1) My first big road trip was a journey to Pasadena to attend the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors with my high school friends. We saw the Munsters' doom buggy, I ran into Marc Dacascos in a hallway, we watched some pro-wrasslin', and I caught the Ghastly Ones live on stage. In between it all, I kept seeing this poster around the convention hall:
This was mercifully before the age of viral marketing, social media, Io9's pop media coverage, or any of the other ways we're all constantly connected to streams of information. I'd heard the missing posters had something to do with a movie that had taken Sundance by storm. The second night we were there, my friends and I scored free tickets to a special late screening at a nearby theater.
2) I had no idea what I was in for, but I was a horror fan surrounded by horror fans. Collectively we'd seen the worst possible films that humanity had to offer. What could some weird little art house movie do to us?
3) The movie started without a lot of preamble. It looked like a genuine documentary about a haunted experience. We knew it was fiction but goshdarnit, it looked so real.
4) Things start getting weird slowly. People get lost, but that's not entirely surprising given that the filmmakers are a bunch of city kids with a camera. They start losing their shit, blaming each other, and falling apart. All the while, the legend that they've been investigating turns out to be true.
5) For me, the tension became quickly unbearable. I was acclimated to horror in from the 80s and early 90s, where everything was obviously artificial. Slashers telegraphed their kills in highly-ritualized kabuki dances. Ghosts had their tiresome dripping walls and spooky sound effects. I'd never seen real people being haunted by something whose rules I couldn't understand. Because I'd been so invested in the genre, most horror movies made me feel like I was an insider, more akin to the monsters and ghosts than the victim. Blair Witch Project put me back in the victim's shoes.
6) As the attacks got worse, I began to wait eagerly for the daylight. The attacks always seemed to ease off once nighttime dissipated. By the end, the characters weren't even safe in the daylight. Then they discovered the old house. . .
7) The scene of Heather making her final confession has been parodied over and over again, but the actual moment has tremendous power to it. She has been pushed past the point of endurance and has no hope left anymore. It's some of the best acting I've ever seen in horror cinema.
8) I'll never forget what happened after the credits rolled. An entire theater full of hardcore horror fans, who had seen he worst of the worst, rose up from their seats silently as one and left the theater. It was eerily quiet. They all acted like the world had ended in front of them. We left the theater into an empty Pasadena street.
Conclusion: Watching The Blair Witch Project for the first time was one of the best experiences of my life. I was completely smitten by the movie and became it's fiercest advocate. Unfortunately, the movie couldn't survive the world-of-mouth of the real world. The shaky cam nausea was a real issue (I have a harder time with it these days) but there were also tons of meatheads who wanted blood and monster make-up. It was a soft touch movie and I admired that. The whole found-footage thing has been done to death but it's still an effective immersive tool. I really like The Blair Witch Project. I know it's become sort of a touchstore of early 90s pop-culture, but it's also one of the most important foundations of modern horror cinema.
Biggest lesson learned at the convention: if you're going to go to a seminar by an artist who has worked in a variety of media, don't do it in LA. The bulk of the questions from the audience will be about breaking into the industry. That's totally fine, everyone has hoop dreams, but the seminar was titled writing horror.
I keep alluding to this for I am the lord of allusions, but Clive Barker is one of my heroes. I love his versatility, I love the beauty of his prose, and I love how friendly and accessible he is to his fans. When I heard he was hosting a panel for aspiring horror writers, I booked my seminar ticket and flight immediately. It wasn't the urbane, tea-sipping conversation on the finer points of literature. It was still worth every cent I spent.
The seminar took place in a small, cheerless gray room. The Fangoria movie prop auction was going on next door, and we kept hearing amplified auctioneers and the cheering of crowds through the wall. Clive's voice was strained and raspy, even through the microphone, so he invited us to gather around him. It made for a really nice intimate conversation.
At one point in the seminar, the topic of working in television came up, specifically the limitations a creative person suffers when he's surrounded by 20 people telling him he's wrong. The conversation swung to the shows Heroes and Lost. I mentioned that the problem with the shows is that they mistake poor story control for deliberate enigma. He smiled and asked me to repeat it into his microphone, and continued on the topic using my humble contribution. It was definitely a high point. I got to ask my two questions, I got a bunch of memorable quotes, and I left feeling inspired and energized. It was an incredible experience.
It's a good thing that I had that, because there honestly wasn't a whole lot to do.
I've been to dozens of conventions in my life. I go to four or five a year. They're always a blast, but the ones I tend to go to are either pop culture shows with large crowds and tons of events (Wondercon, San Diego Comic Con) or gaming conventions (Kublacon) where there's always a pick-up game going on somewhere. Here, the panels I cared about were few and far between, I didn't necessarily feel like spending the con in the movie room, and one can only wander through the dealer room so many times. It probably didn't help that the show was held at the LA Convention Center. The sheer size of the place dwarfed the convention, so you always felt like it was a tiny show.
