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.

Movies: His son killed Hitler.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact.

Sheldon Roth is the father of director and actor Eli Roth. Over at Patheos, an online religious journal, Roth has an interesting post about what it felt like to see his son assassinate Adolf Hitler in the spelling-challenged film Inglourious Basterds.

From the post:

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, Inglourious Basterds. I watched my son, in his character of "The Bear Jew," machine-gun the Fuhrer's face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief, and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

And later:

It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one's life. Feelings are just as much reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real -- they cannot be dismissed because the story is "historically inaccurate."

Quentin Tarantino understood that it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded, and dies a forgotten work. So, where do Inglourious Basterds and my reactions fit into this picture?

At Passover we read of the sages who urge us to tell the tale of the Exodus tirelessly -- one cannot say enough to describe that devastation in the lives of the Hebrews. However, time has laid dust on the tongue's capacity to be fluent in those events. How historically accurate is the story most Jews repeat not once, but twice a year, for some of us even four times, every year of our lives? Reciting the plagues of Egypt is quaintly interesting, but watching Eli turn his armed fury on Hitler in a cinematic oven of burning Nazis is awesome and much closer to my own history.

The Holocaust provides anew an endless capacity to relate Jewish history. I am in my 70s, and all my life I have studied the Holocaust. But I am still startled by the unthought-of newness of stories. I cannot hear enough; it never ends. Inglourious Basterds partakes of the Passover injunction to tell our story. The feelings evoked while watching this film contain our history -- personal and group. The film, though not "factual," represents a psychological reality. This psychological reality is a fact, not empty fantasy. Uncannily, unbidden, a gift-giver, Eli was acting out my dreams, dreams based on my life -- through a film.

Movies: Cabinessence

Watching Cabin Fever long after seeing director Roth's Hostel mini-franchise take off is a curious experience. First, it gives one a profound notion of just how far Roth has progressed as a director and writer. Second, it points to some stubborn qualities that, since we've seen them appear in three flicks (and even his fake trailer for Grindhouse), we can definitively point to as the limitations of Roth's talents.

Cabin Fever tells the story of a group of highly-grating twenty-somethings who rent a secluded cabin in the unnamed wildness of some meticulously backwater place. After a bit of exposition to establish that these characters have some history together, Roth inflicts them with a particularly nasty flesh-eating virus that not only begins to strip away their flesh, but also makes them victim to an unending barrage of horror film allusions. As the virus gets more bloody and mushy, paranoia sets in and our protagonists turn on one another. This is particularly unfortunate as their rotting condition attracts the attention of the local populace and constabulary, both of which hold remarkably simple, if blunt, views about how public health issues should be handled. Stuck between gun-totting mountain-folk vigilantes and a disease that's part ebola and part Red Death, our heroes find themselves trapped in a bleakly unpromising position.

Cabin Fever is the work of a director who is unusually accomplished on a technical level, but utterly lacking in anything particularly interesting to say or do. CF looks good. Roth suffers from the unfortunate beginner's-notion that simply turning a camera on a pretty lake will give you beautiful shot; but, for the most part, the rich detail that made his two later films so visually arresting is on display. The set design for the titular cabin is packed with fine details and Roth shoots it in such a way that it shifts from generically cheesy to sinisterly claustrophobic. He's also excellent at getting the maximum bang for his buck out of the effects folks. In this we see the foundations of Roth's style.

What Roth has improved on considerably is characterization. When I reviewed Hostel, I opined that the American tourists were annoying enough that they almost justified the existence of snuff-clubs. Compared to the teens in Cabin Fever, the jackass youngsters of Hostel come off like witty/smooth combos of Oscar Wilde and Cary Grant. Watching Roth try to invest the cast of Cabin Fever with some life is painful. For realz. Like reach for the remote and fast forward until we some blood painful. It's debatable if the girls from Hostel 2 are a step backward (though the character work in that flick is, I think, redeemed by his work with the predators, who remain Roth's most interesting characters to date). Still, even the girls of H2 aren't as bile-inducing as this crowd. I should point out that this isn't, I think, the fault of the actors. They've got a script which requires them to act against rotted hobos, extreme skateboarders (in an inadvisable cameo by Roth), and other bizarre non-sequiturs. They're game, but the can't make us give a crap about these thoroughly disposable characters.

