest at times.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: It feels to, as you were saying, m way more refined, ironically, than he's like like either the last house on the left or like the hills of ice.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: Even though the texture of like the cinematography in this film like is very washed out and like oneric, which to me is like something that he didn't really go back to.
• 20:43
  Speaker 6: It's also worth saying that he didn't I was joking about it, but he he never admitted that he directed this film.
• 20:48
  Speaker 6: Because it's it's signed by Mr.
• 20:50
  Speaker 6: Abe Snake.
• 20:51
  Speaker 6: You know, it was always this kind of like mystery of West Craven's filmography that now is like everybody knows that it exists, it's like very available.
• 21:00
  Speaker 4: By morning, I knew I couldn't stand it any longer.
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: I had to go see Peter.
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: I wanted to see him, to hear his voice, to feel him next to me.
• 21:12
  Speaker 4: Oh, Peter, please.
• 21:14
  Speaker 4: I just forgot to forgive Angel.
• 21:17
  Speaker: What if he I know what else?
• 21:46
  Speaker 5: It doesn't matter to me.
• 21:54
  Speaker: I was gonna refer to Dudley Blessing as the f his first studio film.
• 21:59
  Speaker: But still felt a bit detached and cold.
• 22:03
  Speaker 6: I can see in a way why Wes Craven isn't isn't really a fan of that film or doesn't feel like it came off successfully.
• 22:09
  Speaker 6: Especially because a lot of the same sort of ideas would come up later.
• 22:13
  Speaker 6: Even some of the same images in uh Nightmare on Elm Street and and in other films.
• 22:17
  Speaker 6: It's supposed to be one film and then it becomes another and then it becomes another.
• 22:21
  Speaker 6: There's like Amish people in it who are kind of like threatening, then not, then this, then that.
• 22:27
  Speaker 6: And then at some point it does become this kind of pure dream logic film of people kind of like falling asleep, dreaming things, and and this like lack of ability to perceive a difference between everyday reality and nightmares, essentially.
• 22:41
  Speaker 6: It has one foot in the exploitation world, it has one foot in the kind of slasher world, and then it's also just got like all this mixed-up stuff that doesn't really belong there.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess like to me it works better at certain certain things it's trying to do than others.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: I kind of like it a little bit more when it's like exploitation yellow, um just like this is a very like sex-negative attitude towards like which the Amish have in well, the non-amish have in this film, that not having sex, and sex has this like an inherent failure of your spirit, and then that related into like the mortgage.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: I think that Louis Blessings has a little full shining mannerisms as well in some of the kills, which are like very very nasty, but also in to see like a black glove like go to like a car, like a roof.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: But then simultaneously you have like the metaphysical element that then like Jalo was starting to do like towards the late 70s and early 80s, which I kind of like barely stitched together.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: I kind of feel like not being like the fully like mean exploitation film, perhaps I enjoy more in this case, but I still find like uh I'm fascinated also by being like a more like polished visually like a version of that.
• 23:40
  Speaker: It's a transitional in a and it's also formal audacity because in the Blu-ray track he says that like this was his first studio film and he had more production facilities, like he could shoot in the studio, whereas before that he was always shooting in location.
• 23:55
  Speaker: So that's why he kind of like experiments with the cinematic space.
• 23:59
  Speaker: It's also a way of experimenting how he can like manipulate or transform those spaces into cinematic image.
• 24:06
  Speaker: So I think that's a it's also a experimentation film in that sense.
• 24:10
  Speaker 6: It was one of the films that was just clearest to me that he's just a filmmaker who's kind of like has a certain kind of professionalism, let's say.
• 24:18
  Speaker 6: But he's really kind of interested in scenes.
• 24:20
  Speaker 6: But I just can't get out of my mind those those images.
• 24:24
  Speaker 6: And that's also why it's like this younger sister, in a way, to Nightmare on Elm Street, because there's a very young Sharon Stone in this film, and there's a scene where she's like sleeping, uh, and a spider falls in her mouth.
• 24:36
  Speaker 6: There's the snake in in in the bathtub, like shot almost identically to the bathtub scene in uh Nightmare on Elm Street, that aforementioned attack on the car by this black-gloved assailant who then like pours gasoline over the car.
• 24:51
  Speaker 6: You know, like there's this like ability he has to make those images, which do have this like dreamlike quality.
• 25:01
  Speaker 6: And also, I think the old exploitation director instinct inside him always kind of like locates those in like the moments of maximum intensity.
• 25:38
  Speaker: Maybe let's talk about self-referentiality then between maybe New Nightmare and Scream together, because I feel like in a in a weird way they speak to each other while being completely different in tone.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: To me, New Nightmare is kind of like a story of two halves for me.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: And the first one to me has some of the most interesting images I I've ever seen on Craven's films.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: Part of the film when you see the cast of the first night realm street, particularly like uh Hilary Langenkamp having to deal with being still like uh Nancy from the first film and then going to all these like interviews and talk shows and slowly like losing her mind, which it then becomes like a purely like pulp uh plotline of ancient spirit has embodied the manifestation of Freddy.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: Once the film fully like delves into the realm of nightmare in this film, it's like a little bit less visceral, like it's more like towards the fairy tale element, uh perhaps to me like lose a little bit of steam when it's like too ornate in the latter half of the film, where it's like also like Freddy, it's in this film too much of like an 80s, despite being an 80s film, the consciously 80s is like a horror villain, so has like a bunch of catchphrases funny and corny, but distance himself a little bit more from like effective horror in that latter part of the film.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I guess like the more like meta construction of the whole mythology of like you are the one that has to kill him, are also like less effective uh narratively.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: But just on like aesthetic level and a plastic level, those like first, I guess like uh 45 to 50 minutes to me stick to in my mind.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: One of the best like encapsulations of his like visual style uh sense for like horror filmmaking.
• 27:02
  Speaker 6: I think I agree.
• 27:03
  Speaker 6: I mean, I felt also a little bit disappointed by specifically the final kind of descent into hell.
• 27:10
  Speaker 6: It's standard, it's generic.
• 27:12
  Speaker 6: You know, the film has like pushed itself in so many directions before that and has opened up so many possibilities that ultimately it's like, oh, they go into the dream and they kill Freddie.
• 27:21
  Speaker 6: Opens up an interesting conversation about um meta, which I think we can like extend to Scream.
• 27:28
  Speaker 6: The world that these films built is the terrible world of like meta horror that we live in now.
• 27:33
  Speaker 6: So in some ways it's like hard not to hold that against these films.
• 27:37
  Speaker 6: But it's also true that when you kind of like compare the two from my perspective, I'm not sure if you guys really agree with this.
• 27:44
  Speaker 6: I see how like for him this sort of like meta storytelling is like is a tool.
• 27:52
  Speaker 6: It's like something that this old school professional filmmaker in a new era was using to kind of like spice up his work.
• 28:01
  Speaker 6: But ultimately it's still like a horror tool.
• 28:03
  Speaker 6: And I think that's what Alonso was saying, like, particularly in the first 45-50 minutes of this film.
• 28:08
  Speaker 6: Yes, it's set in a world of where the film exists, yes, the characters are playing themselves, you know, there's all this kind of like winking, which is like so ubiquitous now in horror filmmaking, but it's still scary.
• 28:21
  Speaker: What differentiates uh New Nightmare from Scream is the sincerity of horror.
• 28:26
  Speaker: Because in Scream it's it's very cheeky.
• 28:29
  Speaker: I think what remains most effectively in our minds after watching those films, in in the case of Scream is the humor, whereas in New Nightmare I think there's a real horror.
• 28:40
  Speaker: I love how silly the idea is about the the whole story holding Freddy as a prisoner, and then because it loses its relevance that it be that the the evil spirit is released on the world again.
