• Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Penance

I was ambivalent about David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows when I wrote about it a month ago, but the more I think about this undeniably well-crafted horror film, the less I like it. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have given it so much thought if the movie hadn’t become a critical and commercial hit (it’s about to enter its seventh week at the Music Box). With regards to recent low-budget American horror, I’m more interested in the unpretentious, but thematically rich, features being cranked out by Blumhouse Productions (Oculus, The Purge: Anarchy, The Lazarus Effect, Unfriended) than in the wave of arty, but thematically thin, horror movies epitomized by Follows and Blue Ruin. Both camps demonstrate reverence toward such 1970s mavericks as John Carpenter, George A. Romero, and Larry Cohen, infusing low-budget horror with social critique and formal experimentation. Yet where most directors in the Blumhouse stable seem comfortable maintaining the look and feel of genre entertainment, Mitchell, Jeremy Saulnier, and Jim Mickle seem overeager to prove that they’re not just talented horror directors, but serious artists as well. I don’t want to begrudge these filmmakers their ambitions (indeed I wrote admiringly of Mickle’s Cold in July last year). Still, I doubt whether Mitchell is saying anything significant enough to warrant his self-important style.

  • Penance

One reason I’m glad to have caught up with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror miniseries Penance (2012)—which Music Box Films released on DVD several months ago through their genre-movie subsidiary Doppelganger Releasing—is that it helped me realize just what I find so off-putting about It Follows. Penance has affinities with Mitchell’s film in its exacting compositions, simmering dread, and minimal onscreen violence; yet it’s Follow‘s opposite when it comes to the subject of childhood innocence. In Kurosawa’s series (adapted from a popular novel by Kanae Minato), the horror grows out the characters’ obsession to hold onto feelings they associate with childhood. The horror is mainly psychological, but as in Follows it often feels as though a supernatural entity could erupt onto the scene. Kurosawa, a longtime Japanese genre director whose credits include the fine horror features Cure and Pulse, can render almost any environment unsettling through his framing alone.