Just when I think the grotesque bulwark of medieval intolerance and stupidity known as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church couldn’t get any more offensive, along comes some nitwit in a funny hat who goes around telling people that condoms don’t stop AIDS transmission.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; this is the kind of horseshit I was spoonfed for four years in high school, where they all but said that condoms cause AIDS. They also spoke reverently of William Donohue, the loudmouthed theocratic thug who runs an organization of likeminded individuals called the Catholic League, which works round-the-clock to take my books and my movies and my music away from me because apparently the Baby Jesus gets really worried about such things–this is also the guy who was screaming at the top of his lungs defending this latest batch of flat-earth malarkey from the Vatican on the Today show this morning.

Of course, back in high school, I may have been so stunned by hearing sentences like “The Inquisition had some good points–the Jews were always given a chance to recant” (an actual quote from sophomore year History of Salvation II class) that the condom bit didn’t really register.

Freud.

There, just wanted to say the word, make sure you’d be sticking around. You are? Great! Because we’ll be talking a bit about the Original Cigar Aficionado today, I’m afraid. Turns out that in addition to his contribution, if not the invention, of the field of psychoanalysis, Freud also contributed one of the seminal (groan) works in the field of horror criticism, too–his essay “The ‘Uncanny.'” Freud’s project was not unlike my own: He was attempting to pinpoint what people found weird (in the old-school, bizarre-cum-creepy sense) and frightening, and why.

Unsurprisingly he traced the power of horrific images back to repressed memories, of both the individual-infantile and somethin close to the collective-sociohistorical varieties. I summarize his approach in the ol’ thesis, but what we’re talking about today is his analysis of the doppleganger, or double. Freud theorized that the frightening power of such entities stems from its ability to force us to recall such forgotten mental processes like “primary narcissim” (if I recall correctly, this meant that as infants we projected our own personalities onto pretty much everything we encountered–we were our world, and our world was us) and the ego’s formation of a conscience (a process once reassuring, but now, made literal, one we find terrifying).

Freudian “doubling” is a powerful and recurrent theme in horror art. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Caligari and the sleepwalking Cesare, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the Wolf Man and his human alter ego: these are the obvious cases. But one could go even further to say that the entire concept of “monster” is one of doubling–creating a separate, threatening, yet somehow appealing personification of the primal and unsociable drives that the hero or heroine of the story (and by extension the viewer) unconsciously deny.

Speaking of unconscious, my own understanding of this concept is pretty shallow, and indeed I had next to no knowledge of it during the bulk of my studies back in college. It was only when I put together my thesis that I encountered The Double as explicity articulated, and attempted to re-articulate it myself. But in looking back on the horror-related papers I wrote during college in preparation for Where the Monsters Go, I was surprised to see doubling recur, in one form or another, in several otherwise unrelated essays. I figured, Why not make a day of it?

So here are three essays (downloadable as PDFs) that deal with doubles.

The first concerns the pervasive theme of duality and doubles in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, focusing specifically on images and scenes involving mirrors and reflections. One of the fun things about Kubrick is that with him more than almost any other filmmaker one can be confident that any given thing going on in one of his films is not happening by accident. This makes even the closest reading of his work a worthwhile, undistorted peek into his intentions and obsessions. The amount of mirroring going on in The Shining is almost incredible–it’s practically like the “all work and no play” manuscript in its repetitious intensity. I think fans of the film would enjoy this little paper of mine on the topic.

The second deals with the 1913 German horror film The Student of Prague and its 1926 remake. The storyline of both concerns a rambunctious but impoverished student named Baldwin who makes a Faustian bargain that leads to the creation of an evil doppleganger; the essay discusses this and other motifs in the films, and depicts (in light of the historical theses of expressonist-film theoretician Siegfried Kracauer) how the two films serve as “doubles” of one another as well. I think it ends up as an interesting examination of the preoccupations of these films, two of the earliest in the cycle of German expressionist/horror films (and by extension some of the earliest in the larger German-influenced American horror-film cycle of the 1930s and ’40s).

The third concerns Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, which were the first two films in the Hellraiser series, the ones with which Barker himself was most involved, and the only ones worth watching. Here I’m focusing on a more oblique form of doubling: the duality of body and mind as depicted in these viscerally horrific movies. Using Steven Shaviro’s essay on David Cronenberg, “Bodies of Fear,” as a starting point, I try to pinpoint what Barker is trying to say about the horrors and delights of physical experience. It’s a very different thing than what his friend and fellow horror visionary Cronenberg is getting at.

I do hope you enjoy the essays. Though they suffer from the twin faults of undergraduate film studies prose–occasional jargonese and pervasive breathy prose (how many times can I use the words “powerfully” and “masterpiece”?)–I think they’re strong, and sometimes revelatory, despite this. Take a minute–or two–and see what you think.

Lots and lots and lots of good stuff, once again. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed.

If yr interested, here’s what ’90s superstar Marc Silverstri’s art for the final issues of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men will look like. I actually like this stuff a little better than I like Jim Lee’s, though once again I’ll say that a good story (and Morrison’s is one of the best) can make decent art look great.

NeilAlien continues to hold his minions in suspense as regards Dr. Strange’s recent high-profile apperances in Amazing Spider-Man, Thor: Vikings, and David Fiore’s weblog. To paraphrase Godspell, When wilt thou save the fanboys, Neil?

