8. to 5. Hysteria and the F-Word

5. The Girl Next Door  

Okay, I have a strong stomach; I've watched some brutal, even indefensible stuff at the extreme ragged ends of the horror genre, and while it bothers me I also recognise it as fiction, in the final analysis. Grand Guignol has its place. Splatter can be downright fun. Depictions of torture a Warner Bros cartoon writ large, stupid and goofy as hell. Horror can often be a carnival ride, and we know that after all the screaming in the darkness, we'll eventually trundle out on predetermined tracks, blinking in the daylight and laughing. Nervously? Sure. But laughing, all the same. However. This pretty much gore-free movie, based on Jack Ketchum's excellent novel, which itself was based on real events, will not make you laugh or fist-pump the air or shriek wildly. It quite simply damages you on some level. Or, I should say, it did me. Not even fully sure why. Something about faith in humanity being shaken. About how girls suffer at the hands of boys. Or, perhaps worse, at the hands of women. About the potential depths of cruelty in humans, regardless of whether their reproductive organs are internal or external. About the sheer power of... well, power. It's harrowing. And heartbreaking. Yet it's brilliant. If you like your monsters very much of the human variety, grown from a particularly middle-American patch of small town soil and tied to a rotted trellis by a virulent braid of repressed female sexuality, internalized loathing, and the awful human propensity to bow to mob rule, watch this film. But fair warning: this is the real torture porn. And you won't forget it. I mean that. 

6. Melancholia  

Again, not horror, I hear people whisper. To which I'll say this: if the impending collision of the Earth with a rogue planet ten times larger, and the subsequent annihilation of everything we hold dear isn't horror then I don't know what is. But the point of this oddly quiet apocalyptic film is how we respond to this impending doom, or even whether we believe it's approaching at all. And deep down, it's about depression, of course (the title's kind of a giveaway). It's slow, gorgeous, wrenching and yet oddly comforting, in that those brave enough to face the reality of our loneliness are perhaps better equipped to also face the negation of everything. 

Whatever else, this eerie virus of a film distracts you with its unique elegiac mood while gouging whole new hollows inside you. 

Oh, and excellent performances by all the actors, as in most von Trier films. 

7. Irréversible  

Continuing with undeniably controversial themes, Gaspar Noe's sickening and disorienting Irréversible is about the randomness of trauma, about how something awful can be waiting for anyone at any point anywhere. And how such things can never be "made right" again—not by vengeance, not by time, not by natural justice. Except it isn't just about that. Because it tells its story backwards, and with such emotive force, most of its horror is front-loaded, which only makes it more wrenchingly sad in the end, and perversely lovely. But seriously, this film features two of the most traumatic cinema moments I've ever endured, so fair warning. (Oh, plus, it features the sublimely gorgeous Monica Bellucci, which itself is double-edged, since she is utterly and mercilessly brutalized to a point no one can possibly feel okay about it, no matter how often the phrase "in the service of art" is wheeled out like a bloody gurney. Yeah, it made me angry. But that's the point.) 

8. Antichrist 

Controversial and disturbing, which goes without saying in a Lars von Trier movie, but Antichrist drills way, way deeper. It's about men and women and the awful history of the struggle (from one very skewed perspective) between the sexes. There's beauty, but there's mostly horror and demonization. Von Trier uses the tired horror trope of the cabin in the woods and injects a dark new life into it. Or, actually new death-in-life. And yet, it's *still* beautiful. Eden or Hell? Christian myth or atavistic pantheism? Guilt or scapegoating? Grief or fear or desire? Is it misogynistic or is it about misogyny? All I can say is that despite the critical focus on one notorious and horrifying scene of genital mutliation, there is enough here to make the eyes of either gender water. Chaos reigns, indeed. Brilliant, creepy, underrated film.

This scene I was completely unable to shake. It disturbed me on some level the existence of which I'd previously been almost wholly unaware, except in nightmares.

The New Rapture

Had a dream last night, alone… no, more like a vision, in which it turned out the religious folks who insist on the coming of the Rapture—that moment of self-vindication in which the rest of us sinners all burn and suffer and destroy ourselves here on earth while the righteous are taken into Heaven—have been right all along.

Only, there's this twist, see? As our future dwindles due to overfishing, over logging, the constant rapacious destruction of environment after habitat after ecosystem in order to extract the last few drops of something we either need (water) or want (lumber) or are addicted to (oil), and as the planet deteriorates into a toxic, boiling sea of tribalism and increasing barbarity, partly wrought by self-centred short termism, intolerance of others, wealth disparity and outright bigotry, a newly discovered planet slides silently into our solar system and heads toward earth, a half decade away from up close and impersonal.

The planet, at first noticed only by astronomers who decide to hold off on announcing its disquieting presence off the cold shoulder of poor relegated Pluto, appears perfectly Earthlike, with one key difference: it's a pre-industrial unspoiled earth more akin to a fantasy realm than an actual planet. Tracts of warm, green, forested land surrounded by azure ocean beneath the most tender of climates. It is beautiful.

The delay over the announcement arises from an idea put forth by a handful of NASA scientists and thinkers. If this world is approaching so close to the earth, and in under five years, how feasible would it be to transport a few million humans across the tiny amount of space in order to colonize it? They estimate it would be quite possible, albeit a massive undertaking. And due to its size and slowing velocity, they also calculate it will fall into earth's orbit instead of plunging into the sun.

The catch? Only those who have proven to demonstrate true compassion and love toward their fellow humans—who have mostly refrained from the ugliness of racism or homophobia or any type of fundamentalist creed, religious or political, who are admittedly flawed yet possessed of an appreciation of the only two things that really matter: love and beauty—will be permitted to travel there.

So, the plans are drawn up and over the next handful of years, rumours of this thing are everywhere, at every water-cooler, regularly trending on Twitter, whispered along daylight highways, invading the world's fitful dreams, with many on either side of the divide skeptical of its reality. But as the new "star" appears undeniably brighter in our night skies, even showing ever-less faintly after sunrise and before sundown, the tension increases and more and more skirmishes break out upon the earth. Millions of lives are lost in instantly forgotten border wars, in conflicts over resources, over irrelevant differences, but the moment finally arrives and the hidden silos slide silently open and release their silver seeds filled with the t-shirt-sloganned, the pierced, the dreadlocked, the Doc Martened, the tie-dyed, the sexually liberated, the tattooed, the stoned, the tolerant, the disenfranchised, the gentle, the artists, the wounded healers. Not inheriting but departing the earth.

As their planet descends into a maelstrom of rage and horror, both mirrored and fuelled by the earthquakes and tsunamis and raging conflagrations of a world at last tipped beyond the balance of stability, these new migrant-colonists look back one last time, flinching at the dying screams of the cruel, the selfish, the tyrannical, the faux-populists, the prejudiced, the hate-filled, the control freaks, the authoritarians, the zealots, the abusers, the book-burners, the bullies, those who think it perfectly fine to shoot a wolf from a helicopter, those who would deny equal access to health care to their fellow humans, those who would prevent consenting adults from loving each other, those who wish for an absent daddy to come save them, those who believe winning is more important than the joy of playing, those who add and have added nothing to the world… before turning their gaze toward the heavens, toward their new home looming ahead, a new hopeful world the secret planners had already secretly named… this world and this exodus both, named Enrapture.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.