I reread It last month, and re-watched the TV miniseries based on it.

1. I don’t know why I never noticed this before–possibly because this was the first time I read one right after the other–but It has got to be the most Clive Barker-influenced Stephen King work around. Chronologically, It was after Barker’s Books of Blood began having their seismic impact on horror fiction, and King’s enormously effusive praise for the collections (as quoted on said collections’ covers) would indicate they had quite an effect on him as well. The most obvious link is the quote from Barker’s short story “The Midnight Meat Train” that King uses as an epigraph to one of It’s subsections, but the very idea of the book–a telepathic shapeshifting creature whose actual physical shape is all but incomprehensible kills and eats children–could for all intents and purposes be a lost Books of Blood chapter, simply blown up to a gargantuan length and sprinkled liberally with Neil Young and Jerry Lee Lewis references.

2. I’m struck by how many friends of mine who’ve read the book instantly reference the pre-adolescent group sex scene towards the book’s end when I tell them I’m re-reading the novel, especially in contrast with how little this scene seems to be brought up when King’s work is discussed in general. It’s a genuinely outre bit of writing, and given the sexual mores of this country I’m a little bit surprised that it hasn’t landed the book and its author in more trouble than it has. (I happen to think it’s remarkable and speaks directly to the primordial sexual feelings of that age group–I remember thinking that when I first read the book, back when I was part of that age group–but I’m surprised that this is not a discussion I’ve ever had the opportunity to have.)

3. Aside from Barker, surely the other huge looming influence in It is Tolkien. Even aside from the references to Shelob and the fall of Barad-Dur and Mordor that form the core of the book’s climax, the book has much in common with The Lord of the Rings, from the “sleeping shadow that is once again taking shape” angle to the constant glimpses of ancient history that are only partially explained (if even partially–we get no more an answer for why Pennywise’s “human” name is Mr. Robert Gray than we do for what the hell the Watcher in the Water is, but of course that’s what makes both so fascinating to me.)

4. Did you realize that from the time each of the grown-ups receives the phone call asking them to come back to Derry to the time their quest is fulfilled is something less than 48 hours? Maybe even less than 36? I never would have guessed that it took that little time before rereading it last month.

5. Only now do I realize how impressive it is of King to place the entire saga’s lynchpin scene–the blood pact sworn by the protagonists’ younger selves–at the very, very end of the action, after we’ve seen the entire rest of the story from beginning to end (save the postscript stuff). It’s not just structurally risky for a maker of bestsellers, but emotionally quite beautiful as well.

6. I don’t know what this says about me, but I’ve read this book (I think) three times now, and this is the first time the depictions of child and animal abuse got to me at all. But my god, did it get to me. I cried several times.

7. A haunted town–more specifically a town that’s grown quietly evil because of that haunting. What a great idea!

8. And it’s haunted by an evil clown monster–another great idea!

9. Casting Tim Curry as that evil clown monster–ANOTHER great idea!

10. That said, the TV miniseries sure did muck up a lot, didn’t it? A lot of strangely arbitrary changes were made, like making the death of Ben Hanscomb’s father in Korea a big deal. First of all, was that even in the book? I don’t think it was. Second, why introduce that? I would imagine that being a fat kid has an entire wealth of psychic scars a writer could exploit without the introduction of the slain air force captain father angle. King managed just fine. Making Richie a stand-up comic instead of a disc jockey, keeping Eddie with his mother instead of marrying him off–lots of little things like that were just sorta annoying to me.

11. More importantly, the TV movie misconstrues the entire nature of It (the monster, not the novel named after it). It can appear as whatever frightens its intended audience the most–that much the movie gets right. But in the movie, that’s all it is–an appearance. Time and time again the characters repeat to themselves things along the lines of “it’s all in my head,” “you’re not real,” etc., and then they open their eyes and POOF! Pennywise or whatever It’s transformed itself into are gone. But the WHOLE POINT of the book is that It IS real, which is why it’s able to kill and eat people rather than just startle them, duh. When It appears as the Teenage Werewolf or the Creature from the Black Lagoon or a giant statue of Paul Bunyan or a swarm of flying leeches the size of your middle finger, It really is there, in that form, and able to get you. The only time characters think “this isn’t real” to themselves in the book is when It takes the form of a relative or friend of theirs–Bill’s slain brother George, Beverly’s dead father Al, the group’s dead friend Stan, etc.–and what they mean is not “this is just a mirage, like a hologram,” it’s “this isn’t ACTUALLY my brother/father/friend come back to life to kill me.” But that It-in-human-form REALLY IS there, and it REALLY CAN kill you. This should not have been a hard concept to comprehend and work with.

12. The qualitative difference between the cast of It and the cast of The Stand turned out to be a fairly substantial one, huh? But it’s not just the folly of having Harry Anderson in a lead role that scuppered It–it’s the aforementioned lack of imagination when it came to translating King’s ideas, and of course a lack of time in which to let King’s sprawling storyline play itself out. I’d love to see one of the cable nets take a crack at doing a season-long maxiseries adaptation of the book, with all the violence and sex and vicious small-town bigotry and hatred intact.

13. Back to the book for a moment, did Eddie’s wife never bother asking what happened to him? Given what King went out of his way to teach us about her, I think it’s far more likely that the author just didn’t bother tying up that particular loose end. Sloppy, but forgivable, given the strength of the rest of the book.

14. One other loose end–King establishes, through the glimpes into the town’s history provided by librarian/historian Mike Hanlon, that each of Its feeding “cycles” begins and ends with a spectacular eruption of bloodshed–a mass axe murder, a gangland massacre, a factory explosion, a racist arson attack, etc. But what were the massive attacks that began either of the two cycles the book chronicles? Obviously they were cut short before the final outburst, but the beginnings should have worked the same as always, right? Another authorial oversight?

15. All in all it’s a really rich combination of various horror strains: King’s “recurring power of evil” theme, Barkerian “shifting anatomies” and transgressive victimization, Tolkienesque “shadow,” ’50s drive-in monsters, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, urban legends, haunted houses, fairy tales, serial killers, sordid small-town secrets, god knows what-all else. I’m very happy I reread it.

ADDTF co-blogfather Bill Sherman writes in regarding yesterday’s post about A History of Violence, King Kong, and the uncomfortable moments in both:

Re: your thoughts about art that makes people feel uncomfortable. Personally,

I find that there

Malarkey, Drudge. It may have had a relatively low opening day, but it opened on a Wednesday in a cold December before anyone has off from work or school with no built-in Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings/Star Wars-style hardcore fanbase that rushes to opening night, and it’s getting outrageously good word of mouth. It’s going to do just fine. It’s also a pretty handy barometer for just how messed up Hollywood has gotten itself that a movie’s being pronounced a bomb before it’s been out 24 hours.

I finally saw it last night, in the last theatre in New York that was showing it (the Village East, site of the Rocky Horror screenings of my youth.) I thought it was pretty terrific.

It amazes me, though, that critics (both liberal and conservative) really seem to believe this was some finger-wagging statement about The Violence At The Heart Of The American Experience–in essence, “Norman Rockwell Lied, People Died.” (In the battle for the crown of Most Tedious between left-leaning critics who find a kick to America’s junk in every movie and applaud and the right-leaning critics who do the same and boo, the left-leaners lose, but not by much.) First of all, all of the violent people in this film actually hail from big cities–hardly the indictment of Small Town America we’re supposed to see it as. And secondly, Cronenberg went out of his way to make the Americana aw-shucks-apple-pie-small-town stuff as transparently cliched and TV-movie as possible, almost–but not quite–to the film’s detriment. Cronenberg is an extraordinary filmmaker and also, perhaps more relevantly, no dope–why would he do that, if not to undercut that too-pat reading of the film? (Seriously, did no mainstream critics pick up on this? Bizarre.)

Consistent with his work in other, more on-the-surface-weird films, Cronenberg is a philosopher, not a politician, and this movie was not about America’s Love Affair With Guns or some other bit Michael Moore demagoguery for the New Yorker set–it was, like all his films, about the extremes to which we can push our bodies and to which our bodies, our instincts, can push us, and the danger that comes when we ignore or attempt to stifle the fact that biology is, in fact, destiny. Cronenberg out-and-out agreed with Freud’s famous pronouncement in the excellent horror-in-the-’70s documentary The American Nightmare; surely it’s no coincidence that the violence in this film really stems from a man who tried to shun one set of biological links in favor of creating a new one?

With Croneneberg’s usual obsessions in mind, I love how in-your-face this film got with both the violence and the sex, which in both cases always seemed to last several seconds past the point of uncomfortability. Ignore this, it says; try to remain unimplicated by this.

It actually reminded me of the bug scene in King Kong, which I’ve noticed a critic or two (like the always readable, almost never clueful David Denby) say stopped the movie in its tracks. Well, of course! In Kong‘s case, the protagonists have (literally) hit bottom. The relentless rigors of Skull Island have broken them down, and they will not stop until they’ve all been devoured. Jackson strips away the music, strips away everything but the vain struggle–the increasingly primal grunts and screams of the “heroes” and the increasingly grotesque and unstoppable array of creatures aiming to devour them. (Again, seriously, did Denby et al not pick up on the “lowest point” angle, the missing music–did they really think Jackson was unaware the scene stopped the movie’s momentum?)

Cronenberg’s not up to the exact same trick–he’s not trying to stop the movie in its tracks, he’s saying this is the movie’s tracks. This is what sex is like; this is what violence is like. When we cringe and recoil, whose fault is that, really?

And I think it must be said that this movie functions perfectly well as a slightly fantastical action thriller as well–with a darker heart than, say, Four Brothers, and a more realistic one than Kill Bill or Sin City, but certainly not as far removed from all that as it’s cracked up to be. That doesn’t bother me, and I can’t imagine it bothers Cronenberg either. He’s said that setting this film in the context of a family rather than in the context of, I dunno, a man with a video-playing orifice in his chest makes it easier for people to relate to, and therefore to see beneath the surface. I think the thriller context does the exact same thing, in the same way that Cronenberg’s more straightforward horror efforts did.

One final thought: Folks have argued that people who praise art for making people uncomfortable are in fact perfectly comfortable with that art because it makes others feel uncomfortable, and therefore we can feel superior to them. Alls I can say is that my nightmares last night should serve as exhibit A that this movie made me uncomfortable, too, apparently moreso than I’d thought. And I’m glad for it. It’s a really good movie, and I think a really great movie also.

I’m very happy I saw this in the theatre.

I saw King Kong last night at a sneak preview.

It’s a truly grueling film, that’s for sure. This is telegraphed pretty much from the beginning, in that the opening half-hour is one long meditation on what it feels like to know, somehow, that some very big shit is going to go down in your life sometime soon. This is where the contrasts with Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films first begin: It’s a lot easier to get an audience to swallow this sort of rendezvous-with-destiny business if you’ve got wizards and elves and magic rings by way of an explanation. After setting the film in no uncertain terms in the Great Depression of a very real Earth, Jackson’s asking a lot to get us to run with his “something’s gonna happen” moments. But goodwill goes a long way, and surely this project has inherited more good vibes–from Rings and Kong fans alike–than any film in recent memory.

Once again Jackson proves he’s a horror director in blockbuster director’s clothing. Rings gave him this opportunity with its orcs, wraiths, giant spiders, flying monsters, cthuloid water creatures and so forth; in Kong, though, the first glimpse of real horror comes in human form, with the truly terrifying (and studiously multi-ethnic-beneath-the-make-up) native tribe that waylays the protagonists’ ill-fated filmmaking expedition. And in much the same way that Rings was able to incorporate disparate and entirely unexpected horror references (Aragorn’s dreams echoed Fr. Karras’s in The Exorcist; Shelob’s lair was reminiscent of Leatherface’s), the natives call to mind mondo/cannibal exploitation flicks, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (there’s a lot of Indy present here, and not just because they share the same sort of pulp/serial source material; the Indiana Jones movies are source material themselves now) and the booing old hag from The Princess Bride (no less potent a source for nightmares for coming from a romantic action-fantasy comedy).

The action sequences are tremendously grueling. Don’t get me wrong–they’re just as exhilarating and exciting as you’ve heard–but it’s a demanding exhilaration. Jackson is an immensely talented director of physicality, and so much of Kong‘s action centers on the simple act of maintaining one’s balance in precarious positions. Try to imagine the staircase sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring stretched out over the course of about two hours, with dinosaurs and giant centipedes and a 25-foot gorilla running up and down the steps too, and you’ll get the idea. It’s exciting, but exhausting. You’re left breathless in both ways.

