So, a lot of horror lately, for obvious reasons. First up, let’s talk about the last two weeks of the Letterboxd challenge.

Last week’s movie was a Korean horror film, and we decided on A Tale of Two Sisters, which is kind of a haunted house movie, but mostly a movie about family trauma. As the movie starts, a dad and his two daughters are arriving back at a house, clearly returning after an absence and with bad memories in the past. It’s unclear exactly what happened in the past, but when the girls’ stepmother greets them, it’s also clear that the past isn’t entirely past yet.

The movie is good at setting up a creepy ominous feeling without resorting to cheap jump scares, but… well, not to get spoily about it, but there’s a major turning point in the back part of the film, and the film-makers aren’t too interested in explaining the precise details of what happened, such that the events from there on out were confusing for us; after the movie ended, my wife looked up plot summaries and was like “OH, see, the deal is that…” and then retroactively it all mostly(?) made sense.

And like, okay, this isn’t the first movie that I’ve had sense made of from external resources (when I was a kid and read 2010, it was the first time I had any fucking clue what was happening at the end of 2001, which was nevertheless my favorite movie; and I think every Tarkovsky movie I’ve watched has involved at least some Wikipedia plot summarizing), so I don’t want to be too negative about that. But this really is a movie that’s framed as a mystery, and I do think actually explaining the mystery clearly would be helpful.

Still, given that most movies fail on the side of being too obvious and over-explaining things so that even the dimmest of watchers can understand them, I’ll take one that decides to err the other way; and anyway, maybe this is just a me thing, or possibly just an American thing and Korean audiences found it substantially more obvious what was going on. (Heck, maybe it’s even some subtitling that missed a nuance or two.) Enjoyable, and recommended to those who aren’t afraid to do some “okay wait a minute, what?” reading after the movie.

Next up, this week’s challenge was a movie off the Letterboxd Horror Top 250 list. Having just seen a live performance of Suspiria, we were in a Dario Argento frame of mind, and chose The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which is probably his coolest-titled movie.

So the premise here is that there’s a serial killer who’s been killing random women around town, and our protagonist — a down-on-his-luck Englishman visiting Italy — happens to witness closely an attack. The police pull him in for questioning, and it sorta seems like he’s a suspect, but then… they kind of treat him as an honorary deputy? It’s honestly sort of weird, but he basically ends up doing the TV-detective role of trying to figure out the mystery of the killer’s identity, getting more and more embroiled in danger and trouble.

It’s a good movie, with that kind of Italian technicolor noir style, a mystery that plays fair, and a plot that’s intricate but I think actually p. much holds up and makes straightforward sense.

Watching right after Suspiria, though, it’s notable that it’s really nothing like Suspiria — like Tenebrae, it’s much more of a serial killer/detective kind of thing, where Suspiria is a supernatural horror movie. And so apparently, despite Suspiria being the most famous giallo, there’s actually some disagreement about whether it even is one at all, and broad agreement that if it is then it’s definitely an unusual one and not really representative of the genre. To which I have to say: that’s too bad, because Suspiria is great and easily my favorite of Argento’s movies that I’ve seen so far.

Still, even if it’s not the supernatural horror that I might wish it were, it’s an enjoyable horror-tinged noir slasher, and an easy recommend for giallo fans.