Stuff: "I have a problem with mirrors."

Over in the UK, the Portsmouth branch of the National Health Service (NHS) is trying to combat what the BBC delicately calls the region's "traditionally poor levels of dental health" with a new public service campaign. Bad teeth? Solution: vampires. Enjoy.

Due to Blogger's sudden inability to size video worth a damn, I'll also provide this link to AdWeek, where you can see the ad in its full ratio aspect: Take me to where they know how a video should treated!

Stuff: "What's nice about Selphyl is you're only using that person's blood."

It's a good Wednesday when you get to announce a "vampire body modification link dump." If only 'cause it's fun to type the phrase "vampire body modification."

Link the first! Unlike vampires, who stay sparkly fresh for all eternity, pure strain humans get old. It's true. Along with nipples on men, confirmation bias, and the fact that at least one of us became Daniel Tosh, it ranks one of homo sapiens' most notable design flaws. And, while you'll still eventually die, the "vampire face-lift" can help ensure that your corpse's face is pleasingly wrinkle-free. The procedure gets its name from the fact that plastic surgeons use the patient's own blood to fight the wrinkles. From the ABC News article:

The technology is called Selphyl, and it involves injecting a mixture of blood products into the affected areas. It's also called the "vampire face-lift," although calling it a face-lift is not accurate. Selphyl is a nonsurgical procedure akin to filler injections, while a face-lift is the surgical repositioning of facial tissues that have become loose over time.

Curiously, the procedure's ghastly nickname seems to be part of the draw. Again, from the article:

"I think this whole recent theme in the entertainment industry ... of using vampire, Dracula themes, has definitely caused a lot of the interest out there," Berger said.

Perhaps this marks some final stage in the vampire's transformation from folk nightmare to harmless pop confection: the use of the term vampire can now make a somewhat grisly-sounding product more palatable to the market.

Link the second! The Sun has a brief profile of lawyer and tattoo artist Maria Jose Cristerna, a.k.a. "Vampire Woman." Cristerna, pictured above . . .

. . . says constant beatings and abuse at home triggered her reinvention and led her to ink nearly 100 per cent of her body.

Maria has also added multiple piercings to her face and titanium implants to create "horns" under the skin on her temples and forehead.

The mum-of-four, 35, has even had dental implants to create "fangs" to complete her look — but claims to live a "normal life".

The smirkingly superior attitude of The Sun aside – I see what you're doing with the "claims" bit there – she's a fascinating, and even inspiring woman.

Books: Sure it's the end of life as we know it, but it didn't cost a dime.

From the point of view of a vampire, the zombie holocaust would look like a human version of a global mad cow disease outbreak or, perhaps, something along the lines of current climate change thinking: it's a threat, but the majority of us don't really feel threatened yet, and there are too many short term incentives for too many of us to avoid rallying around such an abstract cause.

This is the premise of "The Extinction Parade," a free online story by Max Brooks, author of World War Z.

That's right, free as in "no money." Yeah, I know! Right?!?!

True Crime: "I still have 83 more women to kill."

The francophone Afrik News has a story on the proliferation of serial killers across Africa and the unique problems they pose to nations that often lack the investigative and communication infrastructures to identify, track, and capture such criminals. Drawing extensively from the work of Stéphane Bourgoin, an expert on African serial killers, the article paints a nightmarish portrait of these predators. Along with the police organization and data sharing issues that would hound detectives and researchers in any country, the article points out the way in which local cultural traditions can, for lack of a better word, normalize serial killing in some African communities. From the article:

And while these rampant murders are are sometimes not linked to tradition, most of them are. In southern Africa, sangomas [midwives, healers and soothsayers] call on hired killers who, for the pleasure of killing end up as serial killers, provide them with some of their tools of work. The sangomas sometimes prepare concoctions containing human body parts. A beverage brewed from a child’s sexual organ, for example, is believed to cure impotence.

"Muti killings", murders committed by puncturing the organs of a living person, is the cause of hundreds of deaths per year. "Africa registers more crimes related to cannibalism and vampirism than anywhere else in the world". Eating someone means capturing the soul and spirit of that person. And the victims’ blood are believed to contain life. It is no secret that fetish priests and some traditional worshipers believe that by drinking human blood they either become immortal or are reborn. "This kind of belief explains the acts committed by the two Kenyan serial killers: Philip Onyancha, who drank the blood of his victims and George Otieno Okoth, who collected human hair.

Besides the "muti killings", it can be noted that across Sub-Sahara Africa, many of those often labeled as witches or wizards, mostly by fetish priests, are poisoned, drowned, hacked to death with machetes or buried alive at will in an attempt to deliver their souls from the snare of the ‘devil’. Here again, a killer could evoke witchcraft in order to be given the leeway to kill to satisfy his whim. Only last year, a Zimbabwean judge, Justice Ndou, ruled that 32 year old Vusumuzi Ndlovu’s unshakable belief in witchcraft was an extenuating factor to spare him from the southern African country’s legally imposed punishment, after he killed his neighbor whom he accused of witchcraft.

The title of this post comes from Philip Onyancha, shown under arrest above.

Stuff: Because owning a silver cross you could maybe melt down into a bullet isn't really "werewolf insurance."

I don't often get the chance to throw a link to an insurance site up on ANTSS, so when it does happen I feel weirdly elated. Term Life Insurance, of all folks, has actually whipped up the following table of super serious, very real threats for you to ponder when you debate just what sort of coverage you need. Click to read the whole thing.

Via: Term Life Insurance

Movies: Fangbanging in the BK.

Brooklyn's own BAMcinématek has come up with a pretty good alternative to roasting outdoors and sweating your way through the dregs of the summer. Their new series, Bela Lugosi's Dead, Vampires Live Forever, gives you a reason to hide in darkened, air-conditioned theaters for the rest of the summer. Highlights include:

• Live musical accompaniment for Murnau's silent classic, Nosferatu
• Probably one of the few chances you'll get to see the Hammer lesbo vamp flick The Vampire Lovers on the big screen
• The Spanish language version of Browning's 1931 vamp cinema milestone Dracula
• The wry art house vamp flick Nadja followed by a Q&A with the director Michael Almereyda

There's nine flicks on the slate and the whole runs throughout August.

