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A woman slips between planes of reality and a Vampyr sequel turns up in Salt Lake City, surrealism is funny like that. "A realist," the heroine (Candace Hilligoss) describes herself, in the prologue she's seen in a car crashing off the side of a bridge then much later crawling out of the muddy river, dazed and defiantly unhumbled. Driving at night on the deserted freeway, she's Janet Leigh in Psycho until a pale fellow materializes on the mini-movie screen that is her windshield. "In the dark, your fantasies get out of hand. But in the daylight, everything falls back into place again." The boarder next door (Sidney Berger) is determined to thaw her, though she's far more interested in the dilapidated pavilion outside of town—cavernous spaces loaded with tunnels and spirals and suspended drums rattled by the wind, just the liminal terrain for a lady in limbo. Frigidity and hysteria are useless diagnoses for an uncanny state, not even musical expertise can escape male incomprehension: "Put your soul into it a little, okay?" Herk Harvey's apprenticeship in industrial films grounds the otherworldly in a gray flatness and delayed reactions that often seem to be playing backwards, a Franjuesque feeling for elemental, silent-film mysteriousness takes hold. Severe dislocation in department stores and bus stations, invisible and inaudible to the world, simple wavy lines do the trick. Surrounded by stained glass and rows of ascending pipes, the protagonist plays the church organ while a vision unspools before her eyes: As a disused ballroom is suddenly occupied by waltzing ghouls, her technique goes from sacramental to dissonant. (Neither minister nor psychiatrist have answers for the inexorable drift back into dark waters.) "Thinkin' like that, don't that give you nightmares?" Repulsion and Night of the Living Dead take immediate notice, the influence on The Shining, Safe and Lost Highway is major. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |