Stuff: Does anybody ask mystery writers what crimes they've solved?

The Gray Dame has an nice with-your-coffee-on-Saturday fluff piece that revisits that perennial favorite topic of horror "journalism:" what scares the folk who make the things that scare us? The nice thing about this particular piece is that the NY Times can pull together a list that would be the envy of even the most powerful blogging sites. Their mix of A-list names and notable horror indie types is one of the best horror conclaves I seen in ages.

Movies: 1) Collect dead, 2) ?, 3) profit.

Glenn McQuaid's 2008 period horror comedy, I Sell the Dead, passed the Jess test.

Regular readers will know, but for the newcomers, my wife pretty much hates horror stuff. She'll make a few exceptions: Shaun of the Dead is a household favorite, for example. But, mostly, she's pretty much immune to the genre's pleasures. I don't think this comes from a particular aversion to being frightened. She doesn't mind suspense or even the occasional repulsive image in her entertainments (she is, after all, a mystery reader, so she's not unfamiliar the multitude of crappy ways a person can meet their end). Rather, she's turned off by the thematic focus of most horror films. Too often horror flicks are exercises in genre repetition or experiments in emotional relentlessness. Both of these goals result in a constricted thematic rigor. In the former case, the idea is to hit all the certain marks in an acceptably semi-novel way. In the latter case, you try to strip everything from your thematic palate but the emotion you're magnifying. For Jess this means that, more often than not, she's going to be discomforted and bored. For Jess, watching a horror film is like being trapped on an incredibly uncomfortable bus station seat for two hours. And she forgot to bring a book.

But not I Sell the Dead. A sometimes silly, sometimes biting mash-up of Hammer trashshop glam gothicism, R. L. Stevensonian satiric adventure, and Raimi slapstick horror, I Sell the Dead plays a genre juggling act and manages to keep enough balls in the air to never be just one thing.

The plot of I Sell the Dead revolves around the pre-beheading confession of Arthur Blake. Former apprentice-turned-partner of grave-robber Willy Grimes, Blake is telling his story a priest who is creating one of those wonderful "lives of the scoundrels" pamphlets that our forefathers ostensibly read for moral instruction, but actually read for a violent and sordid glimpse of humanity at it's most corrupt. Blake lays out of tale of how the Grimes/Blake partnership went from plain old grave-robbin' into the far more lucrative field of specialized weirdness collecting. If you need a vampire to study or are looking to get your hands on the corpse of an alien, Willy and Arthur are your men. However, like any lucrative field, strangeness collecting draws competition. In this case, Grimes and Blake find themselves on a collision course with a rival band of grave-robbers who are far worse than any of the supernatural beasties our ghoulish protags have ever dug up.

Much of the film is powered by a handful of great performances. Sadly, Ron Perlman's performance as the priest recording Blake's last words is marred by an awkward attempt at an Irish accent. Though John Speredakos's channeling of Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher makes for a magnetic baddy. And Fessenden's Grimes is one of best etched characters in modern horror film. Alternately predatory and paternal; occasionally wise but so often foolish; he jealously guards his independence despite the fact that he's, at heart, a coward; Fessenden's been in the game long enough to know what makes good characters work isn't consistency, but believable contradiction.

The film's humor runs from dry to broad, and it's helped out by a refreshingly inversion of the standard relationship between the undead and the living. There's a million ways to approach the whole monster thing, but they mostly fall on spectrum of between awe and disenchantment. At one extreme, the monster represents something uncanny, a tear in what should be that is a sort of black hole of understanding. There's a dark and sinister majesty to such beasts. The original Dracula, with his trappings of royalty and its surreal actions, is an iconic exemplar of baddies at this end of the spectrum. At the other end, monsters are threats, exotic and extreme perhaps, but essentially part of the natural order and bound by rules. We might not understand the why of each rule, but the rules are fairly clear. A good example here is Zombieland, with its running gag of zombie safety rules. It's worth noting that disenchantment doesn't require the monsters be given an non-supernatural explanation. Instead, it happens when the phenomena in question becomes so commonplace that people start treating as just another hazard in a world of hazards.

