Creature Cast

30 Days of Night by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith

2012-02-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

I love comic books.

Cartoon strips were the first stories I fell in love with. As a very small child my folks read picture books to me and it was a natural transition into the Calvin and Hobbes books that I still love and revere to this day.

One fine day, I was out grocery shopping with my mom and I saw and Archie's Digest on one of the spinner racks between the thing and the other thing. I loved the stories and will defend them to this day, and when my father came home from work that night I asked him if he would pick up another issue from the comic store next door.

He bought me an entire box of 70s-era Archie comics. My dad was that kind of guy.

When I hit age nine, give or take, Marvel released trading cards of their heroes. The images on the cards were crisp and vibrant and the character bios on the back were fascinating. Plus you got little sport-stat assessments of the character' intelligence and fighting ability. I left the clean, sexless, halcyon fields of Riverdale for the elaborate costume dramas of 616 Manhattan.

I kept reading comics throughout my childhood. I was not particularly bullied as a kid, but I had to eat shit a fair amount of shit for it. I like to think that the little bastards who teased me for loving Jim Lee-era X-Men books loved all the movies that came over the last ten years.

I've been going to comic book conventions ever since they were shady affairs held in church basements full of Comic Book Guys and pedophiles. Now they're somewhere between nerd Mardi Gras and heartless corporate marketing machines. Still, I love the medium. My pull list is about ten bucks a week, give or take.

I love them so much, I want to write comic books for a living.

Shhhh. It's a seeeeeecret.

Comic books have to be judged by a slightly different standard than prose. They are primarily a visual medium, they're often serialized so the story construction tends to be both longer form and paced in fits and starts.

They can be deep. Watchmen is deep. But Watchmen is probably the best American comic ever made. Most of the rest of the mainstream books are fight books between characters that have been teenagers and young adults for over fifty years.

The horror genre has a shaky history in the medium. It nearly killed comics during the panic in the fifties, the seventies saw the birth of the horror-themed superheroes, and the eighties saw the creation of the DC offshoot Vertigo and books like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, both of which are classics by any standard. Horror, however, is not a mainstream thing. Comics in America mean superheroes and savage cyber-killers, not monsters skulking in the dark.

I've seen it all. I've read it all. And I never got around to reading 30 Days of Night.

The reason I've never picked up 30 Days of Night is that I don't care for the art of Ben Templesmith.

I don't think it's bad art. It's definitely unique. It reminds me a lot of the fluid styles of David Mack, which borrows more from the fine art world than from the hidebound styles of comic draftspeople.

Experimentation is fine. Hell, I have a David Mack piece tattooed on my body. But I am not a particularly visual person and it's easy to lose me to overly clever artwork. Templesmith's style is too fluid. Frankly, I have no idea what the hell is going on most of the time. And it's also somewhat of a bad fit for Steve Niles, one of the only purely horror writers in the medium.

30 Days of Night is a fairly straightforward vampire yarn. There's a town in the arctic circle that stays dark for a month, so a bunch of vampires decide to throw a celebratory massacre and invite some of their big leaders. The rest of the story becomes a struggle between frightened survivors and the squabbling vampires.

It's....a'ight. A bit character-lite, not a lot of surprises, pretty to look at. Some of the vampires are nifty. Nice bittersweet ending but it ultimately feels a little bit hollow.

The one interesting thing that stood out was the conflict between the vampires. The younger vampires organized the whole party. The older vampires they invited to impress are furious with them for drawing attention to their existence and because the whole event is, by elitist snooty vampire standards, tacky. I love that stuff.

I've discussed in the blog how I learned my storytelling chops from running role playing games and the very first game I picked up was Vampire: the Masquerade. Long and the short, the Masquerade is the law in vampire society prohibiting its members from revealing their existence to humanity.

I love this stuff. It's the only way vampires work in modern society and I'm pretty sure that White Wolf Games' product line helped kick start the whole urban fantasy thing.

So, there ya go. It was pretty good for what it was. It was worth the four bucks I spent but I don't really see it shaking any new ground in my vision of vampires.

"Hey, vampires can't be out in daylight. Let's set it some place where night never comes."

And they did.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

2012-02-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

This is not a commentary.

This is me planting my standard in the ground and declaring war.

Come at me, motherfuckers.

Recently I got into a conversation with someone else in my program about why people deride genre fiction over literary fiction. I usually hate this conversation. My MFA program is geared toward writing popular fiction and I hear people bitching about literary fiction, claiming literary fiction is just as formulaic as genre fiction, and proudly claiming that they never read anything that crosses the gaze of the elitist literati that snub their noses at our lovingly crafted tales of wizards and robots and vampires and little old ladies snooping around the hedgerows. These sorts of sentiments reek of insecurity but recently I've been asking myself about those lines and how I'm going to define those terms for myself.

Part of me feels that the terms are ultimately meaningless. Good writing is good writing. Good writing is about ideas. It challenges the mind, it has something interesting to say and an engaging way of saying it. It challenges the heart. The lyricism of the words move the spirit and affect the emotions deeply. Good writing changes the perception of the reader. I've been deeply affected by stories of families in small towns and in stories of people fighting off zombies.

I will say that most genre fiction tends to aim low. I will say that most genre fiction tends to be unambitious in conception and execution. Sometimes that's fine. The general stereotype of genre fiction is that it's more focused on plot than on psychological depth. Sometimes I like that. I can bitch about the construction of the Drizzt books 'till the cows come home, but there's a reason my Skyrim character is a two sword-wielding drow ranger.

In short, I think people read their genre fiction to get their guilty pleasure kicks, then they read their Jonathan Safran Foers and Dave Eggers for their high minded stuff.

But there are some writers who work within genre conventions and create works of deep emotional resonance, whose writing leaves me staring out into space. It's a real pleasure to discover their work.

Long and the short, I love Clive Barker. He's my hero, he's the reason I do what I do, and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. Plain and simple.

There is nothing original about Rawhead Rex but, as any good comedian will tell you, it's not about the joke but how you deliver it.

I can't help but notice that a lot of the books assigned to the monsters in literature class deal with monsters as a thinly disguised gender metaphor. The widows of Breeding Ground were....I guess....supposed to be the wrath of women, the werewolves of The Wolfman are a couple of Oedipal figures fighting to see who gets to fuck the pretty girl. The symbols aren't directly addressed, but they're there. Barker states it up front: Rawhead Rex is a symbol of destructive masculine energy. He wrecks shit, degrades his acolytes through peeing on them, feels surges of sexual energy, masturbates on things, and generally acts unbound. He mocks the virgin shepherd because the fear of sexuality inherit in all Christianity lacks the vigor to defeat him but he's subdued and beaten by the symbol of femininity, which negates his virility and allows him to be smashed by the townsfolk.

He's also not an idiot. Most of the monsters are pure id. They wreck shit and get angry but they aren't much more than wild animals with a couple of superpowers and a scary mask. Rawhead wrecked shit too, but he acted like he was entitled to it. He's an old thing, bound by old rules and governed by primal symbolism but he's a king. It's a refreshingly new angle to see an ancient evil and it works astonishingly well.

I'm betting the two things that freaked people out in the story was all the descriptions of male erections and the child eating stuff.

Barker is aware and actively engaged in the symbolism behind his monster. As Rawhead smashes through a farmhouse in pursuit of a mother, Barker calls it exactly what it is: thinly disguised rape scenes. Most horror violence is deeply sexual, but most horror writers, frankly, suck at writing sexuality. Ask 'em to write a bloody murder and they're fine, but when they do a sex scene their stuff falls in a spectrum between scared little boy and mean-spirited little boy. Personally, I blame our religiously repressed, messed-up culture that gives violent movies and 'R' rating but if Michael Fassbender shows his penis the movie gets an 'NC-17.'

The horror in this story has teeth. It has sexuality. It's not coy about the human body and it doesn't treat it as something divorces from our sense of fear. As for the eaten kids, is there anything more terrifying to an adult?

Rawhead Rex is a great story.

I like the artistry and the nuances behind it. Clive Barker does this stuff correctly.

Now I'm gonna troll my fellow student's pages and pick fights.

It's on.

The Wolfman by Jonathan Maberry

2012-02-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Oh my god I am so friggin' pretentious.

I do most of my course reading on the M-train commute to work. I live in Bushwick and pass through Williamsburg, heart of the Brooklyn hipster universe. Every morning I see the same familiar flannel shirt-tight jeans-ironic facial hair crowd reading Murakami and listening to Animal Collective or Das Racist or whatever. They're a pretty literate bunch, too. There are all sorts of tiny rituals involved in riding the subways and one of them involves sizing up what people are reading. When I first came to NYC, everyone was reading the Dragon Tattoo series. These days it's mostly the Game of Throne books.

Nobody's reading a novelization of a failed horror flick.

I'd see people give my book the once-over and I could almost hear that checkout counter this-does-not-compute WONK sound. For the first few rides I just wanted to plead with people: "No, you don't understand! Maberry is a really good writer! And I have to read this cuz the madman I'm taking the class from assigned this to us!"

Eventually I took to covering the cover with my bookmark while I read. It was just easier.

I really, really didn't get this assignment.

I saw the movie back in the day and I can't remember any of the plot. It was one of those 'meh' films, instantly forgotten immediately after consumption. I remember that Benicio Del Toro was miscast, Anthony Hopkins was in high camp mode, and the movie's attempt to recapture the feel of classic Universal Horror was crushed under the curdling weight of studio mediocrity.

I had zero interest in reading this book and, frankly, I thought you were nuts to assign it.

Turns out the novelization was a zillion times better.

I like werewolves okay. They make a strong metaphor for our unchained animalistic desires and they fit in extraordinarily well in straight-laced, repressive Victorian England. During the residency, I pushed forward the theory that monsters are ultimately about our polarizing desires between freedom and conformity. There's a part of us that wants to be free, even if it is completely damaging to the world around us, and there's a part of us that wants to be safe and cheers when the free thing is destroyed. I found the chapters of the wolf's rampages exhilarating. In the really-real world, I'd hate to be responsible for the violent death of dozens of people, but there's something primal in my psyche that had a lot of fun with the wolfman's gory exultation.

I like gothic stories. I like crumbing old manors full of mysteries, crazy children, mysterious deaths, and dark secrets slowly unfurling in the foggy moors.

I like stories where the werewolves are barely-disguised Oedipal complex figures battling it out to have sex with their in-law. It's so squicky!

I like the whole Goddess of the Hunt thing. It's a clever way for the characters to conceptualize the full moon.

I like decadent actors. They made living in Astoria fun. They break out into song in the middle of Two Boots, they're flirts because they're needy and they're pretty because it's part of the job. I like the world Lawrence inhabits, even if he is kind of a wet blanket.

I recently chewed apart Breeding Ground for its lack of ambition and I kind of feel like a hypocrite for not attacking The Wolfman in the same way. The difference is, I feel, style and missed opportunity. Every aspect of Breeding Ground lead me to believe it was going to say something deeper and more interesting about gender products. Even ignoring the shaky plotting, too many opportunities were missed.

The Wolfman set out to tell a gothic werewolf story and Maberry told it well. It ain't perfect, it didn't change my perspective of werewolves the way Alan Moore did with "The Curse" or the way the film Ginger Snaps did, but I liked the story. Werewolf stories are often ultimately terminal disease stories and I felt sad to see Talbot go.

It was, of course, better than the movie.

Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

2012-02-05T09:37:00.001-08:00

The disease is carried in male sperm.

We presume that Matt and Chloe are in a sexual relationship and Katie is untouched by the diesase until after she makes love to Matt. Once they have sex, she starts to change. The poison in his system begins to affect her and it's a slow descent into....

No. Matt also hooks up with Rebecca, she doesn't become infected, and they suddenly decide they're in love and their baby is going to breathe new human life into a spider-ravaged world.

Okay, scratch that.

It's about the fear of pregnancy. The creatures are birthed from women, their gestation uses a lot of squicky imagery we associate with pregnancy: there's a life growing inside me, it's making me nuts, and it will kill me once it comes out. These are powerful fears that are often difficult for a male reader to wrap my head around.

Except...not really. The creation of these creatures don't really go past the gory dynamics of their birth. Aside from a few "there's something wrong with my baby" riffs, it's not much more than a gross image. Sure, it's tapping some psychological buttons that a lot of readers are likely to have, but it doesn't seem to go beyond "everyone's freaked out about this stuff on some level, let's go with pregnant women birthing spiders." It reminds me of those jump scares in horror movies: everyone can be started by loud noises in dark rooms, but it ultimately doesn't mean much.

OOOOH! I got it! It's about gender dynamics. The creatures in the book are unquestionably human-level sentient. They have plans, they have an agenda, and they're not very nice. When the story starts, it seems like the poor beleagured menfolk are under siege. Their formerly domesticated partners have "died" metaphorically, shedding the trappings of domesticity and subservience under their male partners. The book begins with a bunch of befuddled men from different parts of society watching their patriarchal structures dissolve around them. Oooh, and here come some uninfected females! Better watch out, they might look like they're on our side now, but pretty soon they're going to become spider lesbian feminazis reading Steinem and Anais Nin and listening to Ani DiFranco while they open up vegan cafes in Boulder Colorado with their life partner Dillon...

Nope. Eventually, the males start turning into spiders. It's just a plain-old extinction event.

Time to scratch my head. Disease? Oh god, I got lumps. I'm gaining weight in weird places. I'm becoming angry. Powerful stuff, but there's not much beyond the symptoms. People get freaked out, then they die.

Hm. Is it about humanity with our backs against the wall? Could be. Those stories are popular these days. They appeal to people's hysteria and bizarre narcissism (I'm in agreement with Jon Hodgman on this one: post-apocalypse stories are ultimately wish fulfillment). Yeah, everything is fucked. Look how it all falls apart when the lights go out and spider things skitter towards us in the darkness..

Except....it's really badly thought out apocalypse. Like, really, really bad.

Okay, that's dramatic. It's a fine enough yarn. Things happen, people get eaten, it's in the British countryside so everyone calls each other "mate" and there are no handguns and there are Tescos instead of Walgreens. But it's waaaaay too aware of other post-apocalypse stories. Pinborough bypasses that whole oh-my-god-what's-happening-here-are-the-evacuation-plans-oh-wait-they-don't-work. We go straight into desolate Road Warrior country. The only hint we have that there is any sort of formal inquiry into the odd happenings is a completely illogical scene where a doctor gives Chloe a perfunctory examination, blows her off, then goes and gets drunk. No radio broadcast, no "keep calm and carry on." Matt escapes from Chloe and everything and everyone is gone. Ghost town. Boom. Granted, England is a sad, desolate place where all hope dies under the crushing weight of gray skies, good conduct, and sexual repression, but at least have a humvee or two drive by. Drop leaflets from a plane. SOMEONE WOULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING!

Oh god. Does that mean.....is it....no......is Sara Pinborough only trying to tell another goddamned SCIENCE GONE MAD!!!! story?

Sure seems like it. "You faaaacking daft scientists, always messing with things and offending the natural order! I've 'alf a mind to give you a right kicking, so I do!"

"Oh you're bloody right! I'm so concerned by what I can do that I don't ever think of the ramifications of genetically engineering foods so that they will last longer and can therefore feed more people. My word and I daresay, this whole spider plague is my fault. Oh by jove I'm being devoured. What a sticky wicket!"

Guh.

I've gone on a rant about this before, but I HATE science-gone-mad stories. They're simplistic and regressive and reductive and remind me of why I hate horror.

Yep. You read that right. I hate horror.

Grain of salt, obvious. I'm getting a master's degree in horror fiction, I host a horror podcast, I've been to Transylvania, I started my high school horror club, I worked four seasons in a Halloween store and I've been to the Fangoria weekend of horrors a few times. I've earned my stripes. Having said that, fuck horror.

Horror is predominantly a conservative genre. While sci-fi looks to the future and imagines a world of possibilities and fantasy kills hours of my productivity (damn you, Skyrim!), horror is the sad-sack Strong Sad bemoaning change. Horror is the guy from the cornfield town with the religious upbringing and limited sexual experience who sorts out all his pissy little fears and seething sexual inadequacies in formulaic tales that remind us all to stay in our place because the big wide world is super-duper scary. Horror is Chucky Finster from Rugrats: "I don't know, guys. It looks scary. And we'll get in trouble."

Since starting my MFA program, I've come to appreciate the amount of effort that goes into writing a novel. It's hard. You gotta sit down and grind every. fucking. word. out. over the course of MONTHS. You miss things, it's lonely, and you fight a long internal battle with yourself to get something of merit down. Any book, successfully written is a herculean effort and I applaud Pinborough for the effort she put it. It is a failure, but it's a failure of ideas, not craftsmenwomanspidership.

I don't have much patience for this sort of book and I'm probably never going to pick up anything by Pinborough again.

It's unambitious. It's not trying say anything. It's not trying to do anything. It doesn't mean anything. There are a lot of other flaws to it that my fellow Setonians (Hillians?) covered. Who gives a shit about Matt? Nigel is set up to be a straw man jerk and I didn't care about his conflict with the group and the ultimately horrible and immoral way they let him die.

Spiders are scary. Here's a spider.

Post apocalypses are fun. Here's a post apocalypse.

Here's a bit of internal conflict.

Here's a couple relationships (to her credit, I did like the sex scene between Matt and Katie. I love reading female writers writing about sex from the male perspective and I thought she did a good job.)

Here's an ending where the book just....stops. We're done. Lights out. First round at the pub's on me, gents!

Meh.

(Post Script: I found an interview with Pinborough where she talks about Breeding Ground as a book full of interesting ideas. I'd read the HELL out of that version.)

The Funeral by Richard Matheson

2012-01-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

I don't really know what I'm supposed to add to The Funeral.

It's a very funny story. The temptation to be the zillionth Seton Hill commentator to point out the parallels to the song "Monster Mash" is just too damned easy. There's a bunch of monsters gathered around for the 'funeral' of one of their own number, everything goes tits-up, the strangely nebbish and easily shocked funeral director watches everything go south and nearly goes insane, things eventually settle down once the combative witches stop trying to pick fights, the 'corpse' thanks him for the quality presentation of the funeral, and the story ends with the funeral director accepting a request from an Unspeakable Horror From Beyond The Stars to set up his/her/its/fhtagn funeral.

Kicking the tires and lifting the hood of the story, this story tells me three things. One, nobody does absurdist comedy-of-manners style comedy better than the British and this feels like a VERY British story. If I were to steal this riff, I'd watch a lot of Blackadder or A Little Bit of Fry and Laurie. Second, it's not that hard to defang classic monsters. We've all seen them a hundred times before and we've internalized the lyrics to the point where the song is way too familiar. Forget the whole "Twilight ruined vampires foreeeeever" malarkey. Matheson proved back in the '60s that this shit is played out. Third, there's a lot of mileage to be had in monster comedy. As much as it is a comedy of manners, it's also a high-octane cartoon. There's pratfalls and bright colorful characters and an atmosphere of loony, over the top menace. This would make a bomb-ass movie.

Anyway, yeah, it's a damned fine yarn. I like monsters, I like Matheson, I like funny. I don't....I don't really know what I can add beyond that.

I Am Legend

2012-01-15T17:23:00.001-08:00

I started writing this drunk and finished it hung over. Welcome back, Seton Hill.

What am I talking about? Zombies? Vampires? A'ight.

So I was talking to one of my asshole hipster friends and we were lamenting the fact that nobody who is into pop culture seems to look at the roots of the things that they love. Nobody watches Casablanca or Citizen Kane or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Searchers unless they're forced to for film class.

Reading I Am Legend felt like going back to the roots of the whole zombie thing.

Okay, yeah, they're vampires. But the narrative is the same as a zombie story. Lone survivor, desperate circumstances, scrounging for what he needs to get by, and surviving on good old libertarian work ethics (he can maintain generators AND grow garlic AND fix cars AND fight monsters? Man, my ass would be dead in a minute.) Almost all zombie books are siege books and Robert Neville is clearly a man living under constant threat. The book opens with him checking the damage from the night before, repairing busted generator parts, and harvesting garlic from his greenhouse. We don't get the sense that the creatures hounding him are human, but Matheson is coy with the details. Rereading the book, I'm struck how Matheson did himself a disservice by sticking too close to the whole vampire thing. He seems like he's on the verge of creating a brand new monster, but he loses traction trying to fit all the classic vampire details into his narrative. When Romero took this story and made Night of the Living Dead, he was taking the story to the next natural level.

Where Matheson stumbles on the monsters, the construction of the story is brilliant. Zombie stories are actually really hard to pull off. They're siege stories, they're nihilistic, and they only end one of two ways: the heroes either find sanctuary or they get got. The situation isn't helped by the fact that modern creators have eschewed post-apocalyptic survivalist stories for rugged American high-octane machine gun power fantasies. The real threat in old school zombies stories isn't necessarily the zombies. The threat is the isolation, the paranoia, the inability to work together, and fact that our structures collapse in the face of the zombie threat.

Robert Neville is not necessarily an easy character to follow around. The isolation and constant threat has made him weird. He spends his days in a routine: fix, scrounge, and slay. He's tormented by the memory of his dead family, he's got weird sexual hang ups (shades of the dissatisfaction I felt reading Matheson's Hell House) and he's staying alive mostly out of habit. The narrative is fixed on his point of view and we feel trapped along with him. The first time he really opens up to us is when he tries to befriend and stray dog. Frankly, I think the story would have been better if it started with this interaction. It shows how far Neville has fallen from his humanity, especially when you stack it up with the more theatrical scenes of him beating his breast at his wife's grave.

The quibbles I have with the book are mostly minor. The dog scenes should have been first, the vampire stuff is ultimately superfluous, the "science" he comes up to explain the vampire condition is pretty half-baked and takes up too much time, and survival stories ultimately lose narrative flow in favor of the minutia of day-to-day getting by. But Matheson not only creates and nails the zombie genre, he proceeds to end the story in the only logical place it could go.

I keep harping on the idea that the reason zombie stories are unique among the horror genre is that most horror is about the monster invading the normal world. It causes damage, we defeat it, the status quo is saved. Zombie stories are about the monster becoming the status quo. Simply by surviving in our world, the remaining humans become the monsters. Monsterism, therefore, is simply a question of context. In the new world being build by the mutants, Neville is the monster. He's the wild-eyed beast slaying creatures in the daylight. He is a thing to be feared and destroyed. It's a much deeper idea than survival stories, and Matheson created it at the beginning of the modern zombie myth.

A Christmas Carol

2011-12-02T11:55:00.000-08:00

When I saw that we had to read A Christmas Carol for class, I was gobsmacked. It fits the bill and it's appropriate for the season, but I approached it with a sense of exhaustion. I'd seen a zillion versions of the story, featuring yuppie Bill Murray and Muppets and Scrooge McDuck and Jean-Luc Picard. I felt like I knew the framework back and forth and I even had my snarky little opinion about the whole thing: he wasn't actually moved by the kindness of the human spirit into celebrating the holidays. He was just terrified into a death-row conversion.

One of the academics writing the introduction to the ebook version I read said that the value of reading the original work is that you can reexamine the character of Scrooge as he was meant to be written, before his cruelty was exaggerated for comic effect in later iterations of the story. The Ebenezer Scrooge I grew up was a hair's breath away from The Grinch. He was a cartoon character, cringing and hissing and cowering in his evil moments and tapping his heels together when he was happy.

Yes, the Scrooge in the book is much more toned down than the interpretations I've seen in other mediums. His miserliness isn't quite as screechy. He's just a cheap old bastard who doesn't have much use for other people. Whatever shell he built around his soul strips him of his humanity to the point where he doesn't feel the cold that nearly freezes his poor whipping boy of a clerk.

One of the nice things that I enjoy about discovering accessible classics is that you often find a shared spark of the collective human experience. When I read the scene of Scrooge chastising the men who came to collect for the poor, I heard the same perfectly rational and completely heartless arguments I hear fiscal conservatives sometimes make about poor people being poor because they're unwilling to work or undeserving of aid. It's the same sort of blanket statement minimalist bullshit you hear from people talking about welfare cheats and it's complete anathema to the spirit of the holidays.

What else is there to say? I liked the story, I liked that the spirits were slightly more mysterious and eerie than I always imagined them to be, and I liked the peculiar way Dickens wrote. I haven't read too much Victorian fiction but I've read a tremendous amount of stuff that parodies Victorian fiction and it's funny to see how oddly postmodern it scans to my modern sensibilities. Dickens is an odd mix of ominous narrator and focused POV storyteller, with the occasional asides to address the reader directly. It was jarring at first, but I eventually grooved to it.

I'm really happy I was forced to read this book.

I read somewhere recently that the vast majority of people who have claimed to watch classic movies like The Godfather haven't actually watched them. I don't actually think they're lying, but rather that the tropes and images of those movies have so completely invaded the public consciousness that we feel as though we've watched them from beginning to end. When I saw A Christmas Carol on the syllabus, I felt that feeling. What I needed to learn was that knowing the story doesn't mean you know the book. It's incredibly rewarding to see the tale directly through the eyes of the creator and to get a sense of what other creators drew from the source material.

Do you want to know the secret story of how A Christmas Carol ends?

I've been collecting comic books since I was a little kid. These days, the stories are geared toward mean old dudes like me, but back in the day they were a little more kid friendly. Marvel Comics released a Christmas Special back in 1991 that told the story of Franklin Richards, the young child of Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic. As he's going Christmas shopping with his mother, he spies an old man wearing Victorian era clothes and wrapped up in chains. He's Jacob Marley and he's decided to lie down into the New York City snow until he fades from existence. Through a bunch of self-sacrifice and courage, Franklin manages to break Marley's chains and everyone has a happy Christmas. It's a terribly sweet story and a wonderful coda for Dickens's book. Go check it out.

Paranormal Activity

2011-11-15T06:56:00.000-08:00

I feel really bad that I missed Paranormal Activity in theaters.

It was the one movie that I really should have made the effort to see. All the ads made this film look like the second coming of Leatherface. Remember these ads?

Yeah.

Anyway, the people who know me in real life were dying to find out my opinion on it. Unfortunately I missed it in theaters. Partially it was because I was a little intimidated by its supposed intensity, but mostly it was because I could never get the money and the time together. I'm sad I missed it in the theater because I would love to have seen it done properly. As it stands, I watched a DVD of it while on three different types of medication for an epic ear infection, which made the whole thing extra-surreal.

It's also making writing this review a challenge.

Anyway.

Is Paranormal Activity good? Depends on the audience. Kids who expect horror to be nothing but gore and jump-spike scares are gonna feel let down by this one. I liked it. It reminded me of how little you actually need to tell a scary story. The movie works just on sound and suggestion, on strong performances and a slow escalation of terror. Much like The Blair Witch Project, it's a movie that keeps a claustrophobic focus on the leads. In both movies, as shit begins to unravel, I really came to dread nightfall and the terrible escalation of the demon's assault. If that's your cuppa tea, go check it out. Final Girl's reviews are here and here, with a less-gushing one by Flick Filosopher.

The other thing I took away from the movie is the characterization of Micah and Katie, the doomed couple who find their suburban San Diego home under siege. Micah is one of those take-charge alpha male idiots who sees the supernatural siege as something he treat like a home-improvement project. He constantly shines on and ignores poor haunted Katie and refuses to accept help or treat the threat with any degree of caution or respect. He's basically the pushy jerk in every slasher film that dies the most horribly, only fleshed out and broadened into a real character. Our sympathy really lies with poor Katie, torn between a jerky boyfriend and a menacing spirit. Perhaps she courts her doom by not being assertive enough, but they're both people I can believe in. That's the kind of stuff I like: characters that exist as something other than knife-bait.

Go check it out, as it's probably one of the most important American horror films of the last few years. While you're at it, wish me a speedy recovery from this miserable ear infection. Also, for the record, I liked the theatrical ending more than the alternate DVD ending.

Grave's End by Elaine Mercado

2011-11-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

Maaaaaan, I hate these conversations.

So you tell people you're a horror writer and they're all like, "Do you believe in ghosts?" and internally you're all like "Do you ask fantasy fans if they believe in elves?" (but then you catch yourself in a contradiction because you've met some fantasy people who really really really believe in elves and you just want to ask them if high school was really that bad) but you're all polite and deferential and you say "well, I don't actually believe in ghosts but they make good stories" and then someone who's been waiting to pounce on the conversation the way Hobbes pounces on Calvin when he comes home from school butts in and says "Well I saw a thing one time and felt a presence one time and my dad died but I knew he was there and we lived in a haunted house as a kid and I lost my virginity to an Inuit spirit named Pridefoot" and they look at you with a hint of defiance and challenge in their eyes because if you say you don't believe them then you're calling them a liar or crazy to their face and you're challenging something special they experienced that has subtext of mortality, which is the biggest scariest thing of all beyond turning out like your parents and you say something evasive and inadvertently but unavoidably condescending like "Well, I believe YOU believe that you saw something" and there's a rift in the conversation because they're saying something completely fantastic and they can't back it up and you just can't buy it so you go back to safer conversation topics like why the Tea Party are a bunch of uneducated old fart hypocrites for raising cain about the Occupy Wall Street crowd and why the Catholic Church no longer has any right to claim any sort of moral authority because of of institutionalized practices stretching over decades covering up the abuse of children in their care and you know you're a) not getting laid that night, b) no one is going to invite you back, c) you're not allowed to have any more G&Ts and you're stuck drinking from the Miller High Life like you're a 15 year old and d) you are somehow the dickhead because people, even snotty rational atheists like you, need something irrational to believe in and all you've done is piss in everyone's Ovaltine at the party by pointing out the obvious, which is that you're making some damn fantastic claims and that witness testimony is super subjective and people who have certain personality types are more likely to see fantastical explanations to things and confirmation bias is a thing and our minds release chemicals when we confirm our suppositions and that has a narcotic effect and blah blah blah.

Good for you.

I believe that Elaine Mercado believes something was inhabiting her home in Grave's End.

I believe that Elaine Mercado admits in her book that she's prone to panic attacks and night terrors and things like that. I believe her when she reports that her husband and children report very different views on what she experiences, specifically that they are either skeptical at points or believe that the presence in her home is benevolent which makes me wonder about whether or not her tendency to feeling anxiety might be more fine tuned than the people around her. I believe that she discussed her failing marriage and her children maturing in a way that would lead me to believe that there was a lot of turmoil in her life and that might influence her perception of events. I believe that she has religious beliefs that are not necessarily at odds with belief in spirits haunting her home and one thing can feed the other. I believe that she chronicled what appeared to me to be a series of minor events over the course of ten-plus years that could easily be interpreted in a variety of ways over that time. And, not to kick too hard, I believe that a woman who appears on paranormal shows and pursues work as a clinical hypnotherapist, which is a heavily debunked field, might have a variety of reasons to tell this story this way.

And, given that paranormal expert Hans Holzer is the one who pushed the bullshit Indian burial ground story in the Amityville haunting forward, I have to say my skeptic's alarm kept going off.

But, if I were to meet her in a party or meet someone who held her beliefs, I would probably say "I believe YOU believe it's true."

And then I'd change the subject. Man, I'm a firm believer in gay rights. How about you, fundie weirdo?

As far as paranormal things go, it's a pretty good story. Mercado is a good writer. I felt a lot of sympathy for what she was going through. The whole thing doesn't reek of opportunistic profiteering that The Amityville Horror did, and it's a pretty damned good story of a middle aged woman trying to start over. Little balls of light and trapped miners don't mean much to me, but this woman getting out of a bad marriage, beginning a new career, and raising kids meant a lot more. I kinda barreled over her perception of experiences in my previous little tirade but I was totally on her side through the challenges in her life. She seems like a smart, sensitive, caring woman. She and I share different belief systems, but she seems like a cool woman.

In fact, I will say this about the book. When she's talking about ghosts, I kinda blinked out. When she talks about herself, I was completely engaged. I rocketed through it in a couple days of erratic reading.

It was a good story.

Gentle reader, you can probably assume that this is another assigned reading for my ghost story class. It is.

I know you're reading this, Professor Scott.

When I read the syllabus and saw we were doing "true haunting" books, my alarm bells went off. I know you're a paranormal investigator and I've seen you tell a mean true-life ghost story. I was worried that my opinionated dickhead skepticism was going to flare up and you were going to flunk me or go all kajukenbo on my ass. In the back of my head, I was all "man, we're a literature class, what are we doing reading a bunch of pseudoscience?"

I did learn a lot from it. I learned how believers expect these stories to be structured, how belief reflects what we see, and how our funny little minds work when we're frightened in our homes, how much chaos rests in the center of our spirits. It was an interesting read.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm taking Pridefoot out on a date tonight. She called me last week on a ouija board and I think it could work this time. We're gonna see Paranormal Activity. Please don't kick my ass at the next residency.

The Amityville Horror

2011-11-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

Of course it's all fake.

The hauntings that occur in The Amityville Horror are so reliable and violent and...well...obvious that it would left the fringe-y world of parapsychology and become the darling of the scientific community. Things fly, devil pigs talk to children, bugs fill rooms for no reason, stuff flies around and crashes like a low-rent air show. It's all very dramatic and impressive and I'm absolutely mystified that anyone took this book seriously.

I came into The Amityville Horror knowing it was bunk. Besides my natural and intense skepticism, I have a friend who is very active in the skeptic and debunking community. He sent me a bunch of articles and podcasts dealing with the Warrens, paranormal investigators who sound like a couple of crass opportunists, and George Lutz, the homeowner who sounds like a crass opportunist with a screw loose. Before I opened page one, I knew I was dealing with a work of fiction.

Strangely enough, that made the book more palatable.

A lot of horror tales boldly declare they're based on trues stories. It's a part of ghost stories. "We're just down the way from where that girl scout with the lazy eye and hare lip killed the rest of her troupe with a lacrosse stick" or whatever variation you'd care to hear. It lends veracity to the tale, as well as chillingly suggests that it could happen again.

So, whatever. You wanna say you're a true account? Oooookay. I'll be your huckleberry.

The core problem with The Amityville Horror is that it tries to have it's cake and eat it too.

The book tells a lurid story. Mass murders, cursed priests, satanic malevolence, and all that good EC comics stuff makes for a great ghastly tale. Unfortunately, the book reads like it's trying to maintain the pretense of straightforward journalism. Part of it is due to the weaknesses of Jay Anson's style, which can be politely described as leaning toward the hyperbolic. Part of it is due to the fact that it's not really structured like a linear narrative. It's more a series of vignettes. Every chapter is essentially a self-contained story. A bunch of spooky shit happens, the parents act like utter cocks, the priest wheedles and moans and bitches out again, and something really scary happens and a bunch of exclamation points start sprouting on the page like mushrooms on a dry old turd. Not to trash too hard on the man's efforts, which had some nifty imagery and works as a fun beach towel/bedside table book, but it's not much of a narrative.

The only real character is the priest. The parents are sketched out so vaguely that I can't tell if their rising temper at each other and their kids is due to supernatural malevolence or simple bridge-and-tunnel douchebaggery. The priest gets the most pages and most of them portray a cowardly, indecisive Hamlet, forever vacillating on whether or not to help the family and passing off responsibility by appealing to his conservative superiors. Frankly, he comes off like a punk. Fuck that guy.

Speaking of which, I'm noticing a theme in these books.

Between this and Grave's End which is another true life account of the supernatural, I can't help but notice something in the inhabitants of these haunted houses. Both of the books deal with deeply religious people and I can't help but believe people with a strong attachment to believing in gods don't have much of a problem making a jump to believing in ghosts.

Just sayin'.

The movie was much better.

In describing The Amityville Horror in his seminal non-fiction book on the genre, Stephen King called it one of the first "economic horror stories." Think about it. You buy a new house that should be waaaaay out of your price range, you make some rough peace with the fact that people died horribly in there, then you move in and the pipes fill up with black oil and doors rip of their frames and rooms fill up with bugs and the nastiness just keeps escalating. You can't really deal with a fixer-upper when it is actively working against you.

It kinda made sense to me as a kid but it makes a whole lot more sense now. A week ago, I moved into a new apartment in Bushwick. I'm just another hipster kid gentrifying a neighborhood, but it's hard work building a home. It's a tiny room in a basement that was never meant to house people. There is no ventilation in the place, there is no closet, my stuff doesn't fit in the room, the stove barely works, and there's a bunch of teenagers running a craps game going on in front of my place. Yet somehow I gotta make it work. And it's much easier than if some dead asshole started turning over my furniture and knocking over the cheap ass canvas wardrobe I had to buy to keep my stuff.

The movie focuses on that aspect of the tale. The priest is barely in the movie, the family is likable, the performances are good, and shit gets real intense.

Watch the movie. Skip the book.

The Lovely Bones

2011-10-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

There's an argument that The Lovely Bones is a gimmicky book. It's a tale of the disintegration of a grieving family told from the point of view of their murdered daughter. As she watches her family up from heaven with a sort of passive Buddha-like idiot benevolence, we become a sort of voyeur into one family's turmoil. It's pain porn, it's grand guignol melodrama. The story is mostly formless, a series of vignettes dipping in and out of the family's life over the course of several years. The reader doesn't even get to experience a good vicarious sense of vengeance when the murderer gets got. There's no violent death at the hands of a righteous family member or apprehension at the hands of dogged police pursuit. Instead, you get a tale of love and loss, intimacy and regret, growing up and growing old.

I enjoyed the hell out of it.

As I was reading the book, I started to realize that the framing device of the heavenly narrator wasn't actually necessary. She's dead when we meet her, she doesn't seem particularly angry at her murderer (which makes later declarations of outrage hit an oddly false note) and she sort of loves everything and everyone without hesitation. Yes, there is a scene where she inhabits the body of a friend to share a first kiss with her high school sweetheart, but I started to realize that that I had become emotionally invested in the family enough that I didn't need a serene POV walking me through the story.

Still it's unique and dreamy. It feels like the voice of a teenage girl; at once emotionally raw, completely honest, and self-mythologizing. I get harped on a lot in my writing (legitimately so) for injecting too much of an omniscient narrator into my book, and it hit me that author Alice Sebold figured out the perfect way to do this. Susie has a very intimate view of her family, but is distant enough to comment on their behavior as a narrator.

I can't help but feel like I'm going to get in trouble for this, but did anyone else think that Susie's mother was being a self-indulgent asshole for running away from her family?

I mean, okay, her father was entirely too fixated and sloppy about how he went about gathering information on the creep who killed his daughter. And families do fall apart after tragedies like this. But it also seems to me that screwing around behind your husband's back and running away in the manner she did was just straight messed up.

I was at a wedding the other day and, after a few trips to the open bar, me and my fellow bachelors who'd managed to avoid the garter belt were standing around and discussing the wonders of dating women. Someone...okay, me...said that the tricky thing about dating women was that there's a part of them that's always locked away, that always stares at you from across from a great distance. You can try as hard as you like but you can never quite get all the way close to them.

Sexist? Maybe. But when people talk about the mysteries of women, I sometimes think this is what they're talking about.

I tried watching the movie, which was a horrible idea. Aside from the murder and the beatdown in the cornfield and the break in at the murderer's house, not much happens in the story. When Petey Jay directed the flick, he really jazzed up the scenes in Heaven, but the book doesn't focus too much on Susie's afterlife, so tremendous amounts of quality character stuff gets lost in the razzle dazzle world of the movie.

A shame. This is really good stuff. I recommend this book for anyone with a taste for melodrama and a love of strong characterization. I'm going to take a lot away from this book. I hope you do, too.

The Others

2011-10-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

SPOILER BITCHES, THEY'RE ALL DEAD!

Everyone's dead. The heroine? Dead. The weird kids? Dead. The help? Dead. The missing father? Dead. About the only people who aren't dead are the people we're supposed to be afraid of.

That's the shit I remember from watching this movie from the first time I saw it. I remember the dreary British estate, perpetually shrouded in fog. I remember Nicole Kidman all sexified in her uptight little Victorian coats. I remembered it being slow and subtle and kinda gimmicky. The problem with movies featuring Big Tweest Endings is that any future viewings of the movie always being about watching the twist being set up and the narrative turns into one big puzzle to be solved.

I was not looking forward to rewatching the movie. My first experience was pleasant but mild, like eating New York Mexican food (yeah, eat a dick NYC. You don't do everything the best. WEST COAST BITCHES!!!!) and the thought of being locked up in my house watching a bunch of uptight religious Brits dealing with unnamed dread sounded wiggidy wack.

Well shit. Now it's one of my favorite ghost movies of all time.

First off, you HAVE to see this film in the proper environment. You need to see it in a theater or, barring that, on the biggest TV you can find. This film needs your full attention. Unlike something like the Dawn of the Dead remake, which you can half-pay attention to while giving sex advice to Steve Carell, you need to enter into the atmosphere completely. The movie creates a very fragile, ephemeral air that would get ripped apart like a spider web spun on a speaker that starts playing Pitbull's "Get Me Everything."

Strained simile, I know, but I got a word count to hit and I just bought the album like 20 minutes ago.

Anyway, the reason this movie works much better than I expected it to on the second viewing is that it's absolutely lactating with gothic dread. The house is a silent, dark place, lorded over by an uptight religious matriarch of questionable sanity who never quite loses our sympathies. The kids are equally engaging; one a rebellious little firebrand you can't help but root for and the other a little scaredy cat we just want to take to our ponderous man-bosom and rock back and forth, gently reassuring him that everything will be okay. It's an atmosphere of secrets and sickness and understated malevolence. The patriarch is gone, only to come back in a shell shocked daze once his TARDIS malfunctions and drops him off at Drearydown Manors. The children have some weird vampire skin disease that renders them mortally vulnerable to sunlight. The mother coldly orders the new domestic staff around in a manner one would expect of a member of the aristocracy, laying out draconian rules and regulations for them to follow.

Then the weird sounds start echoing through the house. And the kids start making very close friends with imaginary people. You know the rest of the tune, do I really have to call it out?

The mystery is actually brilliantly constructed. The filmmakers play fair and all the reveals work in the context of the narrative. The twist doesn't come out of left field but it does a great job of coming from what had been previously established in the movie. Combine that with the old dark house and eerie, oppressive sense of dread and you have a solid Henry James-style ghost story. The bit where Kidman's character finds the book of posed photographs of dead bodies is absolutely chilling, as was the scene of the ghostly help speaking to the family from outside the door.

Even after you know the twist, when you go back and revisit the characters, you discover how well they are written and performed. For example, I really should have hated Gracie Stewart. She's deeply religious, controlling, and prone to smothering her kids with pillows. Yet for some reason she never fully lost my sympathies, even if there were some moments where she needed a whack upside the head. She had a pair of sick children, three weird caretakers, and a missing husband to worry about. She was a deeply sick woman, but also very loving. The scene where she recounts their murder and her suicide was deeply touching. Even the creepy caretakers were fantastic. They could easily have been stock characters, but Bertha Mills and her lot were a very odd combination of compassionate and menacing.

The Others is one of my favorite ghost stories of all time. I don't know if it's something I can watch more than a handful of times. The effect it creates is slow going and fragile, so it has to be experienced in the right settings, but it's still a helluva film. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes subtle eerie horror, old world ghost stories, and audiences who have a taste for sumptuous melancholy visuals.

Also, I want to give a bump to Childish Gambino, who's rich, lyrically complex music was blaring as I wrote this review. His whole album is available free here.

The Shining by Stephen King

2011-10-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

My old post for The Shining was unnecessarily verbose and boring, so I decided to make a podcast out of it.

Listen to it here.

If you don't feel up for it, here's the short version.

It's a classic for a good reason. King has a powerful grip on characterization.

Jack Torrance is an entitled, angry, self-pitying dick. I don't understand how Stephen King expects us to have sympathy for him.

I didn't buy that Wendy would have stayed with him.

And hedge monsters aren't scary.

Seriously, just listen to the podcast.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

2011-09-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

Because I am a little shit, and because I have a tendency to soak up and project hyperliberal dogmas of oppression and subjugation, my first thought after completing Peter Straub's seminal Ghost Story was "another goddamned horror novel about poor helpless men besieged by an eeeeevil woman."

On a very surface level, it's an accurate observation. The only two women to get any real screen time are the shapeshifter antagonist in her various guises and the wife of one of the protagonists, who is a cheatin' ice queen with a heart like shards of cold broken glass. The shapeshifter is a seductress kinda monster who uses her wiles to send men to their destruction. Her acolytes speak of her in reverent tones. She's eeeeevil because she makes men love her too much, but refuses to be subjugated by that love.

This is ultimately a boy's story about the one that got away, about impotent men cowering in the face of a female power. It's also pretty damned good.

I fully intend to be in the Chowder Society when I grow old.

One of the most popular tweets I ever...uh...tweeted (JoeAverageSF, if you're interested) was "I can't wait to be old. I want to be an old theatrically morbid man like Vincent Price." Well, I want to be like the Chowder Society, the four old men who get together and tell ghost stories, starting each one with the same eerie introduction, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?," followed by the response, "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..."

Eeeeeee! Creepy!

The old men in the story are really likable and engaging, the setting is genteel, and the tales they tell are genuinely eerie. This book plays toward my taste in quiet, evocative horror and the evil that descends on the gentle old professionals is slow and spooky and delightful.

As much as I enjoyed the book, and I really did, there are a couple things that bug me. It has the feeling of being improvised as the author went along. Antagonists that start out as distant and ghostly suddenly become little chatterboxes as they're encountered later. Behavior, motivations, and patterns shift, and people get a case of the stupids later in the book. There's also a certain aimless passivity to the heroes. They spend most of the book waiting to get got, rather than being proactive in any meaningful sense. The most dynamic step they take is to bring in the nephew of one of their murdered contemporaries, who appears to be haunted by the same spirit.

Speaking of the spirit, one of the big questions that bugged me about the book is the antagonist's motivations. She's an immortal shapeshifter who is clearly contemptuous of humanity, yet she wastes decades of her existence hassling four random chumps in an isolated small town? Really? Is her evil that banal and unimaginative? The story would have made more sense if she were an actual ghost haunting them because ghosts tend to fixate on a subject. The creature at the center of Ghost Story ultimately came off as petty.

I do want to make mention of something that I found sort of appealing, which was the relationship between Stella and Ricky Hawthorne.

I think we're living in an age where people are becoming more skeptical about the idea of monogamy. Maybe it's the fact that I'm safely ensconced in a bubble of Brooklyn dating, where being "friends with benefits" is too much commitment, and I'm a Dan Savage devotee who read Sex at Dawn a couple times, but my view of human relationships tends to be a little more...progressive than the mainstream.

Horror, as I've often said, is a fundamentally conservative genre. It's all about the status quo and it's often written by people who hold fairly traditionalist views. That attitude is often an asset, as horror is usually about drawing firm black-and-white lines between good and evil, but it tends to falter around deviations in human behavior.

Somehow, Ricky and Stella work. She cheats, he knows about it, and all seems well. On paper, it appears that she can't help herself and he loves her enough to tolerate it. I suppose to some people that would appear to be a catastrophic state of being, but they seem happy. It works for them, and I liked their dynamic, even if I felt she was a throwaway character.

One of the weird things I took away from reading Ghost Story was the fact that it was less effective as it became a more traditional horror novel.

As a tale of four old men, haunted by a tragedy, who find cathartic release by telling ghost stories to one another, it was a great, evocative book. Once they're knife-fighting developmentally disabled werewolf boys in movie theaters, the book became garish and kinda goofy. Still, the book works. I like the characters, I like their world, I liked the pacing (which was eerie, but not foot-draggingly slow), and I liked the little moments of creepy terror. The dreams, the visits from dead friends, the moments of isolation and menace were all wonderfully done.

I have a litmus test when I read horror fiction. First I look at the non-horror elements. Do they hang together? Are the characters compelling? Do I give a shit about who they are and how they interact and collide against each other? Basically, could they hold up in a book without the horror elements? I absolutely felt that Ghost Story passed this test. There are a lot of challenging, engaging characters and they were all richly detailed and fascinating.