• 28:56
  Speaker: That's why I still prefer New Nightmare to Scream, because Scream is just pointing in a very arrogant way how horror cinema is referencing itself while it has already referenced, so it's like a post-post self-self-referentiality.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: So also thinking about like why does it work better for me in New Nightmare?
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: I think it's more like the structure of each film.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: New Nightmare is still monster slash entity horror film in the sense that it's like there's like unknowable like entity that you can really like understand that just like corrodes the universe of the characters.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: Or since Scream, it's like a hold on it, and like the whole done it like structure kind of like makes this more of like an investigation into the archetypes of the characters to kind of like presents in like a more like highlighted way.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: So these are the jokes and these are like like the promiscuous girls that will get killed, and this is like the nerdy character that watches too horror too many horror films that has the lore.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if it's fully fair to like put that against the film since this is kind of like quintessential like film that kind of presented that in a more meta meta sense.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: But since the film is structurally working around that and being like how these characters relate to like the horror film world, like uh which now is kind of like its own like milieu in the world of the characters.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: That distancing effect to me makes it a little bit more annoying.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Ghostface as like a like antagonist, like as a force.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: To me, it's also not as tangible, like sort of like a situational antagonist instead of like Freddy, which is like more you kind of understand like the horror like Freddy rings.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: But I do have to say, at least in the first screen, which is the one uh I saw for this episode, like modern sequences are very well-staged, and it feels like those moments to me like still make it like a world-world film, particularly.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: I think he always had this thing with like using like weird like Dutch angles when he was kind of like uh framing sequences.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: And the one that's like uh it's on my mind of this film particularly is the one of the girl on the garage when they're like uh on the house party, and you just see like this like sense of uh futility, which is goes back even to like something like last house on the left to me.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Very ugly, and like it's just like his hair like thrown thrown around, and you see the hair like sticking on the uh floor as going up, and you see like that sense of like a futility and urgency, which kind of for a despite being like very like winky and like meta film for those instances it goes back to being like fully visceral and fully fully primal, which is something like I appreciate and I would like perhaps to be like more like uh interwoven to the fabric of the film.
• 31:07
  Speaker: I think Wes Craven is not a character-driven filmmaker, his his characters are not very interesting, or at least the way he depicts them.
• 31:15
  Speaker: We don't get to understand their personality, they're just like devices.
• 31:19
  Speaker: Since we have a group dynamic, since even we have the central figure, she unfolds in a group.
• 31:25
  Speaker: So we have these different dynamics and central points in the film The P The Police Officer Brother, the news reporter.
• 31:32
  Speaker: So there are like micro-narratives and he brings them together, which wasn't the case in his previous films.
• 31:39
  Speaker: I don't think they we have th that kind of like multifocal narrative.
• 31:43
  Speaker: So that's kind of a difference that I noticed and I appreciated.
• 31:47
  Speaker 6: Like it's almost like he wanted to make a film about like the experience of living inside a horror film rather than a sort of like mocking sort of self-referential view on horror films, which is what would come in the later films, which very much exist in a world where the characters are seeing scream-like films.
• 32:09
  Speaker 6: In those films, it's like very, very explicitly a kind of like self-conscious world, whereas in this first one it's like it's a horror film in which the characters uh are sort of like aware that they're living in a horror film.
• 32:22
  Speaker 6: I do take Alonso's point.
• 32:24
  Speaker 6: I just like about this idea of like the archetypes being something a little less fruitful in that sense.
• 32:30
  Speaker 6: I don't know, just to me like it's such a such a kind of unique and funny film.
• 32:36
  Speaker 6: He does still have that level of like horror professionalism for lack of a better word, and like consistently just finds these like very interesting ways to to develop that.
• 32:48
  Speaker 6: I also really like the like 30-second delay on the camera and the way that he plays with that.
• 32:54
  Speaker 6: The opening scene is amazing, of course.
• 32:56
  Speaker 6: I don't know, it's just like so it's difficult for me also to kind of divorce to like analyze Scream because it's such a part of my life and like vocabulary as a kind of pop culture object.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: Oh no, that's in poor taste.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: What?
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: If you were the only suspect in a sense of blood bag, would you be standing in the horror section?
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: He didn't do anything.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: He's got killer printed all over his forehead.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: Why the cops let him go, smart guy?
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: Because obviously they don't watch enough movies.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: This is standard horror movie stuff.
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: Why would he want to kill his own girlfriend?
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: There's always some stupid bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: That's the beauty of it all, the simplicity of it.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Besides, it gets too complicated, you lose your target audience.
• 33:52
  Speaker 6: Scream came about directly after he made the like famous flop uh vampire in Brooklyn.
• 33:58
  Speaker 6: I think at this point in his career he was kind of like desperate to do something else.
• 34:01
  Speaker 6: When the 90s came around, he really wanted to, I think, get away from horror.
• 34:08
  Speaker 6: Like the kind of humor of the of particularly of Scream is very much overpiece with like various experiments he was trying in that decade.
• 34:16
  Speaker 6: In a way, like it's hard for me to see those later films as purely kind of craven objects.
• 34:22
  Speaker 6: Even if they have some pleasures and they're kind of like full of interesting contradictions and like wacky contrivances.
• 34:30
  Speaker 6: Craven's 90s was kind of like characterized by these various experiments.
• 34:35
  Speaker 6: His 80s, I think, was characterized by these soaring successes like The Nightmare on Elm Street, which literally became part of pop culture, The Hills of Eyes 2, which he literally disowned, various kind of TV movies, also film like Shocker, which unfortunately I didn't see, which has quite a good reputation.
• 34:53
  Speaker 6: Two films that we can talk about, which I guess are sort of siblings in the sense that they make no fucking sense, uh coming in this filmography in some way.
• 35:02
  Speaker 6: One which is The Serpent and the Rainbow, which is set in Haiti, so it ticks our usual box of like tropical, slightly problematic explorations.
• 35:11
  Speaker 6: And then just as the 90s came around, he made what I think is one of his best films, very weird film called The People Under the Stairs.
• 35:20
  Speaker 6: Maybe we can start with uh The Serpent and the Rainbow.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: Quite surprised by this film, uh, in not the way I that I expected.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: Psychosis, like uh zombie film was graven in like uh I kind of imagine to be more like fully kind of like people under the stairs in a way, just like like nightmare from start to end.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: And in a way, it's more like um has a structure and and like the feel to me of like a like lost like 50s film, that mixture of like a like adventure and where the horror comes from like, oh, look at the like nasty locals and they're like we weird like local like religious rituals.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: To me, like just fascinating as an object in the sense like it's a film that's based on in real life, as far as I know, like on like the accounts of like a was like a botanist uh or like some sort of scientist.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: It's like has this like a timeless quality, just like in the narrative construction, a lot of like voiceover, which I think not doesn't really happen in in much of like uh Kraven films, uh of this like uh white character played by Bill Pullman that just happens to be after he experiences like a transcendental trance in like uh the Amazons in like some on the term in Latin American country.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: He's then in Haiti doing some sort of like uh research project.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, I understand why it's like would be like a problematic film, just like uh once this like uh his psychosis and like descending to like nightmares happen stores, like I said last half an hour of the film.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: It's like mostly being scared like uh like black faces on screen, like the cosmic like the construction of Vudu.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: But before that, it's kept to me like a very effective, kind of like not necessarily a horror film, but like a pole film that has like these like horror sequences once you see like hands on the soup and like those very like classic gothic images to me work in the world of the film, which is has this very convoluted plot of like a some sort of like political thriller.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: It's not really like a zombie film, which to me was quite surprising.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: Like I was expecting like even like a closer approximation to Vulship, but it's just like this bare bones like descending to nightmare.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: It becomes more and more interesting to me in when he fully goes on board of like just making this like exoticized, like white horror, like of like descending to into the green hill, um, which I guess like in a way goes back to what Chris was saying with his exploitation films.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: First, he's trying to do something perhaps a little bit more palatable, and once he just like takes like overridden by well, this is what I'm doing.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: But it kind of like it's a film like I really enjoy like on a scene-by-scase.
• 37:30
  Speaker: There are some moments in the beginning that also goes full weskraven, and then you go back to the whole adventure white man and the Haiti tropes, like when he's stuck in the coffin that he the coffin is filled with blood.
• 37:44
  Speaker: Like those scenes are pure West Craven.
• 37:47
  Speaker: You kind of feel like hyped by that image, and you want it to keep going on, and then he completely falls back to the the the whole convoluted trope of like finding herbs, the the powder to m that would turn the it's too complex to hold things together.
• 38:05
  Speaker: I think it comes from a very far point to to make the whole narrative hold together.
• 38:11
  Speaker: The whole the relationship with the doctor and everything.
• 38:14
  Speaker: It's too much, and I don't think Bill Pullman is a great actor to like pull it off.
• 38:19
  Speaker 6: In a way, his presence sort of speaks to how much of a Frankenstein this film is.
• 38:24
  Speaker 6: And I'm pretty fond of this film, honestly.
• 38:27
  Speaker 6: Like 80s kind of like liberal-ish prestige.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: I thought of like those like uh misguided white liberal like Oliver Stone films like like Salvalor and Yeah, yeah.
• 38:38
  Speaker 6: Almost like you want to have it both ways, like you want to like be sympathetic to like the Haitian people, but also sort of exploit and like get people to think that they're kind of weird.
• 38:48
  Speaker 6: Then it's like, oh my god, it's like a pure schlock film, you know, like really like a Fulci film.
• 38:54
  Speaker 6: And like the wedding of those two things is really, really weird in Fulci films when you like have all the setup with these like hammy characters and whatever.
• 39:02
  Speaker 6: But here it's not like that, exactly.
• 39:04
  Speaker 6: It's like this Oliver Stone, and then suddenly he's in a coffin buried alive, and there's blood pouring all over him, you know.
• 39:09
  Speaker 6: And speaking of inexplicable melanges, Alonzo, maybe you can conclude this discussion by speaking a bit about uh people under the stairs.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: The things I enjoy the most about like a Craven film and how it's when he like lets loose of any narrative constraint, uh, which we're also talking about, like uh how it started happening towards the 80s when he was like able to work more with like higher budget in more like special effects during films that allow him to like work into an eric.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: To me, people on the stairs actually, from the ones I've seen, it's my favorite Craven film, just because it's like start to finish, like just like a pure like descent into like nightmare.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: Not even like tries to exist in the real world from the first sequence, like it is kind of like a fairy tale, and then starts building from that into like a gothic horror, like classic haunted house film.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: Also, I have to say, like at first actually was kind of kind of a skeptical of this film because the way it's discussed, particularly in the US, is kind of like more on the textual level Ragged's America, like landlords, like the black experience.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: Where again, I don't want saying that's less interesting, just like I have like the PTSD of like elevated horror, and then you start seeing the film, and there's like a whole sequence with Ed from like Twin Peaks in like game suit with a shotgun at the end.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh no, it's actually like it really commits to like uh its exploitative senses, and just like I've seen like people being disemboweled and the whole like cannibal arc the film has with its landlords, which is a very like hummy metaphor, which we aren't really mind in the universal film, which uh landlords are kind of displacing like people in this like neighborhood.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: The the twist, the horror twist being like they literally like eal them a life, which is them like skinning people and like in their basement, and that's that this creates like this whole like uh like underworld of like uh lost children as the main character, which is just called fool in in the film.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: Uh Brandon Quinlin Adams is the actor, the uh the the kid you see that you follow through the film.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: Kind of like follows this very like timeless narrative narrative storytelling of like uh just this kid will just be like in awe of what he's experiencing, so he's kind of like an avatar in a sense, he doesn't really have much character, and the way that even works and in the sense you're just just like being in awe of everything, every sequence, and that on a meta level works as such as the structured film, which kind of feels like craving being like I just want to be have the like the game suit sequence, I want to have the decannibals, I want to have like the Doverman that appears like every kind of 15 minutes and has a lot of jump scare sequences with uh Bing Raims, and all of that more and more effective as it just becomes like this cumulative effect of like pure to me, like the best haunted houses films, just become that at some point.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: Like it's full creepy scoo-y doo.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: It's just like things like flowing from one like wind like door to the other, like even that the like the geography of the house doesn't no longer make sense.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Like you you see like stairs that go nowhere, you see like bathrooms that become like windows, and it's like sensory overload to me is the quintessential expression of like what uh Craven's like virtues are as a filmmaker.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Like that fully embodiment of the nightmare is to me like what really uh materializes his whole work.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: And I in this film, to me, it be like accidental or be like circumstantial, was fully like let like let loose.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: That that's what like to me like stands about this film.
