Well, Hello

So, it's a been a long, long time since I've posted here, eh? I've been busy...

• Saamaanthaa (2011)
• Chosen (2012)
• Relict (2013)

In paperback and in Kindle and Nook formats. Pick them up, give'em a read. And if you find your attention span or busy schedule doesn't allow for much book reading, Relict is a novella -- nice and short.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I saw "The Cabin in the Woods" yesterday, and I don't think it was really the Second Coming of Horror that it was billed as being. I understand that when Joss Whedon cranks something out, his dedicated fan base/cult, much like the fans of Wes Anderson, will breathlessly gather and sing the praises for his work, rendering it critically bulletproof.

Not going to go into the movie, lest there be spoilers to it -- but while I enjoyed the movie well enough, I wasn't blown away by it. It's hard to put it into words, exactly. I would classify it more as a horror-comedy than a de facto horror movie (although there were certainly horrific moments to it, they're all fairly wryly delivered, with that trademark Whedonian smirking smugness framed by an affably earnest self-consciousness that characterizes a lot of his work, and is likely why it's popular with a given group of people).

I didn't find it terribly surprising, found it hard to really shocked by anything in it. I dunno. I think it'll be a tempest in a teapot; it comes off as a kind of critical takedown of Horror as a genre without actually getting at what's horrific (and cathartic) about Horror. The very nature of Horror implies an ineffability, a sense of the sublime -- it's hard to be snidely aware of the sublime, really, and this movie tries to kind of square that circle -- to try to invoke this otherworldly dread while at the same time smugly having a "Relax, I'm just joking" kind of mindset to it that undermines the former.

There are enough Whedon groupies out there for this to likely do reasonably well, or be a cult movie or whatever. But unlike, say, "Evil Dead," which managed to actually channel some real dread, this movie was just sort of an exercise in something else. Like a group of people congratulating each other on how smart they all are. It's like how nobody thinks advertising (or propaganda) affects them -- if you ever see surveys where people are asked about advertising, nobody ever admits that advertising influences their decision-making.

So there is this multibillion-dollar industry that inundates our world, surrounds and enfolds it, whose entire purpose is to manipulate, cajole, wheedle, seduce, and persuade you -- something as omnipresent as water is to fish -- and you're unaffected by it? Immune to it? Why? Because you're too smart to be affected by something like that, you know when you're being influenced. Riiiight. Pat yourself on the back one more time, as you're off buying whatever it is you were persuaded to buy.

That is what this movie felt like. An hour-and-45-minute mutual back-patting from a creator of a particular type of entertainment to his acolytes -- there's nothing to be afraid of, because we already know everything there is to know about Horror, and we're just too smart to be affected by it, too worldly and jaded to be influenced by something as retrograde and yucky as Horror. Riiiiight.

That said, I enjoyed the movie reasonably well; I just didn't think it was half as smart as it (or its audience) thought it was.

Saw

I watched "Jacob's Ladder" the other day; a movie I haven't seen since the early 90s. It's a harrowing, strange kind of movie, very of its time. The McCauley Culkin role in it was something I'd forgotten, and, these days, made the movie more traumatizing for me, whereas back before being a parent, when I saw it, it was merely sad. Needless to say, not a movie I need to see again, although the head-whipping effect in it was inspired, since it was done at production, by altering the film speed and having the actors whip their heads around while keeping their shoulders still -- the net effect being when they ran it normal speed, it turns their heads into these blurs of motion, which is disarming. Neat of the director to have thought of it.

I also saw (get it?) "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (original one, naturally), which I also hadn't seen in a very long time. Still packs a punch. Given that they shot that on a shoestring budget, it went well for them, in terms of final product. What's amazing is how much terror they get with barely any blood. For all the legions of imitators that followed, how much gore came in its wake, TCSM manages to horrify with barely any blood and gore -- the horror and terror comes from implication and insinuation, which is a sign of good filmmaking. I was watching the production notes on it, and during the infamous meathook scene, Tobe Hooper wanted the hook to go all the way through Pam's back, with blood and what-not. But his designer said "No, if you do that, everybody's gonna be focused on the effect, on how you did it. Don't show it, and they'll be focused on the scene." And it's true. They really hit the nail on the head (so to speak) with the less is more approach -- the audience's imagination becomes the canvas, and you feel it more keenly because of it.

Nowadays, 'more is less' is the dominant aesthetic -- with lightning-quick cuts and rapid-fire editing in place of story content or setting up of scenes. Even a little thing like a frickin' clucking chicken, in the context of the movie, is horrifying. I always loved Leatherface's "chainsaw dance" at the end...