The second part of my litmus test is studying the horror elements. Are they original, or at least engaging? Do they improve the human drama or do they just get in the way? Do they make sense? Are they scary? For me Ghost Story mostly passed the test. When the threat was more ephemeral, when the demon facing the the Chowder Society was more vaguely defined, it was an effective horror story. Once we got to know Eva Galli, she became more of an annoyance than anything else.

I was actually a little bit spooked as I read the book because many of the elements of the novel are very similar, and probably better done, to elements of the novel I'm writing for my MFA.

Old friends tied by strange social rituals and a violent crime. An ethereal menace that lurks in the shadows and begins a campaign of psychological warfare before striking with sudden, decisive violence. A strongly defined setting that the characters play off of and experience in their own unique ways.

Screw it. Straub can call a good tune. I will dance to it.

Overall, I give this book my bump. I enjoyed reading it and I think it's a solid introduction to Straub's key work. It's recommended for fans of more subdued, quiet horror.

Also, the movie is pretty good, too.

The Haunting of Hill House

2011-09-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

One of the unique things about my academic program is that it forces me to revisit my beloved genre with fresh eyes. Most horror fans are voracious devourers of their medium and many of the books and movies I'm assigned to read are works I've already visited in the past. There is a world of difference between being passively engaged in a book and being actively engaged in trying to autopsying the great works of horror and laying their guts open for the world to see.

Or, in less bullshitty falutin' terms, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House kicked my ass.

I'm writing a haunted house novel and it sucks because every time I read the prologue of Hill House, I say to myself "That's it. There's no point in writing another haunted house story. How the hell do you write an introduction that sets a mood of eerie, evocative dread that holds a candle to the subtle, imaginative menace of '....and whatever walked there, walked alone.'"

That shit is creeeeepy. We don't meet a specific, sentient menace. We don't have the dusty bones of Hugh Crain greeting the reader, announcing to us that he will be battering at the sanity of poor, doomed Eleanor. Hill House itself is not sane. The size, the vast interiors and the unnatural angles of the home reminded me of a Lovecraftian influence. I tend to hate stories where things have obvious origins and solutions. I feel horror works best with ambiguity, otherwise it becomes puzzle boxes you can open, selfish entities you can strike petty deals with.

I first read The Haunting of Hill House in my early teens, after Stephen King lavished great praise on it in Danse Macabre. People talked about its intense terror and the lurid and shocking underpinnings of lesbianism in the narrative, which attracted 14-year-old me like a pubescent fly to honey. I finished it, but it was a slog. I had gotten used to books with raised lettering and gory pictures on the cover. Hill House by comparison is understated and elegant. It depends on a person sitting alone in a parlor somewhere allowing the book to seduce them.

There were no decapitations by lion statue. There were no hot lesbian make out sessions between Eleanor and Theo. There was none of the lurid, juicy good stuff I loved in my other books. There was just a strange old house and the poor sucker who may or may not have deluded herself into taking her own life. It's all very gracious and subtle, strangely gentile, and I feel Hill House is the template that modern haunted house stories almost ceaselessly follow.

One of the more interesting things that struck me while I was rereading Hill House is how much Eleanor reminded me of Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of The Shining. I never quite bought that the novel's version of the character would have stayed with the self-loathing bully of a husband she found herself with, but the movie's version gave Wendy a strong sense of beaten-down passivity. She exists in a state of perpetual subservience to her husband's whims and makes excuses for his monstrous behavior.

Eleanor Vance struck me as someone desperately waiting for life to give her permission to being. People love harping on Theo's lesbianism, but I think the character appealed more to Eleanor because she was everything that Eleanor wasn't; free, independent, worldly, and confident. Eleanor pushed away from her dickish family in a fairly petty act of independence and her taste of freedom opened the door to a horrible seduction that lead to her doom.

Sure, the ending is an unhappy ending. I guess. Jack Torrance freezing in the snow is an unhappy ending. But ultimately both characters didn't belong in the world. One was too meek, the other too angry. Maybe it's a happy ending. Maybe they were both always ghosts, waiting for a real house to haunt.

Funny story about reading Hill House.

Unlike many horror fans, I'm a big old chicken. Always have been, always will be. I have a much higher tolerance for scares than a casual fan due to sheer overwhelming exposure, but it's not that hard to freak me out to the point where I'm awake at 4AM, staring up at the ceiling, trying not to over-imagine the causes of the noises in my nasty Brooklyn apartment. Because of this, I tend not to take my horror in optimal conditions. I read horror books on trains, watch horror movies at party events, and I get plenty drunk right before I stagger my way through haunted house theme parks (I once puked in a Leatherface set piece in a haunted house attraction in Los Angeles, but that's a story for another time.)

Anyway, I decided to change that up with Hill House. My only memories of it were the memories of a tasteless and stupid boy and I knew there was nothing particularly freaky or scary about it. So I decided to read the book on it's own terms. I kept a copy on my bed stand next to my nightlight and I read twenty pages or so a night before bed. Sitting in the dark, reading a quiet little book in a quiet little space, the story started getting to me.

I live in a party apartment in Brooklyn and we have drunk hipster loudmouths coming and going at all hours of the night. About a week ago, when I was finishing the book, I was laying down to sleep and my roommate's FWB started BANGING on the door. I immediately flashed back to the poor mousy Eleanor and I just about shot out of bed in sheer delightful terror.

The point of this story, aside from the fact that Williamsburg American Apparel zombies should stay away from cocaine and my front door, is that it's tremendously important to take horror stories in the correct context. If I simply read it every day on the subway I would have developed an intellectual appreciation for the craftsmanship of Shirley Jackson's writing, but the emotional impact of it would have been lost to me. Horror is meant for the dark. Keep it there.

Hell House by Richard Matheson

2011-08-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

While I was reading Hell House by Richard Matheson, I kept thinking to myself "Thank god I was born and raised in San Francisco after the sexual revolution."

Sex plays a HUGE part of this novel but it's the kind of sex horror writers from that era love to write about; 70 percent Penthouse Forum, 30 percent hand-wringing WASP-y sensibilities. Sexual repression runs rampant through the character's psyches and the evil spirits residing in the haunted house torment them with pornographic images, scenes of debauched orgies, and....gasp and shock and awe....a chapel with a crucifix equipped with a large erect penis. A woman has sex with a corpse (sorta) and is forced into having a lesbian encounter with the repressed young wife of the arrogant, impotent professor. The ghosts come from the Rob Zombie/Pazuzu dialogue school of Saying Really Foul Shit To Shock Conservative Sensibilities. I'm sure it was all terribly cage rattling to the sensibilities of some people, but to me the whole thing seemed juvenile.

I'm not scared of sex.

Okay, I'm scared of some of the real, practical stuff around sexuality that everyone is afraid of. Will I ever get laid again? Will I by any good at it? Will the person I get naked with take one look at my fat naked ass and laugh? But the novel seems to be written to rattle the cage of someone with a much more reserved outlook than my own. While I'm not the Marquis de Sade by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not rattled by most of the stuff on the page. I read my Dan Savage, I've lived in slutty cosmopolitan cities my whole life, I had my wild days, and I've walked through the Folsom Street Fair and "seen" (cough) more debauched shit than the book covers.

And all that stuff is done by normal people. Public sex, group sex, gay sex, all that stuff isn't done by depraved monsters rutting in the mud at the expense of their humanity. It's done by people. Ever notice how the most wild sex acts in horror fiction are always accompanied murder, as if the two things run hand in hand and it's a narrow line between murder and fucking? It's like the message is that really wild sex is always one-sided, predatory, and possessive, and there's little distinction between consensual wild rutting and cutting your partner's throat mid-coitus.

But, yeah, I'm not that repressed. I don't find sex particularly shocking or taboo-breaking, so when I read a description of a bunch of psychos fucking, all I can think is that the writer has issues and he assumes that I do too.

But then, that's just me.

Not to dog overmuch on Richard Matheson. I am a big fan. I've read a lot of his major work and a bunch of his stories and it's clear the debt that Stephen King owes to him. He's a great writer, Hell House was a very interesting and engaging book, but the view of sexuality at the core of the book didn't work for me. If the engine behind your horror story are taboos that the average slutty modern person doesn't share, you're gonna run out of steam early.

Reading the book, I couldn't help but think back to Clive Barker's work, particularly The Hellbound Heart. Barker has said that his work is meant to titillate as much as terrify and his stories are full of wild sexuality. But Barker doesn't approach the material the way most horror writers deal with sex. It's a part of his characters' experiences, not something to draw anxiety from. It feels more mature and in line with my sensibilities.

Oh, wait, in all this hot nonsense, I didn't actually synopsize the story.

Hell House tells the story of four paranormal investigators hired by a rich man to investigate the Belasco house, a haunted house of such dreadful malevolence that several previous investigative attempts have ended in tragedy. The noble group includes a beautiful clairvoyant with a new-agey take on Christian ideals, a polio-addled scientist and his significantly younger wife, and a previous survivor of one of the doomed earlier investigations. Each of them brings their own interpretation of the hauntings in the house and their safety and sanity is tested by the vicious spirit at the center of the house, a hedonistic deviant with a messianic complex.

It's impossible to ignore the obvious debt that this story owes to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which also has a group of deeply conflicted individuals trying to puzzle out a rational explanation to the supernatural events that surround them, but Matheson did a great job drawing out these characters. It's a hoary old truism that the best haunted house stories feature characters whose internal traumas power and fuel the hauntings, but the characters in Hell House are really engaging.

Florence, the former actress turned spiritual leader, is usually the sort of character I have a difficult time getting behind. She's essentially, in her own compassionate and gentle way, a religious fanatic of sorts. There's something slightly arrogant about her demeanor; she knows exactly what's going on in the house and the best way to combat it, and her unwillingness to critically examine her surroundings leads to her destruction. She's essentially the house's patsy and she completely buys the con game the house sells her. Yet despite all my complaints about her gullibility, I found myself admiring her courage and selflessness. She enters the house and reaches out to the spirits because she actually wants to help them, and she risks herself time and again to reach out to the "spirit" of the house's owner's son. For all her good intentions, her story ends in the most harsh way imaginable. Her eventual fate genuinely squicked me out, particularly due to the sexualized elements of it, but I got behind her and I found her heroic.

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, representing the calm rational world of science is Dr. Lionel Barrett. Unlike many science characters in these sorts of tales, he's not there to scoff rudely at evidence of the supernatural. He's a parapsychologist, but he's view of the source of the energy is refreshingly interesting. I liked his take on the occult and his fancy machine, which he believed would dissipate the energy in Hell House. I also liked his relationship with his wife. It was tender and affectionate, if sexless. One of my complaints on the story is that I felt Matheson doesn't set up the Barrett's bedroom woes early enough, but they work as an engaging and supportive couple. It's got a weird father/daughter dynamic going on and Edith is probably a big ol' confused closet case, but I felt they were portrayed realistically.

The other two characters, Ben Fischer and Edith Barrett, are well-defined and engaging. The shell-shocked man who survived a previous attack on the house and the neurotic wife of the doctor are heroic when needed, weak when called to be, and keep the tale humming along. They're good. Go read the book if you want to learn more.

One of my favorite aspect of the book is how well flushed-out the spirit haunting the house is. Most haunting stories are amorphous entities with ill-defined abilities and agendas. They exist to provide the creak in the floor, the rattling chains, and the whispered threat. Matheson paints Belasco in very specific strokes, with a very specific endgame and weaknesses to be exploited. He's very much a character in the story, at once powerful and ruined by his own egotism. In general, I like ambiguity and mystery, but I liked that Hell House represented a very clear antagonist with a very specific goal in messing with the heroes.

Hell House is a classic of horror literature. It's built like a Swiss pocket watch in its taut precision and was engaging on a craft and characterization level alone. The primary tools of horror the book used to rattle my cage leaned too much toward a melodramatic sexuality, which felt childish. Still, the book was definitely interesting and engaging. I'd recommend it to people who like solid haunted house stories.

Super 8

2011-06-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

I wasn't all that excited about Super 8.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Spielberg softie as much as the next guy. And I do like a heartfelt tale of scrappy kids and monsters. But I'm not a big J.J. Abrams fan and the ad campaign seemed like it was trying to recapture the mojo from Cloverfield. We know there's something terrible in the train, we know there are going to be a bunch of jump scares, but we're left in the dark beyond that. The marketing campaign worked for Cloverfield because it was new and novel and we knew it was a creature feature, but the same tricks didn't work for Super 8. Watching the trailer was more annoying than enticing.

I've seen Super 8 a couple of times now and it's pretty much what you'd expect it to be. There are some kids and a monster and it's trying real hard to be Spielberg. It's perfectly engaging and interesting and charming and all, but...I dunno. I simply don't care any more beyond that. The kid's tragedy was suitably tragic, the weird kids looked and acted perfectly weird, and the monster was monstrous. Don't get me wrong, the movie gets the job done and I didn't leave feeling ripped off. I left without feeling anything. It's weird to bitch about a movie that hits all the right notes, but I just didn't quite emotionally connect to it.

Rob Zombie's Commercial for Woolite

2011-06-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

That's right folks. The good people at Woolite tapped Rob Zombie to do a torture porn commercial for fabric softener.

Huh.

AV Club Presents: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre House

2011-06-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

Austin: The Texas Chain Saw... family restaurant?

So apparently the house they filmed the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre in is now a family diner.

Huh.

I've Got Blood On My Name

2011-05-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

Blood On My Name from Whitestone Motion Pictures on Vimeo.

I'm a big fan of westerns.

I'm a big fan of musicals.

I'm a big fan of horror.

I loved this.

Reposted from Io9.

The Grudge 3

2011-04-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

The Grudge 3 is a case of the filmmakers trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

Ju-On is one of my favorite horror movies of all time. It's effective, subtle, creepy, and absolutely merciless. It's one of my rainy day go-to films. It's comfort food.

I liked the American remake, though not enough to own it on DVD. I enjoyed the American sequel for what it was. But every instinct told me to avoid The Grudge 3. I saw the panel for it at Comic-Con and they had a couple of the fresh faced young actors talking up the movie. The clip they brought along was the boyfriend returning to the haunted apartment. The room is pitch dark, he stumbles forward for a few seconds, there's a heartbeat of eerie silence, then Kayako reaches forward in the darkness. Cue soundtrack-spike jump effect and the lights go back up.

Objectively it all worked very well, especially that creepy moment of silence before Kayako strikes, but there was something off about it. Maybe it was the fact that actor was too pretty or the moment felt too rote, but the scene felt a little off. Adding to my ambivalence was the fact that it was a direct-to-DVD sequel with no direct involvement from Grudge creator Takashi Shimizu. I wound up giving it a pass.

I've been on a huge yurei kick lately. I'm tinkering with a ghost story and I'm reading the excellent Suicide Forest miniseries from IDW so it felt like a good time to revisit the Saeki family.

The story begins with the last surviving kid from The Grudge 2. He's locked up in an insane asylum and terrified that Kayako is going to kill her. The doctors don't believe him and lock him in a padded cell. Unfortunately, he's not alone...

The intro to the movie is actually really scary, due in no small part to the kid's acting talent. I've seen a lot of poor souls lead to their deaths because no one believed them, but this kid was spectacular. He really pulled the scene off. The doctor feels responsible for his death and returns to the apartment that the Saeki family are currently haunting. In the meantime, the landlord's sickly kid sister starts seeing Toshio and a mysterious Japanese woman moves into the building. It doesn't take long before chicks start crawling down the stairs.

As a basic creepy ghost story, The Grudge 3 works perfectly fine. The actors are surprisingly good, the atmosphere is suitably eerie, and it hits all the right notes. The problem is that it doesn't really feel like a Grudge film.

My first problem with the movie is we see WAY too much of Kayako in it.

The original Ju-on keeps her mostly out of sight. She's an indistinct shape in the window or a shadow on the wall or an out-of-focus lurker in a background. The only time we get a long extended look at her is when she's crawling down the stairs. That scene still stands as one of the creepiest things I've ever seen on film. Here, she shows up waaaaay too often, that crawl thing is overplayed, and you see that it's just a women with a lot of white make up on.

The second big problem I had with the movie is that Kayako just doesn't belong in Chicago. I get that yurei aren't necessarily bound to a single physical haunted location, but the logic for having her jump national boundaries was a little bit flimsy. A bunch of dead Japanese people haunting a run-down Chicago building full of attractive white actors feels discordant.

Finally, one of the things I loves about the original Ju-On was the way it told its story in little vignettes. The whole story takes place over a couple generations and we see how the evil in the house affects different people in different circumstances. That makes the horror of Kayako leaner and more graceful and frees the tale from the typical narrative tropes that haunt the ghost subgenre. Here, the story has a straight forward narrative almost lifted out of screenwriting 101. The characters have relationships laden with issues they don't discuss until they are brought to a crisis point. It's actually pretty well written and acted, but sticking to a formula sacrifices some of the intensity of the horror.

Despite all my harping, I enjoyed The Grudge 3. It's got a decent story, some solid scares, and I was engaged in it from beginning to end. It's a good horror film, but I don't quite think it's a good Grudge film.

Call of the Dead Trailer

2011-04-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

I take back EVERYTHING I said about being sick of zombies.

Dibs on (Buffy) Machete!

Scream 4 (SPOILERS)

2011-04-18T08:44:00.001-07:00

You know, I have complained before about movies that wink too much to an audience of presumed horror fans, but Scream 4 takes it to a whole new level. In Roger Ebert's suprisingly positive review, he described the characters in the movie as being "preternatural in their detachment." Every character in the movie is so savvy and self aware, they become essentially audience surrogates commenting on themselves. They act so far removed from people genuine danger that the effect is disconcerting. The only person who is an actual character is poor, tormented Sidney Prescott.

I didn't really realize it until I watched this movie, but I think that Sidney Prescott is one of my favorite final girls of all time. She's definitely damaged from three encounters with film nerd serial killers, but she's got real steel in her spine. She stands up for herself, she fights back, but she never comes off as invincible or fearless. My favorite scene in the movie is the bit where her cousin's friend is being attacked next door and Sidney rushes out into the night to save her. Me, I'd be running the opposite damn direction. My only complaint with her is that I can't help but wonder why Sidney just doesn't leave town every time the killings start. Screwing with Sidney seems to be priority one with the Scream killers and leaving them derails their primary motivation.

I sat on the edge of my seat all through the movie, waiting for Sidney or Dewey or Gail to get it. It makes a mean sort of sense that the movie would bump them off to make way for the new generation. I was expecting it and I was really pissed about it. I came to realize that I really liked Scream's intrepid trio. Horror has very few memorable non-monster heroes and the trio didn't deserve to go out to service such a mediocre story (see: the death of Laurie Strode in that awful Halloween: Resurrection movie.)

Anyway, big spoilers here, Sidney's niece and one of the film nerds are the killer duo.

The film nerd is pretty dismissible. He's watched too many movies, can't tell the difference between right and wrong, and is snookered by his partner at the last minute. He's also got an incredibly slight frame and, like Sidney's cousin, it's very difficult to believe that they have the physical strength necessary to commit the murders.

Sidney's cousin is a much harder sell. Killer motivations in Scream movies are usually pretty lousy, but the idea that she is so enamored with Sidney's legacy that she's willing to kill her mother AND cousin to take her place is too farfetched. That's Hollywood-crazy, not real people crazy, and that's when the whole self-awareness thing stretches too far. It also doesn't help that she plays the final reel in histrionics worthy of a Justin Bieber crowd.

There's also one difference in the methodology of the new murderers: they're filming the killings as they take place, essentially making their own snuff film. This seems like a natural progression of the movie's themes, but ultimately very little is done with it. Scream movies exist in a very strange universe where the line between true crime and gory fantasy is very thin, and the public seems to crave more real world violence to happen so they can fictionalize and revel in it. I would have LOVED to see this played up more, but it's barely touched.

I get that Craven and Williamson were trying to comment on the remake craze sweeping through horror and the way that they do it is fairly clever, but the jokey self-referencing thing feels very 90s and stale. As I was watching the movie, I thought to myself that the only way to really reinvent the movie is to have a Ghostface with an entirely different motivation and voice. I want to see one who isn't playing to the camera, but one who is silent while his predecessors were chatty. There are still meat on dem bones, but not if they keep redoing the same thing over and over again.

I keep talking about the negatives of Scream 4, but ultimately I enjoyed watching it. Craven's movies are seldom bad and this one had enough wacky slasher antics to keep me entertained. It ultimately felt a bit disjointed. The film moved from set piece to set piece with little connecting them. It was fun to reunite with the heroic trio of Scream survivors and watch them beat up the two stupidest killers they've encountered yet, but it's not quite all there.

The big problem I had with Scream 4 was I'd just seen Insidious a week before. Scream 4 is basically fine and I don't feel cheated out of my money, but Insidious was a much more intense experience. Neither are particularly original films, but the raw craftsmanship and terrifying muscle behind Insidious won me over. It shaded my experience with Scream 4. I never jumped, never felt tense, and it never really got under my skin. It was fun to watch though.

Also, it ain't saying much, but Scream 4 was a lot better than Scream 3.

Anyway, here's an interview with Wes Craven. Also, below is the AV Club's video review. Enjoy!

John Carpenter Interview in the AV Club

2011-04-13T08:14:00.001-07:00

The AV Club just posted an interview with John Carpenter where he talks about the ups and downs of his career. It's a fascinating look at the way he views himself, but I can't help but feel sad for the guy. A lot of the things he's done only earned acclaim long after they were box office failures and that clearly wore him down. He's done with directing. Thanks for some of my favorite movies.

Insidious

2011-04-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

I keep trying to like James Wan's work more than I do.

There are moments in his movies that scare the utter shit out of me. There are few people working in the genre today who can do the drawn out, tense silence and the sudden sharp shock as well as he can. He's also a master at creating deeply unsettling images that drill themselves deep into my skin. I lost a good hour of sleep last night around five AM envisioning the creepy grandma from Insidious lurking under my bed. I think he's got the chops and I like that he sticks with the genre.

Yet despite his chops, I can't really get behind his movies. The screenplays are full of unengaging characters, weird tonal shifts, and frustrating plot holes. As a purely visceral experience, the movies are fine. As stories, they tend to be lacking. I've seen most of his major films, but I usually check them out on DVD.

Still, this season has been very dry for this little horror enthusiast and the word of mouth around Insidious has been surprisingly positive. I watched the movie last night and I can honestly say that Insidious is my favorite James Wan movie.

Insidious tells the story of a family who move into a haunted house. After the eldest child falls into a mysterious coma, the family becomes the victim of terrible hauntings. They flee their new home, only to discover that the ghost has followed them. In desperation, they turn to a psychic with an odd connection to the family.

The general consensus among all the reviewers I've read is that Insidious attempts nothing original, but it does the classics with style and verve. There are a lot of glib people out there who are saying that this movie is an all-but-in-name remake of Poltergeist, which isn't entirely untrue. It follows a similar narrative structure, with a slow set-up that puts the family in danger and targets a child, followed by the introduction of some comedic ghost hunters and a wise psychic who helps the family get through it all.

Insidious, however, has teeth. Between the long, creepy shots of silence and isolation and the genuinely terrifying ghost scares, this movie scared the bejeezus out of me. This is gonna be one of those movies I come back to, but only in well-lit rooms. I especially liked the now-famous eerie old lady in black, which reminded me of a similar creepy creation in Wan's deeply flawed Dead Silence film.

The movie's one point of genuine originality is the hero's journey into the Further, a shadowy reflection of our world where doomed souls wander. As he searches for his son, the father sees enough ghastly tableaus to fuel a dozen different horror films. It reminded me of the doomed landscapes of White Wolf's Wraith: The Oblivion role playing game. I loved seeing the world from the ghost's perspective, and the chilling images still make my skin crawl. Really, I could have spent an entire movie exploring the Further and it stands as the highlight of the movie for me.

As much as I enjoyed Insidious, it suffered from a few problems. The first was that there are three very large tonal shifts in the movie. The movie starts as a very conventional haunted house story, moves into a VERY exposition-heavy ghost hunter bit, and ends as more of a fantasy film. Each transition is very jarring and a lot of character threads get lost in each jump (most of the family disappears from the narrative by the second act.)

Second, the lead characters aren't particularly likable. Haunted house movies always have one person who doubts and the audience surrogate goes through the frustration of trying to convince them. In Insidious, this scene comes after a huge chunk of exposition that any rational person would have had a difficult time swallowing. Suddenly I felt tremendous sympathy for the poor, beleaguered rationalist who doesn't automatically believe in unquiet spirits and faraway lands of the dead. It didn't help that the wife came off as self-indulgent and high strung.

Insidious ain't perfect. People ding it for being unambitious, the writing is inconsistent, and the characterization is bland. But it succeeds on craft alone. It's a genuinely scary movie, done with tremendous style on a limited budget, and it stayed with me long after the final credits finished. I am probably going to come back to it, and I recommend it for anyone who likes a solid haunted house movie as well as anyone who likes Alice In Wonderland stories of people exploring strange places.

Finally, you ever notice how Wan's movies always have incredibly dark endings? Granted horror isn't exactly an optimist's genre, but his movies always have a sharp kick at the end. If you want a nice little final scare, wait until after the credits end.

The Confined : Silent Hill inspired fan film

2011-03-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Stolen from Kotaku.

This is apparently a segment from an upcoming Silent Hill-inspired fan film. I like it. It's eerie.

Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage

2011-03-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

Not that long ago, I participated in a discussion a criminal justice professor hosted about comic book fans' outlooks on crime and punishment. Among one of the questions the professor asked was who our favorite villains were. The obvious answers were thrown out (The Joker, Doctor Octopus, Magneto) when the question came around my direction. My answer was a little known Spider-Man villain known as Carnage.

Created in the 90s during the heyday of the comic industry's blood-soaked "iron age" Carnage was a serial killer fused with a alien symbiote who used his powers to slaughter great numbers of people. The high point of his career was the 14-part Maximum Carnage storyline, where he recruits a gang of killers for his largest rampage, tearing the heart out of the city. As the violence mounts and the city breaks out in riots caused by the psychic powers of one of Carnage's accomplices, Spider-Man finds himself allied with a motley crew of amoral anti-heroes and psychopaths and struggles to hold onto his ethics as the world burns around him and his allies push him to fight murder with murder.

The Maximum Carnage storyline started when I was 13 years old. I was already pretty deep into the horror genre at that point and I adored the storyline. It had a lot of the theatrics and sturm-und-drang that young dumb kids like. Carnage and his makeshift "family" don't any real agenda beyond butchering everyone they come across and the heart of the story is how Spider-man, a character prone to an almost self-flagellating level of doubt, is going to deal with such an elemental force of violence. His allies were all heroes of the 90s and had no compunctions against killing Carnage, so Spider-Man is torn between stopping Carnage and committing an act he might never be able to forgive himself for.

It was, indeed, one of Spider-Man's best horror stories.

I haven't read Maximum Carnage in years. I grew up and my tastes got better (some day I need to do an article about my relationship with Evil Ernie, then and now) but there was always some weird soft spot in my heart for Carnage's bloody rampage through Manhattan. I eventually caved and ordered a copy through Amazon.

It was a blast.

For me, part of the appeal of Carnage is that underneath all the blood red armor and nightmarish liquid skin, Cletus Kasady is a very petty and banal individual.

There's something ugly and sordid about Kasady. He bears a passing resemblance to Alan Moore's Rorschach character from Watchmen. In the supermodel-beautiful world of comic books, Cletus Kasady is very unattractive. He's drawn with very closed, nervous body language. In short, he comes off as the squirrelly, nervous kid who can't get a date and is planning something terrible.

In addition, Carnage is unique among supervillains in the fact that he's barely operating with any sort of grand scheme in mind. He's not a maniacal genius like Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom. He almost willfully avoids having any sort of plan or overarching goal and lashes out at any member of his "family" who suggests any sort of higher purpose to the mayhem. It's easy to attribute Carnage's aimlessness as trite storytelling, but I feel the apparent shallowness of his motive is away to process whatever happened in his childhood.

Supervillains with bad childhoods were a dime a dozen in the 90s, but most of them cheerfully announce their traumas while committing their evil schemes. Kasady, on the other hand, seems to have created the Carnage persona as an avatar to run away from himself. I think that the nightmarish trappings, the garish action scenes, and the damaged psyche of Kasady himself keeps me fascinated with Carnage.

Maximum Carnage is pretty much the only kind of story you can tell with the Carnage character. His very first story arc is actually a better tale, but it's more confined and intimate and personal. Turning Carnage loose in New York City with a gang of killers, including one who can cause normal civilians to go mad, turns him into an elemental force of nature.

Strangely enough, the one character who comes off the worst in Maximum Carnage is Spider-Man himself. The dramatic crux of the narrative is that Spidey is forced to recruit allies who have less qualms about killing and he's forced to try to restrain his partners as he fights alongside them. His restraint, coupled with his almost self-flagellating sense of responsibility, make him heroic when fighting characters like Dr. Octopus or The Vulture, who do nothing more than rob banks and seduce Aunt May. Unfortunately, his extreme morality comes off as impotent when faced with a threat like Carnage.

There are several instances in the story where Carnage is at the heroes' mercy. As one of the anti-heroes move in for the kill, Spidey steps in with some wheedling "we don't need to sink to their level" speech. The anti-heroes begin fighting, Carnage escapes, and his murder spree continues. I suppose the writers were trying to paint Spidey as morally superior to his allies, but I can't help but feel that it would have been more morally correct to stop Carnage once and for all. He kills dozens of people after each escape and that seems like a very high price for the world to pay so Spidey can feel good about himself.

From what I've read, the writers cooked up the conflict as a way to contrast Spider-Man with the new breed of bloodthirsty heroes popular in the early 90s. Unfortunately, Spider-Man doesn't look good in the comparison. He comes off as a meddler and you get the sense the insanity gripping New York would have been handled a lot sooner if he didn't try to help

This type of story isn't for everyone. The writing is really melodramatic and hackneyed and bad (the bad guys are defeated in the 11th hour by a gun that shoots love) but it's a lot of fun to read. It's a superhero story, full of breathless exposition and punch-ups and childish morality, with just enough of an edge to push it into dark territory.

The Maximum Carnage storyline remains controversial among Spidey fans. Complaints range from it being too long and too cluttered to the story being far too grim for the title character. Still, Maximum Carnage is a completely engrossing read that was one of the stepping stones on the path to horror fandom.

Classics Mutilated

2011-03-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

I couldn't really get on board the whole monster-lit thing.

On paper, it's a neat idea. Take all those tepid, boring old novels we read in junior high, add a couple ninjas and a horror from beyond, and BLAMMO! instant pop-novel trend. When I'd heard about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I haunted bookstore after bookstore trying to find a copy. Ultimately, I couldn't quite finish it. I found the juxtaposition too jarring and I was constantly being pulled out of the narrative by the constantly shifting writing styles.

My best friend gave me a copy of Classics Mutilated, the monster-lit anthology. In the introduction, editor Jeff Conner wrote about drawing inspiration from the mash-up music scene. I dig the same sort of of music (go check out Bootie's website for examples) and I eagerly settled into the stories.

Anyway, I like to review anthologies on a story-by-story basis. Most anthologies, especially ones by different authors tend not to have strong thematic ties beyond their core subject matter. Also, it's fun to nitpick. So with that, my review of the tales of Classics Mutilated.

The Fairest of Them All: It makes some sense to start the anthology with an Alice in Wonderland/Sleeping Beauty/Cthulhu mash-up. All are well loved, all are very imaginative works, and all have strong imagery. Still, there's some truth to the old chestnut about too many cooks spoiling the pot and this story is a good example of a mash-up gone wrong. Too much stuff goes on, too many things need to be explained, and the story gets lost in the details. Finally, the writer shoehorns Alice so hard into the villain role that his interpretation bore little resemblance to the original character.

All in all, not a good start.

Anne-Droid of Green Gables: I adored this story. Steampunk ain't really my cup of tea and I've never read the Anne of Green Gables stories, but this story crackled with warmth and charm. There's a tendency in genre fiction to tell big, bombastic stories of violence and lust and death, but this story of a family coming together and embracing a curious little robot absolutely charmed me.

Little Women in Black: Eeeeeeeerie. I don't quite have an idea about what the hell is going on in this piece, but the characterization is strong and the horror is creepy and mysterious. I'm gonna dig out more Rick Hautala stories after this.

Death Stopped For Miss Dickinson: 15 year old me would have loved this story. Chronicling the emotionally rich love affair between Emily Dickinson and the specter of Death, this story is florid and melodramatic and moody. As an adult, I find the Gothic trappings a bit overwrought, but there's something in this story that kept me hooked. Plus, the author clearly has a great reverence for Dickinson's work and threads the poems into the narrative.

Twilight of the Gods: Riffing on both the Twilight series and Norse mythology, this clever little parody boasts some of the funniest, most charming storytelling of the book. Loki replaces the Bella character and his rakishly sociopathic take on her romance is absolutely hilarious. Of all the stories in the book, this is the one I'm most likely to recommend to people.

Pokky Man: Probably the most unique mash-up in the book, Pokky Man explores the Pokemon universe through Werner Herzog's famous documentary Grizzly Man. The story follows a former trainer who has become obsessed with the Pokemon and attempts to live among them, leading to tragedy and terrible revelations for the Pokemon universe.

There's a good argument to be made that this is the best story in the anthology. Many of the mash-ups are little more than gimmicks cleverly done, but filtering the sterile, consequence free world of Pokemon through the obsession Herzog portrayed in his tale. At first it's a simple parody, but the trainer's eventual fate is incredibly eerie in the context of his world. The writer of this story works in the video game industry and his wealth of knowledge of the game's universe brings the horror to life.

Vicious: There are a couple of stories in the book dealing with rock stars and their legacies. It's not hard to see why; rock stars create their own grand, larger-than-life mythology and it's easy to add a little magic into their lives.

Vicious absolutely works as a character study. The writer is clearly a fan of Vicious' self-destructive persona and captures his voice and personality very well, spiraling between the arrogant highs and self-loathing lows of a junkie rock star. While I don't know if it's a hundred percent authentic, it captures the flavor of the man. The story itself isn't quite as good. It's not so much of a plot and more a series of shitty magical things that happens to Vicious during the New Orleans leg of the tour. Still, it's definitely worth reading for the strength of the writing.

The Happiest Hell on Earth: Probably the most ambitious and imaginative story in the book, Happiest Hell crosses Dr. Moreau's island of vivisected freaks with the colorful world of Walt Disney.

Prior to reading the story, I never really realized how much The Island of Dr. Moreau got under my skin. The process of creating the hybrids is absolutely horrible, and the painfully unnatural way the creatures live made me cringe. Once they leave the island for Hollywood, the story begins to feel too crowded and rushed. There are a lot of ideas in the piece and it feels like it should be a novel. It's a fine story otherwise and one of the best examples of mash-up monster lit fiction in the book.

From Hell's Heart: I grew up reading Nancy Collins' vampire adventure stories. They were Urban Fantasy before the genre became all saturated and florid. Her take on the insane Captain Ahab is a fun pulp-feeling adventure riff, with fast action and tons of suspense. I rocketed through the story in record time although in making Ahab a mournful protagonist, Collins loses a lot of the insanity that is the hallmark of the character. Still, anyone who can't dig a story about a hellbound mariner stabbing a wendigo with a magical harpoon ain't someone I want to know.

Frankenbilly: Frankly, there wasn't enough Western stories in this book and I was happy to see Frankenbilly in the list. This remake of Interview with a Vampire as told by a reanimated Billy the Kid doesn't always work. It feels a bit like the story got away from the writer about midway through. Fortunately, the dialogue is crisp and the story is just goofily absurd enough to remain engaging throughout.

The Green Menace: In some ways this story works and in some ways it absolutely doesn't. On one hand, it's a fun little tale about a group of lakeside vacationers besieged by killer frogs cooked up by a former Nazi scientist. It's tense but never needlessly grim and it's a blast to read. On the other hand, one of the characters is disgraced former Senator and commie-hunter Joe McCarthy. In reading the notes on the story, writer Thomas Tessier said that he wanted to put a man who was a master at commanding fear into a terrifying situation. Unfortunately, that aspect of McCarthy's character never really comes out and he reads as nothing more than an unpleasant dude with too many guns. As a mash-up it's not much of a success but it works just fine as a fun action yarn.

Quoth the Rock Star: The low point in the anthology, this floridly-written tale of the meeting between Jim Morrison and Edgar Allan Poe features a fight between their two spirits, manifested as a raven and a lizard. By that point, my eyes glazed over.

Dread Island: The famous closer to the piece, Dread Island is Joe Lansdale's fusion of Huckleberry Finn, Cthulhu, and the stories of Uncle Remus. It's a tense horror tale, full of terrible places, apocalyptic fury, and hungry gods in the sky.

Lansdale, to his credit, doesn't attempt to ape Mark Twain. Lansdale writes like Lansdale, and his take on Huckleberry Finn rings authentic. Long time fans of Lansdale's work (he's one of my favorite writers) will recognize a lot of the tropes with his other stories, but this one holds together very well. My one complaint is that it requires more knowledge of the source material than I had, especially with the surprise cameos by famous people throughout history. Still, it's a fine adventure horror yarn.

I'm not really big on anthologies in general. Most of them are wildly inconsistent and it takes effort for me to constantly get reinvested in a new story. But Classics Mutilated is a strong collection of tales. This stuff probably works better in a shorter format anyway, before the absurdity of the individual tales causes them to collapse upon itself.

I'd recommend this book for monster-lit fans, people who like really quirky writing, and anyone who wants to see Huck Finn escape the clutches of Cthulhu himself.

Detention Trailer

2011-03-03T09:48:00.001-08:00

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Okay, this looks pretty good. In a year that's as dry as this, I'll take anything.

Well, maybe not. I did skip over The Rite.

Castlevania: Lord of Shadows

2011-02-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

Castlevania was less a video game and more of an epic quest.

I've spent over a month playing through the game. I've ascended the peaks of Heaven, I've battled demons and vampires, I've unlocked ancient mechanisms, and I've done battle with the devil himself. At times, the game felt endless and I felt that poor Gabriel Belmont would never see the end of his journey.

Two days ago I finally saw the end of the game. And I'm really sad to see it go.

Zero Punctuation is pretty harsh on the game. Sure, Castlevania is basically a God of War rip-off, but originality was never the video game industry's strong point. At this point, GoW has been ripped off a dozen times, but never with this much style.

You take control of Gabriel Belmont, the (likely) progenitor of the legendary vampire hunting clan. We meet him as he's on the quest to rid the world of three darklords and avenge the death of his beloved wife. His journey takes him through many dark and exotic landscapes, from the spires of Castle Frankenstein to the very gates of hell itself. As your quest leads you deeper and deeper into damnation, you discover the terrible secrets linking the House of Belmont to their age-old adversary, the vampire lord Dracula.

I tend to approach most media, whether films, games, or comic books, from a slightly different angle than most people. I'm not a particularly visually-oriented person and I pay very close attention to the strength of the writing, but for Castlevania my standards were completely reversed. The writing is fairly pedestrian, which the level intro narration being florid and melodramatic, but the visuals of the game were absolutely captivating. From the opening scene of the werewolves attacking the Bavarian town to the wintery climb to the summit of the vampire citadel, I was completely entranced. Every environment, every enemy, and every weapon looks gorgeous. The game does a great job of immersing you in a foreboding gothic universe and I loved the sheer aesthetic joy of following Gabriel on his quest. There are tons of unlockables in the game but I made absolutely sure that I got all the concept art.

God of War-style play tends to fall under two camps: the people who can be measured and precise in their fast-paced combat, and guys like me who mash buttons frantically and hope for the best. Yet despite my utter lack of skill, I felt that the game kept pace with me. One of my big issues with most GoW games is that after awhile it becomes boring butchering enemies who seem to only exist to make you look cool, but Castlevania has enough variety in their enemies to make the game engaging. They attack differently, defend differently, and if you get cocky they can eat you alive. You gotta be paying attention and have fast hands to make it through, but it makes the victories all the more sweet.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on this game awhile. As I've become used to games you can knock out in ten or twenty hours, spending thirty-plus hours immersed in the haunted battlefields of Transylvania became much more of an undertaking. After awhile, I stopped feeling like I was playing a game and more like I was undertaking an epic adventure. Sure, Gabriel's angsty revenge drama is pretty generic, but it's played against such a mythic backdrop that I was completely sucked into the world.

I would recommend this game for people who like quest-themed stories with a darker age, avenging anto-hero types, and fans of good Gothic adventure. I've always had a soft spot for the Castlevania franchise but I enjoyed the hell out of this game from start to finish.

Frozen

2011-02-22T18:58:00.000-08:00

My cousin fell off a chairlift when he was a kid.

My aunt and uncle live in Lake Tahoe, CA and they've been skiing all their lives. The way I heard the story, my cousin was leaning too far forward and just fell face-first off the lift. I used to think about that incident when I family went on skiing trips. The chairlifts in Tahoe never had safety bars and the weight of boots on your feet almost pull you out of the chair. I used to be terrified that I'd get tangled up in someone's boots or tilt too far forward and pitch myself off into the icy ground below.

Anyway, I didn't much care for Frozen.

Frozen tells the story of two dudebros and a girlfriend who get stuck on a chairlift. The rest of the movie is spent alternating between attempts to get down and moments of introspection. Eventually things work out and some credits roll.

I wasn't that big a fan off Hatchet, the movie that made Adam Green famous. It's a classic among horror fans, but I thought it was too derivative and playing too much to the crowd. I'd heard about Frozen when it first toured theaters, but I wasn't particularly interested. The whole premise sounded like the hoary old theatrical trope of a small group of characters locked in a room and being forced to confront the truth about themselves. To pull that old chestnut off, you have to really good at dialogue and characterization and those elements weren't Hatchet's strong points.

So I do have to confess to a bit of bias even before I sat down to watch the movie. But I didn't enjoy it all that much.

A couple of things really didn't work for me. First, the earlier parts of the movie feel like a low-rent MTV special. There's a lot of montage shots of the characters snowboarding around set to obnoxious pop-punk. The dialogue is really bad, especially in all the bits where Green is trying to establish the relationships between the character. One guy is all "you've changed, man" and another is all "dude, leave my girlfriend alone" and there's a bunch of resentful passive aggressive sniping and by that point I was playing scrabble on my laptop.

Ultimately, the movie relies on too many cheats. I had a hard enough time believing that the perfect string of coincidences could happen to get these characters trapped in the first place, and once the superwolves started their hideous siege (all filmed in tight close up) it kinda lost me.

It's basically a movie about three boring, unpleasant people stuck in a bad situation. I just couldn't bring myself to care.

This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed bullshitting skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. Welcome aboard!

Dead Island Trailer

2011-02-17T06:46:00.001-08:00

Our fine friends at Geekologie posted up two trailers for the upcoming game Dead Island. Yeah, I'm burned out on zombies, but this is really good stuff.

Enjoy!

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

2011-02-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

I love westerns.

It’s ironic, because in the real world I’m not well suited to the genre. I’m not very outdoorsy, I’m not particularly tough or taciturn, and I’ve never been particularly good around cattle or horses. In short, I’m a city creature through and through. Yet there’s something about the old west that excites my imagination. The endless vistas, the lawless frontier towns, the conflict between civilizations, and the stern, capable people who populated these stories ignited my imagination. It should come as no surprise that I gravitated toward Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption.

Red Dead Redemption is the (mostly) perfect western game. Its got sprawling landscapes, a hard-bitten hero, colorful sidekicks, and a perfectly engaging combat system. I knocked it out in record time so I could start digging into the Undead Nightmare expansion pack.

Taking place shortly before the game’s apocalyptic ending, Undead Nightmare tells the story of a zombie infestation in the territories. The lead character’s family becomes infected and in his quest to save them he revisits old friends, endures new challenges, and uncovers the sinister secrets of an ancient Mesoamerican death god.

I can’t quite tell if Undead Nightmare is canon or not. Red Dead Redemption, despite a few zany moments, plays things straightforward. Undead Nightmare looks, sounds, and feels like a grindhouse slasher film. Beloved characters pop up for cameos, say a few cryptically self-aware things, and then get devoured. Regardless, the story veers from dark comedy to nihilistic horror, remaining engaging and entertaining the whole time.

One of the things that I liked about the game is that it plays fair with George Romero’s rules. Most zombie games (Resident Evil, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead) play fast and loose with the traditional rules, where the characters are suddenly invulnerable to zombie bites and several quick shots to the chest disable the walking dead. In Undead Nightmare, you have to shoot the zombies in the head and a single bite spells doom for John Marston. It makes game play much more tense and requires much more reliance on the dead-aim mechanic, which slows time down and allows players to line up their shots. Unfortunately, seeing as I barely used this ability in the main game, it took me a couple of hours to figure out just how useful it was. In the meantime, I wasted a lot of rounds on missed headshots and became zombie chow on more than one occasion. Until I figured out the practical application of the dead-aim mechanic, I really hated Undead Nightmare.

Like most zombie games, there comes a point where the gameplay becomes a little routine. Rockstar has a deep and abiding love for making the players do repetitive things, which in this case means you have go back and rescue previously liberated towns over and over again. If you want to use the fast travel system, you have to keep these towns free. Saving a town once is a challenging adventure. Saving a town two or three times feels like busy work.

Ultimately, a few return trips and a bit of busy work are minor negatives to a game that I greatly enjoyed. Red Dead Redemption created a world that I never wanted to leave, even as I sped toward the game’s conclusion. Even after Undead Nightmare resolved the story of John Marston in a grimly unique manner, I wanted more. I hope they keep going. It’s an alternate life I’d love to return to.

Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy by Allison Moore

2011-02-12T16:29:00.000-08:00

I had a guest from my native San Francisco stay with me last weekend. He was a big Broadway fan and wanted to check out the shows in Times Square. While we were exploring the bright lights and garish ads of the heart of America, I took him to the Drama Book Shop. It's one of my favorite book stores in the world. It's full of young, hungry actors and old thespians with bored eyes. The shelves are chock-full of plays with blank covers and evocative names and I can spend all day browsing there.

Anyway, while he was flipping through a vampire paper doll book, I found a new play on the shelves. The cover was black and featured a screaming woman, a knife, and plenty of blood. Ten bucks later, I have Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy.

Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy tells the story of a broke young woman hired to take over a starring role in a low budget horror film. This doesn't sit well with her housebound mother, an embittered old hag with a host of psychosomatic illnesses and a persecution complex. As the daughter begins her movie career under the tutelage of a sleazy director, the mom schemes with a violent fundamentalist group to stop the production by any means necessary.

I wish I saw Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy performed live. It's an engaging story with interesting characters and some fascinating themes, and I'd like to see it performed. It's not a particularly long play and it's one of those very self-aware narratives where the characters seem to be doing as much commenting on the story as they are engaging in it, and I'd love to see how it plays live.

There are a couple of interesting ideas discussed in the play. First, the mother objects to the movie on feminist principles: horror movies degrade and commodify women and the makers are little more than vile sexist pimps peddling sleaze to an apathetic audience. As the play moves along, we learn that she uses her combative attitude as a way to avoid dealing with the world, but I found it telling that she allied herself with the bright young religious fanatic who firebombs abortion clinics. It's an interesting parallels for the way seventies-era progressive groups found their goals aligned with fundamentalist groups in their opposition of pornography. While their goals were ostensibly noble, they found themselves in bed with one of the most controlling and conservative groups in the United States.

Which is not to say that the poor people involved in the horror movie come off as a saintly victim. The director of the movie is an opportunistic sleaze with a darkly violent streak and the already beleaguered production descends into chaos. I can't tell if playwright Allison Moore is a genre aficionado with strong writing skills or someone who really doesn't like the genre, but the plays asks "who watches this stuff? Why do we find images of young girls being murdered so titillating?" As a life long horror fan, I'm used to a bit of finger wagging but this one is particularly sharp. I felt a little chided.

