Incidental Ghosts

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Although it’s a bit too close to torture porn for my liking, Incident in a Ghostland does feature strong female characters.  And it deals with dissociation in a somewhat intelligent way.  The film, by the way, is also known as simply Ghostland.  I don’t remember where I got the recommendation for it, but I would warn off those who are squeamish (and I include myself in that number).  It begins with a dedication to Lovecraft, but the story resembles a different kind of horror.  It begins with a mother moving to an isolated house with her two daughters.  The night they move in, they are attacked by two psychopaths.  Beth, the sister who wants to be a horror writer, has to witness her sister being raped and her mother being stabbed before she wakes from the nightmare many years later.

She converted this childhood incident into her bestselling novel, Incident in a Ghostland.  She’s happily married and has a young son.  When her sister calls her, clearly in the midst of a fit, Beth goes to visit only to find that Vera, her sister, is still living that horrible night over and over.  Things get pretty creepy but Vera manages to snap Beth out of her fantasy of having become a successful writer.  They are both still in the situation where they’re being attacked.  Their mother is dead and the psychopaths dress the teens up as dolls while one of them fondles them, torturing them if they don’t play along.  I’ve stopped watching movies for less.  By this point I was pretty far into it and decided to see it through.  I’m not sure I’m glad I did.

The film has its share of creepy dolls.  It’s also quite scary.  The violence is extreme and unrelenting.  As I’ve noted many times before, I try not to read about movies before I watch them.  I rely on recommendations quite a bit but I didn’t use to write down the recommender, so I’m not sure who, or which website, suggested this one.  I might think twice before following them again.  Cinematically, the movie is well made.  The nod to Lovecraft is a bit of misdirection.  The dissociation seems real enough.  Beth slips back into believing her future as a famous horror writer when present reality overwhelms her.  This seems to be what actually happens when real dissociation occurs.  You keep hoping that the imagined future is the real one.  It may be, but only after getting through the horror of the past.

Horror Lite

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Since movies are endlessly referential among themselves, Death Becomes Her brought to mind other films.  The last time I watched it, over three decades ago, it didn’t stay with me.  Looking for something to fit the autumnal mood, and seeing that it was listed, in part, as body horror, I thought to give it another chance.  In my mind I’d confused it with, of all things, Beetlejuice.  The latter didn’t really capture my imagination either, but the similarities were more imagined than real.  A better comparison might be The Witches of Eastwick, although that film portrays female power in a better light.  Another comparison that came to mind was The Substance, which was much better done.  Death Becomes Her isn’t without its charms, however.  The acting is good although the pacing is a bit slow.  The idea works, but the writing often doesn’t.

Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp go way back.  When they meet up after a lackluster show in which Madeline stars, Helen’s fiancé Ernest falls in love with Madeline and marries her.  He’s a wealthy plastic surgeon.  Helen, depressed, lets herself go but 14 years later has written a bestselling novel.  At the party, Madeline, who’s concerned about her aging, and her declining career, is amazed to find Helen trim and youthful.  And earning back the attention of Ernest.  Madeline visits a mysterious woman who has an age-reversing formula and she provokes Ernest afterwards, as their relationship has been falling apart for years.  He pushes her down the stairs, breaking her neck.  Helen helps him with a scheme to dispose of her body, but Madeline comes back to life, clinically dead.  The body horror comes in with the abuses heaped on the women’s bodies.

There’s a kind of misogynistic undercurrent that isn’t really counterbalanced by the humor.  Ernest is the victim, mainly because he can’t control his own passion for Madeline.  Then Helen.  In the end, he’s remembered as a noble soul while the women take care of each other but fall apart nonetheless.  There’s some social commentary here, but not as much as comes through in The Substance.  And the empowered women aren’t the winners as they are in The Witches of Eastwick.  The humor isn’t as obvious as Beetlejuice (yes, in my mind they’re still connected).  Over the years Death Becomes Her has become a cult classic, and for some viewers, part of their autumnal viewing.  I did appreciate the gothic castle and the perhaps a little too constant thunderstorming.  It was fun enough, and I’m glad to have some of my memories of what goes where refreshed. Still, women deserve better.

