Spooky Season Continues: Sleepy Hollow (1999)

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I am going to try to alternate these Spooky Season posts between films and television I have watched before and ones I have not, Sleepy Hollow I watched in the theater during its original run.

Loosely based on the classic American short story Sleepy Hollow re-united Director Tim Burton with his favorite actor Johnny Depp for a unique take on the tale of Ichabod Crane and his encounter with the headless horseman terrorizing an isolated community.

Paramount Pictures

In this adaptation Crane (Depp) is a police constable from New York City, despised and distrusted for his belief in scientific analysis and rationality, now dispatched to the community of Sleep Hollow where gruesome decapitations have struck fear into the farming community. Upon arrival the town’s leading men advise that the murders are the work of a vengeful spirit, the headless horseman taking his revenge on the locals. Crane, a man of reason rejects their superstitious folktales assuring the men that the murderer is a man of flesh and blood. What Crane encounters in Sleepy Hollow upends his world view about reason, science, the supernatural and himself.

While the story is officially set in upstate New York in the last years of the 18th century there is no doubt that thematically and artistically the production is thoroughly English with stylistic flairs that call to mind the heyday of Hammer Horror. The cast, with few exceptions, is deeply English from Hammer veteran Christopher Lee is what is little more than a cameo to genre favorites such as Michael Gambon, known to younger audiences as Dumbledore (2) from Harry Potter and Ian McDiarmid, (Palpatine from the Star Wars franchise).

The film is photographed with desaturated color save for the blood which is rendered in brilliant crimson. The production design reflects Burton’s quirky with more than one moment evoking the ‘Large Marge’ jump scare from Burton’s first feature, Peewee’s Big Adventure.

Sleepy Hollow is not a film that will deeply scare you, leaning closer to adventure than true horror but the copious blood spurts and on-screen decapitations will test some audiences. I thoroughly enjoyed this film on its initial release and continue to enjoy it on home video.

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Nope, Not Going to See the New Exorcist Movie

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I have just read a review of The Exorcist: Believer and it confirmed precisely what I feared, and not in the good horror movie kind of way, about that sequel.

Minor Spoilers for The Exorcist: Believer

Apparently in the climatic exorcism scene the ritual to cast out the demon this time is a multi-faith exercise involving various Christian and Non-Christian faiths because as one character had stated ‘it doesn’t matter what you have faith in as long as you have faith.’

This is the sort of shit that really annoyed the fuck out of me in bad storytelling and crappy world building.

As I have said in other posts, I am not a person of faith. I do not believe that there are any supernatural beings, gods, devils, demons, or ghosts. That doesn’t preclude me from enjoying a good piece of fiction that posits the existence of any along those lines. For the sake of a good story, I can give you all sorts of impossible things. The human body is a very complex and intricate machine easily broken and turned lifeless by any number if little chemical reactions gone astray but I can much my popcorn and lose myself in a good zombie movie even while knowing that re-animated dead are an impossibility.

When a storyteller or filmmaker resorts to the ‘it’s the person’s faith’ that makes the magic and not the myth or lore of the world, the story loses its power and its meaning. If a vampire is repelled by a cross than in that world that setting I want the blood of the Christ to be what causes evil to flee and not the ego of the person wielding the religious iconography. When angels come to Earth, bringing the war in heaven here as they battle over a child’s soul, I want to answer to come from Christian myth not some misplaced ‘noble savage’ appropriation of native American faith. When Catholic priests confront a demon and with ‘the power of Christy’ compel it to leave that tells me we are in a world of Christina lore and myth. All I am saying is be true to the rules, lore, and myth you are using for your tale and do not water it down for a mass audience seeking to not offend anyone.

In the Hulu television series Reservation Dogs, the mundane world and the mythical world of the Native American co-exist. Some characters are shocked when the spirits of their ancestors appear to them and others seem to live in that liminal space between those two worlds, but throughout the series the world is simply presented as it is and as it is believed in without any muddying of the waters about ‘it doesn’t matter what you believe in as long as you believe.’

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Spooky Season Continues: The Witch (2015)

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Robert Eggers’ first feature film and the production that introduced the world to the talents of Anya Taylor-Joy The Witch: A New England Folktale is my kind of horror movie.

The Witch centers on a 16th century family that had crossed the Atlantic Ocean with a colony

A24 Studios

only to find themselves exiled from the plantation for their overly strict interpretation of scripture. On their isolated farm on the edge of a vast and wile forest the family is tormented by the ‘witch of the wood,’ going mad and turning upon each other.

The film is a slow-burn eschewing bloody gore and jump scares for methodical grinding tension and paranoia. Everything that occurs in the story feels ‘off’ and even simple hares imbue scenes with dread and foreboding. The Witch is not for everyone, in addition to a measured pace without explicit violence every ten minutes the dialog presented is authentic 16th century English, comprehensible to modern audiences but requiring a greater focus and attention.

The film’s dedication to period production design helps craft a nearly perfect illusion that the audience is witnessing events from the 16th century. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s excellent use of only period light sources, lanterns and candles, also adds greatly to not only the realism of the setting but the mood of building fear with so little of the frame fully visible. The music score by composer Mark Korven utilizes choirs and ascending scales that is discordant and continually building with clear resolution perfectly mirror the pace of the story.

The cast is uniformly great, along with Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead as teenager Thomasin, the film has Ralph Ineson as the father William, prideful and stubborn in his faith, Kate Dickie as the mother who loses all grip on reality as her family disintegrates, along with a collection talented young actor portraying the younger children.

The Witch played October 4th as part of AMC’s Thrills and Chills from A24. The rest of the month includes on 11th Ty West’s X, on the 18th Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and concluding on the 25th with Ari Aster’s modern folk horror Midsommar.

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Appeasement Only Begats Destruction

There was a time, and not that long ago for it was within my political lifetime, when the Republican Party was the party that warned of appeasement, that at every instance, and often when it was far from justified, invoked the specter of the terrible policy of appeasing Hitler and the Nazis. It is both ironic and fitting that they are destroyed by the same mechanism that they so vocally insisted others be wary of.

As I have written before it was the ‘Southern Strategy’ that invited in the segregationists following that passage of landmark civil rights laws that first began the process of infecting the GOP with its current disease. Once invited in racism is painfully difficult to excise, particularly if that action cost you power.

Rather than face that pain, the GOP has for decades appeased it. Throwing scraps of legislation to this faction while feeding it lies and outrage in an attempt to satisfy its hunger and hatred. Of course, like the patrons of The Menu they could never be satisfied. Fed lies and outrage their appetite did not reach fulfillment but only grew. So, the GOP fed its racist hateful base more lies, more outrage in an ever-growing movement of appeasement.

With the coming of Trump, a sadly predictable event, the faction now having grown strong and large on its near endless diet, now longer needed to beg for scrap from the legislative table but rather determined the entire menu. The masters of the party found that instead of appeasement that they now paid blackmail, begging for their money and their lives with subservience to the monster of their creation.

No person better epitomizes this than Kevin McCarthy. An experience feeder of lies and sower of hatred, in his vain, egotistical quest to be Speaker of the House, paid and paid and paid the blackmailers, giving them every lie and every hatred that they demanded foolish in his delusion that he could pay off the blackmailers enough to save himself.

He had as little chance of satisfying the MAGA as the Europeans did of buying off Hitler. I weep no tears for McCarthy, he paved the road to his own destruction, delineated lanes, and posted signs to hell before he drove it to his doom. He hasn’t suffered a portion of what he has earned, but I do weep for my nation, my imperfect, flawed, but beautiful country, ravaged and on the brink of ruin by these little men and their foolish appeasement.

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I Need A New Name

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As I have previously mentioned I am currently writing a horror novel about werewolves in the far north of Idaho. The process is going surprisingly well considering that is also an experiment in writing a long form piece of fiction without my traditional outline to guide me. In the five-act structure I have adopted as my preferred story framework the first draft of The Wolves of Wallace Point, I have reached act 4 and haven’t yet struck the shoals that might sink this enterprise.

I have reached out to an editor that I am on fairly decent terms with and expressed that the novel could be finished soon and if they were interested heading out in their direction early in 2024. The reaction was favorable but with the caveat that given my previous novel was seriously science-fiction and a commercial train wreak it was likely that this book and subsequent horror novels would require to be published under a pen name.

In my traditional fashion of being overly concern way ahead of the need I find my thoughts returning again and again to the idea of a pen name.

What sort of name should it be?

Something wild and obviously crafted for the cover? Something to honor family members who helped me along the way? Something that places it near the front of an alphabetical list, so the book is near the front of any horror section in a bookstore? Something unique as to stick in a shoppers memory?

So many considerations and I have no guidance in how to proceed.

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Spooky Season Starts: Thirteen Women (1932)

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I decided to kick off Spooky Season 2023 with a bit of classic horror that I had not seen from the pre-code era, 1932’s Thirteen Women.

Warner Brothers Studios

In what could be considered a proto-slasher Thirteen Women, adapted from a novel of the same name by Tiffany Thayer, is the story of a collection of old-school mates, each of whom has gotten a foreboding lettering advising that their personal horoscopes predict doom and death for each of them. The predictions come to pass with terrifying accuracy including the suicide of the mystic casting the horoscopes. The film doesn’t dwell long on the mystery of the person behind these forecasts but does, in fashion of slashers to come, hold back the person’s motivations until the film’s final scenes.

 

 

At just over an hour long the movie is really too short for the subject. Not all thirteen women are represented on the screen, and often the manipulations that bring each prediction into reality is presented too quickly and glibly for any real suspense or impact.

That said this movie has a number of rather surprising and well-executed sequences for 1932, including a stunt sequence where our heroic detective must climb from one car to a driverless and out of control limousine.

The cast includes Myrna Loy before her fame in the Thin Man series of mystery movies, as the villainous Ursula Georgi. In this period of her career Myrna Loy often played ‘exotic’, that is to say non-white, characters that were evil and manipulative while performing in the ghastly practice of ‘yellow face.’ While the film both in the employment of ‘yellow face’ and presenting Asian characters inscrutable traffics in the accepted racism of its time it also presents an argument against that racism detailing in part the harm it creates.

Far too short for it material and marred by casual racism Thirteen Women is not without merit and the film’s final 25 minutes or so were thoroughly compelling. This is perhaps something that could be remade into a project of real interest.

Thirteen Women is currently streaming on Criterion Channel as part of their ‘Pre-Code Horror’ series.

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RINO Hunting Destroyed the Conservative Ecology

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Biological ecologies are a complex web of interdependencies between their constituent elements and the same is true for political ecologies.

There was a time, not that very long ago, when the two political parties in the United States each contained divergent factions of liberals, moderate, conservatives and assorted minor ideologies. The Civil Rights movement and legislation fractured the Democratic Party as a considerable number of their ‘conservatives’ were more invested in segregation than anything else politically. After a brief turn as ‘Dixiecrats’ this faction was wooed and welcome into the Republican Party as the wedge that allow the GOP to begin winning elections in the deep South.

This additional faction swelled the GOP and ushered in the Reagan Regime that dominated American politics from 1980 until well into 1990s. However, like HYDRA with SHIELD this racist driven conservatism grew like a parasite with the Republican Party. With the power to win or cost elections it soon, welded to its fast-growing cousin the Social Conservative faction, determined the shape and course of American Conservatism, and thus began the period of ‘RINO hunting.’

RINO is a slur for member of the Republican Party not sufficiently subservient to the conservatism imported from the deep south and it stands for Republican In Name Only. The very nomenclature reveals the transformed nature of the GOP. It became a party that tolerated no dissention, no variation, and no other factions. There had become just one way to be a Republican and those who did not conform, who were not of the body, were cast out, chased out, and hounded out of the party. What had once been a collection of factions became a movement and a movement can only proceed in one direction.

Throughout the late 90s there was a giddiness every time a ‘RINO’ was defeated, resigned, and switched parties. Like a boiling solution what remained concentrated in its purity. Led and goaded by non-politicians such as Rush Limbaugh and bomb-throwing politicians such as Newt Gingrich the GOP moved more and more in lockstep to a beat that had been determine decades earlier by fleeing segregationists.

Racism has always been an American problem and both parties have a long history if welcoming it within their domains. However, once the Democratic party began moving in a direction of racial justice, awareness, and correction the racist had but one party that welcomed them. At first tacitly, then subtly, and eventually openly, the GOP.

With the RINOs, primarily the Northeastern liberal Republicans, driven out of the party, and the communists threat collapsed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the GOP turned it unified and obedient movement on American itself. It abandoned all pretense at governing or morality. A political movement that embraces torture is capable of anything.

Is it any surprise at all that such a movement, such a political ecology now deprived of any contrary thought, proved such fertile ground for a con man and a demagogue? That after decades of beating obedience into its base that it would lash itself with the fanaticism of a cult to that new leader?

No, not at all.

The GOP hunted the RINOs into extinction and without that balance dove into neo-fascism endangering us all.

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Why Day of The Dead (1985) Doesn’t Work for Me

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I first watched Day of the Dead, the conclusion to George A Romero’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, in a fun and

Laurel Entertainment

 

 

 

hopeful mood. At the time I worked at the US Glasshouse theater in the Sport Arena area of San Diego and my friend Brad, who was the assistant manager there, had just finished assembling the print on the platter for the project. So, late at night, after everyone else had left, we ran the print and watched it just the pair of us Zombie fans.

We were disappointed.

Now, nearly 40 years later, I have watched the movie again this time as part of the 6-film marathon hosted by Film Geeks SD.

It is still disappointing.

The Night of the Living Dead introduced the zombie plague where the recently deceased are animated and then attack and eat the living. A small, contained film it boasted a diverse set of characters trapped in microcosm of American society fighting, and failing, to save their lives.

Dawn of the Dead, produced a decade later, presented a world in the process of being overrun by the living dead with society collapsing into anarchy. The central characters, with sharply drawn natures, flee their responsibilities for a life of isolated decadence with a shopping mall. This film is a satire on consumerism, holding a mirror to humanity’s obsession with possessions even after death.

After a pair of sharp, interesting film populated with interesting characters I had high hopes for Day of the Dead, but Romero’s script presents none of the flourish or insight this time around that he had displayed in the previous two movies.

The movie follows a set of characters in a hastily assembled research facility that is tasked with understanding and defeating the zombie outbreak. The world has been overrun and for months these survivors have been unable to contact anyone on the radio as their number dwindle. Tensions run high between scientists tasked with the research, the army troops assigned to the facility, and the civilian support staff as the hopelessness of their condition becomes more and more evident.

That is an excellent premise. It is a crime that Romero’s populated it with flat, stereotypical cardboard cutouts instead of characters. Each division of characters, scientist, military men, and civilian are presented exactly the same way, without any meaningful differences. Heroic characters are presented not only as heroic but as correct and moral. Villainous characters, which include all the military men save for one romantic interest, are presented as crude, cruel, and bigoted.

The cast, struggling with the flawed screenplay, is fairly forgettable, except for two, Sherman Howard as the zombie ‘Bub’ and Richard Liberty as the chief scientist Dr. Logan. Howard performs excellent mime-work, giving ‘Bub’ a depth that is lacking from most of the human character while Liberty is mischievous in his choices as an actor imbuing Logan with a life that stands out in sharp relief to all the other performances.

This pair of actors however is not enough to salvage the film which wanders zombie-like from cliche to cliche with Romero cribbing from himself like so many low budget zombie movies did in the wake of Dawn of the Dead.

Now, I was prepared to suspend my disbelief that the dead could reanimate as it is central to the story’s conceit. That said I simply cannot accept as any form of reality that the base is constructed in the vast stone caverns beneath South Florida.

Between the absurdity of its setting, the flatness of the characters, and the lack of any coherent theme Day of the Dead is a movie that I shan’t watch again for another 40 years.

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Another Friend is Gone

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Last night I learned that a friend I had known for nearly 40 years died. Brian’s passing was a not a shock or a surprise but hurts just the same. Last year he was tragically struck with a degenerative neurological disease that robbed him of motor control and the ability to speak. Such diseases rarely allow for people live very long.

Brian was a good and close friend. We had played many a board and card game together, attended several science-fiction conventions, including the one where I met my sweetie-wife, and we even wrote together. Two feature film scripts, a thriller and a period adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Of course, the script went nowhere but I learned from them, and I learned from Brian. A piece of advice that he passed on I carry still in writing characters stricken with grief. People don’t cry, they try to not cry. That is so true so often and trying to capture that struggled of someone trying so hard to not cry and failing makes such moments more powerful.

He was a historian by education and without a doubt I learned so much from knowing him. Before he moved away and before the damned disease, we often went to movies together, though there was a run where every film he picked for us to go to turned out to be a stinker.  When I was laid up for two weeks in the 90s recovering from surgery, he came over every day with a fresh VHS tape and we watched them together,

He was not a perfect friend, no one is, and I learned all too early in life that in the end death comes for us all, but he will be missed.

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2023’s Secret Morgue

 

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A quick note to recognize and celebrate that the WGA and AMPTP have reached an agreement and the strike is coming to an end.

This year Film Geeks San Diego threw a Secret Morgue themed around Zombies. That means six films the titles unreleased to the festival attendees, with snack, lunch, and a dinner provided. Starting at 9:00am at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego’s Balboa Park and going until nearly midnight. As with the other Secret Morgues I have attended this was a blast.

I arrived early enough to score a parking spot right in front of the venue which made it easy for me at breaks to head out and grab a cold soda from the cooler I had stashed in my Kia Soul. Sadly, a friend I hadn’t seen in years came down sick and wasn’t able to attend as planned but I was more social than usual and managed a few conversations.

And I should note that my predictions for the schedule turned out to be utterly wrong.

The First was The Zombies of Mora Tau. Produced in 1957, a dozen years before George A Romero reinvented the entire zombie genre with Night of the Living Dead, Mora Tau centers on a group of treasure hunters intent on recovering lost, cursed, diamonds from the bottom of a bay. The diamonds however are guarded by the zombies of the men who stole them, enactors of the curse. Neither Voodoo nor Romero styled zombies, the living dead her are closer akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, though vastly less intelligent. Hardly a great film it was still a fun one.

The Second movie was Pontypool from 2008. Set in a radio station experiencing Canada’s harsh winter, this film follows the experiences of a tiny news crew as they attempt to make sense of the reports filtering in and the eventual threat that invades their AM Radio station. Inventive, character driven, and well-designed this film shows a lot can be done with very little.

Next up was Deadstream, released in 2022. This movie I had heard about but actually avoided because it was of a style I find usually distasteful, the ‘found footage’ made so popular by The Blair Witch Project, a movie that earned praise all out of measure with its quality. Deadstream that takes as its central conceit that we are watching a liver stream of a YouTube-like influencer attempting to reclaim his followers after a social media disaster, was fun, funny, and at time surprisingly horrific.

The next pair of movies were ones I had seen before. The Return of the Living Dead (1985) a black comedy written and directed from the screenwriter of Alien, and truly one of my favorite zombie films, and Day of the Dead the disappointing conclusion to Romero’s original trilogy, filled with one-note, cardboard characters and most fantastic element ever seen in a zombie movie, vast subterrain caverns in South Florida.

We concluded the evening with a Mexican animated movie El Santos vs La Tetona Mendez. Over-the-top with far more crude humor than suits my sensibilities it was not without it comic moments but far from the sort of film I would seek out and watch more than once.

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