Comics: Change the record.

One of the oddest things about Max Brooks's popular zombie-centric franchise - the highest point of which is the critic and fan fave novel World War Z - is how haphazardly it all hangs together. The cornerstone of the whole thing is his '03 Zombie Survival Guide, a goofy spoof of the then wildly popular Worst Case Scenario books and their imitators. A gag impulse-buy book, the book and it's author then appeared in Brooks's second book, World War Z: The premise of that novel's oral history conceit is that Brooks was selected for the job of oral historian because his well-known writer of a zombie survival guide is considered essential reading by the humans that made it out of the zombicaust. Aside from the tonal shift - the guide is clearly a goof, but the novel (though often hilarious in the way any really obsessively detailed consideration of the impossible inevitably is) takes its premise as seriously as it can - there's a sort of continuity error insomuch as Z assumes a guide written after a single, global zombie outbreak, but the guide assumes that there have been many outbreaks of differing magnitudes. The latest addition to the franchise, a graphic novel expansion of a section from Brooks's original guide titled Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, mixes the premises of the first book and the tone of the second. Recorded Attacks posits that zombie outbreaks of varying severity have been a regular part of human existence since the Stone Age and, within the Brooksian world of zombies, certain cultures have highly developed responses to fighting the undead. Though the tone of new graphic novel owes more to WWZ than the tongue-in-cheek meta-ness of the guide.

The comic begins with a hypothetical attack on a tribe of prehistoric humans. From there, readers go to ancient Egypt (where the removal mummies' brains takes on a new significance), the borders of the Roman Empire, and so on, in a rapid tour of zombie/pure strain human history.

Eagle-eyed readers may spot the conflict between this opener and the title of the book. After all, the point of the label "prehistoric" is to underscore the fact that the period in question produced no historic record. Brooks repeated breaks his conceit that the stories in his book are "recorded" attacks. Later, he tells the story of an outbreak that was later reported as a slave rebellion. He actually ends this story with the narration telling us that there was no record of what really happened in that incident, causing readers with a bias towards narrative logic to wonder how, then, could it be in a book pretending to be a collection of recorded attacks.

Those head scratching paradoxes aside, the stories are, on the whole, rather fun. The book's standout is a series of interconnected bits that infect humanity's grimmest crime - the 400 plus years of the Atlantic slave trade - with the zombies. There's an effective and creepy parallel between the predation of the slavers and the cannibalism of the zombies. Ibraim Roberson finely done black and white art is up to the task. He handles the rapid shifts in time confidently and his action and horror scenes are suitably lively and grisly.

In fact, the only thing the book really suffers from is the fact that the zombie markets been absolutely glutted for nearly a decade now. A competently handled, reasonably clever work like Recorded Attacks might have been great in '02, but now it is not only the victim of a crowded field, it trails behind Walking Dead, the definitive comic treatment of the whole zombie thing. There are those who can't get enough of the shambling dead. Such readers will find more than enough to enjoy here to make the book worth their time. For readers fatigued by this endless zombie moment we seem to find ourselves in, this will seem like more of the same.

Link Proliferation: "To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest."

I totally flaked on this last Friday, but I meant to hip you to a great post by Zoe, the amazing blogger of the high strangeness that is Zoe in Wonderland. In the trademarked Zoe style, the post follows a single thread of thought through art, history, religion, and murder, excavating the twisted roots of a Bolivian religious tradition known as "La Diablada." I don't want to ruin it by stepping all over the post's content. Well worth the click. Read on, McDuff.

Movies: Learn to live like an animal.

Though it may be the product of some sort of strong blow to the head - most likely suffered in childhood - I actually enjoyed Jonathan Henseigh's 2007 Welcome to the Jungle, a clumsy first-person-shooter jungle romp that owes a huge debt to the vastly overrated Cannibal Holocaust and the still hotly debated Blair Witch Project. And I say that knowing, on an objective level, W2tJ is a very, very dubious flick.

The plot of W2tJ is simple: Four ex-pats - one stick-up-the-butt couple and one boozin' and sexin' pair of goofs - living in Fiji get wind of a old white dude spotted amongst the cannibal tribes of New Guinea. After a bit o' research, the quartet decide that the mysterious white shadow must be none other than the vanished Michael Rockefeller, who vanished in the cannibal jungles of New Guinea in 1961. (The true story of the young Rockefeller is fascinating and, while it hardly justifies the "based on a true story" tag this flick gets, it does justify a quick Google exploration of your own.) Visions of tabloid gold dancing in their head, the quartet grab some jungle-grade camping gear, get two camera, and set off into New Guinea to find the famed missing scion of the Rockefeller empire. In the tradition of Cannibal Holocaust, they run afoul of locals - from crafty urban traders to the cannibals that act as the film's final baddies - and, in the tradition of BWP, they turn on one another under the stress. As a result, our heroes fare little better than characters from either of W2tJ major inspirations (indeed, one is even dispatched and displayed in a manner that alludes to Holocaust's infamously grisly girl-kabob gag).

There's ample reason to consign W2tJ to the dustbin of horror film history. Primarily, there's the first-person camerawork. Taking all the wrong lessons from Cannibal Holocaust, W2tJ mixes what appears to be vérite style third-person shots with first-person subjective camera work. But, unlike Holocaust, there's no in flick justification for the back and forth. Consequently, there are several scenes where the viewer is left pondering whether or not they are supposed to think anybody is behind the camera - a distraction that break you out of the film and diminishes the impact of the visual style by underscoring how contrived it is. Even when the film does fully commit to the premise of first-person p.o.v.'s, the conceit make a hash of certain scenes. Most notably, there's a scene is which our young cannibal kibble run into a particularly testy set of New Guinean military patrolmen. There's some sort of dust-up between the smart-ass male of the group and one of the army men, but the whole thing happens mostly off scene and what we do see, shot in low-light and with the camera's stabilizers set to Parkinson's, is fairly incomprehensible. One could argue that this sort of low resolution opacity fairly mimics the nervous isolation of our main characters and communicates to the viewers as sense of their own frightened ignorance of what's going on. But the result of repeatedly leaving the viewers literally and metaphorically in the dark doesn't heighten the tension. Instead, it give the viewer the sense that plot incidents are happening willy-nilly, so investing the mental bandwidth to attempt to puzzle out what's happening and why we should care seems like a bad call. The result is a sense detachment. We begin to feel like what we don't get wasn't getable and doesn't really matter.

But let's accentuate the positive!

W2tJ was sot on location, in jungle surroundings so beautiful that its almost cheating. There are a few set ups in a the flick that, despite the hand-cam conceit, look epic. Given the ever increasing quality and portability of film equipment, it's kind of a mystery why small budget filmmakers don't get out more. If you lack the budget to create the lavishly squalid dungeons of Jigsaw, go find a rotting hospital structure like the one that practically stars in Session 9. Think of the brilliant way the birch trees in Blair Witch became a grim, minimalist series of white slash marks on a pitch-black background. You aren't going to get that in a studio. Perhaps it's a genre-specific distrust of the beautiful: Other than the occasional final girl, horror too often seems to pride itself on the rigor of is grotesquery and see the beautiful as a sort of softening, feminizing indulgence. There also a distinctly American strain of fantasy that focuses on the intrusion of violent or uncanny of the quotidian - a manifestation of America's defensively suburban mentality - that has long replaced the early modern gothic of Poe and Hawthorne or sci-fi-hued apocalypses of the early Atomic Era. The sets for such horrors are cookie-cutter tract homes, shopping malls, and high schools proms. There's little room for for the spectacle of beauty in such flicks; it's a cinema of touchy possessiveness, a horror that wants you off its lawn. In contrast, there's an expansiveness to W2tJ visuals that is pleasing. It wants to explore new places and pit its characters against the challenges that await those bold or foolish enough to venture forth. It speaks to a sense of heroic questing, rather than peevish insularity. That said, Henseigh's vision falls a bit short of the naturalistic poetry in recent Aussie flicks like Wolf Creek, Rogue, or Black Water. In those flicks have an almost pagan vibe. Nature is vast, ancient, and possessed of a brutally serene indifference to the activities of the mortals who intrude in her realm. Steeped in classic action tropes, Henseigh treats his jungle more as a series of tests for his characters rather than something that exists on another plane of being.

