For six years, me and my buddy JD did a podcast. Very quickly into this process, I discovered I hated the sound of my own voice. I felt an obsessive need to cut every awkward pause, half-formed thought, stammered word, repetitive filler phrase, weird breath, and all the gross crackling, clicking, and slurping sounds your mouth sometimes makes as you talk. This led to the episodes sounding extremely choppy and only coming out two or so times a month. It would sometimes take me twelve hours of editing or mixing to produce an hour long podcast, an amount of labor that in no way was rewarded by the paltry listeners base we slowly developed. I bring this up to say that I know exactly what it's like to stare, bloodshot and dead-eyed, at a computer monitor while chipping away at a wave form. It is, I hope I'm illustrating properly, not a very cinematic experience. When it was announced that A24's hot shot indie scare-fest this year attempted to generate frights from this exact same hobby, I was skeptical. "undertone," insistently not capitalized, received the same wave of hype as A24's other horror flicks as well as the usual much more divisive reaction from wider audiences. Time for me to catch up and see if this one actually did get scares out of slouching over a mouse and keyboard, isolated behind headphones, as you glare at Audacity for God knows how long.
Evie currently lives in her childhood home and takes care of her catatonic mother. There's no chance for improvement and all Evie can do is watch over mom until her body catches up with her non-functioning brain. Evie also co-hosts a popular podcast called the Undertone. Her and co-host Justin investigate eerie and unusual audio they find online. The show is sent an email containing a string of incoherent text and ten audio files. The recordings seem to document a young couple, expecting their first baby, as the mother-to-be experiences sleepwalking episodes and nightly disturbances. Distorted nursery rhymes, backwards speech containing strange messages, and other odd noises accompany the audio. Evie plays the skeptic to Justin's true believer. He insists he hears the rambling noise invoking Abyzou, a Semitic demon said to cause miscarriages and drive expectant mothers to madness. Evie thinks it's all a hoax until she begins to have disturbing nightmares, hear strange things, and have other unsettling incidents. Evie is also, she soon learns, six weeks pregnant.
Early within "undertone," Evie and Justin have a conversation about how children's nursery rhymes contain secret, macabre messages. This is a widely held but mostly overstated belief that the film unironically buys into. It regurgitates a dubious myth that "London Bridge is Falling Down" contains references to child sacrifice before inventing a really goofy "dark" meaning for "Baa Baa Black Sheep." This occurs alongside the script's fixation on demonic messages being backmasked into reverse speech and random groups of letters. The spooky audio files includes a baby screaming, a creepy old pull-string doll, and banging in the middle of the night. All of this is set off by the creepypasta-like premise of very stupidly listening to audio they've been warned not to. This is mirrored in the opening scene by Evie choosing to watch a supposedly cursed YouTube video of a warped face. All of this reads as extremely corny to me, to the point that it probably sounds like a joke. However, the film seems to be playing it all very seriously. Much the same way it picks a rather silly sounding name for its demonic threat. Yes, Abyzou is a name actually taken from the Key of Solomon and surrounding folklore but the name being continuously repeated only draws attention to how goofy the pronunciation is. When paired with repeated references to infanticide, sometimes bluntly stated as “women killing their babies,” “undertone” starts to feel like a horror movie conceived by an eleven year old kid with misconceptions about what is and isn't actually scary.
Clearly, motherly instincts being twisted into murderous ones is meant to run parallel to Evie's own mommy issues. We never learn too much about her relationship with her mom but it would seem ma's devoted Catholic beliefs fucked up her kid. Clearly, Evie is terrified that she'll mess up her own child, bad parenting being passed down to the next generation. I wish writer/director Ian Tuason leaned into that element harder. Not only because it would've made the script a lot richer, creating actual depth and not merely the suggestion of it, but it also inadvertently reveals the film's best idea. By living in her mom's house, Evie is surrounded by Catholic iconography. However, she finds no comfort in it. A lingering shot of a disinterested Christ or a little statue of a grimacing saint suggests that, if a higher power does exist, it is ambivalent or actively scornful of us. One assumes this is meant to tie into Evie's status as the podcast's resident skeptic. “undertone” doesn't seem to have too much to say on this topic other than the standard horror moral of a non-believer being punished. Which doesn't say much about the role of spirituality in the modern world, technology supplanting religion, or the question of why evil is so active but good seems non-present.
