Movies: Advice for time travelers, Part 2.

This is the second post in an increasingly goofy geek out over time travel initiated by the flicker Triangle. It picks up pretty much where the last on left off, so you might want to check that one out first.

In the last post, we discussed two possible interpretations of what's happening to Jess Prime in the flicker Triangle: supernatural punishment and an infinite time loop. Unfortunately, for the would be chrononaut worried about getting stuck in time, neither of these scenarios have a satisfactory exit strategy. In the case of supernatural intervention, you'll just have to hope whatever is screwing with you decides to stop. There's nothing you can do. Though even that's better than the second alternative. If you're stuck in a perfect loop of time - an eternal return scenario - then not only is there nothing you can do, there is literally no escape. In the former situation one can always hold out hope that the gods get tired of tormenting you. Happily for Jess Prime, we also discussed why she cannot be stuck in a perfect time loop. So there's still some hope for her and chrononauts that may find themselves in a similar situation.

So now that we've determined what isn't happening to Jess Prime, what is?

To explain Jess Prime's situation we need a different model of time travel. In fact, I think we need elements from two models: one to explain how the boat travels through time and one to explain why Jess Prime's fate is not strictly bounded by the principle of self-consistancy.

First, let talk about how the boat travels through time. From what we actually see in the flick, the Aeolus appears to be a Depression Era ocean liner. It has no crew or passengers. Despite the lack of a crew, the engines seem to work fine. When we first see the Aeolus, it is moving along under its own power and smoke is rising from its stacks. The clock's onboard have stopped (as does Jess Prime's watch, though none of the watches of the other members of Boat Party Prime have stopped, suggesting that Jess has already made this trip enough times that her watch has died on her). We know that, on the boat, one perceives time as rolling forward, but from the perspective of people not on the boat, you're traveling backwards in time.

From a theoretical standpoint, traveling backward in time is a lot tricker than traveling forward. Most models that account for the possibility of traveling back in time require mucking around with elements of mindwarping cosmic craziness that, as far as I can tell, are not a factor in Triangle. Physicist Kip Thorne has proposed that the curvature of space-time theoretically allows for the possibility of taking a "short cut" that is, in essence, so fast you could take a roundway trip that ended before you left. But that presupposes travel on a scale that dwarfs anything we could do on one of Earth's oceans. Another, somewhat similar theoretical option involves moving around two "cosmic strings" - infinitely long strands of hyperdense material left over from the earliest days of the universe and woven throughout time space - in a loop that would allow you to arrive at the place and time of your departure. Finally, Thorne and physicist Mike Morris showed how wormholes, theoretical tunnels in the fabric of space-time much beloved as plot cheats by sci-fi creators, might allow for travel to the past. Though the presence of a wormhole would, in theory, appear as a massive malformation of space. If it was large enough to travel through, than it would be something you could see with the naked eye. Jess Prime encounters no such distortions on the Aeolus.

So basically, we need a way to get an oceanliner stuck in a time loop without punching holes through space-time or fitting the ship with a warp drive. Luckily, a quirk in quantum mechanics does all this for us without us so much as breaking a sweat. For our answer we return to the work of Igor Novikov (who along with Thorne cooked up the self-consistency principle) and the concept of the "jinni" - or an item that, through a loophole in quantum mechanics, has a looping world line. I've used the term "world line" before without explaining it. Essentially, a world line is a single unbroken experience of time-space. You're life is your world line. Most objects, like yourself, have a single world line that continues in a relatively stright line from the past to the future. (Actually, because space time isn't flat, our world lines warp ever so slightly, but our experience of space-time is so similar to everybody elses around us, and their experiences are so similar to ours, that we do not notice any warping effects.) But some objects, called jinni (as in genie, as in "I dream of") have a loop for their world line. These objects have no begining or end. They appear fully formed and continue on until the collapse of the universe maintained against entropy by injections of energy from the universe itself. In theory, the vast majority of jinni would be marcoscopic. There's no limit to the size of a jinni, but the larger a jinni is, the more energy it requires from the universe to ward off the effects of entropy. This makes macroscopic jinni unlikley. Unlikely, but not impossible.

I propose that the Aelous is a macro-jinni. It was, through a quirk of the laws of the universe, created as an underway Depression Era oceanliner off the coast of Florida. This makes for some trippy consequences - for example, the Aelous was never built and launched, no band ever played the drums in the ballroom, no captain ever steered her, the food members of Boat Party Prime find aboard was never actually harvested and prepared - but it also explains some mysteries about the ship. First, where's the crew and passengers? There never were any. That's why the ship doesn't look like a bunch of panicked folks hauled ass off there in full woman-and-children-first mode.

How could the ship still be running after some eigth decades of non-crewed operation? The Aelous, like Jess Prime, can be considered to have a frame of reference to the time traveling shenanigans that are afoot. From within its frame of reference, cycles are experienced linearly. This goes back to the aging problem we discussed in last post: Just as Jess Prime ages throughout a cycle that other experience as a spen of just a few hours, the ship is decaying throughout the cycles. It is the victim of entropy. It uses up fuel, parts get worn down and break, sea water corrodes the hull and seeps in. In the immortal words of the Talkig Heads, "Things fall apart. It's scientific." Consequently, time loop or not, the ship should be a wreck. But, as a jinni, the Aelous has a little trick Jess Prime doesn't have: the universe regularly injects energy into the Aelous time loop system to reverse the ravages of entropy. The ship is a power vampire sucking energy from the universe. I must admit, I'm not quite sure wht a cosmic hotten up looks like, but if I had to guess, I'd imagine it would look something like a giant Perfect Storm grade disturbance that comes in advance of the ship, followed by extreme placidity around the ship itself. (Which raises questions: What happens to the universe becuase it is losing this energy to support a macro-jinni? Is the Aelous eating up stars? Are there babies who are never born, never concieved because the Aelous sucked up some energy? Could it eventually drain the resources of the enitre universe? Who knows?) Becuase the ship draws energy from the universe to fight entropy, it regularly gets the reset button hit on it. Unlike Jess Prime, it is actually starting over on a regular basis.

This entropy reset partially explains the Problem of the Piles mentioned in the previous post. Why do certain elements in the flick show the cumulative effects of multiple cycles, such as the stack of dead Sallys, but other things seem to be perpetually the same, such as the seemingly unending supply of shells for the skeet shooting rifle? Part of the answer is that being onboard the marco-jinni lets you travel through time, but only the jinni gets the benefit of the entropy reset. In the example mentioned, Sally Prime and All Sally Other Points on the Loop is traveling through time, but she isn't getting the an entropy reset (which, presumably, would resurrect her). But the shotgun shells were part of the ship at its moment of creation. They appear again every time the ship resets.

