Bad Boy

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I’m still trying to figure out what I think about it.  The introduction by Grady Hendrix got me interested in the novels of Ken Greenhall.  The introduction was in Hell Hound and it described how Greenhall’s books whispered horror rather than shouted it.  That’s also true of the horror stories I write, and it’s clear I still have plenty to learn.  Baxter is a bull terrier whose thoughts are recorded for part of each chapter in this short book.  What we read isn’t terribly welcome.  Baxter is aware and intolerant of human weakness and he has a strong will.  So strong that he uses it to get people he doesn’t care for out of his way.  At the same time, as the story unfolds, you can’t see Baxter as evil.  He obeys his nature but he has morals.  Spoilers follow.

His first owner, an old woman with little joy in life, is his first victim.  He’s adopted by a young couple but they’re about to become parents and when they do his jealousy appears in the worst way.  They couple give him away to a young boy who aspires to be a Nazi.  A fan of Hitler, he appreciates Baxter for his power and his, as he thinks, killer instinct.  But Baxter doesn’t kill for the sake of it.  Misguided as he might be, his kills all have a purpose.  The boy is a bit different.  He demonstrates his callousness by trying to have Baxter kill another boy.  Then the Nazi kills the pups Baxter has sired.  The two face off and the story is written well enough that you find yourself hoping that Baxter will prevail.  But alas, opposable thumbs do give a fatal advantage.

It’s unclear by the final chapter how much, if at all, the boy has changed.  He knows how to manipulate others and his own interest is what guides his actions.  It’s kind of a bleak story in the end.  It is, however, well told and compelling.  Greenhall wasn’t known much during his life, but he did manage what’s rather difficult today—he had a series of novels published.  He died over a decade ago and is now starting to be recovered.  That’s often the sign of quality writing.  Those who make an impact are often overlooked in their own time.  Hell Hound isn’t my favorite horror novel, but it is a strangely affective and effective one.  And it shows that dread need not take place over many hundreds of pages to work.  I’ll likely be coming back to Ken Greenhall for more.

Things Seen

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I disagree with the critics on this one.  Things Heard & Seen is a remarkable horror film.  That’s not to say it’s without its flaws, but it is quite engrossing for the right kind of viewer.  It has elements of dark academia, as well as ghosts and a respectful treatment of Swedenborg.  And it takes place in the Hudson Valley (the headless horseman is even mentioned once).  The Bible appears both visually and is quoted.  In short, it encapsulates many of my personal interests.  And it’s not badly made.  There will be spoilers here, but it’s difficult to discuss religion and horror without them.  George Claire married Catherine because he got her pregnant.  He has, however, finished his doctorate and been offered a post at Saginaw College, in the Hudson Valley.  It quickly becomes clear that George is an entitled, self-centered liar (sounds familiar).

As the story unfolds, both Catherine and their daughter Franny see ghosts.  George dismisses them but even at the college the head of his department is a Swedenborgian and tells him not to dismiss the spiritual world.  George’s true character starts showing through.  He cheats on his wife.  He forged his letter of support from his Columbia doctoral advisor because his work was substandard.  When a fellow faculty member finds out, he runs her off the road, putting her into a coma.  He drowns his department head while boating on the Hudson because he also learned the truth.  He even claims to have painted pictures done by his brother.  In other words, he’s a real piece of work.  The ghosts aren’t able to save his wife when he murders her, but his colleague comes out of her coma and spills the beans.

In the end, George sails away into a Thomas Cole painting where a Swendenborgian ending overtakes him.  The use of Swedenborg adds an etherial element to the film, figuring thoughtfulness to what otherwise might be just another story about an unhinged academic.  The department head’s advice about seeing death in a Swedenborgian way was also strangely affecting.  In other words, this is thoughtful horror.  And once again it demonstrates that religion can be crucial to understanding what we really fear.  I suppose some critics dislike the unambiguous use of ghosts and the supernatural breaking into “reality,” but that seems to be precisely the point.  I only learned of this movie because Netflix recommended it, but they hit on several major themes in my work over the past several years.  I would watch this one again.

Missed Movie

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It has been years since I read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”  I’d never seen this original movie made from it, often cited as being a reasonable adaptation of a Lovecraft story to film.  The visuals are sometimes impressive, but it is a slow moving, plodding movie.  It does, as far as I can recall, follow Lovecraft in general terms.  This is one of those movies that would’ve fit into Holy Horror for two basic reasons: it begins with a quote from the Bible and it has its own alternative sacred book, the Necronomicon.  In one scene the latter is explicitly compared to the Good Book.  Since religion didn’t enter horror in any kind of direct way until about 1968, this movie is an early example of how the two interact.  It came before The Exorcist.

The point is made at several junctures that the religion of the Whateleys is the antithesis of Christianity.  Indeed, the point of all Wilbur Whateley’s shenanigans is to raise the old gods.  Lovecraft, famously an atheist, used gods to set up his cosmic horror.  He’s also notoriously difficult to capture in movie form.  While Roger Corman was the executive producer he was not the director, and that may answer for the pacing.  Daniel Haller, the director, had worked with Corman before on some of his Poe Cycle films and had directed Die, Monster, Die, also a Lovecraft adaptation.  Lovecraft wasn’t a terribly cinematic writer.  His stories contain ideas that feel like they might fit on film, but executing them well is difficult.

For this movie, the house used for the Whateley residence is fitting.  It helps create a sense of dread.  The basic idea of the flick is that Wilbur needs a virginal victim to help summon the old gods.  He lures Nancy Wagner to his house where she falls under the influence of drugged tea.  There’s an intriguing glass sculpture that is never fully explained.  As Nancy begins to lose her will, her friends come to find her, and one of them is killed by Wilbur’s inhuman twin that had also killed their mother during birth.  Once released, this monstrous progeny begins killing locals (the locals hate the Whateleys) and is poised to take Nancy until a guest lecturer at Miskatonic University bests Wilbur in spells recited from the Necronomicon, saving the girl and dooming the last Whateley.  The family line ends.  Until it is rather heavy-handedly shown that Nancy is pregnant by Wilbur, so the unwholesome Whateley genealogy continues.  The visuals aren’t bad, but the story is lacking.  Still, it’s part of the canon, so I needed to see it and it used religion to intrigue me.

Coming for You

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Skimming through the freebies on a streaming service I came to Serpent’s Lair.  Having written a book about demons, I try to keep an eye out for possession movies I might’ve missed and that may add something new to the discussion.  This one turned out to borrow quite a lot from other films, most noticeably, The Omen.  Tom Bennett and his wife Alex buy a unit in a house that could’ve stepped from Rosemary’s Baby.  I kept wondering what the unnamed city was where they worked.  It turns out that the entire film was shot in Romania, so that’s why identifiable landmarks were missing.  In any case, their unit had been inhabited by a college professor who’d been dabbling in the dark arts.  Some of his stuff was left behind.  By the way, there is a lot of religious imagery in this film—maybe not directly Bible (so not Holy Sequel material), but plenty of religion.

Their kindly next door neighbor is a doctor who smokes a lot for his profession.  The couple adopts a stray cat in the courtyard.  The cat turns out to be a kind of conduit for a succubus.  Naturally, the cat takes a dislike to Alex, finally causing her to fall down the stairs and end up in the hospital.  When she’s out of the house the former resident’s sister comes to close his estate.  I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I say she is the succubus.  While Alex is away, she coaxes the faithful Tom into a torrid affair.  Tom really loves Alex and is reluctant, but succubi can be very persuasive.  Meanwhile more cats move into the building.  When an archaeological colleague of the former tenant arrives, he notes that said tenant had no sister.  Research indicates Tom is dealing with a Bast succubus.  Of course, the colleague is killed.  Spoiler alert:

It turns out the the doctor next door is Satan himself.  The only way to get rid of a succubus is to set it on fire.  Alex has already left Tom, so the next time the demon shows up, he lights her up.  Satan, next door, sees the whole thing and laughs.  Roll credits.  While a low budget film for its time (1995), it isn’t a cheap movie.  Serpent’s Lair at least tries.  The story is a touch weak because much of this has been done before.  It takes advantage of something that had been discovered a couple of decades earlier—religion is a great setting and source for horror.  Even if the explanation doesn’t really satisfy.