Mad science: All the dead are vampires.

Vampires are essentially a Romantic and Victorian phenomenon. Prior to that, a vampire was one of any number of distinct and mostly unrelated local folk beasties. But an explosion of vampiric literature and art in the 19th century began to establish, for what would ultimately become a global audience, the norms for vampires. With the exception of the wonderful Chinese jumping vampire, almost all notions of what a vampire is pretty much a reaction to the Romantic/Victorian template, itself a massive constriction of the diverse and regional sense of the term. (That last bit is worth noting when encountering purists' arguments about what should and should not be considered a real vampire: There's no original vampire; it was always already a mess of different influences, original inspirations, and second-hand ideas.)

At the Chronicle of High Education, science writer turned horror anthology editor Michael Sims attempts to find the cultural and scientific roots of the Victorian vampire boom. And he comes up with some neat ideas:

The vampire story as we know it was born in the early 19th century, as the wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence. But in writing these depraved tales, Byron and Polidori and company were refining the raw ore of peasant superstition. And the peasant brain had simply been doing what the human brain does best: sorting information into explanatory narratives.

I found lots of reports of vampires from Europe—from urban France, rural Russia, the islands of Greece, the mountains of Romania. Along the way, I was reminded of something I already knew but hadn't thought of as relevant in this context: During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dead bodies were a common sight. Plague and countless other illnesses ravaged every community. Corpses of the executed and tortured were displayed in public as warnings, even left hanging as they decomposed.

Few bodies seemed to rest peacefully even in the ground. Often people in the 18th century had an opportunity not only to see corpses but also to glimpse them again after they were buried. Urban cemeteries were densely overcrowded, sometimes with the dead stacked several graves deep, causing horrific spillage during floods or earthquakes. More corpses than the ground could accommodate resulted in the stench of decay and the constant risk of disease. Grave desecration was also common; a thriving trade in illicit cadavers for medical students joined a vicious rivalry between competing religious groups. After Louis XIV abolished the convent at Port-Royal des Champs as a hotbed of Jansenist heresy, drunken locals dug up nuns' bodies from the cemetery and fed them to their dogs. Corpses of executed heretics were dragged through the streets, then reburied in too-small graves by breaking the body into small pieces.

Sims thinks this familiarity of death lead to the development of erroneous notions about what death should look like: a corpse gently sleeping for eternity. The actual messy process of decay is not so pleasant. And this unpleasantness was interpreted as something out of the norm.

As I continued digging into the literature, I wondered: If ordinary people were encountering the corpses of the recently dead or even long-dead friends and relatives, what were they actually seeing that they misinterpreted and then wove into a vampire mythology? Not surprisingly, no one understood the process of decay within a subterranean chamber. They had no forensic body farm at which to chart a corpse's fade from nauseating stink to cautionary bones.

Any variation from "normal" in the grave provoked fear, yet there isn't really much of a norm in the process of decay under different circumstances. Some coffins protect their residents better than others. Lime helps preserve a body, as do clay soil and low humidity. Graves in different climates and latitudes vary, depending upon air temperature and humidity, soil composition, and insects, not to mention those invisible sanitation workers who turn us all back into the dust from which we came—and of course in the 18th century, no one knew that such creatures existed.

Many natural changes after death were judged to be evidence that the late lamented had turned into a bloodsucker. Like hair, fingernails don't actually continue to grow after death, but as fingers decompose, the skin shrinks, making the nails look abnormally long and clawlike. You begin to look as if you're turning into a predatory animal. Dead skin, after sloughing off its top layer, can look flushed and alive as if with fresh blood. Damp soil's chemicals can produce in the skin a waxy secretion, sometimes brownish or even white, from fat and protein—adipocere, "grave wax." In one eyewitness account from the 18th century, a vampire is even found—further proof of his vile nature—to have a certain region of his anatomy in a posthumous state of excitement. The genitals often inflate during the process of decomposition.

And what about the blood reported around the mouths of resurrected corpses? That too has a natural explanation. Without the heart as a pump to keep it circulating, blood follows the path of least resistance. Many bodies were buried face down, resulting in blood pooling in the face and leaving it looking flushed. Sometimes blood also gets lifted mouthward by gases from decomposition. Vampire stories recognize that death is messy.

It's interesting stuff. Plus, Sims found this brilliant quote:

The scholar Marie-Hélène Huet sums up the subtext of many early vampire accounts: "All the dead are vampires, poisoning the air, the blood, the life of the living, contaminating their body and their soul, robbing them of their sanity."

Stuff: George Romero pulls an evil Captain Kirk from episode 37.

Over at the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough attempts a Marxist interpretation of the popularity of vampires and zombies:

Maybe Karl Marx, wrong about so much in the real world, could offer some clarification in the realm of make-believe. Could vampires, like the filthy rich, parasitic, aristocratic, and charismatic Cullens, be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies, those lumpen, lurching, mass-consuming legions, could they stand for labor and the proletariat? If so, vampire movies would embody the audience’s anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse. And zombie movies would touch on the dread of — and wish for — an uprising of the working against those same exploiters.

Aside from the analysis itself, Keough gives us a little gem of a reaction shot from the father of the modern zombie flick:

Not even George A. Romero, who as much as anyone can take credit for the zombie phenomenon — spawning it as he did back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead — can explain why they do this. “I don’t get it,” he remarked about these undead wannabes when I interviewed him recently about his newly released sixth film in his zombie franchise, Survival of the Dead, which opens next week. “You just want to say, ‘Get a life.’ ”

Wow. The dude responsible for Diary of the Dead thinks you're the one who needs to get over the whole zombie thing.

