20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Recently, the AV Club did an article about whether or not we are living in a golden age of movies and pop culture entertainment. While I couldn't hack my way through - AV articles can be really pretentious and boring - it did get me to thinking about the way I view genre history. I tend to wax nostalgic about a mythical yesteryear when movies weren't all about the stupid jump scare, when everything didn't feel watered down and played out. The thing is, maybe that's true of any age. Maybe the stuff that is actually worth remembering is always surrounded by mediocrity. Maybe it's the process of casting the wide net through the sea of bullshit and Platinum Dunes remakes that leads us to the things that are genuinely good.

Or, to put it mildly, I think Joe Hill is the real deal.

Maybe I'm such a big Joe Hill fanboy because the characters and subjects he writes about resonates with my own life experience, in the same way melodramatic angsty music resonates with a moody teenager. Maybe I'm trying to apply an objective standard of "good" to highly subjective things. Whatever. I've gone through three of his books and he ain't let me down.

20th Century Ghosts is an anthology of horror-themed stories. Though there are ghosts and monsters aplenty, the stories tend to be about the spectres of memory and loss. Hill does something I wish more authors would do; he tells stories that use horror tropes as a grounding for tales of people rather than drag us through the same rusty haunted house doors. He's got a great command of characters, he uses language beautifully, he doesn't think endless swearing makes a story more tough and authentic (not that I have a problem with swearing. I swear like a sailor. But bad writers often rely on it to make a story more "edgy", like 10 year olds cussing out their parent's earshot. Mine cussed around me, so it was all good) and, unlike certain other major horror writers, he can actually end a story.

Anyway, that's enough of lighting incense at his feet. When I review anthologies I like going through the stories. It's a pattern that has worked well in the past and I don't see a reason not to try to duplicate success. Without further ado:



Best New Horror: I had this idea once. I really, really did. But I chickened out because I didn't think I could pull it off. Honestly, I was probably right, but Hill definitely did a hell of a job on it.

BNH is one of the most dead-on depictions of horror fandom and the fatigue that often comes with it. You love this stuff with a primal ferocity and then one day you realize that most everything out there is either a rip-off of something better or it thinks you're a fool. The protagonist, a burned out anthology editor, comes across a genuinely original and scary work and it shocks him out of his ennui. He recalls the first time he ever felt the joy of the horror genre after watching The Haunting as a small boy:

When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.

Boom. Nailed it.

It turns out that the guy who wrote the story is a bit messed up and BNH quickly degenerates into a nasty backwoods stalker story. But the story takes it's most celebratory tone when things are at their worst. The protagonist has finally gotten the purest jolt he'd been searching for his entire life. This story should be compulsory reading for the hardcore horror devotee.

20th Century Ghost: A lot of horror writers tell stories about haunted movie theaters, whether it's Clive Barker's seminal Son Of Celluloid or Joe R. Lansdale's trippy Drive-In novels. Most of us horror fanatics developed our taste of the genre in darkened movie palaces and it's natural that haunted movie theaters are just as much a trope of the genre as spooky castles, abandoned graveyards, and eerie summer camps.

Despite the story's scary elements- and the ghost of poor Imogene Gilchrist is genuinely unnerving- the story is really a love story. It's strangely nostalgic and sentimental, maybe a little adorably schmaltzy, but I loved it. It's one of the two stories that I remember most fondly in the collection.

Pop Art: I'm not sure if I'd mentioned this before, but Joe R. Lansdale is one of my heroes as a writer. I read his stuff at a key point in my development and his unique combination of Southern dry wit, machismo, and absolutely insane subject matter got me hooked. I have a natural inclination toward literary pretentiousness and whenever I start writing to impress people rather than writing for the sheer joy of it, I crack open a Lansdale book and marvel at the almost childlike imagination and enthusiasm of it.

Pop Art felt like a Joe R. Lansdale story.

The story is about a boy made out of inflatable plastic and the troubled, angry kid he befriends. It reminded me of a Lansdale piece about an inflatable sex doll that yearns to be free, but Pop Art has its own thing going. The inflatable boy is serene and almost Christlike in the way he views the world and the difficulties of his condition. His positivity and his unconditional love go a long way to healing the narrator.

I read a lot and, God help me, I read a tremendous amount of genre fiction. In most genre fiction, the first person narrative almost always sounds the same: cynical, detached, tough, and cold. Speaking as a long-time roleplayer, I know when someone's creating an avatar for the way they either perceive themselves or the way they want to be and most first person narratives sound vaguely like wish fulfillment. Both this story and the tales "Voluntary Committal" and "Better Than Home" deal with a narrator with emotional problems. They're not dry, detached reporters of events surrounding them, but instead they perceive the tales through the lenses of their own world view. The kid in Pop Art is angry and defensive and the inflatable boy's presence in his life does him a world of good. It's ultimately not a happy story, but it's one of the most emotionally engaging in the book.



You Will Hear The Locust Sing: This really odd mash up of Lansdale-style weirdness, fifties sci-fi big bug horror and Kafka's Metamorphosis is just...odd. I can't quite tell if it's a story that didn't so well for me or if it's doing something I'd need an English degree to figure out, but ultimately it didn't rock my cage too much. It ultimately confined me to an experience I wasn't all that interested with in the first place. Not that it was bad. It's like Korean food; it's really well made for what it is, but it's never gonna be the first thing I want to order on the menu.

Abraham's Boys: Oh, did I love this story.

I'm so sick and goddamn tired of the Dracula story. It's interesting up until we leave his bitchin' castle, then all the movies/stories/whatever degenerate into the characters wringing their hands and watching Lucy die. Even when people screw with the narrative like they did with Hammer's Horror of Dracula, it all still seems too familiar. While I still basically like vampires and I still adore the character of Dracula, stories based around the actual novel don't really do anything for me. I gave up hope on anything interesting being done with Jonathan Harker, Mina, Van Helsing, Lucy, and the rest of the gang. Boy was I wrong.

Abraham's Boys is a vampire story without any vampires in it. Van Helsing has immigrated to America, where he's been cast out of academia for his crackpot beliefs in vampires. He now lives in isolation with his two terrified boys, whom he rules with physical abuse and tales of supernatural forces set against them. We discover that Van Helsing married Mina, who died under terrible circumstances, and the boys begin to doubt their father's sanity.

This interpretation of Van Helsing, while significantly less heroic, totally works. He's a scary, paranoid, cold father figure and there's a real chance that he may simply be crazy. We feel bad for the boys, and their slow rebellion has horrible consequences, but it's the best Dracula story I've read in a long time.

Better Than Home: Probably the best character study in the book, this completely non-horror tale is told from the point of view of a special needs child and his relationship to his baseball coach father.

It's really hard to pull off a narrator with severe mental issues, especially when that narrator is a kid. The best example I've ever seen is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but author Mark Haddon had worked extensively with autistic children before writing the book. Most writers either slip into that cynical outsider perspective or, to use the distasteful terminology of Tropic Thunder, go "full retard" and make the story unreadable. Hill leaned toward the former and the narrator is a little too on-the-ball for how severe his disability is, but the relationship he has with his wonderfully patient father is one of the strongest emotional moments in the anthology.

The Black Phone: This story felt like a throwback to all those trapped-by-a-serial-killer stories I used to read in Cemetery Dance after Silence of the Lambs blew up. The protagonist is a kid (and I'm just starting to realize, what's up with all these kids and teens in Hill's work?) who gets captured by a grotesquely obese sexual predator and kept in a basement. While he's trying to figure out a way out of his predicament, a black plastic phone starts ringing. On the other end of the line are the voices of the man's previous victims.

Spooooooooky....

I really liked this story. The lead kid was tremendously scrappy, proactive, and resourceful and you were rooting for him through the whole thing. It's a very direct sort of story: stuff happens, followed by other stuff, then boom! done, but it's got creepy ghosts, dank murder holes, and gross hatchet wielding, fratricidal killers. Win.


In The Rundown: Hill has an amazing ability to make completely angry, unsympathetic characters redeemable, and his gifts really shine in this story. The lead character is a nasty jerk who gets fired from working in a video store after making threatening comments to a coworker. On his way home, he comes across a grisly scene of a crazed mom trying to kill her kids and rises to the moment.

I liked this piece because of the way it shifts our perspective on the lead. He's an absolutely mean-spirited shit but he comes through in the end. The scenes with the crazed mother is genuinely chilling because it unspools so slowly. We only get information on what's going on in small pieces, so we're as off-balance and disoriented as the protagonist. It's a great effect. In The Rundown is less of a whole story than the portrayal of a single moment, so we don't quite know how things worked out, but it's a great little horror tale.

The Cape: I grew up on Ray Bradbury. When I was a kid, I loved his imagination, his nostalgia, and the poetic way he told his stories. Though he's since disowned it, The October Game is still one of the most terrifying and grisly stories in all horror fiction. As I've gotten older and ornerier, I've had a hard time connecting to his sentimental, syrupy stuff, but the Ray Bradbury story has become like 80s video game music to me: even if I haven't heard it for a long time, just a few notes brings back a tidal wave of memories and emotions.

The Cape starts out feeling exactly like a Ray Bradbury story. It's about a couple of brothers who spent their childhood tying fake capes around their necks and pretending to be superheroes. As the story begins, one of the brothers is starting to outgrow the game, but his sibling tries to get him to play one more time. He climbs up the tree, taunting the brother, and discovers that his cape gives him the ability to fly.

At that point, I expected the story to turn into a nostalgic childhood tale of whimsey and magic but shit rapidly goes downhill. Stuff happens, people become awful, and lives don't turn out exactly the way the characters want them to before someone goes and does something horrible. It was kinda hard to really like the story because there aren't really any sympathetic or likable characters, but it does play to one of Hill's strengths, which is an honest depiction of the small ways that people and families disintegrate. It's a well-told tale and it showcases some of the things I really love about Hill's work, but it's not something I'm going to be rushing back to any time soon.

Last Breath: The other stand out horror tale in this anthology, Last Breath is a tale about a very polite, very creepy doctor who collects the final exhalations of people at the moment of their death. He bottles them up and displays them in a museum, where people can listen to the sounds with a device called a deathoscope. A family of three visits the museum. The father and child are enraptured by the exhibit, but the mother becomes more and more uncomfortable. Things happen.

I loved the creepy but kindly Dr. Alinger. As a guy who is fascinated by tale spinners and crypt keepers, I love weirdo morbid eccentrics. The way he describes his collection is chilling and evocative. The little tales he tells with each death are amazing and eerie. I think I want to be this guy. It's a fairly straightforward EC comics sort of tale, but it's one of my favorites.

Dead-Wood: A one-page poetical rumination on the ghosts of trees, Dead-Wood...is good. Look, just read the fucking thing. It's a page.

The Widow's Breakfast: Another really good non-horror story, The Widow's Breakfast is a Depression-era story of a drifter who shares a meal with a recently-widowed young woman. It's a great character piece, kinda sad and kinda touching.

We meet the drifter right after his more intelligent friend is killed and he's feeling vulnerable and lonely. I like that he keeps comparing the way he does things to the way his friend did them. He probably wasn't the brains of the outfit, but he's also trapped in tremendous insecurity, which makes him more sweet. Everyone is so sad and lonely and goddamn likable.

It also has the most chilling final line I've ever read in a non-horror story.

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead: This tale was featured in The Living Dead, an anthology I reviewed awhile back. It's cropped up in pretty much every zombie anthology I've seen since then. My original notes still stand.

My Father's Mask: This is a damn weird story. It's somewhat Alice In Wonderland, somewhat straight horror and all weird. Stories with kids who have weird parents are a dime a dozen, but these cats were really, really weird, especially the sexy mom. It was a very cool piece, though. I think the point was that adult problems go straight over children's head and all they can do is get knocked around in the ripple effect. Still, the mom is pretty damn hot.

Voluntary Committal: The novella that closes the anthology, Voluntary Committal tells the story of a young man whose idiot savant brother creates elaborate forts in the basement of the family house with sheets and cardboard boxes. The forts become more frighteningly elaborate until people go in and never come out...

This story could have been a lot shorter. There's a certain kind of horror author that would have fixated on the creepy shit going on in the basement, but Voluntary Committal, like Better Than Home is mostly about the effect disabled kids have on a family. The family is brilliantly realized and I especially liked the fact that the narrator's mother recognized the mean streak in her healthier son and did her best to suppress it. I liked that the "evil" friend of the narrator wasn't really one of those generic effed-up generic horror sociopath. Instead, he had all the squirrelly, needy defense mechanisms of a kid from an abusive home. I actually felt a little bad for him when his fate came down, and I felt especially bad for the sad, insecure girl he left behind.

As for the horror, it's a pretty Lovecraftian piece, all weird angles and plateaus of Leng. I love that stuff. Voluntary Committal is ultimately a compelling family drama with just enough nastiness thrown in.



20th Century Ghosts sticks to a lot of repeating themes in Hill's work; screwed-up families, emotionally troubled narrators, and horror as a lens to view the troubles of real life. It's a very good anthology with a broad range of styles and subjects, and a couple of stories are among the best I've read. Go check it out.

Pontypool

I dunno how I feel about Pontypool.

For a guy who bitches about how zombies are played out, I'm a little bummed out that I didn't love Pontypool more. It's definitely a unique take on the whole zombie invasion thing. It gets points for originality, talent, and effort. I just don't quite know how how to process the ambivalence I feel towards the movie.

Pontypool centers around Grant Mazzy, a former big name shock jock radio personality banished to small-town Canada after an unnamed scandal. While on-shift one lonesome winter morning with his producer and techie he starts getting reports of mysterious riots popping up around town. Things proceed from bad to worse and....well, you know, shit happens.



Watching Pontypool, I learned that I tend to prefer stories that take place in the beginning of a zombie uprising. Once the zombies have taken over the world, you've basically degenerated into the same old post-apocalyptic nonsense. Zombies are most scary right at the beginning, when panic sets in and people don't have any good information on the mysterious plague. Pontypool is ultimately a really good movie and the best scenes by far are the moments when the isolated radio station hears the first chilling eyewitness reports of zombie attacks from panicky observers.

I really dug the notion of a virus spread through corrupted words in the English language. It reminded me of the crazy language virus from Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, but its an idea that needed more space to explore than a short movie centered in a small environment. At times the information came so quickly that it felt forced, but the scene where he figures out how to talk his producer down from the infection was really cool. Unfortunately, while it's normally de rigueur to leave the zombie plague's source a mystery, the unique nature of the Pontypool zombies made me really want to learn what was going on. The attacks start when the zombies besiege a doctor's office and the doctor later turns up in the studio. Even though he seems to know a fair amount about the virus, we never learn much from him before he disappears again.

I guess that my big problem with Pontypool is that they did such a good job creating one of the most unique lead characters in all of zombie fiction, then they stick him in the middle of an outbreak centered around language. Suddenly a fascinating speaker isn't allowed to say anything. Because Grant is so clearly based on politically-charged shock jocks like Don Imus and the underlying metaphor is clearly about the danger of spewing unrestrained ignorance out into the air, having the character remains silent misses a lot of good opportunities for the story. Plus, honestly, Grant Mazzy doesn't seem like a bad guy. Sure, he's cocky, but it's not like he ever makes any of the insane, mean-spirited statements that most crackpot radio hosts really make. He's got a fantastic voice and a lot more personality than his job really requires, but if they wanted to show the dangers of communication, they could have made Grant a lot worse.



I've been writing this review over the course of a few days and I keep wanting to say that I really liked Pontypool. It's got brains and skill and talent going for it. The notion of being trapped in a studio and hearing the first panicked reports is genuinely terrifying and, at it's best, Pontypool takes that idea and runs with it. There's a lot of stuff I should have loved, but I'm ultimately so fucking sick of zombies that I couldn't really get into the movie. I'm tired of people saying "what's going on?" I'm tired of people desperately trying to learn anything they can from static-y reports. I'm tired of zombies beating their hands against flimsy glass, trying to get to besieged survivors. I'm tired of watching someone slowly turn. I'm tired of the grim final images.

Please don't take what I said as a shot against Pontypool. It really is a good movie and it really tried to give me something new. I've just subjected myself to waaaaaaaay too many of these things.

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.

Horns by Joe Hill

I'm really struggling to come up with something clever to say on this one.

First, I loved it. I've been reading a lot lately, given that I no longer have access to video games or a TV, and most of the stuff coming across my desk have been slogs to get through. I breezed through Horns and I didn't want it to end.

Second, the themes of the book hit me at the right time. I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years within the past year and I'm currently at the "oh my god, why did I let her go" phase. This story is essentially The Crow, in that supernatural agency allows a wronged man to seek revenge, but unlike The Crow's ethereally perfect love, Ig's romance with poor doomed Merrin is much more fraught with doubt and discomfort and pain. She's murdered the night she dumps Ig in a bar and the conversation she has with him rings cruelly authentic. There's a bit where she accuses him of putting her on a pedestal and loving the image he's made of her rather than who she is as a person.

That stuff resonated with me because, unlike a lot of love stories in genre work, it resonated with authenticity. Hill has a real gift with chronicling realistically damaged relationships. I remember a line from Heart Shaped Box where Judas Coyne talked about staying up late at night so his girlfriend would be too tired to want sex. I've been to that level of dysfunction and I haven't seen it detailed with the same heartbreaking accuracy that Joe Hill brings. I dunno where he's been in his life, but you can't make that shit up.

I actually had some trouble with the twist, which essentially invalidated Merrin's previous behavior. I liked the difficulty and ambivalence of Ig's memories of Merrin and when it turned out that every decision she made was made out of love for Ig suddenly stripped the story of the emotional murkiness that I found so charming. Then again, I'm not exactly reading the story without baggage.

One of the things that I really liked about the story was the way it was told from multiple angles. It's essentially a very small story between a couple of characters, but nature of Ig's powers allow the readers to see the crime from several points of view. At no point does the book feel padded, mostly due to the strength of the characterization. Hill has a great command of his character's point of view. Ig's lovestruck, self-loathing perspective on events is a million miles away from Lee Tourneau's selfish, sociopathic take on his crimes, and both are equally entertaining to follow.

Finally, both of Hill's novels feature female characters who start out in the background but eventually come into their own. In Horns, it was the sad, damaged Glenna. I really liked her arc in the story. We know that she doesn't like herself much, that she's curvy but sees herself as fat and grotesque, and that she possesses a wounded beauty. She's one of the invisible people of the story and my heart went out to her.



Maybe it's my love of superhero stories, but I really dug Ig's transformation into a pitchfork-wielding, red skinned devil. It's a compelling image for a character and it has the same nifty internal logic of a good comic book story.

I even dug his powers, which compel people to confess their darkest secrets to him. I was originally a little iffy on this aspect of the story because I was worried it would turn into yet another variation of the same old "people are shits deep down" that I've gotten bored with before, but the characters in Ig's world are all interconnected, and you see the effect of one person's secret spill over into another. Their deepest, most unspoken thoughts are especially vicious given that almost every character in the book believe Ig murdered Merrin, which deepens our sympathy for him as we see how much of an outcast he's become. The scene with the waitress who originally reported Ig to the police is especially amusing because we find out just how messed up he is. I could have easily read an entire novel where Ig goes around getting confessions from people. Reading the story in my wretched, misbegotten state, I couldn't help but wish I could use this power on my ex and figure out exactly what she felt about me, but I doubt I would have liked the answers.

Ig's powers grow to a point where he can start tempting people to act on their secret desires. He almost seems like he's going to walk the path of damnation, especially given the shocking and slightly out-of-character scene where he nearly kills his grandmother after she confesses her hatred of him. Instead, this devil turns out to possess some decency, and spends the rest of the story walking a brutal road to redemption, one that involves him using Morse code, finding a tree house, getting set on fire, wearing a blue skirt, and discovering an aversion to the crucifixes of dead ex-girlfriends. As the story went along, I discovered that I really didn't care how he got all these cool powers, but the explanation cooked up at the end is both lyrical and strangely satisfying.



I can't recommend this book highly enough. I liked it more than Heart Shaped Box and I foresee a future where Joe Hill is a big cheese in genre fiction. You can read a really good interview with him here, along with a pretty good review of it from the AV Club.

This was one of those books that came along at the right time in my life. The themes of lost love and alienation really resonated with me. I sometimes wish I could find the Tree House of the Mind, with it's strange votive candles and cheerful proprietor. There's a lot of trees in this city. Maybe it will appear for me when it's needed.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Shhh. Don't tell anyone, but I already outlined my review before going to see the movie. Here's the outline, unedited:

1) Jackie Earle Haley brought the scare back. Platinum Dunes knows how to cast 'em.
2) I hate hate HATE the constant soundtrack spike jump scare.
3) Teenagers bore me.
4) Harp on the whole "Freddy was always a pedophile" argument again.
5) Fun but dissatisfying, like McDonalds or sex with an ex.

Most of my little predictions turned out to be correct. Jackie Earle Haley was genuinely creepy. No disrespect to Robert Englund, but Freddy had become way too cartoony over the course of the series. You had to clean the slate completely over the course of a reimagining and, love 'em or hate 'em, Platunim Dunes knows how to cast a monster.

I very carefully avoided reviews of the movie before seeing it. I heard through the grapevine that it wasn’t getting good reviews, but horror movies never do. I did chance on Roger Ebert’s review of it where he accused Wes Craven of being the “Ray Kroc of horror”, which I found both distasteful and dismissive. It’s no secret that he doesn’t care for a lot of the stuff I really like and it’s no secret he’s become the crazy old coot who constantly rails against the things my generation does, but his review is very flip and he completely blows off the contribution Craven has made to our cultural landscape. You don’t have to like ‘em, but creating monsters is just as valid and valuable as any other art form. It’s meant a lot to me, at any rate.



I don’t think I cared for the movie all that much. The nicest thing you could say about it was that it was unambitious. There’s a lot of subtextual meat on Nightmare’s bones that the filmmakers don’t particularly seem interested in exploring. It’s just happy to scream in your face every few minutes. The screenplay is terrible, with character moments constantly interrupted by god-awful dialogue that sounds leaden and off-key. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Freddy is on-screen.

One thing that struck me as most interesting about the new Freddy was how different his characterization felt. The original Freddy was evil in a kind of simplistically joyful way; he basically gets off on hurting people. We don’t really have a sense of who he is prior to his death and he carries off his role of dream murderer with a malicious glee that made him curiously likeable. We don’t think too deep on his crimes because he’s a lot of fun to watch.

Haley’s Freddy is much, much angrier. We see him when he’s alive and it’s clear he’s a very sick man. In the flashbacks of his life, he portrays Freddy as apparently suffering from a mild form of retardation, and his death at the hands of the enraged parents is almost tragic. His Freddy isn’t the callow sneering demon of the Robert Englund day. The new Freddy is a sniveling little shit made monstrous by his murder.

He’s also got a more specific reason for going after his victims. While the original Freddy seemed to be targeting all the kids in Springwood, the new Freddy is killing the children who told their parents about his hidden playroom and the terrible things he did to them. One of the movie’s big redeeming factors for me was that it dealt explicitly with something that has always run through Freddy’s mythology, which were his crimes as a child molester.

There’s a lot of fans in the horror community who are up in arms over Freddy being “recast” as a pedophile. I don’t really get that. It’s always been fairly clear to me from the get-go that he was a child molester. His taunting has always had a leering, sexual edge and the only reason they never went into it in depth is that pedophilia is always a taboo subject, even in a gory horror film. Slasher movies have always had a preoccupation with sexuality and the leering gaze, but Freddy has always been pretty explicit about his predilections. Really, why does he always have little blonde girls following him around, showing victims the boiler room and saying “this is where he takes us…” This movie deals heavily with repressed memory and the long reach of childhood sexual trauma. The characters haven’t healed from it and it reaches out to affect their lives. The scene where the two remaining kids find Freddy’s hidden chamber is genuinely disturbing in a way very little of this movie is.



One of the things that ties into the motif is the parent’s conspiracy of silence. Slasher movies are always about isolating the teenagers from their forces of authority, usually by getting them into an abandoned something-or-another. Here, the isolation comes from the parents not believing the kid’s admittedly outlandish claims and concealing their complicity in Freddy’s murder.

The rest of the cast is pretty good too. I never quite warmed up to this movie’s version of Nancy. She’s really cute and kinda looks like Felicia Day from The Guild, but her performance is wildly uneven. Is she the aloof, guarded artist? The shy loner? The angry teenage rebel? She’s more interesting than the bland fake-out final girl we initially follow, but she’s ultimately too impenetrable to win my sympathies. The male characters are slightly more interesting. Aside from being better actors, they portray the stress and fear of crossing over into Freddy’s hellish world much more believably. I don’t’ remember where I read this, but I remember that Thomas Dekker gave an interview where he said that he wanted to portray Dean as scared out of his mind, rather than as the stoic male lead we’ve come to expect. He did a great job and I’m never going to be more creeped out by the words “We’ve still got six minutes to play.”

It’s also funny to note that Friday the 13th’s Aaron Yoo has a cameo appearance as another one of Freddy’s victims. I like that guy, but every time I see him some maniac uses his face as a speed bag. At the rate he’s going I feel Platinum Dunes owes the poor guy a chance to balance the books. Maybe when they inevitably get around to remaking Child’s Play he can stuff Chucky into an industrial-grade printing press or something.

I really liked the whole notion of the micro-naps. One of my favorite parts of all the Freddy movies are how the real world and the dreaming world intersect as the victims become more and more sleepy. This movie gives a stronger reason for this phenomena, and some really trippy stuff starts to happen. I particularly liked the bit in the pharmacy, where Freddy’s dream-self takes big swipes at Nancy, knocking over stuff from the shelves.



In the end, I guess I was vaguely disappointed by it. It was nice to see Freddy doing his thing again and I really liked Haley’s performance in the role, but there wasn’t a lot more to the movie besides jump-shock scares. I try to be kinder about Platinum Dunes movies than a lot of my fellow commentators, especially because they’re keeping my favorite icons alive, but they seem to think of horror as a sledgehammer with which to bludgeon an audience. All the classic scenes from the original are there, but they're amped up to ten. The girl doesn't crawl up the wall, she's violently slammed around the bedroom. Freddy doesn't eerily stretch out of Nancy's wallpaper, he pushes out of it like bad CGI from The Haunted. Sigh.

There’s very little attempt to building any real tension or creating any sort of creeping dread. I get a bunch of jolts, which always leaves me twitchy and nervous, and I can leave the movie behind at the theater. It doesn’t follow me home, it doesn’t tuck me in bed late at night, it doesn’t stand over me while I sleep, waiting for me to open my eyes.

What’s worse is that, even though they work in a very formulaic subgenre, the movies Platinum Dunes have made come off feeling very cold. The people involved are too experienced and professional to make movies that have the weird amateurish enthusiasm of the classic slasher flicks. The stars are all very good looking and marketable, the camera work is very skilled, and the watching the movie feels like watching a technically skills if emotionless ballet. Bitch about Zombie's Halloween remake all you want, but at least that had soul. It was ugly, unpleasant soul, but it was there.

Walking away from the movie, I sort of wondered if the makers actually have any reverence for the genre at all, or if they are cynically aware that idiots like me will keep paying money as long as there’s some nostalgia involved.

Whatever. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Toxic Ideas in Horror Fiction

Recently a friend of mine loaned me a horror novel. The author was a big name who I've been meaning to check out for some time and a previous winner of the Bram Stoker Award. I was looking forward to the book, but somewhere between the unpleasantness of the lead characters, the overly-caustic tough guy dialogue, and the trite Stephen-King-Did-It-Better menace, I found myself feeling the same despair I feel every time I pick up an issue of Fangoria and seeing nothing but direct-to-video zombie movies. Are there any new ideas? Is there anything really innovative in our genre or are we doomed to keep retreading the same ground like Michael Myers on a slow-moving treadmill.

One of the things that really didn't sit too well with me while reading the book was how painfully familiar it all felt. The story revolved around a mysterious supernatural threat that befalls a small suburban town. The residence succumb to madness and violence as the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away and people blah de blah de fucking blah.

I get that horror isn't exactly an optimistic genre, but I've seen this theme done to death. Plus, I don't think it's a really accurate portrayal of humanity. Constantly harping on the evil inherent in humanity completely misses out on our higher aspects. Even if an idea is old there's still some value in exploring it, but it needs to lie fallow for a time.

With that, I want to look at a few themes that really need to be put on the backburner. I'll probably expand this list as times goes on, but these are the subjects that bug me the most.

1) There were some things Man was not meant to know.



This one really drives me nuts.

I get where this one comes from. You used to see this theme a lot in the creature features of the 50s, when atomic warfare seemed destined to wipe the human race off the planet. Hell, this theme goes all the way back to the roots of the horror genre, when the mad doctor Frankenstein spits in the eye of God and loses control of his blasphemous creation. While I understand people's phobias about atomic destruction, it seems like every time some new piece of technology emerges some jackass makes a ham-handed cautionary tale of how it could go wrong.

Me, I like technology. Lord knows I don't get it, but I like it.

I'm with Spider Jerusalem on this one: the future is inherently a good thing. The future represents an opportunity to crawl further away from the mean roots of our humanity and embrace something better. Change doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. We want change. We want new things. We want to know that there's a newer, brighter land on the other side of the mountain. What we don't want is some dire monastic killjoy nervously whispering to us that everything could fall apart and we're better off staying where we are. If humanity believed that, we'd still be flopping in the muck instead of swaggering around Williamsburg with ironic moustaches.

2) Sexual promiscuity is a moral failing and punishable by death.



I've covered this one before at great length but it still keeps coming up and it still keeps pissing me me off.

One of my heroes, author and sex advice columnist Dan Savage, once wrote that slutting around is like travel; it broadens the mind. Now, while I do believe it depends on the mind in question, I subscribe to the idea that sex and sexuality isn't intrinsically bad and that it's part of life. But then I'm a godless liberal educated city-dweller type, born in San Francisco and living in New York. In summation of my previous arguments, uptight virginal characters are boring and it's a bit puritanical to bump off characters who have the audacity to have sex on-camera. It's like we want to see them do it, then we want to see them punished. What the fuck is that about?

I've recently been revisiting slasher classics and one thing I couldn't help but notice is that I can't think of many final girls who are clearly labeled as virgins. Many of them have boyfriends, some of them are actually quite forward (Ginny from Friday the 13th part 2 and Megan from Friday the 13th part 6), and they seem more bothered by their friend's boneheadedness than their promiscuity. Sure, they're often outsiders in their groups but that's because they're brainier and more mature than their friends. On the other hand, abstinence is usually a big part of their survival, if only because they're paying attention to their environments rather than their bacchanalian excesses.

One of the things I really liked about Wrong Turn 2 is that the final girl clearly isn't a virgin. She's damaged goods, we get the sense that she's lived an interesting life, and we know that the shit she's been through gives her the tools she needs to survive.

As I've said before, let the sluts and the stoners live. They're usually more likable, more interesting, and probably better equipped to survive because their brains haven't been turned into anxiety-flavored taffy by a lifetime of conservative dogma.

3) Humanity falls apart once the light goes out.



I object to a lot of these themes on moral or intellectual grounds. I'm just plain sick of this one.

You've seen this one as far back as The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. A community is isolated from the world, some weird shit happens, and everyone turns against each other. There's lynching and looting and chest thumping and oh-my-god-civilization-is-a-thin-veneer-over-primitive-madness. The idea of going all Lord of the Flies on your neighbors holds some gruesome appeal, but at this point it's become tiresome.

I really don't think horror gives humanity enough credit. Sure, when disasters happen, there's looting and civil unrest, but there's also tons of people donating blood and digging through wreckage and doing their best to keep their fellow humans warm and sheltered and safe. I don't know about you, but I find that side of humanity inspiring. The fact that horror never seems to acknowledge that side of our character puts me in mind of an angsty teenager who only chooses to see the worst in everything because it fits with his bleak and hormone-soaked world view. In other words, it reminds me of myself at fourteen.

4) Pacifism is a useless, high-minded ideal.



This one comes up a lot in stories that involve fierce survival situations, like The Hills Have Eyes or Joe R. Lansdale's The Nightrunners, where innocent, good-natured city types are beset by territorial cannibals or sadistic ghouls or vicious hoodlums. Most of the time there's one guy in the group who is singled out as the wimpy but good-hearted pacifist who ever imagine harming another human being but is eventually forced to reconnect with his bloody, savage natural instincts in order to survive. Sometimes this is framed as part of the horror, as the poor man (and it's ALWAYS a man) becomes just as savage as the monsters he fights, but most of the time we're clearly meant to be impatient with the wimp and to celebrate the time he embraces his manhood and clubs the mewling, wounded monster to death with a big hunk of wood.

Of course, the gimmick of having a character put in a situation that forces him to work against his limitations is straight out of Dramatic Conflict 101 and it's so familiar at this point that it's simply exhausting. What bothers me most in this theme is the narrow-minded definition of masculinity at the center of it. Sure, when you're put in a situation where it's kill or be killed against a bunch of snarling monsters the choice is a no-brainer. But there's something vaguely simplistic and mean-spirited about the whole idea.

I myself am some sort of a pacifist, partially because I'd never win a fight and partially because I believe it's a losing game to measure your masculinity based on whose ass you can kick, but in horror that attitude is framed as a character weakness. The pacifist is always the most cowardly, the most snotty, the most unwilling to adapt, and, bluntly, the most stupid character in the group. All pacifist characters come off as red-state stereotypes about educated people. What we need is a good solid push so we can start kicking righteous ass. It touches on some ugly, outdated ideas of what a man is supposed to be.

Conclusion

I have no doubt I'm going to add to this list. I pay a lot of attention to subtext and horror is full of dodgy ideas and puritanical subtext. At some point I want to do an article on the age old misogyny question, but for right now I'll leave it at these. Readers, if you've got any other good ones, send 'em my way.

The House of the Devil

Horror is a funny old bird.

There are some stores that contain tremendous depth, with rich characters and fascinating mythologies and engaging narratives. The people who created these stories were trying to create something with more layers than simple fear, and I keep going back to the best examples of these works. I keep going back to stuff like The Shining and Romero's Zombie movies and Clive Barker's output. There's a lot to explore and take in.

But under Horror's dark wing exists the campfire tale. You're sitting in the dark, the fire is crackling, and that seductive voice whispers to you, sketching out the tale. The storyline is direct and primal, with very little to get in the way of the horror. Which is not to say that it's shallow. When done right, the campfire story is an engine, precisely crafted to scare the living crap out of you. Every once in awhile you get something really well made, where the craft of constructing tension and suspense raises up to the level of art. Some campfire stories have the grace and poise of ballet.

In other words, I really liked The House of the Devil.

I'm really late to the party. Many other people have lined up to kiss this movie's ass and they did a better job than I can. There's really not much to say about HotD other than it's brilliantly made and I want to see what else this Ti West guy can do.

The Tension



One of the first things that struck me after I finished HotD was how effectively scary it was.

A long stretch of the movie involves Samantha, the desperate-for-cash girl who takes a really sketchy babysitter gig in a creepy house on the outskirts of town, wandering around a creepy old house by herself. In terms of narrative stuff, not a lot happens. She pokes around the place, watches some TV, and wanders down some creepy old corridors. When written, it sounds boring, but the way Ti West filmed it lead to an atmosphere of almost unbelievable tension. I realized something while watching Samantha in the house: this is the kind of horror I can relate to.

I'm typing this update after hours in my office in New York. I'm alone in this large hollow office space, with only the hum of the building's heating engines keeping me company. It's eerie. I've felt these feelings a thousand times in my life but horror rarely explores the discomfort of being in a strange place with the depth and patience of HotD. Like many movies that rely on atmosphere, I don't know how worthwhile repeat viewings would be, but watching her explore the Bad Place was incredibly chilling.

The 80s



HotD is set in the 80s and a lot of people have commented on the little touches outlining the setting, from the 80s-inspired opening credits to the feathered hair and the big-ass Walkmans Sam totes around. Most of the commentators I've read are kids of the 80s and those little touches bring back fond memories of watching crappy VHS movies.

The setting never feels like a gimmick. Part of the reason West set his story in the 80s is that he wanted to circumvent the whole stupid "there's no cell phone signal" thing. I think this is brilliant. Horror depends on isolation and cell phones have made it too easy to call for help. Someone someday will come up with a brilliant permanent fix for this problem, but HotD's trick of setting the movie before the technology became commonplace is a good dodge.

Satanism



The other major reason West set the movie in the 80s was due to the cultural paranoia around Satanism. I remember those days. We didn't really worry about Satanists growing up in hippy-dippy San Francisco, but I remember talk show TV "exposes" on Satanist cults and all the movies from that era. There really was a cultural paranoia about the hidden Satanic cult next door looking to sacrifice your baby. In retrospect the whole thing seems goofy, but it's fun stuff to tap into.

In retrospect, the movie isn't particularly Satanic. It takes a long time to get to the pentagrams and the rituals and the hypnotized victim. When Sam is confronted by the head cultists in the graveyard, he speaks of Satan very indirectly. I thought this was a nice touch as many movie cultist-types tend toward the gloating villain speech. In HotD he implores Samantha to return with him and he sees her violation as a great gift. He's not a very threatening figure and his neediness makes him a great character.

Self-Referential



I've gone on rants about how horror directors who have too much fondness for the genre tend to make campy, over-the-top horror with varying degrees of success. They're often fun to watch, but they usually end up feeling a little too self-aware and reverential. I'm really happy that West, a clear genre enthusiast, took the atmosphere seriously.

HotD doesn't constantly wink at you. The gore is present and nasty but it's not as theatrically excessive as many horror fans seem to prefer. The emphasis was clearly on atmosphere and it accomplished the job delightfully. The actors aren't hamming it up and the characters aren't reference-laden quip machines. They're likeable and jokey without being buffoons.

Samantha



I really liked Samantha. She reminded me, in a lot of ways, of Jamie Lee Curtis's character from Halloween, in that we got as much of a sense of her practicality as her social restraint. People love analysing what Final Girls mean but I think one of their defining attributes is that they tend to be grounded, practical people.

A lot of her personality comes through as she deals with her desperate financial straits. Maybe it's because I just moved to a new city and I'm broke as fuck right now, but I empathized with the hassles Samantha experienced in finding a new place and I probably would have taken the creepy old man up on his offer, too. A lot of movies love to harp on the whole "money is the root of all evil" chestnut, but the simple fact is that money is like food: you need it to get by.

The other thing I really liked about Samantha is the fact that, like the capable Ms. Strode before her, she can kick a surprising amount of ass when called to. She isn't an invincible superchick, but when the hammer falls she does real damage to her pursuers. I was really impressed with the way the character handled herself. She truly was heroic. While I don't want to give away the ending, I gotta say that it took cojones to do what she did. It's out of my league.

Also, while I'm on the cast, props to Tom Noonan as the creepy old guy who offers Samantha the job. He's that right mix of being harmless and just a little off. I really liked his work.




The Pacing



The last thing I wanted to talk about is the most divisive issue of the movie, which is the slow pacing of the narrative. The runny-runny-stabby-stabby stuff all happens within the last half-hour or so, so most of the movie has a slow-burn effect as Samantha takes a really sketchy job and explores this creepy old house.

West has said in interviews that he was trying to ape the narrative structure of many classic horror movies, especially the original Halloween, where the big payoff didn't happen until the tail end of the movie. Some detractors say the movie is too slow-paced and nothing happened, while others say that the first group is a bunch of simpletons who only care about gore and guts and shallow instant gratification.

Me, I'm on the fence.

A slower, most classic sense of pacing doesn't automatically make a better movie. I've seen other filmmakers try it and was bored to tears by the result. However, most of the people who want hard, fast, relentlessly gory horror often have lost their capacity to appreciate anything with any subtlety. I have spent years defending The Blair Witch Project against these kind of arguments.

Ultimately there are going to be people who are turned off by HotD but there was enough meat on those bones to keep me thoroughly entertained.

Go check it out. And keep an eye on this guy. I like his style.

This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed, liberal-arts education bullshit shellacking skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. We also got a podcast here. Welcome aboard!