W2tJ also gets points for being happily free of the untidy, ill-concived "philosophical" baggage that makes Cannibal Holocaust such a particularly embarrassing failure. Admittedly, the "who are the real savages" nonsense in Deodato is little more than a beard, a clumsy bit of misdirection meant to justify the film's energetic wallowing in exploitation extremism; but it's a beard Deodato seems determined to sell. We get our cheap kicks smothered in in a overly generous helping of the unearned and juvenile revelation that modern man can be cruel; a philosophical "discovery" that is all the more embarrassing for the fact that Deodato doesn't seem to believe it himself as he takes pains to make the cruel documentary freaks who act unlike any of other folks in the flick. (Curiously, the idea that all humanity is inherently evil and incapable of evolution past its most essential and savage core must be a great comfort to artists from formerly fascists nations who must otherwise ask themselves the less comfortable question of how rational, well-meaning human beings commit unspeakable evil.)

In contrast, W2tJ plays strictly for kicks. This isn't without its problem: The specters of Burroughs, Haggard, and the worst of Kipling haunt the film, not full exorcised by the native's bloody revenge at the end. But we're mercifully spared the hectoring voice of the filmmaker trying to convince us that he's speak great truths. In this aspect at least, W2tJ is far superior to is deluded predecessor.

Henseigh's cannibal flick also shows cannibals that act like humans rather than excitable zombies: They hunt their food carefully and strategically, they ration out their meat, they even keep a separate butchery and killing field so as to not litter their home with messy people parts. That's a real step forward in the presentation of cannibals.

W2tJ is great film. In fact, with it's occasional lapses into visual incompetence, I can't even say its a very good film. Furthermore, because its aims are so much more modest than Blair Witch, it never achieves that flick's creeping existential dread. However, it's a honest flick with some well-made scenes. If there's room enough on your Netflix queue for such easy and unremarkable pleasures, you could do worse.

And now, because we've all got it stuck in our heads now . . .

Music: "My Heart Was Stolen in the Outer Realm."

The band Sea Wolf, named after the 1904 Jack London novel, is really just one dude: Cali native Alex Church. The rest of Sea Wolf is pressed into service as needed. Here, Church and company do "Wicked Blood" of Sea Wof latest long-player, White Water, White Bloom. The video is a charming homage to the lo-fi pleasures of z-grade sci-fi/horrors like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Stuff: My bloody shower time?

If you're anything like me, you like your hot morning shower, but wish it could somehow be more ominous. Hygiene is all good and well, but where's the menace?

And if there could be a sort of visual "shower/gas" holocaust gag embedded into the experience, all the better.

Screamers and Screamettes, we're in luck. I give you Chris Dimino's Gas Mask Shower Head!

Happy Halloween.

Link Proliferation: "When Grete Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, she found herself changed in her bed into a Halloween costume."

Whose Dad You Gonna Call?

The Daily Beast features a profile of Peter Aykroyd, co-author A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, and his son Dan Aykroyd, comedian and eccentric vodka producer.

The story reveals that Dan's interest in the ghost stuff comes from his family's long-time involvement in psychic "research":

Peter Aykroyd, father of the famed comic actor Dan, isn’t afraid of ghosts.

Even when the long-deceased spirits of Ming Dynasty Chinese, ancient Egyptian princes, and the family’s 18th-century patriarch, Samuel Aykroyd I, called out to him as a young boy in Ontario, Peter says he felt no fear.

And why should he have? Ever since he was 8 years old, purported communication with the dead was a regular occurrence, part of a long series of séances conducted by his grandfather, Dr. Samuel A. Aykroyd, a dentist with a side career as a psychic investigator, and the family medium, Walter Ashurst, who would channel the spirits’ voices through his body.

“Even extraordinary things in life, experienced enough, become commonplace,” Peter, now 87, told me as we sat together with Dan in Manhattan’s Essex House. “If you see a ghost 10 times—”

“—it’s like the family pet,” the younger Aykroyd interrupted, completing his father’s sentence.

Monsters Have Their Uses

In the Chronicle of Higher Ed, there's a nifty little post discussing the use of monsters in the development of our "moral imaginations":

In a significant sense, monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the good life or at least the secure life. Our ethical convictions do not spring fully grown from our heads but must be developed in the context of real and imagined challenges. In order to discover our values, we have to face trials and tribulation, and monsters help us imaginatively rehearse. Imagining how we will face an unstoppable, powerful, and inhuman threat is an illuminating exercise in hypothetical reasoning and hypothetical feeling.

