I’m going to let you in on a little tip. You know, just betwixt me, you, and the wall. Don’t tell nobody I told you, but I think the next big thing in horror is going to be zombies. I’m serious. They’re an underused concept and I think they’re completely ready to blow up.
Canadian artist Rob Sacchetto must think so too. He’s offering to create zombified portraits of you and your loved ones. Just send him a photo reference and $80 US (+ $5 shipping and handling), and he’ll dead you up something fierce.
Even the most cursory summary of Stephan Graham Jones’s newest novel, Demon Theory, begs the comparison, so let’s just get it out of the way. The links between Demon Theory and the experimental landmark horror novel House of Leaves are both obvious and only superficial. Both revolve around the retelling of fictional films, both play with narrative conventions in an overtly postmodern way, and both books are laced with pop cultural and academic references in the form of asides and footnotes. I bring this up because, upon reading the jacket cover summary, I think anybody who has read House of Leaves (which Jones acknowledges as an influence in the back of the book) is immediately going into the book with preconceived notions about what they’re getting into. And, unfairly, this works against Jones’s novel. Despite the similarities, Demon Theory is very different beast.
Demon Theory, the novel, is written as a collection of three “film treatments,” the larval stage of a screenplay. It presents the story of a trilogy of horror movies surrounding a cursed family and a horde of bat-like demonic entities. The first film, a pseudo-slasher flick, takes place in an isolated country house during Halloween night. A young medical student, who needs to bring insulin to his mentally disorganized diabetic mother, convinces his friends to join him on his errand. As such errands seem to do, this one goes horribly wrong and the gang ends up trapped in the house and facing down a masked killer with dark connections to the family’s past. The sequel involves a series of possessions in a local hospital. Several of the original cast (some of whom actually didn’t make it out of the first flick) race against time in order to stop a full-on demonic invasion. The third, and strangest of the three films, follows our cast back to the old country house of the first film. Again, strangely, several of the characters are inexplicably back to help face down the secrets of the old house and end their demonic troubles forever.
Jones rolls through these three sections like a big freakin’ truck. His plots don’t advance so much as they montage forward in leaps and bounds. The gore is there, but, mainly due to the treatment-style language he employs, it is merely stated and moved over. Jones doesn’t leave himself time to linger over the details of the carnage. His characters start as the stock characters familiar to fans of the slasher genre, but ultimately gain an uncanny, but very uneven, depth as they must confront the rising levels of surreality in their lives, becomes less stereotypical as Jones’s plot becomes more atypical.
Unlike the chopped-up, concrete-poetry style of House of Leaves, Demon Theory is written in a clipped, propulsive, minimalist “filmese.” The language is spare, littered with film production jargon (POV, f.g.), and vigorous. It drives the action along, dragging the reader somewhat breathlessly through scenes. The idea, one assumes, is that, in a film treatment, where the writer doesn’t have control over the visuals anyway, one favors plotting and dialogue. Here, instead of describing an action, setting, or detail, Jones might just drop a film reference in its place. For example, when describing a demon nesting site, Jones evokes the queen alien’s lair for the Aliens franchise and pretty much leaves it at that. This is probably the biggest make or break point in the book. Readers will either adapt to the distinct rhythms and limitations of this approach, rolling along with the book’s often breakneck pacing, or they’ll find the writing thin, clunky, and lazy. You’ll either find it a “literate film treatment” or a “film treatment-like novel.” I suspect that those with the former point of view will feel the book is a greater success than those who adopt the latter. Personally, I alternated between the two extremes. Often, especially during the action scenes, found myself tearing along with the book. Though, in other places, it becomes a bother that you don’t really know what the characters or setting look like.
This occasional frustration with Jones style was sometimes amplified when Jones would congratulate himself on a particular image or detail, actually inserting self-praise like “nice effect” into the prose after one of his few descriptive passages. It is never clear if this grating effect is meant to be taken on some meta- level. Perhaps, were meant to think that this is not how Jones writes, but how a Jones who was selling film treatments to Hollywood would write. Either way, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Whether intentionally or unintentionally grating, either you can go along with it or you can’t, questions of intentionality won’t save it or damn it. In fact, the question of just which Jones – the near hack or the clever postmodernist imitating a near hack – is paradigmatic of the whole book. Sometimes the plot comes off as a bit hokey, but is that because his plot is hokey or because the plots of so many of the films he’s paying homage to are a bit hokey. The strained dialogue: awkward writing or expertly imitated awkward writing? One could take the occasionally pointless footnotes as either the work of a Hollywood treatment writer trying to show he’s made an important work or as Jones trying to make light fun of the post-David Foster Wallace hip-lit crowds love of foot- and endnotes.
