7. Jim Mickle
(Mulberry Street, Stake Land, We Are What We Are)
We kept our monsters in the shadows, mostly suggested. Besides, if you have good actors who can really look scared you can play scenes off of their reaction more than trying to scare the audience with showing the monsters. Our main aesthetic throughout was keeping it realistic and character-driven.
- On Mulberry Street, interview with Slant
The films of Jim Mickle play like eulogies for the genres they inhabit. Oppressive doom, communicated through careful sound design, soft scoring, and limited colors, pushes a constant feeling of the world in decay. In movies like Mulberry Street and Stake Land, that decay matches to the physical settings: a run-down New York tenement and a barren post-apocalyptic USA. In cannibal drama We Are What We Are, the decay is internal, as a family keeps up appearances while rotting from the inside out. Viewers know these stories, but not told with this melancholic style.
That makes his films sound like a collective buzzkill, but all three feel renewing, filling the space between simple story development with sincerity and naturalism. These are real, plausible worlds into which horror intrudes. Consider We Are What We Are, in which a father preserves a family tradition of eating human remains. While he uses a glower and the specter of a dead mother to keep his children in line, his daughters fray at the edges. Mickle finds space for their struggle in pregnant pauses, moments of hesitation. The film plays like tragedy, Titus Andronicus as conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne and adapted by Kubrick.
Stake Land similarly reworks itself, using a vampire apocalypse (vampocalypse?) as a means to explore just how quiet and desolate an actual apocalypse would be. While movies like 28 Weeks Later and Land of the Dead escalate efficiently (if sometimes predictably) into high-stakes action extravaganzas, Stake Land sits perpetually at simmer. The focus rarely widens beyond its two main leads. Compared to those two films, Mickle's debut Mulberry Street is almost zippy, cross-cutting between a wide-range of New Yahwkers living on the eponymous street as a growing plague turns people into... but anyway, its characters are plausibly human, simple, grabbing what small reliefs they can find. An old man luxuriates in the idea of enjoying a good cigar. A middle-aged jogger quietly pines for an unwed mother.
Mickle's co-writer Nick Damici (who also acts in all three movies) is undoubtedly a large part of why these films work. The two have their own little indie-horror Scorsese/DeNiro partnership, with Damici playing as gruff, well-meaning types in all three movies. Like those movies, he trusts viewers to pay attention, to listen. Most people who watch horror watch it casually, for the roller coaster of depravity. And that's okay - who doesn't like a carnival? Jim Mickle shows viewers what happens when the carnival's stopped, and all that's left are the metal husks of tents and rides, beautiful and eerie, standing against a setting sun.
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8. Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects, The Lords of Salem)
Okay, you've rendered my unwritten Jim Mickle blog post unnecessary. You sum up his career perfectly and eloquently.
ReplyDeleteJim Mickle’s movies are constantly on my best of lists. I love the way he creates another world and draws in the viewer. I thought “We are what we are” was absolutely brilliant.
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