Tuason originally intended “undertone” to be an audio drama. This perhaps points to the story being secondary to the primary focus as a technical experiment. The film's sound designs is, indeed, very well done. Whenever Evie slips her headphones on, an eerie silence overtakes the film and draws the audience's attention to what they are listening to. Utilizing the viewer's imagination does make the off-screen paranormal activity a lot more compelling than it otherwise would be. A chilly, isolated ambiance is quickly engineered, via some howling wind outside. The steady wheeze of the mother's breath or the crackle of the microphone are strongly used When the creepy shenanigans ramps up, “undertone” does a good job of deploying louder sounds without the constant jumps getting annoying. While an evil laugh or demonic bellow are misplaced, the film's soundscape is usually effective.
This relative blend of maximalism and subtly is also present in its visual design. The entire film takes place within Evie's house. The dining room where she sits in front of a microphone is the primary setting. This still shots, almost boxed-in, draw our eyes to the shadows and margins of the frame, making us watch out for any weirdness. When the camera does move, it's in surprisingly fluid, perhaps even “Evil Dead” influenced, shots that roam ominously around the home. The spiral staircase leading up to the bedroom is often decorated with disconcerting shadows, exactly the kind of thing you'd start to see in the middle of the night after listening to spooky bullshit on your computer for too long.
“undertone” is almost a one-woman show for Nina Kiri, as only one of two characters that actually appear on-screen. She's a sturdy enough actress to carry the film. Her big, expressive eyes are well-suited to a character that is constantly vulnerable. However, the script never goes as far into the character's head as it could have. Evie remains a frustratingly thin character throughout, her feelings towards her mom and quasi-boyfriend too flatly laid out while her inner thoughts never quite become clear. “undertone” is clearly influenced by “Repulsion” but never seems as willing to go into the echoing depths of its protagonist's head. Take the audio angle present here and mash it up with Lauren Ashley Carter in “Darling” and you'd have a much more satisfying film. Despite a dopey script and shallow approach, “undertone” does sometimes work as a horror flick. Not so much as a movie about podcasting, as Evie and her co-host don't seem to never record more than ten minutes of audio in each session but still somehow get an episode out weekly. [6/10]
Evie currently lives in her childhood home and takes care of her catatonic mother. There's no chance for improvement and all Evie can do is watch over mom until her body catches up with her non-functioning brain. Evie also co-hosts a popular podcast called the Undertone. Her and co-host Justin investigate eerie and unusual audio they find online. The show is sent an email containing a string of incoherent text and ten audio files. The recordings seem to document a young couple, expecting their first baby, as the mother-to-be experiences sleepwalking episodes and nightly disturbances. Distorted nursery rhymes, backwards speech containing strange messages, and other odd noises accompany the audio. Evie plays the skeptic to Justin's true believer. He insists he hears the rambling noise invoking Abyzou, a Semitic demon said to cause miscarriages and drive expectant mothers to madness. Evie thinks it's all a hoax until she begins to have disturbing nightmares, hear strange things, and have other unsettling incidents. Evie is also, she soon learns, six weeks pregnant.
Clearly, motherly instincts being twisted into murderous ones is meant to run parallel to Evie's own mommy issues. We never learn too much about her relationship with her mom but it would seem ma's devoted Catholic beliefs fucked up her kid. Clearly, Evie is terrified that she'll mess up her own child, bad parenting being passed down to the next generation. I wish writer/director Ian Tuason leaned into that element harder. Not only because it would've made the script a lot richer, creating actual depth and not merely the suggestion of it, but it also inadvertently reveals the film's best idea. By living in her mom's house, Evie is surrounded by Catholic iconography. However, she finds no comfort in it. A lingering shot of a disinterested Christ or a little statue of a grimacing saint suggests that, if a higher power does exist, it is ambivalent or actively scornful of us. One assumes this is meant to tie into Evie's status as the podcast's resident skeptic. “undertone” doesn't seem to have too much to say on this topic other than the standard horror moral of a non-believer being punished. Which doesn't say much about the role of spirituality in the modern world, technology supplanting religion, or the question of why evil is so active but good seems non-present.
This relative blend of maximalism and subtly is also present in its visual design. The entire film takes place within Evie's house. The dining room where she sits in front of a microphone is the primary setting. This still shots, almost boxed-in, draw our eyes to the shadows and margins of the frame, making us watch out for any weirdness. When the camera does move, it's in surprisingly fluid, perhaps even “Evil Dead” influenced, shots that roam ominously around the home. The spiral staircase leading up to the bedroom is often decorated with disconcerting shadows, exactly the kind of thing you'd start to see in the middle of the night after listening to spooky bullshit on your computer for too long.
At some point before 1911, Arthur Henry Ward reportedly asked a Ouija board what would make him a fortune. He claimed the planchette spelled out “C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N.” He set out to create such a character and consulted the writings of Bayard Taylor as a reference. Taylor, by the way, referred to Chinese people as possessing “depravity so shocking and horrible, their character cannot be hinted at” based solely on the shape of their skulls. Ward would name his villain Dr. Fu Manchu and the stories and books featuring him, published under the pen name of Sax Rohmer, became an immediate success. The popularity of these tales would influence other pulp fiction in the following years, Dr. Fu Manchu being a creditable pick for literature's first proper supervillain. Rohmer drew from every Yellow Peril cliché imaginable in these texts and probably invented a few new ones. Today, Wikipedia summarizes the character as “a fictional supervillain based on Asian stereotypes.” And so, Rohmer's creation occupies a conflicting place in modern pop culture. His fingerprints are visible on most mad scientists, evil sorcerers, or colorful crime bosses made since. The specific character remains so insanely problematic as to be nearly impossible to use in any modern context. True to form, the number of adaptations of Rohmer's work had white actors playing the character. Boris Karloff was not the first white man to play the character on-screen and only donned the yellow face one time, in 1932's “The Mask of Fu Manchu.” However, his take was so popular as to make Rohmer's villain something of a classic horror mainstay, leading to other genre icons playing the part long after such things should've gone out of fashion. Curiosity has got the best of me, so let's take a look at this deeply problematic relic of the not-nearly-distant enough past.
Archeologist Lionel Barton has uncovered the legendary tomb of Genghis Khan. The mask and sword within are said to hold magical qualities. British Intelligence warns Barton that criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu is also searching for the tomb, intending to use the ancient relics to incite his people into a race war with all white folks everywhere. Fu Manchu kidnaps Barton and subjects him to various tortures. The man's daughter, Sheila, and her fiance Terry lead the authorities to the tomb but Fu Manchu's spies are hot on their trail. Soon, the villain has captured Terry as well. His equally wicked daughter, Fah Lo See, develops an erotic fixation on the man, who is subjected to brainwashing. The mesmerized Terry leads Sheila and her party right into the clutches of Fu Manchu. Will his dastardly scheme come to fruition?
It is a moral foundation that is, to say the least, troubling. To merely judge and dismiss a film like this, however, closes our eyes on the past. We must consider something like this as “a product of its time” but that's not an excuse to turn your critical brain off either. In that case, what do we learn from "Mask of Fu Manchu?" Namely, that someone has always been happy to profit off portraying outsiders and anyone of a different culture as faceless monsters. Nauseating as the thought is, it's also not difficult to imagine a modern day equivalent treating Muslims or undocumented immigrants or drag queens in much the same way. And the current administration would probably love that. Shining a light on bigoted propaganda such as this reminds us that the past really isn't that different from the present. The desire to demonize any cultural other has always been there. Whether they be Jews in medieval Europe, communists in post-war America, Asians in this film, or any of the current administration's chosen boogie men, the technique remains the same. Reduce everyone of one race or “type” to a faceless horde, with only violent and vile intentions in mind, and push the solution that we must wipe them out before they do the same to us. Don't consider the individual and certainly don't consider what those in power have to gain from you treating an entire demographic this way.
