Dead, Not Sleeping

Leave a comment

A Nightmare in New Hope is a fairly intimate space.  The owner told us that the collection will change and grow, given that he’s still collecting.  Having a particular interest in Tim Burton’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow—having a book (ahem) on the subject coming out soon (cough)—I was particularly anxious to see what props they had.  To make sense of this it helps to have seen the movie, but you’ll catch on, even if you only know the Disney version of the story.  There were three main items from the movie that they have on display.  One is the wax seal used for the Van Garrett will, used as the movie opens.  The seal is quite large.  Of course, movies substitute props from time to time, blended by celluloid magic.  CGI doesn’t leave as many tracks.

The second artifact is one that wouldn’t have occurred to me to have even existed.  This was the animatronic horse’s head for Daredevil, the Headless Horseman’s mount.  There are a couple scenes in the film involving horse acting, and I’d just assumed that trained animals were used.  Being up close and personal with this artificial head, a couple thoughts came to mind.  One is that right next to it, it’s quite obvious that it’s artificial.  The second thought was just how much thought and effort goes into a big-budget movie.  For a few seconds of a close-up horse head, this model had to be constructed and used and then set aside.  I asked the owner about how such things were acquired, and he noted that production companies don’t keep everything.  He also noted that movie artifact prices have skyrocketed.  Both because horror is now popular and because CGI, as noted, doesn’t leave tracks.

The third, and most proudly displayed Sleepy Hollow piece is the Headless Horseman’s sword.  This appears in the movie far more often than either Daredevil’s head or the wax seal.  One of the aspects of Washington Irving’s story I discuss in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that the Horseman’s weaponry changes over time.  I won’t say more since, like museum owners, those who write books hope that they well sell a few copies.  I’ll be revisiting A Nightmare in New Hope from time to time.  For the items on display, I’d seen probably 90 percent of the movies, and a few of them I’d discussed in some detail in either Holy Horror or Nightmares with the Bible.  Of course, the Sleepy Hollow book is forthcoming (ahem).

Scary Father’s Day

Leave a comment

Given my circumstances, I never really celebrated Father’s Day growing up.  By the time I was old enough to get the concept, my father was long gone.  My step-father, some years later, was no real father.  Besides, we were poor and it was hard to think what such a celebration might entail.  All of which is to say that I never really expect much from the day myself.  My wife and daughter suggested we try Nightmare in New Hope again—this is the horror movie museum in New Hope, Pennsylvania, which had been closed last time we tried.  It was an appropriately rainy day, the kind we seem to specialize in around here.  I suspect that the museum will show up in a future blog post or two, but suffice it to say that it’s an impressive little collection.  It’s an odd feeling, this human desire to be in the presence of something you’ve seen in a movie.  I recommend it for any horror fans who happen to be along the mid-Delaware.

Not being large enough to take all day, we considered what we might do that afternoon.  In keeping with the theme, a visit to Vampa: Vampire and Paranormal Museum was suggested.  This museum is in Doylestown, which is only about a quarter hour from New Hope.  There’s more to it than just the museum, so it too will likely come up in future posts.  This museum contains a truly impressive array of artisanal vampire hunting equipment from Europe, dating between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ll try to put together a photo essay of it soon.  But that’s just the first room.  A second deals with demonic possession.  Then rooms have displays of occult and other esoteric artifacts, along with creepy suggestions to be careful of engaging too much with them.  The final room is dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, and it warns that the struggle with evil is real.

Both places had a steady stream of visitors yesterday.  It would be fair to say that by the time we finished I was over-stimulated.  You have to understand that I personally don’t know many people interested in horror.  Going to these places was the sacrifice of a rainy Sunday afternoon for my family but will likely become one of those pleasant, lingering memories of the unusual that take on a rosy afterglow over the years.  This blog quite often ponders over why such things take on meaning for someone interested in religion and belief.  Being in the presence of artifacts, as noted above, puts you in touch with a kind of earnestness that mere electronic reading on the internet lacks.  If you happen to be along the mid-Delaware, the side trip to Doylestown is a worthy add-on, Father’s Day or not.