Courtesy of the ‘Alien, here’s a swell bit of “knock it off, knuckleheads” from Bookslut’s Karin Kross, directed toward mainstream-media comics reviewers who feel the need to slag the medium in order to justify their praise of one of its products.

Along related lines, Jim Henley skewers Big John Byrne‘s jaw-droppingly dumb assertion that mature-readers comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns “should never have happened,” for the sake of the kids who apparently wander into these books in droves looking for the happy-go-lucky supercharacters they knew from SuperFriends or whatever. Personally, I think no response more detailed than “Jesus, what a tool” need be offered, but good for Jim. Actually, Jim just sticks to a relatively minor technicality in Byrne’s argument, pointing out that virtually no one on Earth even knows that Watchmen was based on goofy old superhero characters from a defunct company, let alone bought and read the book because of that knowledge. But the really egregious thing about Byrne’s line of reasoning (despite its self-serving attempt to explain why poor ol’ John’s books don’t sell–it’s all the fault of those miserable child-corrupting assholes Miller and Moore! Actually, he’s probably on to something there, though not in the way he intends) is the Werthamesque notion that comics–even something as near-universally maligned as the superhero-genre subset of comics–ought not depict certain things. So much great art has been made from taking something seen as “inherently for children” and making it for grown-ups over the centuries that Byrne’s argument is virtually stillborn. Look at the updates of “Hansel & Gretel” that are Night of the Hunter and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the development of the sock-hop genre of rock and roll into Bob Dylan and the Beatles–I mean, need I even go on? I find the notion that some art forms or genres are inherently childish, immature, incapable of or improper for delivering stories of mature and real power to be the most offensive, elitist canard currently swimming its way through the murky waters of popcult criticism and theory; the fact that this notion is apparently shared by some of comics’ retrograde nostalgia-mongers is equal parts disturbing and unsurprising.

Jim also exhorts us to prepare for a Captain America “sermon”. I’m ready.

Eve Tushnet attempts to sell the conventions of superhero comics as potential strengths, not inherent weaknesses, and does so by way of Hamlet. I, for one, am buying–as is, of all people, Marvel president Bill Jemas. In his storytelling guidelines for Epic submissions (as summarized in Marville #7), Jemas instructed would-be supercomics creators to keep in mind that the conventions and tropes of superherodom, particularly the superpowers themselves, should…well, I’ll quote Eve, since it’s basically exactly what Jemas was saying:

The thing comics-about-comics forget is that superhero conventions arise for a reason. They speak to something–sometimes a good thing, sometimes a rotten thing–in human nature. They resonate. That resonance–what it reveals, what it obscures, what it gets wrong about the world and what it gets right–is what your story should be about.

As Jemas put it, stories about a mild-mannered but somewhat obsessive scientist being transformed during fits of rage into a giant green monster–good. Stories about that giant green monster being transmogrified into a smaller, gray, sarcastic, streetwise mob enforcer–not so good.

Waiting patiently for J.W. Hastings‘s take on Squadron Supreme, Mark Gruenwald’s magnum opus and a very early stab at “revisionist superheroes.” I actually enjoyed the book quite a bit more than I thought I would: despite its burden of unnatural and cheesy 70s/80s comicspeak dialogue and narration, and the fact that Gruenwald’s ideas seem to have outstripped his ability to execute them, I thought the book was a very effective (and, much to my delight, affecting) examination of superheroes taking the use of their powers to the logical extreme. The resonance in today’s political climate is perhaps even stronger than it was when Gru wrote the thing. I’d also like to take this opportunity to reiterate that I’m enjoying J. Michael Straczynski’s update of the Squadron Supreme saga (which was itself a knock-off of the Justice League), Supreme Power. Lots of folks have been pointing out that this sort of thing has been done a million times already–here’s Steven Grant responding to the general phenomenon and John Jakala taking down an upcoming Chuck Austen manifestation of the trend–but I’m just not convinced that every revisionist-superhero book needs to be some Bold Step Forward In The History Of Mainstream Superhero Comics, as were Miracleman, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (that revisionist book’s impact won’t be felt for another couple of years, I think), the various Warren Ellis superteams, and (to, I think, a lesser extent) Marvels, Kingdom Come, and the Mark Millar spinoffs and takeoffs from the Ellis-verse. Straczynski’s book has been well-paced and well-written so far, with less anger and more sadness and loneliness than the usual revisionist fare. And Gary Frank’s art has just been a joy for me to look at–like a more obsessively energetic Steve Dillon. I’ll keep buying the thing as long as it continues to entertain, regardless of whether or not it reinvents the revisionist wheel.

Jason Kimble has the latest in a series of posts about “decompression” in mainstream comics storytelling (i.e. every story takes six issues now), focusing on how the schizophrenic nature of contemporary comics publishing means that artistic and financial considerations are not just in conflict, but one in which each side’s victory is often a Pyrrhic one. This is very, very true: I’ve often wondered how much patience Marvel, say, will have with their Epic and Tsunami titles, created in theory for the bookstore audience (with, I think, eventual production as bookstore-friendly manga-format books in mind) but reliant on the Direct Market audience for up to a year before making their first appearance in a bookstore.

David Fiore has posted his completed thesis proposal, on the contemporization of Puritan themes by the Marvel comics of the 1960s and ’70s. Entertaining and educational, as I wish all theses were.

