The Bent Spine

The Tommyknockers, dir. by John Power (1993)

2011-05-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

Searching the Internet for positive reviews of one of my childhood favorites, The Tommyknockers, turned out to be much more difficult than I'd imagined. Based on what I found, it seems I'm one of about twelve people on the planet who actually enjoyed this film.

The miniseries version of one of Stephen King's less well received novels premiered in 1993, in that period of time when miniseries based on his work were particularly popular. It (another great adaptation with a few glaring flaws and a disappointing conclusion) had come out three years before, and The Stand was right around the corner, as were The Shining and The Langoliers.

I saw the two-part Tommyknockers when I was eleven, on its original airing, and that's probably about the best age to appreciate this film. If my first viewing occurred later in life, no doubt some of its more glaring inconsistencies and shortcomings would beharder to ignore. There are certainly holes in the story, the ending is somewhat unsatisfying, and some of the subplots are left hanging without much resolution. And yet my love for this movie is almost completely undiminished eighteen years after first seeing it.

My parents tolerated, while not quite encouraging, my interest in King's books and movies. At my insistence, we rented Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and had a family screening. I'd put my age at ten and my brother's at eight, so, understandably, our parents made us leave the room during the scene in which the young woman steps out of the bathtub naked and transforms into an old, scary woman, still naked.

Our family was always somewhat technologically challenged; we had one TV in our house when I was a kid, and our VCR's programming would never allow us to watch one channel and record another. If it had been up to me, I'd have replaced the VCR for one that could effectively utilize that function, but I didn't have enough of my own disposable income to buy something like a VCR.

And our television--we had one of those big-box wooden floor models--had a very sensitive volume setting, and if you changed the volume using Remote #1 and then tried to change it with Remote #2, it completely screwed the whole TV up. I thought we'd gotten this problem fixed in time for the Tommyknockers premier. For some reason, I was unable to watch Part One the night it aired, so my parents taped it for me. The TV sounded fine, but the next day, when I put the tape in, the volume was off, very low and fuzzy, making the tape unwatchable.

Fortunately, my neighbors had recorded it as well, their whole family fans of Stephen King miniseries. So I went over to their house and watched the first part; it ended just in time for Part Two to come on. The first half was such a great setup, I couldn't wait to see what the second part offered. Unfortunately, the show takes a bit of a downturn once that second part starts up.

The story is set in Haven (a fictional town which sits next door to Derry, the setting for It and a few other King stories). In the Anderson Woods, Bobbi (Marge Helgenberger) and Gard (Jimmy Smits) have stumbled upon a large, mysterious object, buried in the ground, its topside very near the surface. As they uncover more of the object, strange things begin to occur around town; the residents of Haven are suddenly gifted with bizarre abilities, churning out odd new inventions, while at the same time losing teeth and becoming more robotic and inhuman.

Nearly three hours of build-up leads to a conclusion that, even as a kid, struck me as kind of weak. I won't give it away here, in case you're not familiar with how things turn out for the Tommyknockers and the residents of Haven, ME, though most reviews I've come across pretty much throw it right out there, and the European DVD box art shows an image of one of the Tommyknockers, which is pretty crazy. I was disappointed with the ending, as a kid, possibly only because I wanted something else, something a bit more standard as far as Stephen King stories go. Watching it on second, third, twentieth viewing, I found more to like about the ending, and can't really view the movie the same as I did that first time. The climax comes as more of a surprise than in the book, as the real goings-on in the Anderson Woods are hinted at earlier in the novel than in the movie. And despite its shortcomings, the final revelation of the Tommyknockers doesn't come off nearly as silly as the climax of It.

Also, if you haven't read the novel, it isn't nearly as bad as its reputation. It's one of everal of King's books written in the seventies and eighties that dealt with his own alcoholism, in a veiled, metaphorical manner, and in particular, there are a lot of aspects of the novel that deal with Gard's and Bobbi's separate struggles with dependence, that aren't gone into in as much detail in the film. The Tommyknockers is a pretty good book, and the miniseries is great, especially if you're younger than fifteen.

Stranger In a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961)

2011-05-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

I take in a lot more horror and fantasy than I do science fiction, but I've read a few of the classics: 1984, Farenheit 451, Foundation, Brave New World. I picked up Stranger In a Strange Land as part of my attempt to read to completion all the books I started back in elementary school or junior high and never finished. I loved reading as a kid, but didn't always have the attention span for some of these books, and as a result would read a hundred, two hundred, or in the case of this one, three hundred pages, of a novel before discarding it for something else.

I've mostly gotten around to reading all the stuff I only half-completed years ago, and was happy to give Stranger In a Strange Land another shot (these days I only quit a book partway through only if it's absolutely un-readable, and most of the stuff I passed on when I was a kid certainly didn't fall into that category).

The only other Heinlein familiar to me is a collection of short stories called Menace From Earth. Stranger In a Strange Land, by its reputation, compared to his other books and stories, is his more "serious" work. Personally, I find the adventurous stories in Menace From Earth considerably more entertaining, but Stranger is certainly a good one, and I'm sure I got more from it than when I'd first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old.

Valentine Michael Smith, the Man From Mars, is born to human parents, scientists from Earth sent on a mission to Mars. He's subsequently raised by Martians and took on their ways. He's taken back to earth a couple decades after his birth, and his ideas inevitably clash with those of the humans with whom he attempts to acclimate himself.

Smith is capable of extraordinary acts of teleportation, levitation, and a disturbing ability to make objects and people disappear. He's a peaceful guy, and only wants to love his friends, impart his wisdom to the humans, but where he's from, dying, or "discorporating," isn't that big a deal, and when you discorporate, you simply move on to the next level of existence, becoming what the Martians refer to as an "Old One." And so, though he means no harm by it, it's no big deal to him to kill people who pose a threat to him. He learns, kind of like the Terminator,

why he can't do this, why it's different than on Mars--but unlike the Terminator, he never really seems to get it.

Smith, with help from Dr. Jubal, a sort of father figure, an

d Jill, his nurse and friend, comes to prominence living among the humans, with the President of the U.S. as his personal accountant. He eventually finds his way to a bizarre church that professes a sort of Christianity tinged with New Age craziness. Their prophet, Digby, dies early in the story, and is said to join their previous, and head, prophet, Foster, in the sky. Smith takes what he's learned from the Fosterites, decides it matches in part his Martian religious views, and develops his own church, with himself as high priest.

Here's the major part of the book I can't get into. All this talk

of Old Ones, scorned by Jubal, and believed wholly by Jill and other followers of Smith's, and Foster and Digby, is quite fasincating, and good for some multiple-page theological debates between the main characters, but midway into the book, appears the first of a series of brief sections in which Foster and Digby, up in heaven, adorned with halos, discuss, in a somewhat humorous manner, the goings on below, and the facts of the Man From Mars and the Old Ones.

For my money, it'd be better to leave the Old Ones and the two god-prophets to the area of speculation. I might've bought what Michael was saying anyway, and believed the Old Ones really had sent him to Earth on a fact-finding mission, that they were indeed real, without needing it so bluntly stated in a series of three short sections that clash with the rest of the narrative.

The novel loses some of its steam after that, and it's never quite as good as its first hundred-fifty, two hundred pages, but there are some interesting debates towards the end, with the skeptical Dr. Jubal finding it harder to make excuses for the bizarre supernatural occurrences surrounding himself and the Man From Mars.

I have a feeling I'd prefer some of Heinlein's more pulpy novels, though there's a lot to like about Stranger In a Strange Land, and it offers, perhaps, more for the reader to think about and consider.

Insidious, dir. James Wan (2010)

2011-04-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

Some critics and horror fans have complained that Insidious, recently released to theaters, isn't much more than a mash-up of various "haunting" films from the past: Poltergeist (1982), The Amityville Horror (1979), Paranormal Activity (2009), etc. But as far as I'm concerned, any movie that can pull great elements from those films and provide decent characters and a near-constant supply of suspense, is a success. It's not as though this is the first horror film (or film, in general) to borrow heavily from predecessors; and Insidious works much better than a lot of recent remakes and throwbacks.

The opening credits, which feature a quiet, creepy score over still images, sets the tone. The title card--INSIDOUS--takes up the entire screen; its font is distinctly from the 1970's. In many ways the rest of the movie takes a traditional approach to its material; director James Wan (Saw [2004], Dead Silence [2007]) utilizes long takes and a decidedly non-slick style. And there's no distracting pop music anywhere in the soundtrack. Definitely an old school sort of vibe.

But Insidious doesn't build slowly, like most films of its sub-genre. We're given a spooky and suitably vague pre-credits scene, and after the credits we meet the family, the protagonists who are already being visited by some otherworldly presence in their home. Things get pretty intense in the first twenty minutes, and really, never let up until the film's end. I checked the time about forty minutes in, thinking more time must have passed, because there was no way we had more than half a movie left, with all that had taken place.

That said, the second half isn't quite as good as the first. The setup is so good that it's hard to imagine any filmmaker could fully deliver on its promise. Wan does a decent job of it, and while I wasn't blown off my feet by the final scenes, they're certainly competent, and the ending is a respectable one.

Animal, dir. by Adeel Abbasi and Rafiqul Alam

2011-03-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

Animal, directed by Adeel Abbasi and Rafiqul Alam, makes much use of the close-up. Indeed, most of the short film's six minutes are comprised of close- and medium-close-ups, a fitting choice for the subject matter, about a man with a split personality confessing a violent crime to himself. The film was shot in London, from a screenplay by Noel J. Rainford, and is currently viewable on youtube (link below). The filmmakers know how to work a camera; this is ceratinly a step above a lot of the content on that site. Arrival features some pretty good camerawork, and has a cool atmosphere, building to a solid payoff. If you've got six free minutes, check it out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZYkEwt2YS0

My Fantoms by Théophile Gautier (1830s - 1870s)

2011-03-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

Richard Holmes's 1976 translation.

Mark and I talk about books.

Mark Rooster: I have some thoughts on this book, but I'm not sure I have them in order here, so I'll just start.

I like the similarities in the titles of these stories. They're all connected thematically, and the simple titles, "The Poet," "The Priest," etc. fit with that.

The writing style is pleasant to read, very poetic but with some quite direct humor mixed in. I love the ending of "The Painter," where the narrator declares, "The reader will think, no doubt, that this is a very commonplace ending to a very unusual story. But he must take it or leave it. I would not utter a single false word. I would rather cut my throat."

There's another line that made me laugh, but I can't recall which story it was from. It's a line regarding a dog, whose sole purpose in life was to provide a shaggy black foreground over a green background.

Many (or all) of these seven stories deal with madness, insanity, and the possibility of supernatural interference of a romantic nature. I feel like with a couple of the stories, rational explanations might be acceptable, and in the others there are most certainly supernatural things going on.

"The Adolescent." There's less discussion in this one about the possibility of hallucination or madness, and it's told more directly, a woman climbs out of a painting, to come to the narrator.

"The Priest." Here the storyteller says quite plainly that he is unsure whether the events he describes happened in a dream or real life. But it seems more like he's saying that as a last-ditch sort of effort to deny what's happened. Because even his superior by the end believes he's been courting a demon.

"The Opium Smoker." I take this one as simply a drug-induced hallucination.

"The Actor." In this story, the Devil himself is involved, and there isn't much discussion about the reality of events.

"The Tourist." This one could go either way. And lastly, "The Poet"--this story threw me off a little bit. It seems less like the others. I'm only halfway through Richard Holmes' introduction (I wanted to save that for after reading the stories, as sometimes the intros in these collections give away more than I want to know prior to reading), but I saw in there that this one is nonfiction?

M. Buozis: I agree. The thematic connections between the pieces seem to be twofold. First, each, with the possible exception of "The Poet," deals with the dark power of desire. Secondly, there is a supernatural element that is questionably created by the arousal of the protagonist. I was never sure whether Gautier meant his fantoms to be anything more than the manifestation of his desire for women.

Even the Devil in "The Actor" seems like just an extension of the narrators strange uncontrollable utterances. It's almost as if he's created the devil to explain his own devilish behavior. In "The Priest" I never thought of the demon woman as an actual spirit, but only as demonic in the eyes of a holy and celibate priest. Her retinue is described in a supernatural way, but I think the priest is just seeing Africans for the first time and thinking they are the demon's otherworldly helpers.

While Gautier has a fun, relaxed way of telling a story, I thought many of the stories lacked a compelling resolution. This must have been a great lead up to modernism, where the plot is not necessarily integral to the success of the story, but here I was expecting more of a satisfying development of each story. He brings his characters to life in such a vivid way and then lets them drop at the end like puppets who've been abandoned in mid-line.

"The Poet" is not strictly non-fiction. I think it's something like a fictionalized eulogy for his poet body Nerval. In this respect, the piece reminds me of Borges in its radical blending of reality and fiction. Its really meant to be read as truth, and reminds us that in order to enjoy any piece of literature we have to suspend our disbelief and live in the world of the story.

M.R.: You've got a point there about the resolutions in these stories. They all kind of end in a similar manner. But I like the openness regarding the possibility of supernatural occurences.

After reading the introduction, I have a better understanding of the last story. Did you read the introduction and afterword? I found both to be pretty informative. I guess the afterword is from the original book published in the 70s and the intro was done later on?

M.B.: Yeah. I read both the introduction and afterword. I think they shed a lot of light on Gautier's importance and the autobiographical nature of many of his stories. You also get a great sense of the romantic nature of his life, and the translators life while he was translating the stories. It helps to further bring together the collection.

I'd also like to discuss, a bit more, Gautier's writing styles. He always creates wonderfully fleshed out settings and characters without ever using showy language or lingering too long on a particular description. It's rare that you find such precise and great writing from a 19th century writer.

M.R.: I definitely wouldn't figure this for mid-1800's if I didn't know beforehand when it was written. The writing is very fluid, poetic in some places, but also rather modern. Probably the "easiest" to read of any of the classic French authors we've looked as so far. And the humor too; I laughed a few times reading this book.

M.B.: I'd agree. Despite the dark subject matter, this was a pretty light read, something I wouldn't mind taking to the beach, if I ever went to the beach.

Related Links:

1. Joy's Blog Review
2. Bookslut Review

Miscellany: The Best Post-Modernist

2011-03-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

Barry Hannah's fiction blows away all the other mid-century American post-modernists. He makes John Barth's narrative trickery look like utter masturbatory nonsense. He makes Robert Coover's plays at authenticity seem like a little city boy playing a country part. (Basically, he makes them look like the hipsters they were, and still are for the most part.)

Hannah died about a year ago, but his fiction has yet to receive its due revival. Always under-appreciated during his lifetime, Hannah's work deserves another, closer look.

Richard Ford told the AP, “Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself.”

Here's an excerpt from Hannah's story "Water Liars".

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. The movement of every limb in every passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.

You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.

I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.

Related Links:

1. Oxford American Interview
2. Bomb Interview
3. Vanity Fair Retrospective
4. New York Times Obituary

Die Farbe, dir. by Huan Vu (2010)

2011-03-10T17:50:00.000-08:00

I recently received a copy of Die Farbe, a black and white German film from filmmaker Huan Vu. The film is based on H. P. Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space". Lovecraft stories have been adapted many times, often to great effect (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon, etc.). I've read a lot of his stories, but wasn't familiar with this one, so I looked for it and read it before putting on the movie. Some people have a hard time watching a film version of a book or a story they just read, but not me; I like to line em up as close as possible, book, then movie.

"The Color Out of Space" has been adapted a few times previously, including "Colour From the Dark," a 2010 production from Italian filmmaker Ivan Zuccon. I haven't seen that one or David Keith's 1987 The Curse, but I'm familiar with the Boris Karloff-starring loose adaptation (very, very loose, really) Die, Monster, Die! from 1965. That film doesn't have a hell of a lot to do with Lovecraft's story, though it's entertaining in its own strange way.

Die Farbe tells just about all of Lovecraft's tale, and provides a new bookend, as a man hears the story of what occurred in a town his father once visited long ago. The long ago is the end of World War II, and the bookend takes place about thirty years later. The man finds that his father, an American in Germany, came upon a house and property that had been ravaged by a mysterious alien force a while back.

This is the "color" of Lovecraft's story, in which he describes the visual qualities of the alien "light" as being completely unknown, a color never seen before (on Earth anyway). After crashing to earth inside a meteorite, the mysterious presence fixes itself in every organism on the property: vegetables, animals, and eventually people.

Vu's direction is patient and focused, with lots of long, brooding shots of the house and land where the alien force takes hold. A sequence involving a psychotic woman succumbing to her neuroses, alone in an upstairs room, pacing back and forth works quite well. There are a number of eerie scenes and moments; these are accompanied by an effective, haunting score.

If there's anything I'm not quite sold on, it's the way the "lights" are presented towards the end of the film. Using color distracts somewhat from the beautiful black and white picture we've been seeing for the last seventy minutes--although I'll add that I don't have a better suggestion as to how to visualize what Lovecraft wrote.

This is a good film, whether you're a Lovecraft fan or not. The acting is decent, and as I said, some of the cinematography is very striking. Vu has an engaging style, and I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.

www.die-farbe.com

Fireflies by Lacey Reah (2011)

2011-03-03T14:59:00.000-08:00

Lacey Reah's Fireflies opens with the narrator, Linda, walking through Central Park, captivated by the fireflies that come out at night. There she is willingly seduced and transformed by a vampire-like creature known as a nymphomite.

The book gets off to a quick start, and from the Central Park scene jumps right into Linda's new life as a nyphomite. These creatures drink blood from their victims, but can only properly feed if the victim is in the throes of an orgasm at the moment of feeding.

Linda holds no grudge against the creature that changed her; she doesn't, in fact, hold onto any kind of nostalgia for her life as a human, and goes through a nightly routine of hunting, seducing, and feeding, and she is, if not happy, at least occupied.

This changes when she meets, and transforms, a woman named Jesse, who subsequently lashes out at her, condemning her for turning her into a nyphomite, instead of simply killing her. For the first time since being changed, Linda feels something human within her, and is forced to contemplate what she left behind in her first life.

Reah keeps the action moving along at a fast pace, while exploring the various moods and emotions Linda struggles with in her new form. It's about halfway into the 95-page book that Linda is confronted with Jesse and what she's done to her. Soon, the complacent but active character we've been with for the first fifty pages transforms, and what we have is a wounded, suddenly regretful vampire, who even takes a shot at going home, knowing there's no future for her there.

It isn't easy to make a sympathetic character out of someone who happily sucks the blood out of anybody who looks like easy prey, but Reah pulls it off pretty well. Linda is pretty much doomed from the beginning, and by the second half of the story, you wish there was some way out for her, despite her easy adoption of her new bloody appetite.

Fireflies is available in paperback and e-book formats, and can be purchased at the folowing links. The Lacey Reah/Fireflies myspace address is listed below.

http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Lacey-Reah/dp/145028163X
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Fireflies/Lacey-Reah/e/9781450281638/?itm=1&USRI=lacey+reah+fireflies

http://www.myspace.com/lindafireflies

Horror Film Director Feature #2: Mick Garris

2011-02-25T14:16:00.000-08:00

Known for his Stephen King adaptations, and for creating the impressive Showtime Masters of Horror (2005-2007) series, Mick Garris has been working in television and film for about thirty years, as a writer, producer, and director.

His first horror feature was Critters 2 (1988), and Garris has been working steadily in the genre ever since. I'm not sure how many people would care enough to argue, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Critters 2 is the best of that series. Expanding upon the first in nearly every way, the outerspace-bred Krites move past the farmhouse they first terrorized, and this time take on the entire town, during Easter. The action culminates with an enormous "Critter Ball," made up of hundreds of the little bastards, rolling over townsfolk, immediately shredding their skin, turning them into skeletons (there's a good deal more blood in this movie than you can get away with in a modern PG-13-rated film).

For my money, Critters 2 is as good as it gets, far as horror-comedy B movies go.
Garris followed that one up two years later, with the TV movie Psycho IV: The Beginning. Not exactly a career highlight, but not a bad film. Another two years, and Garris came out with Sleepwalkers, his first Stephen King adaptation (based on a King-written screenplay). A crazy story about incestuous mother and son shapeshifters.

He got a good deal of shit from horror (and Kubrick) fans for his update of The Shining (1997). I'd argue, though, that the faults with the second movie version of King's novel, lie mostly in the screenplay, written by the author, which sticks very close to his book but never quite builds tension the way Kubrick's film did.

There's more agreement on his 1994 TV movie The Stand. I never could get into this one, both before and after reading the novel. It's hard to say exactly what it is about it that I don't like, except to say that in every scene, it feels like I'm watching television. There are moments in Tommy Lee Wallace's TV adaptation of It that make you forget you're watching network television. I'd say the same for Garris's Quicksilver Highway and Desperation (2006), but The Stand always looks and feels like it needs a bigger budget, and some of the acting and dialogue is pretty limp.

But the movie does have its admirers, a pretty big fanbase actually, and is by no means a bad film. I just wouldn't suggest it as a good example of Garris's best work.

One of his more curious adaptations is the under-appreciated TV movie Quicksilver Highway (1997), which features two forty-minute stories, one an adaptation of Clive Barker's short story, "The Body Politic," the other based on King's short story, "Chattery Teeth." Both stories are representative of each writer's best short form material, and Garris's film is worthy of the source material. The first half deals with a man whose hand has suddenly become possessed, and the second with novelty store chattery teeth attacking a menacing hitchhiker.

Masters of Horror was a good series, and in addition to holding a "created by" credit, Garris has directed a couple episodes himself. Check out Valerie On the Stairs. It's available on Netflix Instant View. Garris followed this up with the network television series Fear Itself. From the little I saw of that show, it didn't seem to capture the energy of Masters of Horror (2008-2009), but when you start trying to combine horror and the three-letter companies, ABC, NBC, CBS . . . it probably isn't destined to work out.

I'd like to see him get back to something with a bit of humor in it. Critters 2 and Quicksilver Highway stand as two of his best works, and while Garris's later work has its share of great moments, some dark comedy might be in order.

Maybe something to top that giant Critter Ball?

Garris is currently in production on an adaptation Stephen King's Bag of Bones as a television series. Look for that later this year.

Miscellany: An Epic Memoir of Hooah

2011-02-24T07:13:00.000-08:00

I lost count pretty quickly of how many times David Bellavia used the word "hooah" in his memoir of the 2004 Battle of Fallujah in Iraq titled House to House (2007). While I'm usually averse to the gung-ho patriotism and relish of ultra-violence Bellavia brought to his account of this and other battles in the early years of the Iraq War, his streamlined narrative approach to infantry combat is more palpable than any piece of political war writing has ever been. Maybe it's because, when you get down to it, Bellavia is not interested in the politics of the war. He's interested in the hell it causes on the ground, and the moments of insanity it evokes in its participants. At one point Bellavia realizes, in order to defeat the fanatics in his crosshairs, he must become a fanatic himself, whether it’s for a Christian god or for his brothers-in-arms. Sounds like a Children’s Crusade to me, especially since many of the men under Bellavia command aren’t old enough to drink legally back home in the States. Gives you something to think about.

But perhaps the biggest revelation, for me, in House to House, is Michael Ware, an Australian journalist who embedded with Bellavia’s unit during their operation in Fallujah. I thought Ware’s breed of dead-set adventure journalists had died out in Vietnam. Ware’s journalism isn’t as morally ambiguous and hardnosed as I’d like, (I think you might still have to go back to Vietnam correspondents for that) but he evokes the action on the ground better than anyone else I’ve read.

From Into the Hot Zone, Time Magazine, Monday, November 22, 2004

“Within the Bradley's cramped and musty hold, the shock of the minesweeper's explosion was felt by the infantrymen huddled inside. Among them is Fitts, a lithe, expressive Mississippian and father of three who joined the military eight years ago. He warns his team to "get ready to get out of this big metal bitch." With the bulk of the Marine-led assault force poised on the northern side of the railway, 3rd Platoon plowed forward, bringing its Bradleys to a halt beneath Fallujah's first houses. The platoon radio net crackled, "Drop ramp. All 3rd Platoon elements drop ramp, drop ramp." And with that, the ground battle began.”

2. Hot Air Interview with Bellavia

3. NPR Piece on Military Memoirs

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One – (1983-1984)

2011-02-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

Writer: Alan Moore

Artists: Stephen Bissette and John Totleben

My only exposure to Swamp Thing, before reading this first collection of Alan Moore’s famed run on the DC comic starting in 1983, was the 1982 Wes Craven film. Images of Dick Duron tramping around the Virginia jungle in a rigid plastic monster suit saving a sweaty Adrienne Barbeau from falling out of her torn white top reinforced my prejudice of a trashy comic book conceit only a step or two above the ludicrous Toxic Avenger. Little did I know that Moore was able to take an aging character (Swamp Thing was created in 1970 by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson) as far away from Troma stupidity as the comic book medium would allow. While Saga of the Swamp Thing is a piece of horror fiction and therefore subject to the strange flights of fantasy only edible with a healthy dose of suspended disbelief, Moore’s integration of the plot into the fibers of his characters makes reading Saga a powerful delight nearly thirty years after it was created. Ramsey Campbell, in his introduction to the 2000 edition of the collection, writes, “Here as elsewhere, Moore’s language and imagery is simultaneously comic and horrifying, as is the way with horror fiction. Horror fiction at its best is in the business of pushing back the barriers, of risking the absurd in order to reach the sublime, just as Jason Woodrue does by eating a tuber of Swamp Thing’s. By this stage no reader can doubt that here is a story prepared to go to the end of itself, whatever it may find there or on the way.”

Closer in content and aim to Watchmen than Moore’s later work in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore’s run on Saga (which began with issue # 20) starts with a gritty paranoid vision of the military exploiting the Swamp Thing and the monster realizing his place in the world is shrinking. Through the research of Dr. Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, we see the true nature of the Swamp Thing in the brilliant issue # 21, The Anatomy Lesson. The Swamp Thing is not, as was believed before Moore’s tenure on the book, a reincarnated and plant-reinforced Dr. Alec Holland, but a completely vegetable entity that thinks it’s Alec Holland. What’s so thrilling is Moore’s ability to make such a strange and unbelievable conceit so emotionally and ecologically devastating. It’s nice to see Moore use his considerable storytelling talents to tell such a gritty, anti-capitalist tale of environmental rage. The Floronic Man’s hatred for mankind manifests as a raging terrorism, a hypocritical stance that could only be taken by someone who was originally human. Here, only the Swamp Thing truly speaks and acts for the benefit of the planet. Even a later enemy, Satan himself, manifests to the Swamp Thing and his world as an ecological condition – autumn. The creature’s ability to reason in a moral fashion wins out over his pure physical prowess, which is almost never employed. He’s a Frankenstein’s monster who knows restraint, who shows readers the kindness and compassion manifest in the grotesque.

Bissette and Totleben created a dark, restrained look for the book. Their influence is seen in later 80s books such as Sandman and then pops up again in some of the quirkier titles in the 90s. I can’t imagine Sam Kieth’s dreamlike The Maxx without the precedent of Bissette and Totleben’s Saga books. Their panels flow organically through the story, and they never worry about wasting space for the emotional tableaux so necessary to create a superhero comic which can be enjoyed on levels other than muscle and breast worship. In a particularly memorable series of pages, the Swamp Thing chases a billionaire industrialist through a vast office complex, while Dr. Jason Woodrue narrates the set piece he has orchestrated. “And will there be blood? I don’t know. I don’t know if there will be blood. It isn’t important. It won’t spoil things if there is no blood. The blood doesn’t matter. Just the dying. The dying’s all that matters.” You’ve got to see these pages to believe the power of Moore paired with Bissette and Totleben. They created a pop-art language that is much underused, even in today’s glutted comic book market.

While the environmental message of Saga of the Swamp Thing can easily be overstated, it should not be neglected. Like other late-70s and early-80s American art, Saga tackles the excesses of an empire reaching its manifest destiny – to exploit not only the natural resources of its land, but the very fabric of nature, the forces of the universe.

Related Links:

1. Grovel Review

2. Pads and Panels Review

3. Wired Review

4. IGN Review

5. Blather Alan Moore Interview

Nice Jacket: Dispatches

2011-02-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

*The Picador Paperback edition of Michael Herr’s 1977 book Dispatches.

This cover reminds me of M*A*S*H. In both, a weird brand of 70s minimalism flavors the apocalypse with humor and whimsy. The saturated green helmet with its slogan ‘HELL SUCKS’ and a teardrop peace sign in vivid yellow, nestles in a hyperbolic (but mostly true) blurb from John Le Carré. It’s certainly the best book I’ve ever read on men and war in any time, but then again I haven’t read many true war narratives.

When I hold this book in my hand, I can see the yellow of the passing years on the white cover, the thumbprints of everyone who has picked it up over the years shining in the light. It feels like a cheaply-made, but beautiful communiqué, delivered personally by a friend.

When you get down to it though, Dispatches, isn’t much of a narrative. It’s more a patchwork of impressions. Herr uses an erratic, stream-of-consciousness style. He’s a straight, war-hardened Hunter S. Thompson with big balls and a bigger heart. His reports stick close to the dirt as he follows the lowest ranks of the most active units in the marines. He’d rather tell us what the stoned grunts are talking about than the generals or the intelligence agencies. Herr’s Vietnam War is in no way romanticized. He refrains from the easy exoticism of Hollywood’s Vietnam films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now. There are no easy political answers like you might find in Peter Davis’s powerful documentary Hearts and Minds.

Herr’s gift is the ability to show the horror and madness of war without any bloviating rhetoric, just the facts and the action of it all. He shows most of the men in a human light, which is what they deserve, no matter the atrocities some of them participated in. Herr’s strongest moment is his long description of the press in Vietnam. The journalist’s odd hypocritical stance and parasitic nature is set into stunning relief against a war most of them objected to.

Dexter Filkins accomplished something similar for the Iraq War in his brilliant 2008 book The Forever War, but some of the resistant glamour of the journalist has been lost in the intervening 40 years. The alienation is stronger in Iraq, it seems, and perhaps the disinterest of civilians back home has helped make the Armed Forces more callous. Let the draft be reinstituted and see how oblivious we remain.

2. The Massachusetts Review Essay on Dispatches

3. New York Times Review of Herr's book on Kubrick

My Brain is Hanging Upside Down by David Heatley (2008)

2011-02-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

The first of David Heatley’s stories I read was part of an anthology published about four or five years ago. I can’t remember if it was one of those Best American Comics books or the hardbound issue of McSweeney’s filled with indie comics. One thing I do remember is what the story was about. In a few sloppy panels, Heatley told about living with his father after college, sitting on the toilet and wondering what it looks like when he wipes his ass after pooping. Not all of us wonder what this looks like, but I’m sure more of us wonder than would admit it, and Heatley’s honesty immediately struck me as both hilarious and heartbreaking.

In his 2008 full-length graphic memoir My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, Heatley brings this intimate and odd tone to broader subjects. Whether he’s showing us a record of every woman and man he’s had even the most fleeting of sexual encounters with, or if he’s reviewing every one of his favorite hip-hop records, Heatley’s innocence and appreciation for life is always evident. He is our generation’s Harvey Pekar, somewhat more socially well-adjusted, but a singularity just the same. His stories are all realistic and never flinch from sharing the emotional content of everyday life, with all its painfully happy and awkward moments.

Portrait of My Dad

My Brain is Hanging Upside Down is divided into five sections, each very focused on its topic, and all with some overlapping threads of family, sex and music. The first section, Sex History, depicts all of Heatley’s sexual experiences with blinding honesty. His simple, almost childish art makes the graphic sexuality innocent and endearing. Heatley’s panels are like manic sketches of the most intense moments of his life.

Each of the five sections begins with a number of dream stories relating to each topic. The second and fifth sections, Black History and Family History respectively, stick to the format of Sex History, with literal laundry lists of experiences and personalities. Only in sections three and four, Portrait of My Mom and Portrait of My Dad does Heatley allow himself to become expansive and relate separate stories to one another in a less linear manner.

In most of the other sections, Heatley comes off like a typical 80s kid. He’s enamored of hip-hop culture, yet never fully comfortable with it. His sexual freedoms and experimentation seem quaint and almost old-fashioned. Was he ever worried about getting AIDs when he was screwing all these girls and guys at college? He doesn’t tell us. But in the two Portraits we see Heatley’s strange and contradictory parents in a way that helps us understand his paranoia and obsessions in a whole new way. His mother is the reformed hippie who doesn’t know when to stop trying to relate to her kids on their level and just try to be their mother. His father is a bitter hermit who builds train sets in his basement and smiles bitterly at a world that left him behind.

Heatley's New Yorker Cover

So, I’m a fan of all types of comics. I dig Alan Moore and Frank Miller as much as Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb. However, if indie comics aren’t your thing, Heatley is going to seem juvenile and artless. His drawings are all flat, with very little detail. They look like they were scrawled off on notebook paper by a stoned high school kid during study hall. If you’re not into Chris Ware or Kim Deitch, if you prefer Will Eisner’s superhero stuff to his brilliant The Contract with God trilogy, you’re probably not going to be into Heatley. He’s not interested in the fantasy and exploitation of most mainstream comics and though his memoir is certainly for Adults Only, it will not satisfy your little boy prurient interests. Still, it’s fun and funny enough in its weird, jaded way.

The other half of The Bent Spine, Mark Rooster, has been writing surreal autobiographical comics as long as I can remember. His style and sense of humor reminds me of Heatley. If you like My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, be sure to check out Mark’s site, www.markrooster.com.

2. The Daily Cross Hatch Review of My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

3. GraphicNovelReporter Interview with David Heatley

4. David Heatley's Site

Horror Film Star Feature #2: Jeffrey Combs

2011-02-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

Since the eighties, Jeffrey Combs has been all over TV, in a variety of roles, including different characters on different incarnations of the Star Trek franchise, but horror fans know him more for his work in various genre films of the last thirty years. His best known role, Dr. Herbert West, has stayed with him for three Re-Animator films, the first coming out in 1985, from Charles Band's Empire Pictures, directed by Stuart Gordon.

Herbert West, originally an H. P. Lovecraft creation, is a phenomenal role, played so strangely and perfectly by Combs, a scientist hellbent on resurrecting the dead, acting out quite bizarrely on a regular basis, uncaring how any of his co-workers or associates digest his various eccentricities. Combs does amazing things with these sort of bizarro roles, and played another offbeat character in another Stuart Gordon film, From Beyond, the year after Re-Animator. From Beyond, also based on a Lovecraft story, has Combs playing another scientist, this time attempting to breach another world through a machine called the Resonator. It's just as gruesome as Gordon and Combs' last collaboration, though without nearly as much dark humor.

That humor, and Combs' expert way of using it throughout gory scenes of shock and horror, is part of what keeps Re-Animator fresh in the minds of horror fans years later, and is considered by many to be one of the best examples of the genre.

After Empire folded, Charles Band started up direct-to-video outfit Full Moon, which got a fast start thanks to the popularity of Puppet Master (1989) and its sequels. Combs, who apparently had a good working relationship with Band at Empire, joined for Full Moon for a string of films, including The Pit and the Pendulum (1990), Trancers II (1991), Doctor Mordrid (1992), and the extremely dark (particularly for a Full Moon movie) Castle Freak (1995).

Combs doesn't always play a psycho, but his more demented roles are the fan favorites. He played Herbert West again in Bride of Re-Animator (1989) and Beyond Re-Animator (2003), both of those films directed by Re-Animator producer Brian Yuzna. Combs has played characters based on Lovecraft creations a total of eight times, often with either Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna, or both.

Perhaps the most distinct aspect of a Combs performance is his odd speaking style, which is entirely an affectation, and not the manner in which the man speaks when not in front of a camera.

Combs has had roles, large to small, in various genre films since the eighties, and has appeared in studio films such as I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) , The Frighteners (1996), and House On Haunted Hill (1999), as well as a number of low budget features. Check out the complete list on wikipedia or imdb.com.

Duma Key by Stephen King (2008)

2011-02-10T08:54:00.000-08:00

Mark and I discussed Duma Key over at Goodreads. Here's the transcript of our monumental conversation.

M. Buozis: So, let me get this big criticism out of the way. I really enjoyed about 75% of this novel. King has a way of creating believable, likable middle class characters, seamlessly incorporating their thoughts and actions and all sorts of pop culture references. For the most part he leaves the supernatural elements in the background. For 75% of most of his novels these elements seems more psychological than other-worldy. And then King explains everything for you, leading up to the climax, and the supernatural elements are so much harder to swallow because he's done such a great job of creating believable characters in a rich setting.

So, here, he ruins the novel with pirate ghosts. Edgar's wonderfully strange powers are shucked off as the corruption of an ancient sea witch. His love for his daughter and his fear for her going out in the world, which are the emotional touchstones of the novel, are given short shrift to a fleet of zombies.

I don't like it. He's done this in most of his other novels, and usually fails for me, with a few important exceptions like The Shining.

But I guess he's got to give the people what they're after so...

Mark Rooster: I'm going to agree with you here, although I think I probably liked the book a little more than you did.

This one is written in a slightly different style than I've come to expect from King--would you agree on that? It has almost more of a . . . I don't know, old-fashioned sort of style to it? I don't think that's quite the word I'm looking for. But it's definitely got less of his creative grammar and style, with half-sentences in parentheses and italics all throughout. It seems like he was going for something a little different with this one.

I enjoyed that, and the story hit me pretty well, until the last two hundred pages or so. But all the explanation about the ghost ship and the old lady's family got tiring after a while, and I found that I just didn't care too much what was really going on.

I'd have been fine with the story sticking to those elements you mentioned, even if no explanation was ever given regarding Edgar's new artistic ability.

M.B.: I guess the important distinction I'd make between King's novels and stories that I like a lot and the ones that are ruined by the endings, is that the supernatural elements in the good ones always seem completely vital and character-driven. In The Shining for instance, the supernatural elements are so linked with Jack Torrance's alcoholism that the problems become almost indistinguishable. The same could be said about Carrie. We know from the beginning this girl has some strange powers and it is vital to the story that she use them to get back at all the kids who are screwing with her. Here in Duma Key, and in a few other King novels I've read, most notably 'Salem's Lot, the supernatural element doesn't even seem necessary. It almost seems like an afterthought he contractually has to include so his publishers can rest assured that they've got another best seller on their hands.

As far as the style is concerned, I didn't notice much of a deviation from what I've come to expect from King. I think he did a bit of the cutting off sentences and using weird indefinite perspectives, especially in the sections that were all italics. I love how he references pop culture all the time. Most writers can not pull this off, but he seamlessly interjects rock lyrics into conversation through the chummy rapport of Edgar and Wireman.

He's a master of making likable characters. I thought Wireman and Edgar's shrink Kamen were particularly likable. This seems like almost an archetype for King characters. Most of his books include a person who is benevolent to the main character, almost a father figure that guides both the main character and the reader through some crazy stuff.

M.R.: Your last sentence immediately reminded me of the old guy in Pet Sematary (I can't remember his name at the moment). I think you're right about that, he does use that kind of character a lot in his books. Kamen was a great sidekick for Edgar in this one.

I tend to like King's books more often than not. There are a few of his I haven't thought were all that great, but of his more recent ones that I've read (and though I'm catching up, I'm still not that up on his stuff from the last fifteen years), this was one of the best. But I agree that the supernatural stuff was handled less artfully than in some of his other novels.

M.B.: One thing I really did enjoy was King's handling of Edgar's new found talent for painting. The way he describes the paintings, the odd juxtapositions and surreal descriptions, is convincing and believable. While non-supernatural art does not have the power that Edgar's paintings seem to have, the idea that a painting can affect people in some way is intriguing. Some questions every artist asks himself are, 'how does my art actually affect people?' or 'does my art make a difference?' Here Edgar gets an answer to these questions, but not in a favorable one at all. He would've been better off painting pictures that were less powerful both as valuable art and conduits for negative energy.

The whole art scene in this small Florida city is also rendered really well. The small time curators and art critics who take themselves very seriously and who know how to turn a profit come off as genuine.

Kamen and Wireman both reminded me a bit of the cook from The Shining. They all seem to have some connection to some other realm (which is all probably explained in some other King book) and use that connection to protect the lead characters.

Then perhaps the most important thing is the relationship between Edgar and his daughter Ilse.

M.R.: I liked the stuff with Ilse quite a bit. Was sad to see her get killed. Although not as sad as if she'd been in the book a bit more. Though I don't have any suggestions as to how there could have been more material with her.

M.B.: I think this father-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. In a way, Edgar comes off as a bit of a materialistic jerk at the beginning of the novel. Through Ilse, we see that he is a caring father, if not a completely fair father (especially in his preference for Ilse over his other daughter). If Ilse wasn't so central to Edgar's recovery and his art, there'd almost be nothing the ghost could do to him that would hurt him. He'd lost everything else, his ex-wife, his physical capability.

The question is, what does Ilse really have to do with this ghost? Is she just the conduit through which the ghost attacks Edgar and then uses him to wreak havoc. And what gain does the ghost have in killing everyone it does? Is it protecting Duma Key? Is it collecting souls for a ghost ship armada? King doesn't make it clear.

M.R.: I guess it could just be a pissed off ghost who enjoys causing trouble and havoc in Edgar's life?

M.B.: But then it has no emotional resonance. It's just bad luck.

M.R.: Yeah, I see what you're saying. I really think the last two hundred or so pages of this book are somewhat of a letdown. Not a letdown on the level of the mechanical spider at the end of the movie version of "IT," but still a letdown.

What did you think of the epilogue? I found it pretty satisfying. The way Wireman ended up dying kind of randomly, and Edgar was basically left by himself. Very much of a downer, but it worked great. I wonder if he recovered the other paintings.

M.B.: Yeah, I liked the epilogue. The ending definitely needed to remain melancholy, but at least King didn't have everyone die. That might have been too much of a bummer, in a book that was pretty melancholy throughout.

M.R.: It's definitely one of his saddest novels. I liked reading that in close time with Sarah Langan's "The Keeper." Two very sad ghost stories.

In the clip below, King discusses Duma Key.

Horror Directors Feature #1: Clive Barker

2011-02-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

Clive Barker's accomplishments include more than just film directing--his primary passions are writing and painting, and he hasn't directed a movie in more than fifteen years. But this entry is going to focus on his three considerably worthwhile directing outings: Hellraiser (1987), Nightbreed (1990), and Lord of Illusions (1995).

Hellraiser, based on Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart, broke new ground in the late eighties, introducing the S&M-styled demons, the Cenobites, in particular Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley. Bradley would go on to reprise this role in about a thousand Hellraiser sequels (none past the fourth film in the series are actually worth seeing), and, to horror fans, will always be best known as Pinhead. The first Hellraiser movie is startlingly graphic, but only in spurts. A creepy, "haunted house" kind of atmosphere pervades most of its scenes, set in the new residence of sixteen-year-old Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, who would reprise this role in three more Hellraiser movies). Kirsty's uncle Frank (Sean Chapman, early scenes; Oliver Smith, later, "skinless" scenes) previously took up residence in the house, and while there incurred the wrath of the demonic Cenobites. He returns from the dead with the help of Kirsty's evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins). Julia kills for Frank; each time she offs someone, he's able to add another layer of skin, muscle, and/or bone to his depleted frame.

As is the case with Barker's novella, the Cenobites take a backseat for much of the action, giving way to a story of familial horror, with Kirsty slowly becoming aware that her stepmother is cheating on her father with his recently deceased brother. An influential film, Hellraiser has been a favorite of horror fans since it first arrived nearly twenty-five years ago.

(Dimension Films currently has a ninth sequel--for the first time sans Doug Bradley--and a 3-D remake in the works. Jesus wept.)

Barker's second film, Nightbreed, is sometimes referred to as the Magnificent Ambersons of horror. It shares with Orson Welles' second film the unfortunate circumstance of being chopped up by its studio, with the excised footage subsequently lost (or destroyed). For years, horror fans have signed petitions and hoped for a "director's cut" release of Nightbreed. Things began to look up last year, when a full cut was found on video. Since then, however, the studio has announced no future plans for a full restoration. Too bad, because it's an underrated and exciting film.

One of the elements Morgan Creek/20th Century Fox and the MPAA ratings board took issue with was the fact that the "good guys" in the film are the monsters, a bit of a reversal on tradition. The monsters in the film being the residents of the town-within-a-cemetary, Midian, confined to live in secret, unable to come out during the day. Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) plays a man framed for murder by his doctor, the homicidal Decker (played by director David Cronenberg). He is killed, only to be brought back to life due to the powers of Midian. From here, Decker leads an attack on Midian, and true to the MPAA's complaints, the "good guys" of the cemetary city are the clear protagonists of the film.

Nightbreed was marketed in an odd manner (the cover art pictured to the left hardly invokes the mood of the film), and the studio's trailers attempted to sell it as a slasher film, which it isn't. What did we lose thanks to the meddling movie gods? At least a half hour's worth of footage. Nightbreed is an excllent horror-drama, and hopefully someday we'll get to see Barker's original vision.

The last time Barker sat in the director's chair was for Lord of Illusions, a unique mix of horror and film noir, based on a short story found in his Cabal (1988) collection (title story Cabal being the novella on which Nightbreed was based). This story introduces the character Harry D'Amour, who would go on to appear in the novels The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994), and the upcoming Scarlet Gospels. Played by Scott Bakula, D'Amour, a private investigator specializing in supernatural mysteries, travels from New York to the Mojave Desert, to discover the truth about magician Phillip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who has apparently been killed in the middle of a show, in full view of a packed theater house. D'Amour ties Swann to the mystical cult leader, Nix (Daniel von Bargen), murdered a dozen years ago in the desert.

MGM was somewhat put off by Barker's blend of horror and film noir, and thus asked him to cut out many of the noir elements for the theatrical version. However, the movie that was subsequently, and fortunately, made available on video, and later DVD, was Barker's original director's cut (many video stores carried this cut, and not the theaterical cut).

In the time that's passed since Lord of Illusions' release, Barker has been attached to various projects, and rumored to have another film in the works. He has, however, kept his Hollywood involvement limited to the role of producer (Gods and Monsters [1998] and Midnight Meat Train [2008], among many others) and writer (films based on his stories, including Bernard Rose's excellent 1992 film Candyman, based on the short story, The Forbidden).

He's recently been tapped to direct Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae, based on Todd McFarlane's gruesome line of Barker-inspired action figures. With two books on the way in 2011 (the next Abarat novel and the previously mentioned Scarlet Gospels), I'm not holding out much hope. But it would certainly be a treat for horror fans if he did return to film directing again, at least one more time.

Miscellany: A Hidden Herzog Gem

2011-02-01T01:00:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve 1971, 17-year old Juliane Koepcke, survived a plane crash in the Peruvian rain forest. All 92 of the other passengers, including Koepcke’s mother, were killed. She remained in the jungle for eleven days, struggling to find food and potable water and keep her head on straight after such an emotionally devastating accident. In the end, she was reunited with her father, the famous zoologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke.

If you think Juliane’s story sounds like the perfect premise for a Werner Herzog documentary, you’re onto something. Unfortunately, what seems like the most coherent story Herzog has chosen for a film in the last ten years (other than Grizzly Man, perhaps) was produced as a made-for-TV movie for German television and thus Wings of Hope, Herzog’s account of Koepcke’s ordeal, which premiered in 1998, has not received a wide release to date. It’s only available in fragments on YouTube. I’m a little bitter at Herzog, just having watched The Wild Blue Yonder, a cheap mash-up of stock NASA footage and corny alien conspiracy monologues, but I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and rent Wings of Hope in a heartbeat.

Here’s an excerpt from Vice’s September interview with Koepcke.

Vice: OK, and then you woke up the next day on the jungle floor?

Koepkce: The next morning, actually. The crash was around 1:30 PM, and the next morning around nine I looked at my wristwatch. It was still intact and only stopped working later on. Then I realized I was on the ground and I knew right away what had happened. I had a serious concussion, so I couldn’t sit up. My eye was swollen. My glasses—which I’d had since I was 14 because I’m nearsighted—were gone. I was lying underneath my seat and I wasn’t strapped in anymore. I could see a bit of the forest but also a bit of the sky. I knew that I had survived a plane crash. The concussion and the shock only let me realize basic facts. I didn’t really think about myself. I was more concerned about where my mother was. That’s the first thing I remember. I had probably woken up and lost consciousness again a couple of times before that, due to the heavy concussion. I must have released myself from the seat because I was definitely strapped in when I fell. That’s what Werner Herzog reconstructed later on, too. We know I was attached to the seat, which must have turned and buffered the crash. Otherwise I wouldn’t have survived. I also know that I had crawled under the seat because it was raining. I used to dream about this. I dreamed that I was dirty and soaked and would only have to get up to take a shower. Then I have a tiny fragment of a memory, of pulling myself under that seat to protect myself from the rain. Then I thought, “I just have to get up,” and when I made up my mind to do that, I woke up.

Related Links:

1. The Vice Interview

2. A CNN Article on Koepcke

3. The Free Fall Research Page

Nice Jacket: Endgame

2011-01-31T01:00:00.000-08:00

*The Grove Press Twenty-Seventh Printing of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame

The cover image is terrifying and conjures, for us now, less the post-modern existential horror of the play and more the squalor of our political realities. More Abu Ghraib than a bad dream, the power of the grainy reproduced photograph of the cover comes not from the fear we have of the figure, but the moral fear produced by the figure’s implications. The man is bound to a chair. His face is draped with a towel. Spots of blood form a ghostly mouth and eyes over his face. His hands hang limply over the arms of the chair, and his human form is hidden beneath a heavy sack or straight jacket. The typewriter font of the play’s title lends the image the quality of a piece of classified information from a government file.

We’ve all seen the now iconic images of prisoners being tortured and humiliated in Iraq. I’m sure some have been desensitized to their power, but I still feel they symbolize the U.S.’s foreign policy of the past ten years in a way nothing else can. There’s a delicate balance between immersing oneself in the nonstop media onslaught of the 21^st century and being a complete Luddite. I lean toward the latter, but accept the power of images to affect policy and the moral opinion of a nation. Sometimes a snapshot can do this more effectively than a brilliant movie or play or book.

But none of this is what Beckett’s play is about. Endgame belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, a school of mid-century European theater firmly set on the premise that in a godless universe all human endeavors, especially communication, are meaningless. This begs the question – why write a play in the first place? Why, for pedantic reasons of course, to show the rest of the human race the meaningless of their lives and their relationships. In Endgame, Hamm, a paralyzed man, is served by Clov, a clownish servant. They rely on each other more for petty arguments than for survival. But in this way each is indispensible to the other. Beckett is not much of a humanist when you get down to it, though I suppose he does, in his better plays, capture the real taste of 20^th century human suffering better than most writers.

More than anything, Beckett’s plays strike me as visually important and innovative. Happy Days, the play Beckett wrote after Endgame, centers on a woman who is literally buried up to her chin in the rubble of Western Civilization. Her situation is much like Hamm’s in Endgame. They are both paralyzed but still willful and struggling against the cruel world. Joyful stuff!

These Faber editions of Beckett's plays are more typographically interesting, but much less visually powerful.

Here's the first part of a filmed version of Endgame.

Horror Film Star Feature #1 - Danielle Harris

2011-01-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

Danielle Harris began her film career as Michael Myers' niece, in the 1988 slasher Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Running from Myers for most of the film, she proved a perfect foil for the demonic killer, even donning a Halloween costume nearly identical to the clown outfit Myers wore when he murdered his sister as a child, the event that kicked off the Halloween story in 1978. Fans of the successful Halloween 4 were left, at the time, to wonder if the precocious Jaime Lloyd would be donning a mask for good in the next film, continuing her uncle's murderous legacy. (Fortunately) that wasn't the case, and the following year, Harris returned as Jaime for Halloween 5. The fifth film in the series was a bit of a bore, and couldn't stand up to 4 (or, obviously, the original classic), but Harris pulled off a great role, continuing the Jaime Lloyd character, this time as a mute child with a tenuous psychic link to her again-resurrected uncle.

In the nineties, Harris had some few notable film roles (Marked For Death, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, The Last Boyscout, City Slickers, Free Willy), but made her name mostly in television series such as The Wild Thornberries and That's Life.

The storyline begun in Halloween 4 and 5 was continued in Halloween 6, though Harris' Jaime Lloyd character was only briefly seen onscreen and was played by J. C. Brandy, after Harris balked at the character's treatment in the script and at the low salary offered for the role. This was probably the right decision; the producers of Halloween 6 really did take kind of a shit on the character in the first ten minutes of the film.

Harris surprised Halloween fans by returning to the franchise years later, in the "second series" of films directed by shock master Rob Zombie. When she came back to the franchise, it was due to her own pursuing of the part of Annie Brackett (originally played by Nancy Loomis in the original 1978 film), as Zombie originally had no interest in bringing back any of the cast of the original series.

Both the new Halloween (2007) and its followup, Halloween II (2009), have some pretty serious flaws, but then, that's the case with every film in the original series as well, with the exception of John Carpenter's first. But there's a lot to like about the new ones. I'm one of the few out there who actually enjoyed Zombie's second outing in Michael Myers territory more than his first. One of the issues I took with his first Halloween is the film's bizarre structure, which leaves the traditional Laurie Strode story with a mere forty-five minutes to play out, after following Myers through his troubled childhood and subsequent breakout from the mental asylum. The audience is never allowed to get to know Laurie Strode and her friends.

Harris gives a solid performance as Annie Brackett, but she isn't given enough time. In this respect, Halloween II gets the job done much better. Harris's Annie from the second film is a much tougher character, cocky and rough, but still a sweet kid; that side of her just remains a bit further below the surface. The dynamic between Annie and her father, Sheriff Brackett (played by the always excellent Brad Dourif) is particularly enjoyable to watch; she teases him and gives him shit nearly constantly, but it isn't hard to see the love evident between the two.

As a side note, there's really no point in comparing Harris's take on the character to Nancy Loomis's from the 1978 film. They're both energetic, confident, and somewhat rude, but the two acting styles are fairly opposite, making for two similar but very different portrayals of the Annie Brackett character.

In addition to preferring Zombie's second Halloween to his first, I'm probably also in the minority when I say that I think the theatrical cut of this film plays a little better than the fifteen-minute-longer director's cut. It's faster-paced, and you don't get so many close-ups of a shaggy-ass, bearded Michael Myers without the mask on (Myers works better as a character when you see less, not more, of him, and when he has less screen time). One thing the director's cut does better, however, is to include more between Annie and Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton). Their relationship is significantly more complex in the director's cut, with the two of them antagonizing each other much more, evidencing the fact that a lot has changed between the two best friends since the events of the last film. It isn't like the verbal sparring between Annie and her father; in this case, you begin to wonder if the girls are even friends anymore, and if their mutual attack by Myers one year before screwed them both up to the point that they'll never be able to connect like they once did.

[Spoiler warning] Also, the director's cut features a fairly heartbreaking death scene for Annie. In the theatrical cut, Sheriff Brackett finds her body, falls down, shocked, jaw dropped, and is carried away by his deputies. The longer version extends this moment, giving the Sheriff an extended flashback to moments from Annie's past, from her childhood. On its own, it's a wonderful scene, but, like much of the rest of Zombie's Halloween films, it doesn't quite fit with the other scenes, and is a great example of why these movies are good candidates for the "sum of their parts" designation.

Harris appeared in last year's darkly humorous gorefest, Hatchet II, further cementing her reputation as a modern scream queen. And unlike some actresses who've shown up in horror films only to later scorn the genre in the press (Jennifer Connelly, Jodie Foster, etc.), she clearly has a sincere love for the genre. Her appearances at horror conventions always draw a crowd, and she seems to have a good report with her fans. She joins Jaime Lee Curtis and Paul Rudd in the small group of actors who got their start in the Halloween franchise and went on to have successful careers.

Frozen - dir. by Adam Green (2010)

2011-01-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

Adam Green is a talented guy. Most known for his 2006 send-up of 80's horror films, Hatchet, over the past few years, he's demonstrated talents for very different types of scary movies. His 2010 thriller, Frozen, is as different from Hatchet as a film can be, and features no monsters, slashers, or pyscho-killers. The villain is this one is Mother Nature herself, and it's one of the better man vs. nature films out there.

Whereas Hatchet and its sequel, released last fall, combine dark humor with over-the-top gore, following the basic A-to-B of the slasher genre, Frozen packs its punches with intense, real-life situations, and is, in some places, rather difficult to watch.

On a Sunday night, three college kids convince a ski lift operator to let them go for one more trip down the hill, before the resort shuts down for the week, not to re-open until the following Friday. The lift operator gives in to their request, then leaves his post to use the bathroom, asking a co-worker to cover for him. The co-worker thinks everyone's off the lift, and shuts the operation down. Leaving the three students stuck in their chair, at least fifty feet above the ground, with no one in sight, the resort lights turned off, and a hail storm on the way.

Some criticism has been thrown at the film, some folks bothered by the actions of the kids on the ski lift, questioning the rationality of their decisions; decisions which, in some cases, inch them unnecessarily closer to death. But no one claimed at the beginning of this film that any of these kids are particularly smart, and, without giving away the action of the film, I would suggest that plenty of people I know--possibly even myself, in a situation that awful and nerve-wracking--who would likely attempt some of the same idiotic maneuvers these guys attempt to pull off.

Emma Bell (recently seen in AMC TV's The Walking Dead) nails the role of the girly-girl relying on her boyfriend (Kevin Zegers, who you may have seen in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, Wrong Turn, or TV's Gossip Girl) to protect her, even when it should be perfectly obvious there's nothing he can do for either her or himself. The most rational character, as played by Shawn Ashmore (The Ruins, X-Men: Last Stand), even goes to some lengths to save this girl and protect her from the reality that it's very unlikely any of them will make it out of the ski chair alive.

There are some nature elements aside from the cold and the hail storm that these kids face, but I'm not going to go into detail here, so as to avoid ruining some of the film's surprises. It's a grim story, well-directed, and very intense, and another win for Adam Green, in addition to the two Hatchet movies and the equally different psychological thriller, Spiral (2007). All of these are worth checking out, with Frozen being the best of them.

Nice Jacket: Blow-Up and Other Stories

2011-01-17T06:11:00.001-08:00

*The Collier Books 1971 Third Printing of Julio Cortázar's Blow-Up and Other Stories.

Writers and lawmakers had contemplated the moral and social implications of photography for decades before Cortázar published Blow-Up in the mid-60s. The peeping tom strikes us as the creepiest kind of voyeur. Give him a camera and his offense becomes a civil issue. He's now not only breaking the law, he's also infringing on our rights. With the recent prevalence of social networking, which integrates photography into our daily discourse to a degree unimaginable only a decade ago, an individual's control of their privacy and personal image is even more tenuous.

In the 60s Cortázar, and filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, who adapted Cortázar's story, and Michael Powell, whose Peeping Tom stands up even better as a psychologically terrifying and socially relevant document, sexed up the idea of the camera's power, both over the photographer and the subject. It's an issue we should reexamine, now that a million drunk college girls are indiscriminately sharing pictures of themselves draped over each other at the bar.

Collier's cover of the Cortázar collection shows a grainy close-up of a photographer, his piercing eye contrasted with the glare of the camera's lens. Underneath, the same image is shown at a greater remove, suggesting motion and distance. The photographer's stare becomes horrifying because of its vapidity. Its mere presence is cause for alarm, like the stranger standing on the tower in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

These movie posters are sinister in two different ways. The poster for Blow-Up uses negative space and the human form to show the photographer's wicked power. The poster for Peeping Tom shows a more paranoid image, the light from a keyhole imposed over a bloodshot eye. Great typography all around.

Check out this intense trailer for Antonioni's film.

Look out! for this trailer for Powell's film which reminds me of a module of Look Around You a hilarious British parody of educational films.

Related Links

1. Cortázar Interviewed for The Art of Fiction

2. The Times Review of Antonioni's Blow-Up

3. The Times Review of Peeping Tom

Miscellany: Suvanto Scenery

2011-01-11T03:00:00.000-08:00

The most interesting aspect of Maile Chapman's otherwise overly-formulaic and derivative Scandinavian novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is the setting. While the story and characters strike me as Chapman's attempt to channel Russell Banks channeling Woody Allen's Interiors channeling anything by Ingmar Bergman channeling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain she manages to evoke the Finnish landscape enough to make me wonder what this place really looks like.

The Karelian Isthmus, where the novel takes place, turns out to look a lot like the northern states of the American Midwest - Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. But among these untamed lakeside forests, a much richer architectural past is hidden.

Enjoy the scenery. A lot of this land is now part of Russia.

Lake Vuoksa - Courtesy of Dmitri A. Mottl, 2009.

Perovka River - Courtesy of Евгений Адаев, 2008.

Viipuri Wyborg Round Tower - Courtesy of Merja, 2010.

Loincloth in Lappeenranta - Courtesy of Finbar_Mad, 2004.

Olavinlinna - Courtesy of Jussi Hellsten, 2010.

Boat Houses - Courtesy of Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho

Katherine Noel, reviewing the book for the New York Times, on the other hand thinks Chapman's premise is quite original.

Friday the 13th YA Series, by Eric Morse

2011-01-10T19:16:00.000-08:00

About five years ago, a company called Black Flame put out a series of Friday the 13^th-inspired novels, featuring Jason Voorhees in all his post-Jason X, but pre-remake, glory. Being a massive Friday the 13^th fan, I was curious to check these books out—but after reading their basic plot summaries, I lost interest. The stories sounded ridiculous and barely resembled the Friday the 13^th I’d grown up with, that was such an important part of my childhood (if you think it's ridiculous that Friday the 13th would be an important part of anyone's childhood, then welcome to the low-brow portion of our website). These stories seemed to have more in common with the later films in the series, the ones that strayed from the basic slasher formula in hopes of creating something different.

For the record, normally trying to do something different is admirable, preferable to just spitting out the same thing over and over. But not with slashers and not with Friday the 13^th. Innovation isn’t necessary with this franchise; and not only isn’t it necessary, it’s traditionally looked down upon by the most hardcore fans of the series.

So I didn’t order the Black Flame books. Maybe if they were 200 pages, I would have, but at 400-plus . . . I mean, it’s Friday the 13^th, OK, what the hell were they gonna do for 400 goddamn pages? A few months ago, I decided that I might like to check out the novels after all. I read a lot, and I’ll happily admit my tastes include classics, serious literature, and also some pretty silly stuff. Unfortunately, by the time I’d decided I’d be willing to part with a few bucks for these Black Flame novels, they’d gone out of print and were no longer available for a few bucks.

Looking for the Black Flame books inspired me to re-read the Young Adult horror series written by Eric Morse in 1994. After New Line acquired the rights to the Friday films and put out Jason Goes To Hell, they commissioned a line of books to cash in on the series' name and on the popular YA horror market. This was the time of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike, before the arguably more talented J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. Now, I mention those two names while fully aware that neither of those authors write horror. There doesn't seem to currently be as much interest in straight up scary stories in today's YA market; it's more fantasy, dark as that fantasy might be. But in the early 90's, the money makers were horror titles.

Eric Morse (real name William Pattison) wrote four books, all under 200 pages, in the "Camp Crystal Lake Series." He had plans for more, but the series was canceled after the fourth, Road Trip, was released (and very recently, on his website, the author posted the final chapter, going a chapter at a time, for a period of months, of his "fifth Crystal Lake book"). It's hard to imagine why Berkley and New Line would come up with the idea of a book series cash-in on a popular film franchise, only to short that series on advertising, to the point that even today, many fans who've seen every Friday the 13th film aren't aware of the Camp Crystal Lake books.

It seems New Line's only stipulation on granting the rights for print was that the novels couldn't actually feature the Jason Voorhees character. Bummer, right? I mean, it didn't work in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning [1985]. But recall, that movie was a piece of shit in general, and the reason for its failure wasn't simply the guy-disguised-as-Jason "surprise". The concept Morse came up with, having a different character stumble across the famous Jason Voorhees hockey mask in each story, becoming possessed by his spirit, and carrying out murderous acts on local townsfolk and traveling teenagers, works surprisingly better than you might think.

I got a kick out of these books when they came out. I was in junior high, and a fan of all kinds of horror fiction, including the YA stuff, and nearly jumped out of my pants when I came across these books. I read them with great joy, realizing they were what they were, not exactly Shirley Jackson or Stephen King, but exactly what I wanted--the printed equivalent of the gory, crazy, and often silly horror franchise that I loved so much.

Morse got the tone of the films down with his novels. Despite the YA target audience, the novels are full of ridiculous amounts of violence, high body counts, and inventive death scenes. And they respect the source material. Nothing in the books contradicts anything in the films (which contradicted each other constantly). Morse even takes the time to look a little deeper into the town of Crystal Lake, something else that was rarely done in the films.

In the first book, Mother's Day, a backwoods hunter puts on the hockey mask and terrorizes some kids staying at the long closed campgrounds. The second book, Jason's Curse, involves the sister of one of the kids killed in Mother's Day, as she and her friends set out for the cursed campgrounds, seeking revenge. There's a nice continuity with this series; each book is its own story but makes references to the previous entries.

The third, The Carnival, has a traveling carnival dumb enough to set up shop on, yes that's right, the old campgrounds. I don't know if these guys never watch the news or what, but no one seems to be aware of the camp's legendary murder sprees. It's the same non-logic the movies follow, and I love it (though, thankfully, it never gets quite as silly as some of the goings-on in New Line's Jason Goes To Hell, which was released a year before these books). The fourth book, Road Trip, has a skinny dork putting on the mask and taking revenge on the van-ful of jocks he's been stranded with in the woods outside the camp.

When I read over these books recently, they took me on kind of a nostalgic trip back to my junior high days. Sometimes you pick up something you loved as a kid, to check it out again, and you're disappointed. But with the Camp Crystal Lake books, I found myself pleasantly surprised. If you're a Friday the 13th fan and are unaware of these novels, they're worth checking out, if you can get hold of some used copies. Clearly written by a fan of the series.

Eric Morse / Friday the 13th YA websites:

http://f13bloodbath.homestead.com/preview.html

http://www.outpostvevetta.com/

http://www.myspace.com/f13_bloodbath

Miscellany: The Other Orwell

2011-01-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

The Fall 2009 issue of Lapham's Quarterly (that's right, I'm over a year behind reading my subscription) excerpts a George Orwell essay from the 1940s, entitled “How the Poor Die” which references a time in Orwell’s life more fully explored contemporaneously in Down and Out in Paris and London. While Orwell is famous for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, I’d always heard talk of his days fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He seemed to be a Hemingway figure who was less concerned with being a prolific modernist and more with the integrity of both his life and his work.

Most of his non-fiction books have been rather obscured by the fame and ubiquity of his two popular novels, which nearly every American kid read in school, at least back when I was in school. Even New York’s great bookstore, The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books couldn’t keep a copy of anything else by Orwell on the shelf for more than a few days, according to my friend who has worked there for years. More recently, his Essays, Homage to Catalonia, and Down and Out in London and Paris have been reissued by various publishers.

For “How the Poor Die” Orwell became a pauper, developed an illness, as the poor do, and went to a public hospital in Paris for treatment. Not only the treatment he receives, but also the treatment he sees others receive reveal a healthcare system stuck in a rut of cold, clinical (and often primitive) practice. Orwell seeks treatment for what he believes is pneumonia. When he is admitted to the hospital, he is promptly given a cold bath, a flimsy robe and the order to walk across the open air courtyard in the frigid February air.

All the patients in the pauper’s ward are given numbers. Orwell sees number 57, an old man, dying of natural causes. “As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old.” This honesty allowed Orwell to fight in wars he felt were just and to live a full life, in fear of living vacantly, not of dying meaningfully

Seriesofhopes posted an interesting piece called Visualizing George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris" providing pictures of some of the conditions and locales in Orwell's book.

Nice Jacket: The Ginger Man

2010-12-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

Dell's second Laurel printing from March 1974 of J.P. Donleavy's 1955 novel The Ginger Man - Art/Design Uncredited

I like to call this one Still Life with Debauchery. While it's no Cézanne, this cover does a good job of capturing some of the spirit of the novel with a few well-chosen objects photographed in a bare studio. The discarded clothing suggests sex. The whiskey suggests, well, whiskey. The old wrought iron chairs hint at domesticity and give the piece its structure. Sure, you could buy all this junk at a thrift shop for $20 (other than the whiskey of course) and take a snapshot, but the cover is still miles ahead of the pastel illustration montages on most literary paperbacks from the 70s. The typeface is spare and unobtrusive, almost an afterthought.

The cover below, from Oympia Press, is a mid-century abstraction of the shattered nerves of the novel's namesake drunk.

Berkeley went with psychedelic sex for their cover.

I think the ginger man looks best in tweed.

Here's an interview with J.P. Donleavy from the Paris Review's recently opened Art of Fiction archives.

Miscellany: Real Folk Vampires

2010-12-23T06:13:00.000-08:00

In her Letter from the Balkans in November's issue of Harper's, entitled 'Twilight of the Balkans: Hunting the Real-Life Undead' Téa Obreht takes us through the history of real folk vampire stories from Eastern Europe. Far from the romance of Dracula's inspiration, Vlad the Impaler, the vampire story originally comes from peasants who were believed to rise from the dead and feast on their fellow villagers. They'd look more like a fat drunkard from a Bruegal or Bosch painting than a lithe, aristocratic Gary Oldman or Christopher Lee.

In the age of Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse, it's refreshing to return to the gritty folk elements of the legend.

You can read about one of the most famous Serbian vampires here. His name was Petar Blagojevic, and besides having a horribly coiffed head of hair, his resurrection was witnessed by officials from the Austrian Empire, a reputable source if I've ever heard of one.

If your tastes are more domestic, check out this entry on O.T.I.S. about Rhode Island's own vampire, Mercy Brown.

Here's another historical account of a Serbian vampire, named Arnont Paule.

Nice Jacket: The Lime Twig

2010-12-20T08:19:00.000-08:00

New Directions paperbacks have fascinated me as objects since I first saw an old copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind on a bookshelf in a friend's attic on College Hill when I was a teenager. They've always struck me as the literary equivalent of a punk rock zine, with their black and white covers like photocopied collages cut from magazines by a kid in his basement.

The cover art for New Directions's 1961 edition of John Hawkes's The Lime Twig shows a fever dream, the blurred faces of a street crowd with only a woman's face in focus, her eyes and mouth in shadow like a skull or specter. The severe title helps enforce this uncompromising vision and prepare the reader for a serious bit of post-modernist horror.

The back cover, as with most New Directions paperbacks, includes a nice black and white author photo. Hawkes is shown in a woodland setting smoking a pipe. You can see a white mark on his wrist where his watch has blocked the sun. Writer's tan! The back is also jammed with text, not only a synopsis of the novel, but also quotes from Flannery O'Connor and William Kennedy. The whole layout looks more like a press release than a retail copy of a book. The spine is just as austere.

As is common with books of the period, the design and cover art are uncredited.

It looks like New Directions has added color to their covers. I still prefer the old DIY look.

Haywire - Episodes 1 and 2

2010-12-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a recommendation: a new horror/sci-fi web series created by Scott Klein, titled Haywire. As of today, there are two episodes up, and a helpful timer on the website displays the countdown to Episode 3: fourteen days, nine hours, as I'm writing this. The series has gotten some attention lately, after being praised by Indie Intertube and SciFiPulse.net, and for good reason: the show crams a lot of intensity and drama into its five-minute run time. They've clearly got a very small budget to work with, but that doesn't stop the filmmakers from delivery a quality program.

Each episode opens with a comic-book-style intro that relates the story's basic setup--a bright light erupts in a small NY town, shutting down all electronics, and affecting those who saw its flash in a peculiar way: it sends their brains into a scrambled loop, and they are only able to continue endlessly doing whatever they were doing when the light hit.

Episode 1,"The Gardener," has a house full of trapped people nervously watching their neighbor, outside, working in her garden. When one of their friends approaches the woman, she attacks him, repeatedly shouting for him to get off her lawn.

The subject of the second episode, "The Beaten Path," concerns a jogger who is stuck repeatedly wishing everyone he meets a nice day. Unfortunately for him, he meets some rather nasty folks who are too wary of the new zombie people to return his greeting.

I say "zombie," but really, these guys wouldn't fit under the traditional meaning of that word. For one thing, they aren't dead (or undead), and they don't crave flesh. Still, for me, it falls under the horror sub-category that the George Romero films and 28 Days Later occupy. These sad, confused, braindead people, stomping through the only activity they know--if they aren't zombies, I don't know what the hell they are.

Check this show out if you have a moment. It's a quick download, and is worth watching. I'm curious to see where the series goes, if later episodes will back to these first two seemingly separate stories, or if a new story will appear with each show. It's quality short filmmaking either way.

http://haywireseries.com/

(All artwork and photos are taken from the Haywire website.)

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (1990)

2010-12-16T09:57:00.001-08:00

The adaptation of older stories into more contemporary forms, particularly those which were adapted from archaic forms, epic poems, oral legacies, mythical texts, into novels and films, has always fascinated me, both for its rarely satisfactory execution and for the very mechanics of making a popular piece of art from ancient material. In many ways this process is akin to exhuming a Mousterian bowl from your backyard and selling it at Ikea. The critical reception of such exercises always dissuades me from reading or watching them. From Robert Graves's stodgy 1934 novel I, Claudius to Robert Zemeckis's ill-imagined 2007 film Beowulf, most strict adaptations seem to be trying a little too hard to stick to the fictional facts. Give me the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou. You can keep Wolfgang Peterson's Troy. Give me Styron's The Confession of Nat Turner. Keep Madison Smartt Bell's Haiti novels.

In her 1990 novel Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner, famous for a string of fantasy novels she published in the 80s and 90s and as the host of public radio’s Sound and Spirit tackles the legend of True Thomas, a 13^th century Scottish minstrel and purported prophet. You can read more about Thomas and some of his prophecies at this informative wiki page. Kushner uses four narrators to tell the tale of Thomas’s adoptive family, his exodus in Elfland, and his romance with a milkmaid named Elspeth. It all sounds pretty kooky in synopsis, but Kushner manages to tell her story in an engaging and earthy way. Surprisingly, the least deft of these four narratives comes from Thomas himself. When Kushner hands the narrative over to Gavin, a farmer, or his wife Meg, or Elspeth, we start to see some of the shades of reality seeping through the story. Thomas’s own tale is of nothing more than an orgiastic trip to the land of the elves. Kushner renders this fantasy in a dreamlike psychedelia that only occasionally borders on the inane, as when the elf queen’s brother becomes an orange flame and fights for Thomas’s fate. However, we see from the simpler folk around Thomas that he may have made all of this up to cover up his own gallivanting womanizing ways. The novel’s real worth lies in this examination of reality and the power of storytelling and song in shaping the narratives that are believed in the present and remembered in the future. While the elfin queen and the wondrous feasts denied to Thomas may have some significance as an allegorical digression about the limits of escape and emigration, the uncertainty of Elspeth’s fate is at the heart of the drama here. Thomas manipulates the conventions of the period to his advantage when he asks Elspeth if she would accompany him on his journeys, knowing full well she would risk her standing in the community by running around with an unmarried man. It is her life which is wasted by his flight. Of course, Kushner’s book is a romance, so Elspeth forgives Thomas and they live in happiness until the end of their days and bear many great children together. The end.

In all cases, Kushner renders her novel in a clear and uninflected style, which is infinitely more effective than trying to capture the language of the Scots phonetically, or intersperse archaic words and phrases. Her use of evocative perspectives reminds me of Styron or Faulkner without the arch literary pretension. While most fans of traditional fantasy might bemoan a lack of dragons and magic and violence, I find Kushner’s novel much more revealing about human nature than the average bit of swords and sorcery.

Oh, and how about the dust jacket pictured above. Not Nice Jacket material, that's for sure. I much prefer Kate Greenaway's watercolor below.

Miscellany: Literary Ranch Sale

2010-12-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve always had an awe of the west, some vestigial cowboys and Indians longing for wide open desolate expanses, sagebrush scuttling across my path, clean air and big sky. Every red-blooded easterner has thought wistfully of a return to nature, to the frontier (which exists no more), an escape from the complications of society. I’m no different, and as I age, the comforts of the city become both more appealing and more confining. The call of the wild is stronger but more distant.

So, when I read Annie Proulx’s memoir, A Year of Birds: At Home on the North Platte River in December’s issue of Harper’s I immediately googled ‘wyoming ranches for sale.’ The hefty allure of a new state in which to ply my literary trade is a fleeting, but somewhat therapeutic indulgence.

What's the first Wyoming listing on ranchbrokers.com? That’s right, Proulx’s Bird Call Ranch is up for sale.

The 640 acre ranch is listed at $3.7 million, a hefty, if fair price for the stunning cliff side views (above) and the menagerie of birds and lions and antelope Proulx describes in her Harper’s piece. I’m struck by how lovingly Proulx relates her year alone on the ranch and how quickly she can be unburdened of her property. Maybe the Harper's piece was a bit of veiled real estate promotion. One could do worse than have Proulx marketing one's home.

I’m not sure which stories or books Proulx wrote while living at Bird Cloud, but she sold another Wyoming property back in 2006. So chances are you fanboys can’t purchase the house in which she wrote Brokeback Mountain.

Though I’m pretty faithful to the Audobon guides, Proulx cites the Stokes field guide repeatedly in her article. I’m thinking of checking this one out. Then again I don’t need a more thorough field guide to tell me the squirrels in my backyard are not birds.

Check out one of Proulx’s great watercolors below, apparently inspired by Bird Cloud.

For more information on the historical homes of writers near you, check out writershouses.com.

Nice Jacket: The Demolished Man

2010-12-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

In order to widen the scope of The Bent Spine, I've decided to introduce a few new features. The first, which you're reading, is called Nice Jacket and will be dedicated to the incidental art of book covers. I'm no art historian or critic, and I know even less about design, but I know what strikes me as an interesting visual accompaniment to a book. Nice Jacket will always be brief. I don't want to bore you with theory (and to tell you the truth, I don't know much art theory). While I won't limit this discussion to genre books, I'm starting with one of my favorite sci-fi covers.

The cover art and book design for Signet's fifth printing of Alfred Bester's 1951 novel The Demolished Man are both uncredited. While the design is not revolutionary, it is certainly evocative of a certain clean, bold layout that was abandoned with the cartoon Frank Frazzeta covers of the 60s. The clean sans-serif title on the left and the bold text of the author's last name on the right leave room for a great bit of cover art below.

Unintentionally phallic, the art shows a towering collage of details from the book. From the gun at the bottom of the painting, to the silhouetted figure above, the tape reels flanking the figures head, the bifurcation of the two-headed brain, and some great red-and-green lasers shooting from the oracles' eyes, the artist has given us a psychedelic fantasy that has a strange visual appeal. It's not sophisticated, but it is pretty fun.

I like the back cover as well.

The City and the City by China Miéville (2009)

2010-12-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

The City and the City recently won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of 2010. Never having followed contemporary fantasy, I decided to start with a writer I'd heard much about over the years but never considered reading before. While The City and the City doesn't strike me as more fantasy than science fiction, I think the many distinctions between genres are often harmful and confine writers and readers in the scope of their imaginative abilities. In fact, part of our aim here at The Bent Spine, is to liberate genre fiction from its dearth of critical attention. While Miéville doesn't provide us with ghouls and goblins, dragons and warriors, he does embed a thought-provoking concept in a highly readable detective story that borders on the high political intrigue of John le Carré at his strongest. While I don't have much to compare it with, The City and the City deftly avoids the pitfalls of many science fiction and fantasy cliches. Miéville's vision is gritty and uncompromising in its ambiguity.

Inspector Borlu is investigating a crime in his dystopian home city-state of Beszel, when he becomes embroiled in a cross border conspiracy involving a secret power lying in the shadows between Beszel and its sister city Ul Qoma. Beszel and Ul Qoma, for the most part, occupy the same topography. They literally inhabit the same physical space. But through an amazing feat of mass self-hypnotism the citizens of either city do not see of interact with the citizens of the other. Only at the border gate of Copula Hall can one look from one city into another without fear of committing breach, the greatest crime possibly, and attracting the wrath of a shadowy authority called, you guessed it, Breach. Borlu examines the multifarious political factions of each city, the differences in culture, police procedure, respect for antiquity and taste in hot beverages. The only thing these two cities share, other than geography, is an intense fear of Breach. Miéville places his cities in a realistic Eastern European locale and makes many references to a geopolitical situation much like our own. This not an alien landscape, but a parable for a Jerusalem transplanted to Europe, where there are no physical barriers between the Israelis and Palestinians other than an odd self-imposed blindness.

Miéville works in a long tradition of political science fiction, the sort of metaphorical story found in the best Philip K. Dick novels and Aldous Huxley. However, he never makes a completely clear political statement, and this saves The City and the City from becoming strictly a novel of ideas. He writes with a keen simplicity that at first seems rigid, but gradually flows into the staccato rhythms of Raymond Chandler. His imagery is always dark. There are no rays of light to be found here. As John Carpenter did in Escape from New York, China Miéville has created a dystopia both believable and entertaining. Though I can't say this is the best contemporary fantasy and science fiction have to offer, The City and the City shows the scene to be thriving with intriguing new work.

Check out this old, but interesting interview with Miéville at The Believer.

From Within - dir. by Phedon Papamichael Jr.

2010-12-03T14:47:00.000-08:00

Netflix has really been ramping up their Instant View selection this year, in preparation, I’m sure, for an eventual total switch from physical DVDs to streaming films. For a while, their Instant catalogue, particularly the horror section, was kind of a grab bag, featuring some pretty bizarre, random—mostly lousy—movies, mixed in with a few classics. Now, at the end of 2010, I’m finding tons of interesting-looking films available to watch instantly, and coming across horror films I’ve never heard of that boast excellent user reviews and star ratings; it’s almost become difficult to keep up with the selection.

I don’t remember how I came across this one. It’s part of the After Dark/Lionsgate “8 Films To Die For” series, not all of which I’ve gotten around to yet. But I believe I discovered it from simply scanning the horror section in the Instant View for plots that sounded intriguing.

Well, here’s an intriguing plot: a small, conservative, religious town is besieged by a rash of suicides, which the pastor’s son and his cohorts believe are the work of a family who live off in the woods, and whose matriarch, a supposed witch, was burned to death a few years ago, blamed by the townspeople for the murder of a local man.

Fast-paced, yet sometimes very subtly spooky, From Within (2008) catches your attention in the first scene. A young girl (Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce) sits outside with her boyfriend, sharing a romantic moment that ends with the boyfriend shooting himself in the face. Naturally distraught, the girl heads into town, to her father’s shop, barely able to speak, covered in blood. Before ten minutes are up (real time, not movie time), the girl and her father have both killed themselves in differing, equally disturbing, ways. So begins a wave of bizarre suicides that baffle the local community.

There’s a kid who lives on the outskirts of town, played by Thomas Dekker (John Connor from the two-season series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), whose brother got the whole thing going by offing himself in front of Willis. It turns out, their mother was burned to death a few years back, after being accused witchcraft, and implicated in the death of a local man. It seems likely her death wasn’t the accident the newspapers reported it as.

The kid played by Dekker makes friends with a friend of the Willis character (Elizabeth Rice), and they go head to head with the pastor’s son (Kelly Blatz), a fired up, righteous, 18-year-old Pat Robertson, who makes no secret of his desire to wipe the witchcraft-practicing family off the map.

Everything moves very quickly. The above is only a very basic plot summary; there’s enough in this movie for a film twice as long—but the fast pacing and action aren’t presented in lieu of good characters or storytelling. There are some nice dramatic moments between Dekker and Rice, and Blatz is perfectly cast as the pastor’s son.

Director Phedon Papamichael Jr. shows us a church sermon, towards the beginning of the film, with Steven Culp, as Pastor Joe, giving an energetic sermon to help the townspeople deal with the three suicides of the day before. The scene ends with Pastor Joe’s son confronting him, looking at his father with nothing but disgust, and telling him, “What those people need to hear is faith. You just gave them a cheap Hallmark card,” or something to that extent. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie. At first, it seemed hard to swallow that the most popular kid in school is the pastor’s son, but shortly in, I accepted this, and also began to hate the Blatz character, who uses his position as a local leader of sorts to gather together a large group of hateful, pissed off fundamentalists to take on the devil in their midst.

There’s a lot about religion, Christianity, witchcraft, dark magic, and whatnot, but the movie doesn’t get preachy with it, and there are plenty of scary images and sudden, violent deaths to remind you that it’s a horror film, first and foremost.

Intense, occasionally thoughtful, disturbing, and overall fairly scary, From Within is one of the best films After Dark has brought us yet.

Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan (2009)

2010-12-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Today's post will take the form of a conversation between me and Mark.

M. Buozis: I think one of Langan's biggest strengths is her ability to capture the real heart of her down-and-out characters. Audrey's stultifying life in New York City is one I witnessed many times. The 30-something who is chewed up and eaten by the city and aged by it is a theme not often broached in horror fiction.

Audrey's neuroses ring true and they never make her annoying, just more endearing. The back story involving Betty Lucas is never over-powering, but Langan provides just enough detail to make Audrey's journey to sanity emotional and rich.

Mark Rooster: I found her neighbor Jayne to be an even more, as you said, chewed-up, character. I don't think I could even take a story with her as the lead! When Audrey smashes the hula figurine and has that inner-vent about how Jayne's too dumb to realize how unhappy she is, followed by her shouting F you, Jayne! down the hallway, I felt pretty awful for her.

And there's that previous foreshadowing, the kind that sometimes works and is sometimes only annoying (works in this case), that line about "the next time either of them would see Jayne would be in much more unfortunate circumstances." That isn't the exact line, but it's something similar. I found myself thinking, Man, don't be right about that, let Jayne be OK.

M.B.: For me, the little bit of real obvious foreshadowing there was one of the only really weak moments in the book. It seemed somewhat out of place with the rest of the narrative. It's the only sentence in the entire novel where there's a sort of retrospective looking back. I thought it took away from the immediacy of the action. Why tell us something bad is going to happen and not just let us find out for ourselves?

I thought Langan's secondary characters were particularly strong. You're right about Jayne. Though she's intensely annoying, she is very real and very human. Saurab reminds me of a bunch of people I've met who are still holding onto this dream about making films, but living only on the kindness and wealth of their families.

The whole Chaotic Naturalist aspect reminded me of something Borges would do. Langan makes us believe the architecture and social aspects of this strange school of thought could be historical. As usual, I'd almost prefer it if Langan would've left out the supernatural elements and concentrated on the strange allure of the cult.

M.R.: I like how she lists her influences at the beginning of the book. I could definitely see elements of "The Tenant" and "Rosemary's Baby," as well as the others she listed.

I normally don't like the foreshadowing, but in this case, it added to the dread and foreboding I was already feeling, and it didn't throw me off too much. I figured Jayne was an innocent, anyway, and likely wouldn't make it to the final pages.

The Chaotic Naturalism was very intriguing. I even found myself gooogling it--not that I didn't believe Langan had made it up, but it just sounded so strange and yet nearly-possible, that I had to check, to make sure.

M.B.: Oh, yeah. I had to google it too. I think she throws in some references to real architects, like Gaudi, who used non-traditional forms taken from nature in their buildings. I love when authors flirt with the line between reality and fantasy. It draws me into a story much more than a strictly made up universe.

I found a lot of similarities to The Shining here, especially in the way the building uses people's weaknesses against them to make them go crazy. The Breviary, like the lodge in The Shining becomes a character by the end of the novel, and a character with an extremely powerful will.

M.R.: I loved the character of Shermerhorn (I know I got that wrong; I don't have the book right in front of me), in particular the scene in which his demonic figure approaches Audrey; the description of his arms being as long as his legs, and crawling like a spider, was very effective. Rather creepy, for sure.

M.B.: I definitely liked how Schermerhorn ended up being the man in the three piece suit from Audrey's nightmares.

Another aspect of Audrey's character that I particularly enjoyed was the way she could not leave anything to her imagination. She must read every website that pops up on the first page of her google search for The Breviary. She must check under Betty's sheets. She is afraid of what her imagination might create, how the unknown might haunt her.

Oh, and the old people at The Breviary. I can't remember such an effective exploitation of the creepiness of the elderly, particularly the wealthy elderly with their plastic surgery and fancy clothing. The tenants of The Breviary were the most horrifying aspect of this novel.

M.R.: I loved the way one of the chapters about two-thirds of the way in ended with all of the tenants stepping out of their rooms and clapping at once. Freakin scary! There was a lot of excellent imagery in this book. I'm looking forward to reading her other novels.

And you know, you mention the extent of Audrey's OCD--it really is remarkable that Langan could write such a character without her ever getting on the reader's nerves. You can see where she gets to Saurab with some of this stuff, and how it must be absolutely agonizing to live with, but she never gets boring or annoying to read about.

M.B.: The key is Langan only ever mentioned the OCD as it related to the action of the novel. There was no big long exposition about all of Audrey's ticks and obsessions. They all come out while she's battling with The Breviary.

In this respect, Audrey's Door is similar to Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn in which the narrator suffers from Tourette's Sydrome, but the verbal ticks and twitching never overrides the engrossing plot.

M.R.: I suppose if the author only mentions it here and there, as it pertains directly to the rest of the action, it works to give a sense of what this person's like without beating the reader over the head with it.

I find the same technique used sometimes with a writer including a stuttering character. Stephen King's written stutter is pretty creative (for example, "Wuh-wuh-what?" instead of "Wh-wh-what?").

Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy by K.W. Jeter (1987)

2010-11-18T05:53:00.000-08:00

If you're paying attention, which you're probably not, you'll notice today's selection is not a horror novel and it's the first time we've reviewed anything here other than horror. We've decided to expand the scope of our discussions to include other types of fantastic fiction not normally given the attention of more traditionally 'literary' works. While many of the books and films we review will be well-known classics within their genres, we also hope to uncover lesser-known works deserving of the attention of the general reader.

Infernal Devices is the first novel I've read in the now well-defined steampunk genre. Steampunk, as I understand it, is set exclusively in a Victorian setting, but contains many of the tropes of standard science fiction, including advanced technologies (though most rely on steam for energy, as opposed to electricity), time travel, alien beings, mysterious plot twists, and juvenile sexuality. While it has its roots in classic proto-sci-fi writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, it was refined in the 1980s by William Gibson, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter. Here's a decent overview of the most important works in the genre. Jeter coined the term steampunk as a lighthearted response to the growing popularity of certain works outside of the more prevalent cyberpunk movement.

Infernal Devices deals with the bumbling adventures of George Dower, the son of a brilliant watchmaker and developer of advanced automatons. Dower has no specific will in the story, and the outrageous characters he meets and the outlandish events unfolding around him throughout the novel seem more of a brief and frightening interlude to an otherwise purposeless existence. Dower is visited in his father's shop by the mysterious Brown Leather Man who drops off a mechanical device and a strange coin that send Dower down a path leading him to strange piscine boroughs of London and the alien landscape of the Scottish Hebrides. He meets a coin forger, a pair of hustlers with strange futuristic accents, fishmen, elderly mad villains, temperance leaguers, whores, the Godly Army, and real-life selkies. There are several sudden reveals throughout the novel which change our perspective of all the prior events. None of these reveals seems earned by Dower, but only forced on him by a manipulative secondary character. Dower might be the key to destroying the earth, or he might be the key to saving it. The reader is not sure until the last ten pages.

Jeter's greatest strength is his deftness with the Victorian setting. He uses a breezy writing style which is eminently readable, but manages to imbue each scene with the grit and smoke of Dickens or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When Dower walks through Wetwick, we see the shadowy alleys and the lurching denizens. We smell the rot swept into the gutters. Also, concerning the mechanical automatons, Jeter writes with verve. The Paganinicon, which resembles Dower in all ways except for his skill with a violin and another important tool (where lies Jeter's juvenile treatment of sexuality), enforces the fantastic and comedic tone of the novel.

While Infernal Devices is a greatly entertaining read, I feel it's maybe not the best introduction to the steampunk genres. Jeter hits all of the superficial cues. There's magical mechanical technology, flying machines, weird underclasses, secret societies, myths come to life. But one of the most important aspects of the genre, as I understand it, is the punk spirit underneath its most important works. We see no liberating of non-western individuals from the obscurity the Victorians doomed them to. Jeter only briefly addresses the perils of the technologies of the future. I'm not suggesting every novel should involve these themes, but Jeter's novel seems to be on the lighter end of the spectrum of this genre. It's still a pleasant read. I'd just call it more steamgentry than steampunk.

Second Chance by Chet Williamson (1995)

2010-11-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

A time traveling future murderer ditches his friends on the way from the 60s to the 90s, in order to adopt an anonymous persona and carry out plots of mass destruction. That's the basic plot of Chet Williamson's Second Chance, and if that sounds weird enough, it gets even weirder when you expand the plot summary.

The hero of the story, a decently likable new age musician named Woody, decides he'd like to relive his past, specifically his college days from over two decades past, and he gets his old friends together, and since he's rich, he's able to rent out the exact same apartment they partied in back in the 60s, and fill it with items and artifacts from that era, recreating, as best he can, a typical partying night from the best time of his life. Back then, his girlfriend and his best friend attempted to blow up a campus ROTC building, only they end up blowing themselves up.

Now, in the present, he and his friends get together at this old apartment, they even dress as they would have in the 60s, and smoke some expensive weed, while sitting in a circle. And they end up traveling back through time, and suddenly their long-dead friends show up. Before long, they reason that they've gotta get back to the present, and they figure, why not take their dead friends with them? It works, too--they get in a circle, smoke the great weed again, and they all come back to the present, where they lead somewhat different, better lives, with their dead friends returned--except, oh, actually, the one guy, he slipped their grasp in the time traveling, and now leads a secret life as a mysterious killer named Pan, who carries out assassinations and mass killings, in the name of saving the planet.

Completely ridiculous plot--but somehow it works as a mostly serious, non-jokey, science-fiction thriller. I've never read anything else by Chet Williamson, but I wonder if his other stories are as completely crazy as this one. It's quite something that he's able to write this in a manner that can be taken seriously. He somehow pulls it off. The method of time travel, in particular, could potentially come off as very silly--something out of a low-budget stoner comedy--but damn if it doesn't work. I found myself enjoying the story so much, I didn't require any more evidence that smoking a joint with friends in a circle can send you back, or forward, through time.

The novel was originally published in 1995 and was re-released in 2002 by Leisure Books, home of a wide range of genre writers. "Second Chance" is a strange blend of horror, science-fiction, and pot, and I highly recommend it.

Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1910)

2010-11-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

One of the things that separates this book very much from its film and stage adaptations is the amount of detail Leroux provides about the Opera's cellars. Some of the details almost seem like fantasy, or at least science fiction, even for current readers. A lake under a functional building? Five cellars in a 19th century urban building? A torture chamber? A 'siren' in the lake protect a fancy house stockpiled with gun powder? Trap doors and fake walls and revolving mirrors? It all seems almost impossible, but Leroux writes it like it's a matter of fact. I haven't watched any of the film or theater adaptations in quite a while, but I remember Erik's layer being more of just a creepy basement. Here it's turned into a magnificent symbol of Erik's almost superhuman abilities and knowledge of physics and illusions. Great stuff.

Erik himself is also made much more of a super-villain here than a tragic monster. Of course, we still get the tragedy in his relationship with Christine, but he's also a mastermind of deception and a bit of sadist. When the Persian relates the story of how Erik grew up in the East, we get a great glimpse of how Erik learned this amazing things. Leroux, of course, makes Erik more than a comic book character by telling us exactly why Erik might be so sadistic and angry at the human race. His mother rejected him, refused to give him any affection unless he wore a mask. No wonder he's such a bastard.

I've noticed with a lot of late-19th century and early-20th century fantastic fiction, authors often used this method, shifting points of view to establish a believable narrative. Dracula is a perfect example. Instead of presenting the story of a vampire as a legend, Stoker manages to create a believable account of what it might be like for a group of people to really encounter a vampire. Here Leroux gives us newspaper accounts and different perspectives from people in the opera and makes his narrator almost a secondary source, a reporter convincing us of the existence of the 'ghost'.

I haven't read much steampunk, but I did pick up a copy of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen about a year ago. Steampunk seems to be a cross between fantastic Victorian literature and science fiction, where 19th century settings are exaggerated in their technology (steam engines and dirigibles are very prominent) and the exoticism of people from the east is very exaggerated. The Phantom of the Opera, in a way, is a proto-steampunk book, in that Erik employs amazing technologies that almost seem magical, and the treatment and inclusion of the Persian is somewhat exceptional for literature of the time.

I certainly like the fact that we don't get too much information about Erik early in the novel. I've been thinking about this, watching some of the old Friday the 13th movies. What made those movies so frightening to me is that you rarely actually see the monster except for a few brief moments and then finally at the end, with the climactic battle. I feel like most horror movies these days show their villains in full light, from the beginning of the picture. While this might be more fun for filmmakers, I think it detracts strongly from the horror value of most new horror films.

That being said, at the end of the first Friday the 13th I think you get a similar reveal, where his mother explains everything that happened to him and why she's killing everyone.

You can check out a nice fan page detailing the film adaptations of the novel here.

Charlie Spradling

2010-10-28T12:32:00.002-07:00

I was watching Subspecies II (1993) earlier this week, thinking happily to myself about the early 90's, when Full Moon--Charles Band's crazy puppet/doll-obsessed direct-to-video horror company--still put out movies I actually enjoyed. I kept thinking Charlie Spradling should have played the lead. Or the lead's sister, the fledgling vampire. In my mind, it always seems Spradling appeared in more Full Moon movies than just the three she did. That could be due, in part, to her being the Full Moon "Video Zone" merchandise girl, advertising for Full Moon at the end of producer Charles Band's behind-the-scenes program that played after every Full Moon movie in the 90's, thanking the audience for watching and joking around with the puppets from Puppet Master II, while encouraging viewers to call 1-800-MOON, to find out more about Full Moon's fan letter and exciting array of merchandise.

Spradling had a few small roles in notable films of the late eighties and early nineties (The Blob, The Doors, Wild At Heart, Ski School . . . OK, maybe Ski School isn't all that notable--but it does star another great B movie actors of the time, Dean Cameron), but her best appearances were in the Full Moon films.

In Meridian: Kiss of the Beast (1990), Spradling plays an American student traveling in Ireland, who gets involved in an odd situation with her best friend and a monstrous man-beast. It's, uh . . . pretty strange. Charlie has lots of screen time.

In Puppet Master II (1991) Charlie is spared the worst dialogue scenes (those belong to lead actress Elizabeth Maclellan). She ought to have more screen time, but is excellent in her scenes, as a member of a team of paranormal investigators checking up on the mysterious Bodega Bay Inn, site of the demonic goings-on of the original Puppet Master (1989). Puppet Master II may not be great cinema, but it's a fun movie, and one I'm guilty of having seen at least a dozen times. Spradling is the best of the cast in this one, but her co-stars aren't terrible, and the movie's got some pretty good stop-motion animation, a great opening scene in a cemetery, and a creepy dead guy parading around bandaged up like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933).

Bad Channels (1992) has Spradling being shrunken down by aliens, while in the middle of a rockin dance routine, and teleported to a local radio station, where said aliens have set up headquarters. Even stranger than Meridian.

Charlie acted in a number of films in the 90s (To Sleep With a Vampire, Angel of Destruction, Johnny Skidmarks) before retiring from acting in the early 2000's, but for myself and other Full Moon fans, she's most remembered for her work with Full Moon. Upbeat and fun to watch, sure aware of the campiness of much of the material, Charlie Spradling put out some great work in some under-appreciated genre films of the early 90s.

Giallo - dir. by Dario Argento (2009)

2010-10-23T16:13:00.001-07:00

Any time I hear that Dario Argento is working on a new film, I feel somewhat anxious. One of the most visually energetic, original horror filmmakers of all time, Argento's work of the last two decades has been somewhat lacking, to say the absolute least.

So, there's good news: his new film Giallo, I'm happy to write, isn't nearly as bad as the master's other films of late, and is overall a passable thriller.

It contains almost none of Argento's signature visual flare, and isn't particularly exciting artistically, but if you're looking for an above-average horror-story-slash-police-thriller, you could do worse than Giallo.

The plot is essentially the usual Argento bit about a serial killer offing beautiful women, only this time around, he shows us the killer towards the beginning. Rest assured, this is one ugly son of a bitch, who wears his true feelings on the outside. In fact, his childhood tormentors, along with one of his recent victims, refer to him as "Yellow" due to his jaundice-affected skin (providing the inspiration for the title, I'm guessing, since the film itself isn't what one would normally consider a "giallo"). The man speaks in a gross mumble that raises in pitch the angrier he gets, but his disturbing voice is no match for his grotesque physical appearance. (Argento fans will notice the unusual bare hands, quite different than the normal black-gloved look.)

The major problem with Giallo is the same as with his last film, Mother of Tears (2007): there isn't enough Argento contained in its ninety minutes. I don't mean that the movie's too short--just that his style is sadly missing. Both of these films don't show much in the way that grabs the viewer and immediately points to the evidence of their creator. They aren't complete dogshit like Phantom of the Opera (1998) or The Card Player (2004), and are worth watching for any fan of the director, but at the same time, there's nothing to get particularly excited about.

Adrien Brody (currently suing the film company, claiming they haven't paid him any of his reported--and very reasonable--fee) gets the job done as the police investigator taking on the case. Vincent Gallo was originally signed to play the role of the serial killer, but dropped out due to the involvement of his ex-fiancee, Asia Argento (who was subsequently replaced Emannuelle Seigner). I'd love to see Gallo and Argento team up at some point, preferrably with a better script. I'm sure they've probably both pissed each other off by now, though, and such a collaboration will never happen.

Oh well . . . Dario's got something called Dracula 3D coming out next year . . . so . . . there's that to look forward to . . .

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)

2010-10-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

One of the masters of the subtle, quiet horror Charles L. Grant championed through the 1980s, wrote his most famous ghost story almost one-hundred years before Grant started publishing his anthologies. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, perhaps due to its quiet and ambiguous nature, stands as a monolithic tale, perhaps the most literary of ghost stories. Most of James's novels and stories, other than perhaps Daisy Miller are read today almost exclusively by academics and lit-snobs, but The Turn of the Screw, a novella-length tale, has been popularly adapted for the stage and screen and remains a well-read classic.

As with many other Victorian stories and novels, especially those dealing with ambiguous supernatural events, The Turn of the Screw starts with a framing device integral to the believability, or at least the suspension of disbelief, necessary for such an otherworldly tale. The reader experiences the story of a young governess on an English countryside estate through the lens of a man listening to a friend's tale in an old house on Christmas Eve, beside a roaring fire, in the tenuous comfort of both temporal and physical distance from the tale itself. Unfortunately, James drops this frame completely when the friend starts reading the governess's journal to his audience. The governess, new to her position, at first admires her charges, a ten-year-old boy named Miles and a somewhat younger girl named Flora, for their intelligence and affection. Through a series of minor transgressions the children begin showing themselves as masters of the crumbling estate, visiting with what the governess thinks are ghosts. The children deny the existence of the ghosts, and no one sees them but the governess. Somehow, James creates such startling scenes of haunting, completely motionless almost, the reader does not question the power of the governess's experiences. The first ghost, the estate's dead young chauffeur, appears atop one of the mansion's tall asymetrical towers and stares down upon the governess. The simple expressionless figure creates such a huge sense of tension, the presence of a stranger on the estate becomes an iconic image of horror and invasion the way Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls (1979) uses the phrase 'Have you checked the children?' as an opaque, yet chilling incitement to panic. The remainder of the tale deals with the governess fighting with the stone-faced, far too intelligent children about the existence of the ghosts and their strange sense of rebellion. Miles especially shows himself to be a sociopath in his dealings with the outside world. Of course, the reader receives all of this information from the governess's perspective, so the question of an unreliable narrator is always present in all characterizations.

The Turn of the Screw's influence on subsequent horror stories is less evident in ghost tales and more apparent in novels and films of childhood evil and deviance. James's portrayal of Miles and Flora as eerily perfect, intelligent yet wholly sinister children found a home in a more overtly supernatural novel, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) which was adapted for film as Village of Damned in 1960 and 1995. There's something inherently creepy about a child who has the bearing and manipulative powers of an adult and the self-awareness to place him or herself in the larger world and the vocabulary to explain all of this to his or her keeper. James mastered this without resorting to any definite supernatural elements, but his depiction of children spills over into such occult masterpieces as Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971).

Here's a fun comparison of four filmed versions of Quint at the window.

The Children - dir. by Tom Shankland (2008)

2010-10-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a recommendation for some enjoyable viewing this Halloween season: a creepy, occasionally graphic British horror film called The Children. As far as scary-kid movies go, this one's leagues beyond junk like Children of the Corn (1984) and rivals The Bad Seed (1956). I'm not going to say it's better than The Omen (1976), but hey, what the hell do you want, right?

Director Tom Shankland's been working in TV and film for the last ten years, but his name was unfamiliar to me--in fact, I hadn't even heard of this film until I stumbled across it in this article from last Halloween: http://open.salon.com/blog/scott_mendelson/2009/10/22/the_10_best_modern_direct-to-dvd_horror_films). Very glad I came across it, as this is a high-quality film that seems to have been widely overlooked, which is a shame.

The basic premise is somewhat similar to that of Night of the Living Dead (1968), except that instead of all the undead suddenly rising up and turning on the living, we see the children (in an unspecified area) all suddenly turn on the adults. There's even less explanation than in NOTLD, and that's fine, because it isn't necessary. I won't go further into the film's plot because, (1) as usual, the less you know, the better; and (2) there isn't much of one.

Spooky, possibly murderous kids? Check.

Casual inspiration from Night of the Living Dead? Check.

You're either interested in this type of thing or you're not. Anyone who's a fan of this sub-genre of horror film can tell you, however--there aren't an awful lot of good evil-kid movies out there. The Children is certainly one of the best.

The film's final moments work remarkably well. The finish of a horror film can be a tricky thing to get right--this one nails the ending. If a scary movie can end with a truly frightening image that stays with you, it's more than done its job. After I got done watching The Children, I considered whether to give it a three- or four-star rating on my Netflix account. I walked outside to smoke a cigarette, and found myself getting somewhat spooked just being outside, alone, at night, thinking about those final shots in the film. Went back in and rated the film four stars. Gotta figure any movie that can creep me out like that deserves at least four.

The Hour of the Oxrun Dead by Charles L. Grant (1987)

2010-10-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard of Charles L. Grant, until he died in 2006. Shortly after his death, Cemetery Dance ran a tribute issue to him, devoting two or three story slots to unpublished horror tales he'd written, and quite a bit of laudatory essays and personal accounts from his friends and fans. During his life, he'd been known more for his influential horror anthologies in the 80s, which according to many of the authors featured in the Cemetery Dance tribute issue, offered a haven for more subtle horror that did not depend on gore or extreme violence or gimmicky sci-fi for its entertainment value. I was not too thrilled with his short stories I read in Cemetery Dance but the praise his fellow genre authors spouted, and a quote from Stephen King calling Grant "the premier horror writer of his or any generation" compelled me to pick up an old paperback copy of one of the more popular novels set in his signature Oxrun Station.

The Hour of the Oxrun Dead is a subtle novel of terror, vacillating between a sense of mounting paranoia and the possibility of some real occult activity in sleepy Oxrun Station, a Connecticut village, a haven for small town provincial and a bedroom community for commuters. Natalie, a young, sexy librarian (they only exist in novels and movies, it seems) is the widow of Ben, a police officer in Oxrun who is murdered soon after he and Natalie marry. For some reason, Natalie feels the need to stay in Oxrun, a town that offers her little else but job security, even though she has gotten over the pain of Ben's loss. She starts falling for a young beat reporter for the local weekly paper, Marc, and together they begin to come up with what seem to be grand delusions about the town's upper crust establishment. Grant manages to create a comfortable, almost cozy bit of suburban horror with his very familiar setting and cast of characters - the creepy police chief, the corrupt banker, the old craggy innkeeper, the wicked head librarian, the megalomaniac millionaire. But the implications of the "plot" Natalie and Marc imagine some horrible small town cult enacting don't cross the boundaries of this sleepy little village. In the end, who cares what these folks do with Natalie and Marc. They lose all of their likability when Grant has them frolicking and flirting through the cemetery directly after the funeral of one of Natalie's only friends.

Oxrun Station has the odd, doomed quaintness of Stephen King's Derry or Castle Rock, which is an easy trope for a writer of horror in the 80s. There's no sense of the time period, however, in The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, no sense of an innocent yet excessive mid-80s decadence, which could spruce up the somewhat banal story. The supernatural elements of the novel seem psychological, a quiet muffled background conversation heard behind a tedious plot, like Argento's Suspiria but with little of the physical beauty and grandeur. There's still a tradition of quiet horror, both in literature and cinema, which combats the torture porn aesthetic of movies like Saw and books like Palahniuk's Haunted or the bizarro sub-genre. If Grant is responsible for bringing this approach intact through the 80s, we should thank him for it. I think to understand his true impact on horror, it might be important to read the anthologies he edited and is best known for and let his novels sit on the shelf.

Check out Grant's official website here.

The Lost by Jack Ketchum (2001)

2010-08-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

I'd say that Jack Ketchum has slowly been growing on me, except that I've liked his writing ever since I first began reading Off Season, his 1980 novel about cannibals attacking vacationers off the beach. The thing about Ketchum is, his stuff is so violent, so visceral, and downright tragic that his books are somewhat exhausting. I read the sequel to Off Season, the better, equally violent Offspring, and from there moved on to The Girl Next Door (1989), a novel that probably deserves its own article.

The Girl Next Door is one of the most deeply disturbing books I've yet read, and one of the best. The horror is derived from human cruelty, nothing supernatural, the same as his cannibal stories, and when I'd finished I put the book down knowing I'd read something brilliant, but at the same time, I was wholly ready to move on to another book, something lighter to follow it up.

Now, having read The Lost, I think I can safely say I'm hooked and won't be allowing as much time to pass before reading another Ketchum novel.

The Lost tells the story of young adults in the late sixties, hangin' out, partying, trying to get laid--and keeping the awful secret that one of them, their leader, murdered two girls, very randomly, four years before. His name is Ray Pye, a self-obsessed, vain monster of a man, who stuffs his shoes with beer cans in order to rise above his natural five-foot-three, and demands loyalty from the younger kids who buy drugs from him and hang out at his place, and more or less worship at his feet.

Ray's two best friends, Tim and Jennifer, are the only ones who know about the murders. Two cops, one retired, are pretty certain, however, and when the second girl succumbs to her injuries four years later, the cops begin to harrass Ray and his friends, to try and break him down, get him to slip up, so they can finally nail him.

The Lost doesn't contain nearly as much graphic violence as the books I've mentioned above, but when it happens, it's very, very rough. The murders in the prologue are described in explicit detail, leaving the reader to wonder what else could possibly occur in the next 350 pages.

There is a lot of waiting, a lot of tension that builds and builds, an inevitability that at some point, something is going to push Ray over the edge, once again, probably worse than the time before. Ketchum captures the mood of the late sixties, finds parallels with his story and the Manson murders, committed around the same time, and writes believable characters the reader can't help but care and worry about.

Seance - dir. by Robin Kasparik (2009)

2010-08-19T20:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a nineteen-minute Czech horror film that truly is deserving of your time. Seance, by newcomer Robin Kasparik, takes a simple premise and wrings it for some effective scares and suspense.

A psychic is called upon to perform a seance in the castle dwelling of a very recently deceased woman. The two men who've requested her are after an answer from the deceased, and hope to speak with her spirit.

The seance takes a turn for the worse, of course (if it didn't, there wouldn't be a movie, right?), and, through some solid acting and atmospheric cinematography, Kasparik gets a few good jumps in, along with a number of genuinely creepy moments. There are more scary images in this short film than in the entirety of some recent feature Hollywood movies.

Seance has played at a number of international film festivals, and has won some awards, and been spoken highly of by folks like Jack Ketchum and Tony Randel. The filmmakers have made the film available, for free viewing, at: http://vimeo.com/11784656

Check it out if you've got nineteen minutes.

Shit, check it out even if you don't.

Trilogy of Terror - dir. by Dan Curtis (1975)

2010-08-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark sparked my interest in made-for-TV horror from the 70's and 80's, so I moved on to Trilogy of Terror, possibly the most famous made-for-TV horror film released during the sub-genre's heyday. I'd caught the sequel, 1996's Trilogy of Terror II, which featured the Zuni fetish doll made popular by the first film, years ago, and enjoyed it, and honestly have no good explanation for having waited so long to see the original.

Both films were directed by Dan Curtis, and the first features three vignettes based on stories by Richard Matheson. Karen Black plays the lead (different characters) in each, in stories named after her characters: "Julie," "Millicent and Therese," and "Amelia". In the first, she plays a teacher who is drugged and blackmailed by a deranged student; in the second, she is a woman living in fear of her psychotic sister, a mental patient who scares off everyone from possible lovers to neighborhood children.

The final story is the most famous and features the aforementioned Zuni fetish doll, which was featured again in the third segment of Trilogy of Terror II, eleven years later. While not the first "living doll" story ever put to film (check out the Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" for a brilliant early entry in the sub-genre), this particularly vicious doll certainly had influence on later films from Child's Play (1987) to just about everything Full Moon released in the early nineties. The first two stories are good, but this last episode is the best and features an extremely creepy final shot.

Trilogy of Terror was an ABC Movie of the Week, and is one of the better anthology horror films out there, ranking with Creepshow (1982), Tales From the Darkside: the Movie (1990), and the more recent, and brilliant, Trick 'R Treat (2008). Originally the pilot episode to a proposed TV series, it stands on its own as a fine example of the best of this type of film.

Puppet Master: Axis of Evil - dir. by David DeCoteau (2010)

2010-08-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

As a big fan of the Full Moon direct-to-video horror movies of the early nineties, and the Puppet Master films in particular, it's disappointing to say that this newest Puppet Master outing is possibly the worst of the series. And that includes Retro Puppet Master (1999), which is pretty awful (I don't count Puppet Master: the Legacy [2003], and neither should you).

The man behind the camera this time is Full Moon regular David DeCoteau. He's done some decent movies--hell, he directed possibly the best of the Puppet Master films, number III (1991)--but he's also responsible for the aforementioned Retro Puppet Master and . . . well, check out his credits on imdb.com. DeCoteau biography makes no mention of it, but it appears he got his start directing porn under various pseudonyms, before moving into B (and probably C) horror, sci-fi, and comedies.

I haven't seen any of his porn titles, but will go out on a limb here and suggest that the acting in those movies couldn't possibly be worse than what's on display here, in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil. It's hard to say which is worse, the writing or the acting. They complement each other to horrible effect. It's bad, very bad. Even bad for a newer Full Moon movie.

Budget limitations can be blamed for a number of failings littering the Full Moon catalog from the last fifteen years, but there's no excuse for the kind of writing, the kind of dialogue, found in this incredibly boring film. It's shot OK, the anamorphic widescreen is nice, and Richard Band's theme is as awesome as it always is. But the story is ridiculous and unexciting, and there's just about nothing to like about any of the characters.

Our lead villain is a supposed Nazi, though he looks and sounds more like a punk-ass American kid. This, he explains, is his cover. See, he's infiltrating Chinatown in 1939 (which, according to the film, is the year the U.S. got into the war), trying to track down these puppets, you know, the puppets the Nazis were after in Puppet Master III, which, compared to this, looks like it belongs in the National Film Registry. The hero is an intense, righteous bastard, who hates himself for being crippled and thus unable to fight in the war, alongside his courageous (and equally annoying) older brother.

The sets are poorly lit, there are few establishing shots, almost no extras, and no real sense that we're actually in Chinatown. Music plays constantly on the soundtrack--as is often the case with newer Full Moon titles, displaying the director's lack of confidence in his material. There isn't much of note in the way of special fx. No animatronics--unless you count shots pulled from the original Puppet Master (1989). If the writing and acting were better, a decent Puppet Master still probably couldn't be made with the sort of budgets Full Moon works with these days.
Add to that, awful writing and acting, and shoddy direction, and there really isn't much to recommend. The opening credits sequence was kind of cool, I guess.

The movie ends with a cliffhanger--the words "to be continued" don't appear onscreen, but they may as well--and I have zero interest in what comes next.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - dir. by John Newland (1973)

2010-07-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Guillermo Del Toro-produced remake of Don't Be Afraid arrives in theaters early next year. Looking to go the same route as Eli Roth with The Last Exorcism (coming later this summer), Del Toro and director Troy Nixey shot their film with a PG-13 rating in mind, only to receive the more restrictive R.

"By agreement," Del Toro said at this summer's Comic Con, "we shot a movie with no sex, no gore or profanity, because we thought it was the way to avoid R. The MPAA came back and said, it didn't matter, that it would be rated R anyway, for 'pervasive scariness', which in a way is fantastic to hear."

It is fantastic to hear. Now, hopefully the studio won't try and cut out some of that "scariness" between now and January. It isn't Fox, so there's a good chance the film will go out as intended.

The movie this is based on, made for TV in the early seventies, is a damn good piece of horror that is helped by its simple premise and director John Newland's ability to create tension and suspense, while leaving his villains mostly in shadows for the film's duration.

Those villains are nasty little bastards too: small, almost puppet-size, humanoid monsters set free by a curious woman (Kim Darby) unable to ignore the warnings of her dead grandmother's housekeeper. He tells her to leave the fireplace alone, not to mess with the bricks which have sealed it ever since her grandfather's death. Pretty soon, she's seeing the little monsters all over the house, but only in brief glimpses. She tries to tell her husband (Jim Hutton), who naturally doesn't believe her, and the monsters continue tormenting her, before mounting their big attack.

TV movies got their start in the seventies, and were fairly popular at the time (programs like the "ABC Movie of the Week," which was before my time). Some are rather good--I'm thinking Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing (1981) and Frank De Felitta's Dark Night of the Scarecrow (also 1981). And then there are some quality Stephen King miniseries as well, later on (It [1990], The Tommyknockers [1993]). I'd rank Don't Be Afraid of the Dark up there with some of the best in the horror made-for-TV genre, and I think, with Guillermo Del Toro producing, we have a pretty scary remake to look forward to next January.

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996)

2010-07-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

I’ll start this by saying that I am aware that Clive Barker is not strictly a horror author. I’m sure it’s been somewhat frustrating to him over his career to have carried this label years after writing his last true piece of horror fiction, Cabal, in 1988 (a case could be made, however, for Cold Heart Canyon [2001] or Mister B. Gone [2008], being horror). But his style of fantasy, even his children’s novels such The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (2002 and 2004), are so dark, and contain so many elements of horror fiction, that it isn’t difficult to see why he still gets pegged as a horror author. And, I’m sure his involvement in mainstream horror film series (Hellraiser, Candyman) helped contribute as well.

Anyway, I’m now going to discuss his 1996 novel, Sacrament, which is a fantasy, a parable of sorts, and is not a horror novel, but does, as I said above, contain plenty of horror content, like his other fantasy novels, and thus is suitable for discussion on this blog.

The scope of this novel is not nearly as large as some of his other works. A recurring theme of Barker’s stories is that of a world hidden within our own world; or a doorway from our world leading into another. In Imajica (1991), the heroes of the story travel through Four Dominions, other planes of existence linked to Earth, the Fifth Dominion; the characters in The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994) travel across a mystical dream sea known as Quiddity, to explore the unknown areas lying on the other side. Sacrament, on the other hand, involves a man, Will Rabjohns’, journey across the Arctic, through his hometown in England, and to his new residence in San Francisco. The vivid and fantastic descriptions this time around are focused not on otherworldy places, but right here in our own fantastical world.

One thing Barker does so well in this book is show an enormous appreciation of nature and our planet in general. It isn’t a preachy story, but one doesn’t have to look hard to find an environmental message of sorts. Rabjohns has made a career as a photographer snapping pictures of wildlife in its last throes, species on the verge of extinction. When a polar bear knocks him into a coma, he is taken back through his memories to his childhood, when he came into contact with two bizarre, powerful beings disguised as humans, Steep and Rosa. He finds that it was Steep who, when he was a child, gave him his first taste of death and provided him with his lifelong interest in the end of life, particularly with the extinction of entire species.

Will Rabjohns is the first gay lead in a Clive Barker novel, and sections of the book deal with Rabjohns’ and his friends’ coping with, and understanding of, “the plague,” Barker’s word for AIDS (he also referred to the disease by this name, and this name alone, in Imajica). Indeed there are parallels drawn between the AIDS epidemic, and also the gay lifestyle, and Rabjohns’ and Steep’s respective places in the world. Steep is a man who has lived for hundreds of years and is continuously vexed by the fact that he does not know what he is or where he came from; his entire life is an attempt to reconcile this, to hopefully figure out what he is. He has transformed Rabjohns, in a way, or rather, set his life on a course he otherwise wouldn’t have intended; and because of this, Rabjohns has doubts and questions about his career and motivations. But his identity, who he is as a person, as a gay man and artist, are never unclear to him. His security in himself is in sharp contrast to the murderous Steep, who can never be fully satisfied due to his lack of understanding of himself.

Like Barker’s other novels intended for adults, Sacrament contains some fairly bizarre violent and sexual content, mixed in with scenes of great beauty and some philosophy. He’s stated that this is his lowest-selling novel (I don’t know if that’s still the case). Too bad, because it’s an excellent story, told through flashbacks, with a great pace, startling moments of horror, and is certainly worth reading for fans of dark fantasy, fantastique, fables, or however you’d like to call it.

Splice - dir. by Vincenzo Natali (2009)

2010-06-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

It's somewhat hard to believe a studio executive saw the film Splice (2009) and thought it would make a good wide-release film, a possible summer-alternative money-maker. Don't get me wrong--the movie is good; damn good. It's just . . . well, a weird sci-fi horror movie, featuring adults in all major roles, that doesn't have a necessarily happy ending, and generally doesn't have much of anything that you'd normally think would appeal to a major studio.

So, thank you to Warner Bros for distributing this crazy film, and more importantly, Joel Silver and Dark Castle Productions, for picking it up after its festival premier last year. Dark Castle has had a weird history, starting their company off with the releases of House On Haunted Hill (1999) and Thirteen Ghosts (2001), both decent remakes of William Castle films. After that, it gets a little sketchy, with nonsense like Ghost Ship (2002), Ninja Assassin (2009), with some good ones (last year's The Orphan was quite good and went basically unnoticed) here and there.

Splice is like nothing I've seen from the company yet (I can't comment on it in relation to the rest of director Vincenzo Natali's ouvre, as I have not yet seen any of his previous films), combining realistic (seeming) science fiction with some worthwhile questions of morality--and how's this? Zero fake scares or jumps. When's the last time you went to see a horror film and there wasn't a single moment wherein someone is startled by a cat, their friend, an ice machine turning on, etc; or there weren't at least seven or eight soundtrack shrieks, in order to get a cheap jump from the audience?

As much as I liked this year's The Wolfman, the first half contained more silly soundtrack jumps than anything I've ever seen. It's nice when you know the author of your horror entertainment is aware of the difference between a genuinely scary moment and a gimmick used to cause someone to jump in their seat.

I think bypassing that kinda thing, which doesn't always hurt a movie but can sometimes be fairly annoying, Splice actually creates a pretty believable atmosphere. It isn't jokey sci-fi, but it isn't confusing hard sci-fi, and it doesn't get hung up on overexplaining anything, which is kind of a feat considering the gene-splicing subject matter.

And overexplaining is also something critics should be wary of when reviewing a film of this type. And by that I mean one that contains seriously strange plot developments in the second half, developments that aren't even hinted at in the trailer.

It really isn't fair to say much more about the film's plot than what you see in that two-minute preview. Two scientists, romantically involved, do some off-the-record research on gene splicing and end up creating a creature that is part human, part animal, and growing quickly.
I've seen some comments online from folks who got a Species (1996) vibe from the trailer. It's not Species, though; it's nothing like that fun, if silly, action-sci-fi-erotic-thriller mash-up. But it is very, very good, and probably not too similar to anything you've seen before.

Cropsey - dir. by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman (2009)

2010-06-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

Cropsey was a maniac, an escaped patient of a mental institution, a bogeyman who scared children sitting around campfires up and down the Hudson Valley of New York state. Like all folklore, no matter how fantastic, the Cropsey legend arises from real fear and guilt, from a dark element of the culture that is so pervasive it shows up in the subconscious of the most innocent and uneducated members of society. The American mental health system throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century was a disgraceful network of overcrowded, understaffed institutions with some of the largest, most disfunctional hospitals located on Staten Island and Long Island. Enter Geraldo Rivera and his crusade to make a change (and get famous).

In their 2009 documentary film Cropsey Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman explore the real life Cropsey tale of a Staten Island derelict, Andre Rand, accused of kidnapping and murdering at least five children on the island in the 70s and 80s. Most famously Rand was convicted of the murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year-old with Down syndrome. The directors manage to weave an intricate narrative out of a very cloudy, sensitive story, using newsreel footage, interviews with Staten Islanders involved with the case, and an eerie NYPD missing persons detective who seems to think the serial disappearances are all the work of Satanists.

It’s hard to create horror out of real life, especially in the age of hyper-saturated media, but the lore of Staten Island and the testimonies of the families and community members affected by these crimes helps to deepen the mystery surrounding Rand’s guilt or innocence, while at the same time revealing a lynch mob mentality in a society unwilling to admit its own culpability in creating a monster. In the end, the question is not whether Rand murdered these children because he felt they were better off dead than at the disposal of a cruel and destructive mental health system, or if a group of Satanists sacrificed them for some greater glory. The question is how and why we created these guilty monsters and scapegoats. How can we dump our trash and our human refuse on the Staten Islands of the world and still be surprised when out of the filth arise such demons?

Check out the film's website here.

Here's some more info about the Cropsey legend.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978)

2010-06-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

I was a little disappointed with the police procedural fixation of Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen from the get-go, even when it was relatively clean and somewhat evocative of the urban landscape in the earlier chapters of the novel. The setting and time period, New York City in the 1970s, could play host to an awesome story of mass hysteria, urban decay, and perhaps hedonism, not to mention werewolves, the way Spike Lee manages in Summer of Sam, with a real life serial killer. I can't think of a novel, offhand, that achieves this sort of 70s paranoia and delirium, but I'm sure they're out there. It seemed that Strieber completely forgot about his city after the cops were killed in the auto pound in the first section of the book. We get a decent description of the desolation in the Bronx, and a few upper Manhattan scenes (the fountain and the museum) that are bland and generic. The love triangle bit was useless and made the two cops much less interesting. I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Dick, our main character’s husband. He seems like a misunderstood guy who has been chewed up by the system, though Strieber pulls the heartstrings a bit too heavily when he has Dick spend the extorted money on taking care of his sick father. Come on. I could imagine someone, someone who wears Druid garb at conventions, reading this novel as a defense of the Wolfen. They are nobler beasts than we. They only kill the sick, old and weak. They live in harmony with their ecosystem. That’s baloney and not supported by the text (though knowing a bit about Strieber’s wacko ideas, he may have been aiming in that direction).

Strieber also seemed a little proud of himself concerning the idea about vampires being normal humans who leach off of the Wolfen. He made the guy at the Natural History Museum a little too credulous. All it took to convince him of the existence of sapient wolf-beings was an old etching in a silly book.

There is a 1981 film starring Albert Finney very loosely based on this novel, and I’d definitely recommend the film over the book in this case.

You can learn a bit more about Strieber's latest obsessions here.

The Beast Within - Dir. by Philippe Mora (1982)

2010-05-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

. . . and here's a not-so-great adaptation of that fun, scary novel. B-film director Philippe Mora (The Howling II and III [1985 and 1987, disrespectfully]) starts out well enough, with Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch driving through a suitably creepy wooded area. She is attacked by an unseen, but clearly non-human, entity, and when the scene fades out and the words "seventeen years later" appear on-screen, it's a good bet the teenager in the next shot wasn't fathered by Ronny Cox.

Ronny Cox gets the job done. He's like Steve Buscemi or Michael Moriarty, always fun to watch, no matter the quality of the film. Bibi Besch is all right, does what she's supposed to, and Paul Celemens, the actor who plays their afflicted son, well . . . he isn't given an awful lot to work with, so maybe that's why his character comes off as somewhat flat. The inner torment this guy experiences in the book only comes across about halfway in this film version.

Not that the movie has much of anything to do with the novel, aside from the very basic premise. The book was adapted by Tom Holland, who wrote several screenplays, including this one (and Psycho II [1983]) before his directing debut, the magnificent Fright Night (1985)--which, by the way, is one of the latest horror films of the 80's to be lined up for an unnecessary remake. Holland is a good writer, but this adaptation is weak. The story consists of some nonsense about a dead man coming to life through Ronny Cox's poor son, and what they come up with isn't all that interesting. There are no werewolves to speak of, psychological or physical, but strangely, the filmmakers do come up with a fairly interesting monster towards the end, one that is aided by some pretty gnarly early 80's fx, and that is nothing like a wolf.

I'm not the kind of person who cares at all if a film adaptation stays close to the source material, or if it gives it a big middle finger--but this one's confusing. See, just as the film is wrapping up, the lead characters come out with some exposition that goes right back to Edward Levy's original novel--taking some of the most interesting aspects of that story, the first few chapters, and jamming them into the end of this one.

It's a somewhat interesting move, but is completely botched. For my money, I can't figure any good reason for keeping that information until the conclusion of the film, and wasting all this time unravelling a truly uninteresting mystery. And by the time the true source of the boy's affliction is revealed in the film's final minutes, I just didn't care.

It isn't bad overall, just very flawed. Worth seeing for Tom Holland fans--and with this guy's reasonably impressive body of work (dir. Child's Play [1988], The Langoliers [1995]), I'm sure they're out there.

The Beast Within by Edward Levy (1981)

2010-05-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

The three acts of Edward Levy’s 1981 novel, The Beast Within are well-defined and each serves a distinct flavor of horror to the reader. In the first section, Levy creates a sense of gothic rural isolationism in the deep south of the 1930s, much akin to Cormac McCarthy’s early Appalachian novels. The second section drifts into a working class nightmare of misfortune that struck me as more Stephen King’s New England of the 1970s than the 1940s rural south Levy means it to be. Finally, the third act brings us into the 1950s, where the heart of this story of lycanthropy spreads open in a glossy and prosperous America innocent of the sins of the body.

Our werewolf, who is created in the first act by a religious zealot who locks him in a basement for over a decade and feeds him human flesh, makes this novel a bit of a science fiction experiment, as well as a horror novel. What if how we treat each other altered our genes? What if we passed down acquired tastes and predilections to our children? Michael, the offspring of this werewolf raping a woman (though this remains unknown to the woman and her husband) struggles against the demons of his genetic makeup. As a teenager he sees flesh all around him, and he is aroused violently and sexually by it.

There's a certain equation here of sexual freedom with violence and loss of control. The novel can be understood as an indictment of civilization, but it could easily be flipped on its head and interpreted as a conservative horror story the same way Friday the 13th or other 1980s slasher films seem to be telling us that the wicked, and more importantly the wicked children, will be punished for their licentiousness.

Levy’s prose is clean and unadorned, with the welcome exception of some of his descriptions of his rural southern landscape, making The Beast Within an entertaining modern werewolf tale.

The Vanishing (1988) - Dir. by George Sluizer The Vanishing (1993) - Dir. by George Sluizer

2010-04-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

If you come across a copy of a movie called The Vanishing, make sure it doesn’t have the names Jeff Bridges, Keifer Sutherland, or Sandra Bullock anywhere near the title. Not that these actors, are bad—I like them all quite a lot, particularly Sutherland—but I can’t recommend the version of this film in which they star.

That one was made in 1993, with the same title, story, and director as the original Dutch production. As far as acting goes, the stars of the American remake are more than up to the task; and technically, the film is well-made. The only difference—or anyway, the one glaring, enormous difference—is the ending. In George Sluizer’s original production, the ending is dark, bleak, and makes sense. The ending of his remake is silly, unrealistic, and disappointing.

I don’t think I felt that way when I saw the remake of The Vanishing (the first version I saw) in . . . oh, I don’t know, ninety-ninety-something . . . but that probably had a lot to do with my teenage naivete and the fact that the ninety minutes leading up to the ending are completely engrossing, top-notch suspense material.

In both versions, a man and woman are on a cross-country trip and stop at a gas station off the highway. She goes in to buy some things, and he never sees her again. This begins a three-year-long quest to find the missing woman. Simultaneously we follow the man who likely kidnapped her. Somehow the fact of knowing his identity early on does not detract from the film’s suspense.

The ending of Sluizer’s original film will disturb the viewer. Indeed, I put on something very light-hearted and easily digested, when the film had finished, as I did not want this to be the last thing I saw before shutting my eyes for the night.

The American version will likely leave an unsuspecting viewer feeling like they’ve just watched a well-made American thriller. They might not even notice how cheap the ending is.

The Collector - Dir. by William Wyler (1965)

2010-03-25T09:45:00.001-07:00

William Wyler supposedly turned down The Sound of Music in order to direct this creepy little thriller. Probably not a great career decision, though one can see why he might have been attracted to this small-scale, two-person story about a demented man who kidnaps the woman he desires, in a misguided attempt at making her fall for him.

I’m far from an expert on Wyler’s films, but from what I’ve seen, The Collector has more in common stylistically with The Children’s Hour (1961) and the claustrophobic Desperate Hours (1955) than his higher-budgeted films like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946). The basic plot alone might remind one of horror films which came later (Misery [1990], Captivity [2007]), and so for that reason, the story may seem too familiar. But the performances and Wyler’s masterful atmosphere draw the viewer in, and while the film goes on perhaps ten, fifteen minutes too long, the tension is solid, and builds, from the beginning to the end.

I also found myself quite surprised by the ending—one which, if the film had been made a few years earlier—wouldn’t have been allowed, I’m sure. While not strictly a horror film, The Collector has its share of creepy moments, along with a perfectly bizarre villain played by Terence Stamp.

As with films studying similar themes, the dynamic between captor and prisoner is strange and unsettling—but documented in real-life cases. This movie is worth checking out; the suspense slowly builds to an expected, satisfying conclusion.

The Nightwalker by Thomas Tessier (1979)

2010-03-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

Today's post will take the form of a discussion. We hope you enjoy.

Mark: OK, starting things off here . . .

Let me ask you, did you find the protagonist in The Nightwalker to be at all likeable? Because I think this is one thing that kept me from enjoying this book more--although I did like it.

When he first starts changing and hurting random people, he seems conflicted and upset about it, but there were times that he really just sorta rolled with it and overall came off as kind of a bastard. But then, I found that somewhat intriguing at the same time. I guess I still haven't made up my mind how I feel about this character. I did sometimes wish there was more of a protagonist, someone else to follow besides this guy exclusively.

So, did he actually change into a wolf or not? It's left fairly open, just like in Werewolf of Paris. I don't know if I like that or not--though I do like the descriptions, the brief descriptions, we get when he confronts a few of the folks towards the end, the stuff about his hands being gnarled and his walking strange. I don't feel that he turned into an actual huge hairy beast, though.

Michael: To answer your first question - no, I didn't find Bobby Ives especially likeable. I also found it striking that he did not express any sort of remorse for the senseless slayings of the people he was closest to. Especially, the first girl, Annie, who seems to be really quite normal and healthy. He doesn't dwell too long on whether he murdered her, and he doesn't express any real emotion, any sense of missing her. But I think Tessier tries to explain this with one of the Vietnam stories that Ives tells, the one where he kills the prostitute who has just impaled a soldier. I think we're supposed to understand that Bobby has been really desensitized to this type of violence. So, while Ives is not likeable, I think he is, at least, interesting and complex.

I liked the fact that Tessier didn't resort to too many overt werewolf cliches. We get the sense of Ives's metamorphosis, the way he turns into a lethal pretador. I don't want to see a huge hairy beast in this setting. I think it would take away from the reality of the text.

On that note, I'd like to bring up Miss Tanith. I was really worried when Ives started looking for a psychic to tell him what the hell was going on. This is a device that is used in too many horror novels. I don't want a hokey gypsy psychic to be the portal to the realm of the supernatural. But I thought Tessier handled this really well. Miss Tanith is very subtle in her reading of Ives's problem. She doesn't spout any mystical mumbo jumbo, just does her job like a professional. She helps Ives in a practical way, by locking him in the room and adjusting his diet and lifestyle. It would have totally ruined the novel for me if she did some sort of exorcism or other ritual.

Mark: Oh, I definitely agree on that count. Miss Tanith was very well-done. Not overused, and staying away from genre cliches as much as possible. I enjoyed the bit with Ives locked in the room, and also found it interesting that he didn't kill her at the end.

I liked this book, and I think Tessier could be an author worth checking out. The novella that came with edition I got was very good; I actually enjoyed it a little more than Nightwalker.

Anyway, I liked this book for the most part. The "stalking" scenes were particularly excited; he has a talent for writing action/suspense scenes.

Michael: Another thing I thought was really interesting was how Tessier brought the whole punk culture into the ending, after Ives meets Angel. He doesn't glamorize it or dismiss it as a disposal youth movement. I think he gives Ives exactly the right reaction at the basement punk show. This guy is more oriented to the Allman Brothers than punk rock, but he's got anger inside of him, so something about the aggression and sheer power of the music and the manic singer really gets to him. You don't get many believable descriptions of punk shows in fiction.

However, I think Tessier could have spent a lot more time on creating a rich and detailed portrait of London. I'm thinking he cut this book down to its barest bones, taking out anything that seemed unnecessary. But I would have loved to see more of Ives running around the city, getting into his head a bit more about how he feels about people. Being a Vietnam vet he's probably got some interesting views on everyday life, on the silly mundane things people do in a peaceful city. I'm thinking of some of those scenes in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is just looking at people. I want Ives to look at people more, to be more introspective and express some of his thoughts.

Mark: Yeah, the section with the punk shows was done very well. I liked that character, Angel. I kind of wish there was a bit more of her in the story.

Michael: Another thing I'd like to discuss, is Ives eating habits. I know this may seem like a strange line of criticism for a book (I'll call it dietism), but I think it's important. Ives eats nothing but honey and ginseng supplements and a vitamin here or there, and I think maybe he eats a hamburger soon after Annie dies.

I was really wondering what Tessier was getting at with this. I would have completely let it go if Ives only ate his honey and ginseng once or twice, but it comes up in almost every chapter. It reminded me a bit of this theme that runs through Marc Brandel's The Hand where the main character's wife gets into all this silly dieting and meditation to try to deal with the problems of her marriage, instead of confronting the real problem. Maybe Ives is trying to suppress his appetite for flesh by eating such a strange, bird-like diet. But I think in reality it probably serves to make him even more blood thirsty. I know I'd be ready to eat some joggers if I only ate honey all day long.

Mark: Yeah, that was very odd, and you're right, never fully explained. I immediately thought of a bear, how you figure bears like honey, but never gave it much consideration beyond that. It just seemed kind of, I don't know, animal-like?

Michael: Yeah. Maybe he was a werebear, not a werewolf. Werebear doesn't sound very scary though. It, in fact, sounds less scary than a plain old bear.

Another thing that's pretty striking in this novel is Tessier use of trashy sex descriptions, bordering on erotica, especially in some of the first scenes with Angel. Some of this was just a little too over the top for me. Not that any of it was too explicit, but I just thought that it came out of nowhere. Ives seemed like a normally sexually repressed dude who wouldn't have the nerve to screw with a woman the way he does with Angel. Is this the werewolf coming out? If so, it's an interesting concept. I don't know too many werewolf stories where the monster sexually ravishes his victims. Maybe it's a part of the legend that is generally neglected. Can you think of any films or books in which the werewolf is a sexual predator, as a well a predator predator?

Mark: Werebear may not sound that scary, but it DOES sound awesome.

The Howling. I don't recall exactly how the book differs from the movie, but I believe this would be one case.

Also, even though not technically a werewolf, when Dracula is in beast form and sexually assaults . . . Mina? Lucy? I can't remember which it is.

Check out this overview of Tessier's career.

Triangle - Dir. by Christopher Smith (2009) Dead Snow - Dir. by Tommy Wirkola (2009)

2010-03-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

Here are two solid horror films from overseas. Both came out last year, neither of course receiving much of a release by their distributors, but now both widely available on DVD and the Internet.

The artwork I saw for Triangle featured a killer wearing a bag over the head, eyeholes poked out, and immediately reminded me of Strangers (2007). Aside from that small detail, however, this movie shares no similarities with that film. Some fun-loving adventurers, including a woman (Melissa George) who’s just had a frightening and unexplained experience with her autistic child, set off on a boat for an afternoon voyage. They’re bowled over by a sudden storm, and find themselves capsized and without help. Seemingly out of nowhere (perhaps out of the mist, out of the fog) appears a cruiser. The scared group boards the cruiser, and that’s when the really weird shit starts happening.

It’d be pointless for me to try and describe what occurs next without attempting to explain the entire film and thus, give away the ending. Let me just say that this movie appears, from the beginning, to be one of those stories that includes some sort of supernatural element, and could possibly lead to a disappointing twist—one of those deals that has such a great setup, you wonder how they could possibly pull off a satisfying finish. I’m thinking Identity (2003), that kind of awful ending, where the surprise, the twist, is nothing more than a cheat that negates everything the viewer has previously seen. (If I wanted to open myself up for taking some real shit, I’d say that I felt similarly about the much-beloved The Usual Suspects [1995].)

Triangle’s ending makes sense of everything that came before, and ties into the movie’s theme, hinted at towards the beginning, with great effect.

A much different film, this one from Norway, Dead Snow I’ve seen described as a horror-comedy. The comedy—which one can naturally imagine, based on the description: Nazi zombies attack vacationers in the woods, during winter—comes a bit late in the film, after roughly a half-hour of creepy, somewhat violent moments. I didn’t welcome it.

The comedy in Dead Snow isn’t like the outrageous humor of Shaun of the Dead (2006) or what one would normally expect from an American horror-comedy show. Naturally, things are going to be a bit different coming from that part of the globe, but for me, the humorous moments simply stuck out from the film and took away from the spooky atmosphere established in the opening.

There are some extremely effective scenes here and there, however, and overall, the film is suspenseful and enjoyable. I grew a bit tired with the last half hour’s attack scenes, running scenes, shooting scenes, etc., but there’s a lot to admire in what leads up to that final showdown between the campers and the undead Nazis.

Check out this interview with Christopher Smith, director of Triangle.

Check out this interview with Tommy Wirkola, director of Dead Snow.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

2010-03-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s 1981 nonfiction examination of horror fiction in literature, film, television and radio, he names Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the prototypical werewolf tale. Whereas his choices for the other two major horror formulas are uncontroversial – Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein for The Thing Without a Name, and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula for the vampire – Strange Case seems an odd pick for the piece that set the mold for all future werewolf stories, considering that we don’t find a typical werewolf in the novella at all. And it’s not as if Stevenson doesn’t have predecessors who used a more recognizable werewolf, an honest-to-god lycanthrope, in their fiction. Going back all the way to Petronius’s Satyricon from the late first century CE, we see evidence of folk tales involving men who morph into humanoid wolves and terrorize the countryside. These figures show up in a few medieval texts, but don’t become a staple of horror literature until the mid-nineteenth century with George W.M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Werewolf (1848), Alexander Dumas’s The Wolf-Leader (1857), and Erckmann-Chatrian’s story “The Man Wolf” (1859), which all contributed to the werewolf legend’s decidedly middle European feel. Really the cliché Hollywood werewolf was pretty much set in stone at this point. Just substitute foggy English moors for a stormy Black Forest and you’ve got a very recognizable piece of horror fiction. Even in Wagner the Werewolf our villain is unwillingly terrifying young women.

Now, I don’t know if I agree with King’s choice of Strange Case as the prototypical werewolf story, but I do agree with skipping over Wagner for this honor. Though Wagner might express all the necessary tropes of a werewolf story, it is practically unreadable. Strange Case remains an entertaining, and evocative exploration of the irresistible lure of the lowly and vile, and while Mr Hyde doesn’t howl at the moon, Strange Case certainly exhibits the key traits of a werewolf tale long before this archetype was codified. Dr Jekyll is a handsome, successful, almost overly optimistic and jovial character, who enjoys the peaceful company of his friends. He shows himself to be preternaturally good. So when he falls from grace, when he dabbles too far into quack science, the contrast with his alter-ego, his “werewolf” of sorts, is made all the more terrifying. This contrast must be present for a truly successful werewolf tale. It’s what separates the vampire from the werewolf, and makes the latter a much more introspective horror story, where the reader puts him or herself in the villain’s shoes. Where Strange Case diverges from the ideal werewolf tale, is that Jekyll, when transformed into Mr Hyde, is not drawn specifically to the people closest to him, he never attacks his friends or family. However, this might be explained by Jekyll’s self-imposed isolation, which plays a very important role in the novella. In this respect, I’d propose Guy Endore’s 1933 masterpiece, Werewolf of Paris, as the purest werewolf tale, but we’ll leave that discussion to a future post.

The power of Stevenson’s most popular piece of horror fiction lies with his understanding of two extremely important aspects of genre storytelling, or for that matter storytelling of any kind. You must have a compelling story to tell, of course, but without strong and resonant settings and interesting, believable perspectives, any form of fiction falls flat. Too many horror writers sacrifice these two elements for the gimmicks of gore, plot twists and a preoccupation with trends in the genre. In Strange Case, Stevenson created a dark and foggy London, one that traces its literary lineage directly through William Blake. It’s striking that Blake could conjure such a rich picture of a place in sixteen lines (“London” 1797), something many novelists can’t do in 100,000 words. Stevenson manages, however, to create a brutal, unforgiving picture of London with its decaying alleys and mansions. Everything is imbued, here, with a sense of dissolution and death. Utterson and all his friends, including Jekyll, seem on the brink of oblivion, seem to be about to disappear into their gray surroundings.

Another important aspect of Strange Case, which Stevenson skillfully employs, is perspective. So many contemporary novelists confine themselves to a bland third person omniscience, or lifeless first person, in a futile and counteractive attempt to make their fiction “objective”. What Stevenson understood, and what I think all great novelists understand, is that there is no such thing as an “objective” narrative. Even something as objective as a movie camera is manipulated in such a way to provide a unique, subjective perspective to the audience. Stevenson uses many different perspectives to reveal a tale of decay and distrust, in a powerful way that could never be achieved through a straight third person narration. Utterson, a close friend of Jekyll, unfolds the action for us, and it is his compassion for Jekyll that makes his transformation into Mr Hyde all the more terrifying. We respect Jekyll because Utterson does, and we feel revulsion towards Hyde because Utterson does. The final passage of the novella is presented as Jekyll’s own words from a letter he’s written accounting for all the strange events surrounding him. This confession is a riveting psychological portrait and brings yet another fully formed perspective to add a depth to Strange Case that is remarkable for such a short book.

If you’ve only experienced the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through adaptations, do yourself a favor and read the original.

Check out this free audio book of Strange Case at LibriVox.

We All Scream For Ice Cream - Dir. by Tom Holland (2007)

2010-02-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

The tropes of We All Scream For Ice Cream, Tom Holland’s installment in the Masters of Horror series, are well-worn. We’ve got the communal guilt and childhood temptation, not to mention the creepy clown, of Stephen King’s It and the unwieldy power of children, straight out of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos, the novel Wolf Rilla used as the basis for his brilliant 1960 film, Village of the Damned. But here Holland, director of Fright Night and Child’s Play imbues his subject with enough creepy camp and nostalgia to turn a fresh twist on that old adage that you can’t go home again.

Adapted from John Ferris’s short story, We All Scream For Ice Cream follows the mysterious disappearances of a group of middle aged men, once known as the West End Bunch, who are now paying for a horrible crime they committed when they were very young. Buster, a dim-witted clown, who sells Cheery Time ice cream to the town’s children, has returned from the dead to exact vengeance on the West End Bunch, and he’s using Cheery Time ice cream and the appetites of children to do it.

Honestly, Holland’s job making Buster into a terrifying lure of temptation for the West End Bunch’s children is no accomplishment. Clown’s are scary, plain and simple, but the delight that modest treats like ice cream brought to an American suburban childhood through the second half of the 20th century, is easily manipulated and combined with a child’s resentment for his or her parents into a guilt-ridden paranoid trip through the past.

The real terror comes not from the children who wield the power to destroy their parents, but the ghost of Buster, who represents the regret we all feel for our own childhood indiscretions. The death Buster brings is almost a sweet release for Big Joe, who as a kid didn’t even directly participate in the crime against Buster, but who still feels wracked with guilt. Do we submit to our painful memories like Big Joe, or fight back?

Since Tom Holland’s at the helm here, all this deep stuff is delivered with a spoonful of schlock and kitsch, including a righteously redneck old bully flexing his muscles in a barrel full of suds, and plenty of lukewarm sexual tensions between the protagonist and his wife. Still, I’d recommend this for fans of Tales From the Crypt, both the HBO series and the old EC comics, for its great ironic imagery and fun morbid twists.

William Forsythe delivers an awkward but arresting performance as Buster, a mentally retarded clown, who has an endearing and annoying shtick, overshadowing most of the other bland actors in this low budget production. But when the lives of your characters are so expendable, in such a short period of time, you don’t want to make your audience fall in the love with them. So, Buster’s death is, rightly, the only one here that makes an impact, the rest just melt into oblivion and out of our minds.

Check out this interview with director Tom Holland.

Homicidal - Dir. by William Castle (1961)

2010-02-23T14:47:00.000-08:00

William Castle, sometimes thought of as a low-budget Alfred Hitchcock, went to great lengths to give audiences in the fifties and sixties a reason to get excited about going to the movies. Whether this involved outfitting theater seats to vibrate (as he did for The Tingler) or issuing life insurance guarantees in case one were to “die of fright” during screenings of his film Macabre.

Indeed, the fifties, with the advent of 3-D (albeit bad 3-D), and CinemaScope, provided a number of things people hadn’t seen before. It’s hard to imagine a more energetic, crafty showman than Mr. Castle, who employed all sorts of gimmicks to get people in the theater.

His 1961 Psycho-inspired, rarely discussed film, Homicidal, entertains a subject matter somewhat more serious and less fantastical than those of his previous successes (The House on Haunted Hill, Thirteen Ghosts, etc.), and is virtually gimmick-free, until the end.

The gimmick Castle used this time around for this otherwise “serious” film is a warning delivered via voice over approximately forty-five seconds from the climax, in which the theater audience is told that anyone “too scared to see the end of the picture” may get up and leave. The voice then, with the aid of a clock superimposed over the paused scene, lets the audience know they have twenty-five . . . fifteen . . . seconds to leave.

It is said that when one percent of theater attendees actually did request a refund, Castle became angered and set up a “Coward’s Corner,” along with yellow footprints leading out of the theater, in order to shame those who dared not stay for the ending. It is also said that Castle may have had “plants” in some audiences, in order to add to the spectacle, give the gimmick some feeling of legitimacy. I can’t help wondering how effective, how feared, and how jokingly, audiences took some of these Castle tricks.

There are at least two scenes, and many elements, of Homicidal which will remind the viewer of the far superior Psycho; the film’s influence is obvious from beginning to end. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, though. Castle manages to create some genuine tension and excitement, and even a few scary moments (that kid at the very beginning—tell me somewhere on this planet there’s another kid that creepy-looking).

I found this one on Netflix’s Instant View. A good choice if you’ve seen Psycho a million times and wouldn’t mind something relatively derivative but fun.

Check out this review of the 2007 documentary film Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.

The House of the Devil - Dir. by Ti West (2009) and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane - Dir. by Jonathan Levine (2006)

2010-02-15T12:32:00.001-08:00

With some quick online investigation, I've learned that while Jonathan Levine's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane received a theatrical release in the UK roughly two years ago, an American release has not been scheduled. It seems certain the few horror fans that once held their breath for this film are no longer doing so--and the real hardcore folks out there have already figured a way to view a copy of this movie. Mandy Lane was finished in 2006, played a number of festivals, horror and otherwise, was set for release by the Weinstein Company, and was subsequently sold, after the Weinsteins saw their horror-fest Grindhouse take a beating at the box office. The company it was sold to either couldn't, or wouldn't, give it a proper release, and now it is available overseas on DVD but still hasn't made its way to its country of origin.

And that's too bad, because, while not exactly a great film, Mandy Lane is intriguing and very stylish, with a strong early 80's vibe. It shares that retro style with the other film I'd like to talk about here, The House of the Devil. This film, a true "auteur project" by filmmaker Ti West (writer, director, editor), is very obviously inspired by the haunted house and satanic shock films of the 70's and 80's. Such an effort went into making the film appear older than it is (2009), that 16mm film was employed, the setting is 1983, and attention to detail in this regard is very high. Devil fared a bit better than Mandy Lane, receiving a limited theatrical release in the States, as well as being available through video-on-demand (this, incidentally, is how I came to view the film, which was made available for rent via the XBox). It received a DVD/Blu-Ray release this past month.

Neither of these films are spoofs of their subjects, and there is no winking at the audience. Actually, I don't think there's a single laugh between the two movies. They each take their subject matter seriously, and, particularly in the case of Devil, seem to be made in their respective styles for no reason other than the tastes of the directors. I appreciate the long shots in these films, the fact that the filmmakers are confident in their actors and their story, so that they don't feel the need to cut every two seconds and distract the viewer with fancy camera moves, like so many horror films do these days.

Amber Heard is someone to look out for here. Her character, Mandy Lane, is quiet, often passing scenes with little or no dialogue, and yet she's endlessly intriguing. I had ideas where the story was headed, but could never be sure of either her motives or the direction of the story. Likewise with House of the Devil, which one could safely place next to Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant on the horror shelf.

I haven't seen any of Ti West's other films, though his resume looks promising, and I'm happy to see that he's the director, writer, and editor on most of his projects. Although I couldn't help but cringe when I saw his name listed under the direct-to-DVD sequel to Cabin Fever. But never mind that--further investigation reveals that West hated that project and even attempted to have his name withdrawn from the credits. Good for him. This guy seems smart. I don't know how he got involved with a Cabin Fever 2, but I'm confidant he's still got more good movies to make.

Jonathan Levine directed the enjoyable pot-themed comedy-drama The Wackness a couple years ago, and has two more coming up this year.

Check out this Ti West interview.

Here's another interview with Mandy Lane writer Jacob Forman.

The October Country by Ray Bradbury - (1943)

2010-02-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

This collection of early short stories is startlingly different from anything else I've read by Bradbury, though some of the stories share a bit of the small town sentimentality of Dandelion Wine. None of these tales are truly classics, but the sensibility and the subtle horror that Bradbury brings to each of the many stories here, shows that even from a young age (for a writer) Bradbury's imagination was quite fertile and capable of quite elegant leaps. Many of the conceits in these horror tales have been done to death since the writing of these stories in the 40s and 50s, so I'm sure the impact would have been considerably more powerful at the time. These are great precursors to Stephen King's short stories and should be read by any true horror fan.

In the very first sentence of "The Dwarf" Bradbury shows that he is a master of the perfectly chosen detail, when he points out "the colored lights over the wooden emptiness" of the boardwalk. The story, a sort of mirrored infinite reality that turns everyone into what they fear they are deep down inside, asks the question about dwarves and children that we are thinking. Are they out to kill us? Yes, probably.

In "The Next In Line" a perfect, clean dialogue driven Hitchcock tale of paranoia in an exotic, scary, Mexico without American magazines, Bradbury draws parallels between mummies and enchiladas in a subtle, stomach turning way, and shows Marie's fear in a creeping, claustrophobic crescendo. Joseph is an unfeeling schmuck hiding behind his camera, a red blooded Cortazar's "Peeping Tom".

"The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" is a sort of Elkin tale of the infinite and average boring, subverted into a taste-making industry, a crass denunciation of the avante-garde pretensions and co-option of the mainstream. G. Garvey is a great everyman with a flair for mutilation and style.

"Skeleton" is a sort of Thinner where Harris's body, his skeleton specifically, turns on him. But this is a psychological curse, not supernatural. Munigent is an evil chiropractor (aren't they all?) dwarf who eats bone marrow. The most powerful conceit is that the skeleton is its own legacy, not at all identifiable with the person it once was.

In "The Jar" a Tales From the Crypt redneck story, gruesome and perfectly tragic, with a slight Cormac McCarthy flavor, men mark off the passage of time by Thedy's bare hips, and the mystery in the jar represents all the regrets and fears, and brings a small town together, as regrets and fears are wont to do.

In "The Lake" a Dandelion Wine of the dark side, the weak, trite metaphor of the train bringing us back in time, the past rots at the bottom of a lake and must be buried for the narrator to move forward. Gross, but tired.

In "The Emissary" a great boy sickness story, a Peter Pan, living vicariously through Dog, there is a great freeing of the paralyzed boy with his wild and gregarious Dog, and an awesome zombie lurch of the dead teacher down the hall that makes for a classic horror moment, if not necessarily a classic story.

In "Touched With Fire," which is much like the old men betting on death, like in Calvino's "How Much Shall We Bet?" some anti-feminist tones leak in to a creepy tenement scape and the pig butcher, a domestic master, with a pork face and bloody t-shirt is just the most vivid of the dream-like images in this story.

In "The Small Assassin" a perfectly constructed paranoia rant, centering on a sort of post-natal depression which transfers down the line from the mother to the father to the doctor, the final scene with the doctor holding a scalpel, saying "I've got something pretty, something shiny" is a precursor to Child's Play, or maybe Omen or Rosemary's Baby but in a nice clean 50s SoCal.

In "Jack-in-the-Box" a prototype of Shyamalan's The Village skewing towards the child's perspective, the horror of a completely insular world, where mother is literally God, is wiped away by the joy of the little boy's freedom. 'I'm glad I'm dead!'

In "The Scythe" an agrarian Grim Reaper fable, the main character's reluctance to reap is humanity's attempt at peace, but he loses this reluctance and kills indiscriminately, as mankind does, in massive broad strokes.

In "Uncle Einar" the fantasy of a winged man held back from his potential, barred from flight, and reduced to domesticity, achieves some middle European fairy tale patina in its particulars - the cows, tent wings, and especially Brumilla.

In "The Wind" an angry nature tale told through the telephone, very Hitchcock again in that you can't actually see any of the frightful action, the possibly stupid Himalayan climber Allen deserves to be winded to death.

In "The Man Upstairs" the freshest vampire story I've read in years, a war era boarding house is presented from a child's perspective, a sort of Woody Allen pastiche with sinister overtones. Douglas's "dressing" of the vampire boarder, and Grandma's obliviousness provides some classic comedic moments.

In "There Was an Old Woman" a refusal of death that turns into a very practical struggle with the mortician, some connection between sex and death is drawn, but since it's Bradbury, this lies deep below the surface. This is another comedic performance, especially when the old lady's ghost threatens to ruin the funeral home's business by haunting the shit out of it.

"The Cistern" the most abstract story in the collection is basically a woman's daydream about all the dead folks waiting in the sewers for their loved ones.

In "Homecoming" like blond Marilyn Munster, Timothy is a pure white shining misfit in a family of goths, vampires and telekinetics. He benefits from the wealth of a family full of immortals, but is alone in that none of his family can relate to his feelings about his impending death.

In "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," Stone, a sort of Salinger figure in his legend, having dropped off the map in the 30s, tells a story that shows that if he hadn't dropped out, then he'd have imploded. We wonder if the same is true of Salinger. Of course, it's Bradbury so there's a gunpoint hold up and the real morphs into fantasy from sentence to sentence.

Check out this great article about a newer author who shares Bradbury's sense of dark fantasy and that October feel.