I did get to meet a ton of awesome people. Most of you are reading this now, so give me a shout out. I tried tracking down fellow horror blogger Dragonmanes but no one in the booths I haunted knew who he was. Sorry, brother.
Anyway, there was a big push by Anchor Bay for their upcoming slasher flick Laid To Rest, the 20th anniversary box set release of Hellraiser, and an upcoming movie by director Paul Solet called Grace. The idea, on first pass, could wander into the blighted land of the distasteful, but the stuff I've seen was remarkably well-shot and engaging. I'm cautiously optimistic this one.
The dealer room was nice enough, but I didn't get nearly the amount of schwag I planned on coming home with. There were tons of generic goth-y type spooky merch and endless variations on the witty-zombie tee-shirt thing, both items I'm kinda sick of. The one piece of memorabilia I desperately wanted to pick up was a Lament Configuration. I figured this wouldn't be a challenge, considering the Hellraiser 20th Anniversary panel was going on, but none of the vendors had one. Come on, guys. This was a no-brainer.
The dealer room's stuff also tended to emphasize the more extreme end of the horror spectrum, where suspense and subtlety takes a backseat to vomit and ropes of intestines uncurling from a wound. I see stuff like that and sometimes I wonder just how well I actually fit in with the horror community. When it comes to my friends and the people I work with, I come off like the Marquis De Sade, but I read stuff like this and I feel positively genteel and dainty. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good mischievous cackle, but ugly for ugly's sake quickly becomes unpleasant. If I want to raise my falutin' high, I'd say I'm keen on the macabre and not the grotesque.
Anyway, burnout aside, I got a chance to meet writers, bloggers, editors, actors, directors, documentarians, and other people I promised to keep in contact with. For those of you reading this and wondering why I haven't written to you, I apologize. I work for Major Video Game Publisher and their Big New Game is running up to an important deadline. I have to do all my blogging in times that aren't as readily available these days. Give me a weekend and I'll get back to all of y'alls.
One of the highlights of the convention was the horror website panel, where representatives from Dread Central, Arrow in the Head, FearNet, Fangoria, and other sites all sat down for a round table discussions on the ins and outs of internet horror journalism. Aside from being a hilariously inspiring, martini-soaked chat about horror fandom, the panel taught me a lesson worth a grand to learn: don't get too close to your subject matter.
The nice thing about being a geek is that you have access to your idols, and that's doubly true in the horror world. If you like an author or an actor or a director you will likely have an opportunity to meet them face-to-face at a convention. On one hand it's tremendously inspirational, but it can also be a burden when you're trying to evaluate the merit of a new genre work. The line between creator and audience is very thin in horror and a lot of the people on the panel spoke of how difficult it was to write fair reviews against people they came to regard as friends.
I'm not a big fan of internet forum negativity. Even when I don't like a work, I recognize the effort and enthusiasm it took to produce it. I feel artists should be encouraged and, with a few exceptions, I do my best not to bully or trash a person's work. However, I need to be honest about my opinions and perceptions and I can't do that if I have any kind of relationship with the creators of the work. I met a bunch of people at the con who had projects coming out. I got to hang out with them and absorb their enthusiasm by osmosis. Do you think I want to then go and write a bad review?
People go to the major blogs for scoops on upcoming projects, and publicists don't like giving exclusives to people who trash their work. I'm not bloody-disgusting. I don't have access to publicists and studio marketing reps. Alls I have is my love, my fished-from-the-internet, and my little typey-typey words. I'll whip those ingredients into a tasty stew if you're willing to give my cooking a try.
Anyway, it was a damn fun con. I got some other neat stories, like paying for Doug Bradley and Ashley Lawrence's breakfast, the surreal experience of arriving in the middle of a Britney Spears show, standing in the entry line behind deceased serial killer Ed Gein, winning a Masters of Horror director chair, seeing TCM's Marilyn Burns and TCM2's Caroline Williams having a private moment long after the show ended, watching Clive Barker and Ashley Williams pretend to fall asleep at the Hellraiser panel as Doug Bradley talked at length about his upcoming projects. Lotta good stuff there, but this has already run waaaaaay too long. As for me, I've got some other good stuff in the works coming up. Thank you for reading my humble efforts. You guys remind me my life ain't just about going to work.
Oh, also, if you decide you're going to the convention and you're planning on getting the fancy schmancy gold pass in order to get into the Vampire Ball, don't bother. The stars were only there for a few minutes, I was one of four people in costume, and they closed the private room early and everyone migrated to the adjacent bar that anyone could get into. If it wasn't for the pleasantly strong whiskey sours and the lovely company, I'd have had half a mind to complain.
