November 1, 2008 [The Watcher in the Attic]

In Crawlspace Klaus Kinski slunk through ducts and down passageways to spy on and do nasty things to the female tenants of his apartment building with that Kinski look on his face—the blind stare of a suffocating demon—as he wriggled and peeped, gave in to Nazi impulses, and made sure we got ourselves a horror film.

But that was in the '80s somewhere, a decade before the Japanese Watcher in the Attic, which I assumed would be some typically goofy-twisty J-horror from days gone by.

But The Watcher in the Attic is no more a "horror" film than The Honeymoon Killers—only in the sense that it fills me with horror—and maybe that's it, then, the place where all the funhouse monster movies go to die: into a picture like this in which oneiric fetishists hide in the furniture so that they can be sat on and clowns rub their whiteface on a killer's shoulder, lipstick-on-your-collar morphed into a queasy snail's-trail smear. The guy hides like Kinski, but it's a whorehouse this time, and every customer has a kink. But none matches the watcher's, he's ready to go all the way, and together with his love-em-and-kill-em prostitute-ideal they murder and make love—until a literal earthquake comes along at the end, the only thing the Earth could manage to match that monster-couple's couplings. Oh, the earth moved, all right, but in their hearts it felt like a big crunchy beetle squashed, their own deaths the last climax, as horror-movie a horror as one could hope not to see.

Yes, a horror film's job is to transgress—but this one squeaks and gibbers like the "sheeted dead" who couldn't bear the end of things in Rome and left their graves to wander into the house long after midnight to scare me with (the last horror of all) recognizably human indulgences.