Comics: All aboard that's going aboard.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is an oddly uneven book. It's front-heavy. All the great stuff - Harker's time in Drac's castle; the voyage of the Demeter; Lucy's transformation, death, resurrection, and destruction - happens in the first half or two-thirds of the book. With the possible exception of vampiration interruptus scene, a near perfect vision of the Victorian nightmare projection of sexuality, the last third's pretty slow going. Though we're meant to get the feeling of mad dash through Europe, the result is a strangely emotionless list of ports of call and overland routes, punctuated by repetitious portents from Mina, and ending in a dud fight that end's the count's bloody undeath in an almost exhausted way. Consequently, when artists of various types take up the threads of Stoker's original, it's almost always elements from the early portion of the novel that they focus on. Prequels that give us backstory for Dracula and his three wives, for example, pick up the somewhat hanging thread of the monstrous femme vamps of Drac's mini-harem.

Personally, my favorite episode has always been the short, but sweet log of the doomed cargo ship Demeter. For those who have never read the book, the Demeter is the unlucky ship that has the displeasure of shipping Drac's coffin from mainland Europe to England. Unfortunately for the crew, the count wakes up hungry and starts picking off the sailors one by one. The whole incident is related through the captain's log, so the presence of Dracula is never fully revealed; he's nothing but shadows and fear, a creeping absence, a roll call of names of the missing. In a brilliant closing move on Stoker's part, the bit ends with the lone captain writing down his plan for reaching England, a plan rich in dramatic irony as the readers knows the moment he says it that it ensures he's powerless against Dracula. In this short scene, Stoker truly plays far above his standard level. Here the collage format of the novel, elsewhere little more than a somewhat clumsy lift from Wilkie Collins, is essential to the story: the tension in this scene doesn't come from any ambiguity of the fate of the sailors - they're prey and they never have a chance - but from the fact that the reader understands the situation and the sailors do not. It also has a taut economy to it that is atypical of the rest of Stoker's novel (see previous about endgame).

It has long baffled me that the scene on the Demeter has often been overlooked by adapters and revisionists. The first film adaptation, Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, included an extended scene based on The Demeter's last voyage; but after that it largely vanishes from the adaptations; Browning's 1931 classic merely alludes to the scene, setting the mold for the majority of adaptations that followed. It seems like perfect horror premise: a crew, trapped on an inescapable boat, hunted by a sinister power from beyond. This is the very template of a million sci-fi/horror flicks, from The Thing from Another Planet to every flick in the Alien franchise.

So, it was no small thrill to hear that, not one, but two projects were revisiting the hulk of the doomed Demeter: a limited series comic from IDW and a flick in-pre-production-limbo flick. We'll have to focus on the one that actually exists at this point. Penned by Pumpkinhead screenwriter Gary Gerani and illustrated by the mixed media art of Stuart Saygar, the expansively titled Bram Stoker's Death Ship: the Last Voyage of the Demeter expands the Demeter scene into a four part mini-series. Promising, but not completely filling, Death Ship reveals what I didn't understand, but what adapters of Stoker's tale seem to have grasped: the Demeter scene is actually really tricky to adapt.

There's a harsh catch-22 at the heart of the task. The bit works because Stoker struck a near perfect balance between the relentless narrative drive of the scene and the amount of detail needed to sell it. At it's heart, the Demeter scene is a countdown to Dracula's arrival in England. The crew of the ship that carries him there is barely sketched out: there's the bold one, the drunk, the kid, and so on. What's important about them in the pace of their deaths: one after the other, the period in between getting shorter and shorter. It's like the heartbeat in Tell-tale Heart or the carpet/hardwood Big-Wheel scene in The Shining in that its power comes from it ever-tightening rhythm. Mess up that coiling rhythm and you mess up the scene.

This means that Gerani is between a rock and hard place. If you're going to make the voyage of the Demeter your story, then you need to flesh out the roles of the crew. In the original, the continuity of the captain's voice is hook enough to hang the interest of the reader upon. We need more detail, or we won't give a toss what happens to the crew. However, every added detail adds some drag to the plot. How much stuff can you add on to Stoker's original streamlined narrative before the drag impacts the speed and, by extension, screws up the pacing that is essential to its dramatic power. The creator's of Death Ship understand that more is not necessarily better in this case. They flesh out the crew as little as possible, working with narration and montage to suggest depth of character rather than risk dragging down the narrative chasing greater detail. The sacrifice, of course, is that the impact of the story comes at a remove. The reader cares less about the fate of the crew and, instead, the story's significance comes from our knowledge of context. This gives the whole thing an air of irrelevance rather fated doom.

That said, I think Death Ship suffers somewhat in a monthly format. The pacing of the story and the pacing of the comic biz do not work well together here. Gathered together, and read in a single sitting, I suspect the story will regain its drive and the economic characterization will seem more like a part of an overall artistic design and less like a conspicuous lack. Delivered as a tight, swift-moving whole, it'll better reflect the atypical verve of the original. Right now, it feels like a bit of a tease.

Though I do like Saygar's Dracula. More Man-bat than Bela, Saygar's vampire is an impressive beast.

Stuff: From blood-sucking outsiders to kosher sparkles.

In the Forward, writer Allison Gaudet Yarrow does a pop-light dissection of the Jewish subtext of the modern vampire. Horror fans might not find much new info here, but I took note of a curious bit on vampiric overtones in the story of Jacob and Esau.

Rice may have made a straight trade, from vampires to Jews, in her latest book, but it’s not just contemporary literature that pits those strangers from the East as either one or the other. Some claim that the original myth of the vampire comes from Genesis. A famously hairy and spurned brother struggles with whether to kiss his twin’s neck or to bite it. The parsha reads: “And Esau ran toward him and embraced him, and he fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” Sounds like a surprisingly joyous reunion (Jacob had cheated his brother of his birthright, you will recall), but rabbis point to the dots above the Hebrew word neshikah, “kiss,” which indicate another meaning.