Night Voices

Leave a comment

So this is really why I watched The Lady in the Water.  A friend had recommended The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, by Michael Bamberger.  The book was published in 2006 and I found a “very good” used copy on sale for six bucks.  It’d been on my to read list for a year or two.  The book arrived and I discovered it was about a Shyamalan movie I’d never heard of.  I have friends who refuse to even mention his The Last Airbender.  (I’ve seen the original animated version and it’d be difficult to think a movie would improve on it.)  Indeed, The Lady in the Water was a box office disappointment, and The Happening (which I kind of like) and The Last Airbender were critically castrated.  M. Night Shyamalan’s name does draw crowds, but I prefer his horror to his fantasy, but that’s just me.

In any case, reading Bamberger’s book was like cinematography 101.  It’s a nonfiction account of how this movie was made, written by a sports writer also from the Philadelphia area.  He begins by narrating how he met Shyamalan at a party.  How that meeting led to the idea of writing a book about his movie-making process.  Lady in the Water isn’t Shyamalan’s best work, but this book goes through how terribly personal the project was to the writer-director.  It’s a gripping account, especially for those who try to create any form of art.  It also gave me a renewed respect for what Shyamalan tries to do with his movies.  Early career success made him rich, and then he was in a place to follow his dreams.  Or bedtime stories.  Of course, a book written nearly a two decades ago couldn’t project where Shyamalan would be today.

His career surged again, beginning with The Visit—definitely creepy—and has continued to ride fairly high.  Although I haven’t seen all his films, I was interested enough to read about his creative process.  Although The Village wasn’t as highly regarded as The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, it’s still my favorite among his movies.  Part of that is because it was the first of his films I saw.  It was recommended to me by my brother, which also helped.  Mainly, that movie made me trust Shyamalan as a writer-director.  I’m not sad to have seen The Lady in the Water so that I could read a book about it.  The whole thing was a lesson in creativity.

Water Lady

Leave a comment

Being creative poses the very real threat of being misunderstood.  I can’t help but think that some of this was going on in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Lady in the Water.  Initially cudgeled by critics, it nevertheless seems to me that the perceived arrogance is overstated.  I generally like Shyamalan’s movies.  I think he does horror quite well, and I thought that maybe there’d be some horror elements here.  There were a few, but the story is kind of long and rambling, kind of like the stories I told my daughter at bedtime.  The movie begins by laying out a legend of a narf (water nymph) who will bring the world peace.  She is attacked by a scrunt, the monster in the film, but has to deliver a message to humans and has to be protected by the maintenance man at an apartment complex in Philadelphia.  And complex is right.

Since this isn’t a widely-known story, we have to be told, in pieces, by a number of the ensemble cast.  A lot of it is unbelievable, even for a fantasy movie.  At the same time, it contains a good message and I get the sense that this is why Shyamalan made it.  He does have an important role in his own movie (which is why it is said to be arrogant), but the style is reminiscent of his other movies.  The scrunt seems like a good idea for a monster and a couple of the attack scenes veer briefly into horror territory.  There’s even an element of Scream when Bob Balaban’s character explains (incorrectly) why he will survive an encounter with the scrunt.  The story has some likable elements but when so much of a fantasy world is being revealed piecemeal it’s sometimes hard to keep your focus.

Based on a bedtime story Shyamalan told his own children, it does resemble that genre of story.  Personal.  When my daughter was small, I made up nighttime stories for her pretty much on a daily basis.  They had a kind of rambling, plodding nature to them.  I made up creatures, as in this movie, and, as Balaban says, kept it family-friendly.  Classic stories do tend to follow a trajectory that is well known to literary scholars.  Something entirely new thrown into that area will sometimes emerge  beaten up.  It wasn’t a waste of time to watch The Lady in the Water.  Not one of Shyamalan’s best, it is nevertheless a film that makes you think a little while afterwards.  And that seems to be what it was intended to do.

Addams Family Research

Leave a comment

After having binged on Wednesday earlier this year, and wanting something lighter to watch, we finally saw The Addams Family.  Neither my wife nor I watched the television series too much when we were kids, but it’s probably no surprise that I watched it more.  As with Wednesday, if you didn’t see the television show, or read Charles Addams’ cartoons, you can still enjoy the movie.  After all, some of the salient aspects of the eponymous family are never explained.  Why are they so wealthy?  Things like that.  Although the movie, which is family friendly, can’t be called horror, it is a dark humor piece that scratches a certain itch.  For several years I’ve been pondering how horror has become such an amorphous genre that it really tells us little about a movie.  Taken literally, this one would be horror.

Not having grown up as a particular fan, I never really attempted to research the Addams family, but the basic idea was that they were people who lived as they liked, not caring what others thought of them.  They remain happy and cheerful in their macabre tastes.  The humor in such a situation is obvious.  The ultimate non-conformists, they are wealthy enough not to have to worry about fitting in.  Also, they tend to have some supernatural abilities.  Watching the show growing up, the character that never seemed to fit  the macabre image was Pugsley.  Often a partner in crime for Wednesday, his “monstrous” nature seldom seemed obvious to me.  Maybe it was his outfit.  In any case, not fitting in is what the show is all about.  Not fitting in and not worrying about it.

The plot of the movie is surely well known by now.  Gomez’s brother Fester is missing and a criminally minded Abigail Craven sends her lookalike son Gordon to take Fester’s place to get access to their riches.  The humor, apart from the madcap plot, often comes from subverted expectations.  A character points out a gloomy, macabre, or scary situation followed by a comment of how much they enjoy it.  As I’ve noted, taken literally such things define horror.  Horror and comedy can work well together.  In fact, I’ve reviewed many horror comedies on this blog.  I would have never thought to have watched this movie, however, without the prompting of Tim Burton’s Wednesday.  She’s an underplayed character in the series since the focus tended to be on the bizarre adults, as far as I can recall.  As Christina Ricci’s second feature film, her Wednesday laid the groundwork for the Burton series.  Maybe it’s time to do a little more research into family history.

Dream Machine

Leave a comment

I’ve reached the age where, instead of how well you slept, it’s the nature of my dreams that is more reliable projector of productivity.  You see, after a night of bad dreams I often wake up drained, lacking energy.  Entire days can be cast into this state of lassitude.  The only thing for it is to sleep again and reset.  The next day I can wake up after positive dreams, bursting with ideas and creativity.  New ideas come so fast that I can’t get them down in time.  Dreams. 

My entire life I’ve been subject to nightmares (no, it’s not the movies).  I still wake up scared at least once or twice a week.  More positive dreams have been struggling with these nighttime frights, and when they win, I have a better day.  I know, I know.  I should be in regular therapy.  The problem is time.  I see notes in papers and elsewhere of people younger than me dying.  On a daily basis.  The problem is I’ve got so much that I want to accomplish that I don’t have time to locate, pay for, and drive to see a therapist every week.  (The bad dreams come that frequently, so it stands to reason that weekly appointments should be on the script, right?)

The thing is, there’s no predicting these dreams or their timing.  My wife and I live a life of routine.  I awake early (anywhere from 1 a.m. To 4 a.m. these days) and begin writing and reading.  I jog as soon as it’s light and start work when I get back.  The 9-2-5 insists that you answer emails until 5 p.m., which can make for some very long days, depending.  After that we have dinner while watching some show we missed when it first aired, and then I go to bed.  That’s been the pattern ever since we bought this house nearly seven years ago.  Before that, we didn’t always watch things in the evening, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference in the dreams.

So I get up early and write down my thoughts for this blog, work on the books I happen to be scrawling at the moment (both fiction and non) and anxiously watch for sunrise, that ever shifting foundation.  And then work.  Always work.  But how well I work will depend largely on what was in my subconscious mind before I wake.  I have no idea if this is normal.  Knowing myself, it probably isn’t.  But I’ve reached the age where it at least starts to make sense.

Split Decision

Leave a comment

Sometimes advertising and packaging can make you ill-prepared for a movie.  I know that M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Split, and Glass are considered a trilogy.  Without knowing the story, I saw the first film and discovered it was a superhero movie.  That’s fine, of course.  It’s not really horror much at all.  That’s maybe the reason Split caught me off guard.  It is brought into sequel territory right at the very end, but the story is tense and scary.  Kevin Crumb is a man with DID, dissociative identity disorder—what used to be called a split personality.  Quite apart from the inherently fascinating phenomenon (and the criticism the movie received for misrepresenting it), the idea that a person shifts and you don’t know who s/he is, is frightening.  A couple of those personalities have teamed up and become criminal.  Kevin abducts three teenage girls for a purpose that only becomes clear later.  Their efforts to escape create a great deal of the tension, and the quick shifting of identities that Kevin displays makes any kind of reasoning with him impossible.  

