A scary thing happened on the way to the Movie Forums - Horrorcrammers

I think you may be underestimating the D/S dynamic between Maud and Amanda, especially in how the latter uses the faith of the former to disarm and subdue and coerce Maud, until at least she chooses not to. This is very much in line with Duke but without the explicitly religious aspect. So I would argue that it is NOT more prevalent in those other films. (I think that the lesbianism of Eyes of My Mother is especially subtle and not at all overt.)


But the specificity is accentuated in her adventures into heterosexuality, which are portrayed in an unambiguously unerotic form. Clearly Maud is erotically a lesbian, but the film has very little to say on this outside of this obvious frame, and, indeed, all of the other previous films that you mention that happen to have a more profound expression of it. I was onboard with Maud in the first hour or so, but it failed to develop into anything unique or intriguing for me.

MKS finally appreciating Dawn of the Dead. Thats right buddy, join your family.

I’m not saying it’s not a point of comparison (though I struggle to think of anything DOB did especially better than TBTOPVK) but there’s no real subversion in the power dynamic, which I think is essential to the essence of either of those works. SM doesn’t have that at all. The manipulator is the older source of power from the jump.

The lesbianism in TEOMM is pretty overt. You may be forgetting…



I’m not blaming you for being underwhelmed by SM. I was too, though I still liked it for the style, performances and ending. I just disagree that watching DOB would carry much relevance in understanding what SM is trying to do, which is to investigate the psychological fragility of a woman after a traumatic event and sexual repression. Which is far closer to the films I listed than DOB.

I blame Italian horror. It eroded my once staunch and steadfast demand for craft and sophistication.

But boy, was seeing it in 4K like seeing it clearly for the first time. Pun intended.

When I'd first learned that Gerard Damiano had directed a horror movie, I was immediately intrigued. Not just because movies about devil worshippers and the like, which this one is, tickle my fancy, but because I was interested to see how Damiano would channel his style into material outside his usual genre. Having seen the film, I don't know how much Damiano I could discern in the finished product, but I will concede that most of the film's interest comes from viewing it through that lens. The movie is pretty slight and not very good, but not totally unenjoyable if your partial to marginally budgeted horror movies. Probably the biggest surprise is the lack of nudity and sex in this, given Damiano's background in hardcore pornography. On one hand, those elements, while common in horror, aren't necessary for the genre to work. On the other hand, you can see in his hardcore work how the sex scenes lent charge to the dramatic elements and gave the narrative structure and momentum.

This movie came out the same year as the excellent Memories Within Miss Aggie, and that movie deepens its sense of dread and our understanding of the heroine's psyche with each successive sex scene. (That movie can only loosely be considered a horror movie, but is a lot more effective than this one in that respect.) This movie, without any real set pieces to structure itself around, feels like a comparatively flat experience. (There are ritual scenes but the don't really ground the movie in the same way.) It has something of an arc in the heroine achieving self actualization through her recruitment into and ascension in a satanic cult, but the events that play out feel oddly shapeless, without much sense of escalation. The movie also fails to give us an understanding of who the character was before the plot kicks in, so there isn't much resonance to what transpires. (The fact is that Damiano, like most people but especially so, doesn't have the same relationship with devil worship as he does with sex, and isn't able to give the material the same charge.) This flatness and underdevelopment of characters does at least help enhance the threat posed by the cult, particularly in defining the totally milquetoast husband. This guy's supposed to resist the influence of the devil? Fat chance.

The movie mocks him further when the protagonists are invited to a "costume party" thrown by the cult, and he's stuck wearing a jester costume while his wife gets a flowing white dress. Also on the costume front, it's worth noting that the female cultists mostly get flowing dresses while many of the men are stuck with black hoods and underpants, so this contemptuous wardrobing carries over to the rest of the cast. Some of the more important male cultists get garishly coloured puffy shirts, including one guy with a beard who strongly resembles Damiano but is in fact not him if the IMDb cast list can be trusted. Alas, this movie has no Gerard Damiano cameo. (My favourite of the ones I've seen is his brief but effective role as a probably-mob-affiliated financier in Skin Flicks, where he demonstrated real acting chops while proving crucial to the film's dramatic arc.)

Also, while this is obviously made on a low budget, and it definitely shows in the meager effects (sporadic drops of blood and facial scars), but it doesn't feel squalid, thanks to the astutely chosen sets. (This is one department where it feels like Damiano is pulling from his usual genre, leaning on stylish decor to class his movie up just a touch.) The movie was shot by Joao Fernandes, a prolific cinematographer of hardcore movies and occasional collaborator of Damiano, and he bathes the movie in attractive, Hammer-inspired lighting, while the downmarket production values provide an not ineffective feeling of confinement. (Fernandes shot the aforementioned Aggie, and later worked on a bunch of Cannon productions as well as the most technically adept Friday the 13th movie, Part IV: The Final Chapter.) Sinister electronic fuzz permeates the soundtrack, setting an appropriate tone for the bizarre rituals and occasional bloodletting that transpires. And given my weakness for atmospheric scenes where characters walk down corridors, this movie has a pretty good one. Like I said, not a very good movie on the whole, but there are things to enjoy.