Check for

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If after Sleepaway Camp you’re still willing to go into the woods, beware of Ticks.  Actually, for a direct to video movie, Ticks isn’t bad.  It has some production values and a story that, although very far fetched, keeps you watching.  It all begins with a group of inner-city kids going on a wilderness enrichment project.  They don’t know that some cash croppers growing marijuana have been using steroids to enhance the growth of the plants nearby the cabin.  The steroids leak onto some ticks who grow supersized and are out for blood.  The kids and their chaperones know none of this as they try to get into nature and away from their unhealthy urban lives with its crime and entitled situations.  The local sleazy drug lord, however, doesn’t like them too near his operation, and keeps an eye on them.  One of the drug growers is the first to be attacked.

The mutated ticks start out about the size of a hand.  They first attack the dog of  one of the kids, draining it of blood and killing it.  Then they go for people.  Although there’s nothing really new here, other than using ticks as the monsters, it’s a somewhat fast-paced film that satisfies the monster itch.  Only one of the kids actually dies, although several are bitten.  In keeping with the tropes of many American films, though, the one Black kid is the sole victim.  This could’ve been thought through a bit more carefully.  The only other deaths are, however, three white men—all of them associated with the drug growing operation.  A bit of humor keeps things from getting too heavy, but the fact is that ticks can be scary and it turns out that making them bigger, as tenacious as they are, can work to make them scarier.

If you’ve ever been bitten by a tick (only once, that I know of, in my case) you know they can be frightening in that they carry diseases.  In the movie, instead of Lyme their bite is, or can be, hallucinogenic.  This isn’t applied evenly, however, sometimes the bites do this, and that is used to build some tension and to resolve some issues.  In the end, though, it turns out like many of the young-people-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movies.  I won’t tell you how it ends since you may decide to see it, if you’ve cheap like me, and have been hankering for another excuse not to spend a week in the woods.  You’re generally fine if you do rent a cabin, but it is always best to check for ticks.

Spiraling

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I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, so when I post about it it’s a safe bet a friend lent me a book.  This happened a few years back with Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing series I blogged my way through.  (I don’t own the books so please don’t come knocking at my door.)  Another friend recently let me Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.  I lack the finer points of manga (or anime, for that matter) interpretation, but I see the appeal.  Both of these series are horror, and my friends know that I read and watch horror.  Uzumaki is fascinating in the sheer number of ways it involves both body horror and folk horror.  There will likely be spoilers here, so be warned.  It’s all about spirals.  At first I had difficulty seeing how they could be made scary, but there are some seriously disturbing images in this work, if you read through the entire collection.

The story follows Kirie Goshima and her boyfriend Shuichi Saito and their life in Kurouzu-Cho, a town infested with spirals.  The spirals become the vehicle of horror as some people go insane because of them, but others twist into spirals, or have spirals cut into their bodies, or become jack-in-the-boxes, or grow into snails with spirals on their backs, or turn into vampires because of umbilical cords.  The town is plagued with hurricanes and tornadoes.  The ancient lighthouse’s beam becomes an incinerating spiral.  There’s no way out of the town because all exits spiral back into it.  People who stay in the old houses in town twist into each other’s spiral bodies.  That kind of thing.  Kirie (and her family) and Shuichi try to escape but end up surviving until it becomes clear that an ancient spiral culture still has a grip on the town and it will never let go.

As a kid, much to my mother’s chagrin, I used to read American horror comics.  Some of them contained images frightening to a child.  I really wasn’t expecting that this could be replicated on an adult level, but I’m willing to admit I was wrong.  Uzumaki  is compelling as horror.  Creative and bizarre, the comic shows what can be done with a concept that is pressed for more and more ways of developing fear from something otherwise quite benign.  Junji Ito has an eye for horror and my limited exposure to manga makes me think I’d be open to borrowing more of it.  If I can fit it into my spiraling schedule.

Stone Children

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I’m indebted to a friend for pointing out the folk horror nature of the 1977 UK children’s television series Children of the Stones, broadcast on ITV.  Folk horror is firmly tied to place and often involves ancient religions clashing with modern ones.  The term was coined to describe three horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man.  Most discussions don’t go as far as to include children’s programming, but they should.  Children of the Stones consists of seven half-hour episodes which can be, thankfully, found freely on the internet.  Set in the fictional Milbury, but filmed in the actual Avebury, the story revolves around the famous stone circle located there.  Astrophysics Professor Adam Blake and his teenage son Matthew travel to Milbury for research but soon find themselves in a disturbing scenario.

Nearly all of the villagers are incapable of experiencing negative emotions.  What’s more, they can never leave the stone circle.  The stones possess a great energy and Matthew is psychometric—he can sense accurate knowledge of a place or time by touching an object associated with a person at that place and time.  His father, naturally, is skeptical, but when Matthew and his new friend Sandra realize their friend Kevin has changed—he is one of the Happy Ones and suddenly very good at higher mathematics—they piece together a cosmic mystery that involves the stone circle, an ancient religion, and astronomical events from long ago.  There are many horror elements along the way.  People are turned to stone.  Villagers are brainwashed.  Nobody can leave.  The soundtrack was deliberately disturbing as well.  The solution ends up involving time loops as well, so this is heady stuff.

Since the series clocks in at three-and-a-half hours, it really doesn’t fit movie length.  At least not comfortably.  And it contains fairly disturbing themes for children.  Then again, children tend to like scary things; parents are the ones to object to it.  Building on the mythology of the druids and the megalithic structures in and around Avebury, the series maintains a fascination for adults, even if the action is set at kid level.  I was able to get it watched in a week since the episodes allowed for natural breaks in the story.  If my friend hadn’t pointed it out to me, I’d probably never have discovered it on my own.  It’s a pity it isn’t discussed more by those who analyze folk horror.  It is, after all, fun for kids of all ages.

Jurassic Horror

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We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

Failed Horror

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In general I’m not one for stopping a movie, even if it makes me uncomfortable.  I have what is perhaps a bad habit of not reading about movies before watching them, and occasionally that leads to problems.  Combined with my interest in watching films that I don’t have to pay for (i.e. they stream on services I use, or commercial sites like Tubi) this sometimes leads to bad choices.  I started watching Maniac (2012—more than one movie has this title), but stopped about halfway through.  It wasn’t because I was too scared, but rather what I was watching simply wasn’t what I watch horror for.  I’ve long preferred supernatural themes to mere slashers.  Some slashers with that supernatural element (the biggies: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street) still have an appeal, but for the most part more recent bloodbaths don’t really do much for me.

A few weeks after I attempted Maniac, I tried to watch Freaks.  This is an early film that I’d read about many times and didn’t really want to watch, but it was “free.”  In this case, part of a collection of movies I’d purchased on DVD some years back.  It turned out that the disc was damaged and got stuck in my player.  Now, weekends are a precious commodity.  I hate wasting time.  My wife was still asleep so I tried watching High Tension (2003).  I stopped about halfway.  One of the more extreme slashers, it also is a home invasion story, which I dislike.  It was predictable up to the point where I left off.  Then I decided to read a synopsis and learned it has a twist ending that may have made it worth finishing.  I’m no fan of torture porn, however.