The lighting of it is beautiful, the golden glow of a new day, and it manages to convey complete insanity without a word spoken. Well done!

"Apollo 18" comes out September 2. I'm hoping it's good. The trailers seemed promising. I shall see, will let you know, Gentle Readers.

Deliverance

Dead man's hand rising, "Deliverance."

I watched "Deliverance" the other day, after not having seen that movie for a very long time, and while it's likely labeled an "Action/Thriller" movie in the pop culture, I can't help but think of it as a Southern Gothic Horror movie. It's not even the graphic man-rape in it that makes it so -- I mean, of course, that's certainly part of it -- but there's just a dread and creepiness that flows throughout it. Even the famous "Dueling Banjos" moment is fraught with an eeriness, the inbred-looking banjo boy...



And the setup of the movie -- four "city boys" plan a canoe trip that goes horribly awry. It feels very Horror to me. The dread and terror of the movie hangs heavily over it -- the unwelcoming, downright hostile Mother Nature all around them, the darkness and quiet of the woods, the unfriendly natives, the secrets and lies, the very real destruction of friendships in the face of the horror they encountered? I dunno. It feels like a Horror movie, albeit one that is marbled with Southern Gothic sensibilities, which likely are why it is better-regarded critically than more conventional Horror fare. I mean, the theme that runs through it is that Mother Nature's a bitch, and sure as hell wants to make Man her bitch -- that's what the movie's about, ultimately.

Ed, the Jon Voight character, is the protagonist -- when alpha male Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is taken out because of injury, it falls to Ed to rise to the occasion, to "play the game" as Lewis puts it. Bobby (Ned Beatty) is the smug, chubby city slicker who gets the bejeebers buggered out of him by the local, while Drew (Ronny Cox) is the affable, friendly, guitar-sporting fella who ends up dead and disfigured on the river. Each of the guys is kind of a facet of manhood -- Drew, the kind-hearted soul, is destroyed by the decision to bury the body of the dead mountain man. In a way, he's fortunate that he drowns in the river, because he surely could not have lived with the decision to bury the body. Lewis, the one who is likely most comfortable with things "going South" as they did, breaks his leg and is effectively taken out midway through. Bobby, the least prepared of them, ends up completely bitchslapped by the experience (literally). Ed, who is somewhere between Lewis and the other two -- that is, he's an experienced outdoorsman, but he's always been in Lewis's manly shadow, find himself ultimately able to kill and intent on surviving the experience at any cost (although it's clear that Bobby is traumatized by Ed's ruthless transformation as the movie evolves -- you see it in Ned Beatty's face when Ed tells them they have to come up with their fake story to try to ensure that the bodies they buried aren't found. It's like he can't even believe he's hearing this coming from Ed.



Of course, there are no supernatural elements in it, so quibblers might take issue with it being a Horror movie, but then again, people often consider "Jaws" to be a Horror movie, too, with a very real monster in the form of the massive great white shark. It's funny for me, because I don't really think of "Jaws" as a Horror movie, but I always think of "Deliverance" as one -- I think it's squarely because of the bleakness and dread inherent in the latter movie, and the very real sense that the characters in "Deliverance" will be forever haunted by what happened on that trip. There is no happy ending for those characters -- Bobby has to live with the shame and humiliation of being man-raped and having to lie his way out of his complicity with hiding three bodies (including Drew's body), Lewis appears likely to have lost a leg (putting an end to his he-man lifestyle), and Ed is haunted by nightmares and an understanding of what he's capable of. Since the movie came out in '72, I'm sure the Vietnam War hung heavy in the zeitgeist at the time, and it could perhaps be seen a kind of parable of that war, and the horrors of it. For all the horror of a shark attack, the movie itself telegraphs its dread with the John Williams score, whereas "Deliverance" delivers far more dread per square inch with simple silence and running water, with a verdant forest and feral hills. There is terror in those woods (and there's a curious moment before the rape scene, too, the night before, when the men are camping, and Lewis stalks out into the woods, saying he heard something -- that setup feels very classic Horror movie, although it's not played for that, it still communicates that: danger, lurking in the shadows).