Alan David Doane is right: Bryan Miller is good (even when he’s wrong, which happens from time to time).

Miller’s site-mate Matt Martin offers a critique of Marvel’s recent Captain America output (Jim Henley, pay attention!) from a conservative perspective. Compare and contrast his reading of the John Ney Reiber Cap-versus-terrorists storyline with that of X-Axis’s Paul O’Brien. That two critics coming from completely opposite sides of the political spectrum could look at this story and both come away thinking it represented the absolute godawful worst of the other side shows just what a muddled, pathetic, pointless waste of time the damn thing was. (I happen to think it might also speak to the, how can I put this politely, lack of nuance in Martin and O’Brien’s respective political positions, but mainly, yeah, that story sucked.)

Finally, the threatened jettisoning of dead weight from my pull list has begun. This week I found myself abandoning 1602, 100 Bullets, and Kingpin. Not that any of them were terrible, mind you–I just realized that none of them were the kind of comics I can’t wait to read. That seems like a fair enough criterion to apply, don’t you think?

I don’t have much, right now. But godDAMN I’m enjoying my little brood of horrorbloggers. I’ll comment about these horrorcentric posts at length in due time, but for now:

Bill Sherman on five films that scared him.

Bill Sherman on Uzumaki.

Eve Tushnet on Rene Magritte.

Bruce Baugh on horror as language.

Bruce Baugh on different species of horror.

John Jakala (ahem) on Uzumaki, but unlike Bill’s take this includes an offer to buy it for you if you enter a little contest. Here’s what my entry will be:

THE OVERLOOK HAIKU

The destination

Of the soft-then-loud Big Wheels:

“Come and play with us”

(PS: Special thanks to Jason Adams for lending me copies of the film version of Battle Royale and a film I’d not heard of called Paperhouse. Intriguing….)

Kennyb, the Gandalf of the metaphorical campaign against Sauron that is AllTooFlat.com, has added some fun new functionalities here at ADDTF. Look to your left and you’ll find a search function (it’s pretty simple/simplistic, so remember to search using the bare-bones minimum word you need to find what you’re looking for) and an email submission form.

ADDTF: We are not lovers, we are not Romantics–we are here to serve you.

Not a fan of axe murderers, elder gods, and severe genital mutilation? Fear not! ADDTF hasn’t forgotten plain ol’ comic books!

Big Sunny D weighs in on New X-Men 147, an issue so good it almost made up for having the previous one spoiled for me (by the recently deposed dictator of Comicbookgalaxeria, Dr. Doane). I’m surprised, however, that Sunny didn’t comment on just how radical the changes wrought by #146’s “Big Reveal” have already become in the space of just one issue. Those of us who expected a “picking up where we left off”-style transition from the last panel of 146 to the first of 147 were in for an extremely rude awakening. To which I say “hell yeah.”

Franklin Harris squeezes Jess Lemon, the Pulse’s pseudonymonous reviewer and outrage-monger, over her soft-target panning of JLA/Avengers. I personally think writer Kurt Busiek took the lazy way out of putting this story together (and agree with the general consensus that the faces of the characters on the George Perez-drawn cover were all kinds of screwed up), but that’s really neither here nor there. Franklin is trying to draw the necessary distinction between the inherently outlandish formal and stylistic tropes of the superhero genre and the unforgivably bad execution of those tropes by a sadly vast majority of superhero comics creators. Lemon, he argues, is either too ignorant of the subject or too intent on getting a laugh at the expense of accuracy or insight to bother to separate the two, and therefore s/he blurs them in her demolition of JLA/A. In other words, using Starro the Conqueror isn’t any more or less silly than, say, having a guy wage a decades-long oceans-wide vendetta against a white sperm whale, and then actually having the guy find the whale and get killed by it. I guess you could argue that my “Hush” review was along the lines of what Franklin is arguing for: Believe me, few people appreciate the superhero genre more than I do, which is precisely why few people get more upset at shitty superhero comics than I do. There’s definitely stuff to complain about in JLA/A, but psychic-parasitic starfish and hand-fired laser beams probably aren’t among them–not for serious critics who don’t feel the need to earn street cred by taking potshots at genre conventions, at any rate.

On a related note, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing the blogosphere reach a tipping point when it comes to “Jess Lemon” in the near future. At their best, “her” reviews savage everything that needs savaging in mainstream comics and point out to an audience long past noticing that the spandex-clad emperor is actually butt nekkid. At their worst, however, they can be easy-peasy hatchet jobs that say little about the work in question or larger problems with the genre, industry, or medium, opting instead for verbal slapstick. In addition, I think there’s a growing consensus that writing these kinds of reviews under a pseudonym is a weak-kneed cop-out, particularly when (as is becoming clearer by the week) there’s not one but several writers lurking behind the Jess Lemon moniker. Hell, even messageboard posters with names like Logan_X are basically the same person every time you see their name used. This, of course, is to say nothing about the legion of reviewers, critics, bloggers and journalists who use their real name and say a lot nastier stuff than J.L., without even doing so simply for nastiness’ sake. Having one of the big mainstream news websites run bylined reviews of the sort “Jess Lemon” does would be a real kick in the ass of web-based comics criticism generally, and serve as an announcement to the publishers that the fanboy-based free ride on the Internet is pretty much over. Keeping up the Jess Lemon facade will look less and less like a fun parlor game and more and more like a great big responsibility dodge as time goes by.

