Early Halloween

1 Comment

Call it seasonal disorientation syndrome, but I’ve been reading about Halloween.  I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one thinking about it.  Stores will begin Halloween displays next month, if the usual pattern recurs.  So why not do a little advanced study?  Although I’ve written about holidays myself, they’re unruly subjects to handle.  Lesley Pratt Bannatyne is a name familiar to many fans of Halloween.  Her 1990 book Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History kickstarted renewed interest in the holiday and has been followed by other studies, even occasionally with academic presses.  Still, holidays are difficult to pin down.  One of the most obvious reasons for this lies in the fact that before the world became über-connected, holidays were largely local celebrations.  Trends traveled slowly and not everybody agreed on which holidays to celebrate.

The early days of Halloween are the most difficult to piece together.  This is clear in Bannatyne’s book also; we simply don’t have the written sources we’d like.  The ancient Celts, although great strides have been made through archaeology and close examination of ancient writings of outsiders, remain poorly documented.  They didn’t leave archives like the classical writers of Greece and Rome did.  And clearly Halloween has its earliest known celebration as Samhain among the Celts.  Once Bannatyne gets to America, however, there’s a trove of information in her book.  Her chapter on the celebrations among the original thirteen colonies is quite good at demonstrating regional differences not only for religions, but for tolerance for something like Halloween.  Fall festivals predated Halloween as we know it (if we really do know it), and she does a good job of demonstrating how the melting pot effect made Halloween national.

One of the problems with any history is that one event can change everything.  This book was written three decades before Covid-19 and the pandemic was one of those events that did change everything.  It makes it seem as if we were much more carefree back in the eighties when Bannatyne’s book was written.  Halloween was just starting to become an adult holiday again back then.  In the ensuing years it has become even more so.  Communities are seldom what they used to be with the extreme mobility of much of our society, but many still find a way to agree to the terms of Halloween.  Historians of holidays have a difficult task, and we’re still learning about ancient cultures and their modern manifestations.  This is a good book to start that exploration—I know it taught me a thing or two.

What You Can’t Show

Leave a comment

As I spend my life trying to figure out why I do what I do, I take book and movie recommendations.  I really should note who recommends what because it often drives me crazy trying to figure that out after the fact.  A friend recommended Censor, and since this friend told me where it was streaming for free I’m sure I got the right one.  Like several one-word title movies, there are several with the same sobriquet.  This was the 2021 movie and it’s a British horror film which raises the question of why we watch horror.  It does this through the eyes of the eponymous censor (Enid) who’s particularly tough on movies.  Set during the “video nasty” scare of eighties Britain, the question is whether such movies motivate real violence but with the twist that the censor is the one who turns violent.

Enid is haunted by her missing sister and she finds a video nasty star who looks like her sibling and becomes convinced that it’s her.  Enid gets to the set where her movie’s being shot (a remote cabin in the woods) and ends up killing the star and director (after accidentally killing the producer earlier, in self-defense).  She kidnaps her “sister,” and in her imagination—rainbows are everywhere—takes her home.  That’s where the real social commentary comes in because during this imaginary drive the radio announcer says these kinds of movies have stopped, and all crime and violence have ceased, and social harmony has returned to Britain.  This is revealed, of course, as a delusion.

Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have watched this movie.  I don’t like blood and gore—I’m more looking for gothic themes like haunted houses—but it turns out that this is a smart film.  That’s probably why it was recommended to me.  Intelligent but also with tongue in cheek at times.  Still, it’s a movie about reconciling with childhood trauma, which is something that speaks to me personally.  That’s a wound I don’t always like to have poked.  It’s one of those movies on which I’d like to see more analysis, maybe talk to Prano Bailey-Bond, the writer and director.  Horror with female directors is often thoughtful, and movies are really meant to be discussed (just like books are).  The question remains—why do we watch disturbing movies?  I know I’m not the only one who does.  And in this case I remember who recommended it, so perhaps I’ll be able to get some closure.

Movies about Movies

Leave a comment

The category of movies so bad that they’re good sometimes spawns the phenomenon of a movie about the bad movie.  The Room, generally on the list of worst movies of all time, was followed by The Disaster Artist.  Not exactly a documentary, it was a movie about the making of the movie.  There’s a macabre fascination with films that dare to be so very bad.  They’re released nevertheless, and if they’re the right kind of bad they grow a following.  Ed Wood’s movies inspired Tim Burton’s movie Ed Wood—dramatized, but apparently not far from the truth.  Troll 2 was followed up by Best Worst Movie, directed by the child star of the original, Michael Stephenson.  Such movies are irresistible in their own right.  So when I finally saw Troll 2 I turned around and immediately watched Best Worst Movie.

