Today’s film is a favorite of mine, all the more so for its being a completely unexpected find. It’s called Cemetery Man–also known as Della’morte Dell’amore–and it’s got zombie nuns, serial killers, Hitchcockian doppelgangers, direct swipes from Rene Magritte, existentialist angst, surrealist plot construction, inventive and entertaining gore, and beautiful naked people. In other words, how could it not be one of my favorites?

Directed by Dario Argento protege Michele Soavi, this Italian-made 1994 film (it was shot in English, but the Italian-standard post-sync sound still gives it an odd dubbed look) stars, get this, Rupert Everett. Yes, that Rupert Everett–My Best Friend’s Wedding, Madonna’s ersatz girlfriend for a while. What is he doing in a low-budget Italian zombie movie? God only knows, but he’s doing it really well. Everett stars as Francesco Della’morte, the aptly surnamed (it means “of death”) caretaker of Buffalora Cemetery. Ground down to a little nub of cynicism and washboard abs by years of working with nothing but corpses and a mute manservant named Gnaghi, Della’morte spends his days burying the dead and his nights re-killing them, as some unnamed epidemic has taken hold in his cemetery, re-animating the dead by the seventh day after their death. From the very first scene, it’s clear that Della’morte sees this bizarre and gruesome task as just another part of his workaday existence–to report it would mean losing his job, to say nothing of the mountains of paperwork involved.

Things change for our gruff, sexy, perpetually five-o’clock-shadowed anti-hero when a beautiful young widow, played by the almost comically lovely Anna Falchi, passes through the graveyard to bury her late husband, a much older man. Turns out the widow has something of a thing for death, which Della’morte plays to his advantage, and then, unfortunately for everyone, to his disadvantage. How? Well, let’s just say having sex with someone atop her husband’s grave in a cemetery where the dead routinely come back to life is maybe a bad idea. I won’t say anymore–this film is so unique, and so filmic, that I don’t want to spoil it for you. But suffice it to say that this movie starts as one thing, becomes three or four other things, and ends up as something entirely unexpected and deeply, deeply haunting.

Not something you expect from an Italian zombie flick, huh?

I myself was lucky enough to pick it up sight-unseen at the recommendation of the clerk at the local cult-movie video store back at Yale (before the University moved a Blockbuster in down the street and put the place out of business). I took it home, stuck it in the common-room VCR, and sat enthralled with half my roommates as this movie, utterly unlike anything I’d ever seen before, played out. “Wow,” said my pre-med housemate upon its conclusion, “what a movie–that had something for everybody!” And indeed it does. The film’s sense of humor shines through even in its bleakest and grossest moments, and is as deadpan as it wanna be: Says a doctor at one point to Della’morte, who for reasons I’ll avoid getting into is seeking a fairly radical bit of sex therapy, “Please don’t make me cut it off. Today, I’m… just not up for it.” There’s broad but vicious satire of contemporary mores, both political (“Vote For A Man Who Has Lost All Other Happiness” is proposed as an hysterically exploitative campaign slogan by the town’s mayor, whose daughter has just been decapitated in a motorcycle accident) and sexual (“Mind your business,” yells a love-struck young woman when Della’morte interrupts her post-mortem reunion with her dead boyfriend, “I can be eaten by whomever I please.”). The performances are note-perfect all around, and Everett and Falchi imbue their roles with a kind of nihilistic glamour, like a grand guignol Belmondo and Seberg. Moreover, the two leads are genuinely glorious specimens of humanity; you see quite a bit of them, and they give their sex scenes a genuine paraphiliac chemistry. Indeed, the whole movie is like paraphilia in film form–instead of channelling sexual energy into fetishes, the movie channels horror into comedy, comedy into erotica, erotica into romance, romance into slapstick, slapstick into tragedy, tragedy into gore, gore into high art, high art into pulp, pulp into philosophy. It bridges the gap between film grad students, comic-book geeks and horny teenagers by referencing cult favorites both silly (The Three Stooges) , sinister (the whole zombie-flick pantheon), and sublime (Magritte). And the ending–nope, not another word out of me, just that it’s metaphor writ large, and it’s genuinely fascinating to see.

