A space planned for rewriting some obscure horror films as stories. Sometimes, I review them as well, or think about what works and what doesn't, or what I would instead with the material given. Updated whenever a terrible epiphany strikes.
I started The Horror Doctor three years ago at the height of Quarantine. It was during a time when most of us were staying indoors, hiding from the amorphous and ominous thing we were warned could be lurking within both strangers and loved ones, and for which there was no cure and many deaths.
Three years later, the world has opened up again. The thing is still out there- we have since developed a vaccine and devised methods of detection, but the threat continues. Life, in all of its forms, goes on. Before the Pandemic, I particularly enjoyed going to the Toronto After Dark Film Festival – an event that happens every October showcasing independent and open premieres of horror and all manner of weird films. I missed this event during the Pandemic, but found an online substitute in the form of The Last Drive-In on Shudder with Joe Bob Briggs, Darcy the Mailgirl, and crew. Unlike After Dark, this was a communal event that allowed me to engage with the hosts, as well as my fellow watchers. As another contrast to the festival, I got the opportunity to talk about the show in real time, and riff on the films along with others around the world. Some people I know had this experience with Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I never really got into that. For a few years, as the Pandemic loomed over us, for me and my fellow Mutants, as the show’s community is known, it was all about blood, breasts, and beasts.
Alongside other benefits, The Last Drive-In got me to appreciate B movies again- those low budget productions with equal parts cheese and charm. Then, one day, I ventured out again. I met new people, some of whom became very special to me. I slowly began to rebuild a public and private life that I had previously feared had been permanently overtaken by darkness. In the midst of reforming my life from the ashes of the Pandemic, I found out about Killer B Cinema. My partner stumbled across tickets for Zuma and immediately bought them to cheer me up, suspecting this would be exactly my kind of thing.
After seeing only a few select people for so long, I admit it took some time and encouragement to warm up to the idea of being in a public communal space again. But in the end, thankfully, we decided to go. Along with a strange and enjoyable film, we also discovered a niche event filled with an IRL community of weird movie aficionados adjacent in many ways to Joe Bob’s Mutant Fam.
Nestled into Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood, the movie was held in a unique and cozy cyberpunk-themed bar known as See-Scape. Past the unassuming exterior, we entered to find a whole other world within. As Joe Bob Briggs has said, science-fiction – particularly the classics – and horror tended to go hand in hand. The cool and quirky See-Scape blends genres in both its aesthetic and purpose: the main floor has good food and drinks alongside board and video games, while the upper level features a patio, second bar, and versatile space that is intermittently a stage/dance floor as well as a theatre of the absurd.
This is, fittingly, where Killer B Cinema, a recurring film event running the first Friday of every month, resides. The B films selected, restored, subtitled, and shown by Lizzie Violet and Zoltan Du Lac run the gamut between strange international versions of familiar films like Cellat! (Turkish Death-Wish), Aysecik in the Land of the Magic Dwarves (AKA the Turkish Wizard of Oz), Pape Gudia (a Bollywood reinvention of Chucky), a North Korean propaganda film Hong Kil-dong, the vintage sci-fi spectacle Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and first for us, the strangely spliced and endlessly entertaining Filipino film Zuma. And then in October, 2023, we were treated to a classic: Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express.
I first heard about the film from a Creepshow episode called “Night of the Living Late Show,” in which a man recreates the 1972 horror movie in a virtual reality simulation so that he can live out his childhood interacting with facsimiles of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and later sleep with the Countess. The episode, with the protagonist’s death within the Night of the Living Dead simulation due to the machinations of his jealous wife, was excellent, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I needed to see the film for myself. And I did. A few times. I’ve reviewed Horror Express before on Letterboxd. However, I gained a new appreciation and perspective of the film after seeing it at Killer B.
So let me tell you how it goes. Before every film, we have the opportunity to order drinks and pub food, while Zoltan plays animated shorts in the form of a silly 1963 anime called 8th Man, or 8 Man. It is black and white with minimal frame rates, jerking wooden movements, and bad dubbing that nevertheless manages to be hilariously entertaining, particularly when watching it along with a live audience. It is based on the manga by Jiro Kuwata and Kazumasa Hirai in which a detective is injured and rebuilt into a humanesque android that functions as the sole member of the eighth division of the Tokyo Police, overseen by one Chief Bumble Thumbs.
But somehow, the episodes of 8 Man always foreshadow the main presentation, and this showing of Horror Express was no exception. So, after a strange episode with a child prodigy who invents an imagine-maker device that creates monsters from the psyches of its users – including dinosaurs – which 8 Man relentlessly strives to keep out of the wrong hands, leaving the poor boy with a train set to amuse himself, we get right into the feature film.
The best way to describe Horror Express is taking The Thing, but instead of a research station in Antarctica where American scientists succumb to infection and paranoia, we are on a Trans-Siberian Express from Shanghai to Moscow in 1906. However, this iteration of the being – which is also, albeit loosely, analogous to The Thing From Another World, and before The Thing, a creature adapted from Joseph W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? – is a fossil of an early hominid. This monster is really a creature suspended in ice, with the ability to absorb the knowledge of anyone it touches. As it makes contact with its victim, the cursed individual’s brain will essentially be erased, their eyes turned into unseeing white orbs with blood running down their sockets, and they will die.
It gets worse… Not only did this creature survive its deep freeze to steal the contents of people’s minds, it can also transfer its essence into the bodies of its victims, essentially hiding among the train’s passengers. In that sense, it seems to function not unlike a member of the Great Race of Yith from H.P. Lovecraft’s works, albeit without the switching of minds and bodies, just a simple possession of consciousness. The being has weaknesses, of course. It has a hairy hand that it needs to hide, likely the result of frequent astral masturbation. It can only use its power to mesmerize and absorb someone’s mind in complete darkness. At the same time, light allows the entity to pass as anyone else, and the darkness is a double-edged sword in that it both strengthens the being, while also revealing its red eyes, leaving it open to detection.
This entity, which we later find out is a being of pure energy that had been abandoned on Earth, manages to consume a thief (a spy who Peter Cushing’s character Dr. Wells has been heavily macking on – which actually surprised me as the man tends to portray sexless intellectuals like Sherlock Holmes, Grand Moff Tarkin, and The Doctor), and eventually a cast of suspicious characters including an engineer, a detective, and many others.
The friendly rivalry between Peter Cushing’s Wells from the Geology Society, and Christopher Lee’s Professor Sir Alexander Saxton is as entertaining as anything you might observe from these two real-life friends and consummate actors’ interactions. Saxton is nefariously hiding the creature’s remains in a crate for his great discovery, while the inquisitive Wells wants to know what he is holding, and isn’t above bribing a train employee to peer at this potentially groundbreaking discovery.
There were a lot of things I didn’t remember from my first watches. I didn’t recall that there had been a voice-over narrative by Christopher Lee at the start foreshadowing the events to come, and the actual discovery of the creature in ice in Manchuria. I recalled the film starting on the bustling train station in Shanghai. While perhaps this initial scene added more “telling than showing,” it’s a narration from Christopher Lee, and who would turn that prospect down?
I think there are so many wonderful things about this film: the ornate setting of the train, the snowy landscape of the journey, the dark isolation juxtaposed with the warmth of camaraderie broken by mysterious murders. There are even hints of romance: chemistry with Helga Line’s Natasha, and even the Countess Irina Petrovsky, played by Silvia Torosa, who is seen flirting with Lee’s Professor Saxton despite her husband standing by. And last but not least, the mad Eastern Orthodox priest Father Purjardov, played by Roberto de Mendoza – who basically looks like Rasputin – somehow manages to steal the show just as much as Lee and Cushing.
But what I think really struck me, both viewing it with others and seeing it again, is the turn of the century imperialism and patriarchal elements inherent within this film. Natasha and the Countess are clearly set up objects of desire to the predominantly male horror viewer-audience. Saxton, and to some extent Wells, blatantly look down on foreigners, even as they rely on their craft for transportation. Wells’ scientific assistant, the taciturn, capable, and pragmatic Miss Jones, played by Alice Reinheart, has her mind devoured by the creature- the only woman aside from Natasha the spy that it consumes. Wells ends up penetrating Natasha’s body (though perhaps not in the way he would have liked), when he conducts an autopsy after her demise. Eventually, he and Saxton perform surgery on the eyes of the creature, as well as its victims, and in the process see the last things the monster has seen, including beings from millions of years back. For me, this is reminiscent of the 8 Man’s imagine-machine, with its visions of dinosaurs fantastical creatures. Through this parallel, we spiral back thematically to the anime preceding the film.
The theme of penetration, driven by momentum of the male gaze, doesn’t stop there. There are frequent shots of the train pummeling down the track, a seemingly inexorable and blatantly phallic image which is central to the narrative. Purjardov the priest, desperately begs the creature, who he thinks is the Devil, to enter his mind and take his body. But I think the darkest embodiment of these ideals is the figure of the Cossack Captain Kazan. An imposing, large, bald man played by Telly Savalas, the captain chews up the scenery, intimidating the other passengers with his body language and crass manner, and proceeds – like the historic Cossacks of legend, a Slavic semi-nomadic militaristic people – to get results in direct and brutal ways. When first introduced, the captain is pictured in bed with a woman, probably another in the latest, while he intimidates an old staff member providing him news about the latest troubles on the train. He comes in, and – mockingly giving respect to nobility, in the form of the Count and Countess – proceeds to beat up passengers and threaten their lives until someone gives up “the murderer” among them.
Even the creature, hiding in another body – having looked into the eyes and violated the bodies of so many – is terrified of this man; the monster itself couldn’t comprehend the inhumanity that humans display toward each other. For all of its atrocities, the being is simply attempting to steal the knowledge it needs to build a ship, to get its borrowed physical form home. Captain Kazan, while supposedly doing his duty, uses that as an excuse to exercise his sense of power and brutality. The inspection scene still stays with me; as a child I was told harrowing stories about the Cossacks and their role in pogroms by my Polish Jewish grandparents. In some ways, Kazan seems a larger monster to me than the creature. The contrast of the two begs the question: which being is worse, the alien entity itself, or the manner with which humans treat those deemed foreign and “other.” Amidst the classism and anti-foreigner sentiment, and entitled superiority displayed by the English and American contingents, there is a powerful, violent, hyper-masculine energy that emanates off Kazan, as he physically enacts what the creature is doing psychically. It is no coincidence, I’m sure, that he endures the thing’s onslaught longer than anyone else.
I will say, more people survive this film than they would in modern cinema. Wells and Saxton manage to get everyone to another car of the train, and detach the car containing the creature, who, as it transpires, can reanimate its victims into extensions of itself. Thankfully, the bodies all seem to be on the detached cars. The entity is seemingly destroyed because Kazan’s superiors gave orders to Russian soldiers in another station to change the track of the train, and ultimately send it off a cliff should there be no word back. Even the soldiers question this order, realizing it would potentially doom countless lives, but knowing they have to be sure, that they have to obey orders. And it works out, but it may not have done. The reanimated corpses could still be on the surviving cars with vestiges of the being’s mind. Even if they weren’t, the train could have crashed and killed everyone.
The most haunting thing about the film, is that after we see the rest of the train crash and burn, the camera pans out to show the Earth in space, as we had previously seen through the eyes of the creature, and we’re left to wonder if a being of pure energy can truly be destroyed by a train wreck. And if we are in fact seeing the Earth through the monster’s perspective, are we any better than it? Is the danger actually outside, or always lurking within?
These were some of the thoughts that swirled around my head as the B movie fans began to applaud. The perspective shifts once more. And for all the harrowing events of the movie as well as our reality, the fictional deaths and theatrical ridiculousness, for all the fear and anticipation it took to get us here, to this place where we can gather in a room with a like minded community, to talk and laugh and eat and drink in person again. It was a long dark journey that led us to a good night. And I look forward to the future, to more films at Killer B Cinema, and all the other live events now possible as we collectively reanimate from the perpetual fog of the last few years.
I’ve been watching the entire Corman-Poe cinematic cycle – a series of eight films mostly based on the nineteenth century writer of the macabre’s stories – for a while, and have continued on into this Halloween month. I went into Roger Corman and Charles Beaumount’s film The Haunted Palace cautiously thinking that it would only tangentially be related to Edgar Allan Poe’s works, with some adaptation from H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward to a Lovecraftian, rather than a Cthulhu Mythos degree.
What do I mean by that?
More specifically, I thought it would be a loose adoption of Lovecraft’s plot focusing on the inherent malevolence and indifference of a reality based in cosmicism as opposed to specific elements of the Cthulhu Mythos- the Great Old Ones, Miskatonic University, and the like.
But I was wrong. And you know what? As an avid Mythos lover, and corresponding to the spirit of The Horror Doctor itself, I’m glad that the film adaptation wasn’t what I thought it would be. Of course, I’m not alone in this: Corman, the director, and possibly even the screenwriter, Beaumount, also didn’t believe this film would become what it did. Due to the intervention of American International Pictures (AIP), the film’s title was changed from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward to The Haunted Palace – forcing the addition of a few of Poe’s stanzas from the eponymous poem into the cinematic narrative. Corman wanted to try something new with his work. The result was different, but reminiscent of the horror-comedy experiment of The Raven – the film introducing Vincent Price and other classical horror actors, after the notable lack of them in Premature Burial, with its convoluted ending. However, AIP then made the decision to centre this work in the same continuity as Corman’s Poe Cycle, which, in my view, further obfuscated the film.
If anything, Poe’s The Haunted Palace poem is indeed more at home with something like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The poem is incorporated into Roderick Usher’s song in Poe’s short story of that name, and could have easily been an epigraph or voiceover in Corman’s film adaptation. Nevertheless, the stanza “And travellers, now, within that valley/Through the red-litten windows see/Vast forms that move fantastically/To a discordant melody …” fits well with the preceding scene of Joseph Curwen conducting experiments- terrifying cosmic eugenics- on captive women who end up cursing the town of Arkham, somewhere in the eighteenth century. This fragment seems to hint at the Cthulhu Mythos creatures known as shoggoth: eldritch abominations and predominantly formless beings created by, and in servitude to the Elder Things; shape shifting beings that can form any organ or limb at will. These were the monstrosities contained under Joseph Curwen’s old estate in Lovecraft’s novella. Distinctively, in Corman’s film, there is one entity that is vaguely humanoid and wavering between realities, and whom Curwen and his followers utilized to forcibly impregnate young women from Arkham whom he had mesmerized.
