Cropsey

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.

Tales From The Crypt: From Comic Books To Television

Tales From The Crypt made me terrified of polyamory.

I kid you not. When all my friends in early college got all intellectual and experiment with their relationships, I freaked out. That path leads to betrayal, murder, and some grotesque shambling thing breaking into your house in the last panel. Years later, having dipped my toes into the waters of alternative heterosexual relationships, I'm still waiting for the arsenic in the dark, the grasping hands, the descending axe.

Wow. That was ickily personal. Let's get back on-subject.

I picked up Tales From The Crypt: From Comic Books To Television, the horror documentary from Chip Selby and popped it in the player. I have a lot of fond memories from both the comic book reprints and the TV series, but I haven't really returned to the Crypt in a long time. The TV show, to my memory, was very 90s and the comics are full of such impenetrably purple prose that I have a hard time returning to it.



The documentary was very, very good. Like His Name Was Jason, the filmmakers know enough to stay out of the way of the subject and they do a tremendous job interviewing the people involved with the creation of the original work. We learn the skills different artists bring to the table, from one's ability to draw beautiful scheming women, to another's masterful hand at the shambling, rotting corpse.

Learning more about the creation of the comics inspired me to dig out my copies of the original. I found my stack, popped them open, and drifted off to sleep one dark night reading them. I was treated to vivid dreams where I had a mixed martial arts fight with a headless corpse in my bathroom.

And that's when I remembered the real power TFTC held over me: they scared the fuck out of me as a kid.



The artwork was masterful, completely unrivaled in horror comics today. The stuff they did, with its combination of explicit grue and dread suggestion, fired up my imagination like nothing else. Comic books are fundamentally more interactive than television or movies. In movies, the filmmakers do all the work for you. They show you terrible things and how you react to them is dictated primarily on what throws your switches. With comics and the written word, you dictate the pace that you engage the story and the horrors require more effort and involvement. If, like me, you have a gigantic imagination that is particularly gifted to visualizing the magical, mysterious, and macabre, TFTC is going to eat you alive.

Best of all, TFTC was the master of the awful final image/line. They knew exactly what to linger on and what point to end the story so you had to do all the work. The format doesn't always work perfectly, and the text-heavy wouldn't work too well with modern comic audiences, but the fine people at EC Comics were true genre masters.



One of the things that really got to me in the documentary, aside from the craftsmanship of the stories, was the intense level of persecution that EC Comics and editor-in-chief William Gaines suffered during the anti-comics backlash. The stories were remarkably adult for the time and rather than being encouraged and explored, Gaines was forced to stand before Congress and answer, essentially, why he was choosing to corrupt children. Anti-horror sentiments aren't anything new and every fan has had people ask why they were devoted to such an uncomfortable genre, but the level of moral outrage was amazing and laughable. By and large, I think comic books suck and a big reason is because they were repressed before they had a real chance to grow up.

I'm sure I'll get to talking about individual stories at some point in the future. Suffice to say, go check out the documentary. It'll give you a new appreciation for one of the masterworks of the horror genre. There's also an interview with EC contributor Ray Bradbury, another influential figure in my development, but I fell asleep halfway through that part. Bad me.

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

Crap. If I keep this up, this blog is going is going to turn into yet another Friday the 13th site. Okay, after this post there will be a moratorium on slasher-related postings. Besides, I just got Quarantine from my company's nifty free video rental service. I'll try to put together something clever for that. Anyway, this one is on His Name Was Jason, the recently released documentary on the F13 series.

I love horror-themed documentaries. I'm the kind of guy who watches the special features on DVDs, who goes to conventions and asks all the nerdy questions, and who loves to pick apart the stories I love and see what makes them tick. Horror, with all it's wonderful taboo-breaking charm, always has the most fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff going on. Sometimes you pull back the curtain and find the backstage logic distasteful (I'm looking at you, See No Evil), but by and large I really enjoy these glimpses into the construction of the genre.

Anyone who's ever read Peter M. Bracke's Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (and if you're a fan, you really should) will find HNWJ to be similar in form and scope. A bunch of former Jasons and former victims chat about their experiences, their memories, and what being a part of the F13 legacy has meant for them. As you can imagine, the movies are made by a bunch of amateurs, shooting late at night in uncomfortable locations. Tempers flare, mistakes get made, the wrong people get credit for things, and somehow out of all of this chaos a movie gets made.

The whole endeavor is hosted by the ever-charming Tom Savini, who frames the interviews with amusing little skits, chatting with the viewer as some poor girl runs for her life. Each segment is split into general themes, talking about the production, the effects, the character, and the impact on their lives. There's a lot of stuff covered, and nobody ever stays on camera long enough to get boring.



One of the things that struck me was the amount of sympathy the cast had for Jason. When you go back and read interviews with stuntmen who assumed the role early in the series, it's pretty clear that the filmmakers weren't too interested in what makes Jason tick. As the series wore on and Jason became the star of the show, a sort of internal life grew from the character's patchwork origins. Now he's become victim-as-villain, an outsider avenging his mother's death and his social banishment. This aspect of the character is a big part of his appeal, as opposed to the more ethereal and distant Michael Myers.

Anyway, if you're one of those goofballs who would find a two hour long discussion of a B-movie boogeyman interesting, go check this one out. Side note: controversial F13V director Danny Steinmann has some iiiinteresting violence-as-impotency theories going on. Also Kane Hodder, once my childhood icon, is starting to creep me right the fuck out.