Another Peeping

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I’ve become a bit cagey about found footage horror films because they often make me queasy.  With my condition, such nausea can last for days so it’s just not worth it.  This is a shame because there are some very good examples of this sub-genre.  I recently met another horror fan in the area and he suggested Butterfly Kisses.  The camera doesn’t move too much, and, he said, it’s a film worth watching.  He was right.  It’s very meta.  It has layers.  And it’s unusual in that it both deconstructs and participates in the found footage to great effect.  To start at the outside and work our way in, Erik Kristopher Myers leads a camera crew that has been hired by Gavin York, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker to film him making a documentary.  That documentary is about two students, Sophia and Feldman, who are making a documentary for college on “Peeping Tom,” a local urban legend.

The set-up is intentionally like The Blair Witch project, setting itself in Maryland, with film students as victims.  Eduardo Sánchez, co-director of Blair Witch, appears in the film, debunking the movie Gavin York is making.  Each of these layers adds potential opportunity for any of the three sets of filmmakers to bend the truth, if not outright fabricate the story.  It’s very cleverly done.  Not only does it include Sánchez, who is a real-life found-footage horror film maker, but it also incorporates Matt Lake, author of a couple of the Weird US books, including Weird Maryland (and Weird Pennsylvania, which I have on my shelf).  In a sense, movies like this warn against gullibility.  In another sense they encourage it since people quite often have trouble distinguishing between cinema and reality.  The layers only add to the veracity.

In case the title seems inexplicable, butterfly kisses are when a person’s face is close enough to brush your own with their eyelashes, causing you to blink.  Peeping Tom is an entity that appears after staring at a certain railroad tunnel for an hour without blinking.  Then, every time you blink after that, he’s a bit closer.  When he finally reaches you, you die.  He uses butterfly kisses to get you to take the last blink.  Throughout the movie doubt is cast on those telling this account, but at the same time, there is enough evidence that you’re not sure, in the movie diegesis, if it might not be real.  And the camera motion isn’t too bad.  It’s effective found footage with a message.

Whose Stars?

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Star Trek or Star Wars?  I used to hear this among sci-fi fans.  I grew up with Star Trek in the sixties and saw Star Wars in the theater.  Science fiction can shape our future.  Both for good and for bad.  I’m convinced, for example, that many Silicon Valley technocrats are Star Trek people who grew up emulating Mr. Spock.  No emotion, pure rationality.  That idea has come to stand for the faulty equation of brain = computer.  This is incorrect.  As AI began to be developed, the idea was that if we could rationally program computers with human rational thought, they could be taught to “think.”  They clearly forget pon farr from the episode Amok Time.  Even the full-blooded Vulcans know that logic will break down once in a while.  Even now Al is demonstrating that in real time.

Star Wars, on the other hand, depicted a paperless universe.  Nobody, not even old Obi Wan, or the even older Yoda, is shown with an ancient book.  Reading isn’t part of their life.  Tech is.  This idea, I suspect, helped spur on ebooks.  And audiobooks.  I’ve been a proponent of environmentalism since the seventies.  One of the few areas where I think the exploitation of trees is necessary, however, is in the making of books.  The other day I was in a very hopeful meeting where it was pointed out that there are moves afoot to start limiting screen time.  Get people reading books again.  I’m not really conflicted about this, despite my excessive work on this blog.  I spend very little time on social media.  Apart from this blog it’s maybe ten minutes a day.  I spend, if at all possible, at least an hour reading books each day.

Many analysts tend to think that the internet hasn’t really made human life better.  More convenient certainly.  But better?  There was a kind of exquisite longing to reading about a book in a catalogue, walking to a bookstore, ordering it and waiting a few weeks before receiving it.  Such things caused no harm.  Is it logical to speed things up if we can?  Sometimes clearly yes.  At other times, it’s fun to run amok.  To take a walk without your phone.  To pick up a book to spend an unrushed hour or two reading.  These were pleasures.  Now we turn on our devices and hear about the chaos Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are causing.  All the deaths and suffering they wreak on the innocent.  Would Mr. Spock say this is logical?  Even Luke Skywalker would pull out a book to escape for a while.

Photo credit: NASA

Burton and Bats

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Among the directors I more or less trust, Tim Burton seems to share my aesthetic sensibilities much of the time.  Some of his films I don’t really care for, but I have seen the balance of his feature offerings.  Since I’ve been watching Burton, and since we have DVDs of the Batman anthology that started the present movie trend featuring both Batman and the Joker, I decided to watch it again for the first time in many years.  Certainly the last time was before I began blogging.  Before Burton’s 1989 movie, the last Batman feature film had been in the sixties and it was campy.  The idea of making Batman serious drama representing a disturbed hero was quite the buzz at the time.  Of course Burton and his followers were eclipsed by Christopher Nolan, and Heath Ledger’s Joker outshone that of Jack Nicholson, but Burton’s film isn’t bad.

The pacing is a little slow.  Things have speeded up in the intervening years, however, and attention spans have shortened.  Michael Keaton does a good job playing a pensive Batman.  Nicholson was, for those of us who grew up in the sixties, a satisfyingly unhinged Joker.  The sets also stood out to me.  Burton concocted a gothic Gotham City that I appreciated.  And strangely, although it’s been at least a decade and a half, there are scenes I remembered precisely.  The nod to comic book origins with the Joker’s excessively long pistol struck me both in the eighties and now as strangely nonsensical.  After the build-up of the Bat-plane, it’s brought down by a single bullet?  Overall, however, the movie holds up pretty well.  Nolan’s trilogy is better, but then, Ledger’s Joker is a legend.

I mentioned that a DVD anthology exists.  I remember well going all over trying to buy a copy in the early 2000s.  Mainly it was because my wife and I had watched the original film and Batman Returns in the theater but we hadn’t bothered with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.  The latter two, after both Burton and Keaton had left, weren’t very good.  I watched the two on my own after finally finding the DVDs and have never had any desire to see either one again.  They’d received poor reviews in the first place, but I really don’t like dropping things in the middle.  Burton’s Batman is darker than some of his other work.  So much so that it startled me a little upon rewatching the film.  It did, however, kick-start an interest in bringing these characters back to the big screen and, although tripping a time or two (that pistol!) was still satisfying to watch as the days shorten.

CronenDrome

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David Cronenberg is an auteur.  Even before I knew his name I’d watched a couple of his films and I’ve been trying to do some backfilling as I can.  Videodrome finally became available at no extra cost, and I wish that I’d been able to see it before writing Holy Horror.  Before I get to that, however, maybe a little explanation is in order.  Videodrome is a broadcast signal that alters reality when someone views it.  Max Renn runs a sleazy television station and he finds Videodrome while looking for new salacious content.  After that, reality and hallucination and new reality become confused.  With Cronenberg’s characteristic body horror, Max’s abdomen becomes a kind of video player and he’s sent to kill a rival of Videodrome.  At least that’s what I think was going on.  He then begins working for New Flesh.

There’s slime and blood and bodies.  Parts of it reminded me of Cronenberg’s later eXistenZ, and even The Fly.  Guns that become bodies and bodies that become weapons.  There’s also a fair amount of philosophizing and social commentary over the role of television.  Specifically, the role sex and violence on screen has on viewers.  (Televisions turn into bodies too.)  The biblical angle comes in after Max has been programmed and reprogrammed, for and then against, Videodrome.  He becomes “the video word made flesh.”  This modified quote from the opening of John’s gospel is significant in his conversion experience.  The plot is a bit confusing, but we see Max transform from a man in control of his own destiny into the pawn for a sinister organization that claims to be trying to do away with those who are inspired by onscreen sex and violence.

Videodrome is a movie that has re-become strangely relevant in the era of scrolling.  One of the characters, Brian O’Blivion, believes marathon viewing makes television replace everyday life.  Ironically, many people experience this with their phones now.  The movie came before cell phones, or at least cell phone popularity.  Certainly before they had screens built in.  Videodrome was well received in the early eighties, and interestingly, my own viewing of it had to await various streaming deals to align.  (And who doesn’t subscribe to a streaming service or two these days?)  The main service I use was charging $15 for it the last time I’d looked.  Then on a weekend after chores, suddenly you could watch it for free, with commercials.  Like a fly, I’m easily drawn into the trap. Perhaps I’ll be scrolling before long.

Pick Up

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Although it came recommended by streaming services, I’d given The Black Phone a pass.  Seeing it mentioned a few times in a book I was reading, I decided I’d better give in.  Since it was an unexpected success, I suppose it got a lot of press.  In any case, it is scary but the violence is off-putting, at least to me.  The gritty story matter, however, doesn’t make it unexpected.  So, a serial killer is abducting boys in North Denver.  Finny’s best friend is taken.  His sister has dreams that reveal something of the truth, but their alcoholic father tries to beat the belief out of her.  (Not that it’s an excuse, but her mother also listened to her dreams and that lead to her suicide.)  Then Finny is abducted.  The killer keeps him in an escape-proof basement.  Then the kids who’ve died start calling him on the eponymous telephone.

The instructions the kids give him don’t always directly help with his escape, beyond giving him courage.  Meanwhile, his sister has dreams (except for one night when her profane prayer in the morning is sure to make some viewers blush).  The dreams are taken seriously by the police, but her father is less-than-pleased.  Although he’s repentant at the end, the punishment he gives his daughter is about as severe as the killer doles out to the boys before killing them.  And there’s kid-on-kid violence.  Finny and his sister both get kicked around, literally.  In other words, there’s a lot of threat of, and actual violence.  There’s also a fair amount of religion involved.

Finny’s sister has a ritual that she uses to invoke the significant dreams.  It involves, you guessed it, a Bible.  A Gideon New Testament.  Also a prayer card of the Virgin Mary and a cross.  This makes the movie worthy of Holy Sequel.  And, of course, appropriate for the scary movie season.  I think there may be a spiritual lesson here, but I prefer horror with supernatural monsters.  The supernatural characters in this film are all good guys.  After they’re dead, that is.  In life some of them were also violent individuals.  So, for people like me there were a few triggers with the alcoholic father and the way that children are beaten around.  As well as a psychopath.  The movie was well made, however, and the mask of the villain is decidedly creepy.  Horror that taps into religion often has a depth that makes people take notice.  And if done well, it shows at the box office.

Talking to Vampires

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Perhaps it’s the unremitting dissatisfaction of Louis, but I had trouble getting into the novel Interview with the Vampire.  I put it down for over a year before picking it back up and finishing it.  I wasn’t inclined to see the movie, but it’s the season for vampires, and since it was a commercial and critical success, I gave in.  Although I still found the story depressing, the movie works fairly well.  The A-list of handsome actors gave me pause, but they seem to have taken to their roles pretty readily.   In case you’re unfamiliar, Louis is turned into a vampire in the eighteenth century in Louisiana by Lestat.  Lestat is a French vampire and, for many years, the only other one that Louis knows.  To convince Louis to stay with him, Lestat saves one of Louis’ victims, a young girl named Claudia, turning her into a vampire.  After thirty years as a child, she too becomes dissatisfied and “kills” Lestat.

Free from Lestat’s influence, in Paris Louis and Claudia find Armand, who has a theater full of vampires.  Claudia is killed by exposure to sunlight, for killing Lestat, but Louis is rescued by Armand.  Still dissatisfied, Louis returns to New Orleans where he finds Lestat alive, and by the end of the eponymous interview, quite well.

The movie sets its own rules for what harms a vampire.  Crucifixes don’t bother them, nor does garlic deter them.  Staking them doesn’t work.  They can be dismembered, burned to death, and exposed to sunlight, however.  Vampires have a flexible mythology.  Even though they can move much faster than a human, they don’t always use this skill when fighting one with another.  As I think over this, the movies that have multiple vampires often do similar things; fights between immortals hold their own contradictions, it seems.

With the screenplay written by the author of the novel, it’s no surprise that the film doesn’t appear to deviate in any major way from Anne Rice’s printed story.  Of course, it’s been a few years since I’ve read it.  Apart from the difficulties in consistency mentioned above, the film is well made.  Sympathy for Louis grows readily enough, even though his disappointment at his vampire state remains intact.  Visually it scratches an itch for a (mostly) period vampire piece.  The child vampire—the most striking element in the novel—remains compelling in the movie.  The time is compressed somewhat from the original story.  Given time I may warm up to the series.  I’ve never explored The Vampire Chronicles further, but perhaps I shall.

Carrieing On

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There can be little doubt that horror grew up in the seventies.  If I wanted to sound academic I’d say “the long seventies” since the dam burst in 1968.  I consider movies “major” if I heard about them.  Living in a small town with little money, movies had to be big to get my attention and there were plenty I heard about as I was growing up.  (I didn’t see most of them until years later.)  These are the horror classics of these days and most of the time when my wife and I watch horror together it’s from the classics.  While watching Carrie together this holiday season, I was once again struck by how much religion plays into the story.  There’s likely a reason McFarland chose the remake of Carrie to feature on the cover of Holy Horror.

Stephen King’s story is so well known there’s no need to summarize, but I’d highlight just how religious Margaret White is, in evidence.  This was possible in 1976 because Rosemary’s Baby opened the way in 1968.  The Exorcist in 1973 used religion as its main vehicle.  The next stop for this train is usually The Omen in 1976, but we also find Carrie at that same stop.  The Amityville Horror came out in 1979 with its priestly abuses.  All of these films used the Bible and religion in very different ways, but they were all major horror films of that decade.  I heard of others, of course.  People talked about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), and Jaws (1975), even where I grew up.  (Well, Jaws was a major hit, it’s just I didn’t think of it as horror at the time.)  And although nobody I knew saw Magic (1978), it made it into ads I saw and read in my small town and remembered for years.  This latter bevy of films didn’t have religion in them, but they all demonstrated how much horror had grown up that decade.  As long as we’re using the “long” moniker, Friday the 13th showed up in 1980.

This was a heady time to be growing up, even in a small town.  I didn’t see Carrie until much later.  It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing my mother would take me to the theater to see.  I’d heard Stephen King’s name, of course.  In English class we were assigned one of his short stories in an anthology.  Horror ebbs and flows, just like any cultural phenomenon, but it had to be taken seriously once the long seventies hit.  People were paying a lot of money to be scared.  And a significant portion of those horror classics used religion to move them along.

Falconry

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Some years back I read Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and the two follow-up volumes.  My interest in them was reignited when I started seeing them being branded as dark academia.  The home is really a kind of school and the images offer a feeling compatible with other dark academia works for children.  Then, reading about Tim Burton, I realized one of the few movies of his I hadn’t seen was the one based on this book.  Now, it has been long enough that the storyline has faded a bit, but I’m pretty sure the movie took some liberties with the original tale.  Even before seeing the movie, it seemed to me that Burton’s distinctive style would be a good match for what I remembered of the tale. I didn’t know it was a Burton movie when I first learned about it.

The best way to be introduced to the story is to read Riggs’ books, but the basic idea is that “peculiar” children—those with strange abilities—are kept in secret locations by Ymbryne, peculiar women that can turn into birds.  Miss Peregrine, for example.  They are kept safe from Hollowgasts, monsters that want to eat their eyes, and Wights, Hollowgasts that eat enough eyes to appear human.  The children are kept safe in time loops created by Ymbryne, where everyone stays the same age and they can hide from Wights and “Hollows.”  Jake’s grandfather was in Miss Peregrine’s home, but he decided to leave to hunt down the Wights and Hollows.  When he’s killed, Jake wants to find out if all the stories he told were true.  His father, thinking his son has mental issues, agrees to go on holiday with him and Jake finds and befriends the peculiars at the school.  They’re stuck in 1943.

When a Wight follows Jake to Miss Peregrine’s loop, the children have to fight the Hollows and Wights to rescue her.  And Jake has to make a decision whether to stay in 1943 or go back to 2016 where things haven’t been so great for him.  You get the picture.  The movie’s not bad.  It threw me a bit not to have the music by Danny Elfman.  Again, the subject matter would seem to have suited his particular style.  I remember hearing about the movie when it came out a decade ago.  It didn’t make a huge splash, and nobody else I know had read the books so I didn’t see the film back then.  Burton is a director that I’ve followed more or less steadily since his second film.  I have a little more catching up to do, however, peculiar as that may seem.

Picking on Poltergeist

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It’s not nice to pick on the elderly, I know, but Poltergeist is one movie where I disagree with the critics.  One of my “old movies,” I saw it sometime back in the eighties and although there were scary scenes, it felt rather lackluster to me.  That doesn’t mean that I haven’t watched it several times, of course.  As one of the horror films that my wife will see with me, we pulled it out this October and it just felt silly to me.  Part of the reason is that it doesn’t seem to have the style of either Steven Spielberg or Tobe Hooper.  The story is a bit too protracted and apart from the over-the-top ending it’s not clear what the “poltergeists” are.  I’m probably forgetting what it was like to see it in the eighties when it was new and fresh.

Or maybe it’s just that far scarier movies have come out since then.  Reading about it afterwards, it was strange to see how highly rated Poltergeist is among critics.  For me, the problem  was partially the illogic of parts of it.  A tree tries to eat a kid and the authorities aren’t called?  The neighbors didn’t see anything.  If the whole development was built on a graveyard, why does only one house show it?  And after many years have passed?  Naturally, the movie does have some classic moments.  When Marty (who is a rather silly character, along the lines of scientists in a John Carpenter film) pulls off his face, that was shocking the first time.  And Zelda Rubenstein does a great job as the psychic.  Much of the rest of it doesn’t make sense.  Why decide to stay that last night, given what’s happened before?  Of course, without that night there’s no climax.

The fault must be my own.  Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen enough movies now that the input of two directors with different visions seems to’ve pulled the film in too many directions.  It feels much more like a Spielberg movie than it does a Hooper film.  Where’s the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (also an old movie) subtlety and social commentary?  Of course, Hooper’s next film was Lifeforce, which, although fun to watch, also seems not to know where it wants to go.  I know that Poltergeist was a formative movie in the horror genre.  It was a big budget success.  Perhaps the relative dearth of religious explanation hurts it.  There’s plenty of talk of when happens when we die, but it doesn’t have the backing of the conviction of a Fr. Merrin or even (God help us!) Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Or maybe I need to let go and just watch it for fun.

Exorcising Emily

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Perhaps after The Exorcist, the demonic possession movie cited with the greatest respect is The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  This 2005 movie is based, in part, on the true case of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died after undergoing several exorcisms, beginning in 1975.  Sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop, but after reading about The Exorcist the timing of all of this struck me.  Somehow reading about it in Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson’s “The Exorcist” Effect, hadn’t stuck with me.  William Peter Blatty published the eponymous novel in 1971.  This was based, in part, on a case from 1949, over twenty years earlier.  The novel was a bestseller and, of course, adapted into William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973.  That movie was a blockbuster, and is probably the single biggest influence in the current perceptions of demonic possession.  What caught Blatty’s attention in the first place was how rare exorcism was.  And one was held in 1949?

Anneliese Michel had been undergoing psychiatric treatment since 1970.  It was only five years later, after the release of both the novel and movie, that exorcism was suggested as a possible cure.  It may be impossible to know if the priest whom the Michel family approached had read the novel or seen the film.  One thing is certain, however.  The Exorcist brought the topic back into popular consciousness in the western world by then.  Yes, in the United States it was pop culture, but the film was taken with such seriousness that it filtered into everyday consciousness as well.  Although banned in parts of Britain, that consciousness had entered Europe as well.  Was the idea to treat Michel by exorcism part of what Laycock and Harrelson termed “The Exorcist Effect”?

Media is incredibly influential.  Fiction can create reality.  It can cost someone their life.  And not just for being in an accident in the film industry (although such tragedies do occur).  Humans are intrigued by ideas.  We tell stories about them.  Sometimes our own life stories become fictionalized in our recollections.  My memories have been corrected more than once by my siblings.  Culturally, we were shown what demons were and what they could do in The Exorcist.  Even if Michel’s priest hadn’t seen the movie, he lived in a culture already altered by it.  I really need to go back and read Laycock and Harrelson’s book again.  Being invited to a podcast about demons back in August made me think about Emily Rose again, after years of pursing The Wicker Man and Sleepy Hollow.

Demeter at Last

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Now that official scary movie season is here, and now that I’ve had a chance to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, well, I guess I can share my thoughts.  First of all, it immediately went into Holy Sequel.  There’s a lot of religion in this vampire film.  If you’re not familiar with Dracula, as written by Bram Stoker, or its many adaptations, the Demeter is the ship which carries the vampire from the Balkan peninsula to England.  Dracula has purchased Carfax Abbey and since he’s traveling alone he has to ship himself there.  He has crates of his native earth loaded on the Demeter, along with his coffin.  Along the way he snacks on the crew until the fateful Demeter arrives at Whitby as a ghost ship, no crew anywhere.  Anyone who knows Bram Stoker’s story knows that nobody survives aboard the ship.

That conceit makes this an interesting angle from which to tell the story.  Critics were unkind, but the reason, it seems to me, is that you pretty much know how it will play out from the title.  Personally, I’m more generous than the majority of critics.  This is a perfectly serviceable horror film, well made, and with a message.  Not only does the Black man not die first, he’s also the sole survivor.  The fact that Drac picks off the crew one-by-one will come as no surprise.  You need to guess who’ll go last and the successful escape of Clemens is, in some ways, unexpected.  I did wonder, apart from the inclusion of the Bible right out there in the open, at the name Clemens and the dog Huckleberry.  Was there a Mark Twain subplot going on here as well?  I found Anna’s presence a bit strained but having a strong woman aboard was a nice touch.  She almost survives too.

André Øvredal directed a couple of other horror films I enjoyed: The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  Having seen three good horror films from him made me add Passengers to my list of movies to watch.  There are a number of directors that are making horror that I’m starting to follow.  Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Damian McCarthy, Osgood Perkins, Zach Cregger, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Ti West, and Ari Aster, among others, are taking horror in some interesting directions.  If I didn’t have to work for a living, and if I could afford all the horror movies I wanted, I have a feeling that the future would be pretty bright.

Sweet Horror Music

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I don’t often write about music because it’s far too personal.  And very important to me.  I’m not a casual listener, for the most part.  When I listen to music I listen to music.  Still, sometimes it seems to hit the spirit of the moment.  When innocently watching a horror movie (When the Lights Went Out) I heard a catchy song I’d never been aware of hearing before.  The film was set in the seventies and the song was the slightly salacious single “Little Willy” by The Sweet.  Since this was a “based on a true story” movie, they were shooting for period authenticity.  I was alive and somewhat aware during the seventies.  I knew, and liked, The Sweet’s hit “Fox on the Run.”  I really couldn’t name any other song of theirs.

Image credit: Majalah Varianada. Public domain in Indonesia, where published, via Wikimedia Commons.

I lived in a small town and there was no internet.  We got our information from school, television, books, newspapers, and magazines.  And word of mouth, of course.  Much of what I learned about music was from someone telling me something.  I heard Alice Cooper bit the head off of a live chicken.  Actually, Ozzy Osbourne had bitten the head off a live bat.  You couldn’t rely on word of mouth, but about popular music that was about all that was available.  In other words, I knew nothing about The Sweet.  Since I never heard anything more after “Fox,” I’d figured they were a one-hit wonder.  They got shelved, in my mind, until I saw When the Lights Went Out.  As these things usually do, my curiosity about them had to await a day off work when I could indulge my curiosity.  I looked them up online and discovered, to my surprise, that they’d been around since the early sixties, making them an early rock band.  In the often tangled history of early rock, they didn’t become The Sweet until the late sixties.

Their peak came in the seventies, although according to the internet, in the way of George Washington’s axe, they still exist (one of the original lineup is still alive).  We live in an age of antique early rockers still performing.  I’m sure music must be a tough business.  Staying popular for decades can’t be easy.  Now we can find the history of a band with just a few keystrokes.  We can call up their music on some streaming service.  Or hear it over the loudspeaker in just about any shopping venue.  When I hear music, I pay attention to it.  And about the only thing I remember from that horror movie is a song by a band I’d long forgotten.  Not bad for a mediocre film.

Old Man Country

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As a movie fan, you eventually come to trust certain filmmakers.  The Coen Brothers produce consistently good work.  I’d missed No Country for Old Men and was somewhat reluctant to see it.    Films about sociopathic killers bother me, and I knew that the Cormac McCarthy novel was about a drug deal gone bad (and made him a household name).  Drugs are another of my triggers, having grown up in an alcoholic household.  But still, the film won the Academy Award for best picture, and it was a rather glaring hole in my viewing of Coen Brother major movies.  While the film isn’t horror, it is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in some time.  The ending is devastating, and sad, and reflective.  It’s easy to see why it appealed to the critics.  Nothing is neatly tied up at the end.  I haven’t read the novel, but I hear the film follows it closely.

Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad.  He finds a couple million in cash and takes it to the trailer park so he and his wife can retire.  A hit man, Anton Chigurh, pursues him and eventually Moss realizes that a transponder has been hidden among the cash, giving away his location.  Meanwhile, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, does what he can to protect Moss’ wife and tries to save him from what he realizes is an unstoppable foe.  Chigurh proves as tenacious as his reputation suggests, and viewers learn that Moss is as equally tenacious, but has both a conscience and morality, both of which Chigurh lacks.  The scenes where Chigurh appears to be fair-minded are the scariest in the film.

The log line “There are no clean getaways” about sums up the outcome.  Often classified as a western, the feel is more of a thriller.  “Coen Brothers movie” might be a genre all its own.  The relative lack of humor puts it much closer to Fargo than to O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Raising Arizona on the Coen Brothers scale.  The unrelenting violence also brought Pulp Fiction (different director, different feel) to mind.  The bleakness of the outlook of Sheriff Bell, as well as the look in his eyes, is haunting.  His conversation with Ellis near the end stirs thoughts of Ecclesiastes and the reflection on just how violent people can be toward each other is profoundly disturbing.  I’ve seen many horror films that didn’t scare me half as much.