This might be a stretch, and indeed Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” is all about something that was once beautiful: the seat of a wise ruler was overthrown, the memory has become bitter and corrupted by the proceeding violence. You can see how that might fit “The Fall of the House of Usher” to an extent when you look at something beautiful becoming rotten through terrible acts, but Curwen’s estate is already a font of evil- taken from Europe, and transplanted there brick by brick to continue his family and coven’s work, into allowing the dark gods a way back to Earth’s reality through his mutants.
It is generous to say that Corman’s The Haunted Palace is a fully faithful adaptation of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” or even Edgar Allan Poe’s poem.
There are several other key ways in which the film adaptation departs from the source material. One such factor is that of setting. One could make the argument that the origin of Lovecraft’s Curwen did indeed come from the eighteenth century, but the main story took place in 1928 and not 1875. It may be that Corman’s film is set in the nineteenth century, complete with horse and buggies, to make it fall in line with the background and scenery of the Poe Cycle – it essentially being Poe’s time period – but it is fascinating to consider how the grafting of Charles Dexter Ward to the late nineteenth century as opposed to the early twentieth might pan out, and how that would change the telling of the story. Lovecraft’s story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island while Corman’s work occurs in Lovecraft’s creation of Arkham, Massachusetts.
Charles Dexter Ward is a bachelor amateur antiquarian who lives with his parents. He is fascinated with the history of his home and family. Through his research, Ward discovered his ancestor Joseph Curwen’s ashes in his old residence, and with more investigation into his occultic practices, he resurrected his predecessor. Ages before his death, Joseph Curwen had created a space-time spell that affected the flows of fate. This had his descendant – who aside from a birthmark, and a lack of a forehead pit and witchmark, was practically his ancestor’s twin – find, and bring him out of his “essential Saltes.” In the context of the novella, these “Saltes” are the basic compounds left from a body that can be reanimated into a humanoid form- to be controlled, and interrogated by a necromancer. After that, Curwen – who still speaks an older dialect of English – disguises himself as Doctor Allen. You may recognize this surname to be an important one in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Wearing a fake beard and dark glasses to disguise himself, Curwen manipulates Charles into helping him continue his work.
“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” novella begins with what seems to be Charles in a mental institution having physically and psychologically changed. The entire narrative is about family doctor Marinus Bicknell Willett attempting to figure out what is afflicting his young patient, which leads him to discovering secrets of the world that he really did not want to know. In the end, Doctor Willett discovers that Charles died a long time ago, having refused to do something truly heinous for his ancestor. In turn, Curwen killed Charles, hid his remains behind an old portrait of himself – which led Charles in his quest to find more information about him in the first place – and took his place, hoping to continue his experiments. However, the good doctor realizes what happened, and has studied just enough Mythos lore to not only unleash an ancient spirit of immense power on Curwen’s lich colleagues Jedediah/Simon Orne and Edward Hutchison, but to also undo Curwen’s own resurrection as he’s trapped in his cell in the asylum. In Lovecraft’s work, a young man’s benign but misguided focus on family genealogy takes a dark turn, and he is taken advantage of by forces he doesn’t understand; ultimately, reason, logic and kindness win out against the darkness, avenging his demise.
Corman and Beaumount’s cinematic narrative begins with Curwen and his mistress Hester Tillinghast luring young women to his estate. The purpose of this is to implant what seems to be Great One-Human hybrids inside of these women. Again, there are some interesting references evoked from their choices in name for Curwen’s mistress, the etymology of which has likely been based in Lovecraftian lore. She shares the surname of the mad scientist Crawford Tillinghast in Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, and Hester possibly mirrors the name of “Hastur,” a terrible deity adopted by Lovecraft from Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers.
In the film, we find a completely different practice from the Joseph Curwen in Lovecraft’s novella: while the man was involved in the slave trade, and experimented on countless human beings, he and his compatriots seemed more fascinated with reanimating and tormenting the dead through their essential salts in order to question them, and gain their powerful lore. Necromancy seemed the word of the day for Lovecraft’s Curwen, and forbidden knowledge his ultimate vice- at any cost. Further, we know that Curwen had fled one witch trial before, and was prolonging his life unnaturally. He took a wife, and gave to civic pride in Providence to keep up appearances before the citizens raided his lair after hearing rumours of his atrocities.
Corman and Beaumount’s work posits that Curwen, in taking Hester as his mistress, infuriated her betrothed Ezra Weeden. This, combined with seeing countless young women go to their estate, brought the wrath of Arkham down on him. Curwen’s death in the film seems far more personal, compared to the relative civic duty that Lovecraft makes clear in his work. Yet this also sets the way for personal revenge, as Curwen, in being burned alive by a mob, curses the entire town for generations until – one day – he intends to return.
One hundred and ten years later, in the film, we get a Charles Dexter Ward who isn’t a young twenty-six year old introverted bachelor who loves antiquity, but an older, more cynical and sarcastic man, accompanied by his wife Anne to Arkham. They have come to this town to check on some property that is in Charles’ family. Charles clearly doesn’t even want to be there, and it’s Anne who is fascinated with this dark and dreary town with its sullen, unfriendly people, as well as many afflicted with a terrible mutation. In this version Doctor Marinus Willet, the only person in the town who isn’t superstitious, doesn’t even know them, but he guides them to the estate, informing them of what occurred before. Further, it seems to be Joseph Curwen’s portrait on the mantle in the estate that begins to affect Charles’ mind, and he begins to struggle with the spirit of his ancestor. It is interesting to note that this Curwen doesn’t try to befriend or even manipulate Charles. Charles himself has almost no idea what is going on. In the end, a hapless but kind man is overcome by the soul of his ancestor. The idea of bad blood telling is both a Poe and Lovecraftian idea, or a Gothic one at least. There is some resonance to Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep.” While in “Charles Dexter Ward”, Curwen is resurrected from his ancestor’s remains, here he switches minds with his descendant, and no longer has a body of his own.
In fact, there is a moment where I thought Curwen would get his original body: when he and Simon Orne and Jabez Hutchinson- in this iteration, as his followers, rather than his friends and equals as in the original story- robbed a graveyard. However, that is only to get the corpse of Hester Tillinghast back, to reanimate her. It is the only instance beyond Lovecraft’s novella where we see Curwen use necromancy to raise the dead, and there is no mention of “essential Saltes,” just a repetition of the Latin word for “live.” I do have to say, though, that given the cold and dark beauty that is Tillinghast’s actress Cathie Merchant, I can’t say I particularly blame him.
However, whereas Lovecraft’s Charles Dexter Ward had his father afraid for him, and his family doctor fighting for him, in Corman and Beaumount’s work it is his wife Anne, played by Debra Paget, who won’t leave him despite all of his terrible changes in behavior after coming to the estate. In the end, she calls on Doctor Willet – the descendant of one of the men who helped burn Curwen – to help her and her husband. It is interesting to see the character dynamics play out in this setting. Lovecraft’s Curwen uses blackmail, extortion, and murder to get his way in “Charles Dexter,” as a matter of course, whereas the Curwen in Corman’s film is petty and spiteful against the descendants of the people who killed him the first time, but strangely proud of the man whose life he has now possessed. He almost admires Charles in resisting him, though only because of that “Curwen blood,” which of course is an extension of him. He is an entity that ruins Charles’ life, consuming it into the void that is himself, and attempts to rape Anne. When he gets tired of doing all of that, he even gaslights her to Doctor Willet, trying to get the man to take her away, and let him continue his plans. Vincent Price plays both Charles and Curwen, and the mental dynamic and struggle between them pretty well, but that is no surprise when you look at his dual-roles in Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum a few movies ago in the Cycle.
And those plans are sinister as all get out, even as they are amazing to someone who is a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos. You have a man who possesses a copy of the Necronomicon, a book that has links to the powers of the “Elder Gods” – or as Lovecraft calls them Great Old Ones – such as Cthulhu himself, and Yog-Sothoth. You also have the fact that the afflicted villagers and their ever-worsening mutations are reminiscent of the Innsmouth Deep One-Human Hybrids, and the Dunwich Whateley sons of Yog-Sothoth in Lovecraft’s work. This is not just a Lovecraftian film, you realize at this point, but a Cthulhu Mythos adaptation. And it is exciting to see something like that occur in 1963, long before Stuart Gordon’s films, and other depictions. This may well be one of the first cinematic adaptations of Lovecraft, and you can witness it through so many of these themes.
But while many of those elements – the Necronomicon and Yog-Sothoth – are referenced from Lovecraft’s story, several plot point in Corman’s film are different. Curwen’s ultimate plan in making Anne the mate of the shoggoth, the demonic thing in the wavering green pit, is foiled when Charles seems to regain control of his body. The townspeople attack the estate after Curwen used fire to assassinate two of their number. This actually troubles his followers, as, after waiting for Curwen to return for over a century, they wanted to continue resurrecting their dark gods. This makes the viewer wonder if there was going to be a mutiny, though it never happens. Then, Orne, Hutchinson, and Hester Tillinghast disappear, as Willet goes back to rescue Charles from the fire. I can almost forgive this rush job given how awesome performances were by Price, and Lon Chaney Jr. – who plays Simon Orne – but it does feel a little rough. Even so, I do like the idea that however we got to that point, there is the strong implication that despite the destruction of the portrait, Joseph Curwen is still in possession of Charles Dexter Ward, and ending the film on that dark note finishes strong. There is no stalwart, elderly doctor that vanquishes evil here. No banishment into dust. No deus ex machina destroying Curwen’s peers off page or off camera. Curwen continues on. Evil survives.
It makes you wonder who had a far worse end: Lovecraft’s Ward, who at least got to die after all of his suffering, (though he knew the terrible truths of the world and was forced to commit unspeakable acts before he did so), or Corman and Beaumount’s Ward, who didn’t know anything before being subsumed by his ancestor’s malignant soul. The film’s end, and the thoughts they conjure up, tend to linger long after their stories are over.
It’s mentioned by Willet – or perhaps it was the descendant of Weeden – that the estate, or “the Palace” of Curwen and his family was taken from somewhere in Europe in pieces, and reassembled in America. I feel, too, that this is the case in a more localized geographical, but literary way in North America. According to Corman in his interview with Chris Alexander in Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964 A.I.P. took fragments of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem and attempted to expand it, to mutate and build blocks from it as the Elder Things – and sorcerers after them like Curwen – would shoggoth. One can even argue that Curwen and his associates learned how to reanimate the dead through breaking down organic beings into their salt contents by studying – and feeding – shoggoth as basic building blocks of life. But more like Lovecraft’s Herbert West – and it’s hilarious as there is a Benjamin West as one of the townsfolk that killed Curwen ages ago – in that they attempted to regrow this reptilian skin loosely over a whole other kind of body of work in Lovecraft himself. “The Haunted Palace” stanza, at the end of the film, “While, like a ghastly rapid river, /Through the pale door /A hideous throng rush out forever, /And laugh—but smile no more,” just doesn’t quite … fit.
I am a fan of stories and films that use epigraphs – fragments of literary passages and quotes from other works – and even include parts of them within the body of their narratives. Even Lovecraft and Poe utilized these devices. So if I were to change anything about The Haunted Palace, (aside from not having Orne, Hutchinson, and Tillinghast vanish for no reason, or Charles suddenly return again, or Curwen falsify that act), and I had to make this very clear specimen of the Cthulhu Mythos in the cinematic medium fit in with the thematics of the Corman-Poe Cycle, I wouldn’t have used “The Haunted Palace” at all.
Instead of “The Haunted Palace,” one could speculate on what might happen if the filmmakers took another tactic. What if we go back to right after Curwen’s burning, and have Vincent Price recite in his velvety sardonic voice:
That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.
And then end the entire film with the following lines on screen:
But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued.
Just think about how these stanzas fit the themes, and the content of this film: the mob mentality, the plot of the film, the non-human elements in the form of the mutants and the thing in the pit, the desecration of the dead, and the ghouls that play with death and flesh. It goes back to the mutants, and the disease, and the curse. I mean, if you are going to name a Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos story after Poe’s work, you might as well title it “The Conqueror Worm.”
But really, it should have just been The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and if you look at “The Haunted Palace” as a genuine inspiration of this film, perhaps it is less a commentary on the film itself, and it more refers to its place in the Corman-Poe Cycle. It is placed in a continuity of lush and vibrant, startlingly colourful films, but it is twisted, dark, and cynical. Perhaps the poem talks about the beauty that once existed in the Corman-Poe Cycle, but is now consumed by Lovecraft’s indifference towards any concept of human life and meaning, and the changing of a cinematic era: where all of that dark wonder has become shadows of what they once were. Chris Alexander, in his Corman/Poe, mentions that the change of writers – from Richard Matheson to Beaumount – represents a shift in the Cycle from an immersive experience of twists and turns to “the mechanics of plot.” He argues that the film is almost “pornographically direct” and he further calls Lovecraft the antithesis of Poe, and in his interview with Corman, the latter mentions how Lovecraft is darker and more overt: an approach that both he and Beaumount were looking for in trying something new.
And I think they did make something new, though not necessarily what they might – or might not – have been looking for. They made the first Cthulhu Mythos film for the general public. And while it might be awkward to place it into the Corman-Poe Cycle, as one of Lovecraft’s adaptations it is solid on its own merit for the most part. Like Lovecraft, while it might seem more blatant and steeped in realism, instead of the surrealism of the previous films, Corman’s film reaches into the supernatural and its inherent madness, leading to further grandiose and terrifying spectacles to come.
Dedicated to Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, My apologies.
Vith thiz roating I Hanz Vilhelm Friedreich Kemp, vill quyotely, unt vith gret purpoz, rekort mien accunt ov how I von. Ov ou I dit it.
Ugh. Shit. Pardon my English. Or German. No one in Transylvania can tell the difference. I said, with this writing I Hans Wilhelm Friedrich Kemp will quietly, and with great purpose, record my account of how I won. Of how I did it.
Vater and Mutter were at it again in the tower, making like Act Three of Die Walküre. I was a quiet child, practically a mute. Vater had no patience for it, lost in his cognac, or his work. Mutter was kinder. No. Not kinder. She was nice. She played for us. I still remember the smell of her cigars, and the thrum of her violin. But, like always, they tended to forget about me. They left me with their manservant. Fritz. A mean, nasty sort of fellow. Always furious at me for staying in the bathroom for too long. It was the only place I had to myself. I could barely speak, child that I was, but Mutter and Vater were proud of me for using the pot. Der Großvater, never der Opa, never knew. Vater told me he did not know of me, but would see me when I had grown more. I was a big boy. I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t understand.
One day, in our cramped home that I loved, but was too small, Fritz tormented me again. He liked to see how close he could get with his matches. He knew I’d say nothing. I couldn’t say anything. Vater trusted Fritz, though he had reason to be angry with him.
