Nightmare's Balancing Act - THE APPOINTMENT (1981)

Horror has long been a genre for hopeful directors to get some moviemaking experience in before going on to "better things", mostly because horror movies can be maid cheaply and are almost guaranteed to make money, and if there's a movie you don't want to lose money it's the first one you get out of the gate.  The lineage of directors who got their start in horror includes such luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) and Oliver Stone (Seizure), but not all of them made the leap, such as Carnival of Souls director Herk Harvey.  While Harvey had a steady career he returned to and has resurfaced for interviews and retrospectives, Lindsey C. Vickers, director of The Appointment (1981), only had a couple more appearances working for Channel 4 and then disappeared completely, his sole feature film languishing in obscurity.  I first saw The Appointment a few years ago and was completely floored - it's one of the most unusual and effective horror movies I've ever seen, and its non-presence among genre fandom is a crime.  Much like Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Appointment is a film best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, but its value is so great it would be worse not to talk about it.

"THREE YEARS AGO"...after a school orchestra rehearsal wraps up a young girl takes a forest shortcut home.  An ominous, classified police report talks about a mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl, and soon enough the girl on screen starts hearing voices and growls from the bushes.  She's suddenly pulled into the trees, and the camera focuses on her smashed violin.  "...THREE YEARS LATER" we see teenager Joanne (Samantha Weysom), the star violinist at the same school, returning home to tell her parents Ian (Edward Woodward) and Dianna (Jane Merrow) about her upcoming violin recital with the orchestra.  Before she gets home she stops by the trail the girl disappeared from, now blocked by a tall iron fence, and talks to someone on the other side which we can't see.  Her Dad Ian has to go out of town for a business trip and will miss the concert, but breaking this news to her is a delicate task.  Joanne is a bit...attached to her father, in a very immature, childish way and perhaps more.  The night before he leaves, Ian and Dianna have a series of unsettling dreams, and rottweilers mysteriously make their way into their house and strange things happen. Ian leaves early the next morning, and what happens on his trip is creepy, surprising and aesthetically fascinating.

While that's not much of a set-up on paper, the horror in The Appointment is drawn out of small details, running symbology, and mounting dread.  The uncomfortable relationship between Ian and Joanna is an odd starting point for a horror movie, and the directions the movie goes with that unspoken truth is magnetically unnerving and wholly unexpected.  It's hard to explain exactly what happens in the movie without wrecking the whole thing because on paper it doesn't look like much happens, but what does happen is some of the most masterful horror moments of the time.  For example, the climax involves a kind of set piece that has shown up in countless other movies, but in Vickers's hands it becomes the most intense, detailed and terrifying example of its type, such an insane sequence that you think the movie wouldn't be able to top it...and then the coda knocks you on your ass.  Edward Woodward is well-loved by horror fans for his impassioned performance in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, and his performance in The Appointment is a fine compliment, his arc a composed, practical man being sucked into a vortex of mystery and terror.  Jane Merrow as Dianna isn't in much of the movie, but her role is essential and her performance is perfectly placed.  I can't say that Samantha Weysom, who plays Joanne, is any great shakes, but she was a teenager and the film was a small production, and it can be counted among the film's few faults.


The movie is really built upon its production, a brilliant combination of cinematography, music, editing, sound design and pacing that shows an enormous talent in Vickers.  If any of these things was out of place the mood would have broken and the audience would have immediately been taken out of the story.  It's so skillfully made that I'm very frustrated that Vickers dropped off the face of the Earth.  Unable to secure theatrical distribution due to its confusing structure and defiance of horror tropes, The Appointment was quietly dumped onto video (3M Video in England, Sony Video Software in America) and has never been reissued in any form.  Vickers later did work at the BBC, producing the miniseries Zastrozzi: A Romance (based upon a novel by Percy Shelley) and co-producing the Aardman short Babylon (directed by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, both behind Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit), both in 1986.  The only other credit is The Lake, a 33-minute short film Vickers made in 1978, shot in 11 days for 28,000 pounds and shown in front of screenings of the Chuck Norris movie A Force of One (because lame cop thrillers should always be preceded by atmospheric horror shorts).  I found an article written after a 2012 screening as part of BFI's Flipside festival, and if anybody has a copy of the film or knows where I can find it I'll give them a million Monopoly dollars.