I Sell the Dead is too comedic to be awe-struck, so it's firmly on the disenchanted side of the spectrum. But its sly wit serves up a critique of its very approach. For Grimes and Blake, vampires and zombies are dangerous, but predictable occupational hazards. But, beyond that, they are also exploitable resources. Grimes and Blake never wonder what the persistence of life of death means in spiritual or cosmic terms. When the corpse of an alien is snatched from them by a UFO, their worldview is so limited that, instead of wondering what it might mean that we're not alone in the universe, they simply see it as lost revenue. They don't just live in a disenchanted world. They tame the undead and then turn them into profit. Specifically, they turn them into profit by selling them to collectors and people who want to dissect them. In that sense, what they most resemble is horror filmmakers. And their clients, they're horror fans and bloggers.

Movies: Snow job.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

- "Fire and Ice," Robert Frost

On first seeing the trailer for The Last Winter, Larry Fessenden's snowbound 2006 eco-horror, I thought that it might very well be his The Thing. What, exactly, Fessenden's The Thing would look like, I wasn't sure; but I'd dug his urban vamp tale Habit and was a fan of his previous snowbound monster flick, Wendigo - which actually serves as a prequel to Last Winter in some odd ways – so I was willing to see what shook out. Sadly, the results are decidedly mixed. Often visually pleasing and suitably eerie, the film suffers severely from a too-baggy plot and drama killing scenes of heavy-handed green-guilt exposition.

The movie begins with a corporate propaganda film-within-a-film explaining that, decades prior to the events of The Last Winter, the North corporation (the film's conveniently evil nature exploiter) sent an exploratory well into some frozen patch of desolation nestled in the bleak heart of an enormous stretch of government-owned Alaskan wasteland. The results of that test were never released because changes in government policy locked the company out of public lands. But, to the great joy of starving oil executives everywhere, evil environmentalist fat cats and the political cronies were swept out of office and elected officials more sensitive the press concern of Energy Independence™ were voted in. Now, just miles away from the mysterious and abandoned original test well, a new project is starting up. And progress, by Americans, for Americans, is on the march again!

In practical terms, this means that we get to strand a handful of folks in a claustrophobic base camp – a series of stitched together trailers that, inside, possess all the charm of a particularly sterile DMV – until something cracks or the forces of nature, from plain ol' hypothermia to the more exotic "things man was not meant to know," do them in, which ever comes first.

The Last Winter wears its sources on it sleeve, for better or for worse. One of the better influences is the superlative 1951 Christian Nyby classic Thing from Another Planet. Though now far eclipsed in fan appreciation by the Carpenter remake, I've always admired the original for its characterization. The surly, already somewhat crazed characters of the remake always seemed to me to just be waiting for a chance to turn into paranoid psychos. Like Nicholson in The Shining, they don't give the viewer confidence that the things might have turned out even had outside evil not intruded. By contrast, the characters in the original appear confident, happy, and friendly. They also partake of that Hawksian professionalism: a refreshingly utopian view of competence that makes heroes out of men that know what they are doing and exercise that skill in an ethos of noble responsibility. When stress starts to weigh on them and trust begins to disintegrate, it seems as if the characters have genuinely lost something. The horror of the original Thing is that our best and brightest might find themselves unequal to a task and crumble under the pressure. In contrast, it is almost impossible to imagine what the protagonists in Carpenter's The Thing might actually be studying. Or, for that matter, why anybody would have armed such a hard-drinking, drugged-out, daft, and embittered crew. The research station in the first film resembles a scientific outpost being supplied by a crew of professional soldiers. The research station in the second film resembles a penal colony. Given the choice between these two options, LW tacks towards the original. Sure, the corporate taskmaster (played with familiar gruffness by Ron Perlman) is a bit of a blockhead, and the machinist is perhaps a bit too fond of his booze – but all in all you get the sense of trained folks, working under harsh conditions, to get a real job done. From their dialogue filled with authentic sounding slang to the passive aggressive "office politics," this feels like it takes place in a genuinely adult world. (I got the same refreshing quality of adultness of the demo crew in Session 9.) Whether horror is just innately a juvenile genre or whether modern horror is simply besotted with an infantilizing nostalgia, it is nice to see a horror film that goes against this grain and has genuinely mature characters in it.

Some other great influences positively inform the flick. The stark, snow-blinded visuals of Carpenter's The Thing seem to have inspired Fessenden's beautifully minimalist cinematography (though the cryptic box that marks the sinister old test well seems a nod to the Nyby original). The film even contains nods to Jack London's work, most notably his classic short story "To Build a Fire." The plot's incrementally building tension also calls to mind classic ghost stories. Not so much any particular film, but rather the sort of slow accumulation of incidents that make the characters realize that the entire haunted mansion, boat, graveyard, laundry machine, whatever, is working against them ever leaving. It has that classic structure.

