I saw Twilight a couple weeks ago and Let the Right One In this evening, and frankly I’m panicking. Why? Because we are raising a generation of children that is woefully unprepared for the vampire threat.

Children, vampires are not your friends. They’re not your soulmates. They’re not your first love. They don’t glitter in the sunlight. They don’t solve Rubik’s Cubes and send you messages in Morse code. They will not protect you from bullies, runaway vans, or other vampires. They will not whisk you away from your coldly beautiful northern-latitude environment to be united with them forever. They will bite you on the neck and suck your blood out until you die. I really can’t stress that last point enough, children. The only thing to do when you run into the bloodsucking undead is to grab yourself a good sharp wooden stake and drive it straight through their hearts. This is because, as I said, vampires are not your friends.

I’ll be taking up a collection to purchase and mail copies of The Lost Boys to every 11-year-old in America shortly. For now, I suppose I’ll just have to talk about the movies, dangerous pro-vampire propaganda though they both may be.

I don’t run screaming from (or screaming at) Twilight the way a lot of horror fans do. The Missus really liked the books, for two reasons I think: 1) She enjoyed their vampiric mythos/hierarchy/taxonomy; 2) She enjoyed how they depicted the ideal teen-girl romance. A beautiful boy who loves you more than life itself, won’t have sex with you until you’re married, and never needs to sleep so he can stay up in your room all night holding you and talking? Sign the 16-year-old Missus up! And indeed I can appreciate those aspects of the story as well. True love among teenagers really doesn’t have a whole lot of pop-culture support at this point–god knows I could have used some when I was a kid–and there’s something, I dunno, rebellious about the notion that this girl knows her heart better than anyone else. Yeah, I suppose there’s a creepy Mormon subtext to all this, but the fact that its vampires we’re talking about will hopefully get some undergarments in a twist anyway.

I haven’t read the books so I can’t speak to how well the film does or doesn’t get it, but one thing it does very well is take advantage of gorgeous Pacific Northwest scenery. Watching our tormented young vampire bound around amid the Washington rainforests, all those rich greens and blues, makes you wonder why more movies can’t be set there. It also does high school pretty well: aside from the two leads, or really maybe just Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen, most of the kids you see are convincingly teenaged, awkwardly but not miserably coming to terms with becoming their own individual people. There’s a lot of nervous joking and showing-off of boobs and things like that. Credit director Catherine Hardwicke’s experience on Thirteen.

It’s not a terribly good movie for all that, though. To be blunt, Pattinson and Kristin Stewart as Bella deliver most of their lines like they’re barely holding in a bowel movement–every word feels forced out through clenched teeth and short breath. Bella is an aggressively uninteresting person, with the possible exception of her endemic clumsiness, but even that just makes her seem more Mary Sue-ish as half the guys in the high school, not to mention the drop-dead gorgeous vampire, fall all over her. I’ve heard complaints (including from the Missus, who found the movie very heavy-handed given that nearly everyone who saw it would have read the books and didn’t need things hammered home) that the romance and attendant “I’m a vampire” confession come on too fast, but I didn’t notice it. For me the big pacing problem was with the antagonist vampires, who have a few foreshadowing attacks, then basically come out of nowhere (in the middle of a vampire-family baseball game, of all things), upend the entire story, and get dispatched within the space of about 20 minutes total during the latter third of the film. It felt like the filmmakers just threw up their hands and spliced it in at random. The whole project feels a bit like the work of people who aren’t quite sure they’re gonna pull this thing off.

Let the Right One In, on the other hand, is a film that feels like every frame was considered and labored over. That leads to an extremely laconic pace–you really feel every one of its 114 minutes–but, at its best moments, a feeling like you’re watching No Country for Old Men with vampires instead of Mexicans and snow instead of desert. Like that film, and Twilight for that matter, it makes excellent use of its unique locale, in this case the snows of Sweden. The visual emphasis on the contrast between black night or gray day and white snow is constant and engrossing, and the opening-credits snowfall alone is a hall-of-fame image. I think that many of the memorable horror movies of recent years have been exceptionally well made and lovely as films, from The Descent‘s opening sequence and use of reds to I Am Legend, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, and 28 Days/Weeks Later‘s use of ruined and abandoned cityscapes to The Mist‘s handheld immediacy to The Ruins fashion photography-derived cinematography, but this is the loveliest, the filmiest, of the lot. It is, in the words of Ricky Jay in Boogie Nights, a real film.