While The Appointment has the good fortune to be a horror movie made in the 80's it's a far cry from the kinds of popcorn flicks that are such a booming cult market today.  It's much more akin to horror practices of the 70's, and in my mind is the last example of a film genre that has never before been defined but needs to be talked about.  I call it Psycho-Aestheticism - films in the genre used psychological and paranoid stories as launching pads for unique horror experiences driven by heightened film technique, symbology and aesthetic intoxication.  Rather than rely on monsters, violence and sleaze, Psycho-Aestheticist movies built dread through sight and sound experiences, banking heavily on mystery and beauty to let the audiences' mind expand upon the film's story and ideas.  I've written about two Psycho-Aestheticist movies before - Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Symptoms - but there are many others (mostly from the mid-60's through the mid-70's), including Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf and Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now.  The 70's was a time of unparalleled freedom for horror directors, as the old studio standards had nearly collapsed and no huge successes had set marketable trends (like Halloween and Friday the 13th would at the end of the decade).  An odd link between these films is how the directors didn't spend much time in the horror genre, instead ducking in to make a film or two and then moving on to other things.  The singular nature of these films could be attributed to that interloping, the filmmakers more concerned with making a movie than a Horror Movie.  That singularity also ensures the difficulty in marketing these movies, and many of them have had neglectful distribution or were simply forgotten about.  For example, look at that idiotic video box at the top of the article.  Not only is the cover chintzy as hell (though endearing in its cheapness, like the box for Ethan) the blurb on the back is extremely misleading and was probably written by somebody who'd never seen the movie.  

I'll cover a few more Psycho-Aestheticist movies in the future (*cough* Images *cough*), suffice to say that none of them were made any later than The Appointment.  The genre film landscape changed dramatically in the 80's, with horror a more codified industry and distributors more conservative, and a fright flick that emphasized slow burn atmosphere over violence didn't stand a chance.  Heck, this movie didn't stand a chance, and it's high time it got a DVD release or at least showed up at a festival or two.  I've watched it several times now and every time I find some new detail to admire, and while I think I've got a pretty good idea as to what it all means I'd love to debate with fellow viewers.  It's a movie worth debating, a totally unique horror experiment that holds up just as well today as it did 33 years ago.  If you're worried about having to drop $14 on the ancient VHS, don't worry - somebody thankfully uploaded the whole thing to YouTube.

(This is part 1 of 7; when the video ends find the next part in the "watch next" screen.)

~PNK

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971)

I'd like you to do me a small favor.

There are times when you just need to watch a movie cold.  No blurb, no spoilers, no trailer, nothing.  And that's the problem with trying to get people to watch a movie: they need precedence in order to give up their 90 minutes.  But sometimes the experience only works without any foreknowledge.  Let's Scare Jessica to Death is one of these cases.

This movie is one of my favorite horror films ever, made in the early 70's to little recognition and slowly building in power ever since.  It's brilliant and strange, and works best if you know nothing about it beforehand.  Even seeing the poster is a bad idea (or the DVD cover).  The above image is my favorite still that entices without giving anything away.  I've seen the movie nearly 10 times and each time I watch it I find more to admire and soak up.  I can't guarantee you'll love it immediately, but let it sink in.

