How I Get Obsessed with Creepy Films.

Whenever I've finished a day of meditation, writing, exercising, writing some more, dozing off, and not wanting to write anymore, I will settle down on the couch and pick a film to watch until the missus gets home.

And the films are almost always creepy.

By creepy films, I don't mean horror classics like Nosferatu, or more recent class acts like The Descent (which came out in 2006 so you can see how far out of the loop I am).  I mean films with plots and characters and a particular atmosphere which mesmerizes me and leads me through a grand tour of the worst people humanity has to offer.

I suppose it began in the winter of 1992 when I saw Saló, The 120 Days of Sodom on VHS.  I was a lonely young fellow.  I had no girlfriend.  I took classes in college that had no fungible use in the job market.  I was laid off of every part time job I took on because there were people who were smarter and worked harder than me.  So one day at the local RKO Video store I happened upon a movie with three men on the cover doing a kick line with the title Saló scrawled in an angry, bloody red.  I made up some story in my head about these three guys being holocaust survivors who were celebrating after the Allies set them free.  Then I read the liner notes and found out that the film was based on a novel by the Marquis DeSade.

I knew Sade's name.  I knew it was the root of the word sadism.   I knew he was the author of many novels which had been banned in the past, but were available to read in the Land of the Free.  My curiosity was piqued.  I would watch Saló on this cold evening in January.

It was not the grand guignol that I had expected, but it was a frightening story of evil men of prestige and power:  A duke, a bishop, a judge, and a banker (walk into a bar), who capture eight male and eight female teenagers and ensconce them in a mansion far away from prying eyes.  Within the mansion's chambers, the "libertines" as they were called collectively, subjected the youths to all sorts of physical and sexual humiliations until they are ceremoniously executed at the climax of the film.  In the last scene, two young collaborators turn on a radio and slow dance to the music.  One asks, "What is your girlfriend's name?"  The other replies, "Margherita."  Fade to a while title card that reads FINE (The End).

This was the most disturbing film I had ever seen in my life.  Even more graphic films like Hellraiser couldn't hold a candle to this film's depiction of callousness and cruelty!  It was more chilling than any horror flick because the setting was in Fascist Italy at the end of the Second World War.  Unlike the Cenobites, these people could have existed.  Undoubtedly there are men and women in real life who are just like the evil masterminds and victims in this film.  It shook me to my core.

So I rented it again the following weekend, and a fortnight after that, and another two weeks after that, and again, and again, and again.

I was captivated by this world.  This bleak Dantean voyage through the darker aspects of human nature and power commanded my attention with each viewing.  I would tell friends about this movie and how much I watched it and they had thought I had gone insane.  I would buy books about the film, about its director Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the works of the Marquis DeSade himself.  I would also see other films associated with the notorious author such as Marat / Sade.  I was lost in a haunted house with skewed mirrors throughout my twenties.  Saló consumed my attention for ten more years...

Until my obsession was consummated at a screening of Saló at the Anthology Film Archives.  I watched silently as the film I watched on the small portal of my TV set was writ large on a proper movie screen.  I became aware of sights and sounds I had not noticed before, such as a man idly singing some ballad out of frame while young girls languished in a chamber guarded by hatchet faced procuresses and dead eyed soldiers.  Some guy out of sight was singing idly about some sweet nothing while oblivious to the antechamber of suffering in a room a story or two above him.  One girl's suffering is another guy's lazy Sunday.

I stopped watching Saló - frequently, anyway - after the Archives.  However, I had developed a taste for films dealing with people and places that existed Beyond the Pale of civil society.  Films that ranged from the inept and clownish to the grim and polished.  Movies like Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Urotsukidōji, Der Todesking, Nekromantik, Christiane F, The Room (yes, that one), The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Nymphomaniac I and II, Lolita (both Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne), and most recently, The Night Porter.

I will watch any of these films at least ten times before I move on to another morbid masterpiece.  Streaming services facilitate the viewing process without fear of fraying an analog tape.

Now, the strange thing is that I watch these films at the end of my work day, so sometimes Susan comes home while I am watching one of these curiosities with dead eyes and a dispassionate frame of mind.  She is perplexed, and often annoyed that I am midway through these films when she herself wants to relax on the couch for twenty minutes or so before cooking dinner.  She asks why I will watch a particular film of such creepiness over and over again.  I respond with a cowed stare and my mind fumbling to find a good reason as to why I watch these films.  At most, I come up with, "I just... feel like it."

Susan and I have been happily married for over twenty years.  If there was something particularly abnormal about me, I'm sure our union would have fallen apart a long time ago.  Susan often grapples with understanding this part of me.  This part of me that plunges into the murky pool of humanity's shadow and dares to delve deeper and deeper...

If, like Susan, you were to ask me why I watch these eerie, subterranean films compulsively when the daylight of love and comfort beams down on me invitingly, I couldn't give you a definite answer.

The abyss calls, and sometimes I edge precariously to its mouth to see what wonders it offers this time on its flickering screen.

-JJB