Oh, and did I mention the zombie Boy Scouts? Damn, this is a good movie.

Random thoughts from around the ersatz horrorsphere:

Johnny Bacardi has a big ol’ post today that, among other things, talks about the inaugural film in Hammer’s vampire franchise, Horror of Dracula. (Johnny, the reason the crossed candlesticks worked is because it’s the belief, in this case Van Helsing’s, that makes a cross or crucifix an effective vampire retardant, and not the purpose for which the cross-like object/s was manufactured. Cf. the popsicle-stick cross in Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.) Later in that same post, Johnny responds to an earlier post of mine and justifies his criteria for “good horror movies”–he just doesn’t get scared by movies, so he’s looking for the overall entertainment value rather than the fright factor. Hey, to each his own. But me, I gotta have the scary stuff.

Eve Tushnet offers thoughts on a little horror-flick marathon she underwent over the weekend. I agree with her take on Daredevil (okay, not a horror movie, but, uh, “devil”‘s in the title)–I think that, for all its goofy flaws, this movie still deserves more credit. I can see not getting scared by The Sixth Sense–spooky, yes; frightening over the long term, no, but then I don’t think that’s the point–but I must admit I’ll never understand people who aren’t scared by The Shining. And it’s very interesting to hear Eve’s thoughts on The Wicker Man, particularly if you compare to them to that big ol’ hippie Bill Sherman‘s. Personally, I think the brilliance of this film is how it toys almost mercilessly with audience expectation, particularly the expectation of the kind of anti-establishment art-school audiences most likely to see it at this point–and that’s what tripped Bill up a bit. But I think that if you don’t get your worldview challenged by this film, as Eve says she didn’t, well, you’re probably a little too comfortable in your worldview. (Hey, I’m just saying that one little sentence in lieu of a whole debate about Catholicism and same-sex marriage. I’m being a diplomat here!)

Finally, Shawn Fumo reviews Dan Clowes’s if-that’s-not-horror-I-don’t-know-what-is graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and proceeds from there into the assertion that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was, in fact, a horror film. I haven’t seen MD, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be–nearly everything else by Lynch certainly is, whether people notice it or not. His whole oeuvre is about nameless, purposeless evil overwhelming and corrupting the innocent. That’s horror. That, and all the evil murdering Men from Another Place.

Amy counters my response to her thoughts on the utility of criticism. I certainly think she’s right that the ultimate arbiter of quality in art is Time, over which standards both develop and are agreed upon and applied, a canon emerges, and so forth. All I’m saying is that the criticism that each of us does in the here and now are little drops in that ocean, or to make us sound more productive and vital, bricks in the edifice. That’s how I feel, anyway–not that I’m the Judge of Goodness for the world, but just for me, and that these are my thoughts about this or that, and I think they’re good thoughts, and you can do with them what you will.

My worrisome thoughts on the upcoming Peanuts books from Fantagraphics have inspired some responses: Eve agrees that the design is almost confrontationally Artsy, while Franklin and David say it’s okay by them. Well, yeah, guys, that’s what I’m saying: You’re the Peanuts hardcore–of course you’re gonna love a nice tasteful thoughtful melancholic cover that will look nice on your bookshelf. Hey, I’m not even arguing that it won’t look nice on your bookshelf or anything like that. I just think that most people want a Peanuts collection that looks like it’s going to be funny, not one that’s some sort of “Taps”-in-design-form for our lost childhoods and the late Sparky Schulz, which is what Seth came up with. And yeah, David, the angst is right there, but so is the funniness, and that’s ultimately why people come back to Charlie Brown et al.

I’ve been a big booster of the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club ever since they were personally recommended to me by the Dandy Warhols. (Hey, when a man named Courtney Taylor-Taylor tells you something, you listen.) And I love, love, love their first record, B.R.M.C.. It’s swirly, it’s dark, it’s loud, it’s ambitious, it’s progressive, it’s classic, it’s generally a big fat rejoinder to the critics who inexplicably tagged the band as a Jesus & Mary Chain knockoff. (I guess they look a little like J&MC used to, but I really have never been able to figure out the prevalence of this meme.) So I was pretty damn psyched to pick up their second record, Take Them On, On Your Own. Sounds angry! Sounds brash!

Sounds boring.

Okay, that was harsh. To be fair, about half of TTOOYO is a good record, and without the existence of the band’s first album, the whole thing might be considered pretty good. But alas, they already recorded songs like “Whatever Happened To My Rock and Roll?” on the first record, so filling half of this one with uninspired retreads of that song’s thunderous school-of-rock marching-band-isms and endless feedbacky coda is just an exercise in water-treading. And in song after song–“Stop” (which at least has an interesting six-word chorus), “Six-Barrel Shotgun” (might as well be a “Whatever Happened…?” remix), “We’re All In Love,” “Generation” (this one riffs on the first album’s “White Palms” instead–ooh, innovative), “Suddenly” (in 3/4 time, but otherwise same deal)–that’s exactly what they do.

This is not to say that the Club tries nothing new. On “In Like the Rose,” the band tries to do the Dandy Warhol’s drone-y groove thing, but unfortunately all they manage to do is plod; “Ha Ha High Babe” fares much better in its similar vein. “Shade of Blue” seems like more of the same until a simple, sunny guitar line jangles in from out of nowhere mid-song, lifting the whole thing up out of the doldrums. “And I’m Aching” is acoustic, which is pretty, but makes the limitations of lead vocalist Robert Turner’s vocals all the clearer (and they were pretty clear to begin with, on this album). But the record closes with a one-two punch that rivals some of the combos on its predecessor: “Rise or Fall,” a New Wave-y banger that, you want to yell infomercial-style, really works!, and “Heart + Soul,” which sounds like nothing so much as Pink Floyd covering the MC5, which believe me is a good thing to sound like indeed.

So yeah, there’s half a good album on there. It’s only disappointing when you consider their first album–the searing regret of “Love Burns,” the sneering rage of “Red Eyes and Tears,” the swirling psychedelia of “Awake,” the rumbling angst of “White Palms,” the rockin’ “Jean Genie”-isms of “Spread Your Love,” the swelling religiosity of “Alive.” At least 50% of what you have on Take Them On is merely competent, a sort of balls-to-the-wall-by-the-numbers routine. I guess we are on our own, after all.

Congratulations to Dirk “The CNN of the Comics Internet (pre-Fox News)” Deppey for a full year of blogging.

Congratulations to Alan David Doane for his second return to blogging in as many weeks, and congratulations to NeilAlien for redesigning ADD’s site and giving it a logo that, considering a lot of people’s apparent feelings toward Alan, is eminently appropriate.

Congratulations to Mark Millar for thinking of another great way to piss people off, and congratulations to Peter Gross for coming up with two of the best covers I’ve seen all year.

Congratulations to John Jakala for smacking down another example of mainstream comics condescension, and congratulations to John Jakala again for clarifying that it’s not Chuck Austen’s revisionist superhero tale that bothers him, it’s the fact that Austen’s press release reads like it’s the only revisionist superhero comic ever.

And congratulations to David Fiore for coming up with The Comicsphere Sentence of the Week: “Tomorrow, I’ll start my close-reading of Power of the Atom #1.”

Only in the comicsphere, kids. Only in the comicsphere.

The Missus was insistent: I’ve got to stick with the “13” part of The 13 Days of Halloween. So after a lot of thought, I’ve managed to narrow down the mass of movies to a top thirteen. I’ll still be reviewing a bunch of films in the run-up to the 19th, when the 13 Days start in earnest; I’ll also be peppering the days with runners-up and also-rans. But there will be a countdown, stretching from the 19th to the 31st and culminating in The Scariest Movie I Ever Seen.

Pleasant dreams.

James Lileks, of all people, gets into the spooky spirit with a great post about, among other things, Stephen King. I too find myself flipping through It around this time of year (in the beginning of the summer, it’s Night Shift and Skeleton Crew; at the end of summer, it’s The Stand; in the fall, it’s It). I go straight for the good parts, ask myself if they’ll be as good as I remember them, read them, and say to myself Yep, as good as I remember them. Which is to say it has all the simultaneous detail and power of a locomotive engine moving at full speed when it’s about three feet from your face.