And lest you think it’s all landscapes and creatively framed portraits, there’s a plethora of memorable horror images to be found here as well. Indeed, the care given to making the non-horror material so beautiful seems to reinforce the similar attention paid to crafting unnerving scares, and vice versa. The murder set pieces are chillingly blasé, with a tinge of Hostel matter-of-factness. The few overt moments of vampire supernaturalism are subtle and freaky enough that at first I wasn’t even sure I’d seen them correctly. Gore is far from constant, but it’s creative and hard to shake when it does show up. The film has the power to shock using the basic tenets of vampire lore, which is saying something given how shopworn such things can be. And when it shifts gears into sequences involving more run-of-the-mill violence, particularly in the final scene with the bullies, it’s just as disturbing. The only unsuccessful moment involves an attack by a pride of CGI cats that stands out for its obvious special-effectness in a film where the digital work is frequently so subtle as to be in the “did I just see what I thought I saw?” category–it also has countless similar scenes of cute animals attacking people for laffs in shitty post-There’s Something About Mary comedy trailers for the past decade going against it. over. But even there I’m basically okay with it, since it jibes with the lore and since compared to what usually happens to cats and dogs and things in horror movies these days it’s refreshingly good-natured.

The visuals are deployed in service of a rewardingly complex story about a bullied tween and the girl next door, and there really isn’t any monkeying around about whether or not she’s really a vampire. We learn pretty damn quick that she sure is, which I again thought refreshing–after all, no one goes to a vampire movie like it’s a mystery. The pleasure and complexity of the film is following the basic plot as it intersects with three prominent and nuanced subplots.

First there’s the vampire girl Eli’s adult caretaker, who by the time we meet him is old and increasingly bad at his job of murdering people and supplying Eli with their blood. (Reminiscent of Mahogany in “The Midnight Meat Train,” even in methodology.) He’s a sad figure, but the film surprised me with how far it was willing to take that sadness, how furious it seemed to ultimately be about it. And bless its heart, it never comes right out and says what we all suspect about how his relationship with Eli began. It hangs there like a reproach against the film’s own resolution.

Then there’s the saga of Eli’s victims. Normally horror stories that take a sympathetic approach to their monsters “blame the victim,” as it were, showing the humans who the monsters hunt and then who eventually hunt the monster to be provincial, small-minded, and just as evil in their own way as the creatures they’re fighting. The humans are the real monsters, etc. Not so here, even when all the cues we’re receiving from their age and their rough-edged ways and their drinking and smoking signal us to expect otherwise. All told, the lives of three perfectly good-hearted people who genuinely care about each other are cruelly snuffed out by Eli. She’s not a bwa-ha-ha cacklingly evil vampire in the Dracula/’Salem’s Lot mode, she’s portrayed as someone whose well-being we should care about, but neither she nor the film make any bones about the fact that she murders innocent people to survive. As a result the movie plays with audience identification in the same unexpected, effective fashion as, say, The Wicker Man. Who are we rooting for, and what does that say about us?

Finally there’s our hero, Oskar, and the bullies who bedevil him. There’s plenty of comeuppance dealt out in all the right places, and it’s always pretty satisfying…for a time. But one bully cries, another is clearly miserable with his role as a Judas goat, and the ringleader is equally clearly doing unto others what has been done unto him. When their time comes, I snorted a “serves ’em right” laugh or two, but I didn’t laugh for long.