There are any number of avenues to discuss here.  One is that Kevin’s disorder stems from how his mother treated him as a child.  (Unintentionally I’ve been watching movies that trigger me that way lately.)  He developed personalities to protect himself from the pain and they continue to multiply.  Meanwhile, the kidnapped girls can’t figure out what’s going on but Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy—my first clue that this was horror instead of a superhero movie—)realizes that she has to treat the different identities in different ways.  Another avenue is to consider what “the beast” (one of the personalities) asserts: only those who’ve been broken are truly evolved.  Some children make it through difficult childhoods by becoming resilient while others don’t.  Casey, it turns out, also had an abusive relationship in her childhood.  Movies like this always make me reflect on how difficult being a good parent can be.

The person not in control of their own actions (ahem) is among the most frightening of human monsters.  Those with mental illness, however, seldom fall into this category.  I understand why mental health providers found this film problematic, but it showcases Shyamalan’s horror chops.  It was the scariest movie that I’ve seen in quite some time.  After I ejected the disc I felt bothered (and trapped) for quite a few minutes.  And I realized that if this is a trilogy then superhero and horror combined await in the third part.  We shall see.

Deadly Seven

Leave a comment

Seven, styled Se7en, shades more toward the thriller end of the stick than horror.  The two are very closely related, of course, but as a gritty cop drama, the main horror element is the gore.  And the serial killer.  Indeed, it’s often compared to The Silence of the Lambs, a card-carrying horror club member.  My main complaint is that much of the movie is shot so dark that you can’t see what’s going on.  The unnamed city is about as cheerless as Bladerunner, and even when people aren’t being stalked by the serial killer they’re being murdered anyway.  So this dark setting brings together two detectives, one retiring (played by Morgan Freeman) and one with anger issues (Brad Pitt) set to take over.  The two are only supposed to overlap seven days, but the seven in the title refers also to the seven deadly sins.  

A literate cop drama—Freeman knows his literature (Milton, Chaucer, Dante, and even Thomas Aquinas)—it is a step above the standard crime drama.  The fact that Freeman spends his nights in the library may be the reason some people consider this dark academia.  The academic part is otherwise absent.  In any case, it is Freeman who recognizes that victims are being killed for their embrace of one of the seven deadly sins.  An obese man is fed to death, a greedy lawyer has to cut off a pound of his own flesh (in a hat-tip to Shakespeare).  When Freeman’s character tells Pitt’s that it’s from the Merchant of Venice, the later says “I’ve never seen it.”  Not read it, but watched it.  It’s Freeman who recognizes the endgame that the serial killer is playing and tries to warn Pitt.  But Pitt’s wrath is also a deadly sin.

The seven deadly sins aren’t biblical.  They emerge in early Christianity, taking shape through such writers as Tertullian, Evagrius, and Pope Gregory I.  They have remained in Catholicism as  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth (which sounds like the profile of some narcissists in the news).  They’ve been used in proper horror films as well as in thrillers, giving a convenient number of infractions to pursue.  Seven is one of those films that has become more highly regarded over time.  One might say that a prophet is without honor in their own time.  In any case, the movie is gripping and sad and a bit bloody.  It doesn’t unfold exactly as you might expect.  And no matter its genre, it can leave you thinking.

Hop In

Leave a comment

Especially the first part, of Mona Awad’s Bunny, is so well written I almost laid down my pen for good.  I really enjoyed this one.  Once the story gets deeper, into the second and third parts, questions begin to arise as to what’s going on.  One reason for this is the story becomes speculative in nature and Awad’s not about to give away what’s “really happening.”  Set among a set of five graduate students at the prestigious Warren University (the name is a hat-tip), the novel is often considered dark academia.  It starts out pretty light, and although Awad maintains her deft hand, it grows progressively darker as the tale goes on.  Samantha Heather Mackey is enrolled in the writing program with a cohort of four “perfect” women—the kind many guys go for.  Sam’s an outsider, though, writing dark and troubled stories while her classmates garner the professor’s praise.

