Editorials
A Double Feature of What We Love About Indie Cinema
I’ve always been able to say that I loved, love, and will forever love movies. I haven’t always been able to say that I understood how most of the polished talent being showcased in the huge multiplexes, actually was culled from more humble beginnings. Where would we be without the honesty of independent film? Think of it as big budget films being processed and genetically modified through studios and rewrites, and indie films are the organic stuff, locally produced with love and careful diligence. Another plus side is that the organic stuff, in this case, is actually more affordable. The irony of it all is that all too often, independent filmmakers almost have to give all that film goodness away. It may be the only industry where a customized product doesn’t enjoy high demand at a premium price. Then again the sheer will of wanting to tell a good story or doing something innovative that ripples through the larger framework of the medium isn’t always about money. Shallow pockets for me always up the “wow” factor, and when someone does something clever or groundbreaking on a break from their day job, well color me impressed. I recently discovered two films from filmmakers on opposite coasts that excelled in different avenues, but still flow into the same confluence of substance over style. One for telling a good story and the other for technical innovation.
THE LISTING
Director: Mario Cerrito III
Anyone that’s had to weather the challenges of house hunting can attest that finding a new place to live is a killer. It’s all about location, location, location, granite countertops and hoping that weird smell in the basement is only temporary. It can be very stressful on both sides of the deal. Absolutely anything could happen, good or bad, and the real estate agent dynamic has been utilized in a few horror and suspense films before. It’s not new to use the old bait and switch of using home turf advantage to lure potential victims into a convenient kill spot. So to take on such a trope-y hook to hang a film on requires some faith on the writer’s part that there’s a sharper hook in there somewhere else. New Jersey filmmaker Mario Cerrito III’s latest, THE LISTING, is the tale of a very average realtor that finds himself in a very extraordinary situation. He’s got the biggest sale of his career nailed down, and everything seems to be perfect. All is well until his son is kidnapped and his captors issue a very complicated ransom. It’s not money they want, but six dead bodies in 24 hours or his son is dead. The logistics alone seem impossible, but he’s got an ace in the hole with a house listing and several prospects interested in coming by to take a look at it. If killing strangers isn’t hard enough, he also besieged by visits from acquaintances and even family members as the deadline rapidly approaches, and the body count is still lacking. It’s a solid tension builder that gauges the limits of human desperation over morality, and what bad things a good person may do without any other options. Why this happened to such a normal guy is also a nice bit of dysfunctionality that seals the deal with a very elegant twist.
Genre favorite Jessica Cameron also makes a cameo.
THE SECRET OF 40
Director: Kourosh Ahari
Death is the life’s blood of horror. Someone is either dealing it or getting the business end of it. The best thing about horror films is the catharsis of dealing with the imminent specter of death whittling away at our mortality. No one gets out of life alive, and some of the most thought provoking films deal with the denial that death is final. That angle seems to push the most buttons because it’s outside the realm of accepted possibilities, and always poses the question of if “dead is better”. West Coast filmmaker Kourosh Ahari’s THE SECRET OF 40 follows a son who lost his mother in a horrific car crash. While at her house, he finds an incantation that could bring her back. The most striking thing about this film is the revolutionary way in which it is presented. THE SECRET OF 40 is the very first horror film to use the Barco Escape three screen technology. It utilizes the three screen system that not only immerses the viewer in a panoramic field of view for a single scene, but also simultaneously displays two separate, but related scenes in a way that a conventional split screen never could.
The technology could be a refreshing alternative to the mixed blessing and the divided camp of contemporary 3D. An indie movie that shares the same platform with more widely released notables is definitely noteworthy. I opted not to watch the screener on a laptop, and waited until I had access to three screens proper, and it is very immersive and works perfectly in a horror film. A wider field of vision keeps the viewer unsettled by a peripheral assault on the senses. With the prevalence of virtual reality, three screen technology is encompassing, but still, has the comforting tether to the material world. Another side note to THE SECRET OF 40 is that it features Judie Aronson (FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER, WEIRD SCIENCE, AMERICAN NINJA) and Robert Rusler (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2, WEIRD SCIENCE, THRASHIN’).
There’s so much talent in the indie film industry, and the beauty of it is that it gives that talent an opportunity to shine without being diluted by the politics of movie making. Nearly every independent filmmaker’s end product has the true representation of their vision that the funding will allow. That alone can yield some pretty revolutionary stuff. After all, most of the classics started with someone that had a good story to tell, and a distinctive way to do it.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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