"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #11.

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

Publicity still for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), featuring Ken Sagoes.

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.

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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: Despite what the song says, Freddy isn't dead. But you could be forgiven for thinking so.

Sometimes you just don't know how good you've got it, 'till it's gone.

Case in point: The Avatar Press comic titles based on New Line's trinity of slasher icons.

In '05, Avatar Press, one of the many indie comic presses that thrives in the market niches un-served by Marvel or DC, started producing several mini-series and one-shots based on the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises. These comics were, for the most part, pretty lame. I felt the writing was uninspired, the art sub par, and the scares non-existent. The TCM series, which I was most excited about, not only takes place in the revamped universe of the remake, but it suffers from the sameness that plagued the actual film series. How many times are we going to see this family kidnap a girl to add to the brood? The Nightmare books were less creative than the films that inspired them. Liberated from the necessity of having to actually produce dream sequences under the tight budgets of the films, the dream worlds in which Freddy lives and hunts should be more amazing than ever. Sadly, the thread of darkly joyous surrealism that ran through the film series was hardly on display in the comic. Only the Friday books really pushed the character – which is odd if you consider that, as a character, Jason offers perhaps the most limited dramatic range. A plot involving Jason taking on a paramilitary unit designed to capture and destroy him and a story which pitted the contemporary Jason against his futuristic Jason X counterpart were entertaining. Still, even these titles suffered from mediocre art.

What Avatar did do well was gore and the covers. The creators on the Avatar series were not afraid to spill blood and viscera by the bucket-loads. In fact, I would have to say that, in many ways, the gleefully sanguine manner in which these artists approached the destruction of their titles' supporting casts out-did the source movies. The covers, too, were exemplary. Each Avatar title came in several cover variants, almost all of which were wonderful portraits or action shots of Freddy, Jason, or Leatherface. In fact, if anybody from Avatar reads this, I would happily purchase a collection of just the covers. They were brilliant.

Overall, though, despite the bloody contents and the cool covers, I was actually excited to hear that New Line had dropped Avatar and, instead, licensed their legendary properties to DC comics. I hoped that DC would take these famous monsters of film land and actually make something truly worth reading out of them.

This week, the first issue of DC's new Nightmare on Elm Street series was published on their WildStorm imprint. The first ish makes me realize what a good thing we had goin' with Avatar. DC's Freddy is to Avatar's Freddy what post-Army Elvis was to pre-draft Elvis. DC's Freddy, while perhaps more polished, has been tamed. The story is, as far as Nightmare plots go, just serviceable. New kids come to town, one dies, the other learns about Freddy. Certainly, there is a level of genre "sameness" to slasher flicks, but the series that produced the "Dream Warriors" plot could give us something more creative than this. Perhaps worse, the gore is gone. We've got a body count of two. One girl gets the business end of Freddy's glove (off panel) and ends up in blood stained bedding. Another kid gets torched. Freddy ties him to a one-armed-bandit style school desk on top of a pile of books, pours gasoline on him, and then sets fire to him with a match. That's it. For a character in series known for constantly elevating the bizarreness of its methods of dispatch, the deaths in the Simpsons spoof of the Nightmare series were more creative.

In retrospect, even with the QC issues, Avatar's various creators brought an anarchic and disreputable joy to their work. Sure characters were under-drawn and backgrounds were, at best, impressionistic. But the split skulls, torn limbs, and flying guts were intense. Each issue of Avatar seems like it was rushed to get to the good stuff – the crazy, horrific celebration of all the stuff you're not supposed to see. Avatar's books were alive with a rebellious spirit that, while hell on the quality of the books, evoked the sort of maniacal, illegitimate, gory thrills that are the draw of the films. In contrast, DC's book plays it safe. It's a generic work meant to protect brands and sell a product. This new Nightmare might be about the marauding ghost of a pedophile child-killer, but trust me when I say that DC has taken great pains to ensure that nobody could possibly be offended by their Freddy.

Music critic Greil Marcus once said that the moment punk rock was no longer worth censoring, it wouldn't be worth listening to. The same is true of splatter horror. The moment slasher flicks aren't unnecessarily excessive, they aren't worth being afraid of.

Really, the only good that can come out of this is if we get something like a Batman versus the TCM family comic.

Real Estate: A unique fixer-upper opportunity on Elm Street.

Though the address 1428 North Genesee Ave might not ring a bell, you may recognize the house as 1428 Elm Street, home of several of Freddy's many victims. For the horror buff with truly deep pockets, the house is for sale. It comes with a pool and living room fireplace.

Thanks for hulver regular ad hoc for giving me the link on this.