Not Yet Illegal

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David Cronenberg’s name suggests a certain kind of body horror as unique as it is unsettling.  Crimes of the Future (2022) immediately reminded me of Existenz, which I watched many years ago.  Crimes of the Future is more difficult to understand, however, in part because it is shot dark and quite a lot of the dialogue is indistinct.  I happen to be reading a hard-to-follow book and my overwhelmed brain was hoping for a more straightforward narrative.  In any case, in the eponymous future, human evolution is such that it has to be regulated.  A performance artist couple puts on shows of surgery since he (Tenser) is constantly growing new organs.  They’re harvested as part of the performance.  Humans have evolved out of pain by this point, so surgery is done as art.

Meanwhile, a group has evolved to the point that they can eat plastic and toxic waste.  They demonstrate that physical modifications can be inherited, which puts them on the government’s wanted list.  Tenser and his partner, Caprice, own an automated autopsy table (who doesn’t?) that performs the autopsy while letting others watch.  The radical group wants to use this device to autopsy, as art, the child born with the ability to eat plastic (he’s killed at the beginning of the movie).  Also in the mix are a couple of crooked bureaucrats and a detective who seems sincere, but who has been working with an insider among the criminal group.  Eventually the autopsy occurs but it seems the boy’s insides had been surgically altered.  The leader of the radical group is assassinated and Tenser eats a toxic waste bar and dies.

If you’re saying “How’s that make sense?” you’re not alone.  Body horror isn’t my favorite.  Many of Cronenberg’s favorite themes are present here, but the film lacks a strong narrative.  Or at least one that I could follow.  Art house cinema often requires quite a bit of work from the viewer.  The atmosphere of this film, like Existenz, isn’t really horror, but it breezes into that territory.  Just when the horror—the surgeries—appears the social commentary kicks in.  That’s often true of body horror, a genre Cronenberg is credited with developing.  But I watch for the story as well as the mood.  Some movies are more about the images, I know.  And the future orientation makes some classify the film as science fiction.  It has more of a Blade Runner, dystopian feeling atmosphere, but without replicants.  Crimes of the Future, it seems, may require a better detective than yours truly to solve them.

To the Maxxx

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Okay, so Maxxxine will be difficult to discuss in my usual format here, but I’ll give it the old college try.  Ti West is quite a stylist when it comes to horror movies.  Friends recommended X a couple years back, and then it was revealed that it would be part of a trilogy, with Pearl coming next.  I’d seen these two and knew that I would watch Maxxxine when it came out.  More than just closure, these films all make heavy and obvious use of religion.  So much so that an extended piece could be written on that aspect alone.  I’ll try to restrain myself here.  Maxxxine is a direct sequel to X (Pearl was a prequel), following Maxine as an actress trying to break through in Hollywood.  Following the death of her X-rated film colleagues, she found an agent and has been trying to be cast in a horror film.  The movie starts with a home movie shot by her evangelist father advising her never to give up.

Just as Maxine wins the horror film role, a number of her friends in the adult entertainment industry are murdered.  Maxine refuses to assist the police, even when her best friend, who runs a video store, becomes a victim.  A private investigator is following her and she has him killed.  Those who saw X know she killed Pearl, and she’s willing to do as her daddy said, whatever it takes.  She decides to go to the PI’s client to try to stop the murders.  She discovers the man behind the violence is her father, who has learned about her X-rated work and believes she has a demon.  He has been killing her friends to lure her in and is about to brand her as a follower of Satan when the police arrive and a shootout occurs.

The publicity doesn’t hurt Maxine’s career prospects, even though she ends up killing her own father.  The movie is commentary on movie-making, fame, and Hollywood, as well as the potential evils wrought by religion.  My usual critique of the portrayal of religion applies.  Although Maxine’s father is made out to be a fundamentalist, when his plot is revealed it actually portrays him wearing a cassock.  He’s also shooting a snuff film to demonstrate the Devil’s doings.  A real fundamentalist wouldn’t wear such Catholic getup.  Many films that portray fundamentalists clearly don’t understand what separates them from other Christian denominations.  The entire X-trilogy is based on religion and how its constraints lead to horror.  There’s a lot to unpack here, even with the occasional gaff.

