Here you go again—you didn't ask, but I did it anyway. Let me explain.

First: this August will be the month of horrors. Before autumn, I'll try to put out two or three more long texts and an express selection—strictly about scary movies. And second: I'll try a new format. We take several films with a common authorial approach and figure out what that even is and why it works.

Today we'll see how three experimental horrors tell their stories in their own special ways: Buffet Infinity through editing, Skinamarink through visuals, Undertone through sound. We watch, we listen, we don't switch off.

Buffet Infinity / The Infinite Buffet

It looks like a prank gone out of control: a stream of cheap regional TV commercials, news bulletins, and creepy VHS-era interstitials comes at you. But the schizophrenic kaleidoscope forms a fairly coherent story about a PR war unfolding in the town of Westridge between a family sandwich shop and a new monstrous all-you-can-eat establishment. While the restaurants argue over whose sauce is more Italian, car dealerships promise the lowest prices, and insurance agents insure everything in sight, chthonic weirdness grows out of the screen: a giant sinkhole opens near the mall, people start disappearing, and local cultists buy up airtime for end-of-the-world sermons.

Each clip is self-contained and moderately cringe, but in the editing they start exchanging details, names, and warning signals. And the more cheerfully the announcer savors the new menu, the clearer it becomes that some cosmic madness is going on behind the scenes. The "infinite buffet," endlessly devouring competitors, is an entity so hungry and vast that it's indistinguishable from cosmic evil. Never has the call to "eat as much as you can" sounded so threatening.

Skinamarink / Paranormal Activity: Skinamarink

Two children wake up in the night and find that their parents are gone, and with them, the windows and doors have disappeared. The lights barely work, so the kids sit in front of the TV with old cartoons and try to ignore the voice calling from the darkness. The camera always looks off to the side: at a corner of the ceiling, a piece of wall, scattered Lego bricks on the floor. The space can't be assembled into a coherent layout, and the image drowns in monstrous digital and film grain—so dense that in the dark rooms, the brain starts to fill in silhouettes and faces on its own.

Skinamarink doesn't tell a story about a childhood nightmare; it tries to reconstruct the very mechanics of it. It's a horror of pure liminal space and tactile memory. It doesn't scare you with bogeymen; it pulls up from the bottom of the subconscious that very terror when you're four years old, the distance between the bed and the light switch is infinite, and there's no one around. A pure ambient experience, sensory deprivation in reverse: you stare at pixel noise for two hours until a quiet whisper off-screen finally breaks your sense of security.

Undertone / Half-Tone

A girl named Evie cares for her comatose mother, and at night she records a podcast about paranormal phenomena with a friend. One day they receive a dozen audio files: a man is trying to figure out why his pregnant wife talks and hums in her sleep. At first, everything can be chalked up to interference, sleepy mumbling, and a vivid imagination, but with each new recording, rational explanations become fewer. Meanwhile, almost nothing happens on screen—just a girl sitting in front of a microphone with headphones. Alone. Late at night. In a house where, right above her, a person is slowly dying.

Undertone essentially works in the "found footage" genre, but the footage is only audio. At the same time, the film has two spaces—the room inside the recording and the dark corridors behind the heroine—and your imagination has to service both. Rustles form into words, random noise gains meaning, and the brain, that talented but irresponsible sound engineer, mixes into the track things that might not be there at all. And when the film finally falls silent, it only gets worse: the refrigerator hums suspiciously, and the neighbors walk too quietly. The perfect horror to watch with headphones. Especially if you weren't planning to sleep tonight anyway.

#watched_movies