I'm going to be attending the Fangoria Weekend of Horror in Los Annnngelez this month. I've been going to these sporadically since I was a kid and these have always been a lot of fun. It's been a bumpy couple of months in old Creature's personal life, and I'm really looking forward to kicking back, relaxing, and chucking away my hard-earned money on all kindsa memorabilia. If I can remain sober and responsible enough, I intend to blog from the show floor.
If you are gonna be there, drop me a line. Maybe we'll do some sorta meetup thing.
Oh, man. I wanna be Alfred Hitchcock when I grow up.
Okay, writing a review of Psycho is an act not entirely dissimilar to reinventing the wheel. It's been decades since the movie terrified people out of their showers and a thousand commentaries have been written about the movie. Nothing I say, nothing I observe, hasn't been studied more thoroughly by wiser heads than mine. So alls I can do is tell you a story.
I met Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano when I was seventeen. I had just graduated high school and a bunch of friends and I decided to drive down to the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Pasadena, CA. There was a bunch of razzle dazzle around the various franchise horror flicks coming down the pipeline, and a bunch of odd fliers appeared about the disappearance of three amateur filmmakers in the woods outside of Burkittsville, MD, but somewhere lost in the commotion was an ill-attended appearance by the man who wrote Psycho.
I don't recall why I went to the panel or what burning question I had that compelled me to the podium, but I remember that sweet old face smiling down at me from the stage and saying "I think monsters should be beautiful."
Damn. I was very deeply affected by that. Even to this day that accidental little piece of poetry stays with me. The notion that the embodiments of our lusts and our terrors and our animal passions could hold a strange dark beauty was something I responded to. Obviously, I am not talking about the real monsters of the world, the sick and mean among us that go out and do real harm to real people. But those things we create, the stuff that affects us as deeply as a proper monster can, there is something genuinely seductive in that.
Anyway, Psycho. I assume you all know the history of the book, the case it was based on, and the ties to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's a lot of interesting background to the story but generally speaking horror movies play fast and loose with the stories they are inspired from. I would rather get into my views on the movie than go on about some nutjob from Wisconsin and the ways he decorated his house.
It drives me nuts when people call Psycho the first slasher movie. Yeah, a naked broad in a Bad Place gets done in through the gross misuse of kitchen cutlery But aside from a couple of frightening murders, it fundamentally doesn't feel like a slasher movie. Slasher movies, as I've come to understand the term, require the murderer to be a cipher. Norman is painfully, painfully human.
I like Norman Bates. Norman Bates breaks my heart. People tend to fixate on the justifiably famous shower murder, but my favorite scene in the movie is the parlor scene between Bates and the ill-fated Marion Crane. In the darkly shadowed room, trapped by his own obsessions, this lonely little weirdo shares his misery with the increasingly uneasy Marion. It's heartbreaking. Psycho came along before the serial killer archetype calcified into what we understand it to be. Norman Bates isn't a cold, calculating, misanthropic genius. He isn't even aware he's killing people. He's just deeply fucked up.
Psycho, in a weird way, is almost a ghost story. Norman's mother is, in a very real sense, haunting the Bates motel. The atmosphere of isolation and decay, the very tangible sense of claustrophobia and loneliness, and the looming, tombstone-like presence of the old house on the hill, all add a nearly supernatural air to the events that occur.
Then there's the shower scene.
There are three things that work really strongly for me. I like the fact that the violence happens so suddenly, that she's attacked with such brutal speed and viciousness in the sanctuary of the shower. I like the graceful way that Marion Crane slides down the wall, hand reaching out to us as if for help. Finally, I really like the slow pull away from the lifeless eye. It's a horrible image, and Hitchcock forces us to linger in on it in silence.
As for the rest of the movie, the discovery of the corpse in the Bates home still freaks the shit out of me. The big reveal of Mrs. Bates is still genuinely scary and Hitchcock forces us to linger on the image, this grotesque parody of life, poorly preserved and staring back at us with hollow eyes. It's a shocking image, especially considering the era this was filmed.
I don't really have a problem with the Psycho remake. I listen to cover bands, too. I even thought that Vince Vaughn did a pretty good job as Norman Bates. My big issue was the simple fact that he's physically too imposing for the role. Anthony Perkins had a more boyish look to him, which fit better with a character in arrested development. He's more unassuming, more innocent, and his final descent into madness becomes all the more chilling in his guiltless features.
I've always wondered about the final monologue, which comes as a chilling counterpoint to the false reassurance offered by the forensic psychologist. How deep was Norman into his own lunacy? How unaware was he of his mother's actions? Or was he even there at all, a hollow man from the start, his mother's skeletal smile superimposed over his features as the movie ends.
Creepy.
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Creature (who thinks Janet Leigh was quite a hottie in her day)
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