Of most interest to classic horror buffs is, of course, Boris Karloff's presence. As he did when playing a more benevolent racial stereotype a little later, he foregoes any offensive accent. Instead, ol' Boris is in full-on diabolic villain mode. The script makes sure to play up Fu Manchu's brilliance, referencing his doctorates and various fields of expertise. Not that this was necessary, as Karloff always brought a sense of refinement to his villain roles. He ramps the wickedness and sadistic glee way up in other scenes. When explaining the torture of the bells or preparing some specialized snake venom, he seems absolutely delighted. When delivering his modus operandi in the climax, why, I practically felt the need to rise up and slay the white devil myself. In other words, he's a fantastic bad guy, intimidating and a little crazy but with a sense of style and concentration about him. The script does not go into Fu Manchu's back story and why he hates the pale-skins so much. However, Karloff plays him with such frenzied determination and focused anger, that you have to assume it's personal and not political in nature. Was Fu Manchu a victim of Western imperialism? Someone more familiar with the source material than myself will have to inform me but that feels like the implication here.
The spooky western is probably a fictional trend that dates back to the days of ghost stories being traded out in the actual frontier. While short stories about cowboys wrangling stray dinosaurs or Gene Autry uncovering an underground civilization weren't unheard of, “Ghost Riders in the Sky” becoming a hit single in 1948 presumably gave the premise a big push. Rod Serling would pen a similar tale with “The Waiting Room,” the 18th installment of “Night Gallery's” second season. Gunslinger Sam Dichter rides into an isolated, wind swept town. He spies a dead outlaw hanging outside the town and rides into the only saloon that's open. Inside, a group of cowboys silently play a poker game. They recognize Sam and invite him to play. Slowly, each of the men reveal their name and back stories... And how they died, each taking a fatal bullet in a destined shoot-out. Each man exits the bar with the chime of the clock, Sam refusing to accept why he has been invited to this place as well.
Most every cowboy song or story notes that the life of a western gunfighter is a short one, destined to end violently. However, “The Waiting Room” still gets a surprising amount of eeriness out of observing this idea. Since it is obvious very quickly that Sam has entered into some cowboy purgatory here. Rather than try and build any suspense from that evident forthcoming reveal, “The Waiting Room” instead plays its set-up for foreboding ambiance. The segment features no music. Instead, the only soundtrack is the wailing wind outside. The western town is empty and black. The glimpses Sam gets of the street outside are hellish and dream-like. The bartender has the Dracula lighting on his eyes. All of this goes a long way towards creating an isolated and shadowy.feeling, doing well at selling the idea that this is the but one hell awaiting those that live and die by the gun.
Having now established its cast and premise, "Friday the 13th: The Series" can fully embrace its "cursed object of the week" format. A series of mysterious deaths at a Franciscan monk monastery attracts Jack's attention. He sends Ryan and Micki to investigate, both going undercover as monks and Micki disgusting herself as a man who has taken a vow of silence. Jack soon joins them, believing that the abbot of the monastery, famous for predicting people's death, is in possession of a cursed pen. When someone's real name and a method of execution is written down, the pen wills it to happen. This is not quite true because the man in possession of the pen is not a monk but rather the scheming sibling of one, who is conspiring to sell the land the monastery resides on. And he is very willing to kill anyone who stands in the way of that goal.
An actual monastery, inhabited by real monks in old-timey robes and isolated from modern culture, residing in late eighties Canada seems unlikely... But, inexplicably, the lifestyle was kind of on the upswing in pop culture at the time. A record of chanting monks would go all the way to number three on the Billboard chart five years after this episode. This is not the only broadcast from the time I can recall spotlighting the monastic lifestyle. I certainly cannot explain this sudden fascination but, if nothing else, a dusty old monastery makes for a good setting for a horror story. "The Poison Pen" gets some okay ambiance out of that. It also provides some comedy of the intentional kind, as Micki posing as a suspiciously pretty young man is mostly played for comic relief. There is a scene of her binding her breasts but any queer subtext is presumably accidental. Especially since the episode plays a scene of one of the other monks spying on her in the shower, via a "Porky's"-style peep hole, for sleazy tension. Also, when Jack shows up in a hooded robe, he puts on a silly Italian accent.He also later accurately identifies a tarantula as harmless to humans, a subversion I didn't expect from a show like this.
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