New limited editions from Second Sight, part two

There’s nothing like a new, stacked limited edition release to get me re-watching a movie I’m already familiar with; there seems to be a qualitative difference between simply taking an existing disk off the shelf and cracking open an attractive new package. I seem to be more attentive, not simply letting the movie in question flow past with a comfortable familiarity. This was certainly the case with four new Second Sight releases.

The Sacrament (Ti West, 2013)

Ti West has shown a deep interest in the forms and possibilities of genre filmmaking throughout his career, beginning with The Roost (2005), which he made in his mid-20s. While that film in particular is very generic, it already signalled one of his most distinctive characteristics – he’s a minimalist, who strips his stories down to their essence, giving many of his movies the quality of being critical essays on form as much as entertainments, whether he’s making an outdoor action film (Trigger Man [2007]), demonic horror (The House of the Devil [2009]), a ghost story (The Innkeepers [2011]), a western (In a Valley of Violence [2016]) or the self-referential X trilogy (2022-24), which lovingly contemplates both low-budget exploitation filmmaking and classical Hollywood melodrama.

The Sacrament (2015) is similar yet slightly different. This is West’s found-footage movie, which displays both the possibilities and the disadvantages of the form; but it’s also the only movie he’s made which explicitly draws on actual events and raises some uncomfortable questions about exploiting real-life tragedy for genre entertainment. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the movie.

In the opening scene, set in the offices of Vice Media, a real alternative news organization, we meet producer Sam Turner (AJ Bowen), cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg) and Patrick (Kentucker Audley). The latter has received a letter from his former addict sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) inviting him to visit her in what purports to be a paradise where damaged people have found fulfillment in a religious community called Eden Parish. Sam is suspicious of such things and suggests that Patrick take him and Jake along to document what they find. The journey takes them to an unspecified location somewhere in the wilds of Central America.

The trio’s suspicions are quickly amplified when they’re met at the landing field by armed men who are very displeased to find that Patrick hasn’t come alone. But after checking by radio, they’re admitted to the compound where seemingly happy people have built a village of huts and communal spaces, growing food and celebrating the peace and bounty they’ve found under the paternal guidance of Father (Gene Jones), the minister who has gathered the dispossessed from across the United States and offered them sanctuary far from the troubles of a fallen world. Despite initial signs of obvious distrust, the video crew are permitted to wander around and interview members of the community, all of whom offer similar accolades to Father and express how much better life is now than it was back in the States.

The sameness of what everyone says and their uniform demeanour raise more suspicions. It’s obvious that the crew have landed in the middle of a cult under the powerful sway of a charismatic leader. There’s no mystery that West has based his movie on Jonestown and Father on Jim Jones himself. So there’s no mystery about where the story is heading, and despite strong performances from Jones and Seimetz what occurs seems more determined by the historical event than the film’s own narrative logic. In Jonestown, it was an investigation by a U.S. congressman which triggered the mass murder/suicide of more than nine-hundred cult members; in the film, the reaction to a couple of reporters from a small media outlet seems pretty extreme. After Sam poses questions to Father and a number of community members plead with the crew to be taken away because they no longer like the place, Father and his armed enforcers go apocalyptic and everyone is gathered for the drinking of the Kool Aid; young children are given lethal injections, those who resist are shot.

While the movie is well-executed on a technical level, it stumbles dramatically. West hasn’t managed to transform the source material into a fully convincing dramatic narrative and as it moves towards its climax it feels uncomfortably exploitative, trivializing a terrible real-life event. And towards the grim final act, it runs into a problem common to found-footage movies; in the middle of dangerous chaos, why are the cameras still running? It seems odd that Caroline picks up one of the cameras and documents the slaughter before setting it down to record herself murdering her own brother. By the end I may have been ready to nitpick, but it bothered me that while the final confrontation between Sam, Jake and Father is recorded by both cameras, the crew leave one of them behind as they escape – who salvaged the card so that the footage could be used when the “documentary” was assembled back at the Vice office?

And yet, while West ultimately doesn’t seem to have a point to make, there are some fine moments in The Sacrament, in particular the extended central sequence when Sam gets his opportunity to interview Father and finds himself on a platform in front of the entire community. The conversation becomes increasingly uncomfortable as Father effortlessly exerts his authority and picks at Sam’s professional confidence. Jones is excellent here, convincingly conveying the skill with which he has ensnared his followers while suggesting the underlying potential for violence with which he maintains his hold on the community.

