Art: The masks people wear.

It's been forever since we've done one of these. For new readers, I used to regularly share images of gas masks on a semi-monthly basis. No reason, other than I find them strangely captivating. In this batch look for the image of Hitler youth training for chemical warfare. The photog's shadow serves as a powerful and ominous visual.

Meta: Pod people.

You might have theorized that the reason I hide my face behind a mask and communicate almost entirely through the written word is that my face is horribly mutated and my voice sounds like the churning of a million blood-gorged insects attempting to free themselves from a vat of semi-congealed KY jelly.

You can test half of your conjecture by clicking over to I Love Horror and listening to his inaugural Horror Round Table pod cast.

That's right, CRwM speaks! And speaks! And speaks some more!

The lovely and talented Brad, of I Love Horror, invited the lovely and talented Vardulon, of Castle Vardulon, and the lovely and talented Divemistress, of Zombots, (see the sidebar for all magical links to all this talented loveliness) to discuss the state of horror, remake madness, sexism in horror, and other topics.

And then Brad added me. Was it a mistake? Or did Brad do it to the Internet on purpose? You'll have to listen to find out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was not actually sitting at a round table. In that sense, the title of the pod cast is deceptive and I apologize for that in advance.

Movies: Personal filmmaking.

Odd as this sounds, I'm actually impressed by how atrocious the new Jonah Hex movie looks.



I had recently heard that execs so hated the flick that they demanded 50 new pages of material be created and shot for the already wrapped project. Watching this, I wonder if those demands were not corrective, but punitive. Looking at this Syfy channel sneak peek, I can't help but imagine that some suit decided, "I am tired of these shit comic book movies, people. I'm not only going to ruin your movie, but I'm going to bury it in huge piles of runny, steaming, stinking fail that it will strike fear into the next knuckle dragging funnybook huckster who thinks he's got one of the broke dick comic properties to sell me."

This isn't indifference (see Gondry's Green Who?), simple incompetence (see The Fantastic Four flicks, any of them), or even Oedipal egomania (see Miller's The Spirit, or, better yet, don't). This feels like somebody expressing a visceral, personal hatred of the product in question, like they took the movie as a personal affront and just unleashed every bad idea they could think of on the poor film. "Yeah, tough guy? Some movie just got itself packed with allusions to Sonnenfeld's Wild Wild West. Not so tough now, are you?!"

"Chill out boss. Jonah Hex has learned its lesson."

"I don't want it smart, I want it dead. Tell the writers I want more dialogue for Ms. Fox. Boatloads more."

Kind of breathtaking in a way.

Movie: New details in the Bambi case come to light.

The strange, abortive history of the Meyer helmed, Roger Ebert penned Sex Pistols film - Who Killed Bambi? - came in this blog a couple weeks ago. For the curious, Ebert has posted his entire, unfilmed WKB screenplay on the Chicago Sun Times site.

Books: Dogs of varying ages attempt to learn tricks of diverse vintage.

The origin-story of Peter Straub's latest novel, A Dark Matter, can be profitably compared to the origin story of Stephen King's latest novel, The Dome.

King's "new" book is actual a manuscript from the '70s that he decided to dust off, unaware that its basic premise was the central gag of The Simpsons Movie. Despite King's interest in format exploration (from the serial publication of The Green Mile to pioneer efforts at electronic publishing), there's something telling that he's pushing 30-year-old work out now, and that sits just fine with everybody. It seems appropriate, fitting even for an author who famously revisited his own masterworks again and again, who dredged up his early career nom de plume to produce a work two decades later.

By contrast, Straub's new novel owes a debt to the work of Brian Evenson, a genre warping author whose sadly under-recognized work sits at the weird intersection of pulp and experimental art. And I don't mean this in some "I saw some similarities" clever critic way: Straub's introduction not only thanks Evenson for the inspiration, but mentions that one specific scene in the novel is modeled off a scene in Evenson's own The Open Curtain.

When King needs inspiration, he looks back. When Straub needs inspiration he finds it in the work of a guy who not only wrote one of the definitive texts on the mindbending prose of Robert Coover, but who also contributed a story to a collection of stories that takes place in the Halo game universe.

