Masters Of Horror - Cigarette Burns / Dreams In The Witch House [DVD]

Gordon's Dreams in the Witch House is a great adaptation of a H.P. Lovecraft short story that is here up-dated and given a slightly surreal edge, but still manages to retain the sense of gothic melodrama, mystery and paranoia so central to Lovecraft's work. The story concerns a young grad-student named Walter, who takes a room in a dilapidated guesthouse while he works on his graduate thesis. Once there, he meets the misanthropic landlord, a mysterious old man in the room below (who takes to chanting weird incantations during the night whist banging his head against a wooden chair) and a young single-mother who has the room just down the hall. Soon, Walter has developed a friendship with the young mother and her infant son and helps her out with babysitting while she goes out to look for work. However, when a rat with the face of human crawls out of the woodwork and warns Walter that "soon she will come", he is plunged into a strange and at times frightening world of paranoid delusion, bizarre hallucinations and scenes of bloody sacrifice.

Gordon's direction of Dreams... is fantastic, often seeming more like the work of Dario Argento than Argento's own subsequent episode Jennifer (what with all the sweeping camera shots around the old house, the elongated corridors, the abstract lighting and the buckets of blood that flow towards the end). The acting is good too, with the characters coming across as believable, whilst their ultimate plights seem to make sense. The story is also well developed in a narrative sense, with Gordon creating a great momentum of escalating dread, a lingering sense of mystery and an air of occult paranoia.

Carpenter's Cigarette Burns is perhaps my favourite episode over all (with Dreams..., Jennifer and Don Coscarelli's episode An Incident On and Off a Mountain Road falling in just behind), with the director making a real comeback following flops like The Village of the Damned, Vampires and The Ghosts of Mars. The story is perhaps somewhat similar to The Ring, in the sense that it focuses on a mysterious film that has the power to destroy anyone who sees it... however, instead of the ghost of a murdered child, Carpenter and the writers open up the story to wider interpretations that point more to obscure cinematic history. The story focuses on a young cinema owner with a troubled past, who accepts the offer of a wealthy business man (played by Euro-horror icon Udo Kier) to track down an obscure piece of subversive experimental cinema called "La Fin Absolue Du Monde". Apparently when first show in the 1970's, 'La Fin...' provoked such an outrage that cinema-goers were carving themselves with broken glass in the isles of the cinema, while the screen ran red with blood!!

As the story-progresses we see shades of 8mm, with the haunted Kirby plunging into a world of underground movies, snuff and intrigue as he tries to track down this mysterious film (which, supposedly, has the power to mark any person who views it!!). As Kirby gets closer to the film he becomes plagued by strange visions that erupt in the form a cigarette burn (an out-dated film term that refers to the two-blips that appear in the top-right-hand corner of the screen to indicate to the projector that the change-over of the next reel is approaching), which re-play the horror of his girlfriend's suicide. The film itself is only ever glimpsed in fragments, though what we do see recalls shades of E. Elias Merhige's gloomy underground hit Begotten and Gaspar Noé cinematic endurance-test Irreversible, with 'La Fin...' juxtaposing scenes of grind-core political manifesto alongside scenes of kids freaking out on LSD, a hatchet-man performing (possibly) snuff murders and, most bizarrely (and most potently!!) the torture and desecration of real-life celestial being.

Carpenter's direction is strong and thankfully devoid of the dull-western flourishes of his last few films (getting back to the apocalyptic territory of The Thing, The Prince of Darkness and the possibly underrated In The Mouth of Madness), whilst the story remains interesting and engrossing (particularly for film and horror geeks like myself!!). The acting is fine too, and it's always nice to see Udo doing something (whether acting as an extra in the early Fassbinder's, camping it up in Morrissey's Blood for Dracula, or playing himself in von Trier's Epidemic, he's always a great deal of fun!!).

Masters of Horror has been a pretty hit and miss affair (Tobe Hooper and Joe Dante's episodes did nothing for me... while the Larry Cohen and John Landis episodes were entertaining, but not what I'd call horror), but these two films really work. Gordon and Carpenter know horror and, more importantly, know how to craft a good story. If the rest of the episodes are released in packages this great then even the flawed episodes might be worth getting (would be nice to hear what Dante and Hooper have to say about their "efforts"), whilst Jennifer, with the possibility of an Argento talk-track, will be a must-have purchase for me!!