The Legend of Hell House

I picked this British gem in the haunted house genre because Richard Matheson wrote the script. It was weird and dry. It was almost like Left 4 Dead, but in a house. and a ghost not zombies. It had tremendous atmosphere, taking place specifically before Christmas. It was a slow fun romp. Shots like the reflection of a tea kettle and furniture in the foreground were visually impressive. I enjoyed the architecture of the red bedroom, full of mirrors and sexual repression brought the house to life.

Indeed, the sexuality was everywhere. Breasts on statue after statue. Probably worth another viewing for anyone with a film and gender interests. All I know are that these two quotes made me laugh:

"The house is a giant battery"

"these walls are sheathed with lead"

Wes Craven Double Review

Last semester, I went to a midnight screening of Wes Craven's Scream (1996). I then went to a talk with Wes Craven hosted by my school. Finally, last night I watched A Nightmare on Elmstreet. This double review will therefore include ideas from that talk and my thoughts on Wes Craven in general.

The first thing to know about Wes Craven is he did not plan on a film career. He read profusely as a child, a act that allowed him to escape the narrow thought of his Fundamentalist Baptist upbringing (an upbringing that forbid movies!). Made  his way to college and continued to read and study literature. He got a job teaching history of Western Civilization at some small college in the North East. Western Civilization, that's the key. I notice that Wes Craven's horror includes an understanding of the most elemental components of Western narrative. A Nightmare on Elmestreet, as he explained, deals with the fundamental human experience of dreams. If your English class ever read Macbeth, your mind should be buzzing with the half memories of lectures about Macbeth upsetting the natural sanctity of sleep when he kills Duncan. Its no accident that during Nancy's nightmare at school, the teacher is also teaching Shakespeare. Wes Craven bursts with Western Canon.

In the talk, Craven mentioned his fascination with nightmares. What is the evolutionary purpose of the nightmare. He answer: we need the mental stage to cope with our fear. A place to explore our fears of death and our concern about evil that lurks at the fringes of rationality. Stories of evil are necessary in our society.

This brings us the evil core of Nightmare, Freddy Kruger. His creation in an amalgam of several ideas. His method of attack, through dreams, came from an article on a Cambodian child afraid of sleeping because of his war-torn nightmares. The dream is a space where we have no protection, no one can help us. He implement: a glove of knives, combines the primordial weapon of the knife with the dextrous hand. His costume: a sweater whose two colors cause the most amount of retinal stress. No need to hide in the shadows in a dream. With his ability to teleport, Freddy can be equally garish and nightmarish. The most important component though is that ultimately evil intention of wanting to hurt children. Wes Craven told us about his terror as a child looking out his window seeing a man, presumably drunk, staring back at him from the street. Young Wes pulled back from view, hid in his room. After an indescribable amount of time, he returned to the window, the man was still there. That is a man who wanted to terrorize an innocent child. That is evil.

Returning to the Craven's narrative structure. I've noticed the theme of sins. Sins of the parents in Last House on the Left to avenge the sins against their child. Sins of the parents being paid by the child for Nightmare. The parents killed a man, and that man will in turn kill their own children. Scream also has a similar narrative seed. The killer, Billy, wanted to make Sidney Prescott's mother pay for sleeping with his dad. That's my favorite part about Scream, cut through all the jokes, meta jokes, and meta-meta-jokes (nothing beats bugging the TV room with a camera and putting the couch of horror viewing onto the screen to then be watched by the audience) and there is still a damn good mystery and damn good characters.

Wes Craven's characters rock. Most horror, even some of my favorites, does not flesh out any characters, some will only invest in the protagonist. Craven makes everyone interesting. The mother of Nightmare has an amazing amount of suffering and problems that are tangent to the main story about her daughter but such character development is relevant to increasing the stakes by showing that these are all real people being terrorized by the supernatural.