Going Viral

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Okay, so there are some pretty big plot holes, but Viral is nevertheless an effective horror film.  The “virus” is actually a parasite spread by blood, which carriers cough in your face, if they don’t kill you first in a fit of parasite-induced rage.  The really scary thing is that this movie was produced before Covid-19 and the government response, as presented in the movie, is somewhat believable.  Nevertheless, it retains its ability to be a story about family and loyalty.  There are some missed opportunities in that regard, but overall it’s fairly well done.  It certainly keeps the tension going and I feel some spoilers coming on so I’ll warn you here.  A Blumhouse production, it seems to have had a reasonable budget.  And there’s a solid attempt to have a storyline with characters you care about.

Sisters Stacy and Emma are trying to adjust to a new school system as news reports increasingly focus on a new, and lethal, virus.  Their California community is the site of the first U.S. outbreak and the initial panic isn’t unlike what happened in 2019.  I’m a little surprised that, given that development, the movie didn’t gain more residual watching.  In any case, a quarantine and curfew are set up, but the teens of the housing development decide to have a party.  Kids will be kids, after all.  Of course, an infected guy is there and Stacy, the older sister, gets infected.  Their parents were caught outside the quarantine zone, so they have to try to survive on their own.  Emma has a new boyfriend—the guy next door—and he urges Emma to leave her sister, but she won’t.  Martial law is declared and “nests” of the infected are being bombed by the government.  Emma and boyfriend manage to survive, but the rest of the town’s a wasteland.

As I say, the implications are the really scary part.  Governments have the mandate to protect the greatest number of people—isn’t that utilitarianism, by default?—and decide to cut their losses and destroy infected communities because there’s no stopping the disease.  Even as the gaps in the story kept coming up, I was asking myself would our government do such a thing.  I could find nothing to dissuade me that it would.  Self-preservation is human nature.  As is might makes right.  Our government, for my entire life, has consisted of the wealthy and one thing we know about those with money is that they’ll do whatever they can to protect their interests.  Oh, and there are a number of effective jump startles as well. But they’re not as scary as the government.

Unholy Conception

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Religious horror is difficult to get right.  Immaculate received reasonably positive reviews, and did well enough at the box office.  Its message of women being forced into reproductive roles unwillingly is certainly timely.  Viewers with religious training, as well as experience viewing quite a lot of horror, might be less impressed.  The basic premise isn’t bad: a convent in Italy, which has one of the nails from Jesus’ crucifixion, is using the biological material on the nail to genetically engineer a new messiah.  The movie follows the novice/nun Sister Cecilia, a virgin, as she joins the convent and discovers that she’s pregnant.  The entire community—apart from a jealous nun and a friend trying to warn Cecilia—welcomes the news, presenting Cecilia as the new Mary.

The convent, which has a history of torture, realizes that Cecilia might be reluctant.  Past sisters have, and she isn’t the first immaculate conception the resident priest (a former biologist) has engineered.  Realizing, by the second trimester, that something sinister is going on, Cecilia tries to escape but is caught and confined, and her soles are branded to prevent her from running away.  After killing the Mother Superior, a Cardinal, and the resident priest, she does escape, gives birth, and kills the baby.  It’s not difficult to see the social commentary involved, but this is body horror and it’s not about gross outs.  It is pretty tense and has several scary moments, but the plot leaves some rather large holes that might following it difficult.  It’s never explained, for example, how the genetic material ends up inside Cecilia without her knowing it.  For those who’ve spent years reading about Marian devotion, this is not an unexpected question.

Although this would be a candidate for Holy Sequel, there’s just something off about the religious elements of the film.  Having never been a nun, I can’t say for sure, but the convent life (apart from the engineering a messiah) seems inaccurate.  And although the Bible is quoted, it’s presented in an almost Protestant way.  The underlying religious imagery feels slightly askew.  Judging from what critics have said, that doesn’t seem to bother many viewers.  If you’re going to make a religious horror movie, it is possible to get away without doing your homework.  In the end, however, it shows.  The acting is quite good and the theological message is worth arguing over, but like many other religious horror films, it has been weighed in the scales and found wanting.

Late Shift

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M. L. Rio is best known for If We Were Villains, a book I have on my shelf but haven’t read yet.  She’s one of those rare PhDs who can write, and her punchy, irreverent style has a way of drawing you in.  Graveyard Shift is actually a novella (a cynic would say a way to get you to pay a full novel price on a piece a bit too short to qualify), so it’s a quick read.  It’s a little difficult to classify, genre-wise.  The copyright page suggests thriller, which means not-quite-horror, but with elements of it.  Taking place over one night (and just over 100 pages), its the story of how a college student journalist and her friends crack the case of a mysterious shallow grave they discover one night at their usual hangout, behind an abandoned church, Saint Anthony the Anchorite.  Edie, the journalist, has to find a story to headline the next day’s edition, and the grave provides it.

The story involves mushrooms and rats, sleep deprivation, and lots of smoking.  Still, it’s a well-crafted tale that holds your interest.  Of course, I noticed the centrality of the church to the story.  It’s so much a part of things that the disparate group of friends identify themselves as Anchorites.  An anchorite is essentially a hermit—a monk who prefers not to live communally (cenobites, a name taken up by the Hellraiser franchise, are monks in community).  Of course, the friends aren’t monks, just young people in a college town who like to be out at night, and maybe solve mysteries.  The church is both a focal point and a kind of vector in this world where unusual activities take place after dark.  It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the friends solve the mystery and begin to help address one another’s problems.

I like brief books.  I don’t mind moderately long novels—when they start getting over 400 pages I get a bit anxious.  I have to admit that Goodreads has made me conscious of how many books I read in a year.  And since I like to blog about books, it also helps to finish them in a timely way.  Besides, escapism is especially important at the moment.  If you like stories about college kids, under-employed professors, bartenders and others who manage to eke out a living before family and mortgage change everything in your life, you’ll probably like this one.  It’s not really a horror story, but it’ll keep you turning pages, which is what books of any size are meant to do.

A Different Village

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If I’m honest I’ll admit that I first found out about John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos from The Simpsons.  In one of the episodes, “Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken,” a “clip” is shown of a horror movie called The Bloodening.  A spoof on Village of the Damned, the scene caught my imagination and I was able to learn that it’d been taken from this movie.  This was many years ago, of course.  In any case, I went out and found a DVD of Village and found it less frightening than anticipated, but it left me curious.  It was easy enough to find out the book it was based on (it’s in the credits).  Now, well over a decade later I finally read it, but I’d forgotten nearly everything about the movie but the glowing eyes.  Having read the novel, I had to see the movie again.

Interestingly, the book is generally considered science fiction and the movie horror.  The two genres are closely related, of course.  The explanation for the children in the movie is a little sci-fi, but the framing is horror.  So much so that in Britain in 1960 it was nearly given an X rating (the censors didn’t like the glowing eyes).  As typical, when compared to today’s fare this is a tame little piece about some unruly children.  Of course they do get blown up at the end.  That may have been a spoiler.  I guess I can be unruly too.  In any case, sequences of self-harm, and even suicide, make this a reasonably scary movie.  The film has the same stiff upper lip that the book does, but otherwise it’s a modern horror classic.  I haven’t seen the 1995 remake, but it didn’t get very good reviews.

The movie doesn’t have as much moralizing as the novel does, but it raises the very real issue of how we socialize children.  I do suspect, however, that blowing them up when they’re all together is probably not the message they wanted us to take home.  Although far from a flawless film, this is quite intelligent for horror of the period.  Consensus is that horror “grew up” in 1968, but there were some premies, it seems.  Night of the Demon is another one from the period.  Horror has, I would argue, been intelligent from the start.  Dracula, although not a perfect story, has become a bona fide classic, and Frankenstein before it, had already been a literary touchstone for decades by the time the former was published.  Not bad for watching an episode of The Simpsons.

Special Delivery

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Deliver Us is a horror movie intentionally built around religion.  It hasn’t been discussed much on the sites I frequent, but I suspect that it should be more.  Yes, it gets aspects of religion wrong, but then most religious horror does.  And it leaves a lot unexplained.   Again, most religious horror also does.  The cinematography is bleak and beautiful, evoking a winter chill.  The story is built around a made up prophecy, but do I really need to say it a third time?  Fr. Fox is a Catholic priest in Russia and a former exorcist.  Like Fr. Karras, he doesn’t believe in demons, but his bishop really wants him to go to a convent to check out a possible genuine miracle.  Fr. Fox is about to become Mr. so he can marry his pregnant girlfriend.  Since she has to go to Estonia for a while, she encourages him to do this one last thing for the church.

Meanwhile, signs are occurring that the end times are arriving.  In the convent a secret society called Vox Dei is harvesting prophecies from people’s backs.  What sways Fox to go is that a renowned cuneiformist, Cardinal Russo, is there.  Fox wrote his dissertation on “alphabetic cuneiform”—that’d be Ugaritic, folks.  Not explaining where they got the human-skin scrolls, Russo needs Fox’s help in figuring out the language (it turns out to be cuneiform Zoroastrian).  The miracle is a weeping Madonna statue, but there’s also an immaculately pregnant nun.  She has twins in her, one the Messiah and the other the Antichrist.  Fox doesn’t believe any of this but when he learns that the Cardinal is going to kill the babies to prevent the end of the world, Fox convinces him to give up the wicked plan and they escape with the nun.

This is enough to give you a flavor of the movie.  I won’t give up the resolution but I will say it ends up revolving around the end of the world.  In general this is a pretty intelligent movie.  It borrows quite a lot from other films, including The Omen and The Shining, but it is fun to watch (if you don’t mind a bit of gore).  The tension mounts as Vox Dei tries to find the escaped priest, Cardinal, and nun and there are some legitimately scary scenes.  It was written and directed by Lee Roy Kunz, who also plays Fox.  I do think this deserves more in-depth consideration and had it been out in time, and had I known of it, I would’ve included it in Holy Horror.

Cuckoo’s Roost

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John Wyndham is someone I discovered through movies.  Often considered a science-fiction writer, his works cross over into horror, particularly on the silver screen.  Many years ago I read Day of the Triffids and, having seen Village of the Damned, wanted to read The Midwich Cuckoos.  It was a pretty long wait.  I kept thinking I might find a copy in a used bookstore, but it never happened.  When I saw a reprint edition I ordered it with some Christmas money.  There are some horror and sci-fi elements to the story, but there’s also a bit of thriller, as it’s called now, thrown in.  The book is quite philosophical because of the character Gordon Zellaby, a Midwich resident who keeps thinking about what is happening in terms that don’t match the expectations of other, more prosaic thinkers.  In case you’re not familiar:

Midwich becomes unapproachable for a period because an alien ship (the sci-fi part) has covered it.  Everyone in the village is asleep for a couple of days.  When they awake, generally no worse for wear, they soon discover that all the women of childbearing years are pregnant.  They all give birth about the same time to children that look eerily alike and have bright golden eyes.  The officials know this has happened but adopt a wait-and-see attitude.  Meanwhile, the locals get on with things but they discover these new children develop about twice as quickly as humans do and they can control people with their minds.  They also have collective minds so that their brainpower is quite above that of Homo sapiens.  Zellaby makes the connection with cuckoos—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and after they hatch shove the other chicks out of the nest.  Indeed, this is a story about what if cuckoos were humanoid aliens who tried the same thing with people.  Told with a British stiff upper lip.

The story slowly unfolds and gets scary as it grows.  I saw the movie quite a few years ago and the details were lost on me, so I was learning as I read.  I suspect that it differs from the book quite a bit.  Perhaps it’s the Britishisms that make this story less of a horror tale.  There’s a kind of jocularity to the style, at least for a good bit of it.  The serious issues of how governments and individuals interact is raised and discussed to a fair extent.  Even though the book is fairly short, there’s a lot going on here.  But now I need to watch the movie again.

Bad Taste

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There is a reason for watching bad movies, apart from the fact that they’re often found streaming for free.  Sometimes that reason is that they’re so bizarre that they’re almost surreal.  And sometimes the circumstances surrounding them are equally strange.  Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated was included in the set of movies I bought for Zontar: Thing from Venus.  Not one to be wasteful, I’m finally dutifully watching these before allowing myself to purchase new fare.  Given the fact that this had a theatrical release, I’m surprised that it’s not compared more often with Ed Wood’s oeuvre.  In any case, this is a very convoluted story and spoilers will follow.  You’ve been warned.

An international group of demon worshipping cannibals have a member who’s a professor that takes students on a “yeti hunting” expedition every few years.  The students are all killed but one, so that the yeti story can continue.  Viewers (if any) aren’t clued in to this until the last few minutes of the film but early on you can spot the cannibal theme.  So four students in the professor’s Mystery-Machine-like van, go on a hunt while staying with a “colleague.”  Naturally the students start getting killed.

Using some of the worst dialogue ever written, the clueless coeds keep allowing themselves to be led into situations no sane person would.  The chosen “survivor” discovers the plot and is amazed that the creature was (blindingly obviously) a guy in a suit trying to scare them to death.  The cannibals prefer their meat with no bruises.  Much more could be said about the ineptitude of the movie but it ends up having an interesting, if tragic, coda.

Michael Findlay, who made exploitation films with his wife Roberta, was actually sliced to death in a helicopter accident on top of the (then) Pan Am Building in Manhattan.  This happened three years after this movie was released.  In those three years he’d directed eight more films, so his last movie before being mutilated was not the one in my Beast collection.  Quite often when I watch bad movies I have trouble finding any discussion of them at all.  Shriek of the Mutilated is discussed at some length in two books—not surprisingly published by McFarland (they have great pop culture titles).  Until I discovered this movie, in with ten others in a collection, I’d never heard about it.  Of course, the theatrical release was for drive-ins and was limited to Texas, Florida and California.  There can be a lot of information to dig out when people stoop to talking about bad movies.

Release Date

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July 16.  That’s the release date for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  If you’re so inclined, preordering helps to earn a book attention.  (I know it’s pricey, but thanks for considering it for a second.)  This book has been, like most books, a long time in the making.  As my wife will attest, reading the proofs nearly sent me into a spiral this time around.  It wasn’t because they were bad (I only found 7 mistakes) but it was because of my own doubt about how well I’d done this one.  I found myself between elation at some parts, and dread at others.  I really like this book but I spent my proofreading journey anticipating what critics would say.  I do take a few chances in this one and it has what I believe to be an important message.

Writing books is like walking into a library naked.  There may not be many people there, but those who are can see more than you want them to.  I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  I learned a lot about Washington Irving doing this research.  I learned a lot about Halloween—that’s one of my favorite chapters.  I also like the conceit I applied to the book itself as a labyrinth.  And I’m already looking forward to reading more renditions of the myth once the dust settles a little.  Reading the proofs took a good portion of the weekend, as well as after-work time the previous week.  I could focus on little else.  Books, you see, are parts of their authors.  I feel a little bit crazy for even writing them in the first place.

That having been said, I’m chuffed with a July publication date.  The best time for Halloween books to be available is the summer.  My last two Halloween titles (Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible) both came out in November or December.  Not that there were angry mobs at Barnes & Noble demanding them at the end of October.  The other deadline I’d set myself was to have this published before Lindsey Beer’s reboot of Sleepy Hollow hit theaters.  I seem to have managed that one by quite a margin; there’s still been no release date announced.  For her, that is.  I just received mine yesterday.  I guess it’s time to start touching base with those good folks in the Hudson Valley who expressed an interest in the project when I first told them about it.  I’m anticipating Halloween already.

Bloody Lips

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Jean Rollin’s vision of vampires was a strange blend of tradition and art film.  Having seen his Shiver of the Vampires, I was curious to see what other vampire films he’d done.  Lips of Blood is the one I happened upon. (I didn’t see the poster until after watching; hopefully it won’t offend.)  In French, it is a Euro-horror from the seventies and it has female vampires who tend to seduce rather than frighten.  The unwilling victims, however, do show fear when they realize what is happening.  So, a perfumer (I said it was French) is taken by an advertising poster for a new scent at a launch party.  He thinks he recognizes the castle in the photograph, but many of his childhood memories have vanished.  His mother intends to keep it that way.  The powerful impression of the photograph, however, leads him to find the place.  He recalls meeting a young woman there who comforted him when he was lost as a boy.

Despite his mother’s efforts, and with some support from the mysterious lady herself, he persists.  He finds the name of the chateau on a postcard and immediately heads for it.  The woman is still there, but in a coffin.  His mother shows up and warns him that she suppressed the memory because the young lady was a vampire.  She had killed the boy’s father.  His mother and her hirelings failed to kill them and she now asks her son to help.  In love with this mystery women, despite her vampire problem, he secretly spares her.  The two decide to aim for a deserted island in their coffin, where they can prey on the seamen who will inevitably come ashore in their island paradise.  Plenty of lingering shots and images that must be symbolic also appear.  When the man visits a cinema, Shiver of the Vampires is playing on the screen.

