Horror

And here’s the thing: Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen’s new movie is a lovingly constructed tribute and companion to Carpenter’s “Thing,” not a knockoff or a replica. It’s full of chills and thrills and isolated Antarctic atmosphere and terrific Hieronymus Bosch creature effects, and if it winks genially at the plot twists of Carpenter’s film, it never feels even a little like some kind of inside joke. Comparing the two films can only be invidious, and I won’t do it; let’s just say that fans of the Carpenter flick should rush out and see this one immediately. (Furthermore, if you haven’t seen the Carpenter film, after I get done lecturing you about what’s really important in life, I will add that this one works perfectly well as an exciting stand-alone.) Considering what an enormous botch-job this project could easily have become, I’m delighted to tell you that the new “Thing” was made by people who understand what the horror audience wants and don’t treat it like a bunch of brain-dead children. Mirabile freakin’ dictu.

Officially, Eric Heisserer’s screenplay for this movie is based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s original short story, “Who Goes There?” — also the source material for the 1951 film “The Thing From Another World.” But that’s a legalistic dodge not intended to fool anybody; van Heijningen’s “Thing” is a prequel that ends exactly where Carpenter’s begins, with a couple of Norwegians in a helicopter trying to shoot a dog. (Enter dumb Yanks: Aww! Save da poochie!) Can that possibly qualify as a spoiler? I’m not sure, so here’s another one: What those crazed Norsemen dug out of the Antarctic ice a few days earlier wasn’t dead, not even after 100,000 years, and what happened to their research station after that was extremely bad news.

This is van Heijningen’s first feature as a director, but I would venture to guess that he has wasted much of his adolescence and young manhood absorbing the mechanics of horror movies, because he definitely knows his way around. This one has a classic tough female protagonist, in the person of Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a Columbia paleontologist named Kate Lloyd, who is hired by a glory-hunting Norwegian scientist named Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) to supervise a mysterious icebound dig site near a Norwegian Antarctic research station. If you’re guessing that Kate is brilliant, but more than that compassionate and sympathetic, while Halvorson is brilliant and totally unconcerned with the welfare of others when it comes to his history-making discovery, you’re ready to move on to the intermediate class.

Heisserer’s screenplay walks a very fine line between almost-campy references to the period – the action is of course set in 1982, when the back page of a magazine announces, “Carlton is lowest!” – and the subtle injection of a more modern scientific context. As in Carpenter’s film, the thawed-out extraterrestrial beastie is a protean shape-shifter that can absorb and re-create other living things, but Kate observes that it behaves much like an infectious virus, and appears to be infinitely divisible and hence virtually impossible to kill. Van Heijningen’s design team of course relies extensively (although not entirely) on digital effects to create the nightmarish monster, which looks like seven kinds of crustacean, a sub-Freudian vagina dentata and a drugged-out medieval monk’s vision of hell, all at the same time. But in many ways their work pays homage to Rob Bottin and Stan Winston’s legendary creature effects from three decades ago; while a level of detail and flexibility is possible now that wasn’t then, the grotesque imagination remains the same.

While this “Thing” features a low-impact cast full of unknown Norwegians, Winstead makes an appealing star, ably supported by Joel Edgerton in the pseudo-Kurt Russell role of a tough-guy helicopter pilot. (His ass-kicking sidekick is played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, otherwise known as “the black guy who doesn’t get killed first.”) Thomsen is in fine form as the unctuous and untrustworthy scientist who may doom the entire world to being chewed up and eaten, and Jørgen Langhelle is terrific as a gruff Norse workman who sides with Kate although he speaks no English.

Sure, the second half of “The Thing” devolves (as does Carpenter’s film) into an especially scary but essentially predictable game of hide-and-seek involving flame throwers, disturbingly homoerotic beast-fu and philosophical cum scientific debates about who is and isn’t human. But Heisserer and van Heijningen’s puckish take on the famous blood-test scene in Carpenter’s “Thing” is both tense and hilarious, and even at its most repetitious, this “Thing” is never less than a competent, confident claustrophobic thriller. We even get to see inside the Thing’s 100,000-year-old spaceship, which raises wacky questions the movie doesn’t try to answer: Is it intelligent? Is its civilization still out there somewhere? Could it communicate in some way that doesn’t involve digesting and copying us, if it wanted to? Seriously, though, Universal Pictures, let’s not go there. We all dodged a bullet with this film, which against all odds announces the arrival of a promising young genre director. Let’s not push our luck.

But in Dutch writer-director Tom Six’s new “The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence),” the references and allusions pile up like pages of a cultural-studies dissertation. The central character, played by English character actor Laurence R. Harvey, is a squat London parking-lot attendant named Martin who looks more like Peter Lorre’s child-killer in Fritz Lang’s classic “M” than Peter Lorre does — with the added gag that children are the only category of person that Martin doesn’t want to kill. Martin, you see, is obsessed with the first “Human Centipede” film, watching it over and over again in his underground lair, and determines to outdo Dieter Laser’s Mengele-like evil surgeon from that movie by stitching together a dozen abducted strangers into a single pseudo-organism, except without any of the requisite tools or medical knowledge. (If you don’t know much about these movies and don’t quite get what I’m talking about — well, just be happy about that.) He even lures in Ashlynn Jennie, an actress in the first “Centipede,” under the premise that she’s auditioning for Quentin Tarantino, which leads to a dash of actual humor amid the adolescent shock-fest. She made sure everybody showered before the centipede scenes, Jennie tells Martin. “I mean, you’re gonna be near people’s butts, and you don’t want to smell anything.” Oh, ho ho ho.

Martin’s nightmarish home life, which features a harpy mother, a violent neighbor and echoes of sexual abuse, along with peristaltic, subterranean sound effects, is borrowed nearly wholesale from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” The film’s black-and-white cinematography variously suggests underground Japanese horror films, a decayed 1980s British “video nasty” on VHS (if not Betamax), and the classics I’ve already mentioned. At the New York screening I attended, Six told us that the intrusion of color in the film’s most memorably disgusting sequence is meant as a tribute to “Schindler’s List,” and I think he’s not entirely kidding. At least, he’s not kidding about that any more than the entire “Centipede” thing is a tendon-severing, ass-to-mouth, here’s-feces-in-your-eye Grand Guignol gag.

In Six’s international controversy-starter from 2009, “The Human Centipede (First Sequence),” Laser’s character — a disgraced surgeon who lives alone in the German forest, like a post-Third Reich wicked witch — stitches three hapless tourists together into a single pseudo-organism. It had the affectless, almost clinical manner of a low-budget European horror movie — blending, say, Michael Haneke’s early work with grade-Z American exploitation cinema — and at first I assumed that was what it actually was. Silly me. Now I can see that the whole first movie must be understood within quotation marks, as a self-conscious gesture or imitation. And the second one, like Six’s entire enterprise, is more like an endless chain of references to other things, as well as a juvenile game of Can You Top This? Even worse, it’s a pseudo-intellectual game, one in which the point is not just to épater the old bourgeoisie — at which Six succeeds admirably — but also to congratulate oneself for rising above outrage and indignation.

I’m striving to maintain a neutral tone here because I think that’s the best way to deflate this silly, clever, disgusting and ultimately meaningless project to a reasonable scale. Moral condemnation is exactly what Six wants, on some level (although he has now edited “Centipede II” enough to get it unbanned in Britain — sellout!), and anyway I don’t believe that movies, no matter what outrages they depict, turn people into deviants. But the other thing he wants is to be taken seriously as a high-low auteur with something to say — check out the movies’ pompous-ambiguous titles, with parentheses and big words and everything! — and that’s even more ludicrous. A recent tweet from dry-witted critic and blogger Glenn Kenny pretty well sums it up: The “Centipede” franchise, he wrote, is the “biggest piece of cultural suckerbait since the first Black Sabbath LP.” In other words, it provokes a lot of generalized, extracurricular wailing about moral decay and the seduction of the innocent and Kids These Days, none of which has much to do with the work in question, or anything else. (For the record, Kenny likes that Sabbath record and I can’t stand it. Chacun à son outrage.)

I’m willing to defend the first “Centipede” film, up to a point, although I’m now inclined to believe that just means I was that taken in by its Brothers Grimm Euro-blankness and cheap production values. It’s restrained and sober, at least as movies about people being mutilated by madmen go, and almost despite itself has a half-serious, Holocaust-themed undertow about the possibility of remaining human in inhuman circumstances. But “Human Centipede II,” the middle chapter in a planned trilogy that will apparently end in America, is more like a perma-teenager’s idea of dark and disturbing excess. Six has joked that he wanted to make the first movie look like “My Little Pony,” and wanted to show those who were shocked and outraged what a real outrage looked like. The results are technically capable, undeniably clever, unremittingly depressing and thoroughly nauseating, so, sure, check all the boxes. But what’s really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there’s something of substance in “Centipede II,” when it’s more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious “Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom,” with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don’t let me stop you. But please, let’s not pretend it means more than that.