• 42:00
  Speaker 6: It's it's it's almost like West Craven, like particularly in this moment, wanted to kind of get away from the thing that he was known for.
• 42:09
  Speaker 6: You know, like you just see it, like you see this kind of like resistance against being pigeonholed as a horror filmmaker, and uh yet in those moments you see that like uh his kind of natural state, like his natural ability is staging those sequences.
• 42:25
  Speaker 6: The same in The Serpent and the Rainbow, and I think more successfully in People Under the Stairs.
• 42:30
  Speaker 6: You just see like he's at his most virtuosic when he's exactly staging staging those sequences because he's able to push it much further than anyone else would.
• 42:41
  Speaker 6: And basically those those last years of his life, like they were they were divided between doing that, so like making scream sequels, like was his last great project essentially.
• 42:54
  Speaker 6: But he also, you know, engaged in very kind of weird and eccentric projects at that time.
• 43:00
  Speaker 6: He made the film Cursed uh with Christina Ritchie, which I think Harvey Weinstein kind of butchered and got into a huge fight with him about.
• 43:07
  Speaker 6: Uh, he made the airplane thriller with Rachel McAdams uh Red Eye.
• 43:13
  Speaker 6: He made a film called My Soul to Take, uh just before Scream 4, uh, which I think was a kind of very out-of-time film, and was also a film that he stopped working with his regular collaborators just for this film as an experiment, and it was like universally hated and like considered very unprofessional.
• 43:31
  Speaker 6: So and then and then most famously in in uh 1999, after uh Scream was a big hit, he took all of that like capital he had with the studios and literal capital as well, and had become obsessed with this Oscar winning documentary from 1995 called Small Wonders, which is about uh violin teacher like teaching inner city kids to play violin and like kind of cached all His chips on making that, which is the Meryl Streep film music of the heart.
• 44:05
  Speaker 6: It's like you you see that he was trying to escape that trap that he had set for himself in various ways, but always kind of like just falling back on what he could do best.
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: Don't you dodge me?
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: Don't you dodge me?
• 45:08
  Speaker: So that was our uh Wes Craven episode.
• 45:10
  Speaker: This episode we're finishing our Shoctober uh special series, but before we wrap up, our usual segment of the last films we saw.
• 45:19
  Speaker: So have you what have you guys been watching?
• 45:21
  Speaker 6: I'm here in uh Vienna at the Viennale.
• 45:24
  Speaker 6: One film that I was quite a big discovery for me was uh John Abraham's uh Report to Mother, which is a film from 1987 uh that's just been restored by the the Film Foundation in India.
• 45:37
  Speaker 6: John Abraham is a filmmaker that I I've known for a while because I really like his film Donkey in a Brahmin Village from 1977.
• 45:45
  Speaker 6: He was uh Kerali's filmmaker.
• 45:47
  Speaker 6: This is like I guess his most famous film, but I had never seen it.
• 45:51
  Speaker 6: Beautifully restored now, and I know is like touring a lot of like revival festivals.
• 45:56
  Speaker 6: It was a film that was made by a collective, Marxist collective known as the Odessa collective, about a man who stumbles upon a dead body, takes the news of this man's suicide to uh his mother who lives in a different uh city, and along the way he kind of accrues new travelling companions until they make a gigantic uh collective of people who who take the news to this mother.
• 46:23
  Speaker 6: So it's like it's it's a collective film, but it's also kind of a polyphonic film, literally in its form.
• 46:29
  Speaker 6: You know, it's like a film about movement.
• 46:32
  Speaker 6: There's a lot of like amazing handheld moving shots through the streets, through back alleys, seeing this large group of people like constituting itself and managing itself, and also manages to kind of absorb politics in inside itself.
• 46:49
  Speaker 6: I mean Kerala is uh like famously the communist state in India, and this is a very Marxist film, and you see a lot of these images of of street protests and uh newsreels and posters of Sheikh Avara and Mao on the wall.
• 47:05
  Speaker 6: All of these things kind of like blend into a giant uh soup in this film.
• 47:09
  Speaker: And maybe I can speak a little bit about my experience in Cine East because I was in the press jury in Luxembourg.
• 47:15
  Speaker: I watched seven films from there, and the one that really stood out, which we awarded also, was Shame and Money by Visar Morina.
• 47:23
  Speaker: I already knew uh about Morina uh through his previous film Exile, which I also quite liked.
• 47:30
  Speaker: I think I prefer I still prefer Exile to Shame and Money, but I think it was a it was quite a strong film within the selection.
• 47:38
  Speaker: I mean it starts as a very conventional family drama in a Kosovan village where the younger brother of the family sells the cows, that's the the main income of the family.
• 47:50
  Speaker: And one of the older brothers is a schoolteacher in the village, and he's he's so ashamed to accept that their younger brother left the the village by stealing the cows that the actual the other older brother l has to leave the village to the city to work, so they pretend that they sold the cows on purpose to live on in the city, and the way it unfolds, it's quite oppressive in social perspective.
• 48:20
  Speaker: And I would say I was quite triggered by the the whole uh anxiety of not finding a job, not knowing what to do with your life, and and it's a very c it's a it's a class struggle that is depicted in a very effective way throughout the family dynamics and how care work is not just uh a gendered issue but also a cur class issue.
• 48:43
  Speaker: The film does something quite interesting in the it's in the last act.
• 48:46
  Speaker: We kind of see or witness a rage that is not acted, but it's still represented in the film.
• 48:53
  Speaker: A sort of rage that the husband feels to his brother-in-law, but also to the upper class, and I found that quite audacious, uh, left a lasting impression on me.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: I've been working on the Cambridge Film Festival, uh, so I haven't been able to watch like a lot of films I can talk about.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: But I did re-watch uh this smoke film by a filmmaker called David Lynch, Mo Holland Drive.
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: This time seeing it, I think what really stuck in my mind is just like on a scene-by-sene basis.
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Actually, I didn't feel like this film be to be that that weird.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Like there's actually a sense of uncanniness, so just like thinking of like the weird sequences which from this film that kind of like have been like immortalized are very spread out.
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: This time my experience was more like being engaged by this kind of deconstructed noir-ish plot line that the film has.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: You're seeing like that classical element in just like it's like staging and like the missing sun and the playing with archetypes was what really made me like uh be engaged with the film uh this time.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: So it's not my favorite lynch, but just like seeing how becomes this like bridge uh in his filmography, I think, also, where he's kind of like starting to like let loose of like the more like groundedness of narrative filmmaking, but also still quite in there.
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: Like I don't feel like it's like too too distant from something like a blue velvet, for example.
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: Lady Lynch, thumbs up, hot take.
• 50:04
  Speaker: So that was it.
• 50:04
  Speaker: And guys, please don't forget to send your comments, appreciations, uh, things you want to share with us at outskirtsfilmmagazine at gmail.com.
• 50:14
  Speaker: Next week we'll be talking about Robert Aldrich, and so see you later.