Mad science: Ancient Europeans were sick puppies.

Wired Science reports a grisly archeological discovery:

At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests.

Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.

“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.

The article gives the grim details:

Work from 2005 to 2008 — led by Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and Fabian Haack of the archaeology division of Germany’s Directorate General for Cultural Heritage — unearthed additional human bones, mainly skulls and limb bones bearing incisions. Remains of an estimated 500 people have been found so far.

Pottery resting among the bones accumulated over no more than a few decades, the researchers say. Some pieces came from Neolithic sites located 400 kilometers from Herxheim.

The pits that surrounded Herxheim provided no protection from invaders but may have marked a symbolic boundary for a ceremonial settlement, Boulestin proposes. At first, Boulestin’s team, like Orschiedt and Haidle, thought that the dead were brought to Herxheim for ceremonial reburial.

But Boulestin and his colleagues’ opinion changed after they analyzed 217 reassembled human bones from one deposit, representing at least 10 individuals.

Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.

Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.

People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.

And later:

Whatever actually happened at Herxheim, facial bones were smashed beyond recognition, “giving an impression of the destruction of individual identity, a kind of psychic violence against the person,” Thorpe says.

In the article, researchers speculate that the community may have faced some catastrophic food shortage that forced these people to dig up and consume their dead. Evidence of reburial ceremonies supports this theory. Chemical analysis may further support this explanation.

Stuff: Creepy Christmas.

Dark Horse has sent out their client X-mas cards and this year they've decided the Uncle Creepy, the cadaverous host of Warren's famed horror antho Creepy, should bring the tidings of comfort and joy. The card's face image is by none other than Bernie Wrightson.

Books: Horn section.

What happens to supernatural horror after it moved past the idea of the uncanny?

There's a scene in Joe Hill' sophomore novel, Horns, in which our main protagonist - a luckless slob named Ig - has a short conversation with a waitress at a roadside bar and grill. For the story to make any sense, you need to know that Ig has two fairly large horns growing out of his head. Ig never gets the idea to pull a Hellboy (though Hellboy himself probably thought of it as pulling a Concrete) and shave them off, so they're fairly pronounced by the time the waitress see them. In the course of their banter, she asks Ig, "Is it a mod?"

Ig confesses to not knowing what a mod is.

She clarifies, "A body modification. Did you do it to yourself?"

This is typical of the book. The supernatural is not awe inspiring or stunning. It doesn't produce existential vertigo or shake the pillars of our understanding of the world. Instead, it is just one more weird-ass thing in a world chock full of weirdness.

At first I was reminded of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, specifically the discussion of how a unicorn sighting, discussed enough, devolves into the common place and is eventually folded into the mundane world and refashioned as a sighting of a horse with an arrow through its head. Though, on further reflection, that analogy doesn't fit. It isn't that there aren't unicorns, to use Stoppard's terms, but rather that they are no stranger than the fact that there are also horses walking around with arrows through their heads.

Which is genuinely weirder: A man who is forced to grow horns or a who decided voluntarily to attach horns to his forehead?

The central problem creators modern supernatural horror face is that the supernatural is neither stranger nor scarier than real life. It is the central problem of the New Horror movement (Peter Straub's term, not mine - take it up with him) and a hallmark of the newest wave of genre fiction, alternately dubbed the New Fantasists, the New Weird, or Interstitial Fiction. And Hill confronts this problem in his latest novel.

Let's get back to Horns. Ig's horns are not a body modification. They started growing after Ig, small time loser black sheep of the wealthy local celebrity family and alleged rapist and murderer, committed sacrilege by pissing on statue of the Virgin Mary during a bender. The statue was set up at the scene of the murder of Merrin Williams, the love of Ig's life and the woman he was accused of raping and murdering. Ig was never convicted of the crime because the DNA evidence the police hoped would connect him to the crime went up in a mysterious fire at the out-of-town lab facility to which it had been sent. Ig, of course, maintains his innocence. But not even his own family doesn't believe him.

The disfiguring nature of horns turns out to be the least of Ig's problems. He soon discovers that the horns have an inexplicable power over others. Whenever somebody sees the horns, they begin to tell Ig about their deepest, darkest, secret desires. Then, inevitably, they ask Ig's permission to act on these desires, they ask for permission to sin.

Remember those old cartoons where an anthropomorphic duck would be at a moral crossroads, then suddenly an angel and a devil - both Lilliputian versions of the main duck - would appear on his shoulder. The angel would advocate for the moral high ground and the devil would push for committing whatever sin the water fowl was on the brink of committing. Ig basically starts transforming into the devil on your shoulder, the voice of temptation.

Of all the superpowers in the world, the last one you should ever want is the power to read minds. Unfettered access to the unspoken thoughts of others is like unfiltered access to sewer water. There's a reason we don't say everything on our minds. Besides, do you really want to know the sleazy details of your spouse's private kinks? What about you brother or sister's? Mom and dad? Ig finds this new found ability to compel confessions maddening. Everywhere he goes, people see the horns and start chatting away about the worst things they can think of. His doctor confesses the sexual passion he feels for his daughter's 14-year-old best friend. His mom confesses that having kids was the biggest regret of her life. His grandmother confesses that she feigns her senility in order to punish her children and grandchild for their weakness. His father confesses that he bought the arson gig that secured Ig's freedom. A local cop confesses that he cops a feel (pun intended) when he is patting down arrestees. The local gas and sip attendant reveals that he wants to kill his desperately ill wife and start life over again with a mistress in Florida. And so on and so on.

In the midst of all these confessions, however, Ig's brother, Terry, confesses that he always believed Ig's innocence. Ig couldn't have killed Merrin, because Terry knows who did it.

With that confession, Ig's suicidal spiral ends, replaced by a mission of revenge that will put him in conflict with a person whose deep reserves of bloodthirsty evil will prove a match even for a (literal) devil like Ig.

Hill's second novel is less assured than Heart-Shaped Box, his debut haunted road novel. Though this unevenness isn't the product of Hill losing his nerve or doubting his talents. Rather, he bit off more than he could chew. There's at least two books in here: One dark comedy about a man growing into the role of the devil and the other a grim story about a doomed romance poisoned by unrealistic ideals of love. He never full balances these two strands, nor does he fully explore the Ig's new role as the devil (most notably, if he's the devil, does that prove the existence of God?) or the status of Merrin's real killer, who Hill suggests might also be a devil like Ig, but may not be. It's unclear if Hill's ambitions outstripped his abilities or if he lacked discipline to keep things tight. Still, the result is more sloppy than disappointing. For my part, I'd rather have a wealth of interesting, if not fully explored ideas, then a lack of ideas. Furthermore, even in the service of too many ideas, Hill's writing remains fresh and energetic. Hill also has a profound sympathy with his characters - even the most vile. He is willing to climb into their skin and speak in their voice, an abdication of authorial control over the interpretation of their text that is, in its own small way, genuinely heroic.

Less a horror story than a dark fantasy, Hill's work owe less to the American mainstream horror tradition his father so dominates and more to the eccentric visions of Thomas Disch, the off-kilter Brit sensibilities of Gaiman, instinctual storytelling primitives like Joe Landsdale, and modern genre revivalists like Kelly Link. What links them altogether is their dry, laconic approach to the uncanny. In the traditional horror novel, visitations from the impossible are a source of deep unrest. In works like Horns, they are something to endure or exploit, something to navigate or learn to live with.

Nearly a week ago, I posted the first chapter - a short two-paragraph chapter - of Horns. In it, Ig wakes up with a monster hangover and discovers his horns. Regular ANTSS commenter Sassy said that it reminded him of Kafka, specifically one assumes it reminded him of The Metamorphosis. There is something Kafka-esque about Horns and the New Horror moment it is part of, though it runs deeper than the transformation trope (which is hardly Kafka's invention). It's in the exhaustion of the transcendant, the idea that even visible evidence of a reality beyond our own won't make getting through the long and tiresome day any easier. When people confess their secret sins to Ig, it is hardly a revelation. They do it off-handedly, with the slight sense of relief one feels when you unburden to a stranger at a bar. There's a impatience to it, as if they'd rather quit talking about it so they can just get back to whatever it was they were doing. They embody the modern crisis of modern horror. It isn't that we don't believe in a transcendent world. It's that we're solipsistic to care. We vaguely hope that the banshee's death-signfiying wail won't be so loud as to drown out the crate dive Lady Ga Ga rarities mix that guy who is only sort of our Internet friend made us and we kinda accepted simply because he's a facebook friend but we think Lady Ga Ga is about as musically talented as a canker sore and he's kind of a bore, but still, free music, fuck yeah!

In his defense, Hill works in a narrative reason for everybody's nonchalant attitude to the fact that a devil is prowling in their midst, but it's clear that it is simply a beard. The story doesn't need it and I don't think Hill cared.

Horns is odd in that it is a flawed book that is still quite strong. An imperfect and occasionally unwieldy book, it is the work of an author determined to expand their range and willing to take the occasional fall if that's what it takes to push to boundaries. The result feels jagged and occasionally underdeveloped, but it's never dull.

Books: "Policing gender and punishing girliness."

The American Prospect takes a look at the Twilight backlash and questions its gender politics. From writer Sady Doyle's article:

Twilight is more than a teen dream. It's a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won't find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies -- which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking -- tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it's about the fact that those fans are young women.

Twilight fans (sometimes known as "Twi-Hards") are derided and dismissed, sometimes even by outlets that capitalize on their support. MTV News crowned "Twilighters" its Woman of the Year in 2008, but referred to them as "shrieking and borderline-stalker female fans." You can count on that word -- shrieking -- to appear in most articles about Twilight readers, from New York magazine's Vulture blog ("Teenage girls shrieking ... before the opening credits even begin") to Time magazine ("Shrieking fangirls [outdoing] hooting fanboys ... in number, ardor, and decibel level") to The Onion's A.V. Club ("Squealing hordes of (mostly) teenage, female fans") to The New York Times ("Squeals! The 'Twilight Saga: New Moon' Teaser Trailer Is Here!"). Yes, Twi-Hards can be loud. But is it really necessary to describe them all by the pitch of their voices? It propagates the stereotype of teen girls as hysterical, empty-headed, and ridiculous.

Self-described geeks and horror fans are especially upset at how the series introduces the conventions of the romance novel -- that most stereotypically feminine, most scorned of literary forms -- into their far more highbrow and culturally relevant monster stories. At the 2009 Comic-Con, Twilight fans were protested and said to be "ruining" the event. Fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, and Harry Potter are seen as dorks at worst, participants in era-defining cultural phenomena at best. Not so for Twilight fans. What sets Twilight apart from Marvel comics? The answer is fairly obvious, and it's not -- as geeks and feminists might hope -- the quality of the books or movies. It's the number of boys in the fan base.

Doyle ends her piece with a look at why feminists should care about the Twilight backlash even if they think the books are a crock. In a neat judo move, she argues that the Twilight phenomenon, considered through a lens other than the heteronormative knee-jerk male panic of most genre critics, might be a watershed moment in considering the role of young women in the marketplace driven public sphere.

Teen girls have the power to shape the market because they don't have financial responsibilities, tend to be passionate about their interests, and share those interests socially. If a girl likes something, she's liable to recommend it to her friends; a shared enthusiasm for Edward, or the Jonas Brothers, or anything else, becomes part of their bond. Marketers prize teenage girls, even as the media scoff at them.

If you want to matter, though, apparently you need boys. The third film adaptation of the Twilight series, Eclipse, will be helmed by horror director David Slade, who has made such movies as Hard Candy and Thirty Days of Night. Even though it will not hit theaters until June 2010, it is already being touted as "darker," more action-packed, and more "guy friendly." Because the popularity of the Twilight formula guarantees Eclipse will be a box-office smash, the decision to consciously appeal to boys seems more like a grab at credibility than at profit. Romance-loving Twi-Hards be damned! Who cares about disappointing a huge, passionate, lucrative fan base if they're all a bunch of girls?

