And Now the Screaming Starts

Movies: The second worst thing Bin Laden has ever done to us?

2012-02-09T16:12:00.001-05:00

What hath Kickstarter wrought?

It's possible that you were tiring of the zombie craze. Perhaps you've got no more energy for a fast vs. slow zombie debates. Maybe you think that context shifts - zombie strippers in space! - will no longer grab your attention by the shorties. "My God, just let this plague of zombie crap end!" you might cry in the long, dark lonely nights.

Well, this won't change any of that.

Somebody's made a zombie flick featuring Bin Laden as one of the walking dead.

Don't apologize and never explain.

2011-12-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to follow the very good advice in the title. I'm about to become a first time father and thing are crazy absurd at work. I'll leave you to determine whether these are valid reasons for radio silence. I'll be back as soon as I can be. Thanks to all y'all that wait for me. For those that don't, godspeed, thanks for hanging.

Art: Is this a bust or something?

2011-11-09T12:47:00.001-05:00

The It's Alive Project, currently ondisplay at the City Arts Factory in Orlando, FL, is a show of 80 Boris Karloffbusts, redesigned by contemporary artists. Some of the busts allude toKarloff's iconic roles, while others take Karloff's famous mug in some trulyodd directions. Makewith the link clickin' to check out a flikr set of the designs.

Mad science: The snuggle of doom!

2011-11-03T15:57:00.002-04:00

The Psychologuist has a great info dump article on the psychology of horror that gives readers a nice survey of work in the field: from evolutionary developmental theories on uses of fear to theories on the popularity of specific monster tropes. One nice takeaway is the experimental evidence for what's commonly known as the "snuggle theory." Now you'll rarely see the snuggle theory brought into horror conversations when the horror blog pro-am get around to discussing the importance and meaning of horror. Why? Well, because it's main premise is that horror's just an elaborate pick-up gimmick. Also, what horror blog wants to drop the word "snuggle?" The snuggle theory holds that "viewinghorror films may be a rite of passage for young people, providing them with anopportunity to fulfill their traditional gender roles." Basically, it's a danger free way for dudes to act brave in the face of fear and be a comfort to their scared potential mates. Not only is there some awkwardly heavy-handed bio-determinism all up in there, but who wants to take their cherished genre and say that its, at it roots, a kinda of half-assed way to impress the babes with faux courage? But before we utterly dismiss it, here comes the science:

A paper from the late 1980sby Dolf Zillmann, Norbert Mundorf and others found that male undergrads pairedwith a female partner (unbeknown to them, a research assistant), enjoyed a14-minute clip from Friday the 13th Part III almost twice as much if she showeddistress during the film. Female undergrads, by contrast, said they enjoyed thefilm more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Moreover, men whowere initially considered unattractive were later judged more appealing if theydisplayed courage during the film viewing. ‘Scary movies and monsters are justthe ticket for girls to scream and hold on to a date for dear life and for thedate (male or female) to be there to reassure, protect, defend and, if need be,destroy the monster,’ says Fischoff. ‘Both are playing gender roles prescribedby a culture.’

So, next time somebody holds a roundtable on what's so great about horror, have the courage to say "I like horror because it's a great way to fool horror chicks into thinking I'm awesome so I can bang them." I know at least one horror blogger who should be answering this way already, but let's all do our horror-blog host pal a solid and take the pressure off by "I am Spartacus"-ing the idea.

Random Picture #5: Zip lock.

2011-10-29T09:23:00.001-04:00

Radio: "Listen to them. Children of the night."

2011-10-25T11:05:00.000-04:00

Certainly, the most famous Halloween-centric broadcast of the legendary Orson Welles (shown here in dapper and shockingly young form) is the much mythologized War of the Worlds show that, if one believes, was responsible for widespread panic throughout the Tri-state area.

But Welles's alien invasion radio play isn't the only show in The Mercury Theater archives of interest to the spookshow junkie with a taste for the retro. Over at the fine music and horror blog Psychobabble you can listen to The Mercury Theater's production of Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel: Dracula

When The Mercury Theater (full title: The Mercury Theater on the Air) debuted in 1939, Dracula was their first broadcast. Welles himself provided the voices of the eponymous vampire and Doctor Seward. Theater regular Agnes Moorehead plays Mina and the great Bernard Herrmann provides the score. But why stay here reading my blah blah blah? Click on over and enjoy!

Stuff: "There won’t be enough bullets left to kill them all."

2011-10-21T09:49:00.002-04:00

Just in time for Halloween, the defense-sector rag Military Times takes a look at effective responses to the inevitable zombie holocaust. Some of the article is delightfully wonky, in a sort of crazed militia-man way:

Perhaps the single hottest topic of debate among necro-warfare experts is what makes the ideal weapon against the undead.

Fortunately, as anyone who has seen the “Living Dead” movies knows, the possibilities are infinite — anything that will take out a zombie’s brain will do the trick.

Former Marine and “Top Shot Season 2” champ Chris Reed says he would keep it simple. “A good Ruger .22 is hard to beat for your typical zombie killing,” Reed says. (His perfect deadpan delivery inspired our take on this story.)

Others worry that a .22 round just won’t have the stopping power needed for zombie headshots. “The .22 won’t get skull penetration beyond 100 yards,” Bourne says. Instead, he’d grab an M4 carbine or — better yet — an AK47 for drag-through-the-mud-and-still-shoot reliability.

Outdoor Life shooting editor John Snow’s top pick: Lauer Custom Weaponry’s LCW15 Zombie Eliminator with the arrow gun attachment and Beta-C 100-round ammunition drum. For backups, he says he’d add the Remington Model 870 Shotgun and Para Super Hawg .45-caliber pistol. All that might seem like overkill for something that’s not even alive — or real — but among the ranks of zombie hunters, you can never be too careful.

Of course, firearms need plenty of ammo and maintenance. That’s why Matt Mogk, president of the Zombie Research Society, prefers simple, lightweight and silent — a baseball bat, metal pipe or other blunt, maintenance-free implement that will deliver a head-crushing blow.

While the simple crowbar and more elegant katana, favored by ancient samurai warriors, typically top zombie fighters’ list of cold steel, Mogk says he isn’t a fan of bladed weapons.

“You have to keep swords sharp, especially if you’re to trying take off heads. Plus, it’s too easy for them to get stuck inside a zombie. Then you’re really hosed.”

As fun as that is, I found it liked the more atypical bits of advice. For example, how should the smart soldier dress for the reign of the dead (Romero, feel free to snag that title - it's yours, gratis). Again, from the article:

When things come to blows, you’ll be glad you dumped your heavy battle rattle for simple protective gear that will keep you light on your feet and infection-free. A supply of medical face masks and surgical gloves are a no-brainer, but to keep all that blood at bay, try a heavy rubber butcher’s apron.

Movies: How much does knowing you suck excuse you from sucking?

2011-10-11T19:18:00.001-04:00

What does one write about Monster Island, the Jack Perez (of Mega-Shark Versus Giant Octopus "fame") helmed MTV-produced made-for-TV oddity that pits a gaggle of youths against an island populated by stop-motion animation giant insects and Adam West?

Honestly, this thing is barely a movie, so I feel it's only fair that I barely write about it. The most interesting thing about Monster Island is the unintentionally philosophical question it's existence raises: How much does knowing you suck excuse you sucking? This isn't a purely hypothetical question. Regular readers, God forgive them, will know that we here at ANTSS refer to this as the Byrne Problem, after author Anthony Burgess (yes, of Clockwork Orange fame, but he wrote a lot of other, better stuff too). To sum up: Burgess's last book, Byrne, consisted of the fake autobiographical epic poem of the supposed worst poet in the world. That sounds funny, until you realize that it means reading through 150 pages of the intentionally worst poetry ever written. At no time during this trudge through these 150 pages of utter crap verse do you think Burgess isn't on the joke. He knows he's creating bad verse; that's the point. The idea is that knowing he knows will somehow make what's universally admitted as excruciating somehow less so. Still, you've got to read 150 pages of shit. So, how much does knowing you suck excuse you from sucking? Entire careers have been based on the idea that the answer is "100%." Zack Snyder, I'm looking at you. (Not to be confused with people who don't know that they utterly suck; Day of the Woman, I'm looking at you.) Smack dab in the Byrne sweet spot, you'll find Monster Island.

I'm hesitant to review MI, as I feel that gives it too much credit. So, instead, I'm going to extract some observations from my notes. That's right. I take notes. He says as he indignantly pushes his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.

Two random points.

1. MTV gets props for presenting themselves as heartless exploiters of young people. It would have been enough if MTV had simply allowed their staff to be depicted as shallow, heartless dicks willing to put young lives on the line for a quick buck - which this movie totally depicts them as being - but they actually take it further. Central to the plot of the film is the idea that teenagers would be totally stoked to see a concert by Carmen Electra. Even in 2004, this alone was enough to push the film clearly into sci-fi/fantasy territory, no giant bugs necessary. The oddly brilliant twist is that, later, giant ants (no relation) kidnap Carmen to sedate their human slave population (long story). In drawing the parallel, the film basically suggests that the entertainment MTV peddles isn't just exploitative, but actually part of a control system meant to keep you a slave of the colony. Kudos to everybody involved for the lucid moment. That you buried it in a made-for-TV movie that all of maybe twenty people saw, eh, not so great. Still, lollipops for everybody involved just for doing it.

2. Whenever a film targeted at the mainstream, no matter how hopelessly as may be the case, has to include the taste of an indie music slob, there's always an interesting conflict between the visual and the audio. The perfect exemplar of this is the film High Fidelity. The cats in that flick are supposedly the ultimate in music snobs, but the first time we meet Jack Black's character - a character so music obsessed that he regularly chases away customers by insulting their taste - he's grooving on Katrina and the Wave's "Walking on Sunshine." A spiffy little song to be sure, but hardly the signifier of obscure, elitism. Throughout the whole film, we get, again and again, bizarro cop-out music choices. When Jack Black tries to take over the store's stereo from the sad sack mumbly dude, we learn that the sad music he was trying to play was Belle and Sebastian. That's as indie as it goes. The rest of flick rest clearly in common knowledge. When the shop staff debate esoterica like what's the best first track of the B-side of an album, they land safely in Clash and Stevie Wonder territory (not to diss either of those, 'cause they're great). Who is the favorite musician of the indier-than-thou record store owner? The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. Don't get me wrong: the only boss I ever listen to is Bruce - as me spotty employment career more than attests to. Still, it's kind of weird.

(Okay, as a I'm-no-hipster device, sure. When I was a college DJ, the head of the station was a brutally hip woman - so indie her shirts don't fit - who swore that she was the biggest Madonna fan; but it was bullshit, she deployed this po-mo hyper-intellectualized version of Madge as a defense against the charge that her profound love of intentionally inaccessible math rock was some classist affectation. It's the same reason modern hipster doofuses professes to love Beyonce. But we all know it's bullshit. Own your hipster elite douchebaggery and be done with it.)

Anyway, I bring this up because there's an important scene in MI when our hero, a perfectly insufferable self-righteous dick of a indie boy, thumbs through the CD collection of Carmen Electra - and that's not a euphemism, though the phrase "thumbs through Carmen Electra's CD collection" sounds dirty because of Carmen Electra - and decides, despite the fact that she's whoring out (metaphorically this time) for MTV, she must be okay. The pivot point: Radiohead and the Ramones. Seriously? Why does this kid have the taste of 37-year-old man? What's the point of being a snotty music snob kid if you have to worship at the altar of your parents' balding over-the-hill hipster's music tastes?

That said, the whole scene has an unintentional patina of nostalgia: how long before digital music effectively kills the tradition of secretly checking out a potential sexual partner's music collection for hints as to their suitability?

2011-09-13T20:07:00.004-04:00

Neo-folkie Madeline - who was not, I think, named after one of the cats I grew up with, but I like to pretend that she was - has a video that exploits ANTSS favorite horror flick. Enjoy.

Random Picture #5: Variations on a Theme.

2011-08-23T19:44:00.002-04:00

Stuff: Does anybody ask mystery writers what crimes they've solved?

2011-08-20T08:17:00.004-04:00

The Gray Dame has an nice with-your-coffee-on-Saturday fluff piece that revisits that perennial favorite topic of horror "journalism:" what scares the folk who make the things that scare us? The nice thing about this particular piece is that the NY Times can pull together a list that would be the envy of even the most powerful blogging sites. Their mix of A-list names and notable horror indie types is one of the best horror conclaves I seen in ages.

Books: Speaking of American Psycho . . .

2011-08-06T08:52:00.004-04:00

In the Times, there's a neat Google map of the locations that appear in Mary Harmon's cult horror/satire American Psycho.

Two things strike me as notable about the map. First, the section the Times ran it in: "Dealbook" in the business section. Second, the specific fact that it refers to the film alone.

Just some thoughts.

In his 1991 memoir of the Gulf War, ex-Marine Anthony Swofford admirably demolished the notion of filmmakers diminish our taste for conflict when they depict the violence of conflict in graphic terms. Previous, and perhaps more eloquent, writers had dismissed the utility of anti-war art before. Leslie Fiedler, for example, astutely pointed out the obvious in his introduction to Jaroslav Hašek's classic unfinished novel The Good Soldier Svejk and stated that anti-war art hasn't done anything to prevent us from going to war, it's simply stripped it of its nobility. Swofford went one further than Fiedler and suggested that, by stripping it of the nobility that inscribed conflict within a matrix of civil action and responsibility, modern graphic depictions of war became a sort of naked celebration of the unleashed power of violence. Freed of the ideals of combat, what's left is a darkly glamorous wallowing in the use of force, liberated by the presumption of evil of any need to answer to moral calculus. Horace's suicidal war erotica might not have been "true," was it really worse than Blackhawk Down's war porn? Swofford recalls how, prior to deployment, he and his fellow Marines would eat up ostensibly anti-war films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, getting a proxy wargasm off the display of raw hell that they would soon (potentially) be in a position to wield themselves.

Curiously, workers in the financial sector have the same weird fascination with their own potential corruption. In the 1980s, Gordon Gekko, allegedly created as a symbol of what was wrong with America, became something of a spiritual folk hero to the legions of overpaid insignificants toiling away at the bottom tranch of various wealth factories. (One of the few standout scenes in the otherwise mediocre Boiler Room involves the wannabe brokers watching Wall Street and ritualistically reciting lines along with the actors in the film the way geeks recite lines from Star Wars.) For the bloodthirsty guppy who longed to be a shark in the chum clogged pool of pre-Silicon Alley bubble Wall Street, you couldn't find a better icon than Patrick Bateman, the exquisitely acquisitive mental case at the center of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.

As a literary character, Bateman was kind of a bust - at least for the purposes of using him as anti-saint for the quants and bottom feeders of the Financial District. Though Ellis later claimed that Psycho was the second novel he completed, Patrick's first appearance was as the respectable, pompous, and dull older brother of Sean Bateman in Rules of Attraction. In his cameo, the notably not particularly psycho Patrick plays the hectoring voice of adulthood, reminding Sean yet again that the seemingly consequence free decadence of college life is temporary. Given what later know of Patrick, the scene seems unlikely at best.

Even when Bateman got his own book, he wasn't really fit for duty. Though he's now overshadowed by his cinematic version, the literary version of Bateman is an odder and, despite the extreme gore and violence of the novel, more intellectually demanding beast. In the novel, Bateman literally slides in and out of fantasy: many of the characters and locations of the novel are lifted directly from other Brat pack novels and various '80s lit classics, a detail that's often overlooked, partially because the cult following of Ellis's novel is, I think, not the same audience for the novels Ellis alludes to. (Which is my nice way of saying that a lot of the people who love American Psycho don't read a lot.) For example, people often point out that the name of the firm Patrick works for, Pierce and Pierce, is a punning allusion to Bateman's extracurricular activities. It's less common for readers to point out that Bateman works for the same firm as Sherman McCoy, the main character in Bonfire of the Vanities. American Psycho's something of a '80s Wall Street version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yet only a single reference to Ellis's use of meta-fictional elements appears in the wikipedia entry for his novel (near-victim Allison Poole is correctly sourced Jay McInerney's Story of My Life). This odd mingling of the "real" and "fake" within the story has important implications for whether or not Bateman is actually committing any of the increasingly surreal murders he so graphically describes. (Notably, wikipedia doesn't ever suggest the possibly that Ellis himself admits, that Bateman's no killer.)

It would take the movies to streamline and simplify Bateman. Ellis wasn't very impressed with the film. Because "the medium of film demands answers," her said, the character of Bateman becomes "infinitely less interesting." (The adaptation also seems to mark the beginning of Ellis's unfortunate public displays of cinema-centric sexism: since the adaptation of American Psycho, Ellis has been known to raise a stink among the Jezebel-following crowd with seemingly throwaway comments about his belief that women can't direct films.) Regardless, director Mary Harmon's drastic constriction of Ellis's original work clarifies what Bateman is, makes explicit the connections between his violence and the economic rapaciousness around him, and sacrifices nuance for satiric punch. She created a monster where Ellis had built a mystery. And for the drones of Wall Street, that's just what they needed. Sexy, predatory, unstoppable - Patrick Bateman was the new Gordon Gekko. The alluring image of what, in their unrestricted hearts, they could be. Hot stuff. Plus, nice hair.

Which also brings us to the locale map. I'm not certain that such a map would be possible for the novel. Ellis's book purposely has Bateman slide into some Wonderland Manhattan of near-real but not-quite places that seem to exist in a fantasy un-Manhattan matrix Bateman's spread over the real city. Only the movie, with its radically dumbed-down insistence on the literalness of Bateman's existence and activities would demand a geographic sense of '80s New York.

But I ramble. Check out the map and enjoy.

Movie news: Atlantic psycho? Raging bull shark?

2011-08-05T12:04:00.003-04:00

A intriguing little tidbit of news from the Hollywood reporter. Take it away, Borys Kit:

Iconoclastic filmmaker Paul Schrader is teaming up with nihilistic author Bret Easton Ellis for the shark-infested psychological horror project Bait.

Schrader, the writer behind Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and the writer-director of American Gigolo, has signed to direct the picture, and will collaborate with Ellis on the latest draft of the script, which follows a young man itching to take his revenge against the wealthy.

The man, who works at a posh beach club, angles his way on to a yacht filled with the obnoxious elite, commandeering it into waters filled with the finned man-eaters.

There's not much more to the article than that. Production's aimed to start this year.

Random Picture #4: Dig through the ditches and burn through the witches.

2011-08-04T11:55:00.000-04:00

Stuff: Fast food.

2011-07-30T10:45:00.002-04:00

Long time readers will know that I'm kinda zombied out at this point. The shuffling corpses have had a hell of run, but I think it's time for the walking dead to hit the showers. I support legislation that would actually pay people working on zombie-themed horror projects to destroy their projects rather than follow them through, the way we control agricultural overproduction by paying farmers to burn market-deflating harvests.

That said, this is pretty boss: The Run for Your Lives 5K zombie run - a 5K run in which runners haul ass through a wooded obstacle course while being chased by "zombies." It's a combination of obstacle run, flag football game, and the opening run-to-the-river bit of 28 Weeks Late.

Random Picture #3: Hot for creature.

2011-07-26T11:28:00.001-04:00

Movies: "It will give you this wonderful new complexity."

2011-07-23T15:50:00.001-04:00

Look at how awesome the poster for Bava's 1965 flick Planet of the Vampires is. Seriously, just ponder it for a bit. Soaked it all in? Are you ready to absorb all the weapons-grade spectacularness that poster implies?

You didn't really look.

No. I know you.

Yeah. Especially you Nathan. With your hyper ADD.

Look at it.

I'll wait.

Okay. Now: Are you ready to absorb all the weapons-grade spectacularness that poster implies?

Here's the bad news: The poster's BS. In fact, weirdly specific BS. It's not typical sci-fi "we hired some hack who didn't read the book, but he painted us a cover anyway" BS. It's the BS of somebody who watched the film, decided that they liked a fairly minor aspect of original and that they'd then spin out a weird alternative story about how they felt that more interesting aspect would play out if it was the focus of the flick. It's a poster from a weird alternate dimension where the poster artist was the director and screenwriter of Planet of the Vampires.

Here's the good news: The movie is still nifty. And I say that as somebody who is, more often than not, underwhelmed by Groovy Age Italian horror. I usually find their plotting lazy, their visual excesses tastelessly tacky, and their detached sadism more contemptuously hip than genuinely thrilling or horrifying. In this case, however, Bava set out to make a distinctly Italian answer to that cornerstone of cinematic sci-fi, American Fred Wilcox's 1956 classic Forbidden Planet, and the genre borrowed genre template and trappings provide a framework that prevents Bava from indulging in the fatal lack of focus that undermines so many of the of the flicks from him and his compatriots.

Solid screenwriting goes a long way to explaining why PotV works as well as it does. Sure, the dialog is a wooden and gets bogged down in clunky technobabble - the creation of top notch technobabble seems to be a poetic pursuit that English is uniquely suited to, sci-fi nonsense translated from another language always sounds extra fakey - but Bava and his writing team understand that the key to this flick to forward motion. The plot, which is involves two crews of space explorers fighting for their lives against murderous body-possessing alien entities, is lean and efficient. Furthermore, the campy artificiality of the sets and alien landscapes provides a context for Bava's visual excess that feels natural, rather than self-consciously showy. Finally Bava's icy brutality seems to have evolved naturally from the amorally genocidal Darwinistic calculus driving the film's baddies, instead of feeling like the heavy-handed imposition of a filmmaker hungering for extreme visuals. The result is a graphically restrained film whose darkness is conceptual and thematic.

With its dated sci-fi trappings, stilted dialog (which I'm sure isn't helped in translation), and lack of blood and guts, Planet of the Vampires doesn't demand the attention of contemporary thrill-seaking modern horror audiences. But if you're looking for a deliciously retro pop sciffy gem that's still solid entertainment, you could do far worse than Planet.

