Where’d you get the idea that I don’t like Captain America’s costume? Dude, that’s all Dirk. I think it’s pretty cool-looking, actually. John Cassaday proved even the old-school chain-mail version could look imposing and tough; meanwhile Brian Hitch has done a convincing revamp along the lines of what moviemakers have already done with the Daredevil costume.

In short, Cap’s costume is no obstacle to getting a decent movie out of him. I mean, hell, Superman has the dorkiest, worst-designed, least-sense-making costume in all of comics, and those movies set the superflick gold standard.

How much do I like horror? I’ll put it this way: I actually enjoy my nightmares.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many of my bad dreams have been variations on the following theme: Some group of individuals or entities is trying to kill me. I must escape, but in order to truly survive I must hunt down and kill my pursuers, lest I be pursued by them forever. In other words, I can’t just run away–it is, quite literally, a kill-or-be-killed scenario.

Off the top of my head, I can think of examples of this type of nightmare in which I’ve been chased through unfamiliar streets by skinheads for having witnessed their murder of an Indian man; snuck a gun into a big Mafia sit-down in order to execute the boss of my family at point-blank range before he can give the order to have me killed; defended my brother and sister from the Aliens-type aliens who were attacking our house; infiltrated a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan only to realize that if I am discovered I must kill any number of jihadis in order to escape; fought to escape the poisonous clutches of 28 Days Later-style zombies intent on killing me before I could bash their heads in; and on and on. I’m reasonably sure other versions have involved burglars, rednecks, Leatherface, Mola Ram’s Thugee deathcult, and the Ringwraiths, though those memories are a bit foggy.

I know what you’re thinking: “Sean, that’s awesome! You dream in the action-thriller genre!” Wait, you weren’t thinking that? You were thinking, “If I had that type of dream over and over I’d be mainlining No-Doz?” Oh, my friends, you’re missing out. Not because these dreams aren’t scary–they are, o sweet jeebus are they ever. I wake up drenched in sweat, heart pounding, totally convinced that I’ve been fighting for my life–and fighting to kill–for hours at a time. But when I finally do come to my senses and realize it was all a dream, good Lord, it’s an unbelievable rush. It’s like being on the world’s absolute best roller coaster–but thinking you’re actually in a runaway semi on the Jersey Turnpike at the time. You get all the adrenaline, all the fear, all the rage, all the horror of a real-life life-threatening situation, complelty convinced all the time that it is in fact real-life, but realize–only after it’s over–that you were never in any danger at all. If I could bottle that sensation, I’d be mulling over my renovation plans for Bill Gates’s mansion by now.

I’ve never been all that wild about the theory that horror is a way for people to get a vicariously thrilling glimpse into nightmare territory–I mean, I’m sure it is, but that’s never been a big motivating factor for me. But when I think about those nightmares I always have, that sense of complete helplessness in the face of a situation that offers me no choice but to kill or die, one where I must remain close to the object of horror but not so close as to be touched and consumed by it, I see a great many parallels to horror after all. Think of the canoe-trippers in Deliverance, convinced that they have to hunt down the unseen men pursuing them lest they all be killed. Think of the mall-dwellers in Dawn of the Dead, braving the zombie-infested parking lot to get those 18-wheelers they need to guard the doors. Think of Wendy and Danny running through the corridors of the Overlook, trying to find one another yet avoid mad Jack. Think of Agent Clarice Starling journeying into the basement in the final reel of The Silence of the Lambs.

I can’t help but feel that part of my disappointment with the film version of Battle Royale stems from the fact that it devised a situation that replicated the conditions of my nightmares almost to the letter, but for all that failed to get the sweat flowing, the heart pounding, the pulse racing. I get that from my dreams–it seems the least I can expect from my horror movies.

The irrepressible Jason Adams lent me a couple of horror movies to do his part for the horrorthon this month, bless ‘im. (I reciprocated by lending him The Books of Blood and The Wicker Man.) I watched the first of these today: Battle Royale, the supercontroversial dystopian-Japanese kids-killing-kids flick that also exists as a novel and a well-regarded manga. And for the second time this week, I was… underwhelmed.

The plot is pretty simple. In a future, militarized Japan, the government has responded to economic catastrophe by passing the Battle Royale Act. A class of 7th (or 9th–the film’s not very clear) graders is selected at random to take part in three days of mortal combat, wherein they’re isolated in a remote location and forced to kill each other with weapons given to them by the B.R. program. The kids have three days to slaughter each other until only one remains, or all the survivors will be killed by unremovable remote-detonated explosive necklaces. The film (and the manga, and presumably the book) is a study of how the different kids react to the pressure to kill their friends in order to survive themselves. It’s basically a high-concept Lord of the Flies.

I’ve been reading the manga version of the story, and it’s been entertaining thus far. The main characters are interesting and likeable, the shock moments work well, and the violence is spectacularly over the top. But a lot of what worked due to the methodical, make-every-moment-count nature of Japanese comic storytelling is rushed in the film, keeping the viewer less invested in pulling for the heroic characters and unable to see the more bloodthirsty ones as anything but one-dimensional killing machines. Indeed, the filmmakers seem to have taken for granted the fact that viewers would be familiar with either the novel or manga versions of the story: It could be that the dialogue and expository captions were just inadequately translated, but it seemed that no one ever bothered to explain why a pretty massive amount of plot points were happening. For example, the sinister emcee-type character from the manga (the same type of part that Richard Dawson played in The Running Man) is transformed here into a former teacher of the class in question, who had been stabbed (why? we never find out) by one of the goofier kids (why? it seems totally out of character), then quits teaching only to wreak vengeance on the class by forcing them into the game (why? is he now a government official? the soldiers involved in the B.R. program seem to answer directly to him, but he’s still pointedly presented as a lonely, pathetic, working-class schlub). Moreover, we never find out what the purpose of the game itself is–there are some intimations about this being a response to truancy, but a) that’s kind of a harsh punishment for cutting gym class, no? and b) wouldn’t this make kids LESS likely to stay in school, knowing their class could be next into the meat grinder? Indeed, a lot of summaries of the various Battle Royale incarnations say the kids kill each other on a television show, but no mention of a TV show is made in the movie version, and no cameras or viewers are present in any version, including the movie and the manga. And let’s not even talk about the nonsensical ending, which has two plot holes (at least) big enough to drive a Toyota through and culminates in a completely unnecessary three-part reprise of dream sequences and flashbacks we’ve already seen.

The film doesn’t even have a satisfyingly dark tone to compensate for the faulty plot mechanics. I was expecting a Texas Chain Saw-style parable of a country that’s eating its youth, but instead I got a slick, Hollywood-style action thriller–you know, the kind where virtually everyone survives just long enough after getting shot to say something profoundly ironic or ironically profound, and where there’s big swelling orchestral music at all the exciting or touching parts. I guess we’re supposed to be disturbed because it’s kids killing each other, and not grown-up movie stars, but everything else is so similar to a Michael Bay movie that I barely noticed the age of the killers after a while. And even the gore, which in the manga is just splendidly extravagant, is nothing compared to the average action movie, and certainly pales in comparison to, say, the final half-hour of Dawn of the Dead. As horrific as the story is, I never found myself horrified.

The only thing that came close was the (unintentionally?) engimatic Mr. Kitana, the ex-teacher who was calling the shots in the slaughter of his former students. I got the sense that the filmmakers were trying to say something about the adult world’s simultaneous disgust, distrust, and envy of teenagers (as filtered in particular through the strange schoolgirl obsession featured in so much Japanese pop entertainment), or even more specifically the occasional journey of teachers from wide-eyed idealism to sadistic misanthropy. But either through lackadaisacal structuring or simply a lack of ideas, none of these possibilities emerges clearly, or even in a murkily compelling fashion. Whatever the reason, I ended up feeling that Battle Royale, the movie, was a gauntlet I’d rather not have run.

(Still and all, the manga is good, and if I can get over having the ending and all the twists spoiled for me by the movie, I’ll continue to read it. Meanwhile, Jason lent me another movie, Paperhouse, which he discusses here. B.R. aside, his taste is usually impeccable, and it’s been seconded for me by Bruce Baugh. The thrill of discovery and all that… Speaking of which, I’ve got my own relatively obscure horror movies to proselytize for. They’re on the way, I promise.)

When I began my month-long horrorfest, the illustrious Eve Tushnet, no stranger to the macabre herself, asked me what I thought of The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, by author David J. Skal. Turns out that the book was one of those tomes that I’d bought at some point but had never actually gotten around to reading. Spurred on by Eve’s question, I’ve spent the last few days plowing through the thing on the train. (Thank God for the commute, eh?)

It was… okay.

Actually, parts of it were quite good. Skal assigns himself a suitably monstrous task: to chronicle the development of horror a cultural phenomenon, focusing primarily on the 20th century, and America, and film. In some sections he does a fairly bang-up job. His analysis of 1931 (an almost apocalyptically productive year for the horror film, introducing as it did the definitive film versions of Dracula & Frankenstein, an Academy Award-winning version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and the notorious parade of deformity and excess known as Freaks) is both exhaustive and authoritative. Skal also convincingly summarizes the hidden real-world fears that manifest themselves in horror film’s different “cycles”: the unresolved trauma of World War I, the looming spectre of World War II, Vietnam, the sexual revolution and its attendant reproductive-science advancements and setbacks, AIDS; in one particularly masterful chapter Skal nails one 1950s horror/sci-fi trope after another, citing dozens of films inspired by the Bomb Scare, the Red Scare, the Juvenile Delinquency Scare, and the stress of the TV-induced Information Age. Skal also makes the occasional choice that’s both unorthodox and wise, such as his examination of the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”–one I’ve long held to be a criminally undiscussed cornerstone of contemporary horror filmmaking (particularly due to its all but unrivalled impact on popular culture).

Moreover, Skal displays the righteous rage of the horror fan–I know it well–in going after some of the more obnoxious nemeses of the genre, including the old Hays Office Production Code, the Catholic Legion of Decency, feminist watchdog groups, self-appointed culture-guardian film critics, and (most viciously) the MPAA (an organization that deserves to be cast as the “winner” in a film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” if ever there was one) and Dr. Frederic Wertham (whose one-man war on comic books as the source of juvenile delinquency was so successful in spite of his near-total lack of non-fabricated corroborating evidence that the industry is still reeling from its effects some 50 years later). As Eve pointed out in her own review of the book, Skal’s no fan of Ronald Reagan’s; I found his bias a lot less pervasive or distracting than Eve did, though, possibly because I’m more sympathetic to the anti-Regan point of view (for the record: driving a stake through the heart of International Communism? Good! Using poor people to sharpen the stake? Bad!), possibly because the horror filmmakers of the Vietnam era through the 1980s generally did lean left (at least insofar as their antipathy toward segregation, the war, the crimes of the Nixon administration, and rampant consumerism was concerned) but mainly because Skal offsets this liberalish politics by displaying skepticism, even occasional antipathy, toward a variety of common right-wing targets, including psychiatry, the Pill, women in the workforce, sexual liberation, body piercing, the fashion industry, and so forth.

But the real problem with Skal is not his sociopolitical analysis–it’s his horror-historical one. Skal subtitled his book A Cultural History of Horror; unfortunately he uses the amorphousness of that second word to justify an arbitrary placement of emphasis on certain aspects of horror art while unreasonably ignoring others, all in an ill-conceived and quixotic quest to Say Something About Life, accuracy be damned. Skal’s previous efforts in the horror-crit field include books on the long road Dracula took on its path from book to movie and a biography of Tod Browning, Dracula’s (and Freaks’s) director; it’s unsurprising and disappointing, then, that a full third of The Monster Show is devoted to detailing these pet subjects in the guise of using Tod Browning’s life as a metaphor, that of America-as-freak-show. Skal inflates the importance of these films and filmmakers (particularly that of the influential but still obscure Freaks) at the direct expense of other important facets of early film horror (Frankenstein is by no means uncovered, but it’s goofy to give it no more space than Freaks; James Whale, director of Frankenstein and its Bride, is given scant mention compared to the far less technically competent, and not really even all that more interesting, Tod Browning). Skal also puts a bizarrely strong emphasis on the gruesome work of photographer Diane Arbus: Well and good, but I can think of several equally or more viable candidates for giving the low art of horror the gloss of high-art legitimacy–Dali, Magritte, Bacon (Skal does at least try with him), Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Reed, Bowie, Fellini, Scorsese, Lynch…the selection of Arbus seems due almost completely to the fact that she’s known to have seen Freaks in a movie theater.

Skal also misreads the third horror archetype (in addition to Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula; he also cites Freaks, but c’mon, already) as Jekyll & Hyde; J&H were the obvious inspiration for the Hollywood werewolf concept, but the Stevenson story was merely the John the Baptist for the Jesus Christ of Lon Cheney Jr’s Wolf Man (linked inextricably with the Bela Lugosi Dracula and the Boris Karloff Frankenstein by generation after generation of American kids, who really never have a definitive Jekyll/Hyde image in mind). In a misguided attempt to pinpoint the moment at which Dracula and Frankenstein (the monster) became linked in the public consciousness, he spends a chapter detailing the misadventures of one Horace Liveright, an American bohemian and would-be multimedia impresario who finagled the screen rights to Dracula and attempted to do the same with Frankenstein. But Liveright failed in the latter attempt; why Skal focuses on him instead of any number of the members of the British theatrical troupe that formed the backbone of the story (producing and performing, as they did, simultaneous stage adaptations of the two horror classics) is a complete mystery. Additionally, Skal gives short shrift to the zombie and serial-killer/mass-murderer archetypes, too, discussing them (when he does so at all) as subsets of the Vampire/Dracula image, whereas in horror films and literature of today they’re clearly their own entities, drawing on their own sets of themes and fears.

It’s not until Skal reaches the 1960s, though, that the book really loses the plot. He abandons his almost strictly chronlogical approach for one that bounces erratically back and forth between the 60s, 70s, and 80s, nominally in an attempt to point out more of the underlying tropes which he had previously pinpointed quite well. This time, however, all he really manages is a cogent summary of the birth-trauma cycle that began with Rosemary’s Baby, included much of David Cronenberg’s work, and reached its apotheosis with Alien and Eraserhead. Even there he’s sloppy, not even bothering to mention The Omen and perfunctorily shoehorning the complex issues of The Exorcist into a two-or-three-graf subsection. The slasher cycle is hardly mentioned, excised in favor of exploring the real-life subculture that’s as fixated on Dracula as Skal seems to be and launching into a condescending analysis of the work of Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis. The seismic, seminal King Kong, Psycho, and The Exorcist are inarguably three of the most important horror films of the 20th Century, yet a gossipy chronicle of the life and times of Maila Nurmi, better known as the schlocky-sexy 1950s TV personality Vampira, takes up twice the space in the book of those three films combined. As if that weren’t unforgivable enough, films like Night of the Living Dead, the Hammer horror pictures, Kubrick’s The Shining, and (the vastly overrated but still important) A Nightmare on Elm Street (as well as its sequels) are barely mentioned, while an almost comically wide range of key films from Metropolis to M to the Creature from the Black Lagoon to Peeping Tom to The Birds to the Italian gialli directors to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Jaws to Halloween to the Friday the 13th series to Aliens aren’t even discussed at all! And this is to say nothing of movies that, while not horror per se, helped pave the way for the increased viscerality and intensity of modern horror: You’ll find bupkis about Tittitcut Follies, Bonnie & Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction, Saving Private Ryan, etc.; Un Chien Andalou and Fellini Satyricon get one-line throwaway mentions. Even contemporary horror’s real-life analogues–the modern-day media superstars known as serial killers–go undiscussed; Gacy and Dahmer are mentioned in passing, Manson, Whitman, Speck, Ramirez, Fish, and the Stranglers Hillside and Boston not at all. The JFK assassination is also glossed over, nearly unforgivable given that the Zapruder film could well be seen as the most popular splatter flick of all time. As for the horror-genre influence on the work of the 1970s young bucks like Lucas and Scorsese, fugghedaboudit; the closest you’ll come is a recounting of Coppola’s over-ambitious Dracula remake and an anecdote from Steven Spielberg about how he used to love reading Famous Monsters of Filmland.

(Actually, Skal’s socio-politics do get problematic, even bizarre. For the most part it’s limited to the excessive but harmless Freudian phallocentrism that Eve detected–for the love of David, man, the poses of the Aurora model-kit monsters did not secretly evoke masturbation–but occasionally, as in his out-of-left-field assault on gender-change operations as Frankensteinian affronts to womanhood or his paranoid rant about the Human Immunodeficiency Virus not really being the cause of AIDS (is he taking med school classes with Thabo Mbeki?), the author veers into bona fide crackpot territory. It’s as distracting as it is disturbing.)

Am I glad I read the book? Oh, sure. I can’t get enough of this kind of stuff, and as I said there’s plenty of little diamonds in that great big rough. But the gaping holes in Skal’s canon are too wide to be ignored even by the most charitable horror fan. I said before that Skal gave himself too much leeway with the second word of his subtitle; I think that ultimately what killed this beast was the first word. This truly was a cultural history of horror–David J. Skal’s. The cultural history of horror has yet to be written.

The horrorblog bounty is nigh inexhaustible these days.

Johnny Bacardi has completed his list of his favorite (he emphasizes that they’re not “the best”) horror films. It’s interesting to me that he seems to like almost all of them for the fun factor, not the fright factor. I’ve never really dug on horror movies for that reason–at least not as a teen or grownup; when I was a kid I loved good ol’ fashioned Universal Pictures creature features, and holy jeez was I a Godzilla fan. But now, I want to be scared shitless, so any list of my favorite horror films will at least have pretensions towards being a list of “the best” ones (insofar as the scariest ones are the best).

Franklin Harris offers some do’s and dont’s for cable-TV Halloween movie-watching. His list seems like a good one to me.

Franklin also talks about his favorite horror director, Italian horror pioneer Mario Bava.

Eve Tushnet does her own rambly horror round-up, summarizing four separate approaches to/explanations of horror, including my own favorite.

Meanwhile, Eve’s post on Magritte really got me to thinking about what I love in Magritte’s work, and yes, it’s undoubtedly the horror characteristics. (I think the same applies to the only other artist (non-comics, that is) of whose work I bought a book, Salvador Dali.) Magritte is a master of the monumental horror image–the bulk of his work is dedicated to showing things that ought not be shown, presenting them in the dead center of a static frame, lighting them so that there can be no room for doubt as to what you are witnessing, letting the existence of the image itself, and not any threat the image engenders, create the frisson of horror within the viewer. Look at The Pleasure Principle, Discovery, Man with Newspaper, The Tomb of the Wrestlers, The Castle in the Pyrenees, Poison, the entire series of portraits in which people are replaced by coffins–this is the pointless, debased riot of nonsense that is “reality,” he’s saying. Look. Feast your eyes.

(As you’ll notice if you track down the paintings listed above, Magritte’s titles are also chillingly brilliant, casting a pall over the viewer’s perception of what they about to see as surely as a title like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would. They’re almost as good as the paintings themselves.)

Finally, David Fiore has opened up a whole nother blog in order to expand on his already expansive theories about popular art. The thing is formatted in such a way that it’s nearly impossible for me to read it with my web browser, but you’re welcome to check it out–here’s a post on the villain in The Turn of the Screw.

Antipopper has some interesting things to say about David Bowie’s art-funk masterpiece Station to Station. I think Anti vastly overrates contemporary R&B, which, with the exception of Timbaland/Missy, the occasional interesting song Dr. Dre manages to crap out (one a year, usually; cf. “In Da Club” and “Lay Low”), and the Neptunes’s one good idea which they’ve now somehow parlayed into an empire, is the most joyless, artless, mercenary music I can think of since mid-80s power balladry. On the other hand, the bits about the scratchy aridity of disco guitar and the black-or-whiteness of Bowie & Prince are quite smart. (BTW, “Stay,” from this very album, is the forgotten Bowie masterpiece, and probably my favorite Bowie song of all time. Sexy, propulsive, funky, heavy, futuristic, human, rockandroll.

Also, this is a rare find: I disagree with both the letter and the spirit of virutally everything this Forager post about Tolkien says!

Just when I think the grotesque bulwark of medieval intolerance and stupidity known as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church couldn’t get any more offensive, along comes some nitwit in a funny hat who goes around telling people that condoms don’t stop AIDS transmission.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; this is the kind of horseshit I was spoonfed for four years in high school, where they all but said that condoms cause AIDS. They also spoke reverently of William Donohue, the loudmouthed theocratic thug who runs an organization of likeminded individuals called the Catholic League, which works round-the-clock to take my books and my movies and my music away from me because apparently the Baby Jesus gets really worried about such things–this is also the guy who was screaming at the top of his lungs defending this latest batch of flat-earth malarkey from the Vatican on the Today show this morning.

Of course, back in high school, I may have been so stunned by hearing sentences like “The Inquisition had some good points–the Jews were always given a chance to recant” (an actual quote from sophomore year History of Salvation II class) that the condom bit didn’t really register.

Freud.

There, just wanted to say the word, make sure you’d be sticking around. You are? Great! Because we’ll be talking a bit about the Original Cigar Aficionado today, I’m afraid. Turns out that in addition to his contribution, if not the invention, of the field of psychoanalysis, Freud also contributed one of the seminal (groan) works in the field of horror criticism, too–his essay “The ‘Uncanny.'” Freud’s project was not unlike my own: He was attempting to pinpoint what people found weird (in the old-school, bizarre-cum-creepy sense) and frightening, and why.

Unsurprisingly he traced the power of horrific images back to repressed memories, of both the individual-infantile and somethin close to the collective-sociohistorical varieties. I summarize his approach in the ol’ thesis, but what we’re talking about today is his analysis of the doppleganger, or double. Freud theorized that the frightening power of such entities stems from its ability to force us to recall such forgotten mental processes like “primary narcissim” (if I recall correctly, this meant that as infants we projected our own personalities onto pretty much everything we encountered–we were our world, and our world was us) and the ego’s formation of a conscience (a process once reassuring, but now, made literal, one we find terrifying).

Freudian “doubling” is a powerful and recurrent theme in horror art. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Caligari and the sleepwalking Cesare, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the Wolf Man and his human alter ego: these are the obvious cases. But one could go even further to say that the entire concept of “monster” is one of doubling–creating a separate, threatening, yet somehow appealing personification of the primal and unsociable drives that the hero or heroine of the story (and by extension the viewer) unconsciously deny.

Speaking of unconscious, my own understanding of this concept is pretty shallow, and indeed I had next to no knowledge of it during the bulk of my studies back in college. It was only when I put together my thesis that I encountered The Double as explicity articulated, and attempted to re-articulate it myself. But in looking back on the horror-related papers I wrote during college in preparation for Where the Monsters Go, I was surprised to see doubling recur, in one form or another, in several otherwise unrelated essays. I figured, Why not make a day of it?

So here are three essays (downloadable as PDFs) that deal with doubles.

The first concerns the pervasive theme of duality and doubles in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, focusing specifically on images and scenes involving mirrors and reflections. One of the fun things about Kubrick is that with him more than almost any other filmmaker one can be confident that any given thing going on in one of his films is not happening by accident. This makes even the closest reading of his work a worthwhile, undistorted peek into his intentions and obsessions. The amount of mirroring going on in The Shining is almost incredible–it’s practically like the “all work and no play” manuscript in its repetitious intensity. I think fans of the film would enjoy this little paper of mine on the topic.

The second deals with the 1913 German horror film The Student of Prague and its 1926 remake. The storyline of both concerns a rambunctious but impoverished student named Baldwin who makes a Faustian bargain that leads to the creation of an evil doppleganger; the essay discusses this and other motifs in the films, and depicts (in light of the historical theses of expressonist-film theoretician Siegfried Kracauer) how the two films serve as “doubles” of one another as well. I think it ends up as an interesting examination of the preoccupations of these films, two of the earliest in the cycle of German expressionist/horror films (and by extension some of the earliest in the larger German-influenced American horror-film cycle of the 1930s and ’40s).

The third concerns Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, which were the first two films in the Hellraiser series, the ones with which Barker himself was most involved, and the only ones worth watching. Here I’m focusing on a more oblique form of doubling: the duality of body and mind as depicted in these viscerally horrific movies. Using Steven Shaviro’s essay on David Cronenberg, “Bodies of Fear,” as a starting point, I try to pinpoint what Barker is trying to say about the horrors and delights of physical experience. It’s a very different thing than what his friend and fellow horror visionary Cronenberg is getting at.

I do hope you enjoy the essays. Though they suffer from the twin faults of undergraduate film studies prose–occasional jargonese and pervasive breathy prose (how many times can I use the words “powerfully” and “masterpiece”?)–I think they’re strong, and sometimes revelatory, despite this. Take a minute–or two–and see what you think.

Lots and lots and lots of good stuff, once again. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed.

If yr interested, here’s what ’90s superstar Marc Silverstri’s art for the final issues of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men will look like. I actually like this stuff a little better than I like Jim Lee’s, though once again I’ll say that a good story (and Morrison’s is one of the best) can make decent art look great.

NeilAlien continues to hold his minions in suspense as regards Dr. Strange’s recent high-profile apperances in Amazing Spider-Man, Thor: Vikings, and David Fiore’s weblog. To paraphrase Godspell, When wilt thou save the fanboys, Neil?

Courtesy of the ‘Alien, here’s a swell bit of “knock it off, knuckleheads” from Bookslut’s Karin Kross, directed toward mainstream-media comics reviewers who feel the need to slag the medium in order to justify their praise of one of its products.

Along related lines, Jim Henley skewers Big John Byrne‘s jaw-droppingly dumb assertion that mature-readers comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns “should never have happened,” for the sake of the kids who apparently wander into these books in droves looking for the happy-go-lucky supercharacters they knew from SuperFriends or whatever. Personally, I think no response more detailed than “Jesus, what a tool” need be offered, but good for Jim. Actually, Jim just sticks to a relatively minor technicality in Byrne’s argument, pointing out that virtually no one on Earth even knows that Watchmen was based on goofy old superhero characters from a defunct company, let alone bought and read the book because of that knowledge. But the really egregious thing about Byrne’s line of reasoning (despite its self-serving attempt to explain why poor ol’ John’s books don’t sell–it’s all the fault of those miserable child-corrupting assholes Miller and Moore! Actually, he’s probably on to something there, though not in the way he intends) is the Werthamesque notion that comics–even something as near-universally maligned as the superhero-genre subset of comics–ought not depict certain things. So much great art has been made from taking something seen as “inherently for children” and making it for grown-ups over the centuries that Byrne’s argument is virtually stillborn. Look at the updates of “Hansel & Gretel” that are Night of the Hunter and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the development of the sock-hop genre of rock and roll into Bob Dylan and the Beatles–I mean, need I even go on? I find the notion that some art forms or genres are inherently childish, immature, incapable of or improper for delivering stories of mature and real power to be the most offensive, elitist canard currently swimming its way through the murky waters of popcult criticism and theory; the fact that this notion is apparently shared by some of comics’ retrograde nostalgia-mongers is equal parts disturbing and unsurprising.

Jim also exhorts us to prepare for a Captain America “sermon”. I’m ready.

Eve Tushnet attempts to sell the conventions of superhero comics as potential strengths, not inherent weaknesses, and does so by way of Hamlet. I, for one, am buying–as is, of all people, Marvel president Bill Jemas. In his storytelling guidelines for Epic submissions (as summarized in Marville #7), Jemas instructed would-be supercomics creators to keep in mind that the conventions and tropes of superherodom, particularly the superpowers themselves, should…well, I’ll quote Eve, since it’s basically exactly what Jemas was saying:

The thing comics-about-comics forget is that superhero conventions arise for a reason. They speak to something–sometimes a good thing, sometimes a rotten thing–in human nature. They resonate. That resonance–what it reveals, what it obscures, what it gets wrong about the world and what it gets right–is what your story should be about.

As Jemas put it, stories about a mild-mannered but somewhat obsessive scientist being transformed during fits of rage into a giant green monster–good. Stories about that giant green monster being transmogrified into a smaller, gray, sarcastic, streetwise mob enforcer–not so good.

Waiting patiently for J.W. Hastings‘s take on Squadron Supreme, Mark Gruenwald’s magnum opus and a very early stab at “revisionist superheroes.” I actually enjoyed the book quite a bit more than I thought I would: despite its burden of unnatural and cheesy 70s/80s comicspeak dialogue and narration, and the fact that Gruenwald’s ideas seem to have outstripped his ability to execute them, I thought the book was a very effective (and, much to my delight, affecting) examination of superheroes taking the use of their powers to the logical extreme. The resonance in today’s political climate is perhaps even stronger than it was when Gru wrote the thing. I’d also like to take this opportunity to reiterate that I’m enjoying J. Michael Straczynski’s update of the Squadron Supreme saga (which was itself a knock-off of the Justice League), Supreme Power. Lots of folks have been pointing out that this sort of thing has been done a million times already–here’s Steven Grant responding to the general phenomenon and John Jakala taking down an upcoming Chuck Austen manifestation of the trend–but I’m just not convinced that every revisionist-superhero book needs to be some Bold Step Forward In The History Of Mainstream Superhero Comics, as were Miracleman, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (that revisionist book’s impact won’t be felt for another couple of years, I think), the various Warren Ellis superteams, and (to, I think, a lesser extent) Marvels, Kingdom Come, and the Mark Millar spinoffs and takeoffs from the Ellis-verse. Straczynski’s book has been well-paced and well-written so far, with less anger and more sadness and loneliness than the usual revisionist fare. And Gary Frank’s art has just been a joy for me to look at–like a more obsessively energetic Steve Dillon. I’ll keep buying the thing as long as it continues to entertain, regardless of whether or not it reinvents the revisionist wheel.

Jason Kimble has the latest in a series of posts about “decompression” in mainstream comics storytelling (i.e. every story takes six issues now), focusing on how the schizophrenic nature of contemporary comics publishing means that artistic and financial considerations are not just in conflict, but one in which each side’s victory is often a Pyrrhic one. This is very, very true: I’ve often wondered how much patience Marvel, say, will have with their Epic and Tsunami titles, created in theory for the bookstore audience (with, I think, eventual production as bookstore-friendly manga-format books in mind) but reliant on the Direct Market audience for up to a year before making their first appearance in a bookstore.

David Fiore has posted his completed thesis proposal, on the contemporization of Puritan themes by the Marvel comics of the 1960s and ’70s. Entertaining and educational, as I wish all theses were.

Alan David Doane is right: Bryan Miller is good (even when he’s wrong, which happens from time to time).

Miller’s site-mate Matt Martin offers a critique of Marvel’s recent Captain America output (Jim Henley, pay attention!) from a conservative perspective. Compare and contrast his reading of the John Ney Reiber Cap-versus-terrorists storyline with that of X-Axis’s Paul O’Brien. That two critics coming from completely opposite sides of the political spectrum could look at this story and both come away thinking it represented the absolute godawful worst of the other side shows just what a muddled, pathetic, pointless waste of time the damn thing was. (I happen to think it might also speak to the, how can I put this politely, lack of nuance in Martin and O’Brien’s respective political positions, but mainly, yeah, that story sucked.)

Finally, the threatened jettisoning of dead weight from my pull list has begun. This week I found myself abandoning 1602, 100 Bullets, and Kingpin. Not that any of them were terrible, mind you–I just realized that none of them were the kind of comics I can’t wait to read. That seems like a fair enough criterion to apply, don’t you think?

I don’t have much, right now. But godDAMN I’m enjoying my little brood of horrorbloggers. I’ll comment about these horrorcentric posts at length in due time, but for now:

Bill Sherman on five films that scared him.

Bill Sherman on Uzumaki.

Eve Tushnet on Rene Magritte.

Bruce Baugh on horror as language.

Bruce Baugh on different species of horror.

John Jakala (ahem) on Uzumaki, but unlike Bill’s take this includes an offer to buy it for you if you enter a little contest. Here’s what my entry will be:

THE OVERLOOK HAIKU

The destination

Of the soft-then-loud Big Wheels:

“Come and play with us”

(PS: Special thanks to Jason Adams for lending me copies of the film version of Battle Royale and a film I’d not heard of called Paperhouse. Intriguing….)

Kennyb, the Gandalf of the metaphorical campaign against Sauron that is AllTooFlat.com, has added some fun new functionalities here at ADDTF. Look to your left and you’ll find a search function (it’s pretty simple/simplistic, so remember to search using the bare-bones minimum word you need to find what you’re looking for) and an email submission form.

ADDTF: We are not lovers, we are not Romantics–we are here to serve you.

Not a fan of axe murderers, elder gods, and severe genital mutilation? Fear not! ADDTF hasn’t forgotten plain ol’ comic books!

Big Sunny D weighs in on New X-Men 147, an issue so good it almost made up for having the previous one spoiled for me (by the recently deposed dictator of Comicbookgalaxeria, Dr. Doane). I’m surprised, however, that Sunny didn’t comment on just how radical the changes wrought by #146’s “Big Reveal” have already become in the space of just one issue. Those of us who expected a “picking up where we left off”-style transition from the last panel of 146 to the first of 147 were in for an extremely rude awakening. To which I say “hell yeah.”

Franklin Harris squeezes Jess Lemon, the Pulse’s pseudonymonous reviewer and outrage-monger, over her soft-target panning of JLA/Avengers. I personally think writer Kurt Busiek took the lazy way out of putting this story together (and agree with the general consensus that the faces of the characters on the George Perez-drawn cover were all kinds of screwed up), but that’s really neither here nor there. Franklin is trying to draw the necessary distinction between the inherently outlandish formal and stylistic tropes of the superhero genre and the unforgivably bad execution of those tropes by a sadly vast majority of superhero comics creators. Lemon, he argues, is either too ignorant of the subject or too intent on getting a laugh at the expense of accuracy or insight to bother to separate the two, and therefore s/he blurs them in her demolition of JLA/A. In other words, using Starro the Conqueror isn’t any more or less silly than, say, having a guy wage a decades-long oceans-wide vendetta against a white sperm whale, and then actually having the guy find the whale and get killed by it. I guess you could argue that my “Hush” review was along the lines of what Franklin is arguing for: Believe me, few people appreciate the superhero genre more than I do, which is precisely why few people get more upset at shitty superhero comics than I do. There’s definitely stuff to complain about in JLA/A, but psychic-parasitic starfish and hand-fired laser beams probably aren’t among them–not for serious critics who don’t feel the need to earn street cred by taking potshots at genre conventions, at any rate.

On a related note, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing the blogosphere reach a tipping point when it comes to “Jess Lemon” in the near future. At their best, “her” reviews savage everything that needs savaging in mainstream comics and point out to an audience long past noticing that the spandex-clad emperor is actually butt nekkid. At their worst, however, they can be easy-peasy hatchet jobs that say little about the work in question or larger problems with the genre, industry, or medium, opting instead for verbal slapstick. In addition, I think there’s a growing consensus that writing these kinds of reviews under a pseudonym is a weak-kneed cop-out, particularly when (as is becoming clearer by the week) there’s not one but several writers lurking behind the Jess Lemon moniker. Hell, even messageboard posters with names like Logan_X are basically the same person every time you see their name used. This, of course, is to say nothing about the legion of reviewers, critics, bloggers and journalists who use their real name and say a lot nastier stuff than J.L., without even doing so simply for nastiness’ sake. Having one of the big mainstream news websites run bylined reviews of the sort “Jess Lemon” does would be a real kick in the ass of web-based comics criticism generally, and serve as an announcement to the publishers that the fanboy-based free ride on the Internet is pretty much over. Keeping up the Jess Lemon facade will look less and less like a fun parlor game and more and more like a great big responsibility dodge as time goes by.

Anyway, back to JLA/A: John Jalaka has a review round-up of this unexpectedly divisive book.

Forager mentions he’s got a review of Y: The Last Man in this month’s Comics Journal. The review, which is very good, points out that as entertaining as the book may seem, there’s just no there there. I think this problem is exacerbated, as is the case with many Vertigo & DC books, by the muddy green-browns and green-yellows of the coloring. Vertigo’s emphasis has never been art, and that’s fine, I guess, but I think more effort should be made to at least make it attractive and presentable, if not awe-inspiring. (Actually, the Journal review reprints some of artist Pia Guerra’s work on the book, and it’s amazing how comparatively lovely it looks in clear-line black and white.)

Speaking of colors (I love transitions!), Bill Sherman mentions Those Darn DC Earth Tones in his comics roundup of last week. He also echoes my take on Garth Ennis’s Thor: Vikings #3 and rebuts my take on Ennis’s Punisher: Born #4, both found here. (Bill, I think any wiggle room in that opening monologue is almost certainly unintentional….)

By the way, last week was another strong one for supercomics. Alias (despite its contrived would-be meta conversation, which is more than made up for by the genuinely disturbing conclusion), Astro City (best issue so far in this current miniseries), Savage Dragon (an homage to the old-school blood-and-boobs Dragon), Ultimate Spider-Man (interesting to see a certain character faring much better here than he does in the same author’s Daredevil), Ultimate Six (Jeph Loeb, take note: now that’s how you do a shocking surprise villain entry), Powers (man, Bendis is full of gruesome surprises this week, isn’t he?), New X-Men (see above), and Supreme Power (so what if it’s territory we’ve covered before? As long as it’s well-told and well draw, which this is, I’ll buy it. Gary Frank’s art is juicy and convincing, and the panel in which Hyperion rockets past the eardrum-holding troops in Iraq is like a modern-day Action Comics #1 cover). Not too shabby, O Mainstream.

But between Kavalier & Clay and David Fiore’s novel-to-be, I’m starting to wonder if prose descriptions of imaginary superheroes are better than comics depictions of “actual” superheroes themselves….

I’m happy to see that Where the Monsters Go is helping to make the blogosphere a slightly scarier place to be this October.

Novelist and gameswriter Bruce Baugh writes to say that WtMG has inspired him to begin doing some horrorblogging of his own. The results thus far have been impressive indeed. His first post on the subject touches on Electronic Voice Phenomena, William S. Burrough’s ability to draw a fearsome order out of seeming chaos, and the certainty (there’s that word again!) offered by the relentlessly apocalyptic visions of H.P. Lovecraft. His second focuses more on certainty, but also explores the notion that it’s the simplicity of a horror fiction’s diegetic universe that makes it horrifying (as it does not afford its protagonists the myriad non-horrific options that our own more complex, real cosmology offers), and takes a peak at schadenfreude as well. Intelligent stuff, and just the kind of thing I enjoy thinking about regarding horror. (And you thought it was all chainsaws and demonic possession. Ha!)

Meanwhile, Jason Adams grants my request and begins to explain his own undergrad senior thesis on horror films, an attempt to pin down the “fundamentals” of contemporary horror. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of someone trying to tie together horror films of such disparate intent and execution (and quality, IMHO) as the Elm Street and Friday the 13th series and The Silence of the Lambs–and so far, so convincing. I’d love to hear more. But no, you don’t have to rent The Wicker Man, because I’ll lend you my copy. All for one and one for gore.

I was pleased to read Big Sunny D got a lot out of my classification of Barton Fink as a horror film. I’d like to warn anyone who hasn’t seen this movie that it’s one you absolutely owe yourself to see completely unspoiled, so I won’t go into this too much yet. But suffice it to say that it’s not just the occasionally obvious horror touches (appropriate, since the film takes place at almost exactly the same time that the last great Universal horror film, The Wolf Man, was released) that make this film horror. Actually, Sunny’s comments have helped me make a big decision about the 13 Days of Halloween with which I plan on closing out the month. I’d been debating whether or not to include less straightforward “horror” movies in my little review marathon, just to try to make room for really Halloween-y stuff. But I think everyone will get more out of this if I go a little farther afield. Stay tuned….

Dirk Deppey nominates a scary comic book, but misreads my initial bleg: I wasn’t limiting the call to just stuff that scared you when you were a kid. Actually, that’s kinda the point–it’s tough to find any adult who finds comics scary in the same way as movies or books. Kid stuff maybe, but grownup stuff? Still searching.

Speaking of horror comics, in a rundown of some comics he’s looking forward to, Alan David Doane touts the work of Steve Niles. Unfortunately, this is one time I’ve got to split with my metaphorical horror mentor, Clive Barker, who provided a laudatory introduction for Niles’s breakthrough vampire story 30 Days of Night. I found 30 Days to be boring and predictable, with perfunctory characterizations, major plot holes, serious pacing problems, and an irritating climax. Moreover, to echo a criticism I heard I don’t remember where, the art by Ben Templesmith makes everything look “scary,” even the stuff that isn’t supposed to be. Try to imagine what The Exorcist would have been like if Regan had always looked like this and you’ll get the general idea. (And please don’t cite The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a counter-example. Caligari works because the expressionistic mise-en-scene reflects both the mental state of the characters (indeed, that of the narrator!) and the sociopolitical climate the screenwriters (at least) were trying to reflect. 30 Days looks that way because it’s “cool.”) Not my cup of tea. But hey, he’s pretty much singlehandedly put horror comics back in the spotlight. Now if only one would come along that actually deserves the spotlight.

Also speaking of horror comics, Shawn Fumo has a brief little link-laden post on girls’ horror manga. I think it says a lot that Japan has a whole subset of horror-genre comics for young women, while America can barely crank out a dozen serious horror titles for young men.

Franklin Harris blesses my little undertaking (heh heh) and plugs the alt.horror usenet group. I’ll be signing up soon, if only to plug the blog, so I’m steeling myself for getting terrorized by the good Mr. Harris.

Finally, Eve Tushnet blegs for a halfway decent haunted-ship movie. Good luck, man. I guess 2001, Alien and Jaws are close but no cigar, huh?

How the major news media is getting away with claiming the Kay Report said “we got nothing” (that’s an actual quote, by the way, from NBC White House correspondent Campbell Brown on The Chris Matthews Show this Sunday) is just beyond me. But maybe that’s because I always thought the job of the news media was to tell, you know, the truth. Anyway, I reiterate that you should read the actual report and draw your own conclusions. I’ll bet they’re different than Campbell Brown’s.

On a related topic (though he’ll insist they aren’t), Jim Henley makes some good points about how the Bush administration is super-un-conservative in the big-government sense of the word, but then says that “the national greatness types, and the Administration whose foreign and ‘defense’ policy they drive, are the salient threat to liberty in America today.” And here I thought the salient threat to liberty in America today was, y’know, terrorism. It certainly was for these people.

The scariest song I’ve ever heard is by Harry Chapin.

Yes, that Harry Chapin–the one who did “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Taxi” and “Circle” and so forth. (And no comments from the peanut gallery about “Cat’s in the Cradle” being scary enough, okay?) Harry Chapin was always a very, very big deal in my family. A fellow Long Islander, he was one of those musicians that both my rock-centric Dad and easy-listening show-tune-weaned Mom could agree upon. Moreover, he was always playing live shows at local Long Island venues, where my folks saw his surprisingly theatrical singer-songwriter stylings up close and personal many times. (They still sing the praises of his bass player’s stage presence.) In fact, they had tickets to the benefit concert in Eisenhower Park on route to which he died, at age 38, in a car accident on the LIE. Rare was the Sunday afternoon when Harry Chapin songs wouldn’t be playing on our stereo.

What motivated my mischievous Dad to play the song “Sniper,” from Chapin’s second album Sniper and Other Love Songs, on one such Sunday afternoon is a mystery to me. I guess he figured I’d get a kick out of how crazy it was. Indeed I did. But it’s more than crazy–it’s inventive, insightful, piercing, and, to me at least, unforgettable.

For starters, it really is about a sniper. It’s a vaguely fictionalized account of Charles Whitman’s August 1966 University of Texas clocktower rampage–an unusual topic for the man behind “Sunday Morning Sunshine.” But the earnestness with which Chapin imbued his folksy love songs serves this macabre subject well. Chapin is no more able to hide beind irony or ambiguity here than he is in his more romantic work, forcing the audience to come directly to terms with the horror of the sniper attack, and the tortured character of the sniper himself.

Over the course of the song’s 9 minutes and 55 seconds, Chapin and his dextrous backup band wind, segue, and careen from tempo to tempo, key to key, style to style. Here they’re conveying the quiet of the early morning campus, while the protagonist walks toward the clocktower. Here they’re mimicking the buzzing teletype and breaking-news noise of the special reports updating viewers and listeners on the shootings. Here they’re deploying simple, sparse staccato to simulate the slaying of yet another too-curious bystander. Here they’re using cello and chorus to depict the mournful, vengeful mother fixation of the title character. Here they’re building toward the climactic showdown between sniper and police, replete with gas-dropping helicopters and “final fusillade”s. And here they’re crescendoing to a “Day in the Life”-style nihilist’s triumph. A band trained for simplicity, their discipline serves them extraordinarily well, tempering excess and making every musical metaphor convincing.

Chapin’s vocals multitask in a similar fashion. After an introductory chant of the phrase “She said ‘not now'” (words whose significance will be made clear later on), Chapin begins singing as a third-person omniscient narrator, quietly setting the scene while peppering it with ominous foreshadowings: “It is an early Monday morning. The sun is becoming bright on the land,” he sings, firmly in his previously established singer-songwriter sunshine mode, before adding, “No one is watching as he comes a-walking; two bulky suitcases hang from his hand.” Later, the narrator begins taking on some of the sniper’s angry, mocking swagger: “So much to do,” he deadpans, “and so little time.”

When the music takes on its mock-(and mocking-)newscast tone, Chapin switches to a nasal vocal style redolent of bad radio reception or megaphone announcements, posing as several acquaintances interviewed about their now-infamous friend who respond with helpless we-didn’t-know platitudes like, “Always sorta sat there–he never seemed to change.” At other moments he adopts a matter-of-fact, tough guys doin’ a tough job delivery–“They set up an assault team. They asked for volunteers”–before raising his voice to mimick the rising panic of the city and its people–“in appropriately sober tones,” he says in anything but an appropriately sober tone, “they asked, ‘who can it be?‘”

But Chapin’s greatest achievement with “Sniper” is getting inside the labrynthine maze of self-pity, self-hatred, and self-aggrandizement that is its title character’s mind. Chapin frames the entire killing spree as a “conversation” the sniper has decided to have with “the city where no one can know him,” a conversation he initiated the only way he felt he could. “You won’t pay attention,” the sniper says, “but I’ll ask anyhow.” The question? “Am I?” The people of the city answer the sniper by dying at his hands. “The first words he spoke took the town by surprise: One got Mrs. Gibbons above her right eye,” Chapin informs us, stopping to fill in the gruesomely poetic details: “Reality poured from her face, staining the floor.” But even this sudden success in getting a response from the people he felt had ignored him is not enough to assuage the sniper’s misery, the source of which, of course, is rejection by Mother. At this point I feel I’m familiar enough with people in therapy, myself included, to know that this isn’t nearly as reductive a hypothesis for mental illness’s route cause as it’s made out to be. Chapin understood this, and in a lyrical triplet takes the sniper from abject infantile adoration to resentful murderous hatred, a journey one can assume the real-life sniper took himself, seeing as he killed his mother (and his wife) the night before the tower shootings.

It all builds up, needless to say, to the final moments, when police manage to reach the top of the tower and put an end to the sniper’s conversation with the world. But for the sniper himself, the point is moot: In killing him, the world has given him the answer he sought. “I was,” he thinks to himself in triumph as the bullets rip through him, “I am, and now, I will be.” As though just now waking up to this transcendent fact–the fact of his immortalization through the damage he has done, and through the legend he has become–the sniper repeats the last three words once more: “I will be.” The music soars and resounds and, like blood or gunsmoke, slowly flows away.

I thought about this song a lot around this time last year. The circumstances were different, of course: These new murders were mobile hit-and-runs rather than a massive attack. And they ended up being more different than we’d thought: A pair of killers, with Islamic terrorism mixed in as a motivation, rather than (or at least in addition to) the deranged loner with Oedipal rage. But put aside some of the specifics, and the tales told are nearly identical: of men so incapable of communicating their anger that they come to see murder as their only acceptable means of expression, of media that feed parasitically on death and those who produce it.

That listening to a song afforded me insight into and understanding of a human struggle makes it art. That that struggle involved an unblinking, unrepentant killer makes it horror.

A propos of yesterday’s WtMG item, I started a thread on the Comics Journal message board devoted to the topic. Some interesting suggestions are filtering in. Have a look. It’s certainly cool to have Renee French, creator of the hauntingly bizarre collection Marbles in My Underpants, weighing in. Some of the stories in that book–“Corny’s Fetish,” “Fistophobia,” “Mitch & the Mole,” “The Ream Family,” “Hi, my name is Cyndie”–are as disturbing as comix come. No monsters, no maniacs, but it’s horror, you bet.

The Lost Boys was the first rated-R movie I ever saw. As such I guess it was the first real horror movie I ever saw, too, but as it wasn’t particularly scary even when I first saw it–thrilling and exciting, yeah, and totally awesome in a more-violent-Ghostbusters sorta way, but not scary–I don’t tend to count it. Anyway, if you recall, two of the main characters were Edgar and Allen Frog, a couple of crazy pseudo-survivalist teenage brothers who helped run their parents comic shop. (Okay, that part was scary, but only because it’s so accurate a reflection on how most small comic shops are run.) Our hero Corey Haim’s response when the brothers Frog try to get him to read an old funnybook about vampires? “I don’t read horror comics.” Neither, really, do I–because I’ve yet to find one that’s particularly horrifying.

This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of disturbing comics. Renee French, Hans Rickheit, Dave Cooper, some of Dan Clowes’s work, Jim Woodring, the occasional sequence in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles–all can be either revolting or haunting, and in some cases both, but none of them have gotten my heart racing or kept me up at night like the best horror films or straight literature have. What’s come closest to that level? There are some things in the Clive Barker comic compilations that Checker has been releasing that are very good (such as Klaus Janson’s adaptation of the masterful short story “In the Hills, the Cities”), but much of the power of those works is from the prose stories they’re based on. Charles Burns’s Black Hole is very, very good, and I’ve got a feeling it’s building toward something genuinely frightening, but it’s still incomplete and therefore tough to evaluate. The only comic-book image I can think of that was tough to endure looking at for long in the same way that, say, the twins from The Shining or the chalk-white demon face in The Exorcist are, is of all things a splash page from the Man-Thing/Lizard issue of Brian Michael Bendis’s Spider-Man spinoff series Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. Artist John Totleben created an image of the Man-Thing and the Lizard that lined up perfectly with my monumental horror-image theories. But that’s really all I can think of–not a good sign considering how many freaking comics I’ve read and how likely I am to seek out the nasty stuff.

So consider this a bleg for recommendations. Got any horror comics that are actually, you know, scary? You can send me your thoughts here. I’ve heard good things about the manga series Uzumaki–anything else? Here’s your chance to help a horror fan in need….

I heard my first big-media Kay-Report recap yesterday, on WCBS 880AM New York, while driving home from the train station. I nearly couldn’t believe my ears that CBS News was leading not with the “no actual WMDs” angle but with the “lots and lots of WMD programs and intent to develop actual WMDs as soon as possible” angle. Holy crap, I thought, but the news media is actually going to report the non-BUSHLIED! parts of this story!

Then came the cold, harsh light of this morning, and you get this sort of thing. It beats the living shit out of the fact that they didn’t turn up a Batcave full of loaded anthrax bombs, then peppers that pesky part about how Saddam had every intention of getting back to the WMD business the second the French & Russians got those sanctions lifted with enough “some”s and “signs that”s and attempts to cast the whole thing in a “hey, this isn’t the final report, folks, we can still pull something out of our sleeves” they’re-still-lying negativism to choke a horse. And we’re not even talking about their usual stealth-mode front-page anti-Bush editorial “news analysis.”

Do yourself a favor: Read the actual report. Or read Andrew Sullivan’s analysis thereof.

If you’re interested, here’s my breakdown of this whole situation:

1) Saddam Hussein had every intention of continuing to develop WMDs, and had devoted countless man-hours and billions of dollars into creating a program specifically, and explicitly, designed for optimum concealability. He lied about these programs to the UN despite the fact that the post-Gulf War I ceasefire was conditional upon his honesty and compliance. These programs are documented in-depth in this report.

2) The same countries and parties that opposed the war in favor of sanctions tended almost to a man to have once been in favor of removing the sanctions altogether on understandable humanitarian grounds. If the sanctions had been lifted, the WMD program would have restarted in earnest and produced WMD materials within months.

3) Once war became an option due to the insistence of the Blair and Bush administrations, one-time opponents of sanctions then became sanction advocates, essentially promoting an ineffectual regime of economic punishments that enriched Saddam and his Baathist affiliates while keeping the citizens of Iraq in poverty and under the rule of a murderous tyrant and his would-be successor sons.

4) Saddam Hussein was an aggressive mass murderer with a proven track record of starting wars with his neighbors despite guaranteed massive reprisals and almost no demonstrable benefit to his regime or his country, had used WMDs in one of those wars, and had torched oil wells and opened pipelines into the sea in the other despite the “deterrent” threat of nuclear retalliation by the U.S. were he to do so. He was in essence “undeterrable.”

5) By ALL accounts Saddam Hussein was believed to have WMDs and WMD programs, to have lied to and thwarted inspectors, and to have violated the conditions of the ceasefire (though this was often couched in the far less consequential vocabulary of “violating UN resolutions”). Democracts, Republicans, the US, the UK, France, and on and on and on agreed on these points.

6) The Bush Administration never claimed the threat from Iraq was “imminent,” and never based their case for war on such a claim. They argued that the threat should be eliminated BEFORE it became imminent.

My own personal “argument for war” was never terribly contingent on WMDs, because I can’t stand fascism and enjoy seeing fascists be deposed and destroyed just on principle. But to me, this report seals the WMD-argument deal as well. The negative spin placed on the report seems to stem from journalists and commentators who are doctrinairily opposed either to the war or, perhaps more to the point, to the Bush Administration itself.

I’ve had a request to make my thesis available in HTML. I don’t really have the time or the patience to convert the whole shmear, but here’s the beginning of it. It lays out my proposal for what is the “definitive” horror image type (though it doesn’t really explain it; you’ll have to download the PDF to get all that info). It’s a helpful guide to where I’m coming from in my approach to horror and will help make the rest of my horror posts make sense (well, some).

I should warn you that there are spoilers involved (mainly for the end of The Wicker Man–if you haven’t seen that wonderful movie, then when you start seeing me describe it, run away!).

—–

Yale University

The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film

The Senior Essay

Film Studies 491a

B. Peucker, Advisor

by Sean Thomas Collins

New Haven, Connecticut

13 December 1999

It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world…. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.

Suspense, or tension, I guess, is the word commonly used to describe that inertial period in horror focused not on something happening, but on the potential that something is going to happen. However, tension, or suspense or what have you, is tied to the notion that what you are being caused by the filmmaker to expect to happen may or may not do so–that’s the stuff of thrillers, not horror. No, there’s something far more… delicious about knowing, without being verbally told, that what you dread happening is about to happen, inexorably, inevitably. It’s this prolonged frisson of certainty that helps make good horror so satisfyingly horrifying.

I think this is why a film like The Shining actually gets scarier upon repeated viewing. The first time you see Danny turn the corner on his Big Wheels, there’s that scary Big Reveal of the little girls–terrifying, no doubt, for all the reasons detailed here. But in each subsequent viewing, you know what’s coming; since there’s more to the horror-image in question than mere jump-out-atcha shock tactics, this foreknowledge (foreboding?) actually enhances the horror, instead of detracting from it.

That same factor is at work, I believe, in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. I watched it last weekend and was struck once again by how masterfully Shyamalan creates an almost instantaneous foreknowledge of horror, making those tense build-ups (when Merrill watches the newscast from Rio, for example, or when Graham’s flashlight goes out in the cornfield) unbearable, almost sensually so. Again, it’s not just the fear of being startled by something jumping out at you–that’s certainly part of it, but in addition to that primal (infantile) fear of the short sharp shock there’s the awful certainty that something bad–something wrong–is going to show up. Indeed, Shyamalan himself capitalizes on the horror-increasing potential of certainty–in the newscast scene he actually has the videotaped footage of the alien’s appearance digetically rewound and re-shown. The man clearly understands the horrifying power of repeat viewing!

To ramble a bit, I think that similar forces are at play in those forms of popular music that capitalize on near-mathematically induced emotional-crescendo-through-repetition: electronic dance music (the keyboard-hating youngster in me always wants to refer to it with the catch-all term “techno,” but that refers to a specific subset, so no can do), funk, and prog- or math-rock.

When I first got into funk (thanks to a four-stage assault on my ass by Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns’ “A Blow for Me, a Toot to You,” the JBs’ “Doin’ It to Death,” (and especially) Herbie Hancock & the Headhunters’ “Watermelon Man” and a live recording of Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s “Very Yes”), I was struck by how the repetition and predictability of the grooves, far from negating their impact as would be the case with predictable Top 40 pap-pop, actually enhanced or indeed embodied the songs’ appeal. Those moments of THE BOMB–when a groove that has been slowly building to the horn-laden cathartic explosion you knew was coming fiiiiinally gets there–are made so powerful, so funky, by their very inevitability.

I quickly realized that this same principle applied to my favorite electronic acts: Orbital (during the suite on the eponymous record known as the Brown Album) and especially Underworld (during, well, pretty much everything, but “Born Slippy.NUXX,” “Cowgirl,” “Pearls Girl” and “Moaner” deserve special attention–as does their improvisatory and triumphant live album Everything Everything, a recording based in no small part on playing off listener recognition that their favorite part of their favorite song is slowly being woven into the sonic tapestry…closer…closer…yeah!).

Moving over to the math-rock set, they tend to put the “awful” back into the “certainty” equation. Witness the ever-mounting one-note menace of King Crimson’s “Starless,” the timid-yet-insistent plucking atop the bass juggernaut in Tool’s cover of Peach’s “You Lied,” or the crescendoing synthesized chorus of the damned in Nine Inch Nails’ wordless “Just Like You Imagined.”

Call it the Collins Certainty Principle if you will. Used by funk & electronic dance acts, it yields an almost erotic dose of musical bliss. Used by dark prog bands and horror films, it yields an equally sensual payload of purest terror. Either way, prolonged frisson from certainty.