By this point it was too late to start yet another movie.  It was light already and we had to go get groceries soon.  Finding time to watch horror movies, even on weekends, has been really tricky.  And I’m getting to the point where I may have to start reading about films before I invest time in starting them.  The problem is I prefer for movies to reveal themselves.  It doesn’t take a genius to know that “free” movies are often free for a reason.  Perhaps it’s time to start specifying “monster movies” for what I want to see.  Horror has wrongly been associated with mainly slashers for many years now.  Some of us prefer monsters, and preferably ones that won’t cost us an arm and a leg.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Still Early

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the history of horror movies of late.  Although they began being labelled “horror” in the early 1930s, the idea had been around for some time.  When I learned that the problematic director D. W. Griffith presented an early horror film based on Edgar Allan Poe in 1914, I had to see it.  Fortunately it’s easily found.  Long in the public domain, this silent film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.  The Avenging Conscience is an adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  The set-up is quite different, and it has a happy ending.  The characters aren’t named, apart from the sweetheart, who is called Annabel.  She’s taken from Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” which is also used in the film.  A young man owes his good fortune to his uncle, who raised him as an orphan.  When he falls in love with Annabel, the uncle objects.  The lad owes him loyalty.

The young couple decide to break up, so as not to upset the uncle.  The young man has been reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and thinks about killing his uncle.  He falls asleep in a chair and when he awakes decides to do the murder.  He is witnessed, however, by a passer-by.  He has to pay him off, but he is now free to pursue his love.  He walls the body up next to the fireplace.  A detective, alerted by the uncle’s friend, interviews the young man and the tapping of his pencil reminds the nephew of a beating heart.  He begins to see the ghost of his uncle.  His guilt eventually comes out and he begins a shoot-out with the detectives.  When he can’t win, he hangs himself, which causes Annabel to leap off a cliff in despair.  Then he wakes up.  The uncle is still alive, and has had a change of heart about the young lovers.  The couple marries and a weird coda involving Pan and some strangely dressed children, apparently a book the nephew wrote, winds things up.

The ghosts, insanity, and the murder mark this as early horror.  Although the actual deaths, except the uncle’s, take place off screen, they are still horror territory.  And, of course, horror properly didn’t quite exist.  Although The Avenging Conscience can’t really take credit as the first horror film, it is certainly an early one.  And it is based on Poe.  Silent, black-and-white, and not really scary at all, this movie has a place in the history of what we now recognize as horror. Watching it is to watch a bit of history.

Early Horror

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The origins of the horror film are hazy.  Although solidified as a genre name in the early 1930s, the ideas that eventually led to horror movies probably began with the 1896 George Méliès offering “The House of the Devil” (“Le Manoir du diable”).  This trick film features many of the macabre elements that would later become horror.  The Devil enters an old castle in the form of a bat.  We see him conjuring all kinds of magic—an Igor-like assistant, a cauldron, a skeleton, ghosts, and witches.  So much of what would feature as the genre developed is here already.  Others have pointed out that Méliès didn’t produce this film with the intention to scare.  It was a three-minute set of trick photography with typical exaggerated gestures and stage-magician tricks.  Still, there’s something there for horror fans.  Especially those of us pressed for time. 

Image credit: George Méliès, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The film itself is easily and freely found on the internet.  It is sometimes mistaken with “The Haunted Castle,” which was a remake lasting only 45 seconds, that came out the next year.  George Méliès was a visionary in many ways and his techniques in this film would pave the way for both independent producers and Hollywood studios as the early forms of the genre appeared.  “House of the Devil” also shows several tropes that will become standard vampire fare.  The Devil transforms from a bat,  he wears a cape, and is frightened off by a cross held aloft.  This was a year before Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published.  The idea of making films scary in their own right would be a later development, but these early pieces of cinema contain many of the elements we would later associate with horror.

It’s difficult to imagine these days, but in the 1920s the Disney short “Skeleton Dance” was considered too macabre for children.  (I discuss this in my book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.)  There was furor after the release of Dracula in 1931 with some critics finding no redeeming value in it.  Horror films had a difficult road to acceptance, which is still true today.  They weren’t regularly called horror films until the early thirties, although they existed before that.  Some are for lighter entertainment, like Méliès’ work.  Comedy horrors are a popular sub-genre.  Even today they continue to be made and are more funny than scary.  Think Scary Movie,  Shaun of the Dead, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  And many, many others.  George Méliès showed what film could do.  And he inadvertently created the first horror movie.

