Music: Witches (and werewolves) of the Stone Age.

Built out of the stitched together remains of Kyuss, the Queens of the Stone Age have gone through two names and nearly annual staff changes since their formation in 1997. Trying to pin down just who is further complicated by the fact that the Queens love nothing quiet so much as jamming with a guest, which means well known, but temporary faces keep popping up. These guests have include the Strokes' Julian Casablancas and Nirvana/Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (who not only did duty as drummer on the group's 2002 Songs for the Deaf, but toured in support of the album). As of this year, I think only one member from the original line-up remains on the permanent roster: singer/guitarist Josh Homme. Given all that swapping and whatnot, let's say that counts for our normal intro and leap straight into the music.

Screamers and Sreamettes, I bring you two – count 'em: TWO – big songs for the Queens of the Stone Age. Here's the Queens "Burn the Witch."



Still ready for some rumbling, hook-heavy rockage? Good. 'Cause I've got a second platter ready for you. Here's Queens of the Stone Age's "Someone's in the Wolf."

Movies: True horror stories.

Before we get to the movie review, I thought I'd share a bizarre meta-data fact about And Now the Screaming Starts. A slight majority of the readers who stop by either come directly here (they've got the blog bookmarked or type it right into their browser's address bar) or they come from links on other blogs. The rest find ANTSS through Google searches. And the number one topic that leads people to this blog is the 1965 murder of Sylvia Likens. This handily beats out the next two highest-ranking topics which are, in order, Gustave the enormous man-eating African crocodile and the haunted house rides of Coney Island. Curiously, these searches are looking for non-fiction subjects. I have yet to get any searches for the The Girl Next Door or Primeval, the fictional works inspired by these cases. People want info on the real-life stories, not the fictional re-imaginings.

I bring this up because today's film, 2007's An American Crime, purports to be "the true story" of the Sylvia Likens murder, unlike 2007's The Girl Next Door which exists twice removed from the incident, being an adaptation of the novel of the same name, itself very loosely inspired by the infamous crime. Though An American Crime is probably not considered a horror film in a tradition sense, being perhaps better labeled a dramatic film about a horrible event, I've covered previous adaptations, so I feel its appropriate to cover it here.

The filmmakers of An American Crime put the issue of realism front and center. The film begins with title cards that not only give viewers the standard "based on" disclaimer, but also claim that the film is drawn from information in the court transcripts. The story will be familiar to anybody who has seen the aforementioned film or is familiar with the case. In 1965, the Likens, two traveling carnies, leave their daughters, Sylvia and Jennifer "Jennie" Faye, in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski, a single mother with a house full of kids. (The real Baniszewski had seven children, but only six appear in the flick for some reason.) Unbeknownst to the Likens, Baniszewski has a history of mental trouble, and an alcohol problem.

At first, things are awkward, but not entirely unpleasant. The nomadic life-style of the Likens family has meant that Sylvia and Jennie have never had many friends. They enjoy suddenly finding themselves among a whole tribe of kids. Sylvia begins to meet people at school and, aside from Gertie's chemically driven moodiness, there's not much to complain about. Though there are some creepy hints of the horrors to come. Gertie is capable of sudden and explosive violence. And Jonny, the sole boy in the family, seems to take pleasure in small, but disconcerting acts as cruelty, such as leaving a dog's food dish nearly out of reach of the animal or abusing the toys of his sisters.

In less than a week, the inoffensive Sylvia finds herself pulled into a family struggle between Gertie and Paula, the eldest and slightly out-of-control daughter of the Baniszewski clan. Not understanding the family dynamic, Sylvia quickly becomes the scapegoat for the Baniszewski clan's social and financial woes. The mentally unbalanced
Gertie starts to subject Sylvia to series of increasingly horrible punishments, beginning with whippings and getting rapidly worse. Sylvia is trapped in an insane cycle of punishment and groundless accusation – every thing Baniszewski does to her seems to confirm, in the twisted mind of Gertie, the need for further torture. Things come to a head when Gertie accuses Sylvia of sexual improprieties with some local boys. As punishment, Gertie forces the horrified Sylvia to sexually violate herself with an empty Coke bottle as the Baniszewski children and a neighborhood boy watch. This torture is interrupted by the arrival of more family members and Gertie, deciding that Sylvia is to corrupting an influence to leave free to roam, sentences her to be locked in the basement. When Sylvia resists, the Baniszewski children literally throw her down the stairs.

What comes next is a matter of the historical record. For several weeks, the Baniszewski children and numerous neighborhood children come to "play" with Sylvia. She is beaten, burned, stripped and hosed down, denied adequate food and water, and otherwise tortured. Both young men and young women take part in her torture. Most of this occurs with the knowledge of Gertrude Baniszewski, who acts as if the children are playing house and not slowly killing a young woman. Eventually, under the direction Gertie, a neighborhood boy brands "IM A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT" on Sylvia's stomach. This whole latter part of the flick spools out as a long, horrific montage of outrages, much of it filmed from the first person perspective of Sylvia (as if she's fading in an out and all she's conscious off is a nightmarish series of disjointed painful attacks), punctuated by short dramatic set pieces. There's also a short, hopeful dream sequence that serves to cruelly elevate the hopes of the viewer. The conclusion is foregone.

In the end, Sylvia dies from the treatment. Panicked, the Baniszewski children call the police. Officers arrive on the scene and Jennie, who has been silent all this time, fearing the same treatment, tells the cops that she'll tell them everything if they'll take her away from the torture house.

The narrative of the film jumps between Gertrude Baniszewski's murder trial and the events unfolding in flashback.

Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about An American Crime. It is well written and beautifully shot by writer/director Tommy O'Haver (who shot this nightmare as the follow up to his 2004 Ella Enchanted - I kid you not). The acting is fine, though many of the characters seem to intentionally be a sort of appendage of the Baniszewski family-beast, so they don't have a lot to do. Ellen Page, in a reversal of her avenging angle role in Hard Candy, plays the martyr here. It's a kinda thankless role. For a considerable portion of the movie she has to act semi-conscious and on death's door. It is hard to make that role your own. Plus, given the horrendousness of the crime, the tendency on the part of everybody who has tried to work with this material is to turn Sylvia into flat icon of purity, violated by a cruel world. This is weird because it seems to imply that the horror of the incident was that she was innocent, instead of making the moral stance that nobody, anywhere, under any circumstances should be treated this way. Compare this to Boys Don't Cry, which had the same producers. Nobody felt the need to make Brandon Teena's behavior beyond question – including minor criminal activity and the ethical implications of her deceiving others about her identity – but the result in no way mitigates the horror one feels at what happened to her. What happened to Sylvia Likens wasn't wrong because it happened to a nice person, it was wrong because it happened at all. I know this sound obvious and utterly moronic to even make such a point, but in our current judicial and moral climate it is, sadly, not a universally accepted concept. Acting-wise, the real standout is Catherine Keener, who actually flirts with making Gertrude Baniszewski sympathetic before the character slides into irredeemable vileness. This is a pretty gutsy move and many reviewers have expressed disgust at Keener's effort to humanize Baniszewski. It would be a much more comfortable story if Baniszewski wasn't, in fact, a human.

[I'm adding this revision the day after posting. It occurs to me that I should clarify what I mean by "cleaning up" the Sylvia character. I've left it too vague and I worry that some reader will think that there was something in the true story that implies she might have caused or deserved her fate. This isn't the case. What I'm talking about it a minor whitewash of the details of her life. For example, she and her sister were, in real life, left at the Baniszewski house because their mother, in whose care they were in, went to jail for shoplifting. When they first met the Baniszewski daughters, the Baniszewski girls told them they could spend the night at their house. Sylvia and Jennie did so without asking their parents' permission because their mother was in jail and their father wasn't in town. Their father didn't find the girls until the next morning. In the film, this incident is portrayed as a daytime, after-church visit. In the film, both Likens parents are in the girls' lives and the father picks them up before sundown. The implication is that the Likens had it hard, but they were essentially responsible normal parents. The film also glosses over something the Likens girls' father really told Gertie Baniszewski. When he left them, he left Baniszewski with some vague directive about "straightening out" his daughters because he felt their mother was letting them run wild. Another example of the filmmakers ignoring Sylvia's real life details is the fact that Sylvia once admitted to shoplifting. This is notable in that one of the first times Sylvia was punished by Baniszewski, the rough treatment was supposedly punishment for leading the Baniszewski kids to shoplift. None of that appears in the flick. Does any of this imply what happened to Sylvia was right? No. Even if she was shoplifting - which is by no means certain - the vicious nature of the Baniszewski clan's crime makes it obvious that the motivation was not disciplinary. What the Baniszewskis did is still a horrific crime that staggers the imagination.]

Still, it was an oddly empty film experience. Despite the "realistic" label it wears – which is, I imagine, the film's first line of defense against those that would label it exploitation – there's something strangely stagey about the undertaking. I say this ignoring the factual liberties (the oddest is the transformation of Paula Baniszewski into a more sympathetic character). First and foremost, there is the Sunset Boulevard/Menace II Society style first person narration from beyond the grave: Sylvia narrates a few sections of the flashback. Second, there's the historical setting. The Baniszewski home at 3850 East New York St, Indianapolis, (you can Google map it if you like) is not far from the downtown of Indianapolis and it isn't the sort of suburban utopia we've come to equate with American innocence through nostalgia exercises like The Wonder Years. Yet there's something wrote about the period atmosphere here – sun-drenched and bopping along to a selection of period correct pop hits – that seem to imply they exist not in 1965, but in the fantasy realm of the prelapsarian youth of America. This becomes important because the film makes a bid for social relevance later when Sylvia's narration attempts to position the crime as one of those moments when the country as a whole lost its innocence. Both historically and aesthetically, that's a hard proposition to swallow. In contrast, the fictional Girl Next Door frames its narrative is terms of the guilt of the young narrator who stood by and did nothing. Lacking in historical gravitas, it nevertheless achieves a greater universal theme. Whether we've let evil triumph by simply failing to actively be good is a perennial question. The courtroom drama falls weirdly flat because we know how the story ends. The result is that the framing device feels too much like a tool for shoe-horning research details in.

Weirdly, it's the fake story – the adaptation by Ketchum and the movie made from that – that might better get at what is so important about the Likens murder. An American Crime rightly shows us that what happened was horrific. We watch it, we are repelled by the inhumane acts we see, and we pass judgment. Girl Next Door centralizes the moral dilemma of the witness. We are asked to judge not just the monsters, but those who watch the monsters do their work.

Stuff: You want to suck what?!?!

This is a clip of Richard Pryor discussing The Exorcist and Dracula. It's from his 1974 album: That Nigger's Crazy. What more is there to say?

Though this needs very little by way of introduction, it does need a big ol' NSFW warning. But then you'd probably already guessed that.



For some bonus Pryor sci-fi geek fun, here's a scene from The Richard Pryor Show featuring Pryor as the bartender at the "Star Bar," a bar packed with actors wearing the actual costumes from the Mos Eisley Cantina scene from Star Wars. Again, not safe for work. Of course.

Stuff: A late note on the debate - OR - Why a politician's associations do matter.

Normally, I avoid discussing politics on this site. Unless there's some overt politicizing in something I'm reviewing, I tend to steer clear of the whole filthy enterprise. I don't mind discussing what goes on the dank basements of Eastern European torture clubs, but why drag the conversation down to gutter of politics? Kids visit this site, after all. Besides, if you go to horror Web sites looking for the political insights, I'm not sure anything anybody could write would improve your sorry lot.

That said, I can't be silent anymore. I'm horrified and disgusted at how politically extreme bloggers and the slavish star-struck media have been characterizing the latest debate. By any objective measure, we all know who really won: The Penguin!



Damning stuff that should effectively end Batman's campaign for whatever public office could possibly be open to a masked vigilante who refuses to identify himself.

Sing it with me now:

"Vote for Penguin, yes sir-ee.
He's the bird for you and me.
Clean up Gotham 1, 2, 3.
Vote for Peng-ee!"

Thanks to the wifey and her homegirl - Salamander - for hipping me to this clip.

Movies: Chasing tale.

According to IMDB, the source of all cinema knowledge, George Romero was originally slated to direct Haeckel's Tale, an adaptation of a Clive Barker short story that held down the 12th slot in the first season of Masters of Horror. Romero couldn't fit it into his schedule, which leads one to make the shocking conclusion that some effort was actually put into make Diary of Dead despite the end result. After Romero bowed out, Roger Corman was tapped for the gig. Corman – who actually had a full schedule: in 2006, Corman produced five films and made three appearances in various film and television projects – took the helm, but then bowed out because of health reasons. This led series producer and Haeckel writer Mick Garris to tap one horror-hit wonder John McNaughton. Though, to be honest, what a hit: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. If you're going to do just one major horror flick, coming out with a flick so bleak and grim that the MPAA slaps you with an X not on the basis of the films violence (which is gritty, but not particularly over-the-top even for the time) or sexual material (which, again, is grim, but, again, well in R territory) but for the films "moral tone." Between Henry and Haeckel, McNaughton tried his hand at one other horror flick, the sci-fi/horror/comedy/train wreck The Borrower, before walking away from the genre. Over time he amassed an interesting, if not always great track record. Among other things, he shot the DeNiro/Murray/Thurman romantic comedy Mad Dog and Glory (penned by crime-lit giant Richard Price), the sun-baked cult sleaze-o noir Wild Things, and several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets (a.k.a. The Wire version 1.0).

So, can a guy with only one great horror flick to his name really be a "master" of horror? I can't say. But I will say that he does a better job on his episode than many, more firmly established horror directors did on their episodes. Haeckel's Tale is moody, well paced, suitably naughty, willing to be absurd, and makes a stylistic nod to the Hammer period thrillers – all in less than an hour.

Having never read the Baker story, I'm not qualified to tell how loyal it stays to the original. The flick opens with a framing device involving a widower who wants a local witch to bring back his dead wife. The witch says that she will do so, but only on the condition that the man listen to the tale of Ernst Haeckel. If, after her tale is done, the widower is still keen on the idea of resurrecting his spouse, then she'll do it.

Open on a surgical theater in Boston medical college at the turn of the Eighteenth Century. The titular doctor, having studied the notes of one Frankenstein, informs his med school prof that he can re-animate the dead. Forced to make good on the boast, Haeckel makes a mash of it and ends up setting his subject, a female corpse, on fire. After a hearty round of mockery, Haeckel is left with his failure and a local body-snatcher suggest that he should perhaps look in on "Professor" Montesquino. Montesquino, played as a cross between Caligari and a used car salesman by Homicide vet Jon Polito, is a necromancer that Bostonites credit with the ability to bring back the dead.

Doubtful, Haeckel sees Montesquino's show. After watching the necromancer bring back a dead golden retriever (a bit of anachronism: efforts to create the golden retriever didn't begin until the 1860s, with the "first" of the breed being registered in the first decade of the Twentieth Century), Haeckel attempts to bribe the secrets of reviving the dead from Montesquino, but is rebuffed.

Shortly there after, Haeckel receives news that his ailing father has taken a turn for the worse. Haeckel takes to the open road, hiking from the metropolis into the country. On the road, Haeckel finds shelter at the modest Wolfram cabin, home of Mr. Wolfram and his lovely, if creepily otherworldly, wifey: Elise. (As an aside, Elise is played by Leela Savasta, so if you're life has been incomplete because you haven't seen the lovely boobies of Battlestar Galatica's Tracey Anne, then run, don't walk, to your nearest video rental joint.)

I can't go much further without ruining the plot, but rest assured that the Wolframs' have a nasty secret that turns things all messy right quick and involves something that rhymes with "ROM bee hex." I kid not. It's based on a Clive Barker story. You could see it coming. You know what these zombies saw coming?

Where was I? Oh. The movie.

So, aside from the Ye Olde Talke™, which grates a bit before you get into the groove, the period trappings have the lush and stagey artificiality of Hammer or Amicus flicks, though the coozed up climax, if you will, of the flick is considerably more explicit than either of those inspirations implies. The graveyard set is especially nice. The acting is adequate to excellent, with the exception of Elise, who is more of narrative conflict than a character. The plotting moves along purposefully, with enough slack to add some tangential stuff and avoid giving the viewer the feeling that their on a forced march. The mood of the film goes from lushly Gothic to darkly, almost nihilistically, comedic. There is, I guess, a sort of "approval of alternate lifestyles" subtext here, but the metaphor is hopelessly clumsy and one gets the feeling that the message was in the original but that McNaughton didn't give a crap about it. The result is that whatever ideological content there is remains vestigial and under-developed. The film has too much fun with the eerie/goofy surreality of its own plot to try to hone it into some sort of take-home message.

Haeckel's Tale is really one of the highpoints of the MoH series. Playful and nasty, taboo breaking without being ponderous or smug, thoughful without being preachy of clumsily political, it's fun times.

Stuff: Or maybe you've got a better explanation for Michael's behavior?

So, like, Halloween is the new Christmas. This means that you might want to start thinking about getting in the habit of givin' folks Halloween gifts. You know it is going to happen. Deny all you want, but it's the inevitable next step in holiday evolution. It's even part of the big federal bailout package: By making Halloween a major gift-giving holiday, Congress hopes to create one enormous shopping season that starts mid-August and extends until the tail end of the first week of January. Well, that's what I've heard.

