For the week of September 28th, the Criterion Collection is bringing David Lynch's The Elephant Man to Blu-ray. This 1980 docudrama might be the most conventional movie Lynch has ever made. It is largely a straightforward biopic of John Merrick (a heartbreaking John Hurt), a gravely deformed Briton who became an unlikely celebrity in the nineteenth century. Now, conventional though it may be, you'd never call this movie anonymous, to be sure. Working with the great cinematography Freddie Francis, Lynch creates a black-and-white, widescreen dreamscape that sits right at the midpoint between Eraserhead's inky surrealism and Lost Highway sleek menace. And Lynch is trafficking in themes that dominate his oeuvre. He's a perpetual outsider, and he clearly views Merrick as a proxy for himself. Yes, Merrick's physical disfigurements made him a star of the sideshow, but his relationship with the kindly Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins, as subtle as he's ever been on camera) revealed Merrick to be an individual of intelligence and tenderness, and one who yearned to escape the "freak" labels cast on him. For Lynch, that's the same battle he goes through with critics who focus on his oddities while ignoring the humanity (strange and savage as it often is) just below the surface. Yet the film's very form - the biopic - keeps The Elephant Man from ascending to the levels of Lynch's best work. No matter how visually outré the film is, it's bound to conventional templates, of structure and history, that Lynch often eschews in his more personal works. I'd argue that Dune's fundamental incoherence brands it more of a "true" Lynch picture, and even The Straight Story moves with the same airless, casually hostile quality that animates Wild at Heart or Wild at Heart. The tradeoff, of course, is that in sublimating himself, Lynch found widespread commercial appeal, with the film netting eight Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and Director) and grossing over five times its modest $5-million budget. To that end, The Elephant Man was the guarantor that established Lynch's Blank Checks later in life, and glad we are for all of that.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "films about such extreme human suffering are most effective when they leave one struggling to rationalize its existence, not when they let one feel good about enduring it. There is no grace in the pain Merrick must cope with, and this is why he has such a profound impact on everyone that meets him. Unsurprisingly, The Elephant Man is most convincing when Lynch's camera studies the faces of the main protagonists, not when they confess in front of it what torments their souls. Shot in glorious black and white, The Elephant Man has that unique intensely dark aura all Lynch films have. Though not as immersive...and certainly not as manipulative...as it is in his later films, it is still notably effective. The acting is very strong. The sequence where Hopkins meets the Elephant Man for the first time is incredible. Hurt is also fantastic, though almost impossible to recognize under the heavy makeup. Jones delivers an unforgettable performance as well. The Elephant Man also benefits from an outstanding music score courtesy of John Morris...whose simple but elegant melodies enhance the dark aura of the film very well. The string motives, in particular, are tremendous."
From Best Buy, we have two steelbook exclusives. The first bundles together 4K editions of Evil Dead 1 & 2. The 1981 original is responsible for kickstarting one of the most tonally adventurous horror series of all time: who'da thunk that this violent chiller would have led to the Looney Tunes-inspired mayhem of Evil Dead 2 or the thinly veiled A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court parody that is Army of Darkness? Yet this first entry proves most bracing as both a gory endurance test AND as a marvel of no-budget innovation. I miss this version of director Sam Raimi - we lost something when he made the jump over to superhero movies and four-quadrant blockbusters, given how brutally effective he is at putting audiences through the ringer. Raimi metes out such violence against his five young leads (Ellen Sandweiss, Hal Delrich, Betsy Baker, Sarah York, and Bruce Campbell, who debuts as a square-jawed hero here but would become the franchise's put-upon Daffy Duck) after they unleash an ancient evil in a cabin in the woods that you're either gasping in shock or breaking out into stunned laughter. The last twenty minutes present such an orgy of bloodshed that there are parts for which I still cover my eyes. What leavens the gore is twofold: Raimi's clear cinematic virtuosity and the homemade aesthetic of the whole endeavor. Even in 1981, it was clear Raimi put together Evil Dead on little more than spit-shine and a dream, but that lo-fi quality proves beneficial. We can see all the seams and obvious patches behind the grisly effects, and so we're able to better appreciate the energy of Raimi's chops and how he makes these bargain-basement components work for him. But Evil Dead 2 represents the purest distillation of Raimi's aesthetic/thematic obsessions. To some degree, this is less a sequel than a stealth remake. The first seven minutes, in fact, offer a compressed version of its predecessor, with stalwart hero Ash (Bruce Campbell again) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) facing a horde of angry demons loosed from the Necronomicon. Linda dies...badly, and like Evil Dead 1, Ash looks done for, except a miraculous contrivance saves his life and turns him into an unlikely hero. Here's the thing: we realize death might be preferable, and that's the Raimi touch. Raimi so delights in tormenting Campbell's big lug that the movie mutates from horror to sadistic surrealist comedy. The high point of the film - and maybe the high point of any '80s chiller - is the extended setpiece after Ash kicks his case of demonic possession. He goes back to the cabin. He tries to calm himself down. And he loses his mind. It's a funhouse extravaganza of wild visual gags that are more Tex Avery and Chuck Jones than The Exorcist, with Campbell's manic intensity keeping us as off-balance as any of Raimi's absurdist gags. By the time Ash has to do battle with his own possessed hand, we're practically in a one-man show co-directed by Charles Addams and Salvador Dalí. Just essential viewing all around.
Just as important to the horror genre: the second Best Buy steelbook of the week, John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween. Five people die in Halloween. Five (plus one dog). One death occurs off-screen, and the other four do so with so little gore as to make the shower scene in Psycho look like a maelstrom of graphic violence. And I say this not to spoil the uninitiated (spoilers, I guess, for a forty-plus-year-old movie) but to illustrate one of the great contradictions at the heart of this classic chiller. For a movie that kickstarted the slasher genre and inspired the more ample bloodletting in the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, this first Halloween is a model of formal restraint. In fact, it shares more DNA with Robert Wise's great The Haunting. Both pictures emphasize atmosphere and creeping suspense over more explicit displays of the supernatural. Carpenter tells Halloween with the elemental economy of a fable: a monster (Michael Myers, played by Nick Castle as an unstoppable brute in a William Shatner mask) escapes its dungeon in order to terrorize the inhabitants of a sleepy hamlet, and only a wizened sage (Donald Pleasance's psychologist Dr. Loomis) and a pure innocent (Jamie Lee Curtis, whose Final Girl Laurie Strode has proven as iconic as Myers) can stop it. That's it, and like a Grimm's fairy tale, the film's mix of fantasy and menace continues to hold audiences rapt. Like any of Carpenter's best features, Halloween evinces a level of artistry that stands apart from anything else in the genre. This was the first of five collaborations between Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey (of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park fame), and they bring the same sense of gliding menace that they gave The Fog and The Thing. It takes a long time for Michael to attack the first of the film's main characters, but the wait is excruciating, thanks to the brilliant staging, nighttime photography (inspired, I kid you not, by the color photography in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis), and Carpenter's uncanny synthesizer score. Forty years later, Halloween still feels like a revelation: a spare, clean masterpiece of horror.