Horror Films 101

FEATURE: The Best Horror Films of 2011 (And a Few Bad Ones Too)

2012-01-29T23:33:00.000-08:00

I tricked you. This isn't a top list. This is a full list of the horror(ish) releases I saw from 2011, listed from worst to best. The good ones start at number 7, if you want to skip ahead.

First off, the disappointments...

14. John Carpenter's The Ward

There is exactly one good scene in this dull, uninspired, hackneyed work from John Carpenter, and it’s the scene where the imprisoned girls take a break in the rec room and dance. I am not kidding. This is a ghost story in a haunted asylum full of important secrets, and the best moment involves teenagers jumping and jiving. Anyway. The plot feels cribbed from Session 9, the aesthetic possesses little of Carpenter's classic camerawork and composition, and, honestly, nothing new happens in this familiar tale of people stuck inside a mental hospital. You have the ominous and authoritative staff. You have the threat of lobotomy and electro-shock therapy. You have the reality-redefining absurdities of the final reel. How can a film scare when it holds no sense of surprise?

13. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

Relentlessly disappointing. Kevin Munroe directs the should-be-a-bigger-star Brandon Routh as paranormal investigator Dylan Dog, who informs us that the world we live in is a fake world, and beneath it lies a world of ghouls of the night. Or whatever it was Blade said back in 1998. The film noir narration and structure of Dylan Dog, with the hero careening from one shady informant to the next, would be a nice twist on a familiar premise. Unfortunately, the dialogue isn’t funny or intelligent or even snappy in the way film noir ought to be, and Routh’s immaculate pretty-boy look doesn’t suit him to the role of a weary detective back for one last case.

12. Hobo With a Shotgun

So over-the-top and shrill and misanthropic that it becomes wearying instead of energetic, Hobo deserves a bit of credit for the strong central performance from Rutger Hauer. Thanks to his direct and heartfelt performance, the film never quite spins apart, and energy rises midway through with the arrival of two knight assassins correctly named The Plague. They deserve their own movie, not this childish revisionist western that uses its premise for "outrageous" (re: forced) violence. It's all so over-the-top that the filmmakers have to burn children alive just to achieve dramatic punctuation. Jason Eisener got some attention for this story thanks to a over-the-top fake trailer, and his short film Treevenge shows a similar disregard for boundaries. I love bad taste as much as the next guy, but a bit of context and restraint would make all the difference. This paradoxically feels like too much and not enough.

11. Troll Hunter

Found footage horror movies have become a dime a dozen, mostly because that’s what they cost. Troll Hunter tries to apply the new aesthetic to a national cinema (Norway, specifically), both as a means of showing off the countryside and delving into folklore. The problem is that the film never develops beyond its central conceit of trolls caught on tape. The characters don’t gain personality. One dies and gets replaced with surprising ease. And even accepting the low budget, these trolls do not intimidate. There’s certainly nothing here to equal the bed-scare with Trantor from Ernest Scared Stupid, and that is not a film I joke about. Troll Hunter carries hints of a better movie in the way that the eponymous hunter Hans (Otto Jesperson) grows weary of his job and its bureaucratic absurdities. I enjoyed watching him fill out a form after flash-freezing a three-headed goblin. This is my receipt for your receipt.

Now, on to the films that were mediocre, middling, and a little too average to fully recommend...

10. Vanishing on 7th Street

Brad Anderson’s a natural director of thrillers, and his previous films (even his Masters of Horror episode “Sounds Like”) deal with protagonists that play like the reverse of Hitchcock heroes. Those men were wrongfully accused and punished for being innocent. Anderson’s heroes escape judgment and, racked with guilt, punish themselves. Vanishing on 7th Street carries none of that fundamental interest. Instead, the film plays like a thin tribute to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s neo-classic Pulse. It’s a bold film to set the bar so high, but Vanishing never reaches that magical spot between engagement and distance that made Kurosawa’s examination of human loneliness so disquieting. What's here is stylish, even haunting on occasion, but finally underwhelming.

For more thoughts on Vanishing, click here.

09. Scream 4

If Scream 4 were Scream 3 or Scream 2, I’d hold it in higher regard. It’s savvy, it’s sympathetic to its characters, and it wants to say some things about entertainment. Craven and Williamson’s intentions are honorable. Do they realize, though, that four movies of this sort might simply be too much? That viewers can’t muster much sympathy for the same old characters falling into the same own traps? Why does Sidney still have to pull knives from kitchens to protect herself? Why can’t Dewey use his knowledge of masked killers? Why must he be so, so, so completely inept? What’s here is generally well-crafted, and more thoughtful than many major horror releases...but it doesn’t feel dangerous, and that’s an absence no amount of good intentions can replace. Sidebar: Hayden Panettierre is cute.

For more thoughts on Scream 4, click here.

08. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

The greatest inspiration behind this film is director Eli Craig realizing that teenagers don’t need any help when it comes to dying stupidly in the woods. If anything, hillbilly psychos are a redundancy. So this film - a reversal on movies like The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - stars Tucker and Dale as inept goofballs simply trying to fix an old cabin, and the teens are so terrified that they impale themselves on tree branches and dive head-first into woodchippers. Alan Tudyk and Katrina Bowden do a fine job supporting the endearing Tyler Labine, who keeps the film lovable, but he can only do so much. The first forty minutes of this film carry a certain ingenuity that the rest of the film can't sustain. The film makes its joke (what an unfortunate accident!), then keeps on making the same joke.

And now, onto the films that just about anyone should enjoy on some level...

07. Insidious

The popular assessment of this film is correct: the second half is not as interesting as the first. Its outright theft from Poltergeist doesn't help either. But there are elements to admire here, like the way the film doesn’t cheat with jump-scares, and the way the main characters leave their house as quickly as possible. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are fine as the parents, but they don’t hold much interest to viewers - it’s on the effectively eerie ghosts to carry the film. Which is probably why the second half gets disproportionate hate. It’s not that the concept of the “further” dimension is lacking. It’s that the film never lays enough character foundation to make those scenes as impactful as they could be. Still, the film offers some genuine chills, and there’s something satisfying about watching a non-found-footage, straightforward ghost story.

For more thoughts on Insidious, click here.

06. Burke and Hare

John Landis continues his horror-comedy streak of recent years with this relaxed, amiable, relentlessly nasty bit of absurdist history based on the exploits of the bumbling murderers Burke and Hare. In desperate need of money, they take to grave-robbing, and then life-robbing immediately after. I know I shouldn't laugh at simple gags like two morons chasing a barrel down a street...or Isla Fisher destroying the words of William Shakespeare in an outsized Scottish brogue...or the goofy faces Andy Serkis makes during sex. But God help me, I laughed. I also appreciated the casual way the film reduces the dignity of life, with esteemed Doctor Knox displaying corpses like they were letters on Wheel of Fortune, and with a declaration of love laced with literal gallows humor. Check it out. Have a double-feature with Lewton's The Body Snatcher.

05. Fright Night

Unexpected. This remake of the admirable eighties horror-comedy makes its motivation clear when Ed (perpetual teenager Christopher Mintz-Plasse) calls Jerry (Colin Farrell) the “fucking shark from Jaws!” More notable than the line itself is the fact that the line occurs ten minutes into the movie. Would that more horror movies were this efficient. Marti Noxon’s script plays as a fun variation on the cliches of this exhausted sub-genre, with hero Charley (Anton Yelchin) and Jerry as thinly-veiled sexual competitors. However, the film stumbles on occasion. The 3D effects intrude on the otherwise-stylish photography, and the third-act retreat into excessive CGI dampens the overall impact. No special effect will ever be as creepy as the way Jerry smiles to himself and chomps on an apple.

04. Red State

Kevin Smith once made an impressive movie about religion called Dogma. That film was the work of a younger man more assured of his faith. This is the work of someone frustrated by the failures of institutions and higher callings, someone who wants to take us on a tour of the depths of contemporary depravity. Or are these classic problems? Although it may best be classified as a dark thriller, the middle half is unrelenting and frightening, and the banal evil of Abin Cooper imposes. The evil preacher villain is a cliche, but Michael Parks whispers and growls and re-invigorates the trope to intimidating effect. Red State is hardly perfect, but it’s inventive and twisty and caps off with a very sobering view of not just the characters in the film, but America in general.

For more thoughts on Red State, click here.

03. The Woman

Lucky McKee's third feature film (after May and The Woods) is the most uncompromising horror film of 2011, a doggedly perverse look at the savagery of human behavior. The eponymous woman is a feral creature who catches the eye of a misogynist hunter named Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers, remarkable); he catches her, ties her up in a cellar and tells his family they'll train her. What makes the film nearly unbearable is the suffering of this family, which includes a battered wife (McKee regular Angela Bettis), a frightened daughter, and a son who's all too eager to follow in Daddy's footsteps. McKee and co-writer Jack Ketchum get lost in the symbolic meanings of their characters - should we read Chris as a lone sociopath or as a representation of patriarchy-gone-amok? - but this at least suggests that they have a lot on their minds, and the film builds carefully from its pitch-black domestic satire into all-out war.

02. Black Death

This isn’t horror, not really, but director Chris Smith gave us the savvy horror-comedy Severance (a film I enjoyed) and the twisty aquatic thriller Triangle (a film I haven’t seen), and so it’s okay to support his work here. Black Death is a dark Medieval drama-thriller about witchcraft, religion, and the power and danger of superstition. Expertly presented, the misty forests and glens call to mind the environments of Herzog’s Aguirre and Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and the ambivalent faith of those two movies might offer some clues to this film. The story focuses on naive monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), who quests in pursuit of a potential necromancer. His journey doesn't just test his faith - it rips his faith to pieces and throws the remnants on the muddy ground. The final twenty minutes of the film, with Osmund broken and then transformed, may polarize viewers, but I think it’s wise to go as far as Smith does. This is a deeply angry movie.

1. Attack the Block

Joe Cornish’s debut is a wonder of a film, a relentless, funny, thrilling sci-fi-horror film about alien wolves chasing down delinquents in a London apartment block. John Boyega leads the gang of thugs as quiet teenager Moses, who eventually teams up with the woman he mugged earlier, because there are bigger problems right now than their animosity. The aliens are one-dimensional enemies, but their imaginative design (and understandable motivations) keeps them intimidating, and Cornish wisely lets the humor emerge from the discordance between the neighbors. Like producer Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, the comedy comes predominantly from sticking discordant people together and watching them chafe and adapt. This organic approach to the jokes allows for genuine horror when their situation crashes through windows and rears its blue-toothed eyeless head.

MISCELLANY: Minimalist Posters for Romero's "...of the Dead" Trilogy

2012-01-24T21:33:00.000-08:00

Made these a little while ago during the minimalist movie poster craze - there's a good tumblr account that's still updating here - and I think they're pretty fun.

Romero only made three zombie movies, right?

I'm pretty sure there were only three.

REVIEW: Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1992)

2012-01-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

There are great movies, and there are movies that contain greatness. Dead Ringers contains a dual performance by Jeremy Irons that's so riveting, so sympathetic, and so expertly handled by David Cronenberg that the film becomes unforgettable. He portrays identical twins Beverly and Elliott Mantle, Canadian gynecologists who work in the same practice, dress in the same clothes and have sex with the same women. Elliott takes them first, and he gives the leftovers to anxious Beverly; the women mistake him for Elliott, and they can hardly be blamed.

Although his two personalities are bifurcated in a basic way, with one as smug id, the other as effete superego, Irons keeps the twins low-key. They speak in similar cadence, at similar volume, both keeping stronger emotions buried. Rather than being hit over the head with a binary archetype, viewers continually search for hints of difference. There are many scenes where it's difficult to remember who is who, and that's a good thing. In fact, that's the most important thing. We aren't meant to see these men as two people, but as two sides of a coin. The film is about watching that coin spin and fall.

Iron's stunning performance (with aid from Cronenberg's control) explains why Dead Ringers can get a couple of key things wrong and still feel overwhelmingly successful. For example, the film introduces actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) as a feminine wedge between the two men. No joke - the men fall in love with her cervix. Bujold plays her role as constantly exhausted, which makes sense - actresses in the movie business have a limited lifespan, and every gig matters. However, her increasing absence in the main story suggest that her character's less of a person and more of a plot motivator. They eventually push her out, like a graft that doesn't match the host.

Another example. There's a scene later in the film when a drug-addled Beverly seeks out a metallurgist to make him some new gynecological tools - they look like something H. R. Giger might use to chop salad. The implements point back to earlier Cronenberg "body-horror" images, like the gun-hand of Videodrome and organic breakdown of The Fly, but those images felt more essential to their respective films. These tools offer an hint of the lurking grotesquerie inside Beverly, but they're the only image of their particular style in the film, and they don't contribute anything beyond their essential weirdness. Which makes them feel like a needless addition, a stylistic red herring.

Mostly, that detour frustrates because it diverts the story from its true focus: the mutually-assured destruction of Beverly and Elliott, who are as inseparable as Chang and Eng. Whenever Cronenberg focuses on them, either with careful editing or elegant in-camera , the film mesmerizes. The film doesn't have the more gratifying thrills of a film like Black Swan, which uses its twinning premise to create an emotional flurry of shame and desperation and violence. This film trudges to a marked grave. There's a moment in the film when the degenerating Beverly forces Elliott to choose whether to leave his brother behind or descend to his level in the hopes of pulling him out. This being a horror film by David Cronenberg, there's no surprise as to what Elliott will choose, but God help me, there's so much dread.

RATING: A-

REVIEW: Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011) + A Series Overview

2012-01-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

The people in the Scream movies strike adifficult balance. They must be smartenough to know about horror conventions, and they must be stupid enough to doabsolutely nothing with that knowledge. They still answer the phones. They still pull out knives instead of sticking guns in theirpurses. They still spend time listeningto monologues about movies that give them no useful advice. We learn in Scream 4 that “the unexpected isthe new cliché,” but all that means is that we’re in one big house during thefinale instead of the big house we expected.

Familiarity should be expected in the fourthfilm of what was supposed to be a trilogy, but Scream 4 needs to find some wayto rejuvenate the idea. To make thefamiliar seem fresh, and make the cliché seem unexpected. At times, Scream 4 generates some of thatwelcome frisson that makes this series, even on its worst days, preferable tosomething like the attention-grabbing desperation of the Saw saga. Those films push the viewer around; the Scream filmspull the viewer along.

Yes, the Scream series’ unique combination of sly wit,character engagement, and elegant horror set-pieces can still hit, and eachmovie manages at least one fantastic scene where those divergent elementscollide. The first film offered up thecharming Drew Barrymore for cruel slaughter, the second film featured anunexpected demise in broad daylight. The under-valued third film offered a morbidly hilarious sequence wherethe heroes struggled to stay together while the killer faxed them revisedscript pages.

The one great scene in this film revolves aroundHitchcockian blonde Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and her lovesick puppy Charlie(Rory Culkin). Late in the film,Charlie’s hanging on by a thread, and Kirby has to answer the killer’squestions to save him. The killer outwitsher with a classy reference to Peeping Tom. She begs for one more question, and as soon as the killer says “remake,”she cuts him off and lists the titles, one after the other, and Kirby’sdesperation pushes past the meta-commentary on Hollywood’s lack ofimagination. Tears form, breath growsrapid. She doesn’t want to lose herfriend. She’s about to lose her friend.

There are more of references to more classichorror-thrillers. Along with the PeepingTom reference, a whiteboard in the Cinema Club charts out the rising actionof Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Andof course Hayden Panettiere’s hair recalls not only Tippi Hedren in TheBirds, but Kim Novak in Vertigo.

I dwell on Panettiere's Kirby a little too much, but thereare a few good reasons. First off,she’s drop-dead gorgeous. Moreimportantly, she’s the only interesting teenager on-screen. Her sly smiles suggest hidden depths andinterests. The returning characters arewho they’ve always been, and there’s no real risk of danger to Sidney or Gale, or evenDeputy Dewey (David Arquette), who’s been inviting death since the end of thefirst film, and deserves points here for creating what must be the most worthless cop in the history of the genre. His job here is to arrive too late to things. So with the assumed survival of those three, attention moves to the new characters. Apart from Panettiere, the only one to leave a real impression isAlison Brie as Sidney’s ambitious manager.

Since the series deals with multiple killers inprevious entries, there’s not much interest in guessing who they are. Easier to just wait for the big reveal andwhat’s-my-motivation monologue. Some token commentary goes to the disease of reality culture and the rise of internet stardom, and that might explain why one of the killers is so utterly dull outside of the mask. We live in an age where TV networks hire "real" people and give them direction and storylines to follow, and that might be just the ticket for a bland personality yearning for attention. But that trend has little to do with the horror genre. Craven and Williamson would've been better off devoting more time to the way Robbie (Erik Knudsen) constantly v-logs his teenage life, which ties into the newer trend of documentary horror like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield.

Neve Campbell continues to provide a steadyfulcrum to this series, but each time, it’s a little more depressing watchingher come back to the same place, hit the same marks, and deliver the samelines. When the first Screamcame out (and Good Lord, that was fifteen years ago), Campbell was an ingénuewith great promise. She’s kept busysince, but returning to this series isn’t what she deserves. Better to launch some fresh faces and re-tool the premise into something bold and reckless. Maybe the next one be in space. Or use time-travel.

RATING: C+

And a quick series recap:

The first ten minutes of Scream are asperfect as horror can be. Terrifying,funny, suspenseful, sympathetic to its characters. Drew Barrymore does such a good job, and instills Casey Beckerwith such immediate likeability (she’s kind on the phone, bubbly withoutcrossing over into ditzy). Theremaining ninety minutes of the film never reach that height. Of course, they’re still excellent. The scenes of suspense feature impressivestaging from Wes Craven, with help from Marco Beltrami’s elegant score, andWilliamson’s dialogue pushes not just the self-reference, but also the sharplydefined personalities of the main characters. Hapless Deputy Dewey, selfish-but-driven Gale Weathers, quietlyintelligent Sidney Prescott. The finalecomes closest to the success of the opening, especially when a dying killerlaments, “My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!”

RATING: A

Scream 2, like its progenitor,features a fantastic opening and an admirable follow-through, but because it’sso beholden to the original, tiredness seeps through the cracks. The setting shifts from high school tocollege, but the product is much the same, a slasher by-way-of whodunit, withsuspects killed off in inverse relation to their level of stardom. As mentioned, the first ten minutes of thefilm offer a stunning horror sequence, this time with the killer murdering aninnocent in plain sight: at a theater that’s showing Stab, the fiction filmbased on the Woodsboro murders. Thefilm-within-a-film is notable not just for cheeky self-awareness, but for howdifferent it is than the original Scream. The actress speaks in drivel, she’s prepares for a shower (cuethe dropping bathrobe). In short, Stabpanders. Of course, Scream 2does too. That’s what how sequelsfunction. The ending doesn’t tie upwith the impact of the original, although its stage setting gives the film anice bit of symmetry, and Liev Schrieber’s sleazy Cotton Weary evolves from abit player into an unexpected wild card. Gotta keep things fresh somehow.

RATING: B+

The first two Scream movies told basicslasher stories, and, even with the reflexivity, there wasn’t much to chew onafter watching. Scream 3,however, is very upset with how the horror genre treats women. The actresses in this film travel toHollywood with dreams in their heads, and the system almost invariably screwsthem, figuratively and often literally. It happened to Sidney’s mom, it happens to Angelina (Emily Mortimer), itmay be happening to Judy Jurgenstern (Parker Posey), and the archivist in thestudio basement points out that she was up for the role of Princess Leia, butwho got it? “The one who fucked GeorgeLucas.” That buried anger helpsalleviate the larger problems of the “final” entry in the Scream saga. More significant than the uninterestingvictims and been-there-done-that-twice aura is the lack of stakes. Will Gale, Dewey, or Sid ever truly be atrisk? Not even an ominous message fromthe video spirit of Randy (Jamie Kennedy) can revive the tension. His rules of a trilogy avoid noting that thethird part almost always disappoints. Given this series, it’s a wonder nobody pointed that out.

RATING: B-

FEATURE: The Weird Trend of Eighties Flesh-Faces

2011-12-23T18:35:00.001-08:00

Watching Leviathan a few weeks back, it struck me that a lot of memorable horror films of the eighties feature dripping-wet flesh-faces, in which the human face is submersed in extra-human goo and made part of something larger and eviller. While it's possible that this emerged out of a subsumed cultural anxiety about getting our faces stuck in a big mound of gooey crap, it's more likely that everyone looked at The Thing and say, "Hey that was cool right."

Ground zero is John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), in which an alien takes DNA from other creatures and incorporates their features into its bodice. The finale features a victim's face connected to an enormous pair of jaws. Therefore, we get the prime example of flesh-face.

Next up is Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986), which featured a Doctor Pretorious who's taken over by a creature called a shoggoth. The chief result? A nasty flesh-face. Gross.

One year later, Sam Raimi upped the flesh-face ante in Evil Dead II by sticking the faces of people possessed onto the side of an enormous demon head. From left to right, Ash, someone, someone, and...someone. Four people? That's some good flesh-facing bang for your buck.

One year later, Chuck Russell directed a remake of The Blob (review here), and he couldn't resist adding a bit of flesh-face. Here, a devoured sheriff's face is slowly merging with the creature.

One year later (notice a pattern?), George P. Casmatos directed Leviathan, which featured a disease that got inside its victims and merged them together to make a big monster. Naturally, flesh-face.

The final example of flesh-facing in the eighties was produced in 1989 but wasn't released until 1992, and maybe that's because the world wasn't ready for the logical conclusion of flesh-face. Brian Yuzna (producer of From Beyond) took flesh-facing to its ultimate conclusion in the movie Society, in which an entire room full of upper-class alien-people merge together in a perverted act called "shunting." It involves a lot of faces, a lot of flesh, a lot of nudity, and a lot of sweat.

Warning, the following pictures are more than not safe for work.

I don't think they're safe for anybody.

Seriously.

What is this.

FEATURE: The Orgasmic Theater - Stuart Gordon and Sex

2011-12-11T22:03:00.001-08:00

A decapitated head lunges eagerly betweenthe legs of a co-ed, and, for better or for worse, history is made. This image, culled from the climax of the taboo-busting Re-Animator, may stand as the defining image of Stuart Gordon’scareer. Stuart Gordon brings a unique perspective on sex in horror films, one that tries to find organic ways of including it the genre. Despite the insistence of Leslie Vernon, horror isn't terribly effective at wedding sex to scary stories - it's often used as a simple way to guarantee horny teenagers in the seats. Not that this is awful...but sex can be more. And in Gordon's films, it always is.

Take Re-Animator. In Gordon's debut film, there are two key sex scenes. The first one takes place between Dan (Bruce Abbott) and Megan (Barbara Crampton), boyfriend and girlfriend. There is no coercion on the part of Dan, no unwillingness from Megan. They love each other, and they want to make each other happy, and we only catch the end of the act, so the emphasis is on their mutual pleasure, and her screams of "Yes!"

At the same time, Megan catches the eye of the loathsome Dr. Hill (David Gale), and, later in the film's climax, his resurrected body (carrying his head around in a pan) attacks her, ties her up, and sexually assaults her. Although there's certainly an exploitative element to the state of his body (unbodied as it is), the real horror of the situation comes from how Hill views Megan, versus how Dan views her. Dan's love was shared, but Hill acts on his lust with greed. He ties her down, which makes her not only helpless, but also inactive - she literally becomes an object to him. After physically assaulting her, he tries to perform cunnilingus on her, a symbolic consumption of the woman he fetishizes, sex as a devouring mouth.

Gordon's subsequent film, From Beyond, goes one step further, tying the effects of the central "Resonator" machine to characters' sex drives. As the Resonator stimulates the brain's dormant pineal gland, so the pineal gland stimulates sexual appetite. Gordon bases this on medical apocrypha surrounding the organ (the pineal gland actually inhibits sexual development), but by establishing the link, Gordon writes himself a license to explore sexual sensation and pleasures continually throughout the film. As an unexpected side-effect, he also portrays sex in a consistently negative light, since no sexual elements in this story exist free of the destructive Resonator's influence.

Only one brief scene suggests the sexual benefits of the Resonator, as main characters Crawford (Jeffrey Combs) and Katharine (again, Barbara Crampton) embrace in the machine's purple glow. However, nobody in the film ever consummates their desires physically, and the film repeatedly treats sex as a destructive weapon. Not only in how the villainous Doctor Pretorious (Ted Sorel) returns from beyond to assault Katharine, but in how Katharine, under the spell of the Resonator, climbs upon a sleeping Crawford and then tries to seduce Bubba (Ken Foree). Pretorious and Katharine are both sexually attacking, and for specific reasons. Pretorious's impotence (revealed late in the film) is the impetus for his sado-masochistic desires, violence supplanting what he cannot achieve otherwise. Katharine's underlying motivation is never quite stated, but her development visually and behaviorally - from an inhibited bookworm into a lascivious, leather-clad bombshell - suggests an unleashing of pent-up sexual angst. When Bubba brusquely turns her toward a mirror, she bursts into Puritan tears.

Sex in Gordon's later film Dagon returns to the bifurcated approach of Re-Animator, with hero Walter Gilman given two potential mates. On the one hand, he can rescue his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Merono) from the slimy clutches of the Imbocan villagers. On the other hand, he can give in to the appeal of a village woman named Uxia (Macarena Gomez). Barbara's sex appeal is simple and giving. But Uxia's sex is surreal and exotic. Walter's seen Uxia in his dreams, and when he pulls aside her bedsheets, he's shocked to find tentacles in place of legs. In addition to their subtle labial connotation, the tentacles suggest a more obvious alien quality. Certainly they're unsettling enough to make Walter race away from her bedside.

Uxia's mixture of sexual desire and deformity puts her in the same category as Pretorious and Gale, as a perverse, destructive force motivated by the most basic of urges. Uxia demonstrates her destructive side when she stabs Barbara and sacrifices her to an octopus-god. During the sacrifice, Uxia plunges a knife into the naked Barbara, whose once-attractive body has been destroyed by the mad harpy. Only one attractive woman in Imboca is allowed, it seems. Although the sexual politics get complicated on a few points (Walter and Uxia are siblings, and Ezra Godden is homosexual), the dominant image of sex in this movie is of a succubus, an image of beauty that hides frightening secrets and unknown depths.

Although the idea of marrying sexual desire and mortal danger has carried from film to film, Dagon pushes this idea in a more feminine direction, and Gordon's episode of the Masters of Horror series, "Dreams in the Witch-House" takes this to its only possible conclusion. His idea of the fatal seductress ends here with a naked woman shrouded in a black hood that evokes images of the Grim Reaper. The situation feels borrowed from Kubrick's The Shining, which also featured an old witch taking the form of an alluring young woman, but there's no cheating here. Gordon gives the sex an important story function, as the witch lures the hero to bed so she can tear a pentagram into his back with her nails, which renders him a slave to her will.

While not all of his films present sexual situations, Stuart Gordon does carry the issue with him into his urban thriller films, which are really just horror films disguised by their real-world environment. In King of the Ants, the slightly stupid hero (Chris McKenna) is hired to kill a man, and he becomes so enraptured with his target's wife that, after the murder, he seduces the wife in the very home he cased earlier in the film. Their sex is treated as mutually pleasurable, but the undercurrents keep the viewer from engaging. The circumstance is deeply wrong, and the underlying deceptions make the sex selfish, since an iota of honesty would tear their relationship apart, and, naturally, their relationship ends when the wife learns the truth, and the hero kills her.

Gordon's 2007 ripped-from-the-headlines shocker Stuck has a brief scene in which Brandi (Mena Suvari) tries to ignore the man stuck in her car windshield (!) long enough to have sex with her boyfriend Rashid (Russel Hornsby). But she can't get the images of the car accident out of her head, and while she screams in fright during intercourse, Rashid idiotically interprets her screams as throes of pleasure. Her expression of fear affects the act itself, which now feels invasive and assaultive, a source of pain. While Rashid is oblivious, concentrating too much on himself to bother looking at her face, Brandi shrieks in terror. This film features sex more as an aside than as a dominant part of any character's desire, but, all the same, here is again someone for whom sex has been perverted by its association with death.

That's the main thread. In most of Gordon's films, sex isn't a placeholder situation, or a forbidden act that invariably results in death, as with slasher films. Instead, sex ties into the dangerous indulgences of villains and anti-heroes, a passion twisted by the surrounding macabre situation into something that must stop if order can be restored. However, Gordon does offer one twisted text that actively seeks a positive solution. Edmond, based on the play by David Mamet, functions as a nightmare odyssey in which anti-hero Edmond (William H. Macy) bounces from woman to woman throughout a single night. Each is a potential lover, each is just out of reach - sometimes literally, as is the case with the peep show vixen (Bai Ling). Even when he successfully goes to bed with Glenna (Julia Stiles), their mutual attraction shifts abruptly into an eruption of misanthropy from Edmond, one that builds with him trying to diminish her ("You're a waitress, not an actress") and climaxes with him murdering her after she rebukes his vicious emotional outpouring.

Later convicted of Glenna's murder, Edmond goes to jail, where he's sized up and raped by his cellmate (Bokeem Woodbine). After seventy-odd minutes of watching Edmond objectifying, demeaning, and assaulting women, the exact same thing happens to Edmond. This plays out as a sick form of poetic justice, but, in what's the most perverse shift of the film, Edmond comes to accept the rape as routine, to the point that he and the other inmate treat each other as partners. In the final scene of the film, they wax philosophical about God and death and life and the possibility of salvation, and when the lights go out, they climb into bed together and spoon. They even kiss each other goodnight.

It's tragic and haunting and horrible, seeing two murderers clinging to each other when there's nothing else in life they can grasp. Ironically, though, it's the only time in any of Stuart Gordon's films where a sexual relationship is fruitful and lasting. I don't know if this is deeply cynical or ever-so-slightly optimistic, but it shows that Gordon's not beholden to just one perspective on sex. However, he mostly remains focused on connecting the act to the sins and vices of his characters. And because these are horror movies, this also ties sex irretrievably to death. On a superficial level, sex in these films function as an exploitable element (one that can offer investors peace of mind), but, on another level, one that I believe is very intentional, Gordon presents sex as fundamentally destructive. Which gives his films a newfound sense of melancholy. There's almost no real pleasure in this universe from lovemaking. There's only the little death and the big death, both of them dangerous, walking hand in hand between the bedroom and the grave.

FEATURE: Breaking a Scene from...Insidious (James Wan, 2011)

2011-11-29T10:09:00.003-08:00

Insidious ain't a great movie by any stretch. It's a derivative knockoff of Poltergeist with hints of the video game series Silent Hill in its final act. However, James Wan keeps the movie brisk and occasionally scary, and the first half of the film carries some potent energy and style. Despite his involvement with the Saw series, Wan clearly carries the heart of a more traditional horror filmmaker. His Dead Silence focuses on the classic case of the living puppet (never done so well as in the 1945 omnibus Dead of Night), and this film hearkens back to classic haunted house imagery.

I'm a huge nerd about horror history, so it's natural that I'd respond to this side of the movie, but one sequence stands out for both honoring the past and being really damned scary on its own. Obviously the latter's more important than the former, but getting both? That's a treat is what that is.

In the middle of the film, the creeped-out Lambert family hire a couple of low-rent ghost-busters to inspect their house. The men's equipment is mostly familiar, but researcher Tucker (Angus Sampson) has a handy little device that works like a viewmaster. He peers through the eyepiece, turns a lever on the side with a nifty little SHUCK sound effect, and he gets a new segment of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Or something. Anyway, the important point is that the movie's about to go monochrome and the music dips to emphasize the lever.

Nothing.

SHUCK. Nothing.

SHUCK. Come on, we know there's gotta be something in one of these--

SHUCKHOLYCRAP.

A quick check from our buddy Tucker...

Nothing's there.

Of course, something is there. The fun of this shot is knowing that those two girls are still standing right next to that clock, just outside our range of vision. A pair of grinning undead harpies. Ehrgh.

Along with functioning as a neat little scare scene, classically built up and executed, the image evokes the style of silent horror films like Nosferatu and The Cat and the Canary. Which also featured monochromatic tints. Now, it's entirely possible that this scene had no such purpose and simply has a stylistic similarity to those movies, but I don't think so. I think it's on purpose, and the big reason for that is the switch from the wideness of the film's 2:35 aspect ratio to the narrowness of the viewmaster. Which mimics the 4x3 aspect ratio of movies back in the 1920's.

The only alternative inspiration I can think of is old photographs, but those weren't tinted to different colors with the regularity of early horror films. Even if I'm wrong, the context suggests antiquity, which makes sense, because the ghosts are ancient, as is the story. Take us out, Cesare.

"..."

REVIEW: Leviathan (George P. Cosmatos, 1989)

2011-11-22T14:19:00.001-08:00

Warning. I have misled you.

This is not a review. This is a place for me to talk about the ending of the movie Leviathan. Because the movie leaves me with almost nothing else to talk about.

To talk about Leviathan is to talk about its ending, because its ending is stupendously awful. It's one of the great miscalculations in film history. So wrong-headed, tonally misguided, and poorly-executed that it doubles back on the film and ruins every single frame. Nothing of value has been viewed, because the filmmakers thought none of Leviathan's virtues were valuable enough to preserve - everything that happened prior to the last five minutes retroactively decays into meaningless drivel. This movie doesn't suck for ninety minutes, and then it sucks for eternity.

Leviathan's initial ninety minutes play like a reasonable twist on the solitude of Alien and The Thing, with blue-collar deep-sea divers struggling to escape an infection that mutates its victims and combines them into a larger, vicious predator. As the people slowly transform, they lose hair and suffer skin sores, which uncomfortably parallels the effects of diseases like cancer and AIDS (shades of Cronenberg's The Fly). The number of survivors decrease as the monster's size increases, and only a few escape to the surface. The three survivors are Beck (Peter Weller), Willie (Amanda Pays), and Jones (Ernie Hudson).

Up to this point, the film's portrayed its horror in a relatively grounded manner, borrowing more from its inspirations than just the exploitative elements. Beck, Willie, and Jones crest the ocean waves and gasp for breath. It's a beautiful day. Music swells. Beck lights a flare.

A helicopter pilot, evidently looking in the wrong direction, radios in to base. He's calling it a day. The music dips down, and an ominous wide shot reminds the viewer that the heroes have traded their deathly restrictive environment for an equally imposing expanse:

This is where the film should end. The heroes survived, but of course it's a big world, and safety can only ever be temporary. Think of the film's inspirations. Alien ended with Ripley giving a final tragic report on the casualties of the Nostromo. The Thing ended with two survivors uncertain of the other, destined to freeze with their guns forever pointed at each other. The endings are ruminative. They examine the costs of the story. They treat their premises with respect. If Leviathan ended with the heroes treading water uncertainly, it might've succeeded as an honorable knockoff. Maybe the three divers could offer a few more uncertain lines, and the camera could settle on a waning sun, but this is fundamentally correct.

Instead, the film re-uses the footage of Beck shooting the flare, and of course the helicopter pilot sees them, because of course he sees them.

Of course he does.

And then there's an arbitrary shark attack that involves no actual attacking.

And the monster returns just in time to kill the black guy.

And Beck twists a grenade, shoots off a one-liner ("Say hi, motherfucker!"), and throws the grenade in the monster's mouth.

And upon rescue, Beck punches the corporate villainess square in the face and grins, because the agony of watching friends die and become a monstrosity can be emotionally resolved with a single punch to the mouth.

The obvious explanation for this awful ending is that upon review, people higher on the corporate totem pole found the ending too quiet and tried to spice it up with some last-minute high-action and a conclusion that involved the hero and villainess (Meg Foster) meeting face to face (up to then, she's only been glimpsed on video). There's no evidence outside the film to suggest this, but the film itself explains what happened.

The shark sequence was clearly shot much later, because the rubber fins arrive suddenly in a medium shot, and because the actual footage of sharks has no spatial connection and, more importantly, no consequence to what's happening on the surface. The sharks just swim by and leave. The re-used shot with Beck's flare suggests a last-minute fix in the editing room to accommodate the new footage. Beck's out-of-character one-liner and grenade-toss are clearly stolen from Jaws, but all it does is remind the viewer that there's a much better ocean-monster movie out there. The monster's explosion is so poorly edited that it has time for two reaction shots, including one that happens after it explodes.

The whole thing became a sick joke, except I didn't laugh. I couldn't. Maybe other people will. Nothing wrong with laughing at trashy horror movies. The problem is that this is not a trashy horror film. Or at least, it wasn't. Not until the ending. Which switched the film's status from a mature homage to previous trend-setters movies into botched, brain-dead plagiarism. The problem is, now that I've seen Leviathan all the way through, my mind can't make room for the homage. All I can think about is how bad the movie is. It didn't always suck, but now it does, and it always will. What a goddamn shame that is.

RATING: D

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #1 - Alien

2011-10-30T15:12:00.000-07:00

1. Black Seas of Infinity

Alien, Ridley Scott 1979

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little...

...but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.

They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood...

But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.

"The Call of Cthulhu"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES
02. In the Mouth of Madness - "The Music of Erich Zann"
03. King Kong, The Call of Cthulhu - "The Horror at Red Hook"
04. Cthulhu - The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
05. The Mist - "Dagon"
06. The Thing - "At the Mountains of Madness"
07. The Little Mermaid - "The Call of Cthulhu"
08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #2 - In the Mouth of Madness

2011-10-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

2. Oblivion

In the Mouth of Madness, John Carpenter 1995

...the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath.

It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind.

Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth.

And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

"The Music of Erich Zann"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES
03. King Kong & The Call of Cthulhu - "The Horror at Red Hook"
04. Cthulhu - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
05. The Mist - "Dagon"
06. The Thing - "At the Mountains of Madness"
07. The Little Mermaid - "The Call of Cthulhu"
08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #3 - King Kong and The Call of Cthulhu

2011-10-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

3. Racism

King Kong, Merian C. Cooper 1933
The Call of Cthulhu, Andrew Leven 2005

Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, and Malone heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead.

A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden...

They took it to the...thing on the carved golden pedestal...

The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or in any world.

Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors and shocking croakings afar off. Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him through the black arcade...

"The Horror at Red Hook"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES
04. Cthulhu - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
05. The Mist - "Dagon"
06. The Thing - "At the Mountains of Madness"
07. The Little Mermaid - "The Call of Cthulhu"
08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #4 - Cthulhu

2011-10-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

4. They Came From Beneath the Sea!

Cthulhu, Daniel Gildark 2007

I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw.

I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare...

Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them--and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES
05. The Mist - "Dagon"
06. The Thing - "At the Mountains of Madness"
07. The Little Mermaid - "The Call of Cthulhu"
08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #5 - The Mist

2011-10-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

5. Behemoth

The Mist, Frank Darabont 2007

...I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it.

With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares...

...about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.

I think I went mad then.

"Dagon"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES
06. The Thing - "At the Mountains of Madness"
07. The Little Mermaid - "The Call of Cthulhu"
08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #6 - The Thing

2011-10-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

6. Remains

The Thing, John Carpenter 1982

It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake's camp and what we really found there...

I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery...

...the varied uneasinesses of our dogs, the missing sledges, and other items, the deaths of men and dogs,

...the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens...from a world forty-million years dead.

The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos...

The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies--men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways.

"At the Mountains of Madness"

07. The Little Mermaid - "The Call of Cthulhu"
08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #7 - The Little Mermaid

2011-10-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

7. Octopus God

The Little Mermaid, Clements and Musker 1989

...the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency...

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel.

There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on gainst the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon.

The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand open graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper.

"The Call of Cthulhu"

08. Dagon - "The Temple"
09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #8 - Dagon

2011-10-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

8. Shrine

Dagon, Stuart Gordon 2001

My impulse to visit and enter the temple has now become an inexplicable and imperious command which ultimately cannot be denied. My own German will no longer controls my acts, and volition is henceforward possible only in minor matters.

Such madness it was which drove Klenze to his death, bareheaded and unprotected in the ocean; but I am a Prussian and man of sense, and will use to the last what little will I have.

When first I saw that I must go, I prepared my diving suit, helmet, and air regenerator for instant donning; and immediately commence to write this hurried chronicle in the hope that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal the manuscript in a bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29 forever.

I have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Klenze. What I have seen cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead only to suffocation when my air is gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly, like a German, in the black and forgotten depths.

This daemoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. So I will carefully don my diving suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine; that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years.

"The Temple"

09. The Descent - "The Lurking Fear"
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #9 - The Descent

2011-10-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

9. Devolution

The Descent, Neil Marshall 2005

Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear and curiosity. What would the storm call forth--or was there anything left for it to call?...

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw...

The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life...

...a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity...to see the stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking.

When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed...devils or apes - monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously silent...

"The Lurking Fear"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES:
10. Hellboy - "The Other Gods"
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #10 - Hellboy

2011-10-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

10. Other Gods

Hellboy, Guillermo del Toro 2004

Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging cliff and scanning it for foot-holds. Then he heard Barzai's voice grow shriller and louder:

"The mists are very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth's gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than they..."

While Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws...and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:

"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods...

...there is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging...hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!"

And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:

"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!...Look away!...Go back!...Do not see!...Do not see!...The vengeance of the infinite abysses...That cursed, that damnable pit...Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!"

"The Other Gods"

PREVIOUS ENTRIES:
11. Ghostbusters - "The Dunwich Horror"
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #11 - Ghostbusters

2011-10-10T13:27:00.000-07:00

11. Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?

Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman 1984

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.

"We must follow it, boys." He made his voice as reassuring as possible. "I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business."

"You men know that those Whateleys were wizards--well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means."

"I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away."

"Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance..."

"The Dunwich Horror"

NOTE:
I've discussed the link between Ghostbusters and Lovecraft in greater depth here.

PREVIOUS ENTRIES:
12. From Beyond - "From Beyond"
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #12 - From Beyond

2011-10-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

12. Other Dimensions

From Beyond, Stuart Gordon 1986

I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine...

...and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar material objects not one particle was vacant.

Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown entities...foremost among the living objects were great inky, jellyfish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine.

They were present in laothsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids.

These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some malignant purpose.

"From Beyond"

Previous Entries:
13. Vampyr - "The Silver Key"
14. Evil Dead II - "History of the Necronomicon"
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future - "At the Mountains of Madness"

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #13 - Vampyr

2011-10-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

13. Dream Quest

Vampyr, Carl Dreyer 1932

His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and thought shewing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source.

Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.

In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of wood or stone...

Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side.

"The Silver Key"

Doppelgangers.

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #14 - Evil Dead II

2011-10-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

14. The Necronomicon

Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi 1987

Original title Al Azif — azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons. Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D.

He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia...which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it.

In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told.

He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses.

Of his madness many things are told.

"History of the Necronomicon"

Previous Entries:
15. The X-Files: Fight the Future

HALLOWEEN: Lovecraft Movie Moment #15 - The X-Files

2011-10-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

For Halloween this year, I thought it'd be fun to count down the most Lovecraftian moments I've seen in horror films (and at least one outside of the genre). I plan to give no supporting evidence other than pairing images from the films with text from Lovecraft's stories. There will be a new entry every two days.

15. Exploring the Spacecraft

The X-Files: Fight the Future, Rob Bowman 1996

It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet.

This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings...

The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement...We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky...

After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level we descended story by story into the submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances...

"At the Mountains of Madness"
Chapter VI

FEATURE: Games That Scared My Wii Off - Part V: "Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop"

2011-09-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

[The fifth part of a series devoted to horror games on the Wii and the films that inspire them]

Report

Developers: Tose Software, Capcom

Price: $18~

Rating: M

Release: February 24th, 2009

Sales: 240,000

Recap
Zombies in a mall. Go fish.

Review
The title is apt in Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, because it's clear the publishers were willing to hack away at the original game, regardless of how lifeless the end result would be. The result being a neutered Wii version with inferior graphics, reduced maps, fewer weapons, and some baffling gameplay omissions. What's missing? For one thing, photojournalist hero Frank West no longer takes pictures in the game. Now he's just some guy. In another palm-to-face move, the mall is a hell of a lot smaller than in the original game, and zombies "fade" into view when they're about twenty feet away, which is a graphical cheat I haven't seen since Turok on the Nintendo 64. At least that game could claim a heavy jungle fog.

Although the game features a linear story, the player can dip in and out of it as with the Grand Theft Auto games and simply go exploring. This offers some limited thrills, but the novelty wears out quickly, and although Frank West can find a wide variety of weapons for killing zombies, the problem remains that Frank West is killing zombies, and zombies aren't interesting video game villains. They don't invite clever AI, and they all look the same. Remember that middle sequence in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, when the heroes were clearing the mall of zombies, and how quickly it became business as usual? How quickly it grew dull? This game has a legal disclaimer that says it's not Dawn of the Dead. No, it's not. That film had a brain in its head. This numbing action is as mindless as the ghoul walking down the up escalator.

RATING: D+

Resemblance

100% Dawn of the Dead - That's all.

Earlier Entries

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - A - Stunning, immersive, complex, mature, brilliant.

Cursed Mountain - B- - Rote gameplay improved with unique story and presentation.

Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition - A - The classic is still classic; extras boost the package.

Dead Space: Extraction - B - Enjoyable Event Horizon variation with ample gunplay.

REVIEW: Angel, Season Two (David Greenwalt, 2000-2001)

2011-09-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

Angel's still trying to figure out what in the hell it is in Season Two, and if it's no closer than it was in Season One, at least it's more ambitiously confused. The first year of Angel offered bland detective heroics boosted by a late-season prophecy that foretold of Angel's importance in an approaching apocalypse. How many armageddons is that now for the Buffyverse? But anyway. The prophecy says a vampire with a soul will prove essential to the conflict, and he will be given the boon of life and death. Like all fictional prophecies, it's ambiguous enough to be swung in any direction.

Similarly, the tone of the show shifts dramatically throughout the season. It opens on the edge of nihilism. Angel (David Boreanaz) grows so frustrated with the limitations of moral do-goodery that he lets evil people die and torches his former lover, Darla (Julie Benz). He severs his friends from his life, and they say he's going "dark," although that's a little like saying that Buffy's gone "sassy." Although this story turn allows the show to play with questions of morality and shows how Angel could descend to the villains' level...it shows Angel descend to the villain's level, which leaves the show feeling confused. The season opened with the idea of Angel being a champion. Way to murder people, champion.

After wallowing in a pool of loathing for half of the season, Angel's second season swings inexplicably into cheery high fantasy for the final four episodes. Angel, Wesley (Alexis Denisof), and Gunn (J. August Richards) join demon night-club singer Lorne (Andy Hallett) in a trip to his homeworld of Plrtz Glrb. Sound it out. The sets recall Xena: Warrior Princess, and the show overdoses on broad humor, although a demonized Joss Whedon dancing in the background gave me some chuckles. Still, this detour allows a welcome break from the moodier episodes, and it allows for the embiggening of Lorne's character and the arrival of the furtive new girl, Winifred Burkle (Amy Acker).

While Angel goes on his emotional roller-coaster, it's up to show veterans Wesley and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) to ground the show, and although they can't supplant the hero entirely, Denisof and Carpenter offer so much good will and humor that the show keeps working. Denisof especially proves his strength as an actor. Despite his origin as an effete, ineffectual demon-hunter, he takes on responsibilities in Angel's absence and matures. He convinces. The upside of Angel's turn to evil is that his friends become just as invested in Angel Investigations. They're not the help anymore. They're the team.

Despite the emotional whiplash of the season, the two extremes pivot on an episode called "Epiphany," which stands as the best episode of the season, and certainly the most important. Angel stands at a crossroads after making love to Darla - he can continue to plumb the staggering depths of his hate, or he can reconcile with his friends and begin again. Given that three seasons of Angel come after this, there's little surprise at what he chooses, but how he chooses reveals how good this show can be.

See, the Shanshu Prophecy isn't anything to take seriously in this story - it's just a plot device to allow for self-reflection. Is Angel after a reward, or is he satisfying a masochistic streak...or is he trying to help? This question's prominence will wax and wane as the show continues to its ending, but at this moment, Angel decides he should do the right thing because that's the right thing to do. Not for redemption. Not for punishment. Because there's no way of knowing how everything ends. Leave issues of faith to the clergymen. There is just this: ease suffering. That's all. That's enough.

RATING: B-

Buffy, Season Five: A
Buffy, Season Four: B / Angel, Season One: B-

Buffy, Season Three: A

Buffy, Season Two: A-

Buffy, Season One: B

REVIEW: The Unnamable (Jean-Peal Oullette, 1988)

2011-09-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

Let's get this out of the way. The Unnamable is not a good movie, not in any sense of the word "good." Or the word "movie." The film thieves H. P. Lovecraft's short story title while writing a completely different narrative, and its narrative is one of the dullest to come out of the eighties. College kids dare themselves to spend a night in a haunted house. A monster eats most of them. Cue credits. The characters are not interesting, the ending makes no sense. Misjudged doesn't quite cover it, especially when tree branches chafe a monster to death in the climax.

Look at this rubber spider. Look at it.

Yet.

Yet, it's not awful. Why? Because...I don't know. Give me a second.

Okay. Found my notes.

Because Randolph Carter's an interesting character. Mark Kinsey Stephenson plays the man as disinterested and clinical, intrigued only when discussing matters of history, and yet he's the one character who's endearing. His stubborn lack of affection is a unique character trait, more enjoyable to watch than the puppy dog eyes of hero Howard (Charles Klausmeyer) or the idiot jocks who think that, you know what, tonight is a great night to break into the spooky old mansion on the edge of campus.

Why do that when they could read musty old books?

Because the monster design is kinda cool. There was no way to adapt Lovecraft's extradimensional sludge-entity, so the creative team went in a different direction, crafting a pallid, hoofed she-demon who leers and stalks with grace. Most creature design in B-pictures fails to impress. This impresses. Granted, the unnamable beast spends too much time striking poses and tossing around heroes - ever notice how death foreplay increases in direct proportion to how important the victim is? Personal hero Tom Servo once observed that monsters could get a lot more done if they didn't "revel after each small victory."

I could kill you, but I'll play with you until the film runs out of time.

Because it's stylish at times. The overall style of the picture works reasonably well. A lot of deep shadows, plenty of browns and blues inside the Gothic manse. One impressive scene features a couple having sex, and the girl, while slamming a door to the rhythm of lovemaking, dislodges a head from the doorway. It rolls down and lands next to her right as she's about to...well, let's be honest, this genre isn't exactly noted for its good taste. Even then, ever notice how hypocritical slashers are? Whatever empowerment a heroine gains is undone by the fact that she must never enjoy sex.

Stop it!

That's about it, though, and I'm left to wonder why we keep seeing people run through hallways, trying to escape, when there are enormous windows in every single room.

Films like this frustrate me a lot more than something unapologetically shoddy, like the recently reviewed Lurking Fear. That film's outsized craptitude makes it both dismissible and good for some chuckles. There was rarely a sense that anyone took the material seriously. The Unnamable is just good enough to clarify how much it sucks. One final note. The title makes sense in the original story, when the creature is shifting in and out of our dimension. Here, why not call the movie Attack of the Albino Goat-Vixen?

RATING: C-

REVIEW: Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011)

2011-09-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

In the credits of Red State, Kevin Smith lists the charactersby grouping them into categories. Sex,Religion, and Politics. Almost all ofhis characters embody the worst aspects of their respective group. "Sex" refers to the trio of teenage boys who are sexuallyanxious, constantly swearing, so eager to prove themselves to each other thatthey agree to have a four-way with a woman online. Ew. Michael Angarano, Kyle Gallner, and Nicholas Braun play Travis, Jared, and Billy Ray as helpless horndogs, more pitiable than sleazy, difficult to care for...but after being drugged and bound and ball-gagged andstuck in a cage, sympathy’s easy to come by.

"Religion" belongs to the evangelical gun-nuts headed by Abin Cooper, and Michael Parks makes the role both lionesque and serpentine. He leads his pride with a triumphant mane of grey hair, and his words slip from hismouth like temptations in Eden. Hisspeeches might go on longer than necessary, but Parks is so good – the way he cheerily ushers the children out, the switches between doom-saying and warm smiles –that too much is not enough. MelissaLeo is the only actor in this group to escape his shadow, her fury an effective counterpoint to his confidence, but even she kneels before him and cooks him tea. It's easy to see how these people could be led to murder.

The government agents ("Politics") assigned to capture the Cooper family fall under the leadership of John Goodman’s Joseph Keenan, and what a relief it is to see himenter the movie. Like Marge Gundersonin Fargo, he’s a late-film-arrival who’s smarter and more thoughtful than anybody else inthe film. After he speaks with the nervous SheriffWynan (Stephen Root, far too blustery), Keenan assembles a support team ready to follow orders. Keenan's initial desire is to take out the entire Cooper family, but the growing complexity of the situation leaves him uncertain. In this fight, there's no right thing to do, just varying degrees of wrong.

Previous films from Smith emphasized dialogue over action,but the energy here is palpable, as the film morphs from a horror-thriller into a bleak gunfight, Peckinpah filtered through the gift and curse of modern actionediting. Call it intensified continuityor shakey-cam or chaos cinema, but here, it serves a purpose. Smith wants his violence to feel ugly and messy, and the newsreel immediacy evokes real-life atrocities like Jonestown and Waco. There are scenes of sudden, shocking violence in this film that keep the film genuinely on edge, and the editing matches the action throughout. The camera holds steady on Abin's face during his sermon, while a desperate flight through the Cooper house leaves viewers' eyes racing to keep up.

There are also images of humor and of sick irony, as when a terrified Billy Ray crosses himself before leveling his gun at a door. There is even a moment that recalls films like The Rapture and Frailty, where viewers have towonder how God and our world can possibly be reconciled. But a deus ex machina would miss the point, because Red State wants to challenge the idea of absolute higher power. Across all three spheres - sex, religion, politics - characters abandon who they are for the certainty of some higher power. Teen boys follow their hormones. Believers follow their God. Soldiers follow their generals. These are the rules. These are the groups. Blue states and red states. Welcome to America.

RATING: B

Note: The film's inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church, famous for their anti-homosexual crusade that somehow makes room for picketing Hollywood stars and deceased veterans. Geoffrey O'Connor and Louis Theroux of the BBC made a compelling documentary about them called The Most Hated Family in America.

FEATURE: H. P. Lovecraft Presents "Ghostbusters"

2011-08-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

Parapsychology, the study of psychic abilities, began in the late 1800's. It was an effort by advocates of psychic events to legitimize their findings by placing such phenomena inside the scope of scientific inquiry. The field grew in stature well into the early 1900's, and Stanford opened a branch of study on the subject in 1911. Notable scientists like J. B. Rhine and Karl Zener tried to validate such phenomena with repeated tests, rather than with anecdotal case studies. If the name "Zener" rings a bell, it's probably because of his now-famous Zener cards, and if you're wondering why they sound so familiar, it's because Pete Venkman used them to seduce a co-ed.

The movie Ghostbusters arrived just in time for the last gasps of legitimate parapsychology, which is funny, because the first burst of legitimate study coincides with the late cycle of H. P. Lovecraft stories. Lovecraft himself likely enjoyed the subject, since his stories were so often about placing supernatural creatures and ideas into an explicable context. Mythical gods were interstellar aliens. Demons were inter-species half breeds. Ghostly cities were simply spilling in from other dimensions. Lovecraft, like Rhine and Zener, didn't need to believe in mystical forces - reality was bizarre enough.

So, you see, there's a thread connecting Lovecraft to the Ghostbusters already, and that's before we examine the film more closely. Doing so, however, reveals a worldview shockingly in line with the fiction of Lovecraft. From the overall scope of the narrative to the smaller details, Ghostbusters holds an additional layer for genre fans as an affectionate pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft's work. So the next time Stuart Gordon is held up as the paragon of adapting Lovecraft, you can show off by citing the following*.

Gods

H. P. Lovecraft is most famous for the propagation of a cosmology called the "Cthulhu Mythos." In works like "The Call of Cthulhu," "Dagon," "The Dunwich Horror," and "At the Mountains of Madness," Lovecraft created a rogue's gallery of alien deities. The most famous is the eponymous Cthulhu, but others include the globular Yog-Sothoth and the blind idiot-god Azathoth. In Ghostbusters, the chief thread is the ancient god Gozer, who was worshipped by Sumerians, Mesopotamians, and...what's that word...Hittites. This god, like Lovecraft's, is corporeal enough that Ray can ask Gozer to return to her home or to the nearest "convenient parallel dimension."

Shapeshifters

Gozer is described variously as the Traveler, the Destructor, and (redundantly) the Gozerian, and its true form is unknown. The being can manifest as a slender female, but that's just a placeholder, and Gozer announces late in the film that the ghostbusters must "choose - choose the form of the Destructor!" They choose a marshmallow man. Lovecraft created a near-identical god: Nyarlathotep (sound it out). Nyarlathotep jumped from form to form, but it presented itself frequently as a tall and slender gentleman (hrmmmm). Unless it wanted to be a giant mutant bat or a mass of slithering tentacles. Also called the Crawling Chaos and the Beast of a Hundred Names, he walked among humankind and influenced people to worship the unspeakable.

Cults

Lovecraft's Elder Gods frequently required the worship and aid of human cults, if they hoped to regain access to Earth, a power they lost centuries ago. From "The Call of Cthulhu":

Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate them.

Writers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd produced a backstory for their interdimensional threat by explaining that Dana Barrett's apartment building was designed by a mad architect who got deep into "Gozer worshipping." He gathered adherents for black masses, and, at the top of the building,

"They conducted...bizarre rituals, intended to bring about the end of the world, and now it looks like it may actually happen!"

Interestingly, the secret society of Ghostbusters formed in 1920, the same year Lovecraft wrote the short story, "Nyarlathotep." Cue piano keys.

Architecture

Speaking of Dana's apartment, one of Lovecraft's most intriguing details, across his bibliography, is the attention to architecture. He loved describing incongruent angles and cyclopean buildings and nightmare vistas of gargantuan cities. As a man who saw himself first and foremost as a New Englander, Lovecraft would have adored the attention paid to New York's Gothic architecture. Not just the apartment building itself, with the eldritch shrine adorning the top, but the continual attention paid to the chiseled statues that ornament the city. The Grecian that appears beneath the main title and the lions at the public library are the chief examples. Their presence visually prepares viewers for the terror dog statues (which might otherwise seem ridiculous), but they also add some flavor to the setting.

Tools

As mentioned earlier, both Lovecraft and the writers of Ghostbusters don't have any genuine supernatural occurrences, because they place their "supernatural" creatures and situations in a scientifically explicable cosmology. Ghosts are electromagnetic and ectoplasmic beings, quantifiable and destructible**. So the Ghostbusters can craft technology to combat their enemies. Proton packs and PKE meters and containment units. In "From Beyond," Lovecraft's characters peered into the unknown thanks to an advanced spectrometer called the Resonator, and, in "Dreams in the Witch-House," Walter Gilman uses non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics to explain the witch's "paranormal" abilities.

Books

H. P. Lovecraft created an arsenal of fictional "research" to lend credence to his invented gods. The most famous is undoubtedly the Necronomicon, but he also created the Pnakotic Manuscripts and borrowed Robert E. Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I hope I spelled that correctly. These books functioned as all fictional books do: they provide handy exposition when the author can't find a better way to explain what the hell's going on. When they interview Dana Barrett for the first time, the 'busters make mention of the Spates Catalog and Tobin's Spirit Guide as valuable sources of information. Later in the film, Peter is able to give Dana the lowdown on Gozer, and Egon lectures about the mad architect Ivo Shandor. This connection becomes more present in the sequel, when Ray opens up a bookstore dedicated to occult tomes.

Along with these overarching similarities, there are smaller connections. Lovecraft's Gods, due to their limitless size, viewed men largely with indifference, and Gozer holds no interest in the 'busters as threats, because they aren't gods. Additionally, Lovecraft's cosmology held little interest in religion, and, while Zeddemore "loves Jesus's style," he and the 'busters speak of "biblical" disaster only in relative terms. Outside of Winston, religious figures are painted as ineffectual. A Catholic bishop is nervous of taking a public stance on the ghostly tumult, and when Hasidic Jews chant outside Dana's apartment, their prayers get lost in the din of the surrounding crowd. Even the Marshmallow Man makes clear the "smallness" of religion when he literally steps on a church.

Finally, if you thought Lovecraft had a way with verbose, doom-laden paragraphs full of dense prose and archaic language, listen to Rick Moranis:

Gozer the Traveler! He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms! During the rectification of the Vuldrianaii, the Traveler came as a large, unmoving Torb, then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Sloar! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was like to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you!

It's just like Lovecraft. Only funnier.

* This is a great way to break the ice at parties.
** This ironically represents the largest difference between the two fictions. Ghostbusters is optimistic about defeating dread abominations from beyond. Lovecraft was more of a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

FEATURE: The Other Ten Best Horror Films of the 2000's

2011-08-24T14:28:00.000-07:00

Since I posted my top ten, the originator of that idea (Marvin of Montana Mancave Massacre) re-posted my top ten with some very kind words. In that spirit, I suggest that anybody who passes by this post check out his blog, which has some considered, intelligent articles on Martyrs and the Evil Dead remake.

Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to look at ten more indispensable horror movies of the past decade. Although I'd place these below the previous top ten, the difference in quality is so minimal that this is damn near another top ten in its own right. The decade was just that good.

10. Cthulhu

Daniel Gildark, 2007

Cthulhu liberally re-works "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as a slow-burn thriller centering on gay* professor Russ (Jason Cottle), whose return home involves confronting his cult-leader father and coming to terms with his birthright. Director Dan Gildark wisely jettisons Lovecraft's penchant for overwrought exposition, placing his attention on the conflicting desires of Russ, who longs for old flame (and former friend) Mike, while his family pulls him relentlessly toward their own interests, which may or may not involve apocalyptic fish deities. The film wanders freely toward its grim ending, pausing to take in details like an arcane stone and a spiral of names written in a boat house. Those small details prove as evocative as the sumptuous cinematography, which captures intimate scenes and ominous vistas with equal grace.

09. The Eye

The Pang Brothers, 2002

The Eye feels like a classic Twilight Zone episode. Here, Mun (the lovely Angelica Lee), a classical violinist, gets an eye transplant, and so, of course, she can now see the dead. Sure, there's more to the story, including an interesting subplot devoted to the eyes' original owner, but what makes the Pang Brothers demonstrate a mastery of classic suspense craft. Mun looks in the distance. Sees a shadow. But wait. It's gone. She thinks it's gone. Is it?...and that's when the ghost screams and reaches for her. Sure, it's traditional, even cliche, but rarely is cliche done so well. In a way, the stripped-to-its-essence plot explains why Mun plays the violin. The Eye is another instrument that can swing instantly from a murmur to a shriek.

08. Hostel

Eli Roth, 2005

Pornography implies that the audience is titillated or excited by what's happening. Eli Roth's Hostel attacks that notion head-on. His film offers three fratty losers who long for titillation at every turn. They do drugs, have sex and wander around Europe looking for the next cheap thrill. Initially unsympathetic, the three men become sympathetic once captured by the agents of a company called Elite Hunting (shades of "The Most Dangerous Game"). Roth paints a discomfiting picture of Slovakia, always grey and crumbling and foggy, the sense of dislocation evoking movies like Don't Look Now and The Vanishing. By the time the violence begins, Roth's pushed the heroes from pathetic to likable, by both development and circumstance. There's no thrill to be had from their suffering. When you look closer, Hostel is the opposite of torture porn.

07. Ginger Snaps

John Fawcett, 2000

Brigitte and Ginger are sisters and best friends. Their survival of high school depends on each other. So when a werewolf bites Ginger, their bond undergoes some growing pains. That's the story behind Ginger Snaps, a werewolf movie with some meat on its bones. Sure, there's plenty of sly humor to be mined from the relationship between lycanthropy and menstruation, but Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins sell the drama of the situation. With their frumpy hair and frumpier coats, they hide from reality. Their hunched posture suggests the weight of a thousand schoolyard insults. As the film builds, Ginger's emerging sexuality and independence, bolstered by her animalism, draws similarities to Spacek in Carrie and Amplas in Martin. Those kids could share some stories about the horrors of growing up.

06. Uzumaki

Higuchinsky, 2000

I can't get this film out of my head. It's so goddamned weird. The film, based on a (much longer) manga comic by Junji Ito, condenses the story into a compact series of incidents where people are tortured by spirals. Any kind of spirals. Like, some people turn into snails and slide their way up the sides of buildings. Or, like, one woman discovers the coriolis of her inner ear is shaped like a spiral, so of course she has to dig it out. One guy just starts...twisting, and twisting, and twisting, until he looks like a human churro. These events may be related to a pond just outside of town, or maybe not. I don't remember. Honestly, I don't much care. This film functions best as a Lynchian series of interconnected vignettes, united by their baroque style and visual parallels.

05. The Devil's Rejects

Rob Zombie, 2005

Rob Zombie's particular blend of Southern Fried Cruelty focuses in The Devil's Rejects, a film that justifies its title more than once. Elevating the dysfunctional Firefly clan to the level of protagonists, Zombie re-positions himself as a master of gallows humor. What the Fireflies do is unforgivable, but how they do it is...well, it's kind of funny. Okay, not really. But maybe a little. The presence of William Forsythe as a vengeful cop gives the story a boost of moral dimension, at least until even he descends far below the normal limits of human behavior. But while he angsts and furies, the Fireflies truly enjoy their sins. These are their interests. This is their bliss.

04. Slither

James Gunn, 2006

Sometimes I don't want slow-burn ghost movies or timely diatribes on global warming. Sometimes I want to have some goddamn fun. Slither is fun. Boy howdy, is Slither fun. It's a grue-filled grab bag of body horror, zombie horror, and Universal horror (ah, the monster and his bride), as filtered through the head of a demented student of Troma. Nathan Filion and Elizabeth Banks are perfectly cast, bringing a barely-there grin of self-awareness to their hero roles, while Michael Rooker keeps a glint of human need buried under layers of gooey makeup effects. Emphasizing the punchy, good-hearted nature of B-movies like Tremors and Re-Animator, James Gunn's joy behind the camera is contagious, with punchlines volleyed as often as space-slugs. Nothing like some snappy banter to break the tension after impaling a mind-controlled zombie.

03. The Orphanage

Juan Antonio Bayona, 2008

Laura (Belen Rueda) returns to her childhood orphanage with her son Simon, who is HIV positive. She wants the orphanage to resume operation, but Simon's rebellious spirit interrupts her plans and catalyzes the dormant ghosts that haunt the hallways. Because the ghosts come from Laura's past, they're invasive on both a visceral and an emotional level, and they peek at her and disappear in that classic way that ghosts are wont to do. Their impact on Simon, however, is what takes the story from efficient thrills into genuine tragedy. Bayona worked with Guillermo Del Toro in securing the funding for the picture, and like Del Toro's films, The Orphanage feels like a renewal even as it plumbs the depths of its genre.

02. The House of the Devil

Ti West, 2009

The House of the Devil is an exercise in genre purity. It lovingly assembles tropes of the genre. The virginal, quiet heroine. The ominous old man in the suit. The ruinous Gothic manse. The nearby cemetery. Previous to this film, Ti West made the diverting The Roost, but that film felt more ragged, less disciplined. This film manages to evoke words like "elegant" and "eldritch" as it weaves the simple tale of a babysitter house-sitting for an elderly couple. Why her? Why tonight? Who cares? Bask in the imagery. Enjoy the suspense, which builds and tightens until it finally snaps. This is not complex. It has no grand message or vital themes. I don't care. This is horror filmmaking, perfectly accomplished.

01. 28 Days Later

Danny Boyle, 2003

Over seven years later, what's so striking about 28 Days Later is its intimacy. The film watches its small cast adapt, evolve, grow, shrink, and otherwise fight the apocalyptic nightmare gripping Britain (and possibly the world). More than the ravening zombies, more than the images of an empty city, what I remember is the people. Playing Jim, Cillian Murphy affects a perfect balance of nervousness and wide-eyed wonder. Naomie Harris plays Selena as a determined warrior who's cut herself off from her own heart. Brendan Gleeson's Frank is an enormous teddy bear of a man. The film is mostly regarded as the founder of the fast zombie** mini-movement, but Boyle and Garland's humanism is what's made 28 Days Later survive so many years later.

* The film ultimately found released through a distributor specializing in LGBT cinema, and the film does not shy away from the homosexuality. There's nothing explicit, but plenty is implied. Viewers upset by such subjects should act accordingly by growing up.

** Some argue that the "infected" are not zombies in any sense, but they fulfill such a similar function (the horde of murderous automatons who used to be our friends and neighbors), that the distinction is negligible at best.

ESSAY: Lurking Fear - The Story, the Movie, the Difference

2011-08-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

Note: spoilers for both the short story "The Lurking Fear" and the film of the same name.

Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" has some fun, gruesome details that should make for an energetic adaptation. The short story, written as a serial in 1922, focuses on an artist curious about a spate of deaths in the Catskill Mountains. His growing obsession culminates with his horrible discovery that the beast responsible for the deaths is only one of many hundreds, and all of the monsters are part of a centuries-old incestuous family named the Martenses. In terms of genetic deterioration, the creatures are somewhere between the villains of "Home" from The X-Files and the bat-like monstrosities from Neil Marshall's The Descent.

Each sub-chapter ends with a horrifying "revelation" that feels predictable, especially if the reader's already worked through similar regressed-human-creature tales like "The Outsider" and "The Horror at Red Hook," but the serialized structure keeps the short story punchy and entertaining. Lovecraft hounds will enjoy his digressions into florid considerations of cosmic possibility...

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.

...but even casual readers should get a few shivers from the atmosphere of dread and potential violence. Not bad for a hundred-year-old chiller.

Floodlit lighting does this creature no favors. Where the hell are the shadows?!

If IMDB is to be believed, producer Charles Band originally wanted Stuart Gordon to direct The Lurking Fear. Makes sense, considering that Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond were impressive adaptations that transmuted Lovecraft's short works into movies that were somehow both exploitative and dignified. Sadly, Gordon didn't get involved, but Band tried to follow his pattern with From Beyond. Namely, use the ending of the short story as the jumping-off point for the movie. Lovecraft's tale ends with a force of men blowing up the monsters' underground caves, and this film focuses on that idea. There's a lot of dynamite and a lot of explosions.

Also, the film's just called Lurking Fear. Charles Band and director C. Courtney Joyner must've talked to Sean Parker. "Drop the 'the.' Just Lurking Fear. It's cleaner."

Filmed in Romania on a shoe-string, with act breaks and video quality that suggest it was intended for television, Lurking Fear completely reworks the story as a contemporary story of criminals and innocents that must hole up in one location and band together to face a threat. If this sounds familiar, it's most likely because you've seen Assault on Precinct 13. Or Demon Knight. Or From Dusk Till Dawn. Or Ghosts of Mars. Or Splinter. Or a thousand other movies. The formula's easy, and, here, it's trite. The heroes lack common sense, the villains fail to threaten. The dialogue consists of individual sentences with little connection to the action. At one point, villainous Miss Marlowe (Alison Mackie) kicks hero John (Blake Adams) square in the face and purrs, "Ooh, we really are good together." Come again?

Blake Adams is Casper Van Dien as Josh Holloway.

Lurking Fear wants to be a modern action-horror picture, similar, but the film carries too many details from the story, and those details don't work. The context of the film, both its situation and its time period, conflicts with the traits of the story. For example:

Why don't these people talk to police? In the story, police investigated but couldn't turn up any clues, and the isolated terrain made such inquiries difficult. Here, we never learn that. People seems to get to Leffert's Corners off a highway or something.

Why don't the heroes dynamite the creatures' lairs during the day? In the story, nobody knows that the creatures have lairs, which explains why they can't take the fight to the creatures. Here, the heroes just wait around, I guess because they haven't reached feature length yet.

If the creatures are this intelligent, and this bountiful, why don't they have a better fighting strategy? In the short story, they're gibbering, chaotic beasts, cannibalizing each other whenever possible. Here, they're a functional family unit lucid enough to capture and taunt, but they don't have any plan beyond thrusting their arms through boards and windows.

"Hey, bad guy, looks like this cocktail is on you."

"Oh my God, what an enormous explosion!"

"Man, you guys see that huge explosion? No way that explosion didn't happen."

Some references from the story survive. The town of Leffert's Corners is the same as the story. The Martense family is still named as such. A couple of set decorations make mention of Arkham and Miskatonic, which is cute, I suppose. It's nice to see genre actors like Jeffrey Combs and Ashley Laurence, especially with Laurence wearing an Ellen Ripley swagger (and a low-cut shirt), and their relationship is believable, with his schoolyard crush and her purposeful distance, but Blake Adams pratfalls his way through the middle of the film, and his convenient loss-of-shirt during the climax is groan-inducing. The revelation about his character at the end is anything but, since his connection to the monsters is right there in his name.

Oh yeah. Remember what I said about explosions? There's about two minutes worth of explosions at the end of the movie. No doubt stuck there to guarantee investors that the crew got their money's worth. After ten seconds, explosions are boring. So, I, uh...

I improved it.

FEATURE: The Ten Best Horror Films of the 2000's

2011-08-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

So a fellow horror blogger named Marvin the Macabre (of the Montana Mancave Massacre, obviously), requested other horror bloggers to post their top tens of the past ten years, because he was tired of other horror fans complaining about current horror's "suckiness."

This is news to me. I think any horror fan alive today should be grateful for the breadth and depth of the horror genre. Thanks to online resources and a more global market, we live in an age heretofore unmatched in the genre's history. If anything, I'm bummed by the idea of a top ten, because I could easily do a top twenty or top fifty. The last decade was just that good.

There are far too many honorable mentions to list here, so I may supplement this later with another ten movies...but in the meantime, put on some Europe and enjoy the countdown:

10. Frailty
Bill Paxton, 2001

One of the key questions in religion is how an all-loving God can allow suffering. The easiest solution? God is not all-loving. Frailty follows that idea to its logical conclusion, as a father (Bill Paxton) recruits his sons to help him kill demons who look just like normal people. Fenton (Matt O'Leary) doesn't trust his father's new purpose, but Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) wants to believe. Dad's certitude frightens, and the sequences with him kidnapping and threatening the seemingly innocent carry terrific gravity. This is a horror film where the horror matters. The performances by O'Leary and Sumpter are crucial to the film's success, and they feel perfectly normal and natural. It's ultimately their skills that make the film such an impressive chiller; even when they're off-camera, their lost innocence haunts us and reminds us that, if God exists, he's got some explaining to do.

09. The Host

Bong Joon-Ho, 2007

The Host is a horror movie. Has to be. Its creature is a nasty bit of ocean-spawn that chases down passers-by, gobbles them up alive, and plops them into a creepy underground lair. The film's heroes provide too little of a threat to this beast, which is a marvel of design and effects integration. Wait. Scratch that. The Host is a family melodrama. Has to be. Its heroes consist of a kindly grandfather, a slacker father, his plucky daughter, and her uncle and aunt. As they frustrate each other and strike out on their own, the movie shows that they work better as a team. Sure, not a lot better, but, hey. It's a big monster. Hold on. Nevermind. The Host is a satire. Has to be. This thing is as obvious in its indictment of modern threats as Godzilla was to the Japanese. Here, Americans create the monster by dumping toxins into South Korean rivers, and the Host is named so for the deadly virus it harbors. Imperialist satire? Pandemic sub-plots? There's too much here. Here's what matters: The Host rocks.

08. May
Lucky McKee, 2002

May dreams of meeting a friend who might embrace her as she truly is. When that fails, she steals a scalpel from her job, which suggests that who she truly is renders friends an impossibility. That's the inherent tragedy of the grimly funny May, Lucky McKee's debut film. The film functions chiefly as a character study of a social misfit embodied perfectly by Angela Bettis. A thin bundle of nerves, her oddness attracts outsiders like goofy lesbian Polly (Anna Faris) and indie filmmaker Adam (Jeremy Sisto), although they don't grasp how desperately she needs them. Bettis's skill deserves comparison to Sissy Spacek in Carrie, and McKee similarly paints the character descent with distant affection, enough so that, while I don't forgive her sins, I do understand them, and I sympathize.

07. Rec
Balaguero y Plaza, 2007

It's scary as hell. What? That not enough for you? You need some reason beyond the fact that you're stuck in this environment with murderous, ravenous zombies reaching out for you, the viewer? Yes, they're reaching right for you, thanks to the point-of-view camerawork. That not doing it? You need more? Oh, I bet you don't appreciate seamless takes that follow the twists and turns, down staircases and up attics. Oh wait, you should, cause they're amazing. Yeah, amazing. I guess you have no interest in a fast-paced story that finds logical-but-unexpected ways to utilize its characters. Why would you? And given all that, I would assume that you're not ready for a jaw-dropping climax that surpasses everything previous. That takes the scares and shocks and kicks things up to eleven? Oh, sorry. I guess this is a little too real for you. Good news. Land Before Time is on Netflix Instant, you baby.

06. Session 9
Brad Anderson, 2001

When I was in high school, my friends and I brought a video camera to an abandoned asylum just outside of town. Old psychology manuals littered the floor, crumbling pipes and sinks decorated the water-stained walls. In one room, a dollhouse sat in disrepair. So I completely buy that there's an inherent weight to the Danvers Asylum. Even if it's only the minds of those who walk it. Of course, that's the whole point of a movie like Session 9 (and movies like The Haunting and The Shining). What's really happening here? Do we have overextended handymen lost in the labyrinthine halls of Danvers, or are they simply lost within their own minds? The real-world location of the film, like Saltair in Carnival of Souls, lends the picture added pressure, and the masterstroke with the old session tapes offers creepy narration over all those shots of barren corridors. The film's cheesy tagline was "fear is a place." Trust me, it's true.

05. Let the Right One In
Alfred Tomason, 2008

When vampire-child Eli (Lina Leandersson) says she's "been this age for a long time," there's no smile on her face. Just the grim emotion of a life forever on the cusp of adulthood. Sometimes I wonder if vampires age mentally, or if, despite the passing of centuries, a child like Eli still thinks like a twelve-year-old. Certainly she gives the appearance of youth, as when she befriends Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a boy who has problems with bullies at school. But while Oskar is meek and twitchy, Eli is slow and deliberate, mature in her behavior, and the story suggests that she may be more than befriending Oskar. Near Dark and Interview With the Vampire similarly toyed with people destined to be children forever, but neither fully devoted themselves to the methodology and sadness that such a circumstance would require. Let the Right One In focuses on that idea, takes it as far as possible, and produces one of the best vampire movies of all time.

04. The Mist

Frank Darabont, 2007

Although Stephen King's original novella was written decades before, Darabont's adaptation hums with the anxiety of post-9/11 America. Both timeless and intractable from its period, The Mist focuses on the ramifications of a community drowning in fear, searching desperately for someone to blame. Divisions spike between people of different races, classes, and ultimately creeds, as the mysterious vapor traps residents of a Maine town inside a grocery market. Like Dante's Homecoming, The Mist is baldly political, with its heroes as leftist paragons of rationality, its chief villain a religious nut who gains traction with the Biblical implications of the disaster. "Implications" being the creative and grotesque monsters slouching behind the shadow of the mist. Darabont directs the suspense scenes with flair, and the creative monster design contributes to the feeling of an entire world intruding on our own. And the ending is one of the boldest in genre history.

03. The Descent

Neil Marshall, 2005

With The Descent, Neil Marshall mixes the fear of claustrophobia and the fear of being consumed. It's remarkably easy to do so. Caverns look uncannily like the insides of some enormous beast. Facing those fears are the two dominant players: Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Their peaceful world of extreme sports shatters with an event stunning in its random cruelty. After coping for a year, the two girls hope to recuperate through cave diving. The spelunking alone provokes enough suspense for two movies, especially in one terrifying sequence when Sarah's stuck in a small shaft while the rocks above weaken and crack. Similarly, when the monsters arrive, Marshall directs with flurries of energy, keeping the viewers unsure of what they can see, which ties into a shocking moment when one cave-diver gets disoriented and makes a crucial mistake. Dog Soldiers was energetic fun, but this film plumbs greater depths.

02. Shaun of the Dead

Edgar Wright, 2004

This is not a parody. This is one of the most accurate pictures of zombiedom ever. Because slow zombies are not terrifying anymore. If you'll notice, the past ten years saw running zombies, singing zombies, armed zombies, Nazi zombies, talking zombies...basically, anything that would improve upon the simplicity of Romero's original vision back in 1968. Shaun, however, embraces Romero's vision, but has the good sense to place it in a fresh context. The zombies are still blameless, the people done in by their emotional baggage. But now the zombies face desensitized losers, and the heroes of the film take the opportunity to get rid of some old records by throwing them like ninja stars. So much of the film depends on the precision of storytelling - every detail is a Chekhov's Gun - and the rest comes from the capable cast of Brits. They make the same damn mistakes from every other limp zombie movie, but they earn so much affection that they actually resurrect the drama.

01. Pulse
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001

In Pulse, nothing is conquerable, because the antagonist is death. Not the practical joker of Final Destination or the hooded persona of The Seventh Seal, but the actual decay of life. All horror films are about death, of course, but so few have acutely keyed into the specter of oblivion. I can think of only a few. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Lewton's The Seventh Victim. Definitely Pulse. Kurosawa offers up a scenario that terrifies with its totality. All of these characters are doomed, and, as viewers watching and experiencing their emotions, we too are doomed. The premise of the film hinges on how the Internet has somehow cued into the same wavelengths that form the afterlife, which is now spilling over into our world, but Kurosawa has no interest in the logic of his story. He's fascinated by the emotions it inspires, the images it evokes, the colors and the shots and the dread. One of the defining images of horror from the past decade is a ghost slinking down a hallway with liquid slowness. Why hurry? It has all the time in the world. We don't.

REVIEW: Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson, 2010)

2011-08-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

A story still stuck on its first draft, Vanishing on 7th Street is an intriguing concept that never fully develops into a great film. Director Brad Anderson is responsible for impressive slow-burn horror-thrillers like Session 9 and The Machinist, but those films centered on fascinating characters. Vanishing instead forms around its premise, leaving the core of the film curiously insubstantial. Such as it is, the story deals with the few survivors of a world-wide event that disappears the majority of the population instantly, leaving only their clothes. Among the few survivors are Luke (Hayden Christensen), Rosemary (Thandie Newton), Paul (John Leguizamo), and James (Jacob Latimore). In their new apocalyptic surroundings, they must avoid the threat of ghostly shadows that can kill them with one touch.

Although the film wants to evoke Kiyoshi Kurosawa's neo-classic Pulse, the characters' constant search for light and avoidance of shadow more closely resembles the 2003 misfire Darkness Falls, which featured endless scenes of people screaming at each other to "Stay in the light!" That film got old fast, and despite Anderson's efforts, Vanishing similarly turns repetitive. The opening of the film opens with a tantalizing look at a completely empty city, but the budget keeps the characters stuck in exactly one location, a bar, and most scenes feature someone scrambling for a flashlight or battery while fluorescents flicker ominously. Beyond the light, the spirits in the dark slink toward the heroes, moving with that languid pace that seems to be the speed of all horror movie monsters. Slow and implacable.

Why is all this happening? No one knows, but they know they need to escape somehow. In one effective set-piece, Paul and James separate, and Paul finds his way down to the sewers below the bar. Calling this route unwise would be underselling the idiocy, but Paul's likable enough to keep the circumstance frightening instead of infuriating. However, that's more a testament to John Leguizamo's natural charisma. His character, like the rest of the film's cast, lacks any sense of depth, existing as adjectives instead of people. Paul is kind. Luke is bitter. Rosemary is maternal. The film offers little of who they were before the plague, and their actions lack for anything beyond the most basic of character arcs.

This places too much of a burden on the style and concept, hobbling the film's momentum. Sure, the style works, with Anderson now and always a natural director of horror. His use of deep blacks and crisp, elegant camerawork give him an edge over most horror directors. Additionally, the bits of information offered after the initial catastrophe points to a world in which the days keep growing shorter, and more people disappear every day, and the threat of death becomes more and more inescapable. These details grant Vanishing an allegorical edge, in which the fantasy world becomes a microcosm of...hell, everything, in a way. Life, death, old age and new generations.

Were the film shorter, or even an hour-long TV feature, it may have been able to coast on those qualities. There's a Twilight Zone feel to its small cast and high concept, reminiscent of less moralistic, more open-ended episodes like "The Odyssey of Flight 33." I will admit, I enjoy the film referencing the mystery of Roanoke Island. For those unfamiliar, the first colony on the American island of Roanoke inexplicably vanished in 1587. The only clue to their disappearance was a single world carved on a tree: Croatoan. The word most likely meant that the settlers boated to nearby Hatteras Island, which the settlers called Croatoan Island, but ignore that. Let the word linger. Say it aloud, the way that Hindus say "Om" before their prayers. Croatoan. Croatoan. Don't think about what it means. Think about all that it could mean.

RATING: C+

FEATURE: Games That Scared My Wii Off - Part IV: "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories"

2011-07-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

[The fourth part of a series devoted to horror games on the Wii and the films that inspire them]

Report

Developers: Climax Studios, Konami

Price: $20

Rating: M

Release: December 8th, 2009

Sales: 403,000

Recap
A long time ago, or maybe only a few days ago, Harry Mason and his daughter Cheryl were close as a father and child could be. But after a bizarre car accident leaves Harry in a small town called Silent Hill, he must brave the elements to find his daughter.

Review

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories isn't just the best horror game for the Nintendo Wii, it's one of the best games in any genre for the little white box. Efficient, lovely, creative, clever, and plenty of other adjectives, Shattered Memories engages on every level. The moment I picked up the controller, I was involved. You point your flashlight with the Wiimote. You listen to eerie phone calls by bring the Wiimote up to your ear. You grab and clasp in-game items by pinching the A and B buttons together and letting go. The purpose here is not to create fast-paced action. The gamer's supposed to experience the world of Silent Hill, in the first person. To examine and study and feel enveloped by the oppressive atmosphere. Even something as small as phone numbers on advertisements affects gameplay - you can call those numbers and get voicemail messages. Or maybe something more.

The phone doubles as a camera, map, game menu, and phone.

Those small details adjust depending on how you build your "psychological profile" throughout the game. At key moments, the game will abruptly return to a therapist's office, where psychological tests determine the gamer's hangups, be they pathetic or passive or kinky. These hangups manifest in the game, through character outfits and environmental ornamentation. None of these affect the ultimate destination, but they color the story and make it personal. As if the story weren't emotional enough. The focus on the needs of fathers and daughters develops in unexpected ways, not least of which in how you interact with the many supporting female characters in the game. I won't risk saying more, except that I have to note my absolute joy during the final thirty minutes of the game, which pushed the boundaries of the story far past where I thought it would go.*

Using the Wii-mote to shove off enemies is logical and satisfying.

The mechanics of the game, while re-vitalized by the new studio and interface, keep some ideas from the Silent Hill series intact, and the most traditional element is the idea of a shadow world full of malformed creatures. However, Shattered Memories throws a wrench in the gears (and the gears onto the floor) by removing weapons. Forget about fighting - the only salvation lies in escape. There's some relief in that the "normal" world doesn't offer monsters, but the possibility of the invasive nightmare world haunts every open door. When blue ice crackles across the city, the gamer must race against time and God, scaring the beasts off with flares, running toward some destination - any destination. By removing weapons, the game feels less manageable, more hopeless. I'm okay with that.

RATING: A

Cut-scenes adjust to your psychological profile, be it sexual, familial, or even passive.

Resemblance

50% The Shining - Kubrick's wintry nightmare pushed itself into the valley between the fantastic and uncanny, with a father losing himself to a diseased environment. Shattered Memories, like the other games in the series, owes a debt to the way Kubrick stood on the edge of the supernatural.

35% Jacob's Ladder - Again, an inspiration since the series began, Shattered Memories retains the body-horror imagery that Adrian Lyne brought to his tale of delirious madness, as well as the inability to ever decipher what is truly real.

15% The Descent - With the aggrieved parent seeking out the child in an uninhabitable, nightmarish environment that just might host some pale, hungry inhabitants.

Earlier Entries

Cursed Mountain

Resident Evil 4

Dead Space: Extraction

*If you don't care to be SPOILED...

...the final half hour consists of the main character literally racing through a dream-world. Through an endless maze of hallways, across enormous skyscrapers inspired by Giger, and even via a literal swim through the waters of the subconscious mind, with scenes from the characters' past buried in the cold depths. Haunting. Beautiful. Perfect.

REVIEW: Invaders From Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953)

2011-07-24T19:37:00.000-07:00

The wide-eyed child is David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt). He spends his nights looking through the telescope in his room with his kindly father (Leif Erickson), entranced by the possibilities of outer space. After David witnesses a flying saucer's descent to Earth, his parents suddenly act abnormally, to the point that his father exhibits emotion only when he hits David. Of course, that's not his dad anymore - it's a mind-controlling alien working his dad's body like an instrument. David spends the rest of the film learning about and fighting the encroaching aliens, who plan to turn everybody into mindless drones. A nine-year-old saving the world from flying saucers? This literally sounds like the dream of every child of the fifties.

This dreamlike attitude bleeds into much of Invaders From Mars. The hillock behind David's house, constantly seen throughout the film as a pathway to alien control, purposefully looks like a painted landscape. With its soot-black trees and twisting road, the scene looks one step removed from the world of Dr. Caligari.

The police station is notable for its lack of ornamentation and high walls. Later in the film, battle scenes that take place underground feature footage that's re-used with such frequency that the choice stops feeling cheap and begins to feel like a deliberate aesthetic choice. This sense of style keeps the film intriguing and memorable, and the surrogate family David assembles during the movie feels genuine, but other decisions deflate the urgency of the narrative.

In one of the most misguided scenes ever produced for a sci-fi film, David takes a ten-minute break from the action while astronomer Stuart Keltson (Arthur Franz) lectures David and viewers on the growing phenomenon of flying saucers. The scene smashes historical UFO sightings, reckless anti-scientific speculation, and pure fabrication into an explosive collision of nonsense. The film never recovers, and the unsettling paranoia of the first act gives way to gee-golly adventure with unconvincing aliens more suited to a Buck Rogers serial. The reliance on military stock footage further hurts the pull of the story. An obvious cost-saving measure, the images of random soldiers and explosions take up too much time and bring up needless associations with Z-budget "filmmakers" like Bert I. Gordon and Ed Wood.

One could argue that Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in 1956, borrows its paranoia from Invaders From Mars, with its portrayal of a small town exhibiting distant behavior. Of course, Invaders From Mars came out the same year as It Came From Outer Space, which also featured townspeople under the control of an alien intelligence. That film was based on a Ray Bradbury treatment from 1952, which puts it ahead of Invaders From Mars and The Body Snatchers. Then again, The Body Snatchers ripped off Robert Heinlein's 1951 story The Puppet Masters, which features slugs that attach at the base of the neck. Stokely reminds Casey of this in The Faculty, which isn't a great film, but is more clever than you might remember. At the least, it has the good sense to open to the guitar plucking of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall," and, if you think about it, that phrase sums up the theme of this sub-sub-genre just about perfectly.

RATING: C+

FEATURE: Breaking a Scene...from "Storm of the Century"

2011-07-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

Spoilers and so on. "Breaking a scene," in this case, refers to dismantling a scene to its shots and elements and examining why the scene works or doesn't work in terms of those elements.

Stephen King's Storm of the Century aired on ABC in February of 1999, and the tele-film exemplifies King's familiar story template of building up a town person by person, introducing a sliver of discord, and watching the whole populace collapse like a house of cards. Here, that sliver of discord manifests as mysterious wanderer Andre Linoge, cousin to Randall Flagg and Leland Gaunt, possible god-son of Bradbury's Mr. Dark. Colm Feore plays the role with puckish satisfaction, somehow chewing the scenery while sitting still and staring for most of the tele-film. In this scene, Linoge puppets two townspeople into murder...

Cat Withers (Julianne Nicholson) trudges out after her boyfriend, Billy Soames (Jeremy Jordan). Earlier, Linoge revealed publicly that Cat aborted Billy's baby without him knowing, and she now tries to reconcile with him. "Wide" shots in television have only recently become useful, with the proliferation of larger televisions and wider screens, so tracking shots like this come few and far between. Ideally, Storm of the Century should delight in minimizing the people and emphasizing the snow-covered surroundings of Little Tall Island, but viewers rarely get a sense of scope outside of establishing shots.

Billy keeps his back to Cat for most of the scene, an obvious visual metaphor that he's turned his back on her. Although Cat reveals that she knew Billy was unfaithful to her, Billy carries his self-righteousness throughout the scene, and his contempt burns like a lit fuse.

First off, wow, Julianne Nicholson's a cutie-pie. She was around twenty-eight when this filmed, but she convincingly plays younger, and she's got those big green eyes and that light smattering of freckles...

I was speaking earlier about how television doesn't play well with wide-shots. Another thing that television doesn't handle well is conversations. Generally, television must be shot rapidly, due to lower budgets and therefore shorter schedules, and so conversations are almost always shot as unimaginatively as possible: medium shots that establish characters' locations, then close-ups that emphasize actors' faces.

Through Jordan's acting, viewers learn that Billy's a simple kid. "It's our baby and now it's dead, I guess." Baxley's use of shadow places Billy halfway in the dark, which furthers the idea that he's thinking unpleasant thoughts about Cat (notice how her face is full of light in her close-up above). The first part of this sequence occurs free of music - the only sounds are the wind in the trees and the creaking of the shed. That all changes, when...

Linoge twirls his finger inside his cell, far from the quarreling lovers. Linoge already murdered others, both directly and through psychic manipulation, so the goal of the scene becomes clear. The pattern will repeat, and someone will die. Confirming this, the camera tilts from his hand to his face...

Which is covered half in shadow, visually mirroring the shadow on Billy's face. A quiet piano ostinato and soft strings accompany Linoge's machinations. No crazy magical sound effects or bizarre instrumentation, not even when Billy looks at one of the food cans and sees something jarring.

In case you can't read it, the legend at the bottom says "Made With a Blend of Rotten New England Apples." Nice touch. If you haven't noticed, the look of the film skews monochromatic, with blues and greys and blacks dominating the images. This, like other elements, feels obvious, but compared against the comic-book brightness of Garris's The Stand*, the difference is striking. This is a bleak, pessimistic film, and its style matters.

While the music builds, hero Mike Anderson (Tim Daly) recognizes, for the first time, that Linoge is just as dangerous inside his cell as outside his cell, a notion that he could only entertain beforehand. That idea of a no-win scenario powers the remainder of the story and leads to a conclusion that should be much more famous than it is.

One of the big problems with previous King mini-series, like Mick Garris's The Shining and Tom Holland's The Langoliers, is the over-reliance on special effects. Yes, King's novels featured hedge animals and jaw-spheres of death (yep), but their on-screen counterparts look tinny and fake. Although Storm of the Century falls into this trap a few times, Baxley and King generate most of their suspense the old-fashioned way, with lo-fi traits like color, music, and cross-cutting. As we watch Linoge "walk" his hand along his arm...

Billy walks toward Cat with a heavy can of apples...

Linoge raises his arms...

Billy raises his arms...

...the can right above Cat's head.

Although I've talked about cross-cutting and color and composition, the most important element here is the context. Cat and Billy have reached an impasse that feels genuine and sad. They have both betrayed each other, and they have to live with that, because their town of Little Tall is so clearly a trap from which neither can escape. The technique is important here, but it has its limitations. What brings the suspense home is that these two people feel real. Their problems feel real. This extends to the entire film, which goes out of its way to develop tertiary characters and let us see their regret, fears, hopes and worries. That way, we sympathize, and then we connect, and when the horror finally arrives, we share in the fear.

*I don't mean this as an insult toward Garris's work on The Stand. This darker style would not have worked for Garris's tele-film, which existed in a sun-lit world and held a story closer to comic books, with its expressionistic dream sequences and good-evil story of binaries. Sadly, there's no Mother Abigail to bring hope to the citizens of Little Tall. All they have is each other.

For more small-town Stephen King, check out Under the Dome.

REVIEW: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Five (Joss Whedon, 2000-2001)

2011-07-06T23:51:00.000-07:00

What a confident, energetic, bold show Buffy the Vampire Slayer became. Its combination of metaphorical monsters and character arcs and season-long sagas leave me in awe. Individual episodes work wonderfully. Seasons thread together with stunning grace. Special "concept" shows work like pillars, holding up the more traditional stories around them, while, this season especially, Sarah Michelle Gellar displays genuine maturity and wisdom. Episodes like "Fool For Love" and "The Body" and "I Was Made to Love You" show off the creative team's mastery of wit and pathos. It's unfair anymore to simply call this superior genre fare. Buffy's a lot more than that.

The show's so damned good that the creators have no problem introducing the mystery of Buffy's sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), in the beginning of the season. Wait a second. Buffy's never had a sister up to now, and suddenly Buffy's acting like she and Dawn have been siblings forever. Is this one of those television cheats, like the disappearing sister from Boy Meets World or the inexplicable every-other-episode regular Tori from Saved By the Bell? If not, then just what the hell is going on? To understand fully (and to appreciate the density of this show), you had to pay attention during two key episodes from Season Four: "Superstar" and "Restless." In the former, the nerdy Jonathan built a wall of illusion around Sunnydale so everyone would think he was a superhero. The latter offered a subtler hint to Buffy (and viewers): "be back before dawn."

In a parallel season-long plot, the Scoobies must fend off loathsome mooks who work for Glory (Clare Kramer), a demonic woman with curly hair and killer legs. She wants a talisman called the Key so she can travel between dimensions, but, like crossing the streams, there may be some Armageddony side-effects. This may sound too familiar, given how frequently villains on Buffy need a magical thingy for some doom-laden plot (bonus points if there's a never-before-mentioned prophecy). What makes the arc work is the laser-focus of Glory: she dominates every scene with her desire for the Key. After the previous season's unformed Adam, who spent more time pontificating about his goals than pursuing them, this villain is welcome.

She also functions as a perverse mirror-image of Buffy. The show offered previous "mirrors" of who Buffy might want to be, first with Cordelia the beauty queen, then with Faith the renegade, but Glory lacks the human weakness of those two characters. They hid deeper emotions under their cultivated exteriors. Glory is Glory: a blonde-haired, divinely-powered asskicker. Which also describes Buffy, and there's an element of knowing power to Buffy this season, most memorably examined in "Checkpoint." In this episode, Buffy rejects the patriarchal Watcher Council by pointing out that all they can truly do is watch. As she puts it:

I've had a lot of people talking at me the last few days. Everyone just lining up to tell me how unimportant I am. And I've finally figured out why. Power. I have it. They don't.

However, there have always been two keys to Buffy's success. Her own strength, and the strength of those around her. In Season Three, it became clear that Buffy's friends kept her from leading the lonely life that made Faith so wary and frightened. At the end of Season Four, she literally merged with them...twice. Spiritually in "Primeval," and subconsciously in "Restless." The importance of her family and friends is paramount to Buffy, and the threat of death finally closes its jaws around someone close to her in "The Body." That story disruption powers the remainder of the season, right up to the heartbreaking finale "The Gift," when Buffy must thwart the promise of another close death. Of course, that's the kind of challenge she was born to face.

Recently, I heard someone say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't a horror show, but a show for people who like the idea of horror. This is false (the show is for people who like good story) and borderline irrelevant, but it picks up on something worth noting. Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't just a horror show. In fact, it's barely a horror show. A long time ago, Joss Whedon and his collaborators shifted from traditional horror fiction into something more complicated. I don't think that any great piece of fiction fits snugly into one genre, and Buffy, with its coming-of-age-horror-fantasy-action-melodrama inclinations, stopped being a "horror show" about the time Angel went bad back in Season Two. Sure, as a 28-year-old horror fan, I feel odd saying that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is great television. But it's true.

RATING: A

Note: This season, like Season Four, crossed over with Angel often. I may address this when I review Angel's second season. I may not. I'm less interested in comic book hyperlinking than in figuring out what makes these two shows distinct and valuable on their own.

Buffy, Season Four: B / Angel, Season One: B-

Buffy, Season Three: A

Buffy, Season Two: A-

Buffy, Season One: B

MINI-REVIEWS: 3 Online Horror Shorts!

2011-06-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I'm embarrassed for not mentioning this sooner, but Miss Kristin Tillotson of the Minnesota Star Tribune wrote a piece on April 26th that quoted my "Slender Man" analysis from last year, and you can read it HERE. My single "Slender Man" article accounts for nearly three-fourths of all the hits this blog receives, so I hope a little bit of that carries over to Miss Tillotson's article.

Recently, I've been linked to three interesting horror short films distributed online. Despite their large differences, all three caught my eye and kept me watching to the end. In descending order of preference:

"RIGAMORTIS: A ZOMBIE LOVE STORY" (Ted Campbell & David Dewes, 2011)

Honestly, a zombie musical action comedy romance was inevitable, and "Rigamortis: A Zombie Love Story" starts out predictably, as rock opera based on easy rhymes. A thin music mix (where's the bass?) and amateurish extras don't hep matters. However, the film builds as the story develops. The romance between the two zombie leads (Maxwell Glick and Lisa Musser) convinces, especially since they switch from traditional groans and roars into...well, what I guess zombies must hear when they groan and roar at each other. Additionally, Boston Stergis proves a charismatic and fun antagonist as legendary zombie-killer Brock; a song of his necro-cidal deeds evokes both Disney classic "Gaston" and, God help me, the infamous Chuck-Norris-facts meme, but Stergis sells the material with conviction. Despite its independent production, the film looks great, with ample shadow and effective zombie makeup, although gorehounds may be disappointed by the emphasis on tragic duets over organ splatter. Still, with the trio of lead actors and the technical skill on display, "Rigamortis" has plenty of life.

RATING: B

"H. R. GIGER'S ART IN MOTION" (NSFW!) (Petr Luksan, 2011)

All of us know H. R. Giger, right? Alien and Species creature design? "Technorganic" imagery? Made a microphone stand for rock band Korn? His iconic art gets a boost of energy from Petr Luksan, who separates Giger's legendary gallery of landscapes and beasts into planes of action and carefully animates them, making sure the emphasis is on giving them dimensional reality and a hint of life. There's no effort here to tell a story or place the elements outside their paintings. Luksan simply adds a layer of aesthetic plausibility to Giger's work, and the result is damned eerie. Given the half-hour length of the video, it may have been better to divide this experiment into parts, and Luksan subdivides his into chapter that focus on different subjects like "New York City" and "Victory." Better to dip in and out of this extended atmospheric than watch it beginning to end.

PS: As the acronym above points out, many images in this short are profoundly not safe for work; they may not be safe for anyone. That's the point. You're supposed to feel violated.

RATING: B

"AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS" (Michele Botticelli, 2011)

io9.com offered this short as a morsel to the starving fans left unfulfilled by Guillermo Del Toro's attempted Lovecraft smorgasbord, At the Mountains of Madness. While the end result feels underwhelming, there are some moments in this short that achieve the frisson Lovecraft attempted with his novella about an ancient Arctic city. Particularly, the glimpses of the nameless city, with all of its bizarre architecture, conjure up Lovecraftian descriptors like "eldritch" and "cyclopean." Few other adjectives would suffice. However, Botticelli combines 3-D computer animation with 2-D hand-drawn characters, and the 2-D characters, frankly, look like crap. In addition to their poorly-drawn quality, the shot framing goes to great pains to avoid fingers and feet, which feels less like a creative decision and more like a way to skimp on animation hours. Still, Lovecraft die-hards will find elements to admire. My favorite bit was the ending that deftly ties together Lovecraft's entire cosmology. Botticelli's previous short, "A Lovecraft Dream," is both prettier and more efficient.

RATING: C

FEATURE: Where Creepypasta Takes Us

2011-06-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

Are you ready?

Let's go.

Double-you tee eff.

Creepypasta. The term derives from "copypasta," which consists of messages or pictures reposted ad nauseum online. One of the best examples is the now-quaint "Dancing Baby," which proved so infectious a meme in the late nineties that it appeared on newsreels, then Ally McBeal, and finished up as a parody of a parody in the classic Millenium episode "Somehow Satan Got Behind Me," penned by the inimitable Darin Morgan, of whom I spoke briefly in my review of The X-Files, Season Three.

Okay. I think we've hit a dead end at The X-Files, so let's go back a bit.

By nature of what it's called, creepypasta is at least derivative, predicated as it is on the repetition of web-based sources of terror. However, many stories and images go even further in their debts. Countless horrific images listed on Creepypasta sites include the most stock icons imaginable. Decaying dolls. Demonic faces. Eerie little kids. Black bodies with white faces. Men who are Slender (God, be original!). Most creepyposters, it seems, lack in creativity. Hell, one gallery from the Creepypasta Wiki eventually gives up and lists images straight out of the infamous Medieval grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon. Not that the illustrations in grimoires are always imaginative.

"How many more monsters do I have to think up? Alright, fuck it, one's a bee."

I like this connection, though, because The Lesser Key of Solomon was produced in the thick of the Christian witch-hunts (watch Haxan). Such books meant to codify the expansive Church-sanctioned demons into a hierarchy, and, as a bonus, they inadvertently created many of the first widely-disseminated horror images, up to and including many of the demonic visages in the same Creepypasta gallery. Additionally, this is a good connection, because horror fiction loves it some grimoires. My favorite ones are Dyack's Tome of Eternal Darkness, Bloch's De Vermis Mysteriis, and, of course, Lovecraft's Necronomicon.

You knew that was coming, right? I bring up Lovecraft partially because of my endless interest in his status as a transitional force in horror. I also bring it up because the Necronomicon itself became a fascinating pre-Internet creepypasta. Lovecraft gave his fictional book the illusion of authenticity with a flash-fiction examination called "History of the Necronomicon" (1927), and his fellow weird tales authors frequently corresponded with each other and added details from each other's works in their own stories (were they alive today, they'd thrive in online forums). So Clark Ashton Smith's Book of Eibon appears in Lovecraft's work, and Robert E. Howard borrowed the Necronomicon, and, years later, Stephen King borrowed Bloch's De Vermis Mysteriis for "Jerusalem's Lot" and the Necronomicon for "I Know What You Need."

"A thief? Li'l old me? Aw shucks."

Digression: I have to point out that a follower of famed occultist Aleister Crowley named Kenneth Grant wrote, in The Magical Revival (1972), that he believed both Lovecraft and Crowley received their ideas from the same extra-dimensional psychic source (Lovecraft through dreams, Crowley through revelation). Why point this out? Because, in a further instance of reciprocity, Aleister Crowley supervised a 1904 edition of The Lesser Key of Solomon.

Crazy.

Okay, still with me? Let's click back to "History of the Necronomicon" and flash-fiction. The term "flash-fiction" was coined in the early nineties, around the same time internet memes were starting, but its form dates back to folklore and fables, which were tiny little moral and cautionary tales buried in memorable imagery (and there's plenty of horror to be found in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and "Hansel and Gretel"). Such tales were passed around orally, and while details would change from culture to culture (and over time), the underlying stories survived. However, creepypasta is more concerned with the visceral effect than with imparting any sort of wisdom.

You knew I was a horrifying fanged mutated death spider of death when you picked me up.

Along with creepypasta, urban legends function as a modern micro-fictional equivalent of fables, and, wouldn't you know it, one of the stories listed on Encyclopedia Dramatica's "Awesome Creepypasta" page (which is full of stories, not all of them awesome) is infamous urban legend "The Licked Hand." In that legend, someone hears a noise in the dark of night, finds comfort in her dog licking her hand, and wakes to find a message scrawled on her wall (or mirror), sometimes in blood. Either "Humans can lick too" or "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?" Creepy stuff? Yes. Creepypasta? Not exactly. Not just.

Again, derivative. We're back where we started. But now I have more context for creepypasta, and a better understanding of its origins, which go way past random assholes on the Internet re-posting the most weathered of horror concepts. Although there's a lot of that too. On reflection, I don't say much here about my actual opinion of creepypasta as a source of scares - I'm discussing etymology instead of substance. Deeper examination of the sub-genre will make for an interesting follow-up. In the meantime, below, I've listed a few of my favorite creepypasta stories.

Coffins used to be built with holes in them, attached to six feet of copper tubing and a bell. The tubing would allow air for victims buried under the mistaken impression they were dead. In a certain small town Harold, the local gravedigger, upon hearing a bell one night, went to go see if it was children pretending to be spirits. Sometimes it was also the wind. This time, it wasn't either. A voice from below begged and pleaded to be unburied.
"Are you Sarah O'Bannon?" Harold asked.
"Yes!" The muffled voice asserted.
"You were born on September 17, 1827?"
"Yes!"
"The gravestone here says you died on February 20, 1857."
"No, I'm alive, it was a mistake! Dig me up, set me free!"
"Sorry about this, ma'am," Harold said, stepping on the bell to silence it and plugging up the copper tube with dirt. "But this is August. Whatever you are down there, you sure as hell ain't alive no more, and you ain't comin' up."

"Daddy, I had a bad dream."
You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness - it's 3:23 AM. "Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?"
"No, Daddy."
The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room. "Why not, sweetie?"
"Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up."
For a moment, you feel paralyzed. You can't take your eyes off your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

A few years ago, a mother and father decided they needed a break, so they wanted to head out for a night on the town. They called their most trusted babysitter. When the babysitter arrived, the two children were already fast asleep in bed. So the babysitter just got to sit around and make sure everything was okay with the children. Later that night, the babysitter got bored and went to watch TV, but she couldn't watch it downstairs because they did not have cable downstairs (the parents didn't want children watching too much garbage). So, she called them and asked them if she could watch cable in the parent's room. Of course, the parents said it was OK, but the babysitter had one final request… she asked if she could cover up the angel statue outside the bedroom window with a blanket or cloth, at the very least close the blinds, because it made her nervous. The phone line was silent for a moment, and the father who was talking to the babysitter at the time said, "..Take the children and get out of the house…we will call the police. We do not have an angel statue." The police found all three of the house occupants dead within ten minutes of the call. No statue was found.

There is an abandoned mental hospital at the top of a hill in Worcester, Massachusetts. Once every five years, an old rusty box-spring appears within the courtyard of the hospital. If you can sneak inside and sleep through the night on the bed, in the morning a man with a shirt that reads "Observe and Absolve" will take out his wallet and give you a picture. This picture will show you how you will die. If the picture is of the man standing before you, running won't help.

...all of those terrifying stories our ancestors told around fires? All of the things they saw when they looked out into the blizzards of the ancient past? They aren’t gone. Where the lights don’t reach, where the shadows dominate, they still live. They crawl in their eternal crypts, dreaming horrible, dark dreams as the ages pass them by. Outside of the range of cell phones, away from all the commercial flight paths and shipping lanes, where no one can see, they build their kingdoms...dark even against the darkness, they wait....

REVIEW: The Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988)

2011-06-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

Sci-fi camp silliness gets less of an upgrade and more of a sidegrade in Chuck Russell's The Blob, which reworks the fifties drive-in "classic" for the eighties, keeping the basic premise while injecting post-Vietnam government paranoia, post-AIDS pathophobia, and post-Bottin creature effects. The stew of ideas and imagery proves less fruitful than expected, and the majority of The Blob plays too comfortably as a standard creature-feature. What's here is formula, well-wrought but absent of personality, about as thoughtful as its titular beast. The film isn't bad, but with this much potential, it really should be better.

I don't want to live in a world where people don't poke meteors with sticks.

The original film's template serves the remake well. Object falls from space. Homeless man unwisely pokes object from space, reveals space-goo. Space-goo inside object goes on human-absorption rampage. Plucky teens stop threat. Director Russell and co-writer Frank Darabont add a subplot about villainous hazmat-suited scientists who quarantine the small town, and I have to wonder, is a horror film ever going to make the observation that quarantining a small town to save the world might be the smart, reasonable thing to do? George Romero or Larry Cohen would attack that concept with zeal, blurring lines and challenging us with the full implications of the story's elements. Chuck Russell has no such ambitions.

"So it's agreed - we'll be both vaguely threatening and laughably ineffectual."

Instead, he focuses on cutout characters like juvenile delinquent Brian (Kevin Dillon) and smiley cheerleader Meg (Shawnee Smith), who discover that, like in the first film, the Blob can't stand the cold. You'd think that if all the animals we've documented have multiple vulnerabilities, so would the Blob, but cinema beasts always have exactly one vulnerability, so their weakness can be dramatically exposed and exploited in the final reel. It's just the way these things have to go. To say more about these two teenagers would assume that their lives in-film involve much more than reactive stares and screams and breathless explications of plot. So I won't say more.

Sewers this big in a small town? How unrealistic.

I will, however, commend special effects supervisor Tony Gardner (Return of the Living Dead, Nightbreed), who brings a terrific amount of squelchy, gruey disgusterrific scenes to life. Like Carpenter's version of the Thing, the Blob can mutate endlessly, slithering and flowering and crystallizing as it chases after anyone in its path. This beast is supposed to be an evocation of viruses and germs, and Gardner nails the macro-proto-plasmic look of the Blob, thanks to a savvy combination of rear-projection, stop-motion animation, and physical props and animatronics. The stand-out sequence of the film, with someone stuck in a Hitchcockian phone booth while the Blob convincingly oozes down the sides, genuinely frightens.

She's about to either call the police or meet Napoleon.

Other sequences excite, like the heroes' escape from an unusually large sewer system, and the finale where the townspeople perform their best impression of Rio Bravo. The Blob is an efficient film, to be sure, but, then again, it isn't much more. The film lacks the sideways zingers and stealthy cheer of Tremors and Slither. Apart from a few period details (Kevin Dillon's Samson-esque power mullet), the film lacks idiosyncrasy. It's an acceptable tread through familiar terrain. Then again, is that a bad thing? Can't this just be a slight-if-satisfying monster movie? Then again, why bother remaking a film if there's no passion? The Fly, The Thing, Cat People, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers all engaged the viewer on a number of levels. By comparison, The Blob feels distant.

Then again, what does it mean, exactly, when I say that I think a movie about a ravenous blob of protoplasm is emotionally and intellectually unfulfilling?

RATING: B-

REVIEW: Angel, Season One (David Greenwalt, 1999-2000)

2011-05-27T16:56:00.000-07:00

Stoic, clad in black, Angel (David Boreanaz) sinks into the deep shadows of Greenwalt’s Scorsese-inspired alleyways, the decrepit buildings and gutters belching up hellish plumes of smoke. With the brooding self-laceration of Bruce Wayne, Angel claims a desire to “help the helpless,” when he truly seeks rebirth through pain. The pain of his enemies, and of himself. When a hero’s true goal is redemption, are the people he helps anything more than hash marks? Names on a list? By the end of this season, Angel learns that he's a key figure in an apocalyptic prophecy, which tosses aside the show's presentation of a hero dedicated to others. Don't worry, Greenwalt promises us, this show is about Angel's importance, not his selflessness.

Angel stares down a lackey from villainous law firm Wolfram & Hart.

Rest assured that the cult spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer features plenty of the same comic book action of its parent. This ranges from the stock martial arts battles to invasive cross-overs. Familiar faces like Oz (Seth Green) and Spike (James Marsters) appear just long enough to threaten Angel's identity as a distinct show with its own purposes. Permanent imports like the ditzy Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and clumsy Wesley (Alexis Denisof) feel less offensive; the writers give these two the opportunity to develop into characters more appropriate to Angel's mission. They levy his self-flagellation with irreverence and nobility.

Doyle and Cordy grow closer; if you're a Whedon show, this is unacceptable.

Angel's mission, inevitably centered in Los Angeles, grows personal not just through apocalyptic prophecy, but through his recurring battle against the scheming Wolfram & Hart, a rogue's gallery of enemies masquerading as a law firm. Their schemes run deep, which suggests a group capable of machinations subtle and clever...and also buys the writers time to devise a mythos for their show. The final episodes reveal the broad strokes of this plan, but until then, Angel offers the same type of detective stories that made Buffy's first season tedious to a fault.

Even a reveal of the inept Wesley is bathed in shadow.

Angel mitigates this problem by building on its central idea of a demon as a protagonist. "The Ring" and "Hero" show a variety of demons with strikingly human personalities. "Rm w a Vu" features Cordelia befriending a ghost in a new apartment. Jane Espenson, who wrote that episode, contributed to Battlestar Galactica, which similarly built the wall of "othering" its enemies before breaking on through to the other side. The blurred line of human and demon implies the confusion of racial identity, although the late-season arrival of token black man Charles Gunn (J. August Richards) proves that some themes are better left suggested.

Persecuted demons weigh their options while under the command of selfish humans.

His introduction carries an "edgy" attitude to which the show wants desperately but cannot commit. The very idea of Angel as a character promises all manner of ambiguities, but, by the end of Season One, he's essentially crowned a champion. Still, the show feels heavy, with the demonic Angelus as the monkey on Angel's back, and with the bleaker setting of Los Angeles. Although sound-stages dominate most of the action, the references to and use of real-world locations add a genuine sense of place to the series. So even if Angel hasn't quite determined its identity - as a bleak detective show or an elaborate fantasy saga - it has a place to stay while it figures these things out.

RATING: B-

Buffy, Season Four: B

Buffy, Season Three: A

Buffy, Season Two: A-

Buffy, Season One: B

FEATURE: Games That Scared My Wii Off - Part III: "Cursed Mountain"

2011-05-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

[The third of a multi-part series devoted to horror games on the Wii and the films that inspire them.]

Report
Developers: Sproing, Deep Silver Vienna
Price: $10
Rating: M
Release: August 25, 2009
Sales: 141,000

Recap
Impetuous mountain climber Frank Simmons disappeared while searching for a Buddhist relic hidden on the sacred mountain Chomolonzo, leaving his equally-skilled brother Eric to scale the mountain in pursuit of Frank. What Eric doesn't realize is that the peak holds a Goddess whose mystical energies keep the souls of monks and climbers trapped in our plane. If he wants to find his brother, he'll have to both fight ghostly enemies and avoid the mountain's natural threats: avalanches, depleted oxygen, hypothermia...

The game makes the most of Wii's graphical abilities.

Review

Cursed Mountain plays in the tradition of survival horror while ignoring the more titillating side of the genre. Instead of big guns, you have a pickax equipped with mystical attachments. Instead of medical kits or mixed herbs, you meditate with incense sticks. Instead of bloody mutants, you battle grey spirits. The reverence for Buddhist mythology and folklore inspires, and the game offers plenty of accurate details (there's a real Chomolonzo mountain in Tibet). Yes, the overall blueprint is familiar, but the differences accumulate into a truly unique presentation. Much of Cursed Mountain is about its attitude toward horror. Words like classy, eerie, mature, and admirable come to mind.

However (God, I hate that word), Cursed Mountain flubs a lot of details, both small (hard-to-read on-screen text) and significant (problematic motion control*). The biggest flaw: I never sensed the danger of mountain climbing. The game includes pre-ordained slip-ups, but, excluding a few moments, there's no real feeling of precariousness. No feeling that I could slip on ice and fall to my death, or that my pickax could hit a rock incorrectly and fly out of my grip. There's a natural tension to this game's situation that never completely materializes. Given the mode the game works in (linear, cinematic gameplay), this too-safe feeling may be unavoidable, but it mutes my appreciation for Cursed Mountain. The game's identity is both its greatest virtue...and a bit of a gimmick.

B-

This controller prompt appeared in my nightmares.

Resemblance

45% Kwaidan - Given the heavy Buddhist angle, it's hard to not think of Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan. That film (one of the great horror anthologies) featured two stories that evoke this game. "The Woman in the Snow" carries the same combination of death-by-cold and death-by-languishing-spirit. "Hoichi the Earless" features an ascetic contending with ghosts in a Buddhist temple, and many levels in the game feature the same trappings and eerie approach.

35% Pulse - The ghost, dark grey, moving with the deliberate speed of inevitability, strongly echo Kiyoshi Kurosawa's use of ghosts in the masterful Pulse. Even switching into the Bardo state produces a ghostly-looking world that resembles the muted browns and greys of Kurosawa's film.

15% Touching the Void - Granted, this isn't a horror film, but it's still one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen. Two climbers fall under attack from the weather, and one has to make the agonizing choice of whether or not to cut the rope that's keeping his friend from falling into a crevasse.

5% Onibaba - Because there are demons in this game that look a lot like the demon mask from Onibaba. Which is a good movie. If you're not busy playing video games, you should check it out.

*Apparently I'm not the only one frustrated by the controls. If you buy the game (and for $10, it's worth the purchase), control the vertical motions during the "Compassion Ritual" by holding the Wii controller directly up and punching forward.

Earlier Entries:
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition - A
Dead Space: Extraction - B

REVIEW: Prophecy (John Frankenheimer, 1979)

2011-05-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

Prophecy initially proselytizes about urban squalor, Native American marginalization, and industrial impact on the environment, and then those threads take an extended breather while our heroes run away from a man in a rubber mutant bear outfit. The Native Americans in the film dub the monster Katahdin, and did you know that Katahdin also means "the great mountain"? I didn't, not until I wiki'd "Katahdin" in a desperate effort to inflate this review by taking as many tangents as possible. By the way, did you also know that the Native Americans in this film hail from the Penobscot tribe, which included shaman and Henry David Thoreau acquaintance Old John Neptune?

It's true.

Frankenheimer nobly injects artistic flourishes into a film about giant tadpoles.

Prophecy focuses initially on Maggie (Talia Shire), a concert cellist who can't focus on her music because she's got a baby on the way. Later, stuck in the forest with her distracted husband Robert (Robert Foxworth), she learns that all the mercury byproducts from the evil paper mill provoked mutations in the local wildlife and can - cello roll - even affect fetuses. She eventually comes to terms with this symbolically, by swaddling and hugging a mutant bear cub like a newborn. She's so determined that she doesn't let go the whole time, not even when the mutant bear cub bites into her neck. This will give her some idea of what to expect when her own child enters the terrible twos. Am I right, moms?

Oh my God, Talia Shire was in the movie Rad! Did you ever see Rad? I grew up watching that flick. It had Lori Loughlin of Full House fame, and she was lookin' fine back then. I wouldn't mind summiting her Katahdin, if you catch my drift.

Where was I? Oh. I mentioned the evil paper mill, right? Richard Dysart plays the floor manager of the company, and the face should look familiar. He played the doctor who got his arms bitten off by the stomach-mouth in The Thing, and in this film, Katahdin bites off his legs, which gives the two films a nice symmetry. Early in the film, Robert accuses Richard's character - given the manly name of Bethel Isley - of hiding the facts about using mercury, and Bethel responds by demanding that Robert can't accuse Bethel. If anything, Robert needs Bethel, because Bethel produces the very paper that Robert would use to file his pollution reports. Check and mate.

Katahdin does not need continuity!

He needs blooooood!

See, when this kind of thing is happening, the film offers a watered-down Larry Cohen vibe, with its fusion of preposterous monsters and social criticism. Larry Cohen, by this point, already directed the much-superior It's Alive, which starts with a real mutant baby (instead of ending with an implied one) and somehow remained earnest and realistic despite its absurd monster. Prophecy isn't so lucky, offering one-dimensional environmentalism before making its climax entirely about people running away from an enormous mutant bear that can breathe underwater (?) and bite off people's heads like they're gingerbread men. You should be happy to know that, despite the nasty decapitations, this film was rated PG upon release, which is fair, since kids have as much a right to laugh at this movie as adults do.

They might also experience some new sensations.

By the by, I just checked Lori Loughlin's IMDB, and she's in a movie called Medusa's Child, which is not about the monster Medusa and her noisome progeny, but is in fact about a pacemaker-triggered electromagnetic bomb stuffed on a plane that's headed directly into a hurricane. Her co-stars include President Bartlet, Mr. Big, and Johnny Drama. This film's absence from Netflix is a national tragedy.

But I digress. At the end of Prophecy, scientist Robert furiously jabs an arrow at the neck of Katahdin, who serves as either a symbol of industrial malfeasance or a metaphor for Foxworth's agent. Either way, I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't entertained by all this crap. To say if this film is "good" or "quality" is to miss the point. Prophecy is high-energy dreck that's by turns inspired, idiotic, idiotically inspired, and inspiringly idiotic. Nobody who sees this movie could conceivably want their hundred minutes back, because they'll now be able to talk about the absurdity of Prophecy. At the least, it's the most frightening mutant bear movie I've seen since Disney's The Country Bears.

RATING: B-

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Not to be confused with the previously reviewed The Prophecy. That film demands tea. This film demands cheap beer.

REVIEW: The Roost (Ti West, 2005)

2011-04-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

An auspicious debut from director Ti West, The Roost focuses on its suspense, with every other element in the film providing support. The nominal plot - a flock of bats holds a revivifying pathogen - offers barely enough action to justify the eighty minutes of film, but West shows a keen sense of restraint and mood, both key to elevating this film from dumb creature feature into legitimate entertainment. His shots linger, his characters search, and the emphasis lies on unseen threats hidden in dark corners. Also helpful: understated performances by the lead actors, who play to the reality of their situation. Clunky meta-moments involving a midnight movie host (Tom Noonan) do little except inflate the film to feature length, and some of the dialogue feels half-baked, but West's confident style outpaces his mistakes, rendering The Roost an admirable, chilling diversion.

RATING: B-

Read my review of West's second feature, The House of the Devil.

FURTHER ANALYSIS
While watching The Roost, many shots reminded me of Sam Raimi's similar campfire classic The Evil Dead. While some of these shots are likely incidental, and the two films differ in their overall approach (with West more reserved than the hyper-kinetic Raimi) I assembled some of the more noticeable repeat images, and you have to admit, some of these are eerily close.

The following images and text contain spoilers.

Both films feature an image of the Moon with an awkwardly matted-on effect. The Evil Dead with dark clouds of darkness, The Roost with the color of blood (because in horror movies, blood helpfully symbolizes blood).

Both films feature a point-of-no-return bridge that results in the heroes isolated in their rustic setting.

A stretch, sure, but since we're on the bus, we might as well stop at all the destinations. Heroes consider their options from above.

Open doors just beg for us to walk right through them, don't you think? Even when we have some notion of what terrors lie within, curiosity always outstrips fear. Granted, Ash has a lot more reason to come in (he's investigating the ominous wound on his girlfriend).

Both of these attacks occur halfway through the picture, when a formerly trusted compatriot goes zombie on the heroes and must be disposed of with the aid of farming implements (a pitchfork in The Roost, an axe in The Evil Dead).

Floor and cellar doors prove no match for the eager undead.

Dutch (re: tilted, canted) angles represent the idea that reality has been knocked out of balance.

A trope few can resist: push suspense from one direction (in both cases here, the foreground), then whack the audience from another angle. Three-quarters of the way through both films, a fate becomes clear with the re-emergence of a disappeared character. Although one may be a little hungrier than the other.

FEATURE: Games That Scared My Wii Off - Part II: "Resident Evil 4"

2011-04-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

[The second of a multi-part series devoted to horror games on the Wii and the films that inspire them.]

Report

Developers: Capcom
Price: ~$12 USA
Rating: M
Release: June 19, 2007
Sales: 191,000

Recap
In a universe of infinite possibility, hero Leon S. Kennedy once again fights a zombie onslaught in a sequestered town. This time, the town is in the Spanish countryside, and, this time, the zombies are farmers and church-goers under the influence of psychic mutagenic parasites called "Las Plagas," which is Spanish for "The Plagas."

Normally, shooting priests is wrong.

Review
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition takes all the elements that worked so well in the previous console releases, mashes them together, adds new controls that deepen the gameplay, and, oh, in case you weren't aware, the central game is still one of the greatest ever made. Whereas previous Resident Evil games succeeded despite their ungainly controls and static camera, Resident Evil 4 fixes both problems by sticking the camera behind the hero's shoulder. Beautiful graphics and a clever new inventory system (players must stack items like Tetris blocks into an attache case) bolster the dark adventure, which features the most impressive boss fights I've seen in a video game. If you're not crushing house-sized trolls with boulders, you're boating after lake monsters, knife-fighting mutant mercenaries, and fleeing a caged monster helpfully named "it."

The Wii release improves on gameplay by allowing the Wiimote to serve as a reticule, allowing the player to aim at specific body parts without altering character movement. Additionally, the context-sensitive actions ("Press A really quickly to not die!") feel more natural when mapped to the Wiimote. Swinging the controller to swing the knife saves on valuable brain-time, since you're replicating motion instead of interpreting through a button. You'll need that ease of control while wading through this game's enormous size and thousands of enemies. Indeed, there's a generosity on display in this game, as new areas always bring new monsters, new visions, new ways to play, and new ways to be freaked the hell out.

RATING: A

The threat of American imperialism is symbolized by Leon jump-kicking Spanish zombie farmers.

Resemblance

35%: Zombie - Latin-based zombie threats in a rustic setting full of imposing Christian architecture gives Resident Evil 4 a curious Fulci quality. The slow-quick variability of the game's "Ganados" further matches with Zombie, which features zombies that move very slowly unless the plot requires them to speed up, which they do. Often. Points to Resident Evil 4 for consistency.

25%: Night of the Living Dead - I include this mostly for the sequence where you're suddenly trapped in a house with a thousands ghouls outside, and you're forced to barricade all the doors and windows, lay ready with a shotgun. The "Rio Bravo" school of zombie films features hundreds of movies, sure, but we might as well honor the first.

20%: Night of the Creeps - Most zombies in the horror genre come from radiation or voodoo or viral infections, but Resident Evil 4 features parasitic/mutagenic organisms called "Las Plagas." Fred Dekker's 1986 horror-comedy Night of the Creeps comes closest, with its alien leeches that take residence in the human body and reduce people to putrefying zombies.

10% Lord of the Rings - Mostly because the "El Gigante" creature is so clearly aped from the Cave Troll of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth. Supposedly, all the monsters in-game are mutations of real-world creatures, but if this hunchbacked monstrosity grew out of a normal person, then I am Carl Weathers.

10% Resident Evil - In a perverse bit of reciprocity, Resident Evil 4 steals the laser hallway from Paul W. S. Anderson's first film adaptation. You'd think that the films would be easy successes, given how well the games build suspense, but I've yet to see a Resident Evil film that lives up to the experience of playing a game.

You didn't think you'd win without a mine-cart level, did you?

Earlier Entries:
Dead Space: Extraction - B

REVIEW: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Four (Joss Whedon, 1999-2000)

2011-03-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

I don't understand how the writers flubbed Frankenstein. After Shelley's classic novel, and Whale's two superior adaptations, and the Hammer pictures, and countless other films that focus on the multidimensional monster, one would think Whedon and his band of writers could handle the character. Their iteration - a demon-man-robot (demanbot?) inevitably named Adam - cuts an imposing figure, with his muscular body and stitched green skin and cybernetic augmentations (a floppy disk port sits above his left nipple). He even nods to Karloff, but instead of tossing a young girl in a river, he dissects a young boy to see how he works.

This Adam learned the value of pants much faster than his namesake.

How depressing it then becomes to watch him lose that (perverse) human curiosity and become so singularly robotic. Apart from the occasional musing on humans or vampires, Adam proceeds like a cog in a wheel, executing his plans because those plans are what he must execute. Said plans involve the creation of an army full of recombined soldiers like himself, although he never specifies an ultimate goal for this new race. Adam's incomplete process remind me of the underpants gnomes from South Park who can't quite nail the middle step between collecting underpants and making money.

He involves Buffy in his master plan as a means of upping the number of casualties in the human/demon war (thereby producing more parts for Adam's new army), but he carries no interest in her as a potential super-soldier herself. Adam's focus is so narrow (and incomplete) that he doesn't realize that Slayer-parts would make for a demanbot (dewobot?) to equal him, and, heck, if nothing else, he could up the homage ante by desiring her as a life mate. Instead, Buffy's busy mating with stalwart lunkhead Riley Finn (Marc Blucas), a well-meaning soldier from Iowa who works for the same military project that created Adam.

New ally Tara (Amber Benson) proves even more twitchy and furtive than Willow.

Riley serves as a useful metaphor for the entirety of Season Four, which is handsome, good-hearted, and strikingly one-dimensional. I submit the following. Riley's romance with Buffy rests mainly on nice guy safety and loads of sex. The main villain lacks the driving emotion of former villains like the Mayor and Angelus. The threats of college quickly fade to the background, becoming High School: Part Two. Sure, some new developments on the side (a surprising romance for Willow, a surprising romance for Xander) keep individual episodes humming, and the banter frothy as ever, but the overall spirit of the show feels muted.

That muted feeling forces Buffy to live or die, for the first time since Season One, on an episode-by-episode basis. Thankfully, some of the episodes here offer the show at its boldest and most exciting. "Hush" features voice-stealing demons (led by Guillermo Del Toro veteran Doug Jones) who force the entire cast mime their way through most of the episode. "Restless" allows Joss Whedon to discard the seasonal narrative in favor of expertly-wrought dream logic, as Buffy and her friends share dreams and nightmares. "Superstar" suggests the bizarre idea that Sunnydale itself can be spell-cast, so a new character can suddenly become someone who was "always there." The two-part "This Year's Girl / Who Are You" witnesses the welcome return of a former foe, and "Fear Itself" is a delightful haunted house caper.

Riley Finn is Leon S. Kennedy in Joss Whedon's Resident Mild.

The mix of episodes also includes the depressingly blunt "Beer Bad" and the unformed mess of "Where the Wild Things Are," which twists to include Catholic sexual repression, theater-sized bedrooms, and orgasm walls, which are exactly what they sound like. Few of the other episodes lack the unique badness of those two, although "Pangs" forces another plight-of-the-Indians episode upon the universe, and "Doomed" sees the gang return to the high school for yet another round of Hellmouth closing. I guess that plot's supposed to emphasize the distance between the Gang and their origins, but it simply made me nostalgic.

Conceptually, the Initiative is a brilliant addition to the world of Buffy. Think of how authors like Shelley, Stoker, Lovecraft and Matheson offered supernatural beings compatible with the scientific method. Hell, the ghost busters fought a Sumerian deity with nuclear stun-guns. But Whedon and the gang never come at their concept from a fresh angle. They offer the tropes of science but never the questions or the hangups. Instead, we get nebulous aggression and bureaucracy, which offers plenty of plot but little heart. I mean, just look at this place.

Ignore the cool science stuff and study all the empty space. There's room for so much more.

RATING: B

Previous Ratings:

Buffy, Season Three: A

Buffy, Season Two: A-

Buffy, Season One: B