Is The Jar (1984) a horror movie about a man possessed by a demon? Or, is it an art film in which a man loses his grasp of reality? Like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci at their most eccentric, Bruce Toscano’s The Jar synthesizes these two questions and offers an off-kilter genre film as a response. But because The Jar was made on a tiny budget in Denver, in 1984, rather than in Rome with a studio-budget a decade earlier, the film has had a very difficult time finding a cult audience. A Red Letter Media episode from 2015 making fun of the film epitomizes how The Jar has developed an audience that is unwilling to take its challenges seriously. Judging from a survey of horror blog reviews, even many genre fans consider it to be “one of the worst of the worst.”
Toscano’s film begins with Paul (Gary Wallace) driving down a dark road and hitting an old man with his car. He proceeds to give the man, who holds a package, a ride back to his apartment and invites him in, but once inside, the passenger suddenly vanishes. The scenes of Paul driving are lit in a stylized manner, with Paul glowing green, the old man a demonic red, and the car bathed in blue. Opening up the package left behind, Paul finds a jar containing a strange entity. While The Jar begins on a strange note, after this moment the film abandons reality altogether. Despite his wrung-out state, Paul ends up finding some degree of hope in meeting his neighbor, Crystal (Karin Sjoberg), who seems romantically interested in him.
The Jar does away with most of the material that makes up a well-made movie. Toscano’s cinematography took more care with its attention to color than framing, and the lighting changes drastically between shots. With their dialogue entirely dubbed in post-production, Wallace and Sjoberg speak as though they learned their lines one syllable at a time. These qualities add to the nightmarish feel of the film. The slow pacing and sparse dialogue let Toscano’s own score, made with analog synthesizers, take control of its mood. This mood of desperate disassociation hangs over The Jar and is amplified by Paul’s dreams about religious fantasies and the Vietnam War. Toscano opts to shock his viewers with mindfuck after mindfuck, and never offers any explanations. Instead of a narrative, he holds out a disturbed state of mind for viewers to inhabit over the course of 90 minutes. Its strangeness is truly uncompromising and Spectacle Theater’s revival feels like a real discovery.
The Jar screens tonight, November 21, and on November 25, at Spectacle Theater.