Second Sight’s Blu-ray has a pristine image and substantial supplements, including interviews with the main cast members and producer, a video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and a feature-length making-of. The set also includes a 70-page book of essays and some postcards.

*

Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2019)

I was quite ambivalent about Brandon Cronenberg’s second feature, Possessor (2019), when I saw it four years ago. Having now watched it again, and re-reading my original review, I understand that point of view, and yet this time it all worked for me. Maybe this is due to the problem posed in general by a movie which is overtly metaphorical – perhaps I wasn’t fully attuned to the metaphor back then and was seeking an experience rooted solely in the narrative itself. This time, seeing that everything expresses the theme of individuals whose existence has become subservient to the interests of corporate capital, with personal identity, feelings and desires extraneous to the social purpose of those corporate interests, it all seemed to click into place in a satisfying way.

While the story’s narrative mechanisms demand a suspension of disbelief, Cronenberg’s evocation of an alternate dystopian present is well-thought-out, providing a firm grounding for the film’s core focus on the characters – Andrea Riseborough’s corporate assassin Tasya Vos and Christopher Abbott’s worker drone Colin Tate – who become fused when Vos’s mind is inserted into Tate’s brain; controlling him like a puppet as she pursues her mission to assassinate his future father-in-law John Parse (Sean Bean), her conflicted feelings allow Tate to reassert his own identity and interfere. This conflict creates space for Vos’s handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to manipulate Tate into eliminating what she sees as the chief obstacles to achieving complete control of Vos, her estranged husband and young son.

Individuals are powerless against the corporate machine which controls every aspect of their lives. Cronenberg’s script is carefully thought-out and executed with intelligence, benefiting from his preference for practical, on-set effects which add to the visceral impact of the disturbingly violent set-pieces.

The dual-format edition includes a new commentary and new and archival interviews and featurettes, a video essay, deleted scenes and a short film by Cronenberg. The 120-page book contains essays, storyboards and behind-the-scenes pictures; as usual there’s also a set of postcards.

*

Ginger Snaps Trilogy (Various, 2000-04)

My appreciation of Second Sight’s three-disk set of the Ginger Snaps Trilogy isn’t due to some tangential connections with people involved in the productions; it’s because the company has lavished a great deal of attention on these Canadian horror movies, which didn’t get much serious attention when they were released, though they have gone on to gain the appreciation of viewers who like their genre films to be made with intelligence.

As for those connections: I met writer Karen Walton at a conference in Edmonton in the early ’90s and almost hired director John Fawcett for a screenwriting workshop when I was running the training program at the Winnipeg Film Group. I got to know the second film’s co-producer Paula Devonshire and director Brett Sullivan when I was at the Canadian Film Centre in the late-’90s. And I knew the third film’s cinematographer Mike Marshall from various productions around Winnipeg, also back in the ’90s. Even for someone like me, whose career in the film business was fairly local and niche, the larger Canadian filmmaking community is fairly small.

Ginger Snaps (2000) rethinks the werewolf legend in interesting ways, first and foremost by focusing on female characters. There had been female werewolves before, but they were usually outliers – Jean Yarbrough’s She-Wolf of London (1946), Henry Levin’s Cry of the Werewolf (1944), some secondary characters in Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) and its sequels – but more typically, the curse afflicted men and expressed the violence inherent in traditional masculinity which society normally tries to suppress. In Ginger Snaps, that curse is conflated with the “curse” of menstruation, and as in Carrie the physical changes of female adolescence unleash a power which, again, society has long been at pains to suppress – female strength and sexuality which threatens male dominance.

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Bridget (Emily Perkins) are misfit sisters, targets of high school bullying, who are determined either to escape their stifling suburb or to die before adulthood. When a monster which has been preying on the neighbourhood dogs mauls Ginger one night, she begins to transform, her physical changes mirroring those of puberty. She becomes more aggressively outgoing and sexually provocative – when a local jock takes her out, he’s intimidated by her assuming a dominant position rather than submitting to him. These changes drive a wedge between the sisters and Bridget looks for some way to counter the werewolf curse. As Ginger becomes more violent and uncontrollable, Bridget gains strength and confidence; previously dominated by Ginger, she becomes the more mature and responsible one. But their bond remains unbreakable and as an expression of her sisterly love and the fulfillment of their pact to escape or die together, she infects herself with Ginger’s contaminated blood, giving the film a melancholy, downbeat ending.

In Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004) – directed by Brett Sullivan, who had edited the first film, and scripted by Megan Martin – although she’s dead, Ginger continues to exert a hold over Bridget who struggles to control her condition be making and injecting a solution of monkshood. More of an outsider than ever, she lives furtively like a drug addict and ends up being picked up and taken to a rehab facility where the staff withhold her self-prescribed medicine, even though they don’t recognize it as a typical addictive substance. Imprisoned in this grim institution, she has to deal with a condescending therapist (Janet Kidder), who assumes she knows exactly what Bridget is going through, and a predatory nurse (Eric Johnson), who supplies the patients with drugs in order to extort sexual favours.

She also meets a precocious girl named Ghost (Tatiana Maslany), who quickly intuits Bridget’s actual condition and helps her escape. This girl, who becomes a surrogate sister, isn’t what she seems. In fact, she’s a budding sociopath who has already set fire to her grandmother and lies about being sexually abused by the nurse so that Bridget, becoming her werewolf self, kills him in revenge. In another downbeat ending, Ghost confines Bridget and keeps her as a kind of secret weapon against the world on which she wants to wage war.

This bleak development remains unresolved with the third film, which is neither an actual sequel nor prequel, but rather explores the thematic implications of the werewolf legend in a particularly Canadian historical context. Released only five months after Unleashed, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), written by Christina Ray and Stephen Massicotte and directed by Grant Harvey, one of the producers on the second film, is set in the early 19th Century. Initially, it’s a little confusing that Ginger and Bridget turn up in the wilds of the Canadian frontier, having lost their father in a river and having no idea where they are.

An elderly indigenous woman gives them some cryptic advice and a young native hunter helps them find their way to a fur trading fort. Here they encounter English military men who are blatantly racist and apparently terrified by something in the woods which has been preying on them. They face starvation because a party sent for supplies has never returned and winter has set in. These Europeans are ill-equipped for the land, in their arrogance dismissing native wisdom. leading them to destruction.

What is decimating the garrison is an increasing number of werewolves who attack the fort at night. Unknown to the dwindling number of men, their commander has hidden his infected child in a room in the fort, his wife having been killed during an attack. Hearing crying in the night, Ginger investigates and is bitten and begins to transform. Even more than in the previous films, the context puts the audience on the side of the “monsters” because they have come into existence in reaction to the brutality of the white invaders; they are almost a natural defence mechanism against colonial incursion. The film’s originality lies in conflating these lycanthropes with the wendigo, a savage spirit which possesses people facing starvation, driving them to eat human flesh, a curse brought down very specifically by the behaviour of the brutal colonialists.

Ginger Snaps Back makes for an interesting comparison with Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002), another tale of a military unit besieged by a pack of werewolves; in that version, the werewolves are monsters and we root for the soldiers. But here there’s a sense of triumph when the lycanthropes finally destroy the fort and its garrison and the two sisters, with Bridget once again choosing to share Ginger’s infection, set off together into the wilderness, the implication being that the events of the first film now represent a continuation of a natural resistance to occupation by the alien society which has stolen the land. Another interesting comparison could be made with Antonia Bird’s underrated Ravenous (1999), which also uses the wendigo myth to critique Manifest Destiny and the violent appropriation of the North American continent from the indigenous inhabitants.

All three films in the trilogy are well-written and directed with wit and style. Although for the most part sparingly used, the practical transformation effects are excellent, and each episode contains set-pieces which are the equal of any in the genre. What gives all three their potent impact is careful attention to character, not just Ginger and Bridget, but everyone around them. These aren’t generic B-movies, but rather thoughtful dramas cast in the form of entertaining horror films. The Second Sight Blu-ray set acknowledges this by providing both excellent presentations and in-depth critical context. The set includes new and archival commentaries, interviews, video essays, and deleted scenes, as well as a 108-page book of essays.

