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 scares the scary people?

Time has gathered up a small list of notable horror worthies and asked them the obvious, "What scares you?"

Here's a couple of sample answers:

The single scariest moment I have ever had in entertainment came during Diabolique [the 1955 film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot]. It is the moment when the corpse in the bathtub opens its eyes and shows nothing but bulging whites. - Stephen King

***

Nothing. - Elvira

***

I've always loved ghost stories, writers like M.R. James, L.P. Hartley, Joan Aiken, Stephen King, Joe Hill. But the scariest story I've ever heard was a true ghost story.

There were eight or nine of us at a restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we were telling ghost stories. The friend of a friend said, 'When I was a girl living in Texas, I had a recurring dream. In this dream, I was walking down the street of my hometown, and a man would walk toward me. Sometimes he was older and sometimes he was younger. He didn't always have the same face, but I always knew it was the same man. He would get closer and closer, and I would know that something bad was going to happen, but I would wake up each time before he reached me. I would be terrified. One night, in my dream, we finally got face to face and I spoke to him. I said, "What is your name?" He said, "My name is Sammy." And then I woke up, and I was so afraid that I couldn't go back to sleep. I went to my sister's room and said, "Can I get in bed with you? I've just had a really bad dream." My sister said, "Was it Sammy?" I said, "What did you say? How do you know Sammy?" And my sister said, "I don't. But you just brought him in the room with you." I turned on the lights and I saw that my sister was asleep. - Kelly Link

***

Other respondents include Eli Roth, R. L. Stine, Guillermo del Toro, Frank Darabont, and Joe Hill.

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.

Movies: Last night a psychopathic clan of murderous wacked-out ex-whale hunters saved my life.

The logline sounds like a goof: It's Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a whale watching ship. And, seriously, Harpoon: the Whale Watching Massacre, from the titular allusion [1] to plot point parallels, puts in a few hours of overtime justifying that pitch. The central baddies are refugees from a shuttered industry that's supported them for generations, only it's whaling instead of meat processing. [2] The imdb flick summary uses the term "fishbillies." But whether it's a goof or not is unclear. And even if you consider it a goof, just who is supposed to be the butt of this joke is a mystery.

And, ultimately, who cares? A sporadically competent flick with a vaguely quirky premise, H:tWWM has all the depth and power of a teenage suburban boy's act of minor vandalism. Fueled by an unearned sense of rage, bounded by an poorly grokked half-hearted anarchism, and suffused by a love of vulgar displays of power and a general disdain for suffering as the mark of the weak, the flick is an energetic, but undirected, middle finger at a wide variety of targets. So wide a range, in fact, that the film's weird attempts at a message get as muddled as its often incomprehensible action scenes. If this is a joke, the comedians forgot to include a punchline. [3]

Our story opens when a ethnic grab bag of tourists hops onboard a whale watching boat to catch a glimpse of the sea's mightiest beasts. Ah, and what an amazing group of soon-to-be-victims this is. You couldn't find a bigger collection of assholes outside a Wakefield Poole flick. Though it's perhaps a talent under-appreciated beyond the confines of the slasher fancy, there's a fine art to the creation of a top notch victim pool. The filmmakers need to make the victims inoffensive enough that viewers can stomach being around them for the 30 or 45 minutes they'll be forced to keep company, but they need to make them vile enough that viewers are happy to see them dispatched. It's easy to screw up, so slasher fans enter into a secret compact with horror filmmakers to count as capital crimes a wide host of behaviors that, outside of the realm of horror flicks, wouldn't raise an eyebrow. [4] H:tWWM's director, Júlíus Kemp, either out of bold disregard or energetic incompetence, totally blows this balancing act. He creates a group so richly unpleasant, it's almost luxurious, a extravagant display of human crappiness that makes one wonder if Kemp isn't a genuine misanthrope simply playing at the flaccid and cynical misanthropy-theater of the slasher genre. From the friend who hangs up on a panicked phone call by her crying twice-sexually assaulted and now held capitve by crazies friend with a blithe "I have it when you're freaking on E" to the woman who, despite the fact that they're fighting for their lives against a murderous clan of "fishbillies," finds time to react with disgust to another character's homosexuality, we've got a collection of superlosers. In fact, Kemp seems almost incapable of creating a character who isn't repulsive. The two "heroes" of flick, the only non-grotesques, are so flat and uninteresting as to be bores. One is a woman who, because Kemp drags her through the wringer early in the flick, is a dazed catatonic character through much of the rest of it. The other is black and gay; but not in any significant way, just black and gay in that "the easiest way to get a liberal to trust you" black and gay way.