Returning to the power of this terror, I love the frustration integral to horror. This frustration is more than just screaming at the idiots on the screen, "don't go in there!". The best employment of such frustration evokes a dread at our own helplessness. That moment when our muscles tense, "Oh shit", and yet we can't do anything. Fight or flight fails. We are biologically helpless, yet the evil is still going to get us. Nightmare is full of such dreaded helpless moments: bars on Nancy's house locking her inside with a killer ghoul, the boyfriend falling asleep... twice, and seeing the sheets tie themselves in a noose while the police doubt Nancy's warnings. The greatest emerges from the very nature of dreams. The lack of an explanation about the beginning of a dream, so beautifully described by DiCaprio in the link, is a genius way to begin a horror sequence. When I heard Nancy's phone ring after she unplugged it... goose bumps, heart rate, trembling shaking anxiety. Shit, we're already in a dream. Shit, shit, shit. He's going to get us.

That is horror.


I conclude with a beautiful quote from the Wes Craven talk. This should be every horror fans response to those who pompously say there is no reason to pay to be scared.


"We don't pay to be scared. We are already afraid before we go to the theater."

Noroi, The Curse (2005)

What few essays I've read on horror, none have yet acknowledged the feeling of "creepy". Horror and terror are distinct but I need to better understand creepy. As a long and complex entry in J-horror, Noroi  left me with a distinct chill about the silliest of symbols joined together in a demon resurrection film. Pigeons, ectoplasmic worms, child psychics, a village at the bottom of a dammed lake--Noroi has it all. Although it employs VHS tech for its atmosphere, it is not dependent on the technology for the dread it creates. Instead, Noroi is fascinating because it feels like such an ancient horror narrative that still leads the contemporary protagonists to frightening situations. Without attempting a long essay, that last sentence hints to my understanding of "creepy" as an effect in horror. Creepy is the doubt that makes an folk horror story real. A doubt that some magic has slipped through the cracks of science and reason. A doubt that the Kagutaba is out there. 

Watch Noroi, one of my new favorites.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)

So thanks to wikipedia, I learned the director of this movie, Bob Clark, also directed the wonderful early slasher, Black Christmas, who's actress, Olivia Hussey, played Juliet in "the good" film adaptation of R&J that the quirky drama teacher showed my class in middle school.

You may think I'm avoiding writing about CSPwDT. WAIT! That's a horrible acronym. Let's just call it Children. Wait, that's kind of creepy. In fact way creepier than this movie. Let's just call it the horrendously amateur zombie movie that has no action until the last ten minutes. And that folks, is the number one reason it should not be watched.

I have other, more minor flaws, that upset me. There were too many names in the title sequence. The electronic soundtrack felt like it was dripping. The lighting made many shots unclear. It's a shame though, because the screen play had promise. I jotted down some enjoyable phrases:

"clever girl"
"sanctum of satan"
"vibrations are powerful"
"what a perfect place for mass murder"
"It's like a great B movie"
"a fire a day keeps those ghosts away"
"I do have talent, when I have a good part... and get in character"

Those last few point to an attempt at horrality. But their delivery and placement did not make for enjoyable, ironic meta humor. It just made for a bunch of idiots copying night of the living dead-but making it stupid. Stupid, because of the man I dubbed Prospero, the charlatan who leads the "teens" to the haunted island. His lines were ridiculously intellectual and shakespearean. And the part when the ugly girl goes all "Yenta the matchmaker" and bugs out her eyes.

So much potential wasted.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

Ah Claire Denis, I did not expect you to turn up on my list. I must of selected Trouble Every Day during random googling of phrases such as "unknown horror", "european horror", and "transgressive film". The plate of shrimp in this case is that my English professor showed us a film, Beau Travail, also directed by Denis (pronounced Deni) last month.

As such, I totally recognized her style and as soon as the Comic Sans title sequence ended (which I mentioned to a friend who joked "I would have turned it off") the film thrust an audience of one into a creeping tale of suppressed lust.

The striking element of Trouble Every Day is that as one who's been with the genre of horror for awhile, I totally knew its tropes. I knew the seductive femme fatale shown in the beginning was going to kill men after seducing them. I just knew that the American couple's honeymoon in France would not be hunky-dory. I just knew the two teens were going to unleash the femme fatale's dangerous lust. However, I did not know that it would take long shots of gritty French interiors and wordless character development that diverts from the established protagonists to follow the hotel maid to get to these conclusions. Denis rejects "horrality" in all its self aware glory by not letting the tropes propel the film. Instead, the camera's focused eye maintained a brutal grip on the narrative. The audience suffers unease while the camera lingers on places instead of gazing upon the actual horrific events.

Adding with the horror tropes, the "explanation" of the characters' vampirism/cannibalism/sexual bloodlust derives from a Resident Evil-like scientific experiment with rainforest plants containing hormones or some such biochemistry that changes humans. There were beautiful shots of stirring rods spinning in beakers and flasks being shaken on electric shakers. Mechanical repetition that contrasts with the organic irregularity of the characters' lifestyles.

Even though I identified these tropes, Denis refuses to completely align with them and demands the viewer make their own connections. The most powerful scenes are those with blood. Beautiful blood. Breathtaking crimson arabesque that leaps from shredded capillaries and paint the external world. These are scenes of pure transgression where the internal fluids become an external hue. As a result, the violence and the sex are the most concrete actions in the film. Trouble Every Day is a successful, artistic horror film because the reasons for the violence don't matter. The tropes don't make the film. The tropes are a product of showing me the true violent lust capable within a human being.

Ringu (1998)

Enjoyably creepy. The actual cursed VHS had clips that reminded me of chiascuro from Begotten (basically the definition of gritty cinema). I watched this gem with my family and my brother had the creativity to call the home phone on his cell phone right after the first time the protagonist watches the film, made for a great jump scare that I recommend others to repeat.

Yoichi is such a cool name.

Rabid (1977)

keloid /ke·loid/ (ke´loid)
a sharply elevated, irregularly shaped, progressively enlarging scar due to excessive collagen formation in the dermis during connective tissue repair.

Following up my essay on the architecture of Cronenberg's Shivers, it's fitting I continue with his second film of body horror, Rabid. I enjoyed recognizing some stars from Shivers returning to the screen. In fact, Shivers and Rabid create a pleasant multiverse alternative timeline ot the fall of Montreal by zombie-like transformed humans. And yet Cronenberg does not trap himself within the confines of the zombie genre. My few comments on Rabid will consider the physiological message emerging from Keloid Clinic.

As a plastic surgery clinic, they seek to make external appearance beautiful. The examination room has a poster of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man on the wall. The use of these "neutral cells" (read as stem cells) to recreate the proper texture of flesh show. I caught a phrase from a magazine in the waiting lounge, "the truth about skin care" that seems to be a late warning about this fixation on the external. Ironically, a keloid does form and these aesteticians cause internal changes they cannot begin to comprehend.

The motif of external to internal leads to support the perhaps obvious conclusion that Rabid is a film of penetration. The protagonist's armpit penis, the use of needles to immunize, feed, and sedate, the drill that penetrates the health minister's car, and most importantly, biting, the vector for infection. The doctors of the clinic gave a female a phallus, perhaps they only imagine true beauty in the shape of a man?

I Spit On Your Grave (1978)

Why do I suffer the exploitation film? They are horrible. Where chain saws and gore transgress the physical boundaries of our contemporary culture, watching rape shatters the mental boundaries of human imagination. I Spit On Your Grave seeks to show the totality of masculine brutality against women.

The color red is a pervasive hue in the film that works at multiple levels to address the problem of violence against women. Red is the reason, the warning signal, the stage of, and the after glow of the violence. The multitude of meaning in this single signifier presents the argument that misogyny is ubiquitous in our society. Jen's solution of murder implies stopping misogyny requires revenge that is equally beyond societal boundaries.

The color manifests as lipstick, a red dress, nail polish, and the apple that Jen gives Matthew. These reds are seductive, they seem to support Johnny's pathetic excuse that Jen "asked for it" through provocative actions.

The red of the gas station stands, the summer cabin's decorations, lampshade, curtains, kitchen wall, and the interior of her river canoe are a foreshadowing of the kidnapping and rape.

The final brutal onslaught in her cabin, marked by the terrifying scare of the boot kicking the phone from her hand, is saturate with red. The crimson carpet, the red armchair, her bloodied frame all painting the image of carnage against women.

Finally, three of the four murders involve blood diffusing into water. Cloudy red water of the attackers is the chromatic reversal of Jen's experience. She escapes on her motorboat leaving evidence of the violence to seep into the river and disperse until it disappears to hide her deeds. Red, at the end of the film, becomes evidence of successful revenge and victory of the men.

The visual presence of red works to eroticize the protagonist, to warn her of the attack but also becomes an element of the violence and a marker of her revenge; these contrasting instances complicate our understanding of its use. By being associated with the entire plot of the film, red gains universal presence. Instead of symbolizing a single emotion, it represents the entire societal culture of violence against women. With this reading, red becomes the backdrop of the events, a stage that permits the cycle of misogyny to continue as a whole even if Jen killed her specific attackers.

This film.

It's crude. It's amateur. It ends with the creation of a female killer who's origins are fundamentally different from the mindless masculine evil of Mike Myers and Leatherface. The woman has reasons, her evil only emerges from revenge, it was never intrinsic.

The Howling (1981)

One must approach a text like The Howling with Philip Brophy's "Horrality" in mind. The phrase "it knows that you know it knows you know" is a perfect summation of this self-parodizing werewolf movie. Without even looking hard, "Wolf chili" cans and a statue of the twins of Rome suckling from the she-wolf were two of the more subtle points in the great stream of intertextuality that emerges during the middle of the film and rides on all the way out to the end credits. Switching to a commercial for dog food actually made me laugh out loud. Furthermore, the man at the bar commenting on the special effects is pleasantly cheeky. Another supplement to contextualizing The Howling is definitely Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue. The fact that it was released five months before An American Werewolf in London means the two contemporaries are naturally primed for comparative responses.

The Howling, probably due to its origin as a novel, contains a greater world of lycanthropy. The camera shot on an etching of Little Red Riding implies that the wolf is a symbol that is pervasive throughout cultures (The implications of Grandma actually turning into a werewolf and desiring to eat her own granddaughter opens up a tremendous new avenue of potential Freudian creativity). American Werewolf focuses on the single psychological transformation within its main character until the animal nature emerges in the physical realm. The Howling frames lycanthropy as a mental illness that makes the inflicted residents of The Colony feel alienated from the world. It works to demystify the curse and redefine it as a medical affliction that fundamentally separates "the animalistic" in our world from the rest of society. The resolution of  killing  those who are different is horrible in its own right and is definitely not the message of the film. However, as far as horror goes, monsters that are transformations of our own human body so often divide society and we can find no other answer to their monstrous nature except for violence.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

This film made me sick. I know that my last post praised the masterpiece horror in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre due to the film's mastery of sensory emotions. But I must immediately raise another rapturous celebration for Last House's achievements in exploitation horror. Where Tobe Hooper succeeded by manipulating the objective correlative, I will claim that Wes Craven's success derives from his mastery of structure. Last House frames itself as a Shakespearean tragedy and revenge tale placed in the backwater town road outside a city (it may be New York, but the effect of the film does not require an specific location). I say Shakespearean because of the comic relief scenes involving the police officers. Just as the Gatekeeper in Macbeth disrupts the aftermath of the murder to inject a comic soliloquy, these police men brilliantly pull the audience out of the pit of overwhelming pathos. Another Shakespearean element is the gripping frustration at how close the tragedy came to being avoided. Just as Shakespeare denies Juliet seeing Romeo before he takes his life, Craven brutally denies Mari and Phyllis salvation from their captors even though both the police and Mari's home are tantalizingly close during the entire ordeal of bloodthirsty abuse, torture, and murder.

I repeat, this film made me sick.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

I must admit my project in horror literacy is outlandish and juvenile in many eyes. Sturgeon's law is no exception to my genre of interest, 90% is absolute crap, and I embrace such a reality. However, such a law does not mean to diminish the value of that 10% that strives to join the pantheon of arts. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974, is a member of the 10% that succeeds in art's eternal struggle to evoke emotion.

I interpret Hooper's success to the employment of the objective correlative, a modernist term to describe art's effect. Championed by T.S. Eliot, this theory of art argues:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked"

--http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/423797/objective-correlative

Unlike the above definition, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an singular film presents its simple "external fact" at the beginning of the experience, namely that it was a real, historic event. The subsequent mundane dialogue and rural American setting that introduce the doomed protagonists further re-enforce the singular "external fact". This (ir)rational grain of knowledge looms at the back of the consciousness a germinates to a dread that "this could actually happen" within the bowels of the American heartland. Within this structure, the objective correlative horror of individual scenes act by juxtaposition of objects and human senses that become unified by the terminating "external fact" which leads to a dread about our frailty against the madness of cannibalism.  
  
After corrupting the mental domain of the audience member's mind, the film begins a merciless assault upon sensory organs. Once the date fades from the screen, pure audio clips of scratching shovels and shifting earth begin the tale. Suddenly a flash of light burns the retina with the image of a decaying hand. Visual disgust initiates as the mottled, shrunken fingers shock the audience with the simple image of decay. The flashes, the decaying masses, and the whining of the bulb's capacitors all act to create an unnatural experience of rot but deny the audience a complete image. The sudden change to an orange hued image of a skinless corpse is the final shocking, unexplained scene of the introduction. The rotting skin glistens in the sunlight  signalling, if not a specific smell, the realization that this corpse is an abomination of the olfactory. This introductory sequence finishes its own objective correlative micro-arc with the radio's announcement: "Grave-robbing in Texas is this hour's top news story". At this moment, the audience understands that the camera flashes were the dreadfully unnatural transgression of the living against the dead. 

A second, powerful employment of the objective correlative occurs when Pam follows her boyfriend into the house and stumbles into a parlor with more bones than an ossuary and a single, caged chicken. The dark, ruined homestead is already a site of terror and unknown, but this single room sets up the film's central conflict of cannibalism. Feathers, bits of fur, and bone fragments coat the floor and offer a tactile sensation of filth as Pam falls onto the dirty floor. The single, freightened chicken provides an organic clucking that layers over the horror soundtrack and adds links the defiled room to the American image of the farm. The camera pans over the detritus on the floorboards and finds the bones of a human leg. It follows the familiar forms of leg and arm, creating the expectation of a sitting skeleton. Instead, the surprise is another piece of art, a couch outlined with the human skeleton. The continued panning over cracked turtle shells and swinging parts again offers the tactile sensation of their delicate fragility. Pam's wretching summons the viewer's imagination to construct the physical cringing of the internal organs. The sudden action sequence of Leatherface capturing Pam and carrying her into the "kitchen" climaxes to the most powerful physical sensation in the entire film. The meat hook. I will argue that proprioception, the sense of one's own place in space, is a more primal sense than the traditional five external senses. The ability to "feel" where our limbs exist allows to place ourselves into three-dimensional space. As a result, although we will never be held up off the ground by a meat hook piercing our back, every audience member can sense the pull of their body mass against the hook. Horrified by our own minds creating the self-perception of being hooked, the scene completes its absolute sensory overload. As a last treat, the objective correlative again offers up the "external fact" that this is the home of cannibals, and that the protagonists will be chopped up and eaten. 

The final objective correlative I present is Sally Hardesty's interaction with Grandpa. At this point the audience has been living in an adrenaline typhoon as Sally escaped Leatherface only to be captured and returned by the proprietor of the gas station. The blinding glare of the unshaded lamps casts shadows throughout the dining hall. Gagged and tied, the film's use of proprioception allows the tense audience to "feel" the constraints. After bringing Grandpa, the chair-bound human husk, to the table, the hitchhiker and Leatherface slice Sally's finger (one of the few, explicit moments of blood). The final objective correlative moment in this scene happens simultaneously with the revelation of the "external fact" that catapults the audience into the finest level of dread and disgust; Grandpa begins to suck. At this moment, the audience realizes that the mummified body is still alive. Defying age, the man sucks at the finger like a child sucks the nipple. Vile on basest, Freudian level, the audience can feel the sensation of having their finger sucked. Comprehension of this infantile sensation coupled with disturbing visual of an old man slurping and squirming like a new born throws one "over the cliff". It's the gross-out moment of the film, the horror that simultaneously becomes unbelievable, terrifying, and comic. The horrality. 

This analysis of the objective correlative is my evidence for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's classification as a masterpiece. The film applies the modernist definition of emotion evoking art by creating scenes that employ all the senses of the spectator. Through sensory overload, the film gains control over the audience and concentrates their emotions to a single feeling of dread for being at the pointy end of society's cannibalism taboo. This dread is not inferior to the emotions created by other art. Just because it may be more uncomfortable than a Beethoven symphony or D.W. Griffith epic  does not justify a label of inferiority. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an overwhelming cinematic force and deserves respect for its ability to make civilized man fear.

Misc. Thoughts

My side thoughts that would not fit within the above essay.
 
The demonic red chiascuro of the title sequence is beautiful. If this visual aesthetic interests you, consider the contemporary abstract art/horror film Begotten.

 I want to point out the reference to Psycho by using the motiff of family members maintaining the corpses of their elders, in this case "Grandma" and "the dog".

There are essays that consider the parody of the family American dinner table while Sally is tied up. I thought that the attempt to have Grandpa kill Sally is similar to Patrick Star's attempt to get Squidward to hold the jelly-fishing net. Absurd comedy for the win!
"firmly grasp it!"

Finally, the gritty art style,  obvious chain saw-wielding antagonists,  "horror soundtrack", backwater decaying buildings, and use of cannibalistic implications all make me conclude that Resident Evil 4's art direction borrowed greatly from aesthetics of this film.

Horror Literacy: Let the Right One In (2008)

In preparing for this short response, I browsed other internet articles on Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In. Most commentators and reviewers state how LtROI stands out from the pack of 2000s vampire revival culture. I can honestly say I feel removed from that discussion (I know nothing about Twilight and Ann Rice). Instead, this short response considers LtROI's spatial positioning of the vampire in comparison to Murnau's  Nosferatu (1920). Both European vampire films, they rely on the vampire living close to the protagonist's window (Figures 1&2).

Figure 1: http://www.silentsaregolden.com/featurefolder4/nosferatu18.jpg

Figure 2: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwN4grBHLfSBZ3gXpKUBYE0Nf6vclPifdJW6BPcks7gS2ztWc2mZCEWWZYLP0T5FTuNvdosTETB3aTHP0DFYxB6XeB5PB0hTikA0kvQN-LJO_8-WfJ8Bc6qeLzqoOleTWNNcB97PA37fo/s1600/windows.jpg

Nosferatu takes us residence in an abandoned wearhouse that looks directly into the bedroom of the protagonist's girl. LtROI places Eli's apartment adjacent to Oskar's apartment. Axial vs Adjacent. This is the core reason so many critics are quick to claim LtROI is a refreshing escape from other vampire cinema.

The rat-like Count Orlock in Nosferatu defines his existence by lusting over his female victim. His voyeuristic gaze seeks to hypnotize the young maiden to leave her defenseless. As a result, the vampire lives as a horrific abomination in opposition to society. LtROI opens with Oskar looking out the window. He sees his partial reflection and fixates on a bully that harasses him at school. There is not vampiric "other" that gazes back at Oskar, he is all alone in his muted and dreary apartment complex.

I enjoy that the first segment of the film is actually two parallel narratives: Oskar's isolated school life, and Hakan's task to harvest blood as an unexplained guardian for Eli. Compounding the divisive nature of the film is the elderly circle of friends who also live in the apartment complex. The few murderous junctions that propel the plot are the only times they overlap with the young leads. Oskar's school is another isolated narrative that only connects to the vampire plot during the ice skating scene and the final slaughter of the bullies. This division speaks to the vampire's role in an alienated society.

Oskar wants to connect with Eli to remedy his isolation. Morse code through the apartment walls and an failed "blood pact" are two examples of his courage to reach out and befriend Eli in spite of her folklore status as a demonic entity.

Looking at the title, both Oskar and Count Orlock's victim had to let the vampire in, by verbal acknowledgement or physically opening the window. In Nosferatu, the woman believes that only through her sacrifice can she trap the vampire to die by sunlight. She "lets in" the vampire to destroy it. Oskar however lets Eli in to help himself find meaning and love. His undergoes an empowering, stunning transformation by being around Eli. Bopping around his living room, rocking to some tunes while waiting for Eli to finish her shower, he looks five years older in style and motivation. His vampire next door is the gateway into puberty.

No longer does such the blood sucker plague society by existing in opposition to European communities. Instead, the vampire lives at the fringes of our lives, whose monstrosity is secondary to draining self alienation and despair that already infects the population. Instead, her monstrous instincts empower Oskar, the runt of society.

Horror Literacy: The Crazies (2010)

Last Night, I watched Bruck Eisner's remake of The Crazies. I haven't watched Romero's original yet but since the plot, military chemicals altering residents of small town USA, seems to be part of cultural knowledge, there were no real surprises or plot twists. The strength of the film is clearly atmosphere. These Iowans were not caricatures. Their town was a real slice of rural American life. I particularly marveled at the juxtaposition of the mayor's pool in the middle of a flat farmland, an example of rural American pastiche that selectively chooses its comforts. The sudden militarized containment of their humble town gave me shivers. This film, up to the final satellite image, espouses a fear of a faceless military government annihilating a community for the "greater good of America".

Voyeurism is not a new theme in the genre of horror, however, The Crazies distinctly puts the owner of the all-seeing camera into the nameless military. The satellite's computerized gaze shares a lineage with the dreaded panopticon but as a method of execution instead of discipline. Compounded with telecommunications being jammed, the film's rising action prays on the fear of helplessness through isolation.

More importantly, I want to comment on the connection to the zombie genre. I will argue the premise of The Crazies is theoretically more interesting than the common zombie-apocalypse plot. My reason is that two separate, enemy factions for the protagonists creates stronger pacing. There are multiple moments where escaping the threat of the military leads the Duttons and friends into the murderous clutches of the crazies who would be relatively harmless on their own because they are so slow. I see clear connections to video game series that place two enemy factions in the same area as the player's avatar. Such three-way dynamic puts a greater drive for pure survival and escape instead of brute force slaughter. The typical horror conflict of "us vs them" becomes "us vs them vs the government"; a powerful statement in our post 9/11 world where surveillance and military secrecy exist at the fringes of everyday American living.

Horror Literacy: Introduction

I was christened into the horror genre when I saw The Evil Dead at midnight 3+ years ago. Something clicked within my mind in the comfy couch of that little independent cinema. My aversion to blood and loud scares morphed into an attraction to the thrill and humor for the horrifically absurd and the comically gory. And so I began a steady march to watch more horror.

I saw films like Carpenter's The Thing and Videodrome at the Boston Science Fiction Marathon and my seedling began to draw nourishment from such genius. Then in our senior year, my high school friends and I watched the Romero trilogy. Suddenly the entire world of societal commentary became apparent. The greatest horror had messages directly related to society.

Freshman year of college, a class named "Zombies and the Apocalypse in American Pop Culture" appeared in the course catalog and I . Looking specifically at zombie cinema, the class focused on historical and societal messages in horror. Since this class, I've been watching horror with sparing regularity.

With such academic foundation, I now challenge myself to complete my foundation in horror literacy. This project commits me to watch 51 horror films that will elevate me from amateur to aficionado. Here is the list
(strike through denotes already watched) :

The Exorcist
Rosemary's Baby
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
A Nightmare on Elmstreet
The Howling
Friday the 13th (original)
Carrie
Martin
The Crazies 1973
The Crazies 2010
Let the Right One In
Trouble Everyday
Scream
When a Stranger Calls
Angel Heart
Jaws
The Haunting (original)
Poltergeist
Repulsion
Frailty
Eyes without a Face
The Legend of Hell House
Ringu
The Grudge
Saw
Cure
[REC]
Black House
Blood Beach
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things
Dead and Buried
Dead of Night
Deathdream
Deranged
Dog Soldier
Dracula's Daughter
Grotesque
Kiss the Vampire
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Martyrs
Mordum
Noroi: the curse
Rabid
Slither
The Grapes of Death
The Midnight Meat Train
The Mist
The Unknown
The World, the Flesh and The Devil
Last House on the Left (original)
I Spit on Your Grave

I hope to finish by the end of January. Short critiques and interpretations of each film will follow.

Alien compared to Aliens

Image via WikipediaThe xenomorphs of LV426 are an iconic, terrifying bunch. I finally watched Alien and Aliens this week and I'm inspired to write after being asked which movie I like better. To begin, James Cameron has a way of taking an idea and making it a grandiose endeavor in the movie industry. "Favorite" seems irrelavant to discuss on the internet but I am willing to consider and compare the steps these movies took to be a science fiction action/horror movie.

We'll start with the singular Alien, setting; some gritty cargo spaceship and and for one part an uninhabited planet. The mystery factor a huge thrill ride when Cane discovers the field of hibernating eggs. The most important aspect is that the alien must escape from its host in a grisly manner. As much as its terrifying now, put yourself into the time period and realize that such a gruesome "birth" was a massive surprise to the first audience members.
The rest of the film follows Ripley and the crew as they try to survive against the invader. Plain and simple; human reactions to an unnatural enemy. The lack of light and space is absolutely detrimental to a human's natural abilities and scenes in the airducts ooze of claustrophobia. The only weapon available is Prometheus' gift. In addition, the discovery that "Ash is a robot" and the corporation considers the crew expendable completely destroy any sense of trust for the universe. In the end, Ripley escapes the ship with only Jonesy, a sylvan companion who will stand stand by the protag when the rest of space turns a cold shoulder.

James Cameron's sequel does not depend as much on the sci-fi setting but rather on the human interactions. Already, being 50+ years older can wreck havoc on your perspective of the galaxy. Using the allegory that the xenomorphs represent the feral, inhuman aspect of rape, the beginning scenes represent Ripley's inability to forget the terrifying monsters of her past. In addition, with the company ignoring her initial reports, she has no where to turn and lives a isolated life in an apartment complex. Agreeing to go on the expedition is only after trusting that she can get her old career back and hold hope of an attempted normal future.
Enter the marines. Classic science fiction reminiscent of Heinlein's troopers. On the planet, after a couple of interesting technology cinematics and the first alien encounter it becomes clear that training alone will not save you. It returns to ingenuity, Ripley's best resource. This time around, she is not as alone because of the discovery of Newt and the mother-daughter bond created. As the survival aspect of being locked up in the colony increases, the interactions between the humans becomes more important. Ripley needs to trust Bishop for the escape route (I would also say he represents a religious cleric who can help Ripley deal with all the rape, on a side note). Burke realized as a greedy corporate puppet and his supposed betrayal. And that one marine, the name evades me, who keeps having a break down about the inhumanity of their enemy and the hopelessness of the situation. Of course there is Ripley's lone venture into the hive center in the end but its the middle of the movie that comes alive with character development.Image via Wikipedia

As a conclusion, both movies follow the SF interaction between humans and nonhumans. Alien follows a more precise sci-fi "if-then" statement, "if an alien was in the ship what would the humans do?" with a great deal of unknown and darkness thrown into the mix. Aliens on the other hand, seems to have better character interaction, and slowly gives Ripley strength to save Newt and destroy the cause of her suffering and dreams alluded to in the beginning. Because of these redemptive qualities, Aliens is a more humanist approach of science fiction while Alien is content with discoveries and scares.

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