The other day, partially in response to a post by Jon Hastings on The Host and Land of the Dead, I brought up the way that mainstream film critics will latch onto political allegory (real or perceived) in horror films, frequently to the exclusion of other, more interesting aspects of those films.

Blogger Bruce Baugh wrote to me in response:

I have a theory that the critics’ urge to find political allegory in Romero’s movies in particular is their way of staving off dealing with what always seemed to me the obvious point in his work: nihilism. It’s much easier to say “yeah, those guys over there suck” than it is to think “but maybe none of my good intentions or noble efforts matter one bit, either.” It’s not that Romero makes no distinctions between good people and bad, it’s just that he goes on to say that it doesn’t matter in the end whether you were good or bad: it won’t affect your chances of survival when things come munching. And even though I don’t think that’s the moral truth of the universe, it’s for sure an _emotional_ truth of part of our experience, if we acknowledge it rather than hide it.

As something of nihilist myself, at least in my approach to horror, that makes a lot of sense to me. Now, to be fair to the folks who come at Romero looking for the purely political message, I do think it’s there, not least because interviews I’ve read from Romero himself seem to back it up. But it seems reductive to take the complexity of, say, the shifting nature of who’s right and wrong in Night of the Living Dead and boil it down to a campaign commercial. Nihilism works a lot better as an explanation. And it is truer.

Bruce continues:

Hmm. In its way, the Romero-verse illustrates one of the classic existentialist points Camus was on about: whatever you’re trying to hold onto won’t last. You’re stuck. You have to start something new. I wonder what a zombie story would be like if I had a community of survivors who accepted that philosophical/religious despair and then went on to try to do something meaningful in the next context. Damn, like I don’t already have enough on my plate….

Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s ongoing zombie comic The Walking Dead looked, for one brief shining moment, like it was headed in that direction, but that was a year or so ago now and that hasn’t happened and doesn’t look like it will happen. DIY, Bruce!

Meanwhile, Jon Hastings himself wrote in regarding the other half of that post of mine, my surprise at the rape scene in 300:

As for the rape scene in 300, what I thought was interesting is that it wasn’t presented as something for a guy to avenge or get angsty about (a la Identity Crisis) but as the Queen making a sacrifice for the good of Sparta (just like her hubby and his men!). Still very “problematic”, of course, but I’m not sure that I’ve seen a movie that’s taken that particular POV before.

That’s a good point. She even doles out the comeuppance herself, and the whole business occurs with no expectation from either her or the rapist that her husband will ever find out about it, even. Very different than the old “women in refrigerators” approach.

On a completely unrelated note, The Horror Blog’s Steven Wintle, who knows me well, writes the following:

I’ve been watching the British sci-fi series Primeval recently. It’s about a group of scientists investigating holes in time that are releasing prehistoric creatures into the modern world. The third episode looks like it’s chock full of scary aquatic dinosaurs.

Just thought you should know.

PS: I found out about it from Bill Cunningham.

Oh boy! I gotta check this thing out–it seems kind of like The Mist with no mist and tonier accents.

Finally, I write letters too. Or at the very least I post comments. Andrew Dignan’s review of the latest episode of Lost over at The House Next Door (SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!) saw him throw his hands up in despair over the introduction of the so-called “magic box,” from which the residents of the mysterious Island known as the Others claim to be able to produce their hearts’ innermost desires. “I give up” is the direct quote. I myself did not:

I think you’re taking the “magic box” concept a bit too literally. I assumed that Ben was speaking, if not metaphorically, then at least, er, poetically, and never got the impression that the room where Locke’s father was being held was an actual Magic Box that they opened up to find him in that morning. Rather, I interpreted Ben’s statement as a more explicit assertion of the already established ability of the island, and apparently some of the people on it, to make manifest their fears and desires. From Jack’s dad to Eko’s brother to Kate’s horse to Charlie’s guitar to Locke’s ability to walk to Juliet’s ex getting run over to Charlie’s plane full of heroin to (perhaps) Claire’s mother getting into a car wreck immediately following Claire wishing she were dead, the entire show has involved one character after another opening the magic box, if you take my meaning.

Later, Andrew replied, in part:

Guys, come on now. I say outright that the box is likely a metaphor, and not literally a cardboard box sitting in a corner somewhere.

Granted, but I think what all of us who accused Andrew of literalism were picking up on was that he was acting as if this aspect of the show debuted, or at the very least reached some completely unprecedented level, this week. The point I was trying to make with my list of “where there’s a will, there’s a way” moments is that this has been a part of the show for a long time, and that this ability of the Island and some of its residents was already apparent.

Hooray for interaction!

Thursday afternoon is here, and with it my opinions on 52, Justice Society of America, Amazing Spider-Man, Battlestar Galactica: Zarek, Detective Comics, Girls, Runaways Saga, The Walking Dead, and X-Men in this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

“It’s one hell of a movie,” he said. “It’s just in your face, raw as they come.”

Let’s hope so. A bunch more at SciFi Wire.

Taliban militants have hacked off the ears and noses of three Afghan drivers captured helping American forces.

—“Taliban mutilate Afghans for helping US,” Tom Coghlan, The Daily Telegraph

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Jon Hastings at The Forager offers his take on two recent, controversial genre films: first 300, then The Host.

Several interesting points are raised in the 300 review, from a likening of the movie to a sort of Western wuxia picture to a (favorable) comparison of the way this movie translated the comics imagery of Frank Miller to the screen versus the way Sin City did it (for the record, since I’ve seen a lot of people make the same comparison, I actually liked them both a lot).

Jon also kicks off the review by saying “The teenage goth girl who sold me and my brother tickets for this told us that it was the best movie she had seen since The Matrix.” As you can probably tell from the grosses alone, even aside from anecdotes like this and several I’ve experienced on my own, this film is playing awfully well with females. After seeing the movie, I’ll admit I was surprised at this–more so than I was going in, at which point I figured the oceans of beefcake would win women over. The thing that really threw me here was the rape scene, to be honest. After one Identity Crisis too many, I’m sort of at the point where if a given work of fiction isn’t more or less about rape, I’d prefer it not tackle the topic at all; I feel as though far too many writers don’t realize just how completely rape overpowers a story if it’s handled in a perfunctory fashion.

On the Host front, Jon shares my skepticism about mainstream critics’ penchant for political allegory in their genre films, but says that in The Host‘s case, you barely notice it, seeing as how it’s just one of a myriad of different tones and themes chucked into the mix willy-nilly in what is apparently the predominant mode of Korean cinematic storytelling. As a bonus, he also points out how reductive a reading of the original Dawn of the Dead as an anti-consumerist parable really is, and claims that the reason Land of the Dead feels flat is that Romero (perhaps buying into his own press) set it up so it’s difficult to read any other way. (Again, for the record, I like Land, and don’t think it’s as allegorical as all that.)

My buddy Ben Morse interviews Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell live on-screen. Hot YouTube action at the link!

Robert’s is a horror film, because it’s very fantastical and couldn’t happen. Mine is a terror film, because it could happen.

–Quentin Tarantino on the two halves of Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and his own Death Proof), during an “Inside the Grindhouse” commercial segment on the SciFi Channel tonight.

How do we feel about this distinction?

The critics, however, were mostly hostile, and frequently venomous. Many reviews made the same points:

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks the musical question: What is your favorite horror-movie theme music?

I found out last night that due to the use of a fish-bladder-based filtering element called isinglass, Guinness is not vegetarian.

I just died a little inside.

And it’s not The Scarlet Gospels. Or the third Abarat book. Or the third Book of the Art. Or the second Galilee book. Nor is it the Hellraiser remake he’s writing. Or the Midnight Meat Train adaptation he’s producing. Or the Damnation Game and Pig Blood Blues adaptations in the pipeline.

It’s a brand new novel called Mister B. Gone, and it’s coming out this Halloween, and the details, such as they are, can be found at Clive’s Revelations site. (Hat tip: Pete Mesling.)

Writer Jeremy Brown speaks with Battlestar Galactica‘s Grace Park. Man, the BSG crew REALLY think highly of this season’s finale, huh? Given the previous two-and-a-half season finales, that’s high praise indeed…

And as usual, Thursday Morning Quarterback is up, featuring my thoughts about this week’s installments of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Civil War: The Confession, 52, Battlestar Galactica, B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls, New Avengers, Stormwatch: Post-Human Division, and Tales of the Unexpected. Go nuts!

Resolutely P.C. film critic Dana Stevens of Slate loves The Host. I’m not surprised, given that her litmus taste for genre films appears to be whether they can be seen as sufficiently allegorically anti-Bush, and by all accounts The Host passes that test with flying colors. For many mainstream film critics, the slightest display of political awareness automatically enables a horror film to transcend the genre, regardless of what else is going on, or whether anything else is going on. And I guess the fact that the bad guy in this is a monster rather also keeps her from having tut-tuttingly inform us that Doing Bad Things Is Wrong.

So once again, I’m unconvinced. But yeah, I’ll see the thing.

I expected better from Dan Savage.

(Hat tip: Eric Reynolds, who should also know better, god bless ‘im.)

Clive Thompson determines exactly how many vampires could exist at any given time in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. FACT!

R. Kikuo Johnson illustrates Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of the Korean horror film The Host. Lane liked the movie quite a bit, though bona-fide horror buff and ADDTF pal Jason Adams was not that enthusiastic; the problems he cites lead me to believe that Lane’s enthusiasm stems from the typical zeal non-horror-buff critics display for films that “transcend the genre.” “Transcending the genre” is, of course, bullshit, so color me skeptical–though it is a water monster, so I’ll probably see the damn thing myself at some point.

If you’re all aflutter about the deluge of official casting information for Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train film–and I know I am!–you might want to keep the antici…pation high by reading my essay on the original short story. Or hell, my series of essays on the entire Books of Blood collection.

Tales of Mystery and Terror by Edgar Allan Poe, from the Great Illustrated Classics series, adapted by Marjorie P. Katz, illustrated by Pablo Marcos Studio. I found a hardcover copy for three bucks at Michael’s craft store this afternoon and couldn’t pass it up. I had a purple paperback copy of this when I was a kid, and “The Cask of Amontillado” blew me away.

“For the love of God, Montresor!”

“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”

If the sheer volume of responses is any indication, this week’s Horror Roundtable topic is apt to strike a nerve with pretty much any horror fan: Name a horror movie you didn’t or couldn’t watch all the way through. Almost-walkouts were also accepted, and that’s where my entry came in…

I love Frank Miller–he’s my favorite cartoonist–but I’ve never deluded myself into believing his comics have a lot to say politically. Since 9/11 he’s obviously been more tuned in, though he’s careened wildly from doing “bloodied but unbowed” Captain America portraits for Marvel Comics’ benefit book to doing a fairly vicious anti-patriotism and anti-religion thing in another benefit book to rewriting the third and final installment of The Dark Knight Strikes Again so as to play up the similarities with the real-world attack to slowly but surely working on a Batman vs. al Qaeda comic. But before then, you could essentially sum up his political position by saying he likes stuff that is good and doesn’t like stuff that sucks. Politics in his pre-9/11 work–cf. the liberal and conservative stereotypes in The Dark Knight Returns–were of an equal-opportunity angry centrist stripe and served mostly as another source of potential mayhem to play with.

That’s why I find the entire debate over the politics of 300, Zack Snyder’s “this one goes to eleven” film adaptation of Miller and Lynn Varley’s late-’90s graphic novel, ridiculous beyond words. So the following conversation, culled from an email exchange with my old Comics Journal message board running buddy Jim Treacher (of The Daily Gut, Blowing Smoke, and Mother May I Sleep with Treacher fame), is about as seriously as I’m gonna take it. Spoilers, saucy language, and snark abound, so caveat lector.

———-

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

I was waiting for this.

http://www.slate.com/id/2161450

DOUBLEPLUSUNGOODTHINKFUL

—–

jimtreacher

to me

Yeah, I read that. How is it she didn’t slit her wrists during Lord of the Rings?

Here’s my review.

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

It’s like all the lily-livered liberal film critics in America put the same nine criticisms in a hat (video game, comic book, homophobic, white skin good/dark skin bad, warmongering, misogynist, too loud, too slow, too serious, Godwin’s Law violation), drew them out in random order, and made that their review.

—–

jimtreacher

to me

And I’m not sure how this little dork typed up his review with a baby bottle in one hand and his own bleeding heart in the other [chomps cigar].

Of course, when I Googled that guy, he served in the Gulf War so I’m not allowed to call him a little bitty sissy baby.

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

Another Nazi comparison! Did they go to film school with Charles Krauthammer?

“I mean I had an M16, Jacko, not an Abrams fucking tank. Just me and Charlie, man, eyeball to eyeball. That’s fuckin’ combat. The man in the black pyjamas, Dude. Worthy fuckin’ adversary.”

—–

jimtreacher

to me

Also, all that man-heat on one screen could totally cause global warming!

How about that Queen Whatserface? I’d like to [colorful euphemism deleted–ed.]

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

She’s a looker.

I saw it at a Warner Bros/press screening at the IMAX on monday, and I was surprised that the part where she gutted the evil councilman was the single biggest applause moment of the film.

—–

jimtreacher

to me

Yeah, that was good. Historically accurate too I’m sure, just like the rest of it. I liked the bit about standing up to the Persians’ “mysticism and something else I can’t remember.” The Spartan Abe Lincoln, I’ve seen him in a bunch of other stuff, can’t think of his name.

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

He was Elaine’s shrink on Seinfeld, who ordered her to date him. “You can and you will.” If Lifetime ever picks up my spec script for Artificial Person: The Lance Henriksen Story, he’s my lead.

—–

jimtreacher

to me

http://blogs.nypost.com/movies/archives/2007/03/300_gay_spartan.html

http://blogs.nypost.com/movies/archives/2007/03/go_tell_the_spa.html

http://blogs.nypost.com/movies/archives/2007/03/bush_is_not_leo.html

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

I AM pretty amazed that they kept the boy-lover insult line, considering that Frank was still responding to letters pointing out that it’s the most wildly historically inaccurate part of the book (and that’s fucking saying something) like nine years later.

Honestly, who gives a fuck if it’s “fascist”? On a purely aesthetic level fascism was pretty rad, and considering Bush’s approval rating in the country it’s not as if we’re in danger of actually going Fuhrer these days. This movie is utterly divorced from a political program–it’s just Frank’s innermost macho fantasy. No one actually thinks he’s advocating infanticidal eugenics, do they?

—–

jimtreacher

to me

On a purely aesthetic level fascism was pretty rad

“Was”?

and considering Bush’s approval rating in the country it’s not as if we’re in danger of actually going Fuhrer these days. This movie is utterly divorced from a political program–it’s just Frank’s innermost macho fantasy. No one actually thinks he’s advocating infanticidal eugenics, do they?

It’s like people who want to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of Nigger Jim.

And they’re all missing the mordant humor. I only read the first issue way back when so I don’t know how that stuff played on the page, but Leonidas had some great laugh lines. And when they’re huddled under their shields against the rain of spears and all start laughing, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

To be fair, I don’t think Frank is critiquing this way of life. At all. In a way 300 is like Starship Troopers, in that if this more-or-less imaginary warrior culture could make a war movie about itself, this is what it would look like, but unlike Starship Troopers, I don’t think Frank wants us to look at Spartan society with bemused horror. He doesn’t like everything about that society, obviously, but overall he thinks it’s cool, whereas the guys who made Starship Troopers don’t think that society is cool.

It’s definitely aware of how over-the-top it is, though. I mean, walls of dead bodies, you know? Actual fascist art is either oblivious to or contemptuous of or desirous of the ability to exterminate the notion that there’s any other way of doing things–that’s what makes it fascist. 300 knows it’s completely bombastic and ridiculous and doesn’t give a fuck–that’s what makes it fun!

You’re right about the laugh lines. Another thing I liked about the movie is that you really get the sense that these guys LIKE each other–they enjoy hanging out and working together, they respect each other’s abilities, they believe in what they’re doing, they enjoy the fact that they do it well, etc. It’s a celebration of cooperation and competence, two very adult values that don’t get celebrated nearly enough because not enough actual adults cooperate or behave competently.

—–

jimtreacher

to me

Totally, totally, totally.

“Kneeling to you, that might be a problem. See, killing so many of your men this morning gave me a nasty cramp in my leg right here, so…”

I forgot my favorite moment! When the bald giant monster guy was watching the battle and straining against his chains, I wanted Joel Robinson and the bots to yell, “Put me in, coach!”

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

This movie will make an awesome RiffTrax.

—–

jimtreacher

to me

And if they’re going to slam this movie for showing Spartans without a lot of clothes, they might as well slam a Western for showing people riding on horses instead of in cars.

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

I also wonder if it is EVER acceptable to have a film in which light-skinned beings fight dark-skinned beings and the light-skinned beings happen to be in the right. Critics called freaking Lord of the Rings racist because of the orcs, fer chrissakes.

—–

jimtreacher

to me

Yeah, I miss D.W. Griffith too.

Another idiot…

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=5135&IssueNum=196

—–

“Sean T. Collins”

to jimtreacher

It’s like they’re working from a script!

—–

jimtreacher

to me

And you know, Leonidas had a good point throwing those guys down the well. That dude rode into town grinning and holding up the skulls of conquered kings, he dissed the queen, he threatened Sparta with slavery and ruin, and in general he was just a dick.