Movies: This is sound of what you don't know killing you.

If you haven't seen J. T. Petty's S&Man yet - yeah, I know, the wacky typographical title is off putting, for realz - go watch it and then come back. 'Cause I'm pretty much just going to bust into it as if you've seen it.

Okay? Here's five random observations about S&Man

1.
In an early moment of of J. T. Petty's horror mockumentary S&Man, the titular filmmaker, the charmingly shy and rolly-polly Eric "S&Man" Rost, takes pains to clear up the pronunciation of his ampersand enhanced name: It's said "Sandman," not "S and M Man." Oddly, one imagines the incorrect pronunciation wouldn't be "S and M Man," but rather "S and Man." To pronounce it "S and M Man," you'd have to take a some alpha-phonetic liberties and slide another M in there. Still, the point is the first hint of the film's larger theme.

Sexual violence and S & M are often, but erroneously, conflated. The latter is a performance of the former intended to give at least one of the participants pleasure. The fact that it has this performative distance, that it is "fake" and understood to be so means that it ceases to be simply fake and becomes real, but in another sense. It severs the performance from the reality it supposedly emulates and gives it a new self-referential meaning, which opens it up to levels of irony, camp, style, decadence, and pleasure, that real violence, in its brutal mute presence, does not contain. S & M is the artistic conception of sexual violence. As such, it is devoid of sexual violence. When you make something art, its entire factuality is contained in the fact that it's a work of art. That's its power and allure. Art and the real exist in two parallel dimensions: mirrors of one another, but incommensurably distinct. Where art exists, we live in its depths. Where the real exists, one confronts the deafening silence of art's absence.

For somebody craving the art of S & M, sexual violence remains a destructive and vile negation. On the other hand if, like Eric, one desires to see real sexual violence, no amount of art could slake one's thirst.

Eric testily points that he's not "S and M Man." He informs J. T. Petty, playing himself as a documentarian, that he's "not into that shit." Of course he isn't.

2.
The thorniest problem of horror cinema is the fact that horrors fans, without much pretext, can enjoy watching simulated atrocities. Outside of horror fandom, this is the core problem that gives the genre, despite it's longevity and profitability, the irremovable stigma of being a dubious sort of art. That is why, unlike sci-fi, romance, or any of the other second class genres which are dismissed merely as wastes of time, horror (like porn) remains a genre that is, for many, fundamentally beyond the pale.

This problem gets repressed within the fandom, but like all repressed facts leads to neurotic quirks. The critical discourse of genre, even when sympathetic, is steeped in the language of guilt and complicity. Catharsis theories, for example, attempt to prove that horror is good for mental health - a claim fans of sci-fi would never have to make because nobody takes seriously the proposition that watching science fiction films might be a sign of poor mental health. The famous last girl theory, with its play of complicity and sympathy, attempts to codify a spectator approach that justifies the viewing of simulated mass murder by showing how the fans "side" with the triumphant last would-be victim. Again, this notion that the viewer is innocent by virtue of wanting the almost-victim to win nods to the universal notion that there's something morally complicated about the pleasures of horror. Why proclaim one's innocence if there wasn't ever a question of guilt?

Folk theories - the sort of home grown explanations common to blogs and the like - are just as complicated. One popular, but kinda silly, folk theory is the Mimetic Argument: Horror films are violent because the world is violent. The idea that horror films reflect reality is, for the most part, transparent nonsense. If it were simply a reflection of the violence of the world that horror fans were after, we could just watch old Bumfights tapes and toss away ghost show hokum like Freddy. The world of the horror film is to real violence what the world of romantic comedies is to genuine courtship. For folks stretching for a little more redemption in their horror fare, there's the After School Special Argument: The violence of horror flicks is excusable, even if it is excessive, because horror films are "about something." Curiously, I've actually seen this taken to its logical conclusion, with one blogger sincerely arguing that actual on-screen violence against animals is okay if the real bloodshed is being done to serve a larger dramatic theme. This, of course, is a dodge. Even the average film-goer would agree that extreme imagery is sometimes artistically justified, the moral pickle is one's enjoyment of said extreme imagery.

