Mad science: The scientific implications of drooling slasher fans.

An article in Psychology Today discusses an a psych research experiment that used Jason Voorhees's mom as it's stimuli:

Sensation seekers are also particularly drawn to pornographic and horror films. In one study, subjects viewed a 20-minute segment of Friday the 13th. Sensation-seeking people didn't just enjoy the movie more; they actually salivated more, indicating higher levels of alertness and cognitive processing.

Measuring drool might sound like a surreal way to measure attention, but the link has long been exploited by experimental psychologists. The famous drooling dogs in Pavlov's experiments were not drooling out of hunger, but rather from increased levels of attention. On hearing the bell, they began actively searching for other signs that food would be coming. In theory, they could have been trained to associate the bell with walks or petting and they still would have shown spikes in salivation.

The context for the experiment is the idea that certain cultural products appeal to certain personality types. The hypothesis is that fans of horror and porn are "extroverts—lively, active, social people who crave sensory excitement in the art they seek out. You don't have to be a sensation seeker to be an extrovert, but it helps. 'They're bored without high levels of stimulation,' explains Gosling. 'They love the bright lights and hustle and bustle, and they like to take risks and seek thrills.'"

Honestly, I'm not sure I dig this particular hypothesis. I've got two separate, but related, objections. First, the thrill-hunter model seems to best explain the impact of watching a slasher movie in a decontextualized, one-off way. Slasher fans, I find, watch tons of the stuff and, in my experience, value it as much for its formulaic monotony as for the pleasurable shock of emotion. They enjoy the thrill, but aren't big on risk. I mean, c'mon: Can we all agree that the moment it becomes a wallpaper theme, something has officially become not dangerous?

Slasher fans are hardly alone in this. Most horror fans, when it comes to the form and content of their favorite genre, approach works with a profound conservatism. Despite rhetoric about the desperate need for originality and innovation, fans support the general trend of remakes and rip-offs by voting with their dollars. When asked to produce "best of" lists, remakes and franchise flicks regularly appear in higher spots. There are thrill-junkies, of course, and people who want novelty for its own sake, but the characterization of horror fans as craving innovation ignores the same-but-different quality of most horror films.

Which brings us to the dubious link between horror and porn. Though I've always been fond of the "body genres" theory that proposes a link between horror and porn as the two genres that aim for the gut and not the mind, we have to admit that it’s a pretty shaky premise. Sure the shriek of the horror fan and the orgasm of the porn watcher are obvious signs of the physical impact of the films they're watching; but what about the sobs of the person watching a tear-jerker (even the description implies the almost involuntary physical response these films are meant to evoke) or the gut-level thrill one gets from watching an action movie? It also assume there's no intellectual angle to horror films, which is a more haughty way of restating the intellectually-lazy canard that some films, especially those featuring sensational levels of violence, aren't really about anything other than violence. For example, I find most slasher flicks dumb as can be. However, it would be bullshit for me to pretend that many very intelligent folks have teased out all manner of themes and insights from the very same films. More over, it ignores the difference in reception. Horror fans, as mentioned above, create best of lists, debate narrative details, argue the relative values of works, and otherwise engage their favorite works in way that are still relatively rare in world of porn consumption. Whatever the similarities between the genres, there are crucial differences that, in my amateur opinion, make their easy conflation dubious.

Books: Freddy's heat bills are atrocious and that money's got to come from somewhere.

So let's say you're some forest dwelling slasher. You live a simple, Thoreau-esque life. Your needs are no lavish. You have a pair of overalls and some army surplus. You have a head bag for casual wear and a hockey-mask for formal occasions. You don't watch television, play video games, or read – so your entertainment costs are at a minimum. You don't pay rent because you would presumably disembowel anybody who came to negotiate a lease for the accursed patch of sleepover camp that you call home.

Still, there are those unexpected costs that creep up on you. The cost of arrows, for example. Sure, a study machete will get you through a good 98% of teen slaughter situations. But it's nice to have ranged attack options. And you know you don't have time to go around recovering every arrow you let fly at some undergrad doofus who decided to leave his empty beer cans and spent Coney whitefish all over your nice clean woodland. These kids roam in packs and there's always a lot of screaming and yelling and running. Oy, the endless running. It gives me pains! Those 390 A/C/C Pro Superlight alloy/carbon broadheads you liter about really start to add up.

What? Make your own arrows? Sweetie, please. You're a slasher, not the last Mohican.

So you need money, but what to do? You can't just get a job. If the locals see you, you'll lose that all-important edge of sinister mystery. Plus, like, you're kinda justly wanted by the law for being a mass murdering psycho. What you need is a lucrative option that takes you far from your core market, allowing you to capitalize off your image without diluting the brand identity in your core market.

Well, you're in luck, my homicidal friend. Welcome to your new revenue stream. Pulp fiction book covers in India!