The real question is: Does it matter? If you have to read awkward and unrealistic dialogue (and it is awkward precisely because it is so polished and “crisp,” to use the Hollywood term – Jones’s characters talk in the overly allusive jabber of Kevin Williamson characters) for some three hundred pages, does it make a difference if you’re in on the joke?
If the answer is yes, then Demon Theory is written for you. Its curious plot and knowing genre mischief make for light, but witty entertainment. If your answer is no and you enjoy your horror with more straight-up kicks than po-mo tricks, I suggest looking elsewhere.
Demon Theory was published last April by MacAdam/Cage and will cost you 24 smackers, US, in hardback. I don’t believe it is available in paperback yet.
Have a little fun this weekend poking around Raymond Castile’s excellent Gallery of Monster Toys website.
Castile started the site in 1996 and, though the site doesn’t seem to have any place notifying visitors of the frequency of updates, the gallery has plenty to entertain the monster-minded. The site is organized into “wings,” each focused on a specific decade. Altogether, these wings offer the curious an idiosyncratic and delightful sampling of monster toys from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Personally, I think the best thing about the gallery is the seemingly random material that will pop up from time to time. Sure, fancy-targeted art dolls, such as the mini-statues cranked out by the likes of Todd McFarlane, appear on the site; but you’ll also find oddities like the freakin' kick-ass chupacabra doll shown below.
I’ve praised the joys of mix-and-match style stories before. While I might be curious about a story containing Dracula, tell me that it features the Lord of Vampires going toe-to-toe with Al Capone and you’ve got my undivided attention. In The Shadow of Frankenstein, another in Dark Horse Press’s new line of Universal Monster tie-in novels, Stefan Petrucha offers readers just such a promising match-up: Jack the Ripper meets Frankenstein’s monster.
Unlike Di Filippo’s freewheeling and heavily revisionist take on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Petrucha’s book is more overtly an extension of the Universal film franchise. It is meant to fall in between James Whale’s legendary The Bride of Frankenstein and Rowland V. Lee’s excellent 1939 follow-up, Son of Frankenstein. The novel begins with the Frankensteins, the mad doctor Henry and his long-suffering and increasingly unhinged Elizabeth, fleeing legal scrutiny and the hatred of the villagers in their native land. They are off to England with Minnie, trusty but annoying maid servant in toe. Unfortunately for them, the good doctor’s most famous bit of work tags along for the ride.
The Frankensteins and their eponymous monster get separated once they reach the shores of England. Henry, unable to let was he believes to be his dead monster rest, begins investigating the history of the brain he purchased to install within the creature. Meanwhile, the monster saves the life of a Whitechapel prostitute and is taken under her care. In one nice touch, the whores of Whitechapel, used to seeing the effects of urban squalor on their neighbors, find the monster’s horrific appearance somewhat unremarkable.
Into this mix comes Jack the Ripper. After years of retirement, the killer is once again stalking the streets of Whitechapel. Jack’s life, we discover, has been unnaturally prolonged through black magic. Sadly, for our active-senior/serial killer, the old spells just aren’t working like they used to. After encountering Frankenstein’s monster on one of his bloody patrols through the city, Jack comes to believe that, if installed in such a body, he could live forever. All Jack’s got to do is get the good doctor to see things his way. And, it turns out, Saucy Jack can be quite persuasive.
Petrucha’s novel is a fun, light romp through the universe created by the classic Frankenstein movies (and they are extremely movie-centric - if there was an allusion to the novel that started it all, I missed it). Petrucha sacrifices description and mood for a brisk and action-filled narrative that resembles less Whale’s surreal and atmospheric classics and more the crowd-pleasing, but less accomplished later entries in the series, such as 1944’s House of Frankenstein. His book is almost exclusively focused on getting his main characters into position and then letting all holy heck breaks loose. Along the way, he makes sure to hit all the archetypal scenes any self-respecting Frankenstein movie must have. You can almost imagine Petrucha with a check-list of required, archetypal scenes he needs to hit: “Body harvesting in the graveyard. Check. Frankenstein raging at God. Check. Kites training electrical wires. Check.” The presence of Jack the Ripper and the perceived needs of a presumably more bloodthirsty audience means we get considerably more gore out of Petrucha’s work than any classic Universal flick would give us, but all in all is stays true in spirit to the source material.
Not that Petrucha’s novel is without clever flourishes and nice touches. Lines from the classic films are recontextualized throughout the book to good effect. Nod and wink allusions are sprinkled about for the close reader – including my favorite, a short discussion on transferring the captured monster to Seward’s asylum. Petrucha also finds time, despite the pace of the book, to work in some excellent bits of characterization. Most notably, when we get an entire chapter’s worth of backstory on the man whose famously abnormal (“Abby someone”) brain was placed inside Frankenstein’s monster. That chapter is actually a stand out.
Overall, Shadow of Frankenstein is an entertaining tribute to classic horror icon. It is less innovative than Filippo’s entry to the series, though, if in a more narrow way, it is really no less enjoyable.
As regular readers already know, I’m a sucker for garage bands with any sort of gimmick. One of my favorites are the off-again, on-again Gruesomes, a garage revival outfit from Montreal. Taking the name of the Addam’s Family-like neighbors who appeared in The Flinstones, the band formed in 1985 and managed to build a fan base and crank out two EPs all in their first year. Their very first, titled Jack the Ripper, included an excellent cover Screaming Lord Sutch’s signature tune.
The Canadian music ‘zine What Wave interviewed the group in the pages of their eighth issue, scans of which are available online.
The band brought out three more LPs before packing it up in 1990. During their glory days, The Gruesomes only put out two videos: one for their wonderfully creepy “Way Down Below” and another for their more goofy Monkees-inspired “Hey!” I wanted to hit you with this Gruesomes twosome, but sadly I can only find footage of “Hey!” This means we're doing more silly than scary today, but lighten up Maurice, it's my blog and I'll roll like I feel.
If I ever find “Way Down Below,” I’ll post it.
The Gruesomes reunited in 2000, putting out a new album and touring in Canada. Garage archive label Sundazed Records has an amazing anthology of the Gruesomes that collects pretty much everything they did before the reunion. It is good stuff.
So, zombies. Maybe you’ve heard of them. The living dead. They’re kinda popular right now so like maybe you’ve seen them in a movie or read a comic book about them.
With the passage of the Zombie Mono-Culture Dominance Act of 2002, it has been a legal requirement that every third horror movie produced either in America or within the boarders of its NATO allies must be a zombie movie. The creators of the act would prefer it if the plot of the movie involved an unlikely group of survivors trapped and surrounded by the numberless legions of the dead. It is best if creative variation focuses on mobility issues (fast versus slow), the source of zombification (government screw-up versus ecological disaster), and the levels of gore reached. Otherwise, the more formulaic the better.
It is a sign, then, of how far US/French relations have disintegrated that France has produced one of the few truly original zombie movies to come out in the last four years. In fact, They Came Back (which, in France, goes by the considerably cooler name of Les Revenants) pushes the zombie-flick envelope ‘till it rips open.
The film, by writer/director Robin Campillo (who also co-wrote Time Out, a devastatingly eerie, but non-horror, psychological study of a laid-off white collar worker), starts right off with perhaps the most clichéd of zombie flick shots: a horde of the recently revived shuffling out of the local cemetery. Although, immediately, you notice a difference. These are not rotting ghouls. They are silent. Despite the fact that they number in the thousands, the only sound they make is the tread of their feet on the street leading into town. As the zombies reach the middle of town, the living gather to watch the strange sight. Some walk out to greet their loved ones, stunned to see them alive again. A voice over, which we later learn be the mayor’s voice, explains that somehow, all over the world, the dead came back. They are in perfect physical health. They seem to be mentally slower than their living counterparts, but for the most part they remember their lives. They want to go back to living with their families. They want their jobs back.