Louis Ginzberg writes, in the book “Legends of the Jews,” “In the vehemence of his rage against Jacob, Esau vowed that he would . . . bite him dead with his mouth, and suck his blood.” This midrash plays with the closeness of the words neshikah and neshicha — kiss and bite, respectively. About as close as the spellings of Hanukkah and Chanukah, but with distinctly darker overtones of fratricide and vampirism.

Quickly, Jews were transformed from victims of night prowlers to the blood-sucking outsiders themselves. One of the hoariest old axes of antisemitism — the blood libel — is that Jews drink blood, or mix it into their matzo. Erik Butler, a professor of German studies at Emory University who studies vampire psychology, says that historically, vampires were symbolic of any persecuted group, and legends about them grew around whatever images the culture had to present. Hence, subjugated Jews became as good an outsider for vampires to represent as any.

The author goes on to ponder the implications of the vampire's mainstream status, from vaguely Semitic boogyman to romantic lead.

Now, of course, vampires are as often the good guys as the bad. Sarah Jane Stratford charges vampires with stopping the Holocaust in her debut novel, “The Midnight Guardian” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). Her vampires are both morally responsible and self-interested: They use their considerable powers to thwart genocide while combating hunger, as Hitler’s death camps are killing off all their food. These millennials transform the traditional vampire into a monogamous do-gooder. One called Eamon is even a cross-averse Jew himself, having led a pious life before being bitten. Now he’s too busy hunting Nazis to light Sabbath candles, but he can enter churches, unlike the formerly Christian night creatures.

If vampires are equipped to cripple the Holocaust, surely they can manage the suburbs, where they have descended upon diners and high schools. “Twilight” series writer Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon, but Melissa Rosenberg, who is responsible for the Twilight screenplays, is a Jew. She told Los Angeles’ Jewish Journal that the vampires of “Twilight” are “kosher,” if “kosher” is a synonym for “cool.”

With the current ubiquity of vampires, perhaps they’ve outlived their metaphorical life. No longer the “other,” they now just highlight a chosenness to star in their own fiction. In the 2009 film “Daybreakers,” everyone’s a vampire. The outsiders are human. But can these emblematic outsiders depicting minorities (Irish, women, blacks, Jews) still wear that badge now that they have entered into the mainstream? Maybe not. Maybe we’ll turn to mummies instead.

Have vampires lost their ability to represent the outsider because the "outsider" status has lost so much specificity to audiences in a relatively heterogenus and liberal culture?

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #15.

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

William Marshall and Vonetta McGee in a production still from Blacula, 1972.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #4.

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

Artist Keith Haring prepares Grace Jones's costume and make up on the set of Vamp, 1986.

Movies: Like the actual experience of war, I just wanted it to be over.

I picked up George Hickenlooper's Grey Knight - shilled overseas with the infinitely cooler title of The Killing Box - with low expectations. I was expecting a hammy Southern revanchist horror flick about crazed hillbillies, with a schmeer of post-Glory Civil War class and Apocalypse Now guerra matto.

What's actually in the Grey Knight package is an odd fusion of Ken Burn's Civil War docu-epic and Victor Halperin's sadly under discussed Revolt of the Zombies. And, honestly, as far as inspirational shotgun weddings go, that's not half bad. Plus, on paper, the flicks got a pant's load of talent of talent to thrust that premise with gusto. Director George Hickenlooper was fresh off his brilliant documentary Hearts of Darkness. Monte Hellman, elder statesman of independent American cinema, was holding the editor's razor. In front of the camera, there's a cast full of competent actors: Corbin Bernsen, Adrian Pasdar, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, David Arquette - admittedly not the greatest show ever assembled under one roof, but certainly enough talent to get this strictly B-grade fright flick off the ground.

So, why do the results feel so lackluster?

Grey Knight suffers because it can't commit to its own weird premise. Either because Hickenlooper didn't think a monster pic was worth the effort or because he simply grew interested in narrative threads and themes peripheral to the main plot, the finished product feels schizo. In fact, the divided intention is so strong that one can almost tease out the other flick, the one I suspect Hickenlooper really wanted to make.

Let's talk about the movie that actually ended up in the can. Set at the height of the War of Northern Aggression, the stories centers around two principles: A union tracker named Thalman and a former Reb officer turned-POW named Strayn. This duo gets put in charge of the effort to find and neutralize a rogue group of Confederate and Union troops who are attacking Northern and Southern forces in Tennessee. Aside from showing the minimal effort at target discrimination that we use as the thin moral line between "just war" and "inhuman slaughter," this rogue group further distinguishes itself by crucifying the men it takes prisoner. The prisoners are hung upside down, nailed to a crude X of wood.

As it turns out, the renegade group is actually possessed by evil African spirits called the Makers. Once trapped in a well by the warriors of a tribal village, these spirits were freed by slave traders. These traders than brought the spirits to North America where (from what I could understand of the backstory) enslaved descendants of the original warrior tribe trapped them in a underwater cave in Tennessee.

We get all this backstory from Rebecca, a mute psychic ex-slave who comes long on the expedition to 1) give the viewer exposition on a need to know basis and 2) provide Strayn with a highly dubious shot at racial and historical redemption by becoming his love interest. Unable to speak for herself, she exists mainly so that the white characters in the film can position themselves with regards to the race issue. This embarrassingly clichéd character is all the more painful to watch because she's played by the talented and fiercely beautiful Cynda Williams, whose participation in this film was a brief pause between the sad end of her promising early career (Mo' Better Blues and One False Move) and the start of her transition to cheesy softcore (Wet and Condition Red). That filmmakers couldn't find anything better for Williams to do than to play a mute liberated slave who falls for a Confederate officer says something deeply sad about Hollywood.

But back to the film.

The Makers were released by a cannon blast during a short near-massacre of Strayn's forces. Strayn himself was carted off to Bowling Green prison, but his dead me are resurrected and, zombified, start to march in search of blood and new recruits. I should mention here that Grey Knight's undead are a curious breed: Like vampires, they drink blood and increase their numbers by feeding on the blood of their victims. They're also unable to cross running water, vulnerable to silver, and only come out at night. However, they've got no fangs. They all wear white smears of what I suppose is meant to evoke the face paint of African tribal warriors. These undead are also vocal and intelligent, even emotional: They mourn when their own get killed.

