Category Archives: Horror

Thematic Cohesion and the Challenge of Sequels

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Over on threads a response I made explaining why Alien 3‘s opening sequence is a mistake had prompted a little push back from fans of the 3rd film in the franchise.

What is posted was; ‘It’s worse than that. It’s telling the audience from Aliens that they were suckers for investing any emotional energy in Newt or Hicks. All of your emotional strain and joy — wasted — because we can’t give an ef what you feel.‘

The response that has intrigued me the most goes like this; ‘That’s life man. No rhyme, no reason, no ef’s given for your feelings. The people you love sometimes die in accidents, that doesn’t make you a sucker for loving them. Alien 3’s opening is gut-wrenchingly real.’

That response is a clear example of nihilism, that life and existence is essentially meaningless. The vast cold universe is utterly uncaring of your little concerns and your efforts to impose order and meaning are futile.

I myself am not a nihilist but it is a valid philosophical disciple, but does it negate the point I made about the betrayal of the audience with the uncaring killing off of the characters of Newt and Hicks?

Nihilistic art has its place and a long tradition even in cinema. The French film The Wages of Fear is famously nihilistic and its ending a somber examination that a person’s fight for life is futile and that death comes for all of us is woven into the films story and mood.

Alien and the direct sequel Aliens are not nihilistic pieces. Ripley survives the first film triumphant. Ridley Scott did not invoke The Wages of Fear and have an asteroid slam into Ripley’s shuttle after her defeat of the alien to demonstrate the futility of existence. James Cameron’s script and film for Aliens is a voyage of healing and becoming whole after a traumatic event. It contains not only message of hope that healing can be had but message against racism with Ripley’s acceptance of Bishop after her near murder by Ash. It is far from nihilistic.

This is what makes Alien 3 the sequel rejected by so many fans. The franchise had not been nihilistic. The series itself, born in the cinematic garden that followed Star Wars in rejecting the overly cynical mood of the 70s for a more upbeat and optimistic vision. While Alien and Alienscontained the sub-plot of the ‘Corporation’ and its corruption providing motivation for events absent in the original drafts of the script the overall tone of the films are is not cynical. The 1980s were not fertile ground for cynical stories, the audiences had experienced enough of them in the 1970s and wanted adventure and escapism, hence why two film now considered classics and masterpiece works, Blade Runner and The Thing failed utterly at the box office.

Alien 3‘s sharp turn to cynicism and nihilism is at odds with the previous films and with the mood of the audience. It is thematically divergent from the franchise and while each film must hold its own unique vision and theme to work within the franchise they must hold the encompassing theme of the greater work.

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A Third Done but What’s My Destination?

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So, my folk horror novel just passed 30,000 words and I am expecting the beast to land at a slim 90 thousand. At one third drafted what kind of mood am I am?

Well, a little befuddled to be honest. This novel is cruising but I can’t be certain that it is on the right course. I outlined the first act and that went fairly well, I partially outlined the second, which is just now wrapping up and I am pleased, intrigued but also uncertain.

I have a grasp of the core elements that the third and fourth acts require and only a vague notion of precisely where I want to end up.

It is that last elements that has me the most ‘lost at sea.’ My conception of the ending is far more hazy than any other novel I have written, much less the mechanic of how it all works out. My previous novel dealing with werewolves I had a very solid idea of the final state for the characters and only needed to path to get them there. Here I still need it to be revealed to me.

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Patriarchal Horror

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One of my regular podcasts The Evolution of Horror where each season a particular cinematic sub-genre of horror is examined in chronological order to study its origins and changes over the decades. Some of the sub-genres that have been explored are ghosts, the occult, and slashers to name just three.

Last night as sleep drifted into my brain I thought about another possible sub-genre, Patriarchal Horror. What I envisioned was something closely related to but distinct from feminist horror. I would categorize feminist horror about the claiming of power and agency by female characters but that does not require an explicit depiction of patriarchy to exist. For example, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, a key film in the development of the slasher sub-genre coming a few years before Carpenter’s Halloween exploded in the culture is specifically about a sorority house dealing with a stalker and murderer but the men and the wider world that they inhabit aren’t depicted as subjugating or dominating the women. It is feminist without dealing with patriarchy.

An example of what I would call patriarchal horror is the original The Stepford Wives. In the film the men of small town of Stepford substitute their wives with perfect robotic replacements, ones that never challenge, always know their place, and perform all their wifely duties without complaint. It is the platonic ideal of horror that draws entirely from the patriarchy.

Promising Young Woman is often slotted into the ‘rape revenge’ sub-genre and that’s not a terrible fit even if the principal character exacting her revenge isn’t herself the rape survivor. It also neatly fits into patriarchal horror because the film depicts quite intentional the culture and male dominated systems that create the environment where men escape any form of consequence for their horrible actions.

What got me started on this line of speculation was this year’s outstanding horror film Immaculate. Starring and produced by Sydney Sweeny Immaculate is very much about men exercising power and domination over women’s bodies. About how control over oneself is a fundamental freedom and right.

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Movie Review: Longlegs

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From writer/director Osgood Perkins who gave us the disturbing possession tale The Black Coat’s Daughter comes the occult/police procedural Longlegs.

Neon

After junior FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) displays an intuitive sense that borders on the clairvoyant she is reassigned to William Carter (Blair Underwood) to assist with a perplexing series of murders that stretches back decades. Entire families slaughtered by the father without any physical evidence of another person present but at each crime scene as coded cypher signed ‘Longlegs.’ The daughter of a religious mother (Alicia Witt) Lee is troubled by the strange apparently unrelated mass murders but with her added to the investigation what had been cold dead trails blossom with new leads and clues. By the end Lee discovers that ‘Longlegs’ is no garden variety serial killer and families can harbor dark dangerous secrets to safeguard their children.

Osgood Perkins does not make splatter horror. That is not to say his film are devoid of violence or blood but rather that the horror comes from a deeper character and human condition than any sudden explosion of on-screen violence. The adjective that best sums up the sensation of watched Longlegs is ‘unsettling.’ There are scenes where in terms of movement and action literally nothing is happening and yet the composition of the frame, the ingenuity of the sound design, and delivery by the performs combine into a miasma of uncanny dread.

Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi makes frequent uses of characters staring directly into the camera lens turning the fourth wall permeable, subtly drawing us into the scene. In The Silence of the Lambs when characters looked straight down the barrel of the camera it was from Starling’s Point of View, we were slotted into her perspective as a woman in what was perceived as ‘man’s world. With Longlegs it is rare that this is from a character’s point of view, but rather it is the audience that the performers are staring at and making complicit in the scene.

Another area where Perkin and editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng break from convention is in how the film utilizes ‘jump scares.’ In the vast majority of horror cinema, a jump scare is telegraphed long before the director gooses the audience with a sudden sharp cut and sounds. The anticipation of the jump scare is part of the experience, the building dread and certainty that it cannot be avoided. The jump scares in longlegs are sudden and without any buildup or winding of tension. As much as the characters in the story, the audience is caught off guard by the sudden shift in perspective or revelation.

Longlegs in spite of how it begins as a pursuit of a serial killer movie is in fact an occult horror film and that becomes clear in the story’s final act when all is revealed, secrets bared, and terrible truths endured.

This is not a film for everyone. There are no rampaging monsters, nor an endless parade of scantily clad young adults meeting bloody ends for their adherence of drugs and premarital sex. Longlegs is much more akin to Hereditary in tone. It is unsettling, uncanny, and for many people unforgettable.

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My First Mid-Summer Scream

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Last week was a bit of a jumble with dental appointments and all so I did not get in any blog entries. (And despite what JD Vance might fear Blogs are neither more or less ‘masculine’ than a diary.)

Saturday, I attended my first Mid-Summer Scream a convention focused on horror in the arts. It is in Long Beach so it’s just a couple of hour drive from home, so the plan was up in the morning stay the day and return home late evening.

I posted on Facebook that this was like Comic-Con, going on the same weekend in San Deigo, but for horror. That impression is dead on target. The line to get into the convention wound around the complex for nearly a mile and took nearly an hour to navigate.

Inside the major attraction to people were the Dealer’s Floor, a massive space crammed with dealers in booth selling all sort of things and celebrities there for paid for autographs and photo opportunities. Upstairs and on the main floor were panels discussion, presentations, and performances which I had planned to take up the majority of my time.

I had a brief and pleasant conversation with Victoria Price daughter of legendary actor Vincent Price but my plans for the day were ruined.

About an hour or maybe more after I got into the facility the fire alarm began blaring and flashing. There was no fire or emergency. Perhaps some idiot had pulled the alarm as a stupid prank. Announcements were made that they was no cause for alarm at the alarm and technicians were trying to deal with it.

Forty minutes later it continued to sound and flash. I knew it would not take much more continued exposure on my part to instigate a migraine attack. I still had a long drive home and the prospect of that while suffering a migraine looked unbearable.

I left, the fire alarm still blaring, and made my way home.

Mid-Summer Scream is great for some people but not for me. Like Comic-Con it is simply too large too populated for my taste or enjoyment. I do not regret by day trip, but I shall not repeat it.

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It Has Begun

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Last week and continuing for the rest of the calendar year I have begun writing my next novel. No, the werewolf book hasn’t found a home or an agent but in the game you cannot wait. Anyway, the best way to keep my mind off the waiting is to throw myself into the newest project.

This is my untitled American Folk Horror set on an island commune established at the height of the counterculture in the late 1960s and one that harbors a dark secret.

My earlier novels have nearly all been carefully outlined and plotted before I began writing. That is until The Wolves of Wallace Point which quite by accident became my first book written without a preplanned outline. I will admit that after a few thousand words I stopped and sketched an act breakdown but not a full outline, just enough to know what events ended each act.

This book is looking to be a hybrid creation process. I have carefully crafted the core characters with their backstories and motivations, and I have fully plotted and outline act 1 of 5 but not the rest. I know my acts and I think what I will do is outline each act when I complete the previous one.

I have in mind a character death/murder that I have hopes will be the most unsettling and terrifying thing I have ever written, and I can’t wait to get there.

5500 words have already been committed to the first two chapters and a modest production rate of 800 words per weekday should see the first draft completed before the new year. Only the final product will let me know if this has been a worthy experiment or an utter failure.

Fear of failure cannot be allowed to stop you, or one will never get anything of value completed.

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John Grant: a Study in Masculinity, Arrogance, and Self-Loathing

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Last night in preparation to listening to the podcast The Evolution of Horror‘s discussion I re-watched 1971’s Australian social horror Wake in Fright.

Spoilers

The film, based on the novel of the same title by Kenneth Cook, follows young schoolteacher John Grant on his scorching Christmas vacation. After losing all his money gambling Grant is stranded in the town of Bundanyabba in the parched Australian outback. He descends into a multi-day drinking binge with local men, partakes in a cruel, vicious kangaroo hunt that is more slaughter than hunt, and a likely drunken homosexual assignation. After failing to kill himself and spending the rest of his vacation in hospital Grant return to the even smaller town where he teaches and rents a room answering queries with, yeah, he had a good holiday.

From the moments we meet Grant silently waiting out the end of the school day so he can flee just like the children he teaches it’s clear that he harbors a deep disdain for the people of the outback. This is not alienated by the somewhat larger town of Bundayabba ‘The Yabba’ and he treats these townsfolk with similar condescension. Grant’s action however reveals him to be no more intelligent and in fact less so that the locals enjoying their drink and gambling when he loses all of his travel funds playing ‘Two-up.’ The ancient saying is that pride goes before the fall is concretely fact for the character of John Grant.

While the character displays a deep abiding disdain for the locals, he is shown repeatedly lacking the internal will to resist their peer pressure. He introduces himself as John Grant but when the local cop more than once calls him ‘jack’ a common enough nickname for people named John, Grant never corrects him, despite never during his staying introducing himself that way. Again and again Grant when pressed by other men caves to the pressure to drink, a strong indication that internally Grant is incomplete and possibly at war with himself.

During an evening of binge drinking Grant is led for a nighttime stroll by the adult daughter of one his mates. Janette in a direct and forward manner attempts to seduce Grant into sexual intercourse but after wordlessly and timidly complying he is unable to perform, scrambling off the prone woman to vomit. It is interesting that in a film that stays with John during his multiday alcoholic binge and takes to the effort to deal with going to the toilet the only depiction of retching is when he is sexually engaged with the film’s only substantial female character. Even after his same-sex drunken encounter where many movies would insert a reference to the character vomiting, Wake in Fright does not. John Grant’s sexuality is left an unanswered question with a very reasonable interpretation being that he is deeply closeted and in the hyper-masculine world of the Australian Outback quite self-loathing.

Masculinity plays an important element in Wake in Fright. It is always men who insist on John joining them in drinking. It is men who question why John would prefer talking with a woman to drinking. It is to men that John seems always trying to prove himself with boasts of his skill with a rifle and eventually with his attempt to match their physical prowess wrestling with and slaughter by hand with a knife an injured and immature kangaroo. John’s holiday plans had apparently been to travel to Sydney and be with Robin and yet the entire time he is stranded in ‘the Yabba’ he never attempts to call her for assistance. In the novel is apparently clear that the phot he carries is of a woman he has seen, knows somewhat but is not romantically involved with. The film never directly touches on this fantasy of a romantic relationship, but his visions of ‘Robin’ are never full scenes but something more like a teenager’s imaginings. It is what John Grant thinks being masculine is and something he can’t achieve.

Wake in Fright ends ambiguously on the nature of Grant’s character. The audience has no clue is his comment that he enjoyed his vacation was simply a polite but meaningless response or if in retrospect he did enjoy his sojourn to ‘the Yabba.’ There are dramatic gestures such as tearing up the photograph of Robin or any overly emotional reaction to the town on his return. Any change, revelation, or acceptance of Grant’s character by Grant is purely internal for John Grant alone.

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The Most Unlikely Movie I want to See This Year

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It’s not The Bikeriders which looks fascinating though I suspect I am going to have trouble with the accents. No, the movie I am almost certain to make a trip to the cinema to watch is MaXXXine the direct sequel and third film in the ‘X’ franchise.

A24

When X originally debuted in 2022 I had little interest in seeing it. Slashers are my least loved genre of horror films and nothing in the advertising gave me any reason to suspect that X would pierce that disinterest. Then a number of horror cinema podcasts began touting the movie’s style and quality and I relented taking in a late-night screening at my local multiplex.

X bored me with cliche character acting in stupid manners that no actual person would. It was repeat with the tropes and worn-out ideas from countless other slashers with only the barest of novelties.

Fine. The movie was not for me, and I chalked it up to learning where my tastes differed from those on the podcasts. The prequal film Pearl came and went without sparking any interest in me and this year we get MaXXXine which follows the sole survivor of X and her quest for fame in Hollywood.

Something in these trailers have hooked my attention and curiosity. The cast looks fantastic and despite my utter disappointment with X and its illogical script I am being pulled into MaXXXine’s orbit.

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The Birds is Overrated

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The podcast The Evolution of Horror for its current season is covering horror films in which nature is the source of horror with Nature Bites Back and last week’s episode reached Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.

Universal Studios

While I am familiar with the movie and even have some vague memories of it playing on the television while I was present, I cannot actually say that I ever watched the film in its entirety. Now I have and my verdict is that it is vastly overrated.

I am a fan of slow-burn horror which is what The Birds should have been but there is slow and there is full stop dead in the water. The first half of the film is socialite’s Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and her jesting infatuation and meet cute with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). She follows him to his weekend home in the idyllic coastal village of Bodega Bay just north of San Francisco. Meets his former flame, his little sister, and cool, aloof mother. It is nearly 50 minutes into this film titled The Birds before the first bird strike occurs. There had been no real build-up to this, no ominous images of avian observation, in short from the master of suspense there had been no suspense.

The second half of the film is the building level of bird attacks that comes in widely spaces waves with the attack at the restaurant and gas stations providing the most dramatic clips. (It also displays Bodega bay’s fire department as incompetent as they attempt to use direct water sprays to fight a class B fire.)

The films 3rd act retreats to a siege story as the principal characters become trapped in a house, boarded up tight against the flocking fatalities. Then after suffering one last massive valley from the birds the characters in the lengthy pause between waves get into a car and drive away.

I am not bothered by the fact that the cause of the attacks is unknown. I am not bothered by the fact that there is no clear indication that the attacks actually ever end. That sort of ambiguous ending is something I can very much get behind. I am bothered that the characters’ survival and escape has nothing to do with the characters and the choices that they make. There is no moment of decision. No moment of insight. No moment when someone is terribly torn between what they want and what needs to happen. The birds pause and the characters drive away, utterly and completely devoid of agency on any of the characters’ part.

The Birds is a film I shall not watch again.

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The New Novel

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I am about ready to begin writing my next novel. An American Folk horror set on a commune where things are not as idyllic as they appear.

A title for this piece still eludes me but hopefully something will appear as I compose the work. I have sketched out all the major characters, their histories and their relationships. I know all my major twists and I have in mind what I hope to be a truly horrific scene of one character’s death.

The plan is to begin the actual writing this week, while continuing more of the groundwork for the second half of the novel and completing the book by the end of the year. If I land around 90,000 words that requires a daily output of just around 750 words per day, excluding weekend.

No word yet if my publisher like my werewolf novel but the only thing worse than waiting for word is waiting while doing nothing.

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