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction is a sampler-plate intro to the delightful world of Tamil-language newsstand lit: a pulp universe recognizably similar to our own mass-market pulp alternoverse, but filtered through distinct cultural norms and given a unique spin. Editor and translator Pritham K. Chakravarthy selects ten notable Tamil-language market lit legends that give new readers a sense of the range in subject and tone of the Tamil pulps. I don't know that fans of American pulps will find their new favorite author hiding in these pages, but the talent on display in these stories is undeniable. Furthermore, the combination of familiar tropes and foreign culture make reading the volume a surprising pleasure, like eating comfort food that somebody has spiked with a particularly rich and unusual spice.

Why should a shambolic, seemingly sub-literate mass murderer like yourself care?

One of the treats included in the Tamil Pulp Fiction anthology is a series of color plates showcasing the trippy covers of this market lit. Several of these covers include images, both iconic and obscure, from American horror flicks. Below are samples of covers that rip off images from the legendary, The Exorcist, to the cult, Fright Night. The crappy scans are my fault. Chakravarthy's book contains high-quality reproductions of these and dozens of others.

Movies: Who can possibly save us?

Last night, I caught the F13 remilkshake at the Court Street Theater in downtown Brooklyn.

Regular readers should recognize the name, but ANTSS newcomers might not understand the locale's significance. Court Street is home to Brooklyn's, if not the world's, finest cinema-going audience: a collective we at ANTSS lovingly call "the Courtesans."

The Courtesans are to film what the groundlings were to Elizabethan theater, only with more loud cell phone use and less livestock. (In fact, the receiving and placing of high volume calls is so common that the funniest moment of any film at Court Street is the most certainly ironic "Please silence your cell phones" slide that appears before the trailers roll.)

Because this was an 8:25 showing of a movie filled with brutal acts of violence and extended sequences of partial female nudity, about a third of the movie's audience consisted of tots aged 4 to 12. It isn't that Courtesans are, perhaps, liberal to a fault when it comes to their whelps' media intake. They are just frugal: A movie ticket costs considerably less than a night of babysitting. The potential cost of years of therapy for the children is cleverly avoided by revealing to the child the fictional nature of the filmic construct. That is to say, you simply tell the traumatized tike that they are dumb for being scared and laugh at their delightful displays of extreme distress. This is what educational theorists refer to as a teachable moment.

I bring this up because it was just such a mind-raped little nipper that provided the new Friday the 13th repackaging with its finest moment.

About three-quarters of the way into the flick, Jason gets around to dispatching the lone African American member of the victim set, a dude named Lawrence. Now Larry seems like a clever enough cat. Sure, like all African Americans in horror flicks, he feels the need to constantly remind his friends that he is, in fact, African American. Sample dialog from an as-yet untitled slasher project featuring an African American character:

"Anybody want a beer."
"Yeah, the black guy will have a beer."
"Do you have a preference? PBR or Sam?"
"Would you have asked that of a white guy?"
"Um, probably."
"What, you'd deny me the essential disconnect of my experience as a African American in a white man's world?"
"Look, I just wanted to give you a choice."
"You can't give me anything. Freedom can only be demanded and taken. A black man learns that early in life."

If you're writing a slasher novel or film script, feel free to dumb that down a bit and plug it right into your work. Free of charge.

That quirk aside, Larry's displayed average intelligence throughout the film, which makes it odd that he ultimately decides to not listen the two characters that have their crap together and venture out to the tool shed to find another member of this doomed troupe, a character we've already seen Jason send to the Great Beer Pong Game in the Sky. To assure the remaining Jason fodder that he will emerge from this quixotic mission unscathed, he gestures to a wok and fire poker he is using as his buckler and bodkin and says, "Don't worry, he won't touch me."

With friends and audience put at ease, Larry marches off.

After some musical ominousness – the score consists mostly of what sounds to be an instrumental version of Nine Inch Nails "Something I Can Never Have" played at sub-Codeine speeds – Larry and Jason find one another and Jason tries to make with the killy kill, ma ma ma. But, Aw NO! Larry ain't havin' it! After a short scuffle, Larry gives Jason a smashing elbow to the face mask.

At this point . . .

Horror filmmakers, nota bene.

The audience went abso-freakin'-lutely bonkers. The Courtesans were – every man, woman, and child – in agreement that Lawrence's elbow smash was the single finest moment ever committed to cinema. The crowd, firmly in Jason's camp when he was trimming the unsightly edges off the Caucasian and Asian American community, suddenly turned on their taciturn hero. Larry was the man.

Jason, temporarily dazed (not so much out of pain, but simply due to the sheer audacity of Larry's behavior), let's Larry slip out of the shed. Once clear, Larry makes with all do haste to the MVHA. Sensing a historic shift in the paradigm of predator and prey, the audience cheered Larry on. People stood up to holler their support. I think I actually saw two young men, overcome with the immediacy of the moment, spring up and begin running too. It was a riotous outpouring of support.