Meta: Uncle Strangely's Dark Mansion of Big Crap Scares

2011-07-18T22:27:00.004-04:00

As much as I hate to Collins out on you and whore my other web projects here, there's now officially a Tumblr annex to the ol' And Now the Screaming Starts. For folks who dig on ANTSS, but find it a bit trying on the attention span, management is proud to introduce Uncle Strangely's Dark Mansion of Big Crap Scares. It's ANTSS without all the jibber-jabber. It is not a replacement for ANTSS, but a supplement. Think of it as ANTSS that forgot to take it's medication, so it's now all fidgety like.

Mad science: "Activite their Capgras" sounds more humorous said aloud than it reads off the page.

2011-07-15T16:47:00.005-04:00

Wired online has a short article and video presentation on the curious work of UC Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek. Voytek - who is not helping fight the pervasive stereotype that UC Berkeley is some sort of really expensive summer camp for really smart weirdos - has assembled a neurological picture of zombiism by translating zombie behaviors seen in a handful of popular flicks into known neurological conditions. From the article:

Based on that map of the zombie brain, Voytek and a fellow neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen established that the walking dead suffered from a condition they called Consciousness Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. CDHD is characterized by “the loss of rational, voluntary and conscious behavior replaced by delusional/impulsive aggression, stimulus-driven attention, the inability to coordinate motor-linguistic behaviors and an insatiable appetite for human flesh.”

After settling on a brain-model for the reanimated, Voytek extrapolated some survival tips for the zombie apocalypse. Notable exploitable bugs in the zombie-brain: Zack's probably got crap memory, so if you come up with a really neat way to kill zombies, feel free to keep it in rotation as long as you please. Also, Voytek speculates that zombies probably have difficulty visually tracking more than one moving object at a time. Certainly the resourceful zombie hunter could put that to good use.

Random Picture #2: The kiss.

2011-07-11T16:55:00.003-04:00

Random Picture #1: 'Zilla waders.

2011-07-01T14:14:00.002-04:00

Books: Stabbing her repeatedly with sharp, knife-like reproductive organs.

2011-06-30T11:57:00.006-04:00

Ben H. Winters, author of the junior high punk rock detective YA book The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman and the more recent adult horror novel Bedbugs, has probably resigned himself to the fact that he's basically going to be remembered for his novelty mash-up Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies. Oft gifted and rarely read, PPZ was notable for the odd feeling of wasted effort that haunted it. The joke concept at the core of the book was so slim that it was expended the moment one saw the title, making whatever was between the covers pretty much superfluous. In fact, worse than superfluous: The humor of the concept depended on understanding that the proposed fusion would inevitably awkward and fruitless, so the subsequent effort to carry out the plan became somewhat embarrassing and tedious. It's like the old Monty Python gag about the Proust-summarizing contest in which contestants attempt to communicate a comprehensive and lively abridgment of À la recherche du temps perdu using semaphore. The whole joke's right there. The ha-ha's come from an awareness of how ill-suited the proposed combination of medium and content is. The value of semaphore is lost to the length of the task; the value of Proust's work is destroyed by semaphore's low resolution. If you actually had to then sit through several contestants flag-waving their way through all seven volumes of Proust's semi-autobiographical masterpiece, the joke would become murderously dull. The Pythons, comedy masters that they were, only stayed on the joke long enough for the absurdity sink in, and then moved on. PPZ shows no similar insight into the logic of comedy. The experience of actually reading Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies is an experience akin to sitting through a full Proust-summarizing semaphore contest.

Happily for this reader, Winters's new book isn't bridled with the grim task of rendering a clever joke into a humorless novel-length mess. A far more nimble creature, Bedbugs is a slice of retro-influenced middle class real-estate paranoia, in the manner of Amityville or Poltergeist, repackaged as a spook story about satanic bedbugs. I kid you not. Bedbugs from Hell, literally. Using bedbugs as your central nasty is a smart idea that, I'm certain, hundreds of other horror writers - especially in New York - are kicking themselves for having not come up with it earlier. Bedbugs are ready-made horror villains, true examples of just how truly repugnant Mother Nature can let herself get.

Did you know that female bedbugs have no sexual orifice? The male bedbugs swarm the female in mating, stabbing her repeatedly with sharp, knife-like reproductive organs. If she's lucky, one of these bayonet-penises breaks through her exoskeleton at the location of her reproductive organs and fertilizes her eggs. Often, however, in the mad scramble to procreate, the males stab the female anywhere they can reach, filling other organs with their sperm, sometimes to fatal effect. Yeah, I know. That's what I was trying to tell you. An author doesn't even have to make up that part. They're already freakish little nightmares.

For the purposes of a horror story, however, its another, less Rabelais-by-way-of-American Psycho trait that makes bedbugs so attractive as the focus of a horror story. Bedbugs can be strangely hyper-selective. Even if a couple share an infested bed, it isn't unusual for just one partner to be turned into a blood buffet for the bedbugs while the other partner sleeps soundly, untouched. In real life, this causes all sorts of strain and weirdness among the families that get infected. One partner starts getting phobic about the beds and couches, they can't sleep, they get paranoid and can be found searching the bed frames at weird hours of the night. The other can't do anything but sympathize and suppress ever growing frustration. It's your basic haunted house rising-action dynamic: primary victim keeps experiencing things; they're experiences are ignored; what slim evidence there is reinterpreted by others; and people try to be sympathetic, but they really think that the victim is simply losing their marbles.

That classic formula provides gives us the framework of the first half of Bedbugs. The Brooklyniest couple that ever juggled their creative impulses with the need for middle class security moves into a new brownstone duplex in the Brooklynest Brooklyn of all Brooklyns imaginable. (Winters's efforts to situate his narrative in post-collapse Cobble Hill are nearly manic - odd pile-ups of stereotypes, place names, and brand references - and never resolve whether they're meant as reportage or satire. I'm not sure this is the fault of Mr. Winters, himself a Bostonian. Any description of parental culture in modern Brooklyn necessarily straddles the line between reportage and satire.) Before you can say "orgy of bayonet-like bedbug penises," the book's lead, former legal industry drone turned housewife and painter, finds herself falling to a plague of bedbugs who, though they are leaving bites all over her skin, can't be seen. As the book progresses, the attacks get worse and worse, but there's never any sign of the bugs. Is she crazy? (Prolly not.) Or is she under siege by demonic, supernatural bedbugs? (Now we're talking!)

Perfectly timed as summer reading, Bedbugs fuses easy humor with campy mommy-horror and the occasionally grotesque set piece. It's a bit slow to start. I imagine Winters meant this as an allusion to the deliberate pacing of '70s domestic horror, but Winters never really strives for the (mostly unmerited) gravitas of the previous works, so the result is something of a drag, as what is meant to be horror must coast on the goodwill the author builds up with his good-natured ribbing of Brooklyn. Overall, it's a likeable diversion and worth the pick-up for genre fans seeking lighter fare.

That said, publishers Quirk are doing nobody any favors with their slipshod editing of the work. I've been told that basic copyediting is no longer a function editorial house bother themselves with. The incredible number of typos and correctly-spelled but misplaced terms ("she folded the strolled") suggests this rumor is true. Setting that aside as a lost cause, editors still should have encouraged Winters to tighten up his game: his use of generic placeholder terms where precise vocabulary and description could easily be used - for example, at one point a character buys "a thing of sausage;" a package? a pound? a link? what? - regularly crosses the line from vernacular to simple laziness. Demand better, editors: that's your job. The authors will, eventually, thank you for it.

Movies: Enjoy, puny human!

2011-06-25T17:38:00.003-04:00

It's hard to imagine the summer will give you better entertainment than Super 8. That's true whether you read that as a rousing endorsement or a statement of surrender.

In Super 8, J. J. Abrams has produced the perfect masscult artifact. Double J's alien-amok flick isn't just professional to the point that it's so slick it makes Astroglide look like P12 sandpaper; there's plenty of directors whose personal signatures embrace a smooth proficiency (see David Fincher). Nor is this a matter of Super 8's constant stream of allusions; whatever his faults, one can't say that Tarrantino's personal signature gets lost under his obsessive recycling. In fact, Super 8's perfection as a masscult object isn't strictly a matter of Abrams's direction. It also a matter of audience reception. The identifying characteristic of masscult production, if one is still allowed to evoke such such an elitist and ostentatiously divisive concept, is the way it turns both creator and audience a type, a member of some demographic, part of a mass. Further more, it contains its own interpretation: it does the work of thinking and feeling for you. What Super 8 does, and I intentionally personify the film because I believe, in this case, it clearly has an agency beyond Abrams' slender talents, is turn the life-work of a prior, superior artist into a formula and invite audiences to react not to the film in question, but to their collective memory of those prior, superior works. It's a quilt of stitched together shared experiences and we're not really responding to it as we are to those shared experiences. Super 8 isn't homage or pastiche; it's Pavlovian movie making.

I don't mean that as a criticism, necessarily. Sure, it causes some problems. Super 8's near-total reliance on the idea that audiences will respond automatically to certain visual patterns does get it in trouble. First, there's several odd plot points that only make sense if you assume you've dropped into a parallel dimension where Spielberg created the rules of logic. Though, honestly, nobody in any film acts "realistic." If they did, movies would be a tedious bore. The second, and by far more serious, drawback is Super 8's tendency to try to cash emotional checks it can't cover. Most notably, the film's E.T. Moment(TM) fully expects to slide by simply on the fact that audience members will recognize that it is the E.T. Moment(TM) and feel the according emotions. The result of this faith in a sort of response algebra is that Abrams includes several scenes that are emotionally inert, but the viewer knows, with a level of response-deadening remove, that this is the X-Scene that's supposed to feel Way-Y. See "the two males leads work out the romantic problem scene," "the two father's bury their differences scene," and "the cross-species mutual get-it scene" for examples of this dynamic in action. For the most part, however, the plan works exactly a it should.

It's hard to fault something for being so clearly the hyper-competent work of a skilled craftsman, following a clearly successful blueprint that's pretty much guaranteed to work. Often, we're told that a certain film requires a viewer "turn their brain off." While it's sad this is often used as a compliment, the directive to purposefully infantalize yourself before a supposed entertainment is usually well-intentioned. More often than not, anybody with slightly higher standards than a voluntarily auto-labotimized would find most genre dreck insulting in its brazen assumption of audience stupidity. Super 8 isn't really a shut-your-brains off sort of flick. It panders, but it does so on two levels. This is top notch pandering. Consequently, it isn't particularly fulfilling, but you don't feel dirty for having swallowed it. During the summer wave of blockbuster hopefuls, I don't think you can reasonably ask for more.

Really, just about the only folks I could see getting upset at Super 8 are genre-fans who have some irrational fetish for the material Super 8 so ruthlessly mines. To folks who make their name confusing nostalgia for quality, Super 8 must seem like a classier, younger, better put together lot lizard suddenly appeared on their stretch of the truck stop. Worse, in fact: it must be like somebody who actually trawls the truck stop looking for love watching her favorite trucker invite a clearly mercenary whore into his sleeper. Super 8 makes it clear that the art we enjoyed in our youth got most of its impact from the fact that we were young when we saw it. And, more importantly, there's no art or expertise in mining it for gems. It can be done mechanically, for a quick buck. Since you shill to the same demo, everybody already thinks the same things about all the same movies. It's a product of the aging process, not the development of taste. If you're the kind of viewer that believes a film can violate the "spirit" of, say, the late 1970s to early 1980s, then Super 8 is too honest a money-making venture for you and you should stay home and rub another one out to the weird "how'd she end up topless in a PG-13 movie scene" of your Sheena: Queen of the Jungle bootleg Betamax tape. Otherwise, you'll probably enjoy it. In fact, you almost have no choice about it.

Television: House of 1,000 Unisex Solid Paprika Rib Vest Sweaters.

2011-06-17T14:55:00.009-04:00

If you're anything like me, when you think "high-quality, color-fast detergent that will handle tough stains without damaging my ," you think Rob Zombie. Here's Mr. Zombie's Woolite commercial. Enjoy!

Here's the link, so that you can enjoy the full-screen image.

Does anybody know why Blogger no longer fits any standard video in it's copy column?

Movies: Nick Fury, Magica de Spell, Godzilla, the guy from Die Hard, Evel Knievel, and Dracula.

2011-06-13T19:11:00.002-04:00

The subtitle of Resident Evil: Afterlife comes dangerously to being a frank admission on the part of Paul W. S. Anderson. It's as if he was too honest to not telegraph the fact that the series, which was creatively bankrupt after the first 20 minutes of the first flick nearly ten years ago, had entered into a zombie stage. Though without the terrible menace the Z word implies. There's absolutely nothing dangerous about this lazy jumble of stolen visual references and tired plot points. No, the RE franchise is a zombie the way a zombie bank is a zombie: It's a decaying institution whose prior profitability was mistaken for fitness, a delusion that keeps number crunching bureaucrats ordering code blues every couple of years.

A plot summary gives this film too much credit. It shows continuity insomuch as there are some reoccurring characters, notably our superpowered heroine Alice. It should be said, however, that it lacks continuity insomuch as the first 10 to 15 minutes of the flick work diligently to ensure that almost nothing of significance from the previous films comes into play in this one. The army of super Alices? They all go ka-boom. Alice Prime's superpowers? She loses them to some injection of pseudo-science. (Though, as far as I can tell, the superpowers were understood to be something built into her as she was an artificial being, and not some enhanced human. Whatever. The phrase "as far as I can tell" reveals I've already spent more time sweating the details of this flick than the screenwriter did.)

(Wait. Hold on.)

(Okay. I had to check. IMDB says, yes, despite all evidence to the contrary, this film did have a screenwriter. It was auteur, Mr. Anderson himself. He's truly the Orson Welles of utterly shitty video game adaptation zombie schlock crap franchises.)

Instead of a plot summary, the best way to understand this film is to think of it as a near film made out of clips from other flicks. Matrix, Blade 2, the Dawn of the Dead remake, the most recent I Am Legend, Aliens . . . the list goes on and on. And this isn't an homage, or a a confluence of subtexts, a genre-centric blazon[1], or any other fancy-pants term one might have picked up from that freshman intro to film studies course. Instead, it's like somebody signed of on a huge budget for Paulie A's big ass game of backyard war. For those unfamiliar with backyard war because you were never a young boy, the game's pretty simple. Everybody announces who they are. For example: "I'm Robocop" or "I'm King Arthur" or "I'm Wolverine." Then you fight. You might ask, "So, under what circumstances, exactly, would Nick Fury, Magica de Spell, Godzilla, the guy from Die Hard, Evel Knievel, and Dracula all be fighting?" To which Paulie A. would answer, "Don't queer the magic, dude. It's money. Let them fight."

(As an aside, John McClane, Evel Knievel, and Nick Fury surprisingly teamed-up with Drac and saved the day. I know, WTF? But it happened. I was there.)

Sadly, Anderson's willingness to just throw anything into the blender is matched by a palate that hasn't stretched past the most obvious selections of horror-nerd culture from the past decade or so. He's like a dude cutting lose in his own basement man-cave. Sure, he's breaking all kinds of feet-on-the-furniture rules, but what is it really getting us.

Honestly, of all the broken metaphors I've offered up tonight, that's the closest I'll get. This flick is the equivalent of watching Paul W. S. Anderson recline on his couch and tuck his hand snuggly, comfortably, Bundyishly, into his slacks. If that's your thing, right on, mang.

Though, be honest, you know you played far cooler games of backyard war, and it didn't cost ya' nothing.

Movies: I'll give you my Axe Body Spray(TM) when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!

2011-06-05T12:07:00.002-04:00

The obvious reference point for Jake West's 2009 lad-inflected zomcom actioner Doghouse is Edgar Wright's 2004 Shaun of the Dead. The loglines are similar enough: Underachieving male lead with relationship problems sorts his life out during a zombie outbreak. The chief distinction between the flicks lies in just what you mean when you declare your life sorted.

The titular hero of Wright's work has a familiar character arc: for all the yucks and guts, Shaun's recognizable from a million dramas and comedies as "the man who needs to grow up." He's got to make peace with a father figure while simultaneously making a definitive break from influence of his parents. He's got to assume the mantle of responsibility and he's got to secure his relationship with the woman in his life. For all Wright's visual and verbal inventiveness, Shaun's journey to adulthood is pretty standard stuff. That only sounds like criticism until you've seen Doghouse.

If you throw a frisbee so that the disk is released with an upward tilt, the frisbee will gain altitude as it flies. At some point, it'll stall out in its ascent and begin a steep drop. Eventually, whatever combo of drag and lift, wind and spin is working on it will give it enough power to right itself and fly back toward the original point of take off. Sooner or later, the disk runs out of power, but if you've tossed it right, you'll be able to catch it without moving. I'm not sure what you'd call the figure traced by the flight of the frisbee. It isn't an arc, because of the looping return. A loop would suggest a more rounded figure. For purposes of the post, we're going to call this shape - an oddly curvy triangle that looks like a child's rendering of a wind-filled sail - the Frisbee Aerial Return Triangle, or FART.

The male characters in Doghouse don't follow arcs so much as they FART their way through the flick. They start out as a set of variably boisterous losers all on the lam from a collection of stereotype women (I think it is fair to say that even the gay member of our stag party has a partner who is, gender aside, essentially a needy, nagging shrew). Their metaphoric/social conflict becomes a violent, deadly one when the boys find themselves stranded in a town where all the ladies have been transformed into zombie-like homicidal monsters - while, luckily, retaining their stereotypical identities: the hair-dresser, the witch, the barmaid, the fat cow wife, etc. The boys reach the peak of their development when they decide to embrace their arrested development and start fighting back against the legion of female archetypes arrayed against them. We learn the valuable lesson that the point of men is that we're irresponsible, not terribly bright, emotionally limited creatures - and we should be proud of it. Finally, we basically end up with everybody back where they started, except for the few lads who were killed along the way.

The "war of the sexes" is a theme that's rarely employed with any sincerity. More often than not, the "war" is an ambush and a slaughter. Few people have picked up pen, paint, or camera intending to document the tensions between men and women with anything like objectivity or impartiality. It is the theme of choice for those with an axe to grind. So it is here. As far as we can tell, the gents that populate this flick are kind of douchebags. With the exception of the sad sack leader of the pack, they are stalled out examples of modern man-boys. It's far too easy to imagine that, yeah, were I a chick, I'd have had it with this JLA of modern male lameness too. West, however, plays the film out like this band of bros is a ragtag Dirty Dozen on a mad near-suicide mission in the battle for gender freedom.

I should point out too, this isn't me stretching for some political subtext here. West made the liberation of Maxim readers everywhere his central motif. When a character tells his fellow bros to grab golf clubs and bash everything "in a dress," its clear that subtext is the whole text here.

Not that I'm personally upset by the absurdly whatever-the-male-equivalent-of-hysterical-is representation of women. It's unclear to me how offensive the movie would be to a female viewer. On one hand, it is clearly giant middle-finger to anything that doesn't have a penis dangling between its legs. On the other hand, I could easily imagine a woman assuming this was some oddly rigorous exercise in satire by an artist so committed to his joke that he never revealed the slightest crack in his character. The latter position, though, she would most take only because the idea that the director was serious would be too pathetic to believe.

If Doghouse were extremely funny, scary, or exciting, then perhaps it could be forgiven for the dumbness of its central conceit. If there's anything the history of genre entertainments teaches us, it's that audiences will forgive a work almost anything provided it keeps manically mashing our pleasure buttons with both fists. Any time you see somebody stop to think critically, you know something's broken down. But Doghouse never achieves that escape velocity. Enamored with its own minimalist take on gender politics, it yammers when it should run, complains when it should scream, and rants when it should joke.

Take away lesson: Be offensive if you like; but for God's sake, don't be tedious.

Stuff: "I have a problem with mirrors."

2011-04-20T17:25:00.003-04:00

Over in the UK, the Portsmouth branch of the National Health Service (NHS) is trying to combat what the BBC delicately calls the region's "traditionally poor levels of dental health" with a new public service campaign. Bad teeth? Solution: vampires. Enjoy.

Due to Blogger's sudden inability to size video worth a damn, I'll also provide this link to AdWeek, where you can see the ad in its full ratio aspect: Take me to where they know how a video should treated!

Stuff: What scares the scary people?

2011-04-18T10:06:00.004-04:00

Time has gathered up a small list of notable horror worthies and asked them the obvious, "What scares you?"

Here's a couple of sample answers:

The single scariest moment I have ever had in entertainment came during Diabolique [the 1955 film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot]. It is the moment when the corpse in the bathtub opens its eyes and shows nothing but bulging whites. - Stephen King

***

Nothing. - Elvira

***

I've always loved ghost stories, writers like M.R. James, L.P. Hartley, Joan Aiken, Stephen King, Joe Hill. But the scariest story I've ever heard was a true ghost story.

There were eight or nine of us at a restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we were telling ghost stories. The friend of a friend said, 'When I was a girl living in Texas, I had a recurring dream. In this dream, I was walking down the street of my hometown, and a man would walk toward me. Sometimes he was older and sometimes he was younger. He didn't always have the same face, but I always knew it was the same man. He would get closer and closer, and I would know that something bad was going to happen, but I would wake up each time before he reached me. I would be terrified. One night, in my dream, we finally got face to face and I spoke to him. I said, "What is your name?" He said, "My name is Sammy." And then I woke up, and I was so afraid that I couldn't go back to sleep. I went to my sister's room and said, "Can I get in bed with you? I've just had a really bad dream." My sister said, "Was it Sammy?" I said, "What did you say? How do you know Sammy?" And my sister said, "I don't. But you just brought him in the room with you." I turned on the lights and I saw that my sister was asleep. - Kelly Link

***

Other respondents include Eli Roth, R. L. Stine, Guillermo del Toro, Frank Darabont, and Joe Hill.

Stuff: "What's nice about Selphyl is you're only using that person's blood."

2011-04-06T10:33:00.003-04:00

It's a good Wednesday when you get to announce a "vampire body modification link dump." If only 'cause it's fun to type the phrase "vampire body modification."

