Why I love Bram Stoker's Dracula

Why I love Bram Stoker's Dracula

1) The cinematography, costumes, and set design. Bram Stoker's Dracula is an absolutely gorgeous film. It's as highly-stylized and colorful as a European graphic novel.

2) The opening scenes in Dracula's castle. Shadows creep along the walls, cold stone drips with secrets, and torchlight illuminates shadowed corners.

3) Keanu Reeves' amazingly fallible British accent. "Music? Those animals?"

4) The vampire brides in general and Monica Bellucci in particular. They're all dripping with satin and repressed Victorian sexuality.

5) Winona Ryder. My go-to celebrity crush during my tween years was Winona Ryder, thanks in no small part to this movie and Beetlejuice. This movie made her into the perfect Victorian romantic lead; at once uptight and naive. Plus she made a really cute almost-vampire.

6) Gary Oldman as Dracula. As the years have gone by and I've taken the movie less seriously, I've come to appreciate the high camp in his performance.  He glowers, he cackles, he hisses, and he professes his love with operatic glee.

7) Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. Speaking of over-the-top performances, I've never seen Van Helsing performed with the same mix of dispassionate scholarship and lunatic enthusiasm. Sometimes it goes too broad, like when humps Quincey before they go hunting Lucy, but most of the time he makes for a fun over-the-top vampire hunter.

8) The final chase to Dracula's castle, with the gunfights and galloping horses and Mina flipping out and calling to her lover. It's the way I imagine most Ravenloft games ending.

9) The opening sequence, with all the shadow puppetry and fairy tale voice-overs. I like that Dracula's armor looks like a cross between a bat and bloody musculature, and the soaring music that roars when he drinks the blood from the stabbed crucifix sets up our expectation for a truly operatic take on the Dracula myth.

10) "Would you care for some hors d'oeuvres, Doctor Seward?"

11) Lucy's funeral ruff. Who knew Victorian death rituals involved so many ruffles?  

12) The soundtrack is the best vampire score of all time. 

Conclusion: My feelings towards Bram Stoker's Dracula have changed significantly over the years. When I was younger, I deeply believed in the love story between Dracula and Mina. Hell, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Now I find that the campy performances and broad melodrama undercut the romantic moments too much for me to really take the heart of the movie seriously. Now I enjoy it mostly as an exercise in style, with added bonus of cringing at my past self's tastes in melodrama. 

Why I Love Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

Why I love Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

1) Freddy's Dead was the very first horror film I ever rented as a child. I ran up and down the rental shelves, looking for the least-intense movie I could find. Freddy's Dead had a bright cover, a fanciful description, and promised a final showdown between good and evil. 

2) Having been my first introduction to the Freddy Krueger mythos, the movie felt like a fairy tale. I had no idea why the town of Springwood was so strange, nor why all the kids were missing. 

3) Most people hate it when Freddy got funny, but part of the appeal of Freddy's Dead was the fact that it was an evil version of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The bus, the chalkboard, the spiked bed, the video game, all of which were, heh heh, executed with such gleeful aplomb.

4) I liked that the kids were from the halfway home. They were angry, edgy badasses. They were interesting! And one of them knew karate!

5) Roseanne and Tom! "I want my children back!" "You know they bring him!"

6) Yaphet Kotto makes a great wise man. Plus, the movie gave me my first hint on the futility of institutional efforts. The program that he runs seems desperately strapped for resources and he seems to it together with compassion tempered by a no-nonsense attitude. 

7) The cheesy 3D special effects. Totally gimmicky for it's time, totally amazing.

8) The final fight ain't no joke. NoES heroines are always tough cookies, and the brawl at the end between Freddy and his daughter is brutal and exciting. Plus there are ninja stars. 

9) The first time I heard "In A Gadda Da Vida" by Iron Butterfly was during the Spence scene. It blew my fragile 11-year old mind. That, combined with the video game scene (I'm a child of Nintendo) made a horror scene that spoke to my sensibilities. 

Conclusion: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is like a childhood storybook for me. It's full of bright colors, grand characters, and an undeniable streak of darkness. It's a good story and a fun movie. I recognize that it also represents the nadir of Freddy Krueger as a horror figure, but it was the best introduction I could have asked for to the wonders of the horror genre. 

Why I like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

Why I like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

1) It was weirdly kid-safe for a slasher film. FF13:7 was maybe the second or third horror movie I rented for myself, and I picked it because it was supposedly tamer than the rest due to strict MPAA interference. The movie is a master class in editing violence, with all the kills done either quickly or off-screen. As such, it was a good gateway introduction to the genre. 

2) The movie marks the first appearance of Kane Hodder as Jason Voorhees. The definitive actor to assume the role, Hodder brought a lot of elements from the previous incarnations together while adding his own unique touches to the character. Hodder's Jason is an interesting combination of Frankenstein's Monster and an angry pro-wrestler, but he also has an impeccable sense of timing. I recently re-watched the film and noticed the unique way Hodder goes in for the kill: he raises the weapon slowly, giving the viewer a moment of tension, before bringing it down with tremendous force. It's those small touches that make the character effective. 

3) Jason meets Carrie is a great idea. 

4) As a child of divorce, the image of the dead father rising from the water to save the child he had previously abused resonated with me. 

5) Bad News Crews and evil yuppie Melissa. The F13 films always had the best dirtbags.

6) Eddie the science fiction writer, with his stupid story ideas and naive optimism towards women. I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up and Eddie felt like he was made for me. "Rejection? Fine. I can take it. I've been rejected by some of the finest science fiction magazines in the country." 

7) Maddy. Poor, poor Maddy. The Friday movies seldom had an ugly duckling and they never had one with a character arc. I really liked Maddy's boost of confidence. She's the one I'd have picked to survive. Alas, Jason is a poor judge of human potential.

8) The telekinetic battles between Jason and Tina that take up the final third of the movie. I grew up on superhero comics, especially Jim Lee-era X-men, and it felt like the movie tied in my love of superheroes and monsters. The battles are really effective and visually interesting, given the film's low budget, and they end with the biggest non-CGI explosion in any Friday film.    

9) As a kid, I'd always been curious about what Jason looked like under the hockey mask. He goes bare-faced the longest in this film. He also kind of looks like Reptile from Mortal Kombat.

10) Did anyone else love the exposed spine and bones in the Jason suit? I did. It's the best interpretation of Zombie Jason I've seen. 

11) The sleeping bag kill, probably the most famous kill of the series. 

Conclusion: Friday the 13th Part VII is probably my favorite of Hodder's roles. It does a lot of the slasher conventions right while mixing in fanciful supernatural elements and an excellent final battle.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive did two things for me: it created three of my favorite vampires of the last few years, and it taught me how to listen to music again.

 I've had a hard time connecting to music lately. I usually have to listen to a song a few times to know whether I like it or not. Plus in the age of Pandora, Spotify, and the taste-predicting algorithm, I'm usually either sticking to the stuff I've been listening to for twenty years or listening to new stuff that sounds the exact same.

 Part of the problem is that music has always been in the background of whatever I'm already doing. I put it on when I'm writing or commuting or riding roller coasters (try playing Schubert's Ave Maria when you're just about to drop), but I never just sit down and listen to music. Music is meditative, and my brain hungers for activity and never shuts up. It's why mediation never works for me. My thoughts speed up when they're asked to slow down. The notion of simply listening to music as its own activity is alien to me. It's why I don't go to live shows. Just watching someone play music bores me.  

 Most of Only Lovers Left Alive is taken up by people listening to music.

There are a lot of shots filmed from overhead, looking down on the characters as they recline on antique furniture or pitch-black sheets as music washes over them. Adam in particular, the musician of the pair, has an infectious love for all things musical. The only time he ever shows excitement or affection for anything other than his wife is when he encounters a new performer or storied instrument. His dilapidated apartment (one of my favorite touches of the film. His shitty old Victorian in a dead stretch of Detroit is as much a crumbling Gothic refuge as any Transylvanian castle) is packed full of records, books, recording equipment, soundproof padding, and lovingly-tended musical instruments procured by an oblivious rocker boy.

 It's the home of someone very much engaged in the world. The movie is about the longevity and restorative power of creative expression.

 Both Adam and Kit, who turns out to be Christopher Marlowe, the actual writer of Shakespeare's work (at least according to the film) have released their work anonymously over the centuries, more for creative fulfillment than personal gain. It's a movie about the passion of creation, not the narcissistic need for fame. Vampires are often cast as charismatic rock stars, but watching a sad dude noodling around with lovingly-tended musical instruments creates an image of a creator that reverses the idea of vampire as glamorous parasite.

 I love the way the movie deals with drinking blood.

 Adam and Eve don't get their regular sustenance from biting randos. Regular blood often carries impurities that leads to the death of one of the secondary vampire characters. Instead, they get quality-controlled blood from human confederates working in the medical industry. There's a lot of familiar vampire-as-junkie imagery, but the feeding process works well for conveying Adam's depressed and desexualized vibe.

 I've seen a lot of feeding scenes in movies and they're all pretty much the same. The camera positions itself behind the victim's bare neck and focuses on the vampire. The vampire hisses, bears it's fangs, and bites down on the joint between the neck and shoulder. The camera switches to a close-up on the victim, the victim looks pained and frightened, then they melt into orgasmic bliss. It's rare to find a movie where the vampire attack looks painful (Let The Right One In springs to mind) and it enforces the idea that you want to get bitten by a vampire because it will give you a mind-shattering orgasm.

The blood drinking in Only Lovers Left Alive is filmed the way drug use often is. The vampires drink from tidy crystal glasses, a throbbing down tempo guitar plays, and the camera follows the character's face as they recline backwards onto the furniture in ecstasy.

The experience looks sensuous.

Like most drug movies, there comes a scene later in the movie where they're cut off from their supply, and they roam an alien cityscape looking for a fix. By the time that happens, it's the first real crisis of the film.  We feel their pain and hunger in a real and meaningful way. The choices they make ultimately bind them together, and provides the chilling meaning to the title.

The movie keeps threatening to have a plot, but I'm grateful that it never does. It starts with Adam contemplating his own suicide, arranging for his rocker buddy to get a bullet made with a hard wooden tip. As Eve rushes from Tangiers to be with him, following a particularly morose phone call, we get the sense that Adam has done this before. Her presence seems to reinvigorate him, and we see that Eve is the perfect respite from Adam's gloom. The bullet remains in the revolver, violating Chekov's rule about guns and third acts.

The hospital employee that Adam procures his blood from always seems to be on the verge of blackmailing the vampire, but that never comes to anything either.

The one moment of dangerous chaos comes midway through the movie when Ava, a hedonistic idiot vampire kin of Eve's, breezes into their lives like a junkie hurricane. She quickly throws their cozy nest into chaos and does real damage, but she's evacuated from the narrative a short time later by having her bags thrown out into the street and a door slammed in her face. What would have been a film-length conflict between the angsty humane vampire and the cheerful sociopath, is resolved like a surprise visit from a clueless relative.

 The artificial structures of plot, which would have turned Only Lovers Left Alive into just another vampire genre flick, never take hold. Instead, we just get to hang out with these creatures and get to know what their unlives are like. Because of this, they're defined as characters first, vampires second.

 Vampire angst is seldom handled well in vampire movies. It's usually someone brooding theatrically, with other people around them commenting on how much the vampire is brooding. Adam actually seems depressed. He mopes around, avoids company, speaks skittishly to people, and has to be physically dragged out his shell. He seems less effected by the Inherent Tragedy of Unlife. Instead, Adam comes off as a depressed musician who happens to be a vampire. That kind of unselfconsciousness, mixed with actual talent and class, make Adam and Eve the two coolest vampires I've seen in a long time.

 Take the scene where Eve and Ava finally drag him out of his cave and to a concert in some shitty bar. They recline against the back wall, shades on to avoid the light, and simply take in the scene. I've seen so many movies where the vampires walk into the club all slow-mo, Chappelle-style, and glower at everyone. All the Kubrick stares and thudding background music might look sexy on film, but it comes off as an unbearably pretentious affectation in real life. Instead, Adam and Eve are just there, feeding off the passion of the music. It takes a lot of life experience and class to project that level of not-give-a-fuckitude, and the big laugh comes when Adam's rocker buddy puts on a pair of sunglasses in order to emulate them.

 Plus, it's sweet to see Adam and Eve's love story. Most romances are told during the early infatuation stage, when people are love drunk and promising forever. Adam and Eve have been into each other forever, and it's the kind of well-worn, knowing affection of people who've been into each other long enough to know one another's quirks while still keeping the base passion lit. Eve starts the movie in Tangiers, and you get the sense that their affection works because of tremendous personal space. As a person who lived with a partner and didn't like it, the lifestyle seems appealing. Familiarity breeds contempt, after all.    

 I've had a real hard time pitching film to my friends.

 Jim Jarmusch is usually the stopping point. Not a lot of stuff happens in his movies and, while most of my friends are as pretentious as I am, it's hard to sell them on "it's a vampire film where they just sort of hang out, reaffirm their love, and listen to music."

 I doubt I'm going to get a lot of sales from the actual appeal of the movie to me: "these are the kinds of vampires I imagine myself being."

 During barroom conversations about supernatural longevity, I say that I'd take them up on it because I can't wait to see what form of self-expression humanity comes up with next. My life is a sort of happy clutter of things I hold dear, and creativity invigorates me.

 So it's nice to see a movie about love without all the hysterics and heavy breathing. It's nice to see a vampire film created by someone who isn't subconsciously emulating every other fucking vampire film. It's nice to see a laid-back film that makes darkness and mystery sexy again. And it's nice to see the work of someone who can make midnight cityscapes beautiful. I really loved Only Lovers Left Alive. I've already purchased the soundtrack and look forward to long evenings lounging on the couch and listening to it with my shirt open.
   

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?"

Lights Out: A Short Horror Film

This scared the crap out of me. Brilliantly done!

The Disease Artist by Steve Rasnic Tem

"The Disease Artist" by Steve Rasnic Tem is the most effective horror story I've ever read about the terror of terminal illness.

The story takes place in the future, after disease have been eliminated. People live in a antiseptic world that strips the flavor and nuance out of life. The story focuses on a performance artist who deliberately infects himself with various horrific maladies and allows people to watch their symptoms blossom. Despite the concerns of his medical assistant/lover, the Disease Artist presses the boundaries of his performances in order to reconnect his audience to their lost humanity.

As a genre, horror can be a collection of missed opportunities. On paper, it's supposed to be about tapping into hidden anxieties in order to create stories that press those buttons in a safe and entertaining way. So we create avatars for anxieties like the vampire for (depending on your politics) fears of plague or predatory sexuality, werewolves for fear of primal nature, ghosts for the fear of an unsafe home, and serial killers for the fear of random violence. What often happens is that a monster becomes successful and imitators replicate the trappings of the horror rather than the emotional content. So the genre has gotten a reputation as a repository for cliché. 

On the other hand, it's hard to write effectively about the horror of terminal disease. I've seen a lot of horror stories about cancers that grow to world-devouring proportions, I've seen STDs turning people into vampires, I've seen people who die of wasting diseases haunting the bedrooms they've died in. Maybe it's because most horror fears are highly abstract and terminal disease is far more personal so terribly common, but most of the horror stories I've seen feel as tactlessly blatant and heavy handed as early-season Buffy The Vampire Slayer episodes. 

I've written before about how my my favorite horror movies are less about abstract concepts and more about concrete circumstances in my own life. "The Disease Artist" works. Rather than exaggerating the symptoms of disease into a carnival grotesquerie, it discusses the relationship people have with sickness and mortality. It taps the universal fear of illness in a way that tells a very human story.