Throughout the rest of the film, we watch as the living, both on a personal and cultural scale, attempt to accommodate the dead. In the small town in which this film set, 130,000 recently dead people need reintegration. Worldwide, we’re told, the number is astronomical. On a personal level, what happens when your young child returns? Your lover of several years? Your wife?
To further complicate things, the dead come back physically well, but mentally there is something uncanny about them. Sometimes they seem pathetically retarded in their mental capacities. Other times, however, this quiet reserve seems sinister, as if they are patiently waiting for something.
They Came Back is not outright scary. There is no bloodshed. The “zombies” eat normal food and this they seem to do mainly to humor the living. Instead of a feeling of horror, Campillo builds a sustained paranoid and melancholic eeriness that is equal parts unsettling and heartbreaking. This he does through the slow accumulation of perfect little details. For example, when we are first introduced to the holding center that houses the dead while their loved ones come to get them, we get the striking and not immediately sensible image of uniformed soldiers painting blue lines on the floor of a gym. It takes a few moments to understand that they are setting up rows and rows of beds for what amounts to a flood of refugees. The images resonates with pictures from Katrina or the heat wave that struck Paris and this moment of recognition comes with a little extra punch because Campillo let the scene hang unresolved for a moment.
In a way, Campillo’s trust in the poetry of images over the power of narrative logic reminds me of his compatriot, Alexandre Aja. Both build emotionally valid impressions that, when they work, are strong enough to provide their own validation. Perhaps it is a French thing. Despite this similarity, it is impossible to imagine Aja creating a movie this subtle (or Campillo cranking out something as visceral as the circular saw/unlucky driver scene in High Tension). There’s another way in which this is a very French film. It seems to me that only France, with is secular semi-socialist ways would be more concerned about the effects of the returning dead on the pension system than they would be about whether or not returning from death yields any truths about life after death. Only one person, a nameless child character, asks one of the dead what it was like. Otherwise, everybody seems more concerned about how the return of dead relatives will effect their lifestyle. Seems to me that an American version of the movie would have talking heads arguing what this meant for religion, whether the dead would vote Republican or Democrat, and whether dead/living marriage is a sin. I’m not saying the latter would have been preferable. I’m just suggesting that it reflects a cultural difference.
Mermaid Heather, horror-blogger of note (see sidebar), has a policy of never giving out a perfect score for a movie unless it is actually scary. A movie might be technically flawless, contain great acting, and blah, blah – if it doesn’t bring the scares, then it doesn’t get the blue ribbon. This is a wise policy and, though I’ve broken this rule at least once already, I’m going to follow it here. As great a movie as They Came Back is, and as unnerving as it can be, it does not scare so much as unsettle. Therefore, using the Olympic Gold Performances of Amy Van Dyken handed down to me by my father and his father before him, I give They Came Back a 2000 Sydney 4 × 100 m freestyle relay. A winner of a film and certainly gold-worthy, but just short of a full 1996 Atlanta 100 m butterfly.
Cannibal Holocaust is something of jewel in the grindhouse crown. In a subgenre that takes pride in its ability to upset the cinematic sensibilities of the common Joe and Jane, Cannibal Holocaust holds a special place as one of those films that, in the words of the re-release trailer, "goes all the way."
After seeing it for the first time, I have to say that Cannibal Holocaust is one of those odd films that, at once, is both so much less than the rep that proceeds it and fully worthy of its reputation of as grade-A mind-fuck.
The plot (which is an acknowledged inspiration of the love/hate horror landmark The Blair Witch Project) features a professor from NYU who goes into the Amazon jungle in search of four American documentary makers who disappeared after they entered the jungle to film what they presume to be the last cannibal tribes in existence. He finds the footage of the first documentary crew and we learn that they pulled a Heart of Darkness trip, going insanely violent against the natives of the jungle before encountering, fighting, losing to, and feeding the cannibals they hoped to film.
The structure of the film is more complex than this plot summary suggests. Through a combination of flashbacks, faux documentary style footage, and standard narrative filmmaking, we jump back and forth between the various parts of the story. The film begins with a few minutes of the first expedition. Then we get the full story of the second expedition. Then, through a series of screenings of the first expedition's footage, we fill in the details of the first expedition. It is an effective narrative structure and works to build suspense even though the viewer knows before the end of first 30 minutes that first expedition didn't survive.
