How Many Zombies?

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The first thing to note about Zombi 2 is that there’s no Zombi 1.  Except that in Italy George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released under the title Zombi.  And Zombi 2 is also called Zombie.  It’s kind of a 1970s classic, but instead of a spaghetti western, it’s an Italian movie filmed in America.  This is one of those movies that has grown in reputation over the years and when revisited by critics is considered better than it was initially assessed.  All that discussion of the title clued you in that it’s about zombies, but what, specifically?  Well, it does take the concept back to its Caribbean roots.  A woman accompanied by a reporter, is trying to learn what happened to her father on the mysterious island of Matul.  Another couple who own a yacht reluctantly agree to take them to the island.

Meanwhile Matul is increasingly facing reanimated dead (one of whom escaped to New York City).  The local doctor can’t accept that voodoo is actually involved and has stubbornly remained to try to find the “actual” cause.  The two couples from the yacht learn from the doctor that the woman’s father had become a zombie.  The doctor knows to shoot zombies in the head, but the new-comers haven’t quite figured that out yet.  The zombie infection is passed on by a bite, but anyone who has died can come back.  And return they do.  They storm the hospital where doctor is trying to hold out.  In the end, everyone but the original couple has been bitten or killed, and the zombies have taken over the streets in New York City.

This isn’t bad for a zombie movie, but it’s not up to Romero standards.  Of course, few are.  I had only recently learned about it from a friend, and it was old enough to be free on a commercial streaming platform.  Zombies have some inherent contradictions, of course, and unless they’re handled well they can look a little silly.  That’s my overall assessment, not bad but a little silly.  Part of the draw of zombie movies is that they deal with inherent contradictions.  Bodies that lack the intricate biological structures required for walking, digesting, indeed, for doing what living people do, simply can’t walk around eating people.  And yet here we are.  George Romero gave the cinematic world the modern zombie, and his superior efforts have led to many attempts at bringing believable undead back to life.  If, like me, you overlooked this one, it’s worth catching, especially for free.

Another Ghost Story

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Quiet horror films are sometimes thoughtful little gems.  I’d completely missed Lake Mungo when it came out.  An Australian indie, it’s a mostly gentle ghost story that leaves you with an eerie feeling, and perhaps a little sad.  Ghosts can be so resonant.  Yet the Poe-esque death of a beautiful woman—a teen, in this case—makes it kind of poetic.  The Palmer family is having a Christmas picnic (remember, southern hemisphere) at Ararat, where there’s a dam that allows for swimming.  The two teens, Mathew and Alice, go into the water but only Mathew comes out.  It takes some time for search and rescue divers to locate the body.  Filmed as a mockumentary, the movie slowly adds details that make it all seem much more complex than an accidental drowning.

Alice, it turns out, has a life that her family knew nothing about.  As various family members see her ghost, and even try to document it with cameras, their own motivations emerge.  Mathew, wanting to help his parents cope, fakes a couple of photos and films suggesting his sister is still at the house.  Everyone in the family experiences ghostly noises and a presence and they even consult a psychic, but nothing definitive comes to light.  They do learn that Alice was more troubled than she ever let on.  It was while at camp at the eponymous Lake Mungo that her own ghost came to her in a premonition of her death.  Finally, the Palmers decide to move but in their final photograph of the house, a shadowy Alice can be seen remaining inside.

Ghosts are, by their very nature, religious.  The deal with that universal that all religions address—what happens after death.  The Palmer family is traumatized, but as the closing credit scenes make clear, Alice has really been there.  The one church scene has some of their religious friends say that they don’t know how to comfort a family that doesn’t attend church.  There’s a lot going on here.  Even the name Ararat and the dam have meaning.  This quiet, haunting film is not dissimilar from A Ghost Story, in some respects.  Both reflect on the loss that a death has on loved ones, making them quite poignant because this is so very true of being human.  Horror films can be a source of wonder rather than the slashers they’re generally assumed to be.  I learned about Lake Mungo by word of mouth and I’m glad to have learned of it since, although fiction, it has something true to say.

Waking Poe

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It’s personal and it’s deep.  My appreciation for Edgar Allan Poe, that is.  I’ve read a few biographies of him over the years, but my engagement with him feels more like that of a boon companion.  Still, I learn a lot from looking at him from different angles.  (And yes, he will be in my forthcoming book.)  Jonathan Elmer’s In Poe’s Wake: Travels in the Graphic and Atmospheric caught my attention but I can’t remember exactly how I heard about it.  This was a case where the back-cover copy won me over, noting as it does, that Poe’s image is everywhere.  Still, I approach things as an historian.  How did this lead to that?  And I must confess that I’m not a great fan of heavily theoretical work (I see plenty of it).  As soon as I see Deleuze, my eyes begin to glaze over.  Do we have to go there again?

All of which is to say Elmer’s book is erudite and, at times, quite academic.  I learned a lot from it, particularly the first two chapters.  Much of the rest of it was a bit too theoretical for my plebeian tastes, but I was still learning as I went.  I hope.  I guess I was thinking it would be more of a history of how Poe ended up, for example, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Or how the Baltimore Ravens got their name.  Or even how the Ultima Thule daguerreotype became so ubiquitous.  These may well be impossible questions to answer, even as some of us are fool enough to rush in and try.  In academia, the theoretical is a much safer approach.  It impresses Deans and others in the department.

I occasionally listen to famous people talking about fame.  How it destroys some people and obliterates aspects of others’ lives.  Poe was reasonably well known during his lifetime, but not famous on the level that, say, the internet can instantly make you.  Or even TikTok.  Even back within my lifetime (which, I gather, is about the same as Elmer’s) Poe’s influence has grown dramatically.  His was a household name in my childhood, at least among a certain type of reader.  It wasn’t unusual to find people who’d never heard of him.  I suspect that is also true today, but Poe looms large over October and even the New York Times nods in his direction when the days grow shorter.  Like most writers, Poe isn’t who we think he is.  Elmer’s book does indeed explore his wake, and it is one that continues to cause waves over the centuries.

Like Twilight

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The weird thing about watching The Similars is that I’d convinced myself that the movie was from the late sixties.  It’s set in 1968, and the use of desaturated colors gave it an antique feel.  The movie is actually from 2015, a fact that jarred me when it was over.  As I watched it my first thought was, “this is like The Twilight Zone.”  It is, very much so.  It begins with a voiceover and it follows a group of eight people in a bus station during a preternatural hurricane.  By the way, there will be spoilers here.  It’s pretty difficult to discuss the movie without them.  Please be warned.  Also, the film is in Spanish, so you may need subtitles.

Ulises, a youngish man, is trying to get to Mexico City where his pregnant wife is giving birth in the hospital.  A native woman, a shaman, avoids Ulises, while Martin, the ticket seller, doesn’t trust him.  The bus isn’t coming because of the hurricane which, the radio announces, covers the entire world.  Another pregnant woman, Irene, is fleeing her abusive boyfriend, but odd things have begun to happen.  A bathroom attendant and the shaman have seizures.  A mother and her ill son arrive.  Martin insists Ulises is a witch, and Martin has covered his face with bandages.  What soon becomes clear is that everyone is taking on Ulises’ face.  They assume he’s either a government agent and they are being experimented upon, or he’s somehow a supernatural being.  Then the Twilight Zone twist comes: it’s the ill boy who’s the one with special powers.  He is following the plot of a horror comic book he read, where everyone is transformed to look alike and they lose their identities.  That part was borrowed directly from the Zone.  The shaman reveals that aliens gave the boy his powers and this is an extraterrestrial plot.

There’s a lot going on in this movie.  Isaac Ezban, the director, apparently wanted it to be a character-driven drama, like Twilight Zone.  Indeed, the film nods to more than one episode of Rod Serling’s series.  Although it’s derivative, it’s artfully done.  The retro feel to it adds to the effect.  And when Irene’s baby is born it’s pretty clear that we’re firmly in the world of horror.  There’s a certain amount of humor here, but the parts are played straight.  The idea of a child with unlimited power is terrifying, as even ancient stories of Jesus as a boy show.  It does seem to be, however, an alien plot while the camera stays firmly focused down here.

Who’s Pretty?

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Movies come at you from all angles these days.  People love stories and streaming companies make enough money to create their own content.  I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a notable effort for a Gothic film, financed by Netflix.  The pace is fairly slow and there’s little in the way of jump startles or bloodshed.  The story isn’t fully explained, but then it revolves around a horror writer, so that’s not unexpected, I suppose.  Lily is called in as a hospice nurse for Iris, although what Iris is dying from isn’t specified.  The estate manager supposes the stay won’t be long, but Lily remains in the house for eleven months, not leaving at all.  A few creepy things happen, but nothing terribly threatening.  Meanwhile, Lily, who admits to being too scared to read horror, decides to investigate Iris’ best-known book because Iris keeps calling her by the name of one of the characters (Polly).

After several months of this, Lily comes to believe that Polly was a real person and that she was murdered in the house.  Up front the movie announces itself as a ghost story and lets us know that Lily won’t survive the year.  That’s technically not a spoiler, since it says so at the very beginning.  The question becomes, what has happened to Lily?  Iris remains pretty firmly in the background, but she is the one who initiated the story.  The movie strongly implies, without outright stating it, that Polly was a real person who somehow channeled her story to Iris.  Iris, however, when she talks about Polly, seems to take the point of view of her murdering husband.  I won’t say how Lily fails to survive the year because that might actually be a spoiler.

This is one of those movies that relies on mood more than plot.  In that it manages to approach Gothic sensibilities with the very premise being, from the start, that ghosts own a house.  I live in an old house.  Apart from the previous owners, who both left alive, I have no idea who might’ve lived here since about 1890.  I haven’t seen any ghosts but I often do wonder what has happened in this place.  There are those who prefer modern houses with shiny surfaces (and generally no books),  but some of us prefer to take our chances with history.  We may never unpack that history but living among it makes us feel connected.  That’s kind of like the experience of watching I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.  Only we hope that are good guests in what may be somebody else’s dwelling.

Virtual Head Sickness

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I think quite a lot about the nature of reality.  Our brains—no, our minds—create reality for us.  I’m reminded of this when I get motion sickness from watching a movie.  I am not actually moving, and I even look away from the screen frequently, but if I don’t realize it soon enough, I become quite ill.  There really should be an advisory warning for people with my condition since I have occasionally lost an entire day recovering from such an experience.  Most recently it happened with V/H/S Viral.  I had not watched any of the V/H/S franchise; indeed, I didn’t realize it was a franchise.  I was watching it under the false impression that it was a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead movie.  Well, it partially is.  They were responsible for one of the segments—it’s an anthology film.

I made it through an hour and ten minutes, with only eleven minutes to go, when I realized, “I’m going to throw up if I don’t shut this off.”  So I did.  Now, if you have the condition I do, there’s little that you can actually do when the process starts.  You can’t move your eyes much, and even moving your physical body has to be done slowly.  (My sister-in-law, who is a physician, once tried a “tough love” cure when I got motion-sick from a small plane ride.  It didn’t work.  I ended up laying in the dirt by the side of a camp road in Idaho for about half an hour before I could open my eyes and walk, very slowly, back to the cabin.  Once there I slept the rest of the day.)  You might understand why I resent when a movie does this to me.  After maybe an hour, I tried to read.  I was actually reading “Hans Phaal” by Edgar Allan Poe at the time, the part where Hans is hanging upside down outside the balloon.  I had to put the book down.

Although I’d almost gone too far, after a couple of hours I could stand to scroll a bit.  (That often makes me mildly ill, so I need to be careful.)  Then I realized that V/H/S is an anthology series and that various filmmakers are invited to contribute.  Thus the mention of Benson and Moorhead that drew me in in the first place.  I had been trying to complete my viewing of their films.  They aren’t a franchise, but I realized, post-nausea, that I had already seen all of their feature-length collaborations.  They’re philosophical movies, and leave me questioning reality.  The fact that my mind makes my body motion-sick when it’s not moving also does the same thing.

National Nightmares

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Being drawn into the dream of a madman.  Trump’s dream.  It seems like fiction, doesn’t it?  But, as they say, reality is stranger than.  I didn’t come up with this observation of being drawn into a madman’s dream myself.  It comes from Harlan Ellison via Stephen King.  When asked why he writes what is commonly called horror, Ellison pointed to the things happening at the time: Jonestown, Ayatollah Khomeini, etc., and replied something like the world was being drawn into Khomeini’s dream.  So the United States is being drawn in to the mad dream of Donald Trump.  I believe it’s because many people lack imagination.  There’s a reason I write “horror” stories in my spare time.  I prefer not to live in a madman’s dream.  Even if my stories are read by the few who frequent the journals in which they’re published, they are an attempt at viewing the world through unclouded eyes.