3.
Petty's S&Man is the most serious contemporary meditation on the nature of the pleasures of horror cinema. In a pleasant surprise, Petty manages to cut the Gordian knot of voyeurism and film-going, divorcing his answer to the persistent problem of horror cinema's irresistible dark glamour from the po-faced self-flagellations of fright flick slummers, from Peeping Tom to Funny Games. Instead, by looking at the "worst of the worst" - the extreme horror underground of faux snuff fetish flicks - and contrasting them with the possibility of genuine death, Petty suggests the possibility of a radical break between representations and the real.

Throughout the film, Petty contrasts his fictional S&Man with a handful of genuine "characters," all playing themselves. Most notably, the delightfully ineloquent and profane Bill Zebub, auteur behind such horror-inflected fetish stroke flick classics as Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist and Kill the Scream Queen. and the curiously frat-boyish Fred Vogel, the infamous director of intestinal fortitude tests known as the August Underground series. These scenes, part expose and part Spinal Tap-ish satire, are some of the most moving segments in the film. Aside from the gonzo, gross out humor, there are several moments that are genuinely chilling and, perhaps more powerfully, genuinely sad. The scene of Bill Zebub taking a long, drunken night to get a single scene of one of his horror/fetish flicks in the can is one of the best comedic scenes ever placed in a horror flick. With its perfect blend of condescension and compassion, cruel exactness and broad sympathy, it's the best statement about bad art since Burton's Ed Wood.

Thematically, these two filmmakers and their work serve as a counterpoint to the fictional Eric and his films. The anarchic slapstick bad taste orgies of Vogel - who brags with almost John Waterish joy that he's got an actress in his stable that can vomit on cue - and the painfully raw fetish salads of Zebub are displayed in noisy, energetic contrast to the long take, static set up minimalism of the flicks in the fictional S&Man film series.

The S&Man flicks are, actually, really dull. If it wasn't for the almost immediate tip of the hand that gave the dangerous aura of snuff cinema, they'd be memorable for their tediousness. By contrast, the z-grade flicks of Vogel and Zebub are busting with life. The action's hectic - Vogel's clips spill into the film like mutant Marx Bros segments, chaotic to the point of incomprehension and filled with fourth wall breaking bits - and often, once you get past the stomach churning aspects of them, quite silly. More importantly, they - the films and the filmmakers - are products of an artistic subculture. They are reacting to other works and artists, attempting to expand, undermine, or innovate the boundaries of the genre as they know it. In one telling scene, after learning that Vogel employs an actress who is a cutter and who cuts herself in his latest flick, we see get a clip of Zebub working some self-cutting into his latest work.

Though the pleasures, if that's what one calls them, of Vogel and Zebub's work are more extreme than most horror fans care for, the dynamic here is familiar and can be found throughout the genre. Horror is more than self-reflexive; it's a competitive sport. Horror filmmakers are constantly pushing the parameters of previous work in a game of artistic one-up-manship. And it's this relationship, this closed world, that Petty indicates as the source of the joys of horror films. Horror films are not about death or the release of the primal id or the need to psychically unburden one's troubled soul or the latest headlines and echo chamber politics; the joy of a good horror film comes from witnessing the art of the film. Humans respond with pleasure to the well crafted work of art. Thankfully for Vogel and Zebub, the definition of well crafted is pretty flexible. Still, Petty suggests the pleasure of horror spectatorship is located in witnessing the evolution of the subcultural form, of watching something embrace the norms we no and successfully exploit or innovate them.

Eric's work, quiet and seemingly unaware of the audience, is something more like outsider art. He's not a horror filmmaker. His work is about death. It doesn't belong to an artistic community, but belongs to the empty void of fact.

4.
In a brilliantly illuminating role, Dr. Carol "Women and Chainsaws" Clover, playing herself, provides the film's academic gravitas. Seriously, as much as I question her thesis about the whole final girl thing, I could have watched another hour of Clover talkin' head footage: She's that articulate, effortlessly insightful, and genuinely invested in the topic of horror. Somebody shoot the Clover doc, pronto.

5.
Of course, with a thesis that posits an impassable gap between the real and the fake, Petty paints himself into a corner: You can't have Eric the S&Man in the flick as the avatar of reality as you've just proposed that the real needs no avatars and an alleged avatars are, automatically, fakers. (When citing cases of "real horror" it is telling that Petty and Clover both cite instances of genuine violence that, curiously enough, were staged for video or still cameras.) Which I believe explains the somewhat unsatisfying end when Petty seemingly helps Eric off Petty's girlfriend in order to film the death. It's a jarring narrative contrivance, but I think it is meant to appear so. If Petty's right, Eric must end the film being dragged into the clear and unmistakable fictitiousness.

