The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.