Lights On

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Poltergeist horror movies are a touch difficult to make convincingly.  Part of that, I suppose, is because the actual phenomenon is already scary and dramatizing it often ameliorates rather than increases the fear factor.  When the Lights Went Out is a “based on a true story” movie about a poltergeist in Yorkshire in the 1970s.  One of the problems is that none of the adults are really sympathetic enough to care about, with the exceptions of Rita and Mr. Price, the teacher.  All of the other “grown ups” are so mired in their own problems that you just can’t empathize.  Part of that is probably an attempt to show the life of the poor—it isn’t easy, I know from experience—but there are a lot of good people of humble means.  Not all of them are mean, self-centered, and unsympathetic.

In any case, an elaborate backstory is built to set up the plot.  A monk, from before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, rapes and nearly murders a young girl.  He cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell what he did.  She is educated enough to write, however, and the monastery collectively hangs the monk to preserve the honor of the church.  We’ve got religion and horror here, obviously, but a very poorly understood Catholicism.  In the nineteen-seventies the Maynards move into a council house haunted by both the girl and the monk.  The poltergeist activity begins but nobody will believe Sally, the young daughter.  Instead they blame her.  Until the activity happens to her parents as well.  They try to get a Catholic priest to help, but he’s too busy banging his cleaning woman (and besides, he needs the bishop’s permission for an exorcism).  The Maynards call in a medium who is, predictably, attacked.  The priest is blackmailed into an anticlimactic exorcism.

But the evil monk isn’t gone.  After life returns to normal, he attacks again but is driven off by the girl he murdered, or almost murdered.  In real life, apparently, the poltergeist was much more low key.  The dramatization makes it very much like other horror films we’ve all seen.  I do find the lack of research on how the church operates of interest.  Unfortunately, sexual abuse of the young is, and has been a problem with enforced celibacy from pretty much the beginning.  The priest from the seventies is much more concerned with his reputation than plight of the family.  The movie does do a good job of isolating poor Sally, and you can’t help but to feel sorry for her and her friend Lucy, who just don’t fit in.  That’s where the real horror lies.

Stay

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One of the string of low-budget, but well-made horror films of recent years, Good Boy is most memorable for the performance of Indy.  If you somehow missed the hype, Indy is a dog who can see ghosts while the humans around him (very few for most of the film) cannot.  Indy, by the way, has his own Wikipedia page as an actor—that’s how impressive his performance is.  No doubt, he is a photogenic dog.  Credit has to go to the photographers as well, for catching the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever displaying love, anger, sadness, concern, and, most impressively, fear.  The dog received a Best Performance in Horror award normally reserved for humans.  What makes this especially impressive is that, if you think about it, Indy wasn’t aware that he was acting.  He was being a dog and has no idea what human fiction is.  Impressive.

Spoilers follow.  The story itself is a little thin: Indy’s owner, Todd, has an incurable lung disease.  He decides to move to his grandfather’s house in the woods, alone with Indy.  His grandfather died in the house of a similar disease, living there alone with his dog.  Indy begins to sense the ghosts as they drive onto the property.  Todd, whose health is failing, doesn’t notice them and begins to start shoving Indy away, even chaining him outside in the rainy autumnal weather.  Indy, ever loyal, breaks free and returns after having close encounters with the ghost.  Todd is glad to see his pet but finds his own dead body in the bed before the ghost catches up with him.  Todd’s sister finally visits and finds her dead brother and the dog abandoned in the basement.  (Since I saw this on a streaming service that cuts off credits in its eagerness to get you to watch the next film, I missed the cheering scenes of Indy with his head out the window of the sister’s car.)

Throughout the movie the human actor’s faces are never shown clearly.  This keeps the focus squarely on Indy.  It’s astounding how the dog’s range of emotional expression is slotted into the story, which is probably one reason that it’s a little thin.  You can’t explain to the star, “Now you’re seeing a ghost that your owner can’t and react like this…”.  Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, this low budget film performed well at the box office and has become a cultural touch stone among the horror community.  At least among those of us who can’t resist cute pets.