Once, when I was born, Fritz insisted he’d found the right person, one Abt Üblich.
He read worse than I write, and Vatter flew into a rage, choking him until Mutter pried him off. Fritz. Always fidgeting with his tie. On his suit. It was always crooked. A man has to be presentable, was what he told me when he didn’t go on about how awful I looked. It wasn’t my fault. I was a sickly kind, as my parents knew.
But that day, Vater and Mutter were working, and I could hear them. Vater calling her name over and again like she was lost, and it was a miracle to hear anything. Even now, I still hear the sound of the William Tell Overture, and The March of the Swiss Soldiers to this very day.
It made Fritz mad. Fritz was always mad when Vater was with Mutter. I think he was jealous, and he growled like a dog when he flashed his matches at me. I kicked them away, while he laughed. But we were in my room, and while Fritz talked about needing a roll in the hay, I don’t think that is quite what he meant. But I saved him. I pulled him up to the rafters. I even straightened out his tie.
I think he stopped working, then. And I was scared. So I took the secrets of life and death with me. The book. I took The Secrets of Life and Death with me. Shit. Vater lent it to me, to help me learn to talk. To read and write. My handwriting is so messy.
And then I fled.
The rest was a blur. People screamed when I went by. They said that a monster was on the loose. I was terrified. A monster? Where? I couldn’t see it. But it followed me. I hid. There was a talking doll near the lake. An old man that thought I was some kind of soldier, or mercenary. But then his family came, and the monster with them.
And I wanted to go back. I wanted to find Vater and Mutter again. I wanted to tell them that I ran off. I wanted to say that I was sorry. I would be a good boy. A good kind. They didn’t come for me.
They didn’t look.
I knew why. The book Vater gave me told me everything. I handled it the best I could. But the villagers made a party. The rest. The windmill. The pitchforks. The torches. The marshmallows. Then it all came down. I thought I heard someone scream my name.
By the time I woke up, I was under wood. Not waking up with wood, but it was on top of me. And a big man beside me. I growled. I could talk, but not well. And I was coughing. The villagers came. I thought this was it. But they pulled me out. They saw the man beside me. He was in pieces. I could have used some of those. They said the monster was dead. And he got me.
Und ja. Die fiendje monsta dit ziz to me. Mien aye, und mien arm und hant. My apologies. My handwriting. And yes. The fiendish monster did this to me. My eye, and my arm and hand. The hermit gave me the idea. He thought I had more holes in me than Swiss cheese, but I realized that what I was was an Army Knife. I had options now.
They called me Kemp. And so Kemp I became. You would not believe how many drinks they gave me in the Beer Hall. How my new family doted on me. A survivor of the monster. A hero. Kemp must have been a big boy like me, before the fire and the wood got to him. Kinder, both of us, almost made kindling.
Almost forty years passed. Vater was gone, fled the land. I think he was on the rocks on a ship. I choose to believe he drank himself to death on a cruise. Mutter remained, working for Großvater until they pried his will from his bony fingers. I got a nice Prussian mustache, even though we are in Transylvania. I fixed my arm. I got a new one. From the lumber yard, I tell them. Sometimes both arms lock up, but the villagers never seem to remember which side is what. And fire doesn’t scare me anymore, after seeing it up close.
And I am not afraid of the villagers. These people accepted me. They look up to me. Many of them never even saw me when I first wandered off from my home. The high collars really help my neck. The hat I wear too covers my forehead. And my eye is fine. I just wear the patch for emphasis. Perhaps my German is too over-emphasized. It’s easy to lapse back into those growls. But they never notice that slip up.
Riots are ugly things. Every once and a while, I stir them up before they can think of doing them themselves. The last great riot? That was when people got into a fight at the hall over whether Transylvania’s ruled by the Swiss, or the Romanians! Or if we are our own country! Fools! We are Transylvania. Where everyone knows each other, and little boys shine shoes, and men blow horns in their lederhosen. And where we brew beer, and brothels. Especially brothels.
And there are other little pleasures. I play with them. They see me. They respect me. They understand me more than they did their Baron. When Frederick Frankenstein came after the will, I wanted to have my fun. I hadn’t seen my home in years. Mutter wasn’t around. I heard the rumours, though. Just like that sweet music. They made another. Another monster. I went over to the Castle. These hands, even now, are hard to hold a pen. I could break this table if I wanted to. I did a few times. This time, I controlled that knock at the door.
I enjoyed Frederick’s discomfort. He asked me, when I flexed my stiff arm, like a toy’s, if I had a war wound. Pah. Nien, I said. It was … “It vaz ripped out of itz zocket,” I laughed. I had to. This was too funny. He had no idea, “by zi fiendish monster zat your grandfather created!”
Watching him squirm was the best part. I even got to play some darts with him later in the billiards room. I could never throw, not even when I lost that … doll in the lake. And if I did, I would have broken the wall. It was easy to distract him, and just place them there on my arm, and then the board. I couldn’t – I wouldn’t – reveal myself, but I was going to win.
And I did. I had my fun. I didn’t have it in my heart to hurt my cousin. My brother. My little brother. And when I saw what Frederick did for him, after playing some more with the villagers, I really did want to give them some sponge cake. I love sponge cake. But my hand came off. My cousin might be gentler, but he is stronger than I thought. That soun of a veetch.
So off to the lumber yard. Ja. And then, to another time-honoured tradition.
To the brothel.
But I, Heinrich … Henry von Frankenstein, will not need any timber for that.
Fangoria co-owner Tara Ansley told us repeatedly on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) to see Talk to Me in the theatre, and advised us to come into it as cold as we could. And that cold ceramic hand hits hard; this handshake with the dead is the stinging slap of gore and horror you know is coming, but yet can’t quite predict. Telegraphed to an almost ridiculous degree, the film’s initially slow momentum takes a concept that could be funny, trite, but ultimately forgettable, and transforms it into something genuinely dreadful, eliciting a range of feelings in the viewers. Neither a handshake nor a slap, Talk to Me closes its hand into a fist and delivers a solid punch to the gut that upends the very foundations of reality, ruthlessly blurring the lines between the worlds of the dead and the living.
It’s not that teenagers meddling with spirits of the dead for fun is a new idea. It isn’t, not at all. No. Directors Danny and Michael Philippou, and writer Bill Hinzman play with your basic horror tropes, and bring them to a terrifying but familiar place – an embalmed, porcelain-coated hand, reputedly belonging to a deceased medium is used casually and carelessly to interact with the dead, with serious repercussions. In place of a Ouija Board, the cursed artifact is passed around at parties; teenagers, spurred on by peer pressure and an obsessive fascination with the macabre display that ensues, call upon the hand to possess them, for the sheer hedonic rush of it. Following the horror precedent of a roadside harbinger of doom, reminiscent of the graphic death of Charlie in Hereditary, and the deer roadkill from Get Out, there is a pivotal moment at the beginning of the Australian Talk to Me in which the protagonists stumble upon a suffering kangaroo on the road, and Mia tries but can’t find it in herself to put it out of its misery with her car. These early scenes provide character introduction, but more importantly hint at the darkness to come; this film gets ugly, fast, as it is made clear that unanticipated consequences come from well-meaning actions.
The idea of a hand with powers beyond human comprehension is also nothing new, though this film offers a variation on previous models. Legend has it that a hanged murderer’s hand can create a Hand of Glory that renders people motionless when they see it. A Monkey’s Paw can grant three wishes- in the absolute worst ways possible. The hand in Talk to Me opens up a portal to the spirit world, allowing a tormented soul caught between life and death to possess a human host. Aside from the universal appeal of occult practices, holding hands with this cursed object has another draw as it simultaneously puts the user into an altered state of spiritual elation, as Mia — a protagonist mourning the second anniversary of her mother’s death — describes. Mia’s backstory is explored through memory and montage. Mia has an emptiness and longing for connection. She uses the hand to escape this, if only briefly- to not only feel better, but also find deeper meaning, and an understanding of the events that led to her mother’s death. The answers uncovered may be precious truths, or, more likely, malicious lies that will drag her toward actions that ultimately hurt her, and destroy her remaining relationships. After the initial ungodly high, she becomes fascinated with the hand primarily because it allows her, for a fleeting ninety seconds (the time it is deemed safe to be possessed by the hand before you lose yourself to the control of the spirits), to be reunited with her beloved mother, or at least, an entity reminiscent of her mother, to predictably horrific results.The draw to connect with her once more causes Mia to exceed the allotted time, jeopardizing her relationship with her only friend, and throwing the young boy she considers a brother into the tormented grasp of the spirit world.
Like all forms of media, there are many ways to read a horror film.The obvious metaphors are there. As mentioned, the hand is first a drug experimented with by irresponsible teenagers, before it gets, for lack of a more apt phrase, out of hand. Seen through some of the more graphic scenes in this film, the euphoria induced by the hand can also be interpreted as a symbol of sexual experimentation. It is portrayed as a pubescent rite of passage seeped in peer pressure, as one after another volunteers to touch the hand and invite the spirit into themselves, with dramatic consequences, and often accompanied by an orgasmic spectacle for the teenage crowd of onlookers.
The hand, passed around among friend groups and brought out at parties, can be seen as symbolic of social media: the reference to viral trends and online spectacle-making platforms like TikTok come to mind as the teens record the possessions on their phones, traded around for popularity’s sake. Along with a total disregard of future consequences, the teens show a distressing lack of empathy towards the peers they manipulate and pressure to undergo the invasive ordeal. Cautionary tales of social media’s addictive, self-delusionary and sometimes destructive nature as demonstrated through the teen’s documented encounters with the hand are told through a lens of the unreliable narrative.
There is also a commentary implicit in the narrative about the dangers of ignorant people meddling with powerful tools they do not understand until it is too late. Like Pandora’s jar, once opened, it becomes impossible to put the evils back inside. Further, this film critiques the human need to interact with perversity and death, to tempt fate and succumb to temptations, amid extensive backdrops of graphic horror porn. Fans of this genre go to movies in part for gratuitous gore, but we stay for explorations of our collective human tragedy, interspersed with ridiculous frivolousness. We enjoy vicarious experiences of fear as epic bloody scenes are splayed out on the screen, as well as the uncanny, such as a disembodied hand enthusiastically passed around among teenagers like a joint at a party. In this way, Talk to Me does not disappoint as it takes us along for a ninety minute journey, far longer than the altered state brought on by a ninety-second handshake, as we encounter vicarious trauma, and grapple with alienation and the drive for connection and belonging. The screen allows us this exploration of pressing existential questions from a safe distance, leaving us exhausted from a profoundly disturbing and cathartic experience.
For Diana Prince, Darcy the Mailgirl, of The Last Drive-In. Happy Belated Birthday.
From a shattered store window, a black and white television screen flickers with static. There is a picture on there, barely visible to anyone who might see it, who might remain. It’s as though a mashed pumpkin leers out from a space long dead, or alive not so long ago.
It is the only sound in the silence that is Haddonfield now.
It lumbers into the deathly quiet town. It had never left. Its breathing is laboured, muffled, from its labours. The Shape tilts its head to the side, to look at the treats that another’s trick had made. It kneels down, bending on one knee, at one small form. It moves its mask off what’s left of its face. Just like the others, it notes to itself, filled with insects and snakes. They chitter and hiss in the growing darkness of the night, and the chill of autumn. The Shape sees them in the gloom and the dying street lamps, feasting on burned and rotted faces. Some of the masks have survived. Green warty witch faces. The leering facades of skulls. The visages of Jack O Lanterns.
All these small shapes, their brains burned from the inside, boiling their blood, sizzling their nerve-endings, the ozone of electricity and elemental power unleashed, and then releasing compartments or using fragments of power to release the spontaneous generation of pestilence to swarm, and eradicate the larger forms nearby. The Shape feels nothing as it peels off those rubbery death masks, looking at the paroxysms of screams from the remains of the adults. It notes how some of them held the children, spilling candy and chocolate and apples all around them, offerings to a grim, arbitrary harvest that only The Shape can appreciate now, reluctantly.
It looks at the remains of one of the masks, with its silvery component, its medallion and its piece of stone. For a few moments, it thinks it sees the rune of a Thorn on it. It pauses, and something shifts inside of it. Something deep in itself, in the place where its chest is, where it lungs are, and its heart resides. It can feel it.
Nothing in this town is alive anymore. Nothing is alive anywhere.
It can’t explain how it knows, even if it talked, even if there was anyone around to talk with about it. It looks at the knife in its hand, stained with chemicals instead of blood. There were trucks. After the televisions played the song, the endless cycle still reverberating through the town, through the country, perhaps even the world, it had made its way to those vehicles. They had been around the stores, the houses of families. These strange suited constructs, The Shape noticed they didn’t bleed or come apart like the others. Only chemicals and wires. Only plastic faces. One, if one still lived, might have believed The Shape to be disappointed by it all: to see these ends as anticlimactic.
But The Shape doesn’t feel that way. Not at all.
It feels … different now. These were all treats. And this was a trick. Something is lifting from The Shape, something it cannot name.
It walks on. It breathes, more shallow, behind its own mask. It recalls finding it in a store, and even now it smells like devil’s rain. It considers going to another house. It pauses. It knows how far it would be. How easy it would be. But somewhere, deep in the void that it is, The Shape can’t find itself to bother.
It knows that she is already gone. Perhaps gone while babysitting another child. Or hiding. It didn’t matter. Not anymore.
There is only one place now. The Shape steps on crisp fallen leaves, scattered confections, slithering vermin, the burned and rotted corpses of parents and children, the scattered grains of broken dreams.
Until it finds the house.
Its footsteps become heavier on the old floorboards. It closes the door behind it, more out of habit than any other purpose. It has been habit and instinct for so long, in any case. Blood, viscera, pain, killing has been the only thing it ever cared about. As it stomps slowly, ponderously, up the steps where a family used to be, long before this last Halloween, it remembers how disgusting it had been. Before it had been darkness, before it had been perfect. Before the doctor tried to mould an intelligence from it, before all of those experiments, before the fear, it remembered the revolting smell of skin and lust, and grossness of being. Of human bodily function. Flesh making flesh. It couldn’t stand it. The idea that something tied it by blood to blood. The knife had been cold and perfect. Then it moved on, it recalls as it comes to the room where it started, to the vessel that carried it, and the other thing that put it in that vessel. That girl. That woman. That man.
Sister. Mother. Father.
Little Sister.
Ugly, there should never have been more than one of him. Stars and cycles. Blood. How much of it had been real? How much had any of it mattered? He stared that day into his own darkness, and knew that it wouldn’t stop until there was no one, and nothing left to kill. But it is quiet now. There is nothing. There is just the night.
The knife drops from his fingers as The Shape loses cohesion, leaving him empty, possibly bereft. The mask feels artificial now, fake and dead. He slowly strips it off of him. The clatter of the knife echoes through his home. The cool fall air kisses his face almost unbearably, making him raw. Tears flow down his face. He kneels on the floor, near the window, looking for something. He remembers now. Before the doctor tried to kill him, before he tried to lock him away, before he experimented on him silent and helpless, before his parents locked him away, before he started all of this by ending it.
He finds it in the floor boards. He sits down, cross legged, all of the force and momentum of what has kept him going now long gone. He has just enough wherewithal to put it on. And as he puts the old, small clown face on, he knows The Shape is gone. He smiles behind his old face to match it. He takes his treat. He sits against the wall under the window for a long time, before slowly sliding to the side, and slumping over onto the old, hard wood.
And this is how Michael Myers spent his best Halloween ever.
So Fangoria sent me an email as part of my subscription. In it, it implored me to go see Ari Aster’s 2023 film Beau Is Afraid. It was the first film I’ve seen by myself in a long time, approximately three years. I took an Uber at practically the last minute to see it before opening day.
And let me start off by saying that Beau has a lot, and everything, to be afraid of.
When I was talking about Aster’s 2019 Midsommar, I was reminded of the fact that it came out the same year as Joker, and far before I decided to see Beau Is Afraid, I knew that Joaquin Phoenix – who played Arthur Fleck and eventually that iteration of the Joker, on his journey parallel to Florence Pugh’s Dani Ardor – would be the aforementioned Beau.
My initial thoughts, after describing Beau’s existence are the following. Imagine a nightmare maternal Jewish guilt-trip psychodrama set to the tone of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Brother Where Art Thou? and you might get something like Ari Aster’s latest film. Let that set in for a few moments. It’s so tempting for me to envision Beau Wassermann as something like what would happen if Fleck from Joker had never fully thrown off the narcissism of his mother, or killed her, aged and broke down under her manipulative care, and was left completely adrift. He even had one love interest, who does exist, that he held one innocent wish to be reunited with one day.
There is something incredibly surreal and almost magically real about this movie and its narrative, and like Joker or Taxi Driver you have to wonder if Beau’s mental illness is causing various truths and hallucinations of the Freudian, and Jungian kinds to intermix. I can definitely see there being many different interpretations of this movie going forward, complete with critics toting the “elevated horror” line, but also examining the strengths and limitations of A24’s arthouse film sensibility or ethos. Is this film something that pushes the envelope of genre, or storytelling? Or is it more artistic indulgence, and vanity?
We get glimpses of some concrete truths in Beau’s life, even if they are distorted, and necessarily limited by his own perspective. It feels like everything bad that can happen to him does, from the small and inconvenient to the utterly tragic: and all of these little things turn into a tide that threatens to drown the man, especially as he can’t find any water. It’s basically a Comedy of Errors, with little bits of Manners – tongue and cheek words of graffiti on the wall, and throwaway statements – that shape this poor man’s utter existence. For instance, Beau is prescribed medication by his psychiatrist that he has to drink with water, but after somehow losing his house keys and luggage while having slept in due to loud music and neighbour harassment in his apartment, he doesn’t get to the airport to get to his mother’s, and the apartment happens to have shut off all of the plumbing. This leads to him having to go outside into a dystopian neighbourhood filled with corpses, and fights, and orgies – and because he leaves the door open without his keys, the barbarians from outside invade his space and utterly destroy it.
And then, afterwards, he finds out his mother died.
Seriously, Ari Aster seems to be attempting a monopoly over grief and familial breakdowns in the horror genre: from Hereditary, to Midsommar, and even The Strange Thing About the Johnsons. I mean, I can firmly believe that his narcissistic businesswoman mother Mona Wassermann is a witch, a failed Ellen Taper Leigh, for various reasons I won’t go into, and some of her “love” for her son borders on the incestuous if only because her sense of self always trumps his every time: in life, and in death.
Beau’s tragedy isn’t just the death of his mother, and the low, awkward, uncomfortable paces of finding out this truth, and dealing with the cold, unfeeling, shallow, self-centered actions of everyone else around him. It’s that in her attempt to mould him into what she thought of as the perfect man, and make him love her the way she wanted him to express that affection – and only in that way – he has severe mental trauma that the world around him seems to exploit. It renders him nearly inarticulate, and passive: to the point of small things like not having enough change, or being able to renew his credit card utterly fuck him. Some people with mental illness or challenges have called this a difficulty executive dysfunction. Literally, you see Beau wrestling with one frustrating, infuriating thing, only to have to put the other aside and you really feel for him: if only because we have all been there in some way, or form.
It just doesn’t let up. It just doesn’t give him a break. Instead, the film proceeds to break Beau down with various twists and turns, and folds in reality, time, and belief that never give him relief. And some of these you can see coming a mile away. On risk of making a terrible extended pun, even sharing an orgasm with another person, someone he once loved, ends poetically and horrifically, and it only cascades from there after one false moment of peace. Even his mental retreat from the meta-fictional play in a play, whose mileage may vary for viewers, and the strange animation that would not have been out of place in Midsommar, only leads him into a deeper, dark forest of his mind, the feminine, maternal, voice-over telling his story and threatening to overcome and manipulate his first-person perspective, until eventually after not being able to find water at the start of the film, he finds all the water he could want …and very much cannot escape.
There is so much to say about this film, and how almost every agent in it wants to take away Beau’s sense of identity, and I feel like as I describe it I make a lot of other cinematic and even literary comparisons to other works in order to properly elucidate my feelings on how I’ve experienced it. Sometimes, as I followed the film for two hours and fifty-nine minutes, I felt like I was in a Jewish cautionary folktale hijacked by Art Spiegelman’s Prisoner on the Hell Planet comic. I don’t think this is a coincidence, at least in my mind. In the comic, Spiegelman attempts to communicate how his Jewish mother’s death, and her own mental illness before it – her suicide in that case – traps him. He struggled with her own behaviour while she lived, along with the rest of his family, and in her death and how people reacted callously to his grief – and supposed abandonment of her in life – she still imprisons him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Spiegelman’s mother who put him in that place, but the trauma that shaped their lives.
Beau’s mother came from a long line of cold, unfeeling women and she attempted to escape it by pouring toxic love all over Beau. She smothered him, and he rebelled in little ways that he castigated himself over. He doesn’t live with her, but her shadow looms over him. It threatens to consume him with her impossible expectations, and her projected disappointments. She’s become larger than life at the end of the film. Whether or not she’s dead is irrelevant. Whether or not the world is inherently flawed and unfair to Beau is also irrelevant. When Beau is sitting in that broken boat as judgment is proclaimed on him by the prosecution, and the defense is barely even heard: it is that childhood trauma winning over the adult sense of knowing none of this was his fault. It’s heartbreaking to watch especially as it eventually swallows the man, and the boy he was, whole.
And as the credits roll over that upended boat, as the criminal that is Beau is unfairly punished, as the shadows consume the anonymous and distant jury of his self-condemnation into darkness, you realize that Beau’s mother is only part of the terror in this ridiculous film. It’s the entire world. It’s Beau’s world that is the ultimate horror, where his answer to Kafka is that he is not helmsman, he is less than Gregor Samsa’s vermin – and you can recall the spiders in his apartment at the start of the film – and he does find his brother, and himself, and he doesn’t like what has seen. Nothing makes sense, but everything does, and it isn’t the answer he wants, but one to which he has resigned himself.
If I were to give this maddening film a rating, I would give it three and half imagined family members out of five. I say check it out if you are lost, and want to find someone or something even more so.
It has been some time since my last experiment here, a dissection of another thing that I’d come to love.
I’ve maintained The Horror Doctor for over two years. It began as the alchemical child of the Pandemic and personal grief. Then it became something else.
I originally was going to use this as a platform, or medium to rewrite horror films into short stories the way I envisioned them in my head – the way I would have written them – hell, Demon Wind was going to be my crowning revised masterpiece. But again, it changed into another thing.
I’ve even mentioned before how I would only focus on reviewing obscure, or more quiet films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and leave the mainstream horror and weird films to their own devices. But my Blog had other plans. And The Horror Doctor, that was just a working title before I would call it something else, a placeholder for what I was grasping at: finding my voice, and collecting my thoughts in this bizarre and amorphous genre crossing different media.
But The Horror Doctor has stayed.
And yet, I’m going to just say that The Horror Doctor is going to go on something of a witch’s sabbatical.
Like my Mythis Bios Blog before it, I haven’t been writing here as often as I once did. Letterboxd really got me to write shorter and more concise, or just stream of consciousness and note-based reviews. My analyses, and syntheses, take time and commitment in which my brain doesn’t always find itself as much these nights. Between going out more now, and my other new activities, I am not in that mindset in the same way as I was when I was here for about two years along with most other people.
I am not abandoning this Blog, even if WordPress itself has made itself less user-friendly. There are still some Lovecraft films I want to compare to their source material. I also plan to write something about Barbara Crampton’s upcoming adaptation of “The Thing at the Doorstep,” which will have more exploration of sex and identity. You bet your soul I will be back here to deal with that. I know I will find a film I really want to talk about, or reminisce over a story. And hell, I might want to create and cross-post more weird and horror fanfiction.
This year is almost up, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to say anything about this trajectory or just leave Ray Bradbury here before me talking about a normal child being adopted by monsters, and wishing that he wasn’t human. But I am a monster, in that I have accomplished a lot, and while it is my natural impulse to say that it isn’t nearly enough I want to spend a bit of time telling you what I’ve done before Father Time comes in with his scythe much to the second-hand embarrassment of Death of the Endless whose sense of zen can only be peachy-keen for so long.
I am a Moderator for the Lost Drive-In Patreon. I did a podcast on Elevated Horror with the Lost Drive-In Discord server’s administrator Magi Savage, and Critically Optimistic: Movie Reviews. Magi is responsible for me having done, and doing, both things. When I wasn’t brushing up on some Eli Roth’s History of Horror to say something intelligent on the horror equivalent to the comics industry marketing their sequential works as “graphic novels,” I make Spoiler Discussion channels, and generally hang out on the Discord while Joe Bob and Darcy the Mailgirl comment on a movie we are streaming: and just in general. The Lost Drive-In Patreon is great, by the way. I never intended to stay so long, and I came for the DVDs of Drive-In Theater and MonsterVision, but I stayed for the mugs and hoodies, and the excellent company in the Patreon Saints server. Darcy created the Patreon to restore and preserve all of Joe Bob Briggs’ commentaries throughout the years, along with other media: as part of Drive-In history, and it is something to definitely check out if you find yourself interested.
Then, I sent a letter into Fangoria responding to its Editor in Chief Phil Nobile Jr.’s Monstrous Musings column on the Terror Teletype newsletter. It specifically focused on Halloween Ends. Phil decided to publish that letter as a Monstrous Musing itself, for which I am grateful. Did you know that two years ago, when this Blog started, The Horror Doctor was featured as a link on Fangoria’s website? It’s true, and now there is much more content on here than there was last. And it was an honour to have something I wrote in the newsletter. Unfortunately, it only exists on email to subscribers but it was great having my name featured under a Fangoria logo: something that I hope will happen again. If you want to see the contents of what I wrote about Halloween Ends, let me know and I will show it on this Blog. I was told by Barbara Crampton herself that she told Phil that I was a good writer. I have the Tweet preserved, for posterity even now: right along with actual praise from Jerry Smith on that same platform. I wish I could convey what that means to me, but I think it speaks for itself.
But I did something else as well. As of this writing, I created my first ever short film screenplay: a horror film adapted from a short story I made years back. And I entered it into a contest called Killer Shorts: whose judges include Joe Bob, as well as Barbara, and Kane Hodder. I meant to apply to it a year or so before, but I didn’t have a screenplay.
Until now.
It is my first attempt. A prototype. The short story I wrote, that I adapted this monstrosity from, had a tough critique from Strange Horizons, and it was only the first of several stories in the series I made before life and the Pandemic distracted me from continuing them. I am trying to be realistic about my chances in advancing through the rounds, but the mere fact that I made this happen, that I experienced and questioned aspects of my story when I switched from the medium lens of prose to film, and that I will get feedback from some professionals I’ve grown to respect and admire, and that I sent in what I did is an achievement.
I want to thank my friend Miriam for reminding me of Killer Shorts, and also Killer Shorts Top Ten FInalist and Hollywood HorrorFest Best of Fest winner Phillip Dishon for being interested in my work, and taking a look at what I’ve made after my submission. It is probably too late to format my work properly for Killer Shorts, but he has offered to give me guidance for other film festivals. And as I’m going over this invaluable feedback, I realize there is still a lot for me to learn.
I am still not where I need to be, I feel, but I am slowly getting to where I want to be. And that is a lot of places. I’ve learned, over these past couple of years, that it isn’t a straight path but several crooked ones that meander and branch off, and that sometimes you need to mentally split up and cover more ground just as much as you should stay together. I wanted to share these triumphs with you as the uncertainties of another year encroach along because you’ve been here, or you just got here and you are interested in what I’m doing.
I’m glad I did this. All of it. And I am thinking of making more screenplays with more of the knowledge and insight that I hope to gain. Who knows: maybe one day there might be a remake of Demon Wind in the works … or something based on that as a monster of my own design. In the end, one of the major reasons I am stepping away a bit from this Blog is to write less about other people’s works, and to make more of my own original creations: or at least more creative endeavours.
I do plan to earn that Silver Bolo one day. But if I don’t, that is all right too. I just want to construct a monster to be proud of. Happy New Fears, my fiends – from a student of horror.
The thought grows like the branches and roots of The Halloween Tree, nebulous and almost lost to time, but something always cycles back every year in the Fall. Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming” was a short story I discovered by accident. As a child, I had this anthology called Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum: one of the many hand me down books that my aunt would give me over the years. I didn’t realize, in the Eighties or Nineties, that Hitchcock hadn’t actually written those stories, nor had any hand in them really. All he’d done was written an introduction to the book itself, where he posits that anything can be a monster.
And this sentiment applies well to “Homecoming.” Ray Bradbury’s story is situated at the very back of the anthology, where I didn’t even look, until one day, in my parents’ third house, in the basement, near the family computer, I did. It must have been October, close to Halloween. I remember having no plans; I had only the memories of All Hallows’ Eves that I would never have again (many of my old friends had moved on, and most of the people that I knew were gone). I was feeling sorry for myself in that basement: sitting in front of my parents’ old Windows Vista computer, I looked at the nearby bookshelf, and discovered this old friend I’d barely even read as a child, sitting with the likes of the abridged and complete version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
But I did know Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 was required reading for high school, which is where I was introduced to his writings, and it just so happened to fit part of my goal to read all the dystopian literature I could find. I also continued on with Bradbury due to Neil Gaiman as he is also a tremendous fan of his, reading some of The Martian Chronicles he loved. I had tried – and failed – to write a story called “The Man Who Forgot Neil Gaiman,” in the vein he did for Bradbury before him. But in order to potentially forget something, you need to find out what it is. So I had to check out this story. And it is a tale about monsters and what they can be; Hitchcock describes the anthology’s publication date of 1965 as “the Age of Monsters,” and refers to someone starting a “Monster Pen Pal Club.”
The above is an appropriate choice of words when you consider the idea of a group of monsters coming together, acting like people even though they are clearly not human, but something different – though it doesn’t take away from their sense of solidarity with each other, or with the reader and viewer. Take the 1981 film Monster Club, for instance, with Vincent Price’s Eramus introducing John Carradine’s version of R. Chetwynd-Hayes to a whole underground social club world of different beings, and species, and cross-species with their own rites and rituals, after saving him with a bit of his blood. There is this sense of an old world of (if you will pardon the quotation from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein), “gods and monsters” coming to an end; these beings no longer have the same level of fear or respect they once enjoyed.
There will be Spoilers. Reader’s discretion is advised.
Ray Bradbury published “Homecoming” in the magazine Mademoiselle back in 1946, and I found it ages later, reprinted in my weathered copy of the Monster Museum anthology. The story itself deals with the Elliot Family that has come to dwell in an old house in the Midwest, specifically in Illinois, who is preparing for an annual reunion. The main character is a member of the family, a boy named Timothy Elliot, who desperately wants not only to be part of the festivities, but to be accepted by his relatives.
It’s hard for Timothy to fit in. He’s been led to believe that he is ill or deformed: with “poor and inadequate teeth nature had given him,” and, as he tells his pet spider, appropriately called Spid in the Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum reprint, and in later versions included in From the Dust Returned and The Homecoming apparently named Arach, “I can’t even get used to sleeping days like the others.” Despite this, he enjoys the prospect of his family’s nocturnal existence, “He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking; sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.”
In this, Timothy Elliot shares a lot in common with someone like Marilyn Munster: just as the latter has always been considered the “uglier” or “more unfortunate” member of the Munsters, the former is tolerated for his deficiencies, as he is always on his family’s side. The Elliots, a family “of ghosts and monsters,” are a lot like the Munsters, both supernatural beings living in modern America. In fact, they also have a lot in common with the Addams, who also attempt to coexist with American society. Indeed, Bradbury wrote a letter to Charles Addams wanting to make the equivalent of a Halloween Christmas Carol novel with Addams’ illustrations and collaboration; while those plans fell through, they eventually led to a fix-it fantasy novel called From the Dust Returned that links older Elliot Family stories with new ones to create a sense of continuity.
But while the Munsters have Lily, Herman, Grandpa, and Eddie – vampires, a Frankenstein’s creature, and a young werewolf, who are all kind – and the Addams Family have Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Cousin It, and Grandmama, also largely benevolent, with a few naturally violent tendencies here and there, their “creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky” selves, the Elliots are more traditional monsters: more alien and predatory, and less inclined to interact with humans beyond bloody necessity.
If we go purely by “Homecoming” alone, the Elliots don’t have as many defined personages as the previous fictional supernatural or eccentric families. Even so, they have the following kinds of family members: Grandmère who is a thousands years old mummy and ancestor who barely moves, a Niece Leibersrouter who changes into a mouse and back, Timothy’s siblings: Ellen who seems to do something with collecting body parts, Laura “who makes people fall in love with her,” Samuel who likes to read eldritch books, and Leonard who “practices medicine,” and a host of uncles, aunts, and cousins. Aside from Timothy’s unnamed vampiric parents “Mother” and “Father,” the most notable members of the Elliots are his Uncle Einar and his sister Cecy, or Cecilia Elliot. Timothy’s Uncle is a large, bat-winged man that always favours his nephew, taking him on various flights, while Cecy is a girl who sleeps most of the time, and possesses the bodies of various beings throughout space and time. Cecy has one of the most inhuman mentalities: just as willing to change the life and abandon a woman she’s “living through” to drown in mud pits as she is to enter the body of a bird.
There are a whole host of beings in the Elliot Family, but Timothy has exhibited no powers of any kind like theirs. He goes as far as praying to “the Dark One” to “Please, please, help me grow up, help me be like my sisters and brothers. Don’t let me be different.” In a family of diverse supernatural creatures, Timothy is an ordinary human child.
He sees himself in a disquieting, disassociated manner: “Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and kept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing. In imagination he was outside staring in.” It is reminiscent of the unnamed protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” escaping from their tomb, seeing the living celebrating, and wondering why everyone is scared of them. In this case, it’s a mortal boy knowing he’s different; in an All Hallows’ Eve family party of the undead and unnatural, a child wants desperately to belong, feeling like no matter how hard he tries, he will fail.
It is an interesting existential juxtaposition here. It isn’t just Timothy being terrified that he doesn’t fit into this familial multitude of witches, ghouls, and goblins, but there is a sense of impermanence within what should be an immortal tribe of nightmares. As the Elliots observe: “Dawn grew more apparent. Everybody was embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation.”
It makes me think about what Ray Bradbury writes in “Afterward How The Family Was Gathered” in his From the Dust Returned that fleshes out “Homecoming” and other Elliot stories: he mentions that his inspirations for the family came not only from his own childhood Halloween experiences, but those with his family members now long gone. It is no secret that most beings, most families, are mortal; as older relatives will eventually decline, younger members potentially scatter. It is a spectre most of us face. As time marched on through the faded leaves of this world’s Fall, Bradbury dealt with this inevitable sense of loss and memory by writing about the Elliots, and other fictional characters.
But even Ray Bradbury himself is gone now. His memories of tricks and treats, and fun aunts and uncles only exist now in the words he’s left behind. “Homecoming” is written as a children’s story, depicting an old House and trees in constant motion, along with leaves, along with the darkness. The prose is poetic. Sad. Mirthful. It is transitory. Like the autumn wind it references, like another Halloween, another year, this story is magical, existentially scary, and all too brief.
Like Timothy’s life.
Imagine being that child who realizes not only is their family going to be gone one day- the same people they know deep down they are not a part of, and that even if they continue to exist, you are going to die. You won’t be there for Salem of 1990, or there is a good chance you won’t. And all your mother can say to you, in words that still haunt me, is this: “we love you. Remember that. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day […] And if and when you die, your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that. You’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come see you every Allhallows’ Eve and tuck in the more secure.”
There is a reason why this story ends with Timothy crying all the way upstairs to his room. This part hits hard even as it inspires, in a terrible reversal of Robert Munch’s I’ll Love You Forever – where this time the mother is inured to her mortal child’s inexorable death. Certainly, the lyrical childlike prose combines with cold adult truth under the soft, dry, rasping blanket of dark fantasy, making “Homecoming” unique.
I also suspect this story inspired others. The Nightbreed from Clive Barker’s 1990 film of the same name, and its 1988 original novella Cabal, find beings hiding from humanity to keep themselves alive, originally under a cemetery called Midian. While the Breed have been persecuted for centuries, there are others – such as an old man tortured by a psychopath – who desperately want to belong to a people of such difference. It takes an outsider by the name of Boone, who becomes Cabal, to cause a further diaspora of his own people, already scattered from their former lands and holdings, to attempt to find something more, to gain something new.
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book features a male child named Nobody Owens who is raised by ghosts in a cemetery along with a vampire, and a Hound of God, has shared traits with Timothy, who we find out in Bradbury’s other stories was adopted by the Elliots. And then there is the fact that while Charles Addams never collaborated with Bradbury on the Elliots, one of Neil Gaiman’s collaborators, Dave McKean of Sandman and Vertigo Comics’ medium fame, as well as his independent work, used his trademark abstract and Expressionist pastiche or collage art style to adapt Bradbury’s story into the illustrated novel The Homecoming.
It would be easy to leave this story on a downer note. However, Timothy Elliot has more stories to tell, and a bigger role in his family as time goes on: in From The Dust Returned, he is found helping others to maintain their beliefs and through keeping them in existence, becomes a storyteller in his own right, solidifying the idea of Timothy as an Elliot, despite his differences. I’ve already mentioned how the Elliots are parallel with the Monster Club, the Addams, the Munsters, and even the Nightbreed. Perhaps they can also be referred to as “the October people” in one Elliot story of the same name, or “the autumn people,” as Ray Bradbury described the carnival folk in Something Wicked This Way Comes, those who essentially live and breathe the Fall and Halloween.
But even without eternal life, how many horror lovers can be said to be similar? To be the same? Diana Prince, also known as Darcy the Mailgirl on The Last Drive-In has said that Halloween never ends (which is great for this article I’m writing in November). The show she co-hosts with Joe Bob Briggs identifies its viewers with the Nightbreed – with Mutant Family – and I’d argue even the autumn people. Blood, breasts, and beasts is the creed of that viewership; the acceptance of grisly death, darkness, alongside glorious celebration of childhood and the past.
While Timothy Elliot isn’t biologically immortal, as his mother said, in his heart he is part of the Family, and their stories that he tells will keep them alive. He even goes as far as to help save some of them: especially their central ancestor. Timothy remembers them, and we, as the readers, remember him. Family becomes more than blood; more than magic. It’s a place that never goes away. October Thirty-First ends, but will always live on in those that cherish it. Halloween, horror, and the stories we tell, will last forever. While Timothy and the rest of us are all mortal, autumn children who will one day be ready to be tucked into our cold, silent graves, we have some remembering, believing, and partying to do in the meantime. Our stories will live on, in the deep, colourful, and shadowy places that wherever we are, we will always call home.
Imagine you got the Naturom Demonto, and use its pages of finely cured human flesh to go back in time to 1981. A year later, New Line Cinema acquires the distribution rights to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, but even as it makes the film successful, it denies him and his crew the rights to make a direct sequel: one Evil Dead and the Army of Darkness.
But the Book in your hands is a Monkey’s Paw, and the mere existence of you here at this time in history changes everything. Evil Dead is released in fifteen theatres, but all the people that saw it in the original timeline do not see it. Or Stephen King doesn’t write a review of the film, and someone else creates an article that attracts another distribution company. Or producer Irvin Shapiro didn’t help screen the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. Maybe the film goes underground and builds a large following over time. Or it becomes a rare oddity horror fans talk about in small viewings: pondering just how something that looked like The Exorcist piggybacking on The Night of the Living Dead just could not have caught on? Perhaps if you told these hypothetical film students and watchers that it might have been different had there been a sequel, and some Three Stooges elements – which is hilarious as Raimi directed a short film in 1978 called Shemp Eats the Moon – injected into the high energy, insanely paced cinematic monstrosity, with more of a callback to his proof of concept work of the same year Within the Woods.
Yet there is a demonic force, a demented genius, in Evil Dead that could not be ignored. It wouldn’t just end with one weird, incredibly gory, disturbing high octane aberration. Certainly, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, if it were called that, would not allow it to be so, and that Kandarian Demon is restless as fuck once you mess with that Book in general. Yet if that first film had a different set of reviewers or critics, another distributor, or if Raimi and his crew gained more capital in those early years, could the Evil Dead franchise have evolved differently?
I think about what would have happened if Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn hadn’t existed and we simply gained a direct continuation from the first film. Maybe Raimi attained the fame and influence needed to convince New Line Cinema to let him make the film he planned, or simply produced and distributed it himself that early on. What would we have seen?
It’s more than possible that we might have gotten Army of Darkness almost immediately, placing Ash in a medieval era surrounded by Deadites. Whether or not Army of Darkness would have had different production scale, or practical effects in 1987 instead of 1992 is anyone’s guess as temporal manipulation goes, but perhaps Ash would be a different hero entirely.
When you look at Ash Williams in Evil Dead, he is fairly toned down from the loud-mouthed ultra-masculine chainsaw wielding badass that we all know in popular culture. He genuinely seems to care about his friends, and especially his sister Cheryl and his girlfriend Linda. Ash isn’t the one that turns on the tape recorder in this movie, but it’s his obnoxious friend Scott that does it just out of some morbid curiosity, or to freak out the rest of his friends. Ash is a young man that wants to do right by his girlfriend, and his sister: and even after being forced to do horrible things to the bodies of his possessed friends and loved ones in order to survive, the magnifying glass necklace he gave Linda keeps him going. He destroys the Naturom Demonto and the Deadites boil, sizzle, and die away in putrefaction. Everything is horrifying in this film, and there is no respite: and even at the end, when everything seems finally put to rights, the Kandarian Demon – whose perspective we’ve seen as it violated Cheryl with the trees and attacked the others – lunges at Ash, and ambiguously kills him.
But what if the Kandarian Demon, without the anchor of the Book – which isn’t called the Necronomicon at this point, the name borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but rather the Sumerian version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead – uses the last of its waning power, which had been latent in the Knowby cabin and its grounds even before Scott played the recording along with the energies of the Book’s destruction to send Ash back in time to kill him, and therefore save the Book and continue its reign of terror on humankind?
What I’m trying to get at here is what if a serious Ash, without the Three Stooges comedy of Evil Dead II, went back to this medieval era in what might be a version of Kandar Castle? What would the characters look like? What would the franchise look like going forward from that?
I do not have the Necronomicon with me, sadly, to tell me about the dark pasts and futures that could have been. But it is possible that there could have only been two films as a result of this lack of comedy, or very little of it. On the other hand, this version of Evil Dead II might have been a major hit of a darker Ray Harryhausen variety, and inspired the need to make more of itself, and gain more profit. It is also possible that, like most popular horror franchises that start out with darker and grimmer tones, that so many sequels would have resulted in the work eventually parodying itself. You don’t have to look far when you consider Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. So it is possible that Raimi may have led the series to the camp and black comedy it was meant to go into itself, or someone else directing the future films would have begun that process with varying results of quality.
Yet Raimi, when he did get Stephen King’s aid, along with Dino De Laurentiis, did something truly amazing. Not only did Raimi make a soft reboot of his original concept, removing or not mentioning the existences of Scott, Shelly, and Cheryl, and take a cue from Within the Woods where Ash actually gets possessed, he takes the comedy and ridiculous parody that might have happened to his franchise anyway, and institutes in the second movie. It’s almost as though he, and his crew, anticipated this change in tone, or mythology. Horror, more than a lot of cinematic genres, loves to reinvent its own continuity if only to create and propagate more of itself. Ash becomes more belligerent and arrogant, even absent-minded. There is an aggression there that is exaggerated as opposed to the PTSD-fuelled fight and flight of him and his companions in the other film iteration. The chainsaw arm, of course, its utter madness makes its appearance. The other companions that come in afterwards are all antagonistic until they work together, and then they don’t.