Link the first! Unlike vampires, who stay sparkly fresh for all eternity, pure strain humans get old. It's true. Along with nipples on men, confirmation bias, and the fact that at least one of us became Daniel Tosh, it ranks one of homo sapiens' most notable design flaws. And, while you'll still eventually die, the "vampire face-lift" can help ensure that your corpse's face is pleasingly wrinkle-free. The procedure gets its name from the fact that plastic surgeons use the patient's own blood to fight the wrinkles. From the ABC News article:

The technology is called Selphyl, and it involves injecting a mixture of blood products into the affected areas. It's also called the "vampire face-lift," although calling it a face-lift is not accurate. Selphyl is a nonsurgical procedure akin to filler injections, while a face-lift is the surgical repositioning of facial tissues that have become loose over time.

Curiously, the procedure's ghastly nickname seems to be part of the draw. Again, from the article:

"I think this whole recent theme in the entertainment industry ... of using vampire, Dracula themes, has definitely caused a lot of the interest out there," Berger said.

Perhaps this marks some final stage in the vampire's transformation from folk nightmare to harmless pop confection: the use of the term vampire can now make a somewhat grisly-sounding product more palatable to the market.

Link the second! The Sun has a brief profile of lawyer and tattoo artist Maria Jose Cristerna, a.k.a. "Vampire Woman." Cristerna, pictured above . . .

. . . says constant beatings and abuse at home triggered her reinvention and led her to ink nearly 100 per cent of her body.

Maria has also added multiple piercings to her face and titanium implants to create "horns" under the skin on her temples and forehead.

The mum-of-four, 35, has even had dental implants to create "fangs" to complete her look — but claims to live a "normal life".

The smirkingly superior attitude of The Sun aside – I see what you're doing with the "claims" bit there – she's a fascinating, and even inspiring woman.

Movies: Last night a psychopathic clan of murderous wacked-out ex-whale hunters saved my life.

2011-04-02T23:41:00.001-04:00

The logline sounds like a goof: It's Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a whale watching ship. And, seriously, Harpoon: the Whale Watching Massacre, from the titular allusion [1] to plot point parallels, puts in a few hours of overtime justifying that pitch. The central baddies are refugees from a shuttered industry that's supported them for generations, only it's whaling instead of meat processing. [2] The imdb flick summary uses the term "fishbillies." But whether it's a goof or not is unclear. And even if you consider it a goof, just who is supposed to be the butt of this joke is a mystery.

And, ultimately, who cares? A sporadically competent flick with a vaguely quirky premise, H:tWWM has all the depth and power of a teenage suburban boy's act of minor vandalism. Fueled by an unearned sense of rage, bounded by an poorly grokked half-hearted anarchism, and suffused by a love of vulgar displays of power and a general disdain for suffering as the mark of the weak, the flick is an energetic, but undirected, middle finger at a wide variety of targets. So wide a range, in fact, that the film's weird attempts at a message get as muddled as its often incomprehensible action scenes. If this is a joke, the comedians forgot to include a punchline. [3]

Our story opens when a ethnic grab bag of tourists hops onboard a whale watching boat to catch a glimpse of the sea's mightiest beasts. Ah, and what an amazing group of soon-to-be-victims this is. You couldn't find a bigger collection of assholes outside a Wakefield Poole flick. Though it's perhaps a talent under-appreciated beyond the confines of the slasher fancy, there's a fine art to the creation of a top notch victim pool. The filmmakers need to make the victims inoffensive enough that viewers can stomach being around them for the 30 or 45 minutes they'll be forced to keep company, but they need to make them vile enough that viewers are happy to see them dispatched. It's easy to screw up, so slasher fans enter into a secret compact with horror filmmakers to count as capital crimes a wide host of behaviors that, outside of the realm of horror flicks, wouldn't raise an eyebrow. [4] H:tWWM's director, Júlíus Kemp, either out of bold disregard or energetic incompetence, totally blows this balancing act. He creates a group so richly unpleasant, it's almost luxurious, a extravagant display of human crappiness that makes one wonder if Kemp isn't a genuine misanthrope simply playing at the flaccid and cynical misanthropy-theater of the slasher genre. From the friend who hangs up on a panicked phone call by her crying twice-sexually assaulted and now held capitve by crazies friend with a blithe "I have it when you're freaking on E" to the woman who, despite the fact that they're fighting for their lives against a murderous clan of "fishbillies," finds time to react with disgust to another character's homosexuality, we've got a collection of superlosers. In fact, Kemp seems almost incapable of creating a character who isn't repulsive. The two "heroes" of flick, the only non-grotesques, are so flat and uninteresting as to be bores. One is a woman who, because Kemp drags her through the wringer early in the flick, is a dazed catatonic character through much of the rest of it. The other is black and gay; but not in any significant way, just black and gay in that "the easiest way to get a liberal to trust you" black and gay way.

If Kemp meant for these characters to be figures of satiric comedy, he missed the mark. He is a decidedly unfunny director, even when he's trying to sell the ha-has. Aside from the laughter inducing plea of a Greenpeace member before he gets an axe to the neck - "Don't do this! I'm a friend of the Earth!" - Kemp's got no touch for comedy. Still, his decision to go full a-hole on his characterization does pay off in one huge way. In the character Endo (played by mono-monikered actress Nae, née Nae Tazawa), Kemp's got perhaps the most delightful "final girl" ever created for horror cinema.

Endo is introduced as the mousy, continually abused personal assistant of the cowardly and misogynistic Nobuyoshi, a repugnant Japanese businessman who is traveling with his timid, emotionally-inert wife Yuko. For the first quarter of the flick, Endo staggers around the set, sullenly carrying out Nobuyoshi's orders and occasionally retiringly to a quiet section of the whale ship to pursue her favorite pastime: chewing off scabs and worrying her wounds with her teeth. [5] Eventually, the clan of murderously irate ex-whalers shows up and begin slaughtering everybody. Like all the other characters, Endo begins fighting for her life. The difference is that Endo brings it. If there's questions about it being here, they are settled. It was brought. The bringer of it was Endo.

Let's take a moment to talk about the final girl. The final girl is the Lady Gaga of horror characters: She gets a disproportionate amount of credit for what is, essentially, a relatively small tweak in presentation, while the ostensible core competency (music for Gaga, being a female victim for horror characters) is really pitched to the comfort level of the audience, by either riffing off a familiar, proven, and predictable pool of inspirations meant to flatter the unjust sense of erudition of the consumer/fan or by relying on common genre clichés. She's easy to like, cause she's built to be liked. She's basically every other dead chick's character: her time to be chased comes up in the rotation and she flees screaming. Only we haven't spent all film inventing reasons - reasons that we don't even believe - that she should die and, though it's been a losing strategy for every other woman in the film, running around screaming works for the final girl. Very rarely, a final girl will show some genuine resourcefulness and vigor. Nancy in the first Nightmare flick is notably feisty, with her pre-game research and booby-trap creation effort. Mostly though, the survivability of the final girl is simply a product of their commitment to cardio exercise and the fact that fans demand somebody whose not the killer be standing in the last reel. Honestly, her importance to modern fans rest mostly on an ill-understood and very dubious theory that states that the existence of the final girl makes it morally okay to watch films that are naked exploitations of the perverse desire many fans apparently have to watch young flesh be ripped apart. She's our out. We're not morbid little trolls because, you know, though we've totally been cheering on the deaths of however many kids, we're Kool and the Gang because, look, we totally were all on the side of the final girl.

But back to Endo . . .

Endo is a final girl we can believe in. The central crisis of the film is a transformative moment for her. When Endo decides she's the final girl, nobody - killers or other members of the victim pool - are safe from her. While the other's are scrambling around the ship, engaging in sporadic and often one-sided encounters with the baddies, Endo sees the this horrific rupture as the end of her old life. The moment a freakin' whaling harpoon plunges through the corpulent body of her boss, Endo realizes that she's not only fighting for her life, but she's fighting for a meaningful life. She won't go back to being the timid, scab-eater we've known for the first quarter of the film. She's reborn. The brilliance of this is that, un-Scrooge-like, this personal revelation turns Endo into a complete bitch. She's willing to gain any advantage over any other character in the flick, from demanding money for taking one of the characters away with her in a dock boat to convincing a mentally shattered and traumatized woman that it's logical to allow Endo to fit her up like a suicide bomber. (In a deliciously nasty touch, Endo decides not to leave the decision to kill herself up to the kamikaze woman/antipersonnel device, so she pushes her onto an enemy harpoon, dooming her and another of the members of the victim pool, who might have escaped without Endo's intervention.) Once Endo really finds her stride, she becomes the most dangerous person in the film. It's a refreshing take on a weak trope that had, long ago, become a goofy crutch for horror filmmakers.

Is Endo enough to make this film worth watching? Look, I don't give number ratings or pretend this is a consumer advocacy sort of thing because I can't imagine you're smart enough to read and yet, somehow, haven't figured out the sort of film you'll dig. If you're into horror, you've already developed a sense of the sort of flicks you'll risk wasted time on and those films you won't. In a genre so filled with stinkers, you've got to evolve such a sense. Slasher flick on whale boat: if that's your thing, go to town.

[1] The allusion is made all the more clearly in the films alternate title: The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre. Apparently, the more locale-specific title graced the flick on its debut in Iceland, but public distaste over the film's more squishy parts led the filmmakers to rebrand the flick with a more generic title.

[2] Curiously, both flicks seem to suggest that generational involvement with a single industry - something that used to be a symbol of community coherence, but is now apparently a sign of stagnation - is akin (no pun intended) to voluntarily limiting the gene pool: working at the same craft your father did means, apparently, that you'd also breed with close relatives.

[3] And this is coming from a big fan of suburban boys' acts of vandalism.

[4] This compact between viewer and filmmaker is the source of the oft repeated, but not wholly accurate characterization of of the killing-for-kissing morality of slashers as "conservative." It's probably a better characterization to say that slashers exhibit a self-contained ironic hyper-punative morality that replaces fate with narrative utility. Characters engage in some putatively "bad" behavior, though this behavior is, honestly, nothing the filmmakers or the viewers care about, in a moral sense. The reason the nubile teen coed shimmies out of her clothing as soon as possible and then gets an axe to the face isn't because the filmmakers or audience members have any investment in the notion that sexual activity should be punished by death. (Indeed, if either party believed this, the film's would be put in the awkward position of condemning both parties - audience and filmmakers - to death for involving them in softcore skin displays. This is why there's not a huge tradition of teensploiter slashers in, say, Taliban controlled cultures.) Rather, the camp tramp gets the business end of a chopper because she was hired to expose her tits and, that being done, there's nothing else to do with her. That there appears to be a reason - the odd moral calculus of the genre - simply serves to obscure the clumsy mechanical nature of the subgenre formula. Maintaining the fiction that there's some non-financial logic to it requires the viewer and filmmakers constantly push the bar to "sin" lower and lower, until we get moral statements like "you're fat, so you deserve death" and "you just know a midget's got it coming to them." Nobody actually holds these absurd positions. They aren't really even positions. We pick them up just for the flick and then leave them on the floor of the theater, with the rest of the rubbish.

[5] It's part of Kemp's, um, charms as a director that he loves the gross shit that bodies do. And, by this, I don't just mean the horrific gore we can emit when somebody unzips some cavity. Kemp seems to take a positive pleasure in showing people vomiting, picking at scabs, sweating, and so on. There's no toilet scene, but I imagine an extensive and utterly repulsively messy scene exists in some director's cut version.

Movies: You're going to have to find yourself some other urban hellhole to haunt.

2011-03-30T11:08:00.006-04:00

Today the city of Chicago takes the wrecking ball to the high-rise at 1230 N. Burling St., marking the beginning of the end for the final building in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project.

Known to horror fans as the home of Candyman, Cabrini-Green was a real place. Named after Frances Cabrini - religious activist for the poor and the first American canonized by the Catholic Chruch - and Congressman William James Green, the projects grew organically from a row of house built in 1942 to, by the 1960s, a cluster of highrise apartments housing more than 15,000 people.

Initially, the residents of the project were Italian immigrants and their descendants, but social economic shifts meant that residents of Cabrini-Green were predominantly African-American by the early 1960s.

Real life violence haunted the CG. Before the initial row houses were built, the area that would become Cabrini-Green was known as "Death Corner" and was infamous for the number of organized crime hits that took place there. Still, the specific decline of the project can be traced to the post-World War II years when a cash strapped city started withdrawing crucial public services from the residents (such as regular police patrols) in an effort to save money. Even the lush green lawns that surround the apartment buildings were paved over to save money on lawn care.

In the 1970s, the city installed steel fencing in all the open pathways on the outsides of the apartment buildings. This feature - the prison-like metal fencing outside every apartment's doorway - can be seen in several scenes in the original Candyman. Meant as a safety feature, it had the unintended consequence of turning the blocks in armored fortresses for gang members who could now see the police without the police seeing them. In 1970, two police were killed by an unidentified sniper who picked them off from one of the now protected walkways.

By the 1980s, Cabrini-Green's rep as a gangster haven was a national embarrassment. Mayor Jane Byrne, in an effort to rehabilitate the project's image, moved in to a Cabrini-Green apartment. Even with her impressive force of bodyguards, she didn't last more than three weeks. Byrne's retreat from Cabrini-Green was widely seen as sign that the project was past saving.

Perhaps the height of the project's infamy came in 1997, when a nine-year-old girl, known in the media as "Girl X," was found raped and poisoned in one of the Cabrini-Green stairwells. Girl X survived her assailants attack, but the attack left her blind, paralyzed, and mute. The Cabrini-Green based Gangster Disciples street gang turned into a violent vigilante posse, with orders to find Girl X's attacker and beat him to a pulp. The fact that a gang seemed more likely to find the attacker than the police speaks to how far outside the civilized norm more folks considered the CG. Eventually the police did catch the perp. He was tried and given a 120-year sentence.

The projects are going to be replaced by mixed income housing. There's some controversy about the number of houses and apartments slotted for lower income families. Activists say that the new plan will not accommodate the number of lower income families displaced by the demolition of Cabrini-Green.

It's just a rumor at this point, but Target might be building a store on the site. Maybe that's where Candyman will go.

Music: Schoolly D(emon)

2011-03-28T11:26:00.002-04:00

What with side projects, day-job obligations, and whatever else distracts one from one's creative outlets, it took the indie rock outfit Rival Schools a decade to get their new album together. For the first video of this much-delayed platter, lead singer (ex-Gorilla Biscuts/Quicksand frontman) Walter Schreifels and the boys pay homage to a horror classic.

Stuff: Pause for reflection.

2011-03-24T15:16:00.003-04:00

Over at The Atlantic, they're using a piece by Nathan Fox - artist of the comic ANTSS just posted about - to illustrate a lightweight think piece called Our Zombies, Ourselves. I'm not sure that writer James Parker drops any science the average ANTSS reader doesn't already know, though he gets points for correctly identifying the earliest known English appearance of zombies: William Seabrook's over-the-top voodoo study, The Magic Island. Plus, he opens with an interesting question to ponder. Why didn't the modern zombie arrive earlier?

The most surprising thing about the modern zombie—indeed, the only surprising thing about the modern zombie—is that he took so long to arrive. His slowness is a proverb, of course: his museumgoer’s shuffle, his hospital plod. Plus he’s a wobbler: the shortest path between two points is seldom the one he takes. Nonetheless, given all that had been going on, we might reasonably have expected the first modern zombies to start showing up around 1919. Twentieth-century man was already moaning and scratching his head; shambling along with bits falling off him; desensitized, industrialized, hollowed out, metaphysically evacuated—A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many … Had some trash visionary produced a novel or play about the brain-eating hordes, or a vers libre epic of viral undeadness, it would have gone down rather well, at this point.

Comics: Don't let the pigeon drive us straight to hell.

2011-03-22T18:56:00.002-04:00

In an afterword attached to the tail end of TPB collection of the Pigeons from Hell mini, script from Joe R. Lansdale and art by Nathan Fox and Dave Stewart, essayist and novelist Mark Finn quotes Robert E. Howard discussing his folkloric sources of inspiration:

But no Negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature was hers, and there was no light and mirth in her. Her tales showed what a strange legion of folk-lore grew up in the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Southwest, where transplanted Celtic myths and fairy-tales met and mingled with a sub-stratum of slave legends. My grandmother was but one generation removed from south Ireland and she knew by heart all the tales and superstitions of the folks, black and white, about her.

This bit comes from a letter addressed to H. P. Lovecraft. Howard and Lovecraft had a curious relationship, part mutual fan club and part professional rivalry. This particular missive was part of a multi-year long debate between the two titans of genre lit about the nature of barbarism and civilization. Howard, of course, made romanticizing the noble savage the cornerstone of his writing career. In contrast, Lovecraft viewed the barbaric impulse as atavistic in the worst possible way. For Howard, barbarism was the pulsing will to power that ran through the blood of all men in spite of the softening influences of modern culture; for Lovecraft, barbarism was the bloody nihilistic abyss that lurked underneath the fragile scaffolding of civilized progress. [For a more nuanced take on this debate, check out reader Taranaich's post in the comment section - CRwM]

One imagines that Lovecraft shuddered at Howard's breezy, energetic intellectual miscegenation; for Lovecraft, mixing is almost always equal to tainting. Howard, by contrast, happily suggest that the mutt is always the healthiest dog. Setting aside the unfortunate fact of Lovecraft's view on race, Howard's description of his inspirations points to another, more strictly aesthetic, contrast with Lovecraft. "Pigeons from Hell" actually incorporates the conditions of its own creation as a plot point: just as the story rose from a tangle of sources, the key developments in the story's narrative arise from the interplay of cultures and historical conditions. In Lovecraft, more often than not, humanity is attacked from the outside or brought down by an internal imperfection. Either some eldritch thing that shouldn't be phases into the dimension to melt your brain or you discover you've secretly been a fishman all this time. By contrast, in "Pigeons," we get a horror that is the product of a manmade disaster. The supernatural horror of "Pigeons" is the residue of normal human evil, specifically the evil of slavery. In Howard's work, you get the sense that human behavior can get so bad, it poisons the very earth, leaving behind a lethally toxic spiritual superfund site in need of karmic cleansing. The descendants of the sinners and their victims are doomed to fight the same struggles, paying the same steep costs, until the original conditions of the original violation are finally resolved.

Lansdale, Fox, and Stewart manage to capture the same feeling in their modernized adaptation. The plot, a few "why won't my cell work" moments aside, will be immediately recognizable to readers of the original. Two sisters find out they've inherited a decaying white elephant of a plantation way the hell out in bayou country in New Orleans. They visit it, with a small posse of their city-folk friends in tow, to see if they should tear down the joint and try to sell off the land or simply tear up the deed and forget the rotting pile even exists. What they find, of course, is that the primary crop of the old plantation is market-grade freaky shit. And this freaky shit comes in bulk. Zombies, ghosts, black magic, trees that turn into snakes, monsters - should anybody survive, I think we can all agree the answer is to just tear up the deed.

What's nice about Lansdale's plotting, which reflects a similar arc you'll find in the original, is the value it places on the characters as protagonists. What first appears as an riot of threats and uncanny assaults is, as the characters work through their experience, revealed to be a complex web of supernatural interactions, relationships, alliances, and antagonisms. The plantation isn't just haunted: it's got its own supernatural ecosystem. The benefit of this approach is the sense the reader gets that the agency of the protagonists' is not wasted or superficial. Occasionally Lansdale, either out of loyalty to the source story or unfortunate error, lapses in to overt string-pulling: the most notable instance being the appearance of an ancient African American hoodoo man whose chief power is the ability to conjure up massive amounts of exposition.

I'm on the fence about Fox and Stewart's art. At its best, it reminds me of non-Mignola B.P.R.D. stuff. It has the vibrant line work that seems not so much sketchy as literally shaking with life. In fact, there's often a solidity to the characters that gives them a realistic density on the page that I find lacking in the Hellboy spin-off. The downside is that there's a static, disjointed quality to the art - as if everybody has been posed for still shots and then moved to the next set-up without concern for continuity - that leads to busy, murky panels and action that doesn't flow. That said, I'm inclined toward a thumbs up as I think some of the problem with the art comes from constraints imposed by factors outside the artists control. The project's fair tight pacing requires an insane about of visual information be packed onto every page. This keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, but robs the artists of the room they'd need to really bring their all.

Music: "I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without a kingdom."

2011-03-21T11:42:00.001-04:00

One of the most reliable needle-drops in film history, Carmina Burana's Medieval-style chanting and ominously forceful rhythm make it the go-to choice for horror filmmakers trying to serve up their dose of the uncanny with a schmear of religiously tinged gravitas (as well as action filmmakers who have dropped it into hundreds of film trailers). Go ahead and listen to this familiar clip – which appears in the trailers of hundreds of films, from Natural Born Killers to South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut - and we'll catch up on the other side.

Despite the eldritch trappings, Carmina Burana is not an artifact from the Middle Ages. It's not even really a straight-forward religious song. The work was composed over the course of 1935 and 1936 by the German composer Carl Orff. The lyrics, which most powerfully evoke the feel of the Dark Ages, do come from a collection of Medieval poems original written in Latin, Provençal., Old French, and Middle High German (often the poems appear in an odd pidgin fusion of two or more of these languages). Although we now associate these lyrics mostly with tense action film sequences or moments of uncanny horror, the original collection was written as a satire. The poets, a collection of church scholars, used verse to create Rabelaisian satires of the Catholic Church's power structure. Of the 228 poems in the collection, 55 poke fun at the church, 40 are about drinking and gambling, 131 are somewhat randy love poems (with a special fondness for the seduction/rape of shepherdesses – a class Medieval religious scholars apparently found especially enticing), and a final two are spiritual pieces. The book was discovered in 1806 and Orff seems to have run across it in Wine, Women, and Song, a collection of poems featuring more than their fare share of wine, women, and song, anthologized by the famed English cultural historian John Addington Symonds. Symonds's collection featured translations of some 40 poems from Carmina Burana. Orff not only composed the musical setting for the poems, giving a bombastic context for the poems' often surreal and scandalous imagery, but he conceived of a richly multimedia experience for the whole work: a combination of moving sets, elaborate costumes, operatic acting, and music that he called the Theatrum Mundi. The youtube clip above shows all these pieces in action.