If Kemp meant for these characters to be figures of satiric comedy, he missed the mark. He is a decidedly unfunny director, even when he's trying to sell the ha-has. Aside from the laughter inducing plea of a Greenpeace member before he gets an axe to the neck - "Don't do this! I'm a friend of the Earth!" - Kemp's got no touch for comedy. Still, his decision to go full a-hole on his characterization does pay off in one huge way. In the character Endo (played by mono-monikered actress Nae, née Nae Tazawa), Kemp's got perhaps the most delightful "final girl" ever created for horror cinema.

Endo is introduced as the mousy, continually abused personal assistant of the cowardly and misogynistic Nobuyoshi, a repugnant Japanese businessman who is traveling with his timid, emotionally-inert wife Yuko. For the first quarter of the flick, Endo staggers around the set, sullenly carrying out Nobuyoshi's orders and occasionally retiringly to a quiet section of the whale ship to pursue her favorite pastime: chewing off scabs and worrying her wounds with her teeth. [5] Eventually, the clan of murderously irate ex-whalers shows up and begin slaughtering everybody. Like all the other characters, Endo begins fighting for her life. The difference is that Endo brings it. If there's questions about it being here, they are settled. It was brought. The bringer of it was Endo.

Let's take a moment to talk about the final girl. The final girl is the Lady Gaga of horror characters: She gets a disproportionate amount of credit for what is, essentially, a relatively small tweak in presentation, while the ostensible core competency (music for Gaga, being a female victim for horror characters) is really pitched to the comfort level of the audience, by either riffing off a familiar, proven, and predictable pool of inspirations meant to flatter the unjust sense of erudition of the consumer/fan or by relying on common genre clichés. She's easy to like, cause she's built to be liked. She's basically every other dead chick's character: her time to be chased comes up in the rotation and she flees screaming. Only we haven't spent all film inventing reasons - reasons that we don't even believe - that she should die and, though it's been a losing strategy for every other woman in the film, running around screaming works for the final girl. Very rarely, a final girl will show some genuine resourcefulness and vigor. Nancy in the first Nightmare flick is notably feisty, with her pre-game research and booby-trap creation effort. Mostly though, the survivability of the final girl is simply a product of their commitment to cardio exercise and the fact that fans demand somebody whose not the killer be standing in the last reel. Honestly, her importance to modern fans rest mostly on an ill-understood and very dubious theory that states that the existence of the final girl makes it morally okay to watch films that are naked exploitations of the perverse desire many fans apparently have to watch young flesh be ripped apart. She's our out. We're not morbid little trolls because, you know, though we've totally been cheering on the deaths of however many kids, we're Kool and the Gang because, look, we totally were all on the side of the final girl.

But back to Endo . . .

Endo is a final girl we can believe in. The central crisis of the film is a transformative moment for her. When Endo decides she's the final girl, nobody - killers or other members of the victim pool - are safe from her. While the other's are scrambling around the ship, engaging in sporadic and often one-sided encounters with the baddies, Endo sees the this horrific rupture as the end of her old life. The moment a freakin' whaling harpoon plunges through the corpulent body of her boss, Endo realizes that she's not only fighting for her life, but she's fighting for a meaningful life. She won't go back to being the timid, scab-eater we've known for the first quarter of the film. She's reborn. The brilliance of this is that, un-Scrooge-like, this personal revelation turns Endo into a complete bitch. She's willing to gain any advantage over any other character in the flick, from demanding money for taking one of the characters away with her in a dock boat to convincing a mentally shattered and traumatized woman that it's logical to allow Endo to fit her up like a suicide bomber. (In a deliciously nasty touch, Endo decides not to leave the decision to kill herself up to the kamikaze woman/antipersonnel device, so she pushes her onto an enemy harpoon, dooming her and another of the members of the victim pool, who might have escaped without Endo's intervention.) Once Endo really finds her stride, she becomes the most dangerous person in the film. It's a refreshing take on a weak trope that had, long ago, become a goofy crutch for horror filmmakers.

Is Endo enough to make this film worth watching? Look, I don't give number ratings or pretend this is a consumer advocacy sort of thing because I can't imagine you're smart enough to read and yet, somehow, haven't figured out the sort of film you'll dig. If you're into horror, you've already developed a sense of the sort of flicks you'll risk wasted time on and those films you won't. In a genre so filled with stinkers, you've got to evolve such a sense. Slasher flick on whale boat: if that's your thing, go to town.

[1] The allusion is made all the more clearly in the films alternate title: The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre. Apparently, the more locale-specific title graced the flick on its debut in Iceland, but public distaste over the film's more squishy parts led the filmmakers to rebrand the flick with a more generic title.

[2] Curiously, both flicks seem to suggest that generational involvement with a single industry - something that used to be a symbol of community coherence, but is now apparently a sign of stagnation - is akin (no pun intended) to voluntarily limiting the gene pool: working at the same craft your father did means, apparently, that you'd also breed with close relatives.

[3] And this is coming from a big fan of suburban boys' acts of vandalism.

[4] This compact between viewer and filmmaker is the source of the oft repeated, but not wholly accurate characterization of of the killing-for-kissing morality of slashers as "conservative." It's probably a better characterization to say that slashers exhibit a self-contained ironic hyper-punative morality that replaces fate with narrative utility. Characters engage in some putatively "bad" behavior, though this behavior is, honestly, nothing the filmmakers or the viewers care about, in a moral sense. The reason the nubile teen coed shimmies out of her clothing as soon as possible and then gets an axe to the face isn't because the filmmakers or audience members have any investment in the notion that sexual activity should be punished by death. (Indeed, if either party believed this, the film's would be put in the awkward position of condemning both parties - audience and filmmakers - to death for involving them in softcore skin displays. This is why there's not a huge tradition of teensploiter slashers in, say, Taliban controlled cultures.) Rather, the camp tramp gets the business end of a chopper because she was hired to expose her tits and, that being done, there's nothing else to do with her. That there appears to be a reason - the odd moral calculus of the genre - simply serves to obscure the clumsy mechanical nature of the subgenre formula. Maintaining the fiction that there's some non-financial logic to it requires the viewer and filmmakers constantly push the bar to "sin" lower and lower, until we get moral statements like "you're fat, so you deserve death" and "you just know a midget's got it coming to them." Nobody actually holds these absurd positions. They aren't really even positions. We pick them up just for the flick and then leave them on the floor of the theater, with the rest of the rubbish.

[5] It's part of Kemp's, um, charms as a director that he loves the gross shit that bodies do. And, by this, I don't just mean the horrific gore we can emit when somebody unzips some cavity. Kemp seems to take a positive pleasure in showing people vomiting, picking at scabs, sweating, and so on. There's no toilet scene, but I imagine an extensive and utterly repulsively messy scene exists in some director's cut version.

Movies: You're going to have to find yourself some other urban hellhole to haunt.

Today the city of Chicago takes the wrecking ball to the high-rise at 1230 N. Burling St., marking the beginning of the end for the final building in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project.

Known to horror fans as the home of Candyman, Cabrini-Green was a real place. Named after Frances Cabrini - religious activist for the poor and the first American canonized by the Catholic Chruch - and Congressman William James Green, the projects grew organically from a row of house built in 1942 to, by the 1960s, a cluster of highrise apartments housing more than 15,000 people.

Initially, the residents of the project were Italian immigrants and their descendants, but social economic shifts meant that residents of Cabrini-Green were predominantly African-American by the early 1960s.

Real life violence haunted the CG. Before the initial row houses were built, the area that would become Cabrini-Green was known as "Death Corner" and was infamous for the number of organized crime hits that took place there. Still, the specific decline of the project can be traced to the post-World War II years when a cash strapped city started withdrawing crucial public services from the residents (such as regular police patrols) in an effort to save money. Even the lush green lawns that surround the apartment buildings were paved over to save money on lawn care.

In the 1970s, the city installed steel fencing in all the open pathways on the outsides of the apartment buildings. This feature - the prison-like metal fencing outside every apartment's doorway - can be seen in several scenes in the original Candyman. Meant as a safety feature, it had the unintended consequence of turning the blocks in armored fortresses for gang members who could now see the police without the police seeing them. In 1970, two police were killed by an unidentified sniper who picked them off from one of the now protected walkways.

By the 1980s, Cabrini-Green's rep as a gangster haven was a national embarrassment. Mayor Jane Byrne, in an effort to rehabilitate the project's image, moved in to a Cabrini-Green apartment. Even with her impressive force of bodyguards, she didn't last more than three weeks. Byrne's retreat from Cabrini-Green was widely seen as sign that the project was past saving.

Perhaps the height of the project's infamy came in 1997, when a nine-year-old girl, known in the media as "Girl X," was found raped and poisoned in one of the Cabrini-Green stairwells. Girl X survived her assailants attack, but the attack left her blind, paralyzed, and mute. The Cabrini-Green based Gangster Disciples street gang turned into a violent vigilante posse, with orders to find Girl X's attacker and beat him to a pulp. The fact that a gang seemed more likely to find the attacker than the police speaks to how far outside the civilized norm more folks considered the CG. Eventually the police did catch the perp. He was tried and given a 120-year sentence.

The projects are going to be replaced by mixed income housing. There's some controversy about the number of houses and apartments slotted for lower income families. Activists say that the new plan will not accommodate the number of lower income families displaced by the demolition of Cabrini-Green.

It's just a rumor at this point, but Target might be building a store on the site. Maybe that's where Candyman will go.

Music: Schoolly D(emon)

What with side projects, day-job obligations, and whatever else distracts one from one's creative outlets, it took the indie rock outfit Rival Schools a decade to get their new album together. For the first video of this much-delayed platter, lead singer (ex-Gorilla Biscuts/Quicksand frontman) Walter Schreifels and the boys pay homage to a horror classic.

Stuff: Pause for reflection.

Over at The Atlantic, they're using a piece by Nathan Fox - artist of the comic ANTSS just posted about - to illustrate a lightweight think piece called Our Zombies, Ourselves. I'm not sure that writer James Parker drops any science the average ANTSS reader doesn't already know, though he gets points for correctly identifying the earliest known English appearance of zombies: William Seabrook's over-the-top voodoo study, The Magic Island. Plus, he opens with an interesting question to ponder. Why didn't the modern zombie arrive earlier?

The most surprising thing about the modern zombie—indeed, the only surprising thing about the modern zombie—is that he took so long to arrive. His slowness is a proverb, of course: his museumgoer’s shuffle, his hospital plod. Plus he’s a wobbler: the shortest path between two points is seldom the one he takes. Nonetheless, given all that had been going on, we might reasonably have expected the first modern zombies to start showing up around 1919. Twentieth-century man was already moaning and scratching his head; shambling along with bits falling off him; desensitized, industrialized, hollowed out, metaphysically evacuated—A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many … Had some trash visionary produced a novel or play about the brain-eating hordes, or a vers libre epic of viral undeadness, it would have gone down rather well, at this point.

Comics: Don't let the pigeon drive us straight to hell.

In an afterword attached to the tail end of TPB collection of the Pigeons from Hell mini, script from Joe R. Lansdale and art by Nathan Fox and Dave Stewart, essayist and novelist Mark Finn quotes Robert E. Howard discussing his folkloric sources of inspiration:

But no Negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature was hers, and there was no light and mirth in her. Her tales showed what a strange legion of folk-lore grew up in the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Southwest, where transplanted Celtic myths and fairy-tales met and mingled with a sub-stratum of slave legends. My grandmother was but one generation removed from south Ireland and she knew by heart all the tales and superstitions of the folks, black and white, about her.

This bit comes from a letter addressed to H. P. Lovecraft. Howard and Lovecraft had a curious relationship, part mutual fan club and part professional rivalry. This particular missive was part of a multi-year long debate between the two titans of genre lit about the nature of barbarism and civilization. Howard, of course, made romanticizing the noble savage the cornerstone of his writing career. In contrast, Lovecraft viewed the barbaric impulse as atavistic in the worst possible way. For Howard, barbarism was the pulsing will to power that ran through the blood of all men in spite of the softening influences of modern culture; for Lovecraft, barbarism was the bloody nihilistic abyss that lurked underneath the fragile scaffolding of civilized progress. [For a more nuanced take on this debate, check out reader Taranaich's post in the comment section - CRwM]

One imagines that Lovecraft shuddered at Howard's breezy, energetic intellectual miscegenation; for Lovecraft, mixing is almost always equal to tainting. Howard, by contrast, happily suggest that the mutt is always the healthiest dog. Setting aside the unfortunate fact of Lovecraft's view on race, Howard's description of his inspirations points to another, more strictly aesthetic, contrast with Lovecraft. "Pigeons from Hell" actually incorporates the conditions of its own creation as a plot point: just as the story rose from a tangle of sources, the key developments in the story's narrative arise from the interplay of cultures and historical conditions. In Lovecraft, more often than not, humanity is attacked from the outside or brought down by an internal imperfection. Either some eldritch thing that shouldn't be phases into the dimension to melt your brain or you discover you've secretly been a fishman all this time. By contrast, in "Pigeons," we get a horror that is the product of a manmade disaster. The supernatural horror of "Pigeons" is the residue of normal human evil, specifically the evil of slavery. In Howard's work, you get the sense that human behavior can get so bad, it poisons the very earth, leaving behind a lethally toxic spiritual superfund site in need of karmic cleansing. The descendants of the sinners and their victims are doomed to fight the same struggles, paying the same steep costs, until the original conditions of the original violation are finally resolved.

Lansdale, Fox, and Stewart manage to capture the same feeling in their modernized adaptation. The plot, a few "why won't my cell work" moments aside, will be immediately recognizable to readers of the original. Two sisters find out they've inherited a decaying white elephant of a plantation way the hell out in bayou country in New Orleans. They visit it, with a small posse of their city-folk friends in tow, to see if they should tear down the joint and try to sell off the land or simply tear up the deed and forget the rotting pile even exists. What they find, of course, is that the primary crop of the old plantation is market-grade freaky shit. And this freaky shit comes in bulk. Zombies, ghosts, black magic, trees that turn into snakes, monsters - should anybody survive, I think we can all agree the answer is to just tear up the deed.

What's nice about Lansdale's plotting, which reflects a similar arc you'll find in the original, is the value it places on the characters as protagonists. What first appears as an riot of threats and uncanny assaults is, as the characters work through their experience, revealed to be a complex web of supernatural interactions, relationships, alliances, and antagonisms. The plantation isn't just haunted: it's got its own supernatural ecosystem. The benefit of this approach is the sense the reader gets that the agency of the protagonists' is not wasted or superficial. Occasionally Lansdale, either out of loyalty to the source story or unfortunate error, lapses in to overt string-pulling: the most notable instance being the appearance of an ancient African American hoodoo man whose chief power is the ability to conjure up massive amounts of exposition.

I'm on the fence about Fox and Stewart's art. At its best, it reminds me of non-Mignola B.P.R.D. stuff. It has the vibrant line work that seems not so much sketchy as literally shaking with life. In fact, there's often a solidity to the characters that gives them a realistic density on the page that I find lacking in the Hellboy spin-off. The downside is that there's a static, disjointed quality to the art - as if everybody has been posed for still shots and then moved to the next set-up without concern for continuity - that leads to busy, murky panels and action that doesn't flow. That said, I'm inclined toward a thumbs up as I think some of the problem with the art comes from constraints imposed by factors outside the artists control. The project's fair tight pacing requires an insane about of visual information be packed onto every page. This keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, but robs the artists of the room they'd need to really bring their all.