Horror Fans Should Be Bowing Down To "Mad God"
Phil Tippett's stop-motion animated feature film is the best thing to happen to the genre in a very long time
By Eric Shorey
I always thought the concept of The Sublime was pretty boring. Philosophers of aesthetics have been obsessed with the idea ever since Edmund Burke expounded upon it in his 1756 essay “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Yawn!
I’ll sum it up for you real fast: basically, Burke wanted to draw attention to the ways in which the category of “the beautiful” is limited to aesthetically pleasurable experiences and couldn’t possibly capture the overwhelming combination of terror and wonder evoked by certain experiences in and beyond our world. Like the vastness of nature or the void of the night sky. Or whatever.
I guess, implicit in this idea was that the ugly and the beautiful served as a complimentary binary and The Sublime was something else, or somehow both. I’m probably oversimplifying it.
I always found The Sublime to be kind of annoying, not only because of all the intellectual hand-wringing, but also because the beautiful and the ugly never really seemed opposed to me. As J.G. Ballard tells us: the colors of a bruise are both beautiful and ugly. But they’re probably not Sublime.
Avowed horror fans have always been willing to find beauty in the ugly: whether it’s the eye-catching neon blood of Suspiria or the hideously poetic cursed video of The Ring. Isn’t this, like, Pinhead’s whole thing? Pleasure and pain were never that far apart to begin with.
This is a rather long-winded way to get to talking about Mad God, a stop-motion animated film directed by Phil Tippett that debuted last month on Shudder. Mad God is an 85 minute — more or less non-narrative — descent into Hell.
I’m sure that as the movie garners a cult following, an entire mythos will develop around the film and its cursed creation: it supposedly took 30 years to complete after various stops and starts and budget crises. Some sources say Tippett suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of movie’s toil, which would make sense given the imagery.
I bring up the yin and yang of beauty and ugliness because in no world could Tippett’s creations be called beautiful. The monsters that populate his various netherworlds are pus-oozing, puking, melting, boiling, shitting, bubbling, and copulating grotesqueries that are as astoundingly nasty as they are well made. Demons and creatures swing their dripping genitals around while crushing hapless wandering souls cursed to eternal drudgery. A mad surgeon digs his hands into a corpse for several minutes, tearing out organs before tossing them onto the floor.
But it wouldn’t be right to call the movie ugly either. The care and craft of each ghastly creature is so meticulous, every hair on their shit-stained bodies animated with such precision and accuracy, every putrid bodily fluid concocted with such awe-inspiring attention to detail. It would be astoundingly beautiful, if it weren’t all so obviously vile. I caught myself gasping and oh-my-fucking-god’ing several time, like when a new pit or cavern was revealed, unveiling some rotten, unimaginable terror or infernal nightmare. I truly couldn’t believe what I was watching. How many movies really do that anymore?
I will begrudgingly admit that perhaps this was a kind of Sublime experience: the scope and scale of the monsters and backgrounds are truly breathtaking. In one scene, where the film’s abominable explorer (ostensibly the protagonist) passes through a hallway filled with demons being endlessly electrocuted to death, I was stunned when the camera pulled back to reveal the fiends were absolutely enormous — building-sized atrocities and aberrations. Later, as the nameless protagonist descends in an elevator, he passes the skull of some ancient alien being, seemingly the size of a building.
And although Mad God is relentless in its diabolical revelations, there were moments of quiet that stood out amongst the visual cacophony. One layer of Hell is filled with nothing other than piles of abandoned suitcases: a metaphor for the wandering souls? An allusion to the melancholic displays of shoes left behind in the Holocaust? In another moment, a Sisyphean creature reaches out to the explorer silently, as if begging for help. The protagonist pauses for a moment, considering… something — before some filthy chimera snatches the hopeless being and stomps him ‘til his guts splatter against a wall.
There are maybe a few moments of unfortunate steampunk cliches: a lazily designed plague mask-wearing witch features as a prominent character in the film’s second act. Lots of doll heads. (Some reviewers complained that a few instances where IRL actors were inserted into the film took them out of the movie’s world — this didn’t bother me.) It’s all excusable considering the sheer creativity of the rest of the film.
Tippett made a name for himself as a special effects designer and consultant on big budget movies like the original Star Wars trilogy, the Twilight films, and Jurassic Park. It makes one wonder what other artistic geniuses have been held back in Hollywood for the sake of creating uber-profitable, toyetic trash for mega-corporations. No one’s actually interested in real art, ya know? One could similarly use the film as an argument for the return to practical effects — the whole thing could rightfully be read as a rebuke of the soulless CGI garbage that populates blockbusters nowadays.
Mad God will inevitably be compared to non-narrative animated films like Pink Floyd’s The Wall — which is insulting to Tippet’s genius and artistry. It might also be contrasted to Burton’s animated oeuvre, with which it has nothing in common other than the medium of stop motion itself. It’s probably closer to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain in pure insanity — although even that comparison is pretty off. Truly, it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.
Horror fans have been clamoring for something new but have instead been given endless lazy remakes, reboots, and reimaginings. Now that something fresh — and actually frightening — has finally arrived, will they even pay attention?
FINAL JUDGEMENT: A+
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