Stuff: What scares the scary people?

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

Here's a couple of sample answers:

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

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Nothing. - Elvira

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

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

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

Books: "For what it is worth: It now seems morally important to me to do without minor characters in a story."

Over at Letters of Note, a blog dedicated to the perhaps decaying art of the personal letter (I recently saw a blog post written as an open letter containing the confession that the blogger never wrote an actual letter to anybody), they're featuring a letter from author Kurt Vonnegut to then first-time novelist Mark Lindquist. I share it because I think it is neat, but my excuse for putting it on a horror blog is that he discusses the supposed high-brow/low-brow culture divide and gives his opinion of the work of Stephen King. With that thin excuse for horror cred in place, read on:

he fact that you have completed a work of fiction of which you are proud, which you made as good as you could, makes you as close a blood relative as my brother Bernard. The best thing about our family, our profession, is that its members are not envious or competitive. I was with the great Nadine Gordimer recently, and a reporter encouraged us to speak badly of a writer who made one hell of a lot more money than we did, Stephen King. Gordimer and I defended him. We thought he was awfully damn good at what he did. Long ago, I knocked the schlock novelist Jacqueline Suzanne off the top of the Best Seller List where she had been for a year or more. She was a sweet, tough, utterly sincere lady, and, as I say, a blood relative. She sent me a note saying, "As long as it had to be somebody, I'm glad it was you."

The last lines of the letter are interesting.

For what it is worth: It now seems morally important to me to do without minor characters in a story. Any character who appears, however briefly, deserves to have his or her life story fully respected and told.

The letter is brief, but worth the click over.

Books: Dogs of varying ages attempt to learn tricks of diverse vintage.

The origin-story of Peter Straub's latest novel, A Dark Matter, can be profitably compared to the origin story of Stephen King's latest novel, The Dome.

King's "new" book is actual a manuscript from the '70s that he decided to dust off, unaware that its basic premise was the central gag of The Simpsons Movie. Despite King's interest in format exploration (from the serial publication of The Green Mile to pioneer efforts at electronic publishing), there's something telling that he's pushing 30-year-old work out now, and that sits just fine with everybody. It seems appropriate, fitting even for an author who famously revisited his own masterworks again and again, who dredged up his early career nom de plume to produce a work two decades later.

By contrast, Straub's new novel owes a debt to the work of Brian Evenson, a genre warping author whose sadly under-recognized work sits at the weird intersection of pulp and experimental art. And I don't mean this in some "I saw some similarities" clever critic way: Straub's introduction not only thanks Evenson for the inspiration, but mentions that one specific scene in the novel is modeled off a scene in Evenson's own The Open Curtain.

When King needs inspiration, he looks back. When Straub needs inspiration he finds it in the work of a guy who not only wrote one of the definitive texts on the mindbending prose of Robert Coover, but who also contributed a story to a collection of stories that takes place in the Halo game universe.

This is not to say that one approach is necessarily better than the other. In fact, there's a sort of quality assurance that comes with King's approach. Like a top level athlete, King has perfected his performance in a highly specific and limited field. The pleasure of King is the pleasure of knowing that you're in the hands of a master, and that mastery is predicated on the idea of him doing the very thing he's mastered. When I was young, I remember people who weren't particularly into boxing making jokes about how upset they would be if they bought the pay-per-view Tyson fight and Tyson ended it in a minute and some change. But these were the folks who never bought in to a fight. The people who paid to see Tyson do his thing never complained. That was the point of seeing Tyson. Reading King's like that.

Straub's something different. The pleasure of reading Straub is the pleasure of watching a master restlessly push himself to find the limits of his own talent. Straub's interest in the New Weird, that liminal genre of fantasy and postmodern lit, which Straub dubbed "the New Horror" in a recent anthology he edited, has kept him on the vanguard of his chosen field, but that comes with a price. King's like early career Tyson: the result is rarely in doubt. Struab's newest work is more like a tightrope act. It requires skill and training and the careful dexterity of a master, but it still courts disaster. And whatever the outcome, it's interesting.

I wish I could say that A Dark Matter was a triumph, but it's more interesting than successful.

Yet another autopsy of the '60s, A Dark Matter plays with shades of understanding. It's a tragedy about the inability to communicate wearing the Halloween mask of a horror novel. At its core is story of a group of friends who, in their youth, were pulled into the orbit of a somewhat sinister, but mostly pathetic guru. Their cult of personality disintegrated when a black magic ritual when awry and one of their number died in the process. The novel follows the one friend who didn't attend the ceremony - now an adult who made his fame and fortune writing a thinly veiled fictional treatment of the event - as he tries to piece together what actually happened that day.

