Categories
Movies

Books of Blood (2020): Review

This movie has 3 interesting houses: A modern house, a more typical horror house set in a blighted area, and an organic bed n’ breakfast. Made by Clive Barker, he puts some emphasis on housing. For example, the house in Hellraiser is a new purchase (I believe), something to do with real estate, and most of the action takes place in a room upstairs. This is a fairly common idea, that a house has some secrets or history, and entering a new house, there’s a contract or arrangement that is tacitly made. This is used to give a sense of anxiety.

Nearly all the characters in Books of Blood have dubious morals. There are innocent people that suffer for no good reason, only they have walked into a trap laid by these people. After the introduction, the film starts in a modern house. Is there a trap here? More like deep inconsideration and callousness. Two normal people have an abnormal daughter. Mother remarried, him & her, live in a piece of artwork. They have sex. The daughter downstairs with a hypersensitivity to sound. They want her to take her pills. This is an impossible situation because of the loss of agency with mental illness based on a prior incident and living at a psychiatric facility. Starting with these events in the past, her arc has two paths which coincide in the organic house.

It is also instructive to compare the couple that live in the organic house with her parents. This couple lives off the earth having no problem with life, mastery over it. Overtime, they have constructed a bed n’ breakfast and invite strangers into their home.

To write some about the Books of Blood, after a fissure is made, a large section of town is covered in darkness and spirits. The normal folk know that it is haunted. In America, there are whole neighborhoods that have fallen into disrepair. This is not the same, only you do not want to go into certain neighborhoods you have no business being in. Perhaps, it is similar toward this blighted part of town, the attitudes of the middle-class. A single house lies in the center of the blighted area, a family of spirits, a witch, her son, and her lover. They are a trio transformed through death and deceit and they tie the events of the story together. They are omniscient and understand the happenings through spiritual law.