Serial Killers and other scary things

Man, there sure are a lot of serial killers on TV these days.  

True Detective blew me away and I'm finally getting into Hannibal after people talking it up for a long time. True Detective was an fantastic fusion of strong performances, serial killer madness, rural decay, nihilistic philosophy, and Lovecraftian undertones, while Hannibal has fantastic characterization, morbidly beautiful imagery, and an elegantly European predator straight out of Dracula. While I've enjoyed both shows tremendously, they got me going down a couple of rabbit holes.

First off, it seems like the ACTUAL golden age of the serial killer is over. Most of the big names we associate with serial killing, the Dahmers and the Gacys and the Berkowitzes, all happened in the 1970s or the 1980s. It seems like it's just too hard to make people disappear and that law enforcement has gotten too good at catching these guys at one or two murders. Even the phrasing of those last few sentences makes it sound like I want more of these guys out there, because serial killers make the best lurid true crime stories. While reading about serial killer cases, I read something written by a crime journalist who chose to put the emphasis of his stories on the victims. When asked about it, he said that fixating too deeply on the killer makes them heroic and makes the people they hurt footnotes in the killer's story. Read enough about the lives of serial killers and they actually seem kind of pathetic. They look like demons from a distance, but up close they look like sad, sick little men. Once again quoting Lazenby, most things that seem satanic or malevolent are really just wretchedness and frailty that’ve been allowed to put on muscle.

Yet serial killers have become heroes these days. They've become POV characters. Unlike real-world serial killers, who often come off as grubby little obsessives and bitter misogynists, Hollywood serial killers are as sleek and dangerous as a hungry shark. Both Dexter and Mads Mikkelsen's take on Hannibal Lecter have become objects of lust among people with bad-boy fixations, as delightfully illustrated by something that stumbled across my Tumblr recently:

 

 

Second only to the sexy murderer is the sexy tormented investigator. They've got wounded hearts and poet's eyes, their intuitions and insights into evil are at once a blessing and a curse. Drowned in liquor and regret, they're the eternal Doomed Knight, going deeper into darkness because their personal conviction compels them to. It's all very manly and tragic and heartbreaking.

I think most serial killer shows are ultimately puzzle shows. They've really replaced the cozy mystery, where the murder is usually discretely off-camera and the motive was more profit-oriented. The clues are now as much about piecing together psychopathology as putting together a crime timeline and eliminating a list of suspects.

There have been a lot of fantastic serial killer stories out there, I think I'm suffering burnout. I'm tired of dour wounded-heart investigators with scruffy faces and lots of imagination. I'm tired of artfully staged body dump sites that would require a crane, a crew of teamsters, and a thorough understanding of theatrical set design to stage. I'm tired of clever, evil men staring across interrogation tables and through clear-walled holding cells. While the extraordinary stuff still stands out (True Detective, Hannibal) I'm tired of how just gosh darn super serious everything is in such a formulaic way.

And I'm tired about how serial killer lexicon has slipped out into the public discourse. At this point in my life, I've had conversations with four different friends describing their partners as psychopaths because they read some Slate or HuffPo article about the Dr. Hare's psychopath checklist. I wanted to say, "no, they're just jerks and you like it that way because you like drama" (they all stayed with the guys in question) but it's clear that the concept of psychopathy is the new pop psychology buzzword and it's probably directly due to all these stories of serial killers. I've seen and read books and articles about how psychopaths are the ultimate sexy bad boy, how they're heavily represented among the highest echelons of society, how emulating their callous disregard for other people is a recipe for success, how psychopathy is actually a spectrum and that Dr. Hare is far too quick to label people as psychopaths. It's all very intense and serious and tiresome.

Marlo Stanfield and his lieutenants scared me far worse than all the corny serial killers out there.

Unlike the Barksdale gang, who were torn apart by conflicting ambition, the Stansfield organization worked with a terrible sense of purpose that turned the final season of The Wire into a horror show. The group took advantage of blocks of unoccupied buildings and used them as dumping grounds for their murder victims. With no bodies for the police to investigate, Marlo Stansfield had free reign to achieve what he really wanted as a drug lord: absolute power and terror.

The most revealing character moment for Marlo Stansfield is this one:



After being humiliated in a card game by men who refuse to take Marlo seriously due to his age, Marlo goes and humiliates a security guard at a store. The guard tries to confront Marlo respectfully but Marlo decides that's enough of an insult to order the man's death. Cut to the end of the episode, with Chris Partlow and Snoop nailing another door back on to an abandoned house.

The scariest thing about Marlo, beyond his flat affect and dead eyes, is how casually he fills those tenement houses. He kills civilians, he kills allies, he kills the employees who fail him, and he kills the men who disappoint him, and he even kills people who have the slightest potential of being a police witness. He responds to every problem like some dark ages voivode, which makes him look awkward during moments where he's forced to cooperate or negotiate with the drug lord organization New Deal Co-op. Even then, he quickly dictates terms and brutalizes the others the second he gets the upper hand.

It would possibly be better if the people carrying out the assassinations were some dumb brutes, but Marlo's lead assassin Chris Partlow is eerily gentle. He calms people down and speaks to them in a reassuring voice just before he puts a bullet in them. There's a disconnect between his actions and his behavior that makes Chris Partlow absolutely terrifying. I've seen that same disconnect used as a personality quirk in serial killer movies, mostly before something sends them into a frothing rage, but you see the weight of history behind Chris Partlow's behavior. A long life of doing evil formed his methodology and the only time he breaks character is when the murder becomes personal.      

The scariest kinds of horror stories are the ones that feel closest to reality. The Wire was always praised for the veracity of its storytelling, which makes the murders feel plausible. Marlo and his crew aren't motivated by whatever hackneyed, theatrical backstories that motivate most serial killers. They kill to protect their organization and to flex their power. They're not scary because they're using people to enact their psychodramas. They're scary because they just don't care about the people they hurt. It's so much more cold and banal of a reason to kill people, and that indifference scares the crap out of me.

It strikes me as kind of funny that The Wire gets metafictional for a moment to comment on the whole serial killer thing. In the fifth season, Detective McNulty fabricates a serial killer in order to convince the city to free up more funds for him to appropriate to work the Marlo Stansfield case. At one point, they take a trip to the FBI office to work up a psychological profile on McNulty's fraud killer. As they're preparing the material and McNulty is smirking at his own cleverness, a Jack Crawford-style behavior science analyst comes in. He's clearly puffed up on his own cleverness and discusses how he worked up an accurate psychological profile on the Unibomber, to which McNulty replies, "wasn't he turned in by his own brother?"

I Saw the Devil

So here's the fucked up thing about I Saw The Devil.

It's a film about how ultimately dehumanizing and unsatisfying vengeance can be. The movie is a revenge story through-and-through, and revenge stories exist to empower the powerless through fiction. Bad things happen in life and our sense of order demands that someone be punished for it. It's a nice power fantasy and most revenge films feature an average man empowered by rage.

Kyung-chul, the serial killer who murdered Soo-hyun's pregnant fiance, is about as evil as they come. He spends the entire movie kidnapping, raping, and murdering women. His only friend is a cannibal who invades homes and carves up the inhabitants for supper. They're both shabby and unattractive men, though Kyung-chul approaches his work with a steely eyed, world-weary assertiveness that's undeniably compelling to watch. They're both evil men but they're not quite devils. There's something petty and pathetic about them that puts me in the mind of something I read this week: "Most things that seem satanic or malevolent are really just wretchedness and frailty that’ve been allowed to put on muscle."   

Neither murderers have a chance against Soo-hyun. Soo-hyun is the perfect human agent of vengeance. Young, handsome, highly-trained, and brutal, Soo-hyun is basically a Korean Jason Bourne. After his fiancee's body is found at the bottom of a river (in one of the most chilling search-team scenes I've ever seen), Soo-hyun steals some spy gadgets from his office, takes a two-week vacation, and goes hunting. With the help of his fiancee's father, a former police commissioner, he quickly tracks down his fiancee's killer. The rest of the game is a brutal game of cat and mouse between the serial killer and the super agent. Soo-hyun refuses to turn his prey over to the police, preferring to prolong his quarry's torment, and Kyung-chul descends into depravity when faced by an opponent who outclasses him in every way.

This movie had been sitting in my Netflix queue for awhile because I felt like I could figure out how it would end from the synopsis: Soo-hyun would descend into Kyung-chul's level until the difference between the two men was almost nil. While Soo-hyun's revenge does eventually barrel over innocent people, the story is never that trite or obvious. No satisfying revenge can really be taken against Kyung-chul anyway. Soo-hyun can cause horrific physical pain to Kyung-chul (and some of his attacks run close to torture porn) but the effect is similar to Batman beating up the Joker in the interrogation room: a guy as crazy as Kyung-chul is eventually going to disconnect from what's happening to him and all you're left with is cutting flesh. Even torturing Kyung-chul inside his murder room fails to stir any empathy for his victims. Instead he goads Soo-hyun to kill him and treats Soo-hyun like he's wasting Kyung-chul's time.

So the film's title doesn't refer to Kyung-chul. Kyung-chul is essentially a selfish, ignorant creature of the id. The devil in the title is the realization that you can burn your entire life down to gain the object of your obsession and have it mean absolutely nothing. The movie ends without closure and with a sense of loss that's almost crippling. While researching this blog post, I came across the perfect one-sentence review for the film: "There is all the violent mayhem, for certain, but the thing that sets I Saw the Devil apart is its undercurrent of real emotion and how unrelentingly sad it can be."  

Misery by Stephen King

Of all the books I had to read for class, Misery is the one I felt the most apprehension about.

A story about a psycho running at me with a knife doesn't really rattle my cage. It's a situation that (thankfully) seems so far-fetched to me that I don't get a lot of anxiety over it. Having a conversation with a crazy person who is responsible for your safety is much more frightening.

Reading Misery was an intense experience.

Most of the people who read this blog know me in real life. I have a fairly over-the-top vibe and a big flapping mouth, but I don't actually deal with conflict well. Blame the screaming matches my parents got into as a kid or whatever cheap pop-psychology explanation fits best, but the long and short is that I prefer things to be peaceful. I want to be liked. I try to please. Sometimes that means rolling over and showing my belly.

The reason that I found Misery so stressful was because, if it were me in Paul Sheldon's chair, I would have done everything I could to make Annie Wilkes happy. I would have told her that Misery's death was simply a lead-up to a sequel where she comes back triumphant. I would have shmoozed her, gushed at her enthusiasm, and answered every one of her fan-girl questions with the answers that she wants to hear. Yes, Misery eventually chooses handsome Edward but keeps a special place in her heart for brooding, passionate Jacob. Yes, I will be writing these stories forever (although, come on, what kinda dude's dude writes Regency romances? The way Sheldon comes off, he should have been writing stories with .45s and tits) and I'm sorry that you found the swearing in my new novel so offensive. I'm trying to capture the streets my character comes from. In my next draft I will tone it down and add a modern Misery. Agony Velasquez, maybe.

As I was reading the book, I kept roleplaying what I would have said and how I would have placated her, but the simple answer is that she's unpredictable and crazy and sooner or later I'd have to stop placating her and start being assertive. The threat of death, mixed in with the threat of disappointing a domineering mother figure, rattled me in ways that I'm kind of embarrassed about.

King is a good writer.

It's trendy to trash King for his weird period in the 90s when his books were at the same time too personal and too bloated. It's trendy to talk down about him because the Uneducated Masses really dig him. When I first got to New York City and was struggling to get by, I knew that I could go to any Salvation Army, slap down a dollar, and have entertainment for hours. His stuff is ubiquitous and that means it's taken for granted. He writes about podunk towns and podunk people (snotty snort, eats some cheese), but the man knows how to capture humanity and human weakness. His images stick in the mind.

Having said that, his pulpy Tales From The Crypt roots sometimes work against him.

I gotta lay out the one petty issue I had with the book. It's the same problem I had with Apt Pupil, where the villain went from a small, believable sort of banal evil to an obnoxiously grandiose cackling lunatic. Todd in Apt Pupil starts off as just a teenager taking lessons in sociopathy from an old kook, then goes off and starts hacking up homeless people? No. Annie Wilkes is a mass murderer living in isolation? No.

There's a scene where trapped novelist Paul Sheldon finds Annie Wilkes' scrapbook locked up somewhere. He flips through it and it turns out that she killed enough people to fill a city. It stretches credibility and takes the character to a farcical territory. Given that the horror is so close and intimate, it would have worked better if she was just a lonely woman out in the woods whose identity was so wrapped up in her fictional avatar that she goes nuts.

I understand that people feel Annie Wilkes is a mean-spirited stereotype of the crazy woman or romance readers or obsessive fans of anything in general. Yeah, maybe. But people get weird about the fictitious characters they empathize with.

Guilty.

I gotta close this one out by discussing the circumstances I read this book in.

I'd been hearing about Misery for a long time. Everyone knows about the movie, which I tried to watch but just couldn't finish, and everyone says it's one of King's best tales. It's supposed to be of special significance to writers, too. A hundred years ago, I read an interview with Gothy horror writer Poppy Z. Brite and she said that Misery was one of the best how-to-write manuals she'd ever encountered. I was really looking forward to that aspect of the book. I HATE books on writing but making the mechanics of storytelling a part of the story weaves how writing actually works and impacts a human life. It's a Scheherazade piece and there's something weird about how thrilling the idea of keeping yourself alive by telling stories is. 

Telling stories keeps you going. I read Misery right after I lost someone I loved. I didn't want to write. I didn't want to love or fuck or dance or drink or do any of the things that defined my life. I wanted to lash out. I sometimes do, and I sometimes go dancing. Reading Paul Sheldon's story helps me work through my own.  

I doubt I'll read this again anytime soon. It was easily the most hairy book I read this semester. I like a good psycho story but I think I'll stick to nice, safe stalk-stalk-knife-knife-misogyny-religion-daddy issues stories. But it was the right thing for me to read at the right time. 

Psycho by Robert Bloch

So does Norman Bates work better as an effeminate, boyishly handsome young man or as a baby faced, portly, forgettable mama's boy?

That's the big difference, innit? The storyline is basically the same. The structure is a bit different, too. Instead of starting with poor doomed Marion Crane and her lover, we crawl right into Norman Bates' life. Reading it, I kinda wonder how many of the original readers figured out what the big twist ending was. You can do a lot of tricks with visuals that you can't do with the written word and it's pretty obvious that Norman is shadowboxing in empty rooms.

Then again, I came to Psycho, both the film and the novel, knowing all the twists and turns. It feels like a fairy tale someone told me when I was really young and remained imprinted on my psyche. Reading it was still very rewarding. When you watch the movie version of a story, it's like you're observing it in real life. You can see the visuals, pick up the non-verbal cues, and interact with a story as a passive observer in the characters' lives. Reading the book lets you climb into people's heads. What you lose in "objective" visual clarity, you gain in intimacy.

Having climbed directly into Norman Bates' head, I gotta say it's a pretty fucked up place.

It's hard to feel sympathy for him, in that mama's boys seldom elicit sympathy in this culture. I feel a bit of pity for him, though it's easier to pity Anthony Perkins' version than the novel's version, if for no other reason than the superficial. The Norman I imagine from the book is shlubby and unappealing. People who encounter him seem to think he's harmless, but the way he carries himself and the stuff he says would set off my creeper alarm. Maybe the late fifties/early sixties were a more innocent charms, but I buy the version of Marion Crane from the movie, sitting in the parlor with Norman and being frightened by the things he tells her.

Blah blah Ed Gein blah blah Texas Chainsaw Massacre blah blah.


The big thing I took away from this book is the idea that no one really understands themselves or the people around them. Norman Bates really believes that he's covering up for his demented mother, Sam Loomis is shocked that the woman he was considering marrying could have stolen $40,000, and Lila Crane has to come to terms with a sister she barely knew. It's an idea that has some resonance with me these days.

I don't really have much to say beyond the fact that Norman Bates is the ur-psycho of pop culture. His weakness, his vulnerability, his dementia, and his mother issues have become what people think of whenever people use the word "psycho." No other madman has captured the public imagination the way that Bates has.

At least not until Hannibal Lecter came along.    

Last House On The Left 2009 Liveblogging

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.

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.

The Orphan

I guessed the twist ending to The Orphan about half-way through the movie.



I never guess the twist ending to movies. I didn't catch that Bruce Willis was dead in Sixth Sense, I didn't catch that Verbal Kint was Keyser Soze, and I probably wouldn't have guessed the chick in The Crying Game was really a dude. Maybe I'm dumb, maybe these movies involve too much narrative cheating to cover the twist (this is certainly true of The Usual Suspects) or maybe I get too lost in the moment to overthink what happens next. But I got the twist in The Orphan and I was deliriously pleased with myself.

Not that this detracted from the experience. To the contrary, I really liked The Orphan.

I dunno if it's the kind of movie that will survive multiple showings, and I don't know if I would have had as much fun if I didn't see it on the big screen, but I'm a sucker for killer kid flicks and this one was even more deliciously twisted than most. Oh, sure, the squares won't like it, but there is some wonderfully warped stuff in this.

Most of the success in this flick comes from Isabelle Fuhrman as Esther, the precocious little murderess. Most killer kids in movies just kinda stand around and glare ominously, which Esther does in spades, but she also brings a lot of pathos to the role. We don't get the sense that Esther is purely manipulative and evil, but is instead someone that's been so damaged by whatever happened to her in life that she can't come back around the other side. Even when we learn Esther's big secret Furhman keeps the revelation believable, especially given that the character goes into some disgusting dark places. According to IMDB, Fuhrman is gonna be in the Children of the Corn remake, and I hope she brings the same skill to her flyover-land horror tale.

Now, I gotta say that without Esther and all her weirdness, The Orphan would be just another middle class family anxiety thriller. Most of the action takes place in a house I couldn't afford in a million years and the characters have got that successful white-y angst going on. It's a family of Guitar Hero and therapy and miscarriages and hidden diaries and wine bottles, which is all pretty typical of the genre, but Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard do a helluva job making the domestic drama interesting. I liked the two characters, I bought into their frustration, and I felt for them when their family started falling apart. Granted, Peter Sarsgaard's John Colemna was a little too quick to dismiss his wife's concern, but they still remained a sexy, believable, damaged-but-surviving couple.



There were a lot of cool touches in the movie. Esther's insane artwork, revealed only through the black light of her fish tank, was absolutely awesome. I want someone to do a ghastly black-light mural in my place.

There was also a very sexy scene of the couple making love in the kitchen. Granted, they were pretty foolish to have sex in a big open room with their kids nearby, but I liked the spontaneity and the passionate awkwardness of the scene. It's really nice to see a sex scene in a movie that doesn't look as smooth and rehearsed as partner figure skating, where people bump into each other and struggle out of their clothes and do all the other clumsy stuff real couples do.

The movie opens with a really gruesome scene of the mother's nightmarish ordeal during her miscarriage. I've heard a lot of people express discomfort at the image of a pregnant mother taken to such a nasty extreme, but I thought the scene was well filmed and skin-crawlingly creepy, even though it doesn't fit with the rest of the film.



Digging into the subtext of the film, there's something that should be noted about Esther: She's from Eastern Europe. The horror genre always had a long and profitable relationship with the Slavic peoples, going all the way back to a certain TransCarpathian Count. Lately, Eastern Europe seems to be the go-to place when you need amoral and vicious characters. Hostel, Severance, and The Orphan all feature characters twisted by decadence or amorality into doing the most awful things to their fellow man, all fueled by the fall of Communism. This is, of course, horribly prejudiced and made me terribly nervous when I backpacked through Bulgaria and Romania. Any Eastern Europeans out there wanna weigh in on this?

Okay, while we're on this, I want to declare a moratorium on appearing-in-a-mirror-behind-a-character jump scare. You know the one. A character opens a medicine chest/ closet/whatever, with an empty space clearly framed behind them in the shot, they close the door, and someone is now standing in that spot while the music spikes. About half the time they aren't even a threat, which invariably prompts the surprised character to say "You scared me." That shit officially needs to be removed from the horror bag of tricks for a period of no less than three-to-five years.

Anyway, go check it out while it's still in theaters. Bring drunk friends and your love of outrageous wickedness. It's a lot less fun in a small screen, though my friends and I are totally gonna make a drinking game of this. Take a shot every time Esther says something creepy.