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.

The big day is drawing nearer, and horror thoughts abound in the blogosphere. A lot of them are in response to stuff I’ve written, which is, in the words of Charlie Meadows, “a pip.”

Bill Sherman reviews Pet Shop of Horrors, a horror manga targeted at girls. Good for it, but let’s hope it manages to be frightening as well as female-centric. I’ve found that people who go into their project with the noble goal of making it feminist (or at least femme-friendly) end up doing so, but pay little attention as to whether or not the thing is actually, y’know, scary. The teen-girl werewolf movie Ginger Snaps falls into that disappointing category.

And as I mentioned earlier, Bill also chimed in on my reviews of The Wicker Man and The Birds.

Big Sunny D, meanwhile, responds to me and Shawn Fumo‘s thoughts on David Lynch. Sunny focuses on Lynch’s penchant for dream logic and voyeuristic camerawork.

Eve Tushnet recommends an unlikely horror comic–Love & Rockets. This is not the first time I’ve heard folks praise L&R‘s occasional forays into the dark side.

Eve also has a lengthy post responding to several of the films I’ve been talking about. She challenges the sexiness of the pagan religion in The Wicker Man, the scariness of the dead people in The Sixth Sense, and the lack of sympathetic characters in the film version of The Shining. It’s interesting to see how Eve and I are sort of running on parallel tracks when it comes to what we appreciate in horror–we move in the same direction but never reach the same destinations. I think the appeal of the pagan religion in TWM is maximized if you’ve been raised in a religion that denies the worth of human sexuality, which is what I got in my years of Catholicism. (Eve’s experience as a Catholic convert is vastly different than mine as a born-and-raised Catholic who went to a Catholic high school. I only realized how different when I started reading Homage to Catalonia and mentally cheered when Orwell described how all the churches had been destroyed. CLARIFICATION: I was not terribly proud of this feeling.) Regarding the ghosts in The Sixth Sense, no, they’re certainly not as scary as the ones in The Shining, but then they’re not evil and the Shining ones are. (There is at least one great nightmare image in TSS: the woman in the kitchen.) But mainly The Sixth Sense is a sad movie first and a scary movie second. As for The Shining, Eve, have you seen the TV-miniseries version of The Shining, scripted by King himself? Sympathetic characters shoved so far up the viewer’s ass you can taste the vanilla. Ugh. (Props to the dead-woman-in-the-bathtub scene, though, which is almost as scary as Kubrick’s version–the only really scary part of the whole minseries, actually.)

Jason Adams has been quite the busy little horrorblogger, thoughtfully writing about Books of Blood, Donnie Darko, and the remake of Texas Chain Saw–the latter two of which, along with Kill Bill, I still have yet to see. Sigh.

Shawn Fumo comments on my review of Heavenly Creatures, saying he loves the film but isn’t quite sure it’s horror, classifying instead with the brutal-but-not-scary work of Lars Von Trier. I’ve only seen Dancer in the Dark, but my sense is that Von Trier simply piles abuse on his protagonists for no good reason other than the ability of critics to mistake melodramatic misogyny for Saying Something About Life. I know that’s weird coming from someone who lists The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as one of his favorite films, but I’m weird like that.

According to John Jakala, in comics, zombies are the new electroclash trucker hats flash mobs Howard Dean candidacy Friendster Britney-Madonna kiss Wesley Clark candidacy oh, I give up.

Johnny Bacardi apparently began to respond to some of my 13 Days of Halloween entries, but scrapped it. Thanks for the kind words, but c’mon–bring it on back, Johnny!

Finally, I’m appreciative of Slate’s apologia for the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but maybe next time the writer in question could take five minutes to actually watch the film before writing the article, thus learning that half the information he was planning on putting into the article was taken from the film’s sequel. Sheesh.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 5

9. Eyes Wide Shut, dir. Stanley Kubrick

When I wrote my senior essay on horror films, I was responding in part to what I saw as myopia on the part of the horror criticism and theory establishment. It seemed to me that scholars and critics focused almost exclusively on the role of violence in the genre, leaving other sources of horror largely unexplored. And even violence received a fairly one-dimensional treatment, discussed primarily in terms of displaced sexuality.

One of the films that inspired me to try something different was Eyes Wide Shut. It’s ironic, then, that this movie is in a sense the traditional horror theoretician’s dream film: It takes that displaced sexual anxiety and mania and puts it back where it came from. It’s a horror movie with sex instead of violence.

The last film that Stanley Kubrick would ever make, EWS stars then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Bill & Alice Harford, a wealthy and attractive couple who live with their young daughter on Central Park West. Drunken flirtations with other people at the Christmas soiree of a friend of Bill’s precipitate a pot-fueled fight between the two of them the following night. During the argument Alice informs Bill, whose cocksure arrogance regarding Alice’s presumed-inpenetrable fidelity has infuriated her, that she once came this close to throwing away their life together to pursue sex with a handsome stranger. Though she ended up not even so much as talking to the man, the revelation of her desire so stuns and angers Bill that, after being called away from the fight by business, he begins a nighttime odyssey of sexual pursuits. His encounters get progressively more bizarre and, as he soon finds out, exponentially more dangerous.

EWS did not do as well as expected, either with audiences or critics. In part this is due to its billing as an erotic thriller–the thinking person’s Basic Instinct. But folks hoping for detectives, icepicks, and hot lesbian action were no doubt disappointed by the film’s glacial, peripatetic pacing. Expecting a roller-coaster, they instead found themselves in a fable, a grim fairy tale involving the frightening adventures of an attractive, naive young hero as he journeys through the dark forest of his own sexual urges. All of those urges manifest themselves as monsters, ready to devour “the good doctor”: infidelity, cancer, drug abuse, prostitution, pederasty, venereal disease, cult-like ritual dominance and submission. Sex is the pale horse upon which a panoply of menacing riders ride, promising Bill pleasure but offering only ruin. I can’t help but be reminded of (are you sitting down?) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, another film that dispenses with logic in order to depict a series of macabre visions each more nightmarish than the next.

“Heat”? “Sparks”? There are few to come by here (perhaps only when Dr. Bill meets Sally the roommate, but that’s brought to as screeching a halt as possible). Indeed, Kubrick seemed to be visually mocking the very concepts with the gauzy yellows, arctic blues, and sickly pinks that illuminate so much of the film. (The pinks in particular–try to count just the decrepit Christmas trees with those odd pink lights bleeding out of them and you’ll see how prominent a role they play. Then there’s the gang of toughs (from Yale!) who gaybash Dr. Harford (a pun on Harvard? maybe I need to get out more) while saying he must be playing for “the pink team.” And I don’t think I need to go into the other connotation of “pink.”) And people looking for them missed the point entirely. So did those who complained “That’s not Manhattan!” (my God, how did Kubrick not realize he was shooting on a meticulously crafted replica? Stop the press! Alert Warner Bros.!) or even more amusingly, “That’s not how the rich and powerful have orgies” (I was always tempted to intone “he added knowingly” when I saw a critic kvetching about that). The point was to show a man led off the path of what he knows to be right, only to learn the lesson that what’s not right is, in fact, wrong. (And for this condemnation of sexual infidelity, the film was labeled reactionary in some quarters. I found that more sad than amusing.)

It’s worth noting that the source material for the film was a 1926 book called Traumnovelle—Dream Story–by writer Arthur Schnitzler. Viewers who can’t get around the episodic surreality of Dr. Bill’s wanderings might be well advised to view everything between the argument and the final conversation as a kind of detailed dream, one that veers slowly from would-be wet dream to full-blown nightmare. Note the dreamlike structure, with its jarring leaps from one place and time to another (this was common source of complaint against the film, but it only served to underscore the dreaminess of the narrative). Note the somnambulistic quality of Dr. Bill’s wanderings. Note his dreamlike superhuman powers: the ability to get anything he wants by saying the magic words “I’m a doctor,” flashing his magical 5000-megawatt smile, presenting the magical talisman known as his medical board card, and reaching into his magical bottomless wallet; the power to be irresistably attractive to anything on two legs–models, prostitutes, little girls, hotel clerks, roommates, anyone. Note that the recitation of Alice’s dream is the film’s central scene. Note the references to dreaming and wakefulness in the last scene. Note the title.

It’s also worth pointing out that Schnitzler was a contemporary and fellow-traveler of Freud’s, as images of the Freudian uncanny pop up everywhere. There’s the automaton-like women in the mansion. There’s the red-robed masked man with black holes for eyes. And there are doubles galore: Nuala and her friend, the two Japanese customers of Mr. Milich’s (themselves doubling genders with their transvestitism), the alliterative names of the two men who lead Bill and Alice into trouble (Nick Nightingale and Sandor Szavost respectively), the masks and the faces beneath them, the two notes of the ominous Ligeti music. Even the daughter of Dr. Bill’s dead patient and her husband serve as a sort of tragicomic, less attractive doubling of Dr. Bill and Alice themselves (note the placement of both the bereaved daughter and Alice in front of blue rooms, their similar hair color and style, etc.).

The final bit of doubling is another source of great vexation for the film’s detractors: the repetitive dialogue. Time and time again, Bill will repeat a line just spoken to him by another character. “Maybe had Kubrick lived he might have spotted this in editing,” they say–oh yeah, I’m sure he had no idea that was going on. What was he trying to achieve with this effect? Repetition is doubling, and it’s also an instance of the Freudian uncanny unto itself, calling to mind non-human processes of cognition and communication (cf. the dialogue of the “twins” in The Shining). It also yields a certain narcotic, mind-altering rhythm after a time, connoting inward-facing obsessiveness and detachment from reality (cf. the “I will destroy him!” scene in Barton Fink). But there’s a simpler reason, too: Bill needs things repeated to them because he simply does not understand anymore. His customary method of looking at the world has been rendered nonsensical, irrelevant, not even by deeds but by mere words. So he struggles to find a new way to frame things. He needs to repeat the new words to help make them real, to clarify them, to open his eyes to the new reality he’s trying to explore. And when he does have them opened, what he sees is horrifying. That’s the dream, and then that’s the nightmare.

Or, “Close Reading for Fun and Profit.”

Alfred Hitchcock was a member of a very exclusive club, that of directors who did nothing by accident. (The only other members I can think of–limiting the pool to the English-speaking world since I just don’t know enuff about them other folks–are Stanley Kubrick and perhaps the Coen Brothers, but mainly Kubrick.) This means that even the most insanely close reading of a given aspect of one of his films will produce richly rewarding insights into the meaning of the film.

I made two forays into close-reading of Hitch during my bright college years, and here they are:

The first, which I’ve linked to before, is an analysis of the use of sound in The Birds, ranging from the electronic bird-noise “score” to run-of-the-mill sound effects to dialogue and lack thereof. After rereading it myself, all I could think was, “Man, that guy could make a goddamn movie.”

The second is just an outline for an oral presentation I gave, but I think it still makes for an interesting talking-points memo. It’s an examination of design in Vertigo, centering on the central tropes of spirals/circles and towers/verticals. The amount of thought that went into this stuff was just staggering. Look and see.

How good does Joy Division sound when played very loud?

Answer:

Joy Division sounds really super good when played very loud.

Does the Medium Contest have a winner yet? If so, is the winner a haiku?

The conventional wisdom about Marvel’s Tsunami line of comics, wisdom promulgated by Marvel itself, was that it was designed to capitalize on the success of manga in capturing a large American audience. Mainly this consisted of bringing in manga-style artists from the Americas to handle the penciling chores, but to an extent it also involved the types of characters the books centered on (mainly teenagers of both sexes or women) and the pacing of the stories (in mainstream-comics parlance they’re “decompressed,” in that they tell a lot of story over the course of several issues instead of packing each individual issue with a lot of plot, let alone with a self-contained story). This kind of storytelling is also known as “pacing for the trade,” referring to the trade-paperback format in which longer runs of single-issue comics are collected. Pacing for the trade made a lot of sense for the manga-inflected Tsunami books, considering that the legions of manga buyers out there don’t know single issues from Adam, instead buying their comics in the far more user-friendly, cost-effective, attractive, and generally look-like-an-actual-book-ish squarebound paperback format, and doing so at regular bookstores where single-issue comics are hard to come by. Indeed, it was sometimes assumed (by me, at least) that when Marvel produced Tsunami trades, they’d be in manga-sized dimensions, rather in the larger size that’s standard for American comics collections. It would only stand to reason, after all.

What to make, then, of Marvel’s decision not to collect any of their Tsunami titles into trade paperbacks at all? It’s tempting to berate the House of Ideas for not having a clue, but it seems safe to say that Marvel editorial, particularly fluent Japanese speaker and Tsunami steward C.B. Cebulski, are fully aware of how comics should be packaged and produced for maximum appeal to the manga market. Instead, I suggest we see this as a cautionary tale for mainstream American comics companies trying to break away from the stranglehold of the comics-only Direct Market and their pamphlet-junkie fanboy audience. We’re at a weird stage in the history of the business where for a variety of reasons (from aesthetic to literary to financial) single-issue comics don’t make sense anymore, but where for a similar variety of reasons it’s next to impossible for companies to react accordingly. Financially, Marvel, DC et al are beholden to the Direct Market, the bread of which is buttered by single-issue superhero comics. Any attempt to deviate from this norm is greeted with deafening silence. Nevermind Marvel’s attempts to manga-fy itself–even real manga, the most popular type of comcis in America, has made barely a dent in the D.M., which as a group is so conservative and retrograde it makes the College of Cardinals look like a bunch of coke-fiend anarchosyndicalist orgy enthusiasts. This means that the big companies simply can’t afford to take the risk of ignoring weak single-issue sales in order to gamble on a potential bonanza in trade-paperback format. This goes double if the comic in question is even slightly different from the superhero standard, and triple if those trade paperback sales are theorized to be strongest in the regular-bookstore market, one that those companies are having a notoriously hard time cracking.

Simply put, when it became clear that the Tsunami books aren’t selling as single issues in the Direct Market, Marvel realized it couldn’t afford to put them into TPB form–but it’s only in TPB form and outside the Direct Market that comics designed like the Tsunami ones could sell.

A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.

UPDATE: Looks like Marvel’s cutting that Gordian knot after all! Turns out they’re skipping the traditional trade paperback format and going straight for the manga-sized editions. (Link courtesy of Franklin Harris.) Ballsy, and exactly what should be done. Here’s hoping it works.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 4

10. Barton Fink, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

Bill Sherman has kind words for the first couple of entries in The 13 Days of Halloween (yes, I will continue to put that phrase in bold; no, I don’t think it’s over the top at all, but thank you for asking). Mixed among them is Bill’s assertion that The Birds, which I peg as the Master’s masterpiece, falls short of the Holy Hitchcock Trinity (Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho–also known as Hitch’s “O” period) because of the lack of great performances. I really meant to comment on this in my post on the film, but it just didn’t fit structurally: I like the fact that the characters are annoying, and played annoyingly. You’ve got a heroine who gallavants around Europe spending Daddy’s money, then blows an entire weekend in order to show up some hot guy who made her look stupid–she’s the early-’60s equivalent of Paris Hilton. You’ve got a hero who combines smugness and arrogance with being an incurable mama’s boy. You’ve got mama herself, who’s only slightly less cloying than Mrs. Bates. (Okay, so Suzanne Pleshette’s character isn’t so bad, but she has the unfair advantage of a voice that could melt butter.) And all these characters spend the bulk of their screen time having mannered, formal, phony conversations and quarrels with one another. As I said in my essay on the use of sound in the film, the dialogue becomes so irritating that you end up being grateful for the intrusion of the birds, who are all but less noisy by comparison.

And that’s when Hitch has got you. He’s enmeshed you in a conflict between people who are difficult to like–you know, sort of like real people–and birds who, by the end of the film, are impossible not to loathe. How dull a film this would be if it starred the usual assortment of the troubled-but-good, the brave-under-pressure–the cliched stock in trade of the people-under-siege film. Give me Tippi, Rod, and Jessica anyday, man. They’re… unpleasant, and that’s why I care.

(PS: I actually like Rod Taylor a lot. I think he’s sort of a precursor to Mel Gibson, who I also enjoy–particularly in Signs, a film not coincidentally modeled after Hitchock generally and The Birds particularly. And you’ll have a hard time getting me to complain about having to watch Tippi Hedren in a movie, too.)

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 3

11. Night of the Living Dead, dir. George Romero

The hero is cool under pressure. He is able to assess the situation and take action. He is a motivator, a communicator, a leader. He is caring, intelligent, handsome, strong, and brave.

He is also wrong.

Night of the Living Dead is a great horror film for a variety of reasons. The tremendously atmospheric black-and-white photography is one of them: All expressionist shadows one minute and verite-style documentaryisms the next, it imbues the title characters with a simultaneously obscure and vivid nightmare quality that their counterparts in the film’s sequels (even in the excellent Dawn of the Dead for all its satirical brilliance and undeniable terror) sorely lacked due to their depiction in living color. The eerie opening scene is another: a long drive through an empty road into a cemetery, where our erstwhile protagonist mocks his dead father and utters one of the most memorable unwitting prophecies in horror-film history. And the gruesomely simple premise is still another: With minimal explanation the dead have come back to life, and they’ve come to eat you. The film itself lurches forward with a similar basic-instinct urgency, throttling us after mere minutes and never letting go until that unforgettable ending.

But perhaps the most important reason for this horror film’s greatness is also the one you’re least likely to notice at first, or even after a second viewing. The film is such a white-knuckle onslaught of suspsense and disgust that we may focus on the zombies and the conflict they engender. But that’s a focus almost as single-minded as that of the zombies themselves. What’s really frightening here is that in the end, all our logic, all our admiration, all our sympathy is revealed to have been directed at the wrong person. The right person, of course, did not look or act right–angry, loud, belligerent, defensive, vindictive, self-righteous, cowardly, even craven, he was essentially right in spite of himself. But right he was, and that upends our worldview as much as any zombie.

Appearances are not trustworthy. That’s a very radical message, one that the film embraces in a positive fashion in its unmistakable anti-racist undertones: Racism, after all, is the belief that appearances can always be trusted, because we’re absolutely certain of the truth of those appearances. But the movie also promulgates that message in the most disturbing ways imaginable. It goes to great lengths to convey the fact that the zombies look just like us (“They are us,” as Dr. Logan puts it in the film’s second sequel, Day of the Dead). And it goes to even greater lengths to prove that we are our own worst enemies, that even the best of us can be completely wrong about everything, and the worst of us tragically right.

In Adam Simon’s superlative documentary on the independently-made American horror films of the late 1960s and the 1970s, The American Nightmare, one of the speakers says that Night of the Living Dead conveys more about the turbulent end of the century’s seventh decade than any other film, even (or especially) the ones that explicitly addressed that turmoil. I wasn’t there, but watching this tale of normal people run amok, where black is white and night is day (at least thanks to the continuity errors in those television broadcasts) and hero and villain and monster are thoroughly juxtaposed, my fear is that he’s right–and that he continues to be right even now.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 2

12. The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy

The Wicker Man is a film that oozed into my consciousness, interestingly, through its appearance in another cult-classic English fright film, Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave. Ewan MacGregor’s character is seen sitting on the sofa watching some movie in which some guy is screaming “Oh Christ!” at the top of his lungs. It’s an eerie image, one that casts a long shadow over the rest of the film. (I think it may be the most effective use of an image from the 1970s rural-horror cycle in a 1990s horror film–sounds like a limited reference pool, but you’d be surprised–except perhaps the glimpse of the finale of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in American Psycho.) The Wicker Man is also referenced throughout British music–the Doves covered a song from its soundtrack, and Plaid, a drill’n’bass group signed to Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records, has a song called “Think What You’re Doing” that’s actually named after a quote from TWM’s protagonist, Sgt. Neil Howie. It’s a film that’s infiltrated underground culture to a surprising degree. Doubtlessly, this is because it offers a startlingly cogent critique of both the prevailing conservative culture–and of the romanticized rebellion against it. It frightens us because we’re not sure what side it’s on, but we’re reasonably sure it’s not on our own.

The Wicker Man’s power lies in a deft philosophical sleight-of-hand it works upon the audience. The film stars Edward Woodward as an aggressively straight-laced Christian police sergeant, Neil Howie, from the West Highlands in Scotland. He receives an anonymous tip that a girl has disappeared in the remote Hebridean island of Summerisle, and travels by seaplane to investigate. He discovers, to his mounting disgust and indignation, that the residents of the island have rejected Christianity en masse, having adopted a nature-worship pagan religion that reveres “the old gods.” It seems they credit their heathen ways with the island’s incongruous capacity to support the growth of delicious, plentiful apples, which have become their sole cash crop. But Sgt. Howie soon discovers that the crop has failed, and wonders if the disappearance of the girl might be tied into the Summerislians’s attempts to placate their angry gods.

But forget about all that scary-sounding stuff. The bulk of this film centers on the prudish Sgt. Howie’s righteous indignation at the islanders’ practices, which in the main consist of an extremely enthusiastic embrace of human sexuality. Bawdy songs are sung about the landlord’s daughter, who sings right along–as does the landlord himself. Couples rut in the fields, several at a time. Little boys dance around the maypole singing exceptionally frank songs about the cycle of life, while little girls are instructed about phallic symbols and how the penis is worshipped as a symbol of the generative power of nature. Virgin teenage girls cavort naked over a fire, hoping it will impregnate them. And virgin teenage boys are offered to that landlord’s daughter (played to earthily sensual perfection by Britt Ekland and her rear-view body double) to be deflowered as a sort of sexual human sacrifice. Howie, a virgin himself, is as horrified as he is tempted. (It’s not just sex that riles him, though; he’s similarly aghast at the island’s “sacreligious” burial rites, and most importantly, at the complete lack of Christian education.) Throughout, the filmmakers take great care not to show Sgt. Howie as an obnoxious, self-righteous prick: Oh, he’s righteous, alright, but there’s no sign that he’s anything but a true believer, one who has found great comfort and strength in his beliefs. It’s not that he’s a would-be Torquemada, or that he’s a hypocrite, that turns the audience off his religion: It’s that the Summerislians’ is just so much more fun, more earthy, more humane, more human.

Or so it seems.

To go into the specifics of how our sympathies turn would be to spoil the deftness with which Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Schaeffer pull this all off. I’ll just say that they slowly layer the bawdy gaeity of the islanders until before you know it, it’s become not jolly but unsettling. Their trickery and mockery of Howie becomes not playful but sinister. And it’s soon made horrifyingly apparent that this new-old religion of sun and sky and sea is just as interwoven with delusion, with dogma, and with death as its monotheistic, cross-bearing supplanter. It’s all brought home in a line delivered with the simultaneous existential terror and supreme confidence of the fanatic by Christopher Lee, playing Lord Summerisle, when he’s asked what will happen if the crops fail despite the islanders’ rituals: “They. Will. Not. Fail!” They will not fail, because they cannot fail, it is inconceivable, they have willed it not to be so so it must not, cannot be so. It’s failure would be horror to them. And their success is horror to Sgt. Howie–and, eventually, to us.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 1

13. The Birds, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

The one constant in Alfred Hitchcock’s universe is arbitrary horror. Innocent people find themselves wrongfully accused, pursued by sinister forces, embroiled suddenly in obsession or murder, slain at the hands of a madman in whose path only chance put them. In 1963, Hitchcock chose to make the obvious subtext of his films the subject of one. He made a movie in which all of humanity finds itself wrongfully accused, attacked, hunted, tortured at the hands of irrational, implacable evil. That movie was The Birds.

Some filmmakers, after dancing around certain themes for years, finally make a movie that says so much, so completely, about their worldview, that they serve as summations of that filmmaker’s entire ouevre. They may still make movies afterwards, but they’ve said what they have to say. I can think of three such cases off the top of my head: Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now, Woody Allen with Crimes & Misdemeanors, and The Master with this film, a purer distillation of his belief that the world was an unpredictably and viciously horrific place even than Psycho.

It’s a film of extraordinary cruelty. It’s no coincidence that the actress who played its protagonist, Tippi Hedren, was more abused and injured in the course of its filming than any other of Hitch’s blonde ingenues–taking a face full of shattered glass during the filming of the phone booth sequence; getting cut on the eyelids and actually having a nervous breakdown during the attic attack, one that shut down filming for several days (only the second time such a thing happened in Hitchcock’s entire career). Hitchcock appeared to be channeling some of the same maliciousness present in the film he was making.

It’s also no coincidence that we see children receiving the bulk of the abuse within the film. A birthday party and a schoolhouse are both attacked by the inexplicably maddened birds, and Hitchock’s camera lingers on the kids as they run, cry, fall to the ground helpless against the attacks. Even the most “innocent” among us are guilty in this irrational cosmology.

We viewers do not escape the indictment handed down by the Master either. Twice characters stare directly into the camera, offering a frantic, terrified j’accuse. “Who are you? What are you? Why have you come here?” says the panicking mother in the diner after the gas station attack–says the mother, directly to us. “I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil! Evil!” Melanie, the character she’s “really” talking to, slaps her, and we’re grateful, but later even Melanie turns on us, staring at us with horrified eyes and slapping us away, mistaking (mistaking?) us for her attackers. Elsewhere, eyeglasses are shattered, eyes themselves pecked out. We see, and we are punished for the crime of seeing.

But depite the visual violence, despite even the magesterial images of horror Hitchcock deploys one after another–Dan Fawcett’s fate, the jungle gym, the still-like shots of Melanie’s slackjawed trace of the fire’s progress, the bird’s eye view of the burning gas station, the claustrophobic phone booth, the stunning appearance of horses thundering through the attack, the sunlit panorama of the bird-conquered world–it’s sound that makes this film so horrific. The result of a unique collaboration between longtime Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrman and German electronic musicians Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala, the electronically-generated bird cries woven throughout the film play the same role here that Rob Bottin’s visual effects played in The Thing–they provide an almost ecstatic elucidation of the occulted meaning of the films. I wrote at length about sound in The Birds in a close-reading essay for a class in college, which you can download as a PDF here. Hitchcock, like Kubrick, is a filmmaker who does nothing by accident, so it’s amazing how rewarding close reading can be. From the opening credits to Jessica Tandy’s famous “silent scream” to the climactic attacks to the final image, Hitchcock used sound to show us that something has gone very, very wrong. That’s the sound of horror.

Forty years after it was made, The Birds can still make even a jaded gorehound like me sit there, mouth agape, saying “My God.” Hitchcock was the master, and this was his masterpiece.

No movie yesterday, but I double-dipped the day before, so you’re okay with that, right?

Today’s film just missed inclusion in The 13 Days of Halloween. Actually, it was part of the list as late as this morning, but a little more thought on my part led me to conclude that structurally, it’s not quite horror–it doesn’t have that beginning-to-end crescendo of suspense, it doesn’t have that allegorical/fable/fairty tale feel that most horror has at its heart. Quite possibly, this is because, in its joy and its terror, its humor and its cruelty, its beauty and its gut-wrenching ugliness, it’s true.

The film is Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet (in her film debut). Based on a true story, it centers on Pauline and Juliette, two teenage girls in 1950s New Zeland. Pauline is a sullen introvert, Juliette a boisterous, self-confident transfer student from England and sundry other countries to which she’s been either shipped or dragged by her free-thinking university-faculty parents. Together they construct an intense friendship, and a mutual fantasy world of medieval romances and Mario Lanza songs. They fall in love. And they go mad.

I’m surprised at this point to find myself at something of a loss for words. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this movie, and in watching it today with Amanda I was actually stunned to discover just how intense an experience it is. The first three-quarters of the movie are just about as delightful a cinematic experience as you’re likely to come across. Lynskey and Winslet are quite simply revelatory in their roles as girlfriends completely besotted with one another’s talents, intelligence, beauty, and joie de vivre, all of which seem to them compunded exponentially when they’re together. It’s the kind of friendship, so I’ve been told, that lots of girls have, one just as intense as first love with a boy, or even full-grown love with a man. Jackson, who at this point has so proven himself to be a cinematic visionary that no additional evidence is even necessary, demonstrates here much of the virtuosity he displays in his Lord of the Rings films. Then as now, his knack for harnessing gorgeous, inventive visuals to convey human drama and emotion is second to none. The whirling, constantly on-the-move camerawork that follows Juliette & Pauline’s joyous bike ride and Lanza-scored romp through the woods in their skivvies captures the giddy heady rush of happiness the girls are immersed in. Things get more elegant when, after bad news comes down from Juliette’s parents, the girls find “the key to the Fourth World,” and the countryside around them morphs into a secret garden of unicorns and giant butterflies. Then there are the shocking and hilarious moments when the human representatives of those twin bugbears of troubled adolescence, the Church and psychiatry, are dispatched by the clay-sculpted prince of the girls’ fantasy world. And of course there are our journeys into that world, Borovnia, a precursor to the kingdoms and creatures of Middle Earth, this time stemming not from the painstaking recreation of an Oxford don’s detailed notes, but the fevered, ecstatic scrawl of two girls falling in love with each other and out of touch with the real world. It all happens so convincingly, so entertainingly, so beautifully that, as Amanda put it to me tonight, you almost feel guilty of conspiracy when it all goes to hell.

The final quarter of the film comprises some of the most heartwrenching, nerve-wracking moments of cinema I’ve ever come across. One moment you’re in the tragicomic world of teenagers in love, one you’re intimately familiar with even if not under these specific circumstances; the next thing you know, it is announced to you that you are on a collision course with sheer, pointless insanity. You spend those minutes with your heart and stomach lurching around your ribcage like drunken dance partners. You alternate between sympathy and revulsion, a feeling of disbelief and a feeling (one you know is the right one to have, you’ve known it since the opening sequence) of inevitability. And when it happens, it’s not just bad–it’s awful. The sounds alone are pure horror. And it helps no one, and there’s no point to it, none at all, and it happens anyway, and your ship pulls away, and you’re left standing on the shore, crying (I’ve seen this how many times and I still cried?), and alone.

No monsters, no chainsaws. Just the horror of the inevitable, the horror of a decision that cannot be undone. The horror of the human.

Question the design strategy behind The Complete Peanuts on a blog, and you get this.

Question the design strategy behind The Complete Peanuts on a message board, and you get this.

Respectful disagreements, thoughtful support, both with well-reasoned arguments on design, aesthetics, and the content of the strip itself to back it up, plus admissions that ‘hey, this is just where I’m coming from,’ all done in a spirit that everyone involved is intelligent and honest and basically decent and pretty knowledgeable about and invested in the success of Peanuts in particular and comics in general, versus groundless accusations of fanboyism and ad hominem attacks on blogs, Barnes & Nobles shoppers, people who watch television, and anyone who dares criticize anything that Smart People Like ever, plus a general atmosphere of shouting-down, intellectual one-upsmanship, and playing-to-“win.”

Nothing further, your honor.

Oh my gosh! David Fiore points out that I neglected to mention one of the best scenes in John Carpenter’s The Thing: the visit paid by Mac (Kurt Russell) to imprisoned scientist Blair (Wilford Brimley). Blair was the first of the besieged research crew to discover the ramifications of their “visitor”–that if the Thing reached civilization, life as we know it would be wiped out. He snaps, destroying all the group’s modes of travel and communication, but is overwhelmed and locked in a shack by himself, where he’s kept doped up and isolated. Mac goes to check on him, opens up the little view-panel on the door–and sees Blair sitting there, calmly, more or less ignoring the noose he’s hung from the ceiling. Brrr, that’s chilling, man. And the dialogue: “I don’t wanna stay out here, Mac…” My God, what a great, macabre scene. (Unlike David, I don’t think Blair’s been Thinged at this point–if he had been, he’d have taken down that noose, right?)

A propos my recent post on his and Eve Tushnet’s view of The Wicker Man, Bill Sherman clarifies that freak, not hippie, is his preferred nomenclature. So noted!

Personal to Johnny Bacardi: That’s what I meant.

Courtesy of Eve Tushnet, a really terrific list of the 100 Scariest Movie Scenes of All Time over at Retrocrush. Selected with care, described with admiration, and picked out of more than just horror films, it’s a damn fun list to flip through. See how many you recognize from the thumbnails alone.

It’s not a “rivalry” if one team always wins.

Thanks, Babe!

Yesterday was a proud one for the U.S. Senate, as they voted to kick Iraq in the teeth for no reason other than to make life difficult for President Bush. How glad we must all be that these brave souls are ready to saddle a devastated Third World country with crippling debt, in order to take a firm stand against war, or lies, or leaks, or more Americans were shot in Baghdad today, or where are the weapons, or something. How will forcing a destitute country to pay for the damage we inflicted upon it make a difference in any of the above things? Uh… THIS WAR WAS A FRAUD!

Disgraceful. May this incredibly shortsighted and spiteful punitive measure–essentially a big-budget remake of the Versailles Treaty–die a quick and well-deserved death.

Please, please go to this page and read the second comment. It’s by some guy named Nato, and it’s a freaking masterpiece. And I like Mark Millar.

Since a lot of folks apparently feel that I’ve earned the position of Creative Excoriator General, I’ll say that if I had to name a successor, this’d be the guy.

Today’s quote of the day is from Newsarama’s Matt Brady: “[A]s far as the Diamond Top 300 [the list of the best-selling comics in the Direct Market] goes, diversity roughly means superheroes with capes versus superheroes without capes.”

Meanwhile, Dirk Deppey extrapolates on Brady’s simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic reading of the Direct Market tea leaves.

Is Franklin right? Did Blogosphere Kill The Pseudonym Star? John Jakala thinks it was a good idea to stop before the Lemon went sour for good. (Actually, Lemon’s final (?) column is a decent one, praising Watchmen (the analysis is rather perfunctory, but that’s because everyone’s read the damn book already anyway) and rightfully taking the mainstream comics industry to task for not being able to equal it over two decades’ worth of attempts.)

Speaking of people Mr. Harris thinks are better off hangin’ up the spurs, former Marvel President Bill Jemas gets a once-over from Franklin. Like most people (see links here), Franklin thinks Jemas made (or helped make) a lot of changes for the good, but was threatening a lot of the work he’d done with his recent, less productive decisions and decrees. I had actually worried more than once that Jemas’s drawbacks–the trash-talking, the armchair-editing, the occasional tasteless shock tactics–would actually tempt the Marvel higher-ups to undo everything new that happened under Jemas’s watch–you know, the whole “hiring good creators to tell good stories and take risks in doing so” thing. But unfortunately for the fanboys, it looks like this move has headed that possibility off at the pass.

More comments on The Jemas Ouster come from Steven Grant (who argues that it don’t really make much difference: Marvel is Marvel is Marvel. I think he’s greatly underestimating how good the good Marvel books are, and is applying a standard to what constitutes a good franchise superhero book that’s never been applicable even when the books were/are at their freshest and best, but still, some decent points are made), Alan David Doane (who mainly agrees with Steven and otherwise claims apathy), and Chris Allen (who, in something of a public service, recalls Jemas’s proposal for the Ultimate Daredevil/Elektra ongoing series which never materialized; thank Christ, because the miniseries that was produced sucked all the mystery and tragedy out of the characters in favor of playing like a Lifetime Movie of the Week). I’ll just say it again: I’m not sure who was responsible for what, but in the course of Bill Jemas’s presidency I went from not reading maybe three new comics in four or five years to wanting to write them for a living, and his “New Marvel” was a direct contributor to this. So thanks again, Mr. Jemas.

Another debate making the rounds is over the Peanuts cover announced by Fantagraphics. Johnny Bacardi is the latest person to defend it (sorta), but it’s worth noting that so far everyone who has done so has conceded my point that the cover is not going to appeal to the casual buyer. Guys, I agree that it looks nice, but so what? A cover with a picture of Monica Vitti on it would look nice, too, but how would that help sell the book to fans of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown? I don’t care what the price point is or that the collection’s from the “off-model” years–that’s your market, and you should do your damndest to make the book as buyable as you can.

(And David, I agree with you that the strip is about frustration, but a) It’s the funniness that sells it, and b) I’m not sure that everyone does realize that. I don’t think it would be egregiously lowest-common-denominator-exploiting of Fanta to realize that fact and design the book accordingly.)

Finally, thanks, Jason!

Two movies today.

I suppose that what separates the movies I’m watching and reviewing right now from the movies I’ll be watching and reviewing once the official 13 Days of Halloween begin on Sunday is that these ones tend to lack that monumental horror-image that frightens me so. But there’s more than one way to skin a teenager cat, and there’s more than one way to visually demonstrate that something is going very, very wrong. The image may not be monumental in the ways I use the term, but it can be spectacular, and spectacularly horrifying too.

Such is the case with John Carpenter’s The Thing, the 1982 reimagining of the 1951 sci-fi alien-invader flick of the same name (both are adaptations of the John Campbell short story “Who Goes There?”). Director Carpenter had previously pumped new, ahem, blood into horror with his phenomenally successful and influential ur-slasher flick Halloween. But that movie, for my money, has had much of its power stripped away by its imitators. Whereas slasher-movie copycats and general pop-culture rifferty tend to reveal the superiority of forerunners like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in Halloween’s case they reveal the original’s weaknesses, which are many. That film did precious little for me when i finally saw it. But Carpenter runs into no such difficulty with this, his second most-oft-imitated film, which is also his most frightening and visionary.

The plot is pure situational simplicity. The gruff, all-male crew of a remote American research station in Antarctica peek outside their windows to see a pair of frantic Norwegians in a helicopter, shooting at a fleeing sled dog. Within minutes, the two Norwegians are dead, the dog has been taken in, and the Americans are left wondering what the hell happened in the Norwegian research base the trio fled from, a full hour away by helicopter. Kurt Russell plays R.J. McCready, the bearded, heavy-drinking helicopter pilot who discovers that the Norwegian scientists had freed something from the ancient ice–and that that shape-shifting, alien something now walks among his crew.

Like several great horror films (Deliverance, The Exorcist, Texas Chain Saw), this film benefits greatly from its long, slow, tense opening segment. The frigidity and isolation of the snowed-in base is established in detail, as is the gruesome insanity of whatever-it-is-that-happened to the Norwegian, and as are the combustible personalities of the American crew. Carpenter assembled one of the most watchable casts of manly men since Kazan’s 12 Angry Men–it’s a veritable smorgasbord of terrific character actors, including Richard Dysart as the cool-headed base doctor, Wilford Brimely as the volatile brains of the operation, Donald Moffat as the gun-toting military man, and Richard Masur as the sensitive type who looks after the rescued dog. Between them and the other types here assembled–the pot-smoking conspiracy theorist, the rollerskating funkateer, the bespectacled Richard Dreyfus lookalike, the wigged-out radioman, the suspicious rival for McCready’s ersatz leadership post–there’s enough pent-up, violent machismo bouncing around that anyone thrown in amongst the group would be prone to paranoia, even if mysterious Things weren’t a factor.

But they are–oh boy, are they ever. Make-up effects artist Rob Bottin has rightfully entered the pantheon for his work here, some of the most exuberantly imaginative and grotesque horror effects in the history of film. Taking cures from sources like Salvador Dali (“The Great Masturbator”), Francis Bacon (“Study for Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”), David Cronenberg (pick a film, any film), and of course the creature-features of yore, Bottin creates images so bizarre, so utterly unique in their own logic of absorption, disintegration, and transformation, that they simply must be seen to be believed. The very first time we see them in action–it’s one of those cases where the filmmakers make sure you see something coming, but not that–the effect is so overwhelming in its out-of-nowhere explosion of viscerality that we the audience end up being as shocked as the characters. From that moment the film has us, and makes the characters’ every ounce of fear, mistrust, and terror our own.

But these spectacular rendings and transformations wouldn’t work if Carpenter didn’t bother to ground them in some sense of the real. So laced throughout the film are small, relatable moments of pain and discomfort–surgical stitching, extreme cold, cut fingers, heart troubles, putting down sick dogs, and so forth. Because of this, the gargantuan, explosive moments–pain and discomfort writ large–are more powerful, since they’ve been seen in scale.

A similar bait-and-switch is visible in a more recent, often overlooked genre effort–2001’s Jeepers Creepers. Directed by Victor Salva (a man who, unfortunately, has firsthand experience with monsterdom–he’s a convicted sex offender; this does affect a lot of people’s decision as to whether or not to see the film), this was another one of those sight-unseen recommendations I’ve been fortunate enough to receive, this time from Clive Barker himself. “Just a little movie made for nothing that does something genuinely scary and weird,” he says, and he’s right.

The movie stars Gina Phillips and Justin Long as a bickering brother and sister whose long roadtrip home from college through countryside backroads–well, I imagine you can guess that things don’t go well from there, and you know what? That’s all I’m saying, because I think this film is best seen with the same amount of foreknowledge I myself had when I first saw it: none.

Starting with believable dialogue and likeably annoying performances from the two leads, Jeepers veers headlong into a succession of heart-pounding sequences, each different in tone and execution from the last until, after one sudden, bizarre moment (a moment that loses some viewers while sucking others, like me, right in), you’re in a very different, very strange, and very frightening place. In between there are references to Duel, Texas Chain Saw, Nightbreed, and many others–none of which, however, feel at all derivative, peppered as they are with moments that are startling and original (the design of a truck, a slow-motion free-fall, an unexpected turn for the weird, the repeated and total violation of presumed saftey zones). Lead actor Long is required to do little else but look wide-eyed and slack-jawed, but Phillips, who looks like a younger, lovelier version of Laura San Giacomo, gives a performance of surprising nuance, seguing from sisterly irritation to fish-out-of-water fear to unexpectedly fierce protective love. It culminates with an ending that I didn’t see coming at all–no mean feat for a horror film.

Yeah, there are a lot of approaches to horror. These two movies find their own. And they happen to be horrifying as hell.