Spooky Season Is Year Round

Check out ‘Long Weekend’ and ‘Martin’ if you’re still in the mood for some horror.

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THOUGH NOVEMBER IS UPON US, signaling the end of another Halloween and suggesting that all our good times are done for another year, there is in fact no reason to stop watching horror films. They’re available year-round, after all. And today I would like to recommend a couple of great ones that you may not have seen before. One is a bit of an obscurity; the other is a tucked-away masterpiece by one of the cinema’s most famous horror directors. Both can be found without much effort. I hope you’ll seek them out, and thank me later.

The 1970s was a great decade for horror movies. Low budgets were no barrier to ambition, as opulent special effects didn’t need to lead the way. Look at, for instance, the Australian film Long Weekend (1978). Director Colin Eggleston and screenwriter Everett De Roche’s environmental horror movie is both modest in its imagery and scope—there are really just two characters, the married couple of Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets)—and ambitious in its approach to the genre.

Peter and Marcia have planned a camping trip, and regardless of how they currently feel about each other—the tension between them is obvious early on—they’re going to go through with it. Maybe this getaway will help to smooth over their relationship problems. But it is perhaps because of these problems—maybe they’re too distracted by the possible end of their marriage—that their callous behavior towards their environments persists, with little regret expressed by either one. To begin with, on their way to the campsite, they run over a kangaroo. Then, when they get to their destination (a destination set in the woods, butting up against a beach, and the ocean), both of them, but especially Peter, thoughtlessly leaves broken bottles and other trash wherever it falls. They destroy an eagle’s egg. Peter also fires his rifle blindly into the ocean, and the woods.

As this carelessness increases, the reasons for their frustration, anger, and irritation towards each other begin to come out. Peter forced Marcia to have an abortion when she was carrying what may have been another man’s child. Marcia still grieves over this decision; Peter does not. While all of this simmers, and occasionally boils over, they begin to notice strange things, odd visions and sounds, that seem to emanate from the woods and ocean around them. Among their most egregious offenses against nature is Peter’s careless killing of a dugong—a variety of Australian manatee—and it’s after this that nature’s anger begins to make itself known. The strange noises they’ve been hearing at night, Peter reasons, must have come from a baby dugong trapped somewhere. Hence the presence of the mother he has killed. The cries of a baby dugong, Peter tells Marcia, can sound like the screams of a human baby.

As things transpire, Peter and Marcia are soon attacked—by a possum, by an eagle—driving them to panic and a desire to return to civilization. Whether or not they make it, well, I’ll leave it there. But the main thing is that all of these depictions of nature fighting back, or seeking vengeance, are accomplished by showing very little. The most elaborate effect is the model of the dead dugong. Everything else is fairly subtle, even when what happens, happens suddenly.

And it’s interesting, and kind of funny, that Long Weekend is so successful, despite not just the budget, but that also, as a kind of political horror movie, its urgent message to the world is no more complicated or nuanced than a “Don’t Litter!” sign hung off a trashcan in a park. Or maybe “Try Not to Run Over Any Kangaroos!” Still, as obvious as that facet of the movie is, Long Weekend still plays as a film about two fairly unlikable (Peter more so than Marcia, though she’s no prize herself) yet authentic people, and the inexplicable horrors that are trying to consume them. It rises above its theme.

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IN 1968, GEORGE ROMERO RELEASED his very first feature film, Night of the Living Dead. To say this changed everything in horror cinema would not count as hyperbole. That first shot, of the very first zombie (as we now define them)—a shot capturing the figure in the distance, no less—that single, brief, but ominous moment is when the future of genre film history violently changed. Recently on social media, I said that there are few horror movies more influential than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Night of the Living Dead is one of them.

I bring all this up because Night of the Living Dead isn’t even his best film. His best film isn’t even a zombie movie. Romero’s masterpiece is a vampire movie, for cryin’ out loud, and it’s not even really a vampire movie.

I’m speaking, of course, about Martin (1977). This was Romero’s fifth film (sixth, if you count The Amusement Park, which was shot in 1975 and not available outside of film festivals until 2021), and it stars John Amplas in the titular role, a young man who believes that he’s a vampire. This belief is stoked, and possibly created, by Martin’s much older cousin, Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel). Cuda also believes that Martin is a vampire, and spends much of his time on screen either cursing Martin for his evil existence, or doing whatever he can to fend Martin off. This includes strewing Martin’s room (Martin and Cuda live together, along with Cuda’s granddaughter Christina (Christine Forrest)) with cloves of garlic, and waving a crucifix at him. None of this works, which to both Martin and Cuda could suggest that the young man is maybe a new, more powerful strain of vampire, but which confirms to the audience that all of this is complete nonsense.

Martin is a monster of a different sort. He spends his nights stalking women, raping, and murdering them, in unmistakably vampiric, but not supernatural, ways. The film opens with one such killing. Martin is on a train, eyeing the pretty young woman staying a couple of cabins away from his own. He soon breaks into her cabin, attacks her, and kills her. This is bad enough, of course, but Romero has Martin slice open her arm and pour streams of that bright red 1970s blood all over himself. Not a unique image, you might argue, but rarely has the basic idea—essentially bathing in another’s blood—felt so grimily assaultive.

Of course, the main idea here is the way being raised, or surrounded, by an extreme belief system can shut down any possibility of relating to the rest of the world in a reasonable, and realistic, way. Then again, if Martin and Cuda equally believe in Martin’s literal vampirism, their approaches to it differ wildly. Cuda, a strict Lithuanian Catholic, sees in Martin a proof of God, and an opportunity to do good in this world, by killing his young cousin. But Martin’s supernatural powers of evil and immortality (“I’m 84,” Martin tells someone who asks his age) stem, for the young man, from an atheistic point of view. In his mind, maybe vampires could be, not the enemies of God, but rather the next evolutionary step. A similar reading can be made of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Romero’s films, horror or otherwise, usually had some sort of cultural or political satire or commentary, embedded within it, and Martin does lean, in strict tonal terms, towards Martin’s atheism (of a sort; like I say, it’s complicated), and the insanity of both he and Cuda. The film’s general attitude towards religion returns in a later scene, depicting a church congregation meeting in what appears to be some sort of school, or theater, attic, presided over by Father Howard (Romero). The priest begins by talking about what it will take to rebuild their fire-gutted church. One can imagine a certain irony coming from Romero here. But if the religious guy is shown to be crazy and delusional, then the non-religious guy is too. Which would include these atheistic ideas, leaving us where? Back at the beginning.

Complicating matters further is the way Romero depicts Cuda and Martin as each of them sees the other. The way Romero shoots it, Cuda and Martin both see the other one through the lens of an exaggerated, old-fashioned Gothic vampire movie (either Universal or Hammer, it’s hard to tell; it’s kind of an overblown mixture of both). Almost as if they both know their tightly held, mutually exclusive beliefs are fictional and unstable.

All of which makes the aggressively blunt ending so perfect. It’s almost as if Romero became exasperated, said “Both these guys are stupid,” and closed things out with an exclamation mark.