After a few one-sided encounters, the remnants of the Union scout group end up teaming with the remains of a Confederate rear guard unit to fight the undead troops. There's a battle. Some people die. The end.

Questionable as the racial politics may be, far more crippling are the films visuals. Though Hickenlooper and Hellmann have a study and functional sense of narrative, the film has a dull, washed out feel to it. Whether this was the unfortunate result of an effort to give the film a faded, historical look or simply the result of a lousy color transfer, I couldn't say. The result is a milky, muted palate that drains life from the film far more effectively than the movies pseudo-vampires. Hickenlooper also fails to bring his combat scenes to life. Although early film effectively presented the madness of Civil War Era combat, filmmakers from the 1960s and on have too often relied heavily on the assistance of Civil War re-enactors. The result, aside from fielding armies of retired white collar workers, is that the combats have a sort of stagy calm. Hickenlooper's fight scenes feel leaden.

That said, there's something interesting in Hickenlooper's faint commitment to the story he's shooting. Despite setting up the clear premise that the undead troops are (literally) bloodthirsty monsters, Hickenlooper gives a handful of them some key speeches that, I believe, suggest the outline of the film he would have rather made. Strip away the monster movie trappings and, instead, imagine a band of Southern and Union soldiers who have gone rogue because they refuse to fight for either cause. The Southern boys don't want to die so rich folks can keep slaves. The Union boys don't want to die in a far off field for a cause they don't sincerely care about. Instead of putting down a semi-zombie outbreak, the scout unit is meant to find these dangerously freethinking individuals and crush their rebellion before it spreads to other troops. That story is, I think, what Hickenlooper wanted to do. His speeches about finding a third way out of the war, his attention to curious historical details, his refusal to embrace any of the larger moral issues of the conflict at the cost of an oddly myopic populism - it's when he's focusing on what he cares about, the flick gets a shot in the arm. Sadly, those bright moments aren't enough to carry the whole film.

Music: Neo-prog taco-eating werewolf.

And he fights a vampire.

Here's Bear in Heaven's "Werewolf."

It's like two dudes who got too old and got kicked off the set of New Moon had a drunken brawl outside a Motel 6 in Rich Creek, Virginia, while a Catherine Wheel tribute band attempted its first Lungfish cover in the background.

At least, that's what I thought it was like.

Bear In Heaven - Werewolf from Hometapes on Vimeo.

Movies: Da' mystery of less boxing.

The social contract between audience member and auteur is signed on the basis of the of the promise of the title. A title vouches for everything that follows and, boiled to its very essence, the experience of film appreciation is the raw and immediate moment of feeling the joys and disappointments of working out that promise. NB: This is different than film criticism. Film criticism is to film appreciation what conducting an autopsy is to watching ballet.

Given that, consider the promise inherent in the title of Douglas Kung's 2006 genre mash-up soap-fu horror actioner: Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power. Seriously. Read it again. Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power.

That's an insane promise. It isn't Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Mediocre Power. It isn't Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Sufficient Power. Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Plenty of Power. Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Perfectly Adequate Power.

This is Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power! Shaolin! Evil Dead! Ultimate! Power! You need that many exclamation points just to say the freakin' title right. Here's one more! 'Cause it can take it!

If jaded film criticism had a face, that title would punch it in the nuts.

Of course, as any horror fan knows, the defining characteristic of horror fandom is disappointment. When Sturgeon proposed his law that 90% of creative endeavors are crap, he did warn us that our culture would store all that crap in a single genre.

To nobody's surprise, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power cannot live up to the promise of the title. It makes a game effort, but what film can support that many exclamation points?

The flick starts off with a well crafted bit of wirework-fu, as a Shaolin student named Dragon and his wife Phoenix take on a crew of raping and pillaging banditti. During the course of the battle the bandit queen - a wonderful, but wasted character, but that's kind of the film's signature move: this flick throws away material that filmmakers of greater sanity and competence could build careers on - strikes Dragon and Phoenix wit a poison tipped sword.

The poison doesn't immediately off either of our heroes, but "uncle" - the elder statesman of the Shaolin temple clan of D & P - warns Dragon that the poison has tainted the growing child in Phoenix's tum-tum. The poison complicates Phoenix's labor and she dies in childbirth. The loss is especially bitter because, just as Phoenix passes away, a young student from a neighboring temple arrives with an elixir which can retard advance of the toxin. Uncle tells Dragon that he must take the elixir in order to give Innocence, the aspirational name given to Dragon and Phoenix's tainted spawn, a moral counterbalance to the toxin in his system. Dragon also ends up adopting the young messenger, Roam Chow.

As Dragon ages into the leader of the clan (characters in this flick experience Peanuts-style aging: they age in spurts, stalling out for a bit at the next dramatically convenient age), he struggles to tame his son's vicious tendencies. Dragon places a young female martial arts student under Innocence's supervision, hoping to inspire some sense of responsibility and honor within him. But, Innocence is one of those primally savage creatures: Like Grendel and happiness, civility seems to pain Innocence. It's at those moments one realizes that the character's name is not ironic.

It becomes clear to Dragon that Innocence is a jerk. Convinced that Innocence's cruelty makes him an unsuitable leader, Dragon chooses his adopted son as the next leader of the clan. This goes over like a tub of warm vomit with Innocence, who promptly flees the temple with a stolen magic sword. The rest of the movie tracks the parallel lives of Roam Chow and Innocence as they head to their inevitable collision.