That still leaves a hitch in our Problem of the Piles: Why are certain elements of the flick that are clearly not a part of the macro-jinni not piling up? For example, we've got more dead Sallys than brains, but there isn't a enormous puddle of blood under the hook where Victor Prime and Victor +1 get the back of their head impaled. What up with that?

This question leads us to the second time travel concept we need to explain Triangle: the Many-Worlds Interpretation, or MWI. To grossly simplify one of the most absurdly complicated notions in the history of human intellectual endeavor, the basis of MWI works like so: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that you cannot know the position and velocity of a particle at an arbitrary level of accuracy. The fuzziness isn't a property of some failing on our part to measure with suitable exactness, but a property of reality itself. It's wobbly in some respects. This wobbliness is usually negligible when you get to a macro scale, where all the weirdness of the universe comes out in the wash. But it is still always there.

Because the basic building blocks of reality are hazy, when you're crunching quantum equations - like you do - the results allow you predict the probability of particles appearing at certain positions. In some interpretations, this leads to the proposition that there are different worlds, alternate world histories, where the particle appears in each position in a given world. We should note here that many physicists feel that the hypothesis of unobservable alternate dimensions violates Ockham's Razor, the guiding philosophical principle that the theory that involves the least novel elements is probably the best one. (There are other objections too, but we won't go into them, mainly because we're talking about a movie here rather than trying to prove a quantum theory hypothesis. Lighten up Francis.)

Now, as I said, most of this subatomic wackiness comes out in the macro wash, but some a couple of famous thought experiments show how this submicro sloppiness can impact that macro world. Most famously, there's Schrödinger's cat, the famous thought experiment in animal cruelty (sorry dear readers, sometimes you just have to imagine killing a fictional animal - it's called science) in which a cat is placed in a box with an apparatus that will either drop a vial of lethally poisonous gas or will not based on the vague quantum action of a radioactive trigger device. According to quantum mechanics, in essence, the math suggests that both cat-death and not-cat death are happening until the box is opened up and observed. Schrödinger actually concocted this thought experiment as an assault on quantum mechanics, but his living dead cat has become something of a mascot for the paradigm of MWI. Considered through the lens of MWI, Schrödinger's experiment causes what some physicists would call a decoherence: the world line, or history of the universe as it is experienced by people within it's frame of reference, splits into two branches, one in which the cat died and one in which the cat lived. Each of these is equally the real world, but the two don't intersect. The sense that there is a single "real world" is a product of the observer's relative frame of reference.

(An even more mind-shattering version of this experiment involves "quantum suicide," which simultaneously kills the person involved and makes them, from the relative frame of reference of the other alternative, becomes invincible to the method of death involved. As trippy as this notion seems, it weirdly mirrors the narrative of Triangle. Jess Prime survives while other Jess's die not because of her luck or will to survive - after all, there are an untold number of equally real alternatives where she is slaughtered - but because the continuity of our observation of her requires we follow a world line where she survives whatever is thrown at her. In fact, the quantum suicide problem is basically the key to the unlikely survival of every final girl in every horror film ever made.)

Here's the final proposal: The wackiness that Jess Prime is experiencing is a product of the fact that the macro-jinni Aeolus gives her a unique frame of reference from which she is aware of at least three different world lines at any given time. When Jess Prime (or any of her counterparts) travels in the jinni's time loop, they do not simply loop back to their own timeline. If that were true, the self-consistency principle would rear its ugly head. Instead, she's getting ported over to a similar, but alternate version of events. She's Schrödinger's Jess Prime, branching off along decoherences, watching and influencing things as they play out in a similar, but not exactly matching way. When she encounters other versions of her, they aren't from her past. Rather, they're from alternate world-lines.

This explains a handful of the problems in the flick. For example, Jess Prime can kill an earlier version of herself (Jess -Prime) and not vanish. The somethings pile up in the flick while others don't because every trip through the narrative plays out differently. There's no reason to think that, say, nine times ago, Jess Prime lost her locket or that she hit a seagull on the way to the ditch Jess -Prime's body every time. She's clearly killing Sally nearly every trip through, but she fate of the other characters must be less stable or we'd see pools of blood all over the ship.

Why do all these Jessi from different worlds end up on the same ship? I must admit, that's a bit of a puzzle to me. Perhaps it is a product of the macro-jinni's energy sucking ways. Constantly fighting the entropy of an infinitely repeating ocean liner is a big task for one universe. But a potentially infinite number of universes could handle it, no problem.

Regardless, for the stranded time traveller, this is actually really good news. The biggest upside of the whole MWI is that it is free of self-consistency. A time traveller ported over to another branch of world-line has no history to screw up. They could, to dig up the classic example, go and kill their grandmother (actually an alternate world version of their grandmother) and happily go on living within that world as the freaky time traveller dude who kills old ladies. After all, your history, now safely independent of your actions, becomes no longer relevant. (In fact, some granny hating time traveller could go kill your granny too, it wouldn't matter to you as you've been decohered - you've been observed in another world, so you're real there and that's all you need.) This means that you can operate with freedom and break the pattern without paradox anxiety.

If this is so, then why doesn't Jess Prime break the pattern. As strange as this sounds, she isn't creative enough. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly, "What we have here is a failure to imaginate." Jess Prime seems to repeat the same general pattern simply because she never thinks of anything else to do. The offs the same folks, takes the same trips, makes the same errors, and so on because she's convinced herself that if she could just perfect the pattern, she'd be out. But it is her very determination to go through the pattern that is dooming her to its repetition.

Don't be like Jess Prime. Imaginate like a son of a bitch.

What do you do if you are a time traveller and you appear stuck in a loop?

Step 1: If you've gone through one full cycle, you're not really in a loop. As a test, make a pile somewhere. Pick an arbitrary place and dump a single, insignificant object on it. Place a penny on the table near your front door or something. If you're in a branching pseudo-loop, you'll have a pile of pennies before too long.

Step 2: In the otherwise forgettable Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, our heroine's significant other gives her a piece of survival advice: "When all else fails, try crazy."

"What if crazy doesn't work," she asks.

"Crazy always works," he replies.