This is not to say that one approach is necessarily better than the other. In fact, there's a sort of quality assurance that comes with King's approach. Like a top level athlete, King has perfected his performance in a highly specific and limited field. The pleasure of King is the pleasure of knowing that you're in the hands of a master, and that mastery is predicated on the idea of him doing the very thing he's mastered. When I was young, I remember people who weren't particularly into boxing making jokes about how upset they would be if they bought the pay-per-view Tyson fight and Tyson ended it in a minute and some change. But these were the folks who never bought in to a fight. The people who paid to see Tyson do his thing never complained. That was the point of seeing Tyson. Reading King's like that.

Straub's something different. The pleasure of reading Straub is the pleasure of watching a master restlessly push himself to find the limits of his own talent. Straub's interest in the New Weird, that liminal genre of fantasy and postmodern lit, which Straub dubbed "the New Horror" in a recent anthology he edited, has kept him on the vanguard of his chosen field, but that comes with a price. King's like early career Tyson: the result is rarely in doubt. Struab's newest work is more like a tightrope act. It requires skill and training and the careful dexterity of a master, but it still courts disaster. And whatever the outcome, it's interesting.

I wish I could say that A Dark Matter was a triumph, but it's more interesting than successful.

Yet another autopsy of the '60s, A Dark Matter plays with shades of understanding. It's a tragedy about the inability to communicate wearing the Halloween mask of a horror novel. At its core is story of a group of friends who, in their youth, were pulled into the orbit of a somewhat sinister, but mostly pathetic guru. Their cult of personality disintegrated when a black magic ritual when awry and one of their number died in the process. The novel follows the one friend who didn't attend the ceremony - now an adult who made his fame and fortune writing a thinly veiled fictional treatment of the event - as he tries to piece together what actually happened that day.

The curious thing about A Dark Matter is that is isn't exactly Rashmon-like: Nobody disagrees about the most significant details of the event, so the event in question is never really a mystery. (To be fair, Rashmon isn't very Rashmon-like either - like the term "Kafkaesque," which is used when things are Orwellean, the adjectival form of the proper noun has proved more useful in day-to-day conversation and has long since overwhelmed the details of the real; which is, perhaps, the most Rashmon-like thing about Rashmon.) The result is a spiral narrative structure. With each retelling, the events of the disastrous ceremony are fleshed out and told with greater nuance or given a slightly different spin. The pattern is pleasurable, but the major downside is that there's no dramatic tension. We know, from the start, who survived, what happened, and who paid for it. It's a novel that begins by telling you exactly how it all ends.

The spiral structure of A Dark Matter is a bold move. It basically throws down the gauntlet. It disarms the most obvious and powerful weapon a genre writer's got in his arsenal: plot. Sadly, it's a bold move that Straub can't quite pull off. Wrapped in the familiar trappings of a "what happened" '60s tale, the narrative innovation seems oddly out of place; like a 2D movie shoehorned into 3D, the novel feels like a story he had on hand that he then forced into the this curious structure.

Still the spectacle of a master who could have phoned it in trying a trick that undermines one of his greatest strengths is bracing. It's the kind of no-net risk taking that should be encouraged. By incorporating the innovations of the New Weird, and doing so on such a broad and deep level, Straub hits the reset button on his writing development. He reverts back to novice level and pulls off a noteworthy debut. Is it polished, perfect? Far from it. But it has the energy of an explorer behind it. It's a hell of a trick.

Ironically, after forty years of writing, Straub's become a new voice to watch.

By contrast, Sarah Langan's Audrey's Door is firmly in the young novelist's wheelhouse. Returning to the surrealistic supernaturalism of her debut novel, The Keeper, Langan's latest welds a sympathetic drama of damaged, haunted losers to a haunted house plot heavily influenced by landmark works like Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion. There's also hints of Farris's And Then We Came to the End and even satiric evocations of the shallow tropes of post-Sex in the City chick lit.

In this case, the titular heroine, scarred by the insanity of her alternately smothering and negligent madwoman mother, attempts to create a new life in Manhattan. Her reinvention leads her to a eccentric high-rise apartment with a sinister secret. The building, designed by a demon-haunted insane genius, is a conduit for Lovecraft-ish menaces from beyond, and Audrey appears to be the key to unleashing this unnameable horror on the world.

The joy of Aubrey's Door comes chiefly in Langan's specific mastery of a style of horror all her own. Langan's feeling for her protags, the attention she lavishes on the details of their inner lives, is unique among modern horror authors. Often horror characterization is a matter of making characters sympathetic enough to give the horrors that descend upon them some sharpness. Langan, by contrast, relies on the unlikely proposition that a human being, rendered with sufficient honesty, will always become a dramatic locus of sympathy because they will seem alive, and all humans would rather see life prevail over death. Langan's characters don't need to be likable, just real. The confidence Langan places in the empathic capacity is the single greatest act of respect for fans that you'll find in genre lit - any genre - today.

Admittedly, there is a nearly oppressive air of familiarity here. Langan's moved much of the action to an urban setting, but she can't resist a long interlude in a recession ravaged Midwest town that resembles the struggling small towns of her first two works. This interlude serves as an odd allegory for the artistic project of the book; Langan is ready to move on, but still has to wrestle with the material that so strongly defined her early voice. (The mother/daughter relationship at the core of the book is another handy allegory for the creative tug-of-war being worked out in these pages.) There's a familiar shagginess to the end. Endings are the hardest things to pull off and a particular weakness of Langan's, though she gets credit for daring something completely new to her novelistic work: a (qualified) happy ending.

Langan dares less than Straub does with his book, but she gains more from her less ambitious bet. Fans of Langan's previous novels, especially The Keeper, will find much to dig here. Audrey's Door won the Stoker, and with good cause. Still, there's a nervousness about the book that suggests Langan's impatience with her own tools.

With the next novel, I hope Langan pulls a Straub.

Stuff: Portrait of a serial killer. And some landscapes.

In 1957, Life magazine sent a team of photographers to capture the unfolding Ed Gein case. Online, Life's created a slideshow of the images those photographers created.

Movies: His son killed Hitler.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact.

Sheldon Roth is the father of director and actor Eli Roth. Over at Patheos, an online religious journal, Roth has an interesting post about what it felt like to see his son assassinate Adolf Hitler in the spelling-challenged film Inglourious Basterds.

From the post:

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, Inglourious Basterds. I watched my son, in his character of "The Bear Jew," machine-gun the Fuhrer's face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief, and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

And later:

It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one's life. Feelings are just as much reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real -- they cannot be dismissed because the story is "historically inaccurate."

Quentin Tarantino understood that it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded, and dies a forgotten work. So, where do Inglourious Basterds and my reactions fit into this picture?

At Passover we read of the sages who urge us to tell the tale of the Exodus tirelessly -- one cannot say enough to describe that devastation in the lives of the Hebrews. However, time has laid dust on the tongue's capacity to be fluent in those events. How historically accurate is the story most Jews repeat not once, but twice a year, for some of us even four times, every year of our lives? Reciting the plagues of Egypt is quaintly interesting, but watching Eli turn his armed fury on Hitler in a cinematic oven of burning Nazis is awesome and much closer to my own history.

The Holocaust provides anew an endless capacity to relate Jewish history. I am in my 70s, and all my life I have studied the Holocaust. But I am still startled by the unthought-of newness of stories. I cannot hear enough; it never ends. Inglourious Basterds partakes of the Passover injunction to tell our story. The feelings evoked while watching this film contain our history -- personal and group. The film, though not "factual," represents a psychological reality. This psychological reality is a fact, not empty fantasy. Uncannily, unbidden, a gift-giver, Eli was acting out my dreams, dreams based on my life -- through a film.

Movies: "A human volcano of unpredictable terror!"

I suspect The Sadist, the James Landis helmed 1963 cheapie that features a trio stranded travelers in the clutches of two teenaged psychopaths, is actually more interesting now that it was when it was first released. Made to cash in on Psycho fueled mania for crazed killers, on it's release, the flick must have simply looked like another kooks on a rampage flick. Now, from a distance of more than 30 years, The Sadist stands out far more clearly as stumbling, but still strangely prophetic step down a path to a more purely American horror cinema: a cinematic vision of fear that stripped away the last vestiges of the European Gothic mode that dominated the imaginations of American horror filmmakers until the twilight of the 20th Century and rooted itself in the features of our distinct landscape.

In this respect, Psycho is a great liminal film. Hitchcock's masterpiece has one foot in new paradigm, with its distinctly modern landscapes of cities, empty highways, and seedy motels. It's a landscape of anonymous transience that mirrors the inner rootlessness of the film's protags and victims. But, true to his own Euro roots, Hitchcock never fully shook off the Gothic trappings that, for centuries, defined European horror. The film features a rotting family manse on the hill, a sickly Victorian vision of sexuality that is at once titillated and morally repulsed by deviancy, suggestions of family sins, and fluid sense of identity as a symptom of a world order in chaos. One can even read into the geography of the Bates homestead and business Hitchcock's judgment as to the value of the two paradigms: The Gothic mansion towers over the brutally characterless motel. Psycho belongs, along with American Notes for General Circulation and Lolita, in that genre of works by Europeans both in fascinated and sickened by the vibrant, uncultured barbarism of the Americans. In Hitch's case, he has the ghosts of the old world shred the avatars of the new. He even buries the poor saps in that most American of symbols: Norman puts the corpses in the trunk of a car. Then the car sinks in a swamp. A bunch of corpses in a car, sinking in a cesspool. There are few more pointed satires of American life than Psycho.

Many of the flicks that followed kept that weird split in their genetic make-up, though one imagines that American filmmakers viewed more as a formal and it lacked, for them, Hitchcock's energetic, visceral punch. Coppola's Dementia 13 features a return to an ancestral castle home as a major plot point. William Castle set his Homicidal in a rotting family mansion and tangled the plot up in an inheritance issue. Ancestral blood guilt, one of the pillars of Gothic horror, rears its head again in Taste of Fear, which features a young woman returning to her father's estate. It wasn't until The Sadist and Violent Midnight, the former beating the latter to the theater by just a month, that filmmakers injected a strain of American youth culture into their flicks and inoculated them against the influence. And of those two films, Midnight's visual language borrows so strongly from Psycho that it near fully breaks free from its influence. In contrast, The Sadist seems oddly fresh, both narratively and visually, even today.

The logline is spare and simple: Three travelers ended up stranded at decaying gas station in the California desert and find them selves at the mercy of a pair of Strakweather-inspired teen psychopaths. Watching it now, we can see the flick hit all the necessary marks: the travelers search the place, missing all the signs of trouble that the viewer catches; shots from the stalking killers' POV, including a gun hand shot that strangely presages the standard POV of first-person shooter games; police officers who represent the victims' best chance at freedom, but who turn out to be little more than killer fodder; and a final girl who, in her flight, stumbles across the killers' previous handiwork and is, Chain Saw Massacre-style, saved by a deus ex machina when the film gets fatigued by its own brutality. Oddly, its the very familiarity of these tropes that give them punch here. You don't expect to see this worn pattern played out against the backdrop of the early 1960s. Our male travelers (headed to a baseball game instead of rock concert or summer camp) are in white shirts and skinny ties. Their female companion wears dress and has her hair done-up. They're adult presences that fool you into believing that a certain moral order will prevail. But, as the grim pattern slowly falls into place, you recognize these three as doomed emissaries from a gentler time.

Visually, the film is noteworthy for its total rejection of the lingering Gothicism present in so many of its contemporaries. Gone are the shadow-drenched castles and mansions. The Sadist is set entirely in a sun-blasted service station and wrecking yard. Gone are the themes of blood guilt and family secrets, the backstories of the killers and the victims are almost entirely irrelevant: the film plays out their random, violent encounter in near real-time. The soundtrack mixes jazzy pop and hillbilly country music, often from diagetic sources. Landis's minimal approach was, no doubt, dictated by a nearly non-existent budget, but within those limitations, Landis found a stark and unrelenting style that matches the harsh simplicity of the story.

Though, already, I'm probably over-selling this thing. There's a giggle inducing intro of psychobabble. The acting is often wooden, sometimes to the point of comedy (though, on occasion, the inert face of the young female killer, the product of her inability to act, seems like the perfect expression of amoral soullessness). I personally enjoyed the over-the-top performance of Arch Hall Jr. as the male psycho; but he really chews the hell of what scenery there is and I expect viewers' milage will vary greatly. The pacing in the early stages of the flick drags some. Also, the flick's only available on pretty gnarly transfer, so viewers will have to put up with odd, random visual and audio artifacts throughout the film.

The Sadist would be worthy of recommendation if only for its status as a curious ancestor of the slasher cinema and torture porn that would follow decades later. Happily, it is much more than that. It's a snapshot of an under-discussed moment in American horror cinema, the transition to wholly native sources of fright. It's the moment cinema shook off the ghosts and specters of Europe, the contrived monsters of the mad science lab, and fanciful invaders from beyond, and instead took a long, hard-boiled look into the madness that Jim Thompson said was the birthright of all the pure products of America.