(no subject)

[shadowkat]

So as previously mentioned, movie buddy really wants to see Midsommar which is director Ari Aster's followup to "Hereditary", considered the best horror flick of 2018. Now, this is being considered the best horror flick of 2019.

People have compared it to Wicker Man, but the description reminds me a bit of Harvest Home by Tom Tyrone, later made into The Dark Secrets of Harvest Home starring Betty Davis, Rene Auborgonoulis (ODO from DS9), Rosanna Arquette, Dan Ackyrode, John Calvin, Joanna Mills, and the voice of Donald Pleasance.

I found Harvest Home on youtube. The book was creepy psychological horror, reminiscent of the Stepford Wives and Get Out. The movie isn't quite as good. It's about a couple with a daughter, who are struggling and decide to retreat to the country, Harvest Home, and slowly find themselves embroiled in secretive pagan cult. The husband decides to write a book about it -- and discovers far more than he bargained for.

HERE's PART II.

Midsommer from the reviews has been compared to Get Out, and various other films.
I've been reading the reviews...and am curious (because hello, had a cultural anthropology minor), but ...I can't tell if I can watch the thing without it keeping me up at night and/or grossing me out on a certain level. It appears to end with the heroine in pretty much the same place as the hero of Harvest Home...which no, it's not what you think. Harvest Home isn't Wicker Man, it's much creepier and a lot better.

Harvest Home according to my mother was one of my grandfather's favorite novels. My father's father loved horror films, particularly science-fiction horror films. He used to take my grandmother to the Saturday Maintainee to watch, and he had quite the collection of horror novels, including a book about sci-fi horror movies -- that I remember flipping through at the age of ten.

I'm going to grill Chidi on Monday, he said his friends who'd invited him to see it, were psyched to see the film. And he and I get scared by the same things.

Comments

[cjlasky7]

This seems to be the blog equivalent of "backing away slowly."

I don't want to nudge you into a movie that will give you the heebie jeebies for weeks. If you have the slightest doubt, we'll find something else.

[shadowkat]

Yeah, I think we may need to find something else. I kept looking at reviews...and watching the trailer...and seriously, the trailer gives me the heebie jeebies. There's an image at the end of it of a disfigured young woman, who is insane and traumatized...that, just, no.

Plus, apparently the director does not shy away from big close-ups of smashed heads. Eh...hard pass. I'll just read spoilery reviews. LOL!

My brother used to see horror films and come home, when we were kids, and tell me everything that happened, letting me know if I could stand it or not. (He warned me off of Something Wicked This Way Comes -- spiders. That was enough to give me nightmares.)

[shadowkat]

So, I decided to thoroughly spoil myself...and...this is an interesting film, you should go see it and tell me what you think afterwards. It sort of makes the Wicker Man seem, well irrelevant by comparison.

But I can't watch it. Hard pass.

The story itself as it is laid out on paper is rather fascinating in some respects and I could have a field day analyzing it. But, there are some horrifically gory images in there that people described in the reviews (didn't show, because copyright infringement and spoilers) that I do not want to see on a big screen in a darkened movie theater. Those will haunt my dreams. Just the description of three of them...was enough. Gah.

You just can't unsee certain things. I still have the human meat-grinder bit from Nightmare on Elm Street in my head.. do not need to add things.

And then there are descriptions of things in reviews that make me wish I hadn't read the review -- such as the review of The Human Centipede. Gah.

Horror film directors have sick sadistic minds. ;-)

[cjlasky7]

Ok, how about we pivot away from horror and do crime drama? "The Kitchen" comes out August 9th.

[shadowkat]

Oh, I can definitely do The Kitchen. That looked really good -- also funny. Crime/Comedy -- up for that.

[cactuswatcher]

I saw the movie of Tryon's novel The Other and was impressed. I then read Harvest Home, which was fairly new at the time. I didn't like it much at all! I think I watched at least part of an episode of The Dark Secrets of the Harvest Home which was a TV movie, and decided it was not going to be as good as The Other, in other words, too close to the book I didn't like. So I never watched the rest.

[cactuswatcher]

I should add, I mostly remember Tryon as a leading man actor on TV in the 1950s, and playing the title role in the godawful movie The Cardinal from the 1960s. If I remember correctly he started writing when he got fed up with acting.

[shadowkat]

This is true. My mother remembers him as an actor but in "Three Violent People" in the 1950s. She remembers the actors in the 30s-80s, anyone after that is a blur.

Here's his Bio.

He wrote more than I thought. Also was in a lot more films that I thought prior to giving up on the business. (Don't blame him -- the writing biz is no where near as nasty as the film biz.)

[shadowkat]

I haven't read the Other, nor did I know a movie was made from it. I have the book somewhere -- hunted it done at a discount book shop in Brooklyn that went out of business five years ago. Harvest Home is about a cult of women who to prevent in-breeding, rent a house to a new couple every few years, and have one of their own mate with the wife, and somehow get rid of the husband. The man who mates with the wife, a young hunk, is then killed by the wife. The husband (John Calvin's novelist), goes back to try to stop the ritual and they capture him and put him inside a tree (in the book), in the movie they just attack him and bound him and force him to watch. In both he's blinded and can't see anything afterwards. Pampered and blind. Senseless.

The ritual depicted in Harvest Home -- is actually very similar to MidSommar and Wicker Man. I like the plot and story of Harvest Home better, I could never get through Wicker Man, which I found to be too silly for words (both versions). Similar stories were told in The Perilious Guard (which I loved), Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (which didn't work for me at all), Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand (which got a bit confusing and silly), and Secret History...which erred on the side of not showing all that much (by far the most effective).

It's the son is sacrificed to the mother, and his blood brings forth spring and renewal. We actually do the same thing in the Christian faith -- it's no accident that we celebrate the death of Christ around the same time as the Spring Solstice. Or the birth around the same time as the Winter Solstice...the pagan beliefs sort of blend quite nicely into the Christian ones. Except in Christianity -- the son is sacrificed to the Father god (sun), while in Pagan religion - the son is sacrificed to the Goddess (the earth).

I like the mythological aspects of it and the metaphors. But the ritual, sigh, I'm not a fan of ritual.

[wpadmirer]

I am not a fan of horror films at all, but I did read HARVEST HOME when I was a teenager and it scared the shit out of me.

[shadowkat]

I found the book frightening. Also the mini-series when I saw it as a kid in the 1970s, although my memory of it is very different than what I found on You Tube, so I keep wondering if I saw a different version or something else? (shrugs).

The spoilers of Midsommer really remind me of Harvest Home.