Category Archives: Horror

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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Spooky Season Symbolically: Enys Men

Neon Pictures

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Enys Men (Pronounced In-es Main) is a 2022 cornish Folk horror set on the windswept desolate island of Enys Men. Set in 1973 the film follows an unnamed naturalist as she repetitiously records the ground temperature and her observations of seven flowers growing on the island while fascinated by a tall, weathered stone figure looking out over the sea and with lichen growing upon it. Amid the repetitive actions of the naturalist the film often intersplices unsettling sequences and imagery. The film’s narrative is nearly non-existent, doing away with such traditional conventions such as character arcs or any sort of act structure, relying upon imagery to convey emotional meaning.

Enys Men is more akin to poetry than narrative film and its sedate pacing will task many viewers. The film is reminiscent of the works of David Lynch but not as lyrical nor as impactful. I think that there is a quite small audience for Enys Men and sadly I cannot be counted among them. It lacks both the weird factor of something like Mulholland Drive and a stronger narrative nature of hold on it, leaving it, like its unnamed naturalist, trapped between worlds.

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Spooky Season Pre-Code Edition 2: Murders in the Zoo

Paramount PIctures

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Released in 1933, 90 years ago, Murders in the Zoo is playing as part of the Criterion Channel’s ‘Pre-Code Horror’ selections. While some of the scenes, particularly one at the front are gruesome and would have been stripped once the production began serious enforcement this film is less transgressive than many pre-code classics.

Eric Gorman (Lionel Atwill) is big game hunter, millionaire, and philanthropist with an inflated ego is and murderously jealous of any man showing attraction to his wife Evelyn (Kathleen Burke.) Gorman murders his victim by staging animal attacks and accidents.

With a running time of just 62 minutes this movie is clearly a traditional B feature. Atwill has appeared in several early horror films and as a ‘second banana’ performed quite well, however hampered with a lackluster script and second-rate dialog he proved inadequate as a lead to carry this movie.

Murders in the Zoo has none of the sacrilegious flair of Paramount’s better known pre-code horror The Island of Lost Souls and wastes far too much time with a bumbling secondary character meant for comic relief. A few scenes are effective and unnerving, particularly Gorman dispatching a rival in the jungle on a hunt, but over all this movie is dull, plodding, and scarcely worth anyone’s time or attention. Viewers concerned with animal welfare and cruelty are advised to skip this feature as in the climax of the story big cats are forces to attack each other and no production justifies such cruelty.

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Season 3 Reservation Dogs & Native Media

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My sweetie-wife and I finished watching season 3 of FX’s Reservation Dogs a dramedy set on a Native American reservation in modern day rural Oklahoma as it follows s collection of teens, their less-than-legal antics, their interpersonal events, and the lives of the larger community around them. The series, a first with American television, with all the creatives coming from Native American backgrounds explores the lives of its characters while both simultaneous·ly honoring culture and religious belief and avoid the ‘noble savage’ stereotype. These characters feel real and continue to feel real even as they encounter spirits of their ancestors, vengeful mythical beings from their heritage, and possibly even extraterrestrial encounters. The mystical never comes off as either jammed in to make the story standout from wider American culture nor overly praised for being native but simply another part of the tapestry of the story’s world.

Our interest in the show when it premiered in 2021 came from the fact that Kiwi creative Taika Waititi served as the series executive producer, but the series has very little of Taika’s erratic chaotic energy and much more the product of its showrunner Sterlin Harjo, a creative whose career I shall watch closely.

There appears to be a little boomlet in Native media and it is one I welcome. In addition to Reservation Dogs there has been the excellent Predator prequel Prey set among the Comanche during the 18th century which also presented as a viewing option the ability to watch the film with an audio track entirely in the Comanche language. A sequel to Prey is already in the works,

 

 

 

The series Resident Alien about an extraterrestrial who mission to slaughter humanity is derailed by his interaction with the Earth’s population also utilizes Native Americans among it cast and world building avoiding simple tropes and cliche presenting its native characters as actual characters.

 

 

 

 

From north of the American border came Blood Quantum a Canadian zombie apocalypse movie with much of its cast and characters coming from First Nation peoples. (The Canadian equivalent to the phrase ‘native American.’)

It is quite a privilege to watch so much media that rejects the racist or adoring portrayals of native peoples in favor of more complex, emotionally interesting, and culturally engaging fare that is now finally becoming available.

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Bits and Bobs

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Not a lot to post this morning as I awoke with a low-grade migraine. Not enough to keep me home but strong enough to require medication and to screw with my focus.

Sunday evening I stayed for the evening in a hotel as San Diego Gas & Electric had a planned outage for our condo complex that may have lasted several hours while I would have been asleep. Without power my CPAP machine will not function, and I would sleep terribly and so would my sweetie-wife due to the return of my snoring.

Also Sunday I discovered a non-fiction book I just had to read, Shot From The Sky: American POWs in Switzerland. Allied aired crew in Switzerland has fascinated me since I learned of the topic in the later 80s. This book had first-hand accounts of life while interned by the ‘neutral’ Swiss.

The Wolves of Wallace Point my Idaho werewolf novel is coming along. I have just passed 63,000 words and should need only another 17 to 25 thousand to complete this draft. This week I should transition into the fifth and final act with still only a vague and hazy sense of how to resolve everything.

That’s all for now.

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