Some other influences don't wear so well. The film contains what appear to be nods to Event Horizon and Resident Evil which, if intentional, makes The Last Winter the most extensive film homage to the works of "auteur" Paul W. S. Anderson yet created. So, um, it's got that going for it.

There's some other snags too.

Perhaps the fatal weakness of making a mostly smart and well-made flick is that what missteps do occur become glaringly obvious. First, after establishing that the characters in this film aren't a bunch of morons, LW requires the characters do quite a few truly boneheaded things. Most notably, when one of the youngest members of the crew goes mad and stumbles out into the artic night in his birthday suit, carrying a camcorder, determined to record the existence of a ghost he claims is haunting him, the footage the rest of the crew recovers clearly shows something bushwacking the crazed and doomed man. Instead of rewinding the film and attempting to figure out what monstrous thing might have just killed one of the crew, the crew chief destroys the tape. Hey, if it is a well-known fact that there's no such thing as monsters, then the camera must be mistaken or crazy too. The last thing anybody needs is a panicky camcorder getting everybody all riled up!

As unfortunate as some of these sudden attacks of the stupid are, they are almost so common in the creature feature subgenre as to constitute a convention in and of themselves. They don't grate as badly intrusive eco-minded monologues and montages which, aside from their horror-killing pedantic tone, feel like out of place, last minute add on. For example, in one of the scenes, one of the station's consulting environmentalists thumbs through a notebook he's keeping and we hear an internal monologue about how everything has collapsed, there is no hope, something it out to get them all, we're all doomed, DOOMED, I say! However, in the very next scene, however, he seems as chipper as the next guy; he's concerned about the environmental impact of the project, but hardly convinced that its ramifications are apocalyptic; and he seems to have pushed the whole "something there is that does not love a drilling station" fear out of his mind.

I don't particularly have a problem with eco-friendly subtexts (in fact, I seem to be on some sort of roll with the green-themed horror stuff, though the trend was unintentional). If that's what fuels the filmmaker's vision, then go to town. The issue is that these somewhat hamfisted interludes clash with the rest of the film's efforts at building an aura of mystery. If the film were entitled Larry Fessenden Explains Global Warming, with Occasional Monsters then the tone would be fine. But the "haunted tundra" vibe's artificiality is highlighted and its menace strangely drained whenever the film fails to trust the viewer to make the necessary connections and smothers the action in an unnecessary coating of exposition.

The end result is a respectable and often eye-catching flick that feels hobbled by the awkward earnestness of its message. It's not a bad film, but it isn't one of Fessenden's best.

Movies: Yet another reason not to live in Manhattan.

Recently my lovely and talented wife, a bookseller who works in Manhattan, told me an unnerving story. She was working one of the later shifts at the shop and, after the long day was done, she and a co-worker decided to head out for a gin and tonic or two at a much beloved nearby watering hole. To get from the shop to drinking establishment, wife and co-worker normally head down Crosby, a charming still-cobblestoned street in the middle of the absurdly upmarket neighborhood of SoHo (the caps there being intentional and typical of the neighborhoods designation – even its typographic representation wallows in unnecessary pretentiousness – says a dude who goes by the nom de blog CRwM). This night, however, as they walked down the street, they noticed that rats were swarming everywhere. Out of every shadow, crisscrossing the street, diving into darkened doorways, swarming over piles of gnawed open trash bags, vanishing and appearing out of imperceptible holes in the storefronts. There were seemingly hundreds of the beasts running in mad zigzags all over the street.

My wife is no wilting flower of Brooklyn womanhood. She was raised on a ranch out in the California desert. Despite the fact that she was wearing open-toed shoes, she turned to her co-worker and said "Follow me." She began to loudly stomp her way down the street, like some drum majorette leading a instrumentless and utterly creeped out parade of one down Vermin Avenue. The strategy, she later explained to me, was derived from her childhood experiences with rattlesnakes. These potentially fatal reptiles were a common feature of the ranch that served as the setting for her youth. The theory goes like this: animals don't want to be fucked with and they don't want to fuck with you. Consequently, most unfortunate animal-human interactions are the result of one or more of the involved parties being surprised. Conclusion: Make a lot of noise and everybody will simply avoid one another.