An Education

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The point of education is to improve life for people.  Reading and studying and listening, we learn.  Travel is often an educational experience.  We gain knowledge, but it does no good if we hoard it.  That’s why some become teachers.  In a society that undervalues education, a self-fulfilling prophecy sets in.  Just look around you.  The usual path into becoming a teacher is education in education.  You can major in it.  You don’t have to be wise necessarily, since, like all things capitalistic, choice of career is economic.  You pick something for which you feel suited.  If you’re lucky, you get a job doing it.  For “higher education” it’s a bit different.  First of all, you need not study education at all.  You choose a field in which to become a specialist and, if you’re lucky, get a job teaching it.  And those jobs are dependent on, of course, the dismal science.

This is one of the main reasons I write.  When your intention is to be a lifelong learner, you know that if you don’t share what you’ve picked up over the years, it will simply be lost.  As a society, we really don’t encourage sages.  The motivation is to make money, to look out for yourself.  Education becomes a means for self-promotion rather than for sharing what you’ve learned.  In my case, I sometimes feel guilty for writing about horror.  Is it really helping anyone?  I have to believe that it might be.  A certain segment of the population finds horror therapeutic.  Psychologists are starting to explore how it’s actually good for your mentality.  I can only hope that if it means something to me, it will mean something to some others.  And I want to share it.

Religion, at least among the non-cynical, is meant to improve people’s lives.  There is a reason that I wanted to be a religion professor, as I was for a few short years.  My circumstances steered me toward horror as a form of self-care, and I think there’s something much deeper here that has to be mined.  Writing the books I do is more like speculating or prospecting rather than staking a claim and digging tunnels.  If they were causing more harm than good I wouldn’t publish them (or try to).  Life is an educational opportunity.  And if we learn from those who care for other people we might have a chance of improving the lot of many.  Look around you.  Is that where we are today?

Walking Sleep

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It has been suggested to me that I might try screenwriting.  I’ve always resisted this, even though some of my fiction may be movie-worthy (one editor told me it was, but then I have a huge stack of rejections from others).  In any case, I had high hopes for Sleepwalkers.  I’d never heard of it before, but I saw that it was Stephen King’s screenwriting debut.  Not all novelists can, or should be screenwriters.  I like King’s novels.  The only one that really didn’t wow me was The Tommyknockers, and even it was well written.  This movie struggles.  Part of the reason is, undoubtedly, that directors depart from the script sometimes.  And the budget doesn’t seem to pay off its estimated 15 million.  For one thing, it’s set in Indiana but the scenery is clearly, clearly California.  They didn’t even try to make this look like the Midwest.  And the acting isn’t great.  The little jokes fall flat.  Something’s wrong in Kansas.

The story seems promising enough.  Sleepwalkers are shapeshifting cat people.  They’re also psychic vampires, drawing their energy from virginal girls.  So far so good.  Then it gets weird.  They transfer energy to each other through incest.  And they can turn invisible.  And turn cars invisible, even at a distance.  They’re super strong and can survive gunshots.  You can kill one by poking its eyes out, however.  And cats are their natural enemies, setting them on fire if they scratch them.  Slow down—there’s too much going on!  And there’s a quasi-comedic tone that prevents this movie from ever really feeling like a Stephen King novel.

A couple of things: those of us who write horror often find humor in our stories.  Sometimes we just can’t avoid it.  And the other thing is writers are often typecast.  For example, we think of Edgar Allan Poe as a horror writer because his best known stories are the scary ones.  Poe wrote funny, however.  And what we’d call, for lack of a better word, literary fiction.  Writers write.  Other people categorize.  In the case of Sleepwalkers, however, it does seem that it was intended as (it was certainly advertised as) horror.  And it has horror moments.  It also has quite a bit of sympathy for the monsters, which isn’t a bad thing.  Predators have to feed—that’s the way of nature.  The sleepwalkers are, to all outward appearances, human.  And they have human emotions.  Stephen King’s first screenplay wasn’t his best work, but we all have to start somewhere.