The “perfect” women call each other “Bunny” and they eventually invite Sam into their clique.  This annoys Sam’s best friend and sometimes roommate, a local artist who isn’t a student.  But Sam is caught.  She learns that the Bunnies actually transform rabbits into their ideal boyfriends.  They haven’t got the process down pat, though, and the resultant hybrids often have various deformities.  Sam is the only one who can’t do this transformation.  Until she does.  But it doesn’t turn out like anyone expects.  I’d better draw my plot summation to a close there, otherwise I might hop into spoiler territory.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I recommend reading this one for yourself.  Awad’s writing is beautiful and compelling.  I did wonder if I’d interpreted everything correctly when I finally put the book down.

Dark academia comes in a rainbow of colors.  Here, although comi-tragic, there’s something seriously wrong at Warren University.  There are plenty of books and classes, as well as intrigues among ingenues.  And also some serious reflection on expectations and how they affect relationships.  Friendship and what it really means.  Loneliness, and how it creeps into the lives of creative people.  It’s also a story about writing and learning to write.  As noted above, it succeeds wildly in this.  There are definitely horror vibes about the tale, but it’s so well told that you might lose track of the fact that they’re there.  When Margaret Atwood praises a book, it’s worth paying attention.  While not dark and dreary, Bunny shows the sub-genre off as one of great potential.  It’s worth twitching your nose over.

Not Fragile

2 Comments

One of the problems with auteur theory is that you cast directors into an expected genre in your mind.  Or at least I do, and that is unfair to directors since they, like those of us who write, sometimes explore different genres.  My first exposure to M. Night Shyamalan was The Village.  Next was Signs.  And finally, The Sixth Sense.   (I was one of those creeped out by the “I see dead people” of the trailer for the latter, and it took several years for me to get over that.)  These were enough to solidify Shyamalan as a horror auteur in my mind.  I think the other films of his that I’ve watched, The Happening, Knock at the Cabin, have all been horror as well.  While some have classified it that way, many consider Unbreakable to be a thriller instead.  These two genres are very closely related, in any case, and I’d been wanting to see it.

Unbreakable is a movie to get you thinking.  It’s old enough that I’m not going to worry about spoilers here, so be warned.  David Dunn, after surviving a train wreck that killed everyone else, runs into Elijah Price, an art dealer and comic book aficionado, who is, literally fragile.  A rare disease renders his bones weak and since his childhood love of comic books informed his outlook, he wants to find a hero.  Dunn seems to be the man.  Never sick in his life, he survived a car crash with no injuries and his only weakness seems to be water (he nearly drowned as a child).  Price tries to convince him that he is indeed a superhuman, but his partially estranged wife disagrees.  Their son, however, believes.  The twist ending has us realize that Price has been conducting terrorist activities in order to find a hero and he “confesses” once he’s certain Dunn is real.

There are definitely some very tense moments in the film.  There aren’t any monsters, and Shyamalan wanted this to be known as a comic book hero movie (which it is).  He has directed some others in this genre as well, none of which I’ve seen.  I watch hero movies now and again, but they often lack the depth of good horror.  Unbreakable, however, does have depth.  At least it makes you think.  Is the good of convincing a hero that he can help people worth the hundreds of deaths it took to find him?  Price’s motivation seems pure, but his methods are evil.  These kinds of dilemmas are inherently thought-provoking.  But I will still probably continue to think of Shyamalan as a horror director.  Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Horror Time

Leave a comment

In case anyone’s wondering (ha!), I haven’t lost interest in horror.  I’ve been discussing quite a few dark academia movies lately since that’s where I seem to be, but what’s really lost is time.  I’m no great consumer of social media.  I spend literally five minutes on Facebook daily.  Less than that on Bluesky and Twitter.  I don’t have time.  I love watching movies, but they take time.  I often discuss this with family—I’m not sure where the time goes.  In my case it’s not social media.  Much of it—the lion’s share—is work.  When a three-day weekend starts to feel like just enough time to get everything done before starting it all over again, I think there’s an elephant in the room.  If I can just squeeze past your trunk (pardon me) I would note that I spend as much time as I can writing and reading, but even that drains too quickly.

I read a lot.  And I read about writing.  Those who do it best have time to put into their craft.  If they’re working long hours, have a family, and weeds that love all the rain we get around here, they’re better than I am.  Home ownership (if you can’t afford to hire groundskeepers) is itself a full-time occupation.  As is writing.  And, of course, work.  What’s been suffering lately has been my time for watching horror.  Part of that’s money too.  I’m not sure if anybody else has noticed, but prices haven’t exactly gone down since January, and movies aren’t always free.  I have a long list of horror films I want to see (quite a long list), but tide, time, and money wait for no-one.  I even had a four-day weekend not long ago during which I had no time to watch horror.  Horrific, isn’t it?

