Stuff: Pause for reflection.

Over at The Atlantic, they're using a piece by Nathan Fox - artist of the comic ANTSS just posted about - to illustrate a lightweight think piece called Our Zombies, Ourselves. I'm not sure that writer James Parker drops any science the average ANTSS reader doesn't already know, though he gets points for correctly identifying the earliest known English appearance of zombies: William Seabrook's over-the-top voodoo study, The Magic Island. Plus, he opens with an interesting question to ponder. Why didn't the modern zombie arrive earlier?

The most surprising thing about the modern zombie—indeed, the only surprising thing about the modern zombie—is that he took so long to arrive. His slowness is a proverb, of course: his museumgoer’s shuffle, his hospital plod. Plus he’s a wobbler: the shortest path between two points is seldom the one he takes. Nonetheless, given all that had been going on, we might reasonably have expected the first modern zombies to start showing up around 1919. Twentieth-century man was already moaning and scratching his head; shambling along with bits falling off him; desensitized, industrialized, hollowed out, metaphysically evacuated—A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many … Had some trash visionary produced a novel or play about the brain-eating hordes, or a vers libre epic of viral undeadness, it would have gone down rather well, at this point.

Comics: Don't let the pigeon drive us straight to hell.

In an afterword attached to the tail end of TPB collection of the Pigeons from Hell mini, script from Joe R. Lansdale and art by Nathan Fox and Dave Stewart, essayist and novelist Mark Finn quotes Robert E. Howard discussing his folkloric sources of inspiration:

But no Negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature was hers, and there was no light and mirth in her. Her tales showed what a strange legion of folk-lore grew up in the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Southwest, where transplanted Celtic myths and fairy-tales met and mingled with a sub-stratum of slave legends. My grandmother was but one generation removed from south Ireland and she knew by heart all the tales and superstitions of the folks, black and white, about her.

This bit comes from a letter addressed to H. P. Lovecraft. Howard and Lovecraft had a curious relationship, part mutual fan club and part professional rivalry. This particular missive was part of a multi-year long debate between the two titans of genre lit about the nature of barbarism and civilization. Howard, of course, made romanticizing the noble savage the cornerstone of his writing career. In contrast, Lovecraft viewed the barbaric impulse as atavistic in the worst possible way. For Howard, barbarism was the pulsing will to power that ran through the blood of all men in spite of the softening influences of modern culture; for Lovecraft, barbarism was the bloody nihilistic abyss that lurked underneath the fragile scaffolding of civilized progress. [For a more nuanced take on this debate, check out reader Taranaich's post in the comment section - CRwM]

One imagines that Lovecraft shuddered at Howard's breezy, energetic intellectual miscegenation; for Lovecraft, mixing is almost always equal to tainting. Howard, by contrast, happily suggest that the mutt is always the healthiest dog. Setting aside the unfortunate fact of Lovecraft's view on race, Howard's description of his inspirations points to another, more strictly aesthetic, contrast with Lovecraft. "Pigeons from Hell" actually incorporates the conditions of its own creation as a plot point: just as the story rose from a tangle of sources, the key developments in the story's narrative arise from the interplay of cultures and historical conditions. In Lovecraft, more often than not, humanity is attacked from the outside or brought down by an internal imperfection. Either some eldritch thing that shouldn't be phases into the dimension to melt your brain or you discover you've secretly been a fishman all this time. By contrast, in "Pigeons," we get a horror that is the product of a manmade disaster. The supernatural horror of "Pigeons" is the residue of normal human evil, specifically the evil of slavery. In Howard's work, you get the sense that human behavior can get so bad, it poisons the very earth, leaving behind a lethally toxic spiritual superfund site in need of karmic cleansing. The descendants of the sinners and their victims are doomed to fight the same struggles, paying the same steep costs, until the original conditions of the original violation are finally resolved.

Lansdale, Fox, and Stewart manage to capture the same feeling in their modernized adaptation. The plot, a few "why won't my cell work" moments aside, will be immediately recognizable to readers of the original. Two sisters find out they've inherited a decaying white elephant of a plantation way the hell out in bayou country in New Orleans. They visit it, with a small posse of their city-folk friends in tow, to see if they should tear down the joint and try to sell off the land or simply tear up the deed and forget the rotting pile even exists. What they find, of course, is that the primary crop of the old plantation is market-grade freaky shit. And this freaky shit comes in bulk. Zombies, ghosts, black magic, trees that turn into snakes, monsters - should anybody survive, I think we can all agree the answer is to just tear up the deed.

What's nice about Lansdale's plotting, which reflects a similar arc you'll find in the original, is the value it places on the characters as protagonists. What first appears as an riot of threats and uncanny assaults is, as the characters work through their experience, revealed to be a complex web of supernatural interactions, relationships, alliances, and antagonisms. The plantation isn't just haunted: it's got its own supernatural ecosystem. The benefit of this approach is the sense the reader gets that the agency of the protagonists' is not wasted or superficial. Occasionally Lansdale, either out of loyalty to the source story or unfortunate error, lapses in to overt string-pulling: the most notable instance being the appearance of an ancient African American hoodoo man whose chief power is the ability to conjure up massive amounts of exposition.