The curious thing about A Dark Matter is that is isn't exactly Rashmon-like: Nobody disagrees about the most significant details of the event, so the event in question is never really a mystery. (To be fair, Rashmon isn't very Rashmon-like either - like the term "Kafkaesque," which is used when things are Orwellean, the adjectival form of the proper noun has proved more useful in day-to-day conversation and has long since overwhelmed the details of the real; which is, perhaps, the most Rashmon-like thing about Rashmon.) The result is a spiral narrative structure. With each retelling, the events of the disastrous ceremony are fleshed out and told with greater nuance or given a slightly different spin. The pattern is pleasurable, but the major downside is that there's no dramatic tension. We know, from the start, who survived, what happened, and who paid for it. It's a novel that begins by telling you exactly how it all ends.

The spiral structure of A Dark Matter is a bold move. It basically throws down the gauntlet. It disarms the most obvious and powerful weapon a genre writer's got in his arsenal: plot. Sadly, it's a bold move that Straub can't quite pull off. Wrapped in the familiar trappings of a "what happened" '60s tale, the narrative innovation seems oddly out of place; like a 2D movie shoehorned into 3D, the novel feels like a story he had on hand that he then forced into the this curious structure.

Still the spectacle of a master who could have phoned it in trying a trick that undermines one of his greatest strengths is bracing. It's the kind of no-net risk taking that should be encouraged. By incorporating the innovations of the New Weird, and doing so on such a broad and deep level, Straub hits the reset button on his writing development. He reverts back to novice level and pulls off a noteworthy debut. Is it polished, perfect? Far from it. But it has the energy of an explorer behind it. It's a hell of a trick.

Ironically, after forty years of writing, Straub's become a new voice to watch.

By contrast, Sarah Langan's Audrey's Door is firmly in the young novelist's wheelhouse. Returning to the surrealistic supernaturalism of her debut novel, The Keeper, Langan's latest welds a sympathetic drama of damaged, haunted losers to a haunted house plot heavily influenced by landmark works like Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion. There's also hints of Farris's And Then We Came to the End and even satiric evocations of the shallow tropes of post-Sex in the City chick lit.

In this case, the titular heroine, scarred by the insanity of her alternately smothering and negligent madwoman mother, attempts to create a new life in Manhattan. Her reinvention leads her to a eccentric high-rise apartment with a sinister secret. The building, designed by a demon-haunted insane genius, is a conduit for Lovecraft-ish menaces from beyond, and Audrey appears to be the key to unleashing this unnameable horror on the world.

The joy of Aubrey's Door comes chiefly in Langan's specific mastery of a style of horror all her own. Langan's feeling for her protags, the attention she lavishes on the details of their inner lives, is unique among modern horror authors. Often horror characterization is a matter of making characters sympathetic enough to give the horrors that descend upon them some sharpness. Langan, by contrast, relies on the unlikely proposition that a human being, rendered with sufficient honesty, will always become a dramatic locus of sympathy because they will seem alive, and all humans would rather see life prevail over death. Langan's characters don't need to be likable, just real. The confidence Langan places in the empathic capacity is the single greatest act of respect for fans that you'll find in genre lit - any genre - today.

Admittedly, there is a nearly oppressive air of familiarity here. Langan's moved much of the action to an urban setting, but she can't resist a long interlude in a recession ravaged Midwest town that resembles the struggling small towns of her first two works. This interlude serves as an odd allegory for the artistic project of the book; Langan is ready to move on, but still has to wrestle with the material that so strongly defined her early voice. (The mother/daughter relationship at the core of the book is another handy allegory for the creative tug-of-war being worked out in these pages.) There's a familiar shagginess to the end. Endings are the hardest things to pull off and a particular weakness of Langan's, though she gets credit for daring something completely new to her novelistic work: a (qualified) happy ending.

Langan dares less than Straub does with his book, but she gains more from her less ambitious bet. Fans of Langan's previous novels, especially The Keeper, will find much to dig here. Audrey's Door won the Stoker, and with good cause. Still, there's a nervousness about the book that suggests Langan's impatience with her own tools.

With the next novel, I hope Langan pulls a Straub.

Books: The literary legacy of Stephen Eff'ing King.

One of the odder phenomena of 1990s horror was the high-culture canonization of Stephen King. From genre hit to book-factory, the commercial success of the King author-function was secured by the end of the 1980s. But, sometime in the mid-1990s, King made the leap from household product (as Clive Barker remarked, there are two books in every American household: one is the Bible and one is a novel by Stephen King) to respected lit lion. In 1994 short works bearing his byline started popping up in The New Yorker. A few years later, in the Whitney approached him for a handmade art book project, slapping the highbrow seal of approval on him. By the time the decade was over, The New Yorker was running profile pieces declaring him America's most essential storyteller. King's rep as a master of narrative is now firmly established in literary culture.

However, there's an unexamined tradition of verbal innovation that we should not overlook. According to Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word, a pleasingly comprehensive historical dictionary of the development of swear word, Stephen King can claim credit for the first written instance of not one, but two variants on "the F bomb" (though not the term "the F bomb" itself, which first appeared in print in 1988 in the pages of Newsday).

King's first major contribution to mankind's understanding of the many nuances of the fucking, in its literal and metaphorical senses, appears in his never-quite-done milestone The Stand. In that ever-metastasizing novel, King added a meaning to the nearly century-old term fuckery.

The word fuckery, meaning a brothel, first appeared in print in 1906, gaining a second sense of "intercourse" by the 1961. In 1978, Stephen King innovated a third sense that, stunningly, moved strictly into the abstract realm of ethical philosophy. King used fuckery to mean "despicable behavior, (also) treachery." From The Strand:

This was an act of pure human fuckery.

King's second inno-fucking-vation appeared in the pages of his 1986 novel It. There King fused two popular derogatories to create the portmanteau word fucknuts, meaning "a stupid or contemptible person." Here comes the literature:

"Why did you do that?"
"Because I felt like it, fucknuts!" Henry roared back.

I feel fucknuts is a particularly charming coinage in its combination of a classic obscene term with a coyly infantile euphemism. That mixture of cynical bitterness and awkward innocence is true art.

Art: The men who brought the zombie to America.

Recently, Publisher's Weekly, casting about for good news in an increasingly bleak biz context, has taken notice of, get this, some sort of uptick in consumer interest for zombie books. I doubt that readers of this blog will be particularly surprised at this President-Garfield-still-dead grade reportage, though the story does show that, really, this publishing "movement" is basically two books: Brook's World War Z and the Austen mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The former's 200,000 copies sold puts it in the realm of genuine hit (20,000 is a solid performance while 1 million puts you in Harry Potter territory), while the latter's rep looks secured on the basis of printing data (600,000 copies, the book's in its 16th printing already), though actually sales data has yet to surface. No doubt the other titles mentioned fetch a pretty penny or two for their publishers, though the data provided suggests that we're looking at two huge redwood trees and a lot of otherwise undifferentiated ground clutter.

Furthermore, to put this new phenom into perspective, the last book in the Twilight series sold 1.3 million copies in its first day of release. Even if every single copy of P&P&Z printed sold – which is unlikely – that single YA vamp book would trounce the combined sales of both titles. For those curious, the sales for the entire series are just south of 30 million. Next time you see somebody bashing the vampire romance franchise, imagine Stephenie Meyers responding, "These jabs sting, but then I just rub some money on the wound and that seems to ease the pain."

Charges of coming late to the not-much-of-a-party aside, the article's author gets extra points for comprehensiveness – the article ranges from Image Comics' excellent Walking Dead series to teen tales like Never Slow Dance with a Zombie - and a gazillion extra points for name dropping the father of American zombies: William Buehler Seabrook.

A restless and often self-destructive man, William Seabrook became a journalist and travel writer known for his extreme tales of far-of lands, retold with lurid detail for the subscribers of Cosmo, Reader's Digest, and Vanity Fair. An uneven and disciplined writer, given over to deploying now embarrassingly simplistic cultural and ethnic stereotypes, much of Seabrook's literary legacy is justly forgotten. However, three major milestones in American literature remain his. In Asylum , Seabrook turned his stay in the Bloomingdale mental institution in New York into the first celebrity rehab memoir. In Jungle Ways Seabrook gave American literature is only extended description of the taste of human flesh produced by a professional writer: "It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable." Finally and most importantly, in The Magic Island, Seabrook's sensationalist account of his wanderings in Haiti, the author introduced American audiences to the zombie.

It is sometimes erroneously stated that Seabrook introduced the word to the English language, though evidence for the term stretches back to at least the mid-17th century. However, these earliest uses are often vague references to various aspects of Caribbean and South American religions or are now archaic reference to culturally specific phenomenon, such as the resurfaced corpses of the buried dead unearthed by seasonal flooding. What Seabrook did was link the term zombie specifically to the concept of a person raised from the dead, and presented this definition in such a lurid way as to kick off a craze for the reanimated corpses in pulp lit and film. Seabrook's Island hit the shelves in late 1929. By 1932, Lugosi was starring in White Zombie.

The Magic Island includes original illustrations by the mysterious Alexander King, a once prolific and now obscure artist whose bio is lurid as Seabrook's. An abrasive man who was, at times, a painter, a failed playwright, and late night television regular, he was briefly an art thief and was busted after boosting 50 prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

King's images, shown below, are the first images of the walking dead to reach American shores.

[UPDATE: The ever on top of things Zoe has found a link to an online edition of The Magic Island. Check the comments for the URL. Thanks Zoe!]

Movies: Stay classy, Part I.

It is so painfully clichéd that it seems like spoof.

Imagine a small B-production flick, a straight out exploitation exercise that hits a nerve by tapping a hot-button social issue - school violence - that, at the time of its release, was shifting from taboo topic to national hysterical obsession. The flick's bizarre combination of grim violence, ham-fisted melodrama, ignorance of actual ground conditions, and occasionally verité style gave the relatively cheesy affair a nightmarish edge that resonated with Reagan Era fears that the U.S. was beset by evil empires from without and barbarians from within. Deserved or not, it got the reputation as a hard hitting and unflinching vision of a new strain of bad ugliness that was threatening Our American Way of Life™.

It made nice bank. The filmmakers gathered several years later, ready for the sequel.

They decided to revisit the issue of school violence. Only this time, they could explore facets of the premise that had been unthinkable when the first film had rolled out. Most notably, what if, instead of human teachers, the government had Terminator-style cyborg killing-machines act as school administrators. You can almost hear the pitch being made to Griffin Mill.

"It's the future. And killer robots run the school. It's like Terminator meets Stand and Deliver."

"Will it have action?"

"Tons of action. These robots are programmed to teach and kill. Tons of gore."

"Tasteful gore?"

"Tasteful gore."

"Will it be socially conscious?"

"Yes definitely. It speaks to America's concerns about our out of control youth. And our national fears that killer robots may be hiding among us."

"I like it."

Goofy as that sounds, it pretty much describes exactly what happened to 1982's cult juvie-run-amok classic The Class of 1984 and it's sequel The Class of 1999.

In this post and the post that follows, my dear Screamers and Screamettes, we're going to take a little detour out of the straight-up horror genre and check in on some kids that are definitely not alright. Today we start with the strangely compelling, if totally horrible, Class of 1984. Then we'll jump into our time machine and travel to the distant future, to the last year of the Twentieth Century, and see what high school is like for The Class of 1999.

Ready. Then c'mon gang!

The flick opens on a montage of Lincoln High, an "inner city" school (gamely played by a far too nice Central Tech High School of Toronto) that suffers from all manner of social ill. The administration is full of ass-covering bureaucrats that are simply punching clock until they can politick their way on to the school board, the teachers are demoralized drunks and cynics, and a students live under the spasmatic tyranny of a gang of punk-music loving Neo-Nazi dope pushers.

Into this slough of despond steps music teacher Andrew Norris – played by show biz survivor Perry King. (As an aside, Perry King's had an astounding career. He's been in everything from the recent schlockbuster Day After Tomorrow to the Warhol produced Bad, not to mention a television career that covers nearly four decades.) Fresh from a school in Nebraska, Norris's first bit of culture shock comes when he finds out that fellow teacher Terry Corrigan (the always nifty Roddy McDowell) packs a .45 every day just in case the little monsters get out of control.

It takes all of about 10 minutes for Norris to run afoul with Stegman (played by White Shadow alum Tim Van Patten) and his gang of Nazi punks. After a tense face off that resolves in a threatening, but relatively harmless prank, it looks like Stegman and Norris might be able to get along by simply agreeing to disagree.

This détente doesn't hold for long. In a scene that showcases director Lester's famed subtly, a student hopped up on some of Stegman's drugs climbs to the top of the school's flag pole, attracts a crowd, begins reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and then falls to his death, the American flag wrapped around his shattered frame. Norris can't take the senseless tragedy and obviously profound symbolic importance of the event and starts looking for a student who will testify to Stegman and Co's evil deeds. Specifically, he turns to innocent bystander Arthur (the film debut of Michael J. Fox) who, even though he won't give up the gang, gets shived in the cafeteria anyway.

The battle of wills between the gang and their music teacher escalates to physical violence, culminating in the gang rape of Norris's pregnant wife and a bloody confrontation between Norris and the gang in the halls of Lincoln High.

As far as plots go, the overall arc of the tale will be familiar to anybody who has ever seen a man-pushed-too-far flick, especially any one of the dozen flicks in the teacher-vs. student throwdown late-'80s to mid-'90s subgenre that this movie helped kick start (The Principle, The Substitute and its three sequels, 187, and so on). The plot, however, is rather incidental to the pleasures of the flick. Instead, it's the odd characterizations, over-the-top set pieces (most noticeably Corrigan's pop-quiz-at-gunpoint flip out), bizarre line readings, and the director's exploitation-honed instincts to "go there" – though tame by modern standards, it was nearly saddled with an X rating at the time - that leave a lasting impression.

The film's visual style is clunky and somewhat artless. The colorful plumage of his fictional gang members did not inspire Lester to adopt similarly colorful flourishes. Aside from some oddly framed shots in the final showdown, Lester's camera work feels stagy and static. Oddly, this kinda works for him. Combined with the cornball dialogue and the presence of so many familiar TV Land faces, Lester's workman-like style gives the film a decidedly small screen feel. Not only does this mean it ages well in the era of DVD, but it also gives it viewer the curious sense that they're watching some "very special episode" of a television drama go horribly off the tracks. We're not watching real life; we're watching some sort of cruel invasion of the reassuring world of fantasy. It tells you almost everything you need to know about American culture at the dawn of the Reagan Era that '84 was considered a work of social realism not because it looked real, but rather because it looked like the kind of fictional television we reserved for important social messages.

The film's unapologetic Reagan revolution morality also packs a punch. Despite it's rep as a groundbreaking film, Class of '84 is far from the first teens-gone-wild flick. In fact, several of its scenes are influenced, if not outright cribbed, from Blackboard Jungle. Nor should we praise it for its clarity of insight in our social ills. It's gang hails from the same mean streets as The Warriors; they're more film baddie convention than sociological phenomenon. What is innovative is its utter lack of apology for the solution it offers up for dealing with such kids: Separate them from the good kids and get rid of them. A Western without the antiquated concepts of honor or human nobility, Class of '84 is surreal fable of authoritarian revenge, a bold reassertion of the moral order in the face of a system so weak and corrupt that it can no longer defend itself. Unlike the Brando's Wild One or Dean's Rebel, the revolting youth of this flick are merely vile and the film not only dispatches them with relish, but it endcaps the execution of the final gangster with a strange sort of smirk in the form of a blackly humorous title card that basically says, "And the community said, 'Good riddance.'"

It's the same kind of giddy knuckle-dragging irresponsibility that makes the works of Frank Miller or the any of a million "cop who won't play by the rules" movies so involving. The fantasy of a righteous avenger fills us with an overwhelming sense of the redemptive power of fictional violence. Done right, as it is in Class of '84, it can be weirdly mesmerizing.

The Class of 1984 is real exploitation filmmaking at its best: mean people doing ugly things in the service of gut level appeal. That its raw populist anger and thuggish sensibilities still give off heat is a testament to how perfectly pitched the flick was.

That said, it has this truly terrible Alice Cooper song – a syn-soaked '80s mistake for the otherwise nifty horror glam icon – as its theme song. Watch at your own risk:

Books: Killer serials.

Because ANTSS prides itself on bringing you, the reading public, the very best in horror-themed entertainments and because ANTSS is cheap, I'm delighted to point you in the direction of not one, but, count 'em Screamers and Screamettes, two free serialized tales for your devious and deflationary delectation.

The first of these serials comes from Cryptic Bindings, a Seattle-based indie press "specializing in handcrafted fiction and one of a kind art books." The currently untitled thriller available on their site (along with a "name that thriller" contest) is cheap as free. It updates every Monday, so the latest installment is fresh off the virtual press.

Your second serialized tale comes from the pen one-man horror factory Stephen King. Taking the trend of book trailers to new heights, Simon and Schuster is plugging King's new short story collection, Just After Sunset, by turning King's Lovecraftian "N" into an 25-episode series of animated online shorts. The mini-flicks are a joint S&S/Marvel dealie. The series updates every Wednesday, so you've got all day to play catch up before the newest installment drops.

Dig 'em hard, hep cats and cool kitties. They're your new Monday and Wednesday productivity drains.

Music: Songs fit for a King

Here's a curious little tidbit for horror fans. America's top one-man horror franchise empire, Stephen King, wrote up a list of his top 20 favorite songs. Its surprisingly heavy on the country stuff (mostly modern alt-country with a few '70s post-Nashville sound nods), but the list also includes some oddball choices like the Gothic Archies, LCD Soundsystem, and even the '80s hit "Wild Wild West" by the Escape Club. Go fig. Most songs link to audio or video.

So, 20 songs and all you had to do was read one little ol' blog entry. Not a bad way to start your weekend. Enjoy, amigos.