Stuff: The Jess List

In my review of I Sell the Dead, I mentioned that my wife generally hates horror films. When she doesn't find them boring, she finds them unpleasant. For her, watching horror is like sitting in a dentist's waiting room: uncomfortable, dull, occasionally punctuated by anxiety-inducing screams. During this explanation, I mentioned that there was a short list of flicks that passed the Jess Test. Though I meant this in an abstract sort of way, a couple of readers asked what films were on this list. So, I asked my wife to write up a list of genre treats that she actually does like. Not all of the works on the Jess List are, perhaps, horror-proper, but they're all what Jess talks about when she talks about horror.

Without further ado, I present to you the unedited, unabridged Jess List, straight from the woman herself:

Shaun of the Dead
The Frighteners
Ghostbusters
Jaws (but I hate the first shark scene)
I Sell the Dead
Bubba Ho-Tep
Hellboy 1 & 2
Army of Darkness
Land of the Dead
Universal Monsters: Creature of the Black Lagoon, Dracula, Frankenstein (Wolfman is a little lame)
The Thing from Another Planet + remake The Thing (but I have to squint at some parts)
Kaiju movies (Godzilla et al)
Interview with the Vampire (the first R-rated movie I ever saw in high school)
Rear Window (favorite Hitchcock)
Topper (with Cary Grant as 1/2 of hedonistic ghostly couple)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Disney version; this totally scared me as a kid but is now delicious.)



Jess NOT list (my least favorites):
These are not necessarily bad art. The fact that they linger in memory and come up in conversation indicates that they are in fact especially powerful. But they haunt me in ways I find entirely unpleasant. I have lost nights of sleep to these films, which I begrudge.
The Ring
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Hitchcock's Frenzy
Seven
book: Monster Island by David Wellington (zombie novel, too scary to finish)


TV shows:
Buffy (just the first season; I checked out pretty much after Angel went bad)
Dexter

Books:
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (practitioner of "the new weird")
American Gods & Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Johannes Cabal, Necromancer & Johannes Cabal, Detective


Comics:
Sandman (mixed, sometimes nightmare inducing)
House of Mystery by (Fables creators) Bill Willingham & Mike Sturges
Hellboy & BPRD by Mike Mignola

DON'T STOMP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW! If you haven't entered ANTSS Killer Kaiju contest yet, you freakin' should! It's as easy as stomping on your favorite scale-model city.

Contest: Because other blog fandoms are Tokyo and you, dear ANTSS readers, are Godzilla.

It's been too long since I've thrown a contest here, and it's about time I thank all y'all for following along with my ramblings. So here goes . . .

Hot off the presses, from the kind folks at Collins Design, comes Killer Kaiju Monsters: Strange Beasts of Japanese Film. Part light-hearted reference book, part art book, all city-stomping hotness, this handsome hardcover, curated by Ivan Vartanian, contains production stills, photos of kaiju collectables, poster repros, papercraft build-your-own kaiju, and original kaiju themed-art from artist (including the wonderful kaiju cross-section art Shoji Ohtomo). It's a pop kaiju smorgasbord!

And ANTSS is giving away one copy a deserving reader. Retail value: about 28 Washingtons. Number of dead presidents it's going to cost the winner: zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Free-city, daddy-o.

Could you be the lucky winner? Sure. Why the hell not? You're as awesome as anybody! It's your time, dammit! Hell yeah!

What do you have to do to win? Easy. Just leave a comment connected to this post saying what city you would stomp if you were a giant monster and why. Tired of Montreal's smug politeness? Think you might be doing Detroit a favor by utterly destroying it? Think an attack on Bakersfield is called for just because nobody would see it coming? You're the giant monster; you make the call. Just tell me what city and why, and you're in the running. One winner will be selected randomly on June 4th. Only one stomp per player.

Because I'm a cheap bastard, I've got to limit this to players in the United States. Not that I don't want to hear what towns my foreign readers would lay waste to, but shipping costs prohibit me from rewarding you for your destructive impulses. Imaginary chaos and devastation will simply have to be their own reward in this case.

Let the stomping begin!

Stuff: George Romero pulls an evil Captain Kirk from episode 37.

