First, some housekeeping: I’m still struggling to conciliate the blog with other commitments, but instead of going on yet another hiatus, I’m shifting into a biweekly rhythm, so the longer Thursday posts will now appear only every other week (the Monday cover compilations should continue to roll smoothly, though).
This is also the time of the year when I pick my favorite recent horror movie. Alas, for the same time-constraining reasons, I’m afraid I haven’t been keeping up with the genre as much I used to… Everyone keeps telling me The Substance and Longlegs deserve my attention, and I trust them, but I just haven’t gotten around to watching them yet. And that’s the thing: horror cinema has been gaining so much quality, popularity, and acclaim that I’m not sure I’d have much to add to the general discourse, anyway.
That said, I can’t resist the thematic pull of Halloween, so I figured instead I’ll just use these end-of-October posts to recommend less fashionable viewing alternatives, from obscure oddities to older classics. This time around, I’ll kick things off with one of the latter…
In the past, I’ve recommended the first Dr. Mabuse film (1922’s silent opus of German expressionism) and the final chapter of Fritz Lang’s trilogy (1960’s puzzle box of Cold War science fiction), so I may as well add, in case anyone was wondering, that the second entry in this gothic series about the titular evil genius, 1933’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, is also definitely worth your time. Sure, the fact that this is an early talkie means that, for every neat piece of sound design (like in the opening sequence), you also get some uneven pacing here and there, although I’d argue Lang more than makes up for this through his inventive visuals, including a number of comic book-worthy scene transitions.
While The Testament of Dr. Mabuse works perfectly fine as a self-contained thriller with original characters, I’m particularly fond of it as an epic sequel. Like its predecessor and its successor, the film follows a bunch of doomed figures in Dr. Mabuse’s orbit without really anchoring the narrative around a specific hero that we’re expected to identify with, despite the presence of the sarcastic Inspector Lohmann (from M, Lang’s masterpiece). As a result, the movies posit a decadent world without a clear counterpoint, where Mabuse isn’t so much a threat to a benign social order as a reflection of society’s darker side… That’s as far as the structural similarities go, though. Rather than rework the same beats all over again (like Hollywood tends to do), the story steams forward while recontextualizing the core concept.
At one point, during the previous film’s climactic shootout, Mabuse said: ‘I feel like a state inside of a state with which I’ve always been at war!’ Here, though, he’s no longer just an anarchic undercurrent, but the promise of fascist takeover – and it’s this, more than the super-powers, that elevate him into supervillain territory… and elevate The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, beyond a crime story, into chilling horror. Since we’re talking about a German film from 1933, it’s hard to disregard the parallel with the outside world, regardless of the makers’ intentions at the time. I suppose I also don’t have to spell out why it’s been on my mind this election season.
That’s it for this year’s film recommendation. Now, as a reminder that comics can be awesome, enjoy 20 hysterical covers with Jack Kirby’s giant monsters:
