The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 2: Read Minds, Make Time Stop, Cook Pasta That’s Exactly Right Every Time

by Andrew Leon Hudson

Frightened monkeys look like they’re laughing. If you don’t believe me, scare one and see.

The same goes for chimps and, for all I know, orang-utans too. I suspect that if anyone ever encounters a terrified gorilla, however briefly, the image they take away with them will include a widely-drawn mouth with a few teeth showing (where they take it away to, in this world or the next, would be another matter). What’s odd though, maybe, is that amused apes look and sound like they’re screaming. If you want to know whether noisy primates are enjoying themselves or not, you really have to pay close attention to what’s happening to whom and who’s watching it all go down from a nice safe distance.

All this is building to the revolutionary observation that humans are smelly, hairy bipedal former-tree-dwellers who jumped right off the very same branch as the rest of them, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that there are vague similarities in the shapes and sounds we make with our faces when we’re terrorised or amused. The fact that our brains have developed to be able to enjoy experiencing both things in close proximity could either be our saving grace or a sign that things are badly on the slide.

The nervous laughs that often follow a good movie scare are part of the environment in straight horror films, but there is a pretty rich vein deliberately mixing comedy and horror in cinema, with the emphasis depending on where you dig. On the humorous side of things there are more examples than you can shake a torn-off limb at, and though the numbers look increasingly epidemic in the last thirty-plus years you’d have to go back decades further looking for a patient zero (it might be Abbott or Costello, it might well not). Yet all these are playing with the trappings of horror to have a bit of fun, so much as I might enjoy the likes of your Shaun of the Deads or your Zombielands or your Scream franchises (less so) I’d not call them horror movies, not really, though even the worst wear a proud love of the genre on their sleeve. Apart from the Scary Movies, which can go to hell.

Rarer, and precious for it, are those films in which the humour is crafted so as to support the horror, not just make jokes about it. In An American Werewolf in London, in Evil Dead II (and, partly to bring things closer to the present day, let’s tentatively flank those with Pontypool and Bubba-Ho-Tep as examples of passingly and broadly humorous horror flicks respectively), we see touches of the absurd that also characterise real life, which go towards making the worlds of the stories a little less po-faced about the awful things we all know don’t really exist and so, perhaps, make them a little more believable. We laugh in the face of danger, after all.

However, when you go searching for literary examples of comedic horror, things abruptly go a bit quiet (Pontypool Changes Everything, interestingly, bares only a sideways resemblance to the movie made of it--something which I tend to like--and isn’t particularly funny at all). Admiring fingers are pointed towards Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, presumably for the benefit of squinting eyes given that it was published in 1820, and hands are waved at the black comedy genre... but then the conversation tends to move on, leaving little in the way of concrete examples. Well, that’s not good enough! I want more than a two-hundred year-old short story, and dark comedies with a bit of grue is not what I seek. Horror so bad that it’s funny--knowingly made a comedy sub-genre all of its own and gleefully jumped upon by Garth Marenghi to very good effect--definitely isn’t, although there’s seemingly enough of that shit to fill a swimming pool and unhappily drown in. What I imagine I want doesn’t seem to have much track record, at least in print.

Enter David Wong (as his friend John Cheese might suggest you do).

John stepped up, pushed open the front door and ducked aside. I dug in my pocket and pulled out one of the pink chunks. They were steak-shaped dog treats, complete with little brown grill lines. I realised at that moment that no dog would know what those grill lines were and that they were purely for my benefit.

“Molly!”

I shook the treat in front of her and then tossed it through the door. The dog ran in after it.

We waited for the sound of, say, dog flesh splattering across a wall, but heard only the padding of Molly’s paws. Eventually she came back to the door, grinning stupidly. We decided it was safe to go in.

John Dies at the End opens with a laugh-out-loud piece of existential zombie philosophy and ends on a rather downbeat observation about how crappily clone-like most mainstream adventure movies are. The above quote isn’t the funniest thing that happens between those points by a long shot, but it might be representative of the novel’s general frame of mind. As is the following, coming shortly after, as the author and his eponymous sidekick are fleeing the very same house and encounter another troubling door.

We kicked through the slithering things and stomped up after the dog, just as the stairwell door banged shut on its own.

I reached for the knob. At the same moment it began to melt and transform, turning pink and finally taking the shape of a flaccid penis. It flopped softly against the door, like a man was cramming it through the knob hole from the other side.

I turned back to John and said, “That door cannot be opened.”

It is not the last penis to feature.

David Wong, narrator (and pseudonymous author) of John Dies at The End, is a fairly nondescript resident of an American town which goes unnamed for tourism reasons, because it apparently rests upon some sort of gateway to hell, et cetera and yadda... although nondescript in his case includes tendencies towards astral projection, telepathy and other-way dog whispering, plus regular encounters with demonic monstrosities, possessed people and objects, things that might be ghosts and his friend John, who is excessively proud of his genitals and alternates between being crass and irritating and obnoxious and generous in the way that more-charismatic-than-you friends sometimes do to get on your nerves.

“Are you on your way over?” [John, who's on the telephone]

“I, uh, got somethin’ going on here.” [David, who’s in deep shit]

“What’s your thing?”

“I’ve got a--”

I paused, made a decision.

“--batch of brownies in the oven. I don’t want them to burn, or else they’ll get gummy.”

“Yeah, they’ll stick, too. Did you grease the pan?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Good. Anyway, Amy is missing and the scene is weird as shit. The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it’ll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean.”

“Who’s--”

“Because you’re gay.”

Like David, John also enjoys intermittent glimpses of the unspeakable denizens lurking beyond the veil, along with a kind of hyper-aware connectivity with what passes for normal reality that smacks of the guy from Rain Man after drinking too much absinthe. This occasionally saves them from a widely-distributed death and at other times clogs up answering machines with annoying messages. For a while they both work in a shitty video rental store, so like John says, if you were to contemplate a Lovecraftian version of Clerks you’d be on the right track. If you envisioned Kevin Smith directing The Call of Cthulhu, maybe less so.

These superficially envy-inducing powers come courtesy of soy sauce, a soy sauce-like substance that definitely didn’t originate in China, causing as it does the attention of an inconceivably alien awareness to focus upon anyone unfortunate (David) or cocky (John) enough to ingest it. However, the psycho-delic effects it initially has on them are by a considerable measure the most benign. Others in their circle of acquaintances are spectacularly and speedily less fortunate; but Wong’s straightforward writing style serves to grant equal degrees of authenticity to incidents of mild canine stupidity and incidents of bodily disintegration into a cloud of semi-sentient flying corkscrew worms, to the extent that the reader decides (in my case at least) to just go along with it and see what happens next.

And plenty does happen, take my word for it. In keeping with the impression that our heroes might just be tripping monkeyballs, the story takes us on a disjointed ride through the recent past and chaotic present, bounding from one crazed encounter to the next, taking in alternate realities, even Las Vegas. On top of all that, the pop-culture references fly almost (well, not really) as thick and fast as the worms. Not the usual sort, though. The culture being popped here ranges from first-person-shooter games (done for chuckles, mostly) and ICQ chat rooms (excellently unsettling) to meta-clichés of various stereotypes familiar to film and fiction. There’s a McDonalds moment that I guess their lawyers haven’t heard about, plus a couple of song references that... well, let’s just say I’ll never listen to Toto’s Africa the same way again.

But it’s not all funny, and though the horror often tends towards the bodily kind sometimes it is at its most effective in less flamboyant ways. We are riding in the head of an everyman, albeit one with a more entertaining than average stream-of-consciousness (plus we’re maybe not alone in there), and it’s his little observations that hint at how this world is off-kilter, usually setting us up for some grandstand proof.

What chilled me wasn’t the cop’s threats. It was the single, dark thought I could read pulsing through his head:

The dead are getting off lucky in this thing.

That didn’t seem like a normal cop thought to me.

Much of the pleasure is in the details that build up the world: the amateurish open-air rock concert where we meet Jenifer Lopez and which is the flash point of all that is to follow; the trailer park trailer with the impossible, horrible painting in it; the shopping mall that never was, filled with used condoms, broken needles and deer; or the confused restaurant called “They China Food!” with a Mexican bull-rider mural on the wall, owned by two brothers from the Czech Republic. This last is the location of the sort-of framing story, in which David tries to convince an intrepid reporter that he is neither insane nor taking the piss, with mixed success.

A word on the author. I didn’t know who David Wong was, didn’t even know the name was a pseudonym until I got to the back of the book. Then I did some digging and discovered that David Wong is, in fact, Jason Pargin, someone else I've never heard of.  More digging revealed that Jason Pargin is a senior editor at something called Cracked.com, so I checked out some funny lists of things they had there and then started reading another book.  All power to him, because when I finished reading JDaTE I was a well-satisfied, somewhat thought-provoked fella who will eventually read the sequel...but life's too short to open another potential online treasure trove.  America is something of a cultural volcano, one that makes the eruptions of Krakatoa, Mount St. Helens, Vesuvius and so on look a bit like farts in a bathtub.  I mean this more or less as a compliment.  Yes, it periodically spews vast quantities of material all over the place, blanketing distant lands and threatening to smother the blossoming of local creativity in its bed...but how fertile is the land left in its wake, eh? All the music, the books, the movies...

Oh yeah.  There's a movie of this book now, too (and probably a soundtrack album).

Honestly, I don’t remember if I first heard about JDaTE because of the film, which I haven’t seen. The man at the helm was Don Coscarelli, once most famous for the pulpy Phantasm series, now for Bubba Ho-Tep (partly hence the earlier mention). There is plenty of visceral horror on display in these pages, plenty of potential for visual gags, so from that point of view he’s probably a good choice; but it was the pervading bleakness that bubbled beneath everything that really made this book work for me, and I think that might be a big ask of a movie being sold off the back of a monster built from reanimated cold cuts. Some of it would transfer easily enough, as when David is asked why he believes in hell and replies “Because it’s the opposite of what I want to believe,” but unsurprisingly some of the most effecting passages--including the one that, in my opinion, sheds light on exactly why Wong picked that title--would demand a maudlin two hours of art house navel-gazing to convey on the silver screen. So let’s not do that. And while we’re on the subject of how not to fuck up perfectly good books when you want to make a movie out of them, why--

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a website soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

We try to laugh, but sometimes the truth hurts, doesn’t it? Now, if I don’t want to look like a freak, I’m going to have to sneak back up and break this bad boy into bite sized chunks.

Which is a bit like what happens to John, really.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Andrew Leon Hudson is an Englishman living in Madrid, Spain. Before taking up writing with intent, he had previously worked in such diverse industries as education, prosthetics make-up, narcotics retail, journalism, butchery and “the services” (customer and military). He once started a company with his parents which employed a few friends until it all fell apart. His first novel, The Glass Sealing, should be in all good ebookshops for Christmas, and he’ll probably mention this article on his pseudonymous blog, andrewleonhudson.wordpress.com

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 1: This Is Not For You

In a recent New York Times article about Stephen King and his family, King and his son, the horror writer Joe Hill, are described discussing "what novel should be considered the MOBY-DICK of horror."  The answer they settle on is one of the more curious, both in its impact and in its very existence, horror fiction phenomenons of the last thirty years.  That I don't extend that time-span even further might indicate something to you, but in any case the novel King and Hill chose is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  As someone who worked in a bookstore in 2000, when House of Leaves was released, I can attest to the mixture of puzzlement and fascination with which Danielewski's debut novel was greeted -- co-workers (and I would do this too) would wonder aloud at the strange layout of some of the pages, and the occasional use of colored ink (how much and of what variety depended on which edition of the book you bought, or anyway were looking at).  I didn't know a lot of people who'd read it, except the woman who I would eventually marry, but I snagged me a copy with every intention of doing that very thing.  I think I got distracted by a TV show or something because I just got around to it recently, but I'm now in a place to object to King and Hill's, to my mind, careless vaulting of House of Leaves to such heights.

I do not, by the way, object to the question.  What novel could reasonably be named the Moby-Dick -- an extremely specific choice, even if it seems like a cliche', and Melville's masterpiece furiously resists being compared to very much of anything -- of horror is a subject that, some version of it at least, concerns me as well.  In any case, I suspect that book has yet to be written, but all that aside, what I do know is House of Leaves ain't it, for a host of reasons, not least of which is that Danielewski was very clearly, very nakedly, not trying to write the Moby-Dick of horror novels; he was trying, aching, to write the Infinite Jest of horror novels.  Now, an argument could possibly be made that if I want to be such a hard-ass about this it's not at all unreasonable to dub David Foster Wallace's thunderous breakthrough work the Moby-Dick of addiction novels (and never mind, for the sake of this post, that this little parlor game grossly simplifies both Melville and Wallace), so therefore, by virtue of its quite striking similarities to Infinite Jest and of it being a horror novel, House of Leaves at least lands itself in the running for the Moby-Dick of horror.  But listen, I'm not interested in passing something through to the semifinals because of a technicality -- this is a meritocracy.  And more than anything is this:  Moby-Dick is a strange book because it is a strange book.  Infinite Jest is a strange book because it is a strange book.  House of Leaves is a strange book because Danielewski, free of malice and with no wish to deceive, has read quite a few strange books in his day.

It is, of course, spectacularly unfair to hold any writer, let alone a first-time novelist, as Danielewski was at the time, to the standards of Wallace and, for fuck's sake, Herman Melville, but when the biggest name in horror fiction outside of Poe and Lovecraft -- and let's be frank, possibly even including those guys -- and perhaps the most critically-acclaimed young writer in the genre open that door, the impulse should be to grab the knob from the other side and pull back with all your strength.  I'd like to think my pointing this out has as much to do with returning Danielewski's novel back to the realm of reasonable expectations as it does with my own ambivalence towards it, though in all honesty that idea has just now this second occurred to me.

But perhaps I've spent too much time on this question.  I think I'd hate to meet the person who thought otherwise.  Anyway, however much further I might wish to take this, I would only benefit by explaining to the uninitiated what House of Leaves actually is.  It sets itself up to be many things, but essentially we have two main stories.  The core of the book is called The Navidson Record, and this purports to tell the story of Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, and his family -- Karen, his wife, and Chad and Daisy, his two young children -- as they move into a new house on Ash Tree Lane, somewhere in Virginia (it's never said where exactly, but apparently in the southern portion), and the insanity they find there.  Which is that one day Will discovers a hallway in the house that hadn't been there before.  Not only that, and more alarmingly, the length of that hallway is greater than can, or should be able to be, contained within the house.  Measurements of the outside of the house and measurements of the inside confirm that this new space is quite literally impossible  And yet.  Navidson films everything, and he doesn't begin recording his experience with the new house after this shocking discovery, so that The Navidson Record, as described to the reader, is meant to be a full portrait of a family, not just a family under duress, though a family under duress is mostly what we get, and no wonder.  This story is framed by, and shot through with, the story of Johnny Truant.  Johnny Truant, an alcoholic, drug addict, and dissolute Los Angeles tattoo artist is the keeper of the manuscript that is The Navidson Record.  He is not the author of The Navidson Record (nor is Navidson or anyone in his family), but he is the one who found it among the possessions of a recently deceased old man, who lived in Johnny's apartment complex, named Zampano.  Zampano is the author of The Navidson Record.  He was also blind, and had a series of young female students and social workers who helped him transcribe and gather together his words and research for The Navidson Record.  But Zampano's dead by the time Johnny gets the manuscript, and Johnny, for motives obscure even to himself, takes it upon himself to complete the process of turning this massive thing into a book.  Along the way, The Navidson Record drives Johnny mad. (On top of all this, there's an unseen and never named editor, or group of editors, who have tightened up Johnny's work.)

Meanwhile, we learn that the events described in The Navidson Record are driving quite a few other people mad, too.  Will and Karen's marriage, already strained, becomes seemingly broken as Will becomes ever more obsessed with the hallway.  And the hallway grows, and grows, and grows, and drops and drops and drops, and widens.  To the point that calculations (there's a lot of math in this book) show that at one point the bottom of the stairs (there are stairs now) is so far down that it should be at the center of the Earth.  And then beyond that.  Late in the book, not to give anything away (I'm not giving anything away), rock samples from the walls in this portion of the house are tested in a lab, the results of which test indicate that these rocks are older than the Earth itself.  The scientist who runs the test assumes the samples must be from a meteorite, possibly found in Antarctica.  Will brings in outsiders to help him figure out what in the hell is going on in his house, including Billy Reston, his paraplegic friend, Tom, Will's twin brother, and a trio of explorers, led by a man named Holloway Roberts, whose initial expedition down the hall and down the stairs will be the catalyst for much of the more conventional horror elements in the book.

With House of Leaves, Danielewski is searching and straining to exemplify the standard implied by the concept of a work of art's form matching, complimenting, and being inseparable from its content.  To do this, he borrows from Wallace (who didn't originate it, but did, let's say, maximize its potential) the idea of incorporating footnotes, most of which contain the story of Johnny Truant, told in the first person and printed in Courier font (there are a lot of fonts in this).  And Zampano's book -- The Navidson Record, I mean -- is not simply a retelling of the events in the Navidson house, but is also a critique and quite academic analysis of Navidson's film, which was released (by Miramax), and of the entire family's behavior, with scores of secondary sources brought in, everything from magazine articles to interviews with survivors to 1,400 page scholarly texts, Navidson's film having been something of a sensation.  Among the topics covered in, again, quite academic terms, are architecture, the history of the Morse code for SOS, Theseus and the labyrinth, the psychology of twins by way of a close reading of Esau and Jacob, echoes, the morality of photojournalism, as well as, no joke, a shit-ton more.  Among the real life figures making cameos -- so that they may offer their thoughts on Navidson's film -- are Stephen King, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Steve Wozniak, and Jacques Derrida.  I don't even know how many times I sighed just typing out "Steve Wozniak," let alone "Camille Paglia."

Then there's the occasional experiments in page layout, which I referred to way back at the top.  Observe:

That's just one example, of course.  There's lots more you can do with a page and type, such as:

My reaction to this sort of thing as I read House of Leaves generally took one of two forms.  At times I would think "Oh, so now I have to turn the book sideways."  Other times, when long stretches of the novel flashed by with only a few sentences, or even a few words, per page, a great relief would wash through my body, even when, in order to read those few sentences I had to turn the book upside down, because that was just that much more of the book in my rearview mirror.  To help you understand why this gimmickry impressed me so very little, I'll offer this example:  when the characters are at the bottom of that cosmically enormous staircase, the text is pushed, now hold on a second while I tell you, to the bottom of the page.  If that's not content matching form then buddy I don't know what is.

Regarding David Foster Wallace, it's not just the footnotes that bring him to mind while reading House of Leaves.  There are little things having to do with language the evoke him as well, though in a comparative way that couldn't have been Danielewski's intent.  For example, the Johnny Truant sections of the book, which are extensive, are where the majority of the "poetry" in Danielewski's prose can be found (Zampano's portion being academic after all), and Johnny being the outlaw junkie gutter cowboy noir poet or whatever the fuck he is, he's presented as being equal to the task of upholding that end of the novelistic art.  The quirk of it is that every time (maybe not every time, it's possible Danielewski bailed on, or forgot about, this idea at some point and I just didn't notice) Johnny should be writing "could have" or "could've" or "would have" or "would've," Danielewski has him write "could of" and "would of."  This brings to my mind the curiously delightful way David Foster Wallace would often begin one of his rich, digressive, endless sentences about not just a thing but what he thought about the thing and what he knew you thought about the thing and what he thought about what you thought about the thing, with ungrammatical, conversational thought-gathering non-phrases like "So but then" and "But then so."  Wallace did lots of stuff like this, and while I was huffing my way through House of Leaves one night I tried to explain to my wife what was unique and so pleasurable about how Wallace achieved this particular effect, though I can't say I exactly nailed it.  It has to do with something that is inherent not just to Wallace's style but to his thought process, which is breathless, all-inclusive, rambling, and desperate to be understood.  It humanizes the author, I suppose is the main thing, or the most easily grasped thing.  When Danielewski does it, on the other hand, he's not capturing speech or thought, because, to pick one reason among many, there's nothing organic about the way it's integrated into Johnny's language.  It's not Johnny Truant, it's a typo.

It isn't as if there's nothing interesting about House of Leaves.  It is in many ways a very odd book, something that is interesting almost by definition, though what's odd and interesting doesn't necessarily get to that point by being a successful.  It's a horror novel (though in one of several dozen bits of meta-ness scattered throughout the novel, Danielewski seems to actually bemoan the fact that House of Leaves will inevitably be remembered as a part of the genre), and the weirdest thing about it as a horror novel is that, stripped down, it's a found footage horror novel.  And not found footage in the way Carrie sort of was, by incorporating magazine and newspaper accounts of certain events, but in the same way, but on paper, that The Blair Witch Project was, or maybe more accurately Cannibal Holocaust, since that movie, like House of Leaves, had elements apart from the found footage conceit.  Either way, it's a found footage horror movie written out, and in a general sort of way Danielewski pulls this off.  Although, House of Leaves also belongs to the subgenre of horror that is about mysterious films, or pieces of film, and the terrifying effects they have on anyone who view them (Infinite Jest had that element too, central to its admittedly somewhat submerged plot).  This concept is absolutely catnip to me, or the human equivalent of catnip, Cheetos Puffs, and I'm powerless, in theory, before any novel that uses it.  But one thing I've noticed about such stories, and this even includes Theodore Roszak's Flicker, the grandaddy of such books and one of my personal favorite novels, is that very rarely does the writer have much of an understanding of filmmaking, and what's difficult about it, what's effective or interesting or inventive.  The most telling moment in this regard from House of Leaves is when Danielewski describes a sequence from Navidson's film -- a film that was hailed as a major work of art when, you know, when Miramax released it -- that is supposed to be just a jaw-dropping piece of brilliance.  And what that sequence is, is Navidson edited together a series of shots, the first three of which are very brief, the next three are longer, the three after that are again very short, and so on.  It's the Morse code for SOS, you see, but through film editing, and it's worth noting that at this point in House of Leaves, shit's about to go down.  Zampano, and I guess the world (well, but never mind, I'll come back to that), were just knocked out by this, but not only is it trite, I could fuckin' do that!  I've never edited a second of film in my life, and I could put together three shots that aren't so long, then three shots that kind of are, and then three more that aren't again.  I think it's no coincidence that Danielewski's way of dealing academically with horror films and documentary films (both of which The Navidson Record is, ostensibly) is to just list horror films and directors who've made documentaries (both lists just an absolute joy to read, incidentally).

My hope was that while writing this post I'd find my attitude towards House of Leaves shifting into something more favorable, or at least more sympathetic.  It's happened before, but it's not happening now, as I sit here.  I'm simply getting more aggravated, because for years on this blog I've begged those who write horror fiction and make horror films to step up their game, to be smarter and more creative and more ambitious, and to not allow formula to suck them dry.  And House of Leaves is certainly ambitious, no matter how derivative it is of David Foster Wallace.  I mean, hell, a horror novel inspired by Infinite Jest?  Sign me up, bud!  But goddamn, what a pain in the ass this thing is.  If I was ever inclined to soften my views on House of Leaves, something happened in one of the appendices (there are appendices; also, there's an index -- "There's even an index!" has been the cry of some. To those people, I would recommend picking up a copy of J. G. Ballard's story collection War Fever and turning to the last story, which is called "Index," and taking note of its structural similarities to that last bit of House of Leaves. I might recommend that Danielewski do the same thing, except I have a feeling it's not necessary) that made any new-found sympathy nearly impossible.  In fairness, Danielewski does set the table for this right at the beginning (and by the way, this is a spoiler) when he has Johnny Truant say that The Navidson Record, that is to say, Will Navidson's film, doesn't exist and has never existed.  Given the nearly 700 pages that were, at that time, to follow, I was prepared to regard this comment as somewhat ambiguous.  But there's a tiny little section of one of the photographs, or photo collages (color plates in certain editions!), near the very end that basically says "Johnny Truant was right, none of this happened, there's no film, no house, nobody died, there's probably not even a real Will Navidson or his family.  Zampano!  What a loony old coot!"  I can't now remember if it was before or after this deadening revelation that we get eight pages filled up with thirty-seven irrelevant, and not even good, poems printed in small type, written by "Zampano," called "The Pelican Poems."  I can't imagine a world in which the answer could make any kind of difference.

I'm certain there are many, many people who can defend this novel, and can do so quite intelligently.  It's not lost on me, for instance, that there's a rather large element of satire at play in the academic material; it's pretty hard to miss, unless you believe that even way back in the 1990s (the "events" at the "Navidson" "house" are meant to have "taken place" in 1993) scholarly film and behavioral analysis was published in People or Ladies' Home Journal.  And a lot of people over the years have cited House of Leaves as being genuinely frightening, and indeed there are bits here and there that are almost ingenious, one in particular that occurs at the very end of The Navidson Record, and then another one later when Johnny Truant's story stumbles towards its conclusion.  But even in those cases, and even before Danielewski backtracks over everything, he backtracks over those things -- one which might have happened but didn't, and one which couldn't have happened because nothing in that part of the book happened.  If such moments are frightening in the moment you read them, does it not matter that the author takes them back?  It's like jumping when a cat screeches out of a closet in a slasher movie and saying later "Well it was scary before I knew it was just a cat, so it's still scary now."  Anyway what I'm getting at here is that there's something that sometimes occurs when reading a book, but which is not often dealt with in criticism, and that is the reader experiencing complete disengagement from what he or she is reading.  In ordinary life when this happens, the reader usually sets the book aside (barring the die-hards, I mean).  When one is obligated or for whatever reason compelled to plow through to the end, unless the author rights the course to the reader's satisfaction, that disengagement grows into an insult, and possibly an injury.  After several hundred pages of disengagement from House of Leaves, I'd say my sympathy's all used up, and my only thought about Danielewski at this point is, "Be ambitious on your own time."

Beware!

Because it's almost October, and you should be terrified! Of ghosts and such!

Ah yes, October. What you're currently reading is my annual preamble to the month-long amble that is The Kind of Face You Slash, a project that ordinarily finds me writing about horror fiction -- stories and novels and so forth -- every single goddamn day. Ha ha, not that I don't love it! That's going to happen again this year, starting Tuesday, but this year there's a slight twist. For about half of the month, I will be doing what I always do, which is as previously described, but the other half of the month will be filled out with a roster of guest writers. The rotation will be roughly and alternating-days kind of thing, though this part I can't be certain about exactly, but in any case your takeaway should be: half me, half other folks, each of whom I'm very proud to have on board, and whose posts I think you'll greatly enjoy. There'll be bylines and stuff, even.

On top of the 31 posts vaguely outlined above, I'll be posting about any screeners I happen to have on deck, and I'll be linking to writing I've done/will be doing on other sites next month as well. So it's going to be kind of crowded around these parts, and the total number of posts could well be closer to 40 than 31.

"Dear sir!" I hear you cry. "Will any of those posts be part 9 of your Cronenberg Series? I'm pretty sure we're up to Dead Ringers by now!" Ha ha, indeed we are, gentle reader (or should I say...gentle bleeder!? (Halloween)), and I do apologize most humbly for allowing that project to take a back seat lately. Things have been all balled up at the head office, as a great man once said, and Cronenberg just kind of drifted out of reach for a while. As to whether or not it will return in October, I can't promise that, but if it doesn't, it will kick back into gear in November. I'm committed to this thing. Anyway, with Dead Ringers we're entering into a new phase in Cronenberg's career, so maybe I should have just said "We're entering a new phase in Cronenberg's career, that's why I took such a long break." You guys would've bought that, right? Fuck, I should've thought of that earlier.

BUT ANYWAY. So that's the deal on various fronts. Don't expect a new post until Tuesday, October 1, but since it's already September 25 no one would have blinked at the lack of activity. So I'm just going to shut up now, and I'll see you all on Tuesday...or should I say BOOsday!? (Halloween.)

Merciful God

The last time The Criterion Collection cast their gaze towards the films of Robert Rossellini, they wound up releasing Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy, a set of films the director made during, and shortly after, as well as about,World War II.  Two of those films, Paisan and Rome, Open City, directly led to, well, quite a lot, actually, but specifically to the films that comprise Criterion's new Rossellini set, which bears the unwieldy yet certainly accurate title 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman.  In the extensive booklet that comes with this set is included a brief correspondence between Bergman and Rossellini, Bergman's letter charmingly praising Paisan and Rome, Open City and listing her linguistic ups and downs ("If you need a Swedish actress who speaks very good English,...is not very understandable in French...") as a sort of resume in case he ever might consider casting her in something.  Rossellini's excited response was delayed, he writes, "because I wanted to make sure what I was going to propose to you."  What he goes on to propose to her is the premise behind the first film they would make together, Stromboli.  They would end up making five films together, and I'd sure like to know why the final two, Joan of Arc at the Stake and Fear, weren't included here, but we can't have everything in this life.  It sounds to me, though, like several dominant themes to be found in the films we do have in this new Criterion set -- Stromboli, Europe '51, and Journey to Italy -- such as the dissolution of marriage, sainthood, and grace, are likely to be unevenly scattered among those two as well.  Maybe not so much dissolution of marriage in Joan of Arc at the Stake, though.

In any case, 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman is nothing to sneeze at.  Plus the films included do share one thematic tie that those later films can't boast, which is "Italy."  I sound glib there, but it's something that joins these movies, and it's anything but inconsequential.  Anyway, enough of this:  the films, now, in ascending order of preference:

Journey to Italy - Of course, one of the things that Ingrid Bergman's appreciation for Rossellini's films brought about, in a very indirect sort of way, was her love affair with the director, which began while she was married to Peter Aron Lindstrom and Rossellini was married to Marcella De Marchis.  I bring this up not to traffic in sixty-year-old gossip, but to note that this bit of movie history is hard to not think about while watching any of these three films, and especially Bergman and Rossellini's third film together, Journey to Italy.  Made in 1954 and long considered one of Rossellini's signature masterpieces, Journey to Italy stars Bergman and George Sanders as a married couple who are taking a trip to Napoli after the death of Bergman's uncle, to check out, enjoy, and eventually sell a small villa she's inherited.  Very quickly -- right around the beginning of the film, in fact -- they both almost simultaneously realize that this trip is the first time they've really been alone together and the result of that intimacy is near total indifference.

So the couple drift from lazing around their property, drinking wine and napping in the afternoon, to separating and doing their own thing.  Sander's Alex goes to parties and smiles hopefully at young women, and Bergman's Katherine goes to museums to marvel at Ancient Roman sculpture, and figuratively travels even further back in time as she tours smoldering volcanic plains, inspired by the memory of an old, supposedly platonic, if only in the physical sense, departed friend.

Journey to Italy is a quietly complex piece of work as it contrasts Alex's more traditional rebellion, melancholy as it is, with Katherine's existential disappearance into time.  It's not just the past as the past that awes her, it's how the idea of the past relates to the reality of her standing before its ruins, and how her standing before those ruins relates to her husband out there doing God only knows what.  Death haunts the film, as you'd imagine given where Katherine spends her time, but in an interview included in the aforementioned booklet Rossellini scoffs at an idea expressed in the film that Italy is "a country of death."  And indeed death as it's represented in the film is, while unavoidably morbid, can be seen as a step along a path, and its remains as instructive, but not in a "don't touch that or you'll die!" kind of way.  When Alex and Katherine visit Pompeii towards the end, what they witness being uncovered by archaeologists is not a horror, though Katherine flees from it.  It could even be hopeful.  Then again, Rossellini rejects that notion, as well.  But if one day a volcanic eruption were to baked Alex and Katherine into their home, future archaeologists and tourists could take from them a certain comfort.

Europe '51 - A stylistic choice Rossellini employs in Journey to Italy that doesn't sit well with me, and never has if you must know the truth, is putting Katherine alone in a car, speaking her thoughts aloud.  As I say, I've never much liked this, not least because it kind of sends the actor in question with the monologue up the creek, because it's often without context in the sense that it doesn't branch off naturally from another scene, as a stage monologue frequently does.  Even more bluntly classical, though in a different mode, is Rossellini and Bergman's second film together, Europe '51 (from 1952, naturally).  Rossellini described this as a companion to his earlier film The Flowers of St. Francis, with the saint in this case being Bergman's wealthy Irene.  Believing herself a kind and giving mother to her son Michel (Sandro Franchina), Irene lives a social life with her husband George (Alexander Knox) that she believes is both busy and important enough to giver less and less of herself to the young boy.  After a terrible fall that may, horrifyingly, have been a suicide attempt, Irene listens to her bed-ridden son recall the warmth and love of their earlier days together as post-war refugees.  Shattered by this, and all but destroyed when Michel subsequently dies from his injuries, Irene slowly begins to shed the trappings of her comfortable life -- among the items and comforts shed is her husband -- as she slowly begins to notice Rome's downtrodden, and particularly its population of poor single mothers.

When I say Europe '51 is blunt, I mean it is in political terms; it's very much a classic social message film.  Typically in such films, at least the weaker ones, the good-hearted protagonist might as well be a saint, and it can stick in the craw to see a filmmaker's idea of the Moral Ideal spread across a movie screen telling us what we're not doing correctly.  In the case of Irene, however, Rossellini and Bergman haven't created some grotesque Christian cipher, but a real, beat up, and suffering person, whose Christian characteristics are found as much in her flaws as in anything else.  There's even something of the Passion about Europe '51, and in going that far, a film will have a hard time being subtle about it, subtlety being a frequently overrated quality anyway.  And while the middle section of the film, which finds Irene bouncing around Rome helping people (including a pre-La Strada Giuletta Masina) who badly need somebody to lend a hand, is the film at its weakest, it is, of course, that chunk that gives the strong beginning and powerful, almost Bressonian (in some ways, but I don't want to go nuts with that comparison) final stretch the context they need to work.  The kind of bluntness, found mostly in the script by Sandro De Feo, Mario Pannunzio, Ivo Perilli, and Brunello Randi, used to dramatize Irene's eye-opening shouldn't be lightly dismissed on the grounds that it's unsubtle.  I mean, it is, but in a way it's unsubtle in the way brick and mortar is, while the beauty of the architecture is found in the tragedy of the beginning, the grace of the end, and in Bergman's powerful work throughout.

Stromboli - My favorite of these three films is this one, Bergman and Rossellini's first collaboration, from 1950. Stromboli is kind of a combination of the strange complexities of Journey to Italy with the religious awakening through suffering of Europe '51.  It also contains a stunning performance from Bergman as Karin, a refugee we first meet in a prisoner of war camp as Allied forces after a new government have come in and are trying to clean out the camp and send the many prisoners from all across Europe to, if not their homes, a suitable, or anyway workable, substitute.  Because her documents and finances are not quite in order, Irene can't return home to Lithuania, but this stings less than it might as she has fallen in love with another POW, a fisherman named Antonio (Mario Vitale) who comes from a small fishing village on the Sicilian island of Stromboli.  The two marry, and Antonio takes Karin home with him.

Trouble begins almost immediately, because Karin was evidently accustomed to a life that was a bit more glamorous than would even be conceivable on the desolate, volcanic Stromboli.  To Karin, the home she shares with Antonio would pass for abandoned anywhere else, but Antonio has apparently lived their for years.  She berates Antonio for not having enough money, for dragging her here, for ruining her life.  Indeed, in the early going Karin is enormously unlikable, but she's not just some shrewish stick figure.  For one thing, Stromboli manages to ask, without actually asking, an audience who at least is able to see movies on a movie screen, a luxury alien to the citizens of Stromboli, the question "Well?  How do you think you'd like it?"  Plus Karin doesn't walk around spitting or sneering at the other villagers -- it's not a matter of her feeling superior to anyone, exactly, but a matter of her simply not being able to take it, and knowing from the beginning that she can't.

But she's still tough to like a lot of the time, as her bitterness and paranoia, fueled by her outsider status, deepen.  At one point she's walking along with the village priest (Renzo Cesana) and as they are about to pass one particular doorway, a woman ducks out to throw a bowl of dirty water into the dirt.  Some of the water apparently splashes Karin, and she asks the priest "Why would she do that to me?"  It never occurs to her that the woman couldn't have known Karin was approaching, and simply needed to get rid of the water.  The island is a place of such psychological menace that she's incapable of thinking of herself as something other than a target.

Stromboli is brutal, though, both physically and spiritually.  The casual killing of a helpless rabbit sickens and enrages Karin (I didn't care for it myself), the taunting of Antonio by other villagers leads him to beat her, and Karin even learns that periodically the entire village must take boats out to see in case the boiling over of the volcano should jump to a full-on eruption.  "See?" Antonio says as they return.  "Our house is fine."  Okay great.  Karin eventually breaks, and her actions following that break are ignoble, courageous, and hopeless, her stumbling journey across a blasted wasteland filled with a religious fervor that has about it a uniquely, even medieval texture that you don't often find...well, now you never find it, and well there you go, there's Bresson creeping in again (or there's Rossellini creeping into Bresson, as the French master's major work in this vein wouldn't begin for another year).  For her part, Bergman, as far as I can tell, is giving one of the performances of her career, and especially in the final minutes seems to be genuinely suffering.  Karin is an astonishing creation, deeply imagined and thoroughly empathized with, unlikable and selfish, by the end surrounded by smoke and screaming for mercy.

Bombastic Ignoramous

"I'm less interested in pointing out ostensible flaws than I am in going where the movie takes me." - Richard Harland Smith

Well excuse me, Richard Harland Smith!

Oh, hello. As you may already be aware, today sees the release on Blu-ray of director Jean Yarbrough’s 1940 Bela Lugosi vehicle The Devil Bat, courtesy of the good people at Kino, and I’ve recently had the opportunity to give it a look. For the second time in my life, as I quickly realized -- I think it hit me that the film wasn’t new to me when Lugosi’s Dr. Paul Carruthers is on the phone, warmly speculating that the family party he’s been invited to might include among its celebrations the engagement of Mary Heath (Suzanne Kaaren) to "that rascal" Don Morton (Gene O'Donnell). This is very early in the film, before, though not long before, we discover that Carruthers plans on slaughtering the apparently nice Heath and Morton families (for whom he has worked, developing new and powerful shaving lotions, and who Carruthers believes screwed him out of a fortune) with his giant mutant bats (okay, we know the bats exist), but even so that kind of sentiment coming out of the mouth of a character played by Bela Lugosi seems alien. I’m sure there are exceptions – I mean, hell, Lugosi even played a good guy now and then – but Lugosi very often played villains who, if they didn’t come by their evil naturally, had nevertheless been driven ‘round the bend long before we meet him. Contrast this with Boris Karloff, who frequently played villains whose descent we get to witness. Anyway, over the years I’ve learned not to trust Lugosi’s smiling face.

Which brings me to a few things, the first of which is sort of the key to where I want to go with this whole post. That is, the way Lugosi delivers the line about the engagement struck me, both times I’ve seen the film, as ridiculous. By which I mean, I laughed at it. Not, I don’t think, with derision, but more with a “Oh, Lugosi sure wasn’t suited for that kind of thing!” attitude. To what kind of thing? you may well ask. Happiness? An emotion we soon learn is a put on anyway. Well, get off my ass, it sounds funny the way he says it. Still, this kind of thing can infect a person, and taint how they engage with a movie, any movie, really, though I submit that horror and science fiction films of a certain vintage, and usually made for a certain budget, are the most likely to suffer at the hands of the infected. The process of watching such movies, and the early days of the revival of Ed Wood probably began the popularization of this, often seems to be one of presumption followed by a need for quick and relentless confirmation. If The Giant Claw is not bad enough, then your seventy-five minutes has just been wasted. And it naturally follows that whatever might actually be good or interesting about The Giant Claw might easily be missed because it is not why we're watching the film.

And this seems like a good time to refer back to the quote that opened this post. I know Richard, and I think of him as a friend -- how I think of him is immaterial -- and this quote, which comes from his excellent commentary track included on the Kino's The Devil Bat disc, is a more baldly-stated version of a philosophy that has been clear in his writings for Movie Morlocks and his superb yet now sadly mostly inactive blog Arbogast on Film. The philosophy, as best I can express it, is "Don't start a movie with your fists up." Or with a smirk on your face, is maybe better. This way of watching a film is not something I'm immune to. I mentioned The Giant Claw before, and I don't honestly know if there is anything good or interesting about it, because when I saw it I wasn't looking (that bird is something else, though). I mean, it can be a great deal of fun, and movies can also be a great deal of fun for all the wrong reasons. Many who lean towards the Smith/Arbogastian side of things can get so wound up about it that they're unable to enjoy Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that's not the kind of life I want for myself. But some years ago, at his blog Cinema Styles, Greg Ferrara, another friend of mine and of Richard's, hosted a blogathon, back when people did that sort of thing, called The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon. The idea there was not to have any illusions about Wood's talent, or to burn your leg with a hot needle any time you thought of laughing at something ridiculous in Bride of the Monster, but rather to celebrate the intent and the passion, and even the clumsiness. The Doing Of It, whatever it might finally look like. Otherwise you can find yourself not being amused by the content of an ineptly made film, but by its very existence.

And maybe it's not actually as inept as the hype, or "hype," has led you to believe. The Devil Bat, Richard strongly argues, is not inept. This being a Poverty Row production, it is cheaply made, but that's not the same thing. It was made by a crew of professionals (and by the way, a not entirely brief digression: Richard's commentary is of the "film historian" stripe also favored by your Eddie Mullers, your Tom Weavers, your Steve Habermans, and so forth, by far my favorite type, and as such is something of a juggling act between cast and crew biographies, necrologies, film analysis, and sidenotes. The connections, in a six-degrees kind of way, that Richard unearths between The Devil Bat and The Three Stooges, The Red Skelton Show, Notorious and lots of other stuff proves, if any more proof was needed, that the early days of the studio system in Hollywood was a crazy goddamn time. Richard also makes a point that might make "What was the first slasher film?" types throw up their hands in despair) who weren't delusional about what their job was in this particular instance, but tried to use their experience and imagination to make the best out of their limited budget, an admirable way of going about things that can lead to Cat People or it can lead to, well, The Devil Bat, which I do not, as it happens, like as much, or rather sincerely like as much, as Richard does. The film is structured around the deaths of the Heaths and the Mortons, so that outside of Lugosi and the the wise-cracking journalist pair (Dave O'Brien and Donald Kerr) who come in to investigate, all the characters are related, or betrothed, and yet the deaths register as nothing much at all. This heedless, ever-forward kind of filmmaking can be thrilling, but in a story like this kind of begs the audience to scoff -- it matters to no one onscreen, so why should it matter to me?

Though why is that kind of narrative base-touching all that matters? Richard, who doesn't entirely agree with me about this emotional, or emotionless, depending who you ask, facet of The Devil Bat, would argue that the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. And he's right. Nowadays, audiences, particularly the vocal online sort, will throw out that baby and then piss all over it for far less. Prometheus leaps to mind unbidden, and the cries of "But a guy who was a space zoologist..." and "If I was a space robot I would never..." that swarmed, smothered, and torched that film's chances to be seriously engaged with by anyone other than loony-bird "apologists" such as, well, myself. Hitchcock, were he still alive and making movies, would, in the face of the Plot Hole Condemnation Affiliate and the Two-Dimensional Character Persecution Affinity, say something like "Fuck this shit." You get the idea, I think, but my point is the kind of dismissal that Richard argues against is spreading and taking new forms, hiding as sophistication within the bodies of Glenn Kenny's "know-somethingish" types, who, quite frankly, plague us, and whose most distinguishing characteristic is that they walk into a film believing that they know better than the film itself what the film is, and what it's goals are. Or they bring with them a mental checklist of what a film is supposed to be, and if all those boxes aren't ticked, brother, you better watch out (Coppola's Twixt is a recent victim of this, but more on that, and this is a promise I can actually keep, later). This even applies to Ed Wood, which was the idea behind Greg's blogathon. I'm a bit dubious about the levels to which some people have taken their appreciation of Wood -- if he was something other than incompetent, I've yet to notice it -- but if Glen or Glenda? is only hilarious to you, then you didn't sit down with the goal of actually watching a movie. This does not mean that Glen or Glenda? isn't hilarious. It also doesn't mean that the "you" in my previous sentence has never applied to me. It has, and often. But boy is that experience becoming emptier and emptier.

So anyhow, that's the pile we're buried in, and it's left to The Devil Bat to fight its way out. Not liking the film as much as Richard doesn't mean I don't take his point, both in general and as it pertains specifically to The Devil Bat. Lugosi, Richard says in his commentary, is on point throughout. That's true. It's up to the viewer to understand where that point is located.

A Hand-Me-Down Dress From Who Knows Where

I know virtually nothing about Rob Zombie's music, beyond the fact that it exists -- for some reason, I feel this is something I need to put on the table before talking about how much I dislike most of his movies. But I don't know his music, so if that somehow feeds into his work as a writer and director of horror films in ways of which I'm completely ignorant, you must pardon me. On the other hand, for a guy who has in the past gone out of his way to talk shit about Zombie's film work, I've seen it all (with the exception of his little-loved animated movie The Haunted World of El Superbeasto). So if I've failed to enjoy that particular experience, a case could be made that I shoulder more of the blame than Zombie. But I'm a horror fan, and it's in my nature to watch a lot of horror movies, so I reject this argument. In any case, that's the only explanation for what led me to actually watch his debut feature, House of 1000 Corpses, a film I thought terrible enough to kill Zombie's film career right off the bat. Since then, I've had to suffer with something of a critical...not reappraisal, because that would have to come some time after the fact, but the construction of a wall of defense by those who would claim that the idiotic and morally broken The Devil's Rejects was a sharp 9/11 allegory, or that his remake of John Carpenter's Halloween was brilliant because it functioned as a biopic of Michael Myers, no pause having been taken to consider that this is a ridiculous idea. So all that's been going on, but it's never been loud enough to bother me too awfully much. My main takeaway from Zombie's two Halloween films was that, however much "original" material he dumped into that old story, he was spinning his wheels just three films in -- so he survived House of 1000 Corpses, but perhaps no longer.

Well, no. Because now, or earlier this year, we have The Lords of Salem, an original horror film that takes as the source of its horror witches, as in "Salem Witch Trials" witches, and this is not a thing that's really done much these days. Curious despite myself, I checked it out tonight, and it's...well. It stars Sheri Moon Zombie, Rob Zombie's wife who has appeared in all of his films, here as the lead for the first time in their working relationship. She plays Heidi, one of three hosts, along with Ken Foree and Jeff Daniel Phillips (whose character, Herman, is Heidi's boyfriend) of a strange, but super popular everybody, radio show based out of Salem, Mass., the premise of which seems to be a morning zoo (but at night) kind of show that regards occult matters with some amount of snark. And I guess they play music too? They at least play music by independent black metal bands who send their EPs to the show for on-air criticism. One album they received comes from a band called The Lords, a name that Ken Foree promptly deems incomplete and therefore expands to "The Lords of Salem," which is the title of this movie you guys. Why Zombie didn't simply call the band The Lords of Salem is beyond me, and the choice is dumb enough that I can't claim he overthought anything. Pretty much all of the radio show stuff is similarly inane -- these guys have every conceivable sound effect drop ready to heighten their extemporaneous conversations with split-second timing -- but the music of The Lords is the point of it all, and is rather effectively industrial and sinister. The music has an apparently nasty physical, and possibly psychological, effect on Heidi, and, we see in a montage, on various other women throughout Salem, who hear the music droning through their radios and immediately become hypnotized.
There's a plot to all this, as you might imagine. The stage is set by flashbacks of 18th century Salem witches, who in this film were actually witches -- that coven was led by Meg Foster, who, based on her performance, and how she agreed to appear, in The Lords of Salem indicates to me that she's down with pretty much whatever -- and a diary from the time, kept by a reverend (Andrew Pine) that provides all of the exposition that modern day Salem Witch Trial expert, and radio show guest, Francis Matthias (Bruce Davison) doesn't. I'm convinced, however, that none of this matters. Bruce Davison's good, I always like him -- he's the kind of actor who can breathe life and personality into even the most thankless role, among which number you'd probably have to count this one, but it's just that in The Lords of Salem, the centuries-old curse Matthias uncovers doesn't matter at all. Or almost not at all -- you need some sort of context, I suppose, to build everything else on top of. But the strength of The Lords of Salem -- and I'll go ahead and say that I think this is Zombie's best film, however little that might mean, considering how I began -- is how Zombie's visual inventiveness is able to shed the trappings of its rote ancient-curse plot and just go absolutely berserk. The film's great weakness is that Zombie still seems to think he's much of a writer, and so it's all equal to him. But in a very nearly good way, it's not equal at all.

One of the great frustrations of this, and so many contemporary horror films, and I do apologize for banging on this drum again, is that the makers consider it a sly talent to be able to evoke for viewers all the horror movies they've all, as one fandom, seen and enjoyed. It does nothing for me to hear Meg Foster say "cunting daughter," a jolt of a line from The Exorcist, but not a jolt of a line here, because it's not meant to jolt -- it's meant to remind. Similar winks toward Rosemary's Baby just get in the way of a film that, maybe about halfway through, I started to realize had much to recommend it. In terms of imagery, The Lords of Salem eventually becomes genuinely wild and unsettling, in ways both new and gratifyingly old (a couple of times, there are actual monsters on the screen). There's a section that begins with Heidi in the grasp of the contemporary witch coven, played by Dee Wallace, Judy Geeson, and Patricia Quinn, who operate out of Heidi's apartment building, which is almost relentless in its colorfully operatic nightmare. And speaking of opera, or anyway of music, and the score by Griffin Boice and John 5 is quite good, if occasional references are being made, and they are, to Popol Vuh. And since none of it is as tiresomely blatant as "cunting daughter," it could be that the effect is merely similar. Not bad as compliments go, if I do say so myself.

Even so, there's an element to all this craziness that feels somewhat unnatural, or inorganic. It often doesn't feel like the strangeness of a filmmaker whose warped subconscious just comes spilling out of his eyes. It's more like "Okay now, what's a weird thing we can do?" Which, hey, the creative process takes many forms, and one shouldn't have to be genuinely insane in order to create strange things. But again, it's that need to announce your influences that trips Zombie up, because Ken Russell is all over this thing. Yet the ghost of Ken Russell, and I'm not a fan, counts in this day and age, and maybe most days and ages depending on your tolerance, as a honest to goodness shot in the arm, so that I was left, as Heidi and The Lords of Salem as a whole flailed away into Hell, unable to separate my understanding of where Zombie's imagination came from, and being actually kind of thrilled to see that imagination on screen in a horror film that, given the paucity of this sort of thing elsewhere in the genre, genuinely new. At its best, The Lords of Salem does a better than average job of depicting Satanic evil let loose.

Of course, Zombie doesn't know his strengths, so after a pretty terrific ending, visually speaking, and in terms of the song chosen to play over it, we have a little bit of, not plot exactly, but even worse, exposition weaving in and out of the closing credits. It's not ruinous, but it is typical. At the top of his game, Rob Zombie is incapable of leaving well enough alone. So the apex of his filmmaker talents ends up being terribly frustrating. But I suppose I'd have to admit that things are looking up.

But please, don't take any of this as a recommendation. I won't have that on my conscience.

Please Stand By

I still plan on writing things, about movies and such.  David Cronenberg and the like.  I just feel so overwhelmed, you guys!  I mean "overwhelmed" in the sense that what I need to do to get back on track is very manageable but I'm kind of lazy.  But stay tuned!  Or "please stand by," as the title of this post recommends.

But The Cronenberg Series will continue, and October is on its way.  This year, though, October...has a twist!  About which more later.  Thank you for your patience.

Here's the first picture that came up when I did an image search for "movie."

You got your popcorn, you got your clapper, and you got a CD of your favorite music.  That's everything you need for a movie.