Takashi Miike's Audition

Audition is an interesting and unsettlingly realistic horror story based around deconstructing the Japanese concept of a Yamato Nadeshiko, a perfect wife as seen through traditional Japanese values. A widower named Shigeharu decides he's finally ready to date again, and decides to set up a fake film audition in order to find a woman he finds suitable. He narrows it down to an attractive young woman named Asami, and discovers that she is herself enamored with him. As he examines his relationship further, however, he begins to note a horrifying atmosphere surrounding Asami's past, and he realizes just how far she's willing to go to ensure that he remain hers, and hers alone.

The film takes some time to get the ball rolling, but the pace starts to accelerate around the time the audience begins to wonder about Asami's mental stability, as she sits in her completely unfurnished apartment seemingly alone, simply waiting for Shigeharu to call after her audition. Once Shigeharu starts suspecting things the movie quickly ramps up, jumping around the timeline a bit to establish the circumstances under which Asami's insecurities and violent clinginess developed. By the climax of the film, it starts unraveling, becoming unclear what is real and what is being imagined, including a horrifying trip to Asami's apartment and the fate of her ex-lover (featuring a stomach-churning vomit sequence involving few fewer “special effects” than one initially hopes) and a disturbingly well-done torture scene in Shigeharu's home after Asami discovers that he has a family and she's “not the only one he loves.” The story has very few morally sound characters and it's resolution is ambiguous, but it's plausibility as a worst case scenario in dating makes it one of the most unsettling films I've ever seen.

Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In is a unique take on the genre of Vampire films from an adolescent point-of-view that combines horror with a boy-meets-girl, coming of age tale. The main character is a bullied boy named Oskar who's fascinated with serial killers. He meets a girl named Eli who's just moved in with her father, Hakan. It's very quickly shown that these two are not who they appear to be when Eli appears to Oskar in the freezing snow in her casual wear, completely unfazed by the cold, and her “father” starts murdering people and draining their blood.

The film plays around with the cliches of modern vampire stories by featuring a vampire that was turned before their sexual maturity, eternally stuck as a child, as opposed to the young adult or full-grown vampires that are usually seen in fiction. The title refers to the superstition that vampires can only enter a dwelling when invited, and at one point, Eli demonstrates what happens when she isn't invited with very unpleasant results. She is also not capable of feeding by herself as her victims will fight back and she is very uncomfortable with personally killing people. Thus she requires assistance from a guardian. The movie implies that Eli was not actually a girl at the time of turning into a vampire, with an incredibly brief shot of a castration scar, and as such, her statement of “I'm not a girl,” takes on a double meaning, with both, “I'm not female” and “I'm not human.”

Oskar assures Eli that he doesn't care about her issues and that he loves her anyway, and she promises to watch over him with his bully problems. By the end of the film, Hakan has died after feeding Eli one last time, Eli horrifically murders Oskar's bullies and he runs off with her, promising to stay with her and keep her fed, possibly eventually falling into the same exact role that Hakan had.