Under-Utilized Nightmares: The wereshark.

In this, a new semi-regular feature of ANTSS, a concept swiped from the brilliant mind behind the I Love Horror blog (see sidebar, then visit, then shower him with praise), your 'umble 'orror 'ost will 'ighlight a few baddies that the fright biz has woefully neglected. In the hopes of ending our ruinous dependence on zombies and slasher retreads, perhaps one of these under utilized nightmares will spark the imagination of a budding filmmaker. Fingers crossed.

Today's 2UN: the wereshark. From Dean Crawford's excellent natural history Shark:

Hawaiian mythology includes numerous stories of shark-men, identifiable by the pattern of shark jaws on their back, who were able to alter their forms, sometimes under the full moon, like werewolves A common event in many of the myths features a strange man warning swimmers to stay out of the water because of sharks. When the swimmers scoff at the stranger and ignore his warning, he transforms himself into a shark and devours them. As in werewolf mythology, the demonic masquerade is discovered when villages hunt the shark, only to later find a strange man, pierced with their spears, dying on the beach.

There's even a sort of "patient zero" ur-wereshark link to the stories of Hawaii's native gods: Nanaue, demi-god son of the Ka-moho-alii, the King of the Sharks. His wonderfully violent and pathetic story is retold here by an anonymous writer for a travel site:

Long ago on the Big Island of Hawaii, there lived a gorgeous young woman by the name of Kalei. Kalei lived in Waipio Valley. Each night Kalei would walk to the waters at the mouth of the valley to bathe in the sea.

One night, Ka-moho-alii, the king of all sharks in the region was swimming just below the surface of the waters where Kalei bathed. Under the shimmering moonlight, she disrobed and slipped into the warm waters as she did every night.

Ka-moho-alii saw Kalei and was entranced by her unique beauty. As shape-shifter he resolved that the next night he would take on his human form as a chief and search the land for the beautiful and mysterious woman.

He did as he planned. For the next few days he walked the land as a chief and ate and communed with the people of Waipio Valley in search of Kalei. In time, he found her. They fell in love and married.

Over time, Kalei became pregnant with Ka-moho-alii’s child. Before the child was to be born, the Shark King knew that his time had come to return to the sea. He never revealed his true identity to Kalei. Instead, he instructed Kalei to give birth alone and to watch over his child, who was to be a son, and to never allow the baby to eat the flesh of any animal. Reluctantly he left Kalei, whom he had come to love dearly and returned to the ocean. The lovers never saw each other again.

On a dark night, as the island winds whipped furiously through the valley, beautiful Kalei gave birth to the Shark King’s son. She was afraid and saddened when she saw that the baby was born with a deformity on his back – a large open hole that resembled a gaping fish mouth.

She wrapped the baby in a thin blanket of tapa cloth to hide the deformity from the others. That night she cried as she rocked her newborn son, for he was as beautiful as she, besides his disturbing deformity. She named him Nanaue.

As the child grew older, she kept him away from meat as the Shark King had instructed her, but she could not protect him for long. Back in ancient times, men and women were not allowed to eat together.

When the child came of age, his grandfather took him to eat with the men. He was fed meat for the first time and developed a voracious and insatiable appetite. The gaping mouth on his back grew rows of sharp teeth.

After that day when Kalei took her son to bathe in the stream she watched in horror and fascination as he took the form of a young shark – he would swim and play in the water in fish form, chasing and eating the smaller creatures in the stream.

As the child grew into a man, Nanaue also grew as a shark. After he would swim in the ocean, people would go missing. A great shark would come out of the water and tear his fellow swimmers limb to limb.

The people of Waipio Valley became suspicious – why was Nanaue never harmed in the ocean? They began to suspect that he had special powers, but they did not know that it was he who was actually killing his friends while in shark form.

One day, the villagers discovered the great mouth on Nanaue’s back. It all came together that he was the one that had been causing all of the deaths in their otherwise peaceful waters. The villagers were very angry and decided to capture and kill him. Nanaue then changed into shark form and escaped into the sea.

From Waipio Valley, Nanaue swam to the Hana side of the island of Maui. There he took the form of a man. He married a chiefess while on Maui and tried to hold back his desire for human flesh. He could not. One night his hunger took a hold of him and he kidnapped a young girl, ran to the ocean, shape-shifted and devoured her in plain site of all. The people of Maui were outraged. They tried to spear Nanaue from canoes, but he swam quickly toward Molokai.

Once again, after he had reached the island of Molokai, Nanaue tried to keep his true nature a secret, but as he grew older his hunger only got stronger. By this time, tales of a dangerous shark man were circulating through the islands.

The Molokai people kept a look out for this strange Man Shark. Finally, they saw Nanaue shape shifting in the sea when he thought that no one was watching. They snared him while in shark form and beat him with clubs until the ocean was red with his blood. The people chanted continuously until Nanaue became weak.

His shark body was drug to shore where he was chopped to pieces and incinerated in a large oven. Thus died Nanaue, son of Ka-moho-alii – King of Sharks.

Movies: I was rolling my eyes upwards too.

If you're a horror filmmaker about to launch into biz, I have a single bit of advice for you: Shoot your film in a foreign language. Preferably French, if possible.

Seriously.

As the self-appointed torture porn guy of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers (what, was I gonna be another nostalgia besotted fan of exploitation cult stuff? - might as well announce that you enjoy metabolism and access to oxygen – besides, this gets me out of watching The Room) I've finally gotten around to checking out Martyrs, the Aught Eight Pascal Laugier helmed latecomer to the much reviled subgenre. Yet, while horror elites have gone out of their way to denigrate the homegrown torture porn flicks, they'll sprain their wrist trying to be the first to gookie cookie this particular flick.

Why?

Because it's French. So very very French.

Let's get the plot summary out of the way.

The film starts with a young girl escaping a grimy meat packing plant torture chamber. On her way to freedom, she sees another prisoner, but out of fear of getting caught, she abandons her to her fate. (Think Hostel, except the hero doesn't go back for the prisoner he could free.)

The girl, Lucie, ends up in a orphanage where, after and extend therapy/coming-of-age montage we find out that she's befriended by the pleasantly dykey Anna. Lucie's now a cutter, though in her mind the slashes come from a Samara-esque projection of the woman she failed to save. (Think Ring, but more slashy.)

Cut to "now-ish" – Anna and Lucie are an armed duo on the road looking to get revenge against her former captors. (Think Boise Moi except mercifully shorter.) Lucie finds the couple she thinks is responsible for her imprisonment and goes Columbine on them with what appears to be a very expensive quail-hunting rifle. (Think Funny Games.) Lucie's rage includes the execution of the couple's children: a young boy headed off to college and a girl in the early teens.

(I'm going to quit with the "think" motif, but you get the idea. Martyrs is a basically a mash-up flick of the New French Extreme and American mainstream horror, notably the torture porn genre. If you're watching Martyrs and comparing it favorably to American torture porn, then you just haven't watched very much of the subgenre. Martyrs - by being French and by extension "good" – is torture porn for people who would never stoop to watch torture porn.)

Just because it struck me as curious, I'll mention here that Lucie's gun is a very French weapon in that it is absolutely savage to the human body, but apparently can do no harm to inanimate objects. The boy, for example, is shot while seated in a chair. The buckshot clearly goes straight through him, but leaves but the chair he's seated in, the glassware in front of him, and the glass double doors behind him completely unscathed. By the same token, blood in this film acts the way blood would if Jackson Pollock designed the human body. Nobody jets blood or bleeds out; rather they get injured and smear about great expressionist Crayola red swatches of it about the place. Notably, being around blood gets you covered in it, even before you touch anybody or anything.

Anna, to her credit, is horrified by the violence she sees – if you're curious about what Oskar's life will be like in a few short years after the credits roll in Let the Right One In, the scenes post-family-massacre show vividly what it's like to be the non-bloodthirsty one in such a relationship – and ends up intervening on behalf of mother, who is wounded and left for dead by Lucie, but is still clinging to life. This act of kindness is ill-rewarded as Lucie finds out, offs the mother anyway, and then – feeling unloved, I guess, or perhaps fulfilled – dispatches herself.

Anna, now alone in the world, discovers that Lucie was right all along – there's a CDC-grade sterile torture dungeon underneath the house, complete with simpering victim! (Think, of all things, Captivity - sorry, I know I said I'd quit, but c'mon, how often to get to point out that a film bit off of Captivity - seriously, it steals from Captivity for fuck's sake!) Anna tries to care for the prisoner, but it goes pear shaped when functionaries group who made all this possible show up. Dressed like people who thought "Basically, what I'm sayin' is that I want to dress like I'm a rebel in the The Matrix all the time," these folks bust in, kill the tortured girl. Then the take Anna captive and hand her into the custody of a lady who looks like what would happen if you appointed Mrs. Garrett the high priest of the Thuggie in the Temple of Doom. Mola Garrett explains that Lucie, the now dead new torture victim, and now Anna are part of some George Bataille cult (don't worry – the French didn't get the reference either – surveys show that, despite their rep for culture, the French tend to read even less than Americans do) who feel that death, administered properly, leads to states of self-negating ecstasy that can reveal truths beyond the capacities the self-bound – specifically, what lies on the other side of death.

This is not, despite its oddness, an invention of the filmmaker. Not only is the central concept lifted from the writings of Bataille, but the cult apparently decorates their lair in images from Bataille's death/sex opus The Tears of Eros. The flick gains a considerable amount of mileage out of one particular image – one of a series in the original work – of a man literally dying the death of a thousand cuts. Though, oddly, the film sells the gender wrong: The torturers, in their almost Alan Moore-ish zeal for putting the screws to women, never fully explains why women make better torture subjects than men. As an aside, in Tears, Bataille is at least honest about the fact that person being chopped up is doped to gills with opium, hence the weirdly beatific expression. As weird as this motive sounds, it ends up being not too dissimilar from the secular religion of Jigsaw in the Saw franchise, though Martyrs wisely doesn't let Mola Garrett ramble on and on about it.

Anna, by accident of place, is selected to be the next mortinaut in the cult's program of postmortuary exploration. They starve, humiliate, smack about, and then ultimately flay Anna. If you were of the mind that Hostel was okay, but what it really needed was close-ups of a chained-up woman pissing in a can followed shortly there after by several shots of said woman being skinned alive, then you are in luck, my friend. Curiously, these militant spiritualists don't seem to have any method to their madness. They're shown as having all these elaborate security and prisoner-abuse processes in place, but none of the abuse we saw on young Lucie, the first abandoned prisoner, and the second nameless prisoner match what happens to Anna. This despite the fact that, as we learn later in the film, they've been doing this for nearly two decades and have had some small measure of success.

Anna, sans skin, sees what's on the other side of the great divide and whispers her vision to Mola Garrett. The cult's faithful gather at the house for confirmation of what lies beyond, but Mola Garrett kills herself instead of telling. The viewers, mercifully, aren't left in suspense. After you die, you seem to drift about in cheaper, less trippy effects show that will remind you of the end of 2001. We get a few more lingering shots of hypernaked Anna then we roll the credits.

As far as torture porn flicks go, Martyrs belong in the first rank. It's innovative in its story structure, which weds the captivity narrative to several horror and exploitation threads: the women's revenge flick, the lesbo love tale, the J-horror style ghost story. This keeps the film from feeling like a retread of previous torture porn flicks (when, ironically, it is hugely indebted to other flicks in the subgenre).

It is also, I think, the first notable torture porn flick to bring an overtly supernatural element into the mix in the form of the whole "Death: the Final Frontier" angle. Unfortunately, I don't believe the film is all the better for this particular intrusion. The cult's bizarre motivations, seemingly haphazard methodologies, and blithe inhumanity don't set them apart from the villains of other films in the TP constellation – the look like the guys from Hostel and talk like the baddies from Saw. Worse yet, the supernatural context robs the film of any satiric bite it might have had. Like Jigsaw, the idio-religion of this cult seems determined to not think of itself as a religion – rather, they fancy themselves extremely neuroscientists. Consequently, the flick only faintly evokes that old Francophone cinema go-to crowd pleaser: anti-clericalism. Though the cult is wealthy, Martyrs doesn't touch on the inhumanities spawned of an ethical system ruled by market logic, the way Hostel does. In fact, the whole cult-thing is little more than elaborate dues ex machina to justify the extended suffering we're treated too – it places the motivations and methods of the villains out of the realm of scrutiny, basically making them not really make sense in the first place, and preempting questions about the illogic of what they're doing.

(Notably, when I first wrote extensively about the subject of torture porn, I cited two elements I thought were central to the subgenre: a overwhelming tendency towards naturalism and the curious lack of importance sex played in the films, especially compared to the slashers that preceded them. If I was rewriting that series of essays, both elements would have to be taken off the table: Martyrs touches on the first element and Captivity is all about the latter.)

The visuals are also extreme, even for this subgenre. Taking its register not from the horror genre, but rather from the current strain of French shock cinema, the film likes its gruesomeness sustained for as long as it can manage it. This is less a feature of torture porn than it is the influence of flicks like Irreversible. The film's ably shot, though the style favors crisp storytelling clarity over the hyperrealistic squalor of the Hostel series or the frenetic editing and color washes of Saw (or, for that matter, the look of other recent French fright flicks). In this, again, the film most resembles Captivity, though Martyrs is considerably more visceral for most of its running time than that film's worst scenes.

The real question about Martyrs - indeed about the whole wave of extreme French horror that's taking the horror blog-twit pro-am by storm – is why such a perfectly middle-tier film gets such lavish praise. Martyrs is a fine film. It is reasonably well made (though rife with continuity errors and other early-filmmaking career tells), looks professional, and is scary and brutal by turns. On the other hand, it's more clever than creative, it lacks any subtext that justifies its wallowing in extreme imagery, and it doesn't seem to take even it's own premise very seriously (which is not the same thing as having a sense of humor – this flick most definitely lacks a sense of humor).

I think it's just the French language. It makes your film seem better. Seriously.

Comics: Hey! I resemble that remark!

From the embittered Pictures for Sad Children.

Click to make with the bigness.

Stuff: Daisy cutters.

The true crime site Clews (that's "clues" in old-timey spelling) recently posted a link to a story about convicted wife-killer Mark Hacking (pictured above). Seems that Hacking's been shipping out personal items to online auction-sites that specializes in "murderabilia."

From Salt Lake City's Deseret News:

The Utah Department of Corrections said it plans to monitor convicted killer Mark Hacking's mail after an alleged confession and even moustache hair from the notorious wife-killer appeared on an online auction site specializing in so-called "murderabilia."

. . .

Hacking is serving a six-years-to-life sentence for the 2004 murder of his wife, Lori. He admitted to shooting her and dumping her body in the garbage. He claimed she had disappeared while jogging. Her body was found months later in the Salt Lake Valley landfill. Prosecutors said he killed her after she had unveiled his web of lies.

DaisySeven.com touted the letter as being a confession from Hacking, including details about his sex life with Lori. On Monday, it was selling for $24. A posting on the Web site said operators of the auction do not give interviews.

Visiting DaisySeven, "lowest price, free shipping", is a bizarre experience. The site itself is pretty low-rent looking, but in a way that suggests something kludged together by earnest, but novice coders. It's almost clumsily charming and could be mistaken for some home business's arts and crafts site, if it wasn't for selection options like "Dial a Killer" (which allows you to browse categories by specific criminal – not all killers, by the way: Heidi Fleiss is a category unto herself) and the featured Spahn Ranch business card auction (buy it now price is just $4.64) on the home page.

Horror fans more interested in the supernatural than true-crime will be gladdened to know that there's a entire shopping category dedicated to "vampires," consisting mostly of collectables from the nine-person Vampire Klan of Kentucky, responsible for the 1996 bludgeoning deaths of Richard and Naoma Wendorf, the parents of the one of the cult members.

The only member of the clan to do serious time, Dana Cooper (the only legal adult at the time of the murder), has a lovely signed photo taken from her home at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Florida. It's black and white and Cooper, now in her late-twenties, stands sideways towards the camera. She looks over her left shoulder at the camera. Her hair is thick and curly; she has a slight smile and dark eyes. She's wearing lipstick and eyeliner. She has a full, rounded face. She appears to be leaning against a wall that's been covered up with palm shoots or some other thin reed-like plant. Her hands are together, as if she's going to rest her head on them. In the black and white photo you can't immediately tell she's wearing her blue prison-issued top. In clear, legible cursive, at the bottom of the photo, she's written "Dana L. Cooper Easter 2003." The buy it now price is $28.64. Perfect for Mother's Day.

R.I.P.: Dun dun DUNNNN!!

Him
August 1, 1933 – May 4, 2009

Art: Halloween it ain't.

In April, I posted a series of photographs that were group pics taken of people with gas masks on. Today we're revisiting the concept, but we're highlighting the possibly creepier theme of children in gas masks.

It's hard to think of anything more symbolic of the many ways in which the adults strive to thoroughly corrupt and poison the world their children must live in than the image of a child in a gas mask. That the children in these pics are often posed for shots in which they play or hang with their families – as if to say, hey, even a full-spectrum bio-chemo-nuclear holocaust won't be all bad – makes it all the more strange and disheartening.

Movies: Bat-shit crazy.

The reception of Ti West's debut full-length, the low-fi creature feature The Roost, is exemplary of the Internet Age of horror flick criticism.

On its release in Aught Five, the flick was remarkably polarizing. Horror-centric review sources were fulsome with their praise. Bloody Disgusting declared it one of the best movies of the year, "if not THE best!" (Hyperventilating caps and exclamation theirs.) Severed Cinema called it a "wonderful Super 16-mm throwback to the 1970s horror so many of us love and miss" and gave the film their highest rating. Twitch claimed the film justified calling writer/director Ti West the "new Sam Raimi" and said the film compared to Evil Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And Fangoria called the film an "unheralded horror gem, an unexpected little treasure in the sea of independently made chillers" and compared West to George Romero and, again, Raimi (who, back then, was still being lauded as "the horror kid who made good" and not derided as "the dude who made Spider-Man III who needs to remember his horror roots").

But the fans, they were having none of it. Though BD gave the film 4.5 out o' 5 little skulls, the fans gave it a mediocre 3. (That doesn't sound like a big difference until you think of it in terms of the scale's minimum unit: the half skull. Measured in "half-skulls", BD declared the film just shy of perfection, while their readers sat it near-square in the middle of the scale.) Severed Cinema readers disagreed with the site's masters and gave the film the lowest possible score. Fangoria was spared the reader revolt by dint of its dead-tree format, but imdb – the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner of online fandom – gives the film a weak 4-ish stars out of 10 and the critical comments include terms such as "torturous," "failed," "nothing short of absolute garbage," "truly bottom of the barrel," and – my personal favorite – from Kathy, who, after writing "Eeeeeeek" and announcing that she is also a filmmaker, accuses the cameraman of "scratching his butt" the whole time through the movie and encourages the filmmaker not to film dialog with the actors' backs to the camera (though, honestly, why exactly that pisses her off so much isn't clear). Wonderfully for the purposes establishing parallelism in these two opening paragraphs, there's even a review that begins, "I don't quite agree with Fangoria, that this film is an astonishing achievement of modern horror and that it is a horror gem."

Ironically, many of the genre's biggest promoters found themselves in the same position they regularly ascribe to mainstream critics. The "average" fans were telling them that they'd missed the boat and either championed some obscure piece of preciously self-conscious art-junk or didn't know enough about the genre to spot rubbish. It's an object lesson to would-be Visigoth's determined to destroy the criteria of the ivory tower: There's always another band of Vandals coming hot on your heels.

This polarization – that a film is either brilliant or utter shit – seems to me to be paradigmatic of Web Era criticism. If the tone of Interwebs is any indication, horror fans are constantly having their world rocked. Either they are getting their faces just melted off by the insane super awesomeness of whatever they just saw or, more likely, they a reeling with incomprehending horror at the news that Michael Meyers will – GASP! – appear without his mask in latest remake. Apparently neither the fact that remakes are pretty much universally poo-pooed on sight or the stunningly craptacular popular and critical reception of the F13 reimagimak-a-launch, which had the horror-blog pro-am pooping hockey-mask wearing kittens for weeks leading up to its debut, has in any way inured the fright fancy to the notion that these things won't make them 18 again.

The second thing that is so exemplary is that these passions seem to be spent the moment they're shared. The release of West's flick and the division between the "horror elite" and the horror polloi could have been something amazing. The horror blog-twit pro-am could have used it as an opportunity to look at the values of the community, the changing tastes of the old timers vs. the new blood, or at least questioned what was at the root of the wild divergence of taste. Instead, of course, what happened is that everybody shot their critical wad, put their pants back on, and split before we could even ask if we were going to call one another later. In the defense of the horror fan community, this is somewhat commensurate with the importance of what we're talking about. We're just shooting the breeze about some fright flicks – it ain't like the definitive review of The Roost is going to cure cancer, end the oppression of the toiling classes, break our dependence on non-renewable energy sources, or make Mr. Pelagius any smarter. Still, there something dismaying about the instant amnesia. It smacks of rancor for rancor's sake.

Happily, this means that the unpaid Interwebbian bloviator, like yours truly, now approaching the flick gets to avoid the kerfuffle and toss in their two cents without taking a side in the GFOAT versus Kathy war.

But before that, my friend Cori and her quest for the best mac and cheese in Manhattan. Cori was this woman I used to know. I met her through her boyfriend, a dude named Matt, who I met at a bar called No Idea in the Flatiron District. Once a month Cori would drag Matt out to some new food joint – could be a greasy spoon, could some posh jackets-required joint (this was back when that still existed – now even 21 doesn't bother) – for the sole purpose of trying their mac and cheese. Now what's interesting about this is the Cori never really became a mac and cheese snob. She wasn't looking for innovation or somebody who revolutionized mac and cheese. Rather, it was as if she was trying to find somebody who could magnify its comfort food aspects. She wanted the Platonic mac and cheese. This was, of course, impossible. She ate a lot of mac and cheese, but she never found that elusive plate of perfect mac and cheese.

Matt left her for a talented, but not particularly nice professional cello player. Cori chased a new boy to San Francisco, but left him after only a week. She settled in Chicago; she became a very successful salesperson of packing goods. She excelled in the hot beverage container segment of the market, if I recall. None of this has anything to do with mac and cheese, but I thought you might be curious to know what happened to them.

The point is, though, that Cori ate a ton of mac and cheese. Over time, she developed a pretty exacting taste for who was doing it right and who was screwing it up. She'd say that the premise of good mac and cheese is fairly simple. You have mac. You have cheese. There are a handful of other ingredients you can add to tweak this formula – but, really, the art of good mac and cheese is about taking some staple ingredients and handling them well.

Ti West's The Roost is pretty darn good mac and cheese.

The plot is familiar, though cleverly handled. The film opens with a pomo framing device: A Crypt-Keeperish horror television host (played with hammy reserve by Tom Noonan) announces that, once again, his master is not at home and that the responsibility for introducing the evening's program has devolved to him. After some suitably cheesy banter, he hands us over to The Roost proper.

Curiously, several reviewers, both pro and con, mention the host's involvement in the flick solely at the beginning, a short appearance in the middle, and at the end of the film. This is, I think, incorrect. I believe that his voice appears repeatedly throughout the film, often embedded in various sound-effects or accompanying the music. His strange invention at a later point in the film suggests that he's one of those odd characters – like the home invaders in Funny Games - that seems to understand that he's in a film and that he can, if he wishes, alter the narrative to suit his needs. Viewed this way, several of bits of his typically goofy horror host banter take on a more sinister aspect, such as when he suggests that he's altered the protagonists' travel schedule to suit "our" – his and the viewers' – needs.

The "film" of The Roost then begins. We open on a stretch of rural road. It's nighttime. There's a carload of young folks, three men and one woman. The driver, bespectacled and slightly smarmy Trevor, and the woman, the withdrawn and sullen Allison, are up front, talking and half-listening to an old-timey horror radio show that's being rebroadcast because it's Halloween night. We learn from Allison and Trevor's banter that the foursome are headed to a friend's wedding. Suddenly, a big ol' bat comes barreling straight into their windshield. Before you can say "That's a crap idea" our band of protags have wandered off to the nearest farm house to get help.

The rest of the plot involves them awakening a very irate barn full of vampire bats who, as vampire bats are want to do, turn people into vampires. (Curiously, people refer to the post-vamp bite undead as zombies, though I'm not sure that's what they're supposed to be. I guess one could theorize that the bats have some sort of super-rabies that turns folks into 28 Days Later-ish viral-based "zombies," but I assumed that this was just a particular strain of vampire located far over on the mad-beast vrykolakas side of the vamp-spectrum instead of the suave opera-cape wearing type.) Needless to say, not everybody is making it to the party and, once the bat/undead monkey-shines begin, our protagonists end up in a tense battle for survival.

Let's start with what doesn't quite click. Visually, West has a feel for these minimalist, lonely shots: the sort of image where one human with a flashlight stands framed in a tiny little rectangle of light, engulfed by inky darkness on all sides. Many of these compositions are stylish and striking. However, the limitations of his DV combined with the demands of a night shot and his unfortunate decision to muddy up the result in an effort give his film a vintage '70s feel – even down to artificial scratches and cigarette burns (applied here with a considerably lighter hand and far greater consistency than seen in the Tarantino/Rodriguez vanity project that followed two years later) – forces viewer to try to glean the craftsmanship of these set-ups through a thick smear of murky imagery. [UPDATE: An anonymous reader sets me right in the comments. The grainy look comes from shooting on 16mm film. The scratches and other artifacts in the film were not post-production adds.] The acting is also patchy. The director smartly mitigates the damage done by shooting expended sequences without any dialogue between the characters. This both creates a mood of literal unspeakable tension and, oddly, liberates his actors to emote without the added challenge of trying to bring awkward B-film dialogue to life. Still, the actors are basically trapped in a barn for an hour or so. They carry as much as they can, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that we're not watching seasoned thespians doing their thing.

That said, so much else works.

Though the plot is strictly KISS workshop stuff, West's slow burn approach invests it with real suspense. I remember a time when indie and underground horror was characterized most by its over-the-top splatter that made the "video nasties" and the like so infamous. Now that the anti-hero slashers of the 1980s can be repurposed to shill sneakers and 3D slasher fare is considered a good bet with mainstream audiences, it would seem that the creation of suspenseful, minimalist, almost reserved flicks is now the purview of the indie auteur.

Where ambition outstripped capability in the visual department, the sound department has both in spades. Running through The Roost is this dense sonic stream of retro-horror broadcasts, thunderous silences, surreal fourth-wall busting sound artifacts, well crafted sound-effects, and a soundtrack that evokes a stripped down and punkier version of, say, the intro to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. West is so confident in his use of sound that his first big "kill" occurs completely in the dark, with only the sound of the violence and horror providing the scares. The old-timey radio broadcast that provides a reoccurring sonic backdrop isn't just a pomo gag, I suspect that West is sincerely inspired by the work of yester-year's radio horror masters.

Finally, The Roost might be the single finest example of how horror filmmakers can use pastiche and allusion without lapsing in a sterile Möbius strip of fan service or wallowing in a cheap and easy nostalgia. In its fighting trim 80-minute running time, The Roost fuses threads of grindhouse era schlock, radio horror classicism, Silver Age showmanship from horror's television boom, and a distinctly contemporary postmodernism. But here's what separates the flick from the rehash slasher-revival and reheated grindhouse hack work that's dominated the big screen for way too long now – West genuinely lets each of these threads influence the entire flick and in significant and meaningful ways. The radio horror show introduced at the beginning of the film becomes the paradigm by which the entire film handles sound. The dark-yet-cheesy humor of the television horror host who introduces the film shades into self-aware genre bending. The only misstep is the visuals, which we discussed earlier – though, even there, at least West has the conviction to follow through, rather than dumping the style once you feel you've met the minimum requirement (I'm looking at you, QT). There's a way in which The Roost is one of the most inclusive love letters to the genre ever committed to binary code.

The Roost is remarkably accomplished or a debut flick, but it often what pleases the viewer is the promise of more. Greatest film of '05? I don't know about that. It was a big year: The Descent, Devil's Rejects, Hostel, the silent ultra-indie Call of Cthulhu, Romero's return to the "of the Dead" series, and, of course, Komodo versus Cobra. Still, it deserves, and rewards, your attention.

Now who's hungry for mac and cheese?

1 3/4 cups of macaroni
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups of extra sharp cheddar
3 tablespoons of flour
1 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2/3 cup sour cream
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cup half-and-half
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 2/3 cups grate extra-sharp cheddar (this is on top of the cheddar you've already got – you're using all of it – get your heart ready for the overtime)

Cook the mac until just tender. It's getting cooked more, so don't over-do it. Drain well and transfer to a buttered 9-by-13-by2 inch baking dish. Take the 1 1/4 cups of ungrated cheddar and cube it. Add that to the mac in the dish.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Put the flour, the salt, the dry mustard, the black and cayenne papper, and the nutmeg in a mixing bowl. Stir it all up 'till it's mixed.

Now you got to do this next bit in order. It matters. Add the sour cream, then the eggs. Now whisk that mess until it's a single consistency. Whisk in the half-and-half, then the heavy cream, then the Worcestershire sauce. Blend that all up. Then pour it evenly over the mac and cubed cheese. Stir all it all up to blend it.

Top that with the grated cheese, but don't stir that in. Just let it sit on top.

Bake it until the edges set, but the middle's still a little loosey goosey. It should take about a half hour.

When you take it out of the oven, let it cool for about 10 or 15 minutes. That lets the custard set and makes it extra nice.

Link Proliferation: !

Sharks!

One of the curious things about Jaws is that for all the technical difficulties that plagued the original high-budget Hollywood blockbuster, the film's inspired slews of brilliant backyard D.I.Y. lo-fi remakes and tributes.

Here's a new one: The Bronx's video for the "Knifeman," which features the band, sub-aquatic rock action, and a vicious toy shark.



Cannibals! (And Philosophers!)

The first chapter of An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is available as a free download from Princeton Press. But, be warned, you've got to wade through this sort of jargon.

This history of cannibalism can be reconstructed as three successive stages, part historical and part conceptual. In the first, the cannibal is viewed as a creature from the perspective of natural law. In the second, the cannibal becomes the diabolical retort in which the flux of particles confounds the calculations of theologians and metaphysicians. The third stage is that at which we seem to have arrived today, when the cannibal is a creature of circumstances and education. Natural law, materialism, and anthropological relativism are the three major contexts that impose a division in the history of the cannibal’s passage through thought and which are, in their turn, clarified by his presence.

Nevertheless, the present work is not one that is primarily historical. First of all because it is in no way a history of cannibalistic practices. Of course, the instances of verifiable anthropology have sometimes left their traces in the ideal productions of the philosophers. However, whether cannibals existed or not is a fact of marginal importance. My cannibal is in the first place a scholarly creature, a personage who animates theoretical texts, and only to a lesser extent, if at all, is he a subject for the anthropology of the aberrant.

Robots!

A Swedish newspaper is reporting that "a Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm."

The article summarizes the whole attack:

Public prosecutor Leif Johansson mulled pressing charges against the firm but eventually opted to settle for a fine.

"I've never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this," he told news agency TT.

The incident took place in June 2007 at a factory in Bålsta, north of Stockholm, when the industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," said Leif Johansson.

The matter was subject to an investigation by both the Swedish Work Environment Authority (Arbetsmiljöverket) and the police.

Bones!

Christine Quigley, mistress of the macabre, has an excellent post featuring shots of this unbelievable, skeleton-filled tomb in Peru.

Notice that each skeleton is topped with two skulls.