And Henrietta Knowby, played by Ted Raimi, changes the relation of the Deadites not only to Ash and his companions such as Annie Knowby, but to the audience as well. Before this, we saw a group of friends turn on each other as the invisible turned tangible and monstrous through their bodies. And while this does happen in Evil Dead II, we have the presence of the tangible malformed evil of Henrietta locked in that horrible cellar. The Book is now called the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis as well, and more about Kandar itself is revealed through missing pages, and the Dagger. After this, we see Ash sent through a portal into the medieval period: even though by the time we get to Army of Darkness, the beginning is different from the Evil Dead II ending.
The change in continuity would not have phased Raimi and his crew either, or even the tone of the series. Raimi himself had background in comedy films, and it is more than possible that he not only paid attention to Friday the 13th and A Nightmare, but also Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm: a franchise that constantly reinvented its own mythology in hallucinogenic, dreamlike ways.
But I keep on thinking about what would have happened if Evil Dead II had been made the way Raimi originally intended, or if the comedy simply hadn’t entered into its sequels. I wonder about which film I like more: Evil Dead, or Evil Dead II. The second film does add a lot more to the Evil Dead Mythos: with the Book, the Dagger, the Pages, a terrifying being in Henrietta who we don’t see transform into a Deadite like the others but is well into her advanced stages, Ash facing his own dark self through possession and also his severed hand, the chainsaw prosthetic, the portal into the past, and the whole iconic insanity of this world.
Yet there is a simplicity in the first film that I greatly appreciate. It is straightforward horror with suspense, and tension. Evil Dead II has us laugh at the hijinks that happen, helping us with moments to release the tension that has been wound throughout every mad action and gore scene while wincing at the weirder moments, but the first Evil Dead makes us sympathize more with the people in that cabin. The sequel lets Ash survive, while the first one seems to kill him off, and it just hits harder in my opinion.
But if the franchise continued without the comedy, what would it look like? The closest thing I can think about, when I consider alternative paths, is The Evil Dead remake directed by Fede Álvarez, but also produced by Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Robert Tapert. It is, arguably, another soft reboot of the original but there is no comedy in it whatsoever, or tongue in cheek references – popular-cultural or otherwise – and it is genuinely unsettling, and upsetting. David Allen is an Ash Williams analogue, a throwback from the first Evil Dead film, who actually dies at the end. And Mia Allen, a drug-addicted artist, is like a darker version of Cheryl Williams who actually survives and is freed from her possession in a ridiculous but clever way, as well as some mutilation on her part. The other characters are almost different versions of the ones from the first film, and the Book is called The Naturom Demonto again. Mia does take that chainsaw, but she doesn’t make it into a prosthetic, and I can’t help but wonder that even with the Ash Williams cameo at the end, what a sequel to this film would have been with that evil Book of the Dead still in existence. In some ways, I think a sequel to this 2013 remake would have answered a lot of my speculative questions.
As it is, Evil Dead Rising, written and directed by Lee Cronin, with our usual suspects as producers might provide another possibility: with a girl named Beth going back to her sister Ellie and her family, and finding that damned Book. The funny thing is: Ash’s love interest in Within the Woods was called Ellen. And maybe Mia Allen’s journey, this Cheryl Williams analogue that survives, is continued at least spiritually by Beth in a world of Deadites and Kandarian Demons without laughter for humans, but plenty of slaughter for their enemies.
I need to take a breather. It was an eventful night — both that fateful frightful Friday of Fuck, as the Angry Video Game Nerd would so eloquently put it on a good day — and the subsequent weekend where I rewatched Sledgehammer on the Ad-ridden Tubi as Shudder took its considerable time uploading Week Eight onto itself. As frustrating as that was, I can understand. I, too, would procrastinate before having anything to do with these artifacts deep from the bowels of the Iron Man Vaults, where the Necronomicon and the Lament Configuration would fear being held.
Just as I am procrastinating right now, as I’m writing this.
I can’t help but think that — by the standards of what I’ve gleaned from the standards of the old Iron Man Certification (or as I like to call it after going through a similar experience, the Broken Man — I would have been done by now. I would have been more than done. I summarized an entire terrible movie. I paused one movie, increment by increment, to write sometimes one or two lines. It’s amazing how you can spread an hour and twenty seven minutes into an eternity. This isn’t even covering the commentary segments, where I went back — once Shudder did post them — wrote shorthand notes, and tried to polish them into cohesive thoughts. That is the painstaking methodology that has formed, and we will be dealing with hereafter: minus Tubi.
I am inept in a lot of ways. I have never gone to film school, or studied film in an academic or professional setting. There is much terminology I don’t know, and words and descriptions for things and cinematic phenomenon that I can barely — and frustratingly — grasp.
Oh, I know what you’ve said about that before Joe Bob. You’ve called upon filmmakers towards the end of your One Cut of the Dead episode from Season Two, told them that Hollywood isn’t the place to develop your new work anymore, that there is far more accessible technology, and all one needs is the inspiration, and the drive to keep going: to keep learning on the way. Isn’t that part of what this infernal exercise into VHS Appreciation Night is about? To hit that point home? I remember what you said. I remember you said you wanted people to send you their films.
Just as you want people to send you these Iron Mutant Notes.
I know. I’ve had to learn along the way, adapt as much as I can with the resources that I have. I’ve written movie reviews before, in my own way. And in the end … sometimes you have to go to the greatest lows to achieve the most glorious heights. Sometimes you have to pursue damnation before you can achieve enlightenment. Sometimes you need to go into the depths of Hell to find your way to Paradise. And sometimes, the greatest obstacle to achieving what you want is your own procrastination: your own terrible freewill in which you realize that the only thing holding you back is you.
I remember what you said. I also remember what I said, at the beginning of my account, and testament.
I am not an Aspirant.
And I will prove it. Right now.
*
Part II: Things
If Sledgehammer, both narratively and cinematically, had issues with space-time distortions, Things is an exercise in a fragmented dimensional singularity.
A disaster.
Sanity Check: A Casio keyboard soundtrack. Thank you, Joe Bob. I didn’t have the words to begin to describe this bizarre soundtrack. But my question: there was a father looking the same age as his daughter in this film, never mind a father and daughter period? And were those good cheese sandwiches? I’m lactose intolerant. Also, with regards to the reason we watch bad movies, by the analogy Joe Bob uses, I will be a god after not only exercising the muscle that watched these terrible movies, but in writing about them — and this — as well. And on that note …
We get to it. What Joe Bob said about lighting generally being an issue with camcorder-made films comes back to me as Things appear on the screen.
But at first, there is some light. It’s Left Field Productions Presents being ushered in by an extremely appropriate nuclear explosion. It kind of blurred together from the beginning of Sledgehammer, but this is the real atrocity: the one that’s about to begin.
There are already screams, heralding the credits as “An Andrew Jordan, Barry J. Gillis Film.” You know, because it isn’t confusing enough that is shot on video in 1989 and I kept calling Sledgehammer a film interchangeably, but now this fine specimen is mixing its putrid metaphors together too. Right. Let’s get to the point, please.
It’s just as well it started as brightly with thermonuclear fire because after light, there is always darkness. Things shimmers and wavers into view, obscured by fluid shadows. Then, the title is clear with a gunshot to the head, putting me of my mis — No. Now, we are in a dingy basement. There is a woman in a white dress, and a devil mask hanging up laundry, presumably also ironed if we look at the implement behind her. There is tacky, weird synthetic music and reverberating laughter as a man who resembles R.L. Stine comes through a door.
Basically, he tells the woman he wants her to have his baby, because he and his wife can’t. And hell, he will even “Pay for love.” The lines sound like they are just read off a piece of paper with the enthusiasm of a corpse. But then the lady starts to slowly take off her dress, and undergarments as our bespeckled protagonist watches lecherously. That eerie faint giggling echoes through the background as this stripshow continues. She has a gorgeous, lithe beautiful naked body under her moustached devil mask. Hell, she even fits the Drive-In requirement of breasts all too well. Unfortunately, as with the aforementioned New York Nights, neither beautiful naked women, or great titties, or dark bush is going to save this movie: or our souls. I am just getting crude because my brain is melting, and I am already regretting my life.
Anyway, she almost goes into the shower, and the man says she doesn’t have to. The dialogue is … He insists on her having his baby. And it sounds like he’s having a stroke when he says this line. “I want you to have my bab-y.”
She bends down, laughing, and out of the shower takes out a carrier and states that she’s already had his baby. So now the man is going “Coochie coochie coochie …”
Shakespeare. I am going to be saying this a lot, throughout this film. I am afraid you will just have to deal with it. Something in the carrier, pink and indistinct — the lighting problem Joe Bob mentioned possibly — bites his annoying man’s hand. And he screams.
Then, he wakes up from his nightmare, but ours continues. Now, I have to say that this terrible and off-rhythm dubbing exceeds a lot of Kung-Fu and Dub-Fu films I’ve had the experience of watching, and this movie manages to do it in not even a funny way. It even translates to the sound abruptly disappearing as he screams and writhes silently. I am waiting for that Oscar, man.
Discordant music that’s supposed to sound domestic and comforting plays, but it is more of a cacophony than all the annoying teenagers in the world. Don’t worry, I will get tired of these smart remarks as the despair sets in again, but I wouldn’t bet too much on it. He gets off the couch, and presumably takes some crazy pills from the kitchen cabinet while walking to the bedroom. It reminds me of a silent film in muddled colour, and a demented musician or track playing in the background. The lighting keeps changing. Reality is fluid here. It’s like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on technicolour drugs, and surrealism gone unironically wrong. I …
Right. So he gets to his wife in the other room. She is bedridden and in pain, and she tells her husband that “I hope they work. I feel like I’m going to die.”
Me too, lady. Me too.
So she takes them, the door closes for some reason, and she says she feels better already. Then we … see another title screen — THINGS — but this time it’s surrounded by darkness, and on fire.
That sounds about right. And we even see the “Things” theme and music credits displayed which, apparently, is created by STRYK-9. Two title screens, and now credit for a score that seems to have been made by the pipes of the Blind Idiot God Azathoth in pandemonious celebration. And … more credits. I am having a Sledgehammer flashback, but at least they did it at the beginning of the film and not after two scenes. So, there is also Familiar Strangers, and one Jack Procher. Did they all make the music? And we are also told that Andrew Jordan and Barry J. Gillis wrote the script for this movie. And they produced it too. It’s the Shot-On-Video miracle that Joe Bob has been talking about in action.
Now we see a train going by, reminding me of how we watched the van driving down the road in Sledgehammer, but more credits are happening, starring: Barry J. Gillis, Amber Lynn, Doug Bunston, Bruce Roach, Patricia Sadler — and also starring as we go down the road to grainy hell, Jan W. Pachul as Dr. Lucas. And this is all directed by Andrew Jordan. Then, thankfully, the credits are far less lengthier than those of Sledgehammer and we travel with the camcorder down the roads, into the woods where all modern horror seems to originate from Evil Dead, and its short film predecessor Within the Woods: that had a similar grainy quality but a straightforward, if simple story about violating a Native American burial ground and a young Bruce Campbell getting possessed, and killing his friends.
We will not be so fortunate tonight.
It turns out we have been following a car’s perspective, where two men — Wally and Doug — exit, allowing the driver to leave.
And now, a news segment with anchorwoman — and totally not pornstar — Amber Lynn, and also some man named Johnny Scott. They are the hosts of “today’s broadcast.” Amber Lynn is actually staring right at the camera talking about Cold War politics and thermo-global nuclear war. I am going to try to tie in these segments later as we go on with this, to see what the art of it is. There is also an oil truck crash that messed up electricity in an area that will not have power for up to three hours. Will this be where the shenanigans of this movie take place?
Doug and Wally are walking in the blurry darkness, perhaps in this place and a great excuse for terrible lighting, towards a house. What is weird is that they are looking for someone named Doug in this house with a barking dog. They talk about breaking in if he doesn’t answer the door. And then, they open the door like it was already unlocked after calling his name at the door and confusing me because isn’t Doug already with Wally, or was that a scene from before and Doug was the driver who was “the goof.”
Right. So the two men are looking for Doug in his house, who might be wasted out of his mind and if he’s a reality warper it would explain this film, as one of the characters claims that what they need is “a couple of hot women and a few beers.”
I hate to break to you, dude, but like I said: I don’t think that either women, or alcohol will save this movie.
So they raid the fridge and it turns out that one of the men is Doug’s brother. He reaches in and finds a book called Horror of a Thousand Ugly Brutal Cuts. Well, that sounds like a more interesting story. That book cover also looks like something you would find in the Bottom Feeder Section. I also didn’t realize it was a book until they pointed it out. And Don — which is Doug’s brother’s name, who also found the book in the fridge — finds a tape recorder in the freezer with a weird echoing recording stating “Get your hands off me.” Wally, the other man, jokes that he should turn it off as it could be possessed. No, no Evil Dead references please and thank you. That also won’t save this abomination.
But I take back what I said about the book being interesting. After all, did Aleister Crowley actually kill anyone? Historical inaccuracies for the sake of misusing occult references aside, and being told there are “sick diagrams” in the book well, what can I say. As this movie suggests by its very existence “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Anyway, I am really hoping the “weird movie with the weird things” they are talking about, that starts with a Satanic tape recorder isn’t Evil Dead. But it’s hot in Doug’s place so Don decides to put his coat in the fridge, maybe to make it cooler, or because of a lack of space? Or, really just reasons. So finally someone — maybe Wally — takes the tape recorder playing Satan stoned out of his mind and turns it off, claiming that Susan — presumably Doug’s sick wife — is sleeping in the other room. Wait … weren’t they going to break in if Doug wasn’t home or available? How did they know Susan was there? Was that even Wally?
Anyway, it’s just Don and Wally, as Wally is looking for a “delicious cockroach snack” in the cupboards, and can’t see any of the critters. Is this … foreshadowing? In any case, they decide to watch some television: which according to Don has access to underground murder television networks and such. Another plot point, or an attempt to make this scene with the weird disjointed instrumental music more tense? You decide. Apparently, the television comes from off-the-air stations, or they are from places that Doug doesn’t know.
Then we get back to the mainline news, totally undercutting everything these two chuckleheads were just talking about. Now Amber Lynn, looking perpetually to the right, is explaining how Dr. Lucas of Grizzly Flats has learned that the exposure of ultraviolet light to the human brain can double one’s lifespan: feeling like they are paraphrasing and just barely altering the plot of H.P. Lovecraft’s, and Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of, From Beyond.
Meanwhile, we see Dr. Lucas — who was introduced in the credits — torturing the hell out of a rotting skeleton man. We hear an echo of the words “I want you to have my bab-y” as he is doing so, making us think that Doug — and it is Doug at the beginning — and his experience with the devil woman is tied into this devil doctor. Perhaps the devil woman is simply a metaphor for the technique that Dr. Lucas used to artificially inseminate Susan … and, in retrospect, and if we borrow elements From Beyond, it might explain the end results later. Perhaps the Devil is supposed to be Susan or an amalgamation of her corruption and Susan in Doug’s drunken or fever-dreaming mind at the time. I like this explanation. It’s kind of cool, and probably not what they were going for. But it helps me, in a traumatic situation, to create order from chaos where none exists.
But seriously, the sequence with the woman in the Devil mask seems very surreal and dreamlike, and Doug does wake up. Perhaps it is that nightmare logic that gradually infests the entirety of this fragile, barely held together soggy cardboard reality that is this movie.
So there are some gross effects as he removes parts of his medical subject, the rot on his arm, his tongue, his hand, and then his eyeball. It’s kind of cool. The sound effects when he removes the eyeball sound like a deflating ball or water gun, and there is another man trying to hang himself, and there are decapitated heads everywhere. And the mad doctor snickers like a child, going “Nyeheheheeh …” which is as intimidating as a Cheeto. It’s a whole montage of Lucas and his female assistant cutting this man apart, her sawing at his throat, and him taking out his intestines. He even gets two more assistants in past the one that killed himself with a stretcher containing a severed head that he picks up, turns to the screen, and laughs.
Sanity Check: Where do we start indeed? One actor — Dr. Lucas — got arrested for soliciting and recruiting a sex worker for a role the porn actress didn’t want to be nude for because they didn’t pay her enough.
Does that sound about right? A nudity required application could have helped them. And her wearing the mask was to protect her identity or something to that effect. But like I said, no amount of women could save this.
So we get back to the two men. It turns out Wally isn’t the man’s name, but the driver that wisely left as the character I thought was Wally mentions. He does look at what he calls the infamous Salvator Dali’s The Devil’s Daughter painting, but it doesn’t seem to exist outside this film, or I can’t find it. It was “supposedly burned years ago,” and the clearly intellectual Doug somehow got a hold of it. But that leads us back to the imagery with the Devil mask woman and Susan at the beginning of the movie itself and all the dime-store occult hints here. Don tells his friend that Doug simply stole it when he was living in “a house on the left.” The left position is traditionally associated with the Devil. Yes. Yes guys. We get it.
Don’s friend is nosing around for a long time. He is always asking questions. He nearly burns his fingers on matches as he wants more light, and only seconds later turns on a nearby lamp in the living room. Genius. Don explains to him there is one weird painting that Doug apparently got from the Queen of England. Don’s friend gets the TV to work and tells him there is something interesting on. The dog makes her appearance.
Then Don insults the beer he is drinking and says something incredibly racist and xenophobic about how it “must have come out of a well in West Africa,” and then pays the US a backhanded compliment in saying he’s adding some “pure American water” to that. Yikes, dude. Even in the eighties, that’s pretty fucked.
Let me note, as we go on, that this movie so far and at many other points feels like a silent film, or a previous one that got dubbed over with murmured, drunken, almost incoherent commentary from people buzzed or stoned out of their minds. Keep that in mind, as I can’t cover all of that, and I won’t, but I will let you know if some parts in the continuing scenes stand out. Don is just humming now here, and it totally feels fake: like everything else. This is why I felt compelled to say something.
Now, what happens next? Well, the dog is lying down — and then promptly runs away — filling me with nothing but sympathy. So Don and his friend are watching television and he says — and I fuck you not — “I saw this before. What a bunch of trash.”
Is Things … self-aware? Is there some metafictional winking going on here as they look at the blank hallway on that television screen playing a bad movie within a bad movie? My mind is blown. Look at it. Hell, Don even says “this company puts out the cheapest crap I’ve ever seen.” I mean … I didn’t say anything this time. Honestly. But interestingly enough, it could be a dig at the industry that looks down at DIY filmmakers: how they will generate complete garbage with more resources and it’s never original. It’s always derivative. Is Things saying it is derivative while at the same time making fun of the fact it is, and paying attention to how it uses the camcorder by “reliving old memories” and drawing from the power of nostalgia? That is ahead of its time given what we do with the eighties and its art — especially horror — nowadays. Or, like an augur, I am just trying to find meaning in the guts of dead … things.
So, the movie in the movie plays out with a knife attack and I wonder if this is actual film or something the creators of Things made? Oh, it’s called Groundhog’s Day Massacre (without the apostrophe). Let me see … oh wow. It apparently exists! It was directed by Harold Olminsky in 1986. It was SOV — Shot on Video. And I can’t find anything official about it. But it’s cool that Things used, and maybe homage to another SOV movie.
A lot of this is good to write about as a lot isn’t happening in the movie. But then the two men start watching porn. And I guess Doug was the one that came out earlier to tell them not to bother Susan, as he lives his … very red room, and goes into the kitchen. And I think we are coming to an interesting point. I’m serious.
Doug’s brother and friend — who after going back to the Joe Bob Commentaries I now know as Fred (what am I doing with my life) — didn’t bring any food. So he finds some six month old bread, and sets to work on … a sandwich. His brother Don is surprised that Doug isn’t more pissed off by them not bringing food. But he makes them cheese sandwiches. And after Fred wants more beers — and I imagine everyone did at this point if I didn’t make that clear, or Joe Bob didn’t already — Don gets up to get the drinks and complains about Fred’s laziness, stating that: “The next time you come with me, you’re staying home.”
Yes. This paradox, or koan aside, Fred sees a bug on a suddenly red table and squashes it. Foreshadowing?
Then Doug takes the bug — saying with “he might still be alive” and, “it will be crunchy for his tummy.” Shakespeare, my friends. Doug ends up putting the bug in a sandwich, sits down after some spectacular flatulence, just in time for Don to come back and eat it.
Doug and Fred find this hilarious, but then Don is bitten by a mosquito.” Foreshadowing again? Can I also mention that when Don drinks his beer he makes an obvious fake glugging sound not unlike what my great-uncle used to do to make my dad laugh? Yeah. Pure art. Don then compliments Doug on the sandwiches and Doug goes on about how he used to work at a restaurant.
Now, an interesting thing about sandwiches: both Sledgehammer and Things have sandwiches in common. Both are simple and crude to make and establish a basic function: to feed or be wasted as John in Sledgehammer eats a massive ham one and spits it out on a dare, and the cheese ones in Things are cheaply made: one even getting a bug put in it for gross spectacle? Perhaps it’s not creatures, or tools that are the central symbols of both movies, but working class honest-to-god sandwiches as metaphors for Shot on Video movies and production: on simple and direct messages often lost in messiness. Yes, I know. Order in the chaos. I should really be writing these meditations in my Sanity Check columns, but fuck it: just as reality is melding together in Things, it’s doing so in my mind from pure inspiration, and utter insanity. I hope you enjoy your semiotics, Joe Bob. Maybe put some “the medium is the message” in there too, by Marshall McLuhan while we’re at it, and it all goes back to your thoughts on SOV capturing working class thoughts on, and perhaps fears about, life and DIY folk art.
So Doug remembers he has a wife, and goes to check on Susan. And … oh man. Here we go now.
Susan is bleeding awkwardly in different frames, her screams out of sync with her mouth and reality. As Doug gets Don and Fred, freaking out, a bloody bargain bin xenomorph comes out of Susan’s body, and by the time they get back into the bedroom … She’s dead, Jim.
No. I will not confuse these names further. I apologize. Doug starts screaming, and then muttering like he’s lost his morning paper. And Don asks him: “What are you talking about?” I mean … Doug was talking? All right, so now we get the closest thing to straightforward plot that we will ever have in this disparate movie. Soon. He takes his brother, and presumably Fred aside and says he’s going to tell them … about it. Whatever that is.
The dog meanwhile is running through the hall and going behind a curtain. The place is all red and glowing. The dog whimpers and wails, and then growls and snarls. We see blood spray on the curtains. And even though we see a mutated bug afterwards, I choose to believe the dog went to another dimension after killing one of these creatures, barking the equivalent of “Fuck this shit.”
Sanity Check: Chris Jericho is this night’s guest and considered the show’s expert on bad movies. His high school-made Don’t Go to Uncle Earl’s Cabin For the Weekend with the Bag Man serial killer sounds bad ass for The Last Drive-In. I love how Things was shown in Montreal, and broke down twice. And the no drugs on set, but a lack of a no-alcohol policy says a lot about what happened.
Now back to the lovely Amber Lynn. Speaking of the dead rising, Amber Lynn is talking about George Romero — as the director of Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow, works light-years ahead of this construct, which isn’t so much the radiant of a dead star so much as it’s a blackhole — while explaining that he is taking his copyright claims to the Supreme Court of America: and Night of the Living Dead is getting pirated. I think the film is even playing behind Lynn.
I am trying to put these news segments together in my head. Is the area Doug in suffering from a blackout? Obviously we are going to get the tie-in with Dr. Lucas. But is this reference to Romero the creators of Things criticizing the establishment, and the common citizen, for ripping off independently made and produced movies? I told you my thoughts about meaning would bleed into Things. Literally.
Meta-commentary aside again, we get to the freaking plot. Basically, Doug explains that he and Susan wanted to have a baby, and they couldn’t naturally do it. They didn’t have the money to do it officially, and they couldn’t get money from Don as he was going to college. So they went to this experimental doctor, Lucas, for her to get artificially inseminated. It … didn’t go well. I’m assuming she was enveloped in pain and then these mutated insects came out of her body instead due to ultraviolet light, or some insanity like that. This could have been truly horrific, in a captivating way, as a man’s dream to have a child becomes a nightmare of mutated proportions … but instead, like this movie, like this whole VHS Appreciation Night it becomes a nightmare of unintentionally reality-bending proportions.
Don’s not happy about this. There is supposed to be a dramatic musical moment, and silence but it’s shrill like every sound in this production. And then, somehow, Don starts telling a story — a supposed weird science-fiction story — that is more captivating than this entire movie: all because it sounds like what’s going on in the movie, even though it only tenuously does as some teenagers bully a child named Harold in a small town, and then they kill him releasing some “serpentine bees” or something from his body to kill them and the town. Doug looks puzzled, like we all are, and says “This is really no time for stories.” You know, much like in this whole movie.
And what the hell, Doug? Your wife just died, consumed by your demonic children that might be yours, or not? You’d think you would be a little more distraught, and have no time for your brother’s inane recollections of a science-fiction he probably made up on the spot. Well, Don was only trying to “eeeeeazzzze the tension.” Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like. This sound quality, my friends.
Yeah. Even Joe Bob acknowledged this, that VHS Appreciation Night. It must have been this, or another time that this horrible realization came upon me that they were very serious about this entire thing. I was, for a time, able to just think it was a mass hallucination happening and I would just get past it. But I think this part is what began to make me feel like I could qualify for a Broken Man Certification.
So they talk about what to actually do about this, the three of them. Fred suggests getting the police, but Don tells them they not only can’t let these insects spread, but they are in the wilderness, the phone isn’t working even though none of them have tried it — and if it’s electricity that’s the problem why are the television and the lights functioning? Also, Don has to point out that “This is a real creepy place, you know?” No. No really? So many excuses just to keep this trainwreck happening, and yes I remember the train at the beginning of this whole movie too.
So they plan to go to Grizzly Flats — after Don says he didn’t think he’d ever “have to live with the dead” when Fred asks what to do with Susan’s body, an attempt at a profundity that just doesn’t work — and use Dr. Lucas’ phone to call the cops the next day. You know: the man that made all these monstrosities, this swarm we barely see, possible. Someone mentions that the doctor is evil and should be dead, and I guess it was Don because Doug’s mouth isn’t moving, and it is just confusing. It is all confusing.
Oh but now the lights go off, and everything is red. Our intrepid friends need to find a light source after several excuses about the fuses in the house being messed up, and the gas lamp the other two needed to get to Doug’s house almost being used up. How convenient.
And back to the lovely Amber Lynn. Now it’s weird. It’s apparently been fourteen days since Don Drake and Fred Lewis — presumably two of our protagonists — by Brooklyn residents? What the fuck? Are they trapped in a singularity? Is my tongue in cheek coming true? A woman saw them apparently get killed by bikers though. And then we get the news anchorman Johnny totally going into gossip on Cher’s boyfriend being with ex-pornstar Tracy Lord — and then a woman goes in to sit on Johnny’s lap: not realizing they are still on the air. I guess some people are just plain lucky, because I know this fractured reality is still ongoing.
And speaking of singularities, Fred gets sucked into a mousehole in a cupboard. Just like that. All right then. This leaves Doug, with blood on his shoulder from the ceiling, and Don to face the horrors of this house alone. After the two brothers wish the blood off of Doug’s body, we have a jumpcut to some infernal-looking Kindergartner art on a door that the two have discovered for the first time. They are still trying to find the fuse box. Someone makes a joke, maybe Doug, about how he put up those sinister symbols and whatnot before “we tortured and ate her” and I have no idea what is going on with that.
Right. Okay. They don’t go down there as Doug says “it’s too dangerous now.” Then Don and Doug ruminate about how there is no beer in the house. But Don finds whiskey, and then Doug tells a joke. He asks how do you get paper children? The answer: you fuck a bag lady.
Hey, you two, while you’re telling jokes in this hell house with the cheery music going on, stop me if you’ve heard this one. What happens when you give a bag lady a crown from Burger King?
You get yourself a Paper Bag Princess.
See, I am trying to cut the tension now, and I don’t have the gracious Amber Lynn to help out with that either. They don’t have her either, or the Devil woman, so I guess Doug begins to flipout thinking he hears footsteps — or Don does — and while Don thinks Fred has escaped to get help, we get cuts to Doug in red light cackling and crying about how Fred is dead. Then Don pours whiskey on his head. My unintentional rhyming poetry aside, here we can hear dialogue dubbed over previous dialogue as Don realizes he has to go to the washroom, and is afraid of the bugs. Doug ventures towards the washroom in the dark, for some reason, but it smells bad apparently.
They have to go back to the kitchen to get a flashlight first, and that’s when we see another lazy monster bug motherfucker: this time roaring like the parody of what a child would think an antlion is on the stove. Don kills it with a meat cleaver — or “him” as Doug puts it — “real good” (in several awkward jump cuts between swinging and the bug just sitting there). Damn, Sledgehammer and Things use similar implements if you recall.
Unfortunately, the half-dead creature just so happens to be right on top of the flashlight, which coincidentally is on the stove. Don slowly reaches for it twice, as the thing twitches at one point and gnashes its needle-sharp teeth. Then, he snatches it and washes his hand of all the blood: suddenly having the tremors.
Sanity Check: None of the actors were there at the same time the scenes were filmed. Fred’s actor was not available the day they filmed the scene with the mouse hole, which explains his adventures in space and time. Oh yeah. Scarborough. It really is known as a skid area. As someone who lives in the GTA (The Greater Toronto Area), I have heard the stories. A funny thing: Barry J. Gillis responded to my thread on the Joe Bob Collective about Things, though I love Joe Bob’s take on Things being a filmic version of dementia. I also appreciate how Chris Jericho hopes it was intentionally made bad, and I respect his utter loathing of the … thing. And I agree: Winnipeg as a film production Province would never make something like Things, but it would embrace something like Phantom of the Paradise once again.
The brothers begin searching around the house, and soon get to the bathroom. Then, Don goes in to use it, and forgets he needs the flashlight. Doug has to knock on the door to remind him, and he takes it. Sometimes, and I think Joe Bob said this at one point, it’s like they tried to do a horror comedy sequence — or a series of them — and they just failed miserably. The prime example here is where Doug is clutching his throat and sticking out his tongue like a cartoon character choking as the room turns red, and he’s just joking: trying to prank his brother. Like, dude: your wife just died, your friend is missing, and there are monsters everywhere. What the shit?
So then his brother comes out again and after wandering around more, Don just shoves him ages later. Then they go to the bathroom again, I think, and there is a bug on the toilet. Doug starts wheeze-laughing like he’s a kid imitating a cartoon monster’s voice, and Don is losing patience with him. Maybe Doug is finally going insane. In the end, Doug goes back into the bathroom and … flushes the thing down the toilet? Then he comes out with a manic grin on his face and goes: “Eeeeeee …”
Seriously, this is just obnoxious now. But now everything is going red. There is a brief jump cut of Doug making that sound and it’s gone as someone is checking a drawer. They are looking for items to use as weapons and … oh man. One of them has a tiny sledgehammer! Well, damn.
Finally, they venture into the basement past the hellish mural art that says “Love Tessie,” or some weird shit like that. Now, in the basement and the piano playing a melancholy tune in the background, the creatures are coming down from the ceiling “like spiders in a haunted house,” as Don says. The brothers are trying to get to the fuse box, but apparently the creatures are everywhere as the camera pans around and sees a few scattered plastic insect toys made — and failing — to represent a swarm.
Then as Doug is looking towards the direction of the fuel box, some insectoid legs wrap themselves around his neck. Don smashes the insect with … the sledgehammer, but ends up knocking Doug in the back of the head. He falls on the ground, bleeding out of his mouth, a pool of blood gathering on the floor. He’s dead.
But he’s not dead. Somehow. Don tries to lift Doug, and the latter doesn’t bleed out. He reaches over to stab a bug, and blue ichor flows out. Then he finally finds the fuse box. He’s “not very good at electricity things,” though. The creatures just happen to be sleeping over in the corner, though, and he has time to replace wires and circuits and such. For some reason, Don imitates a “zapping” noise: though whether it’s him, or his attempt to make a legitimate sound effect on the movie’s budget is up in the air. I am not expecting much either way.
Then he bashes another bug with the sledgehammer — or is it a mallet — and takes his brother away up the stairs again. We get an almost Nineties action flick pun from Doug that this is not really how “he wanted to get hammered, man.” There is a cutaway to a man with glasses laughing, unconvincingly, on a television screen. Then, back to Doug, we see that he gets attacked suddenly by another bug that eats his hand as he’s trying to get some alcohol.
So playground Keystone Cops antics aside, Doug is pretty fucked up now. Not when he got smashed in the back of the head with a hammer, mind you. And this is where we see that, in an attempt to cauterize the wound by Don, an amputated stump gets set on fire. Then a brief flash of a television screen. But hey, we get Canadian representation — a shout out to the fact that this is a Canadian film — when Don says that the blood coming out of his brother “is just dripping like maple syrup.”
We stand on guard for thee.
Reality is melting as words from the past echo about what the three men were going to do, and Don’s whole statement about living with the dead are the last words Doug seems to hear as Don doesn’t get the morphine, in the toolbox, in the basement, And he finally dies.
Don is distraught and takes his body and puts it in a closet. He begins sealing doors with a drill or something. He then finds the remains of the dog, who didn’t escape I guess and proceeds to be sick on the floor for far too damn long a sequence. I could have seriously done without that.
He begins drilling the remains of a bug or something, I really can’t see in that light but he goes too far and the extension cord unplugs, and he gets fed up with it. Yeah. Riveting stuff. That pun was unintentional.
Don goes into the other room, where he sees Doug sitting in a chair, and he realizes he is hallucinating. He sees him laughing out of the corner of his eye, but it’s just in his mind. Then he falls onto the couch. This whole time, there is a drinking bird set at the beginning of the film still dipping into a glass of water. Then a closeup of the washroom and a dripping sink.
Sanity Check: The close ups for all the doors and facets struck me too. At least in Sledgehammer, it is all to set up the scene and the atmosphere of the killer’s house, the tension of the stillness accidental or not. I love how Jericho remembers Darcy’s birthday and not only wants to show Sleepaway Camp II, but Halloween III on The Last Drive-In. Joe Bob wants Jericho to be the show’s recurring Canadian and Bad Horror Movie expert. I agree with this idea as his presence would be an excellent complement to the Mangled Dick expert that is Felissa Rose. And on the subject of Andrew Jordan: him not considering Things a horror film, but a “postmodern film about filmmaking” is pretty asinine, but I can see him making this argument from the stereotypical view of post-modernist art as relativistic and without inherent meaning as well. I also appreciate the explanation about the dubbing: Jordan said they had to overdub the background noise of the movie. But to return to someone I don’t mind listening to …
Back to Amber Lynn. She basically states that after being missing for fourteen days — time dilation I suppose — Don Drake and Fred Lewis might still be alive. Is this an attempt at pacing? To show how much time has gone by? How fluid it is? Is the use of different media Jordan’s attempt to deconstruct and destroy sensical cinematic narrative? I feel like I had something profound, but exhaustion is dogging me now. I need to go on. The mission must be completed.
Don is surrounded by bugs. But we hear a chainsaw as Fred comes back from the ether and begins destroying some bug motherfuckers. Maybe he isn’t so useless after all. Don is bashing bugs as well, one even crawling from the ceiling. Fred is screaming with the chainsaw as a bug creeps up on him, No, dude. You are not Leatherface, but you get points for enthusiasm. I can honestly believe that scream of maddened rage. I want to make one like it right now. He does kill the bug though, and after saving Don they flee.
Now Amber Lynn really makes us question the nature of reality and not in the way one might like if you know what I mean, and I think you do. She says that Don and Fred were surprised to find out they were being sought after in a nationwide manhunt. They were apparently in a hotel in Dallas and an off-duty security guard found them. According to Lynn, they were going across the country to visit a relative. So did this happen before the events of Things, as they drove to see Doug, or is this in another timeline? I feel like there is a death of the author involved here as this starts to make so much less sense, and that is impressive given how little sense it already has.
Meanwhile, Don and Fred are in the bedroom and the bugs have eaten their mom Susan. Fred gets Don out as he continues to fight them off. Don finds some bugs still eating Doug’s fingers. But then … the bugs get smart. That’s right. They eat the cord of Fred’s chainsaw.
He’s screwed.
According to Fred, they are eating him and he is begging and threatening Don to help him. The music is just terrible. I can’t even describe it, like glittering instrumentals that have no place in this bootleg cardboard box universe made a reality warping manchild and whose existence only remains now on a VHS recording.
There are two sets of screams dubbed on each other, one actual scream and fake ones. Fred is calling for one “little fucker” to “give me back my eyeball!”
Shakespeare. In the Park.
So Don does come back, but gradually and in an attempt at comedy I guess, we see Fred strewn about like a bloody Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz: just a talking, one-eyed skull. I’m sorry Fred: but no amount of spare artificial parts is helping you come back from being eaten and becoming a bunch of Things.
And back to Amber Lynn. Apparently residents refuse to leave their homes, and there is an atomic explosion.
Back to Don. And guess who’s come to visit the house? Dr. Lucas. We almost forgot about him. He’s come to pay Susan a social visit apparently. Don is not impressed. He leads him through the house to show him the carnage. They find Susan in pulp, and Lucas sniffs the blood he picks up on his hand, and confirms it’s human. He blames Don for the massacre, gaslighting the fuck out of him, while Don says it was because his experiments “fucked up.” But there are no bugs and, awkwardly as the dialogue allows — making me realize just how many brain cells I’ve lost listening to it for over an hour — Dr. Lucas builds a convincing case that Don used a chainsaw, and other implements to kill everyone in the house, despite Don’s rapid “I-I-I-Is.”
The creatures are all gone, supposedly. Don thinks they were either eaten by their fellows, or taken away. Dr. Lucas says “You watch too many horror movies, pal,” being a little too on the nose.
Don is spending entirely too much time attempting to convince the madman that his experiments exist. The doctor mocks him. He says he is going to take Don to an institution, but Don has none of it and shoves him into the washroom: where the creatures happen to be. They consume him.
“Creatures with no soul! They’re devouring me whole!” Man, I thought I was the only one rhyming here tonight.
Don leaves and goes to the closet to bury his brother properly, and then loses consciousness. Then, the next we know he’s out and running out of the house and into the woods through a ravine. He’s shouting. “Help me!”
A man helps him up on a bridge. He is ranting and raving to the man. The man wants to take him to Dr. Lucas, but Don sets him straight and he just wants to get back to Sacramento and tell the police what happened. He goes off with the man, to safety. They finally get to his car and …
“Are you sure this wasn’t all a dream?”
Only for Don to wake up, and the Dollarama Deadite form of Dr. Lucas — perhaps also a callback to George Romero and the possibility of there being a larger infestation of creatures due to the mad doctor’s other experiments — to come at him. He manages to keep the cackling monster out, tying the door closed from the inside.
He sits in there, rocking back and forth, as a creature is on the shelf behind him, muttering. “I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.”
Well, I’m glad to know that Don. Because I don’t know if I will ever be. Ever.
And when, the words “You have just experienced Things” comes onto the screen and the credits roll, this second time around, I feel blessed relief. It’s over.
The nightmare is finally over.
And at the end, after the credits and the thanks to all their fans and supporters, we have Amber Lynn being incredibly frank about doing “Fifty-Two Pick-Up” with Vanity. She talks about how she met John Frankenheimer for a show where she and porn star actress friends came as a joke, and he wanted her to be in his movie. I have to say, her having this conversation with the crew of this movie is kind of refreshing. It is the most animated and real recording in this whole production. I’m glad she was there. She was the only bright spot in that movie. And on that note …
Final Sanity Check and Observation: I agree with Joe Bob that everything is advanced — and improved — by the presence of a pornstar.
I could go into Things being the medium and the message of independent creators attempting to show how shallow media is through the ridiculous news segments, the television sets that inundated that time, a nightmarish realization that nothing has inherent meaning, and terrible things happen — and are created — all the time, and sometimes you know you will never be okay again, pornstars or no.
But there’s something in this Last Drive-In segment that I want to talk about: that I want to focus on.
Something happened.
It all started when Joe Bob mentions the complete earnestness and drive — the dream — these moviemakers had to attempt these creations. And how, in an Age of Irony, it’s to forget that. And then, there came on — jump cut through his speech, a remix of the “Tail-Spin” song. And just as it had that Friday night into Saturday morning, it hit me. In the feels. It reminded me of something I can’t completely put into words. It’s sad, and beautiful, and wistful all at once.
And then, I did write something about it. And, because you’ve read this far — or if you have — I am going to share it with you.
*
Epilogue
Here is a picture of me, at 11:40 am, having not slept, finishing my Iron Mutant Certification.
I am exhausted, but I did it. And I hope you can see that.
I wrote this in a series of Tweets after the show ended on Friday. Joe Bob’s words, and the “Tail-Spin” remix stayed in my mind. And then, I gathered them together and shared them on both the Joe Bob Collective and Slasher.
This is what I wrote, and at the end of this nightmare and my engagement of it — as one Iron Mutant to another — this is how I want to end my Certification.
I wrote some thoughts tonight on Twitter after Joe Bob’s words about …. Things, or as I like to call it now, Try Hard:
It’s after the show now. And I was thinking about it. Even before tonight’s entertainment. What was different about this season up until this point?
And I think … it was because of all the good movies we saw, or at least the quality, industrial production. We hadn’t seen, even with Audition, anything weird. Anything Wtf.
The Last Drive-In is about spectacle and enjoying or cringing through aspects of those films, but also understanding their context. Where they come from. What goes into them.
It is also a space to bond around those ridiculous premises. To look at the ridiculousness on a screen that we all watch at the same time every Friday /Sunday, instead of living it around us.
And there is something that Joe Bob said at the end of tonight’s episode, after the spectacle of Things, of the creator that never made anything after this film.
I thought about them, and their crew’s utter dedication to this: to throw it all out there, not knowing what they are doing, to see what will stick, and to … make something.
Yes. It was bad. But that enthusiasm was real. And I think about my friends, and how we tried to make things. Ridiculous things. Many of them lost with time. And you know … the creators of Things … at least they tried.
They Tried Hard.
How many people can say the same thing? How many of us can say the same thing?
I had fun ripping it apart. I won’t deny that. That’s part of the kind of person I am. But at the same time, I think about how they went out there with just the sheer primal impulse to … make something, even a mess. And they did it. And that is their memory. I feel almost ashamed, making fun of that sheer need to make something, to tell a story, even if it doesn’t come out right.
Like a child making that Devil’s Kindergarten art on the mirror in the film. But they did it. They made that.
And I realize I can still dislike, or even cringe, at something badly made, but still deeply respect the creative impulse and need to express it.
And I am crying a bit.
And not for the reasons you might think.
Because, for a few moments, I could almost remember. That spark, in Try Hard — as I call Things now, is beautiful.
That spark in Try Hard — as I call Things now — is beautiful. And I may take apart everything else around it, but I won’t tarnish that.
I can’t.
The point is, the people behind the camcorders of Things, and Sledgehammer never gave up. And there is a lesson in that somewhere.
The Horror Doctor 