Sadly, it's that collision that is the film's Achilles heel. The first two-thirds of the flick recall the dense, operatic story-telling of classic epic martial arts action filmmaking. That the film captures that sense is all the more noteworthy given the film's technical limitations: Shot in dim digital video and marred with subpar CGI, the film's sweeping scope is achieved in the face of truly mediocre visuals. However, by the end, the plot goes from cleverly tangled to baggy. Even under the more relaxed rules of martial arts cinema, the film introduces inexplicable complications and resolutions and becomes a mess of unnecessary starts and stops that kills forward momentum and sorely tries viewer patience. This confused jumble even overwhelms director Douglas who, painted into a corner, ends his flick with a sudden, out-of-nowhere villain-offing meteor strike. Seriously. It's like they ran out of paper for the screenplay and decided to type on the final line: "Exit all, hit by meteor."

To make things worse, the whole "versus the evil dead" bit of the promise is buried in the last third of the flick. As part of the third act pile on, an army of leaping vampires is thrown into the mix.

Lest I make this sound like a candidate for psychotronicness, SvED2UP (pronounced "saved 2 up") is not some raw explosion of cinematic craziness. The film drags through what should be a mind-blowing climax. That the final act is sloppy is, perhaps, excusable. That it is oddly boring is less so.

Books: "Policing gender and punishing girliness."

The American Prospect takes a look at the Twilight backlash and questions its gender politics. From writer Sady Doyle's article:

Twilight is more than a teen dream. It's a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won't find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies -- which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking -- tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it's about the fact that those fans are young women.

Twilight fans (sometimes known as "Twi-Hards") are derided and dismissed, sometimes even by outlets that capitalize on their support. MTV News crowned "Twilighters" its Woman of the Year in 2008, but referred to them as "shrieking and borderline-stalker female fans." You can count on that word -- shrieking -- to appear in most articles about Twilight readers, from New York magazine's Vulture blog ("Teenage girls shrieking ... before the opening credits even begin") to Time magazine ("Shrieking fangirls [outdoing] hooting fanboys ... in number, ardor, and decibel level") to The Onion's A.V. Club ("Squealing hordes of (mostly) teenage, female fans") to The New York Times ("Squeals! The 'Twilight Saga: New Moon' Teaser Trailer Is Here!"). Yes, Twi-Hards can be loud. But is it really necessary to describe them all by the pitch of their voices? It propagates the stereotype of teen girls as hysterical, empty-headed, and ridiculous.

Self-described geeks and horror fans are especially upset at how the series introduces the conventions of the romance novel -- that most stereotypically feminine, most scorned of literary forms -- into their far more highbrow and culturally relevant monster stories. At the 2009 Comic-Con, Twilight fans were protested and said to be "ruining" the event. Fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, and Harry Potter are seen as dorks at worst, participants in era-defining cultural phenomena at best. Not so for Twilight fans. What sets Twilight apart from Marvel comics? The answer is fairly obvious, and it's not -- as geeks and feminists might hope -- the quality of the books or movies. It's the number of boys in the fan base.

Doyle ends her piece with a look at why feminists should care about the Twilight backlash even if they think the books are a crock. In a neat judo move, she argues that the Twilight phenomenon, considered through a lens other than the heteronormative knee-jerk male panic of most genre critics, might be a watershed moment in considering the role of young women in the marketplace driven public sphere.

Teen girls have the power to shape the market because they don't have financial responsibilities, tend to be passionate about their interests, and share those interests socially. If a girl likes something, she's liable to recommend it to her friends; a shared enthusiasm for Edward, or the Jonas Brothers, or anything else, becomes part of their bond. Marketers prize teenage girls, even as the media scoff at them.

If you want to matter, though, apparently you need boys. The third film adaptation of the Twilight series, Eclipse, will be helmed by horror director David Slade, who has made such movies as Hard Candy and Thirty Days of Night. Even though it will not hit theaters until June 2010, it is already being touted as "darker," more action-packed, and more "guy friendly." Because the popularity of the Twilight formula guarantees Eclipse will be a box-office smash, the decision to consciously appeal to boys seems more like a grab at credibility than at profit. Romance-loving Twi-Hards be damned! Who cares about disappointing a huge, passionate, lucrative fan base if they're all a bunch of girls?

As Twilight demonstrates, not everything girls like is good art -- or, for that matter, good feminism. Still, the Twilight backlash should matter to feminists, even if the series makes them shudder. If we admit that girls are powerful consumers, then we admit that they have the ability to shape the culture. Once we do that, we might actually start listening to them. And I suspect a lot of contemporary girls have more to talk about than Edward Cullen.

Stuff: "Tastes like a bloody Band-Aid."

In a previous post, I mentioned my weakness for swag that, rather than just pitching the show/flick/whatever, pretends to actually be from the world of the property it's pushing. Though this wasn't exactly what I had in mind . . .

The Onion's AV Club test drive HBO's Tru Blood blood orange soda drink, a tie-in to their sturm und fang vampire soap opera.

From the post:

In the show, most vampires don't seem to really like how Tru Blood tastes. They choke it down—most like it served warm—only because they want to live in peace with those pesky humans. So how does a company make a drink in the real world that mimics the taste of badly mimicked blood? Why, with blood oranges, of course!

Here's what the HBO Shop has to say about its exclusive, expensive product: "It’s official! The Tru Blood drink has now been 'de-fictionalized' and emerges into reality as a delicious blood orange carbonated drink. Meticulously crafted, the Tru Blood Drink is an exact replica of the bottle design as seen on True Blood. The 14 oz glass Tru Blood bottle is stained in a rich red, with raised Tru Blood English lettering and matching Japanese Kanji. This blood orange flavored soda is slightly tart, lightly sweet and subtly carbonated. Designed to taste great while matching the appearance of Bill's favorite drink, the drink pours like a regular soda, but with the standing appearance in a glass is stormy and mysterious."

How's it taste? Along with the opinion that does duty as this post's headline, here are some other notable comments:

"This is actually really good. It's a little sweeter and a little less sharp than most orange soda. It doesn’t get up my nose as much. But it’s richer and fruitier."

"It's chalky. Probably why it tastes like ground-up Smarties."

"Tastes like a melted cherry Slurpee."

"With bacon vodka, it tastes like biting a live pig, which I suppose is pretty vampire-like."

"I guess fans of the series will find this kitschy, but my appraiser tells me my Addams Family collectors' cups aren't worth shit."

