Category Archives: Horror

Series Review: Ultraviolet (1998)

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Several weeks ago, spurred by a discussion of the HBO series The Wire I decided that I wanted to rewatch and earlier television series with Idris Elba Ultraviolet.

Starring Jack Davenport, that many people will recognize as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the series follows Detective Inspector Mike Colefield (Davenport) who upon investigating the disappearance of his best friend that night before that friend’s wedding stumbles into the knowledge that vampires are real, and that a secret organization has been fighting them for centuries. Teamed up with a war veteran Vaughn Rice (Idris Elba), a physician Angela Marsh (Susannah Harker) and a former priest Pearse Harman (Philip Quast) Mike tries to uncover what really happened to his best friend, dodge the determined prying of the jilted fiancé, and help the organization discover what grad scheme the vampires have sudden launched.

My sweetie-wife originally exposed me to this series as she had the program on VHS tapes. Much of the vampire lore has been jettisoned. While the vampires are immortal, ageless, and possess fantastic strength and speed, they do not have the ability to enthrall, assume animal or gaseous forms but remain invisible to mirrors and all form of electronic imagery and recording.

While the series is far from perfect, the fiancé character is far too annoying and Mike’s attraction to her indicates to me that this marriage would have been in serious troubles without vampiric intervention, it is quite enjoyable and a nice take on ‘modern vampire hunting.’ These undead creates are not the romantic seducing lovers of modern fantasy but intelligent deadly predators. The entire story is told in six self-contained episodes. They can currently be streamed on Tubi for free. (You just have to endure the bloodsucking of adverts.)

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The Journey in Writing a Novel Without an Outline

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On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.

About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.

I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.

The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.

I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.

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The First Draft is Complete

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This will be brief as the day-job continues its usual Medicare Open Enrollment madness and for the near future I will be using mass transit to get to the office.

So, the first draft of my werewolf horror novel temp titles ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point’ is finished. I completed the draft at LosCon, working from my laptop in the hotel lobby after the parties had lost their allure.

Originally, I had aimed, or hoped, for a length of about 80-75 thousand words and the draft landed at 94 thousand. I am about halfway through the revisions, which are smaller scale than I would have expected for a novel written without an outline, and I have added about 1000 words.

I have written horror before. My short story collection ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ is principally horror short stories, but I had never attempted a full novel in that beloved genre. The fact that my first horror novel was also my first without the outline process continues to surprise me.

Once the draft has been cleaned up and the inevitable run-on sentences and mild misspellings have been located by my sweetie-wife it will be time to beat the brush for beta readers. I suspect that this novel will survived its encounter with beta readers, but I have been wrong on that front before.

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Movie Review: Godzilla Minus One

Toho Studios

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In the nearly 70 years since the very first film the Godzilla has ranged from the very serious thematic representations of Atomic Age fears to wildly chaotic affairs aimed at children. The brainchild of filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki who wrote, directed, and served as Visual Effects Supervisor on the film Godzilla Minus One is a return to employing the legendary monster as a thematic metaphor exploring serious adult topics.

Eschewing the lore of the previous movies in the franchise this film can be considered essentially a remake of the original 1954 classic Godzilla, but with an entirely new set of characters and subtextual intentions. Covering the period from just before the end of World War II until the late 1940s Godzilla Minus One speaks powerfully to the destruction, stupidity, and waste of war.

After an encounter on Odo Island that left his deeply traumatized Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lives in disgrace and poverty while being generally despised by his neighbors for surviving the war. Thrown together in the ruins of firebombed Tokyo with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) Koichi is unable to escape the nightmares of his past and only through confrontation with Godzilla might he possibly excise the unwarranted guilt and shame he has carried since the war.

Yamazaki has crafter an excellent film. As a screenwriter he cracked the difficult problem of combining a deeply human and dramatic story with a plot that finds a monstrous Kaiju leveling destruction on a recovering Japan essential. As a director he possesses a keen eye and understand that keeping the camera mostly at human eye level injects terror rarely experienced when a kaiju is photographed level with their own head. The visual effects of the film are utterly fantastic. While there are bits and pieces where the seams show, naval vessels that aren’t quite perfect in the rendering, the same for some trains, Godzilla itself always is perfectly depicted. Production design has captured the feel of devastation that encompassed Tokyo following the horrors of the Allied bombing campaign.

The film’s score uses movements from the original film’s composition, notably the marches for the Imperial Self Defense forces and Godzilla’s theme. The recording and performance of these pieces is simply epic.

Unlike previous serious Godzilla movies, this film is not concerned with minister and generals, keeping it story focused on civilians and veterans, the people on the ground who lived through a war in which their government too often decided that their lives were something to be lightly tossed away in futile gestures.

I cannot recommend enough that Godzilla Minus One needs to be seen in a proper theater. The movie is epic and grand in every way save for it tightly focused human story. While I could quibble about some aspects of the story final resolution, those issues are not enough to devalue any of my admiration and love for this piece of art.

Godzilla Minus One is playing in theaters in Japanese with English subtitles.

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Spooky Season Finale: Mulholland Dr.

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I had planned to cap off Spooky Season with a re-watch of David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Dr., but sadly sleeping poorly on the night of the 30th, having extra errands add extra stressors to the day, getting zero words down on my werewolf novel, and a minor headache in the evening left me with the brain capacity of a reanimated slug.

Mulholland Dr. is an amazing piece of cinema that the first couple of time I viewed it left deep emotional impacts while remaining just out of intellectual understanding. I think I finally have an interpretation that works for all the aspects of the film, but it could be something entirely of my own invention. Lynch’s work, with the exception of his adaptation of Dune, defies convention and straight forward representation.

The key to understanding Mulholland Dr. is knowing that one of Lynch’s favorite and formative films is 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, and this film is his most direct reinterpretation of that classic movie’s themes. Lynch’s film is the story of a young woman, Diane, played by Naomi Watts, who dreams herself to a magical setting, Hollywood, which she describes a ‘this dream place.’ In the land of her dreams Diane is instantly recognized for her tremendous acting talent and falls in love with a mysterious amnesiac woman, Rita, that loves her back. There are subplots with a vain director tormented by infidelity and criminals forcing his casting choices, but the locus of Diane’s dreams are her career and the love between her and ‘Rita.’ None of this is real and more than halfway through the film we are shown, but it is never explained to us, Diane’s real life, where she is Betty, her career is shit, the woman she loved, ‘Rita’ has left her to marry a man, and everything ends in murder and madness.

In The Wizard of Oz, we experience Dorothy’s real world before being shunted of to her fantastic fantasy. In the end we return to reality and the deeply uncynical message that there is no place like home. Mulholland Dr. inverts all this, we first experience the Diane’s fantasy, unaware that all the characters in it are reinterpretations of people she has already met, so when we meet them in the real world it is reality that is strange, threatening, and confusing. Our disenchantment with reality is the same as Diane’s. This is not the glittering land of dreams that Hollywood has always presented itself to be, and we do not like that. In the end Diane’s madness at what she has done in reality breaks down her ability to separate dream from reality and what had once been a dream transforms into a nightmare as she pursued by figures of innocence from her dream to her death.

Mulholland Dr. is rarely counted among the films or horror but the deep unease and unsettling nature the film places for me it squarely in that genre. It is a film of dreams and nightmares and how though those two things feel very different that are inf act the same thing.

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Even More Spooky Season: Who Invited Them?

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Adam and his wife Margo are throwing a housewarming party with the guests principally Adam’s co-workers and employers. However, one couple, Tom and Sasha, professing to be neighbors has crashed the party and linger well after the other guests have departed. As the two couples, with drinks and drugs, get to know each other Tom and Sasha’s presence inflames lingers issues for Adam and Margo. It becomes clear that Tom and Sasha are not what they claimed and are manipulating the rising tension for some hidden agenda.

Who Invited Them? falls into the genre of horror that is suspense/thriller without any supernatural elements. Suspense/thriller is very script and character dependent and without relatable characters behaving in understandable ways it very easy loses its suspension of disbelief. This movie doesn’t completely fall apart but neither did it fully engage me, and I was always at a bit of distance from the Adam and Margo never really invested in their relationship. Still, I was curious enough to keep watching and see how the entire plot unfolded and what coming reveal might twist the script into a new direction.

Sadly, the reveal when it was presented turned out to be precisely what I had suspected with Tom and Sash’s goal proved to be underwhelming. Perhaps more damaging to the film overall success as a story is that in the final resolution Adam and Margo turned out to be far too passive as characters with happenstance and chance playing far too great in the movie’s climax. Still at a scant 80 minutes Who Invited Them? plays quickly and for some it is a thrilling psychological horror, just not for me.

Who Invited Them? is streaming on Shudder.

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The Thematic Failure of ‘The Savage Curtain’

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If you know anything of the original Star Trek series episode The Savage Curtain, it’s that it is the one with Abraham Lincoln sitting in space.

Of course, it’s not the real Lincoln but one created by aliens from Kirk vision of Lincoln. Soon Kirk, Spock, and a couple of ‘good’ historical characters are engaged fighting with ‘evil’ historical characters, some from real history as with Lincoln and some from Star Trek’s future history. The aliens are curious about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and has created this contest to learn about these concepts. (Really, a forced pit fight is a terrible experiment, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.) After some loses Kirk and Spock win the fight and the baddies run for the hills with the aliens drawing the conclusion that ‘evil’ when forcefully confronted runs away.

Really Star Trek? That’s you conception of evil, that it is something that is cowardly at heart? Was that the result when the fascists were fought tooth and nail over every damn kilometer of Europe? That when ‘forcefully confronted’ that fled?

This is back in my head because as I am writing a novel populated with evil werewolves instead of the more popular sexy ones it has gotten me thinking about the nature of evil.

It is not that evil is more cowardly. I think one of the defining aspects of evil is that it is inherently selfish. It considers its own wants and desire above all else. it considers others as resources to be used, exploited, and discarded not as people in their own right.

In my novel this has raised its head among the pack of werewolves and it’s something to consider when viewing tragic, evil events in our all too real world.

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Three Weeks

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Next month in National Novel Writing Month when many people set out on the ambitious trail to write 50,000 words on a novel between November 1st and the 30th. I once tried this and failed miserably. Nor will I be going at it this month, but I fully support and encourage anyone who does.

What I will be doing is completing the first draft of The Wolves of Wallace Point, my The Wolf-Man subtext inspired werewolf novel. While I have written horror in short form before, quite a few short stories, and I even wrote an entire 90-page screenplay for a horror movie, this is the first crack at doing it in novel form.

As I have posted before this is also an experiment in writing without an outline. I started this project with only a single scene and very strong sense of the theme I wanted to explore. Characters appeared when they walked onto the stage revealing their nature to me. I had considered that if I reached 10 or 20 thousand words then there was a pretty decent chance the project would not sputter out and die but reach an ending.

Yesterday I crossed 70,000 words and fully expect the project to come in at around 80 to 85 thousand. That’s three more weeks at the leisurely pace I am currently doing. So, if I don’t crash on some unseen rocks, I’ll have the first draft completed in 3 weeks, just before I go north for LosCon, a Los Angeles Area SF conventions.

I know the draft requires revisions. Another crack as the battle between the werewolves and the bikers, a better detailing of the pack and who is in it. (Now that I know precisely who that is.) And a little more establishment of some characters and their inner turmoil but frankly it is not a lot of revision. There is very little in the first 30,000 words that is in conflict with the following 40 thousand. The act structure is in place and functional. It is almost as clean as if I had been working from an outline.

What a surprise.

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Past Me is an Ass

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Because the current novel in progress is also my first experimentation in writing a novel without an outline, I have now discovered what other writers already knew, that past me is an ass.

AS my main character has interacted more and more with the local crime family that are also werewolves past me saw quite clearly that there were division and factions with that pack of wolves. Both Darryl and his sister Diana were up to something, and events that transpired were part of a scheme with a goal in mind.

What is the scheme? What is the goal? Well, that’s a problem for future me to work out.

I am now future me.

There remains about 15 thousand words, give or take a couple of thousand, left to compose before I hit the end. It is really crunch time for the main characters and the author. Darryl’s plot and Diana plan, which may be the same thing or may not, is about to come to fruition. Provided I can figure out what it is these two evil asses are up to.

So far it has been beneficial that this novel is being written from a single first-person point of view. The main character hasn’t been let in on the conspiracy so I haven’t had to detail it out but I am laying track before a rushing locomotive and I need to work out the curve before it takes me over the cliff.

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Spooky Season Continues: Dreams in the Witch House

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Episode 6 of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is another adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House.

Netflix

This adaptation, written by Mika Watkins and director by Catherine Hardwick takes several liberties with source material, transforming Walter Gilman from a mathematics student to a man obsessed with life after death following the traumatic loss of his twin sister as a child.  Sometimes serious alterations are required to adapt a story from one medium to another this element did not serious hamper my enjoyment of the tale, but there was another deviation from the original that did. During the episode’s third act several characters take refuge in a church and the pursuing evil is unable to enter the structure. This violates the core doctrines of Lovecraft’s world building. Our ‘gods’, merely stories we have told ourselves, have no reality in Lovecraft’s mythos and no ability to save, protect, or influence anything. Humanity exists alone in a vast hostile universe that is utterly unconcerned with our fate or even our existence.

That said this episode is likely to be passable for those unfamiliar with the mythos and is competently constructed. A suitable spooky season interlude worth an hour of your time, mostly.

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