On many levels, Cannibal Holocaust is better than any movie with the title Cannibal Holocaust has the right to be. Filmed on location in New York and the Amazon, the sets are often breathtaking and, on multiple occasions, invest the exploitation proceedings with a strange and powerful beauty that exceeded what I'm certain were the filmmaker's intentions. Not that director Deodato can't set up a haunting shot. Even when he's not serving up gore by the truckload, Deodato wrings as much detail as possible out of his shots. One scene, for example, features two members of the first expedition engaging in some rough sex while the members of a native tribe they have previously attacked and terrorized watch silently in the distant background. The image is so stagey and its meaning so strange that tableaux of sex, domination, and sorrow sticks in the mind despite the lack of bloodshed. However, for the most part, Deodato's film sensibilities are overwhelmed by the power of his locations.
Deodato should also get some credit for the inclusion of some wonderful character moments. He captures excellent character moments: a wicked grin here, a worried look there. There's a surprising amount of subtle work in this film considering the number of times we're also treated to images of the characters vomiting.
For violence junkies and gorehounds, there's plenty to see. Characters are raped to death, torn apart, devoured, and otherwise discomforted. I didn't keep track of a body count, but those who enjoy having their senses assaulted are in for good time. This does, however, bring up the animal killings that the film is infamous for. In three scenes, Deodato filled the details of his actors killing animals. Deodato brought his same of love of detail to these scenes, so we're not talking about off-screen killings either. In the first incident, a small swamp rat of some sort is stabbed in the throat multiple times and then gutted. In the second, a large sea turtle is beheaded, dismembered and cracked open. Finally, a small monkey has its face chopped off and is bled (in the audio commentary, we're told by the director that the monkey's mate died shortly thereafter of what Deodato claims was a broken heart). These scenes, showing authentic death, ultimately undercut the special effects violence that appears throughout the movie. Ethical considerations aside for a moment, the rawness of these scenes emphasizes the falseness of the rest of the film. In the way the jungle trumped the filmmakers' skills, real violence trumped the filmmakers' moral imaginations. As a viewer, you'll care more about these three animals than you do about any of the human characters, and that, more than anything else, takes what might have been a film that transcended its grindhouse origins and reveals is tasteless, heartless, and exploitative core.
There's plenty more to discuss about the film: Vietnam conflict imagery, a sub-plot criticizing colonial exploitation, internal critiques of sensationalist media (believe it or not, the film actual includes a heavy handed critique of shock-for-shock's-sake entertainment), and more. The problem is that the levels of violence, the ruthlessness of the filmmakers' vision, and the raw nature of the real blood and guts spilled to make the viewer squirm all dwarf those considerations. Deodato has made a movie that is little more than a showcase for horrific violence and he did it so well that his attempts to stack ideological concerns on top – most often in the form of a sanctimonious speech by one of the leads – seems laughable. The violence mocks the philosophy.
Cannibal Holocaust is an exhausting, frustrating, and unsatisfying film. Its few grace notes hint at greatness, but are these moments ultimately drown in a sea of meaningless, exploitative, and genuinely brutal gore. Even its eagerness to shock works against it, as it often feels less like the work of a harsh but clear-eyed nihilist and more like the work of a hack who, when in doubt, simply pours fake blood everywhere. Though it must get some credit for representing something like the Platonic expression of the grindhouse aesthetic, its pleasures are narrow and, finally, shoddy. But that isn't the worst thing about the film. The most frustrating thing about the film is the teasing hints that it could have been better. Instead of being a monument to the gross-out MO of the exploitation crowd, it could have been the Apocalypse Now of horror cinema. For fans of exploitation cinema, I recommend Cannibal Holocaust as the sort of logical conclusion of the genre's most common themes. For anybody else, the film is involving, but ultimately in a sort of disappointing and un-fun way. Using the famed Drums of Sri Lanka Movie Rating System, I give this flick a middling Hand Rabana, bumping it up to Bench Rabana to recognize its infamous and historic status.
Dark Horse, one of the longest running and most successful independent comic book publishers in the history of the medium, is no stranger to pulp tinged horror. For example, the Kirby-by-way-of-Lovecraft Hellboy comes out with Dark Horse's distinctive chess piece knight logo on the cover. The more frantic and over-the-top Goon is also a Dark Horse publication. Dark Horse also puts out a wide range of horror-related film adaptations. They've cranked out endless Aliens and Predator books. They even produced two issues of a Dr. Giggles book, believe it or not.
