The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 3

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

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

He is also wrong.

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

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

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

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

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 2

12. The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy

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

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

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

Or so it seems.

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

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 1

13. The Birds, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing further, your honor.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Babe!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, thanks, Jason!

Two movies today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random thoughts from around the ersatz horrorsphere:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds boring.

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

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

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

Big news in the comics world.

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

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

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

This is not good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasant dreams.