“The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

To some viewers — maybe quite a few — “Take Shelter” will look more like an above-average genre film, somewhat in the M. Night Shyamalan mode (before Shyamalan inflated into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon version of himself), with a bit more grit and realism. It’s not an unfair comparison; “Take Shelter” revolves around Curtis (Michael Shannon), an ordinary Ohio husband and father, who begins having a series of apocalyptic, and increasingly terrifying, visions and nightmares. But Nichols, a 31-year-old Arkansas native who previously made the no-budget underground hit “Shotgun Stories” (also starring Shannon), is after something more complicated than the Scooby-Doo parlor trick of most Shyamalan-style films, where the spooky narrative events are eventually explained through a big “reveal.” Curtis believes throughout the film that he’s suffering a psychotic breakdown, and the possibility that there’s some objective, external, parascientific explanation for his midnight terrors (and midday ones too) is kept locked away until the story requires it.

If there’s a strong horror-movie undertow right under the surface of “Take Shelter,” its main text is a recession-era marriage drama about a family struggling to cling to the lower edge of the middle class. Curtis has recently been promoted to a supervisor position at his construction firm, and his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain, of “The Help” and “The Tree of Life”), is increasingly anxious about how his wobbly personal behavior will affect their financial future. If Shannon’s anguished, brooding performance as a man who’s petrified by what he finds in his own head is very much the movie’s centerpiece (and while Shannon gets a certain amount of stick for overacting, I think he’s almost always good), Chastain provides its moral tether. Samantha is keenly aware that if Curtis loses his job, they lose their house, their deaf daughter (Tova Stewart) won’t get cochlear implant surgery, and the family will slide into the chaos of poverty.

What makes this gripping and compact tale of marriage, faith, madness and possible apocalypse so unusual is the fact that it works so well on all levels. Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone capture the undramatic Ohio landscape and wide Midwestern sky in almost lyrical compositions, and the rituals of Curtis and Samantha’s days and nights are captured with no hint of anthropological condescension. Yet as Curtis’ visions become more pronounced and more troubling — they almost always begin with eerie and unexpected storms, involve unseen but dangerous intruders, and often end with someone he loves or trusts turning against him violently — the sense that something shocking lies just below the film’s everyday realism becomes almost unbearable. And with no more than a few deft allusions, Nichols makes the point that the pressure on Curtis and Samantha is coming from all directions, and is not purely psychological: Extreme weather and climate change, bad economic news, vanishing healthcare and the prospect of unemployment and bankruptcy are all very real threats for this family and millions of others. (Even the painfully inadequate mental-health services available to someone in Curtis’ position play an agonizing role in the story.)

In an Oscar race that’s likely to feature Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Ryan Gosling, an eccentric outsider like Shannon probably doesn’t stand a chance. But I’d like to think this enormous, marvelously compassionate performance will put him in the running. Always a commanding physical presence, Shannon displays a gravity in this role, a gut-wrenching sense of inner turmoil, that I haven’t quite seen before. Curtis is an intelligent but uneducated guy who’s struggling to understand something no one can understand (the deepest mysteries of our own minds), and profoundly grieving for the loss of his own sense of self as a competent husband and father. He checks out books from the public library, tries to confide in his best friend (Shea Whigham), even goes to see a sympathetic counselor (a nice bit part for Lisa Gay Hamilton). When he borrows money to build out the underground storm shelter in his backyard, it’s partly because he feels an irresistible compulsion to do so, even though he knows it’s irrational. But he also does it because it’s something he knows how to do; his relief at handling practical and logistical problems, rather than the murkier ones raised by faith and psychology, is tangible.

“Take Shelter” culminates with an escalating series of crises and explosions, the biggest of them when Curtis goes off, with all the pent-up fury of a volcano releasing magma, at a local fish fry full of whispering, gossiping neighbors. All I’ll say is that Curtis and Samantha and their daughter will indeed wind up down in that storm shelter, but that even then the question of what Curtis’ visions mean, or what’s “really happening,” is very much up in the air. When I talked to Jessica Chastain about the movie, she declined to offer any explanation for its breathtaking final scene, but she’s right that the key to that ambiguous ending, and to the whole film, lies in the look that passes between the couple. It’s that look that allows Nichols to end his terrifying tale of American apocalypse on a hopeful note: Whatever storm is coming, these two will face it together.

“Take Shelter” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

That may go some way toward explaining why “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” a Guillermo del Toro-supervised remake of a legendary TV film that traumatized generations of 1970s and ’80s viewers, is both better and worse than its source material. (Del Toro did not direct this movie, although he gets his name above the title; he’s pulled in too many directions on 50 gazillion other projects to bother with that. He did produce and co-write the screenplay.) This is an above-average horror flick by any measure, nicely directed by del Toro protégé Troy Nixey in an atmospheric, unshowy style that recalls cheapo ’70s cinema without mimicking it. If I didn’t find this tale of an old, dark house infested by ancient and evil goblins exceptionally terrifying, that might be because I’ve seen the original and knew what would (probably) happen. Still, Nixey delivers numerous nasty shocks and an overriding sense of menace, and if the premise is new to you this movie will do more than enough to give you nightmares.

While the 1973 original had laughably bad special effects — I seriously think those goblins were stop-motion apple dolls — hammy acting from Kim Darby as the haunted housewife and Jim Hutton as the clueless husband, and a script full of clunky devices, it also had a clarity and a simplicity that were irresistible. The little monsters from the dark Freudian sub-basement tell Darby what they’re going to do and then do it; nobody is watching and nobody believes her, except us. It was a fable of almost Kafkaesque intensity, a story in which all the hope in the universe dwindles down to a single flashlight beam and then goes out. Without consciously intending to, it engaged all sorts of proto-feminist fears and anxieties about the changing roles of women and the ways they are so often victimized or go unheard.

In the Nixey-del Toro version, the central couple, Kim and Alex, are played by Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, two much stronger actors. But the monstrous homunculi aren’t focused on either of them but on a vulnerable child named Sally (Bailee Madison), who is Alex’s daughter by an off-screen ex-wife. Sally takes ADHD medication and is evidently screwed up in other ways, which both introduces a lot of half-relevant, pseudo-contemporary emotional drama and creates a somewhat hackneyed red herring: When Kim’s best dresses are mysteriously torn to shreds, she and Alex pull long faces and drag Sally to the shrink for some serious intervention. “Sure, honey, little monsters from inside the heating ducts did it. Uh huh. Now take your powerful psychoactive drugs and go to bed.”

Not only does the husband-wife dichotomy of the original film become a stepmother-stepdaughter triangle, but the screenplay (by del Toro and Matthew Robbins) introduces a whole lot of mythological and folkloric back story that simply isn’t necessary. Oh, I can see the appeal of dragging in Celtic legends about the “little people” and the tooth-fairy tradition and secret treaties signed with supernatural entities by medieval popes, and it almost feels as if del Toro wishes they were making a different movie, a geeky “Da Vinci Code” horror-thriller that explored the secret history of goblin-human relations. I’d definitely watch that, but this one’s supposed to be about the fact that our house is full of horrible little creatures who want to eat us and cannot be defeated. I’m not sure that juridical or political explanations for their behavior are all that helpful.

There’s also a little bit of, say, “The Secret Garden” introduced into this remake, although one could just as well cite any of the dozens of books about a child alone in an old house. Sally arrives from L.A. to the crumbling Rhode Island mansion that architect Alex and helpmeet Kim are fixing up as a resale showpiece, and soon discovers not just the previously unknown basement room but the iron furnace grate someone has bolted shut and the local handyman doesn’t want to talk about. Hmm, maybe it’d be fun to find some tools and open it up! Especially because the little voices down there say they want to come out and play! There are plenty of edge-of-your-seat, spooky-loo moments early in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” before Sally grasps the true nature of her new playmates, along with a few shriek-inducing ones later on.

There isn’t much for Guy Pearce to do as the tone-deaf, perennially irritated dad, but Holmes — whose acting is often overwhelmed by her Mrs. Tom Cruise fame — delivers a sensitive performance as Kim gradually builds a tender, hesitant rapport with Sally. Still, there are problems with the characters and story here that the cast can’t fix. It feels as if del Toro and Robbins never clearly chose between leaving the film in the cruel, manipulative horror idiom of the ’70s — in which telephones never work, cars never start, and minor coincidences and catastrophes keep the family inside the house long past the point when any ordinary idiot would have fled — or uprooting it. So some of the knife-twisting later scenes in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” feel almost campy, like winks at the audience or studious self-referentiality. None of this is quite enough to ruin a gripping, gruesome fable, which of course del Toro’s fans and other genre buffs will rush out to see, but it does render the movie a minor muddle rather than a horror masterwork.