'Stopmotion' & other horrors
Nightmares bleed into creative work in Robert Morgan's fascinating if narratively flat horror. Plus, this week's horror recommendations.
Hello, horror hounds!
New week, new dispatch…from hell! This week, we’re tackling Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion, a British chiller following a stop-motion artist in the throes of hysteria as she crafts her first film.
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I’M QUITE THE SUCKER for the costly horrors of creative genius. There’s no gut-knotting pain worse than knowing you lack the artistry and point-of-view required to make something new in your chosen craft.
I especially like stories that hover within the genre. You’ve got your prestige Oscar-bait films, but horror refuses to put these tortured geniuses on a pedestal. They draw blood (buckets!). Get mutilated. Chewed. Spat out. Born anew with unusually red corners in their eyes.
After hearing a few good things about Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion, I knew it’d be my cup of tea. For one, it spotlights the art of stop-motion animation, a style that lends itself well to my favorite genre. For another, it’s about yet another tortured artist who codes their life around the art they love (sounds like someone I know, ahem!) and what chaos might ensue when things fall apart.
The film follows a woman named Ella, an artistically repressed nepo-baby living in the shadow of her arthritic mom, who herself is a stop-motion artist (a storied one, at that). Ella seems grimly aware that she lacks an artistic voice, so much so that she puts up with her mom’s doting and bullish ways (which mother calls her kid a puppet?).
The horror of Stopmotion picks up with Ella (played by Aisling Franciosi, as great here as she was in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale) creating her own stop-motion film. She meets a strange little girl who offers a story idea about a disfigured entity called the Ashman.
I see what Morgan is trying to say, and I observe many of the things the film wants to say about artistry. Where it loses me is the story, which feels, at best, like a patchwork of potentially good ideas about childhood trauma and negative states of mind translating into creative work.
I like the blurring of reality and fiction and the eventual colliding of two mediums. The effect feels akin to something like Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor, a finer film about repressed trauma and rage and also video nasties of yesteryears.
Morgan’s film is finely crafted, yes. The stop-motion elements are fascinating, and even more so is the sound design. But the film is ultimately bogged down by a middling script and quite two-dimensional characters.
ABOUT THE FILM
🎥 Stopmotion
dir. Robert Morgan | Horror, Thriller, Animation | 🇬🇧Ella Blake, a stop-motion animator struggling to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother, embarks upon the creation of a film that becomes the battleground for her sanity. As Ella’s mind starts to fracture, the characters in her project take on a life of their own.
Every week in Field Notes (From Hell!), I recommend three horror films: one recent title, one classic horror, and one guilty pleasure.
Here are this week’s recommendations.
Recent horror — The Royal Hotel (2023, dir. Kitty Green)
Nowhere near the strength or impact of The Assistant, obviously. This tense, anxiety-inducing thriller from the same director (Kitty Green) is a serviceable side-step. Again, it thrusts Julia Garner into a punishing workplace. This time, she plays a backpacking expat forced to take on a barkeeping job with her bestie (played by Jessica Henwick) out in the bar creep epicenter of the Australian wildback.
Classic horror — Aliens (1986, dir. James Cameron)
Watched this in immediate reaction to the new teaser for Alien: Romulus. If you haven’t watched it, do yourself a favor and watch all sixty glorious seconds of it here. And I’m just happy that we’re getting all shades of Alien now, with Romulus shaping up to be somewhat Alien: Isolation-esque, and this James Cameron sequel being the terror-filled setpiece-driven romp that put the franchise on the map. It sprawls out the story outside of Nostromo, with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) leading a group of Marines into a planetoid full of Xenomorphs. As sequel rules go, the body count stands taller. Great film.
Guilty pleasure — Alligator (1980, dir. Steve Beck)
O.K., so I’m not even sure if I’m admitting any guilt in picking this. I unironically LOVE this film. It’s Jaws but on land. Robert Forster is such a gem playing a charismatic cop leading this procedural with a grossly mutated sewer alligator as the big baddie. It’s not fucking around with the kills, either. The pool scene traumatized me as a kid.
That’s it for this week’s digest! Thank you so much for reading through.
About Field Notes (From Hell!):
Field Notes (From Hell!) is Deep Cuts’ weekly email digest. Dispatches go out every weekend, with handpicked capsule reviews and horror recommendations.
Again, this week’s email is brought to you by Amazon Prime Video — watch thousands of horror films, including Amazon Original titles like Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake.
Cheers to you, ghoulies!
—Armand