I’ve Never Seen Die Hard: OTC’s Favorite “Christmas” Movies

I think we are all aware of the meme of Die Hard as a Christmas film. The arbiters of coolness decided there was something a bit cringe about the people who claimed it as their favorite holiday film. Like, “Hey, forget It’s a Wonderful Life normies, I’m the freaky sort of dude who thinks Die Hard is the best Christmas film.” As the title of this blog entry indicates, I haven’t seen Die Hard so I am not in a place to dissect the meme but I have sympathy for people who dare deviate from the more staid Christmas canon. Half the films I consider my favorite Christmas films can charitably be considered garbage. Who am I to question anyone’s else’s tastes in or motives behind liking specific holiday films?

And here is where I completely contradict myself because I sort of wish I could launch a Christmas movie reverse class action lawsuit. Instead of a bunch of plaintiffs, it would just be me suing everyone who ever told me, “Oh my god, you have to see Love, Actually. It’s the best Christmas movie ever!” I did watch it and I was flabbergasted at how horrible it was. Snape destroys his marriage to Professor Trelawney buying jewelry for a side piece he hadn’t nailed yet. Rick Grimes dances in cringe to Dido as he pines for Elizabeth Swann. Mr. Darcy decides the capacity to speak to one’s soul mate should be optional. The movie insists that the (American) size ten woman Hugh Grant, at his most gormless, falls in love with, is fat. Liam Neeson takes romantic advice from a child, as you do. Let us not discuss the low-IQ scumbag whose entire life goal is to… have sex with every woman ever, I guess. The Laura Linney and Bill Nighy sections were the best but they cannot redeem this bizarre vehicle of second-hand embarrassment. Seriously, this movie was so shamelessly cringe that I worried my colon might prolapse before it ended.

With the above rant in mind, here’s my list of my favorite Christmas-themed films. Also, you should know that if I attempt something like this again in the future, the list will likely be different. Stability of opinion is for losers!

1. The Ref

On the surface, it looks like a dark comedy that ends with family redemption. A husband and wife leaving marital therapy are taken hostage by a thief after a failed heist. He forces them to take him to their home where they have to navigate an already tense Christmas family gathering while they pretend he is their therapist lest he kill them. The couple actually ends up repairing their fractured marriage and the genuinely bad people get what is coming to them, hurrah. Sounds like bog standard Hallmark channel stuff, right? The hook to this film is the cast. I dare you to find a Christmas movie with more distasteful leads.

The wife is played by Judy Davis, roundly considered by many in the film industry to be absolutely venomous to work with. Her condescending nastiness to River Phoenix on the aborted film, Dark Blood, made his life such a living hell that some believe it accelerated the drug abuse that led to his overdose. I cannot do justice to her awfulness in what I hope will not be a terribly long article so look it up.

The husband is played by Kevin Spacey, and I don’t even know what is happening anymore with him. Was it a witch hunt? Was he an indiscriminate horn dog and didn’t realize what a menace he was? Is he an abuser whose reputation is tarnished but evaded punishment? I don’t know, but the whole mess around him is unavoidable when mentioning he is in a film.

The robber is played by Denis Leary. People of my age and time and specific social milieu hold Denis Leary in some contempt. His outright theft of the late Bill Hicks’ comedic persona and jokes will always leave a bad taste in my mouth. When he was coming up and establishing himself, he was one of the most called-out thieves of intellectual property.

So you get to watch a harridan, a possible pervert and Denis Leary battle it out, with appearances by Christine Baranski, Vincent Pastore, and J.K. Simmons. Also prepare yourself for lots of mentions of cat piss. Good times.

2. Black Christmas

The original is the best – the remakes all make me itch because I sort of wanted everyone in the 2006 version to get killed. The more recent release was so bad I could not make it through it. The original is just amazing in a 1970s sort of way. Sorority girls don’t know the call is coming from inside the house, abortion is a plot point, Margot Kidder stole the movie (I sense she was “behaving” more than “acting” but who cares because she was hilarious), an entire police force as well as the emergency medical services accidentally leave a comatose woman alone in a house after she survived a murderous rampage, and Andrea Martin is stealth-hot, especially when she is wearing that crocheted shawl tied around her shoulders. Add in John Saxon and a police officer who has very limited exposure to blow jobs and you really can’t miss with this film.

3. Metropolitan

I saw this film when I was deep in my The Secret History/Mitford Sisters/Mary McCarthy’s The Group/Salinger-esque-fueled adulation of old money and the veneer of class. In this Whit Stillman vehicle from 1990, a group of monied college kids in Manhattan home for the holidays permit a less privileged and intellectually pompous peer, Tom, into their group. One of the kinder, intelligent young women, Audrey, has a crush on Tom, while her old friend Charlie pines for her and tries to repel Tom. Tom has eyes for another girl in this wealthy cadre, and the group attend debutante balls, have long after-parties, and engage in very aristocratic and very tame debauchery. Audrey and Tom navigate what they really want from life, I got to watch lots of preppy decor porn, and all in all it was an amusing, strangely sweet film. I would have picked Charlie, though, had I been Audrey. His self-deprecating earnestness and neuroticism were very appealing to me then and now. Repeat after me: Urban Haute Bourgeoisie.

4. Scrooged

You cannot convince me that the scenes where the Ghost of Christmas Present, played by Carol Kane, runs Bill Murray through the wringer are not some of the funniest scenes in cinema. This is just an hilarious retelling of The Christmas Carol, with David Johansen, Karen Allen, and Bobcat Goldthwait. Aside from being a film that has both Robert Mitchum and the Solid Gold Dancers in it, the movie brings little new to the Christmas table, but it’s funny, sentimental and I have a strong and enduring crush on Bobcat, so this one may only appeal to me. Still, give it a look.

5. In Bruges

Not sure if this is a dark comedy or a thriller with some funny moments, but this film is a Christmas gem. Colin Farrell plays a bumbling gangster who made such a huge mistake that his boss, Ralph Fiennes, wants him killed but also wants him to have a nice time before he is executed. So he sends him to Bruges, Belgium with Brendan Gleeson, who is told to show the doomed young man a good time before he kills him. Half the reason to watch this film is to take in how beautiful Bruges is during the holidays and to hear Ralph Fiennes shout, “You’re an inanimate fucking object!”

6. Bad Santa

Mr OTC loves this film and I quite like it, too. Billy Bob Thornton plays a dissolute Santa who, along with a dwarf who plays an elf, robs malls. Serving as a mall Santa permits him to case department stores for huge Christmas Eve heists. With police sniffing out his motel room, Thornton inveigles his way into the home of a bullied kid who lives with his senile grandmother while his father is in prison. The film cast includes the late John Ritter, Cloris Leachman, and Bernie Mac, as well as the still-living mom from The Gilmore Girls. Bernie Mac was the scene-stealer in this film.

7. Inside

Part of the French New Wave of horror, this is a tense, upsetting film that is pretty tight and well-executed, and included an ending that I both hated but concede was the best way for the movie to end. Sarah, a pregnant widow, is home alone on Christmas Eve, preparing for her induction on Christmas day. However, a woman breaks into her home in an attempt to kill her and take the baby she is carrying, and Sarah does all she can to save herself and her unborn child. It’s a grim, gripping, bloody film and one of the few “Christmas” films I watch year-round. I know there has been an American remake but I find artsy European horror translates poorly when under the control of Americans. I use Funny Games and The Vanishing as examples. Just stick to the original with this one.

8. ATM

Boy who screwed over investors meets girl at office Christmas party. Girl accepts ride home. Boy’s jackass friend demands a ride too, plus a stop at an ATM so he can get money for some post-party snacks. Little do they know the ATM kiosk they visit is the hub of a murderous madman’s midnight antics and they have to find a way to get help or escape. It’s a pretty nice, claustrophobic little horror film but it also makes no sense in a “how on earth could anyone pull that off and why would they bother in the first place” sort of way, so don’t overthink it.

9. P2

An executive who works in a New York high rise is stalked by one of the building’s security guards and taken hostage on Christmas Eve. It brings little new to the table yet manages to be a very tense film. Wes Bentley, who is in real life a bit of a lunatic, plays the demented, lovelorn guard to perfection. I enjoyed his performance so much I began to root for him in a weird kind of way, even as I felt the tension as the heroine engaged in absolute mayhem to save herself.*

10. Christmas Evil

John Waters considers this his favorite Christmas movie. It’s the story of a kid who accidentally sees his dad, dressed as Santa, engage in what Joe Bob Briggs would call “aardvarking” with his mom, and it ruins him. He grows up to become obsessed with Christmas and human goodness, manages a toy factory, and keeps his own list of naughty and nice children. I’ll let John Waters explain the rest:

He breaks into people’s houses on Christmas Eve and wedges his fat ass down the chimney to deliver presents. The parents freak out and try to kill him but the kids save him and at the end he takes off on his sleigh.

Except his sleigh is a van, he gives away tons of gifts to orphans, kills an evil capitalist, crashes a Christmas party at a bar that is strangely full of kids and absolutely wrecks his brother’s life forever. This is not a film that attempts to be funny, though some think it is a comedy because of Waters’ synopsis. It’s actually a film about the relentless corruption of innocence and the way that the sacred is made profane though the pursuit of profit. But there are moments so ridiculous that keep it from being a pathos-laden slog. It’s serious but over-the-top, the character with principles is the villain, and Christmas has never before been this grimy.

Tell me about your favorite Christmas films. Do you want to ruin my day and explain why Love, Actually is a masterpiece? Can you explain why Terrifier 3 was so awful? What movie do you watch every year at Christmas?Share away, my friends!

*Can currently be watched for free on Amazon Prime Movie.

Oddtober 2024: Sinful Cinema Series 7: The Stendhal Syndrome by Doug Brunell

Book: Sinful Cinema Series 7: The Stendhal Syndrome (say this five times in a row as fast as you can)

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, film criticism

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, it’s not that odd, strictly speaking, but discussing Doug Brunell’s Sinful Cinema series has become as close to a tradition as I am capable of establishing.

Availability: Published by Chaotic Words in 2024, you can get a copy here.