Over at the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough attempts a Marxist interpretation of the popularity of vampires and zombies:

Maybe Karl Marx, wrong about so much in the real world, could offer some clarification in the realm of make-believe. Could vampires, like the filthy rich, parasitic, aristocratic, and charismatic Cullens, be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies, those lumpen, lurching, mass-consuming legions, could they stand for labor and the proletariat? If so, vampire movies would embody the audience’s anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse. And zombie movies would touch on the dread of — and wish for — an uprising of the working against those same exploiters.

Aside from the analysis itself, Keough gives us a little gem of a reaction shot from the father of the modern zombie flick:

Not even George A. Romero, who as much as anyone can take credit for the zombie phenomenon — spawning it as he did back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead — can explain why they do this. “I don’t get it,” he remarked about these undead wannabes when I interviewed him recently about his newly released sixth film in his zombie franchise, Survival of the Dead, which opens next week. “You just want to say, ‘Get a life.’ ”

Wow. The dude responsible for Diary of the Dead thinks you're the one who needs to get over the whole zombie thing.

Movies: Don't worry, you play the German doctor guy.

Here's your Thursday productivity sink: Human Centipede: The Game.

Stuff: “Scaled, forked-tongued Lizarde Men from the Deepe” and other hazards of life in the Royal Navy.

This is one of the most disappointing stories ever, but I share it here because I think there's a nifty idea behind it. Apparently, there was a long-standing rumor that the Royal Navy's archive of ship's logs contained a special collection of logs detailing the Royal Navy's various encounters with sea monsters. Sadly, this turned out to be BS. Here' the entire article from The Military Times's "Scoop Deck" blog:

Do the archives of the Royal Navy include volume after gilt-edged volume detailing secret encounters between Her Majesty’s warships and horrifying sea creatures? Do archivists in catacombs deep below Whitehall maintain stacks of leather-bound books with reports about ships battling giant squid, or sea dragons, or the dreaded kraken? Are there pages upon pages of hand-drawn sketches or official — but censored — woodcuts depicting men ‘o war being pulled under the waves by enormous tentacles?

In one of the lamest and most disappointing answers in history: No.

The Ministry of Defence says it has no centralized records of ships’ reports about sea monsters or other unusual maritime creatures. Officials acknowledge there may be interesting details in individual ships’ logs, but there is no immense room with immense, floor-to-ceiling shelves full of 18th Century-era reports like the one about the frigate HMS Sabre, which was lost off the Seychelles after the ship was overrun by what its surviving crew members called “Scaled, forked-tongued Lizarde Men from the Deepe.”

That said, what a cool idea for a novel series. Creative types, I give you the freebie, now scribble fast and get first to market.

Movies: Ain't no sin in Cincinnati.

I was going play this cool and keep my blog cred by not stickin' out my neck for a total ho-hum direct-to-video flick that, perhaps justly, was roundly trashed by the blog-o-sphere. But, honestly, what cultural capital am I worried about burning up?

It's bloggin', not real life.

So here goes.

Tasteless, clumsy, lopsided in pace and construction, needlessly excessive, and embarrassingly self-important, The Hills Run Red is best slasher film in two decades.

Here's the thing with slasher flicks. They all remind me of this old joke: A traveling salesman from Cincinnati made a trip to Iran. (NB: This joke's so old that "Iran" meant 1,001 Nights and not an America-hating theocratic dictatorship.) While there, he was picked up by a princess who felt this strange, pale American was an freakish lark.

When this worldly traveler returned to Jefferson Avenue, he described his adventures to a friend. He told his pal of the princess's exotic beauty; the opulent palace she took him to; the priceless vintage wines they drank; the perfumed baths they took, waited upon by flocks of pale, virginal beauties; the orchestras of blinded eunuchs who serenaded them; the jewels and silks she discarded; and, at last, every sensuous detail of of the princess's shimmering, transcendent nudity.

"And then what?" the salesman's friend gasps.

"Oh, well then its just the same as it is in Cincinnati," the salesman says.