As Twilight demonstrates, not everything girls like is good art -- or, for that matter, good feminism. Still, the Twilight backlash should matter to feminists, even if the series makes them shudder. If we admit that girls are powerful consumers, then we admit that they have the ability to shape the culture. Once we do that, we might actually start listening to them. And I suspect a lot of contemporary girls have more to talk about than Edward Cullen.

Music: Limblessly in love.

Been digging through my old records lately.

For my money - and I'll admit that, given the state of my bank accounts, that's not saying much - The Scream, Siouxsie and the Banshee's debut album, is one of the great "missing links" between chaos of punk and the angular post-punk that followed. Because Siouxsie and company later became one of the foundation groups of Goth, The Scream's best qualities are misinterpreted as failings - its thrashing guitars, for example, aren't praised for their energy but criticized as the undeveloped beginnings of a more lush later style. Though that linear historical view doesn't give The Scream enough credit. The LP was the band's debut, but it wasn't really a novice effort. SS&B had been a going concern for years before a label snatched them up. When any shambling gang of lad's with even the slightest chops was getting signed, SS&B was getting passed by. The upside of the benign neglect was that the unit one hears on The Scream was a well-practiced, road-tested outfit with a strong set of fully evolved tunes. The reason it sounds so odd in retrospect is that it was ultimately a sort of evolutionary dead end. The group went Gothic. They ditched the jerky proto-Gang of Four sharp corners and the grimly tangled vision of modern social life that shared more with Elvis Costello's concept of emotional fascism than it did with the Romanticism of Goth.

Anywho, here's some great footage of the band from 1977. The sound quality os atrocious, but the footage is neat if only because it shows everybody looking so damn young.

Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 3: The Objective

Before we make our third and final stop in this short tour of horror films set against the backdrop of our now rapidly escalating war in Afghanistan, here's links to the first two films in this series. In case anybody needs a refresher before we push on:

Part 1: Sand Serpents
Part 2: Red Sands

Our final film, The Objective, a 2008 genre-stew film by Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, was the first of the three Afghanistan set flicks to get made. Set just two months after the 9/11 terror attacks and one month after the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, the film follows a CIA operative and his special forces escort into the Southern Provinces (currently the operational theater of Canada's military forces in Afghanistan) on the search for a mysterious radiation source.

The film's central protag is the Agency spook. He provides a affectless running narration that lets us know from the get go that this operation is not what it seems. He serves as the squads Ripley (the outside consult with a potentially different agenda). The soldiers accompanying him are, as in the other films, familiar types. His unit includes a Rock, a Vig, a Lemchek, and a couple of Fodders. We also get a pick-up Benny Fish to act as a local guide and an inexplicable Australian sniper. Even odder, the sniper later drops a significant bit of esoteric knowledge regarding the 19th century British Afghan War debacle, making him a sort of stand in for all the other white components of Bush's Coalition of the Willing.

Our crew is choppered into the badlands and, before you can turn a video camera on yourself and say you're so sorry, things start to go wrong in strange and unexplainable ways. Radios cease working. The squad is ambushed by Taliban fighters who vanish, even after after taking shots to the head. Soldiers fall victim to mysterious illness and seeing ghostly assassins through their night vision gear. Compasses go on the fritz. The land seems to be morphing around them - putting mountains and deserts where satellite photos show grassland. Even their trusty Benny Fish gets lost and, eventually, so spooked that he commits suicide.

The cause of all this, we later learn, are invisible ancient pyramid-shaped UFOs. Just what these things can do is never defined, so its best to assume that their uncanny radiation can make whatever screenwriters Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark Jr. need to happen materialize. The whole mission was a ploy to get a bunch of troops to engage these things just to see what would happen when a bunch of panicked special forces guys shot at them and got their dander up. The answer, it turns out, is the special forces guys get screwed.