Anyway, if you dig Scream-style self-referential horror, gender and cultural themes, and a whole lot of grand guignol gore, give Slasher a read. I enjoyed the crap out of it.

The AV Club Presents: Ridiculous Horror Movie Adversaries

2011-02-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

You know what the sad thing is? I know most of these movies. And Black Roses was actually pretty good. I have the original recording.

Anyway, take a break from work and enjoy this video.

Resident Evil: Deadly Silence

2011-01-29T12:13:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of people who will tell you that the Resident Evil franchise hasn't aged well. For a long time, I was one of them.

Horror has always been a fringe genre of the video game industry. It costs millions of dollars to make a game and companies want the most return for their investment. Since people are more likely to play sports games or military/sci-fi first person shooters, horror games have a reputation in the industry for being minimal return for the investment. Later iterations of the Resident Evil franchise seem to be tailor-made for mass-appeal, jettisoning the notorious tank controls and fixed cameras for clunky shooter controls and protagonists that looked like a fusion of an emo rocker and a gorilla juicehead. Resident Evil 5 in particular seemed to be almost apologetic for the series' early attempts to scare the audience. The game took place in broad daylight and talked up its co-op play features over its atmosphere and eerie storytelling (as well as its disturbing racist undercurrent.)

Anyway, the point of this long preamble is that I'd also written off the Resident Evil games. My pretension had gotten so bad that I remembered the negatives of RE1, specifically the unwieldy controls and terrible voice acting. I'd forgotten how much fun the game was to play.

It took my Nintendo DS to remind me.

I'd picked up Deadly Silence as sort of a lark after getting a Nintendo DS for Christmas, thinking it would be good for some cheesy fun between rounds of Grand Theft Auto. I was quickly surprised at how completely enthralling and immersive I found the game to be.

The plot is old news by now: members of the ridiculously named Raccoon City S.T.A.R.S. police tactical team find themselves trapped in an old mansion while investigating violent deaths in a woodland area outside of the city. As they struggle to survive the monsters that lay siege to the mansion, they discover the sinister secrets of the Umbrella Corporations biological weapons program and come face to face with a traitor in their ranks.

It's been over ten years since I've played the original games and it really refreshing to return to the game with fresh eyes. I'd forgotten all those little tricks I'd used to move through the mansion. I'd forgotten the caution I'd use when exploring an unknown hallway, or the rounds I'd pump into a body to make sure it wouldn't come after me again. I'd forgotten the pleasure of solving puzzles or finding new keys. I'd forgotten the simple satisfaction of putting one zombie down, watching him get up, and putting him down again. I'd forgotten the eerie little messages you'd find around the mansion as the unfortunate souls before you wrote their final letters to their loved ones. I'd forgotten finding a shotgun and feeling like a dark, merciless god.

The DS is the perfect vehicle to replay the game. Graphics and game elements that would be unforgivable on a main system work just fine on a handheld. In addition, there's a DS-specific most called "Master of Knifing" where you assume a first-person perspective to fight the undead with your trusty blade. Surprisingly, it works really well. I found that I could understand and anticipate attacks and react with moves tailored to each threat.

The complaints with the game are the same as they were before. Sooner or later you're going to be attacked by something you can't see due to the camera angles and sooner or later you're going to wind up in trouble because you try to run away from the bad guys only to hit the wrong button and run right into their waiting mouths. If Resident Evil was never your cup of tea then Deadly Silence won't make a convert out of you, but I had a blast playing it.

And, just because he's so goddamn funny, here's another Zero Punctuation take on Resident Evil games.

Black Swan

2011-01-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

Black Swan is one of those movies that makes me redefine what horror means.

The movie was the cover story on Fangoria last month, which sorta shocked me. At the time I didn't really know anything about the movie aside from the fact that it was shot in New York City's Lincoln Center, where my ex-girlfriend works for the ballet company as a stitcher in their costume department. She mentioned that Natalie Portman was seen around the place and that she was dating one of the dance instructors.

I hadn't thought much about the film until I picked up the Fangoria issue and saw a stark image of Natalie Portman with beautiful black make-up and demonic red eyes, staring back at us with an alien, predatory gaze. It's a chilling and evocative image, but I still wasn't sold. I'm not the biggest Darren Aronofsky fan in the world and watching a movie about a ballerina freaking out didn't really appeal to me.

I was wrong.

Black Swan tells the story of Nina Sayers, a young ballerina who wins the roles of both the black and the white swan in an upcoming production of Swan Lake. While she has the innocence and vulnerability necessary to portray the black swan, her repressed sexuality and emotional disconnect keep her from the more seductive and dangerous role of the black swan. The stress of the role, the pressure of her unhinged has-been-never-was ballerina mother, and the sexual aggression of the ballet director and the hungry young rival all push against the walls of her sanity until she slips into madness.

Talking about this movie is a little bit intimidating. This film is going to be dissected by keener minds than my own, who will fill page after page with nuanced discussion on Sayers' degenerating emotional state. Alls I can do is to simply point out that Black Swan really is a horror film. I have no doubt that there are people who will rail against the categorization and say that Aronofsky is trying to do something more serious than make a simple genre romp, but I would argue that the movie hits too many of the same notes and has too many of the tropes not to fit into horror's big red circus tent. Sure, it's not a mindless slasher film or a bloody zombie gore fest, but Black Swan is one of the most genuinely chilling movies I've seen in a long time.

I started this review writing about how Black Swan made me think about what the genre means. Horror is a maddeningly catch-all term, but the genre has allowed itself to be ghettoized by having a very specific formulas and marketing styles. If a movie has "bloody" or "death" or "The [noun]ening" in the title and the text is in some drippy blood-red font, you can probably guess you're watching a horror flick. They're aimed at kids, they're out to show some boobs n' blood, and they're not trying to do anything too complex or convoluted. Some are about jump scares, some are about atmosphere, and some are just about watching someone else scream as they're being mangled to death. The nicest thing you can say about most of the genre is that it's not trying too hard. Most of the time that means you can enjoy some brainless, tasteless fun, but that also limits the amount of people who will take horror seriously as an art form.

The movie features many of the classic tropes of horror film making. There are jump scares and character screaming in darkness and horrific violence and bodily mutilation and terrible things lurking out of the corner of your eye. In fact, most of the movie looks and feels like a Japanese horror film, only with ballerinas instead of yurei creeping around the claustrophobic corridors of NYC. There's also a heaping helping of self-destructive madness. I've also seen a lot of on-screen carnage in my time, but when Nina tears at the skin of her fingers I found myself looking away.

Black Swan is ultimately about the fear of madness, the fear of sexuality, and the odd mixture of fear and delight of having our boundaries tested. It's not a happy film and it doesn't end in a happy place (or maybe it does, depending on your outlook) but it's a relentless exploration of one girl's degeneration on her way to ascendancy. Aronofsy used a lot of tools from horror's toolbox and crafted something unique out of it.

Psychological horror isn't anything new, nor are stories about sexually repressed people falling into madness. There are aspects of this film that feel similar to Roman Polanski's Repulsion. If I wanted to be really flip, I'd say there are elements of the story that feel like Psycho if Norman Bates' mother has still been alive. I get accused by friends of wanting to slap too many things with the horror label, but I feel that there are many different aspects of scary storytelling, just as there are many different types of humor. Horror doesn't have to be slashers and drippy monsters. Black Swan is a wonderfully effective psychological horror film and that label shouldn't be an insult to the film or the seriousness of its intent.

Island by Richard Laymon

2011-01-11T11:31:00.001-08:00

Damn you Richard Laymon. You pulled the greatest bait-and-switch the genre has ever pulled on me.

I hated every page of this book. I hate every moment I had to spend in the point of view of the sniveling, pathetic, horny little weasel trapped on the island with the besieged women of the narrative. I hated his spinelessness, his perversity, his complete disconnect from any sense of proper human interaction. I hated being him, I hated seeing the world from his perspective, and I hated the fact that people seemed to see him as a representative of normal adolescent sexuality.

I was ready to completely write off Richard Laymon, an author I'd greatly admired, as just another gross, misogynistic horror writer who used the genre as canvas to piss his perverse sexuality on. But book had a HUGE payoff about three pages from the end, something that goes along way to redeeming the book and making me believe that he was in on the joke, that he was deliberately forcing us to inhabit the point-of-view of a monster in the making. I'm going to go on this at length, but from this point out here there be spoilers.

I started reading Richard Laymon's books during my backpacking trip in Europe. I was traveling on a shoestring budget and reading voraciously when I discovered that you could buy cheap paperbacks of his two books in one. They were typical gimmicky 80s horror novels that leaned more towards Bradbury than splatterpunk, but there was something engaging and compelling about them that I still can't quite put my finger on. The writing wasn't flashy but there was a certain craftsmanship that I got lost in. There was one novel in particular about a haunted boardwalk amusement park, that featured a teenage gypsy street performer that ranks as one of my favorite characters in horror fiction.

The story is told from the first person perspective of Rupert, an 18 year old boy who accompanies his girlfriend Connie's family on a boating trip through the Caribbean. The boat blows up, stranding them on an island with a psycho killer. One by one the menfolk on the expedition are killed, leaving Rupert alone with his girlfriend, his girlfriend's Amazon sister Kimberly, and his girlfriend's MILF mom Billie. The killers turns out to be Wesley and Thelma, the on-the-outs members of the family who planned to isolate the women of the family in order to play sick sexual games with them.

So all this stuff seems to be straightforward horror storytelling, but what I found so maddeningly fucking objectionable was Rupert's perspective. Never before in the history of ANY medium have I ever hated a character so much.

Rupert is essentially vicious, unrestrained misogyny disguised as out-of-control teenage hormones. He is CONSTANTLY objectifying the women he's trapped with, to the point where he isn't even reacting the way a real person should in a crisis. When the character's husbands and fathers are being bumped off one after another, Rupert would be standing and watching them mourn and thinking to himself "Man, they've got some nice tits." When they go hunting for the psychos with their makeshift weaponry and everyone is on edge and expecting an ambush, he's commenting on how much flesh their bikinis showed. It never stops, it never eases up, and it never seems to match the reality of the situation he's in. It's like he escaped into a land of fleshy delusion while everyone else is stuck in the real world dealing with a pair of violent psychopaths.

All of this would I GUESS be more forgiving if Rupert was more masculine or competent or strong willed, but he's described as a weaselly beta-male type. The other male characters are forceful, strong-willed, and assertive, but Rupert is a useless toad of a man, constantly harangued by his bat shit crazy girlfriend and screwing up nearly every task he's assigned. You get the sense he's almost eager to have the other menfolk die so he'd get the women all to himself.

He only gets worse as the story goes on. There comes a point in the narrative when Wesley has kidnapped the women and left Rupert for dead at the bottom of a ravine. Once Rupert gets out and gets his head on straight, he goes after "his women." He keeps referring to them as if he owns them. When he sneaks to the mansion Wesley uses as his home base, Rupert witnesses Wesley and his wife torture and rape a 14 year old girl, a scene described in such loving detail it made me sick to read. The act itself was bad enough, but the disgusting thing is that Rupert gets off on the whole thing. Sure, he's conflicted about it, but he's also fascinated and turned on. He later meets the two girls, naked and caged in some gorilla pens (?) down the hill and amuses himself by looking at their nude bodies and feeling mildly ashamed that he's turned on by a pair of sexually battered kids just out of their tweens.

His sexism is weirdly consistent and verges right over into stupidity. There is one point in the story where he comes across the killers asleep in bed. Though he's armed with a straight razor and his tormentors are defenseless in front of him, he decides that he doesn't have it in him to cut a woman's throat, even though he's planning on burning the house down and burning them alive.

So, yeah, Rupert is a complete and utter scumfuck. I cannot tell you how each page of the story infuriated me. I was inclined to believe that we were supposed to write off his perceptions and behavior as representing a standard teenage boy's outlook, but it was so far beyond the pale that I was furious at Richard Laymon and his stunted and unenlightened tale. It's like reading Robert E. Howard's Black Canaan and being shocked and appalled by his overt and vicious racism.

The other characters in Island are equally bizarre. The psychos are the least-liked members of the family. The man is a goofy, opportunistic yuppie and the woman is a delusional, needy weirdo who refuses to see her husband for what he is, even when the bodies of her family start piling up. I had a hard time believing that the family couldn't see their lunacy coming from a mile away. And, honestly, who is afraid of a couple killers named Thelma and Wesley?

Billie, the family matriarch, is every MILF story personified. The way Rupert describes her, she hasn't seemed to have aged a day over her children and she acts with a weird combination of motherly indulged and sex-kitten flirtatiousness that doesn't really mesh with the fact that she'd seen her husband take an axe to the skull. She quickly becomes the object of Rupert's attention and the fact that seems to reciprocate the little pervert's advances makes her come off as a weird sort of desperate housewife who likes the look of her pool cleaner.

Kimberly, the Amazonian older sister, is the least interested in Rupert. A confident, athletic character married to the only appealing male on the island, she mostly ignores Rupert and carries on her path towards vengeance. The odd thing about her is that the story constantly refers to her mixed Sioux/Sicilian heritage, as if her competency is the result of some eugenics experiment to produce the most talented tracker and vicious fighter. This is, of course, stupid.

But all this pales next to Connie. Probably the single most obnoxious girlfriends I've ever encountered in the genre, Connie zooms past the hoary old "frigid girlfriend" trope with behavior that seems both completely castrating and absolutely insane.

Connie is just plain old pitbull mean through and through. She never says a nice thing to Rupert at any point in the story. They haven't kissed, they've barely touched, and yet when Rupert looks at anyone else, she's constantly nagging him in the most crass and ugly terms about his attraction to women. As the story goes on, she starts engaging in what appears to be attention-seeking behavior. She disrobes for him, teases him, and at one point masturbates in front of him, then when he gets turned on, she says "I bet you like that, you fucking pervert." The woman's behavior is completely and utterly divorced from sanity and it's completely mystifying as to why Rupert puts up with this. The rest of the family isn't much better, seeing the whole thing as some sort of annoying quirk rather than as a manifestation of some deeply sex-negative and self-loathing psychosis.

Now that I've spent hundreds of words describing how much the book pissed me off, I need to explain why it's the greatest bait-and-switch I've ever fallen for.

This book was the assigned reading by the NYC horror book club I'm involved with. By the time I got to the club I was about 4/5ths of the way through the book and I had a pretty good head of steam built up by that point. I ranted about the book like a crazy person, berated the poor guy who picked it out, and generally acted like a fool. I figured that, with most of the book behind me, there weren't gonna be many more surprises lying in wait for me from that point forward and I could hash out my impressions pretty thoroughly.

It turns out there's a final, redeeming surprise in the book, one that turns it into an update on The Most Dangerous Game. We're supposed to hate Rupert because he turns out to be the same sort of cruel, abusive monster that Wesley is.

Initially we're lead to believe that Wesley is bumping off members of the family in order to collect a large inheritance. As the story goes on, we discover that he deliberately scouted the island in advance in order to isolate the women, whom he planned to turn into his sexual slaves. There's a sort of private nature preserve on the island, complete with unbreakable gorilla cages. Once he'd capture the women, he'd take them out one at a time for awful torture games, beating and raping them with his crazy wife.

Once the pair are killed (and their deaths are suitably horrible) Rupert doesn't free the women. Instead, he keeps doing what Wesley had done. He hasn't told them that he knows where the keys are and begins a sexual relationship with Billie. He's ultimately no better than Wesley, two little creeps who objectify and enslave women they can't have.

The ending blew me away. It's not played cute or charming and it shows that Laymon had carefully constructed Rupert to become worse and worse as the story went on until he was no better than their tormentor. It's a brutal sort of paradise and quite fitting, much like Rainsford discovering the comforts of Zaroff's house. It sort of redeems the tale, making it a story of a man's lust leading him into damnation. Too bad he's such an unpleasant prick to follow in his journey.

For all the hatred I've piled down on the book, I couldn't put it down.

It's always been hard for me to put my finger on what Richard Laymon does right, exactly. His stories aren't full of literary razzle-dazzle and his characters are solid, dependable workhorses without much star power, but his tales are always completely engaging. I stayed with Island all the way through the end, while I would have chucked lesser books away on more mild offenses.

In the end, I don't actually think I can recommend this book as a good place to start for novice Laymon readers. The sad fact is that Rupert is a very unpleasant guy and not good company for five hundred pages. There are some meat on these bones and I am happy I finished it, but you have to ask yourself if you really want to spend hours of your life in the company of a guy who is one part Tucker Max and one part dweeby bumbling anime lead.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

2010-12-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

Rare Exports is the kind of idea that should have been made a long time ago.

Most of the big Christmas horror films I can think of involve some nut stabbing people during the holidays, which is fun and all but leaves the holidays as little more than dressing for another run-of-the-mill slasher flick. Very few major horror films actually tweak with the roots of the Santa Claus myth, which can actually be pretty horrific. Legends of naughty children getting dragged away by demonic woodland spirits to be thrashed and disemboweled and cast into Hell are the kind of stories that would have terrified me as a child, yet we really haven't seen the definitive Krampus story.

Well, look no further.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is there!

Once upon a time, in a tiny town in Finland, an excavation team uncovers something terrible in the depths of a lonely mountain. Shortly thereafter, a band of hunters discover something has butchered their herds. As the mystery deepens and naughty little children disappear, one little boy follows the clues that lead him to the dark heart of the holiday season.

Thus begins the tale of Rare Exports. The whole movie has a sort of Lovecraftian vibe to it. It's all about isolated locales and ancient secrets, only the heart of the matter is jolly old St. Nick. On paper it sounds ridiculous, but the movie plays the concept with deadly seriousness. The movie isn't particularly campy or humorous and its seriousness keeps the movie engaging.

I like foreign horror films for the same reason I keep watching the travel channel: it's a great peek into the weird foibles of another culture. One of my favorite aspect of the movie is the Finlandishness of the whole thing. The film focuses tightly on a father and son who make their living in the wilderness and the chill of the countryside is almost tangible. It's rough, wild terrain they live in, and the people who make their lives there are a hardy bunch.

One of the most unsettling images in the movie are the wooden dolls left in the place of naughty children. They're creepy and primitive and brought back memories of the stick crosses from The Blair Witch Project. Looking at them, you can't help but imagine the vicious and subhuman mind that created them.

Now, while there's a lot of stuff I enjoyed about the movie, not everything worked. Spoilers here, but we discover that the creepy old man the heroes have chained up is merely one of Santa's helpers. We never actually see the Santa monster throughout the movie. It's clearly meant to be something grand and terrible and probably out of the filmmaker's budget. Still, there's a lot of tease for little payoff.

Also, the little boy hero becomes a little bit too competent and capable towards the end. He starts out as a quiet, nervous boy with a strained relationship to his father, but by the end of the film he becomes Rambo, dangling off helicopters and charging the horde of buck-nekkid Santa men. By the end of the movie it felt more like a child's wish-fulfillment fantasy than a character arc.

I don't know if this is a movie I'll keep coming back to, but I could see this being a sort of cult film. It was playing in the art house circuit in NYC when I caught it and I'm sure it will be passed from dorm room to dorm room. So, basically, if you ever wanted to see Santa Claus done properly scary, this is probably the best example you'll find.

The Rite Trailer

2010-12-10T10:37:00.000-08:00

Is it reasonable to enjoy a story you emphatically don't believe in?

I like possession films, cliched as they often are, but I don't agree with the themes presented in them. Two of the most famous ones, The Last Exorcism and The Exorcist, tell the story of modern day conflicted priests confronting old-timey evil in a way they're unprepared for. Only by returning to the superstitious roots of their faiths are they able to overcome the forces of hell, usually at the cost of their own lives.

I don't believe in gods or devils and I think such ideas are detrimental to society at large and, more than any other aspect of the genre, I think that the demonic possession subgenre is the most conservative and regressive thematically (Constantine being a notable exception.) The Rite looks incredible and dramatic and beautifully themed, but it's the same sort of Old Testament sturm und drang you see in this genre.

Still gonna go see it.

The Burning

2010-12-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

The Burning is one of those movies I should have gotten to a long time ago.

I love summer camp slasher flicks, I love Tom Savini's make-up effects, and I love cult films. The Burning has a big reputation among devotees, especially for the infamous raft attack In addition, the movie was discussed in the famous gender study Men, Women, and Chainsaws for being one of the only slasher flicks featuring a final boy. Finally, the killer in the movie is supposedly based on the urban legend of Cropsey that circulates on the East Coast.

Yet despite all these intriguing features, I never bothered to track it down until one lonely afternoon last week while surfing my Netflix instant downloads on my Xbox. I went in with an open mind, expecting a cheesy good time.

Turns out The Burning is a genuinely well-made and scary horror film.

The Burning tells the tale of Cropsey, an ornery old drunk who works as a handyman at a summer camp. Some campers got it into their heads to play a trick on him, but things go horribly wrong and Cropsey is burned. Cropsey returns to the woods years later, gardening shears in hand, looking for payback. The rest is what it is.

On paper, much of this story boils down to the same tale told in Friday the 13th. While Cropsey didn't have the same staying power as his more famous counterpart, his romp is unquestionably memorable. The acting is pretty good, the script is strong, and the scares are genuinely effective. In some weird ways, this movie actually resembles the original Halloween, in that it's a slow burn sort of film, and the filmmakers take their time in setting up the scares.

One of the things that got me about this movie is that it takes place in an actual, functioning summer camp. The story takes places while the camp is in full swing, with the place packed with adolescents. They goof around, play pranks, splash each other, and act like kids having a good time. And, unlike most slasher films packed with gorgeous '80s 20somethings, the kids in The Burning actually look like kids. There are dorky kids and heavy kids and awkward kids. Even the girls who get nude look more less like toned athletic models and more like shy virgins.

The screenplay is well-written by later Hollywood moguls Brad Grey and Harvey Weinstein. The characters are actually characters (I loved the awkward, virginal sex scenes), the story unfolds in a logical progression, and the young campers are actually capable outdoorsmen. When the kids are trapped in Devil's Cove after Cropsey steals their canoes, they immediately set out to building a raft and escaping. It doesn't end well for them, but you have to applaud their initiative.

Going into the movie, one of the big selling points was the fact that the final survivor was Alfred, a nervous outsider who somehow manages to best Cropsey at the end of the film. Much is made in Men, Women, and Chainsaws about gender inversion in the slasher genre, specifically that most final girls are more masculine than their counterparts, whereas Alfred is slightly more feminine than his friends. I dunno if Alfred is necessarily more feminine but he is unquestionably more weird. We first meet him sneaking into a girl's shower, trying to peep at one of the fellow campers. He gets caught and, unlike most macho fratty movie assholes, Alfred comes off as a creepy weirdo. He's actually not a particularly pleasant character. He sneaks and spies on his fellow campers, particularly when they're having sex, and he cowers behind his friends whenever anyone confronts him. He does make interesting cinema, and he is one of the two young men to end Cropsey's reign of terror.

The other final boy is Todd, the head counselor with the mysterious connection to Cropsey. Unlike Alfred, Todd is confident and capable without being an overconfident goon. Most of the macho types in slasher movies usually become knifebait, but Todd is a nice change of pace. He goes back to rescue Alfred from the creepy, maze-like foundations that Cropsey hides in. It's a great final battle in a creepy locale, and the scene ranks among my favorite closing acts in any slasher film.

I do have to say that watching The Burning was a very similar experience to watching Friday the 13th Part 2. The campfire ghost story scene is taken almost verbatim from F13 and the story hits a lot of similar beats, replacing the counselor's bar night out for an upriver trip for the older campers. I don't think it's necessarily a case of plot theft, but rather both are sort of the ur-story of the madmen in the woods.

Overall, I really liked The Burning. It's a strong, scary horror film and what it lacks in refinement it makes up for in lean, muscular storytelling. It's probably not gonna win any converts, but if you like horror campfire tales, then check out The Burning.