Comments: Every year Doug Brunell, using a system unknown to me though I picture him pulling titles of all known horror movies out of a very large hat, randomly selects a film to dissect for his Sinful Cinema series. These film examinations are a hoot, especially when the film he discusses involves a topless investigator busting a human trafficking ring, or a paranormal fraud wrecking lives, or a weird island in Greece where a vampire is entombed, sort of. I think that the “hoot” element for me is that the movies he discusses are generally forgotten or under-known, which generally points in the direction of the films being fringe or loony in some manner, and the real value of the book comes about when Brunell examines the film and finds value that would have gone right over my head without his guidance.

I won’t say he redeems those films, because each one, though sort of awful in execution, has something of great worth in it somewhere and I can count on Brunell’s sharp eye and erudite analysis to show me where that value lies. I also greatly appreciate that Brunell marries his erudition with a willingness to take each movie seriously. I mean honestly, The Abductors was an absolutely horrible film, but after reading Brunell’s open-minded take, there was more to the film than I absorbed in my first watch, probably because I got really distracted by the heroine’s refusal to cover her breasts, even during a frantic car chase. Brunell also goes beyond basic criticism and investigates those involved in the films, sharing all kinds of interesting trivia about the script, crew and actors.

All of these films, given their fringe or forgotten status, were wholly new to me. I watched them before I read Brunell’s take and his books gave the films some gravitas, but because they were unknown to me, I had no preconceived notions regarding them. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I had some trepidation about this year’s film, Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome.

When I was much younger, I tolerated Dario Argento and the other Italian directors who created the “giallo” style of film making. I found the plots to be too labyrinthine and, frankly, pompous for them ever to really resonate with me. But at the time, such films were very hard to find and watch in Farmer’s Branch, Texas, so anything new beyond what we could rent at Blockbuster or watch on cable was going to be a hit, even if only temporarily. The closest I can come to saying I really like an Argento film is to assert that Suspiria was a pretty good movie (the original, the trailers for the remake seemed so awful that I laughed when I saw one). I wondered how Brunell would handle a film that has been well-discussed in film circles and has such a divisive quality to it, for The Stendhal Syndrome is a movie people either love or hate. I did not like coming into this knowing I really disliked the film he was discussing. I wondered if he would be able to pull off his bad movie redemption act. I mean, if a man can discuss The Abductors in a manner that on some level redeems the hilarious awfulness of it, perhaps he could sway me on The Stendhal Syndrome.

Brunell himself had some of the same trepidation I felt. He wondered if he should even discuss it even though it was the film that he picked during his annual random selection.

Believe it or not, The Stendhal Syndrome was another random pick. It just so happened, however, that it was a film I had seen before. Incidentally, it is also my favorite Dario Argento movie. These things, along with it being well-known and newer, made me reconsider several times if I wanted to write about it. After all, a lot has been written and said about the film, and many of the people involved in it have been interviewed (and I knew my chances of securing interviews with any of the Argento clan was slim-to-none). The biggest question I had was: Could I add anything new to the discussion of this movie?

For me, the answer is yes, Brunell added something new to the discussion because even though Argento is well-known and this film is somewhat controversial, I have not read any criticism of it, and I suspect a lot of those who love or hate the film are in the same boat. So even if some of his observations are not groundbreaking, Brunell’s accessible writing coupled with his unironic affection for the films he discusses, even the hilariously shitty ones, means that people who don’t want to wade through dry and jargon-heavy criticism just to understand what the hell this film was trying to accomplish will find useful and probably new information.

I recall watching this film many years ago when I first moved to the Austin area. Vulcan Video, now gone forever, had a more extensive foreign horror section and I came across a lot of excellent Japanese and Italian horror I never knew existed. I absolutely despised this film and I realize that part of my dislike could be chalked up to not fully getting it. And I guess that is a shame because I didn’t have the visceral dislike of Asia Argento that I currently have. Even had I liked it then, I can’t help but wonder how I would react to the film now given the way Asia Argento’s life has played out in the news over the last few years. Brunell briefly addresses the “problematic” nature of Asia Argento, acknowledging it then promptly moving on to discuss the interesting details I missed.

I can’t say Brunell’s discussion of this movie redeemed it for me, but it did enable me to see past my dislike of Asia Argento long enough to take on what Brunell has to say about the film. I will attempt to give a very brief synopsis of the plot: Anna Manni is a detective investigating a rape case when she collapses at the Uffizi Gallery. She suffers from Stendhal syndrome and becomes agitated or enters a completely altered mental state while in the presence of great works of art. This tendency of hers made it very hard initially to know what the hell was actually happening and it was comforting to learn that even learned critics still don’t agree on what actually happened in the film versus what Anna perceived to be happening. Anna is helped by a man named Alfredo, whom we learn has stolen her gun when she was unconscious and later sexually assaults her. Anna experiences an unraveling, her personality changing radically as she becomes hardened, more masculine in her approach to sexual and romantic relationships. Alfredo continues to stalk her and it seems as if Alfredo has killed Anna’s boyfriend, a man named Maria, but we later learn he could not have been responsible for Maria’s murder. To reveal who did it will ruin the film for those who have not seen it, but hopefully this is enough to frame this discussion.

Brunell does an apt job of discussing the symbolism of the pieces of art that cause Anna to dissociate or descend into hallucinatory psychosis, but the best part for me was his explanation of why it is Anna was so awful to me. I recall not really caring about what happened to Anna because she was so unpleasant. Nasty, even. Her reactions to others were, in my much younger mind, aggressively rude. I didn’t understand her but Brunell goes a long way in correcting some of my assumptions about Anna.

I think most people are familiar with the idea that when women experience extreme stress, we often end up messing with our hair. Anna cuts her hair short after her attack, and even her brother teases her that she looks like a boy, to her consternation. Brunell makes the argument that this common act of cutting her hair was Anna attempting to become more masculine, dealing with the trauma of rape by adjusting her personality until she exhibits masculine traits. She began with her hair, but as she dissembled further she began to engage in self-harm. However, instead of harming herself in a covert way and on a place on her body that was not visible, she was exhibiting a need to appear more masculine. When she deliberately breaks a wine glass in her hand, this is how Brunell dissects the scene:

Anna breaks the glass in her hand and does not seem to react at all to the pain, internalizing it much as a man would do.

He elaborates more:

Cutting her hand is done in public, where most females who resort to cutting do so in private. It is also seemingly done “accidentally,” where females traditionally do it deliberately and with ritual.

Anna’s last name, Manni, evidently translates to “a fierce or strong man.”

She later engages in a sort of masculinization of her sexuality. She is seeing a man named Marco who clearly adores her but is utterly tone deaf to the very real distress Anna is exhibiting. Anna reveals in therapy that she shrinks from the idea of being fucked and prefers the idea of being the one who fucks. When Marco pushes her to have sex, she responds in an increasingly hostile manner that he does not pick up on. When Anna asks him if he wants to “have sex,” when she generally referred to it as “making love,” she is showing a departure from the more romantic view of sex. It gets creepier:

When she spins him around and pushes him face first into the wall and then begins thrusting at him from behind, it is a decidedly male act.

[…]

When she tells him that she is now fucking him and starts to reach down his pants, Marco demands she stop. She tells him to “shut up,” and that she does not want to hear his voice. As if that were not enough, she tells him she is not finished yet and throws him to the ground and kicks him.

Another wrinkle in the film that Brunell helped smooth for me was the reason why Alfredo, who raped and killed a number of women, didn’t kill Anna and kept stalking her. This was an especially sharp observation on Brunell’s part. You see, after she collapses the first time in the film, she loses her identity. It takes her a while to regain her sense of self, her psychic slate wiped clean. Alfredo sees the state Anna is in after she is overcome by art, and it affects how he treats her when compared to his usual victims:

It seems clearer in hindsight than it does during the scene, but Alfredo is toying with Anna and wants her alive so that he can experience her purity repeatedly. If he can have her as she was in the museum, forgetting all sense of self, it is like having a fresh victim every time in the same person.

My first and sole viewing of this film was definitely hampered because I did not understand why Alfredo became so obsessed with Anna. She was pretty, sure, but nothing about her seemed to spark such dedicated obsession. I get it now. And I can also say that much of this movie is indeed better understood in hindsight. It is a film you will probably need to watch several times to really see all that Dario Argento wanted his audience to know.

Brunell explains further:

Anna’s mental collapse began after experiencing the Stendhal syndrome and exciting something in Alfredo, who treats her differently than he does his other victims. Art has acted as the catalyst, and now, as she actively pursues art on her own, her downfall will be hastened.

Brunell does a fine job of making clear the color symbolism, art meaning and psychological motivations in The Stendhal Syndrome but in the end I still don’t like this film. I understand it better, but even after Brunell’s careful examination I still find myself confused as I marry together his measured evaluation with my own memories of the film. Was Alfredo somehow possessing his victim even though he was alive when she begins to adopt masculine traits? I have no idea.

But it’s still sort of worse than that because I also wonder who on earth bought Asia Argento as a police detective, be it now or then. Her status as an art-loving law enforcer was on par with Tara Reid as an archaeologist in the stinker Alone in the Dark, or Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in the Bond film, The World Is Not Enough. And let’s not get into the whole “watching his daughter get raped in one of the most sadistic scenes ever is gross” accusation levied at Dario Argento. That one doesn’t actually carry much weight with me because it gets leveled at every parent who directs their child in a film that isn’t G-rated, but it is something that gives this film just an extra layer of “ick” when one considers the role Asia Argento played in the rise of and eventual marginalization of the “me, too” movement.

Overall, I think Doug Brunell made the right choice to discuss a famous film that he had already seen. I can understand why he was concerned that his take on the film would not be fresh and I think following the rules he set out for himself just makes sense. This was one of his strongest Sinful Cinema examinations and it enabled someone who outright dislikes the film and the female lead to see a lot more worth and nuance in a performance that seemed disjointed and bitchy when I first watched it (for what it’s worth, my dislike of Asia Argento began long before accusations against her as an abuser and worse came out – her role in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things rubbed me the wrong way, so much so that I began to refuse to watch anything else she was in). I really appreciated the art discussions because when I saw it all those years ago the Internet made assembling information like that a lot harder and I had little incentive to revisit the film.

The book suffers a bit because it didn’t bring any of those “wait, that was the woman from Last House on the Left” moments, and of course he was unable to speak to either Argento. Still, he has a long and interesting discussion with Troy Howarth, a horror movie fan and critic, and that interview is one of the “worth the price of admission”chapters in this book. I was afraid I would leave this book without any of the more joyful revelations I had with some of his earlier books in this series, but the inclusion of Howarth exposed me to a writer I had not heard of. He has a book examining the film, Alice, Sweet Alice, that I almost discussed this Oddtober but rejected in favor of Bad Ronald.

So even though I didn’t like this year’s Sinful Cinema movie offering as much as previous years, it wasn’t Brunell’s fault that I am just not that into giallo/rape revenge films or the Argentos in general. In fact, he gave me different perspectives to think about regarding the film and now I have a new author to read. All in all, if the movie was a miss, the book definitely is not. Argento completists may want this on general principle but if you are less familiar with Dario Argento, this would be a great primer to consult as you get your feet wet. This book may not be for everyone but I highly recommend it for those who both love Brunell’s sharp but open-minded criticism and this genre of film.

Oddtober 2024: Catsploitation Zine, Part Three – The Black Cat edition

Clio will be so glad when Oddtober is over.

Told you I would revisit Catsploitation if I could. After discussing the first Catsploitation during ‘Zine September, I was eager to get my hands on more of these ‘zines for Oddtober but was worried I wouldn’t get them in time. Bast smiled upon me, and here it is, a look at Catsploitation Zine Part 3: The Black Cat Edition. Catsploitation Zine as a whole discusses fans of cinematic horror and their cats. This edition features fan reviews of horror films that feature black cats from 1934 to 1998, fan art and stories of the black cats owned by people who participated in the ‘zine in some manner. One of them is ‘zine creator Matthew Ragsdale’s memorial to one of his beloved cats, Mady.

‘Zines like this are difficult to discuss in depth because it more or less does what it says it is going to do. There are thirteen short film discussions with film-specific illustrations from fan submissions, and all of the reviews are helpful but succinct. Ragsdale found an interesting and diverse list of films to review for this ‘zine. I haven’t seen most of the films on his list, even though I am culturally aware of most them. This ‘zine will serve as a lovely playbill should I ever want to have a butt-numb-athon and spend a couple of days watching movies back to back.

I don’t want to spoil all of the films discussed, but I will mention a couple of them just to give an idea of the contents. Here’s a snippet from a discussion of The Black Cat (1934), which I am kind of ashamed to admit I have never seen:

Necrophilia, Satanism, drugs, a chess game of doom, torture, a black mass with human sacrifice, and a man being skinned the fuck alive. 1934’s pre-code The Black Cat is like a giant terror scenario onion that gets peeled back… sending us into a nightmare carnival of shadows with two mortal enemies locked in a game of death… and it’s marvelous.

This one is an early horror film two-for, starring both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I really am surprised I’ve never seen this film.

At the other end of the spectrum is Kuroneko (1968), a movie wholly new to me:

Kuroneko (1968) directed by Kaneto Shindo is best approached less as a horror movie and more as a dark folk tale. There is the horror of inhumanity, but it’s not a frantic fear fest. Kuroneko is eerie. It’s a slow burn. Some may call it boring but it’s more of a tense journey into deals with the devil and revenge for atrocity against women.

Another film on the list is a title that whenever I see it, I always think that I need to stream it but I never get around to it. Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) is probably worth seeing for the title alone, but it sounds interesting beyond that:

Vice is a wicked delight; a slice of Italian Gothic dripping with atmosphere, psychological torment, and conniving characters practically begging for their comeuppance. Martino (and co-writers Ernesto Gastaldi and Sauro Scavolini) transposes the mood of a Mario Bava period piece into present day, and captures the insidious, um, vice of his characters. The Poe-Like mood is definitely there, even if the adaptation is loose.

But because I am one of those cat ladies that JD Vance is so worried about, my favorite part of this ‘zine is the section with pictures of people posing with their own black cats and telling stories about them. And it’s not just because it gives me a sort of perverse permission to share my own cat pics here. I just like seeing people expressing affection for their pets. The world is awful and it’s always nice to be reminded that there are so many kind people who adore animals.

Here at Chez OTC, we have two solid black cats, a tuxedo, a tortie, and a calico, and because the editor of the ‘zine included his tortie in the pics at the back because it’s his ‘zine and he can, I’ll share my own non-black cats because this is my site and I can.

He also goes by Booberry Cat, but you have to say it just like this in a high-pitched voice: “Booberry booberry booberry cat!”

This is Boo Radley. He’s named after the psychologically shattered character from To Kill a Mockingbird. He was raised with a golden retriever, and I took him on when my mother became terminally ill. He’s a big, skinny, shaggy wolf-cat and always seeks out a lap to sit in even though he finds it impossible to sit still. He’s our awkward, handsome boy.

Not even kidding. Clio is tired of Oddtober and my shit in general.

This is Clio. She’s a short haired, glossy black girl who has the attention span of a hummingbird and never stops purring. She is the happiest cat we have ever known. She is also a talker, constantly mewing and chirping, We adopted her with her sister Calliope.

Calliope is one of the most beautiful cats alive, fight me.

Calliope is a big, sturdy tortie who is quieter and probably smarter than her sister. She’s shyer but she also seeks us out when she needs attention. She went through a nickname progression, beginning with Callie, breaking off into Opie, which merged into Opus, which then became Opal, and now she’s often called “Opal Divine” after a fish and chips restaurant. She absolutely loves Paulie.

Puddin’ is partially blind, has no teeth, is 14 and has terminal cancer so she politely asks you to cut her some slack in regards to her rumpled fur.

This is Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants, and she’s technically male but she was believed to be a female for so long that it seemed easier to just switch to Paulie, and mostly we call her Puddin’. She is absolutely the sweetest cat. Her nickname is Uncle Grandma because the three young cats in the house adore her because she really has strong maternal energy, and respect her because she’s a much older male. She is currently at home in hospice because she has cancer and her time is nearing. We adopted her in 2012 as an injured stray, with her sister Molly, who was also injured. Molly was solid black and died in January in 2023 from GI lymphoma.

She may look like a soft little bunny cat but she’s the cranky mothercat, even to the cats much older than she is.

This is Mirabelle, also known as Miss Belly. She’s a calico who basically despairs of us all and secretly runs the place. She does not like being held but she will crawl all over us when we are lying in bed because it’s harder to snitch her up and make her be the baby when horizontal. She, Clio and Calliope are all close. Mirabelle lived rough before we adopted her. She is very small compared to her peers, and lost all but one of her kittens once she was rescued. She’s beautiful and imperious.

Feel free to tell me about your cats, any color and breed, and if you would like your own copy of Catsploitation 3: The Black Cat Edition, you can get one here.

Oddtober 2024: The Melancholy Nostalgia of Rotary Phones in Horror Movies

Rotary phones. This whole entry came about because of the black rotary phone on Laurie’s chest of drawers in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Lately I’ve found myself focusing on phones in older horror movies. The black rotary phone in Black Christmas that delivers deranged phone calls from a psycho killer to the helpless sorority girls. The white princess phone on the bedside table of the protagonist in George Romero’s Season of the Witch. Forget the phone in Scream, that movie’s too young. It’s just the phones in horror films before 1982, approximately.

I wish I had something deeper to root to this feeling of pleasant sadness when I see rotary phones in films, especially horror films. This will not be an erudite discussion along the lines of analyzing the meaning of the James Ensor poster in Laurie’s room. It’s just me explaining, as insane as it sounds, how older horror films trigger memories of people in my life who are gone and the places where they lived. It wasn’t a simpler time because life is always complex no matter what. But it was a more visually consistent time, when memories of people and places were not so subject to change and media influence as they are in contemporary films. It was also a time when a person could have an unassailed inner life if they wanted one, and they didn’t have to go full Unabomber to accomplish it.

For decades, my grandparents had the same telephone, a black rotary phone that sat on a side table in their dining nook. They also had an old fashioned phone where the microphone was attached to the wall with a spool-shaped receiver you held up to your ear. It wasn’t used but it remained on the wall anyway. I’ve always wondered who got that phone when my grandfather died.

My own childhood home had a basic wall-installed phone with a traditional handset that stayed in that place, unchanged, for the ten years we lived there. The cord was stretched out from being pulled across the kitchen so we could talk while we washed dishes or tried to stretch it into a bedroom for privacy. I didn’t hate answering the phone back then. Even though telephones brought bad news, when I was young a telephone ringing generally meant something good. A friend wanted to chat, a boy wanted to ask me to a dance, someone wanted me to go bike riding with them. As I got older, sometimes a ringing phone meant someone needed me to cover their after school shift at Michaels, but uniformly, a phone call was nothing more than an invitation to speak to an actual human being about something grounded to a shared reality.

I miss rotary phones. I especially miss phones where the buttons or dials are not housed within the handset, ensuring a life free of butt dials and accidentally handing up when you shift the phone as you speak. I miss them because they seem like a symbol of the last time in history when technology changed slowly enough that the phone you used in grade school was the same one you used in high school. I often feel like we as a world are descending into absolute social chaos because communication technology has and continues to out pace our capacity to adapt.

In Michelle Stacey’s book The Fasting Girl, which is about Mollie Fancher, a girl who was believed to have lived for decades without eating, she speaks about how the zeitgeist at the time was one of psychological chaos. Why? Because suddenly people could move from one side of the country to the other via the Transcontinental Railway in a matter of a few days. Suddenly letters could arrive to the recipients in other states within the same month they were sent. Then the telegraph enabled people to deliver urgent messages in a matter of hours. This rapid expansion of technology caused people to experience a paradigm shift that deeply affected their mental states.

How could one help being nervous in this mind-expanding universe, in which the emerging universe would threaten to change unrecognizably in the course of a generation? How could one avoid the ambient fear of all the noise and speed and light and steam? Humans had never been exposed to such phenomena; they had not learned yet to tolerate them.

Stationary phones with dials were wholly replaced with touch tone phones largely in the 1980s, though they persisted until modern life made it impossible to use them anymore. I have a better chance of explaining the origins of the universe than I do explaining or even understanding the technology that finally killed off rotary phones (beeps are involved, I think), but it stands to reason that if the possibilities of train travel and the promptness of the telegraph caused people to experience anxiety that manifested in psychological illness, what has happened to us all in the decades between rotary phones and these card-pack-sized devices that allow us to be reached at any moment via voice, text, social media, or email while they also give us the capacity to discover any fact from any place in history in a second. We can watch our lives fall apart into utter chaos when someone finds an old Tweet and decides we are fascist racists because we think lox is gross. We can listen to any piece of music, watch any movie, read any book, all the while avoiding direct human contact. And maybe that’s a good thing, because lord knows I don’t want to talk to anyone ever. But it’s undeniable that phones have now made it almost impossible to be alone, calm, and without the expectation that at any moment you may find yourself texting to several people at once as another scam call from the Fraternal Order of the Police gets sent to your voice mail.

Part of me knows I fixate on rotary phones because it’s a mental link to people like my grandparents. I also fixate on them because they’re stylish, because they make horror movie plots easier to create, because I despise speaker phones. But I also fixate on them because the horror they could convey was concentrated and specific. Nasty prank or obscene calls were of course a problem, but some asshole calling and hanging up or breathing heavily over the phone seems so much more… welcome than picking up a glass and metal device that fits into your hand and realizing that Twitter is coming for you, or that some weirdo has taken to using your phone number on credit card applications and skipped out on payments, or that a device that has access to all your data fell out of your pocket without you noticing and your best possible hope is that your thousand dollar ball and chain is in a toilet somewhere, utterly ruined, and not, say, in the hands of a teenager who can in seconds steal all your money. In Halloween, the worst thing that happened with a phone was when Lynda was strangled with a phone cord, and even then it was sort of okay because it meant we no longer had to listen to her annoying, continual giggling. And wouldn’t you rather go quickly via cord strangulation than the slow death of calling your credit card companies begging them to cancel your card after it is maxed out somewhere in Dubai?

If this sounds insane it probably is but I miss the homes and the things people used in their homes before the Internet came, and for some reason horror movies drive that home to me in a way other films do not. Sometimes it’s not just the phones. I remember the kitchens in Halloween as well, especially the kitchen at Lindsey’s home. Those kitchens were not showplaces influenced by the social media that drives so many of us to alter our homes into minimalist nightmares with kitchens with bare granite counters upon which many a smoothie is blended but meals seldom cooked. I know modern front loading washing machines are more water and energy efficient, but I hate them because clothes never get as clean as they do with top loaders with agitators, and the laundry room Annie used in Halloween when she got butter all over herself reminded me of the machines we used all throughout my life. Then seeing that cardboard box of Tide with maybe ten loads of washing powder… Did Costco exist back then? And if it did, would anyone in the seventies have bought a 108-pod value pack of detergent only later to rush their teen son to the ER because he ate several of them during a TikTok challenge? And would my grandparents have had a chance in hell of even understanding the preceding sentence?

I guess rotary phones in horror movies are a symbol of a calmer, less frenzied life. You go a hundred and fifty years back and those lives seem absolutely foreign to most Westerners. No cars, no electricity, indoor bathrooms were thin on the ground and no phones at all. But 1978, when Halloween was released, is not much different than today. Cars, air conditioning, easy means of communication – even the same damn snacks down to quickly prepared popcorn. But the grinding stress of the way phones now shape our lives is absent. Laurie didn’t need to worry about the crops coming in so her village wouldn’t starve, but she also didn’t have to worry about being accessible every moment to anyone who wanted to reach her. She only had to worry about one maniac who never spoke a word.

And it’s not like I’m looking back at the 1950s-1980s and proclaiming them “better days” or harking back to my childhood and insisting that everything is going to hell these days. As I said, life is a hassle no matter when you are born. I personally think Millennials and Gen-Z have it worse psychologically than I did as a kid. I guess I am just saying that all things considered I prefer the hassles common to the era of the black rotary phones than the hassles of Little House on the Prairie or those of the Internet age.

When I see black rotary phones, I feel an exquisite loneliness. The people and the time those phones represent are gone forever and I miss them. I miss the days when homes were not social media driven showplaces and people made Jiffy Pop over the stove, when phones rang and people answered them even though they had no idea who was calling, when no one except the killer had any reasonable expectation of getting you on the phone at two A.M. And when you threw your phone at the man in the mask, it probably hurt a lot more than hurling an iPhone at him.

Oddtober 2024: The Black Shuck

ETA: Last night, after completing this entry, I had a fourth “black shuck.” I’m reading a short story collection called Dark Blood Comes From the Feet by Emma J. Gibbon. One of the stories is called “The Black Shuck.” To paraphrase James Bond, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Third time is enemy action. The fourth time is the power of Oddtober compelling you.”

A common theme in my online life is that when I am not lost in a rabbit warren, I will notice an unlikely topic come up over and over in a very short span of time. That happened recently with the “black shuck,” the enormous black dog with shaggy fur that stalks the countrysides of the British Isles. Though I am familiar with the black dog of myth, I’d somehow never heard such dogs referred to as “the shuck” or “the black shuck.” I’d been learning about mountaineering disasters and somehow that caused my YouTube algorithm to suggest missing persons cases that happened in the countrysides in Europe, which then led to a charming film about the black shuck.

This is such a touching film. The black dog, the “shuck,” is ushering a newly dead woman to her afterlife. The film only has two words of dialogue. “It’s time.” The black shuck waits patiently for the woman to come to terms with her death, licking the tears off her face, gently leading her to the door that will take her to the next plane of her existence. It could be seen by some as creepy but I found it sweet, a “death positive” look at confronting the greatest unknown of our lives: what happens when we die. It reminded me, in a gentle way, of the people I’ve lost, of the animals I’ve lost, and the melancholy I felt was a pleasant one.

After watching that video, I wondered where on earth the name “shuck” came from. Wikipedia helpfully told me that: “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name Shuck derives from the Old English word scucca ‘devil, fiend’, perhaps from the root skuh ‘to terrify’.” That does not really align with the shuck in the above short film. That black dog is hardly a demon, and I filed it away to look up again later.

The next day I found in the massive cache of television shows that I believe Mr. OTC is collecting in the event that we have another pandemic or several months to spend watching television non-stop, a BBC program called Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country: Black Shuck. Lord a’mercy, it was not particularly helpful, focusing more on the gormless, titular Charlie’s attempts to see and hopefully photograph the black shuck as he struggles with the bed in his van and forgets his mother’s birthday. He interviewed several people who saw the black shuck and had a folklore expert speak of this demon dog that terrified people when they saw it. The black shuck either has green or red glowing eyes, or appeared like a cyclops with a single glowing eye in the middle of its forehead. The dog is described as being huge, sometimes as large as a bull calf. The small amount of actual data wasn’t surprising because this is clearly some sort of schticky program focusing on the foibles of Charlie Cooper as much as the stated topic of the show. But the show did show me that the black shuck in the short film is a softer take on a demon dog that some feel is so terrifying because its sighting can presage death or impending doom.

Third time was the charm. I was digging through ‘zines I had purchased recently, looking for content that I could digest quicker than a novel. I had gone down a folklore rabbit hole and purchased a lot of folkish ‘zines, among them Shuck.

I ordered it recently, and I knew there was a wolf drawing on the cover but I never noticed really that the title is Shuck. I think I didn’t recall the title because the word “shuck” meant nothing to me. I just knew it was a Halloween-y themed ‘zine. Last time I tried to discuss one of the more prominent folk culture ‘zines, Hellebore, I ended up talking far too much about bog people, so something smaller and more focused to Halloween seemed a better bet. When I noticed the title, I knew I needed to talk about this ‘zine and shucks in general.

Shuck, Issue 1 – The Dark was released in October of 2020, and is one of the prettiest ‘zines I’ve explored recently. There is a wonderful continuity of style throughout the ‘zine, with black and white stylized drawings. The ‘zine handles fairly creepy topics, as most folklore ‘zines do, but there was something… bolstering about it. Uplifting. It made me wish I had the time this Halloween season to try some of the rituals mentioned in the ‘zine.

Of course the ‘zine discusses the black shuck:

He can be the size of a large dog or the size of a horse, headless or in possession of two glowing red eyes, or one yellow eye (or green, or red).

The ‘zine also clarifies the origin of the name:

His name is said to derive from the old Anglo-Saxon word ‘Scucca,’ which means Devil, or from a piece of regional dialect where ‘Shucky’ means ‘shaggy.’

What is the purpose of the black shuck? Well, there is some belief he was Odin’s dog of war (which marries well with the one-eyed shucks). A more interesting theory is that smugglers created the myth of the black dog with glowing eyes to scare off locals who would believe their lanterns and ship lights were frightening supernatural hell hounds and would stay away from the coastlines when they saw something glowing in the dark. The appearance of these dogs means a lot of things but in Norfolk, the region this ‘zine examines the most, seeing the black shuck is a universally bad thing, an omen or a portent of something terrible or evil that will soon happen or befall upon those who see it.

The ‘zine also features a sort of “shuck” family tree, where variations of this animal and their assorted names show how the legend of this dog can vary greatly in regions that are close together. For example, Ipswitch has the “shug monkey,” Suffolk features a creature known as the “galleytrot,” among other iterations of the same folkish animal.

Also in this ‘zine are rituals helpful for the folkish believer during Halloween. Want to host a “Dumb Supper,” a silent banquet held in honor of the beloved dead, hoping the silence and presence of their favorite foods might encourage the dead to speak to you? Want to make sure the dead pass your home by on All Hallows Eve and have an urge to bake something? This ‘zine has you covered. The ‘zine also covers topics like the folklorish significance of the Yew tree, the history of Mischief Night, the implications of nyctophobia, and explains why you should never follow something called “The Lantern Man.”

The part of this ‘zine most interesting to me was the explanation of a type of divination board used in a manner similar to a Ouija board. Called a “Charm Board,” you use little “charms” to represent yourself or your desires and you cast them on a board with symbols and spaces on the board that will tell you your fate depending on where your charms land. Later there is a tongue-in-cheek analysis of other folkish beliefs the author, Ada, tested for accuracy. And the back cover features a paper doll so you can clip and dress your own Wise Woman of Irstead.

Non-believer that I am, I concede that sometimes I see meaning in coincidences. Whether or not all these mentions of a dog-like creature can just be chalked up to the fact that I like unusual things and this time of year all kinds of media are teeming with stories of monsters, the fact is that all three times I encountered the black shuck this month involved very gentle media. The video “Shuck” was so touching. Charlie Cooper’s program was mostly silly. And Shuck Issue 1 – The Dark is the paper equivalent of an elderly auntie serving you hot tea as she tells you stories about sprites and faeries and rituals to keep garden trolls at bay.

I submerge myself into a lot of darkness. I’m currently rewriting an article about a child murder I wrote about a few years ago. I read entirely too much splatterpunk and extreme horror. I watch violent horror films on an almost daily basis. Lately I’ve been sick at heart watching the whole disgraceful P. Diddy situation unfold. I dwell in very upsetting places as a default and sometimes I don’t notice that even I periodically need a pick-me-up until I see something that does not provoke disgust or anger in me. Every now and then even the hardest among us need something that doesn’t force us to confront the harm that human beings do, to discuss blood and viscera or torture or murder, or to contemplate dark literature or even darker conspiracy theory. If mentions of the shuck came up three times in rapid succession so that I could have a small break from dead children or violent murder or terror in general, I see no harm in just rolling with it. Such topics generally are thrilling to me but even a hardened cultural traveler needs a rest now and then and the shuck turned out to be my temporary but unlikely respite.

Oh, two other things about Shuck ‘zine. One, you can get a copy of issue 1 here (I intend to get other issues in the future). The other is that the creator of the ‘zine, a writer who calls herself Ada, presented a drawing of her favorite gravestone. September 20 is a very significant date in my life so it was interesting to see it on a tombstone in this ‘zine.

I too have a favorite gravestone. It’s from the Old Corn Hill cemetery in Jarrell, Texas. September 20 again, and you’ll note that Ernest died while still a child. Which I think is a sign that I’ve enjoyed this nice little entry but have come full circle.

Next week Oddtober 2024 ends, and I will begin a more reasonable posting schedule. But we do have a few more days in this spooky month, which means a few more Oddtober entries. Among them, I plan to revive my custom of discussing the latest Doug Brunell Sinful Cinema Series offering. This year focuses on a cult-favorite horror film that most seasoned horror fans have seen. Good times await, see you next week!

Oddtober 2024: Bad Religion – Catholic Horror Movie Crapshoot

What do you know? Another APac mini ‘zine is shaping another OTC entry. I’ve over-relied on these little ‘zines because my will to write came back so late in the game that I had very little time to create any sort of theme for Oddtober. I didn’t even have enough time to just read some new horror and supplement it with books I’ve read but have yet to discuss. These ‘zines help me frame a topic and give me the urge to consume media new to me, and since they focus on films, I can, conceivably, create a new entry after three hours or less. I’m grateful I found them before Oddtober began.

I had high hopes for Sickest Catholic Horror Movies and it didn’t disappoint, not really, but I can say that Amèlie Paquet’s taste in religious horror movies is eccentric. The ‘zine lists some very good films, like Martyrs, The Devils and The Exorcist, which gave me the impression that the other films listed would have similarly strong and obvious ties to Catholic horror. But “sickest” covers a lot of ground, and in some cases it may not mean gory. It may not mean “sick” as a synonym for “cool.” It may mean “so bad it’s good except it went on too long and became bad again.”

Two other films APac features in this “sickest” list are so… not good that I almost don’t know where to start. With the hope of assembling a quick entry I watched one of the films on APac’s “sickest” list thinking I could discuss it while linking it back to some insane childhood story or amusing call back to my various neuroses and bing, bang, boom! Another Oddtober entry finished.

Except I watched John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and I don’t even know what to do. So I stayed up late and watched another film on the list, Stigmata, and now I’m even more fucked.

I disliked In the Mouth of Madness so much that I genuinely have no idea what to say. Do I address the various problems in the film, like an incoherent plot filled with so many bizarre images that the horrible characterization is almost negligible in comparison? Do I just shake it off and ignore it and discuss Stigmata instead because at least I can easily verbalize what was wrong in that film?

I guess the best thing to do is rip the band aid off and do my best. In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as an insurance fraud investigator, John Trent, who is recruited to find Sutter Cane, a Stephen King-style writer, who has disappeared as his work causes those who read it to lose their minds and become violent but even those who haven’t read it go nuts as well, as there are riots at stores that sell out of the book before people can buy it. It makes sense if you don’t think about it. Anyway, Trent is hired to find Cane, because when you need to hunt down a famous author who has disappeared under paranormal circumstances, you need a free-lance insurance fraud investigator. Trent and some woman whose presence in the movie is so meh that I cannot recall her name, drive to Cane’s hometown and encounter bizarre, unrelated, non-thematic issues, like running over old men on bikes, feral children chasing dogs, and a strange land lady with a man handcuffed to her leg. They find Cane and we have no idea why his books are driving people crazy or what his motivations are in causing such chaos. It ends with Trent in a loony bin and we have no clue what all these tangents mean, and the only reason it seems vaguely Catholic is because John Trent covers himself and the walls in his padded room with crosses he wrote in black crayon.

He was watching a far better movie than I watched…

Even were I to take In the Mouth of Madness as a film that is meant to just be… sort of scary with a dash of ridiculousness, I’d have to overlook the appalling acting from everyone involved, including Sam Neill, whose character is such a dick I wanted him dead within the first twenty minutes. He does not play assholes well. Or maybe he didn’t play John Trent’s brand of assholism well. But he’s a great actor and it was weird seeing him in this cringy role. Regardless of the quality of the actors in this mess, nothing made sense, we have no idea why any of this happened, and the best scene was when John Trent punched an asylum orderly in the balls.

Stigmata is a baffling mess, but at least I understand its links to Catholicism. But mostly this film made me cringe, which is all the more awful because I like both leads, Patricia Arquette and Gabriel Byrne. Byrne plays Father Andrew, a priest who is a scientist and tasked with researching religious miracles. He is sent to look into Frankie, a Pittsburgh hairdresser, who is an atheist but is also displaying the signs of stigmata. Frankie came into possession of a rosary owned by a dead priest who found and translated the Book of Thomas, a gospel that is said to be as close to coming from the mouth of Jesus as any known Christian document. In turn, the priest who owned the rosary possesses Frankie and Father Andrew must try to ferret out what is happening to her. In the end, he thwarts a church attempt to kill Frankie, a plot predicated on the notion that the Christian faith would be destroyed if the Gospel of Thomas is released and people find out the Gnostics were right.

The movie reeks of Spice Girls circa 1997. Frankie wears bright colored plastic jelly shoes with socks. As a hairdresser, she and her friends have some of the worst hair styles imaginable. She lives in a loft that looks way more expensive than a hairdresser could manage and is filled with mannequins and hundreds of candles so we know Frankie is whimsy personified, a hip free spirit. Father Andrew is just… good looking and evidently very easily sexually manipulated despite his clerical vows. He clearly develops a thing for Frankie and is ultimately the hero of this piece but mostly he just shoots intense gazes and struggles mightily with his romantic feelings for Frankie, feelings that trump his desire to get the real word of God disseminated to the people.

If I overlook the 1990s cringe aesthetics and pretend that there was anything approaching chemistry between Arquette and Byrne, I still hit a brick wall considering the plot. There are so many theological and common sense issues that they require yet another OTC point by point breakdown.

–When did the Catholic church begin to recognize possession by ghost? Because Frankie isn’t being possessed by a demon, she’s being possessed by a dead man’s soul.

–How on earth does the possession by a ghost trigger stigmata? What possible purpose is there for a dead priest to infest his own rosary and then enter the body of some random girl with spacebuns and a hipper than thou apartment and slowly give her the five wounds of Christ?

–Since when did the Catholic Church believe that demonic possession is like the common cold and can be transmitted like cooties in a kindergarten? According to what I recall, possession can only occur when someone opens their psyche to possession through substance abuse, sexual perversity, greed, or actual invitation to the demonic. You can’t get possessed by handling a rosary a priest once owned.

–The above applies to ghosts, too, since there is no Catholic belief that ghosts can possess anyone, let alone via transitive property.

–The Catholic Church has been aware of the Book of Thomas since 1945. They’ve been struggling with tamping down Gnosticism for centuries. Why on earth would a Pittsburgh hairdresser’s stigmata suddenly plunge the world into chaos because a Book of Thomas believer decided to invade her body and how on earth would that be the final straw on the camel’s back in terms of legitimizing that particular gospel? Out of all the other attempts to bring down the Catholic church, this hairdresser’s fits will be the final boss?

–What is the purpose of a ghost possessing an atheist and giving her stigmata? Initially I wondered if it was a nod to the gnostic idea that the kingdom of God is within us all, but wouldn’t that message have been better delivered by a genuine Christian who understands the significance of what is happening to them?

–Why is possession by a ghost who somehow induces stigmata visually indistinguishable from being tortured by demon possession?

–The final scene where Frankie essentially becomes a new incarnation of St. Francis of Assisi was a garbled, fairy princess mess and I resent such a strange, pointless connection between these two. St. Francis received his stigmata after a vision of an angel during a fast, after he spent years ministering to lepers, after he made very good on his vows of obedience and poverty. His stigmata was a reward for his stalwart faith and he received all five wounds at once. Francis suffered from the wounds but ultimately the stigmata was a gift, a sign that his faith was rewarded via proof of Divine intervention. Frankie, on the other hand, suffers and for no purpose she recognizes. She is not being rewarded. She is being punished, and she is being punished worse than a drunken pedophile being tortured via demonic possession. What possible good does it do to give an atheist stigmata when she was never looking for proof, when she had no desire to find God within her, if she has no idea why this is happening to her?

Patricia Arquette has a very fey, vulnerable quality about her that works because there is generally something steely behind the sweetness but in this movie she seems like Baby Spice simpering and flirting with the priest. No bite behind it like her role as Alabama in True Romance. She’s irritating, and one needs their stigmata infested heroine not to be irritating. Gabriel Byrne’s Father Andrew doesn’t really evince the power of his beliefs – he’s just a handsome priest who makes bizarre decisions because he’s taken with pretty Frankie.

Father Andrew seems strangely okay with a bloody woman’s wrists being so close to his face.

The whole film is full of bizarre decisions. Like Frankie thinking people will let her work on their hair when her wrists are covered by bloody bandages that she does nothing to hide. Or how about Frankie’s friends, who think that when your friend has holes running right through her wrists that the best possible thing to do is get her loaded at a club so she can unwind (she promptly develops the crown of thorns scars on the dance floor and then runs out into rainy traffic).

I curse my decision to watch films from Sickest Catholic Horror Movies that I had not yet seen. I should have rewatched Martyrs, which for all its flaws (I hate the ending so much) is a provocative, interesting film. Fuck, Ken Russell’s The Devils would have been a helluva movie to revisit. Even going over the well-trod ground of The Exorcist would have been more interesting than reacting with a jaded sigh to these two films.

APac’s ‘zines, even when I question her choices, are always thought provoking. And I guess there’s nothing wrong, really, discussing why I dislike some of the films she mentions in her ‘zines, especially this go around because I think “sickest” can mean that these films handle Catholicism poorly, and if that is the case, these two films definitely belonged on that list. Instead, if I were a betting woman, I would wonder if she was trying to steer away from all the usual suspects, like The Omen, The Prophecy, The Rite, Constantine, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and others. I appreciate that she tries to present films that are not ringers.

And sometimes it’s kind of fun to discuss bad films, if I can corral my tendency toward hyperbolic savagery. But at any rate, this ‘zine encouraged me to watch two films and they both sucked and here we are. If you want to see the rest of the films mentioned in this micro ‘zine, you can get your own copy of this ‘zine here.

Have you seen In the Mouth of Madness or Stigmata? Do you agree with my assessments or have I got this completely wrong. Feel free to sound off in the comments.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Book: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, dark humor

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s not wholly odd, but sometimes you can veer off the odd path when it’s Oddtober and you want to discuss final girls.

Availability: Published by Berkley in 2021, you can get a copy here.

Comments: Grady Hendrix really knows how to create tiresome female lead characters who really drive home how irritating they are even as you want them to win. He did it in Horrorstör, which has been discussed on this site, and he did it in The Final Girl Support Group. The heroine in this novel really is quite tiresome, but I kept reading even as I was rubbed the wrong way because Hendrix, through the use of high tension and a perpetually caroming plot, keeps his reader in such a state of anticipation that the miserable inner chaos of his lead character seems very fitting.

There have been several movies and books released over the last decade or so that use the “final girl” trope. I discussed one of them in yesterday’s look at the film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I am neither pro nor con regarding meta-heavy looks at horror, but I prefer those that are black comedies or outright parodies. Though Hendrix manages to maintain a tense plot, this is a comedic book, mainly because the heroine, when juxtaposed with the other final girls in the book, is such a mess. The book can be very deep in terms of psychology, giving a look at what PTSD can do to survivors of violent crime, but ultimately it is mostly a rollicking, fun horror novel that takes the final girl trope and runs with it in a million directions all at once. And, to give Hendrix his due, I had a couple of “a ha!” moments after reading that were gratifying, like realizing how it was one character’s computer was “hacked.” Just half an a hour ago before writing this I suddenly understood why the psychiatrist’s son was being such a brat, antagonizing one of the final girls and urging her to read his self-drawn comic book. It’s hard to have a tight, labyrinthine plot, but Hendrix pulls it off with such ease you don’t realize it until the black humor fades and the plot points take center stage.

Here’s a quick synopsis and be aware that there may be spoilers though I am going to do my level best not to ruin the ending: In the fine tradition of Palahniuk’s use of support groups to bring together unlikely characters, final girls from notorious murder cases that closely mirror the plots of famous horror movie franchises have come together for group therapy. The recovery from their violent pasts has varied from woman to woman, but none have struggled more than Lynnette, whose descent into PTSD-fueled paranoia has taken over her life and turned her into a terrified but well-organized fear machine who is also surprisingly cowardly when push comes to shove. Then one day the woman who best handled her attack – Adrienne – is murdered, and on the day she is killed the rest of the group experience odd and violent events that make it seem as if they are all under attack again. Lynnette, paranoiac that she is, knows something terrible is happening to them but has a hard time convincing the other girls. When it is revealed that Lynnette had been writing a book about the group that had very unflattering portrayals of the group and their psychiatrist, Dr. Carol, Lynnette becomes the temporary villain of the piece, as she was the reason so much information got out about the final girls, putting them in danger. As Lynnette is forced to find the other final girls and plead her case about them all being in danger, she is hurled through all sorts of violent and harrowing situations as she pieces together what is really happening. When she realizes who the killer is, she sets in motion her extremely violent redemption.

That’s all I will give of the plot, but it will hurt nothing to discuss the final girls in this book because half the fun of the novel is the sort of fangirl (or boy) experience of seeing the characters who shaped the horror films of your childhood reconfigured into the women in this novel. Here’s a look at the cast of characters, who all have the first or last name of the actress who portrayed their characters:

Lynnette Tarkington is inspired by a girl who had a very limited role in the first movie in the “so bad it’s good” Christmas horror franchise, Silent Night, Deadly Night. The role is played by scream queen, Linnea Quigley, and Lynnette is clearly a call back to “Linnea.” When the deranged Santa in the film breaks into a family home, he finds a girl who had just had sex on the family pool table, picks her up and impales her on a mounted stag head, ramming the antlers through her torso. Lynnette plays dead and survives, and part of the reason she was never able to move on as well as the other final girls in her support group is because she merely survived the attack that killed her entire family. She did not kill the men who harmed her, and that has caused some of the women in the support group to believe she is not a genuine final girl. She wants to support the other women but when she is initially given the chance to save one of her therapy-mates, she chokes. Overcoming the bone-crushing fear that narrows her focus to her own survival and nothing more will be difficult for her.

Adrienne Butler is a rare black final girl who is inspired by Alice from the first installment of the Friday the 13th franchise. She survived and killed the man who attacked the counselors who let his son drown (he never really had a son though) and was appalled when her struggle was turned into a film. She later sued, took control of the franchise and bought the camp where she was attacked and turned it into a retreat for abused and victimized women.

Heather DeLuca is an amalgam between Nancy from the first A Nightmare on Elm Street and Kristen from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Though she is clearly meant to signal association with Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, she has become fairly insane since killing her more prosaic attacker (Hendrix has to limit the supernatural elements a bit to keep this novel grounded in a more possible reality) and has a terrible drug habit as well, which links her to the character Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette. She’s erratic, and is as ruthless about her survival as Lynnette. She is darkly hilarious, as well.

Marilyn Torres is my favorite final girl in this novel. She is based on Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and is the most self-contained, resilient and reliable woman in the group. She was a Texas debutante who insisted she be able to attend her coming-out ball, even as others felt it was in bad taste, just to give her attacker one final metaphorical fatal blow. She married into extreme wealth and is the woman the others go to when they need help, especially after Adrienne is killed. She is polite, kind, and maniacally focused on doing what she considers to be morally sound. She is also very dignified and proper in the fashion of women raised in big town Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, which rings very true to me.

Dani Shipman threw me for a moment because she was a woman whose brother broke out of an asylum on Halloween and ostensibly found her to try to kill her in the parking lot of a hospital. This to me was clearly a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis’ role from Halloween 2, so her name should have been Jamie, right? Except later in the franchise, when Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is killed at the beginning of Halloween 4, a new Jamie is introduced as Michael Myers niece, and she is played by an actress called Danielle Shipman, who later plays Annie in Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake in 2007. Dani is in a relationship with a woman dying of cancer when the events of the novel get rolling and, in my opinion, is the saddest final girl in the book because she really does have everything taken from her in the end, or at least everything that really matters.

Julia Campbell is based on Neve Campbell’s character from Scream. She kills her two attackers but ends up a paraplegic as a result. She’s my least favorite of the final girls and I am not sure why. Likely because the first introduction to her shows her to be a confrontational, somewhat mean girl, but really, who could blame her. She and Adrienne were the faces of the final girl phenomenon as it played out in the press.

Because I do not want to spoil this book entirely while wanting to talk about Marilyn some, I’m going to discuss one scene from the book that doesn’t really affect how it ends. Dani has been taken into custody because there is some belief that her brother did not commit the murders in the hospital and that Dani killed him unnecessarily. Dani’s wife, Michelle, is dying of cancer and Dani had promised her that she would make sure Michelle was able to die on her ranch, but when Dani is arrested for shooting at the police who wanted to take her in for questioning, Michelle is placed in hospice care. Both Heather and Lynnette descended on Marilyn when their lives began to implode after Adrienne’s death, and Lynnette manages to persuade Marilyn to drive them to see Michelle. Once there, Lynnette’s conscience demands that she get Michelle out of there so she can die at home like Dani promised her. What follows is grimly hilarious, and the only thing that keeps it from becoming an outright atrocity against a sick woman and the nurses who want to keep her comfortable is Marilyn’s innate decency and Texas rich girl ability to control bad situations.

As an orderly seems as if he is about to prevent them from leaving with Michelle’s near-corpse, Marilyn saves the day with her taser:

“You zapped him in the nuts,” the teenaged girl says, incredulous.

“Fucking A,” Heather says.

“I want you to know that I deeply, deeply resent the position you’ve put me in,” Marilyn tells me.

The three manage to get the dying woman into Marilyn’s super expensive SUV and unfortunately the woman loses control of her bowels. Against the wishes of the other two she decides to deal with the situation:

“I am not going to let this woman sit in her own mess,” she says, curving down the exit ramp onto a surface street, heading toward a Ralphs supermarket. “She is Dani’s special friend, and she deserves some dignity.”

When Heather makes a smart remark to this, Marilyn takes her in hand:

Marilyn parks, cuts off the engine, and rounds on Heather.

“This is a natural human process,” she snaps. “We will accord her the respect that any of us would expect if we were in her situation.”

She then barks orders at Heather and Lynnette, goes inside the store to get adult diapers and some water, and once she can comfortably clean up the dying Michelle, she does so without any complaint. She places all the soiled towels and clothing into plastic shopping bags.

“Heather, go throw this away.”

“I’m not touching that,” Heather says. “Just leave it.”

“We are not litterbugs,” Marilyn snaps. “Throw this away or I’ll smack you.”

Heather does as she is told. I just adore Marilyn.

I was hesitant to read this book because I was lukewarm toward Horrorstör and because I’d read reviews that said this book was hard to follow, with too many characters and other complaints about the pacing. That is why I seldom read reviews before I read any book because mileage varies so much in fiction, all the more so in genre fiction, that reviews often lead me astray. I found the book very easy to follow once I realized the key to understanding who the women were and what they represented, and that happened as soon as I noticed there were characters named “Heather” and “Adrienne.” I suspect that if a reader does not have a very strong background in horror films, especially those from the twentieth century, this book may seem confusing at first. Luckily that was not a problem for me. I really enjoyed this look at what becomes of final girls when their monsters are slain, and it’s an excellent meta-look at the trope of final girls, how women deal with institutionalized violence and how hard it can be to rise above what is done to you. Highly recommended.

Come back to tomorrow for a look at a sort of anti-final girl book, a book where there is only one girl who is killed over and over again.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

By now, all horror fans worth their salt are aware of the tropes that horror films use. Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream was one of the first horror films that dissected the tropes as they were happening, showing us the rules to horror movies as they played out on screen. We all should have a firm grasp of horror tropes now. The killer is never dead at the end, no matter how charred his body is, or how riddled with bullets he seems. Taking your clothes off for any reason is a bad idea. The person who says, “I’ll be back in a minute,” will never return. Never for any reason go into the basement when the killer cuts the power lines. Basic stuff.

The rules satirized in Scream also helped define the Final Girl in horror films. Bad girls who drank, did drugs and had sex were going to be killed first, leaving the sober and sexually virtuous good girl as the “final girl” who faces down evil and destroys it (until the killer is resurrected for the sequel). Scream subverted that rule, as Sidney, the final girl, loses her virginity right before she is tasked with eliminating the two doofuses who have been terrorizing and killing people.

Final girls have always played a part in horror films that focus on killers. Their roles are almost instinctual, primal, repeating the same pattern of behavior regardless of the film or the director. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave us blonde, brave but terrified Sally, who escaped when everyone else fell to Leatherface. She didn’t kill the cannibals but she managed to get away, definitely a final girl. Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie from Halloween, Alice from the first Friday the 13th, Sarah from Descent, and, of course, Sidney from Scream all embody the sort of purity combined with intelligence that permitted them to survive at the end.

There are too many examples of this trope to list them all, and there have been a lot of self-aware films like Scream or Cabin in the Woods where the Final Girl trope is explored, but none are as good, in my opinion as Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a terribly underrated mockumentary and black comedy about an aspiring serial killer and his preparation for his first real rampage. All the serial killer tropes are laid out, alongside self-referential takes on how much cardio a killer must engage in to be able to track down running victims, the ridiculous desire for victims to clump together, the equally bizarre tendency for fleeing victims to trip and fall on level ground, and similar rules. But the best bit of meta in this film is the “final girl” trope, which is called the “survivor girl.”

Right about here you may want to stop reading if you have yet to see this film because there will be spoilers.

A quick summary is in order: Taylor, an aspiring film maker arrives in a small town in Maryland with her two member crew to record the preparation of one Leslie Vernon, an ostensibly abused boy with a miserable back story, for his return to the town that spurned him to exact revenge on as many teens as he can. Leslie and Taylor have a weird chemistry that becomes more obvious as the film goes on, as Leslie introduces Taylor and the crew to his serial killing mentor, played by the superb late Scott Walker, and discusses all the cliches and tropes Leslie engages in and uses in his preparation for his rampage. Leslie has ostensibly selected a virginal blonde named Kelly to be his “survivor girl,” and he intends to descend on Kelly and her friends as they hang out in the old Vernon home to get stoned and party. Taylor and her film crew decide they can’t let Leslie kill the teens and Taylor engages in a final showdown with Leslie. The film also features the late Zelda Rubenstein as a librarian and Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger to you and me, as Leslie Vernon’s psychiatrist. His role harks back to Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis in Halloween, and he clearly had a great time chewing the scenery in every shot he was in.

The relationship between Taylor and Leslie is the most interesting part of this film. Leslie is training to become a legendary serial killer like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and initially Taylor is enthusiastic, if not a little squeamish, to document Leslie’s preparation. Initially they seem to have an openly symbiotic relationship – she gets to make a (hopefully) well-received documentary and he gets to enjoy the fame and notoriety such a documentary will give him. But Taylor’s humanity rises up, almost predictably, and if I can predict it, that means that Leslie did as well. Taylor discovers that Kelly was not really ever meant to be the “survivor” girl, and that Leslie’s plans for mayhem were far more carefully laid out and prepared for than she could have imagined.

Taylor is watching Leslie get ready to begin his rampage, putting on makeup. The gender role reversal here is very interesting.

In one scene, Leslie discusses the sexual elements of the serial killer versus victim interactions. Killers seldom pull characters out of closets and kill them because closets symbolize a sacred safety in the womb. Final girls almost never use guns because part of the credo demands the girls find and use a phallic-like object to kill their attacker. And since those survivor or final girls are supposed to be virtuous virgins, by using a phallic object to kill an attacker, they are symbolically becoming women while changing roles with the male killer as the penetrator. Leslie wants his survivor girl to be worth all the effort he has put into his plans, especially since his mentor ended up marrying his final girl, and he cleverly sets up Taylor to play a far more hands-on role in his rampage.

As absorbed in the meta as this film is, the interesting connection between Taylor and Leslie gives this film an interesting tension that plays well alongside the humor in the film. Leslie Vernon is intense but he also has a jocular sense of humor, and Taylor’s flustered attempts to control what is happening are outright funny as she cannot help but engage in the exact tropes Leslie has explained to her. In one especially funny scene, Leslie forces Taylor and her crew to leave the house where the teens are partying because he says she has a look on her face. What look, you may ask. “The we can’t just stand here and let this happen look.” Later, when Taylor tries to convince her crew to help her stop the massacre, she utters that exact phrase, which her crew points out is exactly what Leslie said when he threw them out. Later, Taylor realizes Kelly was never meant to be the final girl. Taylor, virginal and nervous, is the final girl, and far from it being a terrible betrayal, it’s clear Leslie made his selection because Taylor was the best possible foil.

Sometimes the one you’ve planning to kill was right in front of you all along.

This film is notable to me because of the very real relationship shown between the final girl and the killer. No long-lost sister, no revenge motive. Just a girl selected specifically by the killer because he knows she is the perfect woman to play the role of the final girl, seeing in her the capacity for survival that she would never have seen in herself. It’s a strangely touching conceit, to create such a bond between killer and final girl, one that is not tainted at the end like Sidney Prescott’s bond with the killers in Scream. The killers in Scream hated Sidney and wanted revenge on her for her mother’s own promiscuous behaviors that broke up families, but they never selected her believing that she could potentially defeat them. The motive was revenge, pure and simple (and also because they were psychopaths…). Leslie’s choice for his final girl is far more personal and, strangely, egalitarian. He picks his final girl because he knows she could defeat him.

If you are a fan of horror movies and you have not seen this film, go and watch it. Even though I spoiled it, there is a lot – a lot – I have not touched on. It’s a funny, violent, creepy and unexpected gem of a film. Check in tomorrow for more on the Final Girl trope.

Oddtober 2024: The Obscenity Trial of Remy Couture

Ahh, where would we be during Halloween without a good moral panic now and then? Because in some respects, that is the only way to scare seasoned horror fans. It’s a simple formula for fear: take a normie who doesn’t understand that special effects are a thing, mix that with one part idiotic police and two parts puritanical prosecutor, cut it with half a soupcon of angry online Christian moms and you find yourself worried that watching Terrifier 3 could send you to prison.

The case I want to discuss today didn’t make a huge splash when it happened in 2009, but the Remy Couture obscenity trial was a chilling attempt at censorship and moral grandstanding using a legal and judicial system so infested with idiocy that it hardly seems like it could have happened the way it did. I cannot emphasize enough how stupid the case against Remy Couture was.

Remy Couture is a French-Canadian special effects makeup artist who created two very gory films to showcase his skills. The films in question, Inner Depravity 1 and Inner Depravity 2, may strike some as disgusting, and, to be frank, the subject matter and execution were a bit puerile (the first film opens with the silly slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to taste”), but overall any sensible person should have been able to see that the two films were Couture featuring his work in two very extreme shorts. Both films depict the same, masked drug addict who preys on women, killing them, raping them after they are dead, and at times keeping their bodies in barrels so he can defile them again later. The second film features the same killer but this time he has an “apprentice,” a boy whose body language and appearance kind of reminded me of Cha-Ka from the 1970s television show, Land of the Lost.

In 2009, a German Internet user came across the videos and reported them to Interpol as depictions of genuine snuff. Evidently the German man could not read English (or French because I believe Couture’s site at the time had both languages to describe the films) and Google Translate was still pretty new, so perhaps we can understand his alarm. After all, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. In the 1990s, national disgrace Charlie Sheen came across a copy of one of the notorious Guinea Pig films, specifically, The Flower of Flesh and Blood, and was so convinced it portrayed genuine torture and murder that he contacted the FBI. Mistakes happen.

But surely one would expect that French Canadian law enforcement might read the description of the films before going off half-cocked and accusing him of murder, but they didn’t. Eventually the investigators were able to piece out that his films were not literal depictions of murders, and when they did they then shifted gears and Couture was accused of obscenity in the first trial of its sort in Canadian history. Ultimately in 2012, Couture won the case against him, but he had to spend $30,000 CAD to defend himself, and the Canadian tax payers had to pay a cool million for their chance to participate in a moral panic.

I had seen the two films in question before charges were brought against Couture, but I didn’t associate them with his name until I read an article about his legal woes and sought out the films in question. When I realized I had seen them before, I could hardly believe anyone was so naive and lacking in the ability to judge films using common sense and context that they could both believe the films could, in any way, depict something that actually happened, or that it would be considered obscene in a time when horror films can be very detailed in their gore.

Please do not think what follows in any way impugns Couture’s skills in his field, because he is pretty good at what he does. But it does beggar belief that anyone felt the two short films depicted actual violence or were anything worse than what one could see in the Saw franchise or in necrophilic exploitation films like Nekromantik. Human beings love them a panic and Remy Couture accidentally gave those people what they wanted – a stupid witch hunt.

I don’t want to upload the videos to this site because it is recommended that only those over the age of eighteen watch them, but if you are interested, you can find the videos here. There are enough warnings on the site that hosts them to cover their behinds and hopefully indemnify me if some middle-schooler clicks over there from my site. Both films involve rough content. Women are bound, attacked, sexually defiled, mutilated and even victims of extremely casual cannibalism. Half of the time, the brutality is so over the top that if it were not so dark it would be funny. Honestly, the little apprentice is pure comic relief for the right sort of jaded viewer (hi!).

On its face, there is no way an intellectually honest person could have believed that Couture recorded his own acts of actual depravity or that the intention behind the two films was to “corrupt morality.” ID1 literally begins with a full-scale police investigation, as cops and forensics personnel are examining the semi-nude body of a sexually violated woman whose death is later shown in graphic detail. If the murders in the film were accurate depictions of genuine murders, it should have taken no more than half an hour to run down the details of the case to determine which police jurisdiction had investigated the murder. Moreover, someone is videotaping the law enforcement investigation from multiple angles without trained investigators noticing someone using 2005 technology hovering around them in a muddy, wooded area. The video taken of the investigation clearly could not have been police video, as it is visually in keeping with the rest of Remy Couture’s style, and is identical to the style used in the later depiction of the murder in the film.

The second film, strangely, is less skilled than the first. In ID2, at about the 3:37 mark, a bound woman’s arm is cut off just above the wrist and it is clearly faked. The bleeding stump looks like something you’d see in a professional horror film from the 1980s. Again, no shade against Couture, but the only way someone could have looked at that scene and worried that it was real was someone who really hoped it was real. Couture did not have film industry money behind him as he made these shorts to showcase his talent. That there may be some elements of the films that don’t deliver perfect believablity is to be expected, and it is astounding that any law enforcement professional could have watched the film and think any of it was real. Then when Couture cuts off another limb, he cinematically films himself taking a bite and then tossing it to his little Sleestak/feral hobbit to gnaw on. The whole scene is shot to include the perspectives of Couture and the woman being killed, which points in the direction of it being staged. Additionally, all of the women portrayed in the films were actresses there on their own free will, and candid behind-the-scenes shots show them laughing and interacting with Couture.

So eventually it became clear no one was killed in either film. Unwilling to let it go and chalk up their idiocy to a mistake, the Crown decided to charge Couture with obscenity with the intent to corrupt morality. They classified the films as violent pornography with no higher artistic purpose and therefore a threat to public morality. That on its face should never have happened because Couture was clear when he posted those videos – they were essentially exhibitions of his skills as a makeup artist, not an attempt to create pornography. Imagine a Tom Savini proof-of-concept video being used to prove he wanted to corrupt morality. Think about snippets of Greg Nicotero’s work being mistaken as an attempt to prove zombie films are obscene and without artistic merit. But it was staggeringly dense to claim ID1 and ID2 sought to degrade public morality because both films are foul. The public whose morality would be challenged by either film was very small because most people who watch horror content are not taking notes. They aren’t looking at a demented drug addict wearing nasty masks and his little companion gnawing on arms and having sex with rotting corpses and thinking, “You know, working a day job and raising my kids in the suburbs is a loser’s bet. I want to take my son, force him to be a cannibal and live the life of this shambling, filthy necrophile.” Luckily the jury agreed with my assessment and found Remy Couture not guilty in spite of shrill protests from a vocal minority that if you supported Remy Couture’s right to freedom of speech and expression, then you support violence against women.

Unfortunately, while that verdict ended the legal witch hunt against Couture, it hasn’t stopped breathlessly naive people who have no idea Google image lookup is their friend from taking stills from these two films or images from other Couture projects and insisting they depict actual victims of Satanic murder or are hijacked to use in politically charged lies. One particular image of a woman with a crucifix impaled through her throat has been used to fan the flames of Satanic Panic or in political scapegoating. Don’t worry, the actress in the photo is very much alive, the woman whose face is presented next to the gory image is not the actress in Couture’s image, and if that woman was killed for being a Christian, a pox on everyone who demeaned her death in this manner.

No matter how many years pass from the massive Satanic and moral panics from the 1980s through the early 1990s, the sparks that could ignite another witch hunt are always there, burning quietly but steadily, just waiting for a loosely hinged True Believer or political/judicial official in need of a moral platform to spill the gasoline that will save no one from physical or spiritual harm but can burn Western civil rights to the ground. It seems as if Remy Couture’s career did not end due to the absolute lunacy that was unleashed on him when a German internet user had a bad night, but his legacy is still haunted by people completely misrepresenting his work as genuine atrocity, sometimes with racist implications. This particular week of Oddtober 2024 is pretty gross in terms of content, but out of all of the topics I will discuss this month, this is the grossest and the one that should scare you the most.

Oddtober 2024: 10 Best Horror Movies Directed by Women by APac

I discussed an APac ‘zine back in September, focused on the best revenge movies written by women. The list as a whole didn’t really ring cinematic bells for me, but the inclusion of the, frankly, terrible She-Devil, gave me the opportunity to hold forth on Fay Weldon’s The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. So it all worked out in the end.

10 Best Horror Movies Directed by Women gives me a lot more to work with, as I’ve seen most of the movies included and one of them is in my own personal top ten list of the best horror movies of all time. However, I need to state again that the ‘zine creator assembled a master list of horror films directed by women so if your own favorites are not on this list, they are likely on the master list, and she worked hard to create a list that features films that hopefully alert the readers to at least a couple that may be new to them.

And I also feel like I should mention that the stylized drawings have an interesting asymmetry to them that adds to the unease most of us enjoy when considering horror films. That may seem like a “faint praise” comment but I often concentrate on talking about text more than visuals so I felt it necessary to say. These APac ‘zines have a very specific and interesting visual appeal.

I won’t spoil the whole list but I will say that I had no idea American Psycho was directed by a woman, and had never heard of the movie, La Captive, directed by Chantal Akerman. It is wholly new to me and I really want to see it now. It looks like I can only see it if I subscribe to the Criterion Collection, and I may just do that.

The movie that impressed me the most with its inclusion is Near Dark, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. It is one of my top ten, top five, actually, horror films. I was in high school when it was released and it was a revelation. Vampire movies covered a lot of cultural ground, to be sure. I was culturally aware of the campy Hammer vampire films but they were not easily available to rent or watch in suburban Dallas in the 1980s. I’d seen plenty of older Bela Lugosi/Lon Chaney vampire films and, of course, the grandfather of them all, Nosferatu. The vampire films that focused on female characters were of the campy sexy Hammer variety or overtly sexy variation on Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla story. All of them, even the American films, had a very British and refined air about them. Moody castles, hereditary titles, ancestral wealth – even the excellent The Hunger took place in a rarified place of wealth and privilege in a world foreign to Farmers Branch, Texas.

While I am sure there are films that predated Near Dark that focused on the common person’s experience with vampirism in settings far less luxurious than a well-appointed castle, Near Dark was the first one I ever saw and it was a revelation. Horror films with a democratized setting, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, existed, but Sally and Franklin were irritating and the cannibals were… unpleasant, to be sure. Near Dark’s characters were low-brow and decidedly southern, but were also good looking even as they were grubby. Set in Oklahoma, the environment was one I recognized, a place where you might have to worry about a Leatherface with a chainsaw or maybe a creepy serial killer wearing a burlap bag as a mask while brandishing a pitch fork, but not so much vampires. It felt new, adding dimension to old monster legends.

The film features two actors I’ve always had a crush on, Lance Henriksen and the late, great Bill Paxton. The radiant Jenny Wright plays a major role as the love interest, Mae, who turns Caleb, portrayed by a very young Adrian Pasdar, into a vampire. The group of vampires she travels with are none too pleased she foisted Caleb on them but agree to give him a chance. Things do not go as well as one would hope, though Caleb does at times acquit himself well, and the film is filled with blood, gore, fights, and southern charm that clearly inspired the presentation of its spiritual descendant, True Blood.

No spoilers here, friends. The above synopsis is barely a synopsis but if I discuss much more I won’t be able to stop typing. If you haven’t seen this film, you need to, and if you’ve seen it, you need to see it again. But I will direct you to one of the best scenes ever in a vampire film, the prelude to a massacre that should not be this funny but is. Bill Paxton was born to chew this particular scenery.

I know a lot of people consider this a “western” vampire film and they can have their opinions but this is a southern vampire film to anyone who has actually lived in the more western edges of the American South. Lance Henriksen’s character fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Characters have southern accents so thick you can cut them with a knife (or extra sharp spurs, as it were). It’s southern to me, and since I’m from the South, I feel comfortable with my assessment.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the ‘zines I got from APac. I have several others I could potentially discuss for Oddtober, and if I get into a bind and need a quick list to go over, I may well do that. We’ll see. If you would like to get a copy of this ‘zine, you can get one here. The artist, Amèlie Paquet, has a considerable list of interesting horror and feminist ‘zines, so be sure to give her store a look.

Odd Things Considered

Category: Film