The Objective is an intermittently ambitious mess of a flick. Myrick started on familiar ground - the lost on mission plot is close enough to Project that one feels the flick should be in Myrick's wheelhouse - but rapidly loses his way. In BWP the sketchiness of the characterization was thematically supported by the found-films backstory. Furthermore, the thin characterization actually helped to make the unlucky students objects of identification. They didn't have any opaque fragments of personality that would stop the viewer from projecting their own personality onto the screen. Here, the soldiers are too alien - with their jargon, their easy recourse to large amounts of tremendous violence, their (remarkably sloppy and non-standardized) uniforms, their chain of command - to embody the average viewer, but too half-finished to feel like complete humans. The odd exception to this is the CIA operative. Though his voice-over is often tedious, as the film progresses it becomes clearer and clearer that he's a grade A sociopath. Not a foaming at the mouth slasher type, but a genuine a-emotional manipulator who can look a dying man in the eye and, before abandoning him to his fate, say, "Your country is proud of you." The CIA spook is the kinda guy who refers to soldiers as "assets" and says this to their face. While this kind of character is hardly a novel creation, Myrick gets points for making this vile jerk the central character of the story. It's a bold move that actually pays off in several key scenes.

Visually, without the found-film conceit as a cover, Myrick proves hesitant to go verite but unable or unwilling to commit to a more efficient, effective narrative filmmaking style. The result is neither fish nor fowl: An awkward fusion that never feels raw enough to sell as unmediated nor tight enough to drive home the story. The result is decidedly uneven. For every intriguing visual Myrick crafts, there are inert, artless stretches of what occasionally feels like lazy filmmaking. Which is ironic if you consider that they were filming in pretty brutal desert conditions. A lot of hard effort went into this film, I'm sure. I simply wish more of it was visible on the screen.

Finally, the plot derails in the last quarter. Once the viewers figure out that there's no "unified" explanation for why ghosts, and vanishing Taliban, and 100+-year-old British soldiers, and so on are all happening to our protags, the film loses momentum and becomes a collection of strung together set pieces, none of which particularly hang together in any narrative sense. The conclusion, a nod to 2001, feels more like a cop out than a wrap up.

Aside from it's obviously fictional genre trappings, The Objective is only barely a movie about the War in Afghanistan. Like Red Sands, this is a curiously American-centric flick. Again, not in a specifically jingoistic way. The Objective presents Americans as the biggest threat to Americans. Rather, this is a film about the post-9/11 mentality of America. It is, of course, a critique of the blood-soaked hubris of the Bush administration. The CIA protag's delusional willingness to march into the "graveyard of armies" on what amounts to a suicide mission for objectives that can't even be described is a fitting avatar for our post-9/11 adventurism. But the toxic, conspiracy choked atmosphere of dissent is just as much a target. The plot of The Objective sounds like a subplot of the unhinged film-rant Zeitgeist or the basis for a particularly juicy post on Alex Jones's site. I remember when, leading up to the '08 election, a blogger I know and respect posted - I believe in all seriousness - a post detailing how Bush and his cronies would seize the reigns of power permanently through false flag terror scares. These scares would give them the power to cancel the upcoming election and establish marshal law. I don't bring this prediction up to measure its accuracy (happily, it was off base), but rather to point out that in the American political culture of the mid-00s this sort of thinking was relatively unremarkable. This movie seems very much a product of those grimly anxious years.

To a degree, all the films in this mini-genre are less about the status of the War in Afghanistan than they are about our own image. To one degree or another, they're all thought experiments of Nietzsche's famous hypothesis regarding those who fight monsters. In Sand Serpents, the filmmakers assume traditional heroics - complete with noble sacrifice - will win the day. Though the fact that their hero's final courageous act is essentially a suicide bombing does little to convince us. Red Sands more pessimistically posits that we won't survive this encounter intact. It's difference between that film's djinn baddie and soldier heroes dissolves quickly, leaving behind a single soldier who is, literally, the monster he fought. The Objective suggests that we probably wouldn't be out looking for monsters if we weren't already a bit twisted inside.

Books: The devil you know.

By way of a preview, here's the entire first chapter of Joe Hill's upcoming novel:

Ignatius William Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill - wet-eyed and weak - he didn't think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.

But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.

End of chapter one.

Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 2: Red Sands.

The only one of the three current horror films set in the American Afghanistan conflict to actually have filmed in Afghanistan (Kabul, Afghanistan, specifically), Red Sands may have the curious distinction of not only being among the first horror films to be set on the front lines of an on-going conflict, but the added distinction of featuring footage of the country we're fighting in. Imagine a Nazi zombie film that had been shot in Germany when Nazis could have still shot you. It would be easy to make too much of this odd fact. Most of the film was shot in California. Still, historically, it's a first as far as I can tell.

Red Sands is the second stop on our tour of one of the oddest mini-genre to have developed in this particularly tumultuous era of horror: the first American horror films set on the frontlines of an on-going U.S. military conflict.

Without recapping too much of the first installment of this mini-series, the short version of the story goes like this: Horror films are usually Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to spinning cultural anxieties into filthy lucre, but live-fire wars seem to be the exception. Horror films tend to touch on such conflicts in passing (example: Jacob's Ladder features a shell shocked 'Nam vet after he's returned home) or be influenced by such conflicts (example: some critics have suggested that the slasher formula was influenced by the tedium-then-ambush structure of the Vietnam War), but there are few, if any, American horror films made prior to 2008 that are set in a conflict that is currently popping off. In short, when bodies are actually being shipped home, we don’t tend to invent fantastical reasons that more should corpses should be on the plane.

The current Iraq War seems to follow this pattern. There are several dramatic and action genre flicks that are set in the Iraq War, but no horror films. Arguably, many films have been influenced by the war - some critics have suggested the entire alleged genre of "torture porn" is little more than a symptom of the conflict - but none have featured, say, a unit attacked by ghostly Saddam torture victims in a haunted mansion in Baghdad.Though, for some reason, the War in Afghanistan has broken this rule. In 2008 and 2009, at least three horror films have been set on the front lines of the War in Afghanistan. Questions of artistic merit aside, these three films represent something genuinely new in the horror genre. As such, I think they merit our attention.

Helmed by Alex Turner, the sadly under-appreciated director of 2004's Dead Birds, Red Sands is essentially one giant flashback. We open on a soldier being questioned about a fiasco in the wild hill country of Afghanistan. Seven troops were sent on a mission and all of them died but one. And his story just don't add up.

Credits. Start movie.

We start with a squad of seven troops. They're pretty familiar types: We’ve got a Rock (tough-as-nails sergeant) who later becomes a Hudson (he loses it late in the game), a Tori Montroc (idealist sent to the army by his upper class parents), a Vig (the racist lughead – this particular model happens to be a Southern dude who sports a Confederate battle flag on his helmet), a Fodder (who, oddly, in this flick is obsessed with obscure and most likely imaginary sexual activities of the donkey punch variety), a Bozz (a self-oriented barracks lawyer type), and a Sassoon (the bespectacled translator). Sadly, we're once again short a Brooklyn.

This band o' brothers' latest mission is to monitor a lonely stretch of desert road – well more like a flat wasteland with pretentions to roadness - for potential Taliban activity and, if necessary, engage the enemy. On their way to their new post, these proud few nearly drive over a landmine. They get separated from the rest of their convoy and end up stumbling upon an ancient idol depicting a djinn (or, as most of us say it, genie). The squad's interpreter informs the other soldiers that this genie isn’t a big blue dude who’s here to grant wish and drop one-liners. Instead, it is a shape-shifting creature driven to kill by its limitless, murderous hatred of humanity. The fact that djinn get so killy when left on their own is the reason they get trapped in things like bottles or, oh, I don't know, ancient idols. Like the one our proud few are standing in front of.

Not all the soldiers are immediately convinced that they're dealing profound supernatural forces beyond the reckoning of their feeble modern logic, and they discuss what should be done with the idol. Though none of them could be considered "true believers," they rapidly reach a consensus that there’s no point in needlessly tempting fate. They decide to leave the area immediately and tell nobody of their discovery.

Just kidding. The unreconstructed jackass with the Reb flag on his helmet shoots it to bits.

Jump to: House in the middle o' nowhere.

Our boys arrive off at a small, partially destroyed stone house facing a desolate stretch of sand, rock, and desert brush. This is the not-really-a-road they're supposed to monitor. Or, at least, they decide it must be because they don't find any more road-like features around them. The soldiers explore the house and find a quartet of singed corpses – victims of white phosphorous bombing – that they promptly bury.

Before you can say R-Point, the soldiers are receiving cryptic radio messages and getting weird visions. A massive sandstorm drives them indoors and brings them a mysterious visitor: a young woman wearing traditional garb and speaking a language even the translator doesn’t recognize (it's Aramaic, according to the "making of" featurettes). Soon, their transport is sabotaged and squad solidarity begins to crack under the strain. The situation gets no better when soldiers start disappearing.

A haunted house story in desert camo, Red Sands closely resembles Turner's Dead Birds, which featured an armed gang of Reconstruction Era bank robbers hiding out in a haunted plantation. Unlike that film, however, it lacks the baroque backstory that gave Birds its epic sense of the uncanny. This is both a blessing and a curse. Without a sense of mystery to build on, Sands slow burn approach to the scares feels like an unwise pacing choice. Turner tries to make a leaner, meaner genre machine, but fails on the leaner part. On the plus side, the stock frame lets Turner trick his film out with elements he's picked up from his study of other genre works. Indeed, the pleasures of Red don’t lie in the originality of its conceits, but in the clever application of the directors inspirations. Unlike the stylistically inert visual presentation of Sand Serpents, Red borrows the washed out, sun-blasted palate of Three Kings (complete with caption intros for the troopers). An obvious move perhaps, but appropriate and effective. The soldiers are built almost entirely out of stock parts, but their dialogue snaps and the actors suitably embody their roles. Furthermore, Turner encourages a Hawksian improvisational liveliness to their interactions that gives them an charge. Sands seems less daring and original than Dead Birds, but it is work of a man with a good eye for what works and discerning taste. On those terms, Red Sands is a more modest, but still thoroughly pleasurable success.

As a document of the war, Red Sands is a curious beast. Despite being the only film of the trio on our list to actually include footage from Afghanistan, it seems the most removed from the conflict itself. The Taliban, the ostensible reason for the soldiers' mission, never make an appearance. We witness one extended gun battle in a flashback (within the extended flashback), thought that appears to occur between two groups of US troops firing on one another in a panic. The only other combat occurs between our protagonists or between them and the djinn. Aside from a short intro, the only interactions with Afghan civilians are disasters: We see the remains of a family that’s been roasted alive by US bombs and witness a military arrest that goes sour and ends with the death of a small child. The movie's relentless centered on the American protagonists, but not in a jingoistc or egocentric way. Instead, the US presence is depicted as a sort of giant beast, so powerful that it can touch nothing, observe nothing, affect nothing without leaving destruction in its wake. It's a problem of scale, not ethics. With the exception of Johnny Reb (and the later Ahabing staff sergeant), the soldiers are presently as flawed, but basically good human beings. But they can't do anything right because the only way they have to interact with the world inevitably breaks it. Curiously, this both parallels and contrasts with djinn. The conflict between the soldiers and the evil genie is just as one-sided as any of the conflicts between the soldiers and the Afghan land they stomp through. But where the Afghans face a particularly fatal form of blundering, the djinn is deliberately bloodthirsty (and no respecter of national or political allegiance – it's an equally opportunity killer of Americans and Afghans).

The lack of context brings up a sort of chicken-egg question with regards to the films liberal borrowings and allusions. Is Red Sands‘s context of no context an unintentional product of Turner’s extensive mirroring of other pop genre works? Or did he deliberately sever the flick from its historical moment, by design or indifference? Deliberate or not, the result suggest to the viewer that, as Julio Cortázar once said of fires, "all wars are one war." No matter who is fighting, or what the fighting occurs, or what people say they’re fighting about, it’s always just a slaughter of the weak by the strong. Like the djinn of the flick, the particulars might shift and change, but its murderous essence stays the same. It's always a horrorshow.