I'm on the fence about Fox and Stewart's art. At its best, it reminds me of non-Mignola B.P.R.D. stuff. It has the vibrant line work that seems not so much sketchy as literally shaking with life. In fact, there's often a solidity to the characters that gives them a realistic density on the page that I find lacking in the Hellboy spin-off. The downside is that there's a static, disjointed quality to the art - as if everybody has been posed for still shots and then moved to the next set-up without concern for continuity - that leads to busy, murky panels and action that doesn't flow. That said, I'm inclined toward a thumbs up as I think some of the problem with the art comes from constraints imposed by factors outside the artists control. The project's fair tight pacing requires an insane about of visual information be packed onto every page. This keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, but robs the artists of the room they'd need to really bring their all.

Movies: Credit in the straight world.

If 2009 is remembered as the year the fright fancy and its hordes of posting pro-am pundits saved Paranormal Activity from languishing in obscurity, we should also not that it was the year the nattering nablogs of negativity unjustly killed Jennifer's Body before giving the flick its day in the court of public opinion. We shouldn't be able to trot out the rodomontade without also owning the mea culpa.

With the possible exception of Rob Zombie's second visit to Haddonfield, no movie arrived in theaters with the critical consensus so firmly set to thumbs down. It was an affront the the fraternity of serious horror guy bloggers who, according to at least one post on a major site, viewed it as a ideological Trojan horse meant to sneak feminists behind the genre walls. It was an affront to self-described feminists who defended the existence of feminist horror films, but showed their commitment to the common cause by throwing the then-unreleased flick under the bus. In what surely ranks as 2009's Finest Moment in Horror Blogging, one self-appointed member of the fright fan feminist vigilance committee managed to both advance the cause of feminism and refer to Megan Fox as a "skinny bitch" in a single post. (She was, in all fairness, kinder than her readers, who later burnished their feminist credentials by calling Fox a "bimbo," "trash," "tramp," and, to gain the added rhetorical power of what linguists refer to as the ass force multiplier effect, "tramp ass.") The film's plot was dismissed as stupid - because satanic emo bands are more absurd than, say, an Eastern European gypsy in California throwing a curse on you because her house was foreclosed on or waiting until after you're living with somebody to tell them that you're the target of demonic stalking ("sorry honey, slipped my mind") - and the filmmakers labeled as slumming hacks trying to cash in on the horror boom that loyalists presumably have been supporting for years.

Narratively flawed, ideologically suspect, inherently insulting to its presumed audience, when Jennifer's Body finally came out, it was basically screwed.

If there's a hero of the curious story of JB's cyber-mob induced still birth, it is the author of comment linked to the "skinny bitch" story who wrote, "The film has yet to air. It would be worth viewing before deciding its fem-horror value. I think." Sadly, that proposed standard for horror bloggers remains largely aspirational. It's a sign of the strength of the critical group-think that tends to dominate our blogs that such an obvious statement would be qualified with the conditional "I think," as if it was some incomprehensible personal quirk of the writer's that she preferred people known what the fuck they're talking about before opening their mouths.

In this case, it would have saved us quite a bit of bile. Oddly enough, now that the dust has settled and bloggers have mostly turned their invective at one another for perceived slights in various internet popularity contests, a handful of late viewers catching Jennifer's Body have realized, to almost nobody's surprise, it's a pretty good film.

Helmed by Karyn Kusama and penned by Diablo Cody, Jennifer's Body is a horror tinged comedy that focuses on two friends: the popular, overbearing, and oversexed titular Jennifer and the mousy, submissive, eternal sidekick Needy.

BFF's with less than subtle lesbonic overtones, J and N's relationship is one of those toxic friendships that maintains a rickety semblance of genuine support strictly due to the fact that its deep and regrettable personal costs fall just short of the benefits of the positive emotional feedback loops between the two. Needy surrenders her personality, sexuality, and external relationships to Jen. In one telling episode, she puts all three on the altar of her friendship by ducking out on a night with her boyfriend, dressing according to Jen's required dress code (which ensures Needy won't outshine Jennifer), and plays second fiddle to Jen on one of Jennifer's missions of sexual conquest. The upshot is that she gets regular crumbs of attention from somebody she is unabashedly allowed to adore. Jennifer, in turn, gets to bask in this worship. However, worship comes with its own cost. Jennifer's got to play the goddess, always on, always desired, unfailing, perfect. This circle between the two is so constricted and intense that they've developed an idiolect out of odd rhyming slang, bit of pop culture detritus, and in-jokes that have gone stale and solidified into metaphors. Some critics have, unjustly, attacked Cody's dialogue as over-stylized and a poor reflection of how modern teens talk. This misses the point of the banter between Jennifer and Needy. It isn't how teens talk. Even the other teens in the film don't get it. In one scene, Needy's boyfriend requests some translation help because he's not in on Needy-Jen speak. It's a unique language special to these two people - it's how they talk when they don't see anybody else in the world.

(Since we're on the topic, how the other characters in the film talk is no less stylized, but to a very different and more satiric end. The rest of the teens speak in an allusive language of borrowed emotions. It's a trick used to great effect in Battle Royale. It suggest an emotional life that far outstrips an ability to express it and gets mauled and transformed by the effort to compress it into the containers of received expression. The emotional lives of the young are, from their relative viewpoint, always radically new. Inside the head of each teen, they are the first person on Earth to, say, ever fall in love. But the expressions they have to make this experience make sense are, for the most part, mass produced, cynical, tired, retreads. They borrow words with frustrated conviction, until they grow into us and figure out that life is easier, if less colorful, matching your ideas to fit the tools you're given. The adults, suitably, speak fluently in the comfortable cliches of therapy, public service announcements, and false cheer of institutionalized camaraderie.)

The plot proper kicks off when Jen drag's Needy to a z-grade music club to catch a hopeless also-ran emo group called Low Shoulder (think of a more awkwardly earnest version of the band that actually wins the Battle of the Bands in School of Rock - they're that crappy). Jennifer approaches this as the predator - she's longing to bag one of the band as yet another notch - only to become the prey; under the mistaken notion that Jennifer is a virgin, the band nabs her when the crumby dive their playing goes Station and roasts most of the patrons. Turns out the band is tired of indie obscurity and has decided to sacrifice Jennifer to the devil in exchange for the rock and roll lifestyle that their sub-modest chops cannot provide.

The mechanics of this particular diabolic deal aren't entirely clear. There isn't an opening on Jennifer that is a veritable Holland Tunnel, so the sacrifice ends up with her partial possession by demonic forces. Though it isn't clear whether or not whether or not the forces of darkness deliver for the band. The band does become instantly popular, but it might be due to nothing more remarkable than the media's maudlin cycle of scripted mourning and celebrity worship. Low Shoulder's, in the media retelling of the club fire, become the heroes of the event. Their rep as the band of survivors who risked their lives for their fans catapults them into the limelight. That the movie leaves open the possibility that where the devils fails, the media helps suggests the focus of much of the film's satire. Though, in an irony that Ms. Cody could well be appreciated, the film falls victim to its own joke: In our boundless hunger for semi-disposable tragedy and associated mawkish rituals of heroism, most of us seem to have long forgotten the odd spectacle of the Station fire and the flick's satirical barb loses some of its sharpness.

Post-sacrifice, Jennifer is reborn with a ravenous apatite for human flesh and, when full of boy meat, Wolverine-grade healing powers. One one hand, her evolution from Hall-and-Oates-ish metaphorical man-eater to a genuine eater of men gives Jennifer a weirdly meta-level view of the world she lives in. It's a curious twist in the flick that, despite the physical attractions of Megan Fox, the filmmakers show that Jen never simply seduces the young men she's preys upon. Her first victim approaches her because he is literally lost and Jen offers to lead him back home. When luring her second victim to his doom, she plays off the fact that he's mourning the loss of his best friend. Only her third victim expresses any sort of attraction to her. Curiously, this attraction is a turn-off for Jennifer until she realizes that Needy finds the boy-lunch somewhat attractive, a wrinkle that compels Jennifer to conquer him in part of her obsession with being the only object of adoration in Needy's world. What changes in Jennifer is an awareness that she's no longer playing by the same rules as everybody else in the film. She becomes a sort of emotional/linguistic chameleon, expertly manipulating the vapid store-bought phrases and emotions that the other characters traffic in. (This is another facet of the clever, if thoughtlessly maligned, Cody-speak of the two leads: Their idiolect is jarringly abnormal because, unlike the easy mass language of the people around them, Jennifer and Needy are the only two people who actually talk to one another.) Despite the marketing, sex isn't what Jennifer wields over her victims. Her weapon is a understanding of the drift and confusion of young men and women whose lives, personalities, and thoughts aren't their own. In an interesting counterbalance to this insight, Jennifer never loses her need for Needy's adoration. Perfection isn't the necessary precondition of a state of goddess-hood, but being worshiped is. Jen gains unspeakable power, but it will never be enough because her sense of being is predicated on the adoration of another. In one telling scene, Jen is flexing her new found power by burning her tongue with a lighter and watching it heal instantly. Though, immediately after watching evidence of her newly indestructible nature, she twists slightly and pats her tummy, concerned about possible weight gain. It's a move more vulnerable than vain. We know who she's thinking of. The boys come to the freakin' yard because she can play them like fiddle. She's worried of being less than perfect in the eyes of Needy.

Ultimately, Needy's not down with the whole demonic eating people thing and the two friends face off. The results are satisfying, if somewhat predictable. Cody's script never gets so clever as to lose momentum and Kusama tackles the material with a energetic pop sensibility that keeps things visually pleasing and narratively clear. The results are a darkly humorous outing that manages to deliver the goods without insulting the viewer's intelligence.

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: