Adapted from Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same title Wake in Fright is a psychological horror set in the vast Australian Outback, centered on machismo as a smokescreen for insecurity.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young, timid, and naive man teaching school in the isolated settlement of Tiboonda. As a condition for receiving a college education from the Australian government John posted a $1000 bond pledging to serving two years as a teacher in the arid, isolated, Outback. During the scorching Christmas break John leaves Tiboonda on his six-week holiday with visions of Sydney, beaches, and Robyn filling his dreams. During an evening’s stopover in the somewhat larger city of Bundanyabba, dubbed ‘The Yabba’ by locals, John crumples under peer pressure to drinking and gambling. He awakes to find that he has lost all his money, cannot fly out to Sydney, and must survive the Yabba and its drunken, rowdy, men.

Wake in Fright is a study of men without hope, without futures, for whom the entirety of the universe has collapsed down to a singularity of drink, gambling, and violence with even sex relegated to a mere after thought. John’s timidness and naivete and his attempts to break the cycle of drunkenness fails utterly under to social pressures of burly men who measure their manliness in the ability to drink and fight. There are few women that John encounters in the Yabba, barmaids and counter clerks, with the exception being Jeanette, a woman for whom the men of the Yabba have scarred and who seems more of a shattered shell than a fully realized person.

The themes and metaphors of Wake in Fright come crashing together in the Kangaroo Hunt. John, having drunkenly boasted of his shooting skills, accompanies two rowdies and the Yabba alcoholic doctor (Donald Pleasence) into the wilds to hunt kangaroo. This is no measure, careful display of skill and wilderness craft. It is men nearly too inebriated to stand, tearing through the arid landscape in a battered automobile, slaughtering the animals they encounter. It is not for food or sustenance but a display a savage cruelty inflicted on the helpless.

(It should be noted that this sequence will be very disturbing to many people as it is not a simulated kangaroo hunt but one that the filmmakers captured from reality, save for the Kangaroo wrestling sequence in the evening. The Kangaroo Hunt is the most controversial aspect to the feature and weather is finds the filmmakers intended purpose of revolting the audience against the practice or glorifying it will reside in the mind of the viewer. It has been reported that the film crew engineered a ‘power failure’ to stop the hunt. Personally, I found it revolting but believed it could have been achieved by less cruel means.)

Director Ted Kotcheff and Cinematographer Brian West have achieved an admirable effort in capturing the dusty, isolating, and scorching heat of the Australian Outback. The audience is as alien to the setting as John Grant. Even in the comfort of my living room on a cool evening the photography and setting felt hot, dry, and oppressive. West utilized wide lenses, just shy of being fisheye, to not only capture the vast panorama of nothing that is the Outback but also inducing a mild edge of frame distortion that kept the film unreal and unsettling.

Gary Bond is credible as Grant but at 30 perhaps just a bit too old for the recent college graduate and naive character. Pleasence chews up the scenery as the drunken, chaotic, and destitute doctor. The doctor is a character who has abandoned all pretense that he might become a better person, and instead has surrendered himself to his vices, addictions, and fleeting whims.

Wake in Fright is a searing indictment of toxic masculinity long before that term took hold in popular culture. Not a traditional horror film, perhaps not even a folk horror, Wake in Fright‘s lies in the human heart, the condition that pushes men to surrender to their worst impulses and desires. Surprisingly free of sexualized violence, this film and its theme is about the violence we do to ourselves when we surrender out self-control.

Wake in Fright is currently streaming on Shudder.

June 1975 saw the release of Jaws, the film that sky rocketed Steven Spielberg into directorial superstardom and launched a slew of imitators as animals of all types terrorized small communities as defiant individuals stood against the local corruption and greed to save lives and defeat the beasts.

Most of these movies are terrible, torturous to watch, and were taken by their creators far too seriously.

Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks, written, by Jimmy Warden, and produced by Lord and Miller, understood exactly what they needed to make. Little screentime is devoted to deep character study, traumatic backstory, or insane reasons for not ‘closing the beaches’ but rather movie’s 95-minute running time is focused on what was promised in the trailer; a rampaging, coke-fueled bear killing in gruesome and exaggerated manner an eclectic mix of victims.

 There is a bit of character development and backstory, just enough to hang a little flesh on the people but no more than that. Some things are left unexplained, such as the reason the character in the opening decided or was forced to dump the cocaine from the plane. The audience doesn’t need to know. We all came to see the bear, high as the sky, and on a rampage. Once you’ve given us the narcotics from the sky, we have no further need for exposition. This is the brilliance of Cocaine Bear. Just enough to set characters and events in motion then let it play out in all its farcical and gory fun.

And this is a gory film. Mauled to death by a bear in reality would be a bloody affair but Banks walked the line with the violence and blood just cartoonish enough that it provokes excitement rather than horror.

Cocaine Bear is a movie to watch in a crowded theater or with a noisy room with friends, not alone and contemplative. Go see it.

