Category: Dissections and Speculatives

This is where I analyze stories in different media, and consider how some of them might be different.

She Will Always Be There: Travis Stevens’ Girl On the Third Floor

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, I was at a man’s place that had seen a great many wild and passionate parties. At the same time, I also knew that there were some … less than savoury, sometimes even gross things that happened beneath the surface. Lingering hugs on women, someone watching people and being surreptitious about their activities, and a great deal of emphasis on a whole lot of feminine art throughout the entire place along with a great deal of … moisture that you could slip on, and break your neck. I always wondered, if places can record memories — or if people and actions can imprint energy into spaces — just what a building haunted by erotic energy, and intrusive or even predatory behaviour, would look like.

These weren’t just all negative thoughts, of course. At another time, after reading references to Wilhelm Reich’s concept of orgone energy — of a hypothetical universal life force generally generated or manifested by sex and erotic actions — I’d often muse about how that affected another favourite establishment: one that used to be a nineteenth century mansion before it was changed to an adult entertainment hub and night club. What would such a manifestation look like, especially when you consider how it would ride the gamut between lust, love, joy, despair, anger, anxiety, fear, excitement, and all the rest of it? And this was a place focusing specifically on making a comfortable space for women and LGBTQ+ individuals to explore while also making a profit, and still navigating a lot of the patriarchal land and social scape — with men’s desires and expectations — around it.

And this place also had a third floor. And there was always a girl on the third floor.

I was utterly fascinated when I found out about Travis Stevens’ Girl on the Third Floor, and its premise. The Girl on the Third Floor, directed by Travis Steven, and written by Stevens, Paul Johnstone and Ben Parker, is about less about a morally flawed man attempting to renovate an old house for him and his pregnant wife, and more about the house itself, what it has come to be, the forces that shape it, and the girl within it. At least, these last facts are what interest me more than anything else. I recall, when Fangoria #3 came out and I was greedily looking any information on this film before it had come out, wondering where I was going to see it at the time, with only little trails of marbles through an old house and the specifics of cinematography and filmmaking to tide me over before finding … the Girl.

I mean, a horror story that takes place in a house that used to be a brothel. Not only is that an awesome premise, but indeed: what could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot goes wrong for our initial protagonist Don Koch (played by Phil “CM Punk” Brooks) — whose last name is more than suggestive about his personal traits and failings — and all of it is pretty much his own fault. It isn’t just the terrible things he did in his past, how he put his own personal advancement and desires ahead of the lives of others, and the constant transgressions against his long-suffering wife under the guise of claim to change, but what he does to the house. He comes into this place, with its pastels and pink interior, noticing the black secretions coming out of the wall and instead of asking around about its history, or talking with Ellie Mueller the pastor who actually seems to know more about this situation, he pounds holes and nails into the walls, not paying attention to all indicators that something is different about this place. Essentially, Koch doesn’t ask for help, his pride keeping him from even telling his wife what’s going on, and this toxic masculine attitude — of wanting to make a feminine place his own instead of recognizing it as something that is not what it seems — tells you everything you need to know about where this is going to end. .

Certainly, the house isn’t healthy of course. Aside from its black discharge, its marbles appearing like mobile little growths, this house used to be a high-class brothel for some upper-class society men that viewed women like their playthings. On the third floor, bricked up and concealed, is a viewing platform looking into what is now the bedroom. But it wasn’t always a bedroom. Instead, it used to overlook a platform or a stage where the sex workers involved — all young women — were used in kink and BDSM scenes where an bird-headed man would sadistically whip them, among other things, for the viewing pleasure of other men. It is heavily implied that these women, from the nineteenth or turn of the century, are there under duress or were trafficked as well, and the presence of a little girl there who constantly draws pictures, and plays with marbles — that the bird man gave her — is not reassuring in the slightest as to what this place had been really like. Eventually, at least one sex worker is murdered there, followed by a missing body, and the place is closed down, and passed on to several different generations of families with varying results.

Koch is warned, by some men at the bar he’s not supposed to be at as he is an alcoholic, that the house despises “straight men” and will actively attempt to do terrible things to them. And when you look at the history of the house, you can probably see why that might be the case. Koch is a man who has an affair with a woman named Sarah Yates (played by Sarah Brooks) and then coldly attempts to brush her off and pretend it never happened. He also drinks when he’s not supposed to do so, and when all else fails he will resort to violence to get his way. He is pretty much a spiritual descendant of the men that ruled this town and society, and an extension of patriarchy. It’s not going to end well for him.

But strangely enough, as far as malicious female ghosts go, these are surprisingly fair in that they only react to what is brought to them. They’re not fair to his dog, of course, who did nothing wrong but there is a point where any empathy or discernment is erased by the pure rage that is left behind. But it’s more complicated than that, as it always is. We find out that Sarah is actually the ghost of the woman that was killed in the brothel, and that she reacts to people — as an extension of the house — depending on how they treat it, and anyone in it. Sarah kills Koch’s dog to hurt him for rejecting her and treating her like an object. She kills Koch’s former coworker and friend Milo because despite the fact that he is the friend of both Koch and his wife Liz (played by Trieste Kelly Dunn), he goes along with hiding the affair the other man had due to some sense of reluctant homosociality, essentially being complicit in all men’s behaviour.

And then there is the spectre of what is called, outside the film, the Nymph (played by Tonya Kay): a being that resembles a deformed blond-haired woman with a ruined face that is constantly leaving, and shooting marbles throughout the house. At one point, towards the end of the first part of the film, she manages to insert marbles under Koch’s skin that writhe around and, ultimately, seem to possess and kill him.

I’ve thought about Sarah and the Nymph a great deal since I watched this film a while ago. I also read an article that I can only barely recall was on Fangoria’s online site, when it was owned by Cinestate, that focused on the critique of the patriarchal elements of this film, and the nature of the Nymph herself. Unfortunately, I can’t find the article now but I do have my own conclusions and elements that I want to focus on which might not have been completely discussed to death by many other pre-existing reviews.

It is fascinating that Sarah can manifest physically, and be seen by those she chooses. Her being able to manipulate people’s perceptions isn’t as surprisingly, but being capable of materially interacting with the living is impressive, and quite possibly the result of all that tormented, oppressed, sexual energy and anger inside the house itself giving her that strength. Sarah is a result of what happens to a woman used by men, degraded, and killed by men. What’s worse is that she seems to have been the mother of that little girl, Sadie, who had been making all of the drawings throughout the house. So it’s possible that something happened to her daughter, or herself by the brothel owner.

But it’s the Nymph that gets to me. It isn’t clear what she is. I think I read somewhere that she’s essentially the spirit of the house itself: of all those broken desires, and brutalized women by the brothel-owners, and society manifested into some kind of composite entity. Think of her as some kind of twisted genius loci that guards the place where she was generated by the sexual energy of exploited women, and twisted men’s fantasies. I originally pondered over her being a brutalized sexual sacrifice or experiment of a lodge or cabal of male magicians and occultists — especially with the almost ritualistic practices in that place, and the bird-masked man — but I think it is more effective that she and Sarah have become manifestations of rich men’s debased desires of women.

Of course, there is another interpretation of the Nymph that is equally horrifying, if not more so. While Sarah does utilize the marbles as well to lure the dog and distract Koch and his friend, it’s the Nymph that uses them more. She acts skittish, awkward, and almost childlike: like the effigy of a person, or a doll. Victorians used to call a woman the “angel in the house:” like they are some kind of delicate ornament, or a pretty toy. But angels can fall, along with pedestals, in the dichotomy of female virgin-whore. It is as though she is, or was, almost innocent until something changed her into a parody of what men want. If you watch the film, her body is that of an young adult woman, but her face is warped: as though it had suffered repeated blunt trauma … or it had been drawn by a child.

Think about a little girl being in a place built to contain women for rich society men’s pleasure. Perhaps she died in there, or maybe it was just a part of her soul that died when her mother didn’t come back, and the bird man who gave her the marble bag. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider that she was being groomed, or that the loss of her innocence created this apparition. Maybe it is Sadie’s spirit, or Sarah’s lost innocence made incarnate and corrupted over time, or just an entity that represents a woman abused to the point of inhumanity, not allowed to grow or rest, and wanting to play in the horrible ways she’d seen in that place, and in how she sees the world around her.

And it all comes back to those marbles, doesn’t it. Not only do they have a phallic resonance, in terms of gonads, but there is the idea of them being pretty little baubles: just like women, and women’s bodies. In some aspects of Islamic culture, feathers left behind in a space denotes a haunting by restless spirits or demons. But I think that the marbles go well with the imagery of the house being the interior of a vagina: made unhealthy by sexual abuse. Maybe they are like ovum, especially in how they implant themselves into Koch, but they can also be seen as lesions or lumps: as disease. Something natural can also become sick. I can definitely see a sexually-transmitted disease metaphor in there, but also I think what’s important to consider beyond the literal is that Koch sees the house as a distortion of how patriarchy views female sexuality: as something dirty, unclean, even disgusting. It is his perspective that determines the house and how it treats him. Of course, there is also the fact that marbles — as small reflective spheres — can stand-ins for eyes, for intrusive looks that can be anywhere, where not even the sanctity of personal space or the body is safe.

They are like extensions of the mirrors with their over-ornate frames in the house, making Virginia Woolf come to mind when she mentions that to men women are mirrors that show themselves written large. Yet the house’s mirrors turns the male gaze against itself, and shows it what it really is: a wall with a dark hole stuffed with paper.

Indeed, Ellie Mueller — who Liz actually talks with when Koch disappears in the second half of the film — tells her that the house isn’t always malicious. Sometimes it just tests someone, or it doesn’t bother them at all. Couples had lived there, even straight ones, their entire lives without incident. It’s only when someone brings with them these power imbalances and hypocrisies, self-entitlement and forcefulness without facing them, that the house seems to react badly. Of course, it also challenges Liz. But Liz pays attention to details. Liz sees the newspaper article — from the scrunched up papers in the wall socket behind the central mirror no less — about the origins of the house, and she consults with the pastor about it. She knows Koch’s toxic masculine behaviour all too well and is, frankly, tired of his macho and emotionally-stunted excuses. But she is not intimidated by Sarah’s presence, and the ghost and the house seem to want to show her what happened: while testing her the entire time. It gets into her head, or tries to, while it succeeds with Koch: who is just a skin-suit for Sarah now. He got inside of her, and she — and the house — are now in him, as he is also trapped in it. Liz doesn’t forgive him, or his actions that have endangered her and their unborn child. Like a man having an affair and potentially getting his spouse infected by something he caught, Koch has brought Liz to this point but she confronts this distortion of the feminine on her terms.

Liz ends up being let go by Sarah, told she passed the test for not forgiving her cheating and terrible husband again, rejecting a man’s control over her with his false promises, saving herself and her child. But she does more than that. She ends up confronting, and killing, the Nymph. This act actually hurts Sarah. It hurts Sarah more than seemingly being killed by Koch. She ends up holding the Nymph’s broken body, this being that could have been her daughter, or part of the person she used to be, or a representation of Woman twisted and used by men to point of being unrecognizable, or even as a symbol of the house’s hate: of a form of internalized misogyny. And she’s genuinely crying over it: this thing that she loved, that she despised, that was her friend, and her jailor. And now, she’s gone.

Perhaps both Sarah and the Nymph began from a tremendous sense of injustice, but eventually this anger — however justified — turned into something that caused pain for not only those related to their tormentors and murderers, but became collateral damage for everything else in their way. In the end, Liz — after being told by the pastor that each person that enters the house needs to choose to go in and face their own actions — goes further. She ends up going back into the house, finding Sarah’s body, and giving it a proper burial. Liz claims the house for her and her daughter. It is now a place without Koch, and has seemingly made into her own space. And yet … at the end, Koch is still there. Or the house now uses Koch as its new host. It is offering their daughter a marble, a beautiful promise, a terrible lie, a thing to ensnare, a toy to play with, a lesson perhaps to learn, or the hint of the cycle of exploitation and recrimination happening all over again for the next generation.

Like I said, I think about Sarah. I think about the Nymph. I consider the women, and girls, damaged by society around them, its microaggressions, and the weight of a history of trauma influencing who and what they are. I remember that some ghosts are seen in the places they’ve been long after they’ve died. Sometimes you know it. Sometimes, you don’t. So many forces shape them. And sometimes, they come to you. They approach you, and take you to the third floor, like the one at the club I loved. Sometimes, they will offer you something. And you should always pay attention to what is offered, how you accept it, and where you stand.

For What It Is: Steven Kostanski’s Manborg

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

They say that when you dissect a joke, it just isn’t funny anymore. And in my mind, “funny” comes from “fun.” That is the best adjective I would ascribe to Steven Kostanski’s 2011 film Manborg.

I’ve taken on the guise of a mad, false doctor and scientist as a writer of this Blog. And in the vein, if you will pardon the pun considering that the movie is all about rendering infernal, fascist vampires into pulp, of such — and in remembrance of the late and lamented Doctor Scorpius — I would like to put this cinematic creation on the table, and look at it in the following manner.

Imagine a pulp film utilizing a combination of early Mortal Kombat digitization and Ray Harryhausen claymated monstrosities created by Troma Productions, and you might get something like Manborg. Maybe. You can also make a compelling argument that it also feels like a spiritual bootleg version of the id software Doom game universe. Seriously, I almost wrote this entire article just to have an excuse to make that sentence, but there is more to it than that.

The main protagonists themselves look like they can belong in a Mortal Kombat game: the awkwardly cybernetic Manborg himself, the sassy Aussie-accented Justice, the incongruously voice-dubbed #1 Man, and the short-tempered Mina (and clearly no relation to Mina Harker) are all fighters in an arena where Hell’s minions — having conquered the Earth — force humans to fight one another, and their technologically-augmented demons. You can even, loosely, argue that this film is a Dracula-based creation in that the leader of the forces of Hell is a monstrosity named Count Draculon who kills Manborg’s brother and himself as a human soldier at the beginning of the movie and during Earth’s War against Hell: which it loses. And hey, one of the female protagonists is Mina who is lured by the Count back to the arena to rescue a former friend or … sister of hers (totally not Lucy Westenra) who has been made into a demon-human hybrid, I guess?

Right. I am being very generous.

But I really like this film. The jerking, even janky movements of the camera and the figures against the Chroma key backdrops makes this world truly nightmarish, and unrealistic. It’s like watching someone dreaming various composites of characters and situations, and making it into a narrative. The sound effects sound like something from Power Rangers or the 8-bit era of video games. There are various skips in logic and character development, but the film knows that — and it knows how lampoonish and parodic it truly is.

The characters are all true to what they are. Manborg is a former soldier wanting to avenge his brother’s death, and has no idea how to survive in his altered state until a hologram of his creator — or his soul, or something — finally does so. #1 Man just wants to makeup for his cowardice in saving his own life and training the Count’s minions in martial arts to fight for something more. Justice wants to protect his sister Mina, and battles either illiteracy or dyslexia to do so, and Mina desires to fight, and save Shadow Mega from being a slave of the Count. Even the antagonists are straightforward: the Count wants a challenge in fighting Manborg, Shadow Mega desires to defeat Mina, Doctor Scorpius seeks to recant his past mistakes and aid Manborg, and the Baron — another vampire and general asshole — has a crush on Mina, his prisoner, and awkwardly attempts to flirt with her.

What you see is what you get, and yet those little touches show genuine love of the story and characters. A long time ago, I used to only want to read and watch serious works. I didn’t know what to think of something that was just strange, and campy, and over-the-top, and weird as all hell. But then I went to the Toronto After Dark and watched RoboGeisha for the first time, and even before that was Bubba Ho-Tep. And there is just something about watching these silly elements at play that still manage to manifest genuine feelings and a story that is just … inspiring. It’s like high school or college friends sitting down, and making a narrative they want to see and be as ridiculous as ever, and very clearly demonstrate a knowledge of the craft they parody even if it’s for the first time. It’s just … inspiring to see someone through stuff at that wall, like explosions, Nazi vampires, weird cyborgs, martial artists, arenas of doom, and just … ridiculous moments that makes things fun.

Manborg is fun. It is one of the things that I look at to see what is possible, and it’s something I genuinely enjoyed watching. I bought the comic back at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival years ago, and I always meant to watch this movie. In fact, as fun as the film is, I love the comic as it makes fun of its own nostalgia. Think Ninja Turtles comics that were adapted into cartoons and the films, or hellishly faded and septia-coloured dystopian G.I. Joe, He-Man, and She-Ra stories except Manborg‘s adventures are fleshed out, and actually continue with his group of friends.

Also, Bio-Cop, the “preview” Astron-6 has at the end of the film — whose quality is already made to look faded and grainy like it’s an old VHS tape rental — is utterly hilarious. Again, think The Toxic Avenger, but in chronic agony and body horror and seriously to die … in a buddy cop parody.

I mean, someone calling themselves the Horror Doctor has to have a twisted sense of humour.

A Cosmic Joke: Tor Mian and Andy Collier’s Sacrifice

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I’ve thought about horror before: about what it is. Sometimes, I’ve considered it to be a throwback, or a continuation, of the old tragedies that invoke pity and fear in their audience. Other times, I looked at the genre as something that creates suspense and spectacle, and creates an adrenaline and endorphin rush in everyone that reads, or watches it. Horror, for me, had been twist endings, gruesome effects, strange creatures, and a love of being scared: of seeing that your life is better compared to those of the sufferings of fictitious people who might — or might not — be like real people.

These days, I think horror is elastic. Plastic. I’d argue that it has the most flexibility out of many of the genres in their different media. And, in this case, I’m reminded of a piece I wrote for Kris Straub’s horror comic Broodhollow where I focused on how horror is often similar to a joke.

Oh, we are all about dissection here with The Horror Doctor, and learning from what we take apart and put together in weird arrangements. But I think both the form of a joke — the idea of wordplay or the pacing of a story brought to a fitting end that makes fun of itself or laughs with, or at, its subject — and the ever-adapting form of a genre works when you look at the shoggoth build-blocks that are H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and its mutations that arise. In this vein, I thought I had some idea as to where Tor Mian and Andy Collier’s Sacrifice would go, and for the most part I wasn’t particularly surprised: even as the Devil — or entity — is in the details, and the punchline.

And in a vast School of Spoilers. Reader and dreamer’s discretions advised. 

For me, the details seemed simple enough. Isaac Pickman (played by Ludovic Hughes) and his wife Emma (Sophie Stevens) return to his family home on an island in Norway that he and his mother escaped from at least two decades before: trying to solve the mystery as to why they left at all. 

There are already a few details here. Isaac’s last name, for instance, is a callback to “Pickman’s Model” and the Salem family that exists in the Cthulhu Mythos in general. As Barbara Crampton, who plays the local police officer and community leader Renate would be familiar in another film that she produced — the remake of Castle Freak — like the Mythos surname Whateley in Romania, Pickman isn’t exactly a Norwegian or a Nordic last name: and what I love is the fact that the townspeople actually call Isaac on that when he attempts to tell them that he came from this place: something I felt needed addressed, or didn’t sit right in the otherwise brilliant and Mythos-loyal Castle Freak. 

But there seems to be no resonance with Richard Upton Pickman with Isaac, or his mother, save for the tiny little issue of the fact that she murdered her husband before fleeing with her child so many years ago. The name, however, is useful in showing a Lovecraft-familiar audience that this world does, indeed, take place in the Mythos. 

Isaac’s paternal last name is Jorstad. Jorstad has a few Nordic meanings. Mainly, the word refers to, apparently, seven common farmsteads, but is also derived from older Norse words for “battle,” “winner,” or “victor,” and “wild-boar helmet” or “wolf.” There are no Mythos meanings or interpretations, but the name tells you a lot about what Isaac sees himself as, or what he wants to be. He comes to this island, with his pregnant wife Emma, to claim the property of this lost house but you begin to see that he is profoundly unsatisfied with his life: with a middling desk job, and superficial relations of friends and family. There is something … missing inside of Isaac, a part of him that he can’t quite grasp, and he hopes for answers on this island. 

And he gets them. Renate, at first quite inquisitorial, asks him if he knows what happened to his father. And it becomes apparent, if it hadn’t been in the first scene of the film with its opening credits, that not only is Isaac’s father dead but his mother killed him. Later, we realize that Isaac had actually known many people in the community and partook in some of their rituals too. He is profoundly disturbed by this revelation, and it continues to affect everything he does thereafter. 

Emma comes to this island to help her husband find these ties, not knowing what their jurisdiction is here, very pregnant and morning sick, not liking the water — not at all — and wanting to settle the house’s affairs, get some money, and go back to America and their normal life. She is profoundly stubborn and clear about that, while Isaac himself is passionate and gets carried away by his temper even from the beginning of the whole film. Their arguments, in the beginning are playful banter, but this changes as the house and the whole land around them begins to affect them. 

I thought this would be straightforward, as I said before. I’ve written about Dagon, and The Deep Ones — films that adapt the Deep One Hybrids, and their god Dagon, and Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. And what I was anticipating, even hoping, was that what we would get was that Isaac’s family and community were Deep One-Hybrids that existed in Norway instead of America or the Pacific as they had in Lovecraft’s stories. Instead, we find ourselves in a cinematic narrative ruled by a murder house, an insular cult not unlike the one in The Deep Ones but with many families and children, lots of water — water everywhere — sea creatures, and the Slumbering One. 

The townspeople are, well think of them if you’ve seen Ari Aster’s Midsommar, as less friendly versions of the Hårga commune except they don’t seem to use drugs, they live on an island, and the couple have not been invited to their shores until they realize who they are. In fact, as the directors and even Paul Kane — whose short stories “Men of the Cloth” and, arguably also, “Thicker Than Water” inspired the creation of Sacrifice according to the Luna Press Publishing interview Paul Kane: Writing The Colour of Madness — were all, in turn, influenced by the folk horror elements of The Wicker Man. Interestingly enough, the film was moved from its original location from England in “Men of the Cloth” to Norway, not unlike Aster setting his film up in Sweden, to avoid too many comparisons to The Wicker Man according to an interview with the directors and Gig Patta from LRM Online. So you can see how all of these elements play off of one another. 

It is fascinating to see how they combine Cthulhu Mythos elements with Nordic culture. For instance, Renate has a mural that depicts “The Tree of the Shadow on the Shores of the House of the Dead,” which is called in short “The Slumbering One.” They have rites of baptism called Altarisganga, and they even have tentacle-themed curtains, and a whole lot of — let’s call them what they are — Cthulhu plushies. Yes. I chuckled at seeing them, thinking: “so this is where they are going to go with this.” The towns folk also wear white robes and green amulets not unlike aesthetics the Esoteric Order of Dagon in other Mythos films, but you can see that they could be Nordic pagan garb as well: not including the very clear fact that it’s not Dagon they are worshiping. 

They also claim that they “navigate well,” which aside from the Nordic Viking implications that some bar patrons go into quite crassly, also seemed to be a great Green Herring with regards to them being Deep Ones swimming in the water. But more than that, they use a phrase as a greeting and a farewell where they will tell someone to “Dream well.” Uh huh. It took me a moment, because while Neil Gaiman loves to sign his books with that phrase due to his Sandman series, we all know what those words actually mean in this particular context, when you consider who is dead and lies dreaming in his House under the sea. The community citizens think that their deity, or patron, guards their island and that his dreams affect them. Even a child is having a nightmare that is apparently their deity’s nightmare, but their mother passes it off as just commonplace and a matter of fact. 

But Renate is clever. As the town official, and head of their cult — or religion — she actually goes as far as to compare the Slumbering One to folktales of Iceland’s elves, Ireland’s leprechauns, and even mainland Norway’s trolls. It is a well placed series of dialogue that, with Barbara Crampton’s put-on Nordic accent is delivered well. 

But there is another symbol that pops up as well: that of the house. The generations-old Jorstad family home has mythical resonances for me, as well as personal ones. It looks like something the old Nordics would have made, with their sharp angles and almost bone-white insides. The family of one of my late partners of Finnish descent built, and used to own, a house like it a few generations ago in Canada, and I delighted in making horror story ideas about it when I visited once for Christmas and the New Year: with its fairytale, almost folkloric starkness, and austere beauty. It had even been in a mining town near a lake. You could sense the history of family in there, and see the lives lived in it. I could see the Jorstad home as once having been comforting in a similar way before everything came to a head. 

The house, aside from both the strange cramped angles of it reminiscent of the home in Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and the Jungian undertones as a symbol of a person’s psyche going deep into the basement of their collective unconscious, is both a dream house: and a murder house.

It is a dream house in that it symbolizes Isaac’s lost and nostalgic childhood, and a place to properly settle where he feels he can belong, and become a part of something more due to the … lack inside of him. It is also a murder house in that his father was killed by his mother in that very place, tainting it forever even as he wants to reclaim it for himself, and his new family. And, while find out later that this home, like many others, is a part of a land that does engage in human sacrifice: which is quite the extended metaphor for the house as an individual and cultural consciousness. Clearly, Emma has reservations about this. It isn’t just the ghost of the violence that happened here, in this place that can almost be a haunted house, or the fact that there are visions and occasional sounds of Cthulhu Mythos chanting, but it’s also the oppressive weight of its isolation with the island and the increasingly aberrant psychological behaviour of her husband.

I know that in their Convo X Fango interview with Angel Melanson, Barbara Crampton, Sophie Stevens, and Ludovic Hughes do talk about the latter’s character becoming more unhinged, and the strength of Stevens’ Emma as she deals with nightmares, and the other’s actions. But I think one issue with the film’s pacing is while we do see the interplay between husband and wife at the beginning, their transition into a frayed relationship sometimes seems uneven, and how they react and deal with trauma and revelations doesn’t always come across well. For instance, when Renate tells Isaac what happened to his father, for all that Emma was showing him support in remembering his childhood at the beginning, you don’t see her giving him comfort when he realizes his father was murdered his mother when he’s being interrogated for something that happened when he was a child. 

Hell, even the two of them seem to gloss over this when going to dinner with the woman who reveals all of this. This is a Hitchcock Fridge moment where, if I found out my mom killed my dad and took me away from this village, it would genuinely fuck me up. I mean, grief and loss are processed differently, and we see Isaac attempt to do that, but I just … I would imagine just wanting answers, and then really desiring to leave. This is not the only leap in logic that happens here, though in a world of the supernatural that doesn’t say much, but I just like a form of continuity. 

The conflict between Emma and Isaac makes sense to me in that they grow to want different things. It’s no coincidence that the bar patrons refer to Christopher Columbus not even having been born before their ancestors colonized America and then later Emma calling Isaac “as threatening as a gold fish” when he tries to act violent. The man seems to suffer from a kind of trauma even though he didn’t know, or remember what happened to him in that previous life: having been raised by his mother and the Pickman family, I assume. It reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, where a British architectural historian named Jacques Austerlitz gradually looks into his past as a child having been adopted by a Welsh family from his parents that sent him away before he could be taken, like them, by the Holocaust. Technically, Austerlitz never experienced the Holocaust or the camps, or even remembered his parents that well, but that loss was still there and the trauma remains to a point where it hospitalizes him and he needs to know more about where he came from. 

Isaac has not experienced genocide, even indirectly, but he did feel the loss of his father and his world, and that community: and a sense of belonging. I feel that Emma doesn’t quite understand this, and it is hard to communicate that fact. Sometimes, I even sympathized with Isaac and found Emma’s attitude terribly insensitive with regards to that trauma. At the same time, she has seen the rites and rituals of the community, along with a very disturbingly worded prayer during the Altarisganga along with the microaggression of one townsperson touching her pregnant belly without her permission, and endless nightmares and premonitions of what is to come. 

I think the confusing transitions are inherited in some ways from Paul Kane’s original “Men of the Cloth” story: where an entire family, a mother and father along with their children trying to help their father discover his roots in a small rural English village, go from one situation into a wildly ridiculous early-Clive Barker short story scenario.  I also see “Thicker Than Water” with its nearly submerged houses in the endless moving water puns and motifs, running everywhere, a spiritual medium bringing a slumbering god’s dreams and nightmares through dream and murder houses. 

I also think some of the rather superficial characters with their shallow needs carried through as well, though the cast definitely give them more nuance. I love how Emma calls Cthulhu “the lazy one” to Renate, and I was totally expecting her to pay for it later. And then, there is another cultural element that leads to the ultimate abusive blowup instigated by Isaac on Emma: the Tupilaq. 

The Tupilaq is an effigy, almost a scarecrow figure, of the Slumbering One to show a household mourning one of its family members. Weirdly, after looking to see if it exists in real life on the Internet, I found that a Tupilaq is apparently a Greenlandic Inuit avenging monster made by shamanism or witchcraft. How this crossed over to an actual Norwegian Island, if it came from there or from the First Nations of Greenland in the film is unknown. These are tools made of animal and human parts, even from the corpses of children, to create a monster to attack one’s enemies. Most have not survived, but according to Wikipedia Inuit tribes began to carve them out of bone for European travelers fascinated with the concept. In the case of Sacrifice, these effigies seem to have their roots in Kane’s “Men of the Cloth” and they are made of people too — especially children — though in the film they just depict a death. I imagine there are some issues of cultural appropriation you can get into here. The Jorstad house doesn’t have this version of a Tupilaq, as — supposedly — their family wasn’t there anymore, but Renate and her daughter Astrid have one to commemorate their husband, and father, respectively. I will get back to this later. 

It is Isaac that starts to make a Tupilaq for his murdered father, and representing him wanting to stay on the island. But I also think it’s possible that Renate didn’t tell the couple the entirety of for what those effigies are actually used: along with the rest of their rituals, as it turns out.

I think it’s appropriate that, in looking at this film and to quote Astrid, played by a luminous Johanna Adde Dahl, and also a line used by Kris Straub in Broodhollow that “science tells us how, but not why.” And while she is using this to talk to Isaac about an emerald aurora borealis and the stars, it summarizes that I can conjecture how this film and story is constructed, but I prefer to go into questions of why, and its possibilities. Isaac is mostly focused on how to get what he thinks he wants, but Emma is concerned with why, and wanting to get away from it before that knowledge consumes her, and their child. 

And here is where the joke has its punchline. Astrid refers to the cosmos and one’s place in it. And Isaac’s pedantic cultist buddies, one in particular, likes to talk about the universe as well in a way very reminiscent of cosmicism: of Lovecraft’s idea that humanity is insignificant next to the vastness of the universe, and its infinite apathetic and malignant horrors. It seemed clear to me that Isaac and his people were Deep One Hybrids, but they are not. This isn’t Innsmouth in “Thicker Than Water.” It is more the villagers in “Men of the Cloth” pleased to fix up “lose threads” from their insular place. 
I believed that Emma would kill Isaac, and take their child away in a repeat of the traumatic pattern where his mother killed his father, but that doesn’t happen either. 

Instead Isaac, who believes he will sacrifice his wife, ends up being the sacrifice himself. It’s a little strange how they do it. Why they went to the whole trouble of knocking out Emma and tying her on the coastline altar and letting Isaac carry the sword when they could have just taken him and killed him — as they and his father intended to do to him years ago — is beyond me. I think it is for dramatic effect to have that twist. I mean, come on: his name is Isaac. We know what Isaac means in the Old Testament: a father’s sacrifice to his deity. I knew it was going to happen, I just didn’t know how … though the why is obvious. The Slumbering One is sending out nightmares. He isn’t pleased that a sacrifice had been foiled, or the community disrupted. Balance must be restored. Also, Renate doesn’t seem too upset killing Isaac, thinking it would have been better to kill him before he became an abusive self-deluded pathetic man. And Emma lives, at least until the child is born. 

But why? Well, I have a theory of my own. The cosmic joke about Isaac might begin with the fact that his mother isn’t from the island. She is an outsider. His father specifically married her and somehow got her to the island. My theory is that every couple of years or so, the island intermarries with an outsider to create a child that will be sacrificed to appease their deity who resembles Cthulhu. Unfortunately, Isaac’s mother killed his father and left with him before this could happen: while not informing him of the truth. But I wonder, and perhaps only Barbara and the directors can confirm this, if there is another, more personal reason Renate kills Isaac: and why Astrid is so utterly fascinated with him. 

Renate is visibly upset over Isaac’s father’s demise even years later. It could be because of the disruption of the metaphysical and communal balance, but I wonder if there is more. Apparently, Isaac’s mother told him that his father had “another family” and that is why they left. Now, it is probably a reference to the cult of the island, but he inferred that his father had an affair and another partner and children. What if the reason — the true reason — a Tupilaq wasn’t built for Isaac’s father is because … it actually was? We never know who Renate’s husband is, for instance. And she is keen on finding the woman that killed him: perhaps more just a police officer’s zeal for a case opened twenty-five years? 

Maybe there is more than one reason why Renate wanted Isaac dead. Perhaps that’s why she wants Emma alive: either to keep that bloodline going … or to eventually make another sacrifice. Wouldn’t that be a great cosmic punchline to a fascinating film so rich with a created mythology combined with pre-existing ones. Perhaps horror isn’t a revelation of knowledge people are not meant to know, or knowing they aren’t important. Perhaps it’s that there are other powers inherent in reality that play with lives, that are amused by such. And, at the end, perhaps the true sacrifice is no only one’s sense of self-importance, or sense of belonging, but one’s own peace of mind. A sleeping mind isn’t always a placid one.

And with that knowledge, I wish you a good night. 

Dream well. 

I Want Out of This Party: Erik C. Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes to Midnight

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It is well past midnight right now, as I’m writing this post. I have a lot to think about, but I’m not in New Orleans, and this isn’t about Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting” or “The Vampire Song”: both fitting enough titles in and of themselves. Instead, I found myself this weekend — tired and emotionally raw — watching Erik C. Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes to Midnight.

I had this friend, once, that I used to talk with all the time: right about now into the wee hours of the morning, and beyond that. She used to say, with regards to her friends, our loved ones, and to us that we are voices in the darkness. She told me that I was a voice in the darkness: someone to speak with when everything seemed painful, terrifying, and hopeless. For thirty years at the small-town WLST radio station in which she’s been a radio disc jockey, Amy Marlowe, played by the beautiful veteran actress Caroline Williams, has been that voice: that person who took questions live on the air, and made connections with people.

Or at least, she tried.

I’ll admit that I almost misled myself coming into this film. Kreepazoid Kelly sent me a link to a Live Tweeting and Watch Party of the movie, and I fully intended on attending it but I missed the event. Luckily, I found the film and watched it. And, really, it couldn’t have come at a better time in this horror student’s opinion.

And I didn’t go to Berkley, unlike the character of Sienna whom Amy’s predatory boss, Bob, has hired to pretty much phase her out and replace her, though I suspect no one particularly just how much a “rabid bat bite” would change everything going in. That’s right. I read a description, before watching the movie, that Amy gets bitten by a rabies-infected bat, and she transforms into something. It seemed so ridiculous, and arbitrary. Even comical.

This impression didn’t last long as Amy comes in, from the storm, her neck injured pretty badly, but grimly determined to continue the job she earned years ago: to try to make a difference. But she’s tired, and cranky, and underneath all of that you can see that she’s scared: that she doesn’t really know why she’s doing this anymore, or why she’s going through the motions, or how it really all came to this.

I reviewed another vampire film, Bliss, before this movie. But unlike Bliss, where the vampire is part of the extended metaphor but almost incidental to the true beast of that narrative, the symbol of the vampire is front and centre with an almost Cabinet of Dr. Caligari surrealism, minus the non-Euclidean Expressionist geometry going nowhere. Inside, it is reality that doesn’t make sense anymore, with characters saying things that could be attributed to them complete with hallucinations and snippets of time out of space, or thoughts made visually manifest, and it’s Amy’s life that seems to be going nowhere.

The vampire, in this film, is Amy. Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there is is a part of her that is still holding onto her past — her humanity — but it is quickly becoming distant. There are so many vampire references in this film to the point of punsmanship. The security guard Ernie seems to keep sharpening a stake through woodworking. Aaron, Amy’s technical assistant and friend who idealizes her, gives her a red lollipop. And after she attacks, and seems to bite Sienna out of rage, she is in the washroom sucking on a used tampon: as though attempting to hold onto the youth she wasted in this establishment, the thinnest thread to her humanity, to the ideal of femininity and feminine beauty in a male-dominated establishment that drained her and spit her out, and also something defiant against that very thing that wants her to act all prim and proper against one final humiliation.

It isn’t so much the bite that changes Amy, I feel. It’s the slow realization, or the thought — as the details around her are dependent on her deteriorating perception — that everyone, and everything has betrayed her. Bob, who did not age well in thirty years from when he was a slick handsome man impressing a much younger Amy to a balding, grinning slimy ghoul more than a vampire, constantly has female interns in, and one more. Aaron doesn’t tell her about the fact that his high school friend Sienna is replacing her by Bob’s order. Sienna herself, seemingly innocent, knows or thinks she knows the game, and insults the woman she is supposed to replace.

Amy’s reality untethers, and we come along with her on the ride. We don’t know what’s real anymore, and what is in her head. It’s like experiencing a vampire’s perspective from Clan Malkavian — a bloodline of seers and madness from White Wolf’s World of Darkness — in that some events are even out of sequence. But the images are clear. The gaslighting is real as her coworkers seem to ignore, or not see her pain in her forced retirement, and Bob tries to make her think that her attack is all her fault, as Sienna calls her “crazy.” And you see a glimpse of the young woman Amy used to be, idealistic and vivid and kind, as Bob seduces her with his power position, and then uses her: and this is before we even see Amy looking physically younger, and it’s only towards the end that there is one moment of that: and then it’s gone.

I think there are a few images that stand out at me. The juxtaposition of the different characters in different roles shows Amy’s human mind degrading, with both hopes of what could have been, and resentment. Ernie sharpening the stake every time she sees him, is something of an inevitability. Even going off to see the sunrise has the connotation of going off into the sunset, but for a vampire we all know what means. Amy starts to see Sienna as the vampire monster usurping her, after she bites her: this creature that is both disfigured — and yet not on the surface ugly — who even in one iteration of the cinematic narrative wounds Bob: her new boss that she claims she can move on from to pursue greater dreams. This twisted Sienna probably never existed, but represents the deformed version of the ideal young and pretty, and internalized misogynist woman that Amy despises because of Sienna herself, but also because she can still see that in herself. And when she kills Sienna, she is really destroying the part of herself that at the time she thinks is separate from her, as she embraces the blood-splattered beautiful beast that she once feared, that she tried to suppress, the anger she tried to control, but has now become.

But the red phone scene, more than the ominous “For she’s a jolly good fellow” celebration at the end with the coffin, is the most heartbreaking. We see Amy lose her cool, completely, as Sienna is supposed to sit in to learn the ropes, and she uses the show she once loved to attack both the callers, and Sienna, and the radio station she’s worked at for ages. Yet the red phone — there is always red in this movie — stands out to me because I believe the voice on the other line thanking Amy for being there for her for so many years, and wanting to be her is, in fact, Amy. It’s Amy’s voice in the darkness that she’s always wanted. It’s what she was to other people. It’s what she perverted towards the end out of bitterness for what was done to her.

It is, really, the last of Amy’s humanity thanking her for being her.

I think it’s pretty safe to say I sympathized with Amy throughout the entire film. There are other aspects that might not have happened, or occurred the way they did, but it honestly doesn’t even matter. Amy ends the film, more or less, wondering if she actually did touch other people, ten minutes to midnight, three hours before the Hour of the Wolf, but so close to the end of one day and the beginning of another that she has no idea will even occur, or if she will ever see it. She also wonders if anyone is really who they say they are, or seemed to be: including herself.

It is a powerful film to consider, and made stronger because of Caroline Williams’ fierce, distinguished passion as Amy. It could have been a different film entirely. It could have been silly, like the strange descriptive summary I read with a zany vengeance-caper of blood and gore. We could have seen Aaron, who all but worshiped Amy, be the vampire that immortalizes her because he wants to preserve her beauty and keep him with her — doing what she is doing — forever. Hell, Ernie and Bob are nice red herrings — damn red again — because it almost seemed like they purposefully knew what she was, and that Bob turned into a vampire years ago as she “hasn’t seen sunlight in a while” because of the nightshift, and Ernie could easily have been a vampire hunter, or a thug to kill her by Bob after she is done.

We could have easily watched Amy slaughter everyone as a mindless revenant, or infect everybody with a zombie vampirism. But this film stuck to its principles: of a woman who defied misogyny, who had been humiliated by it, who had been seduced, subjected to grossness and disrespect, and whose mind is shaped by the forces of constant stress, gaslighting, and heartbreak but still rages into that good night, leaving a mess rivalling that of the insides of a red velvet food cake that I don’t think she ever got that chance to eat.

Instead, we see her at a party filled with people she thought she knew but never did, with others she’s never seen before, presenting her with presents of frozen time, and a vial of blood, and a coffin. And, as weird as this might sound, I feel like this film is more of a tragedy than a horror movie. Because even as she’s afraid, Amy wonders if anything she did mattered, despite her visceral defiance against the inevitable, she just wants this senseless party to end.

Perhaps sunrise will mark the aftermath of one story and the start of another.

A Messy Road to Sunrise: Joe Begos’ Bliss

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It has been a while since I’ve opened the operating table, such as it is.

And tonight, ladies and gentlemen and other sentient beings, we have an interesting specimen on the table who didn’t so much die young and leave a beautiful corpse so much as leave a glorious mess of bile and beauty, blood and Diablo in its wake. I am, of course, taking about Joe Begos’ 2019 film Bliss.

I, figuratively, walked in on Bliss as one woman was vomiting up blood, and another took a chunk out of another woman’s neck in a club bathroom. Aside from reminding me of my limited clubbing days, though not in Los Angeles as this film takes place, I wondered if I had accidentally crashed one of Dionysus’ revels in the twenty-first century. I left it alone for a while, once I saw this part on Shudder TV, my brain occasionally mixing it up with Panos Cosmatos, Elijah Wood, and Aaron Stewart-Ahn’s 2018 film Mandy, and eventually decided to revisit this strange, yet beautiful specimen after the subdued revelry of the New Year.

What I found was … blood can spoil, and so can films — or people who talk about them — so please mind these Spoilers, or chase them down with a gallon of red, or paint, or your favoured kind of debauchery. Or you can follow the good example of Bliss‘ protagonist Dezzy and, in the words of Neil Gaiman, “Make good art.”

I can see why some others have compared Bliss to Mandy. Aside from the fact that they both played on Shudder, they have heavy psychedelic sequences: with the bright strobing lights, and disjointed shapes, shadows, and shrieking noises that form the basis of every seizure warning disclaimer displayed before the film even plays. But this is the only thing those two films have in common. Before I set the record straight, I had this vision of the female protagonist of Bliss being kidnapped and she and Nicolas Cage engaging in witty banter as they slaughter every human and demon in their way to escape.

This did not happen.

Bliss, on the surface, seems like the kind of film — experimental and with art-house elements — that a critic and personality like Joe Bob Briggs would despise, or at least pick apart. Dezzy, played by Dora Madison, is an artist living in Los Angeles, with a clueless boyfriend content make a moderate living, while needing new experiences to help her break her artist’s block to finish her most recent art commission: a painting that will be displayed in an art gallery. All, obviously, isn’t well of course. It’s a chain reaction of Dezzy having this creative block, not getting paid by her agent, who isn’t getting paid by her, the owner of the gallery not getting the commission she paid for, and Dezzy dealing with a rut in her own life.

So what does Dezzy do about this? Well, it’s really simple. She goes to her drug dealer friend, and his older buddies, and gets some drugs — some alternative consciousness perhaps — to break through her block, and create her painting which at the beginning of the film is almost literally an ember that will ignite into a bloody, terrifying, incredible inferno. However, it is Dezzy’s life that needs to explode out there first.

The cinematic narrative perspective of the film follows Dezzy — and only Dezzy. It’s confusing enough as it is without adding anyone else’s perceptions into the mix, and Begos does this on purpose. On the surface, it would be so easy to say that after indulging in a self-destructive lifestyle of sex, drugs, booze, and rock and roll Dezzy loses her sanity, and kills herself but not before creating her last great work. As I said, this film can easily follow the burden of artistic genius and creative block trope easily: complete with hallucinations that are very much in line with the content of Dezzy’s painting.

But this isn’t taking the vampires into account.

Those vampires, seriously. You almost miss them at the beginning of the entire thing, and it’s easy to do so. In fact, Begos seems to hope that you will. It’s hard to keep track of a lot of events, in between time speeding up, becoming fragmented, and bouts of Dezzy being sick in the washroom, or screaming in terror into a phone and punctuated, rather brutally, by frequent blackouts.

Oh, there are some … crimson herrings of course. At the beginning of the film, Dezzy’s drug dealer offers her the drug called Diablo, and it’s another clever trap: where you might think that she’s inhaling the ashes of a demon that possesses her, and every interaction she has beyond that is incidental, or integral in triggering this entity into controlling her and destroying everyone around her: something like a twisted throwback to the genius, or muse, or daimon of ancient times: the old Mediterranean paradigm of a creator being inspired or inhabited by an outside creative spiritual force that makes them make things. But it seems like this is more than a kakodaímōn that encourages a person to commit terrible deeds such as murder, even if the metaphor might actually be implicit there.

Courtney and her boyfriend have a threesome with Dezzy during a party at her dealer’s house. And it’s only after this act, that we see Dezzy getting sick. And the imagery doesn’t end there. It is complete with Courtney killing a woman in a washroom and sharing the blood with Dezzy, as well introducing Dezzy to a man named Hadrian — who suspiciously resembles the kind of businessman elder vampire we all know from current vampiric films and literature, though we don’t see much as Dezzy’s senses are distorted from alcohol and drugs to the point of passing out.

Slowly, inevitably, we begin to realize the reason Dezzy is vomiting up blood isn’t because Diablo is destroying her body, or some monster is eating her up from the inside: though those things, both physically and metaphorically do take their toll on her. It is her vampirism. It is from all the moments she feeds and kills and blacks it all out of her mind — and it’s only later — when she comes face to to face with this addiction she can’t overcome, or have Courtney take away from her, that we see her kill: this almost somnambulist, animalistic state overcoming her, and making her murder and devour all her friends, and loved ones. .

Bliss‘ vampires are different. They seem to be able to eat food, drink, use drugs, and have sex. If anything, they seem more like Maenads — again with the Dionysian imagery of reveling women lost in drink and dance and becoming enraged to the point of ripping people apart and feasting on their blood — than something undead, or rotting. It could also be that Dezzy herself is in the transition into becoming one of these beings. Indeed, after her encounter with Courtney and her boyfriend, she can still walk around in the sunlight and eat: but it’s earlier on, and as she loses track of time and events spiral swiftly onwards, we get caught up in the whirlwind of the entire time. Eventually, looking back on everything, you wonder if Dezzy is only ever out at night now, indulging in her addictions and her creativity, and her madness.

But the vampirism in this film is almost besides the point. Somehow, it gets sidelined. What is fun is realizing that Courtney and the other vampires probably told Dezzy the rules of what they are, and how they are to operate in society, but because Dezzy is so suffused with Diablo — apparently, and ironically, the only thing keeping the edge of her hunger — she might not even remember those conversations having taken place. If you look at it on the surface, it seems like Courtney just threw her friend into the world of vampirism and “fucked around and found out”: just letting Dezzy go out of control until needing to do something about like — you know — devouring her instead.

Courtney isn’t blameless, of course. She knows Dezzy. She knows how to indulge her worst traits, or enable them. She probably knew it would come to drugs and killing sprees and orgies of death in general. Perhaps she underestimated the scope of them, or the focus. Because, here is the secret of this entire time: the lynch-pin of this film if you’d like. Dezzy’s primary addiction isn’t sex, or drugs, or alcohol, or money, or power, or blood and immortality.

Dezzy’s ultimate compulsion is the creative process.

Dezzy needs to paint. She needs to create. She castigates her boyfriend or lover, who wants to settle for mediocrity, because she tells him that he doesn’t know what it’s like to make something, and it shows. It is the main part of their disconnect. It’s the reason she went on this new odyssey to begin with, but the journey becomes the destination. It might have started with needing to pay bills, or gain fame, or keep up the money she needs to maintain her lifestyle but the seeds of all of this had been planted in the ash-covered ground ages before, watered by the blood of Dezzy’s friends and enemies. She only did the bare minimum to keep living, to have outlets for her physical needs in order to continue her artistic passion: her need for freedom, and the power of creation itself.

Everything has been a means to that act of art: the drugs, the alcohol, the sex, the interpersonal connections, and even the vampirism. E. Elias Merhige’s 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire posits that its monster isn’t the vampire, or human greed, but the cold, soulless lens of the camera that wants to consume everything that it views in its mechanical gaze. Bliss‘ monster is all consuming love of creativity, and the process, at all costs. And, just like the vampire playing Max Schreck, Courtney, the inadvertent vampires made by Dezzy by feeding off of everyone she knows, and Dezzy herself are all consumed by this burning passion: culminating in a joyous, bloody explosion by sunlight, and her painting displaying a beautiful summoning of a road into hell.

The vampires of Bliss can be killed by a stake through the heart, but it’s the light of the sun — the sunset at the beginning of the film, and the red dawn at the end — that sees the beautiful disaster of Dezzy, once well-meaning but become a blood-splattered glory, to the ascension of everything she ever truly loved … and destroyed. After all, it is no coincidence that the damned souls depicted in her painting look an awful lot like the people in her life taken down with her, and the central figure surrounded by them herself.

Perhaps, like Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Who Walks Home Alone at Night — another excellent vampire film and reimagining — Joe Bob and others might see this as artistic cliché and masturbation, but it hits close to home for a lot of reasons. Dezzy isn’t perfect, but despite what she inhales she isn’t the Devil, and there is something about the mentality of the creative process being all-consuming, like fire over a vampire and the release of the mess of emotional gore inside artistic expression combined with Begos’ cinematic unreliable narrative perspective, that truly speaks to me, and I am glad that after my horror writing hiatus from the last year, this is the film with which I chose to wreck it.

Yule in Fuckedupland: Greg Nicotero’s “A Creepshow Holiday Special”

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really know what to say.

I didn’t expect there to be a Holiday edition of Creepshow, but I should have. I really should have. I thought, given what happened with this passing year of infamy and the quality of the Animated Special, we would have to wait until next year — maybe even longer — to see another episode of this Shudder series. In fact, when I first heard about someone mentioning this online, I thought they were still talking about the Halloween Animated Special.

I was wrong. It turns out, I was wrong about a great many things.

What we have here, this particular specimen made of a collection of fibers, buttons, and sixty-five cents in the manner that old vintage-era comics used to cost over time, is live-action and the only story of its kind: its own weird star on its very furry Yuletide tree from the Fucked Up Island of Misfit Stuffed Animals. I know what I said. 

The premise is that Robert Weston, an unassuming prickly man goes to a support group called Shapeshifters Anonymous to deal with the fact that he has become a lycanthrope: a werewolf. But that’s not what the story is about. Not really. This story, written and directed by Greg Nicotero on too much egg-nog spiked on crack perhaps to offset the bleak insanity of this year, is about how these therianthropes — these humans that change into humanoid animal monsters except for for Phyllis, the furry member who just reliably makes every meeting — has to fight to the death against their ancient enemy: Kristopher Claws, a jumped up folklore nightmare wannabe that wishes he was Baba Yaga, and his Santa helpers. 

Yup. That’s it. The episode is off the wall, and its lampoonish insanity and premise is reminiscent of Scare Package’s “M.I.S.T.,E.R” with some What We Do in the Shadows werewolf humour. Also, Bob — as a central power — makes it back into Creepshow, but not in the same way as the name did in “The Finger,” which this episode gives the Holidays. 

I didn’t expect this, in so many ways. It is almost comical, and it’s strange to see a standalone episode without another to accompany it in the usual double features with which we become accustomed. There was an interlude of sorts where it went right back into the comics sequences that we’ve seen, and I wondered if they were going to end the episode there and transition into the other, like they usually do, but they didn’t. 

The story itself is haphazard in a fun way like Manborg, like adults playing with their toys and mixing metaphors in ridiculous ways to just make … fun. 

To be fun.

It could have gone another way. It could have been all fun and games until Phyllis, the only non-therianthrope, is killed by Kristopher, and then it becomes real: this group of friends really fighting for their survival. There were points, even with the were-boar and were-turtle where I thought some of these friends would die. But I’m glad it didn’t go there. I’m glad Phyllis got to have her moment, and get her wish. Phyllis is awesome. 

It’s easy, and dangerous, to take horror seriously. To always expect it to be grim, and tragic, and brutal all the time.Frankly, we had that already in “A Creepshow Animated Special” of Halloween. Between the “Survivor Type” and “Twittering From the Circus of the Dead” I’m not sure I could take anymore of the horror of isolation. I think this year has also done that enough for us. But in giving the tropes of Holidays the taloned finger, Nicotero also draws together these therianthropic misfits from an awkward first meeting to a heartwarming sense of belonging and camaraderie against the ridiculously diabolical hordes of the hired killers that want to rip off all their hides with a gusto usually reserved for cookies and milk, and toys given out of guilt. I even ship Weston, played by Adam Pally, and Irena as played by Anna Camp together: as Robert is a well-meaning fumbling man, and Irena is a good kitty … or as much as a were-jaguar or any cat can be. A were-boar can actually be a terrifying thing, but the one in Shapeshifters Anonymous is not. I definitely had a Ninja Turtle flash-backs with another member, the were-turtle would could conceivably be a fighting tank, and I was just waiting for Kristopher — their enemy — to make a quip like “Tonight we dine on turtle-soup!” What a missed opportunity. 

I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a long time, minus the hysteria. All told, as a Creepshow story it was entertaining, and it is great to see what could be a supernatural affliction become something positive against deceptive holiday normalcy, and instead of Rudolph getting to play reindeer games, Irena gets to show Robert what a California King-sized bed truly is.

I needed something to remind me of how weird and comical horror can be, and how it can laugh at itself, reminding me of some of the fun spectacles at the Toronto After Dark. “A Creepshow Holiday Special” is the heartwarming story of a group of were-creatures fighting against the assassins of Santa Claus is a gift you may not want, but you definitely need. 

The Shadows Over Dagon and The Deep Ones

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about Castle Freak and the origins of both the original and the remake, where Stuart Gordon and Tate Steinsiek along with Dennis Paoli and Kathy Charles respectively draw from and adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s stories to create their own cinematic narratives. In my own article on Gordon and Paoli’s Castle Freak, I considered what would happen if they — or someone else — had told the story of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” and used that protagonist to replace Randolph Carter in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”: essentially stitching together another story to tell a whole other tale. In fact, I’ve engaged in similar speculation before when considering what might have happened if in their cinematic adaptation of From Beyond,  someone had incorporated elements of “The Shadows Over Innsmouth” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” alongside “From Beyond” to create a whole other kind of narrative.

All of this thought is derived from my experience watching Robert Stanley’s Color Out of Space, which is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella of the same name: where Stanley takes the main story, which is meatier — if you will pardon the unintentional pun with the word meteor given the story premise — and made it feel like it was part of Lovecraft’s whole Cthulhu Mythos on screen through word-dropping names, institutions and geographical locations: with the potential to explore more through The Dunwich Horror. Stanley seems to want to continue through “The Dunwich Horror” while Steinsiek and Charles have already grafted it onto Gordon’s offspring derived from “The Outsider” and seem to want to go and make their own retroactive mutation of Re-Animator: though how much of it will be from Gordon, or from the serialized narrative of Lovecraft’s “Herbert West – Reanimator” with their own twist is another matter entirely.

I find it interesting how when thinking about Castle Freak I wanted to go the entire ghouls and Dreamlands route, where there is a thin line between the waking world and dreams reaching into inhuman realities in a sort of terrible dark fantastic odyssey — definitely a part of the Cthulhu Mythos with “The Dream-Quest” and “Pickman’s Model” — while Steinsiek and Charles went into some good old Yog-Sothothery with “The Dunwich Horror” grafting.

But Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli also had to expand on the matter of another reanimated Mythos experiment much in the way Steinsiek and Charles did, and West might have done as a filmmaker utilizing the bodies of other stories as he did during his stint with his partner in one of the serials — or chapters — set in World War I.

I am thinking about Dagon. And by focusing on Dagon, I am looking at Lovecraft’s infamous novella “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and where else it leads. “Dagon” itself is the title to another Lovecraft short story about a former soldier who, after fleeing being captured by Imperial German forces, finds himself on a piece of land emerged from the ocean inhabited by non-human ruins, and what ultimately in later stories in the Mythos become the Deep Ones: aquatic humanoids that worship their own Great Old Ones. This unnamed protagonist is hospitalized after returning to civilization, and he attempts to kill himself when he can’t get anymore morphine to drown out the feelings of terror associated with his memories of dealing with the creatures, and the idols of their god Dagon, but there is this implication that at least one of them tracked him down to finish the job. This story is one of Lovecraft’s earliest to introduce the Cthulhu Mythos, and the rest of the elements of Dagon, and the Deep Ones are expanded in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

Gordon and Paoli themselves simply take the title of this first short story, or the name of the deity of Dagon, and simply adapt — or transplant — “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” into another clime entirely. Gordon and Paoli’s 2001 film Dagon takes place in Spain, in the town of Imboca: the equivalent to Innsmouth. The town itself is just as water-logged and rotten as the costal town in America. While Robert Olmstead in “The Shadow” is a student from Oberlin College fascinated with antiquarian studies and his own genealogy — a thing that never ends well in Lovecraft stories — Paul Marsh (played by Ezra Godden) had been a graduate of Miskatonic University, and is vacationing on a yacht with his girlfriend and their older friends before a storm seems to appear out of nowhere and force at least the two of them to seek help in Imboca.

Paul does have some foreboding about the situation as he’s been having dreams about a mermaid or siren beckoning him and revealing her fangs. He is also filled with no only a sense of dread, but as he says to his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Meroño), a lack of purpose as well. There are also some unexplained pink slashes on his ribs at the very beginning film, and he is always having medication for a stomach ailment presumably caused by stress.

There are differences between the two stories: “Shadows” taking place during Prohibition, and Dagon in the early aughts, and the main character of the former being alone, and the latter having his friends and a lover as well as a female entity interested in his existence. The horror in the novella is more subtle through Olmstead’s description of smells, and the strange “Innsmouth look” of its inhabitants — that uncanny valley of not quite human tinged with no small amount of xenophobia in the writing, while it becomes very clear to Paul Marsh and Barbara that most of the people in Imboca are not human at all, and even those that pass are definitely not normal: almost ridiculously so.

The film is blatant about it. The people of Imboca are pretty ineffectual mobs who  take too long in chasing Paul around, and lose him every time, whereas the citizens of Innsmouth slowly do subtle things such as manipulating the door locks at the inn that Olmstead is staying at, or conveniently making it clear the bus out of their town isn’t working so that they can grab him during the night. Olmstead is more worried about saving himself, while Paul wants to find his girlfriend who goes missing in Imboca: even after he is told that she’s dead.

Fascinatingly enough, :Robert Olmstead and Paul Marsh do see the gold that the Deep Ones are infamous for possessing, and the implements they make out of it. However, while Olmstead sees an example of an ornamental crown or tiara held at a museum, which the people of Innsmouth had been trying to get back for ages, Paul and Barbara simply see the priestly inhabitants — Imboca’s version of the Esoteric Order of Dagon that rules in Lovecraft’s Innsmouth — wearing them, and in particular their High Priestess.

The designs of the Deep Ones, and the Deep One-human hybrids of Imboca are fairly on par with their descriptions from Lovecraft. Apparently, Bernie Wrightson — an American artist famous for his illustrations of Frankenstein, and being the co-creator of Swamp Thing — created many designs for what was going to be a Shadow Over Innsmouth film in 1991: some of which made it into the Dagon adaptation instead. The rituals of the Deep Ones are made clearer in Imboca, with many of them wearing the flayed skin of the humans they have captured for sacrifice and, presumably, food given that some of the bodies are being held with animal meat in storage. It’s strange because I don’t think the Deep Ones of Innsmouth eat humans, and they don’t wear human skins: for disguise, ritual, or otherwise, but it is an interesting conceit for the creepiness in that film. Like I said in my other post before this one, “nameless and blasphemous rites” which, surprisingly this time around are not orgies.

The parallels between the short story and the film are fairly straightforward, though Dagon tends to be more graphic and illustrate exactly what happens. Both Lovecraft’s Obed Marsh and Orpheus Cambarro are sea captains that corrupt their desperate towns respectively with promises of sea bounty, and gold: save that while Innsmouth had a massive human uprising that needed to be put down by the Deep Ones with their shoggoth servitors and Elder Signs, and the survivors were forced to interbreed with them, Imboca mostly had compliance with a few dissenters that were useful as sacrifices and examples of what happens when one defies the god Dagon.

Ezequiel, the old man is played by Francisco Rabal, is pretty much Imboca’s equivalent of Old Man Zadok (Zadok Allen) who is one of the few humans left in Innsmouth. Yet while Zadok mostly just tells the story of the Deep Ones infiltration and control of Innsmouth, going as far as to say Marsh found them during his travels in the Pacific and the Caroline Islands interbreeding with peoples there — and then being disposed of “off screen” for saying too much to an outsider — Ezequiel also explains his past, albeit with a very thick accent that’s easy to miss every other word, and actually helps Paul Marsh out until he is pretty much skinned alive by the priest of the village.

It is made clear that the Deep Ones have mated with humans in Imboca over a period of time, yet Dagon is different from “Shadow” as Dagon himself, this Great Old One from the sea, is more prevalent and puts on a physical appearance: going as far as to, of course, need human female sacrifices to … impregnate in the village’s rituals. This is what happens to one of their friends, and then eventually Barbara herself.

Robert Olmstead somehow manages to flee Innsmouth, perhaps even being let go, and informs the American government that — essentially — takes all of Innsmouth’s citizens into concentration camps, and even damages the underwater cities of the Deep Ones with their submarines. But Paul Marsh doesn’t run away, but attempts to set the church where the inhabitants conduct their rituals on fire … and fails. He fails to both rescue or kill Barbara, who is pregnant with Dagon’s brood, and to kill the rest of the villagers.

At the end, both Olmstead and Paul learn the terrifying truth of their origins. After Olmstead leaves Innsmouth and calls the authorities on them, he investigates his family tree and realizes that his grandmother Eliza Orne had been related to the Marsh family, and he begins to physically transform into a Deep One. This revelation: that he isn’t human, and he inadvertently committed genocide on his own people almost breaks Olmstead, bringing him almost to the brink of suicide by an automatic rifle. Instead, he dreams of his grandmother and ancestor Pth’thya-l’yi — who are still alive due to the immortal lifespans of the Deep Ones — and they order him back to them, to pay a penance for his actions but to nevertheless take his place among them. He ends up rescuing his cousin from a sanitorium who is more transformed than he is, and hopes to live out their lives in the underwater city of Y’ha-nthlei.

Paul Marsh meets the High Priestess Uxía Cambarro — the mermaid from his dreams — who almost seduces him, and it is only at the climax of the film that her father, who is mostly transforms, stops the villagers from killing Paul with the revelation that Paul is his son from a mother that fled Imboca, and the half-brother of Uxia. I didn’t know, when I first saw this film, that Paul’s last name was Marsh otherwise it would have been a dead giveaway as to who, or what, Paul truly is. Uxia and some of the other Imbocan villagers are strange in that they have octopus tentacles instead of amphibian features, seemingly another departure from Lovecraft’s depictions of Deep One physiology, though it may have been combined with aspects of Cthulhu. It is worth noting that I recall them reciting the chant “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä!” which refers to Cthulhu as opposed to Dagon, though Cthulhu is part of their pantheon, and is noted as such in “Shadows Over Innsmouth.”

Paul Marsh, realizing that he is a Deep One hybrid and having lost the woman he loves, and knowing his half-sister wants to be with him for all eternity with Dagon attempts to burn himself alive with kerosene (for some reason, the Deep Ones in Dagon possess a fear of fire), but Uxia stops him and throws the both of them into the grotto under the church, making the stripes on Paul’s ribs turn into gills and making his transformation complete. There is your usual horror cinema titillation with female nudity and sex scenes, especially in Stuart Gordon’s horror, though it is strange not to see Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs having any roles in this Lovecraft adaptation, considering they were in Re-Animator, From Beyond, and even Castle Freak. Dagon‘s production value feels a little wonky — especially in its special effects — but the ending is very Lovecraftian, and it fits well with its original source material.

Most of Lovecraft’s stories don’t have female characters in them, or relationships depicted, though sex here is illustrated as something grotesque and horrible much like Lovecraft would obliquely refer to it in his writing. And this becomes more prevalent in a film like Chad Ferrin’s 2020 film The Deep Ones.

The Deep Ones is a movie made almost two decades after Gordon and Paoli’s work, with a dedication to the memory of Stuart Gordon similar to that of the Castle Freak remake. Ferrin, the director and writer of this film, also does something with Innsmouth and Dagon. However, unlike Gordon and Paoli, he doesn’t take Innsmouth and attempt to transplant it into another geographical locale, but he attempts to reinvent it.

In this film, the characters do not find themselves in Innsmouth but a small, gated community off the Californian coast called Solar Beach. The cultists here, as the couple’s friend Deb comments, seem to be a tamer version of those who might attend the Burning Man Festival, but they resemble more the stereotype of swinger couples: of older men with younger wives that engage in communal rituals. Certainly, Russell Marsh — again, that old Marsh family — played by Robert Miano seems more like Hugh Hefner than the masked and deformed High Priest father from Dagon, or the shadowy and unseen Barnabas Marsh from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” In fact, if anything Russell resembles more of a sea captain, at least in aesthetic: which would make him closer to an Obed Marsh of sorts. His wife, Ingrid Krauer, played by Silvia Spross has more of a Stepford Wife feel, as Kim Newman in his own review of the film notes about the entire situation.

The protagonists themselves are a couple named Alex and Petri (played by Gina La Piana and Johann Urb respectively) that are grieving over a miscarriage and attempting to heal and start over again at an Airbnb that is Russell and Ingrid’s home. The creepiness here isn’t so much the surroundings that look immaculate, even beautiful, but the incredible intrusiveness of the Marshes and their insular community. Literally, the entire house is secretly hooked up with surveillance cameras even as the Marshes invite themselves back into the Airbnb to “take care” of the younger couple, putting some unknown substance in their food, and having their doctor friend, who for some reason is played by the actor Timothy Muskatell in drag, take a urine sample from Alex to look at her fertility.

You can already see where this is going. Hell, even the gate outside of the Marsh residence made Airbnb has the same Esoteric Order of Dagon symbol as the one in the church in Gordon and Paoli’s Dagon. And the good doctor’s husband, who helps host their party at their own residence for the younger couple, has the first name Obed. The cultists themselves do not look mutated, or have that strange fish-like Innsmouth look. In fact, they just resemble affluent rich white American citizens but it is their blandness that makes them so disturbing, and their pervasive, reasonable explanations for strange things. This pervasiveness does become a little heavy-handed when Russell is able to hypnotize Petri with his gold cigarette case: making him “look into the light.”

As far as I know, Deep Ones and their followers in Lovecraft aren’t capable of hypnotism or even changing people without Deep One blood into something inhuman. It was smoother for me with Dagon because we find out Paul is a Hybrid like his half-sister Uxia and from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” we now they can communicate with each other in some kind of communal dream which, given the fact that they are related to — and even worship Cthulhu, especially given how they also make that iconic chant to him “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä!” (Hail! … Cthulhu Dreams!”) — makes a lot of sense. But the fact that Russell uses gold to mesmerize Petri does track with the fact that the Deep Ones possess this ore with abundance and use it to maintain power over humans. Innsmouth did have a gold refinery created by Obed Marsh after all, and Dagon did bring gold to Imboca in the film of his name.

Again, fascinatingly enough, the Marshes and their neighbours have access to a special wine, which they ply Petri with in their seduction of him, that they create in their own personal refinery amongst their locally grown food substances: those Marshes and their refineries. It is also interesting to consider that Alex explains to Deb that Petri might see the father-figure in Russell that he lost with the death of his own father, and then you realize that Dagon in the Cthulhu Mythos is referred to as Father Dagon.

I’d tempted to think of The Deep Ones as something of its own genetic splicing with the Mythos by Ferrin, except for one other element. It isn’t the Deep Ones that we do see, which are few and far between, though there is a young girl with webbed fingers and a fish-face here and there. Rather, it is the addition of a fascinating character named Ambrose Zadok. This is the female analogue to Zadok Allen from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” played by the excellent Kelli Maroney — and easily the best thing, aside from the villainousness of Robert Miano, about this film — who is looking for her lost daughter: a daughter that we realize isn’t missing, but was taken by the Solar Beach cult to their master Dagon. Ambrose is desperate, nearly deranged with grief and fear for her child, and her presence is explained away — gaslit — by the Sheriff who has never heard of Mayberry or Andy Griffith: I mean, seriously, these Deep Ones and their human converts are trying to infiltrate into human society, and they were doing so well. How couldn’t they know about the all-American Andy Griffith Show?

The cultists are indeed fairly good at seeming normal, but there is always something a little off, or a little zany about them. They are awkward, almost cringe-worthy in how they view the protagonists as potential converts … or sacrifices. Kim Newman mentions that their all-white upper-middle class background almost speaks volumes about privilege, and racism in Lovecraft and America. Just like in Dagon, we also see Dagon but the person playing him is smaller than the giant in Gordon and Paoli’s film, and like Paul Marsh and Barbara neither Alex nor Petri — like a dish where specimens are observed and experimented upon — escape, and they join the madness.

There are elements that put me off of The Deep Ones. The production value is different, almost made-for-television. The film’s over-reliance on the theremin’s sound effect for bizarre and creepiness becomes almost campy after a while, and I found that despite having Petri and Alex possessing their own little couple ritual based on how they first met, they were forgettable, and their friend Deb is irritating. In fact, I feel like they were lampoons of the normal white couple of privilege who have the resources to rent a high-end Airbnb, and can afford to ignore the bizarre nature of everything going on outside of their sphere, and the suffering of people like Ambrose Zadok until their final transformation into the Stepford cultists that they want to be. They start this entire film off wanting what the Solar Beach community wants: children and family, and they get exactly that. Granted, Alex does try to think of Ingrid — Marsh’s wife — when she and Deb realize she had been captive, as we’d seen at the beginning of the film, until seemingly brainwashed into becoming pregnant with Dagon’s child.

This is another aspect as well. It seems being pregnant with a child of Dagon is to have something of a symbiote that continues hypnosis by infiltrating the body: as we get with Ingrid’s womb-tentacle into Petri’s mouth after he’s first mesmerized. It’s similar to the tendril and eventual vaginal eye that comes out of Rebecca Whateley and her Freak sister in the Castle Freak remake as they are children of Yog-Sothoth. We also see in Dagon that Ingrid has the ability to psychically possess Petri after the death of her husband, and herself. Indeed, at the end of the film, both Alex and Petri are acting like Ingrid and Russell respectively when welcoming another couple into the Marsh home that now belongs to them. Aside from the symmetry of the film ending much like it begins, with a woman running and then succumbing to fear, and acceptance of the unknown, what seems to happen to Petri at least is reminiscent of the mind transfer ability seen in “The Thing on the Doorstep” with Asenath Waite, or Ephraim Waite, which is appropriate I suppose when you consider that these Lovecraft characters also came from Innsmouth, and perhaps learned that spell there.

When looking back at Chad Ferrin’s The Deep Ones, I can appreciate the Mythos elements and what he does with “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but I feel like there is a missed opportunity with Kelli Maroney’s Ambrose Zadok character. The interactions between her and Russell Marsh in her car, which he can somehow just go right into — which makes me think he and Ingrid do have some powers of their own — stand out the most, especially when he confronts her about how “she knew what she wanted” and “she knew the price.” That is a story all in itself, and I feel like that while it is appropriate that Deb dies being distracted by that creepy little Deep One Hybrid girl reminiscent of the children she’s left with her sitter, it may have been even more effective if that’s how Ambrose dies — with the implication that she made her own compromise with her daughter’s life and had second thoughts far too late — instead of being lured out with her voice, and all but killed off-screen.

I like to compare these films and their source material together. It makes me think about what a big production or an adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu” might look like. Cthulhu, Father Dagon, and Mother Hydra represent a polytheistic idea of dreams and nightmares being one with reality, and how humankind is not that far removed from what they are. Water is another theme: a medium of magic that can call on, and summon things between worlds, or force us to see that they already exist among us: oddity hiding right in plain sight. I have always been interested in the Deep Ones, in the idea of people secretly having non-human ancestry that manifests and they become the beings that they are truly meant to be. I can even see Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water playing with this idea: where the Amphibian Man can be seen as just as much of a Deep One as a Creature From the Black Lagoon, and Elisa Esposito is a Deep One-Hybrid abandoned by the side of a river: with slashes on her neck that become gills with the Amphibian Man. I’d love to compare “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and Dagon with The Shape of Water.

Suffice to say, that tropical literary embryonic tissue that Herbert West and his assistant experiment with keeps growing into different ligaments and directions, continues. I wonder what other mad scientists and filmmakers will make of it all next. Can we always see the same horror twice? Is it always going to be the same deep, dark, dream?

The Shadows of Tate Steinsiek’s Castle Freak

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I so desperately wanted to call this “The Shadows Over Castle Freak,” but I would be mixing metaphors, and inaccurately too.

In my post “An Outsider’s View of Castle Freak,” which focuses on the original Stuart Gordon 1995 film and its tenuous foundation from H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Outsider,” I talked about a possible Cthulhu Mythos remake of the movie by bonding it with the cannibalistic lineage of a family like the last scion of it in “The Rats in the Walls” along with the ghouls of “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” But director Tate Steinsiek and writer Kathy Charles take another Mythos track entirely in their re-imagining of the film.

I had a few ideas for remaking Stuart Gordon’s film, a cinematic piece that I still think is good in its own right but as I was writing it all out for myself in an attempt to say something somewhat original about Castle Freak, I took a look at a preview of Steinsiek’s film and realized they actually made the central protagonist Rebecca Reilly.

When I first saw Castle Freak, I always thought the character of Rebecca was a wasted opportunity. Rebecca is a character who is made permanently blind by a car accident caused by her father John in the original film, and taken to her family’s ancestral Italian castle. More often than not, she was helpless and completely ignorant of what was going on all around her when she wasn’t wandering away, and endangering herself. In the 1995 film, Rebecca is very much her parents’ girl: used in a tug of war between both grieving adults to hurt each other, and threatened by the titular freak.

I remember, watching Gordon’s film that I would have liked to see Rebecca have more agency. She is blind, but she has other senses and she can still ask questions and assert her own personality. In addition, I wondered what her interactions with “the Freak” would have been like given that she can’t see. I considered that she would potentially perceive “the Freak” — her secret uncle Giorgio Orsino — differently, much in the way that the blind man did without prejudice with regards to Frankenstein’s creature. But Gordon decided to make part of the terror a character couldn’t see being victimized by a being she didn’t know, and to whom she was vulnerable. But I am glad to see that Steinsiek and the rest of the production made a different choice with the remake.

I think that while this is a film that can be seen on its own, I am more fascinated with how it can be properly appreciated in parallel to its 1995 predecessor, along with its own literary source material. In my last post, I talk about how several characters in the 1995 film are shadows of each other, especially John Reilly and Giorgio Orsino, and the late child J.J. and Giorgio. In this work, the characters are more shadows of Gordon’s work, and H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dunwich Horror.”

The film begins in Albania as opposed to Italy, with a woman flagellating herself in the name of the Christian faith while abusing her deformed offspring in a dungeon chamber. What we found out is this woman, this recluse not unlike the older Duchess D’Orsino in Gordon’s film, is Lavinia Whateley (played by Kika Magalhães) who keeps her deformed daughter as a prisoner. For those readers who recognize that name and saw the story I reference, I think you might already begin to know where this is going.

Unlike Giorgio (played by Jonathan Fuller), who escapes the dungeon after a week of starvation and breaking a finger to release himself from his chains, the unnamed “Freak” (whose actor is strangely seems not to be credited) is released from her bonds (her female gender being something I only realized later into the film) to find her mother already killed. In some ways, it almost feels like a poetic justice for what the Duchess did to her son in the spiritual predecessor to this film: especially when you see “the Freak” both hold and whip her dead mother and tormentor’s body into so much pulp. However, like I said, if you know “The Dunwich Horror” you realize the story is already radically different.

Lavinia Whateley is a character that lived with her father in Dunwich, Massachusetts. Lavinia comes from H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dunwich Horror” is a girl used in her father’s — the Wizard “Old Whateley” — ritual from an incomplete version of The Necronomicon to summon the Great Old One Yog-Sothoth to impregnate her. Poor Lavinia has two twin children by Yog-Sothoth: the deformed but brilliant Wilbur Whateley who attempts to steal a complete edition of The Necronomicon from Miskatonic University to summon his alien father, and fails — and an invisible, giant monstrosity that consumes a lot of cattle and runs rampant and killing whatever is in its way when his brother dies before being stopped by Miskatonic University’s Professor Henry Armitage and his fellow faculty members. Lavinia herself is portrayed as being albino with some cognitive issues, and she disappears by the time the story truly begins: either having been killed by Wilbur, or consumed by her other invisible son.

Lavinia Whateley in Castle Freak is the exact opposite of her literary counterpart. She is darker skinned and haired, and while she is also terrified over what happened to her — made to bear those children of Yog-Sothoth by her father — she sends one of them away to another family for a better life, and keeps “the Freak” bound: all to make sure the twins never unite. Unlike the Duchess from Gordon’s work, she doesn’t do this completely out of grotesque vanity and a mad sense of petty spitefulness, but to make sure that the two sisters don’t summon their father into the world and endanger it. Of course, it’s not all altruism even then. Lavinia is the victim of rape from her father, who had summoned and been possessed by the entity — whose own father seems to resemble her deformed daughter, and is perhaps indicative of some “tainted bloodline” as one villager tells the protagonists later in the film (and reminiscent of the De la Poers from “The Rats in the Walls”) — and probably sees her daughter as everything she hates in her own bloodline, hence her own self-flagellation and her rapist.

Whereas we see the Duchess whipping Giorgio with her flail to punish his disloyal father, we see this version of Lavinia punishing her daughter for what her own father did to her and the daughter later using the same flail on her corpse after she is freed, on the people that try to kill her, and having it used on her again by the man she sleeps with later. There is a different trajectory of generational pain and horror here that seems to say something about female trauma and survival which varies from Gordon’s film, and is non-existent in “The Dunwich Horror.” A fascinating thing to note is Whateley being a vessel for Yog-Sothoth to impregnate his own daughter is similar to a plot point in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ comic series Providence: where the analogue to Old Man Whateley, Garland Wheatley also commits incestuous rape on his daughter Lavinia counterpart Leticia to create Wilbur and the invisible terror John Divine.

And then we get to the protagonists. Rebecca Reily — or Reilly (played by Clair Catharine) — is different from her counterpart in Gordon’s film. She is more independent, and assertive. She’s still young, but she’s already lived a life of independence and hard living. Rebecca later explains that she was adopted into the Reilys, a nice nod to the original film, but we hear nothing further about them. She is with her boyfriend who, also on alcohol and cocaine leaves a party with her and almost promptly crashes their car: blinding her permanently in the process.

This is where a fascinating dynamic begins. Rebecca’s boyfriend’s name is John, an obvious parallel to the original Rebecca’s father John Reilly from Gordon’s movie. There is no mother or father in this film, Rebecca’s own mother being dead and the entire reason the apparent representative of her birth family — the Whateleys — gets her to go back to her ancestral castle in Albania.

John (played by Jake Horowitz) is a hard-partyer, as Rebecca used to be. He also has issues with control. He flirts with other women to make Rebecca jealous, he is addicted to alcohol and drugs, and he likes to make decisions on Rebecca’s behalf: especially after their accident. Like John Reilly of the 1995 film played by Jeffrey Combs, he seems to have issues with personal responsibility, but unlike him he wants to dominate everything and doesn’t even bother listening to what Rebecca has to say. He, too, feels like Rebecca blames him for their car accident and — while admittedly she was also under the influence when she asked if she should drive instead — his vices seem more the result of superficial influences than anything else as opposed to John’s whose came from a broken home.

If anything, Rebecca’s former life of hard partying comes from a sense of loss that she didn’t understand at the time, having been separated from her birth mother and not particularly fitting in with the Reilys. She knows, already, that there is something different about herself: if even on an unconscious level. Much of the film is Rebecca attempting to find out more about her mother and the Castle she never knew her family had. Rebecca desires to know her roots, and why her mother gave her up so many years ago, sending her all the way to America. John keeps dissuading her of this, and attempt to expediate the process of selling her ancestral property, all the while downplaying the fact that she knows that someone else is in the Castle with them.

Whereas John Reilly’s temptations overcome him after his wife Susan, played by Barbara Crampton who also is the producer of Steinsiek’s Castle Horror, rejects him utterly due to their death of their young son in their accident, Steinsiek’s John doesn’t attempt to commit suicide or see a sex worker in the Castle but he does use the contacts of Marku — the apparent Whateley family lawyer — to get a drug dealer over, who ends up being stabbed to death with heroin needles by the Freak as opposed to being mauled horrifically like the sex worker did by Giorgio in the original film. He does, however, begin to have sex with his friend Shelly after a fight with Rebecca about seeking her family history — and lying to her — reaches a head.

That is another fascinating aspect about John and Rebecca’s dynamic: that Rebecca wants to trust John in literally telling her what is going on around them, and John either glosses over details such as finding her mother’s flail, or outright lies about the colour of her mother’s robe that she ends up wearing. Whereas Susan and John Reilly’s martial problems are the result of his impulsive actions and her inability to forgive him, Rebecca and John’s relationship problems are the result of trust issues: with Rebecca wanting to know more about who she is, especially now that her life has changed so much, and John wanting to go back to controlling her, and having a sense of dominance with the money he plans to get with her from the ancestral estate.

Rebecca herself adapts to her ancestral home relatively quickly. I love how the film shows that because she’s lost her sense of sight, her other senses have increased: such as her auditory senses that allow her to hear the being that is her sister clicking and clacking as she maneuvers herself through the walls. She can also trace her steps, presumably through tactile input, to move around the Castle unassisted and with an idea of where she’s going. It isn’t perfect. Rebecca does get lost, and even injures herself — almost fatally — before her hidden sister actually catches a statue from falling on her.

But there is also doubt as to whether or not Rebecca’s senses are just the result of a woman adapting to her loss of sight. For instance, she begins to have dreams of her mother’s last moments, and parts of her life. Sexuality, and shame also figure into it as well. There is some synchronicity that begins to happen as a result of sexuality: with a vision of her mother masturbating with her flail and Rebecca also climaxing during the dream. And the Freak herself is seen masturbating while watching Rebecca and John have sex through a hidden passageway — and then killing John’s friend Shelly during intercourse with him, after he’s blindfolded to essentially rape him. But Rebecca also sees her mother dealing with her grandfather, and a cult, and sometimes hears her talking to her: warning her.

Rebecca is a shadow of her mother, slowly beginning to realize what she went through in these walls, while also finding out about her sister. And, unlike John Reilly and Giorgio Orsino, she doesn’t reject her sister. Rather, she wants to find her, and understand what is going on. It is the Freak, still unnamed throughout this entire film, who avoids Rebecca for the most part. Rather, the Freak only kills a man who intrudes on her home, the man who killed their mother and robbed her of the chance of doing so — while also having threatened John, whom she had sex with — John’s friends that are hunting her, and then John after he tries to kill her, and Rebecca at the climax of the film.

What we find out is that Rebecca and the Freak have a visceral reaction to being played together, or even physically touching. Their reunion marks the passage of Yog-Sothoth — the Key and the Gate — into the world of humanity. Essentially, Rebecca Whateley and her sister are the equivalents of Wilbur and his invisible, hideous brother respectively, though obviously while Wilbur knew what he was and sought knowledge to bring about his father into the world, Rebecca just wanted to know who she was, and ultimately seems to succeed where Wilbur failed. The Freak herself is cannibalistic, possibly like Wilbur’s brother, though it seems she is only starving: even though much of her physiology seems to be the result of her father — or extra-dimensional parent — as opposed to Giorgio’s deformities being created out of torture. Rebecca definitely takes after their mother, as “The Dunwich Horror” to paraphrase the terrifying concluding sentence of that story.

So what does all of this mean? Well, Lavinia Whateley is more sympathetic in this film and you realize there is something of a reason as to why she performed these actions outside of petty cruelty. The Freak is the result of that torment but also of neglect and physical and sexual needs unmet: not unlike an archetype of the grotesque feminine. While one can argue that the Freak is the physical representation of abuse of women, and the resulting internalized self-hatred, Rebecca is also part of that legacy: who attempts to come to grips with it, and show empathy but in the end is not only almost made a victim of that misogyny by John — who equates her to her sister as a “freak” — but because of her own biology.

In the end, their parent — their “father” — does manifest, and it awakens a mutation in the both of them … and it is something that Rebecca definitely does not want. The cult that their grandfather led, even though he is long gone, still exists. The man that released the Freak and killed their mother, who attempted to curry favour and use the Freak for her bloodline with the Great Old One Yog-Sothoth, is dead, but one of Rebecca’s friends — a young man named The Professor — has the Whateley copy of The Necronomicon and helps Yog-Sothoth to come into the world whether the sisters want it or not. The cults also all appear to be men. And as for Yog-Sothoth — it is hard to ascribe a gender to this being as it seems to resemble a meshing of two beings, of male and female — which is mirrored by the Freak, and eventually Rebecca. They seem to be, at the end of the film, reaching maturity — a form of horrifying growth or transformation, a parody of puberty as far as human female Great One hybrids go. They lose their agency to the cult, and more than that, their own bodies.

I feel like there is so much to say about that in particular, about these gender relations and sexuality and doubles — specifically the synchronicity between mother and child, and twin sisters, and male exploitation of such, and the horror of realizing one’s life is not one’s own and that perhaps that feeling of being “The Outsider” — the story both films were arguably based from — or not fitting in, or feeling like you are different isn’t just a psychological one. Really, I think the body horror at the end might have mixed those metaphors.

It isn’t perfect, this experiment of grafting “The Outsider” and “The Dunwich Horror” into an Albanian setting. Whateley sounds more like a British surname as opposed to a Southeast European one, which took me a little out of immersion. I wish they could have made an Albanian equivalent to that surname. I also wonder why the cult was so hands off aside from one exception in securing the twins, and how one of them — just one of them — had been able to pose as the legal representative. They make such a big deal about the Great Old One cult having so many connections as well, and they do almost nothing until the end of the film: practically being all pantomime like the followers in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.

But there are definitely some awesome Lovecraft Mythos moments, and respectful nods to the original Castle Freak film. For instance, one of the characters finds some vintage wine from Casa Orsino, dated 1926, while Dunwich itself appears on a town sign when John and Rebecca are driving. Also, the Whateley copy of The Necronomicon is far more fortunate than the one in “The Dunwich Horror” which is an incomplete copy inherited from Wilbur’s grandfather that forces him to attempt to steal a whole one from the Miskatonic Library. In Castle Freak, it seems the Whateleys were able to steal a whole Latin translation of the book from the Library back in the 1920s.

And the young Professor? Well, it turns out he has a name. In the mid-credits, he meets with an older man in an office, and another young man whose back is turned to the viewer. He is called “Armitage.” This is a completely different analogue to Henry Armitage, an older man who attempts to thwart Yog-Sothoth’s release and his children, whereas this version of him is a young scholar — enlightened by a tentacle grown from the Freak’s womb not unlike the mutated pineal gland from the head of Jeffrey Combs’ Crawford Tillinghast in Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond — who wants the power and knowledge of the Great Old Ones. He also calls the other young man “West,” who has a vial of glowing bright green fluid, perhaps … some re-agent on the desk nearby.

Could this be a hint that there will be a Re-Animator remake? I will admit, I cackled at that scene. It also makes me think. Robert Stanley, who adapted “The Colour Out of Space” into Color Out of Space, is interested in also adapting “The Dunwich Horror” into film, which has some overlap with what Steinsiek does with Castle Freak. There is definitely room for different interpretations, and I would love to see them compared together should Stanley create his own take on it. After watching Color Out of Space, I’d hoped for a Lovecraft adaptation of similar quality. And Castle Freak is definitely a creation that fits that parametre in my mind, with more emphasis on sexuality in the squamous and horrifying manner that Lovecraft himself always hinted on in his “nameless and blasphemous rites” and Stuart Gordon all but plugged into his own work through titillation and spectacle. As such, it’s not only a love letter to Lovecraft, but to Gordon as well, and if this is an indication of a cinematic shared Cthulhu Mythos universe, I definitely want to see where this goes next.

After all, the thing about Yog-Sothoth being the Key and the Gate, aside from some sexual innuendo, is that it can be both the language that familiarizes audiences with that world, and the story that audiences also want to see: a gateway into some eldritch cinema.

An Outsider’s View of Castle Freak

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I’d been curious about Castle Freak for a little while.

Part of the reason I’ve had interest in the film is because I am still catching up on the first official season of Shudder’s The Last Drive-In series, and then I heard that Barbara Crampton is involved with its remake. It’s strange, for me, being a Lovecraft fanatic that I never made the connection that, aside from being given a poster of concept art from which to work, director Stuart Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli had been inspired — at least roughly — to make the 1995 film Castle Freak by H.P. Lovecraft’s extremely short story “The Outsider.”

I didn’t know what to expect from Castle Freak, beyond knowing it takes place in an old Italian Castle and expecting there to be a ton of gore and brutality: possibly by a group of monsters on an unsuspecting American family. At the time, I didn’t even know that Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton were even in the film, never mind its central stars: though knowing Crampton was being interviewed on The Last Drive-In episode of Castle Freak became another impetus in me having a look at it.

I’ll admit that watching Joe Bob Briggs’ segments did spoil aspects of the movie for me, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film. I’ve heard that many fans of Gordon’s work don’t think as highly of Castle Freak as they might Re-Animator, and even From Beyond. A lot of it, from my understanding, is that while the latter two films — created in the 1980s — have heavily goofy and “camp” overtones, drawing close to comedy in horror, Castle Freak itself is played out seriously, and without laughs. Unlike the science-fictional and paranormal elements of the former two films, Castle Freak is a mystery horror film with obvious Gothic influence: complete with tropes such as family secrets, hereditary sins, a long lost, deformed and/or insane family member, and a scene of crumbling beauty and the price of pride turned into madness revisited on unsuspecting descendants.

Another element I can also argue is that while Re-Animator, and to some extent From Beyond — which I have written about and attempted to experiment on in this mad laboratory that is my Blog — are very clearly based from Lovecraft’s works, Castle Freak uses “The Outsider” as just a stepping stone, or a foundation to create an entirely different work. Re-Animator still follows the resurrection of the dead and the hubris of Herbert West, and From Beyond does illustrate what happens when you attempt to view and interact with dimensions beyond human perception, but Castle Freak? It isn’t like “The Outsider” in that the “creature” involved isn’t the protagonist or some possibly undead monstrosity that was once a human being realizing what he is, and fleeing from that knowledge.

Giorgio Orsino — the titular “Freak” of this film played by Jonathan Fuller — is a tormented man whose death was faked by his mother the Italian Duchess D’Orsino and, blamed for the sins of his American father in leaving her, spent the rest of his life chaining him in a dungeon and flaying him with a barbed whip. He is five years old when his death is falsified and forty-two years pass before his mother dies from a heart-attack after beating him one last time. He is practically a feral being by the time he manages to escape his bonds, though he seems to have a grasp of some rudimentary Italian when he does occasionally speak. However, unlike the protagonist of “The Outsider” who seems to be quite intelligent and has “many antique books” Giorgio is not only driven by a sense of loneliness — more visceral than existential — but hunger and fury over his torment and neglect. If anything, his skittering manner of moving through the corridors of the Castle, is reminiscent more of Lovecraft’s :”The Rats in the Walls” than anything else, and for more reasons than one when you realize just how famished he is. Giorgio is a living being that wants what he thinks is owed to him, and he literally wants his pound of flesh.

Lovecraft, of course, is no stranger to Gothic themes and tropes, especially considering how “The Outsider” and its narrative style is influenced by the prose of Edgar Allan Poe. The story of Castle Freak, however, follows not just Giorgio who is the monster — and I would argue one of the true victims of this entire film — but also the American Reilly family and in particular its patriarch John Reilly.

John Reilly, played by Jeffrey Combs, is an alcoholic and an unemployed professor. His father abused him during his early life, and it the echoes of it affect him all the way until the end of Castle Freak. He inherits the Orsino Castle after the Duchess, his aunt, dies and he takes his family there to claim and potentially sell the property. John’s wife, Susan (played by Barbara Crampton), despises him. There is really no other word for it. Due to his alcoholism he lost his employment, and because his five year old son J.J. dropped his video game in the car and tried to reach for it, the boy loses his life in a car accident when John tries to stop his son and simultaneously keep his eyes on the road: failing at both. This same accident blinds his daughter Rebecca, played by actress Jessica Dollarhide, and it leaves his wife to blame him for everything that’s happened to their family.

I think one element of this film that needs to be discussed is its use of connections, and how they all pay off. And when I mention connections, what I am really talking about are relationships. From the police officer who has a relationship with the sex worker that John takes him when his wife spurns him again, to the child they’ve had together, to the amoral Italian Orsino lawyer being the sibling of the housekeeper that warns the Reillys of the Castle and what her death causes, and John’s own tormented relation with Susan, the memory of J.J., and his attempts to protect Rebecca, Susan’s own resentful bond with John, and her over-protective and even obsessive relationship with Rebecca, and the Duchess’ own malicious and petty need to torture Giorgio, and Giorgio wanting to belong to this new family that he can somehow sense as his kin … it all fits together in a patchwork like the scars on Giorgio’s body, and the worn stones of the Castle that is their heritage.

This unity, or this twisted rhyme, can be seen in the form of J.J. J.J. is the child that shouldn’t have died. Giorgio, whom everyone believed dead, once looked the spitting image of J.J. Two dead children that are blood-related, and practically doubles or doppelgängers of each other: the former’s death indicative of an emotionally absent father whose alcoholism led, in part, to the car crash that took his life, and the latter whose father’s physical abandonment led him to having his very identity destroyed in all the ways the matter are central to this film. Families and children, unhealthy dynamics between spouses, siblings, and parents and children are what make Castle Freak.

And then, there is the matter of karma. We find out, and it becomes clear especially after Joe Bob’s talk with Barbara Crampton, that Giorgio and John both have the same American WWII soldier: the former being the Duchess’ son, and the latter being the bastard child of her sister that ran off with him, unmarried, to the United States. The Duchess dies before any justice or vengeance can be carried out on her from the boy whose life she ruined out of a sense of pride and, presumably, the American soldier is also long dead and gone.

Giorgio is John’s Shadow, another popular literary trope. He has abusive and neglectful parents like John, except taken to the nth degree. He was flagellated by a mother for his perceived sins, and tormented for things that were — unlike John — literally beyond his control. Even John’s sexual frustration as punishment by his wife and her anger, and inability to connect with those of his blood, or a disconnect from the sexual relations he has to have with the sex worker are mirrored horrifically in that Giorgio seems to be castrated, but his mother left him his testicles and the frustration of loneliness and an animal fury he can’t express in any other way: as we see with what he does to the poor sex worker. But mostly, there is a grief there. While John grieves, and is guilt-stricken by J.J.’s death, Giorgio mourns even the death of his tormenter and that fury needs somewhere to go.

And Giorgio, after killing the sex worker and the housekeeper sister of the man who could have saved John from being blamed for their murders, finds this outlet: in the form of the scourge that his mother used on him his entire life. It is this whip he uses on John who, in a way, represents the reason Giorgio had been rendered into a tortured being. To Giorgio, if he can think that far, John is the brother that his father left him for, and abandoned him to the cruelty of his insane mother. In a way, John’s existence is the reason his life is so ruined, and that madness is taken out on his hide.

Giorgio, his mother’s whipping boy, makes John his own. And Giorgio, who John once saw as resembling his dead son — the child dead by his own negligence — is something of a gross magnification of his own guilt flagellating himself. And yet, something happens with John that Giorgio is incapable of understanding, or undertaking. For all of John’s selfishness and self-absorption, he still loves his family. Perhaps, at this point in the film, after contemplating suicide, drinking, and undertaking actions that further hurt his family, John doesn’t want Giorgio — both a psychopathic monstrosity of his aunt’s torment, and a symbol of his own guilty conscience — to damage his family anymore. And with a noble moment of self-sacrifice, John tackles Giorgio and the two fall to their deaths: united in death in a way they could never have been in life.

At the end, Susan Reilly sees this — him having saved her and their daughter — and seems to forgive him, perhaps even seeing her own part in the torment that led to all of John’s own actions as they exchange their last words with each other. The Reillys live on, with perhaps the cycle of abuse and pain and recrimination broken by John and Giorgio’s deaths, and the understanding of what led to where they are now: and perhaps after mourning they can find a way forward.

The sins of the family, in this case, are not a blood related curse or a result of eugenics as Lovecraft’s stories and those of his Victorian predecessors often go, but of generational abuse and trauma. But there is one thing that bothers me in this otherwise relatively immaculate film.

Where is Giorgio’s coffin?

At the end of the film, we see John’s coffin being taken to his funeral, or his funeral endings, but we never see what they do with the boy who was supposed to have died decades ago. John is a sufferer of terrible familiar trauma, consciously or otherwise, but Giorgio himself is an even more obvious victim. What happened to his body at the end of the film? Did he even get the dignity of a burial? A real burial?

It gives me inspiration: to try something else.

I always try to say something in this Blog that is more than just a rehashing of something already said and done. So, in light of the upcoming remake by Tate Steinsiek and its more overt and cultish Cthulhu Mythos influences of which I’m curious to see unfold, I started to think to myself — and this was the only reason this article even happened — what if we went back to the roots of “The Outsider?”

There are obvious issues. “The Outsider” is a short story that functions well from a first-person limited perspective. The readers are limited by what he knows and perceives. It is hard to translate that into a film narrative, even with voice over narratives: though it would make for perhaps a good experimental short film, or animation. And I am sure it’s been done already.

So, let’s Frankenstein this fucker, my solution to almost everything in this mad lab. Think of it as following looking at the lives of two children traveling different paths through Castle Freak. First, let’s take Giorgio Orsino from Stuart Gordon’s film. Let’s say that he isn’t the only freak in the Castle, that Giorgio was used by his mother and her family to seal the rest of them away: namely, the ghouls from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Dreamlands Cycle respectively. Imagine John and Susan Reilly as being completely unsympathetic or clueless and it is Rebecca who focuses on finding her way into understanding how the Castle works: on discovering that it is a weak place between reality and the Dreamlands. Consider that John was supposed to be the original sacrifice, but his father and mother left with him: perhaps even unknowing, and it was up to Giorgio to be offered as a perpetual whipping boy, his blood sealing the other creatures below the Castle into the Underworld.

But then the Duchess dies and Giorgio is freed. A lot of the events of the film continue, but Rebecca is more proactive and bitter about not only being blind, but having her mother constantly attempting to control her. I also like the idea that something comes of her learning some Italian, as she attempts to do in the film, and begins to understand Giorgio: even sympathize with him after she realizes how damaged he is. It may even be that there is something in his hoarse voice that reminds her of her lost brother J.J. I’d also be fascinating if we saw the film from Giorgio’s perspective, and there is a part of him that still thinks he is that golden-haired five year old child until he looks at a mirror, or he does something particularly feral and vicious: almost making him like two different characters and making the audience wonder who that strange child is who also resembles J.J. until the end.

I would have it that it looks like John is attempting to save his family, but he fails. Perhaps he and Susan kill each other, or the other beasts get them instead. Rebecca goes insane or perhaps begins to think that there is another way. It is Giorgio who after his killings of the housekeeper and the sex worker that actually opens the Gate and unleashes the beasts fully: taking Rebecca with him. It’s with Giorgio pledging himself to them that we realize the Reillys and the Orsinos they came from, have ghoul blood. And Giorgio and Rebecca become ghouls, slowly changing, mutating: with Giorgio eating the corpse of his mother who tried to consume his life and keep him in a stillborn stone womb of a prison, shedding the illusion of the child he used to be and wished he still was and the mutilated husk of a broken human to become something more. And Rebecca ends up devouring her own parents: those who controlled hers and emancipating herself to a whole new existence. They then leave with the ghouls — the last of their line here — to live in the depths of the Dreamlands and feast on the dead forever.

So, in this way I am marrying together “The Outsider” with “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” thereby adding a supernatural or low-key Cthulhu Mythos element into it — though not to the apparent extent of Tate Steinsiek’s work with something of a gross and twisted “happy-ending.” Instead of John’s redemption and reaffirmation of family and society, it could be a story about Giorgio, and even Rebecca’s dark salvation from the ruining influence of a mortal world, and the freedom of a bloody, supernatural one beyond human morality.

Conversely, there is the other “child” of my Mythos thought. We make a cinematic story with “The Outsider” traveling through his grave, to his ancestral castle and shying away from the truth of his undead nature, with only snippets of memory and perhaps he — and the audience — see him as a whole being like the youth of “The Quest of Iranon” as he travels through places like “Under the Pyramids” and even through a “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” to finally realize what he is, and to come to peace with it as he joins the ghouls and night-gaunts in their revels. This would have more of a dark epic fantasy cinematic horror feel to it: a saga that expands out to a glorious Lovecraftian cosmic ending: romantic in the sense of it being sublime in unearthly Nature.

Even though I like the 1995 Castle Freak, and my original intent was to not attempt to alter films that I feel work in their own way, I also love the idea of an Outsider, of a supposed monster or a disabled female character — who is actually the central character in the upcoming Steinsiek remake — being the protagonist of their story and challenging a world view in being so. There are opportunities there, perhaps being taken in the remake to an extent. We will just have to see.

Creepshow Commentaries: Season One

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This is something different, even though it might not look that way. Before creating my little laboratory here, before truly coming to The Last Drive-In that consumed me during the summer, but after I stopped writing for GeekPr0n and during a lull in writing about some horror films and comics for Sequart, I began watching the new Creepshow serials on Shudder.

At the time, this creative descendant of Stephen King, George Romero, and Greg Nicotero reminded me of the time I watched the very first Creepshow with my late partner, and when I heard this series was being created I commented on each episode as it came out. But eventually, I wanted to keep my comments. Part of it had to do with the fact that for a while I couldn’t leave comments on Shudder and even when I did, after a time, they would become lost, and I found that I actually liked what I was writing. What complicated it even further was, like I said, I really had no place to put it. It’s true that I had my Mythic Bios Blog but it just … didn’t fit.

As it is, they are comments, but even as such they began to coalesce like the rendered pieces of some dead eldritch god coming together, gravitating and mutating towards each other in something that others might call … themes. In a way, you can think these early prototypical samples of Dissections and Speculatives for the formation of the Horror Doctor Blog itself much later on. As such, they are rough, down, and dirty. I could clean them up, but honestly? I like how elemental and honest they are. This is some early work, including the dates in which I wrote them if not seen the episodes, ,and I’d like to think someone can glean something from this, or at the very least see the place of horror from whence I am still learning. Or, you know, before my descent into madness.

Right now, as of this writing, it is Friday November the 13th of 2020. If there was any appropriate time to release these, it would be this night. And to all the people watching a reanimator student at work in this twisted horror medical theatre, allow me to introduce you to my almost epistolary, “found commentaries” on Shudder’s Creepshow.

*

September 27/19

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 1: Gray Matter/The House of the Head

I like the spiritual influence of the film on the first episode and its two stories so far. The Creep is so much less … communicative than his Crypt Keeper television cousin, at least in this early episode.

“Gray Matter” was an interesting story. You could go very far, to say, that it talks about the dangers of alcoholism and that sometimes it might take a hurricane to quench the thirst of an addict … or not. The dispersion of scenes between the cafe owner and the boy, and the sheriff and the doctor served to add a little more tension to the piece. That tension and suspense making your stomach clench as the boy’s story slowly continued, combined with the gross out factor did fairly well, though it might of gotten a little out of control towards the end. 

“The House of the Head” was my favourite of the two, to be honest. Carl Jung always used the house as a symbol of one’s subconsciousness, or the collective unconscious. Combine that with the premise that if you can have haunted dolls and toys, you can also have haunted dollhouses. And dollhouses have often been literary metaphors for girls exploring their identities in socially accepted ways to become women. You can make an interesting reading of what the protagonist, the little girl Evie, does in attempting to deal with that malign influence, working in that system of the house … before realizing it is the house itself with which she needs to deal with: perhaps more than the thing in the house that no one outside of herself sees. 

It’s a creepy thing, to think you have control over your surroundings, or a place of your arrangement and there is always something there implicit in that place, or space that you just can’t get rid of. It’s actually similar to the mould, or the organic matter in the Harrows beer in “Gray Matter”: something that should have been dealt with by an authority — like a sheriff or the girl through the policeman figurine, or the caricature of a First Nations spiritual symbol of the shaman (talk about an “Indian in the Cupboard” fuck you) — but it is a child that has to deal with it. 

The boy in “Gray Matter” dealt with it one way, by attempting to surrender to it and get away himself. The girl, Evie, in “The House of the Head” got rid of the thing … which might go on to haunt, or infect, or manifest in other’s experiences: not that she had a choice. Not that anyone would have believed her. Not that anyone believed the boy … until it was already too late. 

The themes are good together and complementary. I think the latter story was the stronger one, but they both have merit. I can’t wait to see what the Creep has lined up for us in the next episodes that follow. 

October 4-8/19 

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 2: Bad Wolf Down/The Finger 

What can I say? I really liked this episode. “Bad Wolf Down” was something to which I was very much looking forward. I mean, Werewolves killing Nazis? Where can you go wrong? I also recall the episode in “Love, Death, and Robots” called “Shape-Shifters” where you had werewolves serving both the American Army and what seemed to be an Arabic militia, and it was a case study in character development on the American side. I will say, that “Bad Wolf Down,” which had been advertised for a while with the above premise of Werewolves killing Nazi scum, was sillier than I thought it would be. But it fits into ‘Creepshow’ which also is a homage to ‘Tales from The Crypt’: in it being something of a morality tale in war. It didn’t quite go the way I thought it would. I actually thought they might make it a lot like “Secret War” where the WWII Russians are fighting the forces of hell, but I like how they kept the Nazis evil, but at the same time they also demonstrate how the American soldier characters, who are good people who regret killing, or try not to kill civilians, are willing to embrace the monster to destroy their enemy: a metaphor for war if I’ve ever seen one. Also, Jeffrey Combs as the SS commander was really awesome to see, and made me feel like not only was looking at a 1950s rendition of a Nazi villain, all outlandish and over the top evil, but he brings a ‘Re-animator’ antagonist vibe to the thing. And also, that ending right? War changes a man indeed. 

But I knew nothing about “The Finger.” I like how in both stories, you see comics pages strewn throughout the scenes — tying into the central theme and aesthetic of ‘Creepshow’ and especially how the protagonist of “The Finger” collects them like the old discarded relics that some people used to think them to be. I really like how he’s depicted like what some people might believe to be an “ordinary, normal man” — or a “nice guy” in our time: a millennial adult who feels abused by the system and society, and neglected by everyone around him while also feeling a certain degree of self-entitlement. It was so cool to see the Finger itself grow and become, well, Bob. Bob is pretty much anyone’s best friend who feels discarded, lonely, and has a whole set of petty grievances. 

This story felt like such a ‘Tales from the Crypt’ or ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, and the first-perspective and retelling of the story from the protagonist was chilling in that he is actually so relatable while, at the same time, there is something disquieting and even creepy about him. Certainly, his perspective — which is the axis from which the story is shown — is biased, and we never know whether or not he took that blowjob from his stepdaughter so long ago. I actually hope that — one day — Bob comes back to the protagonist. I think the strength of both stories is how we see the moralities of the characters in how they embrace the monstrous to undertake what they believe to be justice. It is still horrible, but there is a relatibility to it all. Here, the monster isn’t an antagonist but humans are, and if anything the monstrous is to be pitied, or even loved. And Bob, I mean: can you imagine having a friend, someone that would love you, like Bob? And just how far you would feed his love if you had one? And just, for all of the morality you think you have, what you really do with a case of lycanthropy … or Bob? I actually am surprised, but I really like “The Finger” *more* than “Bad Wolf Down,” though I like the former as well. I find that the second segments in these episodes tend to be stronger. I wonder if the trend will continue. I look forward to watching more. 

October 11-12/19

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 3: All Hallows Eve / The Man in the Suitcase

What can I say: this episode has been for me, unequivocally, the best one ever so far. I’m trying to find a central theme here, but I’d say it would be something like vindictive justice, or karma coming, coming, coming to get you. 

“All Hallows Eve” reminds me of an “Are You Afraid of the Dark” episode, or the film version of “Scary Tales to Tell in the Dark” with far more of a tight, controlled, storyline with elements of gore. It’s one of those *in media res* situations where you gradually discover what those trick or treating kids really are, and what happened to them. I loved their tree house, and the D&D session they had — a 23 is a good total, it’s too bad it didn’t translate into luck in their real lives — and the ‘Goosebumps’ poster on the wall was a nice touch. At first, I thought it was going to be each of the adults they terrified being the culprits in what happened, like in a Toronto After Dark short film I saw years back where a group of adults are terrorized by the ghosts of vengeful children whom, as it turns out, they killed as a serial killer swingers group of sorts. I knew there was something about those children, especially the one dressed as a ghost — because we all know what sheets were made to cover — and I like how when they accomplish their final goal, dealing with the bullies that accidentally but cruelly ended them, the boy was restored under that sheet. It was so poignant. I am glad they got their justice and that they can sleep now, perhaps having better dreams and only treats, like they should have done years ago.

And then, we have “The Man in the Suitcase.” I should have seen it coming in retrospect — especially with the cartoon shown during the college kid Justin smoking up — and it was only towards the end that I knew what was going on. I felt bad for Justin having to deal with a complete bitch like Carla, and his asshole roommate Alex. I didn’t know to expect until I saw the description about the coins coming out of the contorted man, in pain. The ethics and horror of it … it got the point where the college kids were just torturing him for the pleasure of it, in addition to the greed and the aphrodisiac of Mammon. But Justin was the only one with qualms as the other two lost their humanity, which was the point. 

I don’t know, I feel like there is some racial, post-colonial statement to make about what are presumably a bunch of North American college kids profiting off of, and even taking pleasure from, the suffering of a subaltern like a brown, Arabic or Persian man in a bag. In a way, I think it the whole story and situation was more like a morality tale or a cautionary one — an echo of a 1001 Arabian Nights tale where a supernatural force arranges a lesson and it may well have been Justin’s lesson, or infernal intervention as opposed to divine: one he ended up learning at the very end. Really, both stories are about emotional baggage in addition to vicious supernatural justice. The Golden Dragons, the D&D kids that were burned alive by the bullies that believed they were mainstream and the parents that backed them from being punished temporally, finally freed themselves from one last quest of vengeance, and the man that turned out to be a djinn — an evil genie traveling on a plane in his suitcase of a lamp — destroyed the two people that walked all over Justin, and because he actually had a conscience at the end, even rewarded him. Maybe mixing it with the post-colonial resonance might confuse the narrative, or make it problematic, and perhaps Justin didn’t deserve mercy, but all I know is that his ex and former roommate deserved everything they got. They failed the supernatural test, the one foreshadowed in Justin’s nightmare, and everything they visited on what they thought was a helpless force condemned to make them rich was visited right on them. 

But damn. This episode was so utterly satisfying. Five out of five skulls. 

October 18/19

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 4: The Companion/Lydia Layne’s Better Half

I will never get used to the Creep not talking like the Crypt Keeper often does at the beginning of his own shows, even if he does play narrator in the facsimile of comics pages at the beginning of each ‘Creepshow’ episode.

You know, one of these stories is called “The Companion,” but in reality both of them are about companions, and companionship, and how it can be used to one’s advantage, or gone horribly wrong as a result. I actually didn’t know where “The Companion” was going at first, even though the scarecrow seen as the graphic, hanging on a cross in a field on its own, reminded me of the story “Harold” recounted in Alvin Schwartz’s ‘Scary Tales to Tell in the Dark’ and its recent film equivalent. However, the only Harold in this particular story here is Harry, who runs from his abusive, drunken, psychotic older brother Billy into an abandoned field where he releases the unnamed scarecrow from a cane stabbed through its heart. 

The scarecrow itself was created by an old farmer named Raymond Brenner from straw, ancient bones under the soil of his property, and a heart embroidery made by his wife Mavis — his beloved companion — who died, and left him lonely. He made the creation to help him deal with that loneliness, and all went well until it killed a Girl Scout coming onto his property to try to sell some cookies. The scarecrow is different from the depictions of Stephen Gammell’s Harold in ‘Scary Tales,’ with its tusks, and almost organic parts on its chest. It looks truly macabre and terrifying. One might also think that the scarecrow is a lot like Bob from ‘The Finger,’ except while it does what its creator says, it will protect its creator — or the holder of the cane that the creator stabbed it with — at all times, or is jealous of the creator’s time, and will act accordingly. I also love how not even the scarecrow’s creator knew what animated it: the bones, or the heart that Mavis wove independently of this. It was inspiring. 

In the end, Harry uses the cane that Brenner stabbed it with all those years ago after the death the girl, to stop it from killing him, and then entrap his brother, and kill him instead with its tendrils of roots and death. At first I thought Harry was trying to make his own scarecrow, as we see him weaving something after reading the suicide letter of Brenner, but why do that when he can just sew his bedsheets around him, and get a perfectly good, ready made companion to do the job for him: to use a greater monster against a pettier one. 

Speaking of greater and pettier monsters, I’ve not forgotten about ‘Lydia Layne’s Better Half.’ It is an age-old story about greed and power, and fear and burying guilt and the evidence of a crime of murder and blood. It has a very feminist