I’ve been pondering how differently vampires are portrayed in media.  I told my wife long ago that vampires and pirates tend to make the best movies.  That was a throwaway comment from an otherwise forgotten conversation, but I do think that vampires were made for cinema.  If you haven’t explored you might be surprised just how many vampire films there are.  They stretch from art house films such as this, where they are beautiful women, to loathsome, pasty creatures that you can barely stand to watch.  The middle ground, the aristocratic vampire modeled on Lord Byron, seems to have retained the largest market share.  That didn’t stop the renegade director Jean Rollin from suggesting that vampires—fearing dawn, and crosses—might be women forever young, and which, for a French perfumer, might be preferable to the living.

Late Night

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If you lived through the seventies, Late Night with the Devil will take you back a bit.  It’s one of the more creative possession movies I’ve seen, but what really makes it stand out is the insider winks plentifully on offer.  Jack Delroy is a late-night variety show host wanting to top Carson.  His ratings have been up and down, and he decides to make his 1977 Halloween episode his ticket back into the game.  His guests that night include a psychic, a James Randi-like debunker, and a parapsychologist and her demonically possessed charge, Lilly.  A character resembling Anton LaVey, Lilly’s father, had raised her to be a child sacrifice to the demon Abraxas.  The broadcast even mentions Ed and Lorraine Warren, as well as The Exorcist.  Someone knows what the paranormal scene was like in the seventies.

The psychic has authentic contact with what he believes is Delroy’s deceased wife and while the debunker, well, debunks him, the psychic nevertheless dies after a mysterious attack.  Delroy insists that the parapsychologist summon Lilly’s demon, while on stage.  The debunker claims that what the audience saw was a case of group hypnosis, but the demon finally attacks, killing everyone but Delroy and Lilly.  Toward the end the layers of claimed deception become so deep that it’s difficult to know, at first, how to interpret the ending.  Or whether you are supposed to “believe” the climatic demonic attack, of if you’re supposed to conclude that it was part of the mass hypnosis.  What is certain is that religion is front and center in this horror, but the demon ensures that in any case.

The taped pieces between segments of the show make it clear that this is all about ratings.  Indeed, Delroy sacrificed his wife’s health and life to try to break into the lead.  The real demon here is capitalism.  The desire to be on top has outweighed every other and hints are given throughout that Delroy isn’t as innocent as he pretends to be.  Still, the main thing is that the movie gets the paranormal seventies in America just about right.  The disturbing implication is that people are suggestible to the point of not being able to distinguish reality from manipulation.  That pall hangs over the entire movie plot as well as the ending.  This kind of meta critique isn’t intended to detract from what is really quite a good horror movie.  It is believable in the context of the world it devises, and that world includes demons.

Proofing Yourself

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Some publishers give you advance warning.  Many do not.  As a struggling writer, after I submit one manuscript I move on to the next project, knowing proofs will eventually come.  The thing is, I’m obsessive.  When I’m in the middle of a project I can think of little else, thoughts of it leaking into other activities throughout the day.  I’m in the middle of one such project, as I have been for at least three months now.  Then the proofs came.  If you write books you know that proofs always come with deadlines.  You need to drop everything and prioritize them.  I read many academic books with tons of errors, and I think I know why.  If proofs come at an inopportune time, you read them as other required activities (I’m looking at you, 9-2-5) permit.  For me, it’s difficult to let go of my present project.  My current fascination.

The proofs for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived yesterday.  I’m excited for this book.  I have hopes of reaching out to local magazines and pitching stories about the Legend this autumn.  But I’m red hot into a new project.  My mind is of an age where there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember precisely what I was thinking if I lay aside my present project for a week to read the proofs.  Indeed, the last two weekends have been so busy with other things that I haven’t had time to watch any horror movies at all.  Just yesterday I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling hopelessly behind already, a feeling that lasted all day.  Then at 4 p.m. the proofs arrived. ( For context, 4 a.m. is late for me.  I’ve been waking up later due to that pointless ritual of annual time changes which, like everything else, the government can’t seem to get right.  In any case, proofs trump all.)

My time is extremely regimented.  I had to drop all committee work at our local faith community because the meetings were all in the evening, scheduled for after when I’d normally be asleep.  I wake early to write and read before the snowplow of the 9-2-5 throws me off the road for another day.  Everyone who talks to me feels that they don’t have time for what’s important any more.  The proofs are here and I’ll get them back by the deadline.  I’ve never been late once told when they have to be in.  My accountant tells me that anything that leads to royalties, no matter how small, counts as a second job.  I hope this one sells well enough to make it feel like that.  In the meantime, please don’t come knocking because I’ll pretend I’m not at home.

Lights, Cam

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Techno-horror is an example of how horror meets us where we are.  When I work on writing fiction, I often reflect how our constant life online has really changed human beings and has given us new things to be afraid of.  I posted some time ago about Unfriended, which is about an online stalker able to kill people IRL (in real life).  In that spirit I decided to brave CAM, which is based on  an internet culture of which I knew nothing.  You see, despite producing online content that few consume, I don’t spend much time online.  I read and write, and the reading part is almost always done with physical books.  As a result, I don’t know what goes on online.  Much more than I ever even imagine, I’m sure.

CAM is about a camgirl.  I didn’t even know what that was, but I have to say this film gives you a pretty good idea and it’s definitely NSFW.  Although, having said that, camgirl is, apparently, a real job.  There is a lot of nudity in the movie, in service of the story, and herein hangs the tale.  Camgirls can make a living by getting tips in chatrooms for interacting, virtually, with viewers and acting out their sexual fantasies.  Now, I’ve never been in a chatroom—I barely spend any time on social media—so this culture was completely unfamiliar to me.  Lola_Lola is a camgirl who wants to get into the top fifty performers on the platform  she uses.  Then something goes wrong.  Someone hacks her account, getting all her money, and performing acts that Lola_Lola never does.  What makes this even worse is that the hacker is apparently AI, which has created a doppelgänger of her. AI is the monster.

I know from hearing various experts at work that deep fakes such as this can really take place.  We would have a very difficult, if not impossible, time telling a virtual person from a real one, online.  People who post videos online can be copied and imitated by AI with frightening verisimilitude.  What makes CAM so scary in this regard is that it was released in 2018 and now, seven years later such things are, I suspect, potentially real.  Techno-horror explores what makes us afraid in this virtual world we’ve created for ourselves.  In the old fashioned world sex workers often faced (and do face) dangers from clients who take their fantasies too far.  And, as the movie portrays, the police seldom take such complaints seriously.  The truly frightening aspect is there would be little that the physical police could do in the case of cyber-crime.  Techno-horror is some of the scariest stuff out there, IMHO.

Not Quite

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There’s a debate among horror nerds that goes like this: “Blumhouse or A24?”  If this is Greek to you, Blumhouse and A24 are entertainment production companies that both make notable horror films.  I’ve always leaned a bit toward A24, to the point of making a list of their horror films and watching them when I can find them on streaming services.  Since I generally don’t read about movies before watching them, I wasn’t sure what Climax was going to be.  Distributed by A24, I figured it would be intelligent horror and it may have been.  Honestly, it was a little difficult to tell.  Nihilistic and non-scripted, it’s a movie with a very slight premise: a French dance troupe holds an after-practice party in which somebody spikes the sangria with LSD.  The entire first half of the movie, practically, is dancers doing their stuff to an incessant techno-beat.  I honestly don’t know why I kept with it.

Since it’s unscripted, most of the young people talk about sex, and occasionally other topics.  They begin to get paranoid when the acid kicks in, and throw one of the dancers out in dangerous winter conditions where he freezes to death.  They think he spiked the drink.  The troupe manager, also a suspect, has a young son that she locks into an electrical closet for protection, with predictable results.  Since she also drank the sangria, the troupe supposes she must be innocent.  A third non-drinker, who is pregnant, also gets accused.  Meanwhile some dancers keep on dancing while others start to pair off, all of them but the pregnant one, tripping hard.  In the end the police arrive and find dead or stoned dancers and really that’s about it.

How is this horror?  Psychologically, mostly.  There is a little body horror, but mostly it’s just viewers wondering what is going to happen.  Which, it turns out, is not much.  There are some religious references in the movie, which maybe offer a little depth, but really this is largely a filmed rave-like dance with a minimal storyline tossed in for good measure.  Also, it’s in French, meaning subtitles are important for following whatever plot there is.  Wikipedia leads me to believe Gaspar Noé, the “writer”-director is fond of making polarizing and controversial movies.  There’s nothing surprising about young people being interested in music and sex, nor, for that matter alcohol and drugs.  All of this is entirely conventional.  It isn’t enough for me to lose faith in A24, but it does make me wonder what they were thinking.