I’m at a stage of life where the shortness of it all stares me in the face.  I was a late bloomer and my career never really took off.  It ended up taking time and not rewarding that time at the usual exchange rate.  I’m watching friends and family retire and some finding too much time on their hands.  Hey, brother, can you spare an hour?  I think of my farming ancestors where every minute was filled trying to stay alive in a world where leisure time really is a luxury.  I have no right to complain, but I do wonder where the time goes.  I suppose if I didn’t blog I’d have a little more time for horror, but I just can’t face giving up all this fame.

What the Devil

2 Comments

Apart from being one of the most controversial films of all time, The Devils is also devilishly difficult to locate.  For as influential as it was (you can’t tell me nobody in Monty Python saw this before making Holy Grail) it has largely been buried, at least in the United States.  It doesn’t stream and to get a viewable copy you are limited to a Spanish language import DVD and have to manually select English as the language if you want to hear it as produced.  The question is if you do want to see/hear it.  Written and directed by Ken Russell, it is over-the-top.  Chaotic and cacophonous, it’s almost distracting and somewhat boring for about half its run time.  Then it turns incredibly violent and grotesque.  So why did I watch it?  Well, for one thing, it was something I knew I could’ve included in Holy Horror, had I been able to access it then.  For another thing, I’d read about it many times and was determined to find it.

Based on historical events (but stylized to the point of abstraction), the film is about the Loudun possessions of 1634.  Nuns in an Ursuline convent began displaying the kinds of tics that girls would display in Salem some 58 years later.  A local, unconventional priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching them and was burned at the stake.  The film makes much of the political machinations taking place, and revels a little too much in the behavior of the nuns.  It also enjoys portraying medieval torture methods and has an almost Clockwork Orangesque feel to it.  Released in 1971, it was given restrictive ratings where it was permitted to be shown, and although some horror has surpassed the excesses in recent years.

Religion’s relationship to horror is a frequent topic of discussion on this blog.  This movie is a textbook example of that.  After my nerves stopped jangling so much, I recollected that Ken Russell was also responsible for Lair of the White Worm.  Another story of debauched nuns and religion gone awry, it made me wonder what Russell’s personal interaction with religion might have been.  He apparently converted to Catholicism and then converted away again.  It certainly doesn’t get much sympathy in his movies.   Father Grandier is somewhat heroic in The Devils, but the overall institution is clearly corrupt.  In some cases religion is the means of fighting horror.  In other cases it is the cause of the horror.  Here the latter is clearly on display, and even that is, unfortunately, over the top.

Sunday Wednesday

Leave a comment

Being busy people, it took us a couple weeks to watch the eight episodes of Tim Burton’s Wednesday, and I think he’s really outdone himself.  As I mentioned before, I was never a great fan of The Addam’s Family, but I watched it often enough to know the characters and their quirks.   I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the television show.  It had monsters, but nothing really scary.  It was funny but some of the humor seemed beyond me.  I watched it anyway.  I didn’t bother with the movie when it came out.  Then on a rainy weekend afternoon I watched episode 1 of Wednesday and I was hooked.  For one thing, this is dark academia personified.  Exclusive, gothic, school, dark mysteries, secret societies.  It’s all there.  And for another thing, it’s well written and the acting is very good.  And then there’s Poe.

Image credit: Chainwit. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

(On a side note: I recently found another review of Nightmares with the Bible.  It is my most reviewed and least successful book.  The reviewer agreed with other reviewers that the Poe angle didn’t convince them.  As I told one critic, the Poe angle is a personal one.  Poe was a man, a sin of which I’m also guilty.  And men of a particular stripe feel protective of women.  Maybe it’s one of those biological things we should just get over, but Poe felt that it was poetic and, being a far less intelligent experiencer of that same disposition, I feel it too.  I think Tim Burton might also, for Wednesday seems full of that as well.)