Apparently, the rats did not understand the theory. Stomping down Crosby Street just seemed to rile them up. As my wife and he friend got further down the street, the rats became frantic. The seemed to swarm in greater numbers, appear in larger bunches, and make weird feinting dashes towards her and her co-worker. As odd as it sounds, the rats – collectively – seem to have concluded that my wife was behaving aggressively and, worse, that they had sufficient numbers to respond in a similarly aggressive manner.

Eventually, concerned that she was somehow escalating the situation to a potential breaking point, my wife decided to retreat. It was the first time I've ever heard of any New Yorker actually altering their travel plans because rats made the normal route impassible. Though I can't say I blame her.

For the record, I never wear open-toed shoes in the city. I know plenty of people who do. When the situation depicted in Jim Mickle's 2006 horror flick, Mulberry Street happen, all those who do will be laughing out the other side of their necks, so to speak.

In Mulberry Street - named after the primary setting, a block of SoHo/Little Italy (about five or six blocks from Crosby Street, where, incidentally, the rat swarm described above happened) - the rats become the vectors of disease that turns humans into nosferatu-looking were-vermin with minimal social skills and taste for human flesh. (Honestly, how come these diseases never turn people into tall, healthy, good-looking, socially-conscious locavores with a insatiable hunger for NPR? A sort of Park Slope plague that makes folks kinda smug, but mostly harmless.) This outbreak wreaks all holy hell on reunion between Clutch, an ex-boxer of no discernable profession, and Casey, his daughter who was recently wounded in one of the various foreign wars America has managed to find its way into. Caught up in this disaster are the other residents of Clutch's apartment building, a set of earnestly developed characters out of central casting who give the proceedings a "Will Eisner's 28 Days Later" feel. The film covers a single 24 period, slowly unfolding the crisis over the course of sweltering hot day and culminating in a classic nocturnal Night of the Living Dead-grade siege.

On first glance, there's not a lot here for the jaded horror fan. You've seen this "zombie" holocaust plot before, tweaks or not. The visuals shift somewhat clumsily between digital hand cam vérité and a jarring lush, overly-edited, and color-washed "edgy" style. The plot is somewhat slow to grind up, the effects and violence are hardly paradigm shifting. Finally, some plot points – notably the sudden reappearance of certain characters here and there – pushes the bounds of belief; no small feat in a flick that features man-eating rat people.

But this assessment undersells the flick, I think. Those who dig on solidly-built genre entertainment will find Mulberry Street delivers on all its promises without condescending to audiences or treating horror archetypes as easy shortcuts.

Building its plot, MS brings an almost Dogme-esque creativity to the problem of creating a citywide disaster on a budget that, for most filmmakers, wouldn't even cover craft services. Through television updates, radio reports, and the clever shooting of street culture as it is lived every day, MS manages to create a genuinely unnerving sense of a city falling apart at the seams. As an example of the rigorous use of every asset available, one of the most effective scenes involves a struggle between infected versus pure-strain humans (to evoke Gamma World terminology) in a bar. What makes this scene stick out is the fact that the bar features a massive projection television. Aside from being a valuable way to deliver exposition without seeming forced, the prop adds a disorienting dimension to the physical conflict that eventually occurs in the bar. The projected images of mass chaos and, later, the color-bars of a dead channel heighten the tension and make for a neato visual effect. Just by exploiting the setting to its fullest, the filmmakers are able to create a surreal effect that gives the whole scene added impact. That's good filmmaking.

The characterization is effective. Though none of the characters rise above the status of generic urban clichés, the filmmakers treat their cast with genuine interest, investing these stock personas with the dignity of archetypes. The ex-boxer, the local flamer, the wounded soldier, the old man who refuses to give over and die, the single mother looking for a good man – they can all be described with thumbnail sketch, but they are treated like they're not disposable. They're a slightly more ragged version of "these are the people in your neighborhood": efficiently spare types that feel more evocative than hollow. This characterization is all the more impacting for the ruthlessness with which the filmmakers treat their characters when the action starts in earnest. When it is time for a character to go, they tend to vanish with a rapid and unsentimental blur, all the more unsettlingly for its deadly flat suddenness.

Oh, yeah, and NYC indie horror fixture Larry Fessenden shows up briefly in the role of "Man Behind the Gate." That's a nice touch.

Mulberry Street reminds me of a perfect garage rock single: its success comes from executing a time tested and fan pleasing formula with energetic enthusiasm and creative confidence.