Anyway, just musing. "Deliverance" feels more than being simply an action movie with horrific moments -- rather, it feels like a true-blue Horror movie, served up Southern-style, with all that this entails. And even when Ed, Bobby, and Lewis make it back to "civilization" (itself the soon-to-be-gone town of Aintry -- or is it Aintree? I can't remember -- this woeful, doleful little town that is going to be drowned when the dam is completed, and is being moved -- the church rolled away, the graves disinterred -- an image that is quietly horrific when seen through Ed's eyes in the wake of their own burials in the wilderness) -- anyway, even when they make it to Aintry, the Southern hospitality is underpinned with the clear dread of Bobby and Ed that the Sheriff (played, ironically enough, by James Dickey, the poet who wrote "Deliverance") doesn't believe their story, but lacks the evidence to lock the men up for murder -- he says "I'd like to see this town die a quiet death." Having delved into the literal and moral wilderness, the men find it hard to embrace civilization again (and, again, the Vietnam specter hangs heavy over this in tangible-yet-understated ways, versus, in my opinion, the ham-handed and overpraised way it looms in "The Deer Hunter" [which came out six years after this movie]). It's like they've seen the black underbelly of the world, the horror of Nature and Human Nature, and are forever marked by it. It makes the happy ending of "Jaws" (which always seems to top the mainstream "best of" Horror movie lists) seem completely panglossian by comparison. With "Deliverance," it's like the saying that when you kill someone, you kill yourself, too -- or part of yourself, anyway, dies with the person that you kill. I think part of Ed died in that river, and it's never coming back -- his nightmare (the hand rising out of the water) and him laying awake in bed beside his wife, clearly troubled, shows this, while the "happy," frenetic dueling banjo theme plays in an echoing rejoinder. Ed and Bobby and Lewis survive, but they'll never, ever be the same again.

Station

Apparently the International Space Station (ISS) is going to be very visible lately, is going to be the brightest object in the sky short of Venus. That's kinda nifty. I'll have to check when it'll be flying over and try to spot it with B1; he'll love that, assuming we'll even be able to see it.

The weather's been pretty dismal the past few days -- we actually had snow mixed with rain the other day, although, as ever, I roll with it.

I'm going to sling out my SF novel to another publisher, see how that goes. I need to gear up for another round of querying my books to agents and publishers; never something I particularly enjoy, but most definitely part of the dance.

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, which is why I've been fairly blog-quiet, too, I suppose. It's the combination of lots of big, bad news in the world and relative quiet at home, I guess.

Saw "Dead Snow" the other day -- I was less than impressed by it; it wasn't scary so much as it was gruesomely amusing. The stark white Scandinavian countryside was a great backdrop for horror, and those very Nordic-looking characters in it were amusing, too, but the movie was an exercise in excessive gore (so many disembowelings -- is that a preoccupation of the director?) And, sure, all that blood works wonderfully against the white snow, but the movie was pretty empty, even as escapist fare. The opening sequence was probably the best thing about it. I didn't like the way they had the Nazi zombies kind of roar -- they sounded like orcs doing lion impressions. That was distracting and off-putting. They already look monstrous, so making them roar monstrously was too much for human-scaled monsters. One of the grossest scenes has the floozie babe putting the moves on the portly film geek in an outhouse -- a sex scene in a frickin' outhouse?? Paging Dr. Freud! It was clumsily constructed -- the floozie takes an unlikely interest in the geek, joins him while he's quite literally taking a dump in the outhouse, rides him on the commode (?!?!) and the next thing we see, the geek is returning to the cabin by himself. Now, honestly, people -- this Scandinavian Poindexter (who looked more like the kind of guy who'd be giving swirlies to nerds) gets laid by the hot girl -- he just walks away from that, turns up in the cabin to swill some more brewskies nonchalantly, leaving her back in the outhouse to get rather gruesomely killed by one of the Nazi zombies?? Terribly constructed scene, clunkily rendered (and gross -- maybe putting the moves on a guy while he's taking a dump in an outhouse is a time-honored Scandinavian courtship ritual? Shudder.) The alpha guy stumbles across a cave that appears to be a kind of lair for the zombies, and actually leaves a couple of perfectly maintained MP40 submachine guns alone, even as he discovers the severed head of his missing girlfriend. Later, he picks up a German machine gun (from somewhere) that he mounts on his "snow scooter" (aka, snowmobile), and briefly uses. But seeing the guy see those submachine guns in this cave, seeing actual horror and carnage, and the guy's military service background is referenced in his first scene -- I was thinking "Helloooo? Pick up the fucking guns, Sven; there's zombies in them thar hills." Instead, he gets to engage in some sloppy disembowelment (see?) knife fights with the zombies. Anyway, these zombies are very fixated not on eating brains, but on eating guts. They do it every time they get after somebody -- you see them gobbling guts. So, either the writer had some kind of fixation on bowels, or the director did, or they both did, because it flows through the whole movie (haha -- "flows"). There are some darkly amusing moments in the movie, here and there (I won't spoil them, if you're inclined to see this movie), and a couple of reasonable scares that are mostly a product of a spliced zombie bushwhack coupled with a BLAST of sound, but this movie didn't rise above the promise of its premise, in my view. You can tell the director is a fan of Sam Raimi -- he opts for that kind of kinetic gore approach to horror, that over the top, so bad it's good kind of aesthetic, but the characters aren't strong enough to carry the narrative.

Monkeyboy

Alright, so I'm watching "Monkey Shines" tonight, and I'm reminded of the trailer for it...

Monkey Shines Trailer

Which masterfully chooses that cymbal-banging chimp as an image for it....

Who in their right mind ever thought those were fun? Was it some wicked toymaker who crafted them? Was it simply the novelty of the automaton ape banging the cymbals that sold it? Or were kids so fun-starved back then that they'd take any toy, even one as creepy as this. I remember a cousin having one of those, and he skinned it, which made it look even creepier. But seriously, who would give that to their kid?

"Here ya go, Scout!" (tousles hair) "Have FUN! Daddy's going out drinking tonight!"

Kid sits in room, gazing in terror at the cymbal chimp...

Jolly Chimp

Ghostly

So, I'm very nearly done (FINALLY) with "Ghost Story." A few comments before I am done with it...

I feel it’s clunky, and has a lot of shallow stuff thrown in there without much behind it – like a zombie marching band playing a bunch of kazoos (and, sadly, there’s even a peripheral character in the book, Dr. Rabbitfoot, who would likely lead such a band). Stephen King gushed about this book, but I just don’t see the attraction. It's like watching something through glass block -- hell, even that would be more terrifying. There’s only one scene that had any kind of bite for me, and even then, it was more a nibble than a bite – like a case of potential there that wasn’t realized. The whole book is very, very arm’s length, which (at least to me) violates the spirit of what Horror could/should be.

I have a theory, maybe that Straub is a conservative, and this is a conservative person’s Horror novel. Now, Horror is, by its nature, a conservative genre – that’s where the horror comes from, like the outraged sensibilities and the capacity for revulsion and terror at the Other.

BUT, by saying that it’s a conservative’s Horror novel, it’s like it’s ARCH-conservative – now, lest you think there’s some overtly political slant to it, it’s not there. But I can sniff out people’s stances, and my sense is that Straub has this Idea(tm) of Good, Decent People(tm) – MEN, in particular, up against an ineffable, horrible, Female Evil(tm) that upends the Proper Order of Things(tm). Which is certainly a component of classic Horror. I get that.

However, he can’t really properly characterize anybody in it – not the male characters, nor the female menace. They’re cardboard cutouts, and the reader is supposed to be hit by it, like “OMG! What an outrage! How HORRIBLE!” – like bad service in a restaurant or something: “Well, I NEVER—” – that kind of fuddy-duddy, pajamas-n-slippers sensibility. It’s like the cliché of how men aren’t in touch with their feelings – none of the men are really in touch with their feelings; they’re all fucking uptight, totally hemorrhoidal, so the “wild” Evil(tm) just upends things, but he can’t find the “emotional pool” (hah!) to offer the right sell, beyond the fuddy-duddy-ism.

Maybe it hit a note in 1979, but in 2010, I’m thinking “WHERE is the horror, here?” Not finding it. I was really hoping for sizzling slabs of Horror, or even a proper ghost story (I mean, "Ghost Story," right?) But, instead, none of the above -- the baddies are these shapeshifting spirits (?) that basically mindfuck people and make them kill themselves (but you never really properly see this -- Straub "averts the eye" in most of the encounters, which is doubly damning, because the detail isn't much there to begin with, so you're peeking through the glass block of his prose, trying to see what's going on, and just when you think you can see something moving back there, he shifts the scene and you're someplace else). Legerdemain.


Admittedly, the Ghost Story is the hardest kind of Horror story to write -- it really is, but that just requires one to apply oneself harder to it. There's a kind of dueling banjos of ineffability in play with "Ghost Story" -- the main characters aren't fleshed out well enough for their back story to have much meaning, and the villain is so diaphanous and chimerical as to be similarly meaningless. It's kind of my rule with fiction -- "anything goes" is almost the same as "nothing to see, here," bizarrely enough.

I went in with an open mind, but Straub lost me with the overlong and plodding prologue, and he just dug himself in deeper. I mean, I'm glad that the book served him well and let him build a career and a reputation, but I wasn't convinced by this effort.

Poor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. -- his last movie appearance, I think...

"Ghost Story" (1981)

Which took about a paragraph from the book and made it into a whole movie that was mediocre at best. I'd always held out hope that the book would be better than the movie, but I can't really say it's so. The above scene is actually scarier than anything in the book, which says something, right? (and, yes, the hokey nature of that death scene is editorially right in step with the book). Oh, and it looks like they CGI'd up the ghost in the movie, which sucks -- the original looked scarier.

Chimpanic

I was talking with a coworker yesterday,  and we got on the topic of chimpanzees, how scary-violent they can be, which led to much chuckling and laughing about just how horrible that is, like When Chimps Go Bad. I said that I could handle fighting zombies, but if a chimp ran at me, I'd take a swan-dive out the nearest window, because chimps do things like tear your face off and rip your limbs apart and beat you with them like you're a bongo drum. Victims of man v. chimp never, ever come out of it without horrible injuries. The combination of aggression and the biomechanics that make them terribly strong make them downright scary.

Of course, looking up "chimp violence" on YouTube gets me this...

Ricky Gervais on Chimp Violence

But seriously, chimps will fuck you up -- or, at the very least, are totally capable of doing so. I joked to my coworker "Any belief in a just, sane, and orderly universe goes immediately out the window when you've got a chimp literally ripping your face off -- one minute you're thinking 'I should get pizza for dinner tonight, maybe' and the next minute you're like 'AUUUGH! You tore off my face!!'" And chimps really WILL rip your face off. It makes a shark bite seem almost genteel and courtly by comparison.

I think it's kind of a variation on the "Uncanny Valley" that comes up with AI -- a shark bite you can relate to, because it's this big maw taking a hunk out of you, sufficiently monstrous and alien to be terrifying, but at least contextually logical; but a chimp tearing your face off is perhaps more unnerving, because it's using hands that are similar to yours, only much, much stronger and worse; and also, you might actually be unfortunate enough to survive it. And further, if a shark takes a bite out of you, odds are it thought you were a fish or a seal or a sea lion -- a case of mistaken identity. But lord knows what the chimp is thinking when it decides to rip off your face. Maybe it didn't like the shirt you were wearing, or the color, or you had a mustache (or didn't have a mustache), or you ate an English muffin for breakfast, and that pissed it off. There are any number of ineffable, incomprehensible reasons why a chimp might go off on you.

So, if you have a friend who has a "pet chimp" -- word to the wise: LOSE that friend. Find another friend. Then you won't even have to worry about getting a face and limb transplant.

Trunk Monkey

Really, Trunk Ape, but, you know....

Hmph

I am still not getting why "Ghost Story" had received so many plaudits. I'm just not dazzled by it. Not the writing, not the story, nothing. I've got about 200 pages to go, and I'm still not floored or scared by it. I'm really hoping Straub delivers, but I don't think he has, yet. It's like when people would rave about Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" -- I remember listening to it and thinking "WTF??" Whatever it's about, I'm not getting. And I try to be open-minded, to approach it without judgment or reservation. It's like the movie, "Inception." That movie was a grave disappointment to me, and I thought "How can people be thinking this is such a great movie?"

Telegraphy

*pant pant* I'm on page 300 of "Ghost Story," still soldiering on. He's doing it yet again, over the span of two pages...

"...craziness..."
"...saw the fractured light in his eyes..."
"...that underneath the 'stayin' sane' kind of craziness there was another, real craziness."
"...saw his eyes gleaming between the lashes..."
"...and his eyes gleamed..." (same paragraph as the first gleaming-eyed bit)
"...grinning maniacally..."

Book Report Voice: I think this character is going crazy.

(cue telegraph operator, dot dash dot dash dot dot dash)

a/c

I keep reading "Ghost Story" because there is some bleakness to it that is intriguing, even if the mechanics of the writing claw at me still. I'm giving him the benefit of a doubt, that the trip'll be worth the destination.

Got the a/c on tonight, as it's a bit warm this evening.

B1 cuted me out -- he said of someone he knows, "She's very reactive; she's just like magnesium!" That made me smile. He also said his name was "like an ocean." I loved that, too.

Wetday

Man, another rainy morning. Storms and such. No big deal, but it's wicked humid and rainy. I had the boys all dressed for it and ready, and wore my slicker, so it was all handled.

I got a library card again yesterday, after work. I picked up Joshua Ferris's "And Then We Came To the End," a much-ballyhooed first novel circa 2007. It was third on my list of to-get books from the library (the other two weren't there, were at other branches). Anyway, for a book that was roundly hailed as a masterwork, I dunno. I'm reading it, but it's not sending me into the stratosphere. Some of the narrative choices he made in the book are like itching powder to me. But I'll soldier through it.

Speaking of soldiering, I stumbled onto "The Ruins" on FX last night. I had read that book years ago (hadn't liked it overmuch, and had issues with some of the ways the writer had set things up). But anyway, it was damned gruesome -- the movie kept pretty close to the story, and the gore was particularly skin-crawlingly icky. The crowning irony of our censorious society -- violence is fine, but no sex -- so you can show somebody carving themselves up with a knife, but don't show tits and ass. Anyway, I'm pretty jaded where horror movies are concerned, but some of the stuff they showed was still damned icky.

I cooked a terduchen last night! Ha! I saw it at the grocery store, and had to snag it -- turkey stuffed with chicken and duck (and pork sausage -- so does that make it a terduchenpor?) Anyway, it was good, a lot milder than I thought it would be. It was a total meat bomb, however. I had some and thought "Wow, that was almost a deadly amount of meat." And practically had meat-overload-induced aphasia. Exene was amused, said "You've lost the power to speak?" Before going into a mild food coma, I managed to stammer out that it was an ideal dish for her family, that I could see them tackling a 15 lb. terduchen and digging it mightily. I'd not make terduchen a regular part of my diet, but it was pretty damned good. I had to try it. Has that same over-the-topness of something like Beef or Lamb Wellington.

Shrimps On Prozac?

Weird study I just saw today on SALON, basically showing that shrimp exposed to the main chemical in Prozac are more vulnerable to dying, for whatever reason. Several things about this -- I've been wondering for years about the role antidepressants play in suicides and murder-suicides, but the prospect of the chemical poisoning the environment by the way of urban runoff is creepy as well. The tip of the hat to brain parasites manipulating serotonin levels in shrimp is, of course, intriguing, too, given my lingering fascination with parasites. Parasites are tricky mofos. I'm forever amazed that dinosaurs had tapeworms, and those frickin' tapeworms survived the extinction of dinosaurs and migrated to mammalian species (no doubt because early mammals scavenged dinosaur remains and picked up the tapeworms, which then adapted themselves to mammalian bodies). That's an impressive (and horrifying) evolutionary feat. Don't underestimate parasites! Seriously. They. Will. Fuck. You. Up.

I've also long followed endocrine disruptors in the environment, too, which seem to come from plastics, creating false estrogens which may increase risks of cancer (and may be responsible for declining fertility in populations). Creepy shit.

Muddied

Notice anything amiss on this "Zombieland" DVD case?

I'll tell you: there's mud on Love Interest's(tm) chainsaw. Mud? Not blood?? WTF? You're in a supposed zombie apocalypse, your chainsaw should be bloody, not muddy. One of many complaints I have about that movie -- like its faux edge and romantic comedy core. Weak. Lame. MUD.

Serial Killers, American Style

Isn't it weird that most serial killers are American? Like if you look at serial killing around the world, the vast majority of them occur in the US. There are serial killers everywhere, but they are most common in this country, with the UK having the next-largest number. What is it about American and British life that lends itself to serial killing? What socio-cultural conditions exist that make this so? I have no answer; I'm just wondering. Are Americans just that much more violent than their peers in other countries? Are we more isolated and anomic? I would chalk it up to size of country and/or media, but we have far more serial killers than, say, Russia. What is it about American (and British -- since we have to remember that our cultural roots are British) culture that fosters this? Is it sexual repression? Cultures of violence? As countries adopt an American or British socio-economic model, does serial killing grow there? Is it perhaps tied to our mass media?

I scrolled down the lists of killers by country, and it appears that more Westernized/Americanized a country was, the more serial killers it had. Many Americans like to suck their own dicks about our cultural hegemony, how great and wonderful Western Civilization(tm) is (and how uniquely exceptional and virtuous American culture is), and yet, it has this shadow creeping in its wake, in the form of the serial killer, as well.