Oh, and the movie stars a young Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter.

The Initiation of Sarah (1978)

2010-11-28T18:28:00.000-08:00

You know, when I think "cutting edge horror", I don't really think "kitschy Lifetime-style '70s television movie." But Final Girl called the tune and I can dance with the best of 'em.

I tend to be irony-adverse and my first impression of The Initiation of Sarah was largely negative. The music is disco, the camera work is zoomy, and everyone's hair is so feathered. I cooked up my Trader Joe's-brand pasta and settled in.

Turned out the movie wasn't half bad.

Okay, it ain't scary. Things are a little too bright and cheerful to really get under the skin, but it's a fine little story. While many of the characters in the movie are bitchy sorority stereotypes, I found that I genuinely cared about the lead characters.

The story revolves around Sarah and Patty Goodwin, two incoming freshman trying to get into the prestigious Alpha Nu Gamma, which their legacy mother has been pushing them to join since childhood. The charming Patty is immediately accepted, but the withdrawn Sarah is cruelly rejected and sent to Pi Epsilon Delta, the nerd sorority. The basically decent Patty starts becoming subsumed by her bitchy sorority sisters and an increasingly isolated and angry Sarah comes under that thrall of a creepy sorority mom with a daaaaaaaaaaaaa.....

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....

rrrrrrk secret.

The movie hits the exact same story beats as Carrie as the troubled outsider slowly comes into her own power, but unlike poor doomed Carrie White, Sarah winds up leading the surly outsiders of Pi Epsilon Delta and teaching them how to stand up to the society bitches of Alpha Nu Gamma. She also forms relationships with other people, particularly the squirrelly young violinist with the obvious crush on Sarah (don't try to deny it) and the sleazy older teacher's assistant.

Overall, I liked the movie. It ain't scary, but it's well-written and acted, particularly with the legendary turn by Shelly Winters as the diabolical Ms. Hunter, who interjects a certain satanic theatricality to the proceedings. It's worth seeing The Initiation of Sarah for her alone.

Also, Morgan Fairchild looks hot soaking wet.

Here's my question: where are the telekinetic payback movies for dudes? These angry teenage psychic stories tend toward stories of repressed feminist rage but high school screws everyone up. I would love to see a reimagining of Elephant with rage-fuelled telekinesis.

This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed bullshitting skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. Welcome aboard!

Play Dead

2010-11-25T19:30:00.001-08:00

Play Dead: When I went to see Play Dead I was lead onstage, stuffed in a steel casket, beaten with a crowbar, soaked in sulfuric acid, and my dessicated corpse was fed into a floor grate to the ghost of Albert Fish. I apparently went mad in the afterlife when the showman attempted to contact my spirit and I began chucking furniture around the theatre. It took the spirit of a sexy nude medium to bring me back from the dead.

The experience was one of the most memorable I've had as a horror fan.

Play Dead is an off-Broadway play/performance art piece created by Teller of Penn and Teller fame. It's a nifty fusion of ghost story, seance, and magic show, where famed Coney Island performer Todd Robbins tells a series of stories about madness, murder, and the Beyond.

At first, the play is simply a ghoulishly good time. Robbins' performance is pure Cryptkeeper glee. He unfurls the tales with such captivating theatrical delight that I felt like I was around the campfire hearing ghost stories as a kid. He accentuates the tales with amazing stage effects and feats of illusion. He also brings the audience into the fun. There are moments in the play when all lights, including the exit lights were shut off, leaving the audience in pitch darkness. My weirdo friend took the opportunity to freak me out by poking me while we were sitting in the darkness and I jumped about 30 feet in the air.

All the ghost stories are all creepy fun and it's worth seeing just for the fun of it, but the second part of the show moved me very deeply.

I've always found it fascinating that the most famous illusionists are the most vocal opponents of sham mediums. They know the tricks and take great umbrage at opportunists using them to take advantage of people's grief. While the end of the show gets a little melodramatic, Play Dead's message is ultimately moving: the horror genre exists because death is a part of all of our lives. We mythologize our fears in order to explore them and ultimately make a sort of uncomfortable peace with them.

Go see this.

Coming back to the blog

2010-11-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

Me as Prince Charming. With the chick from The Grudge. Halloween 2010.

Fear not gentle readers! I have not abandoned you.

Well, maybe I did a little. Most of the creative and critical juices that usually go to this blog have been going to a horror comic I'm working on with a coworker. Maybe it's gonna forever change the face of popular entertainment or maybe we'll get distracted the next time someone tosses a shiny thing into my cubicle, but I've been happily tinkering on other stuff and have turned away from the blog I call home.

Which is not to say I've taken a hiatus from horror. Lord no. I'm still watching the movies and reading the books and playing the game and listening to the songs and buying the Halloween costumes. As I type this at my desk at work (thank you, site outages) I have a copy of Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti on the desk.

When I left off, I had begun an article on The Last Exorcism, a film I greatly enjoyed. There was a lot of stuff to unpack about that movie and I sorta froze up. So, rather than try to cover the VAST swath of horror junk I've done this summer, I'll try to summarize very briefly:

The Last Exorcism: While it's a little too flip to call this the new Exorcist, I thought TLE was one of the most remarkable horror films I've seen recently. The films basically follow the same plot, but by replacing the rigid dogma of the Catholic Church with the provincial fanaticism of small town America made the movie feel oddly more contemporary. I liked the fact that the narrative follows the preacher more than the family. He's charismatic and compelling and he was one of the strongest characters in horror history. Everyone in the movie is very interesting and engaging, from the fundamentalist father to the combative camera crew. Finally, I liked the fact that, unlike The Exorcist, the movie retains the possibility that all the possession stuff could just be a figment of the girl's damaged mind. The only problem I had with the movie was the ridiculous ending, which I gather derailed the film for a lot of moviegoers, but I'll give up five terrible minutes for 85 good ones.

Teatro Grottesco: I just finished Thomas Ligotti's anthology and I've got to say that I'm clearly not smart enough to appreciate his work. It's the sort of thing that fundamentally won't click with me as Ligotti's horror style is a bit too surrealistic for my maddeningly linear sensibilities, but he's good. His style is Lovecraftian in the truest sense of the word; rather than recycling Lovecraft's gods from the beyond with unpronounceable names, he infuses his stories with a nameless dread as damaged narrators sink deeper and deeper into the terrible horrors inflicted on them.

My only real complaint with the anthology is that they almost completely lack characterization. All the stories are told in first person, all use precise speech, all the narrators so sort of psychological malady, many are artists or have artistic friends, many have stomach ailments, and so on. He's great at creating tension but there wasn't much stuff for me to grab on to. Still, I'm coming back for his other work.

Pigeons From Hell: Possibly the most ridiculously-titled story I've ever encountered, PfH is one of the most famous stories ever written by Conan creator Robert E. Howard. I read while plowing through an anthology of horror tales. While Howard was an amazing pulp writer, his stories sort of flow together and trying to plow through his entire catalog in one sitting is a bad idea. The book also included Black Canaan, which was probably the most racist thing I've ever seen put to paper. I was about to set the book aside after that, but over the years I'd heard enough positive things about PfH, including Stephen King saying it's one of the best horror stories ever written, that I wanted to give it a shot.

PfH is one of the scariest horror stories I've ever read in my life.

I realized recently that I seldom read horror the way it's meant to be read. I read horror in bathrooms and on subways. It's usually well lit and I'm usually surrounded by oppressive New York City crowds and I'm rarely in the right environment to be too affected by the stories. I read PfH in bright daylight on the subway platform and it still scared me.

It's got everything a good horror story needs. There's a decaying southern manor, a couple of walking corpses, a guy with an axe in his head, voodoo curses, the most trusting sheriff in all fiction, vigorous manly combat, and evil local legends. I can't recommend this tale highly enough.

Dracula: The Un-Dead: I'd seen this book around for some time but I didn't pick it up until recently. Written as a sequel to the original Bram Stoker novel and co-authored by a Dracula expert and Stoker's great grand nephew, the book has been drubbed for essentially rewriting the original story and making Dracula a romantic, misunderstood hero. For what is meant to be a loving tribute to the original, the book almost completely invalidates everything that's come before.

However, if you can get past all that, it's a ripping adventure story. It has the pacing and derring-do of a fun action film. There are evil monsters, swashbuckling heroes, sexy sex, and carriage chases through the streets of London.

The book is a little too concerned with retreading and reinterpreting old ground, and it's efforts to cast Dracula in a sympathetic light ultimately renders the heroic adventurers of the original novel as a bunch of embittered, violent lunatics. The lead hero, the spoiled actor son of Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, comes off as spoiled, hard headed, and unlikable. But if you're willing to see this as more fanfic than proper follow-up then it's an entertaining action horror novel.

Soul: Soul was the last thing that really scared the crap out of me.

I found this game through Xbox 360s indie game store, where it was a featured selection for Halloween. It's a simple, beautiful little game. You guide a glowing little soul out of a dead body and lead it up into heaven. If you accidentally bump into any of the walls or the blobby demons, you have to start the area from the beginning. Simple enough.

I didn't expect the fucking girl.

You see her about three screens in, this strange little creature standing in your way. As you accidentally brush past her, the screen suddenly changes to this terrifying bitch screaming at you. When this first happened, I jumped 30 feet in the air, screaming my head off. Once I calmed down, I realized that I was playing a high-tech version of the old maze game.

So it's a scam, but it's a brilliantly done scam. The art is beautiful, the gameplay is compelling, and if you fail enough, the chick comes out and scares you again. Because the game requires a lot of concentration, she gets you when you're not ready.

And, hours later, her face kept popping up in the dark. Damn her.

Piranha 3D: I saw Piranha 3D completely drunk.

My office has a lot of celebratory liquor they leave unguarded and I decided that four shots of vodka and four beers would be a good way to start my weekend off. I was planning on going with an NYC Horror Movie meetup group, but I grossly miscalculated how much alcohol I could handle.

I had a great time.

I don't know what I would have thought about the movie sober. The stuff I remember wasn't exactly subtle, but it was a fun little exploitation flick with tons of "Oh Shit" moments. While it rankles my fake-intellectual, ultra liberal point of view, I have to admit that sometimes blood and boobs can be a lot of fun.

Predators: This was supposed to be the movie that saves the Predator franchise. It took the Predators away from their battles with aliens and brought the series back to it's roots: a bunch of tough guys out in the jungle behind hunted by an unfathomable adversary.

It doesn't quite work. Some of the characters are a little ridiculous (Yakuza? Serial killer doctor?), the dialogue displays a bit too much meta humor, and there's too much of thing I can't stand where characters talk about their motivations too directly, so they grow too obvious as the movie goes on. Ultimately, however, the filmmakers strove to emulate the first film so closely that they made essentially an inferior copy. I basically enjoyed it, but when I left the theater I couldn't help but think that it was a film that didn't need to be made.

Adrian Brody kicked ass, though.

Let Me In: I really wanted this movie to succeed even before it came out. I knew they were planning a near shot-for-shot remake of the original, but I just wanted more Americans to see this movie and realize that vampires still have some viciousness to them, that they're not all bad-boy romance novel leads.

Silly me, I should have realized that people aren't actually interested in scary vampires. Let Me In flopped, which is a shame because it's a really good remake. It jettisons a lot of the extraneous stuff around the characters (no CGI cat attack) and keeps the focus square on the kids. The vampire girl is much less alien and cold this time around, the vampire's caregiver is given greater characterization and pathos, and the boy is much more vulnerable and less special needsy.

The movie hits all the same notes in more or less the same way and I did at times wonder, like Predators, why they bothered remaking it in the first place. Still, this was an excellent horror film and I'm sorry it tanked as hard as it did.

Warlock: Warlock is one of those weird movies I have a slightly overblown sense of nostalgia for. I remember loving as a kid, especially Julian Sands' performance as the diabolical, flamboyantly evil warlock. I remembered the Warlock movies as being action-packed romps with a villain so gleefully melodramatic that he came off like a Saturday morning cartoon character with the chains off.

I recently rewatched the first film and I have to say that it still holds up very well. The warlock is still completely entertaining and I really loved the buddy-comedy duo that goes after him. I especially liked the flighty party girl who accompanies the grim crusader in his quest to capture the warlock. She comes off as a real person; mercurial and impatient, but with genuine steel in her spine. I liked how spooked the normally-unflappable crusader was when he came across his own grave. Finally, I loved the weird toe-and-thumb cuffs the crusader binds the warlock in. They're both authentic-seeming, and absolutely ridiculous. This movie, distributed by legendary genre studio Cannon, was made in the halcyon days before CGI and all the flashy effects work looks very quaint and cool.

There's really nothing wrong with this movie. Give it another look.

I Spit On Your Grave Remake: Whoa.

Many, many moons ago, I was really into martial arts and wound up assisting in a self-defense course at the community college I attended after high school. The vast majority of the students were young women and I eventually sussed out that most were there out of a very real fear that they would be attacked and sexually assaulted. As a dude, you don't really think about that sort of thing. When I walked through a dark campus after my late classes, I was worried about getting jumped and robbed, not about getting violated. Coming to that realization was very eye-opening.

I saw I Spit during a free preview screening. The vast majority of the audience were women.

Rape/revenge films are always a touchy subject and I Spit is easily the most notorious of the lot, thanks in particular to Roger Ebert's scathing review of the original. He wasn't much kinder to the remake, but I think in his extreme patronizing, that he missed something of the point. I Spit is an ugly film, and maybe we are ugly people for wanting to watch it, but I can't say I really felt titillated by the painfully long rape scene. It was horrifying and heartbreaking and the viewer is forced to see things from Jennifer's point of view. Jennifer's assailants aren't sexy or masculine. They're just cruel and she is absolutely vulnerable in the face of their cruelty.

I hear a lot about the appeal of horror is that it allows us to confront, in a small safe way, the terrible aspects of life. I refuse to believe that there weren't people in the audience who were projecting themselves onto Jennifer and seeing what her situation would feel like.

The second half of the film loses a bit of steam for me, as Jennifer's revenge becomes a bit over the top and torture porn-y, but I like the way the film focuses on the men and the way they're almost literally haunted by the spectre of what they've done. I don't know if I can say I enjoyed the film, but it was tremendously engaging.

The Walking Dead: This one is a little premature, as I've only seen the first episode. I like what I've seen so far.

I'm pretty much done with the zombie genre. It's completely overplayed, full of cliches, unoriginal, and entirely too prolific. Occasionally something clever comes along, but I have a hard time enjoying even the clever little variations to the genre.

I had believed that, in order to reinvent the genre, the next zombie film would have to radically alter the formula to the point where the old cliches simply couldn't happen. It turns out I was wrong and the real salvation for the genre is in bringing back the humanity to the genre.

Frank Darabont is really good at injecting humanity into horror. His adaption of Stephen King's The Mist stands as one of the most touching, darkest horror movies of all time. He has a gift for intelligent, mature, emotionally rich storytelling and watching his stuff makes you realize just how rare those traits are in the genre. Watching The Walking Dead reminds me that all you need to make a stale genre interesting again is to create compelling drama amid the bloodshed.

I'm not a huge fan of the comic book. I think Robert Kirkman is in desperate need of an editor and his characters spend a lot of time coldly explaining their feelings towards one another. I think The Walking Dead fits best in Darabont's hands and I defy anyone to watch the scene of the man hesitating to shoot the reanimated corpse of his wife to not be moved. Zombie movies are ultimately about what death means to us. It's an amazing start and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

A Special Place: I don't really buy Dexter.

Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the show. I've been with it since the beginning and I will probably devote an article to my observations at some point in the future, but I have a very hard time believing a man like Dexter could ever exist. The circumstances that created the character amount to a sort of perfect storm, one that could almost never be repeated in the real world, specifically the notion that a cop father would recognize the signs of sociopathy in his son and train him to be some sort of invisible avenger. It's a cute concept for TV, but seems as unlikely as a kid getting bit by a radioactive spider and becoming a superhero.

A Special Place seems almost to be an answer to Dexter, centering around a much more likely possibility of an older serial killer recognizing the same traits in a younger family member.

Apparently A Special Place is a side-story to a longer work written by Peter Straub. Some of you may be gobsmacked by this, but for a die-hard horror fanatic, I have never read a Peter Straub book. He looms large in the genre. I never deliberately avoided him but we simply never had the opportunity to cross paths. I enjoyed the hell out of A Special Place. The lead characters come off the way you'd expect real psychopaths to behave, their poor willing victim seems almost tailor-made for annihilation, and the boy's poor mother is especially compelling as she tries to reach out to her doomed son. It's a fantastic read and I need to pick up more of Straub's work.

Anyway, I doubt this will be the last hiatus I wind up taking. Sometimes life gets in the way. But I think I'm gonna get back in the swing of regular contributing, if for no other reason than I like writing about this stuff and I think I'm pretty good at it.

Soultaker by Bryan Smith

2010-10-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

Soultaker fascinated me.

It didn't fascinate me due to it's quality. It can be politely described as formulaic but fun, something to pass the idle hours on the commuter train. There are about five or six horror writers I regularly come back to when I want something lurid and sensationalistic and fun. They wear their genre bonafides on their sleeve and their stories are almost interchangeable: corruption and anarchy hits a maddeningly suburban town, the protagonist is always some Sunset Strip hair metal type, the violence splashes gleefully across the page, and the woman are always cartoonishly sexually aggressive. The tea sipping elitist in me is mortified that I enjoy this stuff, but my inner five year old devours it.

Soultaker plays pretty close to form. A female sexual demon known as a Lamia comes to a shitty little suburb and begins corrupting the populace by taking the form of a surly goth teenager and fucking the local hot shot jock. The jock's alcoholic writer brother comes to town to help him out and is unwittingly forced to fight against evil and blah blah blah. It's not particularly inventive or challenging but it's competently put together and I enjoyed my time reading it. The reason it stuck with me after I put it down because the more I think about it, the more I feel it's a story about male fear of female sexuality.

I've gone on rants before about how I believe horror is often a satire of our fears. Some of them are cultural fears, some of them are fears specific to an era in our history, and some are universal. It's no secret that human cultures have spent generations trying to control what a woman does with her body and Soultaker feels like a sort of extreme satire about what could happen if women had complete control of her own sexuality.

Lamia is an unequivocably female threat. While her goal is to perform some sort of mass sacrifice for another hundred years of life, she achieves it by seducing and destroying anyone who gets in her way. Her acolytes are all women and they use an almost comically exaggerated sexuality to get what they want. They're not bashful or subdued; they want to fuck and come and push bondaries all the way through to graphic murder. The men who they take over become simpering submissive slaves bent to their evil will. The heroes eventually become drawn into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style web where they can no longer trust that their friends or families aren't acolytes or slaves of Lamia. All the heroes are male with the one exception of a lesbian who happens to be Lamia's daughter and uses the same sexuality in an attempt to destroy her mother.

I absolutely don't want to suggest that I think Bryan Smith is a misogynist. While the subjects he's tackling can be incredibly challenging, I don't really sense any particular malice from his work. To be honest, I'm probably overinterpreting the intent behind his book. For all I know he just wanted a little raunchy sex, a little gruesome violence, and a bunch of fun scares. Besides, I'm currently reading the collected horror stories of Robert E. Howard and his virulent racism makes Smith seems like the copywriter for the ACLU.

I don't know if I would actually recommend this book to people. It's crudely written and the subject matter might turn off people with sensitive constitutions or people whose socially conscious dial is set too high. I don't know how much of the stuff I'm drawing from the story is from my notorious penchant for over-interpretation and how much of it was deliberately laid down by Smith, but the gender politics of the book kept me fascinated.

Also, it was a good way to kill five or six hours on my commute.

Horror Commercials

2010-08-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

The fine folks over at Bloody-Disgusting recently posted an article about horror-themed advertisements. If you're like me, you remember the Freddy phone one from the halcyon days of youth. Or maybe you just like watching Vincent Price shill stuff. Anyway, enjoy!

The Addams Family Musical

2010-07-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a little story.

I came out to New York City around the end of January. Like most first-timers, I immediately gravitated to all the touristy shit, which included several awe-struck walkthroughs in Times Square. One of my very first trips led me to a theater that was proudly announcing a new musical based on the Addams Family.

I completely plotzed. It should probably come as no surprise that I am a huge fan of Charles Addams' macabre little creation and, like many San Franciscans, I'm a sucker for musical theater. Unfortunately the show wouldn't even begin its run until after I left. I decided to stick around this town and I'd go to the theater from time to time but Broadway shows are prohibitively expensive. This past week a relative came to visit and he offered to take me to the show. I was elated.

Now, I'd heard rumors floating around that the musical wasn't actually all that good. I'm generally of the mind that where there's smoke there's fire but New Yorkers are also a cynical lot. I went to the play last night with as open a mind as possible.

I wasn't disappointed.

Okay, maybe I was a little. The first act was much, much weaker than the first one. I'm told most Broadway shows lead with their best stuff, but Addams Family saves their best numbers for the second act. Also, perhaps it's because I've been spoiled by the fantastic Marc Shaiman score for the films, but I felt like the music didn't really fit the Addams spirit. For a macabre, ghoulish family the first act's music and lyrics were a bit too peppy and upbeat.

Therein lies my fundamental problem with the musical: I felt that their interpretation of the family didn't jibe with what I understood the Addams to be. The play centers around Wednesday, who falls in love with a sensitive poet type and discovers an affinity for smiles and sunshine and icky yellow dresses. Addams Family Values had a similar conceit with Wednesday's summer camp romance to the hypochondriac, but it was clear that she was still a vile little psychopath. Here, she goes all squishy and stays that way.

That's pretty much all I have to rag on it about. Let's get to the positives.

For all the songs in the first act that didn't feel like good fits for the Addams Family, the second act contained some really strong tunes that fit the family's romantically morbid streak, in particular the sexy "Teach Me How to Tango", the touching "Happy/Sad" and the chilling "Move Toward The Darkness", which laid out the family's philosophy nicely. While I bag on the opening act, the intro song "Clandango" was a catchy tune and a great way to introduce new audiences to the joys of the Addams Family. Finally, there's a substory about creepy Uncle Fester's infatuation with the moon and all his songs are probably the best in the show. They're peppy little ballads sung by a weirdo and infused with his goofy charm.

Second, you have to see Nathan Lane perform comedy live. When I think of Gomez Addams I tend to be fixated on Raul Julia's performance, with all his suave Latin charm, bad puns, and flair for romance. Lane's performance is more flamboyant and energetic but he really plays up Gomez's punny humor to great effect. The man knows how to deliver a line and his unique inflection is absolutely hilarious. If you're even slightly a fan of the Addams clan, you have to see Nathan Lane in the role.

The rest of the family is equally stellar. Lurch lurches, Gramma cackled (and they finally address whose mother she is), and Pugsley gets up to all sorts of near-fatal mischief. Bebe Neuwirth plays Morticia, the matriarch of the Addams clan. I always thought that Morticia would be the hardest Addams character to nail down because you have to walk a fine line between imperiousness and romance and she does a beautiful job of it. Morticia is put through a sort of midlife crisis that shakes her normally unassailable confidence, and it makes for one of the more interest story threads in the piece. Uncle Fester, the family's lovable weirdo uncle, has all the best songs and Kevin Chamberlin does an awesome job.

Finally, let's talk about Krysta Rodriguez, the young thespian who portrays Wednesday Addams. I already griped that the play too out her fangs, but....aw hell, she's hot. Not the most insightful commentary, but cut me some slack. I'm not Ben Brantley.

Man, I really suck at writing conclusions.

There's a lot of stuff to like about The Addams Family Musical: it captures the family's charm, Nathan Lane is brilliant as Gomez, and there's a lot of really good songs sprinkled through it. Not everything works, Wednesday gets the short end of the stick, and there's some stuff that falls flat, but the Addams Family has a Pavlovian effect on my psyche. I'm probably gonna go see it again with a Morticia of my own...

Last House On The Left 2009 Liveblogging

2010-07-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

I'm liveblogging Last House On The Left because I can't bring myself to leave my apartment.

I'm having a rough go of it today. The stress of being always broke and lonely is hitting me like a punch in the heart. Today was the gay pride parade in NYC and I really wanted to go, but inertia hit me and I made the mistake of looking at my bank balance. So I've managed to completely freak myself out and all my roommates are gone so I don't have to pretend to be a nice guy and I can watch this sleazy, big budget remake of a sleazy low budget Wes Craven film.

LHOTL was one of the first horror movies I ever watched. I was slowly going through the big name slasher flicks and everyone said that LHOTL was one of the most intense things Wes Craven ever did. I remember watching it on my tiny little TV/VCR set-up in my bedroom in the apartment my mom rented after the divorce (tween years+intense family strife+innate love of the macabre=horror fandom).

I was disappointed.

There was hardly any gore, which was what I'd come to expect, and the rape stuff didn't really affect me one way or another. I was 12 years old, stupid, and emotionally immature. I've never watched it since. I've grown up and I find that, while I like a lot of really crappy movies, I really can't deal with sexualized violence. It's ugly and uncomfortable and it's a big reason why I never bothered with I Spit On Your Grave. When someone is killed in a movie, it's usually relatively quick. The gun goes off, the machete comes down, AAGH! BOOM! SPLAT! done. When someone is raped or tortured on film, it goes on forever and they're screaming and I squirm because I tend to get wrapped up in my fictions and I always feel weirdly complicit when I watch those movies, which is why I tend to avoid torture porn, too.

Anyway, this is all stream-of-consciousness. I'm alone in my apartment, working on my 20th Century Ghosts review and I decided to pop in my library copy of LHOTL and give it a whirl. I missed it in theaters, but I'd always been curious about it. It looked really slick and I wondered how a flashy remake of a godawful exploitation flick would turn out.

I'm exactly nineteen minutes into the movie and I decided to pause it and to a liveblog review of it.

I read flickfilosopher's review on it and it was about what I expected: she called it sleazy, amoral, and cruel. I've been paying attention to the movie and I felt the same emotions I felt during Funny Games: I don't want anything bad to happen and I absolutely dread what's gonna happen next. The girls have gone back to the hotel room with the sketchy teenager and shit is about to get a whole lot more socially awkward. If I watch this, I'm going to want to write a review of it, but I'm not going to want to spend days chewing it over and writing my typical bullshit dissertation. I'm gonna go with an off-the-cuff thing. So, in the spirit of the inimitable Final Girl, I'm writing my liveblog review of LHOTL.

On the stuff I've already watched: First, the director reeeeeaaaally likes ogling the lead teenager. There's a bit where she comes out of the shower and the camera lingers on her dripping skin, her virginal white undies, the mournful look in her eyes, and all that stuff. It's a little weird.

Second, family strife! The family has already lost one kid to mysterious circumstances and everyone is mooning around in the house full of mementos. If this is your vacation home and you come to relax, wouldn't you remove all the photos of the smiling child looking back at you?

Third, the bad guys are really, really big bastards.

Forth, everyone in this is a really good actor. The direction is also skilled. Aren't these movies meant to be made by amateurs with no taste and no sense of restraint? Isn't it weird when you're getting sleaze from real grown-ups?

Okay, on with the show!

20:47: This movie seems to be a cautionary tale about what happens when you step off the beaten track and don't listen to your parents. Apparently, if you break curfew, you'll be raped and murdered.

22:31: Somewhere in this movie there's a legitimate tale of teenage woe and heartache. The three teenagers have an actual rapport. It's charming. Also, the whole grainy footage, handheld camera thing is a little too planned.

23:46: BEWBS! PSYCHO BEWBS!! Also, the crazies showed up and things are already uncomfortable and terrible. Also, all the psychos are way too pretty. They look too clean and poised, not all sketchy and weird.

26:16: It would have been creepier if the psycho family played nice at first and lulled them into a false sense of security. Instead, they all but announce their intention for violence right out the gate.

26:33: Aaaaaand here comes the knives.

27:10: "I'm sorry ladies, we just can't risk it."

28:41: The kid who lured them in the situation has an iota more humanity than the rest. Not that it's gonna do any good in the end.

29:52: The psychos are clearly meant to be as much a family as the vanilla and sunshine family. I assume the father plans on having his son kill the two girls as a lesson in sociopathy.

31:59: Dude loves his close-ups.

32:46: Why is the Mari girl giving them directions? Is she gonna try to swim the lake.

33:51: Cigarette lighter in the face! FUCK YEAH!

36:00: Well, guess the torture is about to begin. How do actors do this sort of thing? How do you go to the dark places these sorts of roles require?

40:19: Flickfilosopher is right, these movies rely on a tremendous amount of sexualized violence. At what point does it become a problem?

40:36: Roommate just walked in. They are nice people and they don't need to be subjected to this stuff.

40:40: Yep. Lessons in sociopathy. The father is telling his son to rape one of the girls. Guess here's where the rape part of the rape revenge happens.

42:10: Oh good god. Now there's stabbing. Highly sexualized stabbing. The camera lens leers like it did after the shower scene.

43:20: Okay, I just saw the sickest shit ever. The guy who stabbed the girl is telling her friend to offer fake reassurances. As far as sheer, heartless sadism goes, that about takes the cake. This guy's got one over on Jigsaw.

44:11: We've just gotten to the rape. Why is the psycho's girlfriend goading this on? Is it a way to counter charges of male sexist viciousness "Oh the girlfriend was involved, so it's not like it was just an act of male on female sexualized violence." Also, do you you suppose people were expecting to be doing this stuff when they majored in drama? Also, god help me for saying this, it could have been a lot worse and more pornographic. As bad as this is, they could have made it a lot more graphic.

45:55: Still going. Christ, was it this long in the original?

46:34: Hopefully done. There's a weird moment of....I dunno, hyperawareness? Serenity?

48:01: HIT HIM IN THE HEAD WITH A FUCKING ROCK!!! I really like this girl. She's got more fire than I have. I'd have been dead long ago.

49:39: Y'know, I guess I expected Mari to live. Not that kind of movie, I suppose. Also, what's up with the psycho girl? Does she regret what she is? Why is she crying over Mari's corpse?

51:51: There's absolutely no time between the rape/murder and the killers showing up at Mari's family's house. It's like the movie is rushing to be over. DUDE!

54:34: There's an HOUR left on this thing? Are we gonna spend the next hour playing bullshit cat-and-mouse games with these assholes.

57:00: Y'know, I feel kinda bad for Justin, Krug's slightly more moral kid. He's really a lot better than his family. I predict he's gonna die a horrible death.

59:09: Guess Mari survived. That kid is made of steel. I couldn't swim across a lake with a bullet in my back.

1:02:54: I like the quiet moment by the fireplace where the two families are communicating before all the shit starts.

1:05:11: Okay, I call foul. The bad guys aren't...weird enough. They positively leaked menace every other time they were on screen, yet suddenly they have the etiquette skills of a courtier at high tea? No, nuh-uh, people this badly effed up drop more hints on their insanity.

1:07:09: They just found their daughter. Shit's about to get real.

1:09:01: Nothing like sealing a bullet wound closed with a knife to make a movie seem like Rambo.

1:12:34: The parents just realized exactly what happened to their daughter. There is something to be said about having real actors do these roles. There is a lot of really good storytelling potential in these roles and having some campy asshole do these parts would really sap the seriousness of the narrative.

1:14:44: Does Justin want to kill his old man? He is staring longingly at the gun. Maaaaybe he's redeemable, but I'm not holding my breath.

1:19:15: See, you can pretend to be a classy thriller, but once a hero starts looking longingly at power tools, then you know it's gonna be something else.

1:20:15: They aren't gonna do the castration scene, are they?

1:20:52: Don't choose the heavy wrench. Come on, you have hacksaws! Either be a thriller or be an exploitation film. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

1:22:21: Nope, They didn't do the castration scene. Just a plain old knifey knifey.

1:23:11: Guess the doctor ain't much for the Hippocratic oath if he's rebreaking a guy's nose. Also, these guys are surprisingly adept at murder. They're both drowning the fuck out that evil bastard. No, wait, now they stuck his hand in a garbage disposal. Aaaaand a claw hammer in the skull.

1:27:13: Justin is weeeeiiirrrdd....

1:28:50: Again, it's not really a thriller if Crazy Bitch is fighting topless and covered in blood.

(At this point, my roommate came in and took the laptop. The rest of my observations are transcribed from my pretentious writerly moleskine.)

1:30:58: A bullet in the eye is too good for Crazy Bitch.

1:33:01: Um. What is Justin's angle?

1:36:11: Nothing like a chatty sociopath.

1:38:32: Krug is a pretty hardcore monster as far as vicious spree killer sociopaths go.

1:41:01: Yep. Turns out Justin is a hero and he gets to die for it.

1:42:07: Come on. He's down, finish him off. Don't bullshit us with a final jump scare.

1:46:11: He microwaved that guy's head off!!

***************************

Afterwards.

It's two days later. My freak out has passed and I've had a couple days to let the movie simmer in my brain. I don't think liveblogging was entirely a success. The thoughts are too random and disjointed. Rereading what I wrote feels frustratingly incoherent, like trying to read a twitter feed.

Here's what I really thought: LHotL wasn't really what I was expecting. It's not actually bad. If you are looking for a movie where a girl gets raped and her parents get revenge, then this film is for you. There's no much else to it, the movie doesn't stray too much its very linear narrative path.

One weird thing about the movie is that the sleaziness of the subject matter doesn't really jibe with the way it's presented. The original had a gritty handheld camera style and "naturalistic" actors. The remake has very attractive people and confident camera work. It's sort of weird how professional the whole thing is. Exploitation films are supposed to feel cheap and amateurish. When professionals make an exploitation film, it becomes something else. It's too gruesome to be a thriller, especially since the bad girl spends a significant amount of time topless. But it's still all too slick.

One thing I will say is that the rape scene wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. I was expecting something much worse after reading Flick Filosopher's review on the film, but I never felt particularly titillated. Indeed, the rape is pretty horrific. I really liked the way that we're forced into the victim's point of view and the hyperfocus she has on things around her as the act is happening. The filmmakers don't show anything too explicit and keep the focus on the victim's pain throughout it. I can't really make the argument that the scene was meant to titillate the viewer.

I guess I can recommend it. It's not a pretty story, but it has teeth. It's not really a thriller or an exploitation film or a horror flick but it's definitely worth seeing. Check it out.

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

2010-06-24T15:55:00.001-07:00

Recently, the AV Club did an article about whether or not we are living in a golden age of movies and pop culture entertainment. While I couldn't hack my way through - AV articles can be really pretentious and boring - it did get me to thinking about the way I view genre history. I tend to wax nostalgic about a mythical yesteryear when movies weren't all about the stupid jump scare, when everything didn't feel watered down and played out. The thing is, maybe that's true of any age. Maybe the stuff that is actually worth remembering is always surrounded by mediocrity. Maybe it's the process of casting the wide net through the sea of bullshit and Platinum Dunes remakes that leads us to the things that are genuinely good.

Or, to put it mildly, I think Joe Hill is the real deal.

Maybe I'm such a big Joe Hill fanboy because the characters and subjects he writes about resonates with my own life experience, in the same way melodramatic angsty music resonates with a moody teenager. Maybe I'm trying to apply an objective standard of "good" to highly subjective things. Whatever. I've gone through three of his books and he ain't let me down.

20th Century Ghosts is an anthology of horror-themed stories. Though there are ghosts and monsters aplenty, the stories tend to be about the spectres of memory and loss. Hill does something I wish more authors would do; he tells stories that use horror tropes as a grounding for tales of people rather than drag us through the same rusty haunted house doors. He's got a great command of characters, he uses language beautifully, he doesn't think endless swearing makes a story more tough and authentic (not that I have a problem with swearing. I swear like a sailor. But bad writers often rely on it to make a story more "edgy", like 10 year olds cussing out their parent's earshot. Mine cussed around me, so it was all good) and, unlike certain other major horror writers, he can actually end a story.

Anyway, that's enough of lighting incense at his feet. When I review anthologies I like going through the stories. It's a pattern that has worked well in the past and I don't see a reason not to try to duplicate success. Without further ado:

Best New Horror: I had this idea once. I really, really did. But I chickened out because I didn't think I could pull it off. Honestly, I was probably right, but Hill definitely did a hell of a job on it.

BNH is one of the most dead-on depictions of horror fandom and the fatigue that often comes with it. You love this stuff with a primal ferocity and then one day you realize that most everything out there is either a rip-off of something better or it thinks you're a fool. The protagonist, a burned out anthology editor, comes across a genuinely original and scary work and it shocks him out of his ennui. He recalls the first time he ever felt the joy of the horror genre after watching The Haunting as a small boy:

When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.

Boom. Nailed it.

It turns out that the guy who wrote the story is a bit messed up and BNH quickly degenerates into a nasty backwoods stalker story. But the story takes it's most celebratory tone when things are at their worst. The protagonist has finally gotten the purest jolt he'd been searching for his entire life. This story should be compulsory reading for the hardcore horror devotee.

20th Century Ghost: A lot of horror writers tell stories about haunted movie theaters, whether it's Clive Barker's seminal Son Of Celluloid or Joe R. Lansdale's trippy Drive-In novels. Most of us horror fanatics developed our taste of the genre in darkened movie palaces and it's natural that haunted movie theaters are just as much a trope of the genre as spooky castles, abandoned graveyards, and eerie summer camps.

Despite the story's scary elements- and the ghost of poor Imogene Gilchrist is genuinely unnerving- the story is really a love story. It's strangely nostalgic and sentimental, maybe a little adorably schmaltzy, but I loved it. It's one of the two stories that I remember most fondly in the collection.

Pop Art: I'm not sure if I'd mentioned this before, but Joe R. Lansdale is one of my heroes as a writer. I read his stuff at a key point in my development and his unique combination of Southern dry wit, machismo, and absolutely insane subject matter got me hooked. I have a natural inclination toward literary pretentiousness and whenever I start writing to impress people rather than writing for the sheer joy of it, I crack open a Lansdale book and marvel at the almost childlike imagination and enthusiasm of it.

Pop Art felt like a Joe R. Lansdale story.

The story is about a boy made out of inflatable plastic and the troubled, angry kid he befriends. It reminded me of a Lansdale piece about an inflatable sex doll that yearns to be free, but Pop Art has its own thing going. The inflatable boy is serene and almost Christlike in the way he views the world and the difficulties of his condition. His positivity and his unconditional love go a long way to healing the narrator.

I read a lot and, God help me, I read a tremendous amount of genre fiction. In most genre fiction, the first person narrative almost always sounds the same: cynical, detached, tough, and cold. Speaking as a long-time roleplayer, I know when someone's creating an avatar for the way they either perceive themselves or the way they want to be and most first person narratives sound vaguely like wish fulfillment. Both this story and the tales "Voluntary Committal" and "Better Than Home" deal with a narrator with emotional problems. They're not dry, detached reporters of events surrounding them, but instead they perceive the tales through the lenses of their own world view. The kid in Pop Art is angry and defensive and the inflatable boy's presence in his life does him a world of good. It's ultimately not a happy story, but it's one of the most emotionally engaging in the book.

You Will Hear The Locust Sing: This really odd mash up of Lansdale-style weirdness, fifties sci-fi big bug horror and Kafka's Metamorphosis is just...odd. I can't quite tell if it's a story that didn't so well for me or if it's doing something I'd need an English degree to figure out, but ultimately it didn't rock my cage too much. It ultimately confined me to an experience I wasn't all that interested with in the first place. Not that it was bad. It's like Korean food; it's really well made for what it is, but it's never gonna be the first thing I want to order on the menu.

Abraham's Boys: Oh, did I love this story.

I'm so sick and goddamn tired of the Dracula story. It's interesting up until we leave his bitchin' castle, then all the movies/stories/whatever degenerate into the characters wringing their hands and watching Lucy die. Even when people screw with the narrative like they did with Hammer's Horror of Dracula, it all still seems too familiar. While I still basically like vampires and I still adore the character of Dracula, stories based around the actual novel don't really do anything for me. I gave up hope on anything interesting being done with Jonathan Harker, Mina, Van Helsing, Lucy, and the rest of the gang. Boy was I wrong.

Abraham's Boys is a vampire story without any vampires in it. Van Helsing has immigrated to America, where he's been cast out of academia for his crackpot beliefs in vampires. He now lives in isolation with his two terrified boys, whom he rules with physical abuse and tales of supernatural forces set against them. We discover that Van Helsing married Mina, who died under terrible circumstances, and the boys begin to doubt their father's sanity.

This interpretation of Van Helsing, while significantly less heroic, totally works. He's a scary, paranoid, cold father figure and there's a real chance that he may simply be crazy. We feel bad for the boys, and their slow rebellion has horrible consequences, but it's the best Dracula story I've read in a long time.

Better Than Home: Probably the best character study in the book, this completely non-horror tale is told from the point of view of a special needs child and his relationship to his baseball coach father.

It's really hard to pull off a narrator with severe mental issues, especially when that narrator is a kid. The best example I've ever seen is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but author Mark Haddon had worked extensively with autistic children before writing the book. Most writers either slip into that cynical outsider perspective or, to use the distasteful terminology of Tropic Thunder, go "full retard" and make the story unreadable. Hill leaned toward the former and the narrator is a little too on-the-ball for how severe his disability is, but the relationship he has with his wonderfully patient father is one of the strongest emotional moments in the anthology.

The Black Phone: This story felt like a throwback to all those trapped-by-a-serial-killer stories I used to read in Cemetery Dance after Silence of the Lambs blew up. The protagonist is a kid (and I'm just starting to realize, what's up with all these kids and teens in Hill's work?) who gets captured by a grotesquely obese sexual predator and kept in a basement. While he's trying to figure out a way out of his predicament, a black plastic phone starts ringing. On the other end of the line are the voices of the man's previous victims.

Spooooooooky....

I really liked this story. The lead kid was tremendously scrappy, proactive, and resourceful and you were rooting for him through the whole thing. It's a very direct sort of story: stuff happens, followed by other stuff, then boom! done, but it's got creepy ghosts, dank murder holes, and gross hatchet wielding, fratricidal killers. Win.

In The Rundown: Hill has an amazing ability to make completely angry, unsympathetic characters redeemable, and his gifts really shine in this story. The lead character is a nasty jerk who gets fired from working in a video store after making threatening comments to a coworker. On his way home, he comes across a grisly scene of a crazed mom trying to kill her kids and rises to the moment.

I liked this piece because of the way it shifts our perspective on the lead. He's an absolutely mean-spirited shit but he comes through in the end. The scenes with the crazed mother is genuinely chilling because it unspools so slowly. We only get information on what's going on in small pieces, so we're as off-balance and disoriented as the protagonist. It's a great effect. In The Rundown is less of a whole story than the portrayal of a single moment, so we don't quite know how things worked out, but it's a great little horror tale.

The Cape: I grew up on Ray Bradbury. When I was a kid, I loved his imagination, his nostalgia, and the poetic way he told his stories. Though he's since disowned it, The October Game is still one of the most terrifying and grisly stories in all horror fiction. As I've gotten older and ornerier, I've had a hard time connecting to his sentimental, syrupy stuff, but the Ray Bradbury story has become like 80s video game music to me: even if I haven't heard it for a long time, just a few notes brings back a tidal wave of memories and emotions.

The Cape starts out feeling exactly like a Ray Bradbury story. It's about a couple of brothers who spent their childhood tying fake capes around their necks and pretending to be superheroes. As the story begins, one of the brothers is starting to outgrow the game, but his sibling tries to get him to play one more time. He climbs up the tree, taunting the brother, and discovers that his cape gives him the ability to fly.

At that point, I expected the story to turn into a nostalgic childhood tale of whimsey and magic but shit rapidly goes downhill. Stuff happens, people become awful, and lives don't turn out exactly the way the characters want them to before someone goes and does something horrible. It was kinda hard to really like the story because there aren't really any sympathetic or likable characters, but it does play to one of Hill's strengths, which is an honest depiction of the small ways that people and families disintegrate. It's a well-told tale and it showcases some of the things I really love about Hill's work, but it's not something I'm going to be rushing back to any time soon.

Last Breath: The other stand out horror tale in this anthology, Last Breath is a tale about a very polite, very creepy doctor who collects the final exhalations of people at the moment of their death. He bottles them up and displays them in a museum, where people can listen to the sounds with a device called a deathoscope. A family of three visits the museum. The father and child are enraptured by the exhibit, but the mother becomes more and more uncomfortable. Things happen.

I loved the creepy but kindly Dr. Alinger. As a guy who is fascinated by tale spinners and crypt keepers, I love weirdo morbid eccentrics. The way he describes his collection is chilling and evocative. The little tales he tells with each death are amazing and eerie. I think I want to be this guy. It's a fairly straightforward EC comics sort of tale, but it's one of my favorites.

Dead-Wood: A one-page poetical rumination on the ghosts of trees, Dead-Wood...is good. Look, just read the fucking thing. It's a page.

The Widow's Breakfast: Another really good non-horror story, The Widow's Breakfast is a Depression-era story of a drifter who shares a meal with a recently-widowed young woman. It's a great character piece, kinda sad and kinda touching.

We meet the drifter right after his more intelligent friend is killed and he's feeling vulnerable and lonely. I like that he keeps comparing the way he does things to the way his friend did them. He probably wasn't the brains of the outfit, but he's also trapped in tremendous insecurity, which makes him more sweet. Everyone is so sad and lonely and goddamn likable.

It also has the most chilling final line I've ever read in a non-horror story.

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead: This tale was featured in The Living Dead, an anthology I reviewed awhile back. It's cropped up in pretty much every zombie anthology I've seen since then. My original notes still stand.

My Father's Mask: This is a damn weird story. It's somewhat Alice In Wonderland, somewhat straight horror and all weird. Stories with kids who have weird parents are a dime a dozen, but these cats were really, really weird, especially the sexy mom. It was a very cool piece, though. I think the point was that adult problems go straight over children's head and all they can do is get knocked around in the ripple effect. Still, the mom is pretty damn hot.

Voluntary Committal: The novella that closes the anthology, Voluntary Committal tells the story of a young man whose idiot savant brother creates elaborate forts in the basement of the family house with sheets and cardboard boxes. The forts become more frighteningly elaborate until people go in and never come out...

This story could have been a lot shorter. There's a certain kind of horror author that would have fixated on the creepy shit going on in the basement, but Voluntary Committal, like Better Than Home is mostly about the effect disabled kids have on a family. The family is brilliantly realized and I especially liked the fact that the narrator's mother recognized the mean streak in her healthier son and did her best to suppress it. I liked that the "evil" friend of the narrator wasn't really one of those generic effed-up generic horror sociopath. Instead, he had all the squirrelly, needy defense mechanisms of a kid from an abusive home. I actually felt a little bad for him when his fate came down, and I felt especially bad for the sad, insecure girl he left behind.

As for the horror, it's a pretty Lovecraftian piece, all weird angles and plateaus of Leng. I love that stuff. Voluntary Committal is ultimately a compelling family drama with just enough nastiness thrown in.

20th Century Ghosts sticks to a lot of repeating themes in Hill's work; screwed-up families, emotionally troubled narrators, and horror as a lens to view the troubles of real life. It's a very good anthology with a broad range of styles and subjects, and a couple of stories are among the best I've read. Go check it out.

Pontypool

2010-06-23T16:37:00.000-07:00

I dunno how I feel about Pontypool.

For a guy who bitches about how zombies are played out, I'm a little bummed out that I didn't love Pontypool more. It's definitely a unique take on the whole zombie invasion thing. It gets points for originality, talent, and effort. I just don't quite know how how to process the ambivalence I feel towards the movie.

Pontypool centers around Grant Mazzy, a former big name shock jock radio personality banished to small-town Canada after an unnamed scandal. While on-shift one lonesome winter morning with his producer and techie he starts getting reports of mysterious riots popping up around town. Things proceed from bad to worse and....well, you know, shit happens.

Watching Pontypool, I learned that I tend to prefer stories that take place in the beginning of a zombie uprising. Once the zombies have taken over the world, you've basically degenerated into the same old post-apocalyptic nonsense. Zombies are most scary right at the beginning, when panic sets in and people don't have any good information on the mysterious plague. Pontypool is ultimately a really good movie and the best scenes by far are the moments when the isolated radio station hears the first chilling eyewitness reports of zombie attacks from panicky observers.

I really dug the notion of a virus spread through corrupted words in the English language. It reminded me of the crazy language virus from Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, but its an idea that needed more space to explore than a short movie centered in a small environment. At times the information came so quickly that it felt forced, but the scene where he figures out how to talk his producer down from the infection was really cool. Unfortunately, while it's normally de rigueur to leave the zombie plague's source a mystery, the unique nature of the Pontypool zombies made me really want to learn what was going on. The attacks start when the zombies besiege a doctor's office and the doctor later turns up in the studio. Even though he seems to know a fair amount about the virus, we never learn much from him before he disappears again.

I guess that my big problem with Pontypool is that they did such a good job creating one of the most unique lead characters in all of zombie fiction, then they stick him in the middle of an outbreak centered around language. Suddenly a fascinating speaker isn't allowed to say anything. Because Grant is so clearly based on politically-charged shock jocks like Don Imus and the underlying metaphor is clearly about the danger of spewing unrestrained ignorance out into the air, having the character remains silent misses a lot of good opportunities for the story. Plus, honestly, Grant Mazzy doesn't seem like a bad guy. Sure, he's cocky, but it's not like he ever makes any of the insane, mean-spirited statements that most crackpot radio hosts really make. He's got a fantastic voice and a lot more personality than his job really requires, but if they wanted to show the dangers of communication, they could have made Grant a lot worse.

I've been writing this review over the course of a few days and I keep wanting to say that I really liked Pontypool. It's got brains and skill and talent going for it. The notion of being trapped in a studio and hearing the first panicked reports is genuinely terrifying and, at it's best, Pontypool takes that idea and runs with it. There's a lot of stuff I should have loved, but I'm ultimately so fucking sick of zombies that I couldn't really get into the movie. I'm tired of people saying "what's going on?" I'm tired of people desperately trying to learn anything they can from static-y reports. I'm tired of zombies beating their hands against flimsy glass, trying to get to besieged survivors. I'm tired of watching someone slowly turn. I'm tired of the grim final images.

Please don't take what I said as a shot against Pontypool. It really is a good movie and it really tried to give me something new. I've just subjected myself to waaaaaaaay too many of these things.

Cropsey

2010-06-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much of a chance to see a horror flick in awhile.

Money has been very tight and nothing super-appealing has come out. I'm not all that into sci-fi/horror hybrids and Splice didn't excite me all that much. As for The Human Centipede, I can't say I'm really excited about it. The only way it's ever been sold to me is that it's about a maniac doctor who sews people's mouths to another person's asshole so the person is forced to ingest the other person's shit for sustenance. That's not a story; that's an idea. And it's a particularly juvenile and scat fetishist idea, too. Horror doesn't necessarily mean gross, but that's apparently a minority opinion.

So, when walking down the streets of my Williamsburg home, I happened upon a movie poster for a film called Cropsey. The poster showed an old abandoned building out in the middle of some dead woods. The sun hits the trees and the collapsing brickwork in a way that turns everything the color of old blood. The tag line reads "The Truth is Terrifying" and a blurb from Roger Ebert calls it a "chilling horror documentary." I was excited. I stole the poster and hung it up in my apartment and I planned to see the movie.

Unfortunately, I live in a perpetual state of Broke so I haven't had the money to see the movie. In the mean time, I joined the NYC Horror meetup group and met other fans at a rooftop party. I mentioned that I was really excited about Cropsey and all the locals started telling their own Cropsey tales, heard at summer camps and slumber parties all along the Eastern seaboard. Apparently, they were the inspiration for the murderer from the 1981 Tom Savini effort The Burning.

Someone else at the party warned me that the movie isn't quite what the trailer makes it out to be. They were right. It wasn't quite the spooooooky monster show the trailer makes it out to be but instead it was an interesting documentary about urban legends, scapegoats, and the secrets of small towns.

Staten Island, as presented in the movie, is presented as both a bucolic little small town just a stone's throw away from the chaos of New York City and as a dumping ground for all the city's dirty little secrets. Most of the urban legend centers around the Willowbrook state school, a horrific sanitarium that was the subject of an expose by Geraldo Rivera in the seventies. After the school closed down, stories began to circulate about a former patient who lived in the maze of the former building and who kidnapped kids off the street.

The legend became much more horrible when kids really start disappearing. After a frantic search involving the entire community, the cops picked up and convicted a sketchy drifter who used to work at the sanitarium and seemed to fit the legend perfectly. Though he was convicted on what amounts to circumstantial evidence and the film portrays him as a little bit of a scapegoat to the city's hysteria (though, to be fair, the dude was very sketchy) his capture only fuels the legend. Pretty soon Staten Island is alive with paranoid talk of Satanic cults and underground societies of former mental patients and dark suspicions of the drifter's motive. It is, in short, pretty much every horror movie you've ever seen.

I really liked the movie. It has it's slow parts and there were times when I was drumming my fingers on my theater seat, but the film makers tell a great tale of a community in panic, of dark secrets and lunacy. Part of me got into the ghoulish aspects of the tale while part of me was genuinely horrified that it all happened.

I'm always a bit conflicted about horror derived from actual crimes. While I think a certain morbid curiosity is central to horror fandom, but I do want to restrain myself from taking too much pornographic joy in the suffering of real human beings. I think a certain degree of empathy is essential for a healthy mature mind and I always get a little skeeved out by how much joy some of my fellow fans get from real human suffering. On the other hand, I used to work in a job that exposed me to actual factual human suffering in a very real and direct way, and I know that it's a million miles away from anything we can fake. Maybe I'm overthinking this stuff, I dunno. Anyway, rant over.

Cropsey is not a movie that has a resolution. The mysteries don't get a tidy answer, questions on the drifter's guilt linger long after the trial ends, and the Staten Island-born filmmakers do a great job of exploring a creepy urban legend where the truth was just as strange as the fiction.

Horns by Joe Hill

2010-05-11T18:20:00.000-07:00

I'm really struggling to come up with something clever to say on this one.

First, I loved it. I've been reading a lot lately, given that I no longer have access to video games or a TV, and most of the stuff coming across my desk have been slogs to get through. I breezed through Horns and I didn't want it to end.

Second, the themes of the book hit me at the right time. I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years within the past year and I'm currently at the "oh my god, why did I let her go" phase. This story is essentially The Crow, in that supernatural agency allows a wronged man to seek revenge, but unlike The Crow's ethereally perfect love, Ig's romance with poor doomed Merrin is much more fraught with doubt and discomfort and pain. She's murdered the night she dumps Ig in a bar and the conversation she has with him rings cruelly authentic. There's a bit where she accuses him of putting her on a pedestal and loving the image he's made of her rather than who she is as a person.

That stuff resonated with me because, unlike a lot of love stories in genre work, it resonated with authenticity. Hill has a real gift with chronicling realistically damaged relationships. I remember a line from Heart Shaped Box where Judas Coyne talked about staying up late at night so his girlfriend would be too tired to want sex. I've been to that level of dysfunction and I haven't seen it detailed with the same heartbreaking accuracy that Joe Hill brings. I dunno where he's been in his life, but you can't make that shit up.

I actually had some trouble with the twist, which essentially invalidated Merrin's previous behavior. I liked the difficulty and ambivalence of Ig's memories of Merrin and when it turned out that every decision she made was made out of love for Ig suddenly stripped the story of the emotional murkiness that I found so charming. Then again, I'm not exactly reading the story without baggage.

One of the things that I really liked about the story was the way it was told from multiple angles. It's essentially a very small story between a couple of characters, but nature of Ig's powers allow the readers to see the crime from several points of view. At no point does the book feel padded, mostly due to the strength of the characterization. Hill has a great command of his character's point of view. Ig's lovestruck, self-loathing perspective on events is a million miles away from Lee Tourneau's selfish, sociopathic take on his crimes, and both are equally entertaining to follow.

Finally, both of Hill's novels feature female characters who start out in the background but eventually come into their own. In Horns, it was the sad, damaged Glenna. I really liked her arc in the story. We know that she doesn't like herself much, that she's curvy but sees herself as fat and grotesque, and that she possesses a wounded beauty. She's one of the invisible people of the story and my heart went out to her.

Maybe it's my love of superhero stories, but I really dug Ig's transformation into a pitchfork-wielding, red skinned devil. It's a compelling image for a character and it has the same nifty internal logic of a good comic book story.

I even dug his powers, which compel people to confess their darkest secrets to him. I was originally a little iffy on this aspect of the story because I was worried it would turn into yet another variation of the same old "people are shits deep down" that I've gotten bored with before, but the characters in Ig's world are all interconnected, and you see the effect of one person's secret spill over into another. Their deepest, most unspoken thoughts are especially vicious given that almost every character in the book believe Ig murdered Merrin, which deepens our sympathy for him as we see how much of an outcast he's become. The scene with the waitress who originally reported Ig to the police is especially amusing because we find out just how messed up he is. I could have easily read an entire novel where Ig goes around getting confessions from people. Reading the story in my wretched, misbegotten state, I couldn't help but wish I could use this power on my ex and figure out exactly what she felt about me, but I doubt I would have liked the answers.

Ig's powers grow to a point where he can start tempting people to act on their secret desires. He almost seems like he's going to walk the path of damnation, especially given the shocking and slightly out-of-character scene where he nearly kills his grandmother after she confesses her hatred of him. Instead, this devil turns out to possess some decency, and spends the rest of the story walking a brutal road to redemption, one that involves him using Morse code, finding a tree house, getting set on fire, wearing a blue skirt, and discovering an aversion to the crucifixes of dead ex-girlfriends. As the story went along, I discovered that I really didn't care how he got all these cool powers, but the explanation cooked up at the end is both lyrical and strangely satisfying.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. I liked it more than Heart Shaped Box and I foresee a future where Joe Hill is a big cheese in genre fiction. You can read a really good interview with him here, along with a pretty good review of it from the AV Club.

This was one of those books that came along at the right time in my life. The themes of lost love and alienation really resonated with me. I sometimes wish I could find the Tree House of the Mind, with it's strange votive candles and cheerful proprietor. There's a lot of trees in this city. Maybe it will appear for me when it's needed.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

2010-04-30T22:04:00.001-07:00

Shhh. Don't tell anyone, but I already outlined my review before going to see the movie. Here's the outline, unedited:

1) Jackie Earle Haley brought the scare back. Platinum Dunes knows how to cast 'em.
2) I hate hate HATE the constant soundtrack spike jump scare.
3) Teenagers bore me.
4) Harp on the whole "Freddy was always a pedophile" argument again.
5) Fun but dissatisfying, like McDonalds or sex with an ex.

Most of my little predictions turned out to be correct. Jackie Earle Haley was genuinely creepy. No disrespect to Robert Englund, but Freddy had become way too cartoony over the course of the series. You had to clean the slate completely over the course of a reimagining and, love 'em or hate 'em, Platunim Dunes knows how to cast a monster.

I very carefully avoided reviews of the movie before seeing it. I heard through the grapevine that it wasn’t getting good reviews, but horror movies never do. I did chance on Roger Ebert’s review of it where he accused Wes Craven of being the “Ray Kroc of horror”, which I found both distasteful and dismissive. It’s no secret that he doesn’t care for a lot of the stuff I really like and it’s no secret he’s become the crazy old coot who constantly rails against the things my generation does, but his review is very flip and he completely blows off the contribution Craven has made to our cultural landscape. You don’t have to like ‘em, but creating monsters is just as valid and valuable as any other art form. It’s meant a lot to me, at any rate.

I don’t think I cared for the movie all that much. The nicest thing you could say about it was that it was unambitious. There’s a lot of subtextual meat on Nightmare’s bones that the filmmakers don’t particularly seem interested in exploring. It’s just happy to scream in your face every few minutes. The screenplay is terrible, with character moments constantly interrupted by god-awful dialogue that sounds leaden and off-key. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Freddy is on-screen.

One thing that struck me as most interesting about the new Freddy was how different his characterization felt. The original Freddy was evil in a kind of simplistically joyful way; he basically gets off on hurting people. We don’t really have a sense of who he is prior to his death and he carries off his role of dream murderer with a malicious glee that made him curiously likeable. We don’t think too deep on his crimes because he’s a lot of fun to watch.

Haley’s Freddy is much, much angrier. We see him when he’s alive and it’s clear he’s a very sick man. In the flashbacks of his life, he portrays Freddy as apparently suffering from a mild form of retardation, and his death at the hands of the enraged parents is almost tragic. His Freddy isn’t the callow sneering demon of the Robert Englund day. The new Freddy is a sniveling little shit made monstrous by his murder.

He’s also got a more specific reason for going after his victims. While the original Freddy seemed to be targeting all the kids in Springwood, the new Freddy is killing the children who told their parents about his hidden playroom and the terrible things he did to them. One of the movie’s big redeeming factors for me was that it dealt explicitly with something that has always run through Freddy’s mythology, which were his crimes as a child molester.

There’s a lot of fans in the horror community who are up in arms over Freddy being “recast” as a pedophile. I don’t really get that. It’s always been fairly clear to me from the get-go that he was a child molester. His taunting has always had a leering, sexual edge and the only reason they never went into it in depth is that pedophilia is always a taboo subject, even in a gory horror film. Slasher movies have always had a preoccupation with sexuality and the leering gaze, but Freddy has always been pretty explicit about his predilections. Really, why does he always have little blonde girls following him around, showing victims the boiler room and saying “this is where he takes us…” This movie deals heavily with repressed memory and the long reach of childhood sexual trauma. The characters haven’t healed from it and it reaches out to affect their lives. The scene where the two remaining kids find Freddy’s hidden chamber is genuinely disturbing in a way very little of this movie is.

One of the things that ties into the motif is the parent’s conspiracy of silence. Slasher movies are always about isolating the teenagers from their forces of authority, usually by getting them into an abandoned something-or-another. Here, the isolation comes from the parents not believing the kid’s admittedly outlandish claims and concealing their complicity in Freddy’s murder.

The rest of the cast is pretty good too. I never quite warmed up to this movie’s version of Nancy. She’s really cute and kinda looks like Felicia Day from The Guild, but her performance is wildly uneven. Is she the aloof, guarded artist? The shy loner? The angry teenage rebel? She’s more interesting than the bland fake-out final girl we initially follow, but she’s ultimately too impenetrable to win my sympathies. The male characters are slightly more interesting. Aside from being better actors, they portray the stress and fear of crossing over into Freddy’s hellish world much more believably. I don’t’ remember where I read this, but I remember that Thomas Dekker gave an interview where he said that he wanted to portray Dean as scared out of his mind, rather than as the stoic male lead we’ve come to expect. He did a great job and I’m never going to be more creeped out by the words “We’ve still got six minutes to play.”

It’s also funny to note that Friday the 13th’s Aaron Yoo has a cameo appearance as another one of Freddy’s victims. I like that guy, but every time I see him some maniac uses his face as a speed bag. At the rate he’s going I feel Platinum Dunes owes the poor guy a chance to balance the books. Maybe when they inevitably get around to remaking Child’s Play he can stuff Chucky into an industrial-grade printing press or something.

I really liked the whole notion of the micro-naps. One of my favorite parts of all the Freddy movies are how the real world and the dreaming world intersect as the victims become more and more sleepy. This movie gives a stronger reason for this phenomena, and some really trippy stuff starts to happen. I particularly liked the bit in the pharmacy, where Freddy’s dream-self takes big swipes at Nancy, knocking over stuff from the shelves.

In the end, I guess I was vaguely disappointed by it. It was nice to see Freddy doing his thing again and I really liked Haley’s performance in the role, but there wasn’t a lot more to the movie besides jump-shock scares. I try to be kinder about Platinum Dunes movies than a lot of my fellow commentators, especially because they’re keeping my favorite icons alive, but they seem to think of horror as a sledgehammer with which to bludgeon an audience. All the classic scenes from the original are there, but they're amped up to ten. The girl doesn't crawl up the wall, she's violently slammed around the bedroom. Freddy doesn't eerily stretch out of Nancy's wallpaper, he pushes out of it like bad CGI from The Haunted. Sigh.

There’s very little attempt to building any real tension or creating any sort of creeping dread. I get a bunch of jolts, which always leaves me twitchy and nervous, and I can leave the movie behind at the theater. It doesn’t follow me home, it doesn’t tuck me in bed late at night, it doesn’t stand over me while I sleep, waiting for me to open my eyes.

What’s worse is that, even though they work in a very formulaic subgenre, the movies Platinum Dunes have made come off feeling very cold. The people involved are too experienced and professional to make movies that have the weird amateurish enthusiasm of the classic slasher flicks. The stars are all very good looking and marketable, the camera work is very skilled, and the watching the movie feels like watching a technically skills if emotionless ballet. Bitch about Zombie's Halloween remake all you want, but at least that had soul. It was ugly, unpleasant soul, but it was there.

Walking away from the movie, I sort of wondered if the makers actually have any reverence for the genre at all, or if they are cynically aware that idiots like me will keep paying money as long as there’s some nostalgia involved.

Whatever. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Themes In Horror I'm Tired Of

2010-04-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

Recently, a friend of mine loaned me a horror novel. The author was a big name who I've been meaning to check out for some time and a previous winner of the Bram Stoker Award. I was looking forward to the book, but somewhere between the unpleasantness of the lead characters, the overly-caustic tough guy dialogue, and the trite Stephen-King-Did-It-Better menace, I found myself feeling the same despair I feel every time I pick up an issue of Fangoria and seeing nothing but direct-to-video zombie movies. Are there any new ideas? Is there anything really innovative in our genre or are we doomed to keep retreading the same ground like Michael Myers on a slow-moving treadmill.

One of the things that really didn't sit too well with me while reading the book was how painfully familiar it all felt. The story revolved around a mysterious supernatural threat that befalls a small suburban town. The residence succumb to madness and violence as the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away and people blah de blah de fucking blah.

I get that horror isn't exactly an optimistic genre, but I've seen this theme done to death. Plus, I don't think it's a really accurate portrayal of humanity. Constantly harping on the evil inherent in humanity completely misses out on our higher aspects. Even if an idea is old there's still some value in exploring it, but it needs to lie fallow for a time.

With that, I want to look at a few themes that really need to be put on the backburner. I'll probably expand this list as times goes on, but these are the subjects that bug me the most.

1) There were some things Man was not meant to know.

This one really drives me nuts.

I get where this one comes from. You used to see this theme a lot in the creature features of the 50s, when atomic warfare seemed destined to wipe the human race off the planet. Hell, this theme goes all the way back to the roots of the horror genre, when the mad doctor Frankenstein spits in the eye of God and loses control of his blasphemous creation. While I understand people's phobias about atomic destruction, it seems like every time some new piece of technology emerges some jackass makes a ham-handed cautionary tale of how it could go wrong.

Me, I like technology. Lord knows I don't get it, but I like it.

I'm with Spider Jerusalem on this one: the future is inherently a good thing. The future represents an opportunity to crawl further away from the mean roots of our humanity and embrace something better. Change doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. We want change. We want new things. We want to know that there's a newer, brighter land on the other side of the mountain. What we don't want is some dire monastic killjoy nervously whispering to us that everything could fall apart and we're better off staying where we are. If humanity believed that, we'd still be flopping in the muck instead of swaggering around Williamsburg with ironic moustaches.

2) Sexual promiscuity is a moral failing and punishable by death.

I've covered this one before at great length but it still keeps coming up and it still keeps pissing me me off.

One of my heroes, author and sex advice columnist Dan Savage, once wrote that slutting around is like travel; it broadens the mind. Now, while I do believe it depends on the mind in question, I subscribe to the idea that sex and sexuality isn't intrinsically bad and that it's part of life. But then I'm a godless liberal educated city-dweller type, born in San Francisco and living in New York. In summation of my previous arguments, uptight virginal characters are boring and it's a bit puritanical to bump off characters who have the audacity to have sex on-camera. It's like we want to see them do it, then we want to see them punished. What the fuck is that about?

I've recently been revisiting slasher classics and one thing I couldn't help but notice is that I can't think of many final girls who are clearly labeled as virgins. Many of them have boyfriends, some of them are actually quite forward (Ginny from Friday the 13th part 2 and Megan from Friday the 13th part 6), and they seem more bothered by their friend's boneheadedness than their promiscuity. Sure, they're often outsiders in their groups but that's because they're brainier and more mature than their friends. On the other hand, abstinence is usually a big part of their survival, if only because they're paying attention to their environments rather than their bacchanalian excesses.

One of the things I really liked about Wrong Turn 2 is that the final girl clearly isn't a virgin. She's damaged goods, we get the sense that she's lived an interesting life, and we know that the shit she's been through gives her the tools she needs to survive.

As I've said before, let the sluts and the stoners live. They're usually more likable, more interesting, and probably better equipped to survive because their brains haven't been turned into anxiety-flavored taffy by a lifetime of conservative dogma.

3) Humanity falls apart once the light goes out.

I object to a lot of these themes on moral or intellectual grounds. I'm just plain sick of this one.

You've seen this one as far back as The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. A community is isolated from the world, some weird shit happens, and everyone turns against each other. There's lynching and looting and chest thumping and oh-my-god-civilization-is-a-thin-veneer-over-primitive-madness. The idea of going all Lord of the Flies on your neighbors holds some gruesome appeal, but at this point it's become tiresome.

I really don't think horror gives humanity enough credit. Sure, when disasters happen, there's looting and civil unrest, but there's also tons of people donating blood and digging through wreckage and doing their best to keep their fellow humans warm and sheltered and safe. I don't know about you, but I find that side of humanity inspiring. The fact that horror never seems to acknowledge that side of our character puts me in mind of an angsty teenager who only chooses to see the worst in everything because it fits with his bleak and hormone-soaked world view. In other words, it reminds me of myself at fourteen.

4) Pacifism is a useless, high-minded ideal.

This one comes up a lot in stories that involve fierce survival situations, like The Hills Have Eyes or Joe R. Lansdale's The Nightrunners, where innocent, good-natured city types are beset by territorial cannibals or sadistic ghouls or vicious hoodlums. Most of the time there's one guy in the group who is singled out as the wimpy but good-hearted pacifist who ever imagine harming another human being but is eventually forced to reconnect with his bloody, savage natural instincts in order to survive. Sometimes this is framed as part of the horror, as the poor man (and it's ALWAYS a man) becomes just as savage as the monsters he fights, but most of the time we're clearly meant to be impatient with the wimp and to celebrate the time he embraces his manhood and clubs the mewling, wounded monster to death with a big hunk of wood.

Of course, the gimmick of having a character put in a situation that forces him to work against his limitations is straight out of Dramatic Conflict 101 and it's so familiar at this point that it's simply exhausting. What bothers me most in this theme is the narrow-minded definition of masculinity at the center of it. Sure, when you're put in a situation where it's kill or be killed against a bunch of snarling monsters the choice is a no-brainer. But there's something vaguely simplistic and mean-spirited about the whole idea.

I myself am some sort of a pacifist, partially because I'd never win a fight and partially because I believe it's a losing game to measure your masculinity based on whose ass you can kick, but in horror that attitude is framed as a character weakness. The pacifist is always the most cowardly, the most snotty, the most unwilling to adapt, and, bluntly, the most stupid character in the group. All pacifist characters come off as red-state stereotypes about educated people. What we need is a good solid push so we can start kicking righteous ass. It touches on some ugly, outdated ideas of what a man is supposed to be.

Conclusion

I have no doubt I'm going to add to this list. I pay a lot of attention to subtext and horror is full of dodgy ideas and puritanical subtext. At some point I want to do an article on the age old misogyny question, but for right now I'll leave it at these. Readers, if you've got any other good ones, send 'em my way.