Look, I'll fully admit that I'm kind of ripping this post off from Bleeding Skull (with their brilliant post on the subject here, though you might want to put duct tape over the screencaps).  At the end of that post the review Dan Budnik said he intended the recommendation as a small gift, and that if he was goofier he'd buy everybody the DVD.  I'm not that goofy, but I do have something else to offer - the movie on YouTube:

~PNK (with special thanks to YouTuber Robert Buchanan)

The Storm, the Owl, the Secret: SYMPTOMS (1974)

Dew.  Sunlight. Willows.  A sexual altercation.  A body by the river.  They return to Helen (Angela Pleasance) in her dreams, and she writes in her diary of a fear that they may become reality.  This is a context into which she invites her friend Anne (Lorna Heilbron) for a holiday stay at her English country manor.  We know next to nothing about these women, but Helen’s past traumas suggest that she would prefer to keep it that way.  Welcome to Symptoms, a nearly lost horror gem from the 70’s and purportedly the only really good film by Spanish genre barfly José Ramón Larraz.

Helen has many issues with the world around her, and one could argue that Anne’s presence is more of an enabling one than a cure.  Helen’s pastimes appear congenial enough (collecting herbs from the forest and burning them as incense), at least when she’s not making paper doll chains and burning them as therapy.  Her modest, soppy nature is a stark contrast from Anne’s fashionable haircut and prim urban manner.  There is talk of Cora, an old friend whose pictures adorn tabletops but apparently hasn’t been seen in a while.  There is Brady (Peter Vaughan), the odd-job man, at whom Helen never looks or speaks.  “He disgusts me,” she spits, putting distance in between her and him with great speed.  Reflections appear but their owners do not.  At dinner on the first night, she pauses and asks, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”  There is no sound.

“The owl.”

Soon she admits that she “hears things no one else hears.”  Ticking clocks grow and overwhelm her, and Brady’s wood chopping is so resounding it edits scenes with its rhythm.  Lingering shots of the river suggest that the forest may hear her, too.  The attic may have something to do with it, as laughter emerges but the source is unknown.  Perhaps whoever is laughing is the one stringing up ducks in the larder and leaving toast residue on the butter knives.  The problem may also lie in her simmering attraction to Anne, repressed enough that when something does happen it crashes from the screen.  It isn’t long before Anne realizes that not all is right, but is unable to act when Helen presents only enigmatic warnings and thousand-mile stares.  She meets Brady one day and in conversation he says, “You’re prettier than the last one.”

“Who?”

“Cora.”

I shouldn’t reveal too much more without wrecking the experience, and it is quite an experience, dripping in atmosphere and a depth more inferred than revealed.  The acting from all is excellent and expertly placed and the camerawork is stunning, delighting in the cold, rainy corners of the house and making the forest a magical and sinister place.  If pressed to describe the mood in a word, I unfortunately would be forced into using “Bergman-esque.”  That is to say, it feels like Bergman in its studied and thoughtful compositions and in the Persona-like premise, but it thankfully doesn’t share Bergman’s tendencies towards overstuffed dialogue, stiff pacing, and moral superiority.  It wouldn’t be too bold an assumption to put forth that Larraz was inspired by Persona, but focusing too much on the Bergman association would diminish this film’s unique power and is generally bad for the skin.  As it stands Symptoms is not only less annoying than Bergman but is also a deeply intriguing, beautifully shot gem in the annals of artistic horror cinema.  Not bad for the director of Los Ritos Sexuales del Diablo, eh?

As to the above statement that this film is “nearly lost”:  Symptoms played at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, played on British TV in the early 80’s, received an obscure VHS release in Belgium, and the negatives and all known prints just up and decided to vanish.  The only way to see the film is through bootlegging (my copy was duped from one of those TV showings), and unfortunately no official DVD is in sight.  If it makes you feel any better, I actually think the fullscreen cropping, gauzy focus and desaturated colors fit with this movie’s feel (cold, dark, distant and yet confined).  In the meantime we can all just hope for a fresh print to surface so the general public can once again see this quietly creepy masterpiece on its own terms.

Or you could just go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxSOTkVZBTw

~PNK

Symptoms was also reviewed at one of my all-time favorite websites, Bleeding Skull: http://bleedingskull.com/symptoms-1974