Antichrist

Starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Opens Oct. 23

Danish auteur Lars Von Trier’s art-horror film entails an exercise in therapy for both the filmmaker, who conceived and filmed it at the tail end of a serious depression, and its characters. Following the death of their child, a couple (Dafoe and Gainsbourg) sequester themselves in the forest to purge their grief. Things don’t go so well, for them or the audience, as Von Trier immerses us in real-time therapeutic exercises, graphic sex and slow-motion, dreamlike images and sound. I began to look forward to the sporadic, grotesque shocks (and in one case during the press screening, unintentional laughs) involving animals, blood ejaculation and much ballyhooed genital mutilation that break up the tedium. Appropriately, Von Trier dedicated Antichrist to a master of the portentous, Andrei Tarkovsky. Although at times it felt like an endurance test, and disjointed “dream cinema” seems better suited as an art gallery installation, few filmmakers are making this sort of work today, and for cineastes and fans of surreal horror, Antichrist is holy indeed. —Lawrence Ferber

The House of the Devil

Starring Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov
Opens Oct. 30

The house of the Devil is a creaky old Victorian next to a graveyard outside Lime Rock, Connecticut. In writer-director-editor Ti West’s homage to the ‘70s era of grunge horror, there’s not a floorboard that doesn’t squeak, not a semblance of logic that can’t be overcome and no performance that’s not as musty as the secrets in the damp basement. Too bad, really, since the film’s first few minutes set up an expectation for scary good fun, from the landlady (Dee Wallace in a glorified walk-on) showing college sophomore Sam (Jocelin Donahue) the walk-up apartment that’s to become hers, to the retro font of the opening credits, to the grainy images. But after that it’s a long, tedious slog to the first fright, with a lot of static scenes setting up Sam’s babysitting job for a creepy couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) who might as well be wearing nametags that say “Hi, My Name Is ... and I’m a Satan Worshipper.” Satan’s actual appearance comes way too late, but one gets to watch Donahue all alone in a noisy house, doing all the stupid things college students have eternally done in horror movies, and just as vacuously. —Dan Loughry

The Maid (La Nana)

Starring Catalina Saavedra, Claudio Celedon, Agustín Silva
Opens Oct. 23

To call the title character of Sebastian Silva’s The Maid territorial would be an understatement. The forty-something Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), employed in the same Chilean household for 23 years, is fiercely, viciously, pathologically territorial. She’s more than an employee and less than a full-fledged member of the family, though she isn’t above engaging in petty domestic squabbles with the eldest daughter, or keeping a close watch, via stained sheets, of the nightly emissions of the teenage son. She’s getting older and slower, yet each time the female head of house tries to bring in help, Raquel locks the new maid out and sends her running to the hills. Saavedra’s a formidable presence; she recedes into the background yet you can’t ignore her mousy black hair and petulant tyrannies. And though what she does often seems arbitrary, we soon recognize that she’s fighting for her life; or, at least, the paltry life she’s allowed for herself. The openly-gay Silva based The Maid on childhood memories; maybe too much of them are still in his head. His neo-realist film errs in making Raquel as enigmatic as it does, yet he never asks us to gaze at his central creation with pity, only fascination. And on that count, he succeeds. —D.L.

Paranormal Activity

Starring Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat
Now showing

Advance word has been touting Paranormal Activity as perhaps the most terrifying film ever committed to celluloid, and has raised its bar extremely high. Don’t believe everything you read/hear. Fashioned after the mock “we found this footage…” shtick of the far superior Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity tells the story of an engaged couple whose recently purchased home in San Diego is inhabited by a demonic paranormal presence that visits at night to scare the bejesus out of them. They set up a stationary video camera in the bedroom to capture the nighttime visits, and the film becomes a series of brief night shots, daytime reviewing of the previous night’s footage, and so on and so on. (Insert yawn here.) Suspension of belief, especially for the horror genre, is a major prerequisite, but in the case of this film, the demand far exceeds the payoff. It borders on becoming a too-long Saturday Night Live skit, with the bizarre nighttime visits from the paranormal bordering on ridiculous; I felt more compelled to snicker than feel fright. As one patron so concisely put it upon the film’s end, “Boo!” … as in the opposite of “Yay!” —Bob Werner