Movies: She's gotta habit.

Larry Fessenden seems to evoke some pretty visceral reactions. And weirdly, the love/hate demographic seems to divide neatly into IMDB/Netflix clusters. If you're on IMDB, you'll find Fessenden's 1997 vampire flick described as "an indie masterpiece" and "stunning." As for Fessenden, he "embodies much that is great about no-budget, maverick filmmaking." But, lest you think all America has fallen in love with this indie filmmaking scamp, the Netflix folks have given it an underwhelming 2 stars on average. Though many reviewers gush, those reviewers whose star-rating matches the site-average tend to drop the word "pretentious." Perhaps the most energetic suggest you "rent this DVD for the hilarious self-delusion evidenced in the 'Making of' segments." Ouch. (Double ouch because the "making of" features do suffer from this weird navel-gazing self-aggrandizing tone.)

Habit, to get everybody up to speed on the flicker in question, is a low-fi vampire flick that takes place in the somehow still un-gentrified corners of Manhattan. (Despite being filmed on location in 1997, this flick looks like it was filmed on location in 1977.) Sam, an aimless alcoholic bartender reeling from the one-two punch of the death of his father and the loss of his girlfriend, meets the sexy and intriguingly mysterious Anna at a drunken Halloween party. Increasing, Sam is drawn to Anna in a creepy, obsessive sort of way. But Anna's hunger for him seems more, um, utilitarian. Is Anna a vampire? Or has Sam well-pickled mind final given out on him? Duh, duh, dum.

A remake of a shot-on-video film school project that he once showed on a New York cable access television, Habit is an indie flick before that term encompassed such slick fare as Hard Candy. The film has the raw feel of something shot on the fly, taking advantage of what the city streets could offer by way of sets. The cast, with the exception of Anna and Sam, seems to have mostly been amigos of the director. It ain't going win any awards, but it does give the viewer the sense that all the characters are simply random New Yorkers they might run into on any given day. Whether the gains in verisimilitude outweigh the occasional pain of having to watch some really wooden acting is, I suspect, going to depend on how strongly built up your immunities are to the common failings of art house or straight to vid flicks are. I didn't mind it much, but I may be overly lenient in such matters.

All in all, Habit is a smart, innovative twist on a very established subgenre. It weaknesses are typical of the sort of small-scale flick it is and you couldn't call them unexpected. I dug it.

Which leads me to ask, why the violent split in fan opinion?

I think the problem is that Fessenden makes genre films that don't particularly appeal to fans of horror films as fans of horror films. Let me try to unpack that mess of a sentence. Whatever the stylistic concerns of his flicks, Fessenden doesn't seem particularly interested in giving genre fans the horror flick staples that so many find an important part of the genre's pleasures. He doesn't subvert genres or play with viewer expectations. That would be too gimmicky. Instead, he approaches his subjects – all horror archetypes: mad science, vampires, the werewolf, the alien/other invader – as if he were the first guy to ever do such a film. He strips them of their cinematic history, their genre trappings, and the accumulated analysis that cling to them; then he starts again with a template of his devising. With Habit it feels like he's some curious visitor from another planet where they just heard of, say, Dracula. He just doesn't feel the need to carry all the cinema baggage of an entire 70 plus years of filmic adaptation and analysis with him.

The result is a weird sort of freshness that actually levels the playing field between genre fan ad non-fan. The horror fan brings this whole context of vampire cinema to the table only to find out that Fessenden doesn't have any interest in it. What he does to Dracula in Habit is the opposite of what Craven did to slasher flicks in Scream: the film is the opposite of an in-joke and it gives you no extra points for prior knowledge.

I think this accounts for both Fessenden's draw and the reason his films kinda fail it as "horror" movies. With regards to the former, Fessenden's ability to unironically take things back to square one gives his flicks some real energy and life. He's got something of the innately talented primitivism that makes Fuller such an interesting director. With regards to the later, it separates his work from the genre and the pleasures of genre fandom in strangely uninvolved way. He's the horror director who really doesn't care about horror and, for some horror fans, this feels like some high handed intellectual put down – the same feel sci-fi fans get when some author who has clearly written book full of sci-fi tropes tells the press that they don't write sci-fi because that's for kids. In Fessenden's defense, I don't think he means to be dismissive. I think he likes the imaginative of possibilities of horror, but he's just such a singular figure that his flicks might as well their own odd little genre.