Whatever the foreplay looks like - be it the color-by-numbers knuckle-dragging of the originals, the pomo gags of Scream, or the 3-D projection of the Valentine reimangling - there's a stunted simplicity to the concept of the slasher that's the ultimate pay-off: It's always the same as it is in Cincinnati.

The beauty of The Hills Run Red is that it is happy to be in Cincinnati. It doesn't have twenty years of criticism-proof nostalgia hanging around its neck like a millstone. The makers don't have to worry about hand-holding a generation of fan-entitled middle-aged amateur critics. The result is a film that's pleasingly nasty, joyfully slight, and possessed of a nimble disrespect for the genre that birthed it. In an era of bloated remakes that mistake market penetration for archetypal significance, The Hills Run Red comes the closest to providing the cheap, sullied, dirty, semi-trangressive pop thrill that slashers used to deliver before their audiences resembled Old Home Week crowds.

This isn't to say that THRR is dumb. It's smarter than your average slasher. But it never forgets that we didn't queue up a flick called "the hills run red" to get a lecture on the socio-political ramifications of post-Hostel retro-slasher semiotics. THRR giggles all the way through, but only because it is having a blast and wants you to join in. Unlike the slavishly dogged, emotionally dead recreations that gracelessly spill out on the big screens, it isn't obsessed with limning the rules and preaching to the cult. It's an Anita Loos to their Ayn Rand. (That metaphor pushes all bounds of sense, but it's the only way I could think of to work in Anita Loos, to whom I owe the Cincinnati joke.)

To the degree that slashers have plots, The Hills Run Red focuses on a small crew of would-be documentary filmmakers searching for the legendary complete cut of the titular film: an early Eighties slasher so foul and repulsive that it was pulled from theaters after a brief, scandalous run and never seen again. The leader of this doomed trio discovers that the film's reclusive director's daughter is a stripper at a remarkably well-appointed roadside adult entertainment establishment. (Not that I frequent such places, mind you; but the private rooms are large, genuinely private individual rooms with a whole couch for a single client - I'm in the middle of planning a bachelor party so I'm unusually sensitive to such logistical concerns at the moment.) After essentially kidnapping the girl and holding her through an enforced withdraw of her dope addiction, the documentary director enlists her in the search for the missing film. She tells the documentarian that the director of the missing film - which featured a hulking, malformed, porcelain-mask-wearing mass murderer Babyface - died a decade earlier. However, the director's isolated cabin in the woods, the set of the original film, still stands and is full of The Hills Run Red memorabilia. Perhaps the flick is there.

The documentarians go to the house and, after a few tense scenes, they find the missing film. The cabin is full of old editing and projection equipment, so they watch the film there. It turns out that the film is much more than a cheap slasher flick. It's a undiscovered gem of outsider art. The technique and artistry on display reveals the mind of brilliant, raw talent. The documentarians realize that they've rediscovered a hidden genius of American cinema and, along the way, the shattered daughter of the infamous director and the wounded director of the documentary learn to love again.

Not really though. The film within a film was basically snuff. The daughter's in on it. Pretty much everybody dies. Or gets raped and dies. Which is still dead, of course, but worse.

What's interesting about The Hills Run Red, in the admittedly limited way that slashers can be interesting, is that it, along with Ti West's Trigger Man, it represents the possibility of truly new slasher. Rob Zombie's Halloween films flirted with updating the genre, but ultimately they got tangled up in the imperatives of the marketplace (need to push the franchise's saleable IP markers) and the vampiric life-draining demands of fan-entitlement. What Trigger Man and THRR benefit from is the lack of franchise history. It frees them to create a slasher particular to their time and place. For example, The Hills Run Red doesn't just occasionally borrow the visual language of torture porn, the tension between the formalized, fossilized formulas of the slasher and the more anarchic, unpalatable norms of its replacement subgenre appear as a plot point.

The film also gets a boost from the acting which, about two-thirds of the way into the film tips into a near-camp range that suddenly gives nearly all the actors a sure footing. After struggling for almost 45 minutes to give naturalistic performances, director Dave Parker let's his cast go ape and it gives every performer the freedom they need to hit bizarre operatic heights. There's something pleasingly John Waterish about this film's approach to characterization. Sophie Monk, who has a truly delightful evil-grin face, especially benefits from the freedom to go crazy. Danko Jordanov, stuntman turned slasher actor, should get a few props to for his turn as Babyface. The brilliance of his role is in it journeyman quality. He's weirdly efficient and coolly logical: In one nice touch, he's dispatched the boyfriend of the lone girl in the crew, so he fishes out his cell and starts calling numbers until his next victim's cell starts to ring, allowing him to locate her. The film within a film set-up gives him a distinct focus as a killer who needs to hit his marks and deliver what he's there for. The "creative kills" so beloved of genre fans are the work of others: the directors. I can't think of another film in which the role of the slasher was actually constructed to fit the world of a film as the stuntman who inevitably plays the baddie experiences it and the result appears in the finished product. Jordanov also, for a character who has a single line in the whole film, delivers his dialogue with surprising and well-chosen understatement.

I could ramble on, but you get the idea.

There are a million slasher lovin' dudes out there that will be happy to tell you that The Hills Run Red isn't a patch on whatever slasher they cuddle close at night. And their right. Because it isn't about the cinema necrophilia of '80s slasher love. The flicker ain't perfect, but at its heart is the desire to push things forward.

And I'm all for that.

Let's get the heck outta Cincinnati for once.

Books: The lion, the witch, and the uncanny.

I owe this find to my wife, who hipped me to this passage. Below, C. S. Lewis discusses the difference between fear, which he sees as an apprehension of danger, and dread, which he equates with the uncanny and a religious concept of the Numinous.

Aside from being an unexpected, but lucid voice in the on-going discussion about the varieties of horror, I also find Lewis's insights interesting for calling into question the common "just so" story that horror, as we now conceive of the emotion that fuels of genre entertainments, has some clear lineage to the psychological lives of ancient ancestors. While he doesn't doubt that our ancestors lived in demon-haunted worlds, he raises the question of whether one could conceive of supernatural forces when one hadn't conceived of a "natural" world. If everything is supernatural, isn't that your natural? And, if that's so, is the uncanny a fear of relatively recent vintage (in terms of the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution)?

Here's Lewis from his The Problem of Pain:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked’. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.

Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits. Professor Otto [I have no idea who Otto is – CRwM] perhaps assumes too easily that from the very first such spirits were regarded with numinous awe. This is impossible to prove for the very good reason that utterances expressing awe of the Numinous and utterances expressing mere fear of danger may use identical language—as we can still say that we are ‘afraid’ of a ghost or ‘afraid’ of a rise in prices. It is there- fore theoretically possible that there was a time when men regarded these spirits simply as dangerous and felt towards them just as they felt towards tigers.

. . .

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the visible universe. There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural that early man, being surrounded by real dangers, and therefore frightened, should invent the uncanny and the Numinous. In a sense it is, but let us understand what we mean. You feel it to be natural because, sharing human nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine yourself reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way; and this reaction is indeed ‘natural’ in the sense of being in accord with human nature. But it is not in the least ‘natural’ in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them. Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be explained—as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead, without explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of men) should have attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear.

Comics: All aboard that's going aboard.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is an oddly uneven book. It's front-heavy. All the great stuff - Harker's time in Drac's castle; the voyage of the Demeter; Lucy's transformation, death, resurrection, and destruction - happens in the first half or two-thirds of the book. With the possible exception of vampiration interruptus scene, a near perfect vision of the Victorian nightmare projection of sexuality, the last third's pretty slow going. Though we're meant to get the feeling of mad dash through Europe, the result is a strangely emotionless list of ports of call and overland routes, punctuated by repetitious portents from Mina, and ending in a dud fight that end's the count's bloody undeath in an almost exhausted way. Consequently, when artists of various types take up the threads of Stoker's original, it's almost always elements from the early portion of the novel that they focus on. Prequels that give us backstory for Dracula and his three wives, for example, pick up the somewhat hanging thread of the monstrous femme vamps of Drac's mini-harem.

Personally, my favorite episode has always been the short, but sweet log of the doomed cargo ship Demeter. For those who have never read the book, the Demeter is the unlucky ship that has the displeasure of shipping Drac's coffin from mainland Europe to England. Unfortunately for the crew, the count wakes up hungry and starts picking off the sailors one by one. The whole incident is related through the captain's log, so the presence of Dracula is never fully revealed; he's nothing but shadows and fear, a creeping absence, a roll call of names of the missing. In a brilliant closing move on Stoker's part, the bit ends with the lone captain writing down his plan for reaching England, a plan rich in dramatic irony as the readers knows the moment he says it that it ensures he's powerless against Dracula. In this short scene, Stoker truly plays far above his standard level. Here the collage format of the novel, elsewhere little more than a somewhat clumsy lift from Wilkie Collins, is essential to the story: the tension in this scene doesn't come from any ambiguity of the fate of the sailors - they're prey and they never have a chance - but from the fact that the reader understands the situation and the sailors do not. It also has a taut economy to it that is atypical of the rest of Stoker's novel (see previous about endgame).

It has long baffled me that the scene on the Demeter has often been overlooked by adapters and revisionists. The first film adaptation, Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, included an extended scene based on The Demeter's last voyage; but after that it largely vanishes from the adaptations; Browning's 1931 classic merely alludes to the scene, setting the mold for the majority of adaptations that followed. It seems like perfect horror premise: a crew, trapped on an inescapable boat, hunted by a sinister power from beyond. This is the very template of a million sci-fi/horror flicks, from The Thing from Another Planet to every flick in the Alien franchise.

So, it was no small thrill to hear that, not one, but two projects were revisiting the hulk of the doomed Demeter: a limited series comic from IDW and a flick in-pre-production-limbo flick. We'll have to focus on the one that actually exists at this point. Penned by Pumpkinhead screenwriter Gary Gerani and illustrated by the mixed media art of Stuart Saygar, the expansively titled Bram Stoker's Death Ship: the Last Voyage of the Demeter expands the Demeter scene into a four part mini-series. Promising, but not completely filling, Death Ship reveals what I didn't understand, but what adapters of Stoker's tale seem to have grasped: the Demeter scene is actually really tricky to adapt.

There's a harsh catch-22 at the heart of the task. The bit works because Stoker struck a near perfect balance between the relentless narrative drive of the scene and the amount of detail needed to sell it. At it's heart, the Demeter scene is a countdown to Dracula's arrival in England. The crew of the ship that carries him there is barely sketched out: there's the bold one, the drunk, the kid, and so on. What's important about them in the pace of their deaths: one after the other, the period in between getting shorter and shorter. It's like the heartbeat in Tell-tale Heart or the carpet/hardwood Big-Wheel scene in The Shining in that its power comes from it ever-tightening rhythm. Mess up that coiling rhythm and you mess up the scene.

This means that Gerani is between a rock and hard place. If you're going to make the voyage of the Demeter your story, then you need to flesh out the roles of the crew. In the original, the continuity of the captain's voice is hook enough to hang the interest of the reader upon. We need more detail, or we won't give a toss what happens to the crew. However, every added detail adds some drag to the plot. How much stuff can you add on to Stoker's original streamlined narrative before the drag impacts the speed and, by extension, screws up the pacing that is essential to its dramatic power. The creator's of Death Ship understand that more is not necessarily better in this case. They flesh out the crew as little as possible, working with narration and montage to suggest depth of character rather than risk dragging down the narrative chasing greater detail. The sacrifice, of course, is that the impact of the story comes at a remove. The reader cares less about the fate of the crew and, instead, the story's significance comes from our knowledge of context. This gives the whole thing an air of irrelevance rather fated doom.

That said, I think Death Ship suffers somewhat in a monthly format. The pacing of the story and the pacing of the comic biz do not work well together here. Gathered together, and read in a single sitting, I suspect the story will regain its drive and the economic characterization will seem more like a part of an overall artistic design and less like a conspicuous lack. Delivered as a tight, swift-moving whole, it'll better reflect the atypical verve of the original. Right now, it feels like a bit of a tease.

Though I do like Saygar's Dracula. More Man-bat than Bela, Saygar's vampire is an impressive beast.