The Collection Project: Keep Doubting

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A young girl named Lucie escapes from...somewhere. We don't know from where, or from what, but her hair has been hacked off, she's dirty, and has clearly been beaten. She's picked up by some sort of orphanage/children's hospital, though her parents apparently cannot be tracked -- we get the sense that she wasn't running from them -- because it is here that she will stay.

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Then we see a house, and are told this is "Fifteen Years Later". A family, consisting of a mother, father, and a teenaged son and daughter, is gathering for breakfast. The mother has found a dead mouse in the plumbing, and says this explains the low water pressure. The daughter has taken a private letter from her brother, a letter from a girl, and is teasing him about it. The mother also mildly berates the boy for his indecisiveness and middling school achievements. Then the doorbell rings, and the father answers it. A young woman is there. She shoots him with a shotgun, and then stalks through the house, blasting away at the rest of the family, killing them all, but pausing, after the parents have been killed, to ask the boy "Do you know what your parents did to me?" He says he doesn't, but he, and his sister after him, are both blown to hell just the same.

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So begins Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, one of the most notorious recent horror films, and part of what some critics are calling the New French Extremity, a movement -- if such it is, which it probably isn't -- that also includes such odious films as Inside and Frontier(s) and genuinely good ones like Fat Girl and Trouble Every Day. What all these films have in common, besides being French (or French-Canadian, or Belgian) is a commitment to showing the viewer the most grotesque, horrifying, disgusting images imaginable, and to do so unflinchingly, with a minimum of gaze-aversion, as well as the atmosphere and examination of whatever world-view such images might imply. As with any genre, or subgenre, or artistic movement, the success of the New French Extremity as an idea is neither important or even calculable. If Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day is an exceptional film -- and I think it is -- but Inside and Frontier(s) are terrible -- and I'm very confident that they are -- Denis's film doesn't suddenly appear to me to be invalidated because the movement into which some critics have lumped it also contains a fair number of films I despise. I don't think "I thought Trouble Every Day was pretty great, but I sure wish it wasn't part of that whole New French Extremism thing they got going now." All of which is to say that I do my damndest to approach the films that fall under this particular umbrella with a mind that is at least partly open. And if the beginning of Martyrs, as described above, signalled anything to me, it was that something possibly interesting was up.

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The young woman is Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), and her girlfriend Ana (Morjana Alaoui), whom she's known since they met at the hospital, is parked nearby. Ana is shocked to hear that, upon confirming that the husband and wife are the same couple who abused her in her youth, Lucie has simply slaughtered them, instead of calling the police, but Ana goes to the house anyway, where the two women go about disposing of the bodies, and, not incidentally, stumbling over the truth of why Lucie's abuse took place. Getting to that point is a relentlessly grim, shocking, unbelievably violent trip, one that made me far more uncomfortable than just about any other film of its type ever has. Martyrs is a chronicle of almost never-ending suffering and bizarre imagery, to the service of a story that regularly drops out from beneath you.

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Here's the problem with Martyrs: its story ends in a very unusual place (not so unusual that it's never been done before, as anyone who's read Lucius Shepard's The Golden knows, although Shepard actually didn't do much with the idea his story shares with Laugier's film, as in his novel that wasn't the focus), the point where we learn what, exactly, all this mind-numbing suffering has been in aid of, and why the film is called Martyrs. It's difficult to talk about that revelation -- an appropriate word -- without ruining any sense of mystery for those who haven't seen it. And the film really does maintain an air of pretty dreadful mystery, one it actually pays off, which is such a rare thing that blithely exposing it is not something I'm willing to do.

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But the problem, as I was getting ready to say before losing track, is how seriously can I ultimately take the film as a whole? A certain amount of Martyr's sadism is actually justified, but there's also a chunk midway through when Ana encounters a woman who has suffered the kind of torture Lucie did as a child, but worse, and for a much longer period of time. This sequence provides several of the film's most awful images, and it also goes absolutely nowhere. It's a red herring, a waste of ten minutes or so that did nothing but provide the film with more peeling flesh, screaming, pain, blood and bone. Like Inside, Martyrs never stops to breathe, and while I can't claim to have felt desensitized by the violence as Martyrs built to its viscera-splashed crescendo, it was also a little bit difficult to view it with the same amount of weight it would have had if the film had let up for even three goddamn minutes (another for instance: one character dies twice, when once would have been plenty).

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And yet: the ending is not nothing. This is a modern horror film that is pretty much wall-to-wall butchery, but is, finally, not actually about wall-to-wall butchery. Or so it seems, or pretends, or something. Hence my ambivalence, and hence the title of this post, "Keep Doubting", which is a line from the film -- a good one, too, in context -- and also a sort of philosophy for viewing the films of the New French Extremity and their international kin. Like the "splatterpunk" wing of horror literature, this kind of film usually comes presented as a work of intellectual and moral rigor, when in fact they're often blatantly unpracticed in both arenas. But then again, sometimes they are. It helps to be able to tell the difference. When it comes to Martyrs, I'm not sure I can. Still, at least I'm wondering about it.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 13 - The Best-Fed Citizens in Calcutta

So. Zombies.

It all began -- the kind of horror fiction that now dominates the field -- with zombies, in 1968, when a young generation of horror fans first saw George Romero's seminal low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, and blah blah blah. The connection between Romero's film and the sharp increase in extreme gore in horror literature has not only been written about to the point of dead-horse-beating, but if no one had ever written about it all, the same conclusion would have still been reached by any reasonably intelligent horror fan, on his or her own. Why go over it again?

So I won't. But, by way of introduction to today's post, I will say that eventually, this violent surge in the genre gave rise to a half-assed "movement", a group of writers who dubbed themselves the "Splatterpunks". I know, they sound so dangerous, don't they? It's almost like you don't even know what a guy who calls himself a "splatterpunk" is going to say next. He'll say anything, that guy. His writing is sure to be "in your face", not to mention "full of attitude".

In 1990, a critic named Paul Sammon edited together a collection of short stories in this mode called, aptly, Splatterpunks. Hilariously, out of sixteen contributors, only four writers considered themselves part of the "splatterpunk" movement. To be fair, one of those was Clive Barker, who is a talented writer. But two of them -- John Skipp and Craig Spector -- wrote primarily as a team, so they sort of count as one (I've never read their work, so no comment). And the fourth (or third) was David J. Schow.

David J. Schow not only considered himself a "splatterpunk" (and he still may, although to my knowledge no one ever uses the term anymore, other than when they're referring to the time nearly twenty years ago when four writers referred to themselves that way); he coined the term. And he contributed a story to the story anthology that really launched the movement, such as it was. That anthology was not Splatterpunks, which came a year after, but rather The Book of the Dead. The premise behind this collection (edited, by the way, by John Skipp and Craig Spector...things are getting pretty insular at this point, aren't they?) was that each contributing author would write a story that sort of took place in George Romero's "zombie universe". All this really means is that all the stories are about zombies, and they're gross (okay, I haven't read them all, by any stretch), and they take place during a zombie apocalypse.

David J. Schow's story is called "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy". I believe this story is now considered something of a seminal work in the genre, at least of the last twenty years or so. And, oh my Christ, that is so sad.

Here's what it is: after the zombie apocalypse has been going for some time, a guy named Wormboy has built his existence around luring zombies (which he calls "geeks") into his reach, killing them, and eating them. See, he feeds off zombies in the way that worms feed off of corpses. Okay, so that's pretty much all you need to know about him. The other side of this story involves an evangelical fundamentalist named Reverend Jerry, who considers the zombie uprising to be sign from God that all his fundamentalist beliefs were right all along. Jerry has also figured out a way to control zombies, so that they don't eat him (don't ask -- it involves snake venom, and makes no sense), and so he's able to use them as a sort of army.

Reverend Jerry and his undead army meet Wormboy, and we get passages like this:

It took no time for the air to clog with the tang of blackened geek beef. One whiff was all it took to make Wormboy ralph long and strenuously into the moat. Streaming puke pasted a geek who lay skewered through the back, facing the sky, mouth agape. It spasmed and twisted on the barbs, trying to lap up as much fresh hot barf as it could collect.

If you liked reading that, then you'll love this story. Because that's all it is. Actually, let me hold up a second, and see if I'm leaving anything out that, if I mentioned it, might make the story sound more interesting...well, you know that Reverend Jerry is a Christian fundamentalist. Can you guess that this easy target is taken down in exactly the same way over and over again? Now, Wormboy is an atheist, and a heartless nihilist. When I found that out, I thought Schow might be going somewhere, because Wormboy is unlikely to be embraced as an atheist icon, so you have the extreme end of the religious spectrum facing off. You knew where Schow goes with this? He goes nowhere. What we know about the characters' beliefs is that they believe them. Then almost everyone dies, one more toothless swipe is taken at Christianity, the end.

This story is wretched not because it's disgusting; it's wretched because it's boring. About two pages into this thing, and I saw I had twenty more to go, I was ready to quit. I could barely muster up the energy to read a twenty-two page zombie story.

Fuck it. Congratulations, Mick Garris, pop the cork on that champagne, because you've no linger written the worst story I've read this month.

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And so we turn to Poppy Z. Brite. Brite was a big up-and-comer in horror fiction, back in the early to mid-1990s. She had a lot going for her, on the surface, as someone the media could maybe possibly kinda sorta latch on to, if horror fiction was on their radar at all: she was young; a female, of all things; good-looking (and don't tell me it's condescending to mention that, because Clive Barker played up his looks, too. He still does, actually); and received early praise from the likes of Harlan Ellison and Dan Simmons, among others.

Honestly, I've only read this one story by Brite so far, so this is almost all based on what I've read about her, but Brite's star seemed to rise in the wake of Clive Barker's own ascendance. The two of them seem to have much in common, in that sex of all types feature prominently and graphically in their fiction, as does extreme violence. And like Barker -- and unlike most of the other young horror writers who followed his path -- Brite has genuine talent and imagination.

Her zombie story is called "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves", and it can be found in her only collection of short horror fiction, Wormwood (published in the UK under the more attention-grabbing title of Swamp Foetus). It's about a man born in Calcutta to an Indian mother and American father. The mother dies in childbirth, and the grief-stricken father whisks his son back to the US. Several years later, after his father's death, the son returns to Calcutta, right around the time that the dead begin returning from their graves to feast upon the flesh of the living.

Calcutta, you will say. What a place to have been when the dead began to walk.

And I reply, what better place to be? What better place than a city where five million people look as if they are already dead -- might as well be dead -- and another five million wish they were?

Brite's relationship to Calcutta in this story is very similar to the one Dan Simmons has in his first and (to me) still best novel, Song of Kali. To blunt, the city is depicted as a miserable, rotten death-pit, an open sewer and an open wound. This a very, very rough depiction of India at its most hopeless.

There is no real story here. "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" is kind of a mood piece. The narrator drifts through the city, observing this particular zombie apocalypse as it lays waste to a place that defines "zombification": Calcutta was dead, but it didn't know it. And along the way, he ruminates on the appropriateness of being in this place at this time, as he becomes more and more interested in meanings and portents that surround the Hindu goddess, Kali. There is a particular temple to Kali that he visits regularly, where he brings her offerings. And he's not the only one:

By day Kali grinned down upon an array of blossoms and sweetmeats lovingly arranged at the foot of her pedestal. The array spread there now seemed more suited to the goddess. I saw human hands balanced on raw stumps of necks, eyes turned up to crescents of silver-white...I saw severed hands like pale lotus flowers, the fingers like petals opening silently in the night...

These things the dead brought to their goddess. She had been their goddess all along, and they her acolytes.

This is a good story, and a strange one. And it's difficult to write about. As I said, it's a mood piece, which also happens to be disgusting, in a lyrical kind of way. I feel that if writers like David J. Schow (and believe me, guys like him are a dime a dozen) could achieve the effect that Brite nails here, they would. It would almost be nice to believe that...that the Schows of the horror world write what they do because they can't write in the way that Brite and Barker
can. So, they give up, turn to what comes easily to them, wrap that in as much attitude as they possibly can, and swagger around making claims that they belong to some kind of New Wave. Sure, Schow can disgust, but Brite can haunt.