Jason Adams went on a horror-DVD shopping spree, and also talks a bit about reading the copies of the Books of Blood that I lent him. Volume I really is just plain incredible, one story after another.

Finally, good enough, Jim, good enough!

Since The 13 Days of Halloween, my planned denouement of this whole Where the Monsters Go horrorfest, are fast approaching, I tried to compile a list of the thirteen films I’ll be reviewing at the end of the month while on the train today.

Ha!

It quickly became apparent that the odds of me whittling down my favorite horror films to a mere 13 were slim to none–a top 25 is a little closer to the mark. Once we get to around the top, oh, seven or so, the rank is pretty clear, but below that tier there’s just a mass of movies that I simply love and would love to talk about. And there’s other movies that I haven’t seen yet but want to, and want to discuss the results of said proposed screenings. What to do?

Well, there’s only one thing for a self-respecting former film-studies major horror junkie to do: Start immersion therapy now, and let God sort it all out come the 31st. Let’s call it The 13 Days of Halloween: The Director’s Cut.

Update: I did it! 13 Days, 13 top horror films: so be it. Stay tuned.

So anyway, Paperhouse. This was the filmic equivalent of a blind date for me: My pal Jason Adams lent me a copy with his personal recommendation attached. Directed by Bernard Rose, this 1988 feature has all the hallmarks of 1980s British genre cinema that I know and love: men in grey suits, pretty-plain women with broad white faces, ethereal synths and strings for the soundtrack, an overall feel of elegant decrepitude. (Think Hellraiser, think the film version of 1984…)

It’s a lovely, scary little film, centered on a sick young girl whose dreamlife seems connected to the absent-minded-cum-compulsive sketches she draws in her notebook. Her immersion in this world and her friendship with the young boy she finds there soon come to threaten her health, and perhaps her sanity, in the real world. Like the work of a proto-Shyamalan, Paperhouse is constructed by director Rose at a deliberate pace, with long takes, thoughtful editing, and marvelously immersive sound. The performances are quiet and convincing, particularly those of the two children (Charlotte Burke and Elliot Spiers) and the girl’s harried all-but-single mother (Glenne Headly, an actress I could stand to see more of). The scary stuff is not really the point of the film, but when it comes it’s off-kilter, disturbing, and intense–thanks in no small part to the film’s art direction, which achieves a weird synthesis between Rene Magritte and Edward Hopper.

As Jason says, the Freudian imagery can become a little much at times–lighthouses, blind fathers, parapalegics, dark tunnels, warm baths, the sea, using a soft-serve ice cream machine but then disappointedly sighing “no cones”–and since I’m sure there’s a debate to be had as to whether Freud unveiled this symbolic undercurrent to humanity or simply hyped and/or outright invented it, it’s tough to say how primal all this is. But it’s eerie–uncanny, if you will–and coupled with the surprisingly touching turns the story takes, it gives the film a haunting, poetic feel that I can tell will stick with me.

I see from looking at the IMDB that comparisons to The Ring have been made, and rightly so; this film lacks that one’s vicious heart, though, and in this case is the better for it. Paperhouse is a hard film to find, but look around.

Apologies to Jim Henley for stealing his idea, but…

War is bad. However, war is not always the baddest. Sometimes it’s not even close.

Just because you support war doesn’t mean you can or should fight in it. I advocate a radical reevaluation of the Rolling Stones’s writing and playing habits, but I will not and should not be taking over vocal duties from Mick Jagger anytime soon. (Seriously, Jim, chickenhawk arguments? Even if you’re just kidding, that’s beneath you.)

Oppose the war? Fine. Cheering for people who, because they oppose the war, want to punish the Iraqis for no good reason? Not fine.

While it’s true that Al Qaeda can never transform America into an Islamist fascist theocracy, they and their friends, forerunners and supporters have in fact done this in an extraordinarily huge area of the world, and will continue to murder random Americans and others for as long as said theocracies exist, for this is the nature of said theocracies. So terrorism is the foremost threat to liberty in the world; and while I think the PATRIOT and VICTORY Acts are pretty dumb (much less dumb than things done by every other wartime administration in the nation’s history, yes, but still dumb), it takes a very, very narrow reading of both “America” and “liberty” to decide that Ashcroft and Rumsfeld are a bigger threat to either than terrorism is.

In general: Espousing doctrinaire isolationist/pacifist libertarian views to attack a war designed to end an expansionist, belligerent, fascist regime? I’ve got to admit that I just don’t get it. Or maybe I do, but because it stems from not giving a tinker’s damn about the rest of the world, I don’t want to.

Moving on, Iraq is not in chaos. Iraq is not spiraling towards chaos. Iraq is occasionally chaotic, but so is Mepham High School in Bellmore, Long Island. If you are being told that things are getting worse and worse in Iraq, you are being lied to.

If you are being told that President Bush ever said the threat from Iraq was “imminent,” you are being lied to.

If you are being told that David Kay and the weapons inspectors found “nothing,” you are being lied to.

I’m really, really, really tired of seeing news reports from the likes of NBC’s David Gregory, who in a transparently anti-Bush chat with Chris Matthews last week talked about how the Bush Administration’s drive to publicize the successful reconstruction going on in Iraq is “belied” by the urgency with which they were doing it, that the bad poll numbers (not so bad anymore, it would seem) stem not from lousy one-sided reporting but are the logical consequence of the number of K.I.A every day (as if that’s the only story in the whole goddamn country), that the weapons inspectors (here it is again) found nothing.

The truth is out there.

Amanda offers a thought-provoking post on the nature, and perhaps the futility, of art criticism. She’s focusing primarily on music, with a nod towards visual arts and dance–the three most ineffable art forms, I’d wager. And obviously her point is a good one, as evidenced by the differences of opinion between all the intelligent, well-rounded art/lit-crit thinkers in the blogroll over there: What makes art “good” is as hard to find as Flannery O’Connor’s proverbial good man. But in the end I can’t accept that criticism is totally futile (not that I think that this is what Amanda is saying, necessarily, but a more strenuous version of her argument is often lobbed at critics by artists and creators claiming “you’ll never understand,” so it’s worth offering some kind of defense). I know in my heart that there is a difference–a real, qualitative difference–between this song and that, this comic and that, this film and that, this painting and that, this book and that, etc. I know that, taste and background and education and experience aside, there are cases in which one can say that this art is better than that art. Why? Passion, craft, innovation, originality, creatifity, ingenuity, skill, impact, iconoclasm, iconicity, enjoyability, intelligence, entertainment value, God knows what else; it varies, from case to case and even from time to time. I think it’s foolish, and probably inimical to art itself, to claim to have all the answers when it comes to Art; here’s the latest installment of an interminable object lesson on this point, courtesy of a self-deluded individual who’s Got It All Figured Out. But ultimately, we try, we struggle, to figure out as much of it as we can, and occasionally we offer our interpretations, our opinions, our critiques, like little unrequited love-letters to the Art that sustains us, infuriates us, gives our lives meaning. That’s how I see it. That’s how I’ve got to see it.

Big news in the comics world.

Marvel President Bill Jemas is out. Not out out–he still works for Marvel–but he doesn’t seem to be in charge of anything anymore, at least insofar as any of us on the outside will notice. A lot’s been said about the pros and cons of this development, and I think it’s worth noting that virtually everyone worth listening to (Deppey Johnston Hastings Alien Naso et al O’Brien) is both grateful for many aspects of Jemas’s tenure and worried about what will happen now that it’s over. So am I. Jemas had his drawbacks–constantly baiting the retailers (even if he was in the right 85% of the time), constantly baiting the fanboys (even if he was in the right 95% of the time), coming up with a storytelling formula that (though superior to a lot of storytelling methods used in supercomics) simply should not have been applied in a needlessly Procrustean manor to virtually every comic line-wide–but he presided over one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune for a mainstream comics company since Stan, Jack, and Steve birthed Marvel Comics As We Know It back in the early 60s.

Marvel now produces a whole bunch of books that are both financially successful and extremely enjoyable, and a handful of books that are as good as superhero comics get. Their stock has increased in value something like 1000%, and the company is the pace-setter for the industry. The fanboy and fanboy-retailer influence is at a delightfully low ebb, and Marvel (thanks mainly to the movies, but at least in part to the fact that the comics aren’t a total goddamn joke anymore) is a cultural player. It’s difficult to pin down how much of this is attributable to Jemas as opposed to editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, key editors like Axel Alonso, or key creators like Grant Morrison and Brian Michael Bendis (though it seems safe to say that it was respected editors like Quesada and Alonso or top-notch creators like Morrison and Bendis, and not a former Fleer Trading Cards executive, that attracted talent to the company). But President Jemas oversaw all that, and in at least the case of the Ultimate line of revamped big-gun superheroes, had a direct hand in some of the best ideas the company’s had in years and years. Most indications are that, with Joe Quesada still in place and friend-of-Q Dan Buckley stepping in to Jemas’s old slot, little will change except that the most grating aspects of the Jemas era will be gone. (Some folks worry that a “don’t rock the boat” mentality will arise out of fear of ruining potential movie franchises, but for a variety of reasons–the fact that a little comic seen by a hundred thousand people ain’t gonna affect a multi-hundred-million-dollar movie one way or the other not least among them–I just don’t see that happening.) So in closing, happy trails, Bill Jemas. You played a big role, whatever it actually happened to be, in getting me back into comics. Thank you.

Meanwhile, Fantagraphics has formally announced the details of its upcoming Complete Peanuts series… and I’m worried. Not by the content itself, obviously, which is just wonderful and will be a perennial Christmas-gift sure-thing (the early years that don’t quite look like what people think of when they think of Peanuts might be a problem, but hopefully not much of one). No, I’m worried about the design, by acclaimed comix creator Seth. To get straight to the point, it looks like it was created to deliberately alienate the average person who enjoys Charlie Brown, Snoopy et al. Despite what Seth–and Fantagraphics owners Gary Groth and Kim Thompson–must think, I guaranTEE you that when Joe Peanuts Fan thinks of the strip, “austere,” “quiet,” and “melancholy” aren’t what leaps to mind, as they apparently did for the designer, who uses those words to describe the work he did. No, what most folks think of is that joyous Vince Guaraldi Trio piano music, with Snoopy dancing merrily with his nose in the air, and a bright-yellow-shirted Charlie Brown getting that football tugged away from him by a bright-blue-dressed Lucy. And when they pick up volume one of The Complete Peanuts, they’ll be looking at colors and design suitable for a repackaging of Maus. It’s the kind of decision that only people immersed in the insular world of alt-comix hero worship–one just as limited and limiting as its more gaudy spandex-clad equivalent–could make. Let me put it this way: If you were a little kid, or a grown-up interested in feeling like a little kid, would this appeal to you in any way?

This is not good.

(Okay, so he’s not on yayo. Still, how many chances do you get to make a germane reference to a song from the Scarface soundtrack during a political discussion?)

So Rush Limbaugh is a pill popper. I could make a lot of “well, that explains it, then” jokes right now, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll stick to excoriating this man’s bottomless hypocrisy. Here is an individual who’s harped time and again on the wisdom of even the most draconian anti-drug laws. Not just druglords and dealers but users and addicts, not just crack and heroin but weed and ecstasy (and illegal prescription pill usage)–in Rush’s world, everyone on drugs or involved with drugs should get the book thrown at them, because Drugs Are Evil. Yet for years this paragon of virtue, who’s made it his business to convince the American public that the government should be getting involved in other people’s business to the point where non-violent drug offenders can be rounded up and thrown in jail for more than a decade, has been illegally abusing drugs. Shame on him for his sanctimonius imposture. Shame on him for his staunch advocacy of a grotesque and Sisyphean policy that wastes money, ruins lives, and is–in its violations of human and civil rights, its overheated rhetoric and outright lies about the “danger” it’s supposed to be combating, and its ability to make the government look purveyors of ulterior-motivated hyperbolic deceit in an age of real threats and real dangers–not just stupid but immoral.

But finally, shame on people who gleefully wish upon Rush the same grim institutional fate that awaited the victims of the heartless and moronic drug policy he himself advocated. Like all addicts, like all users, Rush belongs in rehab, not prison. I can only hope that he comes to realize this himself.

In what I’m sure will come as a total shock to you all, I am the proud owner of a Lord of the Rings wall calendar (a gift from The Missus). I’ve owned various and sundry of these in the past, usually showcasing the art of one of the many Tolkien-inspired painters out there. I always looked forward to the month of October, because that was always the month with the baddest-ass picture of Smaug or the Balrog or Glaurung or the Ringwraiths or the Sauron-Wolf or what have you. Though I doubt that Halloween was a holiday Professor Tolkien much approved of, it sure did me right on all those wall calendars of yore.

But this time around the monster in question is an orc, shown in close-up, from the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring. And man, is it ever scary. Scary to the point that every once in a while it kinda sneaks up on you and you take a look and go “yaaah!” Scary to the point that when my mother-in-law was visiting and staying in room where it’s hanging we turned the page back to September (Galadriel and Frodo) so she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and freak out. Scary enough that our cat sometimes stares at it and hisses. (Well, no, she doesn’t, but if she started doing that I wouldn’t be surprised.)

Back when they announced that Peter Jackson would be making a live-action movie trilogy out of LotR, I had actually decided about two days prior to the announcement that translating the books to the screen would be my life’s work. Had they picked any other filmmaker, I probably would have been pissed. But I knew Jackson’s work well, and he was more than okay by me. I knew he was inventive enough to do the material justice but restrained enough not to make it A Peter Jackson Film before it was a J.R.R. Tolkien one. I knew he had a knack for balancing effects and human drama, as he did in his tremendously entertaining, moving, and disturbing film Heavenly Creatures. And I knew (this was key) he could be scary.

A goodly chunk of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings is the scary stuff. I think this may stem from the way in which Tolkien, whose powers of description are nearly unrivalled when it comes to landscapes, architecture, civilizations, and so forth, stays deliberately shadowy when describing his monsters. This can occasionally cause some trouble amongst his readers–the debate over whether or not the Balrog actually has wings has raged for decades and is not likely to cease any time soon–but in the main Tolkiens flights of dark poetry in talking about his bestiary and rogues gallery allows the reader to fill in the frightening blanks. The chilling decrepitude of the barrow-wight, the relentless mindless evil of the Nazgul, the terrifyingly undefined leviathan known as the Watcher in the Water, the warcrime brutality of the orc catapults launching severed human heads over the walls of Minas Tirith–that’s some horror right there. (Stephen King has talked on numerous occasions about the impact the Shelob passage had on his formation as a horror writer, and for my money Tolkien’s description of her–“all living things were her food; and her vomit darkness”–is maybe the finest passage in all his books.)

Ralph Bakshi’s much-maligned animated adaptation of the first half of LotR is better than I think a lot of people give it credit for, though even quick comparison to Jackson’s adaptation is not kind to the earlier version. But one thing Bakshi managed very well is portraying the dread and horror laced throughout the books. The weird, ominous music and post-psychedelic lighting actually apes the nightmare-like quality of Tolkien’s horror prose quite well, and in some cases (as in the attack at Weathertop) Bakshi actually out-horrors his live-action successor. But Jackson is no slouch; indeed, he’s a horror master. His Uruk-Hai alone deserve a place in the great monster pantheon (and are a far superior film translation of the titular character in Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” than the goofy-looking thing in the film that was made of that story). The ghosts lingering in the Dead Marshes were unexpectedly terrifying; the huge winged Fell Beasts the Nazgul ride upon are perfectly wrong, right down to that biting-on-tinfoil roar they emit; the Watcher in the Water is maybe the best Cthuloid creature ever committed to film; and on and on and on. Even Christopher Lee equals the madmen he’s played in the past with that utterly insane cry of “To waaaaaar!” in The Two Towers. In addition to making wondrous, beautiful, thrilling, exhiliarating, moving films out of LotR, Jackson’s made horror films out of them too–as well he should.

(As for Jackson’s interpretation of Shelob, of which we’ve only seen a fleeting glimpse in the Return of the King trailer, the director is said to have issued a prime directive to his creature shop regarding his specifications for the beast: “She’s got to scare me.” Now that’s my kind of standard.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was… okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The horrorblog bounty is nigh inexhaustible these days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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