When Jason, also booking it to the MVHA grabbed a hatchet, the audience began trying to warn Larry. Sadly, Larry didn't even it see it coming when Jason launched the hatchet straight into his back. Felled, the audience's avatar collapsed on a pile of chopped firewood. The Courtesans were stunned. For a brief moment, they'd dared to open their hearts up to the possibility of hope. And now, it had ended, as so many dreams had, in a big honking hatchet in the back.

From the silence, some young kid, his voice straining in anger and dismay, screamed out, "Save him, Obama! Save him!"

And everybody laughed.

And that was about the neatest thing that happened in the film's hour and 30-odd running time.

As a side note, E! reports that F13 history making box office take on opening weekend has been followed up by another record-breaking weekend, in the other direction:

Ticket sales for Friday the 13th fell dropped plunged 81 percent from last weekend. According to Exhibitor Relations, that's the steepest-ever descent for a film playing at more than 3,000 theaters. The record previously belonged to the aptly named Doom, which went skydiving without a parachute in 2005.

That's more informative than just about anything I could say about the flick.

Movies: Sweet little thirteen.

Being neither a fan of the original series nor having any real interest in the relaunch, I'm somewhat surprised at how interesting I've founding the critical reactions to the new film.

Perhaps the strangest phenomenon spawned by the Friday the 13th remilkshake is, unlike the treatment of the original, this flick has entered the pop culture sphere with a resounding shrug from the non-horror world. To the world outside of the horror blog pro-am circuit, Friday is just another flick breezing through the multiplex. Compared to the moral outrage, protests, and (mostly in Europe) occasional censorship that slashers met on their first outing, this relaunch might as well be a movie featuring a lovable cast of computer generated puppies and kitties for all anybody seems to give a crap. Citizens groups used the opening date as a chance to time-shift their Valentine's plans to a night when more tables would be available; mainstream reviewers saw the whole thing as little more than a laughable excuse to business expense a box of Milk Duds; and nary a peep was heard from the pre-Millennial horror set, as they were to busy trying to figure out them new fangled ticket kiosk machines to register their normal apocalyptic note about how nothing worthy has happened in the genre since Mountaintop Motel Massacre.

The result of the widespread "sure, whatever" feeling is that, long after the hoi polloi have gone back to less embarrassing pursuits and the Plat Dunes professionals have returned to their meeting rooms to spec out the Roman numeral bearing offspring (Friday the 13th Part II: Jason is Our 401K), the only ones left to energetically debate the alleged merits of this flick are the long-time fanboys and -girls. For outsiders, it all gets a bit esoteric. If you weren't born between 1965 and 1975, then the debates about the relative merits of the new F13 have something of the flavor of theoretical schismatic communist politics: While the various folks involved seem to be able to get wound up about the distinction between Mao-leaning neo-Council Communism verses a retro-flavor militarist post-Hoxhaist Trotskyism, it all sounds the same to un-indoctrinated. Still, if you're willing to grant that the various folks involved are, in fact, seeing distinctions that, to your eye – untrained as it is by the fact that you've seen and enjoyed movies made after the Reagan/Bush years – are imperceptible, then there's still a strange fascination is watching the family fight.

Not unlike the Shiite/Sunni split in Iraq, one side's got the numbers while the other has years of practical experience. The vast majority of the slasher fancy has decided that, somehow, the new F13 doesn't measure up. While this seems to be the majority viewpoint, such critics are in a pretty tenuous place. After all, it isn't like we're evaluating a remake of Citizen Kane here. A lo-fi giallo rip-off, the F13 franchise has been corny for longer than its been worthy. To suddenly evoke considerations of quality seems like you're moving the goal posts.

In opposition to these nay-sayers, we've got a hardy minority who, even though they are outnumbered, have the great advantage of historical continuity. They're in the position of defending the indefensible, which has been the default position of the F13 fancy for nearly 20 years now. While apostates struggle to suddenly apply some sort of critical criteria to their once thought-proof pet franchise, the defenders can rely on years of experience dismissing the notion that films should aspire to quality. The F13 Tories can comfortably announce, "What were you expecting? It's a Friday flick – we don't do plot, or characterization, or drama, or sequence of events, or cause and effect, or main idea and supporting detail. It's this utter lack of concern for anything resembling filmmaking that equals fun." And then, if they're feeling their critical edge-on, they might add, "What happened to you guys? You used to be cool."

Even stranger, nobody seems to be really defending the quality of the film. What's at stake seems to be whether or not your allowed to demand quality in the first place.

This debate actually touches on a problem central to modern aesthetic theory. John Ruskin identified it as the "Chuck Berry Eats Poop Problem."

A little history. In Prisoner of X, a hilariously foul memoir of working two decades for Hustler, Allan MacDonell identifies one of his less savory tasks: watching, validating, and then negotiating the price for stolen celebrity sex tapes. This was back in the day before the miracle of the Interwebs basically automated the gig. Sometimes, on good days, there was a Rabelaisian carnivalesque aspect to the gig. There's something irresistibly funny about the idea of Ted Turner, Hanoi Jane, and an unidentified third party making the beast with three backs – especially when Jane is wearing some prodigious hardware and gets a bit Operation Barrel Roll on the Teddy Boy's rough road. Mostly, however, the content of these tapes and amateur loops was simply sad: the sordid kinks of legends already pickled in the formaldehyde of pop's collective conscious, old gods nearly gone who were still getting their dirty kicks while the world measured them out for a memorial plaque at the appropriate Hall of Fame. Such is the case with Chuck Berry.

MacDonell had the displeasure of negotiating for a tape that showed the man who wrote "Sweet Little Sixteen" eating fecal matter fresh from the backdoor of several anonymous partners. I know it's hard to believe the man who was caught video taping the WC-using patrons of his unfortunately named Southern Air restaurant could be a bit pervy when came to subject of bodily waste, but there it is.

But here's were Chuck Berry's predilections enter the realm of aesthetic philosophy. According to the source of the tape, Berry wasn't just some opportunistic poop-eater. Berry was a connoisseur de merde. Like all discerning aficionados of disreputable pleasures, regardless of the genre of kick, he developed an otaku-like passion for crap. He established a private ranking of his favorite providers, a sort of excremental Tête de Cuvée list. He would have his grand cru producers pinch off a loaf in white Styrofoam containers, neatly organized and labeled, for later consumption. In short, he became the Robert Parker of shit.

The "Chuck Berry Eats Poop Problem" is, thus, a two part dealie. Part Dealie the One: It is possible to apply the methods, mentality, and obsessive passion of the connoisseur to anything. And, Part Dealie the Two: Doing so doesn't mean your not still just talking about shit.

I have yet to see the new film. After dragging my horror wingman Dave through I can't think how many torture porn, man-eating plant, and similarly dubious horror experiences, I think I owe him this one; we're probably going to catch it this weekend. That said, I'm going to have to say that logic pretty much demands you side with the Tories on this one. The Friday flicks have, for that vast majority of the series, been Berry-chow. The first flick, with its effective use of a crisp and minimal visual style and its clever narrative structure (the girl who gets all the "clues" is essentially in a subplot that never fully links to the main story), is about as fine a piece of genre hackwork as you could ask for. The second film, which takes a welcome turn towards the grotesque, wasn't bad either. But, after that, the Friday franchise becomes, for non-devotees, a monotonous blur – excepting game efforts to go-wacky and set Jason's shenanigans in Manhattan (a sad bait and switch, unfortunately) and space. Too much a product of their time, the F13's cynical morality – in the 1980s, if you said that one's amoral sexual choices justly lead to a horrible death, you were either a teenager discussing slasher flicks or, sadly, the President of the United States talking about something else – their sub-music-video grade depth, and their lack of any sort of passion for quality hasn't allowed them to age well.

Given this, the loyalists are right to ask, "You had a lamprey-like lip lock on P. Doonie's dump door – what the hell did you think was on the menu?"

Not that the splitters don't have reasons. Among the most common are the film makes no sense (a opposed to the rigorous logic that was the hallmark of the series prior – e.g., Jason being alive in the first place), that the new Jason acts out of character (there's apparently something about Jason, some aspect of his nature invisible to the average viewer, that would prevent him from, say, using a bow and arrow to kill somebody), and that there aren't enough nods to the fans (despite the whole movie being fan service since Scream's Ghostface Killer is the slasher anybody under 30 grew up with).

That said, isn't it a bit of a pyrrhic victory? When "Your problem is that you've forgotten how to enjoy eating shit" is the strongest defense that can be mustered for a flick, it's hard to get excited.

But, since 2009 marks the semi-official "Return of Fun Horror" – meaning we've got remakes, relauches, and formula fodder coming out the wazoo, metaphorically – there's not much to do but kneel down and put on a bib.

Link proliferation: I'm telling her every lie that you know that I never did.

You're not from around here

B-Sol of VoH, nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in the list making business, has posted a ranking of the best foreign horror flicks of all time.

Here's the bottom 10. The number one is a bit of a truly unexpected upset.

10. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – Germany
11. Audition (1999) – Japan
12. The Host (2006) – South Korea
13. Zombi 2 (1979) – Italy
14. Dead Alive (1992) – New Zealand
15. Ringu (1998) – Japan
16. Inside (2007) – France
17. [REC] (2007) – Spain
18. Shaun of the Dead (2004) – United Kingdom
19. Wolf Creek (2005) – Australia
20. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – United Kingdom

Not even a nice place to visit

Foreign Policy follows up with a completely different kind of list. Here's the worst prisons in the world, including Israel's Camp 1391, the officially non-existent "Gitmo" of Israel, and Equatorial Guinea's Black Beach prison, where, according to Amnesty International, incarceration is essentially "a slow, lingering death sentence."

Oddly, one of the worst prisons in the world can be found in Paris. Here's FP's description of France's La Santé prison: a little slice of Hell nestled right in the City of Lights.

The last remaining prison in Paris -- it's located near the Montparnasse area -- was established in 1867 and has housed everyone from surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire to legendary assassin Carlos the Jackal. The prison's name, which means "health," might seem ironic considering the conditions inside. Mattresses are infested with lice, and because prisoners are only allowed two cold showers per week, skin diseases are common. Overcrowded cells, rat infestations, rape, and the humiliation of prisoners' families were also common.

In 1999 there were 124 suicide attempts in La Santé, almost five times as many as in California's entire prison system during the same period. These facts only became available in 2000 when the head surgeon of the prison, Véronique Vasseur, published a bestselling book chronicling abuses in the prison. The book caused an uproar and a celebrity campaign to improve prisons throughout France, but little in the way of progress. France's prison conditions were condemned by the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the country's own minister of justice in 2008.

Satan is real

The music blog Aquarium Drunkard had is offering a free mp3 of the Louvin Brothers' famous tune "Satan is Real," from the cult album of the same name. From AD's intro:

The Louvin Brothers’ album Satan Is Real is without a doubt the Rosetta stone of fire and brimstone country gospel. Released in 1960, wrapped up in quite possibly the greatest iconic album cover of all time, the LP pulled no punches.

I like that polyester look

This has crap all to do with horror, but since we're talking music, the 20th anniversary (yes, you're that old) remastered edition of the Beastie Boy's Paul's Boutique is now available for listening enjoyment. And that's awesome.

Here's the video for "Hey Ladies."



Grandpa Jason walkers his way back to Crystal Lake

The Old Gray Lady takes on the George Burns of horror icons in a NY Times fluff piece about the F13 reboot. Most telling line:

“There’s a tremendous benefit to staying in the same genre and producing movies for the same amount of money over and over,” said Mr. Fuller, “because you really learn who your key players are and how best to work with them.”

"Over and over" indeed.

Recently, a reviewer praising the My Bloody Valentine remake ended his positive review with the line: "Sure more can always be asked for, but more shouldn’t be expected." That should become the official tagline of the slasher film revival.

All praise to Doug Savage, artist behind the Savage Chickens web comic.

Opinion: A modest proposal or "Godzilla versus Jason."

So the horror blog-o-sphere waits with bated breath (but not baited breath – it's short for abated and it means you're holding your breath – the source of the phrase, "Don't hold your breath" – but I'm suddenly on a tangent and we haven't even gotten a whole sentence out – the shame) to see if Robert Englund is going to reprise the Freddy role in the new remake, re-launch, re-imagining, re-re-re of Nightmare on Elm Street. The general consensus seems to be that the whole of horror fandom pities whoever the hell picks up the Freddie mantle as Englund pretty much made it all his for so long.

The subtext of this conversation is that the venerable franchises of the '80s are between a rock and a hard place.

Basically, nobody wants just keep grinding out sequels. The sequel game has been one of diminishing returns: generally less money goes into each flick in the effort to ensure a profit, these increasingly crappy flicks rightly draw fewer viewers, the studios see profit and invest even less in a sequel, which draws fewer people, and so on and so on. It becomes a race to the bottom. The ultimate end of it would be that the studio makes a flick that costs less than the cost of a single ticket to try to make a profit off of the last poor schmuck that cares.

In an effort to break this cycle, franchise owners have decided that the way to save their valuable properties is to hit the reset button. The idea wasn't totally without merit. One of the unfortunate products of the long death-spiral these franchises had entered was the introduction of meta-nonsense, wackiness, and other non-scary elements meant to rejuvenate the flicks. Sadly, it did the opposite. If you could just start over, as if you hadn't turned your characters in parodies of themselves, you could strip that crap out and get back to basics. This was one of the stated aims of the recent Halloween re-launch. Again and again in interviews director Rob Zombie claimed that he wanted to make the franchise "scary again." Get some hip talent, market it as the second coming of a classic. Good times, good times.

It's a great idea. There's only one problem. It doesn't seem to work. Zombie's Halloween was one of the most trashed horror flicks of last year. Not to be outdone, studios are rushing to throw Friday the 13th and Nightmare down the same hole. There's no reason to believe these will be any better. The problem with Zombie's Halloween will be faced by these flicks too. Revisiting a film automatically puts overwhelming restrictions on what you can or cannot do with a flick. At best, you can add some details to the backstory, modernize the filmmaking techniques, and push the gore up to modern standards. That's pretty much it. And that's everything Zombie did and the result was poor. I'm predicting now that the Friday and Nightmare flicks will suck in the same way.

So we're stuck. We can't make sequels and we can just magically restart the series and recapture the magic. What do we do?

The solution comes from an unlikely horror franchise: Godzilla.

Compared to Godzilla, the horror franchises of the '80s are small beer. The Godzilla franchise has reached an astounding 28 flicks. Like the '80s horror franchises, it had been diluted with heavy-handed humor, tweaked with premise undermining elements (like Minizilla), and generally abused in the name of getting asses in theater seats. However, unlike the '80s franchises, the last series of Godzilla flicks was widely praised as being among the best of the series, second only to the original in terms of entertainment value. This is no small feat. Godzilla is not exactly a multifaceted character and one can be forgiven for assuming that, after nearly 50 years, there's not much more to say about him. And yet, the filmmakers behind Godzilla managed to revitalize a property that had sunk so low as to feature its leading lizard doing a little jig after defeating an adversary. The tricks the Godzilla directors used could be used, I think, to get the '80s franchises out of the trap they find themselves in.

In 1999, Toho studios brought back their big reptilian star after a four-year lull. There were two huge factors working against a successful comeback. First, the last batch of Japanese-made Godzilla flicks had been roundly criticized as lacking. Ticket sales were mediocre, their target audiences – Japanese youth – had decided they were unhip relics, and talented filmmakers avoided the projects to avoid getting tarred as a hack. Second, the lackluster American version had been a one-two punch to Japanese Godzilla fans: it was at once upsetting that Godzilla failed to penetrate the American movie biz and upsetting that the American version was such a universally reviled mess. Toho revitalized the Godzilla series by 1) getting rid of continuity, 2) making it a showcase for new and promising talent, and 3) creating artificial scarcity.

Let's talk about getting rid of continuity. The new flicks exist in a sort of "Godzilla universe," but the details of the universe are reinvented with each flick. For example, in the last series some of the films assumed that Godzilla had attacked Japan only once before, others assumed that Godzilla had attacked several times, and one of them assumed that monster attacks were so common that a special UN military force existed solely for the purpose of fighting giant monsters. Some of the films take place in the here-and-now while others take place in the near or distant future. Basically, each film is a stand-alone product. The ground rules for the particular flick are explained in the film through exposition.

The second element: new talent. I'm going to be honest. The use of new talent has been a bit of a mixed bag in the context of Godzilla. On one hand, because we've got hungry directors, actors, and key crew, you get these sort of balls-out spectaculars that are meant to blow the audience away. This is everybody's big chance and they mean to take it. The downside is a tendency towards allusiveness, pandering to the audience, and an over reliance on currently "hip" techniques. For example, the makers of The Matrix should be able to sue the makers of Godzilla: Final Wars for stealing scenes and techniques. Still, it should be said that, unlike many a previous Godzilla flick, Final Wars never lags. It is an insane rush of set pieces and action sequences. And this is typical of all five of the last set of films: they are all made as if the future of the filmmakers' careers depended on it. Nobody phones it in.

Finally, another important lesson we can learn from the Godzilla franchise has to do with "clustering" the releases. Toho has learned that it is really easy to just keep cranking out flicks. But then you end up in the death-spiral that '80s slasher franchises are stuck in. Better to release a string of flicks and then dry up for a few years. Toho regularly produces as string of flicks, then retires Godzilla for four or five years, then releases a batch of new flicks. This requires some self-discipline. For example, Toho intended for the last series to extend for three films. It lasted five. Still, they could have gone on and on, dropping costs and accepting small and small returns. Instead, they left while the party was good. Don't drown your viewer in inferior product and they'll come back when you're ready to release more product.

I propose that the owners of the horror franchises of the '80s learn from the Godzilla franchise. First, adopt a looser approach to creating sequels. Let's take Friday the 13th as an example. Instead of adding more an more flicks to the current story, just set some ground rules involving Jason, Crystal Lake, and so on. After you've done that, let each film take a different approach. Does nobody know that people who go to Crystal Lake are asking for it or is it something everybody knows? Is Jason just some guy or is he some magical and unkillable zombie? Set this up with each flick and don't require each and every film to toe the same line. This opens up the stories that can be told and would encourage creativity. I would even drop the numbering system. Just give the films unnumbered titles like the Godzilla franchise or even the James Bond franchise.

Second, use real talent. "But wait," you might well say. "Rob Zombie came fresh off The Devil's Rejects and he went on to make the subpar Halloween." Of course he did. Zombie's best film was his most creative. House of 1,000 Clichés and Halloween are just too beholden to other flicks. Imagine if he'd been told, "Hey, Zombie, here's the keys to the Halloween franchise. Do whatever you want." There's no point in getting good directors and good screenwriters, and then putting them in the straightjacket of a remake. Find talent and let them do what they do best.

Finally, do the math on the value of your franchise. You can kill the goose that laid the golden egg by driving your franchise into the ground or you can keep it evergreen by avoiding overproduction. Pick one?

There's actually an interesting test of these theories already going on. Over at DC/Wildstorm comics, they've got the rights to the New Line horror franchises: Texas Chainsaw, Nightmare, and Friday. The comics follow the basic rules described above. They don't just retell the film stories and, where it helps the story, they break with the continuity established in the flicks. They've put real talent on the titles. Finally, they haven't made the title monthly. Instead, each title exists as a collection of loosely connected mini-series, each with its own narrative arc. The results are mixed. Nightmare has been so-so, but Friday and TCM has been to notch. Still, I'm willing to bet that 2 out of 3 is a better ratio than we'll see out of these remakes.

No strategy can ensure that every flick in a franchise will be a success. But I think going this route would make each flick an event. Each film in the franchise would worth checking out because you'd now you were going to get something new.

Anyway, that's this horror blogger's opinion.

Comics: Two out of three ain’t bad.

The third of the New Line/DC Wildstorm franchise-theme horror books got its official launch this month. After a regrettable start with the vapid Nightmare on Elm Street series and a considerably more promising Texas Chainsaw launch, Friday the 13th has arrived.

I must admit that I had my doubts about this series. Outside of a film context, Jason’s a bit of a hard sell for me. As a character, Jason works best simply as an icon. By which I mean to say that his mindless and relentless persona rewards lack of development. He’s at his best, really, on covers and in posters, just standing there, all implied threat and malice. The hockey mask doesn’t hide his face, it is all the face he needs. The character is made to be thoughtless, free of motivations, in a paradoxical way, characterless. Movies, with their strong visual element, are his natural medium. He can move and kill and that’s all the medium will demand of him. Books and comics, with the interiority that prose implies, seem contrary to the spirit of the character. Before picking up the comic, I had this vision of the comic book Jason stomping through the woods, covered in gore, silent; blood dripping from his machete, but above him is a thought balloon that reads: “Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.”

What could a comic do that 1) couldn’t be done better in a movie and 2) wouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to flesh out a character that become less interesting and less scary the deeper you looked into him?

Happily, like the TCM series, Jason’s new showcase bucks the low expectations set by the lame Freddy-based series and promises some genuine good times.

Penned by Justin Grey and Jim Palmiotti, the team behind the mostly successful Jonah Hex relaunch, the new series starts with a gutsy narrative move: Jason, the iconic anchor of the entire franchise, barely appears in it. The move not only pays off, but it signals to the readers that this series aims to be something more than comic book redo of your standard slasher romp.

The book starts with a lone RV cruising through a forest road. Suddenly, out of the woods, in front of the RV, a girl tumbles into the road. She’s naked, bruised, and half of her right hand is missing. (Injury to the hand, specifically finger-loss, is the signature wound of new horror, replacing, I think, the downward-jabbing knife wound to the body that’s been the hallmark injury since Psycho.) Behind her, making his patented deliberate and calm way through the woods, is Jason. The RV passengers get out, help the girl into their vehicle, and take off before Jason can reach them. This will be the last we see of Jason in the first issue: a splash page with him standing on the lonely forest road, machete in hand, watching the RV tear off, a small cloud of mist near his mouth wear his breath shows against the cold night sky.

Flash forward: hospital, the girl we’ve seen earlier is thrashing in a hospital bed. Nurses rush to sedate her. The local sheriff looks on and makes a comment about how, when he first arrived in town, he didn’t buy the stories of a death curse on Camp Crystal Lake. But, now, he says, they should burn the whole damn camp down.

Flashback: Camp Crystal Lake. The victim, presumably our “final girl,” and a handful of other young men and women are being lectured by a young business “shark” type. He explains that the horrific past of Crystal Lake makes it a unique camping opportunity and he intends to turn the decrepit camp into a sort of horror-themed camp. He’s even run off a bunch of “I Survived Camp Crystal Lake” t-shirts. (Do these really exist? If not, New Line, you’re missing a wonderful merch opportunity.) He explains that he’s hired this group to clean up the camp and get it ready.

We can see where the rest is going. Or can we?

One of the most interesting aspects of this new take is the inclusion of more backstory not only for Jason and his clan, but of Crystal Lake. Grey and Palmiotti seem to be working in two different threads of horror, hoping to add some more depth to the franchise’s shopworn formulas without ruining the basic premise. The first is a return to the giallo inspired suspense genre that helped first spawn the series. Instead of rushing straight into the slaughter and relying on revved up gore levels and body counts, this series promises to work on a slow burn. Second, the groundwork is laid for the idea that something was very wrong with Crystal Lake long before the Voorhees family made it their personal al fresco abattoir. By the laying the groundwork for a sort of “cursed land” theme, this series establishes the franchise in the context of the classic strain of New England horror, connecting a modern horror icon to a deep and traditional source of American horror.

It is an ambitious, creative, and strong start to the series.

Movies: In space, nobody can hear you groan.

Somehow – presumably because I was doing something I thought more important, like alphabetically arranging the forks in my utensil drawer or creating plans for a time machine fueled solely by my contempt for the revival of the skirt-over-leggings look – I managed not to see Jason X, the tenth installment in the interminable Friday the 13th franchise, in either the theaters or on DVD.

To my great puzzlement, that problem was rectified last weekend.

Jason X starts in bowels of the Crystal Lake Research Center, an institution that, while high-tech enough to contain an elaborate cryogenic facility, looks pretty much like an abandoned parking garage. Here, scientists have been holding the infamous and unkillable Jason Voorhees using state of the art incarceration tech – by which I mean he's held still by a handful of what appear to be bicycle chains. The head of this fine institution, one Dr. Hottie McFinal-Girl, intends to freeze Jason until such time as a proper disposal system can be developed for him. Unfortunately, her brilliant scheme is disrupted by Dr. Stupid (played by, of all people, famed art-horror director David Cronenberg, shown above, who, I assume, lost some drunken bet and was obliged to appear in this flick) and his crack team of highly trained soldier-victims. They want to take Jason to another location and study his remarkable regenerative properties. Dr. McFinal-Girl objects. Apparently Dr. Stupid's lab would be less secure, though that scarcely seems possible. What, they don't have bike chains at the Saratoga site? Jason, of course, busts free seconds after Dr. Stupid and company arrive. The soldiers, with all their guns and training, prove no match for Jason, now armed with one of his bike chains. Jason then chases Hottie to the cryogenic lab where he and she, through a series of misadventures, get frozen and, Buck Rogers-like, are thrown four centuries into the future.

Our lead icicles are found by a scavenger crew from Earth 2, where humans fled after years of environmental decay made Earth: Original Formula uninhabitable. The scavengers bring both of the frozen folks back to their ship: the Grendel. (We later encounter a ship called the Tiamat – in the future all ships are named by D&D players and it is not unusual to serve on ships with names like the S.S. Encumbrance Check.) They carefully thaw out Dr. Hottie. To her credit, she takes the news that she has just woken up four hundred years in the future and that everybody she knows, and even the plant she called home, are now dead with remarkable aplomb.

Jason, who thaws out on his own (because he's Jason, dammit, and it'll take a bit more than 400 years of exposure to absolute zero to keep him down), also takes the transition well. After several milliseconds of adjustment to his new, high-tech surroundings, he decides that this new context does not radically alter his core competencies, and he begins killing like his old self. After all, teens making whoopie is teens making whoopie no matter what century you're in. And where folks is making whoopie, Jason's got killing to attend to.

Mostly he relies on a future version of his trusty ol' machete, but he finds time to expand his repertoire to keep pace with the rapid changes around him: freezing a woman's face with liquid nitrogen and then smashing it off (in the future, people keep sinks of room-temp stable liquid nitrogen in their labs), impaling folks by dropping them on large drill bits, impaling folks on what appears to be some sort of space anchor.

As an aside, in many ways, Jason's machete is a symbol for the downward spiral of the entire franchise. The young, pre-zombie Jason was a tireless innovator of the fatal applications of garden impliments and construction tools. This was a trait he got from his mother, who, though blinded by murderous rage, found novel ways of dispatching teens. Though, even she seemed like some middle-class housewife once Jason hit his stride and was approaching McGuyverish levels of tool use. However, as time went on, Jason came more and more to rely on the old machete. In many ways, it became as much a part of his persona as the hockey mask. But there was a difference. The hockey mask, which didn't even arrive on the scene until the third flick, was an inspired bit of branding (if a bit of a rip from the less prolific Halloween franchise). The machete, however, is a concession to laziness. Why put in the extra effort when you can just chop away with the good ol' machete? Yep, the ol' machete never lets you down. It is as if, twenty years of unlife later, Jason's lost the fire in the belly. He can still kill as well as you please, but he doesn't want it any more.

As the bodies and contrivances pile up, eventually Jason gets nano-tech'ed up and appears as Uber-Jason – at least, that's how he's credited. This is a bit of a let down as the Uber-Jason is basically the same old unstoppable killing machine who likes to bash people around and whack folks with his machete. That's right. No laser eyes. No death ray from the palm. No missile launcher built into his chest. He gets his eye-color changed and they chrome some parts of him, but otherwise the transformation is shrug-inducing. He comes off like Iron Man's retarded baby brother.

Though somebody deserves some credit for trying to aggressively rejuvenate an increasingly stale series, the combination of genre elements in Jason X adds up to something less than the sum of its parts. The sci-fi trappings, which are only a shade better than a made-for-TV original, work against the horror genre – Jason seems incongruous and silly among the flashing lights and hissing, Trek-style doors. The efforts at self-aware humor – while providing one conceptually brilliant scene, the idea of trapping Jason in a holodeck-style simulation of Crystal Lake circa 1980 – kill the already weakened fright-factor. The gore seems more goofy than visceral; the change in context works against the recognition of frailty that makes slasher flicks work. We can imagine getting whacked in the head by an axe but when you've got to puzzle out exactly what it is somebody was killed with, your fear devolves into slight confusion.

Really, the only thing Jason X has going for it is the also the only convincing reason to rent it: the concept of putting Jason in space is just so bizarre that it has its own attraction beyond the actual elements of the film. There's a certain odd pleasure in watching such a strange and obviously bad concept play out. As such, Jason X is a lame movie that still has an undeniable charm of sorts. Using the justly controversial, but wholly appropriate Order of Battle in the Indochina Expedition of 1940, I'm giving this movie an overall score of the 9th Infantry Brigade, with a bonus 3rd Regiment Tirailleurs Tonkinois in recognition that the film is still kinda fun in a goofy sort of way.