*

The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)

By the time I saw The Blair Witch Project (1999) during its original theatrical run, it had already become a phenomenon, having achieved unexpected box office success, critical accolades and a huge groundswell of audience word-of-mouth. It was probably inevitable that I’d be disappointed, and I have remained somewhat ambivalent through the ensuing quarter-century. There were things I appreciated, but I also found it frustrating and the supposedly devastating ending struck me as vague and anticlimactic. Much of this, it has become clear, is inherent in the found-footage genre which the film inspired … or rather to which it gave commercial legitimacy; it wasn’t the first movie in the genre, but it was the first which really connected with a broad audience.

The concept is simple: a student filmmaker recruits a cameraman and soundman to help with her class project, a documentary about a local folk myth. Back in colonial times, a woman accused of witchcraft was executed and apparently returned to exact revenge by killing the children of her accusers, and supposedly has haunted the woods through the ensuing centuries, luring children, killing people and inspiring others to kill, including a local recluse who kidnapped and ritually killed a number of children in the 1940s. After interviewing a few people in the town, the trio head for the woods in search of an abandoned cemetery. Personal friction gradually escalates as the two men lose faith in the female filmmaker’s ability to navigate through the woods with an obviously inadequate map.

Not only do they become lost, they are tormented at night by strange sounds, including children’s voices, and find odd signs outside their tent every morning … little piles of stones, stick figures. More disturbingly, there are hints of something supernatural as time and space seem to distort and it becomes impossible to find their way back out of the woods. The cameraman disappears and there are indications that he is being tortured by the unseen menace; the filmmaker and soundman, in a state of abject panic, finally find their way to an abandoned house, where they again hear the cameraman’s tormented pleas for help. Inside, there are cryptic symbols on the walls and it becomes clear that this is the house of the serial killer from the ’40s. Here, the filmmakers meet their unspecified fate from some force which remains off camera.

It’s in the nature of found-footage that the ultimate source of horror generally remains unseen. While this works thematically, it is often dramatically unsatisfying – which I’ve always found to be the case with Blair Witch, though I came to appreciate the absence of a conclusive revelation here after seeing Adam Wingard’s unnecessary remake (2016) which throws in aliens who abduct the characters.

More interesting than the narrative itself, however, is the risky way the film plays with potential boredom and irritation. Because we are watching the raw, “unshaped” material shot by the missing filmmakers (found stashed in the old house a year later), a great deal of time is spent on seemingly extraneous business. From the start, certain sources of conflict are clear – filmmaker Heather (Heather Donahue) is self-assured and assertive to an annoying degree, though it gradually becomes clear that this is to some degree performative; she’s an inexperienced woman who is aware that she has to work harder to gain respect and assert authority. Cameraman Josh (Joshua Leonard), as the experienced technician, has no doubts about his own skills and judgment and very quickly makes it clear that he doesn’t trust Heather’s abilities. Soundman Mike (Michael C. Williams), less experienced but enthusiastic, is caught between the other two and quickly loses confidence as Josh openly confronts Heather about her knowledge of the woods and her ability to guide them. Her over-confidence becomes an increasing problem as the woods seem to conspire against them, leading them in circles as strange forces seem to close in.

Although these forces produce hints of menace, much of the running time is devoted to the bickering between the characters. This becomes tediously repetitive, but paradoxically provides a convincingly realistic foundation for the escalating nightly intrusions, which at first might plausibly be attributed to hostile locals who want to drive the filmmakers out of these woods, but eventually point to something more sinister and unnatural. This balance of the mundane and the inexplicable is one of the defining characteristics of found-footage and it’s a mark of Blair Witch’s success in maintaining it that it became such a popular hit.

Re-watching the film now, I appreciated the air of authenticity it achieves, while still feeling a vague sense of dissatisfaction by the end – my desire for a more traditional narrative structure and resolution vied with a recognition of what it does actually achieve. But what gave me a greater respect for the film were the copious extras included in Second Sight’s two-disk limited edition. There are three transfers of two different cuts – a reconstruction of both the theatrical version and the slightly longer festival cut from the original Hi-8 tapes and 16mm elements, and an older transfer of the theatrical cut from a 35mm source. There are two commentaries on the theatrical cut, one from the filmmakers, the other from critics Alexandra Nicholas-Heller and Josh Nelson.