A few things stood out in this documentary.  One is that being part of something larger, it’s not always clear what this larger thing will be.  Most of the people in the movie (which was released directly to video) found out about the release by accident.  Many of them never acted again but one thing they all knew: when they did see it, it was clear that it was a bad movie.  The one person in the documentary who doesn’t accept this is Claudio Fragasso, the director.  Fragasso is Italian and he still maintains that this is a great movie and everybody else is wrong about it.  He skulks around the tributes made to the movie and insists to both actors and viewers, that the movie isn’t bad.  They are wrong, he is right.

There’s nothing wrong with pride in achievement, of course.  Sometimes, however, it’s more graceful to admit that you simply got it wrong.  Best Worst Movie follows some of the actors to conferences where they expected huge lines and great attention, only to find a handful of disinterested spectators wondering what all the fuss was about.  At the same time, there are screenings of Troll 2 in major US cities that draw sell-out crowds.  Bad movies don’t appeal to everyone, of course.  They can, however, serve some good and might even add some enjoyment to life.  Best Worst Movie underscores that not all film fans have the same taste.  It also shows that those who enjoy traditionally bad movies aren’t alone.  There’s an aesthetic to being bad enough to be good, and even that can spin off sequels of its own.  And please, Mr. Fragasso, don’t make the sequel you’re touting—this kind of magic only comes once, unless you’re a genius like Ed Wood.

Bad Movie Therapy

Leave a comment

I haven’t see Troll, but it doesn’t matter.  Troll 2 has nothing to do with it.  As a frequent contender for worst movie of all time, Troll 2 is an anti-vegetarian screed and campy horror film that’s impossible to take seriously.  It’s part of my bad movie therapy.  And it’s also an example of religion and horror.  But first, let’s set the scene.  The Waits family (Michael and Diana, and their kids Holly and Joshua) is doing a house exchange for a vacation.  Before they leave, however, Joshua’s dead grandfather appears to him to warn him about the goblins.  The goblins, who are vegetarians, make people eat/drink a special substance that turns them into plants so that they can eat them.  (Yes, it’s that bad.)  Ignoring Joshua’s concerns, the Waitses head for Nilbog (goblin backwards) and go ahead with the house exchange.

The locals (there are only 26 of them) can make themselves appear human and they try in vain to get the visitors to eat.  Joshua prevents his family from eating the plant food by peeing on it.  They go to bed hungry as the queen of the goblins plans her next move to get them floradated.  About midway through the film, we’re shown a church scene in which the minister preaches of the evil of the flesh.  Ironically, this is not far off from the teaching of some Christian denominations.   He tells the trolls what they already know—they have to get the visitors to eat so that they can eat them.  If nothing else, it will make you forget your troubles for ninety minutes, unless your trouble is that you’re being turned into a plant.

Any number of reasons have been offered for why the film is so bad.  While filmed in Utah, the crew was Italian, and most of them spoke no English.  The movie was low budget.  The acting is just plain bad.  All together, however, these features work symbiotically to grow a wonderfully therapeutic end result.  Some of the crew claimed that it was the intention all along to make this a funny film.  Comedy horror or horror comedy is a recognized genre, after all.  The only problem I have now, however, is where to go from here.  So how does the Waits family escape their peril?  I’ll need to offer a bit of a spoiler here.  The goblins are frightened away long enough by a double-decker bologna sandwich that the family can touch the magic stone and destroy the conspiracy.  What are you still doing here? Why aren’t you watching this already?

Hoppy Fourth

Leave a comment

Today is the one of the relatively rare summer holidays.  Modern industrialized nations tend to take a more relaxed view toward summers without having to give out too many prescribed company holidays.  This seems to follow on from school schedules because the kids are out in summer and adults need some flexibility when work demands collide with family needs.  The internet has made work-life balance a little tricker to achieve since work is always just a click away.  Some more generous employers gave yesterday as part of an extended four-day weekend, which is rejuvenating in a way that’s easily forgotten until you start to feel it.  The sense of obligation takes a couple of days to wind down, and then on Monday you realize “I’ve still got another day off!”  It’s a sublime feeling.  Why not watch holiday horror on it?

The Wicker Man is a holiday horror movie.  One of my arguments in the book is that holiday horror has to derive its energy from the holiday, and not just be set on it.  For example, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Return of the Living Dead are both set on or near Independence Day but the movies don’t really draw their horror from the holiday itself.  It falls into the same category.  Frogs?  Well, maybe.  Perhaps holiday horror, it’s definitely in bad movie territory.  A rich southern family is dominated by a Trump-like grandfather who controls the money and measures everyone by loyalty to him personally.  On his birthday, the fourth of July, nature revolts and his adult children and grandchildren (apart from one granddaughter), are killed by animals in this eco-revenge groaner.  But is it holiday horror?

One scene may suggest that perhaps it fits the category, but the real significance of that day is that grandpa won’t let it be celebrated any way other than by his prescribed plan.  Even as the estate is overrun by frogs (mostly), snakes, lizards, alligators,  tarantulas, and even some birds (thank you, Mr. Hitchcock), he insists that everyone do what they always do on the fourth of July/his birthday.  The only scene that suggests holiday horror is where the eponymous frogs hop onto a cake decorated like an American flag.  I normally like nature-revenge films, and this one starts out well but quickly goes downhill.  The environmental message is there, but underplayed.  There are some firecrackers and a number of dead rich folks, but otherwise the film seems to have no message at all.  It’s a bad movie.  Holiday horror?  Not really.  Something to watch for a day off work?  Definitely.

Good-Bad

6 Comments

If anybody bothers to follow my movie viewing history, they’ll know that it includes a perhaps disproportionate number of “bad movies.”  In fact, I recently added that as a category for my blog posts.  In need of some reassurance, I read Matthew Strohl’s Why It’s OK To Love Bad Movies.  (As far as I can tell the Why It’s OK series was started by my old boss at Routledge—an inspired idea!)  Strohl is a philosopher, but one who admits to, and even advocates for, loving bad movies.  This book is fun but it does have a serious philosophical underpinning.  I can’t summarize it all here (you need to read the book anyway) but my main takeaways are that ridicule isn’t making the world a better place.  Movies that are so bad that they’re good are definitely a reality.  There’s a community built around it, but I haven’t had many visits from it in my lonely little corner of the internet here.

Strohl points out that not all bad movies are what he terms “good-bad.”  There are certain qualities—aesthetic qualities—that make a bad movie good.  And it doesn’t involve watching the movies to make fun of them.  One of the films that often tops the list is The Room.  When I first saw it I really couldn’t think of anything to write about it on this blog.  It was just another bad movie.  Now I want to see it again.  I do have to say that on my first viewing I didn’t feel like ridiculing.  I was more stunned than that.  And when I watched Plan 9 from Outer Space—another on the list—I felt inspired to learn more about Ed Wood, its famous director.  I’ve since watched a couple more of his movies and I appreciated them.  Now I have a better idea of why.

In addition to discussing the biggies, Strohl also takes forays into some collectives: the Twilight series, for example, and the movies of Nicholas Cage.  These are both often singled out for ridicule, but this book demonstrates that there’s an artistry to such things.  And Bad Movies underscores that not everyone likes the same bad movies.  Strohl also makes the salient point that if we only ever watch great movies we’d have no basis for comparison.  There’s a lot to like in this little book.  One thing it convinced me of (in addition to making me feel a bit better about myself) is that there’s a community out there that I’m missing out on.  Good books bring people together instead of dividing into factions.  This is a good book.

Out of Season

Leave a comment

Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz, has been a fixture since the early eighties.  I was a bit too old for Scholastic at the time, but my daughter had a copy that I read recently.  I heard about the 2019 film before it came out (and I’m having trouble believing it was all the way back before the pandemic).  It’s more of a Halloween movie and since it features young actors it had translated to a “kids’ movie” in my head.  I suppose the PG-13 rating contributed to that.  Sill, it turns out that it’s a proper horror film, but not too scary.  The story is partially by Guillermo del Toro, so I had some idea of what to expect.  I’m glad I watched it, even though the right season is still months away.  Therapy is welcome any time of year.

Anthology films often don’t work well, and this one manages to avoid that by constructing an overarching narrative.  The teens, visiting a haunted house on Halloween night, find a book by a hidden family member who’d hanged herself but who was rumored to tell stories to those who ask.  The book, written in blood, writes new stories featuring each of the kids, telling their bizarre deaths.  Since there are six main kids there are six main subplots and some of them are quite effective.  Scarecrows aren’t like the kind you find in Oz.  And two of the good kids end up missing while this is played off against the Vietnam War (it’s set in 1968).  One of the characters has been drafted and is being shipped off to the war as the film ends.  Since the final girls (there are two) are committed to finding the lost kids, a sequel seems inevitable.

The setting of fictional Mill Valley is a Pennsylvania town, and it’s nice to see my home state getting some attention outside M. Night Shyamalan movies.  I’ve always felt there was more creepy potential here than has been explored.  And autumn is generally beautiful in the commonwealth.  Although I watched the movie out of season (while it was free to do so on Amazon Prime), it has landed on my list of films to watch in October.  It manages to get that feel right and I know that come the autumn I’ll have a hankering for that sensation.  It’s not really that scary, but it manages to be worth an adult’s time and attention.  And it makes me want to read the book again.  And horror can work for therapy, even when it’s starting to get hot outside.

Release the Wicker

Leave a comment

One of the many fascinating things about The Wicker Man is that even its release date can cause confusion.  There should be nothing so simple as to look up when a movie first hit theaters, but especially in trans-Atlanic efforts the dates are often different between the UK and the US.  The Wicker Man had a limited UK release on June 21 (quite close to Midsummer, it turns out) of this year.  It’d been released before, of course.  The initial UK release date was December 6, 1973 (twenty days before the US release date of The Exorcist).  Making its way to the US, it was first released on May 15, 1974—not long after May Day.  One of the features of the curious history of the movie is that it lacked support from its own studio.  Not surprisingly, it performed better overseas, particularly in America.

Release dates can be important, and can make a difference in a film’s success.  Again, the quirkiness of The Wicker Man reveals this—although set in late April-early May, it was filmed in November.  Actors had to suck on ice chips to prevent their breath from being visible.  And who’s thinking about May Day when getting ready for Christmas?  All of these factors swirl around in a mythology that the movie has developed.  My book went to the printer yesterday.  It should be out in August-September, hopefully in time to catch the interest of those who’ve gone to see it in theaters again.  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it.  I’ve watched all three released versions.  It feels like an old friend.

From the beginning, the plan was to release my book this year, due to the fiftieth anniversary of the movie.  It’s funny how simply surviving half a century can make something interesting to people.  There are plenty of 1973 movies that aren’t getting any particular boost this year.  The thing about The Wicker Man is that it became a cult classic.  Although it was never a mainstream hit, it has sent out its tentacles far and wide.  I notice references to it is unexpected places.  If you’re attuned to this you say to yourself, “that movie really made an impact.”  And it did.  When I first pitched this book idea to the editor of Auteur, I told him I’d do whatever I could to make a 2023 release.  Of course, I started writing it before Nightmares with the Bible came out.  My next book after the Wicker Man doesn’t have an anniversary release in mind.  That’s good, because like a moon-shot it’s nerve-racking to aim for such a narrow target, years in advance.

Employment Opportunities

2 Comments

It’s important to be reminded that stories can also be told by what’s not said.  Non-narrative fiction can be a little tricky to follow, but often contains admirable aphorisms.  Such as “I believe in the future.  I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it.“  This is from Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century.  One of the many things driving me insane at the moment is where I found out about this book.  I know I ran across a recommendation somewhere and I can’t recall the place.  It would be helpful to know since I wonder what it was about the description that convinced me I had to read it.  In any case, there will likely be spoilers below since it’s difficult to describe the book without them.  I’ll start off by saying it’s classified as science fiction, but it’s not your typical 1950s kind.

The story’s told via a series of employee statements to the company that owns a space freighter.  The ship has a mixed crew of humans and humanoids—androids that aren’t easily distinguished from biological humans.  They discover some mysterious, perhaps organic, objects on a new planet and the humanoids begin to request, or even demand, equal treatment.  The outlooks from the two perspectives, human and non-human, are quite different, but they argue that fair treatment is only, well, fair.  The situation gets out of hand and the company, as such entities often do, decides on the economical solution of killing everyone aboard the ship but preserving the exotic objects.  Though generally described as “comic,” I picked up on the seriousness of the issues of prejudice and inequality.  The quote above is from the very last statement from the ship.