You can't know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien face-hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chainsaw-wielding psycho. Fortunately, you're unlikely to be put to the test. But you might face similarly terrifying trials. You might be assaulted, be put on the front lines of some war, or be robbed, raped, or otherwise harassed and assailed. We may be lucky enough to have had no real acquaintance with such horrors, but we have all nonetheless played them out in our mind's eye. And though we can't know for sure how we'll face an enemy soldier or a rapist, it doesn't stop us from imaginatively formulating responses. We use the imagination in order to establish our own agency in chaotic and uncontrollable situations.

You've Got a Day to Get Your Shit Together

Dustin at McNally Jackson (SoHo's finest purveyor of vendible books) posts ideas for down and dirty literary-themed costumes. Here's a sample:

A. Gregor Samsa’s sister from The Metamorphosis. What was her name again? Ah, yes, Grete. Thank you internet. I don’t really know what that would look like, but I think it’d be brilliant.

C. You could be A Film Adaptation of Your Favorite Book. So: shorter, dumber, but also sexier, with more kicks to the face, more explosions, and maybe a happier ending. (Don’t take the “more explosions” bit too literally, eh?)

E. A young John Ashbery, in a convex mirror. Wow, I love that one. Maybe I’ll do that. You can still do it, too. I think the more of us there are, the funnier it would be.

Movies: Saving grace.

William Blake once wrote that it was better to smother an infant in its cradle then to nurse unsatisfied desire. The murderous narcissism of nursed unsatisfied desires isn't just a theme in first-time feature director/writer Paul Solet's brilliantly played slow-burn horrorshow Grace, Solet makes it his monster. Sure there is a blood-and-flesh-eating undead tyke at the heart of the film, but it is really just a MacGuffin. Only slightly more grotesque than your average child, the fairly harmless monster baby is scary only in the way it affords the rest of Solet's characters the chance to truly become monstrous. An acid-etched, deeply misanthropic study of the modern family: a vapidly craving, painfully white, shallowly moral existence rendered sick by its own unexamined definitions of happiness, there's plenty of creepy things in Solet's dark flick; but the baby's hardly one of them. Far scarier is that selfish, ravenous egotism that destroys in the name of love. And that particular beast stomps its way through Grace like Godzilla through Tokyo.

For those who haven't seen this film – and you should: there's far more power and truth behind Grace's indiscriminately nihilistic view of suburban malaise than there is in the po-faced slumming platitudes of Mendes' sheep-in-wolf's-clothing American Beauty - it play's out like so: Madeline and Michael are two well-heeled upper middle class types who are trying to conceive. Michael is a milquetoast under the thumb of his tyrant mother, a retired judge named Vivian (Michael takes after his silent, suffering, insignificant father, Henry), which is unfortunate as it basically leaves between the rock of his WASPy mother domestic dictatorship and the hard place of Madeline's vacuously smug pseudo-Enlightenment. As luck would have it, Michael seals the deal and puts Madge in a motherly way. Sadly, fairly late in the pregnancy, Mike and Madge are in a car accident (they own a hybrid SUV, natch) that compels a shuffling off of Michael's mortal coil and snuffs the fetus in Madge's tumbly.

With the approval of her supposedly quite wise mid-wife, Madge decides to take the corpse to term and squeezes out the dead kid in a specialized Jacuzzi the mid-wife keeps for just such a purpose. But – miracle of miracles – the baby does not seem dead. Against all logic, the mid-wife lets Madge take little, cold, creepy Grace home. It's no spoiler to announce that Grace is not what you'd call a healthy baby. She stinks like a poisoned rat that's given up the ghost behind the walls of your house and she boots any food except human blood. And yet, poor insane Madge, fueled by that sacred love that binds mothers to any monster they may manage to force out of their breeding chute, decides to raise Grace as she is, feeding her blood sucked from her own breast (in a bizarre literalization of the Elizabethan Era metaphor that held that pelicans symbolized motherhood because – according to the mistaken notions of the time – they fed their young by piercing their own breast and suckling them on their blood).

To complicate things, Viv goes nuts after the death of her son and hatches a plot to seize Grace. It should be noted that Viv is unaware that Grace is a zombie baby; Viv simply wants to claim control over the bloodline she spawned and is willing to roll over Madge to do so. Viv involves a family doc over whom she seems to exert an erotic influence (there's a hint of misadventure in his past, something Viv might be exploiting given her previous history as a judge) and convinces the repressed skeez physician to call on Madge: All the better to declare her unfit, my dear. Only Madge "Audrey II"'s him, setting the stage for a final confrontation between Madge and Viv.

