Music: Cave in.

On the 19th – just five short days away – Mute Records will drop remasters of the first four Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums. The music-meisters at Aquarium Drunkard use the event to wax poetic about Cave and Co.'s debut platter: From Her to Eternity and offer up a download of the title track for those who don't already have this morbid music milestone on the mp3 player.

From the first post:

The candles freshly blown on The Birthday Party, Angry Young Nick Cave entered a London studio in March of 1984 and, alongside BP leftover Mick Harvey and a host of others, banged and thrashed through seven tracks of what would come to be Cave’s stock and trade: Murder. Deception. Thievery. Loneliness. Literature. All of these done up in a landscape as bleak and terrible as anything Flannery O’Connor ever imagined, and its insides couched in terror. This is the rumbling lodestar in the dark icy sky of Nick Cave’s discography, an almost completely joyless set of songs that are lacking in the humor and grace that would temper his later work. These songs were born straight from the oily fires at the center of the earth.

AD will be following up with reviews of the other three albums in the set: The Firstborn is Dead, Kicking Against the Pricks, and Your Funeral . . . My Trial. I'll link the follow-ups here, loyal readers.

'Till then, why not dig on this live footage of Nick Cave spazzing out all over "From Her to Eternity"?

Books: HODAG!

The University Press of Chicago is offering a taste of historian Joshua Blu Buhs's (real name, swear to God) new book about Bigfoot, everybody's favorite Fortean missing link. The online marketing includes a neat little interview with the author.

The book excerpt not only discusses the origins of the Bigfoot story, but it also briefly recounts the story of the fearsome hodag – which should always be said with near ecstatic excitement: HODAG! – "The Rhino of America's North Woods." Pictured below.

From Blu Buhs's new book:

Lumberjacks, hunters, trappers, and other working-class men had long told stories of such prodigies. For decades, seasoned veterans had funned greenhorns with tales of sidehill dodgers and mosquitoes so big that they sucked cows dry and by having them fetch the equally legendary left-handed wrench. Or they sent them to hunt snipes. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Eugene Shepard, a Wisconsin lumberjack, raconteur, and prankster, announced that he had caught a hodag, the rhino of America’s north woods. Shepard photographed a group of friends killing the beast with picks and axes. The picture was made into a postcard; hundreds of thousands were sold; tourists flocked to Rhinelander, Wisconsin; reportedly, the Smithsonian even expressed interest. Seeing is believing. But the hodag was just a woodcarving. It was all a humbug. American history is rife with such practical jokes, stories of giant turtles and panthers, jackalopes and sea serpents, agropelters and snow wassetts—an entire bestiary of legendary animals. The tradition continued long after the frontier closed. In 1950, for example, the men’s adventure magazine Saga introduced a feature called “Sowing the Wild Hoax” and encouraged the blue-collar men reading it to send in examples of “particularly fiendish” and “unusually funny” practical jokes.

Stuff: Let's talk about (funeral) sex.

I don’t know which is weirder: funeral sex or a magazine dedicated to all things funerary. Mercifully, I no longer have to choose.

The latest issue of Obit magazine features an article on funeral sex:

On a Yelp message board, the question “where to flirt” in San Francisco provoked a vigorous online debate. Jason D. ranked funerals as the fifth-best flirting hot spot, beating out bars and nightclubs. “Whoa, whoa, back up,” objected Jordan M. “People flirt at funerals? Really? Huh. I'm not sure I could pull that off.” That prompted Grace M. to note that “the first three letters of funeral is FUN.”

The author discusses his own morticopulatory adventures – sealing a "busty strawberry blonde" at his friend's mother's shiva and, years later, having hot married sex after an open-casket viewing of his wife's friend who died of cancer – and then quotes sex advice writer Alison Tyler, author of Never Have the Same Sex Twice:

Post-funeral sex is totally natural. You need something to cling to -- why not your spouse, your lover or that hunky pallbearer? Post-funeral sex can be life-affirming in a refreshing way you just can’t get with a cold shower or zesty soap.

Now personally, my philosophy always been when it's right, it's right – but I understand some might not be quite ready to do the horizontal wake shake. Not yet convinced that a little after-doom delight is for you? Here comes the "science":

According to Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book Why Him, Why Her (Henry Holt), the neurotransmitter dopamine may play a role in boosting the libido of funeral-goers. "Real novelty drives up dopamine in the brain and nothing is more unusual than death.... Dopamine then triggers testosterone, the hormone of sexual desire in men and women."

"It's adaptive, Darwinian," argues Fisher, who regrets that desire after the death of a loved one remains verboten. "It's almost like adultery. We in the West marry for love and expect to stay in love not just until death but forever. This is sacrosanct. Society tells us to remain faithful during the appropriate mourning period, but our brain is saying something else. Our brain says: 'I've got to get on with things.'"

Movies: Praise Tod.

If you are in the NYC area and can get yourself to the Film Forum, you will be rewarded with a Tod Browning film series.

Today's double feature is the Browning classic Freaks - the now cult classic that brought Browning's fantastic post-Dracula popularity to a crashing end – and his silent era landmark The Unholy Three. The latter, which was called the "source for all that is best in the horror movie," will be shown with live musical accompaniment.

The series will also include the bizarre horror flicks The Devil Doll and The Unknown. Browning fans should also try to catch his 1928 flick West of Zanzibar. This sleazy revenge drama, a fave of indie director-hero Guy Maddin, was not only labeled "an outpouring of the cesspools of Hollywood" on its release, but it contains the first use of the "chicken-human" shot that would Browning would repurpose for Freaks.

For pro-am horror historians, the series also includes Mark of the Vampire, Browning's remake of his now vanished London After Midnight. The remake was notable in that it parodies the horror conventions that Browning, with his Dracula just four years previous, had helped cement. One of early satires of the horror genre, Bride of Frankenstein beat it to theaters by just three days.

If that wasn't reason enough to get there, the Forum is also hosting a series of prison films. This brilliant series includes double feature of Pre-Code women's prison picks: Ladies They Talk About, featuring Barbara Stanwyck, and Ladies of the Big House, a melodrama written by an actual convict.

Good times.

Mad science: This is your brain on movies. Any questions?

Wired editor and neurosci popularizer Jonah Lehrer has posted a bit on narrative structure, film, brain functions, and the "lose yourself in a film" phenomenon – which he equates with the concept of "suspension of disbelief."

He starts with an extended lamentation from New Yorker film critic David Denby on the state of basic film narrative:

"State of Play," which was directed by Kevin Macdonald, is both overstuffed and inconclusive. As is the fashion now, the filmmakers develop the narrative in tiny fragments. Something is hinted at - a relationship, a motive, an event in the past - then the movie rushes ahead and produces another fragment filled with hints, and then another. The filmmakers send dozens of clues into the air at once, but they feel no obligation to resolve what they tell us. Recent movies like "Syriana," "Quantum of Solace," and "Duplicity" are scripted and edited as overly intricate puzzles, and I've heard many people complain that the struggle to understand the plot becomes the principal experience of watching such films.

He agrees somewhat with Denby's jeremiad, then he brings the science:

Here's the requisite scientific reference, which comes from a study led by Rafael Malach. The experiment was simple: he showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie ("The Good, The Bad and the Ugly") and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. To make a long story short, he found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is "Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision".) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here's the nut graf from the paper:

"This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains "tick together" in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment."

But it's also worth pointing out which brain areas didn't "tick together" in the movie theater. The most notable of these "non-synchronous" regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. (It carries a hefty computational burden.) Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself in the movie.

Finally, Lehrer makes a test-balloon hypothesis of his own:

What does this have to do with tricky cinematic narratives? I'd argue that the constant confusion makes it harder for us to dissolve into the spectacle on screen. We're so busy trying to understand the plot that our prefrontal cortex can't turn off. To repeat: this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does go against the fundamental experience of watching a movie. It's a formal innovation that contradicts the essence of the form. We can't afford to "lose ourselves" in the movie because we're already lost.

I'm not sure I find this prelim hypothesis entirely convincing. Still, I think it's interesting. What I do like about it is that it shifts attention from content to form. So many of the debates in the horror blog-twit pro-am focus on content issues: the divisions between genres, the use of the supernatural, "showing the monster," etc. It would be interesting to consider flicks that, say, regardless of their content, followed the same narrative structure. This isn't to say that the content is irrelevant or not worth discussing, but it may be overvalued in our current conversations.

Under-Utilized Nightmares: The wereshark.

In this, a new semi-regular feature of ANTSS, a concept swiped from the brilliant mind behind the I Love Horror blog (see sidebar, then visit, then shower him with praise), your 'umble 'orror 'ost will 'ighlight a few baddies that the fright biz has woefully neglected. In the hopes of ending our ruinous dependence on zombies and slasher retreads, perhaps one of these under utilized nightmares will spark the imagination of a budding filmmaker. Fingers crossed.

Today's 2UN: the wereshark. From Dean Crawford's excellent natural history Shark:

Hawaiian mythology includes numerous stories of shark-men, identifiable by the pattern of shark jaws on their back, who were able to alter their forms, sometimes under the full moon, like werewolves A common event in many of the myths features a strange man warning swimmers to stay out of the water because of sharks. When the swimmers scoff at the stranger and ignore his warning, he transforms himself into a shark and devours them. As in werewolf mythology, the demonic masquerade is discovered when villages hunt the shark, only to later find a strange man, pierced with their spears, dying on the beach.

There's even a sort of "patient zero" ur-wereshark link to the stories of Hawaii's native gods: Nanaue, demi-god son of the Ka-moho-alii, the King of the Sharks. His wonderfully violent and pathetic story is retold here by an anonymous writer for a travel site:

Long ago on the Big Island of Hawaii, there lived a gorgeous young woman by the name of Kalei. Kalei lived in Waipio Valley. Each night Kalei would walk to the waters at the mouth of the valley to bathe in the sea.

One night, Ka-moho-alii, the king of all sharks in the region was swimming just below the surface of the waters where Kalei bathed. Under the shimmering moonlight, she disrobed and slipped into the warm waters as she did every night.

Ka-moho-alii saw Kalei and was entranced by her unique beauty. As shape-shifter he resolved that the next night he would take on his human form as a chief and search the land for the beautiful and mysterious woman.

He did as he planned. For the next few days he walked the land as a chief and ate and communed with the people of Waipio Valley in search of Kalei. In time, he found her. They fell in love and married.

Over time, Kalei became pregnant with Ka-moho-alii’s child. Before the child was to be born, the Shark King knew that his time had come to return to the sea. He never revealed his true identity to Kalei. Instead, he instructed Kalei to give birth alone and to watch over his child, who was to be a son, and to never allow the baby to eat the flesh of any animal. Reluctantly he left Kalei, whom he had come to love dearly and returned to the ocean. The lovers never saw each other again.

On a dark night, as the island winds whipped furiously through the valley, beautiful Kalei gave birth to the Shark King’s son. She was afraid and saddened when she saw that the baby was born with a deformity on his back – a large open hole that resembled a gaping fish mouth.

She wrapped the baby in a thin blanket of tapa cloth to hide the deformity from the others. That night she cried as she rocked her newborn son, for he was as beautiful as she, besides his disturbing deformity. She named him Nanaue.

As the child grew older, she kept him away from meat as the Shark King had instructed her, but she could not protect him for long. Back in ancient times, men and women were not allowed to eat together.

When the child came of age, his grandfather took him to eat with the men. He was fed meat for the first time and developed a voracious and insatiable appetite. The gaping mouth on his back grew rows of sharp teeth.

After that day when Kalei took her son to bathe in the stream she watched in horror and fascination as he took the form of a young shark – he would swim and play in the water in fish form, chasing and eating the smaller creatures in the stream.

As the child grew into a man, Nanaue also grew as a shark. After he would swim in the ocean, people would go missing. A great shark would come out of the water and tear his fellow swimmers limb to limb.

The people of Waipio Valley became suspicious – why was Nanaue never harmed in the ocean? They began to suspect that he had special powers, but they did not know that it was he who was actually killing his friends while in shark form.

One day, the villagers discovered the great mouth on Nanaue’s back. It all came together that he was the one that had been causing all of the deaths in their otherwise peaceful waters. The villagers were very angry and decided to capture and kill him. Nanaue then changed into shark form and escaped into the sea.

From Waipio Valley, Nanaue swam to the Hana side of the island of Maui. There he took the form of a man. He married a chiefess while on Maui and tried to hold back his desire for human flesh. He could not. One night his hunger took a hold of him and he kidnapped a young girl, ran to the ocean, shape-shifted and devoured her in plain site of all. The people of Maui were outraged. They tried to spear Nanaue from canoes, but he swam quickly toward Molokai.

Once again, after he had reached the island of Molokai, Nanaue tried to keep his true nature a secret, but as he grew older his hunger only got stronger. By this time, tales of a dangerous shark man were circulating through the islands.

The Molokai people kept a look out for this strange Man Shark. Finally, they saw Nanaue shape shifting in the sea when he thought that no one was watching. They snared him while in shark form and beat him with clubs until the ocean was red with his blood. The people chanted continuously until Nanaue became weak.

His shark body was drug to shore where he was chopped to pieces and incinerated in a large oven. Thus died Nanaue, son of Ka-moho-alii – King of Sharks.

Movies: I was rolling my eyes upwards too.

If you're a horror filmmaker about to launch into biz, I have a single bit of advice for you: Shoot your film in a foreign language. Preferably French, if possible.

Seriously.

As the self-appointed torture porn guy of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers (what, was I gonna be another nostalgia besotted fan of exploitation cult stuff? - might as well announce that you enjoy metabolism and access to oxygen – besides, this gets me out of watching The Room) I've finally gotten around to checking out Martyrs, the Aught Eight Pascal Laugier helmed latecomer to the much reviled subgenre. Yet, while horror elites have gone out of their way to denigrate the homegrown torture porn flicks, they'll sprain their wrist trying to be the first to gookie cookie this particular flick.

Why?

Because it's French. So very very French.

Let's get the plot summary out of the way.

The film starts with a young girl escaping a grimy meat packing plant torture chamber. On her way to freedom, she sees another prisoner, but out of fear of getting caught, she abandons her to her fate. (Think Hostel, except the hero doesn't go back for the prisoner he could free.)

The girl, Lucie, ends up in a orphanage where, after and extend therapy/coming-of-age montage we find out that she's befriended by the pleasantly dykey Anna. Lucie's now a cutter, though in her mind the slashes come from a Samara-esque projection of the woman she failed to save. (Think Ring, but more slashy.)

Cut to "now-ish" – Anna and Lucie are an armed duo on the road looking to get revenge against her former captors. (Think Boise Moi except mercifully shorter.) Lucie finds the couple she thinks is responsible for her imprisonment and goes Columbine on them with what appears to be a very expensive quail-hunting rifle. (Think Funny Games.) Lucie's rage includes the execution of the couple's children: a young boy headed off to college and a girl in the early teens.

(I'm going to quit with the "think" motif, but you get the idea. Martyrs is a basically a mash-up flick of the New French Extreme and American mainstream horror, notably the torture porn genre. If you're watching Martyrs and comparing it favorably to American torture porn, then you just haven't watched very much of the subgenre. Martyrs - by being French and by extension "good" – is torture porn for people who would never stoop to watch torture porn.)

Just because it struck me as curious, I'll mention here that Lucie's gun is a very French weapon in that it is absolutely savage to the human body, but apparently can do no harm to inanimate objects. The boy, for example, is shot while seated in a chair. The buckshot clearly goes straight through him, but leaves but the chair he's seated in, the glassware in front of him, and the glass double doors behind him completely unscathed. By the same token, blood in this film acts the way blood would if Jackson Pollock designed the human body. Nobody jets blood or bleeds out; rather they get injured and smear about great expressionist Crayola red swatches of it about the place. Notably, being around blood gets you covered in it, even before you touch anybody or anything.

Anna, to her credit, is horrified by the violence she sees – if you're curious about what Oskar's life will be like in a few short years after the credits roll in Let the Right One In, the scenes post-family-massacre show vividly what it's like to be the non-bloodthirsty one in such a relationship – and ends up intervening on behalf of mother, who is wounded and left for dead by Lucie, but is still clinging to life. This act of kindness is ill-rewarded as Lucie finds out, offs the mother anyway, and then – feeling unloved, I guess, or perhaps fulfilled – dispatches herself.

Anna, now alone in the world, discovers that Lucie was right all along – there's a CDC-grade sterile torture dungeon underneath the house, complete with simpering victim! (Think, of all things, Captivity - sorry, I know I said I'd quit, but c'mon, how often to get to point out that a film bit off of Captivity - seriously, it steals from Captivity for fuck's sake!) Anna tries to care for the prisoner, but it goes pear shaped when functionaries group who made all this possible show up. Dressed like people who thought "Basically, what I'm sayin' is that I want to dress like I'm a rebel in the The Matrix all the time," these folks bust in, kill the tortured girl. Then the take Anna captive and hand her into the custody of a lady who looks like what would happen if you appointed Mrs. Garrett the high priest of the Thuggie in the Temple of Doom. Mola Garrett explains that Lucie, the now dead new torture victim, and now Anna are part of some George Bataille cult (don't worry – the French didn't get the reference either – surveys show that, despite their rep for culture, the French tend to read even less than Americans do) who feel that death, administered properly, leads to states of self-negating ecstasy that can reveal truths beyond the capacities the self-bound – specifically, what lies on the other side of death.

This is not, despite its oddness, an invention of the filmmaker. Not only is the central concept lifted from the writings of Bataille, but the cult apparently decorates their lair in images from Bataille's death/sex opus The Tears of Eros. The flick gains a considerable amount of mileage out of one particular image – one of a series in the original work – of a man literally dying the death of a thousand cuts. Though, oddly, the film sells the gender wrong: The torturers, in their almost Alan Moore-ish zeal for putting the screws to women, never fully explains why women make better torture subjects than men. As an aside, in Tears, Bataille is at least honest about the fact that person being chopped up is doped to gills with opium, hence the weirdly beatific expression. As weird as this motive sounds, it ends up being not too dissimilar from the secular religion of Jigsaw in the Saw franchise, though Martyrs wisely doesn't let Mola Garrett ramble on and on about it.

Anna, by accident of place, is selected to be the next mortinaut in the cult's program of postmortuary exploration. They starve, humiliate, smack about, and then ultimately flay Anna. If you were of the mind that Hostel was okay, but what it really needed was close-ups of a chained-up woman pissing in a can followed shortly there after by several shots of said woman being skinned alive, then you are in luck, my friend. Curiously, these militant spiritualists don't seem to have any method to their madness. They're shown as having all these elaborate security and prisoner-abuse processes in place, but none of the abuse we saw on young Lucie, the first abandoned prisoner, and the second nameless prisoner match what happens to Anna. This despite the fact that, as we learn later in the film, they've been doing this for nearly two decades and have had some small measure of success.

Anna, sans skin, sees what's on the other side of the great divide and whispers her vision to Mola Garrett. The cult's faithful gather at the house for confirmation of what lies beyond, but Mola Garrett kills herself instead of telling. The viewers, mercifully, aren't left in suspense. After you die, you seem to drift about in cheaper, less trippy effects show that will remind you of the end of 2001. We get a few more lingering shots of hypernaked Anna then we roll the credits.

As far as torture porn flicks go, Martyrs belong in the first rank. It's innovative in its story structure, which weds the captivity narrative to several horror and exploitation threads: the women's revenge flick, the lesbo love tale, the J-horror style ghost story. This keeps the film from feeling like a retread of previous torture porn flicks (when, ironically, it is hugely indebted to other flicks in the subgenre).

It is also, I think, the first notable torture porn flick to bring an overtly supernatural element into the mix in the form of the whole "Death: the Final Frontier" angle. Unfortunately, I don't believe the film is all the better for this particular intrusion. The cult's bizarre motivations, seemingly haphazard methodologies, and blithe inhumanity don't set them apart from the villains of other films in the TP constellation – the look like the guys from Hostel and talk like the baddies from Saw. Worse yet, the supernatural context robs the film of any satiric bite it might have had. Like Jigsaw, the idio-religion of this cult seems determined to not think of itself as a religion – rather, they fancy themselves extremely neuroscientists. Consequently, the flick only faintly evokes that old Francophone cinema go-to crowd pleaser: anti-clericalism. Though the cult is wealthy, Martyrs doesn't touch on the inhumanities spawned of an ethical system ruled by market logic, the way Hostel does. In fact, the whole cult-thing is little more than elaborate dues ex machina to justify the extended suffering we're treated too – it places the motivations and methods of the villains out of the realm of scrutiny, basically making them not really make sense in the first place, and preempting questions about the illogic of what they're doing.

(Notably, when I first wrote extensively about the subject of torture porn, I cited two elements I thought were central to the subgenre: a overwhelming tendency towards naturalism and the curious lack of importance sex played in the films, especially compared to the slashers that preceded them. If I was rewriting that series of essays, both elements would have to be taken off the table: Martyrs touches on the first element and Captivity is all about the latter.)

The visuals are also extreme, even for this subgenre. Taking its register not from the horror genre, but rather from the current strain of French shock cinema, the film likes its gruesomeness sustained for as long as it can manage it. This is less a feature of torture porn than it is the influence of flicks like Irreversible. The film's ably shot, though the style favors crisp storytelling clarity over the hyperrealistic squalor of the Hostel series or the frenetic editing and color washes of Saw (or, for that matter, the look of other recent French fright flicks). In this, again, the film most resembles Captivity, though Martyrs is considerably more visceral for most of its running time than that film's worst scenes.

The real question about Martyrs - indeed about the whole wave of extreme French horror that's taking the horror blog-twit pro-am by storm – is why such a perfectly middle-tier film gets such lavish praise. Martyrs is a fine film. It is reasonably well made (though rife with continuity errors and other early-filmmaking career tells), looks professional, and is scary and brutal by turns. On the other hand, it's more clever than creative, it lacks any subtext that justifies its wallowing in extreme imagery, and it doesn't seem to take even it's own premise very seriously (which is not the same thing as having a sense of humor – this flick most definitely lacks a sense of humor).

I think it's just the French language. It makes your film seem better. Seriously.

Comics: Hey! I resemble that remark!

From the embittered Pictures for Sad Children.

Click to make with the bigness.