Entirely too much of our collective lives have been eaten up by Trump’s antics.  I was looking for an image on this blog going back some eight years and found, you guessed it, posts about Trump.  And here we are on the precipice again, all to stoke one man’s vanity.  And people ask why some of us write or watch horror?  We tend to treat insanity as if it’s rare.  Any self-aware, reflective person, when alone and honest, will admit that some things we do simply aren’t rational.  We’re not, as Silicon Valley moguls like to think of themselves, Mr. Spock.  (And even he underwent pon farr.)  The evidence of Trump’s manipulations is all over the place, but that doesn’t stop yard signs from popping up like toadstools.

We are far from a “sane” species.  We may wonder why deer step out onto the road and stare blankly into headlights, but we do the exact same thing.  Horror writers tend to be pretty clear thinkers.  I suspect it’s because many of them spend time trying to get into the heads of their irrational characters.  They can recognize the madmen and the dangerous among us.  King’s Twitter posts make no bones about his seeing through Trump.  The latter’s public speeches clearly indicate that his mental capacity isn’t sufficient to be given nuclear codes, let alone the reins of the most powerful country on the planet.  He dreams of his own greatness.  His desires are entirely for his own glorification.  Anyone can see that.  But we are creatures who dream.  And it’s difficult to wake up from a dream, even if it’s a nightmare.

Keep Them Open

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“To be is to be perceived.”  That was the summary of Berkeleyian philosophy we were taught in college.  In other words, not to be perceived is not to exist.  So, Don’t Blink kind of runs with that idea.  Before getting started, a spoiler: close your eyes if you don’t want to know something important.  Okay, so no explanation is given.  Ten friends (a lot of names to remember) drive to a resort that is so remote that you arrive with the fuel tank on empty.  The friends explore the resort but there’s nobody there.  Clearly people were there, just shortly before, but they’re all gone.  And then the friends start disappearing, but only when nobody sees them.  That’s the Berkeleyian angle.  The last survivor never does figure out what is going on, although the authorities seem to be aware that something’s up.  For those of us easily ignored, this is a scary movie.

It’s also another potential film for Holy Sequel.  After her boyfriend vanishes, one of the girls finds a Bible and begins claiming that God is punishing their sins.  Given that these are all millennials, this kind of thinking starts to get on the others’ nerves.  It’s not a major event in the film but it reinforces, as so many factors do, that religion and horror aren’t ever very far apart.  And in case you’re wondering, no, she’s not the survivor.  Neither does she suggest this might be the “rapture.”  During said event, the righteous disappear, not twenty-somethings with a weekend of sex on their minds.  The director, Travis Oates, is apparently a Hitchcock fan, so some elements fit into that sensibility.

I only found out about the movie because a friend suggested that it might be good beginner horror.  There are a couple of pretty intense scenes, but overall there’s not a ton of blood and guts.  There aren’t any jump startles, just a dread that continues to grow throughout.  I’m pondering how the Bible is being presented here.  It’s used as an apotropaic device—as protective magic.  Because the Bible is divine, it has, so the belief goes, the power to prevent harm.  Ultimately, in the world of this movie, nothing has that ability.  Although the Bible’s there, the message is pretty nihilistic.  Kind of like thinking about the heat death of the universe.  Still, the acting is good and the premise, although Vanishing on 7th Street also covered the idea of people just disappearing, is engaging.  Even though it doesn’t answer the question of why, or how, it is a movie that underscores the philosophy of George Berkeley as having perhaps been onto something.

Something Somewhere

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A friend suggested I might like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead films.  An unusually intellectual type of horror, these movies challenge perceptions of reality and are tied together with one or two thematic elements.  Something in the Dirt is their most recent offering and as far as existential horror goes, it’s a winner.  The storyline, as with their other films, plays with alternative realities bleeding over into what we think of as everyday life.  There’s a lot going on in this one that will keep you guessing until the end, and even after that.  Levi, a ne’er-do-well, awakes in his cheap apartment in LA and meets his neighbor, John, just outside.  Even this initial meeting has a sense of the surreal about it, but the two strike up a conversation, each trying to weigh the other’s truthfulness.

Levi’s apartment begins to show elements of paranormal happenings.  Neither he nor John have professional careers, so they figure they can use their off times to make a documentary about the phenomena to sell to maybe Netflix, setting them for life.  They each start coming up with theories about what is happening from ghosts to extraterrestrials to Pythagoreans building Los Angeles on an occult geometric pattern.  Ultimately they seem to settle on two basic forces of nature: electromagnetism and gravity.  Both are distorted in this apartment.  Meanwhile, each learns that the other isn’t quite what he seems to be.  Levi has a history of arrests that he downplays.  John is the member of an evangelical, apocalyptic group, but he’s also gay and claims to have made a ton of money that he donated to the church.  (Religion and horror, folks!)  Neither really trusts the other but synchronicities keep occurring, preventing either one from just ending the project.

They bring in occasional experts who have varying degrees of skepticism regarding whether the two are faking what they capture on camera.  After all, they include reenactments along with their actual footage.  I won’t spoil the ending here, but it is pretty much what a seasoned viewer of Benson and Moorhead might appreciate.  These movies are so unusual and so full of hard thinking that it seems odd that they aren’t discussed more often.  If I understand correctly, there is only one remaining film where they appear as writer, director, producer, editor, and director of photography that I haven’t seen.  They are the kinds of movies that if you binge on you’ll either end up enrolling in a graduate program in philosophy or spending the rest of the day blowing dandelion seeds into the wind.  Or maybe there’s something in all this.

Seasonal Poe

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The more I read of and about Edgar Allan Poe, the more convinced I become that he wasn’t as associated with horror in his own mind as he has become.  As one of the earliest American writers, he has become the icon of those who wrote on the dark side.  His contemporaries—Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—did as well, but it was Poe who became iconic.  On a recent trip to Michaels to take in the seasonal ambiance, Poe’s presence was difficult to ignore.  I wasn’t prepared to shoot a photo-essay (I’m not sure how they feel about such things in a store, in any case) so I didn’t photograph all the pieces.  “The Raven” is frequently referenced, with typewriters with the poem emerging and large, ominous black birds about, but Poe himself also appears.  There are, of course, painted busts of Poe.

But Halloween has grown more whimsical over the years.  Arguably for my entire life it has been primarily a children’s holiday, but many have noticed that those of us who grew up with Halloween have retained adult interest in it.  Part of this is no doubt commercial since the captains of industry have learned people will spend more on Halloween than any other holiday except Christmas (I do discuss this in my forthcoming book).  And indeed, the Headless Horseman appears quite a lot as well.  Irving, however, isn’t there on the ground.  Poe is.  The whimsical part comes through in showing the humor of the season.  For example, although Poe is shown in the noble bust format, he’s also portrayed (fully clothed) on the toilet.

Finally, there were figurines of a fanciful tombstone of Poe.  They even got the dates correct.  Now, there’s more to be said regarding the comparison with Irving.  You can find the Headless Horseman on the toilet as well (along with Dracula).  You can find the Horseman in bust format as well.  When it comes to tombstones, however, the fictional Ichabod Crane shows up alongside the nonfictional Poe.  That casts a certain light on Irving’s most famous story.  I’ll save that for another post, however, since authors are expected to repeatedly plug their books.  I left Michaels strangely reflective.  Poe-themed merchandise is fairly typical any given year, but since we’re having our first Halloween party in some years, and since I’ve been exploring Poe’s range as a writer, this clear abundance of Poe as an icon gave me pause.  As if I were coming within view of the melancholy house of Usher. 

Haunted Space

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A haunted house film set in space.  That’s what I thought and then read the same words in a published description of what the writer and director were going for.  In that way it was a clear success, but in others it struggles.  The premise is good, if jarring.  Space travel, which is the most scientific of scientific enterprises (there’s a reason the rest of us say, “I’m not a rocket scientist”) collides with the traditional supernatural.  The results are worth pondering.  Event Horizon has become a cult classic, and like many older films, has been more positively reevaluated in recent years.  So the crew of Lewis and Clark is on a rescue mission to the ship Event Horizon, in a decaying orbit around Neptune.  Neptune’s atmosphere provides lightning for this haunted house.  The crew learns that Event Horizon has been through a black hole and has returned sentient.  Its crew has no survivors and it won’t allow Lewis and Clark to either escape or to destroy it.

Those of us who watch horror looking for religion—and even general viewers—can’t help but notice that Event Horizon ended up in Hell and returned.  It plagues the rescue crew with hallucinations of their regrets and failures.  Weir, the scientist who designed Event Horizon, is more or less possessed and stops at nothing to save the ship, which has brought Hell back to this dimension.  Again, it’s a bit jarring, like vampires in space.  (Yes, I know it’s been done.)  There’s even a point where Weir informs one of the crew that the crewman doesn’t believe in Hell.  Heck, they’re in outer space on a ship technology built.  But what if there is a spiritual reality—“dimension,” in the film’s lingo—out there?  What if some traditional religions are right?

The movie’s not apologetic, but it’s offering a reminder that to be human is to be spiritual.  No matter how much science “proves,” there’s always potentially more “outside.”  Hell in Event Horizon is beyond the bounds of the universe.  It is another place but a place it is.  It costs some of the crew their lives, but does it claim their souls?  Event Horizon is one of those movies that the studio ordered severely edited, and for which the edited footage was lost.  Movies ever only show us what directors, producers, and studio execs want us to see.  People crave stories.  And when a movie, like Event Horizon, raises more questions than it answers, viewers want to know—what really does happen in a haunted house in space?

Some Body

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Many period movies are reevaluated and found better than originally critiqued.  (It feels strange to write that about a 2009 movie, but that was a decade and a half ago.)  I’d read about Jennifer’s Body before, but the title put me off from watching it.  Then, of all places, the New York Times recommended it last year during one of their autumnal forays into the horror genre.  Interestingly, it’s a possession movie with a few twists.  Demons are quite malleable monsters, of course.  So Jennifer and Anita (Needy) are best friends.  Jennifer is the girl all the guys want, and Needy, well, isn’t.  One night they go to hear a band at a local bar, and Jennifer leaves with them.  We later find out—spoilers about to appear—that their intention is to sacrifice a virgin to Satan to help them succeed as an indie rock band.  Jennifer’s no virgin, though, and demonic transference took place—i.e., Jennifer is possessed although the band gets their boost.

Then Jennifer has to eat people (high schoolers, of course) to survive.  She eventually tells Needy all of this, and her friend researches the occult and realizes her former friend is seriously dangerous.  And she decides to stop her.  I won’t give away the ending (it was only 15 years ago), but I will say that the overall result is somewhat unusual for a demon movie.  There’s plenty of religious imagery, but nothing really explicitly showcased.  For example, Needy’s mom has religious paraphernalia around the house.  There are no clergy in the story and Needy teaches herself what she needs to know about dispatching demons.  In other words, it’s a strangely secular possession movie.  And in the end demonic ability leads to justice.

The critical reappraisal is largely based on the feminist message and complexity of female relationships in the movie.  Both written and directed by women, those aspects aren’t unexpected.  And the movie is a horror comedy.  The funny parts tend to come from aspects of the dialogue since the acting is played straight.  This isn’t so much a scary movie as it is a smart one, which is probably why the Times critic recommended it.  Demons aren’t always scary monsters in horror, and what you end up being afraid of here is that the relationship between Jennifer and Needy might end since it seems to be the foundation on which two young women’s lives are built.  Is it a good movie?  Well, it’s not bad.  I tend to lean on the side of the reappraisers—it still has something to say. 

Another Host

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Several months ago I wrote about The Host, a movie I enjoyed but had watched by mistake.  By that I mean that someone had recommended The Host (2006) and I watched the completely unrelated The Host (2020).  (You can’t copyright titles.)  I waited long enough that the right Host became available on a service I use so it was, in essence, “free.”  This one is a Korean monster movie, directed by Bong Joon-ho.  I’d previously seen his excellent Parasite, and The Host didn’t disappoint in either the social commentary department or in the heart-felt monster tale.  In the latter department it has some common ground with Godzilla Minus One.  The Host begins with chemicals poured in the Han River causing a mutation that becomes a big problem.  This monster kills many, but the story focuses on the Park family where a ne’er-do-well father (Gang-du) disappoints his daughter and siblings.  Then the monster carries off his daughter.

The government, wishing to hide the origins of the creature (an American military facility did the chemical dumping) invent a virus story to keep people away from the river where they have trouble locating the monster.  Meanwhile Gang-du learns that his daughter is still alive, being kept as a future meal in the creature’s lair.   His father, sister, and brother all come together to try to find her, having to work around the corrupt government response to the crisis.  In other words, there’s a lot going on here.  The monster is believably rendered and its interactions with crowds of people don’t strain the imagination.  I do have to wonder if the creators of Stranger Things were familiar with this film.  Again, there’s some overlap there.  There are some holes in the plot, or it may be that I didn’t quite get everything (quite likely regardless).

It’s easy to see why the movie won so many awards.  The question that haunts me is whether this is a horror movie or not.  There are definitely horror aspects, but the overall feel is a meaningful monster movie, which isn’t really a recognized genre.  Monsters sometimes—often, in fact—bring out the best in people.  Without giving too much away, we can say that about this movie.  A family torn apart is reunited by a monster.  It doesn’t end well for them, but they have learned something by the experience.  And the movie is impressive from a cinematic perspective as well.  So now I’ve had two Hosts and although quite different from each other, both are recommended.

Burial Zone

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I don’t always believe the statistics.  Numerically, the number of horror films—depending on how the term is defined—declined into men (and sometimes women) in rubbery suits in the 1950s.  Indeed, it’s often opined that had not Hammer joined the horror business in the mid fifties that the genre born only twenty-something years earlier might’ve died out.  There seem to have been some good horror films made then, though, even if overlooked because of their B status.  A friend recently directed me to I Bury the Living, after reading my post about Carnival of Souls.  I have to confess to having never heard of I Bury the Living.  (Stephen King mentions it in Danse Macabre.)  Produced as a B movie it was itself buried among the various other efforts of the late fifties.  It’s not a bad movie, however.  In fact, it’s better than the title might lead you to believe.

The plot is something of a period piece—a well-respected department store supports a cemetery committee for Immortal Hills, the town’s graveyard.  Robert’s turn as chairman of the committee arises and he tries unsuccessfully to get out of the duty.  The caretaker, Andy, doesn’t want to retire, but he’s aging out.  The movie, however, revolves around the map.  The sold plots are marked with white pins while the plots already occupied have black.  When Robert accidentally puts black pins into newly purchased plots and the couple dies, he believes he’s cursed with an ability to kill those he black pins.  He substitutes a black pin for a white one at random.  The person dies.  In all, seven people succumb.  Convinced he’s murdered them, Robert decides to bring them back to life but putting the white pins back.  Only at this point does Andy confess that he’s been killing the victims in retaliation for being forcefully retired.

The ending is a little weak, but the psychological tension as it builds up is believable.  One critic compared it to an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, a comparison that has also been made for Carnival of Souls.  I would concur with that observation.  Although Twilight Zone wouldn’t air for another year, that kind of unsettling tale was already in the air.  No zombies appear, but the palpable belief that they might is what really makes the horror work in this instance.  The first half is an eerie story, but when Robert sticks in that first white pin a shift takes place.  Of course, modern viewers have been primed by Night of the Living Dead, so we know the possibilities.  Perhaps the power of Night gives life to older movies.  After all, anything can happen in the Twilight Zone.

Dancing with King

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There are books you wait too late to read, but which you read at just the right time for you.  That’s how I feel about Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  This book is endlessly cited in more academic treatments of horror and I knew I should read it.  And one thing I immediately appreciated is that even early in the eighties King expressed my long-term concern: many genres fall into horror.  He, perhaps rightly, considers horror a subspecies of fantasy.  Or course, fantasy has come to mean something quite different in the intervening half-century.  Still, the reader is treated to thrillers, sci-fi, and weird fiction.  There’s also a dose of the gothic and speculative as well.  King sets his four classes of monsters early: the vampire, the werewolf, the thing without a name (Frankenstein’s creature), and ghosts.  These are all very broadly conceived.

It will become clear in coming weeks, for anyone who’s interested, that the movies I “review” here have been influenced by King’s list.  And in the longer term, the books as well.  And I tend to agree with King’s antipathy toward television, although I disagree with his assessment of The Twilight Zone.  Danse Macabre is a book of its time, of course.  I would be curious as to the master’s reaction to such more recent classics as The X-Files.  I loved that he treated Ray Bradbury as a sometime horror author and it becomes clear that each of us finds different things scary.  The thing was, I found myself anticipating my too scarce reading time each day for the month it took me to read the book.  I often start books that I soon find myself approaching with a kind of duty to finish.  Love him or not, King is a talented writer and will keep you coming back, just like birds to a feeder.

I learned that King, too, appreciates bad movies.  He grew up about a decade and a half before I did, but the small-town culture I experienced as a child was not so different, although Sputnik was already up and the Cold War already on.  I guess what I find so engaging here is that this is a guy who speaks my language.  My tastes differ, of course, but there’s something comforting about whiling away the pre-dawn hours with a guy who can say “The Thing” and you know immediately what that vague phrase means.  And it was strangely reassuring to be reminded that the world of the seventies, which I experienced as a teenager, was just as scary as the world is right now.  And if King ever looked me in the eyes, I think he’d recognize something about me, although a sometimes critical fan.