Film

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.

Oddtober 2024: I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

When I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, I watched a movie on television that affected me deeply. I’ve discussed some of my very specific fears before on this site and interestingly all of them were provoked by media and not some innate fear common to children. For example, I get very antsy around people wearing full-face masks or too much makeup, and that was the result of being terrified by an Alice Cooper tour commercial I saw when I was very young.

For all that it scared me, this is actually is a very sad film.

The fear I want to discuss here developed after I watched the film Bad Ronald. Have you seen it? It’s a made for TV film adapted from a novel by author Jack Vance and it absolutely messed me up. The plot of the film is that a divorced mother who suffers from mental and physical illness, has raised her with the hopes that he could become a doctor so he can cure her sickness. Her teen son, Ronald, is awkward and an outsider at school – kind of like a male Carrie but without telekinesis – and one day he decides to ask a girl out on a date. She declines and laughs him down. Later her younger sister mocks Ronald, who pushes her so hard on the ground that she suffers a fatal head injury. After racing home and telling his mother what happened, she decides to cover a door with wallpaper and essentially walls Ronald up in the house so the police can never find him. Seclusion causes Ronald to descend into a fantasy world where he is a prince who is going to protect his princess from an evil intruder. Then his mother dies and the house is sold, unaware that Ronald was living in a hidden room. The new owners have three teen daughters and Ronald decides one of them is his princess and that an older boyfriend is the evil intruder and things go bad but ultimately the only other death is a nosy neighbor who is literally scared to death.

Clearly Ronald never crept into the shower.

For the record, it is not a good movie. Not the worst movie made in 1974 but arguments could be made that it belongs on some sort of “worst of” top ten list. It also stars Scott Jacoby, who was also in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, an early Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen film that also involves a hidden cellar entrance and a creepy man who accesses the house.

Ronald becomes filthy and creeps around the house at night, eating food, stealing family items, watching the family sleep, all while still living in his dream world of himself as a prince trying to protect a princess from harm. The images of him emerging from the dark, dirty and deranged, spying, stealing and moving things around, affected me and eventually every time I heard something creak in the house, I would freeze in fear like a squirrel who sighted a hawk. I began to develop the idea that someone was creeping around in the house between the walls, which would be impossible with the crappy little 1950s house we lived in. I even intuitively understood that we did not have the sort of house that could provide enough room for an intruder to skulk between the walls, but I still could not shake the fear that every time I heard something or felt like something had been moved without me touching it that someone was in the house, stalking me.

This specific fear was cemented during a two month period when both of my parents were working night shift. I was in the third grade and had to be alone in the house from the time I got home from school until my father arrived home after midnight (my parents were broke and had interesting perspectives on child rearing plus we had no family in the area, so don’t think too badly of them). Add to it that at the time we didn’t have phone service, and I spent a nice chunk of time absolutely terrified.

This scenario is somehow still less upsetting than Bad Ronald creeping around the house.

It faded over time, but the fear of someone being in the house would remain a thought in the back of my head until my mother and her new husband moved into a far less ramshackle home. However, even living in a place that made far less noise didn’t eliminate the fear entirely. When Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs came out, it revived the fear and twisted it into a generic fear of someone being in the house. Given who I am, when the movie cycled over onto cable, I watched it every time I could. The titular people under the stairs were portrayed as monsters, but they were made into monsters by their captors and ultimately were forces of good, but the idea of ragged, abused people living under my nose without me knowing, was just another wrinkle in the same “someone’s here and watching” cloth.

Then, god help me, I read about the Lalaurie case. Whether or not the details are all true, the accepted story is that Delphine Lalaurie, a demented slave owner in New Orleans, was experimenting on her slaves, chaining them throughout the mansion and performing ghoulish experiments on them that sound as if they were straight out of Nazi research or Unit 731. A fire broke out in the house in 1834, allegedly started by a slave who was chained in the kitchen and was hoping to draw attention to her plight, and the fire brigade discovered the horrific torture chambers. The abuse was so egregious that even during Plantation era slavery in Louisiana, people were appalled and stormed the house, but Madame Lalaurie was able to escape and is believed to have fled to France. No one had any idea she was doing this, torturing, maiming and killing slaves right under the noses of her neighbors. I’ve often wondered if the Lalaurie case was partial inspiration for The People Under the Stairs.

I did not develop a phobia or fear from the Lalaurie case and a Wes Craven film, but the essential premises linked my brain back to Bad Ronald: there may be a hidden place in homes where deranged people are living, or, worse, being harmed. But mostly I forgot about it because I had student loans and the Internet had not been invented yet.

Enter Reddit.

I cannot recall how many times people have found a hidden space in their homes that someone had been living in, or found evidence of someone living in an attic or cellar. Sometimes families lived in those homes for years before discovering someone had been creeping into their house without them knowing, doing god knows what while they were sleeping. When we bought our house, luckily we purchased a more modern built home that is essentially cardboard held together with wall putty but lacks a basement and the only place someone could hide is, interestingly, under the stairs, but we’ve been in and out of that space making repairs over the years, so I know no one is there. Plus an adult male who seldom leaves me alone at night lives here so when the cats do something that produces creepy sounds, he can go and check on it. Also I’m sort of an adult now, and can permit the adult part of my brain to drive me around these days. I still am extremely uneasy when people wear scary masks or wear corpse paint apropos of nothing but I’m not afraid of them. I just wish they wouldn’t. And this is similar. It was never as closely as held a fear as my mask/makeup issues – it’s just something I remember viscerally when “triggered.”

But every now and then, I see something like this and I feel that same sort of chilly creepiness that I experienced the first time I saw Bad Ronald.

Even though this video is fake, it’s still so horrifying I have to include it here. An aspiring actor hoping to go viral concocted this video of a woman living in the crawlspace over his apartment. The premise: he set up the camera because he’d noticed food and things going missing. This woman was descending into his apartment at night, eating food, watching television, and even urinating in his kitchen sink. Because I also have a germ aversion (caused by the same house I lived in when Bad Ronald warped me, a shit heap if there ever was one), the idea that someone could creep around at night and pee in my sink is just too much to think about.

There are a shocking number of videos about this sort of thing happening on YouTube and I am unsure how many have been debunked. It almost veers into the supernatural, thinking about how someone can creep around your home, creating their own home while you sleep or are away, and you never know it until you set up a camera after noticing things going missing, or remodel the house and break through a suspiciously thin wall, or get norovirus repeatedly because a stray human keeps urinating in your sink.

All in all, I have remarkably few genuine fears for someone this neurotic but this was one of those times when the fear that plagued me as a kid actually manifested for other people in real life. But I’m also proud to announce that I watched The People Under the Stairs on Shudder last week and was able to reminisce about my weird childhood rather than force Mr. OTC to search the house top to bottom when our stupidest cat fell off a shelf into the laundry bucket at three A.M.

Tell me about the weird thing that scared you when you were young. Was it the result of unmonitored television time? Did you grow out of it or did it get worse as you got older? Let me know!

10 Best Revenge Movies Written by Women by APac

I ordered this ‘zine recently because it was bundled with some interesting horror film ‘zines, but I am a sucker for these sort of top ten lists because I generally end up with at least a couple of pieces of new media to check out.

There are so many revenge movies that have female protagonists who seek vengeance for terrible things done to them, notably I Spit on Your Grave, The Brave One, and Ms. 45. I tend to thinkCarrie is as well. However, those films were directed by men and this list focuses on those directed by women, which ensured I would find a few films new to me.

Of the ten films, I have seen only three. One is Prevenge, directed by comedian Alice Lowe, which features a pregnant heroine seeking to kill those whom she holds responsible for the death of her romantic partner. I enjoyed it quite a bit, so much so that I watched it three times. My favorite scene is when the protagonist and one of her future victims burst out singing Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good.”

Another is Violation, directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer. I really disliked this film because I disagree with the essential premise. Should a perpetrator who misinterpreted sexual signs, who believed he had consent, be tortured and brutally slain because he got it wrong? None of this was helped by how unlikable the heroine was, because her behavior was so unpleasant that I almost walked away with the belief that she wanted to destroy her sister’s happy life and succeeded in spades. I’m not condemning her by implying she is a “bad victim” but rather stating that her aggressively sexual behavior with her partner and overall behavior with her sister made me think initially that she seduced the man she killed so she had an excuse to kill him. When we saw her perspective later and realized she did feel violated, I was surprised, which points in the direction of inconsistent characterization. If you loved this film, tell me why because I don’t get it but am willing to see other points of view

The third is She-Devil, directed by Susan Seidelman. This is one of the worst films ever made, taking a very serious novel with well-used black humor and turning it into a terribly unfunny slapstick comedy starring Roseanne Barr, Meryl Streep and Ed Begley Jr. I suspect the semi-positive reviews were down to Streep’s presence in the film. However, it was a delight finding it on this list anyway because the screenplay was “based” on the novel The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon. Though I have not reviewed any of her work on this site, I’ve mentioned her often, and it was painful seeing her work so terribly degraded because I am serious when I say the film adaptation sucks a’plenty.

Excuse me as I begin to go off on another tangent somewhat unrelated to the ‘zine in question.

But the book the film was based on is resplendent. No one handles revenge better than Fay Weldon did. In fact, critic Regina Barreca included Fay Weldon’s work in Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. It would be a near-book length entry to discuss the things that happened to Weldon that caused her to seek revenge in her often autobiographical  books, but she took some outrageous slings and arrows of fate and turned them into amusing, startling and provocative books. In the actual novel, Ruth, the fat and unattractive protagonist, loses her husband Bob to a beautiful romance novelist, Mary. Mary schemes to break up the marriage and succeeds and Ruth disappears with little more than the clothes on her back. She spends years making connections, earning money, and setting the stage for her ultimate revenge. Brick by brick, she disassembles Mary’s perfect life via her behind the scenes machinations and the coup de grace was several years of surgeries that left her looking identical to Mary. She even had lengths of her leg bones removed to reduce her height. Looking exactly like her defeated rival, she swoops back in to regain her husband who has been so broken by events that one is not sure if he understands he is now with Ruth, and we leave the novel wondering how much Bob is going to suffer for his callous cruelty and abandonment of his loyal wife.

Snerting at two of the three films in this ‘zine isn’t a slight against the list or those who compiled the list. Though these films are touted as the “best” ten revenge movies directed by women, the fact is that there are not that many films that meet the criteria. There are a couple of films on the top ten list I want to see, namely Promising Young Woman because I initially thought that it was based on the Caroline O’Donoghue novel, Promising Young Women. It isn’t but I adore Clancy Brown and the reviews seem good so I am eager to check it out. There are others in there that seem worth watching but I won’t spoil things further and instead encourage you to check out these ‘zine makers.  I will be discussing another ‘zine from APac for Oddtober.

Though this list didn’t necessarily ring many “best film” bells for me, the creators took the time to  search out films that weren’t immediate ringers that many have seen. I know they were trying to present more obscure films because they placed three of the most famous revenge films women directed in a sort of “honorable mention” list. I’ve definitely seen Baise-Moi, Monster and Jennifer’s Body, and excluding them ensured I got to know about more films I hadn’t seen. I appreciate the attempt to introduce the reader to something new. Also extremely helpful is a master list of all the movies they considered for this list and I was pleased to see that Carrie 2 was on it.

And I really appreciate the opportunity to redirect people from the terrible She-Devil to the darkly delightful Lives and Loves of a She-Devil.

I Got That B-Movie Autism by @frankenart13

Mirabelle loves to curl up with a good ‘zine.

It’s a small relief to discuss another single-page ‘zine after Chris Mikul’s much longer, research-heavy ‘zines.  I Got That B-Movie Autism is the work of an artist who goes by the moniker frankenart13 across various social media platforms. I really enjoy little ‘zines like these. They are artfully folded, reminding me of passing notes in school or carefully constructing cootie catchers so my friends and I could hopefully determine who we would marry or if we would be rich when we grew up. There is an interesting intimacy to these small ‘zines that draw me in, and I have a lot of them. I hope to one day find all the ‘zines I’ve stashed all over my shelves and stuck in drawers and behave as if I am collecting these little ‘zines rather than haphazardly accumulating them.

This ‘zine has a very specific mission:

If you’ve ever wanted to be recommended 3 obscure and amazing cult movies by an autistic queer dude, then this is the zine for you!

The three movies Frankenart13 wants to share are Reanimator, The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera, and I won’t spoil why he wants to recommend them in case you want to buy a copy for yourself.

I will, however, note that The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera are both directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. I enjoyed both films when I saw them, years ago, and had no clue who directed either, let alone that it was the same man, though it shouldn’t be surprising because the two films are clearly siblings with similar aesthetics and style.

I  know about Darren Lynn Bousman because I became very interested in the Saw franchise last spring. With the exception of Saw 3D, also known as Saw 7 (because, shockingly, it was the seventh Saw film in the series) and Spiral, I found all of the Saw movies strangely compelling and compulsively watchable. I had dismissed the films as being little more than torture porn, and in a way they aren’t much more than that, but the character arcs, the plot twists and the grimy visuals ensured that even when the films were bad, they were still sort of good. I found myself watching tons of YouTube videos about the franchise, ranking the best and worst traps, best and worst deaths, best and worst characters, etc.

Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV were directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Chris Rock brought him back into the fold after seventeen years away for Spiral, which was the worst film in the franchise, in my opinion, and I am unable to express exactly why it didn’t hit me the same way the other films did. Others tended to agree with my puzzled dislike. But Bousman’s miss was offset by Saw II, a film that some horror aficionados consider the best horror sequel ever made. They may be right, as I can’t currently think of a sequel that was as good as or better than the first movie. Saw II was pretty good, with interesting character development, some really grody traps (Shawnee Smith in that needle pit…), and some excellent twists. Bousman is a director with a very specific style that I never would have associated with The Devil’s Carnival or Repo! The Genetic Opera. I want to rewatch both and then rewatch Saw II for the umpteenth time and see if I can pick out details that are Bousman-like in all three.

Not all ‘zines will cause this cascade of reaction but it’s always fun when they do. This ‘zine is, in the end, just a piece of artfully folded paper but because of it I’m likely going to spend six hours watching films in a search that has nothing to do with the original content presented in I Got That B-Movie Autism. Good times!

Catsploitation: A Zine Celebrating Horror Fans & Their Cats

It’s interesting how many of my more recent ‘zine purchases are strangely sweet. During my own ‘zine heyday back in college and shortly after, most of the ‘zines I purchased were decidedly dark. I know there were some very sweet ‘zines available during that time, but I guess I didn’t come across them or I myself was in a place mentally and socially wherein I sought out harsher fare. The ‘zines I have bought in the last ten years have strands of cuteness or charm that run through them. I have some darker ones to share this month, but I guess what I am saying is that it may be true that we mellow when we age.

Today’s offering is the amusing Catsploitation from 2017. I do not recall where I got it, but it’s published by a guy named Matt and you can contact him via catsploitation@gmail.com. Insanely, again the only place I could find to purchase it was on Etsy and it was awesome to see that there is a part two and a part three available. The first and second editions are only available in digital form, but part three, which is devoted to black cats, is still analog and I bought it as soon as I saw it.

Black cat lying on an orange and blue blanket, with a purple 'zine next to her.
Clio’s expression tells me she knows the black cat edition is on its way and I better have a salmon Churu waiting after her next photo shoot.

 

 

This ‘zine is one of those “my people” ‘zines. You pick up the ‘zine, flip through it, and realize you are among your own kind.

Catsploitation contains photos of horror lovers and their cats, next to interview questions they answered. I think the best way to illustrate what I mean is to reproduce the main questions and answer them myself.

Your top 5 favorite horror/cult movies: Near Dark, Dark Song, May, Halloween, Beyond the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Saw franchise and Pan’s Labyrinth are close behind them)

What horror title best describes your cat(s): Clio is the most endearing, silly cat and I can’t think of a film with a horror plot that features a beautiful young woman with a five second attention span who is always ready to sit on your shoulder.

Calliope can best be described by As Above So Below because she mirrors her sister when they sit on a cat tree, occupying the space on the level directly under her. Clio on top, Calliope right underneath, in the same pose.

Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants is easily described by Drag Me to Hell because that’s what you feel is happening to you when she uses the litter box.

Boo Radley is best described by It Follows because he is always right behind you.

Mirabelle embodies The Lurker because she’s often around corners, peering at you, watching your every move.

What iconic horror villain does your cat act like: Clio is most like Dracula as played by Nicholas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss because she is insane and likes to eat bugs.

Her sister Calliope is most like Michael Myers from Halloween because she never speaks and seldom makes any noise.

Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants reminds me of the very elderly vampire in the movie version of What We Do in the Shadows because she is old and wants to be left alone.

To Kill a Mockingbird is not a horror movie but needless to say, Boo Radley reminds me of Boo Radley, who isn’t a villain but still…

Mirabelle doesn’t really act like a horror villain. She’s just a tiny little calico cat who really likes treats. If there is a female horror villain who is cute and aloof and adheres to a rigid snack schedule, then that’s who she is like.

What do you think the connection is between loving horror (movies/art) and loving cats: I think cats are perfect little murder machines. They play with their prey before killing it. They even kill just for sport. They are fast, sleek and you can often be alone with a cat in a room and not know it is creeping up on you until it jumps up and hogs the blanket. They can tiptoe across a dresser without moving a thing. Were cats human and humans their prey, we’d all be dead. But they aren’t. They’re furry creatures we can smooch on the head and dress in little hats, and there’s something heady about having these little murder muffins purring when you feed them and curling up next to you for a nap. It’s like owning chaos.

I hope there is a Catsploitation 4 in the works and I also hope Matt sees this and invites me to participate. But until then I will cherish my copy of number three when it comes in. Clio can nap easy… for now.