In a word the answer is unsettled. I want well after the film has ended and I have either returned home or switched off the television to still be thinking about and uneasy with what was presented to me.

This is part of the reason why slashers, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the like do very little for me. I am not principally interested ‘the kills’ and jump scares are only startling in the moment lacking in any lasting emotional weight. A good jump scare can add spice to a movie, but most are predictable, telegraphing their arrival well before the moment of sudden movement accompanied by a loud discharge on the soundtrack.

A monster movie can be better than a slasher, particularly when the monster has a symbolic role, such as ‘The Nothing’ in The Night House or The Babadook, each a representation of the horror of grief without losing the requirements of good story and tension needed for an excellent horror film.

But like jump scares, metaphor can be over employed yielding a less coherent experience that is more confounding than unsettling. Alex Garland’s Men is like this for me. Clearly Garland is tilling the fields of grief and regret with a plow of generalized gendered threat that is common to women’s experience in the real world. However, by the film’s end it is impossible to know what was diegetic, that is to say real within the fictional setting, and what was cinematic metaphoric convention for the audience’s consumption. Rory Kinnear portrayed every male role in the film except for Harper’s deceased spouse. Now, as a metaphor intended for the audience that’s fine and dandy. We understand why harper takes no notice that every man she meets in the village wears the same face, because only we are seeing that repeated appearance. But, in the film’s final sequence when her friend Riley arrives, the detritus of the previous night’s horrific events is strewn about indicating that this was not a symbolism of Harper’s trauma but diegetic reality. If that’s the case, then why did Harper not react to all the men being physically the same? It’s a circle I can’t seem to square. Men has many a scene, shot, and sequence that is vastly unsettling, but the interpretation is so difficult that I find the film impossible to enjoy. half-way to Lynch leaves me stranded.

I recognize that I am ‘tough room.’ There are many recent horror films that have been enthusiastically embraced by the community that failed for me but luckily the genre is wide and deep enough that there are plenty of films for all of us.

This essay is laden with spoilers.

Signs, the third feature film from M. Night Shyamalan, released in 2002 has widely been interpreted as a science-fiction film concerning an alien invasion. While the ‘invasion’ takes place globally the film remains fixed on a single Pennsylvanian farm family head by Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) a former priest who has lost his faith following the traffic accident death of his wife. Throughout the story is peppered with disconnected actions and random quirks of characters, the wife’s dying words seemingly referring to a baseball game, the youngest daughter’s habit of abandoning half full glasses of water, the older boy’s asthma, but by the end of the film each item is precisely placed to ensure the family’s survival. The accumulation of these ‘random’ events restores Graham’s faith in religion and that ‘everything happens for a reason.’

The film, while successful upon release with a US domestic box office total of more than 200 million dollars, was criticized for the unlikely occurrence that a spacefaring race would ‘invade’ Earth when half a tumbler of water was more than enough to cause them serious physical damage.

As science-fiction the film makes no sense. Presuming some form of life may exist without liquid water the nature of that life would be so radically different from terrestrial life as to render our entire environment lethal to them. To walk upon the Earth without benefit of protective gear would be like a person walking on a planet with acid hanging in the air. Let’s not talk about the absurdity of ‘crop circles’ as a method of navigation to a race capable of crossing the nearly unimageable distance between stars. Patterns in local crops are visible to only a few hundred or thousand kilometers,

Additionally, the concept that ‘everything happened for a reason’ is wholly incompatible with a universe governed by blind physical laws devoid of a creator or guiding intelligence. Science-Fiction is a rationalist medium and requires that the fantastic be ‘explained’ by natural law and physical processes. That is not to say that SF is incompatible with horror, author Gregory Benford in his short story A Dance to Strange Music crafter a terrifying tale of planetary exploration with disturbing imagery and events that were fully explained by physical laws but remained terrifying.

Signs makes no attempt to justify how all these little random things existed to save the Hess household other than that ‘they were there for a reason.’ Simply put, the story does not work as science-fiction.

But what if it is not science-fiction? What if Signs belongs to another genre of horror?

Consider, we never actually saw the ‘starships’ that brought the ‘aliens’ to Earth. Why do we ‘know’ that they are actually aliens? They never stopped to announce such a thing to us, never proclaimed that they originated from the star system we call Zeta Reticuli. (Bonus points for spotting that SF Horror reference.)

What if Signs is a better fit for an Occult Horror movie than a science-fiction one? So much that is incompatible with science-fiction works if we consider everything to be occult driven.

Not aliens, but demons.

Strange glyphs and symbols are traditionally part of the occult.

 Water makes much more sense against supernatural creature than naturally evolved organisms.

And of course, then there is a ‘purpose’ to life, existence, and all the ‘random’ things and quirks are part of the grand plan.

Signs is much more akin to The Exorcist, a priest with shattered faith finds it again when confront by a demon, than War of the Worlds.

Nothing in the record supports that writer/director Shyamalan intended such an interpretation so call this my personal head cannon, but it resolves all the films issues without contradicting anything on the screen.