Hi everyone!
Welcome back to our Indie Wednesday coverage, where we feature microbudget and independent films overlooked by most media outlets. Today’s review will feature 2019’s NOCTAMBULIST, a film by Johnny Daggers. Last year we featured a review of his documentary film BLOOD ON THE REEL (Episode #612), as part of Reign of Terror 2019, but it was clear he was most excited to talk about his latest film. So, over break, I gave it a second viewing, and made sure to place it on the calendar this year to feature this silent noir horror, or noirror, film. I’ll even be featuring some snippets from our full interview with Johnny Daggers, available on our Patreon page in two parts, episodes P012 and P013. If you love silent films, especially German expressionist pictures, then you’ll love today’s film.
Before the review, we’ll have a quick promo from our good friend Kolby Told Me, one of our biggest supporters for the podcast last year, as demonstrated by his near domination of the Follow Friday boards. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @kolbytoldme. And if you take up one of his recommendations, let everyone know that Kolby Told Me!
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Here we go!
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Today’s movie is NOCTAMBULIST, the silent noir horror picture written and directed by Johnny Daggers. Set in the early 1900s, Zella (Lauren Peele) is struggling with the recent death of her mother, and the inheritance expected from her passing. She begins to suspect her husband Stellan (Nicholas Nazario) is cheating on her with notorious flirt Marlene Demone (Nadia White). After being prescribed medicine to calm her nerves, she begins to lose her grip on herself, struggling to separate reality from fantasy.
No spoilers.
However, it’s hard to use clips from a silent movie, so instead, I’ll be interspersing segments from our interview with Johnny Daggers last year.
When I first started One Movie Punch, I wanted to use the opportunity to see a wide variety of films. I certainly have my favorites, but I also have a ton of blind spots. Some of those blind spots are from being too busy as a young parent to make it to the theaters. Some of those blind spots are still there because the content explosion has made finding unique films, and the time to watch them, much more difficult. So, I made a commitment at the time to weekly classic movie reviews, calling them Film Buff Fridays, and began taking in a wide variety of films from the past few decades, including a lot of pre-code and silent films.
You don’t realize just how formative early cinema was for the stories of today. My recent review for BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (Episode #657) took us all the way back to the beginning, in the very late 1800s, but this eventually spread to two key centers: Hollywood and Germany. Hollywood began churning out picture after picture, mostly in the noir genre, due to its tantalizing content, which became the films I watched growing up as the late night movies on syndicated television. Germany was taking a more artistic approach, with Fritz Lang leading the way with German Expressionism on the screen, along with a host of lesser-known filmmakers. Sure, there were comedies, shorts, romances, and others, but those two genres were two of my favorites. It’s the same with Johnny Daggers.
JOHNNY: “With NOCTAMBULIST, it is my first foray into German Expressionists or surrealist type films. I call it ‘noirror’ just because I was just like, oh, stared at the words noir and horror so much, and I’m like, yeah, you fuse them together, you know. I really wanted to make a silent that paid tribute to NOSFERATU, CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, M, GOLEM. All these early great films, because again, being an archivist, I don’t want those films to ever get lost. Grant you, you can’t replicate a movie like that, although I’m thankful for a nice German review that came in on Twitter lately, that said that NOCTAMBULIST is the closest thing that you’ll get in modern day to the heyday films. And that was a nice compliment. I don’t know if I say that, but that really warmed my heart. Obviously, I’m working on digital, and so I really have to spend the time to kind of give it that old stylized German Expressionist look. I’m very pleased with how it turned out.”
It’s an unexpected change of pace for Johnny Daggers, whose filmography include SAMHAIN: NIGHT FEAST, a film about a pagan ritual that brought him to notoriety, along with CAUSTIC ZOMBIES, the follow-up that took a crack at toxic-waste driven zombie horror. He followed that up through a series of events with BLOOD ON THE REEL (Episode #612), which you can learn about in our review. Sure, Johnny Daggers is a heavily-tattooed model, who likes punk music and has made horror films, but we definitely shouldn’t stereotype him, because at his core, he’s an artist, who has to create, and is frankly getting sick of being pigeonholed.
JOHNNY: “And now finally, like, NOCTAMBULIST is just like the, like... I’ve always been influenced by early German Expressionist films. CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU. That’s where I always wanted to go as a filmmaker, but I didn’t... I knew that I couldn’t make a film like that until I knew what the hell I was doing. Finally came time where everything fell into place with NOCTAMBULIST. It’s, in my opinion, beautifully stylized. Is it perfect? No. Like I said, I don’t think any indie or anybody should every say their film’s perfect, but I tell you what. It’s like, this is the film that I wish that I would have made all along, and I wish that nobody would have even heard of me until NOCTAMBULIST came out, because it literally was the ten-year mark, almost. And the ten thousand hours of finally learning what the hell I’m doing and to feel comfortable in being able to make a film successfully and have something that turns out. But then I wouldn’t change anything for the world, because everything’s a learning tool, and it makes you who you are today. You know, it was tough, being under a magnifying glass as soon as... it’s tough to be examined when you still don’t even know exactly what you’re doing.”
NOCTAMBULIST, subtitled A TALE OF REFRACTING SHADOWS, follows the story of Zella’s struggle with her husband, initially set within what we can call the real world, a sequence of high-class 1920’s parties, cars, and affluence, but seen through a darker lens. Rather than exemplifying the male characters of old noir films, Daggers lets the overtly misogynist spirit of the time leak into his story, especially when Stellan decides to have the doctor medicate her into submission. Once Zella goes under, we’re then introduced to a second world, a dream world that delves directly into some truly amazing sequences clearly influenced by German Expressionism. We bounce back and forth between the two worlds, sometimes not sure which world we’re actually in or not.
Silent film requires a lot of visual storytelling, outside of the text placards that tend to give us the jist of a much larger conversation, normally. Ironically, Daggers had to use a lot of editing to get the modern, sleek, high-resolution cameras of today to look like films from the time period, but it’s a beautiful product when it’s done. Especially when combined with the excellent sets, great costuming, and well-chosen music. You might think all of this would be a super-expensive proposition, but fate has a way of following the consummate artist around.
JOHNNY: “When things fall into place, they just really fall in place. And that just happened with NOCTAMBULIST. I mean, not only did I finally know my craft, I felt well enough to make a film like ‘Noctambulist’. It’s really funny, because I was doing a music video, for a gentlemen a couple of years back. It was right after I moved to Maryland. I usually don’t do music videos, but it was a friend of a friend who was in a band, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign on. I’ll do it. But we needed a makeup artist and a hairstylist.’ And, you know, I was new to the area, didn’t know anybody.”
JOHNNY: “Somehow, I became connected with this wonderful lady by the name of Buffy Roman Fox, who was a hairstylist, and she was going to work on the music video. Once I had written the script for NOCTAMBULIST, I had reached out to Buffy and said, ‘You know, I don’t know anybody in the area. I’m working on this 1920s German Expressionist film, and I just need to be introduced to people with locations and so forth. She said, ‘You know, two of my best friends, Bonnie Shipley Peele and Steve Summerland, their whole entire house is furnished with 1920s antiquities. So let me just reach out to them. You know, see if they’d be interested in helping out.’ Because in the independent world, when you don’t have the money, it’s all about connections and networking. Most people are just happy to help for me just to be a part of a film.”
JOHNNY: “So, Buffy reached out to Bonnie and Steve, then we had a meeting together, and they were super enthused about it, and this is prior to me ever going to their home. I remember one day, Buffy and I are driving out, I think maybe it was the first time to meet Bonnie and Steve, or the second time, and I said, ‘Boy, you know, I really wish that I had access to like a swamp, or this murky water area with cattails and creepy trees and stuff.’ And she’s like, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Bonnie and Steve also have that in their backyard of their house.’ I’m like, really? So, their house is already completely furnished with 1920s antiquities.”
JOHNNY: “The way that the movie was written, you know, I needed an early 1920s Model A. Just happened to find a guy. He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I have an era-appropriate car. If you need to use it, go ahead.’ And it was like, literally, like, everything fell into place. It was like the props, the locations, the cars, and just felt like I was strong enough to tell that story and film it properly. Everything just fell into place. I don’t know how else to explain it other than it was serendipitous. It was like everything was meant to be with that film.”
JOHNNY: “And so after I was introduced to Bonnie and Steve, that had the 1920s antiquities, and had the bog and all that stuff, I was like, ‘Boy, you know what, like, I literally just canned two actresses for the lead.’ And they were like, ‘You know, our daughter would be perfect. She used to be an actress on “Dawson’s Creek”, back in the day.’”
I’m not one who believes in miracles or fate. I often think we invent the stories of our successes after we accomplish them. But I also think, as one good friend once said, that the cosmos sometimes winks at us in bizarre ways. It’s hard not to think there’s something bigger going on. However, I tend to trust Seneca’s maxim that “luck is when preparation meets opportunity”, and NOCTAMBULIST is what happens when Johnny’s consistent, if sometimes difficult commitment to the craft meets a series of opportunities. NOCTAMBULIST could easily have been much worse, but instead we get a genuine film, in a new or perhaps rediscovered genre, that still manages to tread new ground. It’s an intimidating proposition for any filmmaker, especially one as self-critical as Johnny.
JOHNNY: “It’s kind of, I’m kind of intimidated. Not, I’m again, not saying, I would never say that anything I do is the greatest film in the world, but as far as what I’ve done, it’s definitely the best thing that I’ve ever done, and I hope that I can live up to it. I don’t want it to be like a one-off for me, so to speak, like, I don’t want that to be, like, that’s the only film I ever got right, and it was just a fluke or something.”
JOHNNY: “With my next film, which I’m keeping very low-key. I’m not mentioning anything about it. Just because the script is so original, that I’m afraid that somebody might run with that idea and film it before I do. So, all that I will divulge about the film is that it’s going to be in color, shot in 4K, high-def. It’s going to have audio and not anything you would expect from a Johnny Daggers film. But the underlying story, if you just take a look at the story, has a very strong noir presence.”
Thankfully, Johnny’s going to continue making movies, and I can’t wait to see where his expanding filmography takes him next.
NOCTAMBULIST is a unique film, melding noir and horror films together into a taut psychological thriller that pays homage to German Expressionism in the best ways. It has some rough parts, and may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is a high quality, well-made film that takes risks where so many others dare not. Silent film fans, or noir fans, or German Expressionist fans owe it to themselves to check out this film. And anyone looking for something different from most of what’s available today.
Rotten Tomatoes: NR
Metacritic: NR
One Movie Punch: 7.6/10
NOCTAMBULIST (2019) is not rated and is currently playing on Amazon Prime.
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