Election Day Special: The Hunt

Tuesday, November 3, 2020, is going to be a hell of a day.  I despise talking about politics because the only discussions less useful to intelligent discourse lately are forays into conspiracy theory.  But I think I have a perfect way to express the angst, fear and disgust many people have felt when they realized 2020, a year with numbers that represent perfect vision and clarity, was descending into chaos, sickness and violence while those in power exploited the chaos, sickness and violence.

Enter The Hunt.

The conversation about this film gets derailed frequently. Due to release just after the horrific mass murders in an El Paso Walmart in August 2019, The Hunt’s opening was delayed after President Trump and right-wing pundits like Laura Ingraham insisted the film’s goal was to inspire partisan violence against conservatives.  The film’s opening was delayed until late September 2019, then again until March of 2020. It opened right before Covid-19 caused theaters to shut down in the USA. Not many people got to see it on screen, but those who did found the film uncomfortable viewing.  Leftists were angry that the liberals in the film were such assholes.  Those on the Right were angry that the conservatives in the film were such assholes and also felt that the asshole liberals were coded as conservatives.  That, my friends, is a pretty good sign that this is a film that may show you some uncomfortable truths about class, politics, objective and subjective truth, and what happens when the schism becomes all anyone can see.

If it makes you uncomfortable, interrogate that feeling.

Here’s a brief synopsis of The Hunt, and there will probably be spoilers (I don’t think you really can spoil a film like this, but step wisely if you prefer to go into films utterly tabula rasa): The Hunt is a riff on The Most Dangerous Game, humans hunting humans, but this time it’s personal.  A cadre of elite liberals, very wealthy elite liberals, made a dumb joke in a group chat.  One of them spoke of shooting “deplorables” in a hunt, and the others reacted in a tongue-in-cheek manner.  This chat got hacked and released to the public and conspiracy theorists took it seriously.  The elites eventually lost their jobs and decided to track down some of the most virulent proponents of the conspiracy theory and kill them in a hunt, making the conspiracy theory real after the fact.  Conservative and conspiracy theory caricatures were kidnapped, flown to an estate in the Balkans and killed. The last woman standing is Crystal May Creasey, a lower-middle class blonde with a thick Southern accent. The mastermind behind The Hunt, a woman named Athena, researched the prey she and her peers would hunt, but got it very wrong with Crystal.  Athena kidnapped the wrong Crystal Creasey, not knowing the Crystal behind the social media accounts talking about The Hunt spelled her name “Mae.”  That mistake costs her and you need to watch the film if only to see the final confrontation between Athena and the wrong Crystal.

Athena and her comrades in arms are extremely wealthy and very white, with the exception of one Arabic man who is their token minority. They are wealthy in a way that makes them part of the 1%.  They are so wealthy that losing their jobs means little to their overall net worth as they are able to charter airplanes, pay off staff who fly them around, rent entire compounds for weeks, hire a military advisor to help them train, etc. Their absolute privilege fuels their rage at the mostly blue-collar advocates of the conspiracy theory.  How dare those “deplorables” interfere in their lives in such a way? They must be taught a lesson, an individual lesson that results in their deaths. They messed with their “betters” and that cannot stand.

Liberal discomfort at watching these caricatures is interesting.  Athena and her cohorts get very upset over language – while hiding bodies in a back room at a fake general store and gas station set up to catch anyone who escaped the compound, one older married couple argue over whether or not “black” is an appropriate description for human beings. They come to the conclusion that “African-American” is the only polite term, no matter what NPR has to say about it because NPR employs mostly white people. They have no problem policing each other’s language as they literally kill three people with poison gas because they talked conspiracy theory online. Similar conversations happen in a bunker on the compound, as the tiresome elites wait in anticipation for Crystal to return.  When they accidentally shoot a pig named Orwell, their anger at hurting the animal far outweighs any concern they have for the human beings they rounded up and slaughtered.

Oh, and it is a slaughter.  It’s not a hunt. The conspiracy theorists find a box of weapons but the moment they get their bearings in a clearing, they are immediately shot from an enemy they do not know is there, with no knowledge of why they are there and the rules of the hunt. Those who escape instant death are chased into booby traps, tracked with drones, blown up or gassed and the notion of an actual hunt only comes up when Crystal proves hard to kill.  It was never a hunt until Crystal, the wrong Crystal, hunted them.  It was graphic, outrageous revenge against people who had very little power outside of their capacity to talk about jaded and cruel rich people online.

But bear in mind, the people getting shot and gassed and blown up are also distasteful. One of the guys is a big game hunter, posing with animal carcasses like that asshole dentist who lured a lion out of an animal preservation to kill.  One is a hard-core conspiracy theorist who sees a crisis actor in everyone he sees, even babies, and it strips him of any real humanity and makes him an easy target. Another is a dead ringer for Tomi Lahren, so much so that we don’t need much more from her than a couple of sentences because it’s clear who she is meant to portray (checking the name for spelling showed me as I was typing this, the real Tomi Lahren was tweeting and retweeting about the election and evidently wrote a book called Never Play Dead that came out a year after The Hunt finished production and I sense we’ve come full circle, in a way).  And while I don’t like Tomi Lahren, for many of the same reasons I lipfarted at Phyllis Schlafly, I don’t think it will get me cancelled to say that I don’t want to see her kidnapped and her head blown off.  These ringers aside, the rest are just Q-Anon and Pizzagate true believers who never really understood that there were real people on the other side of their accusations, that what they were saying could potentially ruin lives. If they consider that their actions could ruin lives, they feel it was a morally upright decision to ruin those who prey on the weak, even if the basis for such a decision is bad logic and supposition. They just had the bad luck to cross people more motivated for revenge than the Podesta brothers or that dude who runs Comet Ping Pong.

The Tomi Lahren stand-in and the big game hunter may have had some money, but that they are so easily kidnapped and illegally flown into Europe speaks to being far lower on the financial ladder than the liberals who want them dead. This is a class war, pure and simple, and it is based simply on class because the liberals feel it would be terrible to kill any of the people of color who spread the conspiracy theory about The Hunt. It’s an interesting place to stand, to be so attuned to white privilege that one is willing to kill any number of white people who say the wrong thing but utterly unwilling to kill minorities who do the same because that’s just not politically correct.

In the middle of these warring class factions stands Crystal.  Her skills are of a Neo-in-the-Matrix type and her flat deadpan delivery is often far too calm, but in her hyper-aware, violently competent, quiet sense of self, we see the only real human in this film. She may be part of the working class the elites hate, but she was never a part of the conspiracy theory and as an outsider to wealth and conspiracy, she is the only one who can see clear enough to survive.  While the other hunt victims woke with bits locked in their mouths, convening together in the clearing where a large box containing weapons was placed, Crystal was pulling apart her name badge and placing the pin on a leaf in a pond to show her the way north.  She never banded together with the rest of them until she was forced to when other victims found her  – she didn’t even wait around long enough to find out who they were or what any of them may have known about what was going on.  We don’t know her political beliefs.  We know she was in the military and that she had a crappy job at a car rental place.  Beyond that she’s an Everywoman, a stand-in for every person who has watched the world split apart, with loved ones on either side of the divide, tired of the rhetoric, cruelty, entitlement and fear.

The prelude to the final fight is very interesting. Athena’s arrogance and distaste for the messy lives of the underclass is sickening.  She taunts Crystal, reciting knowledge about Crystal Mae Creasey’s sad life.  Parents were meth addicts, life spent in foster care, and that pedigree of poverty and despair to Athena is a sign that Crystal, in some Calvinist assignation of blame, earned her terrible life because she on some level deserves it, that her misery was pre-ordained.  Crystal Mae was scum, she was foul, and she had messed with Athena via comments online and had to die for it.  It’s just a shame that she kidnapped Crystal May Creasey, whom she knew nothing about.

The end of the fight is instructive, showing the way the 1% looks at those who don’t have an MBA and who live paycheck to paycheck.  All of the victims have nicknames the elites use and they call Crystal “Snowball.”  Crystal asks Athena why she called her that and Athena immediately thinks Crystal is asking because she doesn’t have any idea who Orwell was nor had she read Animal Farm.  She begins to pedantically explain it to Crystal, who cuts her off, telling her she understands the reference but doesn’t get the link between her and Snowball.  Athena is visibly shocked that this woman, this woman whose identity she now knows she fucked up, read a book, let alone a book almost every high school freshman in America reads. Athena is so married to her idea of those unlike her being genuinely deplorable that any sign of intelligence in her perceived enemy is shocking.

By the way, I’ll be damned if I understand the way that this film viewed Snowball, the pig who represented Trotsky and whose death was used as propaganda by Napoleon/Stalin, who bastardized Snowball’s ideas. Perhaps the conspiracy-minded Crystal was Snowball, but the Crystal they kidnapped was not.  More puzzling, Crystal says she thinks Athena is Snowball, and that makes even less sense, unless it is a way to convey that Crystal is going to somehow misuse Athena’s image to achieve some larger goal.  If that is the case, it’s unclear at the end.  And that lack of clarity may be the point.  At the end, education, literary allusion and decent analogy meant nothing – they were all slaughtered like pigs. In that regard, Athena really was Snowball.

This is an uncomfortable movie to watch.  It parodies conservative conspiracy theories and parrots the worst people think about elites who use the lumpen proletariat however they want but tantrum like very pampered babies when the proles speak out of turn.  It shows how impermeable conspiracy theory is to rational or reasonable thought.  It shows how perhaps we are right to be very afraid of those who wield power and have money.  Conservatives thought the immoral liberal elites were a parody of them, and maybe they were.  Liberals really hate the way the elites were more focused on the minutia of civility than the morality of killing people for sport and revenge.  This film shows what incompetent assholes many who are rabidly partisan become, and won’t let us off easy in the end by telling us much about the heroine who outlasted her financial peers and bested her economic betters. We may be far more like Athena or the ersatz Tomi than Crystal.

The days ahead are going to suck regardless of who wins the election.  I’m a liberal, or a leftist – I don’t even know anymore because the labels change online constantly – and I see Athena in some of my own. And I know that though I am far from rich, the intellectual company I keep may make me seem like a pandering asshole to those to the right of me. Enemy lines have been drawn in a way they never have been before and I worry about the days to come.

That’s it.  That’s the end.  I have no great conclusion here. No matter what happens today, restoring our faith in the government, politicians, and even our peers will not come quickly. Maybe watching this film will result in some sort of catharsis but right now it might just feel like the movie gods are mocking us.  Just buckle in and hope your level best that we will one day live in a society wherein it is not so easy to constantly invoke Orwell.

Oddtober 2020: Sinful Cinema Series vol. 5 by Doug Brunell

Book:  The Amazing Mr. X from the Sinful Cinema Series

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, cinema studies, film criticism

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Less odd than disheartening – this book illustrates how it is that being very good at what you do is no assurance you will ever become famous or even well-respected in your craft.

Availability: Published by in 2020 by Chaotic Words, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Doug Brunell has become a staple of my “Oddtober” adventures.  I’ve read a little of his fiction (I read Black Devil Spine and my main criticism was that I wish he’d just let loose a bit more and wallowed in the depravity because he was soooo close to pulling off the most difficult feat a horror writer can achieve – pornographic violence that doesn’t pander) but am mostly familiar with his looks at weird, fringe and/or under-known films.  I hope he keeps updating his Sinful Cinema series until either I or this site dies because I think his work has become the OTC version of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. You gotta watch Linus out there in the pumpkin patch and you gotta have a Sinful Cinema volume or it just doesn’t feel like Halloween.

I am in a strange place with The Amazing Mr. X because I want to engage in my usual, endless examination, and this film isn’t outrageous like some of the films Brunell has explored. I have had no qualms about spoiling the plots of those films because the plot and characterization took a backseat to the shlock, sleaziness or overall hokeyness.  Few watch Crypt of the Living Dead or The Abductors for plot complexity or interesting characterization and god help those who find such titles and hope that at least the acting is decent.  But Brunell has a gift for seeing the intent behind bad or outrageous films, showing his readers unexpected ways to look at the plots, character arcs that would have been missed among all the stilted delivery and random boob shots, and his biographies of those involved in the films show the crazy ways Hollywood is connected, from the winding paths between sexploitation and Disney franchises to how the name of a small boat that takes a researcher to a vampire-infested, in-bred island can demonstrate the uneasy interactions between rational science and pagan tradition.  Without Brunell, the average film fan might not have ever understood all of these connections and ideas that permeate even the crappiest low budget horror film, and his extraordinary love of the subject redeems films I would have ignored had I known about them.

That is not the case with The Amazing Mr. X. I can see watching this just because.  In fact, I sort of want to watch it with Mr. OTC to see what he thinks of it.  As Brunell notes in his examination, this film has a lot of things that hamper it, mainly the title, which leads one to believe that this is going to be some sort of character-driven science fiction film.  It’s not.  Brunell says it’s a noir film disguised as a horror film and he’s right.  Every actor hits their mark, the plot is a masterful series of misdirections that never seem forced or false, and all the important characters have unexpected redemption arcs that make sense and are not insulting, forcing a schmaltzy and happy ending.

So I don’t want to spoil this film.  I think you need to watch it, decide what you think is happening, and then read Brunell’s book.  This film is fairly easy to get hold of.  I watched it on Amazon Prime for free but the film is also all over YouTube.

Quick synopsis: The extremely wealthy Christine was widowed when her husband Paul died in a car crash. She feels his presence still and is having trouble moving on. Her somewhat annoying but adorable younger sister, Janet, wants her to accept an engagement ring from her new suitor, Martin, a likeable guy, but on the night when Martin proposes, Christine meets Alexis, a clairvoyant and spiritualist (who has a big squawking crow as his familiar, a bird whose role in this film was not clear to me until Brunell explained the ending), who knows all about Paul and Martin.  His unexpected knowledge weighs on her until she consults Alexis for help and becomes a regular client of his as she uses his psychic powers to try to reconnect with Paul.  Paul’s memory is causing Christine to become unhinged and Janet and Martin become suspicious of Alexis. They hire a private investigator, who is a former magician who knows all the tricks of psychic con men (a sort of James Randi figure, may he rest in peace), to look into the psychic and, sure enough, he has a file on Alexis.  To make sure Alexis is the man he thinks he is, the investigator and Martin send Janet in as bait to get his fingerprints but Alexis is two steps ahead of them because he is, indeed, a con man. That may seem like a spoiler but it isn’t because the viewer knows Alexis is a fraud the moment she sees him.  But in the end, Christine really is in danger, Paul is the source of this danger, and by the time everyone figures out what is going on, Christine is more or less a second thought as far more interesting characters shape the end.

This film is an interesting history piece.  Filmed in 1948, it comes at a sort of crossroads in cultural reactions and social movements.  Young widows filled with grief at the untimely deaths of their young husbands were not uncommon after WWII, so this movie had a sort of anchor in Christine. But spiritualism was dying off, men like Alexis raising more suspicion than praise, so much so that the film’s title was changed from The Spiritualist. But Christine (and Janet) are wealthy, presumably through their family, leaving them prey to con men, while also showing that they didn’t need anyone to take care of them.  Moreover, Alexis, played by Turhan Bey (who was known as the “Turkish Delight” and once dated Lana Turner but couldn’t marry her because his mama didn’t approve), was shoved into a role that was losing potency.  The trope of women swooning over suave sheik types of men was drawing to an end.  Yet in spite of these issues, from the terrible title to the tired tropes to the lack of a “big name,” the film works.  Brunell speculates that if one big name had been cast, this film would today be far better known than it is.

One of the benefits of reading Brunell’s books after watching these films is that they encourage me to watch carefully, almost training me in film analysis.  I missed the subtext behind the ending, and there were other bits and pieces I didn’t pick up on.  But it’s interesting what I did see before I read Brunell, things I would have missed ordinarily.  For example:

–I didn’t entirely connect the dots but I felt a sort of discordance at first because it seemed like Christine, who was played by the lovely Lynn Bari, was the protagonist of the film.  Why was the film called The Amazing Mr. X if Christine is the lead character?  Well, she isn’t.  Alexis is, and that misdirection is intentional and part of why this film is so clever.

–Janet, who is at least ten years younger than Christine, has a chipmunk voice, appears ditzy and silly, and Alexis is able to ingratiate himself to her by insinuating that she is actually the more mature, more grounded of the sisters. Even Christine scoffs at this but Alexis is not wrong. Janet may be silly but she is not plagued by ghosts of dead husbands with questionable motives, she offers unwavering moral support, and is capable of saving lives when the chips are down.  Christine, who has a sort of Joan Crawford, 1940s remote elegance that often is linked to feminine intelligence, is easily fooled, ridiculously unable to act in her own best interests, and at the end the least interesting character in the film.

–I wondered why I liked the bad guy – Alexis – so much when he was a con man.  Because I’m supposed to.  Again, the director laid out a path I was walking on before I knew I was even walking.

And I picked up on these things because I was anticipating Brunell’s book and what it would show me.  It’s a fun sort of mental exercise, a puzzle that connects my experience to the ideas of someone very well-versed in film while showing me the puzzle pieces that I missed.  For example, Brunell’s discussion of the lighting in the film was fascinating and far outside my wheelhouse.

And though the cast and crew biographies are not as salacious as those in the other volumes of Sinful Cinema I’ve read, they are still very interesting.  For example, one of them was blacklisted by McCarthy.  One was utterly beloved by all who knew him. One actress lost her acting contracts when she refused to divorce her husband at the demand of a studio executive. And all of them, very good at their craft, never achieved the fame they deserved.  Seriously, this was a tight cast.  The weakest link was the detective and even he had decent acting chops.  If you dislike Christine, it’s because Lynn Bari’s performance was deliberate in its attempt to create that emotion.  If you begin to enjoy the Gidget-like Janet, well-done because she’s a character who only seems like a caricature of a chatty blonde until you juxtapose her with the more “competent” female character and realize she’s pretty cool.  (And though you aren’t wholly expected to want to root on Alexis as he cons Christine, if you do find yourself feeling ambiguous about him, you’re in good company because I didn’t want Christine to come to harm, but if Alexis got a few bucks out of her, c’est le vie.)

Brunell’s other four volumes in the Sinful Cinema series focus on more outrageous or fringe fare and initially I wondered if I was watching the correct film because I didn’t find myself falling into the sort of MST3K mindset one uses when watching a film that is notably terrible in some manner.  This is a well-crafted, though certainly flawed film, with an interesting script, good actors, and mystery elements that are always honest, never resorting to uneven characterization or left-turn plot twists.  Yet in its own way its as much an outlier as Crypt of the Living Dead because the cast and crew themselves remained outliers in an acting community that never gave them their well-earned dues, the film itself got lost among other noir films that didn’t mislabel themselves via terrible titles, and this film seems… cursed in a way, including a leading lady who died in a notorious fashion before the film began production, and terrible timing.

I really enjoyed Brunell’s tour through The Amazing Mr. X. It was particularly enjoyable seeing his keen eye take on a film that isn’t mostly boobs, poor acting, terrible casting, and inexplicable plot elements.  It’s great to see unexpected weirdness in more mainstream and conventional fare.  Highly recommended.

Oddtober 2020: WNUF Halloween Special

WNUF Halloween Special is one of the best “found footage” films the horror genre has produced in years, which is kind of grim because it was released in 2013.  It doesn’t really matter if the premise has had every drop of ingenuity and decent story-telling wrung out of it.  If it worked once, why not keep doing it until not even the mafia will finance your film?  Given my dim view of other films that mine this vein, the only reason I selected this film on Shudder is because I was doing mindless chores and wanted some background noise. Five minutes in, I understood this wasn’t just another V/H/S.  So I stopped it so I could watch it later and pay attention, and forced Mr. OTC to watch it with me.  Good times.  (By the way, I could only find this on Shudder and couldn’t find it elsewhere to stream, sorry.)

The premise is fairly simple: The news station on WNUF, Channel 28, in some northern town some time in the 1980s is hosting the “first live on TV seance.” We are watching a VHS video someone recorded of the news program that aired right before the Halloween special, wherein we learn about this little town and all its problems. Periodically, the film fast forwards through repetitive or uninteresting sections, mimicking what we all used to do when we recorded network television back in the day, placing the audience in the role of an active viewer of the tape. Interspersed throughout the news and the later seance special, we see commercials that are so absolutely true to 1980s concerns, mores, cultural issues and consumer habits that it was hard not to cringe at how awful the 80s really were. The program for the seance begins after the news, and the audience learns that a son slaughtered his parents in the house, and a couple who are paranormal investigators, a hapless priest, an oily reporter and a cat find out that the dead should be the least of anyone’s concerns.

The only way to discuss this film is to recount both the plot and the running commentary Mr. OTC and I engaged in, as we were delighted and utterly appalled by how much this film got completely right, balancing perfectly between retro cringe and upbeat nostalgia, lampooning and lauding the 1980s.  I’ll swap back and forth between the plot and the best of the commercials, but know that if I could explore every commercial without writing a novella-length discussion, I would.

The film begins with a fast forward through commercials, some of which are helpful PSAs (“Wait! Stop! Think! There’s nothing sexy about STDs!”) and then the news begins.  We meet hosts Gavin Gordon, looking like a young Fred Willard in a vampire costume, and Deborah Merritt, with perfect mom makeup, wearing a witch hat and a saccharine smile.

First thing they tell us about is the upcoming special with reporter Frank, and make terrible Halloween jokes.  “No, you didn’t tune into the Transylvania Public Access station,” Gavin says.  Then they give a rundown of the evening’s news stories: a religious organization is praying for the end of Halloween because Satan is bad, the ads in the governor’s race are getting dirty, and they announce Frank Stewart is going to take us along as he traipses through a murder house.

***

Mr. OTC: Did you see that smile and little shrug she gave him.  You know that wasn’t on the cue cards.  He’s ad libbing and she hates him.  I bet he even bounced the whole Transylvanian cable access joke off her beforehand and she told him she’d strangle him if he did it and he did it anyway to piss her off.

Me: Really?  I got the impression those two are having an extramarital affair.  That’s weird sexual tension, I think.

Mr. OTC: No reason it can’t be both.

Continue Reading “Oddtober 2020: WNUF Halloween Special”

Happy Halloween!

Well, I had intended to follow up yesterday’s entry about the WKCR radio broadcast hijack with some new information I found about the names uttered in the chant in the audio clip.  I have, predictably, fallen down a rabbit hole.  Like I think maybe I’ve solved the link between the names but need some more time, or I’ve hit the bottom of an empty rabbit warren and need to dig my way out, probably filled with shame at my hubris.  We’ll see.  Once I know which way it’s going, I’ll post about it.

And that’s kind of a lame way to end Oddtober 2019.  But hey, I’ve written about a lot of weird crap over the years and I seldom do revisiting compilations so I feel like maybe I’ll just link to some of my lesser seen odd/creepy/horrific entries and get back to listening to a weird audio recording that reminds me I have tinnitus every time that bell rings.

But anyway, read away and enjoy your day!

Murder/Serial Killers

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths

Thirteen Girls

The Postcard Killer: The True Story of J. Frank Hickey

The Paranormal

Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us

How People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It

Aliens

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

The Cryptoterrestrials

Horror or Unsettling Fiction

House of Leaves

Drujika, Contessa of Blood

The Cannibal’s Guide to Ethical Living

Ruthless: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection

Necrophilia Variations

Dust

Horror Films

Only Lovers Left Alive

The Bunny Game

Places and Personal Stories

Ben Thompson’s Grave

Slave Cemeteries

The Liberty Hill Witch Grave

Baby Head Cemetery

The Mom Ghost

The Abductors, #1 in the Sinful Cinema Series by Doug Brunell

Book: The Abductors: Sinful Series 1

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, cinema review, film history

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the film is a huge, steaming pile of horse shit but Brunell’s love and enthusiasm for this type of grindhouse/sexploitation genre actually made me second guess my initial reaction.

Availability: Published by Chaotic Words in 2016, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Jesus Allah fuck, this is a terrible film.  I’m not going to say you in particular would hate this film because a lot of you have weird tastes or you wouldn’t be reading here in the first place. Also, if you mute it so that you are not subjected to appalling dialogue delivered by people who probably would have been better used in outright porn, there are some interesting things going on. For example:

–If you are tired of seeing buoyant, surgically enhanced breasts, the natural boobs in this film may be just what the doctor ordered.  Additionally, people tired of the PAWG trope will delight in the mostly flat, often saggy butts found on the women (and men) in The Abductors.

–How do you feel about pubic hair?  Fans of the bush will love this movie.

–Do you have strong opinions about hairy chests on men lacking even the 1970s Burt Reynolds version of muscles, who look hilarious when they get handcuffed to trees?  You are in luck.

–Do you harbor unresolved and unsettling feelings about helicopters, especially when you see them flying low over trees or landing on lakes so small you sense that they received a fine for even trying to land, let alone trying in the dead of night? Take this film to your therapist.  It could be key in your recovery.

–Have people told you that if the Olympics had a “cringe” category, your grimaces could bring home a gold medal?  Do you need practice covering up second-hand embarrassment so that you can endure your Uncle Jack’s casual sexism as he gets drunk at Christmas dinner?  Consider this film your training camp.

So it’s clear that this is a bad, bad film.  And that’s okay.  Without bad films we wouldn’t have had Mystery Science Theater 3000. The bad film has its charms, and Doug Brunell has such a keen eye and sympathetic take on the genres that bring us terrible films that if you read his books after you watch the films he discusses, you can genuinely find yourself wondering if maybe you got it all completely wrong.  To be completely frank, you probably won’t find much in Brunell’s writing that redeems this film, nor does he serve as an apologist for bad cinema (he refers to this film as being part of a “sleaze saga”). Rather, he accepts films as they are, discusses the times that spawn such films and the career arcs of the people involved. He recognizes the film’s many (many, many) flaws, but he also has such a great knowledge of genre, the specific cinematic tropes at work when older schlock was released, and the various ways filmmakers attempted to subvert those tropes, that the background he gives as he discusses the movies is the price of admission for the Sinful Cinema series.

And to be blunt, there is charm to schlock. For interior designers, it’s the Memphis Group.  For bibliophiles, it’s the “so bad it’s good” that writers like Richard Laymon and VC Andrews bring to the table. What would bad music discussions be without The Shaggs and Jandek?  When you read Brunell’s take on schlock films, you see the charm.  Whether or not the charm works on you is subjective.  But when you read Brunell’s work, objectively you see how one bad movie’s reach can extend into cinema you’d never expect from a sexploitation film.  Brunell sees how it is that the worst can be a link to the best, or maybe just a link to something that isn’t quite as bad. His knowledge and love of the topic are infectious, so much so that I actually sat through the whole of The Abductors so I would be assured I could follow his book about the film.

Quick synopsis: This film is the second in the “Ginger” trilogy but if Doug Brunell doesn’t write a book about the other two films I’ll be damned if I watch them.  So the plot is simple: White slavers are kidnapping women to sell to men who can blow $100k in 1970s money on cheerleaders taken hostage and “trained” to be excellent companions for really old men who wear Sansabelt slacks and live in a split-level home with orange shag carpet. After a convertible with three witless cheerleaders is run off the road, the three women kidnapped, a private investigator calls in Ginger, a woman who may be a spy, may be a detective, but never wears a bra, to help him.

(Honest to god, the first time we see her in street clothes, she is wearing a cropped denim vest with no buttons or zipper and no top underneath.  Later when she tries to seduce a bad man who unties her bizarre top that looks like the old Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders’ tie uniform but as imagined by Fredrick’s of Hollywood and made by a hippie who learned to crochet in rehab, she takes forever to retie it and when she does, she ties it with her boobs outside of the fabric.  She spends a lot of time topless or naked. Oh, and I remember this most clearly: the credits say “Chantilly Place” provided Cheri Caffaro, the lady who played Ginger, with all her “knits.”)

Together Jason, the private eye, and Ginger manage to track down the slavers by recruiting a pretty private eye and having her swallow a pill of some sort that allows them to track her for up to 25 miles. But before this happens, Ginger gets involved with a pudgy dude who looks like Steve Majors but isn’t (the scene where he dances with Ginger in what appears to be the courtyard of a rest home for geriatric hotel band members is cringe-gold – she’s actually got maracas). Pretty private eye gets kidnapped by slavers, Ginger watches her be relocated on a helicopter on pontoons, and is so upset she befouls a white shag carpet with like-Steve-Majors-but-isn’t and dun-dun-DUN, afterward he takes her hostage because SPOILER ALERT: he’s the head slaver.

Predictable stuff happens – all the men involved are dumb and will spill any number of beans if you show them boobs or grab their dick. Sex is had atop a pool table. An enormous henchman who “trains” the girls gets kicked in the crotch by a girl and then kicks her in the crotch in response (his name is weird and I cannot recall it now but Mr. OTC and I called him “Jablowme”). A woman gets gut punched, sexual torture is implied, but it all ends well when Ginger escapes and gets all the information she needs out of like-Steve-Majors-but-isn’t by, and I shit you not, restraining him in a shower, spraying him with water from the shower head and soaping him up.  He is utterly undone by the water spray, begging her not to spray his chest anymore.  Brunel actually manages to discuss this scene in a thoughtful manner that never would have occurred to me.

The three kidnapped girls end up really liking the men who bought them and stay with them. Ginger and Jason are nearly shot by a banker’s desk guns, but good prevails, the end.

The biggest problem with the film is that no one can act. Ginger speaks only in double entendres and they are delivered with a flat, smirking dullness. The men are all dumb or speak in gangster-ese. Every man seems like he’s dressed like a leisure-suit Harlequin, all the women have their nipples exposed at all times, and what is represented as the height of luxurious domestic decadence would need to be fumigated to qualify as a modern Motel 6.  The abducted girls only speak when they are introduced to the used car salesmen who purchased them, asking them innocent questions over dinner, wondering how they will be able to explain to the neighbors that they are sex slaves.  But the plot, oh the stupid plot, and the acting, tend to make all the excellent cheese turn into something that is merely cheesy.

Most notable is how difficult it will be for modern audiences to stomach this film.

This 90 minute film is sometimes a chore to watch. Bad acting, inexplicable costume and hair changes in the middle of a driving scene, and the idea that all women need is either a skilled lover or to be raped in order to “break” them all work to erode the average viewer’s patience, tolerance and sanity. Watching young women’s breasts be groped and twisted as they are told they are about to be tested for their sexual skills is something rarely seen in current non-pornographic, semi-mainstream or mainstream films, though it was a bit more common place in the daring ’70s.

But applying current mores to an old film should only be done when one is comparing the changes, not condemning that which is outdated for being outdated.  Brunell doesn’t do that and his refusal to condemn these films for their lack of PC content is refreshing.  He actually reproduces a couple of lines from an Amazon review that remarks that this film is an affront to all that is politically correct.  But placing the film in the context of the time when it was made, Brunell points out that while the film is sexist, even as it tries to make Ginger into a badass investigator/spy who can kick ass and suck cock and always solve the case, it is notably lacking in the casual racism that was part and parcel of the sexploitation and grindhouse film industry.

And because he has watched all three Ginger films, Brunell can sincerely explain how this film is an improvement upon the first, that Ginger has a character arc that was as important to the filmmaker as showing her boobs in every scene.  I think that’s important to know, that underneath it all, goals were set and achieved and that some people may have actually improved their acting chops. This was someone’s artistic vision – they were trying very hard to make a good movie.

The best part of Brunell’s examinations of these films is his look at the people in the films and where they ended up.  He has an interview with Jeramie Rain, who played “Jane,” one of the three abducted cheerleaders (she’s the one with the short dark hair, which naturally means she’s the one who was best suited to be a dominatrix, hilariously beating the bed next to her new owner with a double-coiled black whip). Rain is very notable for her role in The Last House on the Left, the Wes Craven film that fucked me up so badly that I will never forget Mari’s near-pre-Raphaelite death scene, her hair spreading out into the water as she dies.  Rain plays Sadie, the psychopathic moll who delights in the violence her male friends inflict on the girls they abduct.  Rain has some interesting stories about the film.

Brunell also notes that future porn actor Harry Reems, from Deep Throat, has a role in this film of the “blink and you’ll miss it variety.” Best of all, he shows the direct line from the director of this sleazy and unintentionally hilarious film to a lucrative Disney franchise. The cast info at the end of Brunell’s books never fail to surface some WTF details that show how small the entertainment world really is.

So what I am trying to say here is that this is a terrible film and you should only watch it in conjunction with Brunell’s Sinful Cinema series.  The worst film has to offer is often swallowed easier when you have someone who is knowledgeable in the genre, both sympathetic to and willing to discuss with humor the film’s many flaws, and able to write about it all in books that inevitably are better than the films that Brunell examines.  I highly recommend you check out Brunell’s work.

And yeah, this is more Odd than October, but maybe if you watch The Abductors, you’ll find the perfect Halloween costume.  Seventies banker, hot pants cheerleader, plaid-suited sex lord, or maybe you can just walk around naked like Ginger did. All you’ll need is a platinum wig!

Thanatomorphose, Oddtober 2019

Film: Thanatomorphose

Director: Éric Falardeau

Type of Film: Body horror

Availability: Released in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve shared more than once that I sit on the OCD spectrum.  I specifically struggle with dirt, grime and germs – basic contamination obsessions.  While the obsessive element of contamination fears will likely always be at the back of my head, the compulsive element seems better in check these days.  I can get a little tense if things get dusty or if the cats have been shedding or puking a lot, but I don’t really find myself wanting to crawl into the vents to scrub them with a tooth brush anymore. Over the years I guess age and a good pharmacological combination have helped me tamp down the worst of it but mostly I’m doing pretty good, OCD-wise.

So of course I watched a movie about a woman who, essentially, rots to death. Of course I did. My skin crawled, I felt my scalp prickle, and about half-way in, I began to mindlessly tug on the hem of the t-shirt I was wearing. Luckily the film ended before I began chewing on my hair.  It’s a bad sign when I begin to chew my hair.  It means I will be going to Target to get several bottles of Lysol, sponges with a mesh scrubber on one side, and a new pair of rubber gloves.  What I am trying to convey is that this film ended just in time for me to be able to collect myself and avoid sanitizing everything in the house for the next couple of weeks.

Also, I feel I should mention I will be spoiling the hell out of this film.

Brief synopsis: Thanatomorphose literally means the signs of decomposition the body exhibits after death. This film’s title is what happens in the film. Laura, the heroine, begins to show signs of the sort of decay commonly experienced after death.  Initially, she has a few bruises and her joints are stiff, but once she turns the corner from freshly dead to recently departed, her bodily decay begins in earnest and speeds up.  All of this is normal if one is actually dead, but Laura still breathes, still walks, and still talks, though all of that becomes harder and harder as her body continues to decay. Eventually genuine death catches up to the rot and she finally decomposes past the point of being able to remain mobile and sentient and the film ends.

This is not an allegory.  There is no subtlety.  Laura may be able to breathe, have sex, interact with others, but she’s dead.  She’s an artist  – a sculptor – but she is unable to make any headway into becoming a working artist.  She had just moved into the apartment where the first scene takes place – unpleasant sex with her boorish boyfriend Antoine – and one of the first things she does is uncover a clay sculpture she was working on, an oval, almost egg-like mound of clay, but can find no inspiration.

Antoine steps on a nail after having sex with Laura, and she takes care of his wound with competence but shows little caring.  She’s naked, sponging off the wound, pouring peroxide on Antoine’s instep, and the first signs of rot show on her body.  She has a bruise along her jaw, a large bruise on her upper arm, and one on her ass. The bruises were settled and showing brown or purple – they were not fresh. I believe they were the first signs of Laura’s death.  After Antoine leaves and she gives up on trying to work on her sculpture, she attempts to masturbate but cannot reach orgasm. This implies she probably didn’t have enjoyable sex with Antoine – which seems very likely, actually – and she’s feeling increasingly separate from her own body.

The next morning, she wakes and gets ready for work. While in the shower, she drops the soap and catches her nail on the drain, pulling it off.  The rot is beginning to accelerate.  She goes to work and comes back to a rejection letter from an art co-op. Later her friends come to visit until her landlord throws them out.  One of the friends, Julien, comes on to Laura, annoyed that she seems to prefer the brutish Antoine.  When her friends leave, Antoine again forces himself on Laura, even hitting her at one point.  He comments that her body is very cold, and he means it literally, but she doesn’t seem aware of it.  She taunts him, insinuating that she is cold because he is lousy in bed and more unpleasant sex ensues.  After they go to sleep, she wakes and vomits on him, collapsing several times as she tries to get water or go to the bathroom.

Evidently Antoine leaves her in this state because when she rises again that morning, it is undeniable what is happening. Laura is dead.  Her body is showing the sort of effects one would see in a corpse dead for around 24 hours in a hot place.  She is unsteady on her feet, and it is here that she gives into the death that she clearly wants.  She accepts no help and asks for no help.  Julien shows up at one point and is appalled by what he sees happening to her but she refuses to leave for the hospital. Instead she gives him a blowjob, and he is both upset but unwilling to make her stop.  She’s already beginning to smell, her head is bleeding from one of the falls and he ends up with her blood on his hands, yet he doesn’t make her stop.  He leaves after ejaculating and she spits it onto the floor that previously she kept spotless.

Antoine comes back and Julien returns a second time, but I won’t reveal exactly what happens to them but it really can’t be called murder because the dead cannot form intent to kill.  Laura descends into a claustrophobic nightmare, wherein she begins to document her decay, using fingers and teeth that fall off in her egg-like sculpture.  She duct tapes her limbs when tendons begin to separate from the bone. She cloaks the windows with sheets or tapes trashbags over them in an attempt to cool her apartment because the summer heat is accelerating her decay.  She puts ice in cold baths, she becomes riddled with maggots, shits out the lining of her intestines, vomits up maggoty bile, and tries to preserve the parts of herself that she cannot tape or sew back on, in jars with some sort of alcohol, taking Polaroids when she can.  At some point she attempts to masturbate again, and this time she is able to climax, thinking about harming Antoine, which may have happened or may not have happened.  I’m not sure.  But only after she accepts her death does her sex drive return.

And she does accept her death.  She’s suffered a metaphorical death in that she hates her relationship, her friends seem like assholes, her new apartment comes with a pushy landlord who considers people listening to music a party, and her art offers her no sense of accomplishment.  She’s already dead but doesn’t lie down yet.  She seems to revel in her decay, the ultimate form of self-harm – rotting to death while photographing the ruin of her body.

However, at the end, just before her body finally falls apart due to the rot, heat and continual submersion in cold water, she accidentally knocks over her sculpture and breaks it. She no longer has the physical capacity to pick it up and make it right again. I initially thought that the pain and misery of dying this way caught up with her because it was here that she showed her first real sign of anguish, screaming in torment.  She has another spell of screaming when she deals with Julien the second time, and she lets out a banshee-like wail just before the remaining components of her body give way to decay.  Her scream ends when her jaw falls off and her skin falls away, her limbs dis-articulating.

She wants this death.  She’s a calm, competent young woman.  There is nothing hysterical or irrational in her behavior. She’s had enough of her life and the world as a whole. But her death takes long enough that she engages in diversions of the sort that give the viewer a belief that perhaps if she manages to create the piece of art that shows her talent and expresses her inner loathing, she may escape this death, maybe it’s a hallucination caused by a breakdown and not really happening.  But it is happening.  And there’s no way out.  This is one of the most complete forms of self-annihilation you’ll ever see in a film, and she embraces it without equivocation.

This sense that she wanted this suffering, this end, is probably what kept me from bathing in bleach the moment the film was over.  She did not feel misery because she was rotting.  She was rotting because she was miserable. The decay was her salvation. In a way that made the film easier to stomach.

This film takes place entirely in Laura’s apartment – a living area with a kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom. As her decay progresses, the space seems even smaller as Laura blocks out the windows and makes makeshift dividers between rooms to filter out the light.  It wasn’t an entirely claustrophobic feeling, seeing this play out in a small apartment but it was certainly stifling and limiting, an apt description of Laura’s life.

Additionally, the actress who played Laura, Kayden Rose, was naked throughout most of the film.  Once she took off her clothes after sex with Antoine after the “party,” she never again has on clothing.

 

 

 

Kayden Rose’s body’s decay is hard to watch.

The actress herself is attractive, and she possesses a thin but decidedly “skinny fat” build, with little muscle tone.  Her continual nudity, even before the rot really set in, stopped registering as nudity.  Her body was a repository of death and maggots, and in that state the most beautiful of bodies stops possessing any erotic qualities (unless you have some very specific paraphilias). Her body was a waiting room in the ICU. It was waiting for the end, as well.

Kayden Rose also has a capacity to look gawky when her hair is swept off her forehead and she is wearing glasses, to looking beautiful when her hair is loose and wearing makeup.  Sometimes just a change in lighting could cause her to look angelic one moment and distressingly plain the next. Similarly, her naked body could in some scenes look like an Hellenic marble statue with hipster tattoos or could look strangely flabby and unkempt.

The ability to offer such differing views of her body in a film wherein her body was rotting away, is an interesting talent.  Kayden Rose carried this odd, upsetting film all on her shoulders, and to be able to change how the viewer perceives her form is remarkable.  I looked her up after the film ended but she’s only been in three other films, two short films and one segment of a larger film.  Finding out she has not done more since this film was akin to watching Morten Klode in a death metal video and finding out he’s never starred in a leading role in a film.

I guess sometimes you have to take what you are given. But it’s a shame she’s not in more recent films.

Though it really did make me physically and psychologically uncomfortable, I’m glad I watched this film.  I found it on Amazon as I was searching for a copy of yesterday’s film, Where the Dead Go to Die. I deliberately try not to know too much about a film before I watch it, but by the title I more or less knew what I was walking into. But the film was simultaneously far more disturbing and much more appealing than I anticipated.  Bodily rot will always be disturbing but for me there is something very compelling about a heroine who has just had enough and embraces her end, however slow it comes.  This film is a slow suicide with no redemption but in the end Laura had more control than she ever had before in her life and once you get past all the “suicide is bad mmmmkay?” bullshit, this is a compelling, weirdly comforting film.

Where the Dead Go to Die, a film by “Jimmy Screamerclauz”

Film: Where the Dead Go to Die

Director/Producer/Writer: James Creamer, aka “Jimmy Screamerclauz”

Type of Film: Extreme horror, animation

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It was, in part, inspired by yesterday’s entry, Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy.

Availability: The best place you can find this film, which was made in 2012, is on Amazon:

Comments: This discussion is happening in a deliberate vacuum.  In my search to find the film, I couldn’t help but notice the very low ratings this animated movie has received. I deliberately didn’t read those reviews, which is standard operating procedure for me, but I mention the low ratings as well as my intentional ignorance about this film so hopefully my very specific perspective will make sense to those who may know more about this film and its origins than I do.  Had I not watched this film with a specific bit of information in mind, I suspect I would have panned it myself.  But that little piece of information makes a big difference in my perspective.

I follow an Instagram account called Gorrific_Extreme and it was this account that led me to Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy. In the comments on the entry about the book, jimmyscreamerclauz made the following comment:

That book is disturbing and completely fucked, but eventually inspired Where The Dead Go To Die. Also seems less crazy and far fetched in this day and age….

So yeah, I had to track down both the book and the film it inspired. And jimmyscreamerclauz is unfortunately right: given what we know now about Jeffrey Epstein, the Lolita Express, Nickelodeon and Dan Schneider, it’s harder to dismiss claims of extraordinary sexual abuse. Though it must be said, those cases are more terrestrial than the “flushed down the toilet so Walker, Texas Ranger could rape me then carried by hot air balloon to the cemetery where I was forced to dig up corpses” narratives that came out of the McMartin scandal, the inspiration for Don’t Send Me Back, Mommy. Five years ago, had a starlet complained that she was pressured to have sex, and when she refused she was raped by a producer, and it was an open secret, and that famous renowned actresses may have set her up for that rape, I would have waved it away as bullshit.

But even as I realize mankind is not as depraved as the Satanic Panic narrative wants us to believe, we still suck and do terrible things.  The McMartin case is firmly debunked by all reasonable people, but just because one thing is a manufactured drama doesn’t mean children don’t come to grave harm daily, though generally in far less fantastic ways. This film covers the more realistic harms – child abuse by parents and child porn creation – along with other, stranger and nearly impossible harms (but even those “impossible” harms show up in current Pizzagate narratives, more on that in a moment).

It’s a hard film to watch. The content is over the top, and it’s over the top in a way that is not wholly unfamiliar.  The animation reminds me a lot of the cartoon, Xavier: Renegade Angel, a sort of crude, early Second Life look.  And the content, strangely enough, reminds me a lot of old Adult Swim shows.  Remember Hand Banana, the rapist dog thing from Aqua Teen Hunger Force? How about the time Carl got auto-raped so badly with a broom that the handle poked through the top of his head? The pool full of elf blood?  And don’t forget the gross, Christian misery of Moral Orel. This film takes all of that extreme content further than we could be shown on cable television, but for those who enjoyed the random, nonsensical violence of such cartoons, Where the Dead Go to Die may seem extreme but it’s not wholly new.

I think the sort of shambling and random nature of the narratives in this film are seen as unique due to the lack of proximity to similarly random, outrageous sexual violence, and the narrative is indeed a stagger through various hells.  The film has three chapters:

–“Tainted Milk” is clearly a riff on the old Lassie films.  Labby, a black dog with glowing red eyes, tells Tommy, an unhappy kid whose parents are equally unhappy, that the baby his mother is carrying is the Anti-Christ and must be killed.  Tommy can’t bring himself to do it so Labby does it for him. This chapter is rough – all of the content is rough, really – featuring forced abortion, emasculation, murder and bestiality.  Followers of serial killer lore will also hark back to the dog that supposedly egged on David Berkowitz to shoot happy couples as they made out in parked cars.

–“Liquid Memories” features a character whose name I did not catch.  He looks a lot like Jesse Custer from Garth Ennis’ comic, The Preacher.  He likes to kill people in churches and before they die he inserts a needle into their necks to extract their final memories.  He injects himself with the memories of a dying prostitute who has crawled into the church for help, experiences her psychedelic and horrific memories, and promptly kills himself in response.

–The final chapter, “The Mask That Monsters Wear,” is the longest and most upsetting. Ralph was born to fundamentalist whack jobs who refuse to get a parasitic conjoined twin removed from his head because God has plans for all His children and that would be murder.  They torment Ralph with the notion that he is abusing his brother by wearing a ski mask that covers his head and blame him for what happened to his brother. Ralph is treated kindly by a neighborhood girl named Sophia.  She is abused and pimped out by her father, who also makes kiddie porn of her.  I am unsure of her age but she and Ralph are in grade school, and Sophia sounds like she is no older than ten.  Kindred spirits, Sophia and Ralph develop a deep friendship.  In what was strangely the most heart-wrenching scene in the film, Sophia finds out that Ralph keeps bugs that come into the house so his mother can’t kill them. Sophia tells him the bugs are worse than dead because now they are trapped in the jar habitats he keeps them in.  She takes him to a place in the woods she calls her “garden,” full of pretty flowers, and they release the bugs.  Sophia says it is the happiest day of her life.

But then Ralph is recruited into the porn movies Sophia’s father makes, and finds out his own father is also involved in Sophia’s abuse. After Ralph is forced to have sex with Sophia on tape, Sophia reveals his bugs destroyed her garden.  Ralph’s involvement in her abuse kills what is left of her spirit.  Ralph, disfigured and emotionally abused himself, runs amok and kills his parents, strangling a rabbit near a well that a voice comes out of from time to time, a voice that speaks to Ralph, Sophia and Tommy.  Ralph’s corruption is now complete.

The key for me understanding all of this and how it all links together is the book that inspired it (though clearly the film has a lot of influences and inspirations).  Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy, is an attempt to offer help to children who suffered satanic ritual abuse and mirrors the McMartin pre-school case.  I am unsure what Doris Sanford’s motives were in writing such a book – as I explain in yesterday’s entry, her books became more outrageous over time, beginning with self-help books for kids whose parents have depression and eventually including books for kids who survive prison/death camps.  Though I found the book ridiculous, I approached it with seriousness, willing to see what it brought to the table, and I approached the film it inspired from the same perspective.

The at times tenuous links in the content seem less tenuous when you look at this through the focus of Doris Sanford’s work.  James Creamer is parroting back to us what many insisted happened during the Satanic Panic.  I suspect the good, moral folk who believed in stories like McMartin, who genuinely think such atrocities happen routinely to children, would condemn this film because it’s violent and obscene. But it is no more obscene than court transcripts from the McMartin case, Michelle Remembers, or any other Satanic Panic tell-all.  Every horrible element from this film can be linked to a genuine Satanic Panic account or belief.  The Satanic Panic belief will be followed by the detail that describes it in the film:

–Unborn babies ripped from wombs/Tommy’s mother’s baby being torn from her womb

–Evil animals used to control or harm children/Laddy the dog urging these kids to do terrible things in the name of God

–Killing bunnies to frighten children/Ralph strangles a rabbit at the end to show his utter loss of innocence

–“Naked Movie Star” used as a game to make child porn/Sophia’s father making porn of her with neighbors and Ralph

–Claims sacrifices happened at the Episcopal church/the unnamed man who kills people in churches

There’s more but those are the more obvious correlations. Interestingly, though this was not a claim in any of the Satanic Panic beliefs from the 1980s through the mid-1990s, the serial killer who extracts spinal fluid for memories is a bit on the nose when one considers the Pizzagate belief that children are held in terrified captivity because terror makes their adrenal glands produce hormones that jaded celebrities remove and drink.  Sometimes the adrenal glands themselves will be removed, according to these legends, and Pizzagate and QAnon message boards are full of accusations that weird beverages consumed by famous people contain AdrenoChrome harvested from abused and forsaken children. I did a search on “adrenochrome” in the Pizzagate Voat and there were dozens of entries. (I wanted to link to the search but no matter what I did, the link would not work. If you’re curious, and if Voat is accepting new registrations, maybe make an account and read through the above search and Pizzagate as a whole because there are so many rabbit holes to fall down.)

I am unsure how far back claims that elites were drinking brain fluids from children go, but if they post-date Where the Dead Go to Die, it’s a sign that there is literally nothing so far-fetched that people will not believe it, and there is nothing so horrible someone can do that a person sufficiently plugged in to the zeitgeist cannot predict it.

In the end, this film parrots back at Satanic Panic True Believers the very things they believe, yet if they ever watched this film they would be outraged and upset. Increasingly I see this as an excellent gambit to use in argument culture – repeat back what others say and watch their reactions to hearing themselves in a different voice.

Like I said, the reason I was able to stomach this film was because I understood some of the source material.  I don’t know if those who hate this film would reconsider if they knew what I know or what anyone who has studied the Satanic Panic would know.  But it makes a difference.  It gives the at times hallucinatory and seemingly gratuitous gore a tether that leads back to the witch hunt cycles that plague mankind.  Once you have the premise behind even the most outrageous display of depravity, you find yourself unable to dismiss it out of hand and you may even find yourself taking it seriously like I did.

Seriously.

This film is a reflection of beliefs that ruined lives, and it’s also a wallow in the worst mankind can do.  It’s content that is very hard to take in and I don’t think I will watch this film again, but to be fair one reading of Michelle Remembers  tends to be enough for the average whacked-culture student.  But watching it with its inspiration in mind enabled me to see this film in a wholly different light than I would have had I just randomly stumbled across it online.

I have no idea if you want to see this film, and I can’t really recommend it because my experience with this film is very specific.  If you’re a gorehound, you may want to have a look. Similarly students of the Satanic Panic or those very interested in the current Pizzagate lore will find this film interesting  The rest of you may want to give it a pass.  But at least now you know it’s out there, and that one beleaguered woman thinks that once you look past the DIY or Die-style production and link the content to the notions that inspired it, it may not be as pointless a wallow as others seem to think.

3 from Hell, Oddtober 2019

Film: 3 from Hell

Director: Rob Zombie

Type of Film: Horror, camp

Availability: Released in September of 2019, you can see it several places online. I’m linking to the Amazon Prime listing mainly because I have an Amazon Affiliate account but it currently appears to be on Google Play and on the pay to watch section of YouTube.

Comments: Not all of the Oddtober entries will be wholly odd, and this film is a good example. Graphic, violent horror films will often be a bit odd to some, but had this film not ostensibly been released as a Halloween film (Dia de los Muertos features heavily in the latter hour of the film), and had it not been Sid Haig’s last film with Rob Zombie, it likely would not have been discussed here.

Yeah, Sid Haig died. He is only in the opening five minutes or so and he looks rough but I’m glad he got to rally and be in the franchise he’s so well associated with one last time. His role in House of a Thousand Corpses was one of the funniest horror film roles. Though evil to his core, Captain Spaulding provided viewers with coarse humor to blunt some of the very graphic violence and gore.


I strongly suggest that you go watch House of a Thousand Corpses again rather than mess with 3 from Hell because Sid Haig’s absence is felt acutely. Fuck yo mama, indeed. But if you’re the sort who must see all the entries in a franchise, or you just wanna pay respects to a fine character actor, I guess you could do worse than this latest installment. But still, this is not a particularly good film until the last 30 minutes or so.

There may be spoilers throughout this discussion. But really, you already know what is going to happen. You can’t spoil Zombie’s formula, really. So if you get worked up by spoilers, skip this off-the-cuff discussion until you’ve seen the film.

***

Synopsis: Okay, I’ve mentioned Sid looks rough and his role is over in five or so minutes but that’s okay in a way because at least we get to see Captain Spaulding one more time, defiant and clowny.  Otis Driftwood is still Otis Driftwood, pompous and given to long diatribes, but Baby Firefly is fucked. For people who hated her shrill laughter, baby doll mannerisms and cutesy psychopathy in House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, she will be unbearable in this film. Gibbering and insane from years in solitary confinement, her character is so over the top and weird that even Otis eventually notices she’s more whacked than usual when he breaks her out of prison.  Oh yeah, he breaks out of prison with the help of his half-brother, Winslow Foxworth Coltrane, an Argus Filch look-alike who is clearly a replacement for Captain Spaulding.  Bloody mayhem ensues, as you knew it would, Baby becomes a bit more grounded to reality, and some shitty town in Mexico is essentially destroyed.  The end.

***

Me: Holy shit, is that Danny Trejo?

Mr. OTC: Of course it is.  It’s always Danny Trejo.

***

Baby is really batshit.  It’s hard to explain how batshit she is because she’s that batshit.  But she’s also competent in a violent way, able to beat the shit out of and kill sadistic psychopaths while in chains, even able to write taunting messages in their blood, unnerving the brutal and sadistic guard who set her up to be murdered.  She’s a force of chaos with amazing hair.  She’s a white trash River Tam.

***

Me: Oh my god, is that prison guard the mom from ET: The Extraterrestrial?

Mr. OTC: (begins typing into IMDb.) “Yep, that’s her.”

Damn… She really pulled her role off well.  She reminded me more of Mindy Sterling as Frau Farbissina in horn rimmed glasses than the mom from The Hills Have Eyes.

***

There are a lot of homages to other horror films or killers.  For example, in the beginning of the film Otis Driftwood is a stand-in for Charles Manson and Baby can be seen as one of Manson’s molls, an extra-demented Susan Atkins. When Baby chases down and stabs to death a naked woman, there is something about the woman’s carriage as she fled, covered in blood, that reminded me of the final scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Sally runs for her life into the two-lane highway, desperate to either escape or find help.  In an earlier scene, Otis flays a woman’s face and  the camera pans to the mask he made of her facial skin, a call back to Wisconsin skin-wearer Ed Gein.

***

Mr. OTC: Can you guess who that clown is?

Me: Not really.

Mr. OTC: He’s played by Clint Howard, Ron Howard’s younger and creepier brother.

***

The clown is meant to represent John Wayne Gacy’s Pogo the Clown.  Maybe. And maybe he’s meant to hark back to Captain Spaulding.  But mostly I have no idea why a clown was involved.  Otis and his brother had taken the prison warden, his wife, and another couple hostage.  The couples were planning on spending the evening eating dinner, had no plans for a party that would need a children’s party clown, yet a clown showed up at the house in the middle of the mayhem.

Baby: What’s with the dead clown.

Otis: I’ll tell you later.

Mr. OTC: Could you explain it to us?

There is no reason for the clown to show up other than that he could sort of represent Gacy.  It was a weird decision, plot-wise.

***

Me: Is that old dude Wilfred Brimley?

Mr. OTC: Nope. (types into IMdb again) That’s a character actor from Office Space.

Me: Wilford Brimley would have been a better choice.

Mr. OTC: Isn’t he dead?

Me: I don’t think so.

Conversation devolves into a discussion about whether or not Wilford Brimley is dead.  Eventually Mr. OTC checks and I’m correct. He’s still alive (and it would have been awesome had it really been him in a Rob Zombie film).

***

Baby, the most lunatic member of the trio, suggests they head to Mexico, which is a good idea.  She got the idea from the Halloween party guest she gutted and slashed because he was dressed as a vaquero, complete with hat and serape.  So they drive to Mexico during Dia de los Muertos celebrations, though it seems unnecessary in the long run because it didn’t seem like law enforcement was engaging in a careful search to find the escaped prisoners.

In Mexico, we meet a host of ridiculous characters. The motel owner (cue me saying: “Is that Eddie from Stranger than Paradise?”) and townspeople are weird.  Best Mexican characters are the one-eyed dwarf and the three-legged dog.

***

Mr. OTC: If they kill the dwarf with one eye or the three-legged dog, we riot.

***

While Baby, Otis and Winslow engaged in enough debauchery to cause the fall of the Roman Empire, the motel owner calls who I can only assume is some sort of drug cartel boss whose father Otis killed and who wants revenge. The drug boss shows up with an El Camino hauling three coffins.  Men in white suits wearing luchador masks spill out of several cars, ready to find and kill the three from Hell.  The suits are so synthetic that when one is doused in gasoline, it pooled on the surface of the fabric until it finally absorbed.  I wondered how hot those men were, wearing polyester in the Mexican heat.

***

Me: Ah, fuck, Baby’s respecting the one-eyed dwarf’s dignity.  He’s clearly about to die.

***

This movie was disgusting in a “please make this character take a shower” sort of way  Dirty feet, smelly armpits, soggy navels, gargling with tequila.  When a Mexican prostitute poured booze into Otis’ navel and lapped it up, I was finally certain that God is dead and that He never loved me much in the first place.  It’s just a grubby, dirty, smegma-smeared film and you can smell these characters from where you sit.  But then again, I’m afraid of grime and one doesn’t expect nihilistic serial killers and a bug-fucked lunatic to practice good hygiene when on the run from the law.  I suspect that few people will be grossed out by the implied body odor and halitosis when there’s so much blood. I just thought I’d share.

***

The last 30 minutes are quite good for the lover of good schlock.  Consider fast forwarding to the final confrontation between the Mexican men wearing wrestling masks and clothes reminiscent of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Lots of topless women die, Baby becomes the Bellevue Barbie equivalent of Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead and everyone gives too many long speeches when they could just kill their foe already.  It’s campy, violent, excessive and ridiculous, a winning combination when you don’t really know which side to root for.

***

So I guess I am saying that if you watch this film with a friend who grew up watching MST3K or with a case of beer on hand, it won’t be the worst horror movie you’ve seen this year, especially if you’re into the whole “Annabelle” doll franchise.  But don’t watch it in earnest.  If you watch 3 from Hell with an ironic eye and an eagle eye to catch all the character actors in this film, you may very well enjoy yourself.  Not highly recommended but not utterly panned, either.

***

The three-legged dog abides.

The Birdman of Leavenworth, a Death Row Proto-Kevorkian

I’m currently working on a new book (new, as in I have an OLD book and you should probably go buy a copy because my publisher deserves money for enduring my head-casery) and as I research I keep finding interesting alleys off the main street of my reading.  So many little snippets that likely won’t have a place in the larger story but are entertaining enough that I want to share them.

My upcoming book will be a look at personal manifestos and their role in shaping particular parts of contemporary culture as well as serving as at times unintentional autobiographies of the people who wrote them.  Less Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and more Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World.  Some of the manifestos I am analyzing are quasi-political, like Valerie Solanas’ The SCUM Manifesto or Anders Behring Breivik’s 2083, but most of them are  analyses of the self that also stand as a statement or declaration of social or political aims.  One such manifesto is Carl Panzram’s autobiography, wherein he discusses how he came to be shaped into a multipurpose psychopath and why he felt entitled to engage in the mayhem that saw him imprisoned multiple times and ultimately executed.  As I researched Carl Panzram, I came across Panzram: A Journal of Murder by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long, editors, and an unexpected look at how the politics of the death penalty played out among the condemned.

Before he was The Birdman of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud was The Birdman of Leavenworth (which actually makes more sense as a moniker since he was never permitted to keep birds at Alcatraz).

Seriously, if there’s a bird with Stroud, he was at Leavenworth. Don’t challenge me on this, I’m ready.

The movie about him, starring Burt Lancaster, was before my time and I probably should watch it in due time, but from what I can tell it portrays Stroud in a very sympathetic manner (as does a more recent film about Panzram that stars James Woods).

Yep, that’s the wiener sidekick from House M.D. standing behind Woods/Panzram in the film Killer: A Journal of Murder.

But bear in mind, if Carl Panzram, dream date of late-child murderer Ian Brady, was a one-man-mayhem-machine, Robert Stroud, had he stayed out of prison longer, would have been his peer.  Though he spent decades nursing birds and researching cures for avian diseases at Leavenworth, Stroud was also a pimp and a murderer, and once imprisoned he was the instigator of many fights and eventually killed a prison guard.  That murder landed him on death row at Leavenworth, but his sentence was commuted and he spent 1918 through 1942 in solitary confinement at Leavenworth (which sounds much different than what prisoners experience in solitary in the USA today).  It was in solitary confinement in Leavenworth that Stroud “met” Carl Panzram.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how Stroud ended up in Alcatraz, the Birdman was caught using the equipment a benevolent prison warden gave him for his birds to make alcohol and sell within the prison.  Upon discovery of this side hustle, he was transferred to Alcatraz.

There are so many mug shots of Carl Panzram, under varying names, that it was hard to pick just one. I selected this one because I like that little curl of hair sticking up over his forehead. It’s easy to imagine him as a kid with hair like this, which is sort of awful now that I think about it.

Carl Panzram was a life-long criminal and an utter psychopath whose crimes ranged from audacious financial exploits on oil rigs in Africa to child rape to murder.  A victim of the harsh practices in reform schools and even harsher practices in prison, all attempts to rehabilitate him made him even worse.  He’d been in several prisons before ending up in Leavenworth, often under false names.  Panzram in prison was a man who just wanted to be left alone.  It’s hard to be left alone in prison and Panzram, in Leavenworth, became a pot waiting to boil over.  He reached his limit and started a prison riot when he killed the foreman in the prison laundry.  That earned him the death penalty and he was kept in solitary during his trial and the time during which he was awaiting execution, in the same solitary block as Robert Stroud.

(There’s a funny story about the end of the riot, too.  Or at least it was funny to me.  Panzram beat the prison laundry foreman to death with a pipe and rampaged through the prison with it in his hand.  When he reached a wing that a guard, Red Ballard, locked down anticipating his arrival, Panzram shouted at him to open the door. Ballard, terrified and shaken, said, “I will never let you in with that in your hand.” As if he forgot he was holding it, Panzram tossed the iron bar away and declared that this must be his lucky day.  Ballard called for assistance and, presumably, opened the door.)

During the trial, Panzram was clear that he wanted to be executed.  Many anti-death penalty groups tried to intervene on his behalf and in response Panzram essentially told them to take their do-gooder notions and go fuck themselves.  He was set on execution, not only because he was tired of the misery of prison life, but also in the spirit of telling the state and the penal system that since they created this monster, they needed to kill it.  A sort of slow-motion suicide by cop.

This attitude alarmed Robert Stroud to the point that he intervened. Or at least he tried.  Despite both men being in solitary confinement, there is ample evidence that Stroud and Panzram managed to effect some sort of communication, and that communication focused on one aim: Stroud wanted Panzram to kill himself.

Unsure if that is the actual gallows where Panzram was executed but I found this pic on a site called The Temple of Ghoul and with a name like that I have to think that if anyone has the actual photo, that site does. (http://templeofghoul.blogspot.com/2013/02/carl-panzram-spirit-of-hatred-and.html)

Stroud found himself on Leavenworth’s death row for the same offense as Panzram, for killing a prison employee, but his sentence was commuted to life.  Stroud to the end felt that Panzram’s yearning for execution was a bluff, that he would, like any reasonable man, want to cheat the executioner, even if it meant dying by his own hand.  But Stroud also felt very strongly that the death penalty – either through the state of Kansas or through the federal government – should never be performed on Leavenworth soil.  He even went so far as to give money to a campaign to prevent another solitary inmate from facing the death penalty for murdering a fellow Leavenworth prisoner.  There had been no executions at Leavenworth and Stroud, as well as many other death penalty abolitionists, did not want a death penalty precedent set.  From his isolation cell, Stroud could see the gallows being constructed and it fired his resolve that Panzram should be encouraged to kill himself to avoid being the man who brought the death penalty to Leavenworth.

Interestingly, Stroud managed to get information to Panzram regarding ways to end his life, and Panzram, afraid his death sentence might not be carried out, made a genuine suicide attempt.  From Panzram, A Journal of Murder (228):

Stroud began long disquisitions to the guard Red Ballard, to the orderlies and to Ono Manuel [another inmate] in a clear, loud voice, hoping that the information would reach Panzram.  He talked about how simple and painless it would be to end it all: press two fingers into the groin until the throb of the femoral artery can be felt, work the fingers back and forth until the artery is brought against the skin, and cut it with a long thumbnail or a chip of a razor blade.  Death would come in minutes.  This artery, Stroud explained in loud tones, is the only one which can be easily reached, yet cannot be tied off.  He also spoke of making a paper quill, opening a large vein anywhere, inserting the quill and blowing a bubble or two into the vein.  Or, he added, simple tap water would do it.

Ballard said nothing.  He closed the wooden door to Panzram’s cell and cautioned Stroud to lower his voice.

Red Ballard kept a very close watch on Panzram but he could not prevent the suicide attempt Panzram made on June 20, 1929 (the one year anniversary of beating the laundry foreman to death).  He had hidden a plate of beans he let go bad, making them poisonous.  He ate those beans and then opened a six-inch gash in his leg using a sharpened button.  Had he just slashed his leg he might have succeeded because it was the sound of him vomiting up the tainted beans that alerted the night guard that there was a problem in his cell.

Once the execution date was firmly set and no appeals were made, Stroud was still convinced that Panzram was bluffing, that he really did not want to die at the hands of the state and that he had simply been too incompetent to carry out his prior suicide attempt.  Since Panzram feared that the state might consider him too mentally unwell to execute, which was the impetus behind the attempt, there may have been some truth to the notion that he was inept with fear. Stroud may have been correct on that front because if there had ever been a man who knew how to kill, it was Panzram.  Still, a failed suicide involving bad beans and a button might help the case that Panzram was too mentally ill to execute and surely Panzram knew this.  It seems very likely that Panzram engaged in overkill with his methods of choice rather than failing due to incompetence. As the execution drew closer, Stroud upped his game and Panzram, in the end, showed his genuine intent.

Two weeks before the execution, Stroud saw his opportunity.  He wrote his earlier instructions on a slip of paper, broke a new Gillette blade in two and wrapped the paper around the top halves of the broken blade. Having found an old tube of watercolor gray, he painted the package the same color as the concrete floor.  He then persuaded a new short-term prisoner, who had been made an orderly in the isolation section, to throw the tiny packet into Panzram’s cell the first time the guard, Red Ballard, turned his head.  The orderly agreed […].

The packet was dropped into Panzram’s cell without incident […]. 238-239)

Stroud had some hope that Panzram would use the blades and take his own life because Panzram held onto the blades until two days before his execution, and then turned them over to guard Red Ballard (who really needed to be paid far more than he was for dealing with all he endured during his tenure at Leavenworth).

“Where did you get these?” Ballard demanded.

“None of your damned business,” said Panzram. (239)

Stroud may have been onto something because why else would Panzram have held onto the blades for around ten days, turning them in so close to the execution.  Was he wavering until the end, perhaps mulling over how he wanted to die?  Did the packet with the blades sit unseen on his prison floor for a while, so well camouflaged by Stroud’s watercolor? More likely he wanted insurance in the event the state decided on a last minute pardon and commuted his sentence, one that carried a better chance at success than rotten beans and a shaved-down button. It’s hard to say why Panzram kept the blades for so long, but in the end the state did execute him. He had the option of slashing his wrists or neck or groin but went to the gallows instead.

And of course, the statement Panzram is most famous for occurred on the gallows.  He sneered at his executioner, saying, “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard.  I could kill a dozen men while you’re screwing around.”

He probably could have, too.  But he didn’t.  Nor did he kill himself.

I admittedly knew very little about Robert Stroud, Birdman of Alcatraz, before I read about Panzram, and what I knew was very fluffy, redemption-oriented sort of quasi-knowledge.  While I could have guessed a man like him would be anti-death penalty, I certainly didn’t anticipate him being so keen on enabling a suicide he considered more ethical in the macro and having more dignity in the micro, nor did I expect him to be so knowledgeable on methods of suicide.  Child of the media that I am, I now have visions of Burt Lancaster encouraging James Woods to commit suicide.

The things you learn when learning about other things…

Crypt of the Living Dead by Doug Brunell

Book: Crypt of the Living Dead, Sinful Cinema Series #2

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, film criticism

Why Do You Consider This Book Odd: It shows the charm and marginal merit of a film that I initially felt had neither but could see once I read Brunell’s take on the film.

Availability: Published by Chaotic Words in 2017, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve begun to despair of the horror genre as of late, and it may be because I’ve reached the age to where there is very little that’s new under the sun.  It’s not helped by the fact that so often genre films are endeavors where those with marginal talents do the bare minimum necessary to get a film together, as evidenced by many of the anemic offerings on NetFlix.  For every Babadook or It Follows, there are a dozen miserable titles that one shouldn’t bother to remember because they all tell the same story, poorly acted, with little spark.

But perhaps I’m being an old crank.  Well, actually, I am being an old crank, at least where the horror genre is concerned and I needed to be reminded that sometimes the desire to see only that which is wholly new, unconventional or somehow rarified can cause us to overlook films that might be interesting if only paid attention.

Enter Doug Brunell’s look at little-known films.

I came across Doug’s work after he read my compendium TL;DR and introduced himself on Twitter. I looked up his work and was delighted to see that he was a fellow traveler in the bizarre and fringe and had written analyses of the cinematic corollaries to some of the books I discuss here.  I saw the title Crypt of the Living Dead, and thought it had something to do with zombies.  Nope, this is a vampire film. (Matt Kaplan’s The Science of Monsters links zombies, werewolves and vampires together as monsters conjured by mass fears of overpopulated cities, disease, especially diseases caused by bodily rot, and though that is certainly not relevant to this discussion it was interesting to see all three monsters represented in this film, as it features a vampire who turns into a wolf and the title leads modern audiences raised on George Romero films to think of zombies.)  I decided it would be interesting to watch the film first and then read what Brunell had to say about it.

Though Mr OTC and I agreed that the film might have gone down better had we been watching it with a space janitor and two wise-cracking robots, it wasn’t wholly bad.  In fact, I found myself uttering Yogi Berra-worthy statements as I watched it, like, “This film would be pretty good if it wasn’t so bad.”  Because there were moments in it that were entertaining, and most of those moments were entertaining because they were so weird.

A quick synopsis, and here be spoilers but I don’t think anyone will be watching this film with an eye toward creative storytelling or unexpected plot twists (but I will try to minimize them): An older man, who came to a small, almost inbred European island to study their customs, is crushed under the crypt topper of a woman called Hannah, who died in 1269.  He is crushed because a wild man (a literal wild man who resembles a cave man with an eye patch) and a robed man knock him over, shove him under the crypt, and knock the supports out from under it, crushing him, effectively decapitating him.  The man’s son, Chris, comes to the island and is greeted by the man in robes, Peter, who lives on the island with his sister, Mary.  We don’t know what Peter’s game is but he seems very helpful to Chris, helping him navigate the stand-offish islanders who are slow to welcome newcomers.  Mary is a schoolteacher and the kids are suitably creepy, as are the islanders, especially the fishermen who won’t even speak to Chris.  We find Chris has come to the island to get his dad out from under the crypt – the islanders were just going to leave him there, minus his head, because the tomb was too heavy to lift, evidently.  So Chris, with Peter’s help, organizes the fishermen on the island to try to go underground and lift the tomb and though they are divided on whether or not they should be messing around with Hannah’s tomb because, as you probably know, she was interred as a vampire and to mess with the tomb risks letting her out, they ultimately try to help. Mary and Chris “bond” and Peter seems excited at the prospect that his sister may leave the island with Chris. But nothing goes easily because Hannah has gotten out, she preys on the islanders and everything ends rather poorly for many of the islanders and, of course Peter, who was in thrall to the undead Hannah.  And it all seems okay at the end, once Hannah has been dealt with in a rather pyrotechnic manner, but alas, peace will be short-lived because evil now infests this little island.

As I watched the film, the deficits, which were funny rather than infuriating, were what I noticed first.  Here are the best of the “WTF” moments:

–When Chris’s dad was exploring the catacomb area, he walks under a sacrificed goat that has been strung up high and is bleeding out.  He feels the blood drip on his face and looks up and stands there staring at the bleeding goat as it spills blood all over his face.  When he finally starts walking again, he doesn’t bother to wipe the blood off, but instead wanders the catacombs with goat’s blood all over his face and head.

–Chris is such a dead ringer for notable porn actor John Holmes that it was distracting.

–Inexplicably, the only person who saw Hannah in her wolf form was, I am not kidding, completely blind.

–Mary, who taught in a one-room school house, forced one kid to stand in the corner ALL DAY because she found him playing in the cemetery because that is a totally reasonable thing for a grade school teacher to do.  The entire classroom is filled with children who would need a bath and a complete set of chromosomes to qualify as extras in Children of the Corn.

–Hannah, the person for whom the film is named and who ostensibly should have at least been a peripheral character, never says one word in the film.  Instead she writhes about in her tomb, wanders about in a filmy white dress, and generally looks kind of pretty but is basically just a piece of animated scenery.

–Chris and Mary hook up and Peter, who I may remind you is Mary’s brother, watches from outside.  Okay, sort of gross, right.  Then the next day when he sees them he is super pleased and overly enthusiastic about Chris nailing his sister and immediately demands that Mary leave the island with Chris because nothing says emotional security and trust like a stranger having sex with your sister within days of meeting her even though he’s supposed to be trying to haul his dad’s carcass out from a vampire’s tomb.

There are other moments that left me wondering what on earth was at play but mostly I focused on the silly plot points because the movie seemed very simple and the details of the film seemed secondary to the gentle mockery that made up most of my reaction.  But then I followed it up by reading Brunell’s analysis of the film and it changed the film for me.  Of course, the film isn’t suddenly rendered amazing after seeing it through Brunell’s filter – and Brunell himself points out the movie’s many flaws – but the efforts the filmmakers put into the film, as well as details that went completely over my head, combined with the themes that Brunell saw in the movie, certainly rescued it from the mental file where I had placed it alongside Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Continue Reading “Crypt of the Living Dead by Doug Brunell”

Halloween 2017: Masks

It’s Halloween, so what better time to talk to you all about the masks or mask-like uses of make-up that annoy, upset or absolutely terrify me.

One of my earliest memories is of a television commercial promoting an Alice Cooper concert in Dallas.  I must have been three or four at the time.  I was absolutely terrified by his appearance, with the heavy eyeliner that appeared to be running down his face, the wild hair, the marks around his mouth that might have been blood for all I knew – our old television was in black and white.

Seriously, fuck this guy.

My parents decided that the best way to help me overcome my fear of this horrible man on the TV was to force me to watch it every time it came on.  My father would prevent me from running from the room when it aired, holding me there and telling me over and over that it was just a television commercial, it was just a man in make-up, that none of it could hurt me.  It didn’t work.  I screamed and cried and still he and my mother persisted, convinced they could reason with a frightened child.  I had similar reactions to KISS, mostly Gene Simmons.

Interestingly, I am not particularly unnerved by clowns.  I look at a clown, and I know it’s some asshole wearing a bunch of make-up and a wig and maybe some stupid clothes.  I know what the intent is behind clown make-up – to delight or terrify.  When I know the intent, it’s hard to be afraid, and that is where my parents, as well meaning as they were at the time, missed the mark.  I didn’t need to know that it was a commercial and couldn’t hurt me.  I needed to know why the man was dressed that way, what his intent was, what he planned to do in that get-up.  And of course I could not express this so young and of course my parents had no idea what was at play in my terror.  Variations of not knowing the reason behind the disguise fuels my adult uneasiness around masks, I think, though surely there are other explanations, from Jungian collective unconsciousness ruling my response to just plain jitters.

There are a lot of explanations as to why it is that people wear masks and costumes at Halloween and I am loath to discuss them because to do so means I have to cover every potential reason going back to early recorded history or someone will show up and leave a very long comment schooling me on Samhain-this and Pope-Boniface-that and how it’s racist for a white woman even to say Dia de los Muertos, let alone discuss the purpose behind sugar skull make-up.  But this is a time of the year that makes a woman who finds the purpose behind masks very important somewhat uneasy.  And perversely, because it makes me uneasy, I expose myself to it in ways that make me even more unnerved.  But I can’t seem to avoid it, and since I can’t stop poking at this canker sore in my psyche, I’ve decided to drag you all down with me.

Continue Reading “Halloween 2017: Masks”

Halloween 2017: The Seventh Victim

As always, assume this discussion (of a film over seventy-years-old!!!) contains spoilers.

Every Halloween I always promise to myself that I will watch all the old horror films that I feel I should have watched.  As a fan of the genre, I have watched precious few of the early horror films and even fewer of the 1960s and 1970s fare and am unable to hold my own in conversations about Hammer films.  But I have to confess that I can never get through older films with legends like, say, Boris Karloff or Vincent Price, without wishing I was in space with two robots sitting next to me.

It was a simpler time.  I know that. What frightened people eighty to ninety years ago is going to seem a bit quaint and possibly silly to a modern audience. I guess I am a result of growing up with John Carpenter’s Halloween films and the Friday the 13th and Hellraiser franchises, which are now cheesy in their own way, come to think of it.  So I’ve been looking for an old horror film I can watch without mockery and I came close with The Seventh Victim.

I learned about The Seventh Victim watching a documentary about horror films – it may have been Nightmare in Red, White and Blue but it’s been a while.  I filed it away mentally because it sounded interesting – the description of “a woman who dreams of death meets a woman desperate to live” or words to that effect plus a possible Satanic cult and of course I would eventually want to see this film.

Not sure where the “robbed of the will to love” part comes in…

It wasn’t entirely as described but it was still interesting.  Made in 1943, it presented a very calm and genteel look at human evil while using some tropes that I have come to associate with Hitchcock and Polanski. The femme fatale was surprisingly fragile, the teen sister looked like she was in her thirties, and all the men were sort of… dumb and/or sappy, but I think this film worked so well because it had elements of some of the more sophisticated horror movies, fare that genuinely unsettled me the first time I saw it.  Christopher Lee as a vampire and Boris Karloff as a mummy never scared me, even as a kid, but Janet Lee in a shower and a cabal of Satanists in a swanky New York apartment seeking their heir did.  Before I discuss this film, here’s a quick synopsis:

Mary Gibson, attending boarding school, finds out her older sister Jacqueline has gone missing.  Jacqueline is her only family and has not paid Mary’s school fees so Mary decides she needs to try to find her sister.  She travels to New York and discovers her sister had given away her cosmetic factory and salon to an employee called Esther Redi.  She manages to trace the man whom she ultimately learns to be Jacqueline’s husband, Gregory Ward, and with him and a very sketchy psychiatrist, whom I think was the same psychiatrist in Cat People, and a dopey poet they manage to find Jacqueline.  Jacqueline, who killed a private eye who was looking for her, is in hiding from both the law and a cabal of Satanists who think she has betrayed them by telling the psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, about them.  Only six people have crossed this cult before and all were killed, and Jacqueline is to be their seventh victim, giving us the title of the film.

Though some of the characters were hokey – seriously someone needed to punch the stupid poet – this short, melodramatic little film was pretty good.  Kim Hunter played Mary, the naive and innocent girl gone to the big city alone to find her sister. The terrible hair and fashion of the time made her look so much older than she was, but Hunter managed to pull off a neat balance between terrified virgin and intrepid girl scout on a mission.  She stays in New York, Gregory Ward helps her get a job, she takes a room over an Italian restaurant (called Dante’s) and is pretty resilient without being too plucky to be unendurable.

Early on, Mary is helped by a private detective who realizes that Jacqueline is being held in a locked room at her salon, and she accompanies the PI to the salon at night and is too terrified to open the door herself.  The PI reluctantly does it and she hovers in the shadows, frightened to her core, and later we learn that Jacqueline was indeed in that room and was convinced a member of the Satanic cult had come to kill her.  The PI drops to the floor, having been stabbed with a pair of scissors, and Mary runs away, leaving him there. Initially, this scene seemed off, but later I realize how well it worked because what was Mary to do?  He was dead, she couldn’t have removed him, and she had no idea how he came to be stabbed – was the killer still there?  The fear and flight were the right reactions.

Gregory Ward, played by Hugh Beaumont (yep, Mr. Ward later became Ward Cleaver), knows he is being cuckolded by Dr. Judd, but is so taken with Jacqueline’s exquisite beauty and cluster-B tendencies that he supports her even on the run, though when he finds out she is a killer he encourages her to turn herself in.  He also finds himself falling in love with Mary, probably because she is so uncomplicated.  He abetted Jacqueline’s craziness to a shocking degree, and she was nuts, no two ways about it.  Jacqueline was obsessed with death and suicide.  Because she was so interested in death, she rented a room – over Dante’s restaurant – and the only things in the room were a noose and a chair.  Gregory Ward kept up the rent on that room because he was besotted with what sounds like the mercurial nature of the personality disordered.

Interestingly, everyone felt Jacqueline was one of the most beautiful women they had ever seen.  When we finally meet her, it’s a hoot.  She’s a bog-standard proto-goth, down to the dyed-black hair and uneven baby bangs.  Her affect is utterly flat, she seems to get by on her quirkiness (death obsessed, continually telling charming lies, being the sort who would get in deep with Greenwich Village Satanists and then rat them out in therapy), and given that this film is ostensibly about finding her it matters very little when she is found.

Her hair proves how mysterious she is.

Dr. Judd, Gregory Ward, the poet whose name really doesn’t matter, and Mary finally track Jacqueline down and drag her back to Mary’s apartment to stay until Gregory can arrange a good time for her to turn herself in for killing the PI. But they don’t count on how intrepid the Satanists are.  They find Jacqueline and escort her to their lair, which is an apartment and filled with a cast of characters we met earlier during a party (the woman who owns the apartment has one arm, inexplicably), and give her poison to drink.

But this cabal of Satanists are civilized.  They will not kill her.  They will just pressure her to commit suicide unless she refuses and then, maybe, they will kill her.

Most civilized Satanic attempted murder ever!

Unsure why this cabal exists – they seem to just like having parties and talking about being bad while not actually being bad – but among them are Esther Redi and an extremely emotional hairdresser who worked for the salon Jacqueline owned.  When Jacqueline seems to be close to drinking the poison, the hairdresser loses it and breaks the glass and the cult sends sullen, affect-less Jacqueline on her way, only to follow her and try to kill her.  Jacqueline gets away, desperate to live, and races back to Mary’s apartment above the restaurant.

It is here that she encounters the dying woman who wants to live.  We had seen glimpses of Mimi, the coughing, dying wraith who lives in the building with the poet and Mary, but this is the first time she speaks.  Jacqueline, so paranoid she sees this sick woman and is fearful she is part of the cult, demands to know who she is, and Mimi explains that she is dying and that she is tired of being sick.  She wants to go out dancing and drinking and have fun, if only for one night, and then she might end it all.  She will only kill herself because she so wants to live and is sick of not enjoying life as she slowly dies from her illness.  Jacqueline, having refused to kill herself and having fought to remain alive, sees Mimi and rushes to her rented room and hangs herself.  Don’t ask me why.  Not the reaction I would have had. Conveniently her death clears the path for Mary and Gregory to be together, and Mimi does indeed dress up and have a lovely night on the town.

I was rather surprised by the way the Satanic cult was handled.  The cult called themselves Palladists – presumably a name that nods to Pallas Athena – and looked like a 1940s bridge tournament was being held.  The only one who seemed the least bit odd was the woman with one arm.  Otherwise they seemed perfectly normal, got up to little that was evil – killing only those who threatened the cult and adhering to non-violence whenever possible – yet operated in such secrecy that one was certain that some horrible stuff had to have gone down at some point.  One does not keep a 1940s exemplar of borderline personality disorder locked away in a room for months and later plan her death for squealing if one’s dopey cult does little more than hold interesting salon-style soirees and occasionally hail Satan.

You can tell they are evil because of the lighting.

The cult reminded me a bit of the Satanists in Rosemary’s Baby, another New York Satanic cult that would not have raised an eyebrow initially, consisting as it did of daft old ladies like Ruth Gordon.  Ultimately we saw what the cult that impregnated Rosemary Woodhouse was about, but in the 1940s I supposed filmmakers had less leeway to present Satanic evil to its fullest cinematic glory.  In a way, if you know real life Satanists, the vast majority likely live lives not dissimilar to the lives of the Greenwich Village Satanists in The Seventh Victim, hosting tea parties and discussing the human will.  Leave out the stalking and killing part and it was a surprisingly modern approach to Satanists.  But since the stalking and murder were a part of this cult, it definitely harked back to Rosemary’s Baby – those who are genuinely evil in your midst may be the last people you would suspect.

Then there was the shower scene.  Janet Leigh being stabbed to death in Psycho was more than fifteen years away from hitting the silver screen, but I’ve seen it, as have most horror fans, and that scene definitely colored how I viewed Mary’s shower scene.  Mary had gotten her hair done at the salon her sister once owned, and had pumped the hairdresser for information about Esther Redi.  Esther Redi finds out and goes to confront Mary.  Mary lives in a single room over Dante’s Restaurant, and shares a bathroom with other tenants.  She is in the shower, complete with shower cap to cover her freshly styled hair, when Esther Redi enters the bathroom, which presumably Mary forgot to lock.

We do not know much about this cabal of Satanists that Esther Redi belongs to, but it is never good when a young girl is caught at such a disadvantage.  The shower curtain is clear so we can vaguely see Mary’s essential outline from Esther’s perspective.  However, from Mary’s perspective, all we can see is Esther’s backlit shadow towering over her.  But thankfully the Palladists are, at their core, gentle Satanists and Esther simply warns Mary away.  But the menace was clear – Esther could get into the bathroom, and presumably into Mary’s room, and had no trouble sneaking up on the naive teen when she was at her most vulnerable.

The use of showers in horror films is a ringer – it’s almost too easy – young person, generally a woman, naked and defenseless, becomes an easy and titillating target for the killer/supernatural monster.  But I note that in most “best shower scene in a horror movie lists,” the lists don’t include any films prior to 1960’s Psycho.  Did this shower scene in the 1940s cause viewers the same apprehension it did me?  Did that menacing silhouette have anything close to the same baggage then as it does post-Psycho?  As I went looking for stills to demonstrate the scene, I found this snippet of the film on YouTube. The person behind this account clearly felt the same way I did.

This was not a terrifying film, but there were enough modern signifiers – a death-obsessed woman whose appearance was a precursor to more modern female death junkies/manic-depressive dream girls, Satanists that were not goat and baby sacrificing lunatics and judicious use of shower-menace – that it set far better with me than early monster movies and seriously hokey Hammer films (god, I want to enjoy Hammer films but they are just so purple and over the top and it makes me feel like a crappy horror fan that I sort of recoil when I hear the names Christopher Lee or Ingrid Pitt).  I recommend watching it if you can find a copy.  It’s not too hard, because you can stream it from Amazon.

If you watch it, let me know what you think.  Feel free to make fun of me for not liking Hammer films.  I’m used to it.

Halloween 2017: Curve

This next offering in Halloween 2017 is not a traditional horror film, nor is it particularly Halloween-y.  It, is, however, utterly frightening.  This little ten minute film perfectly encapsulates what it must feel like to be doomed with no chance of reprieve, yet unable to let go of the very human need to keep fighting even when you know that all your effort may well come to nothing.  I’ve watched this several times but each time I still feel the same tension, the same gritty fear as I imagine myself in the protagonist’s place.  It’s been a long while since a horror film of any sort has left me this rattled.

Halloween 2017: It Comes at Night

This film was absolutely not what I was expecting. I tend to ignore book and film reviews before I consume media so it’s not uncommon that I find myself surprised when I finally watch the movie or read the book. But even with that in mind, this film was still surprising to me. When I see a title like “It Comes at Night” I have some expectations. Like a monster or killer or band of roving post-apocalyptic warriors literally coming at night, attacking the protagonists, creating the violent tension that makes horror films worth watching.

I felt let down by this film, and though that opinion has changed a bit, I still think this film has a core of dishonesty that ensures that the viewer can never know for sure what caused the events to unfold as they did. Which is fine in a way – nothing in the rule book says horror films have to be easy to parse out. My adoration of It Follows should show that I don’t mind doing the work necessary to figure out what is going on with a film.  Sometimes half the fun comes from piecing together the details and clues so that we understand the filmmaker’s intent.  That fun fades when a film that has only six characters and takes place mostly inside a single home muddies the plot line with so many dream sequences and Macguffins that the viewer will never be able to understand exactly what happened.

And I must say that even though I find this film to be dishonest, it still comes no where close to being as dishonest as the most dishonest horror film of all time, High Tension. I genuinely do not know how anyone could praise that film after viewing the last ten minutes. The ending shows that the entirety of the action up to that point could not have happened as presented, that literally the entire movie’s sequence of action could not possibly have occurred as the blonde heroine presents the action and experiences it, and therefore the film deliberately misrepresented everything that happened in order to achieve a GOTCHA ending. But the film likely still gets views because the action up until the directors shot us the middle finger was excellent and the lead actress was very effective in the role.  While the actors in It Comes at Night do a fine job, the film is very static, with very few thrills.  I guess if a film is going to dishonest, it needs to go big or go home..

Above the cut, I want to tell you that the actors did a fine job with the material in It Comes at Night, that the bulk of the film works on a very basic level, and that there are worse ways you can spend an hour and a half of your time. I’m telling you this above the cut because below the cut I will be utterly spoiling the film. If you want to take my reaction and run with it, now is the time to stop reading. For those who have seen the film and want to discuss it with me or those who don’t care about spoilers, let’s dissect this little film.

Continue Reading “Halloween 2017: It Comes at Night”

MrsMisanthropy and Other Fan Video Channels

Because I’ve had a number of people land on this site looking for what happened to MrsMisanthropy over on YouTube, I wanted to share that she’s back!  I have no idea what happened to cause her to shut down her channel initially but she’s been busy uploading all her old content over the last few weeks.  Here’s her new URL: https://www.youtube.com/user/prefevetler/videos.

She’s also linked to two other accounts associated with her videos that may be serving as back-up in case she ever loses content on YouTube again.  Over on Vimeo, she’s Atrocity Exhibition (a suitably Oddbookian name to be sure) and she’s MrsMisanthropy on Google+.  Several people had found a Google+ account for “MrsMisanthropy” but there was not enough content to know if it was her or not (and again, no idea if MrsMisanthropy is really female but I think of her as a women and will until told otherwise).  Bookmark the other links in case she leaves again.  I will update my links to her videos sometime today.

While she was gone, I spent time looking for other fan video makers whose musical and cinematic tastes were interesting and I found several.  For now I feel I must share one specific video-maker and the films behind his fan videos because one of his videos triggered a month long endeavor that I feared was going to be a godless one.  I feared I would not be able to find the originals behind the clips used in Piperbrigadista’s fan video for “Synthetic Potion” by a band called Noir for Rachel.

As I was sifting through the videos on this channel, I was immediately drawn into this one because there is something about the woman’s face that makes me want to keep looking at her.  She appears as if she was confronting a voyeur, or maybe just a run of the mill Peeping Tom.  Her face is so serious and beautiful in a manner that reminds me of Ingrid Bergman and Sophia Lauren.  So I watched and listened and became entranced by the song and even more so by the video.

The song reminds me of what would happen if you crossed early Duran Duran with early Cure and made it all instrumental.  I loved the song “Synthetic Potion” so much that I did something I’ve never done before – I bought an album off Band Camp.  The album, entitled Witches, is a righteous purchase.

The video created a strange obsession in me to run to ground the movie these clips were taken from.  The scene beginning at 1:05, ending at 1:48, was incredibly compelling.  The woman was not confronting a voyeur, but if she was, the experience became something else entirely for her.  She sees this disheveled looking man standing outside the window of her home as she is wearing a dressing gown and underwear. After looking at him for a moment, she reveals her lingerie-clad body to him and waits for his reaction.

The woman in this scene conveys so much with her eyes, mouth and a simple tilt of her head.  Before she opens her dressing gown, she steels herself up.  She raises her chin and takes a small step back, never taking her eyes off the man.  She waits for his response.  Seconds pass, and you see a bit of trepidation pass over her face and she begins to list very slightly as she stands.  She takes another small step back and tilts her head in what looks the beginning of a shrug, an expression of disappointment and rejection.  Then before she completes the dismissal, he steps forward and she does too, leaning toward him.  Her expression only changes a bit but that bit is expansive in its depth.  Her lips show a minor, almost imperceptible sneer of power, her eyes focus on him with even more intensity as he touches the glass.  She’s received the reaction she wants and she wanted this reaction because she wants him at least as much as he may want her.

It was so compelling that I spent a month trying to find this film.  And I finally ran it to ground but only after hours spent searching. 

Continue Reading “MrsMisanthropy and Other Fan Video Channels”

YouTube Creepiness: MrsMisanthropy and Alceste Esseintes

I’ve been consuming a lot of media on YouTube lately, mainly in the form of various “creepypasta” channels. Various people with good or interesting voices read short stories and vignettes written for online readers – Reddit’s nosleep is a good source of creepypastas – and sometimes put in appropriate sound effects. I listen to hours and hours of such readings as I sew or iron or do repetitive tasks that don’t need my full attention to perform. It reminds me a bit of old radio serials – I wonder if my grandmother did the same, listening to assorted radio dramas as she ironed or cleaned the bathroom.

Creepypastas are fun but ultimately most are pleasant diversions as opposed to something that inspires me to write about them, but the last few months I’ve found myself combing through a couple of accounts that have proven to be far creepier than story recitations that have creepiness as an actual goal. Of course, both accounts aren’t shying away from presenting unpleasant, upsetting or gross content but when it’s not the goal and it happens sort of organically, it’s all the more interesting, I think.

Continue Reading “YouTube Creepiness: MrsMisanthropy and Alceste Esseintes”

Ethics in Horror Films – It Follows

I wanted to discuss some horror films before Halloween and have watched quite a few in the last couple of months. I haven’t been too impressed with what I’ve seen. Last year I wrote about the somewhat pompous but ultimately enjoyable Only Lovers Left Alive (which featured Anton Yelchin, may he rest in peace) and wanted to look into more vampire films. I remembered seeing Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction some years ago and watched it again and was… well, kind of appalled. Was it really that unredeemingly pompous when I first viewed it? Was the dialogue that stilted? Was Lili Taylor’s character that tiresome? Not even Christopher Walken could save it and I lack the energy to write about how sincerely disappointed I was.

I then watched The Hunger because I’ve watched it several times and always loved it (and, of course, may Bowie rest in peace). But this time it hit some sour notes with me. It was hard to see Susan Sarandon’s allure. She lacked any sex appeal – she seemed like she had no muscle in her body, her eyes bulged like Barbara Bush, and her very voice made me wonder how I ever bought the notion that after living with David Bowie’s character for years Catherine Deneuve found Sarandon to be a good replacement. But I’m also in what my late mother used to call “a mood.” I’ve found myself hating everything lately so maybe I just need to avoid discussing vampire movies I’ve seen several times. I’d hate to go on record as hating this film and next year realize my views were altered because I was in “a mood.”

So I watched a few I’d never seen before and found some good films. What We Do in the Shadows was fun but there’s not much to discuss in something that is successfully funny without much depth beyond the humor. The Collector and The Collection were also fun in that improbable way that complicated “fiend” movies often are. Josh Stewart is actually a pretty good actor and the films had a The Cell-like quality to them, especially The Collection. But I do confess that I appreciated style over substance and when I make a conscious decision to enjoy that which will fall apart if analyzed, I try to avoid discussing it. We all have our failings.

But then I watched It Follows, the film everyone was talking about in 2015. People either loved it or hated it. First time I watched it, I hated it, too. But something about it niggled in the back of my head and I watched it again and suddenly everything about it that seemed wrong with the first viewing fell into place. I realized that the ending that I initially found pointlessly ambiguous showed a clear moral decision on the part of two of the characters as they deal with the supernatural evil stalking them.

Oh my god, I am going to spoil the hell out of this movie in the discussion that follows under the jump. Stop reading now if you have not seen this film yet but are planning to see it. In fact, you should always assume I am going to spoil the hell out of everything I write about here, but seriously, I am going to ruin this movie for you if you haven’t seen it yet. Clear? Good! Let’s discuss the ethics in It Follows.

Continue Reading “Ethics in Horror Films – It Follows”

Pompous Skinny Vampires with Really Bad Hair

11ONLY-articleLarge
Vampires have no need for deep conditioning!

Yeah, I am going to discuss Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. I’m sure my title for this entry totally gave that away but, in spite of my initial glib reaction, I like this film. But it has to be said: the main characters are pompous, thin and have the worst hair ever. Tilda Swinton’s weave is one of the worst weaves ever seen in film since the one Michael Wincott was forced to wear in his role as Top Dollar in The Crow.  Hiddleston doesn’t fare much better on the hair front.

Several people told me I would love this movie and I suspect it is because Tilda Swinton’s character, Eve, packs nothing but books when she travels. Or maybe they assumed I shared the current online love of Tom Hiddleston, who plays Adam. Not that Adam and Eve, for this Eve has an annoying little sister named Ava, though it may be justthat Ava is her blood kin via vampirism, so maybe they are that Adam and Eve.  Those who are into Shakespeare authorship conspiracies will find elements of this film charming. Christopher Marlowe, as played by John Hurt, makes it clear who really wrote all those plays attributed to Shakespeare, so Marlovians may want to have a look.

images-5
Blood popsicles play no role in the shenanigans. But they are worth mentioning because, you know, frozen blood…

Quick synopsis: Adam lives in Detroit and is a musician who spurns the spotlight, and has done for centuries, yet has influenced and written for famous musicians throughout history. Eve lives in Tangiers, drinking the blood Christopher Marlowe procures for them both, but travels to Detroit when Adam is obviously in distress. The modern world inhabited by “zombies,” as they call humans, with all its increasingly aggressive planned obsolescence, weighs heavy on Adam, to the point that he is suicidal. Eve comes to comfort him, her kid sister shows up, shenanigans ensue.

But be warned – though there be shenanigans, they are sedate shenanigans. Not much happens in this film and what happens is… mostly very calm. Never before has disposing of a body been so tranquil. As much as I appreciated the Jim Jarmuschiness in Only Lovers Left Alive, I did find myself longing for Bill Paxton (of Near Dark fame) overacting. I think we all find ourselves longing for Bill Paxton overacting regardless of the situation – don’t deny it.

I’ve always been fond of Jim Jarmusch. Mystery Train is one of the best movies from the ’80s. No one ever put John Lurie to better use than Jarmusch did in Stranger Than Paradise. But I have to admit that even Mystery Train, one of Jarmusch’s more involved films, has a very minimalist plot. Jarmusch films are atmospheric, stylish and deadpan – you can’t really expect gore or intense story-building in a Jarmsuch film, which I think is what caused this film to seem a bit pompous. All the name dropping of the people these vampires spent time with throughout history wore thin – evidently Mary Wollstonecraft was “delicious” and I don’t know exactly what was meant with that description – surely Adam didn’t drain her. Or did he? Who knows? But he hung around with Byron and Shelley, and during a scene where Eve questions her husband about events in his life she surely already knew about, I was reminded of a lyric from a Rod Stewart song: “I couldn’t quote you no Dickens or Shelley or Keats, because it’s all been said before.” If you’ve been married for centuries, you’ve said it and heard it all before but if you remain true loves – only lovers left alive, remember – you want to hear the stories again. They will always sound new to a lover, if quite pompous to outsiders.

Despite the cluttered and run-down house in Detroit that Adam settled into in his attempt to avoid the zombies, their increasingly grotesque world and their often diseased blood, this is a pretty film. There are scenes where Adam and Eve take night time drives in Detroit that are very visually arresting, and Adam shows Eve the ruination of paradise – the empty Packard factory, the theater turned into a parking garage. Yet of all the amazing places in Detroit that revolved around excellent music, music of the sort that Adam and Eve play and listen to (Wanda Jackson, Denise LaSalle and Charlie Feathers), he takes Eve to see the house where Jack White of the questionably talented White Stripes grew up. Jack is evidently the seventh son in his family, and I guess that matters to vampires, but surely he could have run by Florence Ballard’s house or the Leland Baptist Church where Bessie Smith performed with Louis Armstrong. Except we only see one black dude in all of Detroit and he’s the doctor who sells Adam untainted blood. It’s a strange, discordant note in this film that otherwise seems to pay a lot of attention to detail and name drops so many important people of cultural worth.

The clever jokes in the film also sort of fall flat. Adam and Eve travel using passports under the names “Stephen Dedalus” and “Daisy Buchanan.” Why Stephen Dedalus? Kit Marlowe says in the film that he wished he had known Adam when he wrote Hamlet because Adam would have been a far better model for the suicidal Dane, and Stephen Dedalus, if I remember my college analysis of Joyce, shows Hamlet-like qualities. So that kind of works. But Daisy Buchanan? It would be hard to find a more loyal, faithful wife than Eve, despite living on a completely different continent than Adam. Whenever Adam is in need, she rushes to his side. She has no other lovers. She is no Daisy Buchanan. It’s hard for me to think of a better female literary character for her to use for her passport identity, but I’m no filmmaker, to be sure.

And if it sounds like I am bashing this movie, I may be a little bit, but I tend to like pomposity when it is handled well. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is one of my favorite books. I love the films of Whit Stillman, one of the most pompous filmmakers ever to breathe life into preppy culture. But it speaks to the nature of this film that the best part is when Ava comes into Detroit and wreaks havoc on Adam and Eve’s reunion. She is a force of chaos in Adam’s very cloistered life, a vampire who loves the modern world as much as Adam hates it, who gives in to her base impulses in a way her sister cannot. The scenes with Ava are the price of admission for this film.

images-6
No idea what Kit Marlowe is holding here but it isn’t a comb.

But even as I found myself wondering how it is that Adam made the transition from writing adagios for Schubert to becoming a Detroit rock god, how the fuck their passports made any sense, I still found this film enjoyable. As I mentioned it is visually appealing, even when it is shabby. There is no humor but there is plenty of wit. And the actors are all very pretty – including the aged John Hurt – even if they have terrible hair. I think this is a movie that I felt strangely about when watching, realized I enjoyed it at the end, and will love it the second time I watch it.

This film has also given me a terrible itch to see The Hunger, Trouble Every Day and Near Dark before Halloween gets here. All three vampire movies, all three extremely stylish in very different ways, and I think this Halloween needs David Bowie, Vincent Gallo and Bill Paxton to join Tom Hiddleston in the vampire game. Oooo, maybe I’ll watch The Addiction and add Christopher Walken to the mix, too. And all four of those actors have much better hair than poor Hiddleston as Adam. So if nothing else this movie whetted my appetite for more bloody fare (and bloodier fare, too). If you have a favorite vampire film, share it, and if you’ve seen it, let me know what you think of Only Lovers Left Alive.

This Is Not an Odd Books Discussion: Movies and metaphysical despair

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I tend to experience pretty passively any sort of media that requires a television screen. I have the TV on in the background as I go about my day, generally as a form of white noise. It’s not too often that I pay close attention to movies or television shows, but recently I watched two movies that were so awful, so absorbing and deeply terrible, that I could not look away even as I felt like these movies were proof that God is dead and that He probably never loved us much anyway.

The first film was The Snowtown Murders, a depiction of a serial murder case in Australia. I warn you now that if you are not familiar with the case, this film may seem like a mess because many characters come and go without a lot of explanation. This film also has one of the most egregious examples of animal abuse this side of Cannibal Holocaust.  Please bear these things in mind if what I write here makes you want to see this film.  John Bunting, a charismatic psychopath with a fixation on largely imaginary cases of pedophilia, influenced a merry band of marginally intelligent and largely hopeless losers into killing those Bunting felt needed to die. I say his obsession with pedophiles verged into imaginary crimes because Bunting, like most homophobes, also felt that homosexuals were sexual predators. With his rag-tag group of socially marginalized losers, he killed 11 people in about seven years time.

The film depiction of the Snowtown murders (so-called because that was the town where the bodies were found – the murders occurred elsewhere) is a bleak look at a particular section of society in Australia. Small, dingy homes, cluttered with useless crap, not enough space, people sleeping on couches because there are not enough bedrooms. Even the best impulses of parents in such a world end up coming out strange and cramped, and as they try to protect their children from the monsters outside, they fail to protect them from the monsters within.

Even though it drained me of all emotional vitality, this is a film worth watching. It’s raw and unflinching, showing the worst things that can happen in such a matter-of-fact manner that it’s sole purpose has to be to cause the viewer to go numb. The actor who plays James spends the film so completely stunned by the repeated blows that life gives him that very little registers. One of the first interactions he has with John Bunting occurs when Bunting is decapitating and skinning several kangaroos in a front yard. They were real kangaroos and that scene was just foul and upsetting. The actor who played James looked like a shark-eyed Heath Ledger, absorbing an unexpected scene of carnage with a flat yet strangely frightened demeanor.

That sets the viewer up for the scene that could, more or less be one of the worst scenes ever in a film. The rape scene from Irreversible was affecting because it was so long and so deeply horrible. Violent. A total violation. The rape scene in The Snowtown Murders was the complete opposite in its execution and as a result was infinitely worse in the toll it took on my psyche. James had evidently been sexually abused by his older half-brother, Troy, throughout their childhood together. The scene we are given in The Snowtown Murders  is maybe a tenth as long as the scene in Irreversible, but it felt longer to me, as the older brother asserted his toxic will against his younger brother, who lay there on the floor, motionless and quiet, waiting for it to end. It was just a part of the landscape of his life. He just had to submit and then he could begin his day in his bleak, cluttered, hopeless life.

John Bunting, learning of this assault, captures Troy, locks him a bathroom and begins a long, horrible assault against him. As much as Troy needs punishment for what he has done, no one deserves what happens to him. Utterly in thrall to John, James is unable to make things stop until he finally ends his brother’s torment himself. It is the first time he really shows any emotion and it’s clear to the viewer that James’ life is probably far better when he is numb because any awakening of feeling is going to involve violence, cruelty and ill-use. This was a powerful movie and I don’t ever want to see it again, but think others may find it just as appalling and upsetting and transfixing as I did. Sometimes the terrible shows us something, lets us into lives foreign to ours and forces us to understand how it is a person can transform from a small, helpless child into a flat, vicious killer.

The other film I watched was just horrible. No real reason to watch it other than to rubberneck at the sorry lives of others. No revelation. No understanding. All you get is a voyeuristic thrill that comes from watching other people self-destruct but it still may not be enough to get you through Black Metal Veins.

Continue Reading “This Is Not an Odd Books Discussion: Movies and metaphysical despair”

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: The Bunny Game

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I’ve wanted to talk about the movie, The Bunny Game, for a while now but I needed time to come to an understanding with myself as to why I find this film worthy of discussion. It’s a hard movie to watch, an even harder movie to digest and, if one gets derailed by accusations of this film being no more than stylish torture porn, it’s dirty and unsettling. And note that this discussion is full of spoilers, though it’s hard to spoil a film that can be summed up as “trucker tortures prostitute in the desert for several days.”

The Bunny Game struck me as a transgressive piece of cinema that showed a frightening and non-consensual ordeal path/purification ritual more troubling than anything Eli Roth ever brought to the table.  You may think this is going to be a typical torture porn horror movie because some of the marketing leans in this direction.  However this is not torture for the sake of torture, it’s torture with a demented purpose behind it that transcends just the thrill that comes for many when they see a beautiful woman abducted, raped and harmed. I felt this way before I looked up Rodleen Getsic, the protagonist of the film, and found out that she co-wrote this film and based it on an actual abduction she endured. I also read that making this film killed part of her soul, which makes it hard to know if she accomplished what she set out to do when she decided to make this film. She fasted for 40 days beforehand to make herself weak, and she consented to everything that happened to her in this film, from a graphic blowjob (actually more of a face-fuck) to the physical abuse that she endured during the abduction.

The hardest part of this movie for me to stomach was that it was largely script-less, because the implication is that Getsic often had no idea what was going to happen to her next. It was, in a sense, one long, horrible ad lib, which makes it more interesting and infinitely more sickening. The man who plays the trucker is not a professional actor (I believe I read that the director cast him because the actor tried to fight him after claiming he looked at him too long in a parking lot). But the lack of a script meant that Rodleen, a victim of a previous abduction and assault, was potentially being re-victimized even as she consented to all of it beforehand. It also makes one wonder how much anyone can be said to consent to something when they don’t know the details of what is going to happen.

The film, shot in black and white, is visually quite pretty, or maybe arresting, but the cinema quality also made it all the worse, turning all that abuse into visually appealing art. Everything that worked about this film made it all the worse because I did not want to be entertained as I watched this movie.

The film begins with a graphic, unsimulated blow job that is anti-pornographic. Rodleen, the protagonist, is not enjoying herself. She is not moaning with feigned pleasure. Forced to deep throat her john, she pulls back three times to catch her breath, gasping for air and the third time she does this, a wave of misery washes over her face. One gets the feeling she was not acting.  Her reaction shows how nasty her character’s life is and there is no way to see this with a sex positive filter.  She is not empowering herself via sex work.

From that opening scene we are taken through a few days in the prostitute’s life. Bunny lives a life of degrading sexual acts in exchange for enough money to keep her in a nondescript motel room in a nondescript Every City. She spends her time hustling johns, having horrible sex, doing drugs and recovering from it all. Before we are ten minutes in we see her raped when she passes out during a trick and wakes up to find she has been robbed of all her money and her drugs. There is a scene where Bunny sniffs a line of some drug and talks to herself in the mirror, muttering “Yeah, yeah, yeah…” as she psychs herself up to go back out and do more of the same. That, in its way, was the worst scene in the film.

Bunny, wearing platform shoes that had to be a foot tall, wanders a city scape that harbors nothing good or natural. She eats fast food sprawled in front of a wall covered in graffiti, she urinates in an alley in front of a metal fence, right on the concrete. As she wanders the streets, her bleached, straw-like hair in pig-tails, the film flashes to other images, several of her in a natural place, mountains behind her, her brown hair falling in curls, her face, young again as she laughs. Blink and you’ll miss it, but those brief scenes where we see the prostitute in better times, in fresh air in the natural world, are a clue as to what this film’s intent is.

The prostitute, Bunny, finally meets her destiny in the form of a truck driver, called Hog (each are named for the masks they wear during one of the torture scenes). He renders her unconscious, drives her to the desert and spends several days torturing her. She’s unconscious for a while, allowing him time to pull her into his empty trailer, rape her, investigate her body thoroughly, at times snuffling her hair and body like a dog. He then chains her inside the trailer and focuses a camera on her. He forces her to watch her torment, making her relive it as she is actually living it, a particularly cruel bit of meta when one remembers this movie is drawn from Rodleen Getsic’s own experiences.

Hog keeps her in chains, puts a collar around her neck and takes her on walks in the junkyard-like landscape of the desert, at one point forcing her to walk while wearing those insane platforms. He force-feeds her whiskey when she desperately needs water. He completely depersonalizes her by shaving her head, but later brands her as well, taking away one form of identity while giving her another form, one that is more permanent. The brands Hog puts on Bunny’s back resemble infinity signs with tails, but they also look like a bow tied from thin ribbon. Both are apt symbols for this film’s purpose. The torture seems like it lasts forever (this movie is a merciful 76 minutes long – any longer and I think it would have been unwatchable), and the torture is interchangeable with other women we see Hog torture in his own flashbacks. It is interminable and unceasing. But this film also shows that Bunny is being a given a perverse gift.

Bald and slowly divested of her clothing, the end of the movie shows a woman who looks like a slightly better nourished concentration camp victim. She is crouched in the back of the trailer when the door opens and light shines in on her. Naked and near insanity, Bunny runs for it. She runs toward the light. She is a gibbering mess, but the ecstasy is unmistakeable on her face. She desperately wants to live.

The film cuts away and we next see her on a cross. She did not make it to freedom. Hog has caught up to her. She is not restrained. She is not nailed to the cross. She is simply lying atop it with her arms spread, in a Christ-like position. Hog sits near her, not touching her. She hallucinates and sees herself with her healthy face, her brown curly hair, sitting nearby. Her old self burns a book. Her old self puts on a veil. Her old self is watching her self-sacrifice. She is her own Mary Magdalene in this painful vision.

Hog tells her to draw a straw from his fist – if she gets the long straw, she wins. A jittery wraith, she selects a straw. Hog mumbles something in her ear and the ecstasy again shows on her face. She laughs with hysterical delight as he carries her over his shoulder. A man in a white uniform in a white van arrives and Hog carries her to him. They put her in the back of the van and the film ends.

Does Bunny live? Who is the man in the van? I think she lives and but even if she doesn’t, in terms of the purpose of this film, it is unimportant. Taken away from the city into the desert, broken down and depersonalized, she wants to live. She has gone through an extraordinary ordeal, very nearly a vision quest and wants to live. I also thought about this in terms of an extreme purification ritual, with the head-shaving, the starvation, the food and water deprivation.

And if this is a purification ritual, then Bunny lived because there was no sense purifying her if there was only death waiting for her. Purification rituals are to cleanse a person of that which is unclean before a specific life event. I left this film thinking the specific event was life itself. Bunny was cleansed of the drugs in her system, the endless flow of semen into her body, the dirt of the city, the implications of her fried hair and her provocative clothing. Naked, starved and bald she is now ready for life after her ordeal. But even if that white van is representative of death, for the first time Bunny wanted to live. Wanting life is a redemption from the walking death she was experiencing before she was kidnapped. She may never return to being that full-faced, curly-haired, laughing brunette, but just wanting to be her again means she is saved.

I know it’s tempting for many to dismiss this as torture porn wherein the sole purpose is to revel in Bunny’s debasement. But those seeking a disgusting gore-fest will be disappointed. There is no blood. There are no saws or pliers. The blow torch is for use with the brand. No one loses a limb, no toes are cut off, no one is hung upside down with a cut throat and bleeding into a bath. This is not a cartoon of extreme violence like so many other movies that depict torture. This is psychological torture and while equally as horrible as physical torture, it has a different purpose than to titillate, which is why I think so many people were put off by this film. It wasn’t what they expected, and in many ways it was far, far worse.

I do my best to interpret the media I consume in a vacuum. I don’t like to read reviews about books or films until I see them and before I write about them, I prefer not to know too much detail about what others think. But after watching this film I wanted to know more about Rodleen Getsic. Her site is a lot to take in at once and I recommend spending ten minute increments there in the beginning. Evidently after filming The Bunny Game, Getsic slipped on a doormat at a grocery story and landed on her head, causing a catastrophic brain injury, and her site shows her struggle as she recovers and copes. She hasn’t updated her “phonetography” section in a while. I hope she’s okay. And I hope the part of her soul that died when she made The Bunny Game was a part she needed to shed. It’s an uncomfortable feeling realizing that the woman who made this film, a film based on her own experiences, has gone on to experience another ordeal.

This was a hard movie but if you ever watch it, I’d love to hear your take on it. I suspect there are a lot of different opinions, and given the nature of this film, aside from the ones that dismiss this as pointless torture porn, they may all be correct.

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: An e-Epistolary Review of Crappy Horror Films

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

This is an e-mail I sent to Mr. Oddbooks and he thought it might be fitting for a non-odd book discussion over here. These may be the most succinct reviews I have ever written.

Mar 27 (7 days ago)

My beloved husband,

I heard you speak of needing space on the Apple TV. I believe I have found a way to get a small chunk of space. Consider deleting the following Horror titles:

Ominous looks like it was cast by a blind man, shot with a cell phone and sound mastered in the dishwasher. Wanted to die after ten minutes.

Removal sucks more than anything has ever before sucked. It’s got the Fight Club trope of OH NO IT WAS ME but no one can act and for some reason Elliott Gould has a ten second cameo. It needs to go away.

The Task was so awful I now have cancer. Of the butt.

Trapped Ashes is a collection of assholes telling unscary stories (one involves cannibal breasts) to get out of a scary house. It could only be worse if my mom had directed it.

Urban Explorer had zero plot and was offensive to every sensibility. Nazi tunnels in Berlin, yay, let’s visit them with nary a gun to defend us from the racist chunnel dwellers we are sure to find there.

Vlog… words fail me. Seriously. I almost want you to keep it so I can dare you to watch it.

Last Breath is what happens when people decide to write a hackneyed script that no one cares about, cast their friends who cannot act, and decide to film it and call it indie horror instead of a homemade piece of amateurish crap that could interest no one with access to a Rubik’s cube.

Grave Encounters sucked the rancid teat of TV’s Ghost Hunters. Oh no, there are real ghosts in this here place that crooked paranormal researchers are exploring. Who would have thought such a plot turn could happen? Who, I ask you? But more to the point, we need to ask, “Who cares?” No one, that’s who.

Fingerprints stars two sisters who look about as related as any two random people might, features an actress who got her start on Laguna Beach on MTV and “acts” via showing her legs and guest stars the animated corpse of Sally Kirkland wielding an axe.

Exorcismus is the sort of film wherein you want the girl to remain demon possessed. You may wonder why the hell the movie wasn’t about the girl on the the promotional cover – I can’t answer that but I suspect it would have been a far better movie than the piece of shit I watched. You also want her parents to die and her boyfriend to grind himself into hamburger, but neither happens so why bother.

Episode 50: See Grave Encounters.

Dario Argento’s The Card Player involves cutting edge computer technology from 1987, a plot so simple Gertie probably wrote it, and it’s mining a trope so overmined the shaft is gonna collapse.

The Cottage features the dude who played Gollum and I couldn’t last longer than ten minutes to see if it featured anyone else because it was all full of “Who fucking cares?” during the first few minutes.

Credo ( The Devil’s Curse ) is plotless, pointless, and you sort of want all the crappy-acting kids to die. Also seems like the sound was mixed in a Port Authority toilet.

Coffin features two living people buried in a coffin who are fighting for life and yet somehow the film still lacks tension. Oh, it’s a ransom film. Oh, it’s a “punish the adulterers” film. Oh, it’s a piece of fucking shit.

Bitten has Jay from Jay and Silent Bob fame when he was still clearly in the throes of some sort of drug addiction and a whiny, often naked vampiress with one of the most interesting overbites ever seen in a leading lady (note – twas not caused by tooth prosthetics). Lots of bodies stuffed in trunks and no one smells a thing and I think if you decide to keep this one, you should have to watch it with me as I mock your pain.

Bereavement makes no fucking sense, is horrible and exploitative (because making kids watch sex murders is a fresh, new, interesting hook, amirite?), and also who fucking cares?

Beneath – I will contact a lawyer if you don’t delete this piece of made for MTV shitburger. Don’t test me on this.

Bane is a bunch of really unremarkable British women tortured and killed for some sort of stupid project involving what looks like an animatronic roach with fangs sporting a large Giger-style hat. Someone inexplicably cast their boneless aunt, the one with the frizzy perm, and I also suspect these women were not given a script.

Amusement is the touching story of a kindergarten vivisectionist who decides to stalk and kill the three girls who were sickened by his mouse-torture exhibit for the school diorama contest. He tracks them down and kidnaps them as adults in a Rube-Goldbergian manner and takes them to what appears to be a disused grain silo with interrogation rooms. Four idiots enter, only one survives, and it’s the one who decided to go to sleep in a room with a human-sized clown doll in a chair. Hardly seems fair.

Medium Raw features a hottie psychologist in an asylum for the extremely criminally insane where people have sex against the walls of cells containing superhuman killing machines for the thrill and people bring their small daughters who wear red coats to work. The sexy psychologist’s husband sounds exactly like Ryan O’Reilly from Oz and there’s a whole subplot with him that involves lotsa flashbacks. The best part of this film was the cannibal lady who, sadly, failed to eat the protagonist, which would have been the best possible ending, in my book. So stupid that if you don’t delete it, you owe me ten bucks on general principle.

Needle is Saw with needles, combined with the first Hellraiser, with even worse actors.

The Quiet features Jack Bauer’s daughter as a bitch cheerleader with Kenny Power’s baby-mama as a best friend. We have beloved character actors Martin Donovan and Edie Falco selling their souls for a paycheck. There’s also a brunette pretending to be deaf and she’s, like, key to the plot but she’s not naked enough for the target market for this film. Incest, murder, who fucking cares. Notable only because of boobs, some of them Carmela Soprano’s.

This should clear up some space.

As always, your devoted wife

This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion – Late night David Lynch

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I used to be a fan of black metal, and I guess I still am, but now it’s more appropriate to say I’m a fan of specific black metal bands. It always helps to be specific, I think.

So in the spirit of specificity, let me tell you I rather like Ulver. I think even more specifically, it’s safe to say I like Garm, the former singer for Ulver. I love his voice, and I like the idea that if Mr Oddbooks were to start lifting weights again and decided to get some ink, he and Garm could pass for brothers. Maybe cousins.

At any rate, Ulver’s 2000 release, Perdition City, is in my top ten albums of all time. And the best song on that album is “Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses.” At 4:00 one morning, I wanted to listen to it in bed, but iTunes was having “issues.” I was forced to go to YouTube, which was not as an appalling a choice as you might think because it just so happens that there is a fan video for “Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses” that is my favorite fan video ever. Yeah, the video is stretched and skewed but ultimately, the video is very, very good. I don’t think I could ever have thought of “Porn Piece” and Lost Highway as two media elements that went together, but that’s the beauty of this kind of thing, I suspect. Also, I tend to think that imposing one’s will on popular culture is all that’s left to us people who can’t sleep and yet can’t concentrate on anything productive.

So beautiful. “On the stairs, before I left, one of the girls had surprisingly given me a kiss. Stung in the cold long after.”

But it was Youtube at 4:00 in the morning. It couldn’t end in a great mashup of an achingly beautiful song. It never does.

It never does.

You know how Youtube has all the related videos over to the right in one endless and godless lineup?

I looked at those related videos. I learned something. I learned that David Lynch released an album late in 2011. It is called Crazy Clown Time.

I’ll let that soak in for minute.

Crazy.

Clown.

Time.

And it sounds exactly like you think it would and you should not listen to this before the sun comes up. You should not listen to this as your Garm-like husband sleeps with his hands closed across his chest, an elderly cat at his feet, your house quiet, your neighborhood dead. You should not listen to this song even now, but you probably will because the curiosity will force you.

Here it is. The thing that currently haunts me.

I…

I just don’t know. Words fail me. That was horrible. I kind of want to cry.

But because he is David Lynch, in the midst of the grotesque, there is also something truly beautiful. “Pinky’s Dream” is slightly jittery and mildly horrible, but still has lovely moments

But like much of Lynch’s body of work, you have to make a conscious choice: do you focus on the lovely or the grotesque? Do you focus on Isabella’s lips and her accent or Dennis Hopper and his fucking nitrous mask?

You focus on Dennis and the mask.

Fuck.