You're already stuck in a freakin' time loop. Time to break out the crazy. The implications of the MWI have freed you from paradox, so go nuts. Meet yourself and try to talk things out. Avoid going back home and runaway and join the circus instead. Stop in the middle of a conversation for a masturbation break. Shoot the wrong people. Do anything that is something that you wouldn't have ever done before. You can break the pattern, you just need to outcrazy yourself to do it.

That's my advice to you. Do the pile check. If that works, go nuts. It's that weird and easy.

Movies: Advice for time travelers, Part 1.

We here at ANTSS like to think that we give you more than simple opinion pieces on fright flicks. Instead, ANTSS strives to give you info you can use! In previous posts we explained why, against conventional wisdom, splitting up is always the best strategy for escaping a slasher and how game theory can help you survive Jigsaw traps. Today, we're going to use the film Triangle to explore what you should do if you find yourself in trapped in what appears to be a time loop. That's right. One day, you're minding your own beeswax. Next thing you know everyday is Groundhog Day and there's screaming and blood and more screaming. Fear not! We got you through the slasher and the Saw traps, we'll get you through this.

As with all survival situations your first and most important move is to stop and figure out what the hell is going on.

So, what the heck is happening in the movie Triangle?

This isn't going to be a standard review. I'm about to spoil this movie nine ways through Sunday and be waiting to spoil it again on Monday, so if you haven't seen it and you think you might, read no further.

However, I'm also going to assume you've seen the flick, so I'm not going to discuss plot and character enough to make the flick make sense. It isn't that I'm afraid to spoil the movie for you so much as I worry that reading this without seeing the movie might be the horror blog equivalent of reading Malone Dies in Martian.

And if you're confident that you don't want to see the movie, I urge you to reconsider. It's a hoot. Since my initial exposure to his 2005 CHUD-on-the-loose flick Creep, I've always cautiously categorized director Christopher Smith as a man who is, frustratingly, always about to arrive. I felt he was a cat whose flick always showed potential, without ever realizing that potential. Now, after seeing Triangle, I think I was approaching Smith's work's from an unhelpful perspective. If Smith has yet to make to make his masterpiece, it's because he's too uncomfortable with the easy cut-and-paste methods of modern horror. He could "pull a Aja," as they say in the Fright Game, and, after establishing a bit of indie cred, turn his attention to cranking out proficient retreads at the bidding of his new corporate masters. But, instead, Smith's decided to walk his own route, even at the cost of stumbling. We've yet to get the Chris Smith masterpiece, but when Smith falls it's because he reached further. In a genre as conservative and nostalgia besotted as horror, the willingness to accept risks bred of ambition is refreshing. Triangle, like all of Smith's films, is imperfect. But the promise derives from Smith's refreshing belief that horror doesn't have to pander or be stupid. What frustrated me, in the end, wasn't Smith's unfulfilled potential, but the the genre's vast unfulfilled promise.

If that's not enough, you should go if only to see the spectacle of a horror film that believes it's possible to have fun even though you didn't turn your brain off.

Okay, either you've been convinced or you ain't been. ANTSS assumes no responsibility for possible spoilage.

On to the flick at hand.

The central tangle of Triangle involves an abandoned ocean liner that appears to be, somehow, stuck in time. Our protagonists get on the boat and find themselves in conflict with a mysterious assailant. This assailant turns out to be another version of Jess, sole survivor of off the "previous" time our protagonists arrived on the boat. We're going to call the heroine of the piece Jess Prime. Despite the loopy structure of the film, the narrative logic is fairly straight forward and we follow a single version of Jess throughout most of the film.

As Jess Prime and her friends battle the murderous Jess -1, Jess Prime puzzles out that she's stuck in a general pattern. Whenever a particular set of our original cast is removed from the boat (she mistakenly believes that they must be killed, though her own trip through the complete cycle of the plot disproves this), a fresh set of characters arrives on the boat. Or, more properly stated, the boat returns to a previous time-position shortly before our protagonists arrive. (From the relative vantage point of the "new" protagonists, the action on the boat would be "going backwards" - that's to say that the time spent on the ocean liner is actually time spent traveling back to a point before they arrived on the ocean liner. More on this later.) In order to get back to her son, Jess Prime decides that she must break the pattern. At first she attempts to do this through non-violent means. Eventually, she becomes convinced that the only way to break the pattern is to stop it from happening in the first place, and prevent the party from setting foot on the boat. (Though this is only part of her motivation: We eventually discover that she's also attempting to use the time traveling properties of the boat to prevent the death of her son, who in the normal world-line of the plot dies while she's on her way to the sailboat that ultimately takes her to the time traveling ghost ship.) She attempts to prevent Jess -1 from killing the remaining folks in her party. In the course of defending herself from Jess -1, she forces Jess -1 overboard. This fully eliminates Boat Party -1, introducing Boat Party +1 to the ship.

Jess Prime realizes that the moment Boat Party +1 steps on the ship, she got to eliminate them all in order to get another chance to stop the party from boarding. Consequently, she begins a murder spree inspired by the work of Jess -1. But, of course, Jess +1 forces Jess Prime overboard in a near perfect recreation of the battle between Jess Prime and Jess -1.

Cast from the boat, Jess Prime doesn't die (disproving the hypothesis that everybody in the party must necessarily die to start the cycle over again). Rather she washes up on a beach several hours prior to her launch on the sailboat that will take her to the time traveling ocean liner. She promptly heads back to her home, witnesses her (Jess -Prime - so named because her roll is to repeatedly not enter in the plot cycle, and therefore her position is oddly as stable as Jess Prime's) own brutal behavior to her autistic son, kills herself (Jess -Prime is killed by Jess Prime), and stuffs the body in the trunk of her car. She grabs her boy and rolls out to ditch the body. She gets involved in a car accident that kills her boy. Thinking that another round on the ghost ship would throw her back to Jess -Prime's house prior to his death, she grabs a cab to harbor and gets on the sailboat that will take her back to the time traveling ghost ship.

We've got an overview of the situation, less discuss options.

First, there's a potentially supernatural explanation. We need to face the possibility that Jess Prime is dead and being punished by the gods for her abusive treatment of her son. Throughout the flick, Jess Prime is exposed to portents that suggest that what she's experiencing is not exactly materialist in origin. The ship is named after the father of Sisyphus, the mythological king who was punished for violating the privacy of Zeus and doomed for eternity to fruitless toil. One of Boat Party Prime wonders aloud if Jess Prime's behavior isn't due to guilt over her son, a double edged comment the multiple levels of which the character would be clueless about. There are several references to seagulls, perhaps a satiric jab at the Buddhism manque wisdom of Jonathan Livingston Seagull: "Begin by knowing you have already arrived." Plus, there's a host of smaller, odder coincidences that wouldn't suggest time travel. For example, the drummer in a marching band that witnesses Jess Prime's car accident carries a drum that bears the same logo as the ghost ship's house band's drum kit. Certainly one could argue that this is just thematic playfulness on the part of the filmmaker, but what if these bits of data were not window dressing? What if they were somebody or something telling Jess Prime about her fate? Good as any other theory, really.

If, in fact, the problem is supernatural in origin, then it is safe to say that you're pretty much screwed. Humans are the playthings of the gods, yo. Clash of the Titans aside (besides, Perseus is more properly considered a demigod, so using him as an example of a human who took destiny into his own hands is stretching things), when the gods want you SOL, you are most definitely S, O, and very L. Not that you might not, eventually, negotiate your way out of it or escape briefly (Tantalus himself conned his way out of Hell for a brief moment), but this will basically be at the discretion of the gods. My recommendation is to take your lumps and hope that some legendary hero comes by and saves you at some future date. Not a great plan I know, but that's what you get for pissing off the gods.

Honestly, the supernatural thing seems a cop out to me. So let's assume that the situation depicted in Triangle is materialist. It's weird and unlikely, granted, but it is the product of a wrinkle in natural laws and not the result of otherworldly intervention. Given that, what are we looking at.

Here's what were not looking at: Eternal return. Criticism of Triangle has provoked bloggers to dig into their storehouse of allusions and invoke La jetée and 12 Monkeys. The connections are both thematically obvious and factually incorrect.

The concept driving both those excellent flicks is the idea that time protects itself by making paradoxes impossible. One of the classic theoretical problems of time travel is the creation of paradoxes. Y'all know the sort of time warping shenanigans I'm talking about: Could you time travel back 90 years and kill your own grandmother, meaning you'd never been born and therefore could not travel back in time and kill your grandmother? One answer to this question is that time will always already be protected from your intervention. The past is set in stone and if you're in the past, your actions have already been determined. The sticky wicket here is the "self-consistency principle" advanced by physicists Igor Novikov and Kip Thorne. Basically, the concept of "self-consistency" preserves the past: Because any moment in time requires a specific structure of events to "arrive," then that structure is immutable. If you leap back into the past, then your actions were always a part of that structure. You can't change the past or the present.

On first glance, this seems like an attractive explanation of what we're seeing in Triangle. Attractive but inaccurate. Like my pick-up lines.

Jess Prime regularly changes the details of her present and sees evidence that previous incarnations of her (Jess -1 through -infinity) have altered her present. There's one glaring example of this and two less obvious, but kinda more interesting examples.

The most blatant evidence that Jess Prime is not, in fact, stuck in a permanent loop comes when Jess Prime and Jess -1 first come in conflict. Jess -1 is blowing away members of Boat Party Prime in the theater with a skeet shooting rifle. Jess Prime fires back, grazing Jess -1's forehead with some buckshot. When Jess Prime consigns Jess -1 to Davy Jones's locker, Jess -1 has clearly taken a few pellets to the forehead. Jess Prime never suffers a similar injury. When Jess Prime becomes the baddy and starts chasing around Boat Party +1, she takes cover pronto. When Jess +1 brings on the lead for lead trade, Jess Prime never gets nominated with buckshot.

It's a small thing, but time travel is annoying like that. It's all details.

If Jess Prime's fate was etched in stone, than her fate should be identical to fate of Jess -1. But it ain't. In fact, her experiences should also be the immutable blueprint for Jess +1's experiences, but they aren't: Jess +1 experiences missing the baddy and facing a version of herself that isn't sporting a head wound, both experiences that Jess Prime did not experience.

Another crucial, but more subtle difference is the fact that no person in an eternal return scenario can ever complete a full loop of a cycle. Recall La jetée and 12 Monkeys. In both cases, the moment both characters realize that they are in an self-consistency trap, they die. The Man and James Cole can't carry this knowledge back to the beginning of the cycle. Why not? Because that would change the timeline. Even if they were unable to prevent the actions that formed the past, the fact that they were now going through the motions aware of the cycle would be different from the first time they did it, when they were unaware of the fact that their actions were leading to the very timeline their actions helped create. Consequently, we can state that no character in an eternal return story can ever complete the cycle with their awareness of the cycle intact or the cycle wouldn't be self-consistent. Jess Prime manages to go full cycle with her awareness of the cycle intact. For shits and giggles, we can actually extrapolate that no version of the cycle is ever the same for Jess Prime because, at the very least, she's going through the motions with an awareness of having gone through the cycle n - 1 times before where n = the number of the cycle she's about to go through. At the end of the film, for example, Jess Prime is about to start the cycle over again for a at least a third time (her actions reveal she's getting on the sailboat because she knows it will give her another shot at time travel, so we've done it at least once before the flick starts), aware of the minimum two times she's done this before. This is different than the time before, when she would only be aware of having done this whole dance once before. Difference means no eternal return. Therefore, Triangle isn't an eternal return story.

"Okay, CRwM, so there's little differences," you say. "Perhaps time doesn't sweat the small stuff. Maybe, so long as you don't alter the final outcome, the timeline ain't picky and the little stuff comes out in the time wash."

Related to the awareness issue, there's the issue of relative experiences of time and aging. From the view point of the killed of members of Boat Party Prime, the time it takes to complete any number of cycles is always equivalent to a single cycle. They "start over" whenever a cycle is finished with no knowledge of the previous cycle. From Jess Prime's frame of reference, however, all the cycles occur in a linear sequence with a single unbroken thread of time-space experience shooting through them all. She doesn't "start over" so much as she arrives at yet another replay of similar events. That is to say, an infinite number of cycles would always be experienced a single stretch of four or five hours to the boat party, but every cycle is experienced as an additional four or five hours in the life of Jess Prime. In short, Jess Prime is aging while her companions in Boat Party Prime are not. While not immediately noteworthy, eventually Jess Prime's aging would be a clear violation of self-consistency. Since an infinite number of cycles are experienced as a single cycle, the only cycle anybody in Boat Party Prime, except for Jess Prime, would have an experience of would be a final cycle. This means Jess would go through 156,000 cycles and eventually reach the age of 100. From the viewpoint of Boat Party Prime, Jess Prime would have never showed up to the sailboat. Instead some insane old woman would come to the boat, rant that she was actually the late twenty-something Jess, and then croak on the dock of old age.

This leads us to the third and perhaps most subtle proof that Jess Prime isn't stuck in a story of eternal return. We're going to call this proof "The Pile Problem." On three major instances, Jess Prime comes across a pile of objects that reveal the loosely cyclical nature of her story arc.

1) While searching for a way to defend herself from Jess -1, Jess Prime loses a locket. Its chain snaps and it falls on a pile of similar lockets.
2) During Jess -1's kill spree, the wounded Sally attempts to crawl away from Jess Prime (thinking Jess Prime is the killer) and crawls to a section of the ship that is littered with mounds of dead Sallys.
3) Leaving to bury the body of Jess -Prime, Jess Prime hits a seagull with her car and tosses it off the side of the road, where it lands among the bodies of several other seagulls.

Aside from being a neat dramatic flourish, these piles are one of the best indicators that we're not in a self-consistent trap. First, because the presence of previous objects prevents the latest object added to the pile from falling exactly the same way. In a self-consistent eternal return loop, Sally's body would always give out at the same spot, in the same place. The locket would always land the same way, so would the corpse of the seagull. Even if we dismissed the idea that small tweaks to the timeline don't screw everything up, there's actually a far more serious violation of self-consistency going on here. The big problem isn't where the bodies and trinkets fall, but the fact that we keep adding mass to the universe at every cycle, mass that is apparently created ex nihlo every time Jess Prime goes through a cycle. Which gives a problem not unlike the aging issue we've discussed before. Assuming Jess Prime made through 150,000 cycles (as long as it would take her to reach 100 years of age), she would have added nearly 10,000 metric tons of dead Sally to the universe. That's a lot of dead flesh. And it's an impossibility in a closed system like an eternal return model of time travel.

There's other contradictions worth mentioning in passing. While exploring the ship, Jess Prime and Boat Party Prime run across messages painted in blood on bathroom mirrors and various trails of blood on the floor. Why doesn't this stuff pile up like Sally Prime and Sally Various Negative Numbers' bodies? Shouldn't the blood trails be rivulets of crimson after a handful of cycles. And how many bathroom mirrors does this ship have anyway?

So, we can safely say that we're not in a story of eternal return. And that's a good thing for you my impetuous little chrononaut, because there's crap all you can do if your stuck in a eternal return loop. Eternal loops do wacky stuff to free will. You've got it, in a theoretical way, but you've also always already used it. The practical result is that you've already done anything you could do. The upshot is that you'll never actually experience the feeling of going through cycle after cycle. If you're in an eternal loop, you might get a "oh crap" moment right before you die or something, but the principle of self-consistency ensures that you can't ride the loop again with any awareness of the loop you didn't have on the first ride. It's science's little gift to people stuck in that eternal hell; for the most part, the trapped never realize that they are trapped. So you've got that going for you.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #14.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Will Smith in I Am Legend, 2007.

Music: "He's burned up like a weenie / and his name is Fred!"

Lately, I've been slowly reworking my way through the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Last evening's selection was The Dream Master, Part 4. I'm going to jump over the movie here – stopping just to note how bizarrely convoluted and contradictory the continuity of the Nightmare movies were the fourth film – and talk about the music over the closing credits. As the film fades to black, the first sing viewers hear is Sinead O'Connor's "I Want Your Hands on Me." The tune's typical of the soundtrack, which is full of tunes from genuinely noteworthy acts, such as Blondie's "In the Flesh" and Dramarama's "Anything Anything." However, the tune that truly stands out appears after the O'Connor song fades: the Fat Boy's "Are You Ready for Freddy?" featuring the titular knife-handed serial child-killer rapping.

Though it is now hard to believe, the Fat Boys were, briefly, a major act. The Boys' brand of inoffensive pop rap was popular enough to rack up a string of charting hits (several of which were basically cheese rap remakes of 60s rock classics), get them a few film roles, and justify the creation of long-form video for their tie-in tune. Here it is:



I can't think of a better indication that the subgenre of the slasher flick had entered into its decadent Abbott-and-Costello-meet phase than this video, which teams a murderous pedo with the rap crew that took a remake of the surf classic "Wipeout" to the charts.

Oddly, "Are You Ready for Freddy?" wouldn't be the only cheese rap tune to stick to Freddy. Before he became a one-man summer blockbuster factory, Will "The Fresh Prince" Smith recorded the non-soundtrack bound "Nightmare on My Street."



Curiously, Smith's movie mixes details from the first three movies with an emphasis an on the overtly "gay horror" second flick – even going so far as to crib the line "You've got the body and I've got the brains." Though Smith's reworking turns Freddy's thinly disguised homosexual seduction into business deal: Krueger wants the Fresh Prince to cut rap tracks with him. This loyalty to the source material is all the more notable when you consider that the Fat Boys, who were actually working on something to be included in the franchise, got several details incorrect (for example, claiming the character of Nancy appear three times in the series when, at that point, she'd only appeared twice).

Perhaps the musical highpoint of the Nightmare series came with the sixth flick, Freddy's Dead. For that flick, the filmmakers co-opted neo-funksters Fishbone's cover of Curtis Mayfield's completely non-Nightmare related tune "Freddie's Dead."

Movies: Hollywood and vine.

Not entirely unlike the remains the vegetal baddie of The Ruins leaves behind, the film version of Scott Smith's sophomore novel is stripped to the bare bones. Compressing Scott Smith's 300+ page book into in a nimble 91 minutes, director Carter Smith (no relation) pares the novel down to its most basic moving parts. The results are mostly postitive. The film takes the often dreadful, dwindling feeling of the novel and tightens it into a more muscular and propulsive tension. This is, I think, a good move: the screen usually demands tighter storytelling. The cost, however, comes at the characterizations of our protagonists, whose personalities and conflicts are flattened for the sake of dramatic efficiency.

The plot, for those familiar with novel, remains pretty much the same. Four young Americans partaking are busy drinking, dancing, sunning, and puking their way through a Mexican resort vacation. There's Jeff, the Responsible One, who horror fans might recognize as one of the teens/meat sources from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. Jeff's dating the boozy and flirty Amy, who played Donnie's love interest in Donnie Darko. They're traveling with ex-X-man Iceman, here known as Eric, and his Stacey, who appeared as herself in, of all things, The Real Cancun, the MTV produced Spring Break trash-umentary that would have been greatly improved by the presence of a man-eating plant. These four victims to be fall in with a German tourist and a trio of wacky Greeks. The German is named Mathias while the Greeks are totally unintelligible and remain unnamed, but this hardly matters as the Greeks' chief interests seem to be drinking heroically, wildly flailing about in a wacky manner, and shouting "Whoooooooo!" a lot.

For their last day, the named protagonists and one of the Greeks (it doesn't matter which) decide to trek into the jungle to check out an archeological dig that Mathais' brother is supposedly working. On arriving at the ruins, a single stair step pyramid covered in vines, the tourists are quickly surrounded by locals armed with bows and firearms. These locals are determined to keep our hapless hikers at the site. They're so determined, in fact, that they kill the nameless Greek when he attempts to approach one of them. Trapped on top of the pyramid, our soon-to-be-fertilizer learns the grim secret of the ruins. The decaying structure is home to a sinister meat-eating plant species. From this point, things go from "downhill" to "shear cliff-face" and we watch as the heroes have what must surely rate as one of the single worst vacation experiences of all time.

There are a few key differences in the plot: the character list gets whittled down faster, the vine is somewhat "depowered" (no acidic sap and its powers of sonic mimicry are scaled back a bit), the story unfolds over the course of fewer days, some of the escape attempts that appear in the book are dropped entirely, and, perhaps most importantly, the film has a very different ending. The tone is shifted too. In the book, personality clashes between the four main protagonists - five really, Mathias is more important in the novel - are crucial to the story. In the movie, these get reduced to a couple off dramatic screaming matches that come and go without really impacting the film's direction. This is for the best. The characterization and tangents Smith could use to build his cast of characters would have bogged the movie down. Instead of being a strange parable of the failure of people to work together (shades of Smith's first novel, A Simple Plan), the film becomes a pretty straightforward struggle for survival.

Like the book, the tension the film builds is not one of sudden "jump-out" scares (though there are a couple of those). Instead, the film's suspense comes from a steady ratcheting up of the hopelessness of our protagonists' situation. This is less about thrills than a steady sinking feeling. This doesn't mean the flick isn't without its gory moments. Two surgical scenes, one well-meaning but conducted under nearly Neolithic conditions and the other more crazy and self-inflicted, stand out at the high or low points in this, depending on your point of view. The plant looks good – the combo of puppets and CGI go a long way to making the most outrageous aspect of the flick believable enough to be enjoyed without feeling stupid. The acting on the part of our four main characters is solid. Because this is almost a stage piece, with a majority of the action taking place on a tiny little chunk of the pyramid's roof, the actors all had to carry a considerable portion of the film. All of them did a good job.

The Ruins is a smart, effective, and mostly entertaining adaptation of a deceptively simple novel. Less a dumbed-down version of the original than a distilled version, the film is an original standout creature feature in a year that looks like it will otherwise be dominated by limp, half-hearted slasher remakes and retreads.

Now, just so you get the full story, here's a really hilarious review that thought the movie really sucked – and it acts the film out with figurines in the blogger's garden (sort of garden, I guess – she lives on a Christmas tree farm, no foolin' – perahaps her blatantly pro-vegetation lifestyle is at the root, so to speak, of her The Ruins hate, but that's just unfounded speculation on my part). It's darned funny, but the reenactment does give away the end, so you've been officially spoiler notified. Don't bring your bitchin' and moanin' to me, 'cause I won't give a hoot.

Movies: So to you other kids all across the land/Take it from me/Zombies just don't understand.

Who wudda thunk it? With five adaptations, Richard Matheson's slim vampire novel (weighing in at a slender 160 pages) I Am Legend may well be the most filmed horror novel of the 20th century. Though still well behind the twin titans of Victorian terror – Dracula and Frankenstein – Matheson's vampire apocalypse story beats out King's most filmed work (The Shining, which has two adaptations), is ahead of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hull House (again, two adaptations), tops Lawrence Block's Psycho, and leads the "non-fiction" horror classic The Amityville Horror by three flicks.

Filtering out a relatively unknown Spanish adaptation and a completely forgettable straight-to-video cheapie, you get three remarkably diverse interpretations of the original.

The first film, The Last Man on Earth, stuck the closest to the source material. The baddies are vampires of sorts. At night they come and harass a melancholy Vincent Price who is holed up in his suburban home, now festooned with garlic and crosses the way pre-vampire era folks strung up Christmas decorations. During the day, Vince meticulously searches the town for sleeping vampires and drives stakes through their hearts. The film is a grim, sad affair. Price plays Robert Morgan, the titular last man, as a character who rigorously grinds his way through meticulously organized raids and nightly sieges in order to avoid the clear fact that his situation is useless. It's a film about loss and hopelessness. At one point, Price's Morgan wearily narrates, "Another day to live through. Better get started." Ironically, the vampire hunter is already dead, he just hasn't stopped moving about. And Price makes it clear this is more a product of fear and habit than a reflection of the enduring strength of the human spirit. This film was also the only film that kept something of the novel's O'Henry-esque ending.

The second flick, Omega Man, tossed out the existential angst of the first flick in favor of a more over-the-top approach. Featuring the subtle acting of Charlton Heston as last amn Robert Neville, Omega Man is a sort of clearing house for 70's genre cinema. You get post-apocalyptic sci-fi, blaxploitation, cults, and so on. The vampires of the first flick become mutant cultists, the end is reworked to give humanity a fighting chance, and you get to see Chuck H act all over the damn place as his character goes a little wacky from the loneliness.

The latest incarnation is, despite being the first flick to actually carry the name of the original novel, more a remake of The Omega Man than a return to source material. The cultists get reworked as zombie-like hordes, Heston's wacky hero gets rewored into a more smoldering and wounded protagonist, and the set is a 28 Weeks Later-ish abandoned Manhattan.

Legend isn't a bad flick. There's something remarkably liberating about watching the Fresh Prince, the latest Neville, move about the collapsed city like some urban Robinson Crusoe. Unlike the Price film, this flick is canny enough to admit that some part of us secretly thinks the collapse of civilization would be kind of cool. I watched the flick at the Union Square Cinema in Manhattan and the hoots and cheers that greeted a short shot of a decaying Union Square reveals how cathartic it is to see things break loose and just fall over. Certainly, the Price flick is probably truer to what some lone specimen of humanity would feel. But this is the movies, baby. We want to see the Fresh Prince hauling butt around the city in a boss sports car and hunting deer in Times Square. (Although, do deer swim well enough that they'd get to Manhattan? That's a real question. Does anybody know?) The film is also smart enough to keep some of its funniest survivalist moments hidden in the background for astute viewers. For example, no character ever points out that the Fresh Prince's apartment is clearly decorated with masterpieces plundered from the major art museums of island. It's just a detail in the background, but it's nice that the filmmakers were thoughtful enough about the minor details.

Ultimately, the flick suffers somewhat from being the high-gloss Hollywood version of stuff we've already seen. There's not much here that isn't Omega Man, just better; not much that isn't 28 Franchise Later, just bigger. Legend is a summer blockbuster that, somehow, showed up around Christmas. It's a good summer blockbuster. If you know what you're walking into, you won't feel like your intelligence has been insulted or your time wasted. Still, I couldn't help but feel a bit like Price's Morgan: "Another blockbuster to live through. Better get started."

Book: The demon weed with roots in hell!

Critical reaction of Scott Smith's second book, The Ruins just released in mass-market paperback, was decidedly mixed. This is, on reflection, unsurprising. His debut effort, the blockbuster A Simple Plan, was one of those crossover genre hits that manages not only to deliver the goods, but touch a deep and resonant nerve. Mining the same ground as its spiritual predecessor, the genre-crossover classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madres, the plot was brilliantly straight forward. A group of three men find a bundle of cash. To keep it, all they have to do is keep their mouths shut and trust one another. Of course, everything goes to utter hell and what could be an exercise in suspense nastiness turns into a brutal portrait of human souls turned monstrous by greed.

In contrast, The Ruins features a super-intelligent man-eating plant.

Seriously. Like a more vicious, splatter-punk version of Audrey II.

You can see how many critics, especially those who had perhaps felt that they were already dangerously close to slumming it when they read Smith's first novel, turned up their noses. After all, is their any creature feature cliché cheesier than the man-eating plant? Images of shambling men in rubber tree-suits spring to mind; maybe you imagine foam "vines" swung about wildly on visible wires.

Well, the disdainful critics were full of poop. Smith's novel takes the hokey B-movie concept and strips it clean of every last vestige of Navy Versus the Night Monsters camp. Using a finely drawn cast of characters and placing them in a plot that is as eerie and surreally inevitable as the snap motion of a Venus flytrap, Smith builds a novel that, despite its bulky 500-page length, is taught and merciless. The Ruins worthily fulfills on the promise of Smith's exceptional debut.

The novel follows the story of four young American tourists (the tourist is the new small-town teen of the horror world) on an off-season vacation in Mexico. There they run across a friendly German tourist, on vacation with his brother, and a trio of rambunctious Greeks who, despite not speaking a word of English, glom on to our protagonists. The German informs them that his brother has gone to an archeological dig in the jungle inland, chasing after a hottie archeologist he met earlier. The group decides that a hike through the jungle might be fun and the four Americans and one of the Greeks take off to make a day of it. To the readers great un-surprise, things go terribly wrong. Shortly after finding the abandoned site, our heroes get trapped there by the locals who seemed determined – lethally so – to keep them at the site of the dig. Trapped without supplies, our heroes' problems get horrifically worse when they find that, sharing the dig site with them, is a system of seemingly sentient vines that live off the fluids and flesh of human beings.

The plot actually shares a sort of conceptual similarity with A Simple Plan. In both cases, our protagonists are stuck in situation that slowly, relentlessly spirals out of control. Though there is plenty of gore and high-res gross out materials (Smith is downright Rabelaisian in his eagerness to depict various bodily fluids), the real violence of Smith's book comes from his own unyielding narrative brutality. Like all good horror authors, Smith is merciless when it comes to putting the screws to his own creations. What makes him a great horror author is that he never loses sight or sympathy for the humanity of his characters. They remain fully realized characters throughout the ordeal. This at once makes the story more involving and more repellant. If our protagonists were the pasteboard cutouts of most low-grade genre fiction, we wouldn't care about them and the slow green deathtrap they find themselves in would be more tedious than frightening. On the other hand, getting to know these characters makes their fates all the more distressing, especially as the bodies begin to pile up.

Thinking back on it now, sympathy is the wrong word. Smith is something like an anatomist of genre fiction personality. His characters are "full realized," but not in the sense that they remind us of people we know. Instead, they are meticulously constructed extensions of genre types – as if he intended to make the trappings of genre fiction real rather than bring a level of the real into the context of genre fiction. This fits with the rest of Smith's MO: just slowly and steadily push everything to its most extreme conclusion.

Smith's A Simple Plan was such a great debut novel that any follow up was bound to receive a mixed reaction. The Ruins not only holds up on its own; Smith should be given credit for taking his brand of relentless psychological suspense and reworking it into a gutsy, gory concept that doesn't feel like retread of modern horror plots or his own instant classic first book.

You can find The Ruins anywhere they sell readables and the new paperback edition will only set you back about 8 smackers.

Books: Scary monsters and superfreaks.

So you're looking over the stack of unread novels that are clogging up your bookshelves. All those fat and important books from lions in the quality lit game - thick as door stops as if they've literally become bloated by their own sense of self-importance. Or maybe you've got a slew of sci-fi books with covers determined to communicate that sci-fi, for the worse, in no longer about ray guns and bug-eyed aliens. Or, perhaps, you've got a stack of whimsically lock-stepped chic lit on the bed stand, filled with secrets about skin care and shoe design more esoteric than the lore of Masons.

And you think: "Sigh. All these books are good and all. But what I'm really in the mood for is a splatter-punk rewrite of the 1988 cult classic Killer Klowns from Outer Space. With perhaps a dash of gross-out sex. That's really what I'm in the mood for. But where will I, CRwM's finicky little friend, find such a book? Does this magical tome exist? Why am I asking myself these questions when I know I don't have the answers?"

Well, my finicky little friend, you are the very definition of in luck. I'll tackle your questions in reverse order. First, you ask these questions because you've got an innate curiosity about the world around you. It is a positive thing and you should develop it further. Second, the book does exist. It is called The Freakshow. A dude named Bryan Smith wrote it. And, third, you can get it at your local purveyor of vendible literary stuffs for the bargain basement price of $6.99.

You: "It is really a re-write of Killer Klowns?"

Sort of. Think of it as Klowns on meth. The general plot is familiar – circus themed monstrosities from distant elsewhere (in this case a hellish parallel dimension known as "the Nothing") prey upon a small anytown. However, unlike the campy Klowns, Freakshow is dead earnest in it approach, which is best described as "This One Goes to Eleven."

The plot jumps between the stories of several protagonists as they uncover and attempt to thwart or promote the satanic designs of the psycho-circus, called The Flaherty Brother Traveling Carnivale and Feakshow. We've got Heather, who is strives to save her aging mother from the carnivale. Craig, Heather's abusive boyfriend and larval-stage serial killer, who gleefully joins the forces of evil. Josh, one of the few holdouts of town the freakshow attacks. Finally, there's Mike and Jinx, uneasy allies who find themselves trapped in the world of the freakshow.

Smith isn't the most graceful of authors, so the whole thing is a bit of a sloppy mess. In fact, on at least one occasion, Smith confuses his own characters and they swap plot lines for a paragraph or two. Still, it is hard to deny that the whole thing has a propulsive energy that, more often then not, compensates for the lack of structural logic. Freakshow never drags. Smith writes as if he's worried that modern readers have the attention span of a gnat with ADD. After a teaser chapter and one chapter introducing our heroine, the action kicks off and keeps an almost absurd pace throughout. Aside from our main group of characters, other characters are introduced and dispatched with a slaughter-house grade efficiency. And everything is extreme. Smith doesn't tie characters up when he can suspend them from the roof in a bondage harness and shock them with a cattle prod. Character don't just stab one another, they bring out the chainsaws. Finally, nobody has missionary position sex when automotive pseudo-tentacle rape and eye socket penetration are viable alternatives.

You: "Ugh."

Yeah.

You: "You kid."

Here's a sample Smith writing a sex scene at his most typical register. Young children, please leave the room.

Worse still were the moments when that crusty mouth suddenly locked firmly around the socket and slurped at the pooled blood and small bits of leftover optic tissue.

Long sections of the book are like that. When he can't thrill, Smith disgusts – doing both with equal gusto. In fact, he's at his best when he's abusing his characters. The few moments where he stops to catch his breath and attempts deeper characterizations fall completely flat. Smith is a bit of a literary sadist and his characters exist to be put through the meat grinder.

All this adds up to odd book that is compelling at a gut level, but is so clunky that there's little literary merit to it. Cheap thrills aren't anything to be ashamed of. If that's what an author promises to deliver, and the author makes good on that promise, then they are producing honest and effective work. Smith promises cheap thrills and that's exactly what you get. If it isn't your cup of tea, then there's no reason to pick up the book. But if you're looking for a thoroughly disreputable good time, unredeemed by high-faluting artistic aspirations or appeals to good taste, then Smith's thrill ride might be just what you're looking for.

Movies: 'Cause I'm weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?

Creep is the poor man's Descent, which is kinda a good thing – insomuch as Descent is a pretty good movie – and kinda a bad thing – insomuch as you can't watch Creep without constantly comparing it to that superior flick.

The plot of Creep is, like the plot of most great horror flicks, effectively simple. Kate, a German ex-pat living in London (played by the chick from Run, Lola, Run), leaves a fancy party to take the tube (that's what London-type Britishers call their subway system) to a party where she plans to seduce George Clooney. To spare the budget strain of having to hire Clooney, the filmmakers have Lola pass out a bit on the tube platform. She wakes up to find herself trapped in the now empty station. Shortly after establishing that she's stuck as stuck can be, a mutated mole person begins to stalk Lola through empty stations, the occasional train, and numerous gothic tunnel structures designed by the more unbalanced members of London's civil engineering community.

There's much to recommend Creep. Despite hand cam work and what appears to be digital video shooting, the film looks quite nice. The stations have a sort of lifeless, sterile gleam. The tunnels and other subterranean locales are meticulously filthy and decayed. I imagine one scene, involving an abandoned underground medical facility, slick and begrimed with mud and blood and lit with a weak yellow wash that makes everything seem jaundiced, would be enough to give neat freaks the willies for weeks.

The characterizations are so good as to boarder on being wasted. Lola is a great example of this. For all the acting she does, it does not really change the fact that she's not required to do much but scream and run and pant. The Morlock is another great example. Under all that make-up is Sean Harris, or, if you prefer, Ian Curtis from 24 Hour Party People. Harris, who is criminally under-used because of his atypical looks, is a truly remarkable Method actor and his C.H.U.D. character is fabulously over the top. From the animal-like sounds Harris emits to his bizarre physical ticks, he a joy to watch. But again, not even he can make the viewer forget some glaring gaps in narrative and logic. All the cast members make a game effort to push what is a fine and perfect serviceable horror flick into the realm of classic. Ultimately, however, they just don't have enough to work with.

There are two flaws that prevent Creep from truly becoming a classic. The first is a weak narrative. Watching the flick, one can't shake the feeling that the writer/director had scenes he knew he wanted to hit, and just tied them together in a convenient, if not very logical or sensible, way. In the bonus features (and it is still a good enough flick that I was curious enough to check out the bonus features), he director claims that he was not intimidated helming his first picture because he loves cinema and, when in a pinch, he just thinks about what previous directors have done. While this seems quite pragmatic, one wonders if the script was put together in a similar fashion. It feels a bit cut and paste.

The second problem is completely unfair, but unavoidable. If you've seen Descent, you can't watch this film without comparing the two. The dark, underground set. The pale, mole person villain. The female protagonist. The UK accents. It is unfair, but inescapable. Creep is a fine film in its own right, but it is not as good as Descent and suffers by the comparison. Actually, I couldn't help wonder if the writer/director, one Christopher Smith (which sounds like a fake name), won't follow the same trajectory as Descent director Neill Marshall. Like this film, Marshall's first flick, Dog Soldiers, was a good flick that didn't quite make the "great" cut due to some clumsy bits and uneven tone. Perhaps, like Marshall's fledgling effort, Creep is the promising opening jab that will be followed by a stupendous uppercut. Smith's next flick, Severance, described as The Office meets Friday the 13th, might just make him one of horror's A-list names. I'm curious to find out.

I'm probably being too hard on Creep. It is guilty of not being as great as it wanted to be – though it does a good job with what's it got and is a solid horror flick. If it asks to be compared to a horror film of The Descent's caliber, it deserves credit for aiming higher than, say, being yet another remake of a '70s horror flick. Using the sensuous Famous Female Aviatrixes Film Rating System, I'm giving Creep a solid Helen Richey. Sure, she's no Amelia Earhart, but she set a 10-day air endurance record (with mid-air refueling). That's pretty boss in its own right.