Sunny Afternoon

I walked to Subway and back (Tuscan Chicken Melt, if you must know), and enjoyed the good light today, and the mild-but-sunny weather. Just lovely. Snapped a few pictures on my way, including that haunted fucking house I've photographed before (but likely haven't put on this blog). Just a loomy kind of old Victorian building. Gotta watch out for those looming Victorians! Anyway, I was disappointed at Powell's -- their free book box was ransacked by a codger who snapped up a thick stack of novelized screenplays just before I got there. D'oh! Had I gone to Powell's before Subway, I'd have snagged a treasure trove of'em, but I was hungry, and I wanted to get ahead of the Subway lunch rush, so there you go. I thought of asking the old guy for the "Deliverance" and "Taxi Driver" (two that I saw, among the baker's dozen he snagged), but I figured he might as well enjoy'em, but I was peevish at being thwarted!

I think of both of those movies are Horror, even though they're not actually officially branded that way. But how can anyone watch "Deliverance" and not feel the terror and horror throuthout it? And I'm not just talking about poor Ned Beatty's character getting piggy-raped in the Georgia forest; the whole movie is deeply, darkly Southern Gothic in all sorts of harrowing ways. Even the banjo duel just drips Southern Gothic...

Banjo Duel

One scene in particular scared the hell out of me as a teen -- I remember watching it, must've been my senior year in high school, in our big house, all alone. Our den had some doors you could close to seal it off from the rest of the place. Anyway, I would watch movies by myself and shut those doors, feel reasonably safe in there.

So, I'm watching "Deliverance" and it's skeeving me out, as it always does, and because it was on late, I dozed off on the sofa, and I woke up during this part when Jon Voight dreams that the body of the man they killed surfaces -- and it's this creepy-as-hell moment where there's the water of the lake made from the dam, and this hand surfaces from the water with this droning music playing.

Anyway, I woke up to that music, that fucking hand rising from the water, alone in my folks' house, and I was completely creeped out!

Tired

I'm worn out today. Not enough sleep, just tired. One of the pillars for me, definitely.

It's gorgeous out today -- cool and wonderfully sunny. Just very pleasant. Hopefully the summer will be nice.

Sent a query out to a literary agent on a whim -- just a name I ran across, somebody who might be interested in one of my books. We'll see. Odds are long, as ever, but one has to try!

I had such a good horror screenplay idea yesterday, the whole thing just unfolded perfectly, but the concept has already been done, and so I have to figure some way of altering the setup enough that it can't be said to be derivative of the source material. People do this all the time (just compare, say, "The Matrix" with "Monsters, Inc." and you'll see).

Yawn. Too tired today. Lordy. I wasn't even up so late (10:30, maybe?) I woke up at 5:18, so I don't know why I'm so sleepy. Better not be fighting a cold or something.

Spacing Out

I am not agoraphobic, but years of city living has made me realize just how much I love urban living, and how much the suburbs skeeve me out. The four years of home ownership in Indiana (2001-05) were a very stressful time for me, but those silent nights, with only the coyotes crazy-yipping and the trains howling in the incredible dark (and silence) really creeped me out. The city feels much safer to me than the suburbs -- those endless developments, the big and lonely homes with their silence.

Years ago, as a teen in my high school library, before even being aware of my "city boy" sensibility, I remember being creeped out by this picture...

It's a shot of the German Wehrmacht invading Russia, crossing the endless steppe. And the expanse of it, that endless plain, well, it horrifies me on a very deep level. There are other shots in this series, that'll show this column of tanks just grinding across that plain, but the steppe is infinitely vaster than the tanks, and it's haunting, that nothingness. It's just too much, and too little. I remember training through Montana, seeing that, too -- I'd see this lone house with absolutely nothing around it (well, Nature, of course, but nothing else) and would wonder how people could live there without going batshit-crazy.

I've posted this before (maybe on another blog?) but Palmyra Atoll, a very remote little place in the South Pacific, a satellite photograph of it gave me the willies, too -- the inky dark of the Pacific Ocean, just a few feet from swallowing up this atoll once and for all...


I hyperlinked a kayak ride to that atoll in the above picture. I think they're approaching from the right-hand side, judging from the lay of the land, what little there is of it. Anyway, you can see this unfriendly little atoll, dark and mysterious, rain-soaked. I've put more than a few short stories out on lonely little islands like that.

I'm sure it's tied to an instinctive sociability that is inherent in human beings on some level, but that isolation is just very creepy. Give me something for my eyes to fix on -- mountains, forests, rolling hills. Don't give me featureless plains or thumbprints of fading land in a giant, endless ocean of unimaginable depths and dangers.

I've never felt in danger in the city. But living out in the countryside, I've felt that Gothic kind of dread, the sameness, the emptiness, the lifeless houses, and above all, the wasted space. It didn't help that the years at "The Black House" were filled with weirdness and uncanny things, of course, but still, it creeps me out.

The Cell

This is a pretty funny sequence. I am amused, because I've run into that a number of times when working on horror stories -- only I never do pat "no signal" kind of stuff, but come up with other ways that a person can't call their way out of a jam. But it is amusing, because it really does come up as an issue in the era of cell phones everywhere! A related issue is the increased presence of surveillance cameras, at least in urban areas (although not exclusively there, anymore).

Movie: Deadgirl

So, I watched "Deadgirl" last night, part of my recent horror movie filmfest of the past few days, and this one is, by far, the most horrific of the three I just saw. Like squirm-in-your-seat horrific, and also, perhaps, the most classically constructed as a horror story (in the sense of the supernatural leading to the fall of the characters).

That said, it was certainly not a perfect movie, although it was a creative spin on the classic zombie movie narrative (and something I'd actually conceived in the 90s as a story idea, but something I never wrote, because it's just too fucking gross). I'll mention the problems I had with it first...

First, it was too long -- they needed to edit it more tightly. Fewer shots of protagonist Rickie biking around town aimlessly, less time dicking around (pun intended) in the abandoned mental institution. They could've probably trimmed a good 20 minutes off it without consequence.

Second, Rickie (played by Shiloh Fernandez -- there's a name for you) was miscast -- the actor playing him didn't at all convince me as the burnout/loser character he was supposed to be (especially when contrasted with Noah Segan's ghoulish "J.T." and Eric Podnar's dopey "Wheeler" -- those two were perfectly cast and believable in those roles). Fernandez might've come across as weird, but he just didn't fit the burnout/skater/outsider/freak-n-geek character we're supposed to believe he was playing.

Third, Rickie is far too passive of a character in the narrative -- way, way too many shots of him looking on in horror at the admittedly horrific goings-on, or scowling meaningfully at nothing, looking all Walking Wounded. Clearly he's got a lot on his mind, but the story doesn't really give him much to do -- he's perennially railroaded by his out-and-out psychopathic friend, J.T., and rather than really being active in the story, Rickie just coasts along.

I know why they did that -- they wanted Rickie to keep his hands somewhat clean, compared with the horrific hog wallow presented by J.T. and Wheeler. We're supposed to feel some level of sympathy for Rickie, who at least has a modicum of bystanderly compassion in the story, but his half-hearted and half-assed attempts at doing the right thing don't carry much resonance, and since he never really follows through, they are weak, at best. For a protagonist, he's very weak.

Especially when contrasted with J.T., who largely steals the show with his villainy. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the primary villain in the movie, J.T. rides roughshod over the story as thoroughly as he does over the other characters -- and that's not a bad thing; it's fun to watch him be disgusting and horrible in a human trainwreck kind of way. Clearly Noah Segan was having a blast playing the flat-eyed teen psycho (oh, and I looked him up -- the actor's a Libra. I figured. Librans always have those doll's eyes).

Fourth, the love interest (sorta), JoAnn (played by Candice Accola), is weakly played in the story, so whatever she's supposed to represent to Rickie is lost by the weak characterization of her, so what ultimately happens to her is lessened -- she doesn't have far to fall, because she (and his relationship to Rickie) is only very barely fleshed out. Again, it doesn't convince or persuade beyond a "Oh, sure, what the fuck?" from the audience.

The plot is what the title says it is -- a couple of high school losers find a zombie chick restrained in an abandoned asylum and make her their sex toy/slave. That's it. And it's plenty fucking horrifying, and if they'd just tweaked the script a little here and there, they'd have really nailed it, I think. It does succeed in being incredibly disturbing, and while it may on the face of it appear to be anti-woman, I think it was more accurately anti-man (or anti-teen boy, anyway) -- because the women characters in the movie (including the zombie Deadgirl) are actually sympathetic, compared with the guy characters, who are all creeps and weirdos (with the exception of ineffectual Rickie, who just manages to wince emotionally now and again, and, at least up to a point, display some modicum of decency).

A few more revisions to tighten the story up, a more sharply-written script (better dialogue and characterizations) and a better-cast Rickie would, I think, have made it a canonical horror movie. As such, it emerges as a horrific movie with a lot of dark promise.

I would advise against seeing it if you are a horror movie tourist -- if you enjoy horror movies, you'll be ready for it (and still horrified), but if you're just a tourist, it'll freak you out for sure. I will say that the gore elements of it are understated, but the implications of what's going on are damned horrific.