Dark Horse also does business in books of the non-comic variety, under the Dark Horse Press imprint. Here to, horror and licensed work is their bread and butter. Novels based on Aliens, for example, appear on the DHP backlist.
Recently, Universal Studios licensed their iconic stable of monsters to DHP. It is, in many ways a perfect fit. Novels based on the films Dracula, Wolf Man, Frankenstein (and his bride), and The Mummy are all in the works or already waiting for you on the bookshelves of you preferred vendor of fine readables.
The book that first caught my attention was DHP's Creature from the Black Lagoon tie-in: Paul Di Filippo's Time's Black Lagoon. Not being the biggest sci-fi fan, I don't recognize the names of many sci-fi authors, but Di Filippo's is one of the handful of guys whose work I'm familiar with. I read his Steampunk Trilogy with great pleasure, enjoy the reckless way Di Filippo blended high and low culture references, as well as the reckless, but ultimately respectful, way in which treated the various genres his works borrowed from. To me, his involvement in this venture was reason enough to take notice.
Time's Black Lagoon, like the Di Filippo's steampunk work, is a carefree mash-up of 50's horror, contemporary speculative fiction, and pulp action novel. Set mainly in the humid, post-climate change New England of 2015, the novel focuses on the adventures of Brice Chalefant, a marine biologist who, as the novel opens, has pretty much flushed his promising scholarly career down the toilet. At the end of a well-attended lecture on the impact of global warming on the environment, Brice went off on a tangent about how humans would be better equipped to handle the water-logged future if their genetics where altered to make them amphibious. This suggestion is soundly mocked and Brice goes from rising star to "the Merman Guy" overnight. However, not everybody at his university thinks he's nuts. The well-loved but eccentric Professor Hasselrude thinks Brice's fish-man idea is not only reasonable, he's seen it before. Turns out that Hasselrude was the nephew of the late Dr. Barton, the man who attempted to surgically alter the creature of permanent land-bound existence in the 1956 The Creature Walks Among Us. Hasselrude hips Brice to the history of the Gill-Man, suppressed and complete forgotten by 2015. The Gill-Man, they agree, would be the perfect template for Brice's theories. Unfortunately, the long-dead Gill-Man from the 1950s seems to have been the last member of Devonian species. It's another dead end for Brice until a friend of his, a DoD funded physicist working out of the University of Georgia, shows him what he's been working on: a time machine made out of an iPod. Suddenly, the Devonian is accessible and Brice and his significant bother, pro-outdoor guide Cody, mount an expedition to the Devonian. What they find completely rewrites the backstory of Creature of the Black Lagoon and opens up an entirely new mythology for the most neglected of Universal's famous monsters.
Like good pulp entertainment, Time's Black Lagoon aims to entertain. And on that level, it delivers. I suspect hardcore sci-fi fanboys will be disappointed in the lack of detail given such issues as time travel, but Di Filippo is less interested in science as he is in how science was presented in the wonderful sci-fi/horror flicks of the '50s. Despite the updated info about quantum physics and genetic manipulation and climate change, TBL is an intentional throwback to the '50s films that inspired it. Even the dialogue resembles that weird everything-is-a-speech dialogue that was a hallmark of classic sci-fi/horror. For example, on telling Cody he wants to study the Gill-Man, she tells Brice:
"Brice, I understand why you have to pursue this until you can't take it any further. It represents the possible culmination of everything you've been striving for. But all I ask is that you don't let it become an obsession, as it for Barton and the others. This creature and the knowledge it represents has ruined too many lives."
Of course it has sweetie; of course it has.
TBL never makes a bid to be anything other than a good time. It is unlikely that, even within Di Filippo's backlist, it will be considered a must read. But, for fans of pulpy fun and geeks of the Gill-Man franchise, it is well worth the admission price (about $7.00).
I have no pets. I own several ties, but rarely have a reason to wear any of them. I sing in the shower but can never remember the words, so I make them up as I go along, and they always end up being songs about showering. I collect slang dictionaries.