Anyway, back to JLA/A: John Jalaka has a review round-up of this unexpectedly divisive book.

Forager mentions he’s got a review of Y: The Last Man in this month’s Comics Journal. The review, which is very good, points out that as entertaining as the book may seem, there’s just no there there. I think this problem is exacerbated, as is the case with many Vertigo & DC books, by the muddy green-browns and green-yellows of the coloring. Vertigo’s emphasis has never been art, and that’s fine, I guess, but I think more effort should be made to at least make it attractive and presentable, if not awe-inspiring. (Actually, the Journal review reprints some of artist Pia Guerra’s work on the book, and it’s amazing how comparatively lovely it looks in clear-line black and white.)

Speaking of colors (I love transitions!), Bill Sherman mentions Those Darn DC Earth Tones in his comics roundup of last week. He also echoes my take on Garth Ennis’s Thor: Vikings #3 and rebuts my take on Ennis’s Punisher: Born #4, both found here. (Bill, I think any wiggle room in that opening monologue is almost certainly unintentional….)

By the way, last week was another strong one for supercomics. Alias (despite its contrived would-be meta conversation, which is more than made up for by the genuinely disturbing conclusion), Astro City (best issue so far in this current miniseries), Savage Dragon (an homage to the old-school blood-and-boobs Dragon), Ultimate Spider-Man (interesting to see a certain character faring much better here than he does in the same author’s Daredevil), Ultimate Six (Jeph Loeb, take note: now that’s how you do a shocking surprise villain entry), Powers (man, Bendis is full of gruesome surprises this week, isn’t he?), New X-Men (see above), and Supreme Power (so what if it’s territory we’ve covered before? As long as it’s well-told and well draw, which this is, I’ll buy it. Gary Frank’s art is juicy and convincing, and the panel in which Hyperion rockets past the eardrum-holding troops in Iraq is like a modern-day Action Comics #1 cover). Not too shabby, O Mainstream.

But between Kavalier & Clay and David Fiore’s novel-to-be, I’m starting to wonder if prose descriptions of imaginary superheroes are better than comics depictions of “actual” superheroes themselves….

I’m happy to see that Where the Monsters Go is helping to make the blogosphere a slightly scarier place to be this October.

Novelist and gameswriter Bruce Baugh writes to say that WtMG has inspired him to begin doing some horrorblogging of his own. The results thus far have been impressive indeed. His first post on the subject touches on Electronic Voice Phenomena, William S. Burrough’s ability to draw a fearsome order out of seeming chaos, and the certainty (there’s that word again!) offered by the relentlessly apocalyptic visions of H.P. Lovecraft. His second focuses more on certainty, but also explores the notion that it’s the simplicity of a horror fiction’s diegetic universe that makes it horrifying (as it does not afford its protagonists the myriad non-horrific options that our own more complex, real cosmology offers), and takes a peak at schadenfreude as well. Intelligent stuff, and just the kind of thing I enjoy thinking about regarding horror. (And you thought it was all chainsaws and demonic possession. Ha!)

Meanwhile, Jason Adams grants my request and begins to explain his own undergrad senior thesis on horror films, an attempt to pin down the “fundamentals” of contemporary horror. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of someone trying to tie together horror films of such disparate intent and execution (and quality, IMHO) as the Elm Street and Friday the 13th series and The Silence of the Lambs–and so far, so convincing. I’d love to hear more. But no, you don’t have to rent The Wicker Man, because I’ll lend you my copy. All for one and one for gore.

I was pleased to read Big Sunny D got a lot out of my classification of Barton Fink as a horror film. I’d like to warn anyone who hasn’t seen this movie that it’s one you absolutely owe yourself to see completely unspoiled, so I won’t go into this too much yet. But suffice it to say that it’s not just the occasionally obvious horror touches (appropriate, since the film takes place at almost exactly the same time that the last great Universal horror film, The Wolf Man, was released) that make this film horror. Actually, Sunny’s comments have helped me make a big decision about the 13 Days of Halloween with which I plan on closing out the month. I’d been debating whether or not to include less straightforward “horror” movies in my little review marathon, just to try to make room for really Halloween-y stuff. But I think everyone will get more out of this if I go a little farther afield. Stay tuned….

Dirk Deppey nominates a scary comic book, but misreads my initial bleg: I wasn’t limiting the call to just stuff that scared you when you were a kid. Actually, that’s kinda the point–it’s tough to find any adult who finds comics scary in the same way as movies or books. Kid stuff maybe, but grownup stuff? Still searching.

Speaking of horror comics, in a rundown of some comics he’s looking forward to, Alan David Doane touts the work of Steve Niles. Unfortunately, this is one time I’ve got to split with my metaphorical horror mentor, Clive Barker, who provided a laudatory introduction for Niles’s breakthrough vampire story 30 Days of Night. I found 30 Days to be boring and predictable, with perfunctory characterizations, major plot holes, serious pacing problems, and an irritating climax. Moreover, to echo a criticism I heard I don’t remember where, the art by Ben Templesmith makes everything look “scary,” even the stuff that isn’t supposed to be. Try to imagine what The Exorcist would have been like if Regan had always looked like this and you’ll get the general idea. (And please don’t cite The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a counter-example. Caligari works because the expressionistic mise-en-scene reflects both the mental state of the characters (indeed, that of the narrator!) and the sociopolitical climate the screenwriters (at least) were trying to reflect. 30 Days looks that way because it’s “cool.”) Not my cup of tea. But hey, he’s pretty much singlehandedly put horror comics back in the spotlight. Now if only one would come along that actually deserves the spotlight.

