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.    

Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy by Allison Moore

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.

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.

Gateways to Geekery: Slasher Films

The Onion's AV Club website runs a regular feature called Gateways to Geekery, which provides a primer on various nerdy topics for the neophyte enthusiast. They did an excellent write-up of George Romero's work and they recently posted a great guide to slasher films. It's got a good selected viewing list, some pointed criticisms against slasher film detractors, and was clearly written by someone who shared our demented affection for this stuff. Check it out.

Sorority Row

Awright, I wanna start this one off with a big fat spoiler warning: I'm going to talk about the killer's identity. I'm not normally concerned with ess-bombs, but this movie is fresh and there are people who wanna play guess-the-killer. It ain't gonna help; the movie provides no hints or logical clue path and the killer comes completely out of left field. There's some interesting subtextual stuff I want to poke around in, but if you're keen on keeping a few mysteries fresh you may want to skip this review.

In case you haven't guessed, Sorority Row is I Know What You Did Last Summer as well as every other teen-targeted Christopher Pike/R.L. Stine horror novel you've ever read. A bunch of kids are united by a Dark Secret and someone knows it and torments them with it. There's a bunch of social drama mixed in with the slasher carnage and it turns out that some diabolical bastard/bitch is behind all the mayhem.

All in all, Sorority Row is pretty fun. There's absolutely nothing new here and if I had any proper taste I'd probably run from the theater in a cloud of panic and pretension. Eff it. I had a good time. There's a good bit of tension and a few good scares, even if the director LOVES tight, out-of-focus close ups.



Dark Secret slasher flicks tend to be SLIGHTLY more character driven, as we see the people bound by tragedy degenerate under the stress. All this is well and good, but the women in Sorority Row really are assholes. Those that aren't actively self-interested and malicious are either terminally stupid or completely spineless. It's revealed by the end of the movie that each of the girls had done everything short of announcing in the paper their complacency in the homicide. And I'm not entirely sure what the point of the prank that started the whole mess was. Make a guy believe he killed someone and take him out into a quarry? Yeah, that's...uh...wow. Way to pull a fast one.

I have been reading a lot lately that the mainstream horror audience is heavily female. Sorority Row was definitely targeted toward a female audience, and the theater I saw the movie in was full of small clusters of teenage girls. The male characters in the movie are either background noise, glorified accessories, or dangerously incompetent. Sure, the lead sisters are broadly drawn sorority stereotypes, but their relationships are much more realistic. The lead sororitina was pretty and strong and capable, someone you can easily identify with. Finally, Sorority Row ditches the whole puritanical sex-equals-death cliche. Sure, one of the characters is tagged as the movie's slut, but that speaks less to the tropes of the genre and more to the poisonous conformity of sorority life.



Sorority culture isn't actually portrayed very warmly. The initiation rituals and social stuff, especially the bit where the girls inspect pledge's bodies for physical imperfections, is pretty vile. The girls are clearly just killing time until they can make an advantageous society marriage, and two of the main characters are primarily motivated by keeping their menfolk happy. And it becomes pretty clear that all the girl's talk of sisterhood and solidarity is actually pretty meaningless. For want of a better term, the sorority sisters are pretty bitchy. There's usually a few sympathetic characters in these movies, but in this movie you start rooting for the killer pretty early on.



The killer's identity was one of the stranger points of the movie. After all the song and dance, it turns out the guy toting the sharpened tire iron is none other than the final girl's boyfriend, a class valedictorian and all around golden boy. He found out about the crime from one of the others and takes it upon himself to clean up the mess by playing dicky mind-games with the others and killing his way through a graduation party. Granted, all Dark Secret slasher flicks seem to suffer from Third Act Insanity, where every starts acting screwy in an attempt to throw red herrings all over the place, but this was really kind of a stretch. He ultimately had little personal involvement in the whole sordid business and it's kind of a stretch to believe he's killing people for his aloof girlfriend. It's like the dude from Twilight gone bad.



This may be another case of Gibb worship, but my favorite character in the movie was Chug, the drunk party girl. Aside from being the best actor in the movie, her character was the most rich. She was damaged, confident, jaded, and snarky. Of course she was the first one to go.

Oh, the flick features Carrie Fisher in her most badass role since Princess Leah. Sure, she can't aim a shotgun worth shit, but her exiting line is so fucking cool.

So, yeah, that's my two cents. Enjoy the poster, which hearkens back to the awful slasher movie posters from the early 90s where every poster was just a bunch of pretty people looking nervous.

Laid To Rest Trailer

Um. Sure?

I'm getting a bit burned out on slasher movies lately but I saw this trailer on the His Name Was Jason DVD and I just got a feeling, y'know? At this point, I've inundated myself with so much genre crap that it's permeated my senses and I get gut feelings about this stuff.

My gut reaction has been telling me to give this a shot, so give it a shot I shall. Besides, I'm really curious about the camera-looking thing the killer has strapped to his shoulder. Is he filming this stuff? Is he framing his rampage as some sort of demented movie?

One of the tropes of horror that always fascinated me are the tales centered around the line between story and suffering and the people who can't tell the difference between the two. Horror as a genre is all about exaggerating themes, and the ghastly notion of people doing evil because they see their victims through the prism of fiction strikes me as the sort of idea that hits home for horror fans. I don't need another thinly disguised lecture on the evils of horror cinema, as I am exposed to a ton of this stuff and I came out humane and kind, but elements of something deeper might elevate this above the stalk-and-slash crowd.

Or maybe it won't. Fuck it, just so long as they do it right.

Let the stoners live.

So I'm calling for a change, horror movie makers: let the stoners and the sluts and the drunks live.

The vast majority of final girls are withdrawn, guarded, uncomfortable in their bodies or with their sexuality, and are usually outside their peer group. It is their isolation and their perceptiveness that allows them to put the clues together, to realize that Something Isn't Right, while their friends are lost in booze and sex and debauchery and blah blah blah....

Boring.

There will always be a fondness in my black little heart for slashers flicks, the dopey embarrassment of the horror scene. Unlike a lot of my fellow horror bloggers, I am not blind to some of the subtext build into the cliches of the genre. Slasher films always had a vaguely puritanical streak, where the good (read: Christianly) young woman is given both perception and strength by her abstinence, while her friends who've succumbed to temptation fail to see the danger they're in.

This isn't actually anything new. All the way back to the atomic horror films of the fifties, back in less graphic times, the rubberized squiddy monster From Beyond The Stars would chance upon Johnny LetterManJacket and Janie AngoraCardigan. The exchange would be something like this:



Johnny: Come on, baby. Let us French.
SFX: Twig snaps.
Janie: Wait, Johnny. Did you hear something?
Johnny: I didn't hear anything.
Resumes groping and/or necking. Janie looks distracted.
Janie: I wanna go home.
Johnny looks exasperated.
Johnny: Babe, there's nothing out here.
Janie: I don't know....
Johnny turns on the charm.
Johnny: You look beautiful tonight.
Janie is smitten.
Janie: Oh, Johnny.
Kissy kissy. The Atomic Monster shows up.
Atomic Monster: Blaugh.
Johnny and Janie: Aaaaaaahhhh!!!

See where I'm going with this? If Janie just trusted her instincts, if she didn't succumb to Johnny's wiles, they wouldn't be Atomic Monster chow. This formula has been repeated, with significantly more boobs, ever since.

(Side note: there's something to be examined as to why men are always portrayed as such base and lowly animals, incapable of perceiving anything around them because they're too busy trolling for sex, but that's a whole different essay.)

Before you jump down my throat, I don't think that slasher flicks are thinly disguised propaganda for conservative Christian ideology. I think someone deliberately included a slightly abstinence oriented message into a movie, the formula worked, and people kept following and adapting it. Slasher movie makers can be accused of a lot of things, but originality is seldom among the charges.

But here's the thing about virgins: they make for pretty boring characters.

People who live with an overabundance of restraint come off as tightly wound and creepy. Some of the more scholarly work on the slasher subgenre posits that this is why the final girl survives; in the end, she's a mirror image of the outsider-killer. Most of the movies I'm talking about don't have that level of depth, and so you're left watching a square.

That might have been fine once upon a time, but it's 2009 now. Even our crappy slasher movies tend to have better acting, better production values, and better writing (stop snickering back there!) So I'm gonna throw something I've always wanted to see in a slasher flick: the character journey.

My favorite example is Freddy vs. Jason. The final girl, Lori, is both uninteresting and kinda fucking weird ("Why yes, I'm leaving high school yet still pine for my long-absent middle school boyfriend.") Her friend Gibb, on the other hand, is a habitual drinker whose self-esteem is ground down into the mud by her alpha-male asshole boyfriend. She has more dimensions, she's less serenely perfect, and she can be saved. Imagine a movie where this already damaged girl endures the fires of evil and becomes stronger for it. Wouldn't that have been fantastic? The movie doesn't give her that chance, which would have made FvJ a whole lot richer and more likable.



Or, more recently, Chewie from the Friday the 13th remake. This one is kind of a harder sell, because it's hard to believe that the good natured Chewie would voluntarily hang out with the idiots he keeps company with, but he's the most likable character in the movie. He's the most free-spirited, has the most engaging sense of humor, and is just awesome. Fuck it, I heart Chewie.



The fake final girl isn't particularly likable, because she (maybe) dates the biggest asshole in the group, while the actual final girl and guy don't really have much characterization. Really, doesn't it make more sense to have the most engaging character be the survivor. Sure, he's not a bulky manly-man, but has that ever really mattered when you're going up against Jason muthafuckin' Voorhees?

I'm really tired of bland, withdrawn, final girls. I related to them more when I was a scared, nervous Catholic-school virgin. I don't relate to those people anymore, and I don't think the average horror fan does, either. If evil truly is pure, then it's arbitrary: it will not let the virginal girls survive with any more frequency than anyone else. People who've lived, people who are a little wild and a little damaged, are more likely to have to tools needed to fight back and triumph.

So, yeah, clemency for the losers. This posts were inspired by the awesome Who Would You Save? posts circling around the webs. Check out final girl's posts here and here.