But even beyond the bully storyline proper, what they do is give Oskar a reason to do what he does and be how he is. Something that the bullying has done to him psychologically prepares him to fall into the arms of Eli, if you will–that’s something we never see with Bella and Edward. At age 12, an outcast clinging to fleeting moments of genuine happiness with his divorced parents, a hapless victim of children who are perhaps even more miserable than him and certainly less redeemable, an inability to see beyond the end of the school year…you can see why he would care so deeply for this little girl who shows him kindness, lets him in on her secrets. For that matter you can see why the reverse would be true (provided you’re willing to grant vampires that luxury, which for some reason seems to be a whole lot less of a problem for horror fans with this movie than with stuff by Stephenie Meyer or Anne Rice). Perpetually 12 years old, trapped in a relationship long past its expiration date, exposed daily to suffering, possibly the victim of abuse herself in some long-ago life…she needs a kindred spirit. If Bella and Edward’s relationship is a romantic ideal, Oskar and Eli’s is one grounded in personal psychological shortcomings and damage, as well as tenderness and vulnerability and play. Their relationship feels real. Doomed, sad, and real.

* Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds lists his books of the year.

* Curt Purcell explains why he thinks The Spirit will be different from Frank Miller’s past reimaginings of established characters, like his Batman and Daredevil comics.

* Speaking of Cloverfield, apparently that gigantic toy of the monster came out! I discovered this by watching a video in which it harasses Rich “Fourfour” Juzwiak’s cats.

* And finally, Twin Peaks: The Sneaker! The kids love this one.

(Via my pal and frequent ADDTF commenter Jason “Shaggy” Erwin, who has a blog now!)

Thanks to the magic of the special feature listed on the packaging of countless bare-bones DVD releases as “scene selection” I am currently watching Cloverfield sans its opening twenty minutes. The movie had been steadily growing on me since I first saw it a little less than a year ago; it’s not unlike The Mist in that regard, but oddly it is unlike I Am Legend, which ending aside I preferred to the other two entries in Winter ’07-’08’s apocalyptic monster movie festival at the time but since find myself largely uninterested in revisiting. My guess, and I think I’ve said this before, is that it’s because I’m a monster man at heart, and IAL‘s critters were the weakest part of that movie while the monsters in Cloverfield and The Mist were highlights.

Anyway, the destruction of Manhattan by the bastard offspring of Lovecraft and Toho is just as awe-inspiring and as soul-crushing as I remember it being. I’m not going to say it’s a relentless grinding down of your nerves, because there’s the fanservice “girl knows about Superman” humor in the tunnel scene, but it’s grim and it plays those 9/11 notes expertly. Is it the best giant-monster movie I’ve ever seen? You bet. I’d already had a hunch it might end up on my all-time favorites list the next time I update it, and so far…yep. The stuff that I like here is really the kind of stuff I like, you know?

But then there’s the stuff I don’t like, and in skipping ahead to the moment where the excrement hits the air conditioning I stumbled across exactly what that is. Behold the final line spoken by one of our partygoers before the attack begins:

You gotta learn to forget the world and hang on to the people you care about the most.

Also?

In all seriousness, it’s not even that I disagree with the sentiment. In fact that’s pretty much how I’m living my life these days! It’s just that nothing about how it’s expressed throughout the movie rises above the most predictable, clichéd ways of doing so. Lizzy Caplan excepted, the performances don’t help either. I’m struck in this re-watching by how one-note lead actor Michael Stahl-David’s performance is; it seems like he based his character’s reaction to trauma solely on what he’s seen such things look and sound like in the movies. Compare and contrast with the three actors in The Blair Witch Project, which I also re-watched recently, and, well, there isn’t any comparison. The special effects show a lot more seams on the small screen too, oddly enough, I guess because it’s easier for the eye to parse the constantly moving camera.

Good movie anyway. Heck, I’m leaning toward great movie anyway.

Old stuff on Cloverfield here, here, and here.

PS: The girl regaining consciousness with a “hey” is still totally hilariously awful.

My interview with Frank Miller about The Spirit is up on Maxim’s Movie Blog.

* Tom Spurgeon kicks off his annual holiday interview series with a conversation with Fantagraphics co-honcho Kim Thompson. It’s both uplifting to hear a great publisher talk about what he does and why/how he does it, and depressing even to hear him joke that had he known then what he knows now he might never have given it a try.

* The two guys who run Michael Bay’s horror remake factory Platinum Dunes sound like They’re not remaking Rosemary’s Baby and might not remake The Birds after all. It’s really something to hear how dopey they sound even when explaining non-dopey decisions like that one. (Via Dread Central.)

* Josh Cotter’s last few “Driven by Lemons” sketchbook strips have been particularly lovely.

* John Jakala casts a skeptical eye at Brubaker/Fraction/Aja et al’s Immortal Iron Fist as compared to similar manga series. To me, though, the way he critiques it just makes it clear that IIF was going for something different than Naruto or Bleach. I suppose it’s possible they tried to do a balls-out superhero manga and failed, but it seems unlikely. It’s certainly fine to prefer one to the other, of course.

* The Daily Cross Hatch asks a plethora of comics personages to list their favorite books of the year. I could have done with a few fewer NYC comics scenesters plugging their buddies’ books, but it’s still an interesting sampling of opinions. Capacity gets a lot of love, which is terrific given how close I came to overlooking the book entirely. My favorite bit is Dash Shaw’s praise for the great Ross Campbell’s Wet Moon 4:

Campbell knows who he is and what he likes and his comics are born out of his personality and obsessions. His work is unique and untouchable. This man is at peace with himself. That is an enviable life. If Optic Nerve was awesome it would look like this. The Abandoned 2 was going to be his masterwork but I’m okay with more Wet Moon instead. Fuck Tokyopop.

I don’t necessarily agree with the Optic Nerve dig, but Shaw’s dead on in detecting a kinship there. It’s just the look and the milieu of Campbell’s stories that prevents altcomix slice-of-life lovers from jumping aboard, or really even acknowledging its existence. Read Wet Moon!

* B-Sol at Vault of Horror has posted the fruits of his latest labor: The Top 25 Horror Films of the Modern Era. Like his previous Top 50 of All Time list, it was culled from lists submitted by a wide variety of horror bloggers and website writers. There are some interesting selections on there, both good and bad, and I think once again the theory that films need a little time to percolate in our minds before we feel comfortable saying “it’s the best” is borne out.

* Bad law is bad law update: Tom Spurgeon calls our attention to the case of Dwight Whorley, whose child pornography conviction included charges related to cartoon imagery and prose fiction in addition to actual pornographic photographs of children. Given recent commentary about whether unseemly speech should be protected, this seems like an instructive case to me. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who doesn’t think Whorley deserves to rot in prison for possessing the pornographic photos. On the other hand, the activities depicted in the cartoons and the fiction are imaginary, involving imaginary people. I don’t think that’s a crime, and I don’t think it should be classified as a crime, and I don’t think anyone, even a bastard like Whorley, should be convicted for it. Bad law is bad law.

* More grim news: The case of the murder of Adam Walsh, the young son of John Walsh, has long been a fascinating one to me, for a few reasons. First of all, John Walsh’s reaction to his son’s killing–creating America’s Most Wanted and thereby helping to capture countless murderers and other criminals–is the closest thing to a real-life superhero origin story I’ve ever seen. Secondly, Adam’s supposed killer is an infamous figure in serial-killer lore, Ottis Toole. Toole was the occasional partner in crime of Henry Lee Lucas; the two inspired the excellent, trailblazing horror film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and depending on how you credit their often altered or retracted confessions, they’re either among America’s most prolific murderers or its biggest bullshit artists. This article by the AP’s Matt Sedensky on the Hollywood, Florida authorities’ recent closing of the Adam Walsh case, officially pinning the blame on the long since executed Toole, points out the many lingering inconsistencies and flaws with the investigation, the confession, and the supposed case-closing. It also brings up something I either never heard or had forgotten about: the suspicion among some quarters that Jeffrey Dahmer, who lived in Florida at the time of Adam Walsh’s disappearance, might have been responsible for the murder.

*

* Sean T. Collins on dead tree: The new issue of Maxim (Hillary Duff’s on the cover) features a piece I did on The Spirit, complete with Frank Miller interview quotes. “Is it crazy? You bet your fuckin’ ass it is” may be one of those quotes.

* Speaking of Frank the Tank, he’s going to be directing a new film version of Buck Rogers. Also, hee hee!

* I love Matt Wiegle.

* Fantagraphics has posted a preview of Anders Nilsen’s upcoming book, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes.

* My pals Ben Morse, Ryan Penagos, and Juan Doe have comics in the Marvel Digital Holiday Special. Dig that Stephanie Buscema art.

* Here’s a photo of the creepy fashions of some voters in Kashmir.

I enjoy Pitchfork’s year-end best-of lists, but I enjoy them even more when I think of them as countdowns and imagine Casey Kasem reading them. “Coming in at number 34, here’s Fuck Buttons with ‘Sweet Love for Planet Earth.'”

Somewhere in Heaven, J.R.R. Tolkien talks to James Brown about what it’s like for everyone in a given field to owe absolutely everything to you.

* Jane Espenson talks to SciFi Wire about her script for the upcoming Battlestar Galactica TV movie The Plan. As SciFi Wire puts it:

Jane Espenson, who wrote the upcoming movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, said that the telefilm will retell the initial story of the SCI FI Channel series, but from the perspective of the Cylons, and that it will take advantage of revelations that will come in the upcoming new episodes of the show’s fourth and final season.

But you should read the whole thing because it’s interesting to hear her talk about the process, which heavily involved director and star Edward James Olmos.

* Clive Thompson offers the best explanation I’ve yet seen about the use of torture in World of Warcraft, and suggests how it could have been done better. Because I’m thick, I’m only now grokking that torture was mandatory across all character types, not just the “evil” ones. That seems pretty dopey to me. Regardless of its provenance in fantasy literature–Gandalf and Aragorn at the very least credibly threatened to torture Gollum for information–I think most of us look at torture in fiction differently than we might have decades ago. (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* I loved Tom Spurgeon’s review of Mesmo Delivery because it’s like a much more cogent and pleasantly written version of exactly what I said about Mesmo Delivery.

* Here’s a great photoparade from the Kramers Ergot 7 signing at Desert Island in Brooklyn. I actually did the responsible thing and canceled my pre-order in hopes that someone would get it for me for Christmas. Fingers crossed! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Brian Eno and Peter Jackson: two great tastes that taste great together. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Worn Free specializes in reproducing T-shirts worn by rock stars. I didn’t see anything that said “must buy!” to me, but I’d imagine some people reading this blog wouldn’t mind grabbing that Lester Bangs “FREEDOM OR DEATH” shirt.

* I remember reading textbooks that said “nobody knows why the dinosaurs died out.” Since then we’re now on our second prevailing theory: Looks like the asteroid idea is being phased out in favor of massive volcanic eruptions in India. Meanwhile, scientists in the Sahara have found the remnants of a prehistoric river chock full of fossils, including those of a 60-foot crocodile. Six-year-old “I Want to Be a Paleontologist When I Grow Up” Sean T. Collins is tickled pink by all of this. (Via HuffPo.)

* Here’s an insane CBS News story about a cult called SIST from a small town in Wisconsin and how they allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill 60 people in the town, including pretty much the entire local government. It sounds a little like the “hitman,” who was actually just a motorsports salesman who says he played along with the group for a while in order to recoup $100K they owed him, sort of entrapped them into the scheme. But even so, the group appears to be really nuts and the mayor has installed bulletproof glass on her door and the group’s lawyer wears a fedora and calls CBS a communist organization…it’s fantastic.

* Not to be confused with the star of Crank, Jason Stratham of The Cold Inclusive specializes in extremely detailed and bizarre accounts of fictional sexual encounters with celebrities. “The Very Last Fucking of Steven Tyler” has a dystopian science-fiction feel to it, for example, while “Everyone Says I Love You” contains the following passage:

So. You’re on top of [Drew Barrymore], “giving her one,” as they say in post-war British literature, and she stares right up at you and says “You like that? You like fucking People magazine’s most beautiful person?”

How to respond to a question like that?

After a yearlong hiatus, he’s returned with a little something entitled “Christmas in L.A. with Julia Roberts.”

Afterwards, lying on the bed, both catching your breath, Julia says “Whew! And…scene!” and laughs. That unashamed, open-mouthed laugh she has.

I wish I’d thought of this.

* Happy birthday to the great Tom Spurgeon! (Via Peggy Burns.)

* My media discovery of the month: Mashed in Plastic: The David Lynch Mash-Up Album. It’s a seamlessly flowing collection of 18 mash-ups that draw from the soundtracks of David Lynch films and Twin Peaks, linked together and sprinkled throughout with astutely mixed audio clips from the movies. Before you say to yourself “That sounds kind of cheesy,” I simply advise you to take the couple minutes necessary to download the record and listen to either “The Voice of Love Is Crying” or “I’ll Be There in Twin Peaks”; if you are a David Lynch fan and you don’t get chills, I’ll eat my weight in garmonbozia. Production credits and videos are at the link as well. Be warned, though, that you might stand to see something spoilery if you’re not up to speed with all his movies. Twin Peaks virgins especially should proceed with caution. (Via Jason “Shaggy” Erwin.)

* Speaking of which: Fire Walk with Desaad. Thanks again, Rickey Purdin.

* I always wondered who all these people who supposedly fainted after hearing Chuck Palahniuk read the story “Guts” from his horror novel/anthology hybrid Haunted were. As it turns out, they’re a lot like FourFour’s Rich Juzwiak. Wow. It’s worth a read not just because it’s funny that the guy you’ve come to know and love through his cat videos or R&B reviews or ANTM recaps is part of a cult phenomenon, but because he also speaks to that same sense of “failure” as a fan of the extreme that I felt when I switched off Inside.

* Tor.com’s Douglas Cohen finishes off a series of posts on Robert E. Howard’s fab four sword’n’sorcery heroes with one on Bran Mak Morn.

* Stacie Ponder pays “a small tribute to that 80s horror trend where chicks wore sports jerseys as pajamas.” Jo Beth Willicious.

* Finally, John Cei Douglas sends Christmas greetings from Deadwood. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

(via)

* Here are six clips from the already much-maligned The Spirit, directed by Frank Miller. It looks pretty and fun to me. A lot of my friends are freaking the fuck out over this movie, but look, they can’t all be There Will Be Blood, and superhero movies could use a Road House/Speed Racer/Sin City hybrid. Hell, any genre of movies could use that. (Via AICN.)

* The Fantagraphics blog coughs up some deets on Fanta’s upcoming Hans Rickheit graphic novel. It’s called The Squirrel Machine and is slated for release in 2010. I’m a fairly outspoken Rickheit activist so this is really delightful to me.

* Kenneth Branagh is directing Thor. How about that, man. This brings the total number of superhero movie directors who have had sex with Helena Bonham-Carter to two. As far as we know.

* Lost Season Five will air uninterrupted, with the possible exception of a clipshow-augmented skip week prior to the finale. Nice. (via The Tail Section.)

* They’re remaking The Crow, They in this case being Stephen Norrington, the guy who did The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Blade. I would be lying if I said High School Sean T. Collins never dressed up like the Crow for Halloween then ended up not even going out, instead lurking around his parent’s house in pancake makeup and a black leather trenchcoat, so this news concerns that part of me. The graphic novel was actually rather good I always thought. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Marc-Oliver Frisch describes his requirements for how a superhero story would constitute good Art, and then runs down some prominent writers in terms of whether they make the grade. It’s good reading even if he uses the dreaded “transcend the genre” criterion–worth a read, particularly if you’re looking to better understand the kinds of folks who are smart, demanding readers but still stick primarily with superheroes for one reason or another.

* Speaking of whom, my pal Ben Morse, an indie comics tyro, gives Kazimir Strzepek’s world-building exercise The Mourning Star a go.

* Check out some panels from Dave Kiersh’s upcoming Xeric Grant-funded book.

* Thanks to Rich Johnston for correcting the record on a story he ran once about being banned from Wizard’s message board when I ran it. (He wasn’t.)

* Missed linking to this when it was initially reported, but the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report on America’s use of torture and abuse of prisoners has found Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials responsible.

* Finally, here’s a great description of Sid Vicious, from Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Evan Kindley in his review of Sid & Nancy:

here we have kind of a black hole at the center of all the frippery: Sid Vicious, whose very claim to fame was his nullity, his embodiment of the concept of “no future.”

Final Crisis is Twin Peaks with superheroes.

Slap Darkseid’s mug on this wanted poster and you’ve basically got it.

UPDATE:

THANK YOU RICKEY PURDIN