Also speaking of horror comics, Shawn Fumo has a brief little link-laden post on girls’ horror manga. I think it says a lot that Japan has a whole subset of horror-genre comics for young women, while America can barely crank out a dozen serious horror titles for young men.

Franklin Harris blesses my little undertaking (heh heh) and plugs the alt.horror usenet group. I’ll be signing up soon, if only to plug the blog, so I’m steeling myself for getting terrorized by the good Mr. Harris.

Finally, Eve Tushnet blegs for a halfway decent haunted-ship movie. Good luck, man. I guess 2001, Alien and Jaws are close but no cigar, huh?

How the major news media is getting away with claiming the Kay Report said “we got nothing” (that’s an actual quote, by the way, from NBC White House correspondent Campbell Brown on The Chris Matthews Show this Sunday) is just beyond me. But maybe that’s because I always thought the job of the news media was to tell, you know, the truth. Anyway, I reiterate that you should read the actual report and draw your own conclusions. I’ll bet they’re different than Campbell Brown’s.

On a related topic (though he’ll insist they aren’t), Jim Henley makes some good points about how the Bush administration is super-un-conservative in the big-government sense of the word, but then says that “the national greatness types, and the Administration whose foreign and ‘defense’ policy they drive, are the salient threat to liberty in America today.” And here I thought the salient threat to liberty in America today was, y’know, terrorism. It certainly was for these people.

The scariest song I’ve ever heard is by Harry Chapin.

Yes, that Harry Chapin–the one who did “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Taxi” and “Circle” and so forth. (And no comments from the peanut gallery about “Cat’s in the Cradle” being scary enough, okay?) Harry Chapin was always a very, very big deal in my family. A fellow Long Islander, he was one of those musicians that both my rock-centric Dad and easy-listening show-tune-weaned Mom could agree upon. Moreover, he was always playing live shows at local Long Island venues, where my folks saw his surprisingly theatrical singer-songwriter stylings up close and personal many times. (They still sing the praises of his bass player’s stage presence.) In fact, they had tickets to the benefit concert in Eisenhower Park on route to which he died, at age 38, in a car accident on the LIE. Rare was the Sunday afternoon when Harry Chapin songs wouldn’t be playing on our stereo.

What motivated my mischievous Dad to play the song “Sniper,” from Chapin’s second album Sniper and Other Love Songs, on one such Sunday afternoon is a mystery to me. I guess he figured I’d get a kick out of how crazy it was. Indeed I did. But it’s more than crazy–it’s inventive, insightful, piercing, and, to me at least, unforgettable.

For starters, it really is about a sniper. It’s a vaguely fictionalized account of Charles Whitman’s August 1966 University of Texas clocktower rampage–an unusual topic for the man behind “Sunday Morning Sunshine.” But the earnestness with which Chapin imbued his folksy love songs serves this macabre subject well. Chapin is no more able to hide beind irony or ambiguity here than he is in his more romantic work, forcing the audience to come directly to terms with the horror of the sniper attack, and the tortured character of the sniper himself.

Over the course of the song’s 9 minutes and 55 seconds, Chapin and his dextrous backup band wind, segue, and careen from tempo to tempo, key to key, style to style. Here they’re conveying the quiet of the early morning campus, while the protagonist walks toward the clocktower. Here they’re mimicking the buzzing teletype and breaking-news noise of the special reports updating viewers and listeners on the shootings. Here they’re deploying simple, sparse staccato to simulate the slaying of yet another too-curious bystander. Here they’re using cello and chorus to depict the mournful, vengeful mother fixation of the title character. Here they’re building toward the climactic showdown between sniper and police, replete with gas-dropping helicopters and “final fusillade”s. And here they’re crescendoing to a “Day in the Life”-style nihilist’s triumph. A band trained for simplicity, their discipline serves them extraordinarily well, tempering excess and making every musical metaphor convincing.

Chapin’s vocals multitask in a similar fashion. After an introductory chant of the phrase “She said ‘not now'” (words whose significance will be made clear later on), Chapin begins singing as a third-person omniscient narrator, quietly setting the scene while peppering it with ominous foreshadowings: “It is an early Monday morning. The sun is becoming bright on the land,” he sings, firmly in his previously established singer-songwriter sunshine mode, before adding, “No one is watching as he comes a-walking; two bulky suitcases hang from his hand.” Later, the narrator begins taking on some of the sniper’s angry, mocking swagger: “So much to do,” he deadpans, “and so little time.”

When the music takes on its mock-(and mocking-)newscast tone, Chapin switches to a nasal vocal style redolent of bad radio reception or megaphone announcements, posing as several acquaintances interviewed about their now-infamous friend who respond with helpless we-didn’t-know platitudes like, “Always sorta sat there–he never seemed to change.” At other moments he adopts a matter-of-fact, tough guys doin’ a tough job delivery–“They set up an assault team. They asked for volunteers”–before raising his voice to mimick the rising panic of the city and its people–“in appropriately sober tones,” he says in anything but an appropriately sober tone, “they asked, ‘who can it be?‘”

But Chapin’s greatest achievement with “Sniper” is getting inside the labrynthine maze of self-pity, self-hatred, and self-aggrandizement that is its title character’s mind. Chapin frames the entire killing spree as a “conversation” the sniper has decided to have with “the city where no one can know him,” a conversation he initiated the only way he felt he could. “You won’t pay attention,” the sniper says, “but I’ll ask anyhow.” The question? “Am I?” The people of the city answer the sniper by dying at his hands. “The first words he spoke took the town by surprise: One got Mrs. Gibbons above her right eye,” Chapin informs us, stopping to fill in the gruesomely poetic details: “Reality poured from her face, staining the floor.” But even this sudden success in getting a response from the people he felt had ignored him is not enough to assuage the sniper’s misery, the source of which, of course, is rejection by Mother. At this point I feel I’m familiar enough with people in therapy, myself included, to know that this isn’t nearly as reductive a hypothesis for mental illness’s route cause as it’s made out to be. Chapin understood this, and in a lyrical triplet takes the sniper from abject infantile adoration to resentful murderous hatred, a journey one can assume the real-life sniper took himself, seeing as he killed his mother (and his wife) the night before the tower shootings.

It all builds up, needless to say, to the final moments, when police manage to reach the top of the tower and put an end to the sniper’s conversation with the world. But for the sniper himself, the point is moot: In killing him, the world has given him the answer he sought. “I was,” he thinks to himself in triumph as the bullets rip through him, “I am, and now, I will be.” As though just now waking up to this transcendent fact–the fact of his immortalization through the damage he has done, and through the legend he has become–the sniper repeats the last three words once more: “I will be.” The music soars and resounds and, like blood or gunsmoke, slowly flows away.

I thought about this song a lot around this time last year. The circumstances were different, of course: These new murders were mobile hit-and-runs rather than a massive attack. And they ended up being more different than we’d thought: A pair of killers, with Islamic terrorism mixed in as a motivation, rather than (or at least in addition to) the deranged loner with Oedipal rage. But put aside some of the specifics, and the tales told are nearly identical: of men so incapable of communicating their anger that they come to see murder as their only acceptable means of expression, of media that feed parasitically on death and those who produce it.

That listening to a song afforded me insight into and understanding of a human struggle makes it art. That that struggle involved an unblinking, unrepentant killer makes it horror.

A propos of yesterday’s WtMG item, I started a thread on the Comics Journal message board devoted to the topic. Some interesting suggestions are filtering in. Have a look. It’s certainly cool to have Renee French, creator of the hauntingly bizarre collection Marbles in My Underpants, weighing in. Some of the stories in that book–“Corny’s Fetish,” “Fistophobia,” “Mitch & the Mole,” “The Ream Family,” “Hi, my name is Cyndie”–are as disturbing as comix come. No monsters, no maniacs, but it’s horror, you bet.

The Lost Boys was the first rated-R movie I ever saw. As such I guess it was the first real horror movie I ever saw, too, but as it wasn’t particularly scary even when I first saw it–thrilling and exciting, yeah, and totally awesome in a more-violent-Ghostbusters sorta way, but not scary–I don’t tend to count it. Anyway, if you recall, two of the main characters were Edgar and Allen Frog, a couple of crazy pseudo-survivalist teenage brothers who helped run their parents comic shop. (Okay, that part was scary, but only because it’s so accurate a reflection on how most small comic shops are run.) Our hero Corey Haim’s response when the brothers Frog try to get him to read an old funnybook about vampires? “I don’t read horror comics.” Neither, really, do I–because I’ve yet to find one that’s particularly horrifying.

This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of disturbing comics. Renee French, Hans Rickheit, Dave Cooper, some of Dan Clowes’s work, Jim Woodring, the occasional sequence in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles–all can be either revolting or haunting, and in some cases both, but none of them have gotten my heart racing or kept me up at night like the best horror films or straight literature have. What’s come closest to that level? There are some things in the Clive Barker comic compilations that Checker has been releasing that are very good (such as Klaus Janson’s adaptation of the masterful short story “In the Hills, the Cities”), but much of the power of those works is from the prose stories they’re based on. Charles Burns’s Black Hole is very, very good, and I’ve got a feeling it’s building toward something genuinely frightening, but it’s still incomplete and therefore tough to evaluate. The only comic-book image I can think of that was tough to endure looking at for long in the same way that, say, the twins from The Shining or the chalk-white demon face in The Exorcist are, is of all things a splash page from the Man-Thing/Lizard issue of Brian Michael Bendis’s Spider-Man spinoff series Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. Artist John Totleben created an image of the Man-Thing and the Lizard that lined up perfectly with my monumental horror-image theories. But that’s really all I can think of–not a good sign considering how many freaking comics I’ve read and how likely I am to seek out the nasty stuff.

So consider this a bleg for recommendations. Got any horror comics that are actually, you know, scary? You can send me your thoughts here. I’ve heard good things about the manga series Uzumaki–anything else? Here’s your chance to help a horror fan in need….

I heard my first big-media Kay-Report recap yesterday, on WCBS 880AM New York, while driving home from the train station. I nearly couldn’t believe my ears that CBS News was leading not with the “no actual WMDs” angle but with the “lots and lots of WMD programs and intent to develop actual WMDs as soon as possible” angle. Holy crap, I thought, but the news media is actually going to report the non-BUSHLIED! parts of this story!

Then came the cold, harsh light of this morning, and you get this sort of thing. It beats the living shit out of the fact that they didn’t turn up a Batcave full of loaded anthrax bombs, then peppers that pesky part about how Saddam had every intention of getting back to the WMD business the second the French & Russians got those sanctions lifted with enough “some”s and “signs that”s and attempts to cast the whole thing in a “hey, this isn’t the final report, folks, we can still pull something out of our sleeves” they’re-still-lying negativism to choke a horse. And we’re not even talking about their usual stealth-mode front-page anti-Bush editorial “news analysis.”

Do yourself a favor: Read the actual report. Or read Andrew Sullivan’s analysis thereof.

If you’re interested, here’s my breakdown of this whole situation:

1) Saddam Hussein had every intention of continuing to develop WMDs, and had devoted countless man-hours and billions of dollars into creating a program specifically, and explicitly, designed for optimum concealability. He lied about these programs to the UN despite the fact that the post-Gulf War I ceasefire was conditional upon his honesty and compliance. These programs are documented in-depth in this report.

2) The same countries and parties that opposed the war in favor of sanctions tended almost to a man to have once been in favor of removing the sanctions altogether on understandable humanitarian grounds. If the sanctions had been lifted, the WMD program would have restarted in earnest and produced WMD materials within months.

3) Once war became an option due to the insistence of the Blair and Bush administrations, one-time opponents of sanctions then became sanction advocates, essentially promoting an ineffectual regime of economic punishments that enriched Saddam and his Baathist affiliates while keeping the citizens of Iraq in poverty and under the rule of a murderous tyrant and his would-be successor sons.

4) Saddam Hussein was an aggressive mass murderer with a proven track record of starting wars with his neighbors despite guaranteed massive reprisals and almost no demonstrable benefit to his regime or his country, had used WMDs in one of those wars, and had torched oil wells and opened pipelines into the sea in the other despite the “deterrent” threat of nuclear retalliation by the U.S. were he to do so. He was in essence “undeterrable.”

5) By ALL accounts Saddam Hussein was believed to have WMDs and WMD programs, to have lied to and thwarted inspectors, and to have violated the conditions of the ceasefire (though this was often couched in the far less consequential vocabulary of “violating UN resolutions”). Democracts, Republicans, the US, the UK, France, and on and on and on agreed on these points.

6) The Bush Administration never claimed the threat from Iraq was “imminent,” and never based their case for war on such a claim. They argued that the threat should be eliminated BEFORE it became imminent.

My own personal “argument for war” was never terribly contingent on WMDs, because I can’t stand fascism and enjoy seeing fascists be deposed and destroyed just on principle. But to me, this report seals the WMD-argument deal as well. The negative spin placed on the report seems to stem from journalists and commentators who are doctrinairily opposed either to the war or, perhaps more to the point, to the Bush Administration itself.

I’ve had a request to make my thesis available in HTML. I don’t really have the time or the patience to convert the whole shmear, but here’s the beginning of it. It lays out my proposal for what is the “definitive” horror image type (though it doesn’t really explain it; you’ll have to download the PDF to get all that info). It’s a helpful guide to where I’m coming from in my approach to horror and will help make the rest of my horror posts make sense (well, some).

I should warn you that there are spoilers involved (mainly for the end of The Wicker Man–if you haven’t seen that wonderful movie, then when you start seeing me describe it, run away!).

—–

Yale University

The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film

The Senior Essay

Film Studies 491a

B. Peucker, Advisor

by Sean Thomas Collins

New Haven, Connecticut

13 December 1999

It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world…. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.

Suspense, or tension, I guess, is the word commonly used to describe that inertial period in horror focused not on something happening, but on the potential that something is going to happen. However, tension, or suspense or what have you, is tied to the notion that what you are being caused by the filmmaker to expect to happen may or may not do so–that’s the stuff of thrillers, not horror. No, there’s something far more… delicious about knowing, without being verbally told, that what you dread happening is about to happen, inexorably, inevitably. It’s this prolonged frisson of certainty that helps make good horror so satisfyingly horrifying.

I think this is why a film like The Shining actually gets scarier upon repeated viewing. The first time you see Danny turn the corner on his Big Wheels, there’s that scary Big Reveal of the little girls–terrifying, no doubt, for all the reasons detailed here. But in each subsequent viewing, you know what’s coming; since there’s more to the horror-image in question than mere jump-out-atcha shock tactics, this foreknowledge (foreboding?) actually enhances the horror, instead of detracting from it.

That same factor is at work, I believe, in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. I watched it last weekend and was struck once again by how masterfully Shyamalan creates an almost instantaneous foreknowledge of horror, making those tense build-ups (when Merrill watches the newscast from Rio, for example, or when Graham’s flashlight goes out in the cornfield) unbearable, almost sensually so. Again, it’s not just the fear of being startled by something jumping out at you–that’s certainly part of it, but in addition to that primal (infantile) fear of the short sharp shock there’s the awful certainty that something bad–something wrong–is going to show up. Indeed, Shyamalan himself capitalizes on the horror-increasing potential of certainty–in the newscast scene he actually has the videotaped footage of the alien’s appearance digetically rewound and re-shown. The man clearly understands the horrifying power of repeat viewing!

To ramble a bit, I think that similar forces are at play in those forms of popular music that capitalize on near-mathematically induced emotional-crescendo-through-repetition: electronic dance music (the keyboard-hating youngster in me always wants to refer to it with the catch-all term “techno,” but that refers to a specific subset, so no can do), funk, and prog- or math-rock.

When I first got into funk (thanks to a four-stage assault on my ass by Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns’ “A Blow for Me, a Toot to You,” the JBs’ “Doin’ It to Death,” (and especially) Herbie Hancock & the Headhunters’ “Watermelon Man” and a live recording of Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s “Very Yes”), I was struck by how the repetition and predictability of the grooves, far from negating their impact as would be the case with predictable Top 40 pap-pop, actually enhanced or indeed embodied the songs’ appeal. Those moments of THE BOMB–when a groove that has been slowly building to the horn-laden cathartic explosion you knew was coming fiiiiinally gets there–are made so powerful, so funky, by their very inevitability.

I quickly realized that this same principle applied to my favorite electronic acts: Orbital (during the suite on the eponymous record known as the Brown Album) and especially Underworld (during, well, pretty much everything, but “Born Slippy.NUXX,” “Cowgirl,” “Pearls Girl” and “Moaner” deserve special attention–as does their improvisatory and triumphant live album Everything Everything, a recording based in no small part on playing off listener recognition that their favorite part of their favorite song is slowly being woven into the sonic tapestry…closer…closer…yeah!).

Moving over to the math-rock set, they tend to put the “awful” back into the “certainty” equation. Witness the ever-mounting one-note menace of King Crimson’s “Starless,” the timid-yet-insistent plucking atop the bass juggernaut in Tool’s cover of Peach’s “You Lied,” or the crescendoing synthesized chorus of the damned in Nine Inch Nails’ wordless “Just Like You Imagined.”

Call it the Collins Certainty Principle if you will. Used by funk & electronic dance acts, it yields an almost erotic dose of musical bliss. Used by dark prog bands and horror films, it yields an equally sensual payload of purest terror. Either way, prolonged frisson from certainty.

Maybe I’m becoming one of those dipsticks who only think The Onion is funny when it corresponds roughly to their politics, but this seems about right to me. (Particularly in light of the second item here.)

Back in the fall of 1999 I was feeling inspired by an unexpectedly good summer for horror movies. Back then Scream was still pretty much the be-all and end-all of contemporary horror. I saw that movie in a drive-in and was thoroughly entertained, but I could have told you even then that basing a couple dozen horror movies on its reference-heavy self-reflexivity was a great big dead end for the genre. By the summer of ’99, enough I Still Know the Urban Legend of How You Screamed About Your Disturbing Behavior flicks had filtered down the pike that I was pretty much ready to give the genre up for dead. Then all of a sudden The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense and Eyes Wide Shut came along–three horror movies (yes, three; EWS is a horror movie that uses sex instead of violence, and yeah, I’ll probably have to elaborate on that sometime this month) that were both good and frightening enough to enter the canon and had nothing to do with either the current crop of slasher flicks or its progenitors. What, exactly, were these movies doing?

I was disappointed to discover that film studies (of which I was a student at the time) had little to offer me by way of an explanation. Indeed, almost all of the films and images I’d found truly horrifying in my years as a horror buff were glossed over by the film studies establishment in favor of psychoanalytic analyses of gender and audience-identification issues–worthwhile avenues of exploration, but by no means should they be the only ones available.

I decided to write a very practical Senior Essay–a thesis exploring what I thought was the definitive image of horror in most all of the films I’d actually found effective as horror. I called it “the monumental horror-image”–like a monument, it stands in testament to the overturning of the natural order to which horror forces us to bear witness.

I thought it’d be a great way to get Where the Monsters Go: Horror Month at ADDTF going to make The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film available for download. Click here to download the 42-page essay as a PDF. (If PDFs pose a problem for you, you can click here to read the first two sections of the thesis in HTML.) I promise you that there’s not a lot of jargon in there, so even if it’s been a while since you’ve been in a goofy liberal arts program (hey, it’s been a little while for me, now, too), you should still be able to follow what the hell I’m talking about. This was the best-received piece of writing I’ve ever done (up until that Batman piece, of course)–it won an award for Best Senior Essay in the Film Studies Program at school, and no less a personage than Clive Barker called it “so fucking smart.” Also, isn’t it just kinda funny that I got to do a senior thesis that included close readings of movies like The Wicker Man, The Shining and The Exorcist?

So yeah, here it is. It spells out pretty clearly where I’m coming from in my approach to horror, and though it’s sort of cobbled together due to its very practical concern of answering the question I wanted answered, I think its Frankensteinian construction is somehow appropriate. I hope you dig it.

And if nothing else, the volume of Diet Coke I drank during its production–now that’s truly horrifying.

It just occurred to me that there are probably horrorbloggers in the same way that there are comicsbloggers. This is a very exciting thought to me. I’ll see what I can find, but feel free to email me with recommendations.

Anyhoo, David Fiore has an early take on my proposed Horror Month, including a Hawthorne-on-Melville quote that, pretentious as this must make me sound, describes me almost perfectly: