What To Watch After ‘Mandy’ Has Blown Your Mind And Made Your Halloween

Cinema is still full of surprises. For the longest time I never believed any filmmaker would make as sincere a whack-job of a bad movie as Plan Nine From Outer Space, the 1959 monument from Ed Wood; and yet, in 2003, along came Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, an equally earnest and equally hilarious misconception of narrative, film language, and so much more. I never thought I’d encounter a genuine non-laughable cult and/or midnight movie with the aesthetic resonance and emotional trippiness of David Lynch’s 1977 Eraserhead, either, but this year brought us Mandy, a beautiful, mind-bending art-house fever dream variation on early ’80s exploitation movies, directed by Panos Cosmatos and featuring mesmeric performances from Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache.

If you’ve read the reviews (and I wrote one of them, over at the New York Times), you know the outline: a bearded logger lives in a dark wood with his fantasy-genre-novel reading girl; said girl is abducted by a small deadly cult that ultimately deals her doom; bearded logger becomes sword-forging, demon-slaying avenger, in a landscape that increasingly looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

In my review of the movie I wrote, “In its various genre allusions, it draws from a deep, idiosyncratic well. But […] it is not a film that winks at the audience with its cleverness.” The films to which it refers seem, instead, to be a part a Mandy overmind, the remembrances of dreams the characters themselves may have had. And any one of these movies, or a group watched binge-style, would make good companions to the movie.

I mentioned Eraserhead above; in one Mandy scene, when the title character, played by Riseborough, is walking through some woods, she comes upon the well-preserved corpse of a young animal; its head, seen in closeup, looks like that movie’s legendary “baby” (the origin of which Lynch never revealed). Later in the movie, Roache, as the despicable cult leader Jeremiah, screeches at Mandy “Don’t you fucking look at me!” deliberately echoing Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth, the crazed villain of Lynch’s 1987 Blue Velvet.

Another precedent for Jeremiah’s character is the cult leader Walker, who leads a mass suicide that years later plagues lead character Cynthia with the titular Bad Dreams, an underrated 1988 horror movie. Walker is one of the more intense characters embodied by the late, great Richard Lynch. With his mascara and his rockstar pretentions, Jeremiah also has a touch of Alice Cooper, who parlayed his shock-rock persona into an acting gig for John Carpenter in the phantasmagoric, slightly campy sci-fi/horror hybrid Prince of Darkness, from 1987. I’m not the first person to point out that the perversity and super-strength of the “demons” with whom Nicolas Cage’s Red does battle brings to mind Hellraiser, or that their speeding cycles and ATVs hark back to Mad Max (as does, indeed, the plot template to which Mandy adheres).

The sword and sorcery vibe of Mandy is also strong, and when I asked the movie’s co-screenwriter Aaron Stewart-Ahn about the pictures he and Cosmatos were thinking of when crafting the twisted tale, I was not surprised that he brought up classics such as Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian, not to mention Krull. The evocations of magic in the John-Boorman-directed Excalibur have a real darkness beneath their humor, while Conan and Krull bring to cinematic life the ornate fantasy illustrations Mandy makes at home, and which decorate the covers of the paperback novels she reads.  On the cheesier side of influences, there’s also Hawk the Slayer, a low-budget affair that raises the stakes of its threadbare production values (or at least tries to) with over-the-top performances from the likes of Jack Palance.

Stewart-Ahn also told me that he and Cosmatos also discussed 1989’s Cyborg, an early Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle from the legendary schlock-factory-with-aspirations studio  Cannon. It is indeed magnificently cheesy post-apocalyptic fare. Director Albert Pyun evokes a lot of desolate faux-majesty  with junkyard set-dressing and little fires dotting an ostensible urban hellscape, that of a future world of privation and plague. This gonzo concoction also names its  characters after guitars: Van Damme plays Gibson Rickenbacker, while Vincent Klyn plays creepy villain Fender Tremolo, who in an early voiceover proclaims “I like this world.” Despite its obviously low budget, it aspires to mythic scale and has a crucifixion scene that rivals Mel Gibson’s torture sequences in the likes of Lethal Weapon or Braveheart for onscreen masochism.

A movie like Cyborg will cover the exploitation angle well, but what about art? Mad Max and all its sequels have strong art-film touches to be sure, but I also saw in Mandy the influences of Russian directors Aleksandr Sokurov and Andrei Tarkovsky. The lens flares and monochromatic views of some of Sokurov’s films, such as Mother and Son and extending into later work like Moloch and The Sun, clearly inform Cosmatos’ shooting mode for Mandy. And Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, enigmatic sci-fi explorations, inform the pacing of Mandy and its treatment of environments. They, too, are mind-expanding, in a measure both more meditative and also galvanic.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny  reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com , the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Mandy