One of the more interesting aspects of Grace is the irrelevance of its titular character – or, rather, the Godot-ish relevance of her. One can that, in parallel universes, there are versions of Grace in which the baby is just a fun-sized corpse or a post-miscarriage depression induced figment of Madge's imagination. One can even imagine a melodrama in which Grace survived birth, but ended up brain dead or in a comma or something. Her zombie-ness is, while not totally irrelevant, not what drives the story. (Even when Madge feeds Grace the doctor, it occurs after she killed the doctor in an effort to prevent him from seeing the conditions her and Grace are living in – he's not killed to feed Grace.) This isn't to say Grace is sloppily made or doesn't hold together well. Grace's cannibalistic nature is a smartly done visual conceit for the larger family's willingness to eat itself in the mad pursuit of what they crave. Instead, it is praise for how confident Solet is in executing his scheme.

The characterization in Grace has been justly praised, though I think much of this praise has mischaracterized (as it were) Solet's work. Much has been made of Solet's careful handling of female characters and his supposedly feminist agenda; Grace had the misfortune of hit people's Netflix queues just as there was an absurd blogger dust up over whether or not there was such a thing as feminism in horror films (of course there is – the dude who started the whole kerfuffle admitted that he only assumed there wasn't because he never thought of films as feminist; that is about as solid an argument as color-blind person arguing there no such thing as red or green because he's never seen them). Consequently, it briefly became an ill-suited poster-flick for fright film feminism. While it's easy to see how worthwhile feminist readings of the flick can be generated, I think such interpretations miss the real power of Solet's vision: Grace is an all encompassing satire of how we live today, a scorched Earth style examination of the amoral selfishness of a culture that considers relentless self-regard as a form of deep wisdom. Grace is more Lovecraft than Freidan. It's not so much against the patriarchy as, to crib (Hah! That's a joke boy!) a title from a critical essay on H.P., "against the world, against life."

If one wants to make a claim for Solet's feminism, one could at least claim that Solet does not play favorites with genders (or sexual orientations) and treats them just as he treats the male characters in his film: They are destructive idiots. Never in doubt, especially when they are in error, they constantly place their desires before their reason, deaf to the efforts of others to lure them off the path to their doom. It's a source of darkly humorous irony that Grace's characters are so self-absorbed that they don't even need to fool others – as long as they're sure, then that's all they need to carry on. Indeed, this becomes a sort of motif in the flick: Characters are only able to fool themselves, so they are constantly brushing off the obviously good advice of others on the flimsiest pretences. When Michael wonders if the Madge's midwife has any medical training, he's treated as if he's a boor. When the midwife's assistant says that Madge needs full-on medical attention, she's dismissed on the grounds that the clearly losing her mind Madge "knows what she wants." When Viv puts her plans to steal Grace in motion, her stalking horse doctor tries to warn her off to no effect. And so on and so on.

With reason binned, the characters have nothing left to go on but impulse. Everything becomes relative. Madge's hectoring vegetarianism, for example, is tossed out the window the moment it clashes with Grace's clearly abnormal needs. The midwife's professionalism, which comes wrapped in the high-handed moralism that the distinct privilege of the righteous autodidact, and the ethics of the doctor are similarly disposable. In the face of erotic desire, they shed it easily. Throughout the film, Madge watches vegan torture porn: documentaries about the meat industry featuring extended sequences of slaughterhouses. At first, the viewer assumes this links to Madge's vegetarianism in some way and, indeed, in the flick Madge watches this stuff to reinforce the feelings of moral superiority she feels by abstaining from carnivorous behavior. But, for the viewer, they're meant to send a more general message about just how bloody people are ready to get in order to satisfy their hunger. Madge, Viv, and just about everybody else in this picture are ready to spill all manner of blood, so long as they get their way.

For me, a well done horror flick should be like punk rock – it's a resounding no in a culture of yes. Grace has bucketloads of no to pass out: No to well-meant but shallowly held ideological convictions, no to the modern cult of motherhood, no to smothering morality of family values, no to irresponsibility disguised as empowerment. Whatever it is, Grace is against it. In that sense, Grace is the one of the best horror flicks I've seen in a long time.