What Roth hasn't improved on is controlling his narrative arc. It strikes me that Roth gets a boss idea, figures out how to justify the idea, and then doesn't know how to close the deal. In all three of his films, the trap he sets up from the beginning slowly closes around his characters. The strength of his ideas is that they are built like traps. There's a relentless, unforgiving, mechanical fatedness to his concepts. However, in the last act, one character always suddenly bursts free of the trap and then, adrift, ends up running through a pointless and anti-climactic dénouement. It happens in CF, with a character suddenly running into what I assume are supposed to be comedic scenes, a deer "attack", and other time-padding senselessness. It happens with the looping escape-unescape-escape in Hostel. And it happens with the flatly unfunny close in Hostel 2. In a debut flick you might think this was just lack of experience. But, given the fact that every flick he's done has it (and even the Thanksgiving trailer spins wildly out of control), one has to wonder if he's just blind to the fact that it robs his films of some of their punch.

Should you catch Fever? Pretend you can see me shrug. It is functional flick with some nice gross-out moments and a novel slasher-without-a-slasher feel to it. But fans of Roth's lavish squalor with find that approach still a work in progress here. The film further suffers from the fact the Roth's annoying characters and meandering end make the film's opening and closing a bit of a slog.

Movies: A right to be hostel.

Greetings fright fans. I apologize for the dead air. After weeks of homebound freelancing, your humble horror host went out and joined the vast ranks of the regularly employed. I'm still getting over the shock of waking up before noon, but I think I've recovered enough to start writing again.

Since we're discussing personal stuff, I also would like to point out that, for some reason, it seems like I cannot carry out even the most basic task these days without cutting, scratching, or otherwise perforating myself. As it stands now, I have a single finger that doesn't have some nasty little slice on it and my right forearm has an angry red 4 inch long slice on it. It's healing, but ugly and unpleasant.

As yet, we've got no good explanation for my sudden vulnerability to life's sharper corners. I'm not generally accident-prone. My wife thinks it's because my skin is dry, and therefore more likely to split on impact with pointy things, due to seasonal weather changes. She thinks I should put on lotion. I think I might have cut in line in front of an ancient gypsy and she's cursed me to a supernatural death of a billion little cuts. I feel I should devote my energies to finding this witch and forcing her to reverse the curse. This may require I go freelance again, 'cause gypsies are tricky and I can't be tied to an evenings-and-weekend-only schedule if I'm going to find her. My wife says this is "idiotic." Oh, please: "seasonal weather changes." Honestly.

Speaking of perforating: today's flick is Hostel: Part II, Eli Roth's follow up to his seminal horror hit Hostel. For those who follow the blog, I did not have a great opinion of the first flick. Capsule review: Hostel was a great looking gore fest that failed to hide its trashy and cheap core with a shallow cover of awkwardly ill-thought-out anti-Americanism. It was this emptiness at its core, its inarticulate grasping towards anything to say while throwing young bodies into the chopper, that made it, somewhat justly, the poster-flick for the short-lived but much analyzed "torture porn" moment.

With Hostel: Part II Roth found an intellectual purpose sufficient to justify the horror. Instead of relying on a vague and nonsensical notion that the victims of the first flick deserved to be tortured to death by rich foreigners because they are boorish, Roth wisely shifts the guilt from the backpackers to the real villains: dudes and dudettes who would pay money to torture people to death. In this sense, the film is a quantum leap ahead of its predecessor. Unfortunately, putting the film on more solid thematic grounds doesn't entirely eliminate the sense that we've seen most of this material before. Roth now has a good reason to subject us to the horrors of his snuff club, but he's lost the shock value that was such a crucial piece of the first flick's power.

Like the first flick, this film follows the misadventures of three American students – wealthy art students studying in Rome – as they are lured to Slovakia, checked into the titular boarding, and trapped in the pay-to-play abattoir of the first flick. Despite the fact that Roth's changed the gender of his main characters (and made them just slightly less stereotypically the "ugly Americans"), the plot is remarkably similar. We've got two close friends and the outsider third traveler: hotties Beth and Whitney and awkward pity-friend Lorna, played with Dawn "Wiener Dog" Warner gusto by the fabulous Heather Matarazzo. Like the first film, none too subtle hints of homosexuality linger about one of the protagonists. They are even dispatched in the same order as their male counterparts. (I don't think it'll surprise anybody to find out that poor, not-hot Wiener Dog gets it first – being trussed up naked in Roth's most obvious homage to Blood Sucking Freaks and then being bled dry in a literal bloodbath for a client identified as "Mrs. Bathory.") The major change is that Roth has wisely twined this narrative with a parallel story detailing the journey of two clients – Todd and Stuart – as they go from their comfortable upper class yuppie existences to become torturers in the Elite Hunt Clubs slaughterhouse.

In the characters of Todd and Stuart, Roth's finally targeted a rhetorical villain worthy of his nightmare: free market capitalism run amok. This theme hid on the edges of his first film, unacknowledged by a director trying to cash in one an easy generic "Americans are dummies" vibe. While he tried hard to make his backpackers the morally and intellectually bankrupt ones, he was creating a vision of Europe where everything, including people-flesh, was available for a few Euros. And yet that system, the debasing of everything to the level of commodity, seemed to escape his notice. H2 gets the bigger picture and makes it the picture. Roth's second Hostel flick is one of the most effective satires of capitalist ideology I've seen. The flicks most chilling moment comes not in gory torture chambers beneath the post-Soviet brutalist factory in Slovakia, but during a brilliant montage in which a collection of wealthy men and women bid Ebay-style for the right to torture-kill our unwitting heroines. It's a scene made all the more chilling in relation to the recently much publicized scandal involving the ex-governor of New York and an Internet prostitution ring that offered its wealthy clients women ranked and priced for easy purchase. (In a touch Roth would, I think, appreciate, the images of women on the real site always had the prostitutes' heads removed from the picture, giving the weird sense that one was just buying a headless body.)

Roth's new found satiric sharpness is welcome, but it doesn't overcome the biggest problem with Hostel: Part II: we've seen it all before. Roth's best stuff is the new subplot involving the clients – and this film is at is best when showing the bizarre world of the clients and club owners – but he still spends most of his time with the fairly uninteresting and cookie-cutterish victims. Roth doesn't have any sympathy for the victims in his flick. He's made them a bit brighter, a bit less annoying, but they are still there mainly to end up in the torture chair and no amount of characterization tweaking hides that. Given Roth's bent towards the torturers, he'd be better off just making that his focus. The time he spends basically re-shooting his first flick, but with chicks where the dudes used to be, feels wasted.

Hostel: Part II is a mixed bag. Roth finds a framework that really makes the whole concept transcend its original torture porn premise. Unfortunately, it suffers from the fact that we've already become inoculated to his brand of shocks. In a way, the Hostel franchise has fallen victim to its own success.

News: How many remakes of Blood Sucking Freaks does a man need?

Rough times for Hollywood's splat pack. Not long after Grindhouse's poor box office showing handed out notices to numerous folks on the young auteur A-list, Eli Roth (partial director and dubious actor in said flick) get's a stinker to call his own: apparently Hostel II is an underwhelming box office performer. Today, The New York Times asks if the horror boom, fueled by young directors like Roth, is finally running out of petrol. The Times doesn't waver on the issue:

Moviegoers put a nail in the coffin of a dying horror boom this weekend, as 'Hostel: Part II' opened to just $8.8 million in ticket sales, far behind the crime caper 'Oceans' Thirteen' in a three-day period of relatively soft box office performance.

Is horror tired? Are we headed into another lull? I open to the floor to the Screamers and Screamettes. Sound off.