That absence of subversion may be my issue with Maud. It has no surprises in how that dynamic plays out. Or surprises at all. I found it to be eventually dull in whatever it was trying to reveal.


What I mean is more about motivation. In Eyes we see an elaborate backstory which lays out her pathology. That she is a lesbian is not relevant to this pathology. In Maud, it is, in direct tension to her religious belief. In terms of "traumatic events", I think that the event in Eyes, and how she manifests it, is much more intriguing than the event in Maud (which is actually a normal experience for a nurse or medical professional), and is only really complicated by her religious presumptions. So, basically, it's really only a critique of her religious beliefs, placing it more on par with Emily Rose or something, and not a very convincing basis for the kind of pathology she's manifesting.


I'm sure that I was being pretty glib in my initial comments, and being more generous the film is likely closer to a 6/10 on technical merits, but it's such an empty exercise, and a disappointment of expectations, that my ho-hum reaction inspired a certain amount of hostility. As I've said before, I can appreciate certain bad movies, but boring movies (and Maud was just one long yawn after another) I can't abide. That the filmmakers seem to be very self-satisfied in their penetrating profundity definitely knocks a couple of points off that score. This is not the incisive character study it thinks it is.

Damn. I just watch listed Saint Maud on Amazon, as I’ve been interested in it since I saw it was playing at a local theater last year.

That was pretty much my exact reaction as well. Went into the final 5 minutes thinking it was pretty good, then I thought the final shot was cool so I added a star (I'm easy to please).
Delete the final 5 seconds and my review might be the same as yours.

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I might be the odd man out here (which isn't too unusual), but you may find yourself closer to Rock and Cap'n in appreciation.


It felt to me like a concerted parody of the typical complaints that some people have for the A24 horror films. Or at least it's the first one where I can agree with those typical complaints.

Aw man, JJ going after Saint Maud and Impavido ranting about Vast of Night on Facebook... bad day for recent movies I highly enjoyed.


Yeah, I don't know how incisive or cutting Saint Maud is, I just happened to gel to the filmmaking and the lead performance.

??? Tell him to get over here and defend this treachery. Was he expecting another Dick Dreyfuss potato opera?

Bit of a forgotten film from Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, First Blood) about the allure of cult mentality. I'm glad that Rex Reed can relate, but it's not very insightful or suspenseful, and far less entertaining than tabloid stories about Scientology rape trials of any random middling-talented sitcom douchebag.


No, the real action here is in seeing some pretty good, vintage performances from a couple of always watchable character actors, like Brian Dennehy (playing 'desperate and devoted father') and an excitable James Woods (playing the least sensitive deprogrammer ever) chewing scenes as if there was a special Oscar for mastication. The always-unctuous Peter Fonda squeezes out servicible menace, Michael O'Keefe sleeps through his career collapse, and Karen Allen seems almost as medicated here as she was in Crystal Skulls. But, if you're like me and relish some prime beef-eating from Woods and Dennehy, then it kinda makes up for the dumb, made-for-TV quality drama.


6.5/10

Funny, I sort of mentioned that too a few pages ago (see below). So we're not that far apart, I'm just landing on the "liked it" side of things.

I don't particularly disagree with anything here. It lacks subversion, exploration or surprise throughout, which is why I found it frustrating.

As I said, the film survived through craft and performances for me. There are certain scenes that I found quite effective, like the spiked shoe sole, but they felt lost in an island of "we've been here before and better."

I don't believe it is as vacuous or meritless in it's character study, though. I think the juxtaposition of her pre-trauma behaviors vs. her religious orthodoxy are fairly well defined and cue us in on how she's overcompensated herself into an unstable nut.

As I said, it's in the bottom rung of the traumatized woman sub genre but it's a subgenre I think works more often than not. And this still works overall.

Holy **** this brings me back.

ps - Wooley is up in the mountains and is only checking in on the world every few days.

This warms Wooley's cold, cold heart.

I saw this and I agree.

Some recent horror viewing that I don't have much interesting to say about:


Crawl - Did people like this? I liked this. Needed to go full Killer Crocodile at the end, though.


Fantasy Island - This is bad, and you already knew it was gonna be bad, but it looks weirdly well liked on Letterboxd, at least from the reviews I perused. One of them did blame neoliberalism for ruining horror movies, implied a critical conspiracy behind this movie's lousy reaction compared to The Invisible Man, and claimed Lucy Hale gave a better performance than Elisabeth Moss, so perhaps I should have taken their opinions should with a grain of salt.

Yeah I liked Crawl. I wish there were more mid-budget creature features being made.

I called Crawl the Citizen Kane of Crocodilia films. I stand by it.