Orff's piece does arrive with some sinister baggage. When Orff's composition premiered in 1937, Nazi censors were nervous about the overt eroticism in some of the lyrics. However, government officials failed to take action and the work quickly became one of the most popular pieces composed by a German during the Nazi Era. Orff's own relationship to the Nazi party remains a touchy subject. Though never a major figure of the Nazi's efforts to deploy the arts for the glorification of their regime in the way Leni Riefenstahl, Orff did officially submit music to replace the banned music of Jewish composers and, in a particularly damning incident, refused to assist a friend who was arrested in connection to the anti-Nazi White Rose resistance movement. Some later historians have claimed Orff was himself part of the White Rose movement, but the evidence for this is somewhat lacking.

Whatever the reality of Orff's political sympathies during the time, his work emerged from the era unscathed: by the 1960s it was a standard piece in the quiver of any significant classical orchestra. Modern music critic and scholar Alex Ross actually makes the case that its popularity is linked directly to the fact that the music itself lacks any ideological thrust: "That Carmina Burana has appeared in hundreds of films and television commercials is proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever." For horror fans, however, the charm of the song is the faint suggestion of the diabolical. It's just diabolic enough.

Movie: "Have noted 52 distinct uses of WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

2011-03-16T15:40:00.003-04:00

That Piranha (Aja, 2010) features both a cameo by Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss and a close-up CGI monster-fish regurgitating a half-eaten penis says something about modern horror, but what it says, exactly, I don't know.

In fact, I'm at something of a loss when it comes to saying anything about Piranha as the film is basically discussion proof. This isn't because there's nothing to say about the film, but rather because the film is so self-aware in its embrace of every strength and flaw and so meticulously explicit and thorough in its construction that the movie is immune to any significant attempt at analysis. The cinematic equivalent of a cigarette, it's exhausted in the act of experiencing it. Which is, perhaps, the wittiest joke in a film that otherwise favors sub-frat grade chuckles: Aja made a 3D movie that is all flat surfaces.

The fun-horror crowd is fond of defending the endemic stupidity of so many horror flicks with the argument that the viewer fails to "get" these films because they can't shut off their brains and just enjoy them. It isn't that the films are crap; it's that you haven't performed the necessary infantilizing auto-lobotomy required to find their level. For what it's worth, that's not what's going on in Piranha. The flick isn't mindless. It's weirder than stupid: Aja approached the task of recreating a slice of retro schlock horror as if he'd been tasked with restoring Michelangelo's David, and the result is a relentless excavation of guilty pleasure cinema that seems more like an autopsy than a celebration. What the viewer feels isn't so much fun as an excess-induced abobamiento.

Typical of the surreal approach of the film is the joyless, anthropological approach it takes towards the Spring Breakers who will eventually become the titular beasties' main course. On the DVD making-of clips, there's a telling moment when Aja discusses his fascination with Spring Break. Growing up in France, he never experienced anything like Spring Break and confronted with this distinctly American bacchanalia, he says that he spent a lot of time researching it. One imagines him freezing framing episodes of MTV Spring Break and writing down things like "inverse relationship between height and number of breast flashes" and "have noted 52 distinct uses of WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!" The result curiously stagey for what's meant to be an orgy of young ids unleashed. For example, for all his study of Spring Break, Aja decided that the Breakers would be grouped into themed boats. You can tell the members of every krewe apart and reckon your position on the lake by costume-signal. (He didn't just adopt any anthropological eye, he specifically channeled Levi-Strauss.) It's Spring Break as as a structuralist study.

Another great example of Aja's curious stagey-ness is the famous "two girls underwater" scene. In what must honestly be ranked as 3D only genuinely interesting deployment, Aja films what is meant to be a underwater lesbo scene intended for inclusion in a Girls Gone Wild style porno. What ensues is a languorous synchronized swimming scene that simultaneously evokes the beauty and the beast pas de deux in Creature from the Black Lagoon and the elaborate bathing beauty scenes that used to appear in Busby Berkeley joints. What it doesn't look anything like is porn, especially porn that is essentially improvised on location by an intoxicated cast and crew.

Again and again, Aja pushes the flick into these weirdly inert abstractions, unable to hide the fact that his capabilities as a filmmaker can't really be contained in such a crappy project. In Piranha we get to witness the curious spectacle of a filmmaker trying to make a completely dumb film, in homage to other dumb films, and not being able to dumb himself down enough to do it convincingly.

Music: "Yeah, sure Satan rules. But that doesn't mean that I can't be practical."

2011-03-14T18:30:00.003-04:00

Apparently the Future of the Left plays Haxan in the background when they play "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You." So here's the two things put together.

Movies: There's no cannibalism in the champagne room.

2011-03-12T17:25:00.004-05:00

How can you tell when a trend has lapsed into decadence? Some might suggest that the widespread use of sub-genre formulas is a good sign post. When the creative petrol of a movement is spent, the modern cultural industry, with its accountant's heart and its rat-like aversion to the new, ensures that a trend can coast on the fumes for years. Still, some of the best genre entertainments boldly and sincerely embrace the predictable elements of their genre. Besides, genre works pull so deeply from archetypal forms that it's something of a fool's game to try to separate out laziness from profundity.

The inevitable lapse into self-parody? It is one thing to deploy humor, but the idea of a lapse into self-parody is one did it unintentionally because the restrictions of a genre left you nowhere to go but Stupidsville, U.S.A., and you bought that ticket thinking you were going to Awesome Town. To use a non-horror example, Airplane isn't a lapse into self-parody. It's just a parody. Day After Tomorrow's "we're outrunning cold" scene: that's self-parody. This seems like a no-brainer. When the possibilities of a genre have been so thoroughly explored that any existing avenues basically require that you're an idiot to make or consume the product, then it's time to smack the trend on the ass, say "good game," and tell it to hit the showers. Problem here is, outside of the genre, almost all of the genre looks like self-parody. I don't know whether this is because connoisseurship is prerequisite to genre understanding or whether genre fans are simple too close to know when they're shit's become retarded. Is it that you need a deep and nuanced understanding of zombie films to truly grasp the brilliance of Survival of the Dead or have a small group of true believers convinced themselves that Romero's late career disaster is not a cinematic abortion?

When no systematic approach is available, then the best you can do is pick an arbitrary point and map out the trajectory of the waning trend from your specific frame of reference. So long as you admit your frame of reference is singular, you'll allow others, each observing the same phenomenon from their distinct frames of reference, to make whatever calculations to sync up the observations. Applying this pragmatic solution to the problem, I'm defining my frame of reference thusly: A trend is creatively bankrupt when, within a single year, you get two films mashing-up the trend with strippers.[1] This sounds like a pretty clumsy tool for sorting out the messy field of tropes, but applied correctly, you can really get some fine-detailed results. Take, for example, Robert Rodriguez's 1996 crime flick vampire Holocaust flick, From Dusk Till Dawn. Here two trends, vampires and dead-pan pomo crime flicks, ran up against a stripper in the shapely form of Salma Hayek. There would be no other vampire stripper movies that year, leaving the vampire flick plenty of room to further evolve. The dead-pan pomo crime flick, on the other hand, was also caught slipping Jacksons into the garter of Demi Moore in that year's Striptease. It was the first step on the road to Truth and Consequences, N.M..

From that frame of reference, the year 2008 was officially the year the zombie thing hit intellectual and creative rock bottom. That was the year horror fans were afflicted with Jay Lee's Zombie Strippers and Jason Murphy's Zombies! Zombies! Zombies![2], two films boasting the same log line: zombie outbreak traps survivors in a strip joint.

In the defense of both flicks, the two-stripper-flicks-a-year thing isn't meant as a value judgment. It's simply a law of the universe. The same way the impersonal physical facts of a black hole are imbued with no ethic aspect past vast cosmic indifference, these stripper/zombie movies weren't made to kill of zombie films nor is there something so bad about these films they somehow fatally compromised an otherwise healthy sub-genre. Both films are pitched as nothing more than tasteless horror-comedies. And if you haven't seen worse horror films than either of these offerings, then you simply don't watch many horror films. Nevertheless, despite the manic relentless drive of each of these pics at their best, there's something exhausted at their core. One imagines them personified as one of the strippers they feature so prominently: torn between giving their umpteenth by-the-numbers lap dance to any slob-ola who will fork up enough cheddar and roaming the back of the club listlessly, hoping to run the clock out and remain relatively unmolested until closing time.

Of the two films, Zombie Strippers is the better flick. Admittedly, this is a bit like asking which would you prefer: a punch in the crotch or a kick? The answer is a punch, of course, but it will suck big time either way. Even if we restricted ourselves to comparing production values, name casting, and the willingness to show naked breasts, we'd have to give the dubious title of "Best Stripper-Containing Zombie Film of 2008" award to Zombie Strippers. After an oddly low-rent opening action sequence, ZS manages to find some visual pizzazz despite its tiny budget. This is in part because Lee sporadically embraces a color-saturated minimalist aesthetic that gives the absurd proceedings a pop-art feel that 3Z lacks. The visuals of 3 Z are deeply indebted to the "late American indie broke" aesthetic. From the cheapie visual effects to the sheer number of shots that take place in a set the script must of described as "External. Parking Lot where there's nothing in frame that could cost us any money," the movie is what happens when the limits of imagination and budget don't act as a spur to creativity.

But, honestly, the money issues aside, what gives ZS the edge up is its surprising taste in inspirations. ZS really has two stories going on at once. There's the bog standard Beau Geste plot of hold survivors fighting off a horde of zombies, and then there's the plot actually involving the zombie strippers: a plot that owes less to horror film tropes than classic show biz melodrama. And that weird blend is what gives ZS whatever kick it can claim.

The plot of ZS ain't rocket science. In a no longer applicable near future in which Bush was elected four times and launched wars against pretty much every country in the world, in the town of Sartre, Nebraska (the film's first joke in what my wife calls the "Oh, you've read a book" vein of "humor"), a lab experimenting with reviving dead soldiers to further usefulness has a mishap. Of course, the zombification experiment escapes the lab and infects the dancers and patrons of a local strip club (in this alternate future, Bush's 12-year-reign has given the religious right enough juice to make strip clubs illegal and they're something like speakeasies, only pedaling sexual frustration instead of booze). The club, the Rhino, run by one Ionesco - hammed up by Robert "Freddy" Englund; credited and refered to as Ian; and the second "oh, you've read a book" joke of the film - is basically the sole set of the flick. It's the films world and the isolation adds to the pop-art comic book feel of the proceedings. As the virus spreads, two narrative threads unfold. Inexplicably, getting zombified makes one insanely hot as a stripper. I say inexplicably because, visually, zombified strippers get just as rotty and grotesque as any zombie you'd care to cite. (In the world of this flick, zombie stuff impacts men and women differently - in a wonderfully daffy jab at scientific validity, a lab coat states that this has something to do with XX and XY chromosomes - with female zombies maintaining a significant portion - speech, motivations, memory - of their mental powers, and men becoming mindless types.) But, like the mauled sensualists of Clive Barker's many works, we're simply given to believe that being dead somehow give you insights to levels of the erotic that living people somehow miss.

Smartly, ZS doesn't drink it's own Kool Aid on the whole massive-bodily-trauma-equals-hottie thing. In this sense, it links up with the remake of Night of the Demons in presenting Barker's bizarre elevation of fetishization as a goof. Once the strippers begin to zombify (which, by the way, is recognized as a word by my spellcheck), the story bifurcates: one plot involves the zombified strippers fighting for male flesh as a commodity: male attention is the currency that buys one a place in the stripper hierarchy and male flesh is the fuel that keeps the women running. The second plot involves the the pure strain humans fighting for their survival against the zombified byproducts of the strippers' civil war. Sadly, the second, less interesting plot takes up most of the screen time. The movie is most alive when we're watching the strippers go at one another. The strippers live in an almost completely female world: they exist as characters entirely in relation to one another and the crisis of the plot basically gives the diretor/writer and the actresses the ability to literalize every conflict and play it out. In the moments in which this is happening, the film is strangely captivating.

In his infamously honest essay about the "talented tenth," W.E.B. DuBois metaphorically the self-destructive impulse of an oppressed community as a bucket full of crabs. When one crab thinks it can make a break, the others, in a panic, grab hold of it and keep in the bucket. I don't know how many readers have ever actually seen a container of live crabs, but DuBios description of the mad swirl of armored and weaponized limbs is brutality correct. At one point in ZS there's a scene in which two zombie strippers fight for the role of queen of the roost. They literally rip one another apart. At one point, one uses her vagina against the other as weapon. It was meant, no doubt, as a gross out joke, but that doesn't make it any less horrible true. When one reads some trash talk article from Jezebel or the Broadsheet about a femme apostate, you can pretty much imagine that fight from Zombie Strippers as the metaphorical equivalent. In that sense, Zombie Strippers is one of the few real feminist horror films in the sense that it makes a horror story out of women-centric relationships where men are reduced to something like a unit of exchange.

That said, Zombie! Zombie! Zombie! is genuinely more interested in its strippers as people. There's a great line in 3Z in which one of the strippers, on being invited to a post-show grub session, says she has to study for her finals and begs off. The idea that a stripper might have a life outside of stripping would be completely alien to the weird hothouse environment of ZS. There's another delightful bit when, on the occasion of one stripper sheepishly mentioning that she has a child, the other stripper launch into stories of their own children. For all it's faults - and they are legion - 3Z is has lucid moments of sincere sympathy with real humanity. There's a nice bit, about 30 minutes in, when, after a panicked crowd flees to the strip joint for safety, two members of the crowd get into a a lover's tiff. It isn't dramatically important, but it feels so correct as to make one wonder if it is improvised. I don't want to overpraise 3Z. This is a flick whose idea of dialog includes the clunker: "Them ain't crack whores! Them bitches is crack whore zombies!" (Not quoted from memory - Netflix has truly revolutionized film scholarship.) Still, it would be unfair to deny the flick its moments of strikingly real interaction.

One of the weirdest aspects of 3Z is a strange conflict between the strippers of the film and a group of prostitutes who ply their trade outside in the clubs parking lot. I'm assuming it's the club's parking lot; most of the film's first half hour takes place in nondescript parking lots. For all the nuance the film allows the strippers, the whores are jokes. Their pimp is a buffoon and they are all grotesques. There's a surreal scene in which the strippers and the whores dine in the same greasy spoon and viewer gets to see the differential treatment of the two classes of women. The strippers have shown up to grab a bit of post-work protein, but the whores have shown up to celebrate the anniversary of one year of a certain prostitute's chattel-slavery to their pimp. The celebration of the whores is treated as a lampoon. Do they have children? Are any of them in school? Who cares? 3Z couldn't be bothered. The film posits some weird scale of nobility where stripping is a fine, perhaps even noble profession, but prostitutes are scum. Which is weird, 'cause it's otherwise a remarkably sympathetic film.

[1] This raises a problem: What if the genre trend is strippers themselves? If we're trending narratives about strippers, then every film in the trend features strippers mashed-up - figuratively or literary - with strippers. So is trending strippers like dividing by zero? Not exactly, the idea here isn't that nature abhors a stripper. The question is not the existence of a trend, but whether the trend is crap. Provided the films in our hypothetical stripper sub-genre never came out faster than once a year, we could, theoretically, have a vibrant sub-genre dedicated to the fine art of removing skimpy outfits for money. If, however, the films come out at a rate of two or more a year, we still get a numerically significant trend of stripper flicks. This trend, however, will consist mostly of vapid, junky, dumb flicks.

[2] There's no strictly textual guidance as to whether the title of Mr. Murphy's film should be bellowed, with echo effects, in the style of radio announcer advertising a monster truck show, or does it have more of a plaintive, whiny Jan Bradyish quality. "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" or "Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!"? Personally, I alternate between the two styles in response to thematic demands. I leave it as a matter of the reader's taste and conscience.

Stuff: La Muerte Baila la Samba!

2011-03-11T13:33:00.004-05:00

Just a quick Friday post-lunch treat: over at the appropriately named Morbid Anatomy blog, you kind find a small, but delightful, collection of Spanish pulp novel covers featuring skeletons.

Television: "You can do whatever you like. I'm going back down to the cellar . . ."

2011-03-07T16:52:00.003-05:00

Before Stacie made the stick-figure-horror thing the cornerstone of her vast media empire, there was this:

Movies: Trusting young normal human girl wanted to watch completely normal human child of unremarkable human parents.

2011-03-05T09:22:00.005-05:00

There's probably no better example for how absolutely familiar the well-trod ground over which Babysitter Wanted walks is than the shot of Angie (played by the preternaturally young-looking Sarah Thompson) plucking a phone number off a babysitter wanted flier hanging on a bulletin board on the college commons. It's one of those movie-real moments that only doesn't strike us as fake because we've seen it repeated so often in fiction that we've grown to accept it as reasonable. Like elaborate terrorism-for-hire plots or the idea that mental asylums all look like a cross between Disney's Haunted Mansion and the Bastille, we've seen so many people put up random posters for a babysitter - instead of using their social network of personal connections, as most folks do - that this bizarrely non-discriminating way of hiring somebody to watch your offspring doesn't strike us as odd. Or, to put a finer point on it, we know it's odd because Babysitter Wanted is a horror movie, so we know it's a horrible idea to go to the home of somebody who is fine with any babysitter just showing up. We know the poster might as well read, "Trusting young normal human girl wanted to watch completely normal human child of unremarkable human parents. References unnecessary. Non-virgins need not apply. NO CELL PHONES!" What strikes us as not odd is that nobody in the film thinks that it is odd. It's a genre plot point that's become so comfortable that it doesn't even evoke a twitch on disbelief-suspensometer.

The babysitter flier is one of those genre cliches that has become so overused that it no longer seems like a short cut or lazy storytelling, but rather a small shared ritual, like saying "bless you" when somebody sneezes. And in that small space of the knowing exchange of shared meanings, Babysitter Wanted delivers a surprising amount of simple pleasure. This isn't to say that such a willingness to embrace genre expectations doesn't come with some serious drawbacks. BW engages the viewer so effortlessly and places so little in the way of demands on the viewer's attention that the experience is inevitably a shallow one. But some pleasures are narrow. When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with card tricks. My stubby, sausage-like fingers ensured that I would always lack the dexterity to master such tricks myself. I had to content myself with simply learning all the secrets and watching others perform them. When I watch a magician perform a card trick, I (usually, but not always) can see exactly how the trick is done and follow every slight of hand and misdirection. Because of this, I think I enjoy the tricks far more than the uninitiated. For those being "tricked," there's always a hint of potential aggression there. For me, there's the uncomplicated, refreshingly simple pleasure of watching somebody being competent enough to successfully complete a tricky task.

Speaking of cards, let's lay them out on the table. Babysitter Wanted is really nothing more than a poor man's House of the Devil. Or, to give BW its chronological due, House of the Devil is nothing more than an artsy remake of Babysitter Wanted. The plots are similar: young college girl takes a babysitting gig for a family living in a remote house, there's a satanic angle, chasing and sacrificing ensue. But there, the differences end. Reviewers of West's retro fright pic often praised it with negatives: no jump scares, no torture porn, no ADD-friendly pacing and editing, and so on. From the list of negatives, you could imagine a theoretical alternate version of the film that deployed far more typical genre tropes; but you don't have to, Babysitter Wanted is that hypothetical flick.

Aside from storytelling choices, the key difference between the films centers around the treatment of their source material and, by extension, each film's relationship to its genre. BW lacks the period trappings, apparently a major draw for legions of folks who felt that the lack Walkmans in contemporary American cinema was a dire failing much in need of correction. But otherwise, the two films are genetic relations; BW and HotD both draw deep from the well of "Satanic panic" films of the 1980s, only the former does it without the self-conscious display of influences and technique. House treats the whole Satanic stories subgenre as an archival tourist spot, a curious destination to visit and document. By contrast, Babysitter treats it as just another subgeneric tributary, perhaps somewhat attenuated but still flowing, that pours in the mainstream of horror. This is distance is typical of West. The result is that West's work, even at its most energetic (Cabin Fever II), possesses an emotional detachment. This isn't a criticism of West; his most sublime moments often come from his careful indifference to the demands of genre and his movies would lack their delicious sadism if he trafficked in fan-service. In contrast, Barnes and Manasseri are eager to please and driven to fit directly into the expectations of their viewership.

What struck me while watching BW is that we no longer recognize how weird the standard horror flick is. In a way, West's flick is a far simpler beast. Its obsessive awareness of influence acts to restrain it. It wants to be a very specific thing - an '80s cult flick - and only that. By contrast, Babysitter pulls from satanic panic flicks, uses some torture porn elements, throws in some slasher like hunting scenes, goes in for some black comedy, and so on. These things are presented in a oft repeated and utterly familiar context, so the use of these elements doesn't seem particularly surprising or innovative. But, watching them come together, it dawned on me how many influences, how much film history appears in even the most run of the mill horror film. Most horror films, regardless of their merits and intentions, are the result of a century of artistic history and they carry the marks of this heritage, for better or worse, on their face.

One of the most common visual metaphors for evolution is the ascent of man illustration. You know the one: there's a chimp on the far left side, the start of a series of increasingly bipedal and hairless humanoids, that ends with a fully human individual. The problem with that picture is that it suggests variable levels of evolution. Chimps aren't proto-humans that couldn't cut it and therefore never got the bennies of a fully upright posture. Chimps are the result of the same millions of years of evolution as humans. They are equally, but differently, evolved. The same, in a strictly metaphorical sense, can be said of that most reviled of horror products: the "standard horror flick." Babysitter Wanted never voluntarily picked up this burden and it is almost unfair for me to place this weight on such a slender and innocuous flick, but for a brief 93 minutes, the film reminded me that even the commonplace is highly evolved.

Stuff: CRwM and the Case of the Bed-Bug Free, But Still Slightly Haunted Bed.

2011-02-28T20:50:00.003-05:00

This sign was posted on a discarded box frame near my wife's shop in Fort Greene.

Movies: This is sound of what you don't know killing you.

2011-02-26T16:52:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen J. T. Petty's S&Man yet - yeah, I know, the wacky typographical title is off putting, for realz - go watch it and then come back. 'Cause I'm pretty much just going to bust into it as if you've seen it.

Okay? Here's five random observations about S&Man

1.
In an early moment of of J. T. Petty's horror mockumentary S&Man, the titular filmmaker, the charmingly shy and rolly-polly Eric "S&Man" Rost, takes pains to clear up the pronunciation of his ampersand enhanced name: It's said "Sandman," not "S and M Man." Oddly, one imagines the incorrect pronunciation wouldn't be "S and M Man," but rather "S and Man." To pronounce it "S and M Man," you'd have to take a some alpha-phonetic liberties and slide another M in there. Still, the point is the first hint of the film's larger theme.

Sexual violence and S & M are often, but erroneously, conflated. The latter is a performance of the former intended to give at least one of the participants pleasure. The fact that it has this performative distance, that it is "fake" and understood to be so means that it ceases to be simply fake and becomes real, but in another sense. It severs the performance from the reality it supposedly emulates and gives it a new self-referential meaning, which opens it up to levels of irony, camp, style, decadence, and pleasure, that real violence, in its brutal mute presence, does not contain. S & M is the artistic conception of sexual violence. As such, it is devoid of sexual violence. When you make something art, its entire factuality is contained in the fact that it's a work of art. That's its power and allure. Art and the real exist in two parallel dimensions: mirrors of one another, but incommensurably distinct. Where art exists, we live in its depths. Where the real exists, one confronts the deafening silence of art's absence.

For somebody craving the art of S & M, sexual violence remains a destructive and vile negation. On the other hand if, like Eric, one desires to see real sexual violence, no amount of art could slake one's thirst.

Eric testily points that he's not "S and M Man." He informs J. T. Petty, playing himself as a documentarian, that he's "not into that shit." Of course he isn't.

2.
The thorniest problem of horror cinema is the fact that horrors fans, without much pretext, can enjoy watching simulated atrocities. Outside of horror fandom, this is the core problem that gives the genre, despite it's longevity and profitability, the irremovable stigma of being a dubious sort of art. That is why, unlike sci-fi, romance, or any of the other second class genres which are dismissed merely as wastes of time, horror (like porn) remains a genre that is, for many, fundamentally beyond the pale.

This problem gets repressed within the fandom, but like all repressed facts leads to neurotic quirks. The critical discourse of genre, even when sympathetic, is steeped in the language of guilt and complicity. Catharsis theories, for example, attempt to prove that horror is good for mental health - a claim fans of sci-fi would never have to make because nobody takes seriously the proposition that watching science fiction films might be a sign of poor mental health. The famous last girl theory, with its play of complicity and sympathy, attempts to codify a spectator approach that justifies the viewing of simulated mass murder by showing how the fans "side" with the triumphant last would-be victim. Again, this notion that the viewer is innocent by virtue of wanting the almost-victim to win nods to the universal notion that there's something morally complicated about the pleasures of horror. Why proclaim one's innocence if there wasn't ever a question of guilt?

Folk theories - the sort of home grown explanations common to blogs and the like - are just as complicated. One popular, but kinda silly, folk theory is the Mimetic Argument: Horror films are violent because the world is violent. The idea that horror films reflect reality is, for the most part, transparent nonsense. If it were simply a reflection of the violence of the world that horror fans were after, we could just watch old Bumfights tapes and toss away ghost show hokum like Freddy. The world of the horror film is to real violence what the world of romantic comedies is to genuine courtship. For folks stretching for a little more redemption in their horror fare, there's the After School Special Argument: The violence of horror flicks is excusable, even if it is excessive, because horror films are "about something." Curiously, I've actually seen this taken to its logical conclusion, with one blogger sincerely arguing that actual on-screen violence against animals is okay if the real bloodshed is being done to serve a larger dramatic theme. This, of course, is a dodge. Even the average film-goer would agree that extreme imagery is sometimes artistically justified, the moral pickle is one's enjoyment of said extreme imagery.

3.
Petty's S&Man is the most serious contemporary meditation on the nature of the pleasures of horror cinema. In a pleasant surprise, Petty manages to cut the Gordian knot of voyeurism and film-going, divorcing his answer to the persistent problem of horror cinema's irresistible dark glamour from the po-faced self-flagellations of fright flick slummers, from Peeping Tom to Funny Games. Instead, by looking at the "worst of the worst" - the extreme horror underground of faux snuff fetish flicks - and contrasting them with the possibility of genuine death, Petty suggests the possibility of a radical break between representations and the real.

Throughout the film, Petty contrasts his fictional S&Man with a handful of genuine "characters," all playing themselves. Most notably, the delightfully ineloquent and profane Bill Zebub, auteur behind such horror-inflected fetish stroke flick classics as Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist and Kill the Scream Queen. and the curiously frat-boyish Fred Vogel, the infamous director of intestinal fortitude tests known as the August Underground series. These scenes, part expose and part Spinal Tap-ish satire, are some of the most moving segments in the film. Aside from the gonzo, gross out humor, there are several moments that are genuinely chilling and, perhaps more powerfully, genuinely sad. The scene of Bill Zebub taking a long, drunken night to get a single scene of one of his horror/fetish flicks in the can is one of the best comedic scenes ever placed in a horror flick. With its perfect blend of condescension and compassion, cruel exactness and broad sympathy, it's the best statement about bad art since Burton's Ed Wood.

Thematically, these two filmmakers and their work serve as a counterpoint to the fictional Eric and his films. The anarchic slapstick bad taste orgies of Vogel - who brags with almost John Waterish joy that he's got an actress in his stable that can vomit on cue - and the painfully raw fetish salads of Zebub are displayed in noisy, energetic contrast to the long take, static set up minimalism of the flicks in the fictional S&Man film series.

The S&Man flicks are, actually, really dull. If it wasn't for the almost immediate tip of the hand that gave the dangerous aura of snuff cinema, they'd be memorable for their tediousness. By contrast, the z-grade flicks of Vogel and Zebub are busting with life. The action's hectic - Vogel's clips spill into the film like mutant Marx Bros segments, chaotic to the point of incomprehension and filled with fourth wall breaking bits - and often, once you get past the stomach churning aspects of them, quite silly. More importantly, they - the films and the filmmakers - are products of an artistic subculture. They are reacting to other works and artists, attempting to expand, undermine, or innovate the boundaries of the genre as they know it. In one telling scene, after learning that Vogel employs an actress who is a cutter and who cuts herself in his latest flick, we see get a clip of Zebub working some self-cutting into his latest work.

Though the pleasures, if that's what one calls them, of Vogel and Zebub's work are more extreme than most horror fans care for, the dynamic here is familiar and can be found throughout the genre. Horror is more than self-reflexive; it's a competitive sport. Horror filmmakers are constantly pushing the parameters of previous work in a game of artistic one-up-manship. And it's this relationship, this closed world, that Petty indicates as the source of the joys of horror films. Horror films are not about death or the release of the primal id or the need to psychically unburden one's troubled soul or the latest headlines and echo chamber politics; the joy of a good horror film comes from witnessing the art of the film. Humans respond with pleasure to the well crafted work of art. Thankfully for Vogel and Zebub, the definition of well crafted is pretty flexible. Still, Petty suggests the pleasure of horror spectatorship is located in witnessing the evolution of the subcultural form, of watching something embrace the norms we no and successfully exploit or innovate them.

Eric's work, quiet and seemingly unaware of the audience, is something more like outsider art. He's not a horror filmmaker. His work is about death. It doesn't belong to an artistic community, but belongs to the empty void of fact.

4.
In a brilliantly illuminating role, Dr. Carol "Women and Chainsaws" Clover, playing herself, provides the film's academic gravitas. Seriously, as much as I question her thesis about the whole final girl thing, I could have watched another hour of Clover talkin' head footage: She's that articulate, effortlessly insightful, and genuinely invested in the topic of horror. Somebody shoot the Clover doc, pronto.

5.
Of course, with a thesis that posits an impassable gap between the real and the fake, Petty paints himself into a corner: You can't have Eric the S&Man in the flick as the avatar of reality as you've just proposed that the real needs no avatars and an alleged avatars are, automatically, fakers. (When citing cases of "real horror" it is telling that Petty and Clover both cite instances of genuine violence that, curiously enough, were staged for video or still cameras.) Which I believe explains the somewhat unsatisfying end when Petty seemingly helps Eric off Petty's girlfriend in order to film the death. It's a jarring narrative contrivance, but I think it is meant to appear so. If Petty's right, Eric must end the film being dragged into the clear and unmistakable fictitiousness.

Stuff: Swan dive.

2011-02-17T14:01:00.006-05:00

A few days ago I received the ballot for The Vault of Horror's Cyber Horror Awards. Though I have never voted in these awards and do not intend to this year, I receive these with clockwork regularly, a testament to the tenacity and open-mindedness of the award's prime mover, the indefatigable horror high priest and blogger Brian Solomon. My strict adherence to a horror award non-alignment pact isn't a reflection Brian's tireless community building efforts. It's strictly personal: The project of qualitative ranking strikes me as irrelevant in a genre as diverse as horror and the concept of fan awards causes me to break out in hives.

Still, the nominee list is not without interest, notably for the oddity of what surely must be this year's shoo-in nom for Best Pic, Director, Actress, and, most likely, Supporting Actress, Screenplay, and Sundry Lesser Awards (SLAs): Aronofksy's Black Swan.

The appearance of Black Swan on the list is bizarre insomuch as, outside the community of horror fanciers, I don't believe very many people would consider Black Swan a horror film. That source of all knowledge filmic, imdb, gathers it under the generic trinity of "drama, mystery, thriller." The vox pop of Wikipedia prefers "psychological thriller." Vanity Fair explicitly tackled the subject when "25 Questions" columnist Mike Ryan overtly titled his column "Is Black Swan a Horror Movie?" (He weirdly dodges the horror tag, getting right up to the point of using the h-word – "Not in the traditional sense. I mean, it’s not a gory Saw-type movie. But, for lack of a better term . . ." – and then refusing to pull the trigger – "Black Swan is one dark, fucked-up movie."). E Online was willing to drop the h-word in its review, but it was a rare exception. Notably, one few other pro reviewers to drop the h-bomb, Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter, does so dismissively: "The horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness."

For what it's worth, even Aronofksy was somewhat dismissive of the idea. In an extended interview for Art Voice, the director basically dismissed the entire concept of genre as a somewhat outdated crutch: "I'm not really much of a genre guy; this was my best attempt at a genre film. I think audiences don't need that anymore. Audiences are very sophisticated; as long as it's fun, and entertaining, and that's what I was trying to make."

In contrast, the horror fan community seems to have wholeheartedly decided that Black Swan is, indeed, one of their own. Every major horror news aggregator weighed in on the film as if its status was obvious. Bloggers regularly tossed it into the top half of their annual top ten. Indeed, some horror bloggers stretched the bounds of good faith reporting to count the flick as a fright film. Fear.Net, for example, took extensive quotes from Aronofksy out of context to suggest that he crafted the film with horror genre elements in mind. Quoting Aronofksy on the use of handheld digital cameras, the site explains, "He explained that the contradiction between the florid spectacle of the choreography and the intimacy of handheld camerawork ultimately served to distract the audience from the fact that they were in fact watching a horror film – until it's too late, of course." In fact, Aronofksy was answering a question regarding the difference in style between The Wrestler and Black Swan and how he was initially uncertain whether "the whole cinéma vérité, hand held thing was a big risk." When he talks about the camerawork pulling a cinematic rope-a-dope, he's talking about how the naturalistic feel of the hand held cameras sets viewer expectations against the surreal elements of the later film. Horror is never mentioned.

In fact, there's something kind of desperate in the elevation of Black Swan. Its position in the Cyber Horror Awards is unintentionally (I'm sure) comedic. It's pit against such laughably unmatched competitors – a novelty act import, a remake whose superior original is still fresh in viewers' minds, a pity entry from the wheezing decline of the "of the Dead" franchise, and an extended 3D gore-gag reel – that you can't help but feel that we're seeing representatives of the most disreputable aspects of the genre – remakes, splatter, gimmick flicks, tired franchises – offered up as a sacrifice to the god of cinematic respectability.

I'm not sure that I have much of an opinion in whether or not Black Swan is or isn't a horror film proper, but I do find one aspect of the whole thing interesting. Basically, I can't see how a film like Black Swan can be considered horror by any definition that would exclude the much reviled Twilight franchise. As such, I think Black Swan stands as an interesting example of how profoundly useless genre distinctions, as they are currently conceived, are in any meaningful discussion of a film's merits.

Before we go on, it's only right I defend the BS/Twilight assertion. There are, essentially, two main thrusts to the whole Black Swan-is-horror argument.

1. Black Swan is scary, therefore it is horror.

2. Black Swan uses horror tropes, therefore it is horror.

Even a cursory examination of the arguments laid out explicitly shows the problem: If accepted as true, the first assertion implies generic criteria that utterly fail to define the genre. Certainly, the assertion seems to hold for obvious examples. Watching endurance-fest torture porn might not be everybody's idea of good horror, but on the basis that it is meant to horrify us, most viewers would accept that, say, Martyr's is, indeed, a horror film. (Whether it is torture porn or not is a down the subgenre K-hole plummet I don't wish to take at the moment.) If one is flexible with the definition of "scary" and grants that the term can embrace all varieties of dread, shock, and unease, then the assertion starts to do a pretty good job of catching up horror flicks from the periphery of the genre. There are no jump scares or cringe inducing gore shots in Lake Mungo, but the film evokes a real sense of dread and sorrow that under the expanded definition of "scary" would allow us to call it a horror film. Here's the problem: there are countless horror films that, by design, just aren't scary and, even more problematic, countless films that nobody genuinely counts as horror that are truly disturbing. The retro-rom-zom-com Fido has some scenes of tension, but I doubt that the average viewer finds the flick scary in any real sense of the term. Even if you do, dear reader, I'm certain you can come up with at least horror title that, by design, doesn't bring the fear. And, on the other hand, I remember the doc Crumb filling me with a nihilistic depression that I would say qualified under our expanded definition of "scary." Though even I wouldn't honestly claim Crumb was a horror film. Arguably, we could try to defend assertion one by arguing that Crumb, or any other film I find expanded-scary, is a horror film for me and dismiss the problem of consensual categories; but this is the equivalent of admitting the proposition is false because it basically admits that there is no stable, general, useful distinction based in the reality of the movies as objects. Like the animals in Borges's Chinese zoological taxonomy, the field of movies could then be endlessly shuffled from person to person without developing any meaningful insights into the films themselves. For a genre to have any significance as a meaningful organizing principle, it needs to be shared by more than one person. (Tangentially, every now and then, on a slow day, somebody will trot out a list of "movies that are actually horror movies" and this is why the list is always bullshit: we all know that there's something more to horror movies than one dude announcing that a flick is scary.)

If proposition 1 gets us nowhere, proposition 2 won't get us much further. First, there's the question of what we're going to define as a horror trope. Many of the elements of Black Swan that viewers would most readily pick out as horror tropes – a narrative of mental disintegration, violence, the presence of a doppelgänger – are found in Fight Club, a film that I don't feel is widely considered a horror film. Heck, Adaptation features a doppelgänger. Even if we could define horror tropes as horror-specific and granted that their appearance in a film made something a horror flick, you'd have the problem of weird genre proliferation we saw with proposition 1. And, more to the point of defending my statement, you'd have to accept that stuff like Twilight was legitimately horror. Vampires, dawg. Shit's full of 'em.

Genre, as we use it in the wider horror blog-o-sphere, is pretty much a useless idea. If Black Swan is horror, then almost anything and pretty much nothing is horror in any meaningful way. And perhaps that's a good thing. Not that the result would seem much in doubt, but perhaps we should root for Black Swan to win and take its victory to mark the start of a new, more thoughtful way to think about what genre might mean.

Books: Bizarre art-by-the-pound stately pleasure dome.

2011-02-12T22:35:00.007-05:00

About three-fourths of the way into Mat Johnson's new novel, Pym, we meet a hack landscape painter, unapologetically modeled on the master of mall art Thomas Kinkade, who, after adopting an apocalyptic millennial strain of Tea Party ideology, uses the massive profits from his schlock empire of oddly illuminated landscapes to create a self-contained biosphere hidden in the icy wastes of Antarctica. There he lives with his wife – a perpetually peeved housewife who secretly grows and smokes pot in the biodome as a tactic in a losing war against boredom and domestic disenchantment – trying to perfect the internal landscape of his arctic layer, quixotically wrestling with his purchased reality in an impossible effort to impose his saccharine aesthetic on the world around him. Eventually this artist will be required to take up arms to defend his bizarre art-by-the-pound stately pleasure dome against an invading army of abominable snowmen. And women. And children.

And that doesn't even rank as the weirdest thing in the book. In fact, I don't know that I would even put that up in the top ten.

The log line on Pym is simple. A recently canned African American lit prof finds the journal of Dirk Peters, a supporting character in Edgar Allan Poe's maddeningly eccentric novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which proves that (with some minor liberties) Poe's tale was essentially a true story. In Poe's work, there appears a tribe of black arctic natives (so black that even their teeth are black) that, the ex-professor reasons, must still exist: a black society never touched by the colonialism, slavery, and exploitation that has been the curse of the native African population and its diaspora. Though a series of unlikely connections, an all-African American exploratory crew, led by the professor and following Poe's novel and Peters' journal, sets out to find this lost world of blackness.

And it goes all to hell.

Poe's original Narrative is a grand mess of a book. Characters appear and disappear, the plot regularly flirts with incomprehensibility, and the ending of the book is so abrupt and provocatively illogical and unsatisfying that it is, perhaps justly, widely ignored by the reading public. Those that do read it are often compelled to impose a scrim of explanatory order on it. If you're Herman Melville, Jules Verne or H. P. Lovecraft, you basically rewrite the thing. Melville, who unlike Poe had actual experience with life at sea, stripped everything he thought was nonsense out of the book and recycled what was left into Moby-Dick. Verne and Lovecraft created works, The Sphinx of the Ice Field and "Mountains of Madness" respectively, that defused the work and placed it comfortably within the realm of their own creative endeavors (which is a fascinating case study in the anxiety of influence, as Verne's optimistic humanism and Lovecraft's darkly smoldering nihilism couldn't be further apart; it's as if both author's needed to complete Arthur Gordon Pym in a way that would make Poe their spiritual father, but ended up making two Poe's). Lesser readers often claim, erroneously, that the novel is unfinished. When I first read it, approximately a bazillion years ago, in a Penguin paperback edition – yellow color bar on the spine, Penguin's way of denoting "American literature," as opposed to red, green, or purple (English, Middle East and Asia, and "the Ancients," in order) – from the local library (long since plowed over to make way for an "urban center" of upscale markets and chain restaurants, I'm told), the back cover copy actually stated that the novel was Poe's great unfinished novel. It was more than a decade before I found out I'd read the ending wrong: it’s not an unfortunate cut off, but the most deliberate middle finger ever extended towards the reader in all American literature.

But I digress.

I bring up Verne and Lovecraft because this admittedly limited sample (and we could throw Melville in here too and the conclusion, which you have not yet read, will hold) shows that, in the game of being influenced by Poe's Narrative, the winner is the dude who goes the most afield from Poe's original work. Verne set out to write a work-specific sequel and his novel is rightly forgotten. "Mountains of Madness," on the other hand, requires no knowledge that it is basically a sequel to Poe's Narrative and is justly considered one of the key texts in Lovecraft's body of work.

Johnson gets the Pym Principle: You've got to betray the influence to make it work for you. With it's overly quirky cast, it's pulpy narrative drive, and it unembarrassed willingness to discuss it's own themes and make the subtext the text, Johnson's Pym doesn't resemble Poe, but rather Vonnegut. Pym's a burlesque horror/satire/adventure/pomo scramble that manages, somehow, to simultaneously never take itself to serious and never treat itself like a joke. The result is an examination of America's perennial obsession racial identity played as if it were a boy's adventure novel.

Well worth the price of admission.

Spiegel and Grau (if that means anything to ya') put up for this party. It's in hardback now and will set you back 24 Washgintons. You could wait for the trade paperback, but that's basically like announcing to the world, "Yeah, a vibrant literary culture of switched-on readers and authors that produce interesting work isn't worth ten bucks to me."

Music: "As a person who has always said that more pop music should sound like 'Handsome Western States' era Beulah . . ."

2011-02-08T20:46:00.007-05:00

Poised to become the next big band that hipster media vultures decry as a pure product of Internet hype until such time as market saturation hits the point that it triggers the vultures' obsessive need to experience cultural products as a groupthink and they start busting out phrases like "As a person who has always said that more pop music should reference the charm of Oomalama Fire label original release era Eugenius . . ." to preface their sadly tired reviews, Yuck was recently described thusly by a profile in Guardian:

Any idea of Yuck as "saviours" is further tempered by the fact that the sound they are making in 2011 is pretty much the sound a band of indie-loving kids who weren't interested in dance music would have made 20 years ago: a cocktail of Dinosaur Jr noise, Lemonheads melody and Teenage Fanclub's wistfulness. But, by getting excited about music that hasn't been fashionable for years – and matching that enthusiasm with some truly terrific songs – they are making a road-weary sound fresh and exciting.

Here's the video for the Yuck's "Holing Out." It features the band, visuals distortions that remind me of trying to watch scrambled cable, and a sometimes naked woman being chased by a monster. The basically recreated a coming of age moment - trying to glimpse boobies through video signal encryption - that now seems as archaic as hand fan codes or banyans.

WARNING or ENTICEMENT: Flashes of nudity, upstairs and down. Not safe for work or children; especially if you work with children, or employ children, somehow, at your workplace.

Yuck-"Holing Out" Music Video from VIDEOTHING.COM on Vimeo.

Music: But I wanna know for sure.

2011-02-07T20:39:00.005-05:00

For Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1980's Kaleidoscope was a do-or-die release. Guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris, collectively half the band, had taken off. The remaining members, the eponymous Siouxsie and founding member Steve Severin, decided to quickly reform the band and, in less than a year, release a new LP. To refill the Banshees' depleted ranks, the duo tapped former Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones and former Magazine guitarist John McGeoch. For the engine room, the drafted ex-Slits drummer Budgie. The result was a an expansion of the S&B sound that wed their trademark bleak proto-gothic tones with hints of lush synth arrangements and psychedelic flourishes. It was a strong indication of Siouxsie and Co.'s move towards the more elaborate and dreamy instrumentation that they'd pursue for the next three decades.

But Siouxsie hadn't completely forgotten the angular, rhythmic post-punk sound of the early S&B work. She and Budgie, love interests and well as bandmates (they'd later marry), started a side project called The Creatures. Unlike S&B increasingly dense sound, The Creatures would feature a more minimal, but not necessarily spartan sound.

One of their early was a fantastically brutal cover of the Trogg's much abused "Wild Thing." The Creatures paired it down to a tribal beat, Siouxsie's voice, and little else. The result is something more haunted than celebratory, more haunted than horny.

The Banshees would remain the primary focus of Siouxsie and Budgie. The Creatures would appear only intermittently throughout the years until Sioux and Budgie divorced in the mid-00s, ending The Creatures' sporadic career.

You can hear The Creatures' "Wild Things" at The Devil's Music blog.

Books: Sure it's the end of life as we know it, but it didn't cost a dime.

2011-02-04T10:35:00.003-05:00

From the point of view of a vampire, the zombie holocaust would look like a human version of a global mad cow disease outbreak or, perhaps, something along the lines of current climate change thinking: it's a threat, but the majority of us don't really feel threatened yet, and there are too many short term incentives for too many of us to avoid rallying around such an abstract cause.

This is the premise of "The Extinction Parade," a free online story by Max Brooks, author of World War Z.

That's right, free as in "no money." Yeah, I know! Right?!?!

Movies: Tiger style.

2011-02-03T22:47:00.002-05:00

There a single shot in Burning Bright that can effectively represent the surreal charm of the entire flick: After hearing a noise downstairs, our main protag, Kelly, decides to see if her ne'er-do-well stepfather has returned and finds, to her great shock, that a large tiger is roaming through her home; specifically, the tiger - played variously by veteran mammals Katie, Schicka, and Kismet - is walking calmly between the absurdly ornate dining room and the kitchen, almost bored but with a hint of curiosity, as if it hopes, but doubts, that there's leftover chow mein in the fridge. It's a bizarre image that's almost comical, and all the more so because Carlos Brooks (who helmed the equally weird Quid Pro Quo: a drama about disability fetishists) shoots the flick with a completely straight face.

That shot's the flicks touchstone moment. Whenever the flick is about a young woman and a tiger trapped in a small space and the consequences that logically follow, the film shines. Whenever it gets dragged into backstory or a tangential subplot, the film's brilliance gets quickly smothered in narrative sludge.

And, sadly, there's quite a bit of subplot. The entire excuse for why the tiger is trapped within the house, for example, goes from being the dumb plan of a not particularly bright would-be murderer into a long, conspiratorial dumb plot concocted by a not particularly bright would-be murderer. This wouldn't be so tedious if Brooks allowed his characters the time to reflect on just how boneheaded the murder-by-Panthera tigris tigris concept is. In fact, it would be interesting to reflect on the fact that even a dumb murder plot can off you. But the Brooks's larger, and mostly effective, commitment to playing this thing like its not weird wouldn't allow us those self-reflective laughs.

Another important subplot, this one revolving around the autism of Tom, Kelly's dramatic-tension-machine of a little brother. Tom developed autism after receiving a vaccine against script research, consequently he acts less like an autistic person and more like somebody suffering from PTSD. He gets more or less withdrawn depending on whether or not his sister an he have just had a heart to heart about their mother's passing. Notably, the film builds to a psychological breakthrough where Tom, apparently having come to grips with some aspect of his grief, seems to get a little bit less autistic. Somehow.

Worse, his aversion to touching and general space cadetishness comes and goes as the plot demands it. Need to up the odds of the tiger finding Kelly and Tom? No problem, just have Tom freak out and start shouting about being touched. Are Kelly and Tom somewhere relatively safe, somewhere they could probably hole up and wait this thing out? No problem, just have Tom quietly and inexplicably walk off. Tom's "autism" feels too obviously like what it really is, a narrative device for the filmmakers to repeated draw Kelly, who is otherwise drawn too smartly to constantly be throwing herself into danger, into near suicidal situations. He's the puppet string and it gets tiresome watching Kelly get yanked around.

These problems pad out and somewhat muffle what is otherwise an ingeniously strange and simple plot: woman versus tiger. Kelly, one of the more likable heroines of late, is resourceful and resilient without lapsing into post-Buffyish silliness (it is perhaps worth noting that she's the creation of two female screenwriters). Kelly is relentless in her struggle to survive and simply watching her refuse to quit is all the drama this film needed. While its a shame that so much of the energy generated by this plot motor is spent dragging around nonstarter plot elements, there's still more than enough force here to create a tremendous thrill ride.

Burning Bright seems, at times, to be a surreal spoof of the unremittingly nihilistic Inside. Which, honestly, is a great idea. And, for the most part, Burning Bright delivers the goods.

Plus, beaucoup extra points for actually correctly pronouncing "symmetry" in the Blake poem that lends the flick its title.

Guest blogger: Books: The Last Werewolf

2011-01-29T13:43:00.004-05:00

Guest blogger Jessica is married to CRWM, but does not consider herself a "horror person". She owns an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, and sometimes her reading interests overlap with the interests of this blog. She is writing this herself, so please forgive the snarkiness with which she disguises her deep adoration for her clever and handsome husband.

Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf was one of the hot galleys at Winter Institute, an annual gathering of independent booksellers and publishers that has started to become one of the places where a book can get "made." Among my fellow booksellers, it is commonly referred to "the sexy werewolf book." I met the author briefly at a reception -- he is the civilized and self-deprecating Brit you might expect, despite the hair.

This is terrible, but I have to say... I devoured this book (cringe). I read it on cold street corners and in subways and bars and kept trying to tell CRWM about the plot points. The novel is obscenely well-written and brilliantly sexy (and vice versa -- very few pages go by without mention of the narrating werewolf's sexual organs. Apparently sex is what sets them apart from the more coldblooded/pansyish immortals, the vampires). Reading Duncan felt a little like discovering Anne Rice for the first time -- only with more energy, more irony, and a dry British sense of humor that makes the absurdities of lycanthropy into a cosmic existential joke instead of a teen fantasy.

The detailed pleasures of the fantasy/horror genre are there in spades (the logistics of the transformation, the luxuries of immortality, the glimpses of werewolf culture and their conflicts with both vampires and a more sinister, corporate version of the BPRD). That's balanced, though, with an achingly believable love story and a self-loathing descent to extinction which turns into a fierce fight for life (not unrelated).

If this doesn't give werewolves an equal literary standing with vampires, I can only assume some sort of conspiracy is at work. Also, it made me crave cigarettes, good wine, and mellow whiskey, consumed in posh surroundings with an air of world-weary appreciation. When it comes out in July I highly recommend you snap it up -- and keep an eye out for the undead side-taking that is sure to follow.

Movies: Take this job and shove it. I'm not getting demonically possessed no more.

2011-01-27T19:00:00.001-05:00

It is sometimes theorized that the ability to tell stories, the seemingly innate narrative drive of humans i a byproduct of a survival-critical system meant to allow us to evaluate hypotheticals. At some point, when our tool use and ability to work complex plans as a team grew formidable enough, we suddenly had "fight" next to the reliable "run and scream" as threat countermeasures and we had to figure out option would end best for us. By projecting possible scenarios onto the future, we could weigh the outcomes in advance, hopefully freeing use from trial-and-error experimentation in situations where error = death.

As common sense as this argument is, there are some reasonable objections to it. For example, if it is so survival-critical that we be able to evaluate potential outcomes, why are humans so profoundly bad at logically constructing outcomes from existing evidence? In study after study, we prove that we regularly misidentify risk levels, allow ourselves to be influenced by illogical external factors, reconstitute memories to serve current desires, and otherwise make a real hash the evaluation process. As often as not, it seems we're not evaluating outcomes, but convincing ourselves that the only reasonable outcome is the one we want.

Still objections aside, there's something intuitive about the idea that stories are, essentially, narrative teaching tools. Assuming we accept this, what do we learn from NIght of the Demons, Adam Gierasch's surprising not irredeemable 2009 remake of the 1988 flick of the same name?

There are, I think, several key lessons: patience is a virtue, all things in moderation, don't plunge sharp objects into your breast and then fish them out of your vajayjay - all important things to know. But the lesson I most took to heart was this: don't work for morons.

After a nicely done black and white intro, the first 15 or 20 minutes of NotD is essentially a long character introduction montage. We get a few scenes, crammed next to one another, introducing the main protags as they go about their early evening Halloween activities. This obligatory mise en place is handled in a perfunctory manner, though the fact that Gierasch's characters are, at their core, blank narrative functions, gives the scenes a weird disconnected aimlessness that verges on the creative. We know we're being getting the key players introduced not because we're learning important details about the characters or we're seeing crucial plot points come into focus, but rather know, through the Propp-like understanding of horror narratemes that genre fandom has given us, that we always spend a few moments meeting the victim pool. Since the very definition of this narrative unit, "meet the victim pool," tells us all we really need to know about what we're seeing, there's no story-telling demands placed on the director and he can just wander about post-Katrina NOLA giving us disjointed bits of his characters' lives. It's the extremely poor man's horror-inflected Short Cuts.

It during this scene that we meet Colin, a down on his luck, small time drug dealer played by a very down-on-his-luck looking Eddie Furlong. For those of us who haven't been keeping track of Mr. Furlong's post-T2 career (and I'm willing to wager that there's more of us who haven't than have), there's something almost poignant about Furlong's current bagginess. In Colin's intro, he's got to confront Nigel. In the world of professional illicit substance retailing, Colin is Nigel's direct report. We catch Colin at his mid-year interim review. Nigel, it's revealed, is not happy. Colin doesn't have many accountabilities - all three of them are "make Nigel a lot of money" - but Nigel's put Colin down for "needs improvement, with extreme prejudice" in all three.

Colin tries to argue that people don't want to pay Nigel's prices.

Nigel counters by explaining the law of supply and demand. The supply of drugs has remained: "The drug supply around here hasn't changed." However, demand has increased: "We are in a city that was destroyed by a fucking hurricane. People are desperate, people are unhappy, they want their fucking drugs." This combo - steady supply and increasing demand - should lead to higher prices. In fact, Nigel says, with typically villainous confidence, there's "no way" prices could go down.

Colin passively agrees to this logic and tells Colin he'll try to make is Q3 numbers by making a big push at a massive Halloween party that's going down. He is, of course, subsequently trapped in a cursed mansion, chased around by flesh-craving demons, and generally made unhappy unto death.

But it didn't have to be this way. Nigel's actually wrong about the situation and a massive push in Q3, at Nigel's higher prices, probably wouldn't help them hit their numbers. Why? Because they're in a city that was, to use Nigel's phrase, "destroyed by a fucking hurricane."

Nigel's mistaking individual demand with demand understood as a market aggregate. No doubt the drug users of New Orleans still want their dope. Their drug users, it's really the only consistent thing about them. What's putting the cramp in Nigel's numbers isn't that drug users want drug less than they used to, but rather that there are simply less drug users around. After Katrina, about 40% of New Orleans's population left the town. In the course of a few weeks, the population of the city dropped from about 450,000 to to just 270,000. Admittedly, given the socio-economics of drug use, I think we can assume that drug users, as a group, were not proportionally affected by the depopulation; but even if we say they stayed at a noticeably higher rate - say, +10% - then you've still lost 30% of your drug taking population.

Let's make a simple model. Let's say, pre-Katrina, Nigel had a customer base of 10,000 drug users. We're going to measure their aggregate demand in an imaginary unit called a Burroughs. Casual users, which make up the bulk of Nigel's customer base, contribute one Burroughs each to the aggregate demand. Let's say that 80 percent of Nigel's customer base - or 8,000 drug users - are casual users. They contribute 6,000 Burroughi to the aggregate demand. The remaining 2,000 users are hardcore users who contribute two Burroughi a piece to the aggregate.

Pre-Katrina aggregate demand of Nigel's clients = (8,000 x 1) + (2,000 x 2)
= 8,000 + 4,000
= 12,000

Now, let's remove 30% of the drug dealing population, assuming for the sake of simplicity that both segments of Nigel's customer base were impacted equally. Thirty percent of 8,000 is 2,400. That leaves us with a casual user base of 5,600. If we remove 30% of the hardcore users - 600 users - we're left with 1,400 users.

Post-Katrina aggregate demand of Nigel's clients = (5,600 x 1) + (1,400 x 2)
= 5,600 + 2,800
= 8,800

Now, arguably, the movement of casual users to hardcore users could eventually push demand back up to pre-Katrina levels. But for that to happen, 4000 casual users - more than 70% - would had to have made the cross over. This seems unlikely to me, but not impossible. I think there's every possibility Nigel's full of crap and he's suffering under the delusion that there far more aggregate demand out there than there really is.

Furthermore, Nigel's probably making matters worse by jacking up his price. Faced with lower revenues, Nigel's charging more to recoup the lost revenue. In a low demand, high supply market, this drives users to cheaper sources. This means Nigel's got more costs to recoup, which history suggests he'll try to recoup by jacking up his prices. Basically, Nigel's shoddy grasp of market economics is putting his drug biz into a death spiral. And that, more than Colin's half assed pushing, is the problem.

But Nigel is stupid, so Colin gets his soul ripped from his body and ends up dead.

Lesson: If you don't want to be hideously used by a gang of sadistic demons, don't work for a dummy.

Stuff: But you can still write off that eye of newt.

2011-01-25T13:50:00.003-05:00

In 2010, possibly fearing occult reprisals, the Senate of Romania rejected a proposal to impose a tax on professional witches. But it would seem that, just like us more mundane folks, witches can't avoid those inevitable taxes forever. The New Republic reports that Romania's new legal definition of self employment will require that withes fork over 16% of their income to the state. That's right, Brumhilde, the tax man cometh.

As goofy as this sounds, there's two strange and noteworthy undercurrents here. First, there's the unsettling degree to which the Romanian government seems happy to concede to widely held superstitions. If this were just a case of widespread magical thinking, it would be unfortunate enough; but the larger danger is the conspiracy-minded thought this kind of logic leads to. In 2010, after receiving a surprisingly thorough beating at the polls, then presidential candidate Mircea Geoana blame his defeat not on policy positions or the will of the people, but on an attack by occult forces:

Not only did Geoana snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, however, but he proceeded to invite ridicule upon himself and his party by claiming that he had lost the ballot after being attacked with “negative energy” by a parapsychologist employed by the wily [incumbent, Traian] Basescu.

This occult assault wrecked his concentration during a televised debate, he complained, and was part of a strategy by his rival’s election team to harness the mystical “power of the purple flame” by wearing purple ties, socks and other accoutrements on certain important days.

Second, there's the unfortunate specter of ethnic unrest. TNR reports:

It's no surprise that the Romanian government has been eager to tap into this sometimes ostentatious stream of wealth for years. But could its new tax on witchcraft be motivated by more than money? Witches' main activity is fortune-telling, an occupation that has long been associated with the Roma population (often called "Gypsies"), toward whom prejudices run deep. A 1991 poll revealed that 41 percent of Romanians believe that the Roma should be "poorly treated," and a 1994 study found that Romanian newspapers might have directly incited hatred toward the Roma. And this negative attitude toward the group has shifted little since then. As far as I am aware, the Romanian government has not drawn any connection between the new tax legislation and anti-Roma politicking—and the Romanian embassy did not respond to my phone calls or e-mails—but some Romanians still think that the new taxation is an attempt to satisfy latent prejudice by drawing attention to and taking money from a marginalized population. As writer and poet Andrei Codrescu sees it, the new law represents "a cheap populist, nationalist move" that "plays well to the yo-yo's."

Movies: As far as Mr. Sullivan is concerned, the whole "y'all got bigger penises" thing is all the reparations anybody has got a right to expect.

2011-01-21T22:57:00.002-05:00

An unnecessary sequel to an uncelebrated remake of pretty trashy film, 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams marks a step back for a young director who has yet to take any appreciable steps forward.

I have a soft spot for this flick's grandpappy. I'll honestly admit that Two Thousand Maniacs! (Lewis's punctuation, not mine) provides a completely unjust and tawdry revanchist thrill to what little Dixie pride I might have, but that is not the film's chief claim on my nostalgia. Rather, my predominant attitude towards horror as a genre was formed by Lewis's cheapee little splatfest.

First, as a child of the slasher besotted 1980s, horror's dreariest era, I was pleasantly shocked by Herschell Gordon Lewis's general disdain for his supposed protagonists and his blithe willingness to off them mercilessly. Compared to the jump-scare-to-the-kill spasms of slasher flicks, character's in TTM! suffered fates worse than death and then died. Watching, one got the sense that the survivors got out not because they were privileged - like the schematic final girls of slasher cinema - but rather because Lewis's cruelty, like that of cat, is bounded only by his ability to get bored easily. It was as if he'd simply had his fill of blood (or run out of money to buy more red paint), announced the martini shot, let his remaining near-victims go free, and called it a day. Whether this was a genuine insight into the narrative strategies Lewis was trying to employ or not, it left me with an exhilarating, teasing sense of horror cinema as something that was played without a net. To this day, if I can tell in the first reel who makes it to the last reel, I feel played for a sucker through the rest of the flick.

The second, and perhaps weirder legacy, has to do with a single scene in Lewis's original. In the 1964 flick, one of the victims gets placed in a wooden barrel and sealed in. Then long metal nails are driven into the sides of the barrels. Finally, the barrel is rolled down a hill. At the bottom of the hill, the barrel is opened to reveal that the nails have done their fatal work and the victim is a bloody mess. The redneck cannibals go wild! Ever since I saw that scene, I've been obsessed with the idea that there's got to be some way to survive this trap. I haven't fully figured it out yet. I'm convinced that a person desperate enough to survive could, in fact, push against the sides of the barrel and brace themselves throughout the ride. This would send nails into your back, which admitted would suck a billion kind of ways. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be fatal. In fact, it may just be what saves you, as being impaled from the start might help you from bouncing around the inside of the barrel. The problem is, as I see it, even if you survive the ride down, you've ended up at the bottom of the hill severely injured and surrounded by a mob of pissed-off ghouls. That's the sticking point: how to get out of the barrel and use the lead you've gained by rolling down the hill to your advantage. I'm still working on that part. Anyway, the important thing is that it started in me an obsession with watching films with an eye towards thinking, "How would I get out of that?" This isn't your standard "victims are stupid" stuff - on the contrary, perhaps my least favorite aspect of slasher cinema is its cynical formula that dooms certain characters from the start, essentially robbing characters of the opportunity to genuinely fight to live - but rather a fascination with what humans could do if facing impossible odds.

The two things are connected, of course: to get the sense that you're able to battle against the odds, one has to get the sense that there are still odds. A cinema without a safety net is the only cinema in which you can feel people are really struggling and the outcome is always in doubt. And that, oddly, is perhaps my criteria for what makes good horror, though I know it's inadequate to solving genre disputes or helping folks bash Twilight: a good horror film pits humans against the most extreme consequence, without the consolation of a predetermined end.

Oh, here I've rambled on and not discussed 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. Though, honestly, I'm okay with that.

Mad science: Are we inherently tasty?

2011-01-03T07:10:00.000-05:00

In what must surely rank as one of the strangest articles ever posted by Slate, writer Jesse Bering pulls and info dump on long pig in the name of making "an evolutionary case for cannibalism."

Bering brings up the work of Lewis Petrinovich argues "contrary to critiques arguing that man-eating is a myth conjured up by Westerners to demonize "primitives"—we really have been gobbling each other up for a very, very long time. We're just one of 1,300 species for which "intraspecific predation" has been observed. Among primates, cannibalism can usually be accounted for by nutritional and environmental stress, or it appears as a reproductive strategy in which mothers, for example, consume their unhealthy infants to make way for more viable offspring."

To be honest, I don't know if I'm sold. If one is going to make the case that evolution tricked us out with the ability to eat other humans, then you have to make a similar case that it also tricked us out to make it fairly uncommon. (In the article, Bering attempts to make the case that cannibalism is, in fact, more common then we admit, but I don't buy it; Bering is probably right in the assertion that cannibalism has happened more often then we'd care to think, but the real comparison you'd need to show is that it happens regularly when compared to other eating habits, and compared to how often we eat something other than people, the practice is still statistically negligible.) Furthermore, there's always the possibility that it is simply a side effect of some other, less sensational adaptation. For example, we evolved to eat meat. People happen to be meat. The adaptation wasn't aimed at them, but it opens up the possibility. That said, I can't really do justice to his argument here, so check out the article.

Still, whether or not Bering successfully achieves he goal of evo-devoing up a just so for anthropophagy, there's quite a bit of weird data to found in his article. Here's some choice tidbits, as it were.

One pair of anthropologists, for example, actually crunched the numbers, concluding that the average human adult provides 66 pounds of edible food, including fat, connective tissue, muscle, organs, blood, and skin. Protein-rich blood clots and marrow are said (by the rare connoisseur) to be special treats.

Or this bit on inducing mammalian cannibalism in the lab:

Pinpointing the specific factors that cause cannibalism is a rather difficult affair in the laboratory, mainly because of those pesky university ethics review boards. Still, an intrepid Japanese researcher shrugged off these considerations and induced cannibalism among a captive population of squirrel monkeys by feeding the pregnant females a low-protein diet. This led to a high rate of abortion and the mothers' devouring their aborted fetuses—a much-needed bolus of protein.

The idea that we're all cannibals and that it can be induced by controlled conditions was actually the middling Hunger, reviewed on this blog not too long ago. I was also reminded of philosopher Max Stirner's grim vision of the human condition as metaphorical cannibalism: "For me, you are nothing but my food - even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use."

Oh, and happy new year.

Movies: "You are not content with the stories, so I was obliged to come."

2010-12-27T19:08:00.001-05:00

Rewatched Candyman this afternoon. I can't imagine anybody needs a review of this film, so I'll jump straight to my random thought: No flick less justly categorized as a "slasher" than Candyman.

The Clive Barker sourced fright flick, lensed by Bernard Rose, was partially a victim of timing. Film critics, especially the collective pro-am that dominates the dialogue regarding horror films, trade heavily on taxonomic and genealogical observation (both of which speak to core competency: a bent towards the trivial and citizenship status in a large, clannish interpretive community), a strategy that leaves them constantly reaching for existing interpretive models and repeatedly cramming new works into the intellectual boilerplate of previous films. When Candyman appeared in 1992, surrounded by the rotting odds and sods of the long since creatively bankrupt "slasher" moment in American horror cinema, the slasher subgenre was the Procrustean bed the fright fancy chose to stretch the film across. To this day, Candyman is widely considered a slasher: the horror-centric Bloody Disgusting site and the post-Whedon "geek culture" list-and-link-dump UGO site both list the titular baddie in their "Top N Slashers" lists.

To be fair, they're not alone. When composer Philip Glass, who gave the film its revisionists gothic organ and chorus score, saw the finished product, he was so repulsed that he withheld the release of the soundtrack recording for nearly a decade. He had scored the film thinking he was contributing to an artsy indie flick. He felt betrayed by the director. The derogatory Glass used to describe Candyman was "slasher flick."

Either as a slam or critical observation, the label of slasher doesn't fit Candyman. Instead, what Rose delivered was curiously retro gothic tale that owes more to classic Universal monster flicks than it does cynical slaughters of the 1980s.

Candyman himself belongs the odd tradition of monstrous nobility that descends straight from Lugosi's Dracula. Displaying some typically Barkerish traits, Todd's Candyman is a cursed decadent, an envoy from some place beyond our understanding of good and evil, a Romantic and aristocratic character who, it is revealed, is something of a vampiric psychic tyrant, kept somehow in unlife by the fearful worship of the downtrodden residents of Cabini-Green, Candyman's urban Transylvania populated by updated peasants.

The plot has a love-beyond-death seduction angle utterly foreign to the golden age slasher. In fact, the plot somewhat mirrors the plot of Coppola's Dracula relaunch - which emphasized the "weird love story" that was mostly marketing BS in the original film - that appeared the same year.

The film's first coda, with Candyman dropping what's essentially a "we belong dead" line as he and his bride are trapped in a giant bonfire, evokes the two Whale-directed Frankenstein films. We even get angry "villagers" with torches!

Candyman's charms have been buried too long under the misconception that it was just the weirdo entry in the slasher flood. The misappropriation of the flick by subgenre partisans has obscured what it really was: a genuinely interesting effort at updating classic gothic tropes for a modern, urban context. I would argue that the flick wasn't completely successful, but I believe the fusion of an intellectual, urban sensibility with deeply felt traditional gothic themes prefigured quite a bit of the "New Weird" aesthetic of urban fantasy. As source of future inspiration, it languishes in a genre ghetto it doesn't belong in.

I wonder too if we shouldn't credit the film with being an early innovator in the lavish squalor aesthetic that became the signature style of some many modern horror flicks after Fincher perfected it in Se7en. John Doe's nameless city could easily contain this imagined version of Cabrini-Green and you feel like you wouldn't be surprised if Virginia Madsen's Helen came across Jigsaw's bathroom-of-death in some less used section of the project.

Time is ripe for a re-evaluation.

Movies: Without a paddle.

2010-12-23T17:52:00.003-05:00

So Joel Schumacher.

Yeah, I know. Right?

So, this cat starts his directorial career with a Lily Tomlin comedy based on a not-comedic Richard Matheson novel.

He delivers two '80s classics in a row - St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys - and INXS's "Devil Inside Video" (not to mention the stylistically sharp Flatliners).

But before all that, he turns his hand to a stateside attempt at a Euro style sex farce featuring swinger semi-incest.

Then, of course, there's the weird Falling Down, a the sheep in wolf's clothing film that, despite its clear plotting that D-Fens was nuts from the jump, became a political rally point for the sort of genre-guzzling white male middle class jackass who takes a factory-standard antinomianism from every creative work they see as an excuse to play the victim and point out that they're smart enough to read something into a film.

Flashforward to the his bizarro world kamikaze takes on the Batman mythos. Like Burton, Schumacher was smart enough to realize Batman was a pop icon evolved from thousands of influences, serving the needs of millions of fans, rather than, say, a "realistic" figure. Unfortunately, Schumacher seems to have been open to every crappy influence, every shitty idea. The day-glo disasters he delivered are rightly reviled and I can only hope that when the inevitable "rediscovery" happens, by bloggers of future desperate to score hit numbers off the "scandal" of their original take on the films, I am dead and buried.

(Aw heck, somebody should just kick it off. Tired of the lame "Black Swan is teh horrez!!" meme snagging traffic digits, start penning your "Batman and Robin: the Definitive Take on a Legend?" post now.)

What comes after the plastic nipple Batman? Why, a flick about snuff films, of course. And then - what the hey! - a Dogme 95 remake of the first half of Full Metal Jacket!

I bring all this up to point out that Joel Schumacher, director of today's flick - the solid, if unremarkable Blood Creek (2009) - has actually had a hell of a career. And, yet, there are few directors less interesting.

He's an anti-autuer, the last of the workman directors: a weird holdover from the days when you got your assignment, you shot it, and you moved on. Watching a Schumacher movie is to be transported back to a time before French film theory elevated the status of director to make it the equivalent of Artist with a Capital A. He's a technically-proficient skilled laborer working with other skilled specialists to get a product to market. This is director as factory foreman.

And, ultimately, that's what Blood Creek feels like: a competently made product as devoid of the stamp of individual artistry as a lug bolt. That doesn't mean that its devoid of interest, or even beauty. If you've got a set of lug bolts, look at them with open eyes and you'll see a certain futurist glamour there. Still, that's a product of the inevitable gaps that occur whenever a mind considers the work of any human hand, not matter how standardized. It can't be said to reflect the artistic intentions of the guys and gals down at the RAD GmbH factory.

Blood Creek takes its inspiration from a classic American hoax. Inspired by then theories, now since proven, that vikings explored America nearly a century before Columbus's much celebrated "discovery," hoaxers in Oklahoma and Minnesota created rune stones: slabs of stone a few few long and about a foot wide, covered in "ancient viking runes." The first stones were discovered in the 1890s by farmers and sent to the University of Minnesota and Chicago (it's unclear if the farmers were in on it, or if they were the first victims of the hoax). Since the initial "discovery," stones popped up every few years, as late as 1967. The stones caught the public imagination in the 1910s and '20s. Stories of viking raiders doing savage battle with Native American warriors showed up in newspapers and pulp fictions (such a plot inspired a cycle of "Conan" stories, for example). However, nearly every reputable linguist and historian has declared the stones fakes. This doesn't stop hobbyist and local boosters from touting their authenticity; but as much as I think it would be awesome, the stones are utter bullshit.

That said, here's the link - part of the original defense of the hoax was that scholars couldn't translate the stones because the farmers who found it, not knowing the value of what they'd discovered, used the stones to build their farms. In the case of the most famous stone, it was said to have been used as the stepping stone to the discoverer's granary. This alleged abuse left the stones illegible to experts, thus negating the experts' testimony.

Here's the narrative hook of Blood Creek: During the Depression, Nazi scholars were sent all over the US to use the rune stones that rube farmers have built into their farms to conduct an ancient ritual that would put the ultimate occult power into the hands of the rising Nazi party. One such mission goes pear shaped, and the Nazi occultist is trapped on the farm he was sent to. Decades later, two brothers on a mission of revenge assault the farm and unknowingly unleash the seemingly undying occultist.

Zombie horses show up too.

I'll be the first to admit that the log line sounds promising in a trashy b-movie sort of way. And, honestly, it's hard to imagine that anybody picking this film up won't find enough to keep themselves interested. The visuals are strong; imported talent Darko Suvak (who, oddly enough, did cinmo duties on 8MM 2) washes the screen in inky blacks, deep blood reds, and muted yellows. Go-to-Nazi Michael Fassbinder does as good a job as one can do buried under make-up: the Nazi magi needs to carve runes into himself to keep going, so his body is a nasty patchwork of decay and black metal scar-graffiti. Like so many plots involving magic, the whole moves forward on a series of periodically introduced "oh, I forgot about this rule, but . . ." moments that will either count as world building or a cop out depending on your personal preferences.

What's the take away? I've had Blood Creek in the to-be-reviewed queue for something like a month now. It's been sitting there so long because I simply couldn't find enough to say about it one way or another. It's a film that exists beyond criticism by virtue of the fact that it has this dumb, mute, rock-like factuality. It's there to fill a segment of time. There's nothing else to be said about it.

Well, one more thing. On the directors commentary, Schumacher discusses the effort required by the actors to perform some of the more physical scenes. As he talks, he drops this fabulous line about his feelings regarding asking the actors to do demanding things: "That's great filmmaking, unfortunately." Three of those words totally apply to Blood Creek.

Movies: It could have been worse. "Twelve" could have been one of ours.

2010-12-07T12:57:00.004-05:00

Here's one end of the year list that dominated by horror: Film Drunk's list of the 10 weakest box office performers of the year.

That's right, fright fanciers, scare flicks disproportionately dominate the list with a whopping 40% of the year's biggest clunkers stinking up the bottom of the barrel. Here's the breakdown by genre:

Horror: 4
Comedy: 2
Sci-fi: 1
Drama: 1
Western: 1
Action: 1

To be fair, this list is the product of a very specific methodology: the losers were determined strictly by box office take. Because cost isn't figured in, you get a very skewed sense of the disaster these flicks may or may not represent. For example, I can't imagine any of these flicks was a fiasco on the scale of the Airbender flick, though that film certainly took in more at the box office.

Still, nearly half? And one of which was turned in by a guy regularly hailed as a master of the genre?

Oh, well. There's always next year.

Movies: "It’s disenchanting, but it’s not difficult."

2010-12-03T15:13:00.003-05:00

Today in the Grey Dame, Chuckie Closterman take time out from the normal music beat to ponder the oddly reassuring image of the living dead:

"I know this is supposed to be scary," he said. "But I'm pretty confident about my ability to deal with a zombie apocalypse. I feel strangely informed about what to do in this kind of scenario."

I could not disagree. At this point who isn’t?

Mad science: Body disposal pro tip.

2010-11-27T08:31:00.003-05:00

Without fail, the same issue comes up after Thanksgiving year after year. If you're anything like me, you're looking at the aftermath of your Thanksgiving feast, scratching your head, and wondering, "How the heck do I dissolve a human body? And how long will it take?"

Happily, this year, the social science blog Barking Up the Wrong Tree has go us covered.

Below is the entire copy the article, but you'll need to go to the source to follow all the links:

Assassins for Mexican-American drug cartels have been dissolving their victims' bodies in chemicals, according to a piece published Tuesday in the New York Times. The process is known colloquially as making pozole, in reference to a traditional Mexican stew. It can take several hours to make a pot of pozole. How long does it take to dissolve a human body?

About the same, with the right chemicals and equipment. The assassins typically use sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, strong bases commonly known as lye. (The Times story misidentified their reagent of choice as an acid.) Heated to 300 degrees, a lye solution can turn a body into tan liquid with the consistency of mineral oil in just three hours. If your kettle isn't pressurized, you won't be able to heat the solution much above the boiling point of water, 212 degrees, and it might take an additional hour or two to complete the process. Narco-hit men did not pioneer this technique. Adolph Luetgert, known in his day as the "Sausage King of Chicago," dumped his wife into a boiling vat of lye in 1897, then burned what was left. Police eventually found bone fragments in the factory's furnace.

Movies: Could Obamacare have prevented the Jigsaw killings?

2010-11-24T14:41:00.006-05:00

It will serve to be sufficient review of the allegedly final Saw flick that, as the movie slumped towards the final scene of a seemingly interminable 91 minutes, I had time to wonder: Would Obama style health care reform have prevented the creation of Jigsaw, the conceptual franchise-like serial-killer meme embraced by the various murderers of the film series?

Admittedly, it's a bizarre idea, but not one without merit.

Let's review the convoluted origin of the Jigsaw meme. Start with John Kramer, a seemingly wealthy architect or engineer. John cooks up the basic Jigsaw concept when he weaves together three key motivational threads: 1) a sort of gonzo moral hyper-libertarianism that arises from a miscarriage his wife suffers, the product of an unintentional act on the part of a petty criminal/junkie; 2) an obsession with the idea that the precious gift of life is being squandered by the majority of people, a product of being diagnosed with inoperable cancer; and 3) a messianic view himself as the man who has a teachable insight into the value of life and how this value can be understood only through facing death in a test-situation, a product of a failed single-auto accident suicide attempt John made after losing his wife and learning about the cancer diagnosis.

Let's assume that these three events are all necessary conditions for the creation of Jigsaw. If John suffers Event 1 without 2 and 3, he becomes a Glenn Beck fan and Tea Party movement organizer. Unpleasant, sure; but not a serial killer. Event 2 without the others and he is just a man whose successful life is cut short tragically by cancer. Event 3 requires events 1 and 2, so it can't occur in a vacuum. Events 1 and 2, without the failed suicide attempt, just leave John a bitter, terminally ill man, but he'd stop short of becoming the head of a moralistic murder-cult.

Though John is mastermind of the whole Jigsaw thing, he's not the sole Jigsaw killer (which is really more of a philosophy or a brand, than an individual). To truly "stop" the Jigsaw killings, I think we'd have to show that none of Jigsaw's various acolytes would have developed the concept on their own. So let's run through the Junior Grade Jigsaws and lay out their origins.

Amanda Young: Amanda was a dead-end junkie with a tangential connection to the miscarriage that started John's transformation. She was an early Jigsaw victim who, after escaping the head-mounted reverse bear trap, became a semi-convert to John's ideology. Later, it is revealed that Amanda doesn't really care that much about John's philosophies – she build's deathtraps, not tests, for example – but is motivated more out of some Stockholm Syndrome-esque love of John as a father figure. (Debatably, none of the Junior Grade Jigsaws seem to actually care about John's philosophy – which makes John, oddly enough, a total failure on the messiah front.)

Mark Hoffman: Detective Hoffman comes to Jigsaw's attention when he discovers Hoffman is conducting vigilante killings under the guise of Jigsaw traps. Viewers discover that Hoffman has a history of police brutality prior to his posing as Jigsaw or becoming a part of the actual Jigsaw killings. Even after joining up, Hoffman's motivations never jibe with John's, a conflict that plays out through the last three or four flicks.

Jill Tuck: Ex-wife of John, it's somewhat unclear whether or not Jill is really a Junior Grade Jigsaw. Her early appearances in the film suggest that she is not linked to John's post-Jigsaw existence in any important way; but, as the film series progressed, there were more and more hints that she was aware of John's actions (Hoffman claims she knew from the get-go) and may have even assisted in his murderous activities. Regardless, she only kicks into serious levels of Jigsaw-like activities after the death of her ex-hubby and the delivery of posthumous instructions on how to protect his "legacy" by offing Hoffman, who is more interested than outright murder than John's odd notions of spiritual trial through extreme mortification.

Lawrence Gordon: Prior to his run in with Jigsaw, Larry was a successful, if self-absorbed doctor, who liked nabbing a little ex-martial nookie now and then. Like Amanda, Larry converted to Jigsawism after surviving his own trap experience.

I propose that, given the Junior Jigsaws' histories, none of them would have become Jigsaw without John's interaction. Amanda would have perished in some appropriately sordid junkieish manner. Jill would have never received any instructions about trap building or acolyte killing. Hoffman might still be a killer cop, but he'd never have the template of Jigsaw to hide behind and he doesn't seem creative enough to have cooked up the idea by himself (the contrast between John's demented creativity and Hoffman's vigorous, but simplistic, violence is one of the contrasts exploited in the film). And, without falling victim to a Jigsaw trap, there's no reason to assume Doc Gordon would live out his life as anything other than a tail-chasing, low-grade douchebag of a medical professional. In summary, if something could have prevented John from becoming Jigsaw, nobody else would have picked up the pig mask and all of Jigsaw's victims (not just the dozens of trap victims, but the two teams of SWAT personnel and the handful of police officers and FBI agents that died in violence related to the case) would have all lived.

This is where the issue of Obamacare comes in.

In descriptions of the Saw franchise, John's discussed as have inoperable cancer. This term might be technically correct, but the commonly understood sense of the term as it is used to describe John – that John was doomed the moment he was diagnosed with cancer – is misleading. John's cancer was, apparently, to advanced to consider an operation to remove the cancer. However, even within the film series, we learn that John was not out of medical options. In Saw VI, it's revealed that John approached his insurance provider – the in-jokily named Umbrella Health – to request that the company help cover the cost of an experimental intervention's clinical trial. Umbrella – specifically, executive William Easton and his crew of hand-picked denial specialists – denied John coverage to save a few bucks, closing John's last door to treatment, creating the second condition (and, by extension, the third) necessary for the existence of Jigsaw.

Under Obamacare, John couldn't have been denied coverage for the experimental intervention. Currently, it is illegal for insurance companies to deny you coverage if you want to participate in a clinical trial. This was law several years prior to the current wave of reform. However, in some states, companies must pay for the clinical trials, but may stop "routine" coverage – that is to say, they'll pay for you to participate in the clinical trial, but you have to pay for every other cost (doctor visits, prescriptions, etc.) – during the trial. Under the health reform bills signed into law by President Obama, not only are insurers required to cover clinical, experimental treatments in a trial setting, but they must maintain a national baseline of routine coverage throughout. So, under Obamacare, John Kramer would have had coverage for the experimental treatment he requested.

Would this have, for certain, prevented John from becoming Jigsaw? Nothing's for certain. We can imagine a scenario in which John takes the treatment, nothing happens, and the second necessary condition for the creation of Jigsaw is still in play. That said, I think it is more likely than not that entering John in the clinical trials would have ended the Jigsaw story before it ever began. Best case scenario, John's cured. The second necessary condition for the creation of Jigsaw never develops. No reverse bear traps or giant pig ovens. Even if the treatment didn't take, there's the question of timing. By denying John coverage and creating the second necessary condition while John was still possessed of some measure of physical strength, Umbrella Health leaves an important window open when John is both obsessed enough to become Jigsaw and healthy enough to do it. The more time John spent in a clinical trial, unconvinced of his doomed state, the less time he has as Jigsaw to create plans and recruit able bodies to replace his ailing one. In this second scenario, I think you've neutralized Jigsaw by stalling John's conversion to the point where he'd either lack the time to become Jigsaw or be so frail that a suicide attempt would be something he'd be unlikely to come back from.

Conclusion: We can't say for sure whether Obamacare would have prevented the birth of Jigsaw had it been in place when John needed it. Still, it's good to know that, come 2014, we can worry a little less about future Jigsaws being made.

Television: "Your inner monologue is the conscience of America."

2010-11-23T11:51:00.004-05:00

Entertainment Weekly has a profile of Peter Weller, focusing mainly on his turn in latest season of Dexter. In it, readers discover that Robocop is, among other things, a UCLA PhD candidate in Renaissance Studies. I kid you not. This odd story leads to this interesting bit:

"I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history. I just passed my oral exam. One of the guys on my committee is from Cambridge, a professor, Peter Stacey — he’s a genius. He’s also a Dexter freak. I brought him to the Dexter set, and he had this great take on the character. He said, 'You know who Dexter is? If you watched Dexter from outside the US, you'd see immediately. He's the history of America: a child born in blood, condemned to tyrannize — like a child — but possessed with the voice of its Founding Father, pointing him in the right direction. He's the ultimate vigilante. A creation like Dexter sees itself as the world's police force except it has a conscience, which is the voting public.' Stacey told Michael C. Hall, 'Your inner monologue is the conscience of America.'"

Hmmm.

Stuff: Don't ask me, I just roam here.

2010-11-09T13:19:00.002-05:00

Over a the Texas Observer, Owen Egerton files a jokey pop culture observation piece that leans heavily on the horror-as-current-events-allegory shtick. Right at the closer though, he pulls out a curious - and, as far as I know, previously untheorized - allegorical parallel between the divided American consciousness of our morality as individual actors in the context of our awareness of our nation's moral (or lack thereof) standing in the globe with the group dynamics of zombie flicks. Here's Egerton:

Over the last decade it’s become difficult to tell who the monster is. All too often we are the invaders, we are the torturers, we are the ones who terrorize. We no longer need an alien force or lab-manufactured monster. All we need is ourselves. Of course, it’s not any one of us. It’s our country.

Perhaps this explains the resurgence of the zombie film. The horror of zombies is all in their numbers. You can’t blame any single zombie for the chaos of Dawn of the Dead (2004) or Zombieland (2009), just as you can’t blame any single American for the crimes committed in our nation’s name. Any one of us is just another harmless, fun-loving, pleasure-seeking American. Like zombies, we don’t move that fast or think that fast. We spend our time loitering, every now and then pausing for a quick bite. Like zombies, one or two of us can be annoying, especially when vacationing in Europe, but no real threat. But take us as a mass, as a mindless herd of flesh-eaters driven on by base hunger, and we spell worldwide doom.

Zombies as self-absolving symbol of actorless, emergent evil? Interesting.

Books: "And right away, I was scared. We were all scared."

2010-11-06T11:41:00.002-04:00

In his new book, The Lampshade, journalist Mark Jacobson investigates the origins of lampshade made out of human skin: a lampshade that was purchased for $35 at a yard sale in New Orleans and may be one of the infamous lampshades that Ilsa Koch (inspiration for Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS) allegedly constructed for her husband out of the skin of Jews slain in Buchenwald. The majority of Jacobson's investigation focuses on the possibility that this grisly artifact was a product of the Holocaust, but he also investigates the possibility that it might be a native product of New Orleans voodoo culture. From gallery owner and "biological and transgressive" artist - meaning he makes art out of biological matter, including parts of humans left over from medical dissections and autopsies - Andy Antippas, Jacobson learns about the Ekoi, "a warlike culture from Nigeria known for painting large, flowery murals and making giant masks, often from human skin."

Armed with slender lead, Jacobson searches database of the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy Project, which contains digital records of the French slavers that trafficked Africans through the bustling slave auctions of Louisiana from 1719 to 1820. He finds a record of just two Ekoi slaves sold at auction in New Orleans. One, a woman named Felix, was sold for $430 in 1792. The extensive records the French slavers kept contained the following comment on the sale: "Woman is pregnant."

Oddly, the name links with a story Jacobson heard from New Orleans music legend Dr. John. According to the good doctor, a Creole regular at the Saturn bar was a voodoo practitioner of sorts and he was well-known for making masks out of human skin. "Slip them right over your head, " Dr. John tells Jacobson. "Give yourself a whole new face." This strange character's name is, curiously enough, Cheeky Felix.

Could Cheeky Felix be the great-times-ten grandson of the slave woman Felix? Was there some bizarre family tradition of Ekoi flesh-mask making that was passed down from generation to generation for nearly three centuries? Jacobson's curious, if not totally sold, and he attempts to find Cheeky Felix. Dr. John tells him that the Neville brothers - yeah, believe it or not, the Neville "the Meters" brothers - might know where Cheeky Felix is.

This turns out to be a dead end for Jacboson. The Neville brothers are apparently not big flesh-mask types. But Jacobson's interview, in which the brothers Neville discuss New Orleans urban legends and the strange role horror cinema played in segregated New Orleans, leads to a surreal appearance by ANTSS's favorite monster: the Gill-man from the Black Lagoon. Here's Jacobson:

I gave Cyril the short version of the lampshade story and he was interested but again insisted that he had little to add. "Well," he finally allowed, "there was the Gown Man. If our mother wanted to keep us home, she'd tell us about the Gown Man. He was this big white guy in a hospital gown, and he'd snatch you off the street, put you under his arm, and take you over to the dissection room at Tulane University medical school. They'd pull of your skin and you'd get chopped up by medical students, practicing their autopsies."

"They had the Needle Man, too. Supposed to shove a six-inch needle in your eye, suck your brain right out from the socket," Aaron Neville chimed in.

Showtime was approaching and Cyril looked about ready to say good-bye when he said, "There is this one thing. Don't know if it helps you or not, but when we were kids our parents used to send us to this Boy Scout camp y the Lake. We'd play ball and that, but on Wednesdays we went to the movies because that's the day they set aside for black people to go to the movies.

"They always showed these horror movies, like Attack of the Crab People. Creature from the Black Lagoon. The usual shit, trying to scare us, but the movies were so corny, we'd just laugh. Then there was this one time the movie came on and you could tell from the first second this wasn't going to be the same old thing. The film was all messed-up-looking, with these scratches in it. At first you didn't see anything. It looked overexposed. Then you saw these people coming out of what looked like a giant hole. These skinny, skinny people, their eyes sunk deep inside their head. They were wearing what looked like striped pajamas. They showed these dead bodies, stacked up. And right away, I was scared. We were all scared. Because we knew this wasn't something fake. It was real. Remember that Aaron?"

He nodded.

"Then they had these other people, marching by. And I think I saw that thing you're talking about - a lampshade they said was made of human skin. That was really scary."

"You're talking about footage from Buchenwald. The Buchenwald concentration camp," I said.

"Some concentration camp, that was for sure," Cyril answered. "Long as I live I'll never forget those pictures. Give me the chills thinking about it even now. Because there are two things about seeing that movie that have always stayed with me.

"First of all, I couldn't believe white people would do that to other white people. But even more than that was the question about why they picked that particular Wednesday to show that particular movie to us - the kind of message they were trying to send."

Movies: Downward spiral.

2010-11-04T20:29:00.001-04:00

Early in The Descent: Part 2, the much reviled follow-up to The Descent, there's a scene where a tracking dog is unleashed and sent into the elevator house of an abandoned mineshaft. The dog spends a few seconds in the darkened interior of the building without making a sound. The dog's handler and the deputy accompanying him grow concerned and begin to approach the hole in the door the dog used to enter the decaying structure. The dog suddenly bounds out of the building, dashes past his two startled handlers, and races down the dirt road behind them.

What scared the dog?

Because anybody watching this flick presumably saw the first installment, the assumption is that the dog saw one of the troglodyte baddies that live in the seemingly endless cave system that serves as the setting of both flicks. Given what viewers would know at that point in the flick, it's a valid hypothesis.

But we later learn that the elevator house is several stories up from the entrance of any cave entrance. And the nearest cave entrance is actually sealed off. There are no creepy crawlers in the elevator house; unless one wants to propose that a caveman spooked the dog, then quickly crawled down a couple hundred feet of cable, then sealed the cave entrance behind them.

So what scared the dog?

I propose that the dog, finding himself unleashed, realized that this was its only chance to get the hell out of The Descent: Part 2 and took it.

Smart dog.

Stuff: "A buffet of flimsily contained id."

2010-10-28T15:12:00.002-04:00

Sloane Crosley, the publishing marketer turned essayist shown above eating who knows what, is so totally over the Halloween thing.

Scare quote, as it were: "Perhaps it’s because this city has such a buffet of flimsily contained id to begin with. There are a whole lot of people living here who don’t need to let loose on Halloween — their psyches are pretty unstructured on an average Tuesday."

Art: Does it itch?

2010-10-22T19:46:00.000-04:00

The monster mash-ups of writer Tim Hall and artist Jen Ferguson combine lovely visual tributes of classic creatures with deadpan gag dialogue. Above is my fave, the wolfman.

Wolfie and more will be on display at Bergen Street Comics, Brooklyn's finest comic shop, Saturday, the 30th. Free grub is likely. Shindig starts at 8:00. I'll be there. I'll the ravishingly handsome motherfucker who answers to the name of Joe Slick. I'll be wearing a white suit with a purple carnation. Do say hi.

Great Slasher Reaserch Project of '10: End of Step 1

2010-10-20T11:33:00.002-04:00

This post is the official announcement of the completion of the first stage of the Great Slasher Research Project of 2010!

We had more than 50 sources - ranging from scholarly texts to trait lists submitted by readers - who came up with 43 distinct traits that define the slasher movie subgenre.

Taking the most consistent identified traits, here are the elements that we've collectively decided define the subgenre, in order of votes:

1. Single or small group of human killers
2. Multiple kills
3. Killer exhibits focused hunting/stalking behavior
4. Pre-selected victim pool, determined by victim trait or location
5. Succession of kills over time
6. Killer was wronged or has a tragic past
7. Killer uses personal, low-tech weapons (no traps, guns, bombs, poisons)
8. Killer's identity is a secret
9. Final survivor or small group of survivors fight against the killer
10. Predictable order of kills determined by victim traits

Notably, the final girl and the predictable victim order, both common tropes in horror criticism and meta treatments of the subgenre, just barely made the cut.

Thanks to everybody who helped out. I'll be announcing the second part of our research project - and how you can help - shortly. Stay tuned, fright fanciers.

Great Slasher Research Project of '10: Last Call for Comments!

2010-10-19T12:13:00.004-04:00

Alright, Screamers and Screamettes, it's the last day for comments in the first part of the Great Slasher Research Project of '10.

This s**t just got real!

We've email and comment responses from more than 40 readers, as well as definitions I've culled from academic sources. All told, we're gonna aggregate more than 50 trait lists to create our working "formula" for slasher flicks.

But I can still use more data. The more answers folks submit, the better our definition will reflect the general understanding of what a slasher flick is. So whether you're a long-time slasher flick aficionado or you haven't seen a slasher flick since that VHS tape of Friday the 13th scared you into half a heart-attack at your 14th birthday party sleepover, I want to hear from you.

You can leave an answer here or on the original post, just leave an answer. Do it, for science. And the children. But mostly science.

Movies: Think of it as the small plates version of Alive.

2010-10-17T17:12:00.002-04:00

The strangers-in-a-madman's-death-trap set up of Steven Hentges's 2009 film, Hunger, immediately calls to mind the standard-bearer franchise of the much maligned torture porn subgenre, Saw. One of the character's evens suggests that the trap they find themselves in is game and, in order to survive, they need to successfully play the trap out. Within the world-logic of the film, the character's suggestion makes no sense. The maker of the trap has left no instructions and there's never any clear condition the trapped characters can induce that would bring the game to satisfactory conclusion. For the characters, there's no reason to assume they're in a Jigsaw-like game. Rather, this odd assertion is a muffled sort of fourth wall breach; it's the director and writer indirectly communicating the viewer that, yes, they know, there's a seven-film large elephant in the room.

As it turns out, there's little of extreme body trauma and gore sadism that mark the torture porn subgenre here. If anything, the film's links to Saw (and to Saw's absurdist French cousin, Martyrs) come in the form of retroactively calling attention to Saw's curious place in the "mad scientist" strain of horror. Hunger is no torture porn film. Instead, the flick is poor man's No Exit, a slow burn psychological stress exercise that attempts to ground to tension in the decaying characterizations of its protagonists.

The first 10 minutes of Hunger are visually arresting. In keeping with the demands of the strangers-in-a-trap framework, Hentges opens by introducing us to the protag cluster one-by-one, each entering the scene in a way meant to instantly communicate who the leader is, who the traumatized one is, who the crazy dangerous one is, and so on. Though we're walking on narrative ground so well-tread it's got ruts dug through it, Hentges gives the scene some kick by filming it entirely in ill-lit extreme close-ups. The characters become pale face-splotches hanging in a seemingly endless expanse of inky blackness; the emotions the project are explicit to the point of actor-exercise overtness. The viewer hears action, see reaction shots, and loses any sense of the characters spatial relationship to one another. And this goes on for about a tenth of the movie's running time, well past the point where the viewer's wondering if the whole movie was shot in this bizarro horror take on Dreyer's Joan.

After that introductory scene, the film falls into a far more familiar visual template and viewers find themselves in the factory-standard squalor of your garden variety captivity cave. As our captives are watched ceaselessly by a both sipping, classical music lovin' (vinyl geek, natch) mad scientist, they quickly figure out that the plan is to starve them to death. It doesn't take to long for folks to figure out that people are, in fact, meat. Then it just becomes a game of waiting to see who freaks out first and who becomes long pig.

The emphasis in the flick is on the mounting tension between the protagonists and not the gore and violence of their inevitable regression into barbarism. This pays dividends for watchability: there's little in the way of the torn human form that remains to be innovated and the promise of watching a bunch of folks in a pit turning each other into sausage is not much of a promise at all. This comes at a cost. By replacing the mechanical progress of so many horror flicks with a plotline that amounts to a series of interlocked character studies, the film throws too much weight on the shoulders of its game, but not particular exceptional cast. There are some perfectly adequate performances, but nothing magnetic enough to justify that fact that a significant part of the film is simply these characters sitting around, doing little character building bits, biding time until the next plot point.

The motivation for our baddie is another awkward aspect of the film. The film is punctuated by a series of flashbacks that are meant to reveal the reason the host of this mini-holodomor goes through all this trouble - at least twice, as the characters find the remains of previous experiment subjects. However, his experiment bares to little relation to conditions that created him and the conclusion is so foregone that the whole think seems clumsy rather an illuminating. By the end of the movie, I was convinced that we weren't watching mad science as in "you are conducting science with a reckless disregard for the consequences and the cost in human life," but rather mad science in the sense of "you are crazy and believe that the crazy crap you're doing is somehow science, when it is really just you being crazy."

Despite its imperfections and too often clunky story elements, I found I was willing to cut Hunger some slack. With its emphasis on character over shock, Hunger stretches for something genuinely dramatic. Almost all its flaws are a product of overreach. This doesn't make the flick an less flawed, but one can afford to be generous about honest mistakes.

SPEAKING OF HONEST MISTAKES!

If you haven't thrown your two cents into the Great Slasher Research Project of '10, why not do so now? It's easy, it's not necessarily the opposite of fun, and it will not worsen any of the pressing and heart-wrenching geo-political humanitarian issues of the day! The project closes for comments on the 20th.

Books: The Age of Tired Monsters?

2010-10-16T11:23:00.002-04:00

In a recent interview about his new book, Kraken, China Miéville, Marxist economist and New Weird pioneer, discusses what he believes is the state of monster creation in the early 21st Century. Here's the relevant section of the interview:

BS: One of the things I wanted to ask you about is the talk you did at a Marxist conference called ‘Marxism and Monsters’?

CM: Oh yeah, God.

BS: Because I was obsessed with that talk for ages, and my comrades and stuff we always talk about it. So you talk about these origins of monsters, and the socioeconomic origins, and then I was thinking – nowadays we don’t really invent new monsters, we kinda riff off old monsters like vampires and zombies, we use them over and over again. I wanted to know whether you thought we’d exhausted our ability to create monsters or is there a reason today’s society doesn’t really invent monsters like we used to?

CM: I’m not sure I’d agree, I mean, I think there’s two different levels. On the one hand there’s this kind of endless degraded reiteration of the old tropes, so you get these endless endless endless zombie or vampire films or whatever, but at the same time there is also, I mean particularly within geek culture, that kind of fascination with the monster creation. So, with movies there’s always this thing with like, y’no, ‘did you get to the monster shot?’ ‘Did you see the monster?’ and it’s like ‘what’s it gonna be?’ You remember when Cloverfield came out and everyone was like: ‘what’s the monster going to be like?’ You know, there was all these debates about it. There is still an attempt to create, or self-consciously an attempt to create monsters that haven’t been seen before. Or you think about something like Doctor Who where they’re always trying to come up with the new, y’no – but for me, as you know if you’ve heard the talk, I think the early 20th Century was the high point of absolutely explosive creation in the monstrous. But I would say, at the moment – particularly at the level of vampires and zombies – it’s very tired.

I think probably the ’20s was the anomaly rather than now, I think it was more of a question of that being a particularly fecund time than this being a particularly degraded one. And I think there’s probably more teratological innovation going on now than there was in the 1880s for example. I think it’s very culturally specific and at various moments there’s a kind of upsurge of creativity and others there’s not, so I think at the moment things are roughly sort of in balance, you know - we have a lot of very very tired stuff, there’s still some things that are interesting, but most of the time monsters disappoint. Like Cloverfield when the monster is revealed you’re like, uh. *laughs* And that’s a separate issue. But as to the social reasons, why there is such an obsession with sparkly vampires, or whatever it might be, I mean that’s a whole other question – then you have to get into the specifics of each case. And these things are very fashion driven, so, angels are something they’re trying to do at the moment. Angels are very trendy. So overall I think this day and age is kind of middling, in terms of monster creation.

The Great Slasher Research Project of 2010: Keep 'em comin'.

2010-10-12T22:28:00.001-04:00

I've got just over 20 responses in comment form and in emails. Thanks everybody who has responded so far.

For those who haven't yet responded, what are you waiting for? A written invitation?

Well, okay then.

Dear blog reader,

You are cordially invited to participate in the Great Slasher Research Project of 2010. Step 1 of the two step project involves crowd sourcing a working definition of the a slasher film. To help, leave a comment, either here or in the original post, that lists (in no particular order) the elements you believe make a film a slasher film. Don't worry about the answers of others - in fact, don't even read the other responses until you've contributed your own. And don't spend to much time crafting the perfect response. We're looking for a list like so:

1. Something something
2. Things
3. Stuff that is there
4. Nothing that shouldn't be there
5. You know

On the 20th, I'll quit taking suggestions and present those elements on which their was the greatest consensus.

Dress code is casual. You may bring guests.

There's your written invite. No more excuses.

True Crime: America's first serial killer?

2010-10-09T19:35:00.003-04:00

Since his starring role in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, H. H. Holmes, 1861 to 1896, has widely been acknowledged as America's first serial killer. Holmes' bizarre method of dispatching his victims - through the use of a nightmarish gas chamber and abattoir that seemed, at once, to be an organic outgrowth and a demented satire of the slaughter houses of his adopted Chicago home - carries with it the stamp of modernity: His death chamber was, in essence, a human processing plant, a mechanical expression of homicidal urges that seems to presage the genocidal madness of that threatened to entirely engulf the century to come.

But a new claim by author Jack El-Hai - author of the definitive biography of the inventor of the frontal lobotomy - suggests that Holmes might not have been America's first serial killer. According to El-Hai, that title belongs to the obscure Harry Hayward (note to parents, don't give your kid all-H initials).

Hayward first came to the attention of El-Hai when the author was writing an account of the Catherine "Kitty" Ging case. Ging was a dressmaker in Minneapolis. She began dating Hayward in the early 1890s. Hayward took out an insurance policy on Ging and, in December of 1894, with the help of an accomplice, killed Kitty Ging. The accomplice put a .38 slug in her head.

His capture and convict was a pretty straight forward affair. His accomplice was caught right away and, under police questioning, he gave Hayward up. Hayward was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was the last person to get the death penalty in Minnesota. After him, the state abolished capital punishment.

End of story. But something about Hayward stuck with El-Hai. He couldn't get over the murderer's casual sociopathy. From El-Hai:

He never expressed remorse; he laughed over Ging’s fate and disparaged her as a stingy woman unwilling to keep his wallet fat. He joked and kidded his way to the gallows. Only the noose silenced him. . . Hayward’s brutality seems so out of place in 19th-century Minneapolis, so modern. I couldn’t shake off the memory of the killer’s calm, confident face. He seemed extraordinarily manipulative, cold-hearted, and dangerous.

Still, El-Hai could never find any evidence that Hayward was anything other than a desperate kept man who couldn't squeeze his lady for any more dough. Until a random Google Books search showed that Google's indiscriminate scanning of public domain books had digitized an extremely rare book from 1896: Harry Hayward's last recorded confession.

For the rest of the story, check out El-Hai's article at the Minnesota Monthly: The Murderer that Haunts Me.

And don't forget . . .

Submit a list of traits you think make a slasher flick as part of THE GREAT SLASHER RESEARCH PROJECT OF '10: the project so important, it appears in all-caps sometimes. Not all the time though, 'cause that's insanely annoying. Happy slashin'.

The Great Slasher Research Project of '10: ANTSS needs your help.

2010-10-06T10:00:00.005-04:00

In The Onion A.V. Club's "Gateway to Geekery" series, there's an entry on gateways into the slasher horror subgenre. I don't bring up this article to defend its choice of the film to start with - writer Zack Handlen chooses the ironic, post-golden age Scream as the threshold flick - but to point out his definition of what a slasher film is. From the article:

Plus, just what the hell is a slasher? Even seasoned horror junkies have a hard time agreeing on a definition. Much as “torture porn” resists easy classification (although it seems to be, for whoever’s using the term, “violent movies I don’t like”), a slasher film can only be defined by general terms and personal taste. For the purposes of this article, supernatural killers are out, which means no Nightmare On Elm Street. (Also no Leprechaun, Child’s Play, or Friday The 13th movies from part 6 on.) There’s a killer, or a pair of killers, and they’re bumping off people, until a lone survivor (a.k.a., the Final Girl, a virginal young woman who’s probably a bit smarter than her friends) stumbles across the bodies the killer has carefully planted for her to find; a cat-and-mouse game ensues, the Final Girl turns the tables on the killer, and then there’s one final scare before the end credits.

Definitions are always a sticking point - I think most slasher fans count Freddy's films in their canon - but the problem with this particular formula is that not even Handlen follows it. For example, there's no "Final Girl" in Sleepaway Camp, a film he cites as an example of the genre. Nor is Sidney the lone survivor of the killers' murderous spree in Scream.

This isn't to pick on Handlen's definition, but to point to something that's been nagging me lately: I'm not certain that there is a "slasher" formula. From high-minded criticism (see Women and Chainsaw's, the book that spawned the "final girl" trope) to genre in-jokes (see Scream), there's an long-running assumption that there is a widely recognized, essential "formula" of genre conventions inherent to the slasher film. Some of the elements of this alleged formula can be found in Handlen's fomulation: the final girl, the lone killer, the last jump scare, etc. Others get suggested from time to time: nudity; a punitive attitude towards sin; the presence of a signature weapon; a predictable victim-order that requires minorities and sybarites go before the good, white kids; useless adults and authority figures; and so on.

The problem is, when I start talking cases, most of the films I'd consider slashers omit most of the elements people would put on their list. I'm coming to the conclusion that the slasher "formula" is mostly a critical crutch, a convenient catch-all that lumps together the horror films of a certain era, that has become a fan shibboleth.

But instead of just speculating, I want to put this idea to the test. And that's where you come in.

I need some research assistants for what I'm calling The Great Slasher Research Project of '10. This project will have two parts: First we cook up a working definition of a slasher flick, then we watch a bunch of movies to see if the definition holds. We're going to start that first step today.

Part 1: Create a Definition

When I wrote about the characteristics typical of torture porn flicks, I was fairly called to task for defining the genre in a tautological way: to prove torture porn flicks exhibited certain characteristics, I defined films with those characteristics as torture porn. While that certainly makes arguing one's case easier, it's acting in bad faith as a critic. To avoid this, we're going to crowd-source our definition of the slasher flick. Here's how it will work: from now until the 20th, leave a comment on this post that details elements you believe define the slasher subgenre. To keep things simple, use a standard, list like format. Here's a non-slasher example:

I think the elements common to all chocolate chip cookie are:
1. chocolate chips
2. cookie

That's all you've got to do. Don't worry about other people's responses - in fact, don't even look at the other responses before creating your own - just write out the elements that come to mind when you think "slasher." On the 20th, I'll compile the answers, find a subset of broadly agreed upon elements, eliminate outliers, and we'll have a definition reflects the consensus rather than an individual's point of view.

We'll take that definition and use it to complete step 2.

But that's later! Right now, I want to hear from you. Leave a comment. Tell friends to leave comments. The more data, the better. Comment like the wind, my friend!

Music: Jaws 5 - This time, it's a pain in the ass.

2010-10-04T18:52:00.002-04:00