At Nevermore Academy, the morbid, anti-social loner Wednesday learns to accept a kind of friendship from other outcasts.  There’s a town vs. gown aspect as the residents of Jericho don’t exactly love the academy, but they appreciate the money it brings in.  The founding pilgrim, Joseph Crackstone, was a hater of those who were different and tried to rid the world of others not like him (this is important).  Over eight episodes this backstory interrupts into the present and threatens the very existence of Nevermore.  What ties it all together, of course, is Wednesday.  Nearly as gothic as Sleepy Hollow, this Netflix series showcases the aspects of Burton’s vision that I find most compelling.  And the first season was nominated for quite a few awards.  A second season has been approved and I’ll be watching that one, down the road.  I can’t get enough dark academia these days, no matter the day of the week.

Friendly Fear

Leave a comment

I opened my book Holy Horror with an epigraph taken from Apocalypse Now, a movie I recently watched again.  That quote was from Col. Kurtz: “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.”  I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how you can make any progress in a discussion with anyone who’s already made up his or her mind (i.e., no matter what you say to them they will not take it seriously.  Think your favorite Trump supporter).  People far smarter than I have noted that the only way to combat this unthinking adherence is to get people to think critically.  That may be correct, but to preserve democracy we need a more assured method in the short term.  That of Col. Kurtz.

Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.  Both contain a vital truth—fear motivates people.  Democrats have been forward-looking in recent decades, but Republicans run on that fear playbook and it’s very difficult to defeat.  That’s because people are afraid.  It’s important to face fears, but to win elections, you need to seed them.  I know whereof I speak when it comes to phobias.  I was so riddled with fear as a young person that at times I could not leave the house.  At other times even the house didn’t feel safe to me.  I had multiple phobias and difficulty talking to other people.  I’ve grown out of many of these fears, but if I’m honest, I know they’re still with me.  I suspect many other people are also afraid.

Strong men (even if personally weak) appeal to the afraid.  They want someone who can protect them.  I tend to think Democrats think many Americans are better adjusted than they actually are.  You want their votes?  Make them afraid.  I’ve been writing books on fear and its many cinematic manifestations for several years now.  I grew up being afraid of everything.  I don’t advocate creating fear, but when a nation decides Hitler would be better than letting young people read, it’s reached a crisis point.  I do wish progressive political leaders would consider my humble observations.  When afraid people herd together and become the mob with torches.  And just such a mob became the mindless followers of Col. Kurtz.  Just saying.

See Monsters

Leave a comment

I have a soft spot for seventies movies, but I can’t decide if The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is horror or not.  I found it on a horror list, and an oblique reference to Lord of the Flies got me interested.  It reminded me, in some ways, of The Wicker Man.  Although based on a Japanese novel, the movie’s set in England.  Two subplots seem unrelated except they happen to the same widowed mother and son.  The son is part of a group of five boys in a private school who have a secret society (echoes of dark academia here).  The leader, although not yet at puberty, is a sociopath who’s very bright and the others follow him.  He declares that a perfect balance (a very East Asian religious outlook) exists that adults simply cannot realize it.  Indeed, adults are bad.

At the same time, the boy’s mother meets and falls in love with a second-mate on a merchant ship.  The boy likes the mate too and feels that they have found a perfect balance.  Thus the two plots come together.  The boys in the club feel that the son has gone soft on their principles, and so to prove he hasn’t they arrange the vivisection of an anesthetized cat.  When the sailor returns, unexpectedly, to try to marry the widow, her son objects.  The perfect balance has been distorted.  The boys decide that the sailor must be treated “like the cat.”  They take him to a distant overlook on a pretense, and drug him.  In a long shot at the end, the boys gather around his unconscious body.  Now, the similarities to The Wicker Man may seem passing, but the idea of human sacrifice is there.

Is this horror or not?  Hard to say.  Most of the movie revolves around the mother’s relationship with the sailor (which the son watches, voyeuristically, through a knothole in his bedroom cupboard.  The secret society is always there, however, and when the plots come together you realize that the sailor will have to be killed.  Like Wicker Man, there’s nothing really explicit here, although Wicker Man does have a horrific ending.  The Sailor only has one by implication.  The leader of the secret society of boys is pretty scary and apart from the widow, parents are pretty scarce in the movie.  I was left wondering what it was that I’d just seen.  I can see why someone would list it as horror, but it had other echoes that I felt might fit better.  It was, however, free for the streaming.