To get into practice, you should buy me the awesomer than awesome "Thriller was Documentary" tee from Seibei pictured above. Seriously. It's okay. I'll be your spotter while you limber up the old shopping muscles. No need to thank me. XL please; we at ANTSS are currently undergoing a major man-scaping and he-decorating project, but we're not quite at L just yet.

Music: "What appears to be a go-go dancer trapped in a glass case in a fairly bare apartment, dancing to the Sonics' 'Psycho.'"

The Sonics, a five-man outfit from Tacoma, Washington, were part of the northwestern garage rock boom that, for a brief time during the mid-1960s, looked like it might be America's on native resistance to the looming Brit dominance of rock and roll. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, we now know that these scrappy musical partisans would lose the fight, making a fractious mix of California folkies and NYC art rockers the standard bearers for popular music.

Described variously as "1960s punk," "garage rock," "frat rock," or, sometimes, "nuggets rock" – after the influential Nuggets anthology series that revitalized interest in the forgotten singles of these bands – the music of these groups combined low-fi production values, aggressive hooks, and an overtly sloppy take the music of the Brit Invasion. Garage rock groups also acted as a curious link between 1950s American rock and the coming psychedelic era. Many groups, for example, stubbornly kept saxophones in the mix long after rock had moved on. At the same time, these sometimes doggedly traditionalists groups were exploring the artistic possibilities of the fuzz and feedback that were the byproduct of the amateur approach.

The Sonics formed in the early 1960s, inspired by the success of local heroes the Wailers and the Kingsmen (the group responsible for turning the innocent calypso soul tune "Louie Louie" into one of rock's most investigated, censored, and pornographically misquoted hits). They had a couple of local market hits, but could never break into the national market. As the 1960s closed, the group entered the studio to produce a more slick and professional sounding record with the goal of producing a nation-wide hit. The record, too bland for Sonics fans and too clunky for a wider audience, sank without a trace. The group broke up shortly after the record's release.

Because the Sonics existed in the pre-MTV era and they were never big, big stars, there's not a lot from their prime on the Youtubes. There's some live reunion footage, but that's about it. There is, however, this truly bizarre clip of what appears to be a go-go dancer trapped in a glass case in a fairly bare apartment, dancing to the Sonics' "Psycho."

Where's it from? What the hell is going on in it? I have no clue. [Breaking News: Reader Paul has figured out where this strange little clip comes from. Check comments for the solution to this mystery.]



The Fuzztones where part the retro-garage movement that, since the 1980s, has flared up in the indie scene now and then. Like the Sonics, the Fuzztones also broke up after attempting a lunge at mainstream fame. Here's the Fuzztone's video for their cover of the Sonic's "The Witch."

LoTT-D: Nilbog skoobs.

As regular readers of the humble electro-digital periodical know, we here at ANTSS, by which I mean "me," pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the latest doings in the genre. Which is why it pains me – Pains me, I say! – to confess that I totally dropped the ball in introducing our latest LoTT-D member. This delay is inexcusable; but if you'll accept an excuse nonetheless, I blame the economy.

Ladies and germs, give a big belated round of ANTSS-style applause to Paul Bibeau, the man, the myth, the legend, the blogger. At his deeeee-lightful Goblinbooks, Bibeau shares original short stories, waxes philosophical about missing car keys, shares vintage horror clips (including the silent classic Nosferatu in its entirety), and even explores a ghost town in Virginia.

One thing you should know about Paul.

Having achieved membership in the League, many of us would rest on our laurels. On any given day, you can find me kicking back by the League pool at our members on penthouse club in Hong Kong, sipping mai tais with Tenebrous Kate and Zombo's man Friday, discussing the finer points of Freud with Curt over tea and moules a la mariniere at Balthazar, or harassing the in-house talent at Entourage Vegas with Chad. Basically we Leaguers live la buona vita. What more, I ask, is there to aspire to?

But does Paul lapse into a sybaritic life of hedonistic and decadent pleasures with the rest of us libertines?

No sire-ee Bob! Instead, he's busy being the author of not one, but two – count 'em, TWO – books: a short story collection called The Big Money and Other Stories and a horror-centric memoir/travel tome called Sundays with Vlad.

Overachiever! Nerdelmeister! Way to make us look bad, Paul!

But I think you'll like him anyway. His boyish charm is disarming like that. Click on over and let him know you care, won't you?