![]() ![]() Here is someone who doesn't seem capable of standing up for himself in an environment where everyone is more than happy to walk all over him. The entire film seems to be set in the studio over an indeterminate amount of time, loosely conveying our protagonist's slow disintegration. He is a man in completely and thoroughly over his head. That the letter is signed "Love, Mum" tells us everything we need to know about Gilderoy. Gilderoy is immediately understood as a man for whom simple home comforts are best, and a letter he receives from back home details the lives of his neighbors, business surrounding the little local interest pieces he does, and some birds who are building a nest in his shed. ![]() ![]() ![]() It's the story of one meek, reticent man with excellent ears, stuck in another country working on something that is completely outside of his experience and sensibilities. It's a working environment that's immediately toxic.Īnd that's pretty much the movie. Even the simple act of getting reimbursed for his flight to Italy turns into a dead end for Gilderoy, as the receptionist tasked to deal with it flat-out dismisses and ignores him, and Francesco chides him for being so hung up on money, suggesting that he should be working for the love of film. The message is clear: Shut up and get to work. Francesco is casually evasive about Santini's absence, saying only that he's "busy", and that Gilderoy will meet him soon enough and why all of the impatience, hmm? Santini's very excited to work with you, he admires your work very much, so don't get so hung up on these things. Gilderoy would like to talk to the director, but the director is absent, and instead he has to deal with the film's producer, Francesco. We get the impression that it's not the sort of film Gilderoy usually does (his typical gig being documentaries about small towns in the English countryside), and although we never get a clear sense of exactly what the film is about, a wonderfully hallucinatory opening credits sequence glimpsed by Gilderoy as he arrives at the titular recording studio makes it apparent that it's about as far from being his typical gig as possible. He's been hired by an Italian filmmaker named Giancarlo Santini to do the sound work on Santini's latest masterpiece, Il Vortice Equestre (The Equestrian Vortex). He's a quiet, shy, retiring English man who is apparently a very talented sound engineer. It's the story of Gilderoy, no other name given. They're all necessary to talk about Berberian Sound Studio, which manages to be not so much a horror movie as a movie about the horror of making horror movies, and still evokes, albeit incompletely, a range of emotions that - I would argue - make it a horror movie. That's a lot of words about movies (which isn't all that dissimilar from words about music, which is like dancing about architecture), but there's a point to it, and a point to the analogy I just made in that parenthetical statement just now. A bad horror film is one that offers no opportunity to experience any of the abovementioned emotions, or which attempts to evoke them and fails, or sacrifices any sort of emotional resonance for empty signifiers and cheap startles. And ultimately, part of the success of a horror movie (loosely construed) has to be the degree to which it evokes an emotional response. Fear, disgust, anxiety, dread, doom, sadness, terror - all of these are part and parcel of what we have come to call the experience of watching horror films. And horror movies haven' t just been about horror for ages. In an effort to be as inclusive as possible, I try to stick to one simple criterion: Does the movie evoke (or seek to evoke) one of the constellation of emotions we have come to associate with horror? Whether it was the intent of the filmmakers to make a horror movie is, to me, less relevant than the experience we have actually watching the movie. Genre classification is inherently limiting and as I've argued, can have some icky class implications. I cast my net pretty wide in terms of what I consider horror movies, and this is largely by design, since after a certain point a lot of the distinctions between horror movies, thrillers, and even dramas become sort of arbitrary. ![]()
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