But apart from the excellent new masters, it’s the second disk which provides some fascinating revelations. A new two-and-a-half-hour documentary covers the production in exhaustive detail, from conception through release. Co-creators Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, having decided to make a feature (their first), devised a concept which would be cheap to produce, but was creatively risky. The shoot itself rested fully on the shoulders of the three principal actors, none of whom had movie experience. Everything we see of these characters in the woods was improvised and shot by them, guided only by notes left for them at designated places as they wandered through the woods and camped just as we see them. These notes were tailored to each character, with none knowing what the others were going to do. The directors remained out of sight, working with a small crew to set up the strange objects found by the characters outside their tent each morning … and eventually to make those unsettling noises in the night.

The tensions expressed among the characters grew organically through an exhausting week being stuck in the wilderness, anger flaring naturally and emotions becoming increasingly raw. The ability of the actors to make this work without seeming to “perform” is what gives the film its convincing air of authenticity. There’s no sense of self-consciousness, even in the crucial sequence late in the film when Heather makes her emotional admission that she has largely been responsible for leading the crew to what it’s now clear is probably a fatal end. This is an ugly, uncomfortable sequence to watch because it so convincingly conveys Heather’s awareness that she herself is going to die and that her need to assert herself has also caused the deaths of Josh and Mike. It’s here that her character really comes into focus – I’d previously felt the same irritation as Josh and Mike, with the suspicion that she was constantly lying about knowing her way around the woods, but it becomes clear (too late) that her assertiveness was rooted in the feeling that she had to fight for the men’s respect. This is such a key element to the narrative that it was interesting to learn that the character was originally conceived as another man; it was Heather Donahue’s audition that convinced Myrick and Sánchez to rethink the role.

It’s also interesting to learn that the original conception was influenced by various television “true mystery” shows and would have used the footage shot by Heather, Josh and Mike within a more conventional documentary structure, with officials and experts commenting on the material and theorizing about what had happened to the filmmakers. This was apparently maintained well into the editing process until it was realized that the constant interruptions were working against the material’s inherent strengths. That aspect was finally reduced to the brief introductory sequence which tells us that the trio had vanished and their footage had eventually been found by chance.

A good indication of that original intention is on display in Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), a promotional film made for television which plays with the idea that the feature is indeed authentic. Here we get those official talking heads, the police and academics who recount the discovery of the film cans and tapes (buried in the wall of the derelict house in the woods) and provide additional information about the folklore of the witch and the crimes of serial killer Rustin Parr (Frank Pastor). In its way, this is a very clever piece of metatextual commentary which serves to add to the authenticity of the feature itself, illustrating the innovative marketing strategy which helped to create the phenomenal success of Blair Witch. (A less admirable aspect of that marketing was distributor Artisan Entertainment’s insistence that the cast members shouldn’t take any other acting jobs in order to give the impression that they were all actually dead.)

Running longer than the feature itself, there’s also a collection of deleted material which almost constitutes an alternate cut of the film. Not simply different versions of scenes in the final cut, because of the way the film was shot, these sequences flesh out the characters and situations we’ve already seen, adding depth and nuance – and providing more evidence of the cast’s improvisatory skills. It seems that during their week in the woods, they didn’t break character and kept shooting in order not to waste any of their increasingly tense interactions.

Interestingly, the only hard evidence of Myrick and Sánchez’s direct influence on the material is a set of four different endings – all variations on what made it into the final edit, each looking for a slightly different emphasis to convey the climactic (understated) horror of the characters’ fate. While there aren’t any huge differences, the one they settled on is the most clearly direct reference to a comment made near the beginning of the film by one of the locals interviewed on the street by Heather who tells her about the crimes of Rustin Parr.

There is also a brief interview from the 1999 Cannes Film Festival in which Myrick and Sánchez discuss their innovative digital marketing for the film (during post-production they had set up a website with faux documentary material about the witch and the lore which had built up around her over the past two-hundred years).

Finally, there’s a video essay by Mike Muncer covering the film’s use of both analogue (16mm) and digital (Hi-8) technologies to create a convincing simulacrum of documentary reality.

The set also includes a facsimile of Heather’s notebook in which she recorded the events leading to her, Josh and Mike’s deaths, plus a 184-page hardcover book of essays and production materials (including some of the notes the directors gave the cast to guide their improvisations) and the usual set of postcards.

While my response to The Blair Witch Project may not have changed significantly since I first saw it, my appreciation of its significance to pop culture and its impact on the horror genre over the past quarter-century has definitely been enhanced by Second Sight’s exemplary set.