Speaking of giant centipedes, it would appear that once again Jackson’s exploiting the audience’s fear of creepy-crawlies writ large. (More shades of Temple of Doom…) What’s shocking about it here is how really gratuitous it gets at one point. For upwards of five minutes, Jackson dumps giant insects of every conceivable type upon his hapless voyagers, in once case resulting in the most memorably gruesome death in a blockbuster movie that I can think of. (You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, and you’ll be completely grossed out, I promise.) To do another Jackson-to-Jackson comparison, imagine the climactic scene of Heavenly Creatures, only with leeches the size of ponies.

Then there’s Kong himself. The CGI work is landmark, but what’s most impressive is how well his might is conveyed. I was put in mind not of other giant-monster movies but of Clive Barker’s monster-run-amok sine qua non, Rawhead Rex. Kong is not the sadistic brute that Rawhead is, but in Jackson’s hands he’s effortlessly destructive, which makes when he does put some effort into it even more frightening. Considering how much the film rests on making Kong sympathetic–and he is; boy, is he ever–it’s almost miraculous how well Jackson did in making him scary as well. His final rampage through New York City gets laughs at some points, and again you’ll know exactly when and why, but it’s those points in particular that are the most troubling. Yes, you think, this is a giant, angry animal; and yes, this is what a giant, angry animal would do. He’s an innocent, but he is also a remorseless killer. And the way that remorselessness is embodied in Kong’s trademark act of discarding the corpses of his victims, during which process they often become corpses, is really haunting.

And the Empire State Building climax–well, I guess no spoiler alert is necessary here, but still, I’ll try not to say too much beyond the fact that if you are at all afraid of heights, you will be on the verge of a panic attack by the time it’s all over. There’s a bit involving a broken ladder that will make your hair stand on end. Again, you’ve got to marvel at Jackson’s knack for teasing out the visceral, physical nature of our relationship to what’s on screen. There’s so much potential for fear there, and he uses it all.

And what to say of the film’s underlying theme, of the exploitation of mystery by charlatans? Only that the scariest thing is that we are at least halfway into the movie before we realize that’s what’s going on, and kudos, believe it or not, must go to Jack Black’s performance as Carl Denham for that. Sure, at first we think they’re a little sketchy, a little rough around the edges, but they’re not such bad guys–he’s not such a bad guy, right? But. Actually, strike what I just said–the scariest thing isn’t that we don’t realize that, but that Denham doesn’t realize that, not until the very end.

Well, that’s your blockbuster entertainment. A ton of fun at the movies, an all-time-great adventure flick, and oh yeah, genuinely chilling horror. You should certainly go see this movie.

You smell good

Touchin

My old college roommate Josiah Leighton and I have just finished a comic based on the creepily beautiful dance song “Rippin Kittin,” by Golden Boy & Miss Kittin. You can see it here. Enjoy!

I am SO glad the above post title is factually accurate.

Echizen kurage are giant–and I mean giant: 6 feet, 450 pounds–poisonous jellyfish, and apprently there are so damn many of them in the Sea of Japan for some reason this year that they’ve put an enormous dent in fishermen’s ability to make a living. Asian nations are holding a summit to devise a plan of action against these giant sea-faring monsters.

Sheesh, the horrorblog posts write themselves sometimes, don’t they?

A full article can be found here. Photo by Asahi Shimbun/Tetsuji Asano/AP. Story courtesy of Ken Bromberg.

Matt Rota and I recently added a new beginning to our comic about Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, “It Brought Me Some Peace of Mind”. Go and look!

Told you so!

Let’s start with one for Infocult’s Cyberspace Gothic file: Presenting the Craigslist-post-as-horror-story. Done in the standard “missed connections” style, this post chronicles in graphic detail the dream-relationship the female poster believes she is having with an attractive but increasingly frightening ghost who haunts her apartment. Lord only knows if the dreams are even real, let alone the ghost, but to me the intriguing aspect of the post (aside from her obvious talent with gruesome imagery, unconscious or no) is the way that horror seems able to seep into virtually any available space on the Internet, not just the blogs and journals that seem to lend themselves so easily to the genre.

Speaking of Infocult, Bryan Alexander offers his thoughts on Lost. Unsurprisingly, given the way it dovetails with his own uncanny interests, he likes it quite a lot; also unsurprisingly he makes explicit the series’ connection to the enigmatic phenomenon known as numbers radio.

And speaking of uncanny interests, my own affinity for recorded media as a locus of horror was piqued by Bryan’s post on eerie wax cylinder recordings. Noises picked up where no noises were meant to be–all horror comes back to “the things that should not be,” doesn’t it?

Back on the Internet-horror beat, Eric Heisserer, creator of the Dionaea House project, reports to the Dionaea Yahoo group that obstacles have been encountered on the project’s road to film adaptation. First is a new, low budget; as Heisserer puts it:

[Warner Bros.] may also be

attempting the SAW business model for horror, which translates to “tiny budget = decent profits.”

There are some publish-or-perish problems involving similar projects heading to the screen first, too. Overall, Heisserer is startlingly candid about his misgivings. If you’re interested in this project in particular or the journey idiosyncratic horror must take to get to the screen relatively untrammeled, you’d do well to join the Yahoo group and receive these email updates.

My irregular “Meet the Horror Blogosphere” series continues with Mexploitation, by Norwegian expat Joakim Ziegler, a genre actor and filmmaker living and working in Mexico City. Lately he’s been chronicling the film he’s currently working on; he’s also written on Mexploitation’s place in Mexican culture and put up a fascinating pair of posts on “What’s Scary,” which touch on (flatteringly) my senior essay on the subject along with such lodestones as Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, as well as offer a defense of the actual scariness of Lovecraft. Go ye and read.

Jeez, where’s Sean at The Outbreak been? I hope everything’s alright over there.

Finally, The Family Shoggoth. (Link courtesy of Heidi MacDonald.)

It’s back. Just a quickie one, just to get into the habit again, sound good?

In Focus‘s lengthy interview with Harold Ramis touches on his whole career, and as is the case with most vets of the whole Lampoon scene it’s pretty damned impressive. But for our purposes, the interview has some fascinating tidbits for fans of the Ramis-co-written Ghostbusters, the best horror comedy of all time:

Part of the fun of

WEEPING STEPFATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF STEPSON

In a dramatic development in the District Court trial of Richard Macklin for the murder of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran, Macklin broke down under the stern cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife’s vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital’s emergency room.

The courtroom was stunned and silent as the sobbing Macklin, who had previously admitted beating both of his stepsons “occasionally, if they had it coming, for their own good,” poured out his story.

“I don’t know what came over me. I saw he was climbing on the damn ladder again and I grabbed the hammer from the bench where it was laying and I just started to use it on him. I didn’t mean to kill him. With God as my witness I never meant to kill him.”

“Did he say anything to you before he passed out?” Whitson asked.

“He said, ‘Stop daddy, I’m sorry, I love you,'” Macklin replied.

“Did you stop?”

“Eventually,” Macklin said. He then began to weep in such a hysterical manner that Judge Erhardt Moulton declared the court in recess.

—It, Stephen King

Oy.

A perfect storm of headache-inducing blog-obstacles has hit around ADDTF lately. First of all, as regular visitors have no doubt noticed, the entire All Too Flat empire has been experiencing frequent service outages and interruptions, some lasting for entire days. I’m assured by our crack squad of Cornell graduates (oxymoronic as that may sound) that we are simply victims of our own popularity, and measures are supposedly being adopted to prevent blackouts in the future. Please be patient with us.

Secondly, the increasingly hideous post-Yahoo-buyout blo.gs had another one of its periodic freakouts, ditching blogs from its database left and right and resetting a whole lot more to look like they haven’t been updated since early October, then refusing to allow new updates to register. This has really frigged up Where the Monsters Go, my horrorblog aggregator service, as it runs off of blo.gs’ code. (The same ignominious fate has befallen Dave G.’s wonderful Comic Weblog Update Page as well.) I’ve tried to add some of the missing blogs back in and will continue to do so, but it looks like getting all the listed blogs to register update will require some hours of work, hours that I don’t appear to have at the moment. And there’s always the fact that blo.gs seems likely, if not guaranteed, to have another meltdown like this in the near future, which means the whole fixer-upper enterprise would be a waste of time.

Finally, a heaping helping of extra work and a lingering hangover from the mandatory daily blogging of my big October marathon have left me too pooped to pop, as far as blogging’s concerned. Hopefully all three of these problems will be solved soon, but I just wanted to give folks a heads up as to what’s been going on around here.

Oy.

Recently I wrote a short comic about prolific Ukrainian serial child-murderer Andrei Chikatilo; a swell artist by the name of Matt Rota drew it. The end result is “It Brought Me Some Peace of Mind” (the title comes from a quote of Chikatilo’s explaining why he did what he did), which I’m happy to post for your enjoyment, or whatever, here on the site. It’s twenty stand-alone panels, so apologies in advance for the user-unfriendly interface, but a judicious use of your tabbed-browsing capabilities should do the trick. I hope you like it!

Boy, do I like lists. So how could I resist this meme? Taken from Bill Sherman, with some of the categories he deleted added back in and some new ones of my own thrown on the end for good measure. Pass it on!

THE FAVORITE SONGS MEME

Favorite Beatles song: I prefer “the Beatles gestalt” rather than naming any one Beatles song, but okay, fine, “Mother Nature’s Son”

Favorite solo song by a former Beatle: “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison

Favorite Bob Dylan song: I don’t really have one

Favorite Pixies song: “Monkey Gone to Heaven”

Favorite Prince song: “Purple Rain”

Favorite Michael Jackson song: “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough”

Favorite Depeche Mode song: “Enjoy the Silence”

Favorite Cure song: “Pictures of You”

Favorite song that most of your friends haven’t heard: “2HB” by Roxy Music

Favorite Beastie Boys song: “Shake Your Rump”

Favorite Police song: “Synchronicity II”

Favorite Sex Pistols song: “God Save the Queen”

Favorite song from a movie: “Into the West” by Annie Lennox from The Return of the King

Favorite Blondie song: I dislike Blondie, but I guess “Heart of Glass”

Favorite Genesis song: I don’t really have one

Favorite Led Zeppelin song: sort of a Beatles-esque situation for me, but I guess I’d go with “No Quarter”

Favorite INXS song: “Don’t Change”/”Mediate” (tie)

Favorite Weird Al song: “Smells Like Nirvana”

Favorite Pink Floyd song: “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up”

Favorite cover song: “Across the Universe” originally performed by the Beatles, as covered by David Bowie

Favorite dance song: “Born Slippy.NUXX” by Underworld

Favorite U2 song: “Lemon”

Favorite disco song: “Born to Be Alive” by Patrick Hernandez

Favorite The Who song: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

Favorite Elton John song: the opening riff from “The Bitch Is Back”

Favorite Clash song: “The Card Cheat”

Favorite David Bowie song: “Stay”

Favorite Nirvana song: “Come As You Are

Ah, it’s good to be back! But it’s even better to have taken a couple of days off after a 31-day posting marathon. You don’t really realize how much time and energy blogging requires until you obligate yourself to do it every day, regardless of whether you’re tired or it took you two hours to drive home from work or you’re under six different deadlines and closed three publications in eighteen days or America’s Next Top Model is on.

That said, MAN did I enjoy doing Blog of Blood. In the same way that my Where the Monsters Go marathon from 2003 reignited my love of horror cinema, this blogathon reminded me of why I loved Clive Barker’s work so much in the first place. The elegance of his prose and fearlessness of his transgression are both stand-out inspirations. I hope you enjoyed reading along. Links to my examinations of each story in The Books of Blood–the complete Blog of Blood project–may be found here.

First up, a plug: I reviewed my beloved Black Hole by Charles Burns in the lastest issue of Giant (the one with Jennifer Love Hewitt on the cover), on sale now. Here’s a link to my review of Black Hole, as well as Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library hardcover, at Giant’s website. And while you’re there, why not subscribe?

Of course, I wasn’t the only guy who wrote his horror-lovin’ heart out in honor of Halloween. I always enjoy the Best Horror Movies of All Time lists that various pop-culture outlets come up with at this time of year, not so much for the fun of agreeing or disagreeing, but just for the peek they provide at the constantly shifting critical consensus as to where the strongest horror material lies. (For example, I’d bet that zombie movies get ranked a lot higher these days than they would have about five years ago, but that’s just a guess.) Here are a handful of lists for you to peruse and argue with:

IGN’s Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time (This is interesting in that while it picks pretty much the same Top 25 as everyone else, it seems to invert, say, the customary 15-10 with the customary 10-5.)

Entertainment Weekly’s 20 Scariest Movies of All Time (I’m delighted to see that they included Lost Highway, which certainly ranks on my Scariest of All Time list.)

Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments (This is really just a list of the films featured in the cable net’s spoileriffic countdown specials, which I studiously avoid watching for fear of having the endings of movies ruined for me.)

Hollywood.com’s Top 25 Highest Grossing Domestic Horror Films of All Time (a fairly even blend of quality filmmaking and evidence of the power of hype)

Entertainment Weekly’s Six Creepiest Forgotten Films (I guess I’ve got to see this Picnic at Hanging Rock movie, huh?)

Fearfodder’s Great, Over-Hyped, and God-Awful Horror Films (A novel approach to seasonal list-making, as its introduction of an extra degree on the rocks/sucks scale makes it easier both to agree and disagree with.)

Most of those links come courtesy of Dark But Shining, Dark But Shining again, and Escape from Obsession.

I also wasn’t the only blogger to make a marathon out of it. Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder has posted an enormous wrap-up link list leading you to her reviews of the 47 (FORTY-SEVEN!!!) horror movies she watched during October, 28 of which she’d never seen before. Wow.

Dark But Shining also has a massive round-up post with links to their 63 (SIXTY-THREE!!!!!) horrorblogging marathon posts from the month of October. Wow again. (Full disclosure: one of the 63 was from me.)

Here’s something a little different: found via the ads on the right-hand side of this page (which y’all click every time you visit, right?), “The Mechanics of Fear: A Look at the Construction of Horror Screenplays”, by Ryan Williams at Hollywood.com. It focuses primarily on popcorn-movie scares, but it’s a look at horror movies from a very different and nuts-and-bolts angle than I’m accustomed to. Check it out.

News of the real-world weird: Remember when I mentioned the mystery stench that struck L.A., D.C., and Wales? Last week another mystery smell enveloped New York City, the third major American urban center to be so afflicited–only this time, instead of smelling like a used diaper filled with Indian food, it smelled like maple syrup! You’ve got to love the headline of the NYT piece that reports on it: “Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers.” Well, it would, wouldn’t it? So at least we can rest assured that while whoever-it-is is conducting experiments on unwitting citizens, they at least have switched over to pleasant experiments.

Finally:

(Image courtesy of PostSecret.)

from left: Papagena the Kitty, Clive Barker, Sean T. Collins; Beverly Hills, California, April 28th, 2001

Book Six, Chapter Five

“The Book of Blood (A Postscript): On Jerusalem Street”

“Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?” he asked McNeal, as the boy returned with the glass. “Like you weren’t here…?”

“The boy?” McNeal said. “He isn’t here. He hasn’t been here in a long time.”

He sat down; drank. Wyburd began to feel more than a little uneasy. Was the boy simply mad, or playing some damn-fool game?

The boy swallowed another mouthful of vodka, then asked, matter of factly: “What’s it worth to you?”

Wyburd frowned. “What’s what worth?”

“His skin,” the boy prompted. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it?” Wyburd emptied his glass with two swallows, making no reply. McNeal shrugged. “Everyone has the right to silence,” he said. “Except for the boy of course. No silence for him.” He looked down at his hand, turning it over to appraise the writing on his palm. “The stories go on, night and day. Never stop. They tell themselves, you see. They bleed and bleed. You can never hush them; never heal them.”

A postscript indeed, “On Jerusalem Street” does not appear in the American edition of Books of Blood Volume Six, titled Cabal here in the States; nor does it appear in the collected edition of Volumes One through Three that’s available. Before I read it in my Complete Books of Blood last night, I’d never seen it before. So my Halloween treat comes two nights early, I suppose.

The story’s all of four pages long, and reintroduces us to McNeal, the ill-fated fraudulent medium from the story that kicked off the collection. As this story ends that collection, held as it is by the fiction itself to be readable in its entirety on McNeal’s flesh, you can guess how the story ends for McNeal. How it ends for the man by whom McNeal is ended did come as something of a surprise to me, though it probably shouldn’t have. It’s one final act of catharsis for Barker, who by this point had spent (I’m guessing) around four years at least pouring forth these ghastly stories. It shouldn’t come as a shock that he’d want somebody else to know how it felt to be drowned in these books of blood, making literal what had been only metaphorical for him, and for the reader too of course.

Is there any grand concluding statement to be found in the final story? I think so, actually:

It was a great relief to tell the story. Not because he wanted to be remembered, but because the telling relieved him of the tale. It no longer belonged to him, that life, that death. He had better business, as did they all. Roads to travel; splendours to drink down. He felt the landscape widen. Felt the air brightening.

Surely Barker’s talking about himself here, as storytellers are wont to do. But he’s also talking about nearly all his characters, nearly all their lives and deaths. Haven’t they spent each of their stories casting off their belongings–the obligations of responsibility, of morality, of sanity, of gender, of humanity, of body, of mind, finally of life itself? Freed of those possessions, doesn’t the landscape widen for them, even if they have to die to see it?

What the boy had said was true. The dead have highways.

Only the living are lost.

The pleasure of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood is that, lost though we may be, we are given by them a glimpse of a possible destination, and the encouragement, no matter how frightened we may become, to wander on our way.

Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Four

“The Last Illusion”

From a very successful blending of genres to a, well, less successful one. “The Last Illusion” is the story upon which Barker’s final directorial effort, Lord of Illusions, was based. Lots of changes were made in the adaptation–I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember it involved a cult leader with some sort of mask and a Euro Satanist guy who looked like a member of KMFDM. That I haven’t seen it in years probably says something about my feelings toward the underlying story, since (I don’t know if you’ve noticed) I’m a pretty huge Clive Barker fan and could reasonably be expected to have the whole movie memorized.

Part of the problem here is the main character, Harry D’Amour, a down-on-his-luck private dick who’s come to specialize, much to his own chagrin, in cases involving the supernatural. D’Amour was intended to be the star of an entire series of adventures, but then, it was black-widow killer Julia who was intended to be the franchise monster of Hellraiser, not Pinhead; characters take on lives of their own, and the impact and length of those lives are dependent on the audience. (Barker, perhaps in order to rectify this discrepancy, has implied that D’Amour will be involved in the destruction of Pinhead in some future short story/novella, by the way.) He’s a likable enough guy, especially because so much of his life has been determined by his greatest failure–he lost a client to Hell, or as Barker calls it, the Gulfs–but this isn’t exactly new territory for private-eye fiction; “forget it, Harry–it’s the Gulfs,” you know what I mean? (It also doesn’t help that he was played in the movie by Scott Bakula, who to me looks much less suited to be a leading man than he is the guy who holds up the tube of anti-fungal ointment in an athlete’s foot medication commerical.)

But the real problem–the reason why not just “The Last Illusion” but also “Hell’s Event” just don’t work as well as the rest of Barker’s Books of Blood tales–is that the monsters, the demons and their summoners, are fundamentally square. Rather than representing freedom, ecstasy, transformation, transcendence, they’ve got the same venal motives as corrupt government officials or Mafia capos who find their monthly payoff short by a couple grand. They’ve got nothing to offer but punishment for transgression, rather than a reward for it. Barker reworks his concept of Hell considerably in Hellraiser and the novella upon which it’s based, The Hellbound Heart–in those stories, Hell offers pain and pleasure, indivisible, too much for the human mind to handle but still, perhaps, worth a peek. As articulated in The Books of Blood, though, Barker’s then-vision of Hell and its denizens works much better when the joke’s on them, as it is in “The Yattering and Jack,” where Hell’s pettiness and adherence to rules is played for laughs. Make it serious, though, and no amount of creatively bizarre demons (there are plenty here) or inventive ways to dispatch them (plenty again) can distract you from the fact that when you’re reading a Clive Barker story, you wanna be able to root for the beasts–or at least find them more interesting than their victims. Oh well.

Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Three

“Twilight at the Towers”

Now here’s something out of left field–a spy-thriller/Manchurian Candidate/werewolf mash-up! Well, they’re not strictly werewolves per se, this being Clive Barker and everything, but lycanthropy is the myth being toyed with here. As I’m of the firm believe that we’re one rock-solid high-production-value maverick horror movie and/or comic away from werewolves becoming the next zombies, genre prognosticators are advised to pay close attention here.

It’s a real testament to Barker’s abilities at this stage in the series that he can graft this kind of horror into this kind of genre thriller (something he really hadn’t touched at all up until this point) and have it make so much thematic and plot-driven sense that you end up wondering why no one ever thought of it before. Shifting allegiances, hidden identities, the demands of the self vs. the demands of society–Barker horror and Cold War espionage have a whole lot in common, don’t they? To arrive at this conclusion Barker sets up an enjoyable and engrossing mystery that, in the end, leaves you cheering for the monsters. I suppose you could criticize the story for its (much less enthusiastic than many similar cases’) embrace of the ’80s-chic notion that the free West and Communist East were six one way, half a dozen the other, but I think that would be churlish and point-missing. The point is that monsters, good and bad, are everywhere,