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

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 Shortly after his death, Cemetery Dance ran a tribute issue to him, devoting two or three story slots to unpublished horror tales he'd written, and quite a bit of laudatory essays and personal accounts from his friends and fans.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 Beast Within - Dir. by Philippe Mora (1982)

. . . 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.