Ravn has established a reputation as a poet and that shows through in this novel.  The quote above is an example.  According to the article about her on Wikipedia, she graduated from the Danish School for Authors.  That made me wonder why we don’t have such things.  This isn’t the same as an MFA program.  Indeed, the nordic countries seem to have abandoned their viking ways for literature.  There’s a deep wisdom in this.  Costs of living are high in such places, but so are happiness levels.  What’s not to like about a school option where budding poets and novelists can become acquainted with one another and imagine a better world?  Writers sometimes give us challenging stories but the reason, I believe, is that we can learn from them, view a better future, and live it.

Meeting Places

Leave a comment

It’s one of those quirky British television plays that’s its own movie.  It was part of the Play for Today series.  I turned to Penda’s Fen after receiving some very distressing news, as a means of self-healing.  (I may seem distracted for some time, please forgive me.)  Sometimes considered folk horror, it really isn’t a horror film although it may be treated as one.  The dialogue is heavily religious, involving a lot of theological discussion of Manichaeism, the “heretical” belief in the struggle between the powers of light and powers of darkness.  It plays out through the maturing of Stephen Franklin, son of the local vicar who is, unbeknownst to himself, adopted.  He also discovers his homosexuality as he begins to rebel against the strictures of his private school education.  Underlying all this is the fact that he lives in Pinvin, in reality Penda’s Fen.

The story deals with the past interrupting into the present as Penda’s pagan kingdom never really fell.   A local writer claims that there is an entire escape city beneath the British landscape to which those deemed “important” to the government are to be evacuated in case of emergency.  In reality, the kingdom beneath, and overlapping, Pinvin is that of Penda.  Penda was an actual Anglo-Saxon king and here he encourages Stephen to know himself—one of the mottos of the school.  That knowing involves coming to question the conservative, Christian belief system he has wholeheartedly embraced.  His adoptive father, the vicar, has broader beliefs, including the reality of other gods.  Stephen discovers this and learns of his adoption, making for some heartfelt religious dialogue.

My reason for watching, apart from the much-needed therapy, was that it had been recommended as a piece of religion and horror.  There are some horror moments, but generally it’s difficult to say whether they’re hallucinations of Stephen or they’re really happening.  One is presented outside his viewing, which suggests that they are meant to be real.  One involves a demon, but not the scary kind of The Exorcist, which had been released just a few months ahead of Penda’s Fen.  In all, it’s a thoughtful movie, the kind you might expect when based on a play.  Given the themes, I’m not sure it was the best therapy, but it did engage the religion and media dialogue.  I hope to come back to it some day under better circumstances.  The dialogue is worth engaging with more depth than I’ve been able to muster here right now and there’s much I still don’t understand.

Liking Everyone

Leave a comment

I’m not really interested in politics.  Powerful people deciding the fate of the rest of us seems inherently depressing.  We could use a good laugh.  I’ve been curious about Will Rogers for some time now.  He’s a name that everyone in my generation seems to recognize but few people know anything about him, beyond some of his famous quips.  So I read Gary Clayton Anderson’s Will Rogers and His America.  It was an eye-opening experience.  Rogers died in 1935, the year my mother was born.  What a difference less than a century can make!  At the time of his death he was one of the most famous people in the country, personal friend of U.S. Presidents, an international traveler, and widely syndicated newspaper columnist.  He was also a film actor and comedian.  When he traveled internationally world leaders gladly met him.  Not bad for a poor boy from Oklahoma.

Anderson’s book is a good introduction to who Rogers was, but it does tend to focus on the politics.  Arguably that’s where one’s greatest impact in life might reside.  Still, there’s a lot more to an individual than politics.  I’m curious about Rogers’ career as an entertainer.  He started out as a Vaudeville roper—literally, a rope act.  His noted wit, however, made him famous.  At various points he was one of the highest paid entertainers in the country.  His sympathies, like many of us born in humble circumstances, tended to be with the average person who, it seems, is always struggling against an economy that favors the wealthy.  See?  There I’ve done it myself, gone and got political.  It’s difficult to avoid.

Perhaps the most widely read columnist in the country, who influenced political opinions and could rake in the money at just about any form of comedic enterprise, Rogers nevertheless faded from view after his death in a plane crash.  He was part American Indian.  He never completed college.  He was homespun and yet influential around the world.  Fame comes with no guarantees, of course.  I guess it would be helpful to know what Roger’s motivations were.  Was he, like most people, simply trying to secure his future for himself and family?  Was he trying to change the world?  Can anyone manage to do that for very long before things come along and everything’s suddenly different?  (Think AI, for example.)  I’m glad to have met Will Rogers through Anderson’s book.  Even though I’m not really interested in politics, I learned something about them too, along the way.

A Tumble

Leave a comment

So beautifully shot, Fallen is a movie worth watching despite its disjointed plot.  Worth watching for horror fans, that is.  Apart from the night scenes, this is art house cinematography, and that may be because it’s an independent movie.  What’s it about?  That’s difficult to say, definitively.  The night scenes are so dark that you can’t tell what’s happening and the plot seems to have been intentionally obscure.  (That’s hard to substantiate because the 2022 film hasn’t generated too much discussion.)  This may have been another case of mistaken identity, like The Entity, because my notes only had the title down.  There are at least three movies with this title.  I’m learning my lesson to jot down the year when I add a movie to my “to see” list.  In any case, here goes…

A young priest (?) is warned by an older priest that it is time to take up violence because the darkness has started.  The younger priest is called “Father Abraham,” but he wears a tie in church services, and a small pectoral cross, making identification of the denomination difficult.  Since this is religion-based horror you’d think that that much, at least, ought to have been sorted out.  The heavily accented dialogue is often delivered so low that it’s difficult to follow.  In any case, this minister, after fighting “darkness” for many years, is in an isolated farmhouse with his disabled daughter.  He hunts and traps for their needs and a local boy delivers groceries, and is secretly in love with the daughter.  The minister, who seems to be presented as a tortured soul, isn’t really likable.  At night the house is attacked by physical demons.  There will be spoilers in the next paragraph.

It’s finally revealed that Fr. Fallen (apparently that’s his surname) had killed his wife for being a witch.  His daughter is also a witch, out for revenge for her mother’s death.  She summoned the demons and eventually kills her father and leaves the farm.  Religious imagery is everywhere in this film and begs for interpretation.  The lack of coherence, however, makes that very problematic.  The disabled daughter is the only survivor at the farmhouse, and is healed at the end.  By the demons?  Or because she’s a witch?  The influence of M. Night Shyamalan is evident, but his clean plotting is absent.  Online discussion is minimal, but there could be something of substance here.  If only it were better put together.  If only it were more discussed.

World’s End?

1 Comment

I’ve been writing on religion and horror for quite a few years now.  Sometimes you come across a horror movie, or novel, which addresses this directly.  Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is one such novel.  A friend strongly recommended this, and indeed, the first half went impossibly fast.  This despite my dislike of home invasion stories.  It nevertheless kept me on the edge of my seat.  I should probably say there will be spoilers here (there will), in case you haven’t read this but intend to.  I’ll hold off on them until the next paragraph, though, so if you’re a faster reader than I am a writer you won’t accidentally run upon them.  So, a family consisting of two fathers and an adopted daughter find the cabin, where they’re vacationing, invaded by four people who believe the world is going to end.  Spoilers follow!

The world is going to end unless the family agree to sacrifice one of themselves to stop the apocalypse.  The strangers are armed while the vacationers are not.  And, as usually happens when those with weapons confront the innocent, the armed prevail.  But.  But the family refuses to sacrifice anyone.  Then the brainwashed four do something unexpected—they kill one of their own.  They continue to do this, attempting to convince the men that if the invaders all die, and neither of the men is sacrificed, the world will end.  Quite a bit of the novel then becomes a theological discussion regarding what kind of god would make such a demand.  Of course, if you read Genesis you’ll already know the answer, right Isaac?

Tremblay knows not to tip his authorial hand as to what’s really happening.  As the cabin becomes a mess of blood and gore, the television seems to be showing predicted apocalyptic events.  The invaders can’t reveal their source of secret knowledge because they receive visions telling them what to do.  The whole thing raises that most troubling of questions: who is really in charge?  Is there a bloodthirsty deity who requires a willing death or are the invaders simply good at acting out their paranoia and interpreting events to meet their expectations?  So it is that Cabin becomes a disturbing story—nearly a theodicy—asking age-old questions of what happens when religious belief conflicts with rational materialism.  There are enough hints of supernatural happenings to make the reader wonder.  And when it ends it affirms something many of us are exploring these days—religion and horror have much in common but neither is clearly understood.

Not Dagon

Leave a comment

There’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  And when your production company is Crappy World Films you’ve got to wonder if it’s intentional.  Chad Ferrin’s H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones, which was released in 2020, isn’t a great movie.  It is kinda fun, though.  I’ve had a weakness for explicit Lovecraft films ever since Stuart Gordon’s very moody Dagon.  That film was clearly the inspiration for this one.  With the “low” budget of only a million dollars (it feels strange to write that), it nevertheless has a clean cinematography that shows some artistry.  The story just isn’t that good.  A young couple is seeking a getaway at an oceanfront AirBNB only to discover it’s part of a “gated” community.  Their hosts, who are living in the boat down at the marina, keep on stopping in, not leaving them much privacy.

The set-up is very much a Rosemary’s Baby scenario.  The community, as the title suggests, worship the Old Ones.  They introduce Cthulhu early on, but the young man of the couple has never heard of him (he obviously doesn’t spend much time on the internet).  Speaking of the internet, the film makes the point that everyone spends too much time on it, and there’s perhaps some truth to that, but, if you’re streaming the movie you’re also participating.  In any case, the community wants women to offer to Dagon—and the monster here is clearly low-budget—so they can bear more children for the Deep Ones.  Well, not so much bear children for them as to be pregnant with tentacles that can somehow convert newcomers.  Once you’ve been tentacled, it seems, you’re a member of the community.

There is a kind of Lovecraft vibe to the film despite the often wooden acting and throwaway dialogue.  One thing Lovecraft had learned from Poe was the consistency of mood.  It’s here that the movie runs into some trouble.  At times it’s a little scary, at times dramatic, but too much of it just feels silly.  The case could be made that Lovecraft’s writing tends toward the puerile and there’s some truth to that.  It is never silly, however.  Sometimes when translated to the screen the outlandishness of Lovecraft’s view of the world comes across as so weird as to be funny.  It takes an able director, and a strong writer, to adapt him to cinema successfully.  It’s no accident, then, that the movie is dedicated to Stuart Gordon, whose Dagon is still difficult for me to watch, so full of Lovecraft as it is.

Bad Movies

2 Comments

It’s embarrassing.  No, really it is.  The other day I was posting on yet another bad movie I’d watched and I realized that I should add a new Category (although I’m likely the only one who uses them) on this blog.  Now, it’s a pain to add a new Category to a blog with over 5,000 posts.  I reasoned that my bad movie watching, although a lifetime pursuit, really only appeared on this blog recently.  I had to scroll through the existing Category, “Movies,” to remind myself of what I’d posted on.  I found a few to add to my new Category, then a few more.  Finally the number grew to embarrassing portions.  I kept scrolling until it made me dizzy.  I couldn’t remember whether I’d posted on The Room or not.  It’s not a horror film, but it is very bad.  So bad I watched a parody of it.  Using the search function “The Room” brought up just too many hits and I was already woozy.  Maybe I didn’t want to admit to that one.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

There’s an aesthetic to watching bad movies.  In fact, there are books written justifying the practice.  I thought maybe I had started my bad movie watching posts with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, but no.  No, it went back further than that.  As someone who writes books about movies (maybe bad books about movies?) I need to do my homework.  Not only do I write books on movies, I also write on them for Horror Homeroom on occasion.  I’m scheduled to teach a class on a movie this fall.  I’ve even presented on movies to church groups (they never invite me back to talk on that topic again, however).  I know the reason lies much deeper, though.

Part of it derives from a childhood of watching bad movies.  There’s nostalgia involved.  More than that, however, I grew up poor.  Unless you’re a rags-to-riches story (I’m not) that mentality stays with you your entire life.  I’m always trying to cut costs, but I love movies.  On weekends I look for what’s free, with or without ads, on Amazon Prime.  They cater to bad movies, it turns out.  And before long it becomes like an addiction.  There’s a fascination to watching something so obviously poor that nevertheless ended up in theaters.  In other words, hope glimmers through.  My books are far too expensive to sell well.  My name isn’t widely known.  There is, in other words, a validation in watching bad movies.  I’ve got a well-populated Category for them right here.