Movies: Piggly wiggly.

In Teddy Wayne's upcoming novel Kapitoil, a fable of business and family ethics set on Wall Street in dwindling twilight of the 20th Century, Qatar (pronounced like "cotter" and not "kay tar," I've just recently learned after a lifetime of mispronunciation) white collar migrant programmer and mathematical genius Karim Issar is invited to the Limelight by two co-workers. The co-workers use the popular ten point scale to evaluate the appearance of the women in the club. Karim, the narrator of the novel, observes:

They observe the dance floor and and assign ratings to different females from 1 to 10. They say an overweight female is "the worst" and is "four 40s deep," and rate her a 1, which means 1-10 is a poor scale, because it assigns a point even when someone is "the worst" and there exists only a 9-point range.

A friend joins the overweight female, and she is additionally overweight, and Dan says she's "even nastier" and also assigns her a 1, even though if she is in fact inferior, she should receive less than 1 (or the first female's rating should retroactively rise slightly). This is why the Y2K bug is happening: Humans usually do not anticipate what comes next after what initially seems to be the limit, so they programmed their computers to function up to the year 1999 and not 2000. Even Jefferson and Dan, who are resolving this problem nonstop, did not consider the maximum-limit issue in this context. But possibly it is because they have been drinking alcohol, and also they are not the most considerate people.

This passage sprang to mind while watching Kim-Jin Won's 2007 horror flick, The Butcher. I couldn't help think of those critics who suggested that flicks like Hostel and Saw were about nothing but the physical act of torturing people. They were ultra-thin works devoid of sub-, con-, or urtext. It was just about the image of the human body being put under extreme physical duress. Honestly, this appeal to meaninglessness is almost always the last refuge of the useless critic. All expressions, no matter how vapid, are born of time and place and directed by human intention. There's always something beyond the literal.

(NB to bloggers still riding the dead "about nothing" horse, the smart critic has moved on to "it's got no soul" as their non-point point of choice. It's a vague, yet nuanced sounding critique that the film in question lacks the key, but intangible essence of authenticity. Though criticizing a flick for not having something that you can't define or identify is no less lame as critical position, it places you in a comfortably religious realm of argumentation: the existence of soul - as either a religious concept or a aesthetic principle - is simply a matter of faith and those who disagree with you are simply non-believers, to be pitied or demonized as needed. The argument has a ruthlessly mindless efficiency in that it doesn't invite counter-argument the way claims of meaninglessness inevitably do.)

More importantly, The Butcher, like the proverbial second fat chick, forces us to reevaluate what we assumed was the limit of torture porn. If the Hostel franchise, with its ugly American characters and the overt reworking of free market logic as deathtrap, was the zero point of meaning, the The Butcher either dips into negative numbers or forces us to start adding numbers to our ranking of Hostel.

A stripped down, real-time experiment in brutalizing the audience, The Butcher takes the framework of the infamous torture porn subgenre and distills it, boiling the concept down to a starkly unpleasant 75 minutes. In that time the film asks a single question of the viewer, "How much suffering would you take before you sacrificed another to end it?"

Set in an abandoned industrial fossil, the real-time film covers a single shoot by a trio of snuff filmmakers. The flick fuses the first person POV approach of Blair Witch and [REC] to the hyper-squalor vibe of torture porn: The film is cobbled together from footage shot by the snuff filmmakers and footage shot from cams attached to head harnesses strapped to each of the victims. There's the nameless director, his assistant, and their hulking star: a massive, violent, inarticulate monster who wears a pig mask throughout the flick and is identified by the filmmakers simply as "the Pig." The filmmakers alternate between maniacal bloodlust and clock-watching boredom. The director takes a call from his church-going mother. He and his assistant discuss the difficulty of getting good victims and the nature of the market (the American market is especially ravenous when it comes to their product, we're told). Absurdly convinced of their own value, jealous of their prerogatives as "artists," yet desensitized and incapable of human sympathy (perhaps the sole prerequisite of artists) as death camp doctors, the director and assistant anchor the film with their oddly inhuman presence. Their skewed values - they see Americans as perverse for craving their product, but that a strange professional pride in cranking out snuff - tempt the viewer to consider the whole film as an satire on the hyper-stylized violence and clumsy moralism of Korea's contribution to the "Asian extreme" genre.

Satire or not, they make for great villains. Though the link is most certainly unintended, the bizarro professional pride of the filmmakers reminded me of the lamentations of Wall Street bankers post-collapse. In their ability to sever their moral compunctions from the professional act of feeding a market for which they felt nothing but contempt, the snuff filmmakers of The Butcher perfectly, if unintentionally, represents banal professional evil. When you hear the filmmakers bitch about their work conditions, you get the same little throw-up in you mouth that you get when you hear some architect of the Great Recession wonder, "Why aren't they grateful?"

The exception to this is "the Pig." A too-obvious borrowing from Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the Pig is naked copy of Leatherface. That said, I think Won should at least be given credit for emphasizing some of the characteristics that make Leatherface memorable. Like his original, Pig has an odd relationship with the "family" of filmmakers around him. He's a prima donna. Moody, excitable, easily offended, but also desperate to be praised, the Pig seems to throb with a thoughtless murderous energy that is barely kept in check by the surreal professionalism of the other two filmmakers. This vibe of monstrous childishness is often lacking from the descendants of Leatherface, but the Pig's got it.

These filmmakers start with four victims: two men, two women. The victims are bound at the wrists and ankles. They have ball gags in their mouths. The assistant reveals that two of the victims, are actually married. The other two are strangers. That's all we ever learn about the victims. The married victims have names, but they aren't particularly important to the "plot," such as it is. We're going to develop a quick nomenclature system right here to distinguish these basically interchangeable meat slabs: married male = V1, married female = V2, unmarried male = V3, and unmarried female = V4.

The plot: After some shop chat, the filmmakers decide V2 should be the first to go. When V1 protests, he's beaten until his vomits on himself. V2 is dragged to the slaughter chamber and Pig decides that he doesn't like her smell and refuses to kill her. The director and his assistant decide daylight is burning and swap out V2 with a double header of V3 and V4. Off-screen, we here them get dispatched noisily and quickly. Turns out Pig got overly excited and failed to drag out the murders to a suitable running time.

Distraught as the waste of victims, the filmmakers drag V1 and V2 into the now blood-soaked slaughter chamber. The director cuts a deal with V1, if he can withstand 10 minutes of torture without asking the filmmakers to quit, then the filmmakers will let his wife go unharmed. Failure to last the full ten minutes means the filmmakers will kill V1 and his wife. V1 agrees and the Pig goes to work. First V1 is beaten with a hammer about the head and neck. Buzzed with bloodlust, the Pig then rapes V1 for a minute or two. Finally, Pig takes a chainsaw and chops V1's left hand in half.

This breaks V1. He begins to beg the director to stop the torture. Because V1 was unable to last the full ten minutes, the filmmakers turn to kill V2. V1 begs for a second chance. The director offers an alternative deal. Seems the director feels the snuff op has gotten in a creative rut. There's more than one way to skin a human, but the filmmakers feel they've pushed the whole extreme slaughter thing as far as it can go. If V1 can provide them with a truly novel idea for killing V2, then the director will let him go. No new ideas and the filmmakers will kill both of them. Faced with the prospect of more pain, V1 embraces his new role as slaughter consultant and provides the killers with a novelly grotesque way to dispatch his wife, V2. The director approves of the new plan and they let V1 go.

V1 limps his way out the ruin/studio, incurring even more damage when he steps in a particularly nasty bear trap left around by the filmmakers to deter snoopers. Meanwhile, the filmmakers begin to execute V1's plan for killing his wife. The Pig, overzealous in his duties, offs V2 before the filmmakers can fully execute V1's plan. Foiled twice in one day, they give chase to V1 who manages to escape by stealing one of the filmmakers' cars. Safely away, V1 breaks down and cries.

Roll credits.

Weirdly paced, lacking dynamic characters (though not devoid of characterization), hanging on a barebones plot, filled with dialogue that's mostly grunts and screams, and hinging on profound betrayal that makes the sole survivor's victory of impossible odds a bitter triumph that forces the view to wonder if death wouldn't have been better, The Butcher is a thoroughly unpleasant film. And, for now, it may well represent the height (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of the torture porn aesthetic. And, as such, it makes for an interesting test case for some of the claims made about the subgenre.

First, despite The Butcher's refusal to add backstory to the elements within the film, even this minimalist assault on the senses isn't without context or broader meaning. The filmmakers are an acid etched portrait of Won's perception of the South Korean film game circa '07. Long protected by an isolationist quota system, Korean filmmakers could depend on a certain marketshare by virtue of government mandate (similar systems exist in countries all over the world as bulwarks against what's perceived as American cultural imperialism). In '07, the Korean quota system crumbled. In a free market, Korean filmmakers saw their marketshare evaporate to imports. The negative impact of the removal of government protection was exacerbated by the spectacular failure of several big budget homegrown productions. Increasingly, filmmakers turned their attention to the production of extremely violent productions meant for overseas consumption - films meant to be gobbled up by an American audience with a seemingly unquenchable appetite for films in which Asians do horribly violent things to one another. The Butcher shows this cultural logic taken to its absurd extreme: the sacrifice of local value for a degrading product meant to appeal to foreigners hungry for exploitative fare. Arguably, The Butcher, made outside the studio system for a pittance, is exactly the kind of film it professes to mock, though I have my doubts. Compared to stylish fare like Oldboy, The Butcher tries hard to avoid entertaining the audience. It alternates between tedium and discomforting imagery in a way that's meant to abuse the viewer rather than pander. Of course, there will always be people who find that entertaining. Whether that makes Won's film insincere or foolish rather than biting is something individual viewers have to decide.

Second, this raw "torture porn" flick complicates the idea that the point of torture porn is the sick thrill of allowing the viewers to vicariously torture folks. In fact, a majority of flicks in the subgenre focus intensely on the victim's experience rather than the experience of the torturer. By locking most of the film into the literal POV of the victims, The Butcher gives this thematic logic is purest visual expression. Any critical assessment of the subgerne predicated on the notion of identification with the torturer fails to reflect the prevalence of this victim-centric experience.

Third, The Butcher reflects an important aspect of the subgenre in that it is a film produced outside the states. The impact of torture porn on American horror cinema is vastly overstated by critics. Recently I read the blog of film studies professor who lamented that her students tastes ran towards the "torture porn fare Hollywood has been pumping out in spades." In spades? After the disastrous crash and burn of Captivity, only a single franchise in the subgenre seems to have any life in it - Saw - and even that is reportedly shutting down after the next installment. Compared to the endless flood of zombie-fare, torture porn was a minor blip on the Hollywood scene. The subgenre's afterlife has mostly been in foreign productions, where its found a home in the cultish "extreme" currents of various national cinemas.

More a curiosity for those who view horror as a sort of emotional endurance test than an enjoyable film, The Butcher is a near perfect example of the horror genre's least understood, most maligned subgenre and a stands as a challenge to professional and amateur critical establishment that has never developed an approach for dealing with the inevitable consequences of the concept of fear as entertainment.

Link Proliferation: And tell her that her lonely nights are over.

We have a winner!

Here's the winner board for the "Tales from the Captcha" contest:

Troy Z wins the big ol' first season of Tales from the Crypt.
OCKerouac wins Billy the Kid's Old Time Oddities.
Sasquatchan has himself a slightly new copy of The Cobbler's Monster.

If you guys could shoot me an email at the following address: [my nom de blog]44@yahoo.com. Let me know where I can send these bad boys and you get them promptly.

Winners were selected at random from the entry pool. If you didn't win this time, I want you to meditate on what you might have done to earn such bad karma that the mysterious forces of randomness at work in the universe have it out for you.


Mutually interred destruction

I'm not a big Metallica fan. In fact, my level of fandom is somewhere between "active avoidance" and "vast indifference." However, their latest video – brought to my attention by the mad genius behind the delightful The Horror!? blog – used animation, "found footage," CGI, and first person camera work to reconstruct a Soviet plan to close the nuclear missile gap with zombie-making spores. It's pretty boss and you can listen to it on mute if Metallica ain't your bag.




Col' lampin'

I have nothing to add other than this very concept makes me all giggly.


And operator, please reverse the charges

From Screamin' Dave over at Forbes' Digital Download blog, the new Ghostbusters videogame trailer.

Regardless of what the trailer does or does not do for you, can we all admit that the bit of concept art below is some of the craziest crap we've ever seen connected to the 'Buster franchise?

Bring me a dream

Over at Horror's Not Dead, Mr. Hall suffers J. T. Petty's faux snuff mockumentary S&Man. His description of the movie is amazing, but what will get your noodle turning about is the following claim:

It matters not whether the Sandman tapes are real, whether Eric Rost is a real person or just a character. He is a parable for a reality we all know exists. There are people who have made real snuff films. There are people who have sought out real snuff films. More frightening than that, no past tense is needed in those sentences. People still make them. There exists today a market for videotapes of real rape, of real torture and of real murder. Or, failing that availability, as close as possible as anyone is willing to simulate.

I can’t think of anything that disturbs me more.

Excluding the claim that there's a snuff market out there – which remains the snuff of urban legend, as it were – is there a moral equivalence between watching simulated snuff and the real thing? If something is simulated so well that it is indistinguishable from the real thing, is the moral cost of consuming it indistinguishable from the real thing?

Victim-dar

New Scientist reports a weird correlation between psychopathic tendencies and the ability to recall biographical details of "vulnerable victims." Or, more simply, psychos have victim radar.

From the article:

Contrary to popular belief, most psychopaths are not Jack the Ripper types - often they have never committed a violent crime. But as many as one in 100 people display antisocial behaviours deemed psychopathic. Chief among these is a callous ability to manipulate other people to fulfill their own desires.

To investigate this behaviour, Kevin Wilson of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and colleagues put 44 male college students into two groups according to their scores on a test that measures psychopathic traits. "None of these students qualified as psychopaths, but some did have behaviours associated with psychopaths," says Wilson.

The students were shown a series of faces, each accompanied by a name, a job and details about interests and hobbies. When later asked to recall the details, those with more psychopathic-like behaviours were better at describing sad-looking and unsuccessful females than the normal group, especially details about the women's lives.

So ladies, do try not to be sad-looking and unsuccessful.


The dead travel fast

Over at the made-of-awesome Human Marvels site, there's the tale of Elmer McCurdy, former bank robber and wandering corpse.

In life Elmer McCurdy wasn’t anything special. Elmer wasn’t really unique or extraordinary. It was only following his demise that Elmer amounted to much of anything, when his corpse became famous and the stuff of urban legends.


Maybe this is why Euro-horror seems so lame to me

Over at the Neurophilosophy blog, there's a nice write up a recent study that suggests that expression of the biological fear response may be culture-specific, a case of nature being nurtured.

From the article:

The new study was led by Joan Chiao of the Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University. 22 volunteers were recruited for the study; 10 were Caucasians living in the United States, and the remaining 12 were native Japanese living in Japan. All the participants were presented with a series of pictures of 80 faces, each for 1.5 seconds, and each depicting an American or a Japanese person expressing either a fearful, happy, angry or neutral facial expression. Their neural responses to the facial expressions in the pictures were measured using functional neuroimaging.

The results:

Both groups of participants could recognize the emotions depicted in the pictures very accurately. Interestingly though, the Japanese participants were significantly quicker in recognizing fear in all the pictures, while the Americans were significantly more accurate at recognizing fear in pictures of people from their own culture. More importantly, the response of the amygdala was increased when the participants recognized fear in pictures of members of their own cultural group relative to others. Hemispheric differences were also observed: the increase in amygdala activity in response to fear recognition in own-culture faces was significantly greater in the right amygdala than in the left. By contrast, no significant differences in amygdala activity was observed when the participants viewed pictures of happy, angry or neutral expressions.

Earlier neuroimaging studies have shown that white Americans show an increased response in the amygdala when presented, either consciously or unconsciously, with pictures of black Americans with neutral expressions. By contrast, no differences in the response to neutral faces of either cultural group were observed in this study, even though Americans often hold positive sterotypes of Asians. Thus, the earlier observations may have been due to cultural knowledge of the negative sterotypes about African-Americans, rather than negative stereotypes of members of other ethnic groups per se. This is supported by the finding in the earlier studies that black Americans also exhibit increased activity in the amygdala in response to pictures of black people with neutral expressions.

Sir Larry's "Hard Day's Night"

This has nothing to do with horror. But it's pretty funny.

Here's Peter Seller's doing the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" in the manner of Olivier's take on Shakespeare's Richard III. Don't try to wrap your head around that description, just watch.



Have a great weekend, my little Screamers and Screamettes.