The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 12

2. The Shining, dir. Stanley Kubrick

the second scariest movie I’ve ever seen

Look at this.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

And hey, while you’re at it, look at this, and this.

I’ll admit it: Even in broad daylight, sitting in my goofy romper-room of an office, with people talking and music playing and all manner of distractingly normal goings-on going on, those pictures beat me. I actually cannot look at them for long without quickly scrolling past, or giggling nervously, or simply looking away. And now, as I type this in our darkened apartment, I’m afraid to look over my shoulder at the doorway to our bedroom. I am a grown man, and three little images, two of which aren’t even of anything inherently frightening, all of which I’ve seen a million times before, have scared me to the point of irrationality.

This is how Stanely Kubrick’s horror masterpiece–and I swear to you those are not words I use lightly–The Shining operates. This film is not content to spook you from behind shadows or gross you out with kayro-syruped viscera. This film wants to scare the living shit out of you, over and over again, and not really for any particular reason. This film is a bully. This is arrogant horror.

“Arrogant”–I struggled for a long time to find a word to describe the mentality of the horror in this movie (yes, we’re ascribing mentality to an intangible quality–why not? this is a movie about an evil hotel, right?). The critical blurb on the cover says “epic,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. This is certainly horror on a grand scale, but I think that word was chosen simply because this wasn’t a skeevy little movie made on the cheap like most horror tended to be throughout film history, whether we’re talking about the Universal classics or the creature-features of the 50s or the new wave of Romero, Hooper, Carpenter, Craven et al. Also, I think “epic” connotes some sort of struggle between mighty opponents–the type of thing we see in The Exorcist. The Shining‘s Dick Halloran is many things, but Father Lancaster Merrin he isn’t.

I stumbled across “arrogant,” finally, when looking at the performance of Jack Nicholson as the deteriorating patriarch of the Torrance family with the same first name. I don’t often focus on this aspect of the movie, transfixed as I am by the imagery seen above. But it’s this aspect that many fans of the film’s source novel, its author not least among them, blamed for what they considered a failed movie. They believe the film doesn’t work because we never feel sympathy or empathy for Jack Torrance–it’s clear from the moment he opens his mouth that he’s about five minutes away from Richard Speck territory. Nicholson, who studied the larger-than-life performance techniques of Grand Guignol actors to prepare for the role, does not exactly attempt to capture the inner torment of a man losing a struggle with his own demons. He plays it like a schtick, grunting and gesticulating, staring and grinning, and most importantly, mocking and sneering. His is an evil that drips with condescension and contempt for everything good. It’s present as early as when he sarcastically echoes his wife Wendy’s assertion that writing is just a matter of getting back into the habit, but it explodes into the forefront during the long pas de deux from the typewriter to the stairs. Jack transparently feigns concern for their son Danny’s health and patronizingly asks Wendy her opinion on what should be done. He mimics her high-pitched weepy voice. In the midst of threatening to bash her brains in, he comically reprimands her for not allowing him to complete his sentences. He sticks his tongue out and makes a goofy voice like a taunting child as he tells her to hand over her baseball bat. When he’s finally put out of comission for the time being, he fakes contriteness and injury so badly that there’s no chance of his wife believing him, so badly that the only possible purpose is to display the extent to which he believes Wendy is a total fucking moron. He’s not just crazy, and he’s not just evil–he’s an asshole.

This is what is terrifying about The Shining. Not just Nicholson’s performance, but those horrendous visions–textbook monumental horror-images one and all–it all mocks our desire for solid ground to stand on. We want a main character with a tragic arc, but we get a smirking prick on a straight shot into lunacy; we want one who fights to stay human, but we get one whose essential inhumanity appears to have been there all along waiting for its chance to escape. We want an evil we can define, in a form we can recognize, with a cause we can identify and a cure we can affect; but we get random, almost arbitrary snippets of nightmare, ranging from a river of blood and a reanimated corpse to a couple of kids and goddamn spectral “furry,” interlaced with a dry drunk who falls off the wagon thanks to the help of a phantom bartender, all of which ostensibly will continue to plague visitors to the hotel site “forever and ever and ever,” and all of which is “explained” in a throwaway line about Indian burial grounds that paradoxically highlights just how arbitrary the entire “explanation” is to begin with. (Actually, there’s a fascinating interpretation of the film which argues that the whole thing is a metaphor for the Euro-American genocide against the American Indians–you can read all about it here. Watch the movie with this in mind and you’ll see it’s all there. Was this intentional and serious, or intentional and a gag, or just the equivalent of playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz? I think the film feels we don’t deserve to know for sure.) Perhaps this is best encapsulated by the arbitrary changes to facts established earlier in the film when they’re brought up later on: Wendy tells Danny’s doctor that Jack dislocated Danny’s shoulder five months ago, but a month later, when Jack is pouring his heart out to Lloyd the bartender, it’s become two years; the hotel manager tells Jack that the former caretaker who ran amok was named Charles Grady, but when Jack speaks with Grady later on, the man calls himself Delbert. Given Kubrick’s well-deserved reputation for perfectionism, I think we can safely assume this wasn’t the result of the script girl having the day off–it seems to be just another way for the film to demonstrate that it’s making its own rules, and the rules will always be to the detriment of normality and sanity.

This movie may be Grand Guignol imbued with the Theater of the Absurd, but it’s lower-case-“a” absurd, too. It has a wickedly black sense of humor that, for once, heightens the horror, not deflates it. I still laugh when the music builds to a crescendo only to have the chords crash frighteningly upon the appearance of the word “TUESDAY”–scariest Tuesday ever!; the cut to Danny’s horrified doctor as Wendy tells the story of Danny’s injury is just priceless; you’ve got to think that even Wendy and Danny noticed the, ahem, appropriateness of the Road Runner cartoon they watch; and what can we say about Dick Halloran’s interior decorating? That last bit is, I think, particularly telling: Kubrick takes one of Stephen King’s great everyman heroes (I actually am quite fond of them) and turns him into both a dirty old man and a blaxploitation parody. It’s very funny, and very mean. It’s a kick in the teeth of the notion that anything in this movie will be capable of heroism, capable of creating sense, capable of defeating evil. This evil knows our hopes and, to paraphrase Lou Reed, pisses on them. It’s the proverbial boot stamping on the human face. It’s a dead man with a bleeding head saying “Great party, isn’t it?” It’s wrong.

I truly had to debate with myself as to where to rank this film in my countdown. For years, this was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, no question; The Exorcist came close, but the horrible purposeleness of this movie, as well as the unparalleled terror of those images, kept The Shining in a class by itself–the class of movies that can still keep me up at night, afraid. Eventually, I saw a movie that beat it. I saw that movie under just the right circumstances, though, and I don’t know if it’s worth arguing whether it really is “scarier” than this one. All I know is that any time I think of those two little girls, I believe that pound for pound, scene for scene, horror–arrogant, arbitrary, absurd, cruel, evil horror–comes no more horrifying than this.

Except, perhaps, for…

(to be concluded)

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Postscript: I did a lot of writing about The Shining back in my film studies days. Kubrick films hold up under close reading better than those of any other director, in my opinion, so it should come as no surprise that I actually manged to pull off two separate close readings, separated by three years. The first was a study of the film’s employment of duality, and especially mirrors and mirroring–you can download it here, and I truly do think you’ll be surprised to see just how much thought went into every shot in the film, as evidenced by just this one trope.

The second took place in the context of my senior essay on the monumental horror-image, this time focusing on the countless appearances of such images in the film. You can access the whole senior essay by clicking here, but once again I’m reprinting the relevant part in an effort to offset all the waxing poetic I did up above with some hardcore textual analysis. Again, it’s simply astounding how rational was the planning of this, a film about the complete failure of rationality. Enjoy.

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Analyses of The Shining often focus on its psychological horror, in particular the madness of Jack Torrance, its central character. This detracts from the painstaking manner in which Kubrick sets up monumental horror-images (particularly those of the first type) so as to overpower characters and audience alike with the horror of the

“So much to do and so little time.”–Harry Chapin, “Sniper”

Mark Millar is going to be doing a Spider-Man book with the Dodsons. It’s going to be tough to shake that Trouble stigma, but I do like the sound of where he’s planning on going with this. I also like that Marvel is doing Marvel Knights (read: slightly more sophisticated, slightly less continuity-wonky, usually better) versions of its big characters (The Fantastic Four will also be wandering into MK territory, and of course The Incredible Hulk and New X-Men are basically MK-style books already.

John Jakala offers an admirably comprehensive defense of Watchmen, Alan Moore’s seminal revisionist-superhero saga. I’ve noticed lately that this seems to be the book winning Most Likely To Be Kicked Around By People Trying To Prove They’re Not Suckers For Everything Comics Fans Have Labelled “A Classic,” which is ridiculous, because this book really is that good. Eve Tushnet agrees, by the way, and eloquently.

Bryan Miller points out how annoying the Greg Horn-painted Emma Frost banner-ads are on comics site Comic Book Resources. As I and many others have said, they’re even more annoying in their original form as covers on the Emma Frost series. The book itself is a good one, a relatively sensitive tale of a young girl trying to make it in an asshole-male’s world, and the covers look like ads for Flashdancers. It’s so wrong for the demographic the book is intended for–manga-buying teenage girls–that it can only be the result of a decision made by comics professionals.

Franklin Harris goes Deliverance on Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman. Poor Jeph is rapidly becoming the comicsphere’s own personal Ned Beatty. Well, at least there’s Graeme McMillan, who in a shocking lapse of judgement appears to say that Loeb is on the same level as Grant Morrison because, like, a ton of stuff happens in their books. (Your blog is fun, so we’ll let that one slide for now, Graeme.)

Maybe the most horrific aspect of my movie-review marathon is that I only allowed myself to put 13 of them into the big countdown proper. That means that a whole lot of my favorites (I’ve got a lot of favorite horror films, you see) missed the cut. One such movie is 28 Days Later, but fortunately I blogged about it back when I actually saw it in theatres. (I love that I’ve been blogging long enough to say things like that.) Here’s what I said back then, only very mildly edited for coherence. Blood-vomiting goodness awaits you!

Call me radiation from Venus, because the whole scariest-movie-ever thing is spreading like zombification in the Dead movies.

Alan David Doane submits 28 Days Later for your consideration, though he qualifies it by saying the fright comes in large part from shock tactics as opposed to true lasting horror. I’ve wondered about this myself, and am looking forward to checking the film out again to see how it holds up (though God knows which ending I’ll prefer–they’ve got like 12 of them now).

Eve Tushnet nominates Carnival of Souls. This one I haven’t seen, and from the sound of it that’s my loss.

David Fiore‘s candidates are Martin Scorses’s After Hours and David Salle’s Search and Destroy, two movies I also haven’t seen. Part of the fun of this whole thing has been adding to my list of films to see.

Jason Adams becomes one of the first people I’ve ever heard of who prefers the original, Japanese version of The Ring (Ringu) to its American remake. He makes some solid points, though, as always, including something I hadn’t thought of about the surprise climax (yes, there’s spoilers of the hardcore kind in there).

Bill Sherman has created a lovely post on the very ugly EC horror-comics of yore. A pleasure to read and to look at.

RetroCrush’s 100 Scariest Movie Scenes countdown is finished, and I’ve got to say, they did a tremendous job. They included almost all the truly great moments, and ranked them respectably as well, though of course I have some big disagreements as anyone would. (Relapsed Catholic points out, rightly, that the best scenes from The Silence of the Lambs–the ones everybody really talked about, as I can remember even though I was young and didn’t see it back then–are missing.) So far, I think this is the best Halloween-related anything of the year.

Finally, though this isn’t strictly horror-related, both Eve and David have taken me to task for thinking Grosse Pointe Blank is immoral. But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Yes yes, John Cusack’s character stops killing people and settles down at the end, but is he ever punished in any way for the awful way he led his life? Other than the inconvenience of having Minnie Driver be mildly irritated with him for a few hours, that is? I think his change of heart at the end of the film is as perfunctory as could be. Moreover, are we ever supposed to find him awful, even when he is still killing? I submit that no, we’re not–we’re supposed to think “Oh hey, this is Lloyd Dobbler from Say Anything–isn’t he charming? Isn’t he cute? And listen to his taste in music–it’s almost as cool as Lloyd’s was! So what if he’s killing people all the time for money–Nobody’s perfect! Actually, on second thought, that makes him even cooler–he’s adorable AND a bad-ass!” Bleccch. This movie left a really bad taste in my mouth. (I also don’t handle Lethal Weapon/Bad Boys/Jerry Bruckheimer shoot-em-ups very well–I don’t think violence is particularly funny if it’s never really shown to have consequences too. This is not to say that I don’t like action movies–I do. Just wait until I start talking about Kill Bill.)

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 11

3. The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin

the third scariest film I’ve ever seen

“Allahu akbar…”

These are the first words we hear. So we’re in foreign territory, then, and territory presided over by a very great God, one who demands–and receives–worshipful obedience. To dust off an almost forgotten cliche: ‘In light of recent events,’ it might be tempting to believe that we are to understand the events that follow as a product of this devotion to the potentially murderous mysteries of faith. It is equally tempting to fume about Orientalism and misrepresentation of the Other. Interesting ideas indeed, but here I’m going to opt to ignore the forest and focus on one of the trees: This movie begins in Iraq, an appropriate instance of synchronicity given that The Exorcist, the film widely considered to be the greatest horror film of all time, is actually a war movie.

Of course I’m not referring to a war between countries, or even between civilizations, although there are certainly hints of the latter in the rapid-fire juxtaposition of Islam, paganism, Christianity, and modern atheism that begin the film. I am referring to that most unfashionable war, that of good versus evil. But it even trumps the unfashionable rhetoric of today, which when it uses those four letter words does so as codes for democracy and totalitarianism. This is not a philosophical war, or even a religious one. It’s a spiritual one–literally, a war between spirits. The field of battle is humankind, the weapons are lethal in the highest degree, and the horror of the conflict, in which neither side answers to man and law, is total.

I can’t think of another horror film that’s as… majestic as The Exorcist. The horrific images it employs are not just frightening, they’re mind-blowingly so, and deliberately at that. This is a film intended to scare the living daylights right out of you for hours after you leave the theatre or turn the TV off. It’s the cinematic equivalent of shock and awe, and its makers are virtuosos to rival any four-star general. And it’s all harnessed (quite explicitly, in the oft-stated words of its director) to force the audience to confront the idea not just that we are not alone in our world, but that this world is not ours at all.

The demon is first shown as a tiny statue, with the noise of insects buzzing incongruously as it is discovered. Friedkin is already establishing that this thing is royalty–it is the Lord of the Flies. We see it stop a clock. We seem to hear its influence in the cacaphony of the town–the clanging of hammers on anvils, the thunderous stampeding of carriage hoofs as a wild-eyed woman (not the last one we’ll see, oh no) is pulled past, mouth agape as if in some silent scream. We see the potential of the little statue realized in a massive monument–monkeylike head, insect wings, snakelike phallus, blank eyes. The noise swells and buzzes and screeches and growls and screams. That kind of intensity is unmistakeable: War has been declared.

The battleground is a body, that of Regan McNeil, a young girl from Washington, D.C. (and that is surely no coincidence). Here, actually, is where many critics stall: This must be a film about male anxiety over female sexuality! Well, yes, it is that–if Regan’s curiosity about her mother’s love life didn’t tip you off, and the displaced menstrual imagery of urination and surgical blood spurts didn’t either, and dozens of male doctors penetrating her with all manner of needles and tubes still left you guessing, surely “Fuck me!” and “Let Jesus fuck you!” and “Lick me!” and “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Karras!” weren’t insufficiently obvious. But it isn’t any more about just that than, say, Apocalypse Now is just a critique of U.S. foreign policy in Indochina. Human sexuality–human female sexuality–the onset of human female sexuality–these are just weapons in the war, accessible by either side. What better way to erode the resistance of the humans who comprise both the battlefield and the frontline troops than to force them to focus on areas they see as private and personal, if not shameful and animal?

As in many wars, at first the wrong kinds of troops are deployed. We’re supposed to be comforted by the clinical whites of modern medicine, even when they’re stained red. But it becomes rapidly apparent that as much guesswork and dead-ending and thinly veiled savagery is present here as in the work of the “witch doctors” such disciplines believe themselves to have supplanted. The boundaries are blurred further by the sideline professions of the witch doctors themselves. Our very first glimpses of Father Lancaster Merrin show him to be an archaeologist, apparently of some reknown; he simply seems to have brought along, in addition to intellectual curiosity about the old gods, fear of them as well. But our protagonist witch-doctor, Father Damien Karras, does not have the regal, professorial carriage of Father Merrin. What he has is a massively sympathetic face with eyes that seem to pour forth emotion like faucets, a degree in psychology as valid as that held by any of the condescending experts, and the frightening knowledge that his faith is failing him. This modern witch doctor, who has been the latter half of his split personality, is about to see his belief in the former shaken to its foundations as well.

The primary method of assault is visual. (It tends to be, in the great horror films: As Mr. Morgan puts it in The Ring, “My God, the things she’d show you”; or as the Hitchhiker puts in in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, “You like this face?”) The demon (the filmmakers) show them (us) an escalating onslaught of horrors. Regan’s face is wounded and made monstrous. The lights flicker in and out. Regan’s head twists around like an owl’s, and her tongue extends like a snake’s. She levitates the bed, then she levitates herself. She flashes the face of a demon (the first apperance of which, in Father Karras’s dream (we’re talking about the original version of the film here; I think its earlier appearance in the special edition loses much of its power, though to be sure I’d need to ask someone who saw it for the first time that way) is in my opinion the second scariest image ever put on film). The demon statue appears behind her. And most horrifyingly–for it almost succeeds–she transforms into Father Karras’s mother. As voiced by actor Jason Miller in one of the all-time great performances, the anguished cry Karras responds with–“You’re not my mother!”–is like some pathetic inversion of the final words of many a dying soldier.

The assault is aural, too. The demon’s voice emanates incongrously from the little girl’s body, as does at one point or another the voice of a homeless man and a dead English film director and a dead mother of a priest. The demon’s language is obviously an assault on the ears. The otherworldy growls, screams, buzzing and screeching crescendo repeatedly. And we musn’t forget the extradiegetic music, any more than we’d forget the terrific splendor of Father Merrin’s spotlit arrival at the McNeil household while Regan’s demon eyes stare expectantly outward. Harsh, dissonant strings, tinkling bells, ambient tones–evil has a power of beauty just as does good.

And good’s power is cruel just as is evil’s. Good relies on strength, and on the projection of that strength. The priests shout and yell. They wrestle and restrain. They strike. They dress in uniforms, like soldiers. They wield weapons of God. They chant like the repeat of artillery: “The power of Christ compels you,” over and over again, sending chills up and down the spine, over and over again until that power’s compulsion is at last affected. It’s a magesterial moment: At last, good is bringing out weapons big enough and hard enough to fight those that evil has used throughout.

War is death, and there is death here, brutal, human death–heart attacks and defenestration are sufficient to feed the fires of this battle. And it’s the sacrifice of soldiers, make no mistake about it. They submit themselves for sacrifice not because they don’t fear death–clearly they do, evidenced by the fervor with which Father Karras tells Regan’s mother Chris that Regan will not die–but because they do fear it, and because that fear gives them basis for comparison against the superior fear of the evil such sacrifices are meant to combat. Good (at first I accidentally typed God, but I suppose it wasn’t much of an accident) demands such sacrifices without compunction. After all, this is war.

My point is that, in a sense, this movie lacks that awful certainty I tend to look for in horror. There is evil, which his a horrifying notion, but there is also good, which is… leavening, if not comforting. But still I say only “in a sense,” because even though evil has an opponent, we are still caught in the crossfire. At any moment we may be asked to believe the unbelievable in order to fight the unspeakable. It may cost us our faith. It may cost us our sanity. It may cost us our lives. How we rank those losses is the film’s central question. And the realiztion that there are forces whose intrusion could cause that ranking to change, forever, is the horror at the movie’s heart.

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Postscript: It should come as no surprise to you that in a war waged in and by a horror film, the monumental horror image is what I view to be the most lethal weapon in the arsenal. In my senior essay I did a close reading of The Exorcist, detailing the use of the monumental horror images throughout the film and the profound, “cosmic” fear they engender. Below you can find reprinted the relevant portion; to read the whole essay, click here and find out how.

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The inspiration of cosmic fear

Looooong posts ahead. Please don’t let that stop you from scrolling down to see what else is around!

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 10

4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper

Back in college I lived with the same six other guys for three years. All of us had different interests, almost all of us had different majors (I think there were two history guys, but one of those was also a musician, and the rest of us were involved in film studies, architecture, art, economics, and pre-med stuff), but one thing we all had in common is that any time I brought home a movie, everyone was up for watching it. It pretty much didn

You call this an R.E.M. best-of? Even if you agree with their dubious decision to make this a Warner Bros/1990s-only compilation, this isn’t even all the best of that period. In the above link, D. Emerson Eddy runs down some of the songs that are missing. And the notion that anyone should buy an R.E.M. retrospective that includes nothing–nothing–from Document or anything before it is just as goofy as hell. It’s not like the casual fan will care about the need to make this a 1988-2003-only comp: They’ll just wonder where “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and “Fall On Me” and “The One I Love” and “Radio Free Europe” went, and try to figure out how they got half a greatest-hits set. U2 and David Bowie have both managed to produce greatest-hits sets recently that are both comprehensive and entertaining–to say nothing of Elvis and the Beatles. What’s going on here, anyway?

I don’t know whether Guy Cimbalo of LowCulture.com likes the new Strokes record or not, but boy howdy has he humiliated everyone else who’s written about it. He’s assembled a hugely entertaining list of the rock-journo cliches employed by reviewers of the album. Vicious! (That Lou Reed reference is just to get you in the mood.)

Thanks to all this horror stuff I’ve been a bit behind on the comics beat, I know. Why don’t let’s play catch-up?

First of all, I’d like to call everyone’s attention to the current Dave Gibbons/Lee Weeks Captain America run, which is just as entertaining as hell. While the stolid, cramped continuity-wonking of 1602 gets tons and tons of attention, this little unheralded storyline sticks the various Marvel Universe heroes in an alternate-timeline donnybrook about a billion times more entertainingly and convincingly. Plus, they fight Nazis. Plus, it’s called “Cap Lives.” It’s good, is what I’m saying.

The Pulse brings us a characteristically grumpy-sounding interview with Erik Larsen, creator of the improbably long-running superhero series Savage Dragon. I think there’s been something of a slump in quality in this series recently, but generally this is one of the most entertaining, unpredictable superbooks out there. Paradoxically, it’s also one of the most reverent AND most iconoclastic regarding the conventions of superherodom. I think it’s fantastic that Image has planned to get trades of the entire series in print, because it’s really best read from the beginning, preferably in during a Lost Weekend of junk food and booze.

Dirk Deppey has been sparring with some retailers lately regarding his theories about manga, graphic novels, and the bookstore market, and seems to have done pretty well for himself for the tussling. He and Graeme McMillan (permalink pending) have also been trying to wrap their heads around Marvel’s apparent decision to make collections of some of their manga-ish Tsunami series available only to bookstores–Dirk blames peevish vindictiveness against the Direct Market, Graeme credits a Machiavellian plot to drive up Marvel’s bookstore-market share. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a little of both, and in both cases I’m having a hard time getting upset. This kind of move isn’t likely to sink Marvel, the DM, or even the books themselves–what it amounts to is a relatively inconsequential but totally unmistakable kick in the nuts of the DM, an entity that needs its nuts kicked hella bad. Meanwhile, Shawn Fumo reports that the bookstore-only collections might not materialize at all. Frankly I’d trust Publisher’s Weekly before some dude on a messboard, but u-decide.

Speaking of message boards, J.W. Hastings seconds my emotion regarding the comparative utility of messboards and blogs, and is even tougher than I am on the silliness that goes down at the Comics Journal’s board.

But in the interest of even-handedness, if you’re looking for the best superhero comics to read, you could do worse than to follow the suggestions on this TCJ.com thread on the subject. The discussion is staying almost unbelievably civil so far.

Back on the J.W. Hastings front, the blogger commonly known as Forager pits Frank Miller against Alan Moore in a superheroes-for-grownups grudge match. Looks like Moore will win, in J.W.’s eyes, but for me it’s all Miller. Miller’s work is one thing I will probably never be able to write intelligently about, because I love his stuff so much that it’s pretty much inarticulatable for me.

D. Emerson Eddy offers a mixed verdict on the debut issue of the Azzarello/Risso Batman story. I’m of two minds on this myself: Risso draws Batman as well as anyone who isn’t named Frank Miller, and Azzarello is smart enough to show him beating the snot out of a criminal for his opening scene, thus eschewing the fall-back position for Batman writers of just making the caped crusader suffer all the time. (I’m tired of watching Batman being hunted. He’s Batman, not the fucking Fugitive.) On the other hand, the noirish narration just doesn’t fit with the operatic character himself, and even taken as noirish narration the constant Clever Turns Of Phrase wear incredibly thin after a while. I noticed this tendency of Azzarello’s in 100 Bullets recently, which is why i stopped buying its monthly installments–everyone talks like they stayed up all night writing down clever things to say. Witness this exchange from the Batbook:

BATMAN: And you are…?

PRETTY LADY: Margo.

BATMAN: Margo?…

PRETTY LADY: Farr. And to the wall for my man.

BATMAN: You seem to be backed up against it.

PRETTY LADY: If it looks like what I’m up against is a wall, you’re the one that’s backed up.

Verbally, the gymnastics these two go through to have that conversation are just as dextrous as the ones they apparently endure to get into their respective outfits. They’re also just as realistic, but not nearly as much fun to watch. Sigh.

Alan David Doane has an experience similar to the one I had months ago at his local Borders. His seems to bode well for American comics–not as well as for manga, but still.

Two bits of snark to wrap things up:

1) Has anyone else noticed that Citizen Soldier from Micah “Fightin’ the Man, Bitchin’ about Everything” Wright’s StormWatch: Team Achilles is just Nuke from Miller & Mazuchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again with the flag on his face painted upside-down instead of rightside-up?

2) The Warren Ellis Self-Parody Watch continues….

First Kill Bill, now Rite of Spring: is it me, or is ol’ James Lileks’s aversion to unpleasant art getting a little tedious? He honestly seems to see such things as a threat to Civilization As We Know It. I’m not the smartest student of human history, but it seems to me that people who freak out about such things always end up looking like priggish schmucks as the mighty river of time flows by. I know that as a horror fan I’ve got something a vested interest in defending art that reveals horrible truths (put truths in scare quotes if it makes you feel better); and it’s not like I myself don’t draw the line someplace about amoral art (I personally think action comedies are loathsome–Grosse Pointe Blank is one of the most reprehensible films ever made, f’rinstance); but seriously, chill out, James. Maybe everything isn’t all happiness and light here in The Modern Age. There’s value in depicting unpleasant behavior and ideas in art, one that does not equate to endorsing those behaviors and ideas. I know there’s a war for Western Civ on, and I’m as In For The Big Win as the next guy, but is this idea really that difficult to accept?

Meanwhile, thanks to Big Sunny D and Eve Tushnet for the kind words on The 13 Days of Halloween. Relapsed Catholic is enjoyin’ it too, except for all them SAT words I keep throwing in. I know that the reviews have been a little flowery, and that was not planned at the outset, I assure you–it just kinda came out that way. My guess is that I love these films so much I can’t help but wax rhapsodic about them. Glad to hear that, for the most part, people are enjoying them anyway.

On the horror comics front, Big Sunny D praises Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, one of the most beautiful books out there. There’s an ineffable creepiness to this title, despite the rock’em sock’em action and the deadpan sense of humor, that’s what keeps me coming back. I tend to think of it as a more action-packed version of Jim Woodring’s Frank, a comparison that probably makes sense only to myself. Also, Eve Tushnet is the latest person to fall in love with the horror manga title Uzumaki. I guess I’m going to have to pick this book up, huh.

Jason Adams keeps on defending Ginger Snaps, and comes to the realization that straight horror filmmakers find female sexual organs frightening for some reason. Where would David Cronenberg be without the vagina dentata, for example?

Finally, how awesome is RetroCrush’s 100 Scariest Movie Scenes countdown?

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 9

5. The Ring, dir. Gore Verbinski

For once, I don’t have to recount my first time watching a movie. I already did so a few months back, on this very blog. The movie was The Ring, and I was scared as hell.

The most recently made film on my list, it’s very much a product of the genre’s history. The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, Rear Window, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Scream, Poltergeist, and The Sixth Sense are all referenced (as are creepy moments in Fight Club, Blow Up and The Conversation, for that matter). Astoundingly, though, the film manages not to be at all derivative or lazy. It’s simply too relentless for that.

This is a film that deploys the Monumental Horror Image with almost unbearable regularity; to paraphrase a famous review of Stephen King’s It, The Ring is to the Monumental Horror Image what the Sears Roebuck catalog is to things to buy. A chair, a ladder, a television set, a tree, a well, a mirror, a girl, the ring itself–they all stand there in the center of the screen, mute indictments of normality, sanity, reality itself. They should not be, and yet there they are, over and over and over again, each time imbued with more menace than the last.

This is also a film that embraces the horror of the small detail, the little things that just don’t seem right: defaced pictures, distorted photographs, a fly on the TV screen, unexpected phone calls, static on the television. (It seems safe to say that this film will have caused more people to have nervous breakdowns when the cable goes out than any movie since Poltergeist.) Just as the monumental horror images shatter our composure, these “minimal” horror images undermine it. No scene is “safe,” because the filmmakers establish that horror can be found anywhere, in anything. (Especially, thanks to one of the all-time great shock moments in film history, in closets.)

It’s interesting to note that they do so from the very beginning of the film. I’ve found that many of the best horror films begin with a long, slow build-up of tension, with some hints of the horror to come but very little actual action in that direction. Here, however, we’re only five or six lines of dialogue into the movie before the central horrific conceit is introduced. Sure enough, the opening sequence doesn’t end without claiming a victim.

The filmmakers are also smart enough to tie the discovery of horror directly into the plot, which is essentially a search for information. The protagonists are a reporter and a videographer, and the instruments they use to capture and convey information are lushly fetishized throughout the film: lines of type, pens, paper, videocassettes, televisions, editing decks, telephones, cell phones, answering machines, files, microfilm, frames of videotape, photographs, cameras, hands and fingers (with which we write and type and press play and record), and, of course, eyes. With televisions, telephones and a videotape as its central vehicles of horror, this is a prime example of Information Age anxiety in art.

But the most disturbing facet of this intensely disturbing film is, as is often the case with great horror, one of cruelty. When you think about it, it’s actually kind of obvious that all horror is about cruelty: “Look at what we’re doing to your precious status quo. Look at what we’re doing to everything you believe. We’re destroying it. We’re destroying you.” But this is a different status quo than that of the small towns and suburbs that are so often the locus of horror. I’m not referring to the traditional business wherein the kids who smoke pot and fuck get chopped to pieces by the masked killer–no, not at all. This isn’t rebellion that’s being punished by the motiveless agent of horror–it’s a whole new status quo that’s being destroyed, one of leveling, of comfort, an “I’m OK, You’re OK” world. Our hero, Rachel, is a foul-mouthed absentee parent who has her son Aidan call her by her first name. The kid’s father, who Rachel insists must “grow up,” talks to Aidan as though they’re on the same level: “I just don’t think I’d be a good father,” he explains to the little boy the same way he’d explain it to Rachel, or to one of his buddies. Moreover, Rachel views the terrifying supernatural occurrences that befall her as a mystery she can solve, preferrably with comforting life-lessons about love and acceptance. She believes that heartless psychiatric workers and a domineering, abusive patriarch are to blame for it all, and that the murderous “sickness” that has infected her world can be soothed away through understanding. The filmmakers aid us in buying into this, slowly transforming the movie into a relatively traditional beat-the-clock mystery.

In the end, though, we understand nothing.

I won’t go into it any more than that–I don’t want to spoil this film, which should be viewed as unspoiled as possible–except to say that depictions of evil and malice as purposeless and uncompromising as this one are rare, perhaps mercifully so. Mockeries of goodness, of the soporific means of understanding the presence of badness in our world that we feed ourselves, are rarely this vicious, this unrelenting, this frightening. We’re scared, alright. And we’re more scared still, because we’ve been shown that the presence of that which scares us will never, ever end.

I think a great Toby Keith song title would be “You’re Pissin’ Off Jesus.”

Amanda needs help interpreting her recurring dreams. If you think you can be of assistance, give it a try.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 7

7. Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch

I’m finding it difficult to come up with something interesting to say about this movie, arguably the most critically divisive film in the already divisive ouevre of David Lynch. The first time I saw it I spent its duration riveted, then felt that give way to borderline outrage after the credits rolled: What the hell just happened? Was it the work of a genius, or just lousy storytelling? And can we please get that scary fucking man with no eyebrows out of my head before I have to go to sleep?

I probably don’t have to draw you a map from there. I’m a horror guy, and this movie scared the bejesus out of me. Anything that frightening deserved another viewing. So I gave it a second chance.

And a third. And a fourth. And God knows how many others throughout my entire college career. Lost Highway was not so much a film for me and my friends as it was a five-hour experience: two hours to watch, three hours to think and talk it over. We advanced all sorts of theories to explain the bizarre leaps in narrative logic, the nature of the various doppelgangers and doubles, and the origin of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake in his second-most disturbing performance ever). We marvelled at the gorgeous cinematography, which particularly in the first segment of the film gives everything an elegantly morbid, textural feel, like immersing the palm of your hand in a vat of black nailpolish; and at the brilliant use of sound, which coaxes as much menace and emotion from the sound of breathing as it does from a soundtrack that’s at turns ambient and roaring (one assembled by nine inch nails mastermind Trent Reznor). We compared the film to other Lynch efforts, the most germane being the surrealist mood piece Eraserhead and the supernatural horror of Twin Peaks and its theatrical prequel Fire Walk with Me. We’d stay up until the wee hours going over every line of dialogue, every move of the camera and change of lighting. And then we’d go to bed, and we’d only be a little scared that we’d turn around to see a stranger’s face. “It looked like you, but it wasn’t.”

Honestly, pretty much every other movie I’ve tackled during this month’s marathon, I feel like I could make a good case for–that if you saw it and didn’t like it, I might be able to bring things to mind that’d make you reconsider. This one, I’m not so sure. Experience suggests that even among fans of difficult cinema in general and/or Lynch in particular, this is a movie you either love or hate. (Though it’s tempting, I won’t say “you either get it or you don’t”–some people have definitely told me that they got it, alright, but it was still stupid.) For me, there’s just so much to love. The gallows humor, for instance–this is not something that usually appeals to me, but from Mr. Eddy’s lesson in highway safety to “Dent Head,” it’s there and it works. As I said earlier, the film is extraordinarily well made, and that alone makes it worth studying. Patricia Arquette is just stunning throughout the film, and gives the whole proceeding heat. (By the way, the steamy eroticism is not the only thing this movie has in common with another favorite horror flick of mine, Della’morte Dell’amore–I like to describe that movie as Lost Highway with zombies.)

And the horror is played flawlessly. Lynch, who proved himself the equal of Hitchcock at constructing tension on film in scenes like the closet sequence in Blue Velvet does it again here. He wrenches amazing tension and dread out of the accoutrements of modern living–phone calls and videotapes especially. In several deeply frightening scenes, no violence is involved, no monster or maniac pursues anyone–characters simply hear someone’s voice on the line, or watch something on their VCR. What they see and hear is self-evidently wrong, wrong enough to terrify character and audience alike. It culminates in a scene near the end, when the Mystery Man produces a video camera and tapes the our hero, who attempts to escape. As he struggels with the ignition of his car, we cut to the videocamera-eye-view, seeing the car draw closer and closer as we the Mystery Man approach faster and faster. We’re a part of this horror film now, even if we can’t make sense of it. Funny, but that’s pretty much how I felt ever since I first watched it.

(POSTSCRIPT: For a PDF version of paper I wrote on Lost Highway‘s complicated narrative patterns, click here.)

Believe it or not, there are still people who care about things like “cred” and “selling out” and general “my favorite band’s better than yours” stupidity of the type you thought you left behind, along with gym class and algebra, in high school. Amanda subjects one of them to a righteous beatdown. More power to her.

In a related post, this one inspired by stupid arguments made about comics as well as music, Big Sunny D dishes out wrath akin to Amanda’s. Great minds, etc.

I couldn’t agree more with both of them. It’s taken me forever to get to the point where I’m not worried about being a poseur, or feel the need to accuse other people of being one, or make sweeping judgements about entire genres of music or comics or their fans. Now that i’m there, I feel so much better and, um, wiser, as a person and a fan and an artist and a critic and everything. It’s just… stupid not to engage a given piece of art on its own terms, on its own merits. It’s stupid to make your mind up about How Art Works and spend the rest of your miserable life jamming everything into your framework and chopping to pieces whatever doesn’t fit. This is not to deny the value of categorization–it’s just to recognize that the categories spring from the qualities inherent in the individual works, not the other way around. Categories are descriptors, not set-in-stone definers. Basically I’ve boiled all this down to a little maxim:

Life’s too short to hate emo.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 8

6. The Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme

For years I wrote this movie off. “It’s not really ‘horror,'” I argued, “it’s just a thriller.” Thrillers are about cat-and-mouse games and things jumping out at you and (in my opinion, mere) suspense, not the genuine dread and hopelessness and irreversible transgressiveness and awful certainty of true horror. Horror was the stuff of nightmares; thrillers were detective work. Bo-ring. I saw the movie once back in high school and quickly forgot about it.

Then the nascent Film Society at Yale got hold of a print and had a screening. I thought it might be fun to give it another viewing, knowing what I’d by then learned of filmmaking. Also, it was a good excuse to get high and sit in the dark in a theatre and watch an ostensibly scary movie with one of my roommates. So that’s what we did. And this time I realized that something was going on here. Seen in the proper aspect ration on a big screen in the dark, the intelligence of Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography became far more apparent than it ever did on a little TV screen in my basement. Sucked into the world of the film in the way that only stoned college kids can be, I quickly noticed that the conversations between Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, Lecter’s face was always framed much tighter, allowing him to nearly fill the screen and dwarfing Starling by comparison. Some more thought had gone into this, I realized, than just working out the business of whodunit.

The final step in this film’s path to rehabilitation in my eyes took place about a year and a half ago. This is back when The Missus and I were engaged and still living separately. She has to get up hours earlier than me for work, so after saying goodnight to her the night was still young for me. Usually what I’d do is rent a movie, grab some fast food (I tended not to eat dinner till after 11), go home, and eat and watch. One night I decided to give The Silence of the Lambs one more go. (Actually, it was a bit of a hassle–I had to go back to Blockbuster when I discovered the DVD I’d rented was fullscreen. “Didn’t you check before you rented it?” the clerk asked. “Why on Earth would I assume a DVD is fullscreen? What the hell is the point of a DVD that isn’t widescreen? If a DVD is fullscreen it should be in great big block letters like a Surgeon General’s warning!” I got to exchange it for a widescreen version for free.) So, biting into my Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I cued up the movie.

I ended up doing this every night for about a month.

(Granted, people seem split on what aspect of this is more horrifying–the fact that I watched The Silence of the Lamb every night for weeks, the fact that I ate McDonald’s or Taco Bell with similar regularity, or the fact that I did both these things at the same time. But I digress.)

Even to this day, I literally cannot believe how good this movie is. That’s not meant to be hyperbole, you know–it’s just an accurate description of how I feel about this film. Watching it today, I found myself near tears twice, not even by anything particularly heart-wrenching or tear-jerking, but just by how well the film portrays a world that is thoroughly sad, sad down to the air and the water and the soil. If there’s a more effective depiction of the horror of living on film than this one, I’ve yet to see it.

My guess is that a plot recap is not necessary, so I’ll just say that this movie is about how miserable it is to be a woman in a man’s world. No, honestly, listen: Watch the way Demme and his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto (who also worked on Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Signs) frame the close-ups of the men who come in contact with Clarice: Agent Crawford, Dr. Chilton, Barney the guard, her fellow agents during combat training, the cops at the funeral parlor, the SWAT team lieutenant, and especially Hannibal Lecter himself–they all stare directly into the camera, making the viewer as aware of the power of their gazes as is Clarice herself. Eyes are weapons in this world; witness the night-vision goggles that give Buffalo Bill both a practical advantage and a psychological feeling of super-poweredness, goggles that are employed in one of the most terrifying audience-identification sequences since Halloween, or even Psycho. The threatening nature of the looks Clarice receives are brought home when compared to the gazes she does not find threatening: of all the looking-directly-into-the-camera/at-Clarice closeups we see, only her friend Ardelia (a woman) is stared directly back at by Clarice herself. They’re on the same level, and we as the viewers are permitted to join them as, in their carved-out safe haven (Clarice is even wearing pajamas), they unravel the clue that cracks the case. There’s also the two goofy entymologists Clarice comes to for help–like many of the other men in the film, they clearly desire her, one even going so far as to admit he’s hitting on her, but this time Clarice takes it in stride. The explanation is visible: one wears coke-bottle glasses, and the other has a lazy eye. Their threat is thereby neutered. After all, as Dr. Lecter points out in his explanation of Buffalo Bill’s pathology, he kills because he covets, and “we covet what we see.” Seeing is not believing–it is destroying.

If I’m making this all sound like some hamfisted attempt to adapt Laura Mulvey’s theories on the male gaze whole-cloth, I’m doing something wrong. The points being made here are specific ones, tied into the plot, and not just reflexive pseudofeminist wonkery. Clarice Starling is a woman in a governmental agency dominated almost entirely by men. The very first time we see her, she’s climbing uphill; and before long we discover that she’s running an obstacle course. Her boss slights her in order to curry favor with local authorities; a psychiatrist hits on her, then dismisses her reason for being sent in to see Lecter as simply “to turn him on.” Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill, though on the surface a transsexual, is (as Lecter assures us) nothing of the sort; rather, he began killing women because he apparently couldn’t have the one he wanted. His behavior is littered with signs of pathological misogyny and homophobia. Those who criticized the movie as homophobic itself apparently missed the fact that his lisping limp-wristed routine is a mockery of gays, that as a serial killer of women he can reliably be presumed to be a heterosexuality, that there are even pictures on his wall of him cavorting with strippers. Lecter spots these manifestations of misogyny and works them for all they’re worth, repeatedly suggesting that the men in Starling’s life have sexual designs on her, and ruthlessly mocking the maternal actions (and power suit) of Senator Martin, the mother of Buffalo Bill’s latest kidnap victim. The thorough contempt for women is made plainest by Bill himself, when he mocks the screams of his victim, pulling at his shirt to simulate breasts. To me, this is as grotesque as the famous scene in which Bill tucks his penis between his legs to ape the body of a woman. In both cases, what’s being condemned by the filmmakers is not inappropriately feminine behavior, but raw hatred of women–which is nothing more or less than a socially acceptable form of hatred itself.

If I seem to be ignoring the most commonly discussed aspects of this film–the thrills and the performances–I apologize, because in both cases it’s as good as everyone says. The garage sequence, the escape sequence, and of course the big switcheroo and visit to Bill’s basement at the end of the film are as riveting and pulse-pounding as thrillers can get. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins simply disappear into their roles. Foster gives a performance of excruciating melancholy. Hopkins delivers each line so well one can hardly imagine them being spoken any other way–if his subsequent scenery devouring in movie after movie were to put him on the path to thespian Hell, this role insures he won’t go any lower than Purgatory, methinks. And please don’t forget the criminally overlooked Ted Levine, whose pathetic mania is both skin-crawling and, in a weird way, heartbreaking.

I think that the greatness of this movie is often lost in the minds of the public–lost amidst the thrills and chills, or the countless “Greatest Villains of All Time” hype about Hannibal Lecter and the concomitant overemphasis of the fava beans bit and the gag at the movie’s end. But this is a real horror movie, about real horror. It’s scary and haunting and so, so sad, all ruined towns and wasted lives and regret. That’s what I realized when I watched it over and over again–I think it makes us scream so that we don’t end up crying.

Okay, here’s the deal. I think it’s awesome if you go out and rent one of the movies I’ve been talking about based on what I’ve said–hell, I encourage you to do so, they’re all awesome, rent ’em all and go crazy. But I worry that you’ll end up disappointed and feel like I oversold them. It’s important to note that these are my favorite movies of all time. Okay, favorite horror movies only, but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t a disproportionately large chunk of my favorite movies period. So keep in mind that I’m pretty freaking enthusiastic about all of them because I looooooove them and want to have a million of their spawn babies.

On a related note, what is up with DVDs having menu sequences that reveal key plot points and climaxes of the films they contain? That is lame with a capital LAME. I understand that DVD purchases were once largely the domain of film buffs who likely had already seen the films they were buying, but now the things are available for rental, and are generally the format of choice for gifts and so on. As someone who doesn’t even read newspaper reviews or back-cover synopses for movies he hasn’t yet seen, you cannot imagine my fury at imagining someone having a movie spoiled by the DVD of that movie itself. So, word to the wise, particularly the wise who plan on renting Jeepers Creepers or Barton Fink–try to have someone else cue the movie up for you, or just mute it and close your eyes and just start hitting play frantically on your remote and then wait a few seconds until you’re reasonably sure the movie has started. And Hollywood–please, knock this off. This is the modern-day equivalent of that trend a few years ago where all the movie trailers were ungodly loud and gave away the endings of the films they were advertisements for. STOP IT.

Anyway, here are a couple more essays I dusted off and turned into PDFs for your perusal, both of them about the last two movies I reviewed. Here’s one about mind/body duality in Hellraiser and its sequel, the just-as-good Hellbound–it touches quite a bit on Cronenberg, too. And here’s one about the complicated narrative patterns of Lost Highway. This one betrays its origin as a very specific applied-jargon assignment in a film studies class, but I actually think the jargon I was made to use (syuzhet and fabula, meaning the plot as directly shown in the film and the larger, more cohesive narrative we construct in our heads from all the information gleaned from the syuzhet) helps to unravel this film quite a bit. Grab a beer or something and have fun finding out what those student loans of mine are still paying for.

Also, Jason Adams defends Ginger Snaps. Sorry, my friend, but not only did I not find this movie scary, but I didn’t find it moving or even involving, either. I thought the performances of the two lead girls were genuinely annoying, and in the case of the non-wolf sister, pretty much movie-killing. (I kept hoping she’d be replaced with a Dollhouse-era Heather Matarazzo halfway through the movie. No luck.) And believe me, I really wanted to like this film. Good, teen-girl-centric horror is impossible to come by, and the feminist magazines I read (Bust and Bitch) lauded this flick to the heavens. Unfortunately they were too preoccupied by the fact that the movie was “empowering” (and by the way, was it? the lycanthropy does not exactly work out well for everyone. I guess their point was that the movie depicts culturally-dictated female-teen virgin-whore sexuality as a death trap, and kudos for that; but these are the same folks who get angry about movies like The Craft for punishing girls for using supernatural powers indiscriminately (uh, hello guys, that’s not sexist, that’s just sane, not to mention par for the genre course–ever hear of “with great power comes great responsibility”?), so how they could miss the implicit message behind Ginger’s fate is completely beyond me. Digression over) to notice that it wasn’t particularly well done. Also, why aren’t werewolves furry anymore? They always look like mutant hairless rat fetuses now. Wolves are furry, people. Werewolves should be furry. Am I wrong? Are we not civilized people here?

Finally, Johnny Bacardi breaks his self-imposed silence and takes on my whole 13 Days of Halloween list, film by film. I’m doing pretty well by him so far–he agrees with my assessments of 3 out of 7, and offers conciliatory gestures on a couple more, so if this were being calculated like batting averages I’d be doing Hall-of-Fame numbers right now. I’m certainly not surprised to see my praise of movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Barton Fink throwing Johnny for a loop–like Lost Highway (see below) they’re divisive films by already divisive directors. I think in the case of all three, plus The Wicker Man (another one Johnny wasn’t quite down with), my love of the long take plays a role. Folks, nothing gets my film-lover Donkey Kong going like a luscious long take, the quieter the better, lots of slow movement and facial expressions and such. Mmmmm, Andre Bazin-y goodness. Unbreakable is practically porn for me. Ahem. Anyway, what I like about Johnny’s counter-list is that even where I disagree with him, I see the point he’s making. It forces me to reengage with the movie itself, to see if my conclusions hold water, or if they need refining or even abandoning. And my appreciation of the films, and of film, gets that much richer. See how that works? Hooray for blogs!

(As for his claim that The Shining is Kubrick’s career worst, let’s just say we’ll be having words in a few days…)

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 6

8. Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker

Like Eyes Wide Shut, Hellraiser is a movie about the horrors of desire. Unlike Eyes Wide Shut, it is also a movie about the desire for horror.

Clive Barker, who adapted and directed the film from his novella The Hellbound Heart, made these dovetailing preoccupations explicit throughout the script. The titular hellraiser, an amoral, hedonistic wanderer known as Frank Cotton, talks of his search for “Heaven or Hell–I didn’t care which.” The creatures he finds at the end of that search, the Cenobites, offered him not some new level of orgiastic gratification, but endless, excruciating torture. In Frank’s words, they gave him “an experience beyond limits–pleasure and pain, indivisible.” The erudite leader of the Cenobites, the memorably mutilated demon known to his fans as Pinhead, describes himself and his order as “Explorers in the further regions of experience; demons to some, angels to others.” If for some you are still not convinced of Barker’s intentions, remember that the truth comes out in jest: Barker has often jokingly described this parade of murder, monstrousness, and dimemberment as “the story of what a woman will do for a good lay.”

That woman is Julia Cotton, played to icy black-widow perfection by Clare Higgins. Married to a kind but ineffectual doof named Larry, Julia moves with her husband into the house he grew up in, abandoned since the death of his mother. There they find evidence of Larry’s ne’er-do-well brother Frank, who appears to have disappeared abruptly, (they assume) one step ahead of the law. In reality, the house is the site where Frank solved the puzzle of The Box, the means by which particularly devoted and tireless hedonists may summon the Cenobites. It was in the house that Hell claimed Frank’s life; and when a chance spilling of blood enables Frank to re-enter our world, it’s in this house that more blood must be spilled to help him escape the clutches of his tormentors forever. His assistant in this endeavor is Julia, who the night before her wedding had a torrid bout of lovemaking with Frank and essentially promised to do anything he wanted if he’d stay with her. He, of course, split, but now that he’s back, she intends to keep that promise. And that means killing.

For a first-time director, Barker’s proficiency with imagery is startling. Julia’s transformation into a cold-blooded killing machine is depicted masterfully, using harsh, sterile lighting both in the bar where she picks up her first victim and in the flourescent-lit bathroom where she washes off his blood. The scenes are especially effective through their juxtaposition with the damp viscerality of the room in which Frank, now little more than a skeleton with muscle, fat and tissue dripping off of it, devours the victims Julia slays for him. This visual interweaving of the artificial and the grotesquely natural is present on such basic levels as the Cenobite’s costumes: The crisp black leather of their cassocks and the metallic wires, blades, and pins that are their trademarks are literally woven into their seeping wounds. On every level Barker forces us to try to reconcile our warring drives–our lust for pleasure and our voyeuristic enjoyment of pain, the trappings of modernity we use to ignore our bodies and the inescapability of those bodies, our desire for happiness and our willingness to make others suffer to insure that happiness. He’s the anti-Zoroastrian, acknowledging the black and the white but forcing them not to fight but to embrace. (He seems to pun on this, even, in a scene in which Larry’s daughter Kirsty, who has discovered the nature of the relationship between her stepmother Julia and her living-dead uncle Frank, is hospitalized; as the Box is solved and the Cenobites appear, the tiles of the hospital-room wall are shown in reverse-negative–black is white, white is black.)

As Barker’s career progressed, he’d take this juxtaposition to its logical end-point and make the monsters the heroes of his work, as he did in his film Nightbreed. However, he does so not by offsetting or undercutting the monstrousness of those monsters, but by celebrating it. Yes, they’re horrific, and that’s what makes them great, and worth loving. And no, we humans who encounter them seldom escape with sanity or self intact, and in some way, isn’t it worth it? In Hellraiser, Frank and Julia are destroyed for their connivance, treachery, and hubris–these are negative qualities in Barker’s world as they are in any other. But Larry is destroyed too, seemingly for the crime of being boring. It goes deeper than that, though–he’s punished for his refusal to see, for his inability to connect with things greater, deeper, lower, higher than himself. His daughter Kirsty, however, is able to encounter the Cenobites and live to tell the tale. She sees, and instead of going mad or giving up, she accepts the reality of them and in fact bargains with them, making their rules her own. And so she survives, intact, but not unchanged.

And if that’s not an apt description of a horror devotee, then what is?

(POSTSCRIPT: For a PDF of a paper I wrote on mind/body duality in Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, click here.)

Real-world events prevented me from getting to a computer to blog yesterday, but I did watch the 6th movie on the 13 Days of Halloween list, which means I’ll be doing double-duty today. Sit tight.