Jon Hastings (welcome back, Forager!) liked Children of Men but found its political ideology muddled in terms of the dystopian society it posits. That’s a fair criticism, I think. For starters, if the United Kingdom’s work force was slowly dying out, never to be replaced, I’m not sure how ruthlessly tracking down and deporting illegal immigrants would help, or even make sense from a gut-level scapegoating perspective. Moreover, the practice of keeping the pre-deportation illegals in cages outside of commuter rail lines for all the world to see runs counter to what we generally know to be true of human rights violations within Western countries–out of sight, out of mind. A lot of the anti-immigrant commercials you see and hear throughout the film take this logical flaw even further by hammering home the notion that illegals are the employees and even the relatives of good hard-working native Britons; those are difficult bonds to break, even in much more elaborate and totalitarian fictional dystopias like 1984, and though that would be an obvious problem faced by a government dedicated to a radical approach toward illegal immigration, I doubt they’d want to bring it up themselves (even to undermine it) if they could avoid it. Finally, if the career trajectories of the Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine characters are to be used as an indicator, the point at which everything started going totally wrong was the Iraq War, which (as you might have guessed) I find to be an enormously shallow and solipsistic view of how the world actually works and has worked for time immemorial.

All that being said, I still found the dystopia convincing and frightening, and I think that at least in part that comes from approaching those elements as horror. I’ve taken that view of more internally consistent dystopias and post-apocalyptic fictions (again, 1984, but also (say) The Handmaid’s Tale and any number of zombie movies) for a long time, because of my personal association of horror with hopelessness (you generally don’t get any more hopeless than dystopias). Children of Men fails as a dystopia that one could logically arrive at from its constituent elements, I think, but succeeds despite that because of the way those elements add up as a big frightening collage of Things That Are Horrifying. Domestic terrorism, ecological and economic breakdown, torture, prisoner abuse, large-scale human rights violations by a Western nation, internecine warfare between “freedom fighters,” increased video surveillance, assassinations, plausibly deniable action by the government against journalists and dissidents, Abu Ghraib, Vladimir Putin, the drug war, limited nuclear exchanges, pandemics, Islamic fascism, urban warfare, intrusive media and advertising presence, euthanasia, and (I think this is the real emotional key to why the film works and I haven’t seen anyone comment on it) the constant presence of animals in great danger, as undiluted an conveyor of helplessness as it gets–put it all together and it works in the same way that, for example, The Shining takes axes and ghosts and corpses and haunted houses and child abuse and rivers of blood and isolation and psychics and puts them all together and that works.

The big show returns tonight, and I dunno about you, but I’m all aflutter. In the meantime, you can kill some of the three hours or so left before “previously on Lost” by reading my second interview with co-creator Damon Lindelof over at the day job. Nikki and Paulo are discussed, as are Heroes, X-Men, Super Friends, Buffy, and Private Parts. Enjoy!

Gordon Willis is fucked on an iPod.

–Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Grainy Haze of Dreams: Movie year 2006, and the death and rebirth of cinema” (with Keith Uhlich)

As great a line as that is, it’s not even really representative of Seitz and Uhlich’s take on the import of digital moviewatching, which is just one of literally dozens of topics tackled in what is by far the most interesting cinematic year-in-review piece you’ll come across for the year that was. Go and get lost in it.

Remember in that post of mine about erotic horror-movie scenes, when I said that all erotic-horror roads for me lead back to the bathtub scene in The Shining? I take it back.

Why? Because Horror Roundtable participant Joakim Ziegler of Mexploitation reminded me of the sexual splendor that was Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

This film came out when I was 14 years old–and I could probably leave the explanation there, couldn’t I? But it was almost uncanny just how many of my nascent buttons this film, on retrospect, well and truly pushed.

In 1992, for young men of a certain outcast-type bent, there was no more attractive individual on Earth than Winona Ryder. So try to imagine what it was like to watch a film in which she depicted obsessive sexual abandon. In an English accent, no less.

And then, of course, they paired her Mina up with Sadie Frost’s Lucy.

I’m not sure if this film inaugurated pale brunettes and pale redheads as “my types” or simply confirmed them, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.

And oh, when I said they paired Winona and Sadie up, I meant they really paired them up.

In the rain.

Ah, lipstick lesbianism. What would an adolescent boy do without you? Though to be honest, I think that in this case I preferred Sadie solo.

Or with a vampire werewolf.

Say, did I mention my thing for pale brunettes and redheads?

One of whom was a young Monica Bellucci?

I’m making light of things in an effort to cut the jibberjabber and skip to the pretty pictures, but in all seriousness, I remember Bram Stroker’s Dracula as a powerfully, almost disconcertingly erotic film. In part it’s because the women involved perfectly lined up with the archetypes that, for whatever reason, I find attractive. But Coppola and his collaborators made much out of the occulted, transgressive sexuality of Stoker’s original–embellishing it to the point of camp and losing a good deal of the horror by literalizing it, sure, but that stuff was ripe for the picking. The lesbian kisses, the three-on-one vampire bride orgy, mind control, female-on-male penetration, S&M, semi-bestiality, male terror-arousal at the sight of a woman happily (mindlessly?) lost in sexual pleasure–it’s a hornily heady brew, and I lapped it up.

On the morning news this A.M. I heard Because I Said So described as “the romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore.” This made me realize that if Because I Said So were a comedy about a romance between Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore, I’d have been there on opening night.

Apparently there were a lot of set pieces filmed in only one shot. I wasn’t aware of this going in and didn’t notice it as it was happening. I think the former part of that last sentence explains the latter part. Apparently the movie’s technical proficiency is supposed to be evidence of its soullessness? Not from where I’m sitting.

If this, this, and this turn out as good as they have the potential to turn out, I almost wouldn’t care if they let Sam Raimi make The Hobbit. Almost.

This week’s Horror Roundtable centers on a scintillating topic indeed: erotic horror-movie scenes. It takes no great scholar of the genre to point out the bond between eros and thanatos, but still, I was surprised to discover upon considering the topic just how many of the scenes I consider to be really hot stuff come from horror films.

Because it’s a virtual wall-to-wall smorgasbord of sensuality, I named “any Patricia Arquette scene from David Lynch’s Lost Highway” as my fave…

…which led me to think about Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (aka Della’morte Dell’amore), a sister film to Lost Highway in several respects, from horror to surrealism to fractured narrative to (in the persons of Rupert Everett and Anna Falchi) intense eroticism…

…but for me, all horror-eroticism roads lead back to the bathtub sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Lia Beldam’s matter-of-fact, unabashed nudity struck a chord with my young teenaged self that’s still resonating today, I think…

…and I think I’ll stop reproducing images from that scene right there, thank you very much, for all our sakes.

I put off posting about it for quite some time, but if you’re interested in horror comics, I heartily recommend Monster Parade #1 by writer-artist Ben Catmull. Published by Fantagraphics, this first issue of Catmull’s Eightball-style one-man anthology title employs a range of illustrative styles and storytelling tones to explore one subject and one subject only: monsters. In so doing it puts on display one of the most unique comics bestiaries going today. From a wordless “story” featuring gigantic creatures that dominate a storm-tossed landscape like a visual embodiment of Hendrix’s “And the Gods Made Love” to a laugh-out-loud extended gag strip that suddenly takes a turn for the uncomfortable and disturbing to a documentary-style look at a small town plagued with more inexplicably bizarre creatures than an island in Clive Barker’s Abarat world, it’s a wonder to behold. Tom Spurgeon posted a preview of the book and an interview with Catmull back in September; dip your toes in there, because the water’s fine.

One quick horror-comics follow-up: My post on The Abandoned creator Ross Campbell’s falling out with Tokyopop made its way through the comics blogosphere over the past couple of days; Heidi MacDonald has posted some information dug up from Campbell’s personal site (scroll down to March 9th, 2006 for the relevant posts, but beware of some colonoscopy pictures if that’s the sort of thing that would bother you) that would appear to indicate that production troubles were the source of the friction that led him to leave the company.

I get all my quarterbacking action in at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback. Thoughts on Annihilation, Daredevil, Teen Titans, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Anders Nilsen’s The End, Ex Machina, and The Walking Dead abound.

…is just one of the many pleasures offered by Matt Zoller Seitz’s Top 5 Imaginary Movies, which also include a Terrence Malick adaptation of Moby Dick starring Mel Gibson as Ahab and a CGI Watership Down directed by (the overrated, but ymmv) Brad Bird. Hmmm…I may have to cast some Books of Blood films as a response.

One of the great undiscovered horror gems from any medium over the past few years is The Abandoned, the “Dawn of the Dead meets Suicide Girls” graphic novel by writer/artist Ross Campbell. So it’s much to my delight/dismay that Campbell himself delivers some good news/bad news in the comment thread of blogger Bill Sherman’s review of the book. The good news is that Campbell’s pitching The Abandoned 2 to various publishers (all of whom would be well advised to snap that shit up toot sweet), and has a vision for a Volume 3 at some point as well. The bad news is that due to a falling out with original publisher Tokyopop, Campbell no longer has the rights to the first volume’s lead character, zaftig lovesick lesbian punk Rylie. Suffice it to say that the events of the first book led Rylie to a place emotionally that would be very interesting to explore; let’s hope that Campbell’s dream of getting her back in time to cap off the trilogy comes true.

Meanwhile, Thomas Jane, star of director Frank Darabont’s upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s wonderful novella The Mist, reveals to Fangoria that Darabont has changed the story’s much-loved ending. This news comes via The Horror Blog’s Steven Wintle, who expresses concern. However, a coworker of mine noted that insofar as the novella’s ending relies on a very specific way of delivering a line or two that would be difficult to replicate outside of prose, it may not be much to worry about. My feeling is that if the changed ending takes up “the last 10 pages” as Jane implies, there are larger changes afoot, ones that may dumb down the Hitchcockian denouement of King’s original. We’ll see.

Finally, Cinematical brings us the news-to-me details on The Descent director Neil Marshall’s next film, the aptly titled post-apocalyptic virus flick Doomsday. This link comes courtesy of my old running buddy Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants, whose tolerance for all things post-apocalyptic and viral seems a lot lower than mine own.

It seems amazing to me that the surroundings of Stonehenge are sufficiently unexplored for a tiny village to be discovered there now, but there you have it. I hope they find some suitably horrifying artifacts as they continue to excavate.

Even when it’s as obvious a put-up job as this footage of a Norwegian lake monster. (A fairly well-executed put-up job, though, which makes a big difference.)

Hat tip: the great Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo.

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But the notion that this war is about our moral failings is comfort fantasy, pure and simple. It soothes us with the false idea that, if we but mend ourselves, the scary people will leave us alone.

—“Is Hollywood too timid for the war on terror?; Thanks to political correctness, you don’t see much about the greatest conflict of our time on the big screen,” Andrew Klavan, The L.A. Times

This is basically a politicized articulation of what I’ve been saying regarding the “It’s about Iraq!” veneer slapped on the modern-day meat-movie cycle, and why I think that’s a copout. (My version: There’s nothing special about our evil. Evil is everywhere.)

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

Matt Yglesias, like me, thought that Pan’s Labyrinth was okay. Of his three major beefs I disagree with one, sympathize with the next, and agree with the last.

Beef one: “a silly sentimental ending” that I, on the contrary, thought was the best part of an otherwise fairly rote and unimaginative fantasy.

Beef two: “they sapped the Spanish Civil War of any ideological content.” That’s certainly true insofar as the Captain is pretty much just a very bad bad guy (though a very good very bad bad guy at that) rather than one who’s specifically fascist/Falangist, and insofar as the red guerillas might well have skipped out on performing as the students in Les Mis