Hard to believe, but there was in fact another comics-related movie that opened in Toronto this past weekend. Fear(s) of the Dark, a French animated film, enlists the styles and sensibilities of six international alt-comics stars and “auteurs graphiques” in the service of exploring notions of, well, fears and darkness (or, in French, the more unequivocal noir). Each of the artists contributes either a narrative short or a framing sequence, playing formally with the notion of darkness versus light, illustrated either in sharp black and white or greasy scratchy shades of grey, while the stories they tell delve into what scares us, with varying degrees of success. Now, the horror anthology film is always a beyond-dodgy enterprise—most horror films miss the mark with just one try, so anthologising horror often only multiplies chances for failure. While this particular attempt never really succeeds in being scary, it does sustain a certain creepiness, and rarely ever comes off dumb—no slight accomplishments, in this genre.
First off, credit Blutch’s framing story with maintaining that creepy air. His works remain largely unavailable in English, but Blutch is kind of a big deal, having recently been named next year’s president of the Angoulême festival, which roughly equates to being king of comics for the year. The work of his I’ve read is full of indiscriminate but intelligent brushwork, conjuring up limber, solid figures from a tangle of ink. His wordless contribution here makes good use of these atmospheric strengths, presenting us with a sneering, vaguely patrician dogwalker in a tricorne, who gradually looses each of his vicious hounds on a succession of trembling lower class victims. At first these occasional attacks seem too schematic in their targets, while overly expressive eyes mar the figurework, but the clips become nastier as they go along, more and more unsettling in their use of sound, before gradually devolving into lunatic vulgarity and animal savagery.
The narrative of Blutch’s segments is abstract, more metaphor than story, but pure visual abstraction dominates the movie’s other framing sequence, by Pierre di Sciullo. In it, a woman recounts her various fears—of what she eats, of what people think of her, of how she might die—while amorphous black and white shapes and patterns dance onscreen, commenting obliquely on what she says. Di Sciullo, a typographer and artist who works with text, creates clinical rather than visceral effects with his abstractions; they drive home the film’s structuring themes, but prove pretty uninvolving otherwise.
Of course, this thinking may just be my ignorance of his work breeding disinterest in what he attempts. Especially since the offering from Marie Caillou, the other artist I’m not familiar with, strikes me as unimpressive, too. Her Japan-set ghost/possession/hallucination tale is the only one to use clean, dull greytones (along with an oh so subtle touch of… red! for blood, you see!), which only helps to highlight how much the look of this short relies on the herky-jerky movement and suspiciously flat planes used in flash animation, elements which the other shorts pretty-up or at least fudge. While the film’s most unapologetically visual moments of horror do occur here—things in jars mingle with gory disembodied heads and murderous seizures—they’re too often tinged with kawaii for my tastes, and subscribe to an unpersuasive brand of schoolgirl-under-duress japonisme.
The least remarkable entry, however, comes from a familiar quarter, an established artist whose work, in theory, seems amenable to animation. Lorenzo Mattotti‘s most striking comics imply either tempestuous motion or crouching, impatient stillness, using proud curves, bold colours, and fussy but untamed linework. Surprisingly, none of these cinematic qualities translates well into animation. As adapted from one of Mattotti’s albums I’ve not read, the nonsensical story is a bit of hokum about some mysterious beast preying on a quirky village, and has little staying power. What’s worse, though, is that Mattotti’s visual accompaniment looks so unforgivingly comic booky, all expressionist angles and shadows, whenever it’s not purely literal and unimaginative instead. The midway point does feature some fun caricature work and comic overexaggeration, when a huntsman arrives to dispose of the beast, and later on an image of a grotesque shape silhouetted in a window manages to inspire a deep unease. Otherwise, the vibrant life that must have existed in Mattotti’s original drawings fails to survive when transplanted to this new medium.
The movie’s real strengths arrive courtesy of the two artists most well-known on these shores. Tales from Black Hole author Charles Burns and multimedia savant Richard McGuire bookend the film, quality entries that batten down the rest of the picture’s flailing unevenness. It may be because the (North) American conception of horror is the one I find most palatable, or perhaps because I have closer acquaintance with these artists’ other work, but in any case I find more to respond to in their shorts than in the others.
Of the two, Burns’ is the more flawed. In it, a woebegone nebbish tells us from his sickbed how he met his first love, how she enticed him to let her live with him, and how she has fallen victim to the creatures he once captured for biological study. Aside from an overeager soundtrack at times, this scenario plays out with offputting resolve. In comics, though, Burns’s world—a bland but grotesque amalgam of Universal movie monsters and Dick Tracy’s bleak use of black—is fanatically two-dimensional, with its sleek rendering placing every object on the same visual plane. Turning this style into traditional animation has the potential for uncanniness, but this film seems content simply to convert Burns’s flatness into the illusion of three dimensions. The result is plain weird, as though we were being granted a tracking shot around Snoopy’s doghouse; some things deserve to live in our imagination on an x-y axis only.
That said, the artwork does fill the screen impressively, with black and white sharing equal space and emphasis. The handsome character designs—bipedal insectoids, an ectomorph who mutates into a fleshy blob—lose nothing in the transition to the big screen, and Burns’s beloved wounds and malformations become even more corporeal and corrupt when provided with depth. Most helpfully, though, the late Guillaume Depardieu’s voice performance gives fresh insight into the outlook of Burns’s male protagonists and how they narrate their stories. Delivered in a whisper, Depardieu’s voiceover sounds as sure of itself as does, say, Keith’s voice in Black Hole. Only here a note sneaks in of desperation and fear, with regard to sex or the future, that isn’t immediately apparent in the affectless, lifelike voices in Burns’s comics captions.
McGuire’s short, finally, is just so damn smart about every little thing. In each of his chosen mediums, the man’s an innovator: stripping down dance music to its essentials with Liquid Liquid, disintegrating all our notions of space and time in comics with the still-revelatory “Here,” and now rethinking animation in the strictest terms of figure and ground. This wordless sequence tells the story of a snowbound man breaking into a dark and deserted house, warming himself, browsing through belongings, and trying to find some shoes. Thanks to the pacing, the heightened importance of sound, and the furtive interplay between black and white, McGuire overlays these mundane tasks with a not unwarranted sense of dread and foreboding. Despite a shlumpy main character, McGuire’s graphic sense is simple and elegant throughout, as always. Still: the film is, basically, surprisingly, black.
Black serves as the only ground, here, against which black figures move—on occasion we can pick out white shapes and patterns, but often only when candlelight or flame illuminates them. Thanks to so secretive a visual strategy, we never really know what’s around the corner, or even in the bottom of the screen, anymore than the protagonist does, and the abstract shapes we do see we often mistake for something more sinister. The short seems to have been conceived around a dream sequence—one of the few genre tropes McGuire fails to make effective use of—but the real showstopper is a “Here”-style browse through a photo album. This quick series of shots collapses years worth of story information into a progression of static images, cutting quickly between one and the next to create an escalating portrait of psychosis, and as baffling and scary a use of a photo since the final shot of The Shining. McGuire’s climactic short is the only one that instils in us a fear of the dark, but by the time his film ends and we’re back out in the snow, there’s reason to find the light disconcerting, too. As can sometimes happen in a horror anthology film, McGuire’s contribution here is austere, thoughtful work that throws everything around it into stark relief.
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All images from the Fear(s) of the Dark website, except the McGuire images from Comic Art #8.
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