Census Bloodbath: Eine Kleine Nachtmurder

Year: 1983

Director: Gerald Kargl

Cast: Erwin Leder, Robert Hunger-Bühler, Silvia Ryder

Run Time: 1 hour 16 minutes

As we continue our round-up of the slasher films collected at the bottom of the mug of 1983, we have stumbled upon another first entry from a new territory! Austria threw their hat in the ring with Angst, a film that is notable for having influenced the work of controversial cinematic envelope-pusher Gaspar Noé. That's maybe not a good sign (for my psyche, at least), but it's certainly a sign that we're gonna be getting something much more interesting than what we were used to from the foreign slasher market in 1983.

Not that Sweden's Blödaren and France's Ogroff were much competition.

Angst is a tale told largely in voiceover. K (Erwin Leder) is a man with an uncontrollable impulse to torture other human beings. He's been in jail twice, once for stabbing his mother in the chest, and another time for randomly murdering a 70-year-old woman. He has just been released after a 10-year stint in prison and immediately sets out to find a new victim, all the while explaining his life's story and motivations to us in a disembodied narration. After an unsuccessful attempt on a taxi driver's life, he escapes and stumbles across a secluded mansion that houses an elderly woman and her two adult children. He sets about torturing and murdering them, right on schedule.

And... that's pretty much it!

To borrow a term from Brian Collins at Horror Movie a Day, Angst is a "hero killer" movie. Not in the sense that it's glorifying a murderer, but in the way that he is indeed the protagonist and the person through whom we are experiencing the story, á là Maniac, Don't Go in the House, or even the much lighter-toned Psycho III. Generally these movies have a rich putrescent flavor, because spending time in the minds of serial killing psychopaths tends to be a little more unpleasant than hanging out with a bunch of horny teenagers who merely get killed by one.

Angst has no interest in breaking from that tradition. It is a wildly upsetting movie, and it makes sense why it might appeal to a young Noé's sensibilities. There is hardly a word of dialogue actually spoken aloud in the film, alienating us from any other human being and leaving us trapped with K and his warped thoughts. There's a mime-esque quality to his victims and potential victims, keeping the viewer at arm's length from humanity by abstracting it to the point that it's barely recognizable. The camerawork also does this, preferring hyper-close-ups that reduce people to single body parts, just bits of meat that aren't attached to anything important.

If there is a single element that defines Angst, it would certainly be the camera. The cinematography is aggressive and muscular, always moving snakelike through the space, spinning and looping in impulsive patterns. When it's not getting up close and personal with eyeballs and mouths and the like, it's giving us a bird's eye view of atrocities that make them seem more incidental than actually being the focus of the shot. The Steadicam rig they're using isn't perfect. It wobbles and hits snags from time to time, but if anything that makes the overall effect even more off-putting and unpredictable.

Really, it's quite gorgeous, which in turn makes everything that's actually going on in the frame even worse. It's not an Argento approach, where murder itself becomes art. It's about splashing ugliness and terror into something beautiful to shake it up and unsettle it.

Pictured: Not cool.

There isn't a huge body count in this movie, but that's a blessing. When a film can make a scene of K eating a bratwurst deeply chilling (it's all in the way the camera cuts between the eyes of everyone in the café watching him, and him devouring the sausage so ravenously that you worry he might start biting his own fingers off when he gets to the end), it can certainly do a lot with the unpleasantness that can be visited upon the human body.

The two kills K most directly participates in are certainly intense (the stabbing in particular features an amount of blood that is just heightened enough to be completely unnerving), but t most affecting moments of horror come from small details adjacent to the killings. Details like the mother's dentures being knocked out of her mouth in a particularly violent moment, or the daughter (Silvia, the only character to actually be named out loud in the film) struggling to get upright and escape her bonds when K duct tapes her foot to a door handle. There's also a fabulously good dog performer wandering around reacting to all of this, too, which makes things even harder to bear.

I can't say that any of this adds up to a movie I like, but it certainly sets a goal and achieves the hell out of it. The only part of this movie that feels superfluous is the final 25 minutes, where all the killing is done and K is just kind of wandering around. It doesn't add anything to the psychology we've already explored, and seriously deflates the tension built up in the rest of the film. That knocked off quite a few points for me, but beyond that this is a sharp experience in dripping, unpleasant wickedness. Yay?

Killer: K (Erwin Leder)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: This isn't a movie with many kills in the first place, but not a one of them is "fun." The one that has the most realistic gore though is Silvia's prolonged stabbing.

Sign of the Times: Silvia wears the most alarmingly huge librarian glasses.

Scariest Moment: K slowly unties his shoe in the backseat of a cab, intending to garrote the driver.

Weirdest Moment: That sausage eating scene just really is a lot.

Champion Dialogue: "After the act, I felt very well."

Body Count: 3

1. Son is drowned in the bathtub.
2. Mother dies of an unspecified illness combined with shock.
3. Silvia is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Angst is a more artistically-minded serial killer movie than most, but its bag of tricks is empty a good 20 minutes before the end.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1044

Are You My Mother?

Year: 2015

Director: Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz

Cast: Susanne Wuest, Lukas Schwarz, Elias Schwarz 

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hype is a double-edged sword. As much as it can help a film, it can also tear it to shreds. So when the Austrian psychological horror flick Goodnight Mommy was hailed as the second coming of The Babadook, I was rightfully wary. Little did I know, but that comparison was deadly accurate: just like Babadook before it, Goodnight Mommy has received an unfair reputation for being terrifying when it is merely a superbly crafted dark family drama twisting around the ideals of motherhood.

Don’t take that “merely” like it’s a bad thing. It’s not. Goodnight Mommy is a good, even great film, but going into it expecting to be scared out of your wits is inadvisable. In fact, it’s actively damaging to your appreciation of the experience. If you drink an Oreo milkshake and expect it to be strawberry, you’re not going to enjoy it despite the fact that Oreo milkshakes are the very foundation on which we build happiness. Don’t let Goodnight Mommy be that Oreo milkshake.

Brennan Klein: crushing metaphors since 1994.

In Goodnight Mommy, twins Elisa (Elias Schwarz) and Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) begin to suspect that their mother (Susanne Wuest) is not who she says she is after she comes home from facial surgery. She has become irritable, avoids noise and light, and constantly tries to separate the brothers, attempting to drive a wedge between them. The twins investigate, endeavoring to discover who or what has taken up residence in their house, hiding her face behind the bandages.

Is she a vampire? A doppelgänger? Kim Kardashan? The list gets worse and worse.

At its core, Goodnight Mommy is a film about identity. The bond between a mother and son is strong, but can it withstand the kind of doubt that erupts when you discover that proving someone’s identity isn’t as cut and dry as it seems? Behind the face and behind the words, is there something sinister lurking within the people you know and love? There’s no way to ever prove that for certain, and doubt can slowly eat away at you like a worm chomping its way through a book. The big question is: What can the worm do to you once it breaches your defenses? Is your mental book sturdy like Anna Karenina or as flimsy as Green Eggs and Ham?

This drip torture of uncertainty is effective, but results in a perilously slow burning movie. It elevates its tension in deliberately methodical strides, requiring utmost patience of its audience. This patience is worth it thanks to an unexpected payoff, but the buildup isn’t disposable by a long shot. Rather than focusing on scares, Goodnight Mommy constructs its world with clean, clinical precision, every element pointing to its singular theme.

The set design is phenomenal with its off-white house full of modern furniture and devoid of warmth, but the cherry on top is the wall artwork, which depicts faceless shadowy figures. These prints, which were presumably bought from the IKEA in Hell, accentuate the diabolically creepy atmosphere something fierce. But the real tour de force here is the cinematography, which 1) utilizes more silhouette than an iPod commercial in the mid-2000’s, 2) isn’t afraid to plunge the audience into a pitch black frame without warning, and 3) knows how to frame something precisely so we can’t look away.

You could say it’s the 2 Girls 1 Cup of cinema.

Goodnight Mommy also boasts a buried sublevel of additional symbolism. Different people will discover deeper messages depending on their backgrounds, but you don’t have to be Austrian or religious to know that a dude holding a pitchfork and surrounded by blazing fire ain’t supposed to be the milkman. I’ll let you discover the film’s details for yourself should you choose to watch it, but there’s a treasure trove available to those willing to hunt for it.

And when the time comes for the true horror to begin, it hits with the impact of a rainstorm of dumbbells. Without spoilers, the third act is not quite as cerebrally mortifying as the ethereal shocks leading up to it (thanks to inspiration from a surprising subgenre), but it’s so viscerally bold that several of the audience members I was seated with had to get up and leave. If that’s not a sign of an effective horror movie, I don’t know what is.

Unfortunately, the shift required to attain the power of the finale throws the film off balance a little bit. It rights itself quickly and never stops keeping you guessing (even when you think you have things figured out, it remains unnervingly difficult to hold onto your convictions), but that brief slip reveals some of the uglier sides of Goodnight Mommy: namely, occasionally uneven pacing and an inability to say no to ideas that shouldn’t necessarily have remained in the final draft of the script.

Like the damn bugs. Just kidding. The bugs are great. I hate bugs.

But however may rough patches Goodnight Mommy has, it’s a well-oiled machine of psychological torment. For all its earned comparisons to The Babadook (which, to be honest, I personally like a great deal more), it forges its own path as a twisted, beautiful portrait of a shattered family. Motherhood isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it’s poopy diapers, creepy face masks, and crippling doubt. I’m glad we have another film in the pantheon that’s is willing to admit that.

TL;DR: Goodnight Mommy is a cerebral, twisted, visceral psychological horror that’s a little too slow for its own good.
Rating: 7/10 – it might rise to 8 upon a rewatch, but no promises.
Word Count: 956