The original story contains video of some of the Onion crew trying the faux faux-blood drink straight up and as a mixer.

House of Silent Scream: "Watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams."

Denis, the international man of mystery behind the punctuation enhanced "The Horror!?" blog, was, until very recently, the best kept secret in the genre blog biz. Smart, insightful write-ups on a mind-boggling array of films. He's to horror blogging what Elvis Costello is to music: He's doing great work all over the map. Lucha flicks, kung fu horror, Euro-trash exploiters, Bollywood slashers, chance's are the Denis has been there and written it up.

Talent, like blood, will out and Denis is now also posting work at the excellent "WTF-Film" site - schooling an ever broader audience on the topics such as "the wild man of the toilet" from 2004's "Oh My Zombie Mermaid."

Special thanks to Denis for taking the time to contribute to the anniversary celebrations. Screamers and Screamettes, dig hard babies!

I find writing about silent movies - much more so than actually watching them - exceedingly difficult. While I usually don't even flinch when confronted with differences in style or filmic language, silent movies always seem to come from more than just a different time or place and to deserve a more scholarly treatment than I am capable of.

The problem is amplified even further when a film has been as heavily analyzed as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens. There is probably not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging is that one's personal lack of knowledge does not always need to keep one away from trying to wring out a few words about a film.

Even better - I'm not all that interested in talking facts about movies anyway, especially not about films like Nosferatu which invite one to be read as dreams rather than narratives.
This method of watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams, forgoing the need for logic, plot and other unnecessary ballast is the best way to derive pleasure from them for me and makes it easier to watch European films of the silent era than the often slicker American ones which on paper keep much closer to our modern sensibilities.

The German filmmakers of the Weimar Republic were a very peculiar mix of the commercial filmmaker of today and the mad scientist of future movies, giving their better films a mood that I find quite close to that of other films better understood as dreams than as narratives - the European exploitation movies of much later periods. Yes, I propose to watch Murnau films as if they were made by Jess Franco.

The commercial interests of Nosferatu are obvious. Taking the basic plot of a novel like Stoker's Dracula (of course without paying the author's estate) as the base for your film is as commercially minded as anything Roger Corman ever did, although Corman would never have been so obvious about it that you could have sued him.

But I don't think that the interesting parts of Nosferatu are those close to the book. It is much more important which parts of the book Murnau and his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen choose to ignore.

I see the original Dracula as a modernization of Gothic tropes for the contemporary British audience of the 1890s and have a lot of sympathy for interpretations of Dracula as standing in for venereal disease and/or the fear of the other. Murnau's film, though, isn't interested in syphilis or modernization of tropes at all (which doesn't mean that he has nothing to say about/to his contemporary world - that part comes automatically). On the contrary, Nosferatu is full of the medieval attacking a present that seems already too much in thrall of the past anyway. Isn't that very German of it?

For me, as someone who finds parts of it still downright terrifying, this is the point from which the film derives most of its strength: Max Schreck's Nosferatu is an ancient, ancient thing come to eat up the future and drag the present back into his past of rats and plague, not so much a corrupting influence as Dracula is, but a regressive one. Nosferatu's horror is the horror of a past that has never been laid to rest and so just keeps shambling on, smothering the young and preventing a future that's worth living.

Seen from this angle, the end of the film itself starts to look horrifying. Even though the past is laid to rest, Ellen Hutter's youth and innocence have to be sacrificed and she herself has to become something exceptionally medieval herself - a saint. And where I stand, there is nothing more horrifying than a saint when you are trying to cope with the present.

Movies: "It has been proven that people just stay stuff because they want to have the spotlight on them."

Back in February, I featured a news item about Jonathan Sharkey, "one-time presidential hopeful and full-time Satanic vampire overlord of Toms River, Minnesota." Sharkey, who worships the pagan goddess of witchcraft and claims to live off human blood, made headlines back in '07 when he threw his hat in the national ring as the presidential candidate of the Vampires, Witches, and Pagans Party. For a brief moment, he was a hot enough item to merit a Tina Fey delivered punchline on SNL's regular "Weekend Update" bit.

I brought him up in February of this year because his Satanic Majesty failed to make a court date to answer charges he threatened a 16-year-old girl her referred to as "his wife and princess."

From my the story that inspired that original post:

The criminal complaint says he was running for president in 2007 when the 16-year-old girl wrote a message of support on his MySpace page. She told police they began dating online, and the threats began when she tried to break off the relationship.

She told police that "in a desperate attempt" to get him to leave her alone, she had e-mailed him that she was a member of an elite vampire hunter society and that continuing their relationship would put him in danger. Her father told police he talked to Sharkey, but Sharkey continued to call the girl and write letters to her parents.

Well, as it turns out, Sharkey was the subject of a 2007 documentary that chronicled his ill-fated '06 run for Minnesota governor. And, because the Internets are slow to anger and steadfast in their forgiveness, this doc is available free on Hulu. For realz.

That's right. Listen in awe as Sharkey explains that he banged and then married his own half-sister. (The then gubernatorial candidate explains to the camera, "I'm not the kind of guy to ask a girl her last name or anything like that.") Thrill to Sharkey's explanation of his proposed anti-terror policies: "Especially considering the first day after I am sworn in, I am going to personally impale 10 people that I know have violated my rights and have committed acts of terrorism." Squirm as you watch Jonathan and his wife feed of one another. You'll get that ol' "walking in on mommy and daddy's special hug" feeling all over again.

As a counterpoint to Sharkey's Byronic self-regard and Quixotic indifference to reality, the film shows the surprising poignant struggle of Julia Sharkey Carpenter, who claims that her pagan beliefs got her fired from her school bus driving gig, a gig that seems to be her Rushmore. At one point, when asked what the most perfect job she can conceive of would be, Julia thinks hard about it and then answers that she would want enough money to buy her own school bus. Her odd mixture of touchy independence and essential decency makes he a brilliant foil for Sharkey. She also gets the film's best line when she tells Sharkey, without any sense of irony or self-awareness, "It has been proven that people just stay stuff because they want to have the spotlight on them."

I was going to do a review of this odd, low-fi treat, but I realized that the film overwhelms my modest critical capacities.

House of Silent Scream: Dance, Dracula, dance!

I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that Guy Maddin's 2002 Dracula: Pages for a Virgin's Diary is the best silent, all-ballet retelling of the Dracula story that I've ever seen.

Yeah. Ballet. Leaping and such.

Wait! Come back!

Despite sounding like a huge, self-satisfied, art house gimmick, the whole thing holds together surprisingly well. (That's a sentence that works as a summary for Maddin's entire career.) In fact, it only takes a few minutes for these overtly artsy and seemingly provocative decisions to start making sense and pay off. By taking a familiar story and rendering it in dance, the film becomes a sort of ritualistic recreation of one of modern life's foundational archetypes. "Going through the motions" of yet another version of Dracula calls attention to the core of the tale and highlights the power of its repetition. As a viewer, we're forced to re-engage with the story, translating the soundless actions we see through the lens of the hundreds of retellings and interpretations to which we've been exposed, simply by virtue of living in the modern world.

Maddin's reliance on silent film techniques and tech – something he's done in several films to greater or lesser success – seems, in Dracula, to mesh with the overt artificiality of the medium of dance. It parallels the negations at the heart of dance. The same way ballet's force comes partially from eschewing naturalism and dialogue, the self-imposed restrictions of silent filmmaking make Maddin reconsider the system of film representation and encourage him to get the most he can out of what he leaves in play. There's a certain irony here in that, as retro as Maddin's approach is, its suitability for this project is something available only to a modern filmmaker. Without the sense of a deliberate refusal to use certain techniques – something that was not available to filmmakers in the silent era – then the film would lack its lush and self-aware artificiality.

The film is supported by a powerful performance by Wei-Qiang Zhang as the famed vampire. Zhang is a compelling performer, and I say that even though he has no recourse to dialogue or naturalistic motion. His Dracula is convincingly animalistic and sensual, and Zhang uses the defamiliarizing nature of the medium to invest his Drac with profound uncanniness that, in its way, works as wonderfully as Max Schreck's Nosferatu make-up. While watching Zhang's performance, I was reminded of those "my favorite vamp lists" that sprung up in protest over the EW best vampy run down. I don't recall Zhang's interpretation of Stoker's iconic villian appearing on any list, but I think an argument could be made that the force and originality of his Dracula earns him a place on the shortlist.

Tara Birtwhistle's Lucy deserves special mention too. As with most adaptations, Mina gets the greatest amount of screen time and is more central to the plot. But Ms. Birtwhistle's Lucy, with the surging eroticism and attractive mix of innocence and calculation, is the character who will linger in your mind longer.

For all its visual innovation, the plot of Maddin's Dracula (based on the ballet by Mark Godden) is remarkably true to the source material. In fact, Maddin brings back to foreground elements that most film adapters – going all the back to Lang – leave out. Notably, Maddin dredges up the novelistic Dracula's bizarre relationship with money. Though largely forgotten, Stoker's Dracula and his opponents are oddly obsessed with money. Dracula pauses the tight action of Harker's intro, the most intense part of the book, to divert the plot and dig up some buried gypsy treasure. Dracula's financials are considered part of his threat: He partially represents a dangerous flood of foreign capital into the British system. Later, Mina reflects on the efforts of Harker and Lucy's three suitors to bring down Dracula and takes special notice of the financial sacrifices they've made. She contrasts their noble use of money with Dracula's sinister transactions. What all this money stuff is supposed to mean has baffled critics of the novel. Various Marxists have suggested it some hold over Victorian fantasy of the innate goodness of the white upper class in the face of an increasingly international system of capitalism that does not respect Anglo notions of value. Others have suggested it reflects Stoker's own financial unease. Maddin suggests it links up with the xenophobia of the original. Whatever Stoker's intentions, the money-thing is a bizarre facet of the original that most interpreters simply drop. Maddin gets points for working it back in.

Where Maddin does diverge from the original text, he tends to explore familiar territory. Maddin highlights the sensuality of Lucy and plays her death like it was a lynching at the hands of a puritanical masculine mob enforcing Victorian, repressive norms. Though there's an undercurrent of this in the novel, the off-kilter feminist subtext tends to become the text in modern adaptations. Maddin doesn't innovate here, but rather gives us a nod to the story's most common modern reading. The end of Maddin's film also more resembles final scenes of Browning's seminal 1931 adaptation than Stoker's endgame, though Maddin closes out on a shot of an impaled Dracula that evokes the terror tactic Drac's real life inspiration became famous for.

Maddin does add a strange steampunkish iron lung for Lucy mom into the piece. To be honest, I couldn't tell where Maddin was going with that particular bit. At first I thought it might be intended as a loose parallel to Lucy – another women cut off in some way from the world. But, honestly, I'm not sure Lucy is that cut off from the world. Even prior to her vampification, Lucy is a highly sexualized figure. So, I don't know. Maddin also foregrounds the sexual identity of Harker, a figure most adapters shuffle off-stage as soon as the novel's introductory scenes are complete. In fact, his diary is the titular "virgin's diary." Maddin highlights the sexual aspects of Harker's encounter with Dracula and his brides, then plays out the implications of what that would mean for Hacker in terms of readjusting to the safe, Victorian norms his marriage with Mina represents. Unlike the somewhat inscrutable iron lung thing, this adds a nice element of depth to Harker and Mina, a relationship that I think is usually viewed as little more than a speed bump on the way to the more tantalizing relationship between Mina and Dracula.

I'll admit that the pitch for this flick is almost a deal breaker. Happily, it is neither opaque or vapidly pretentious. For all the preciousness of the project, Maddin's finished product is more artsy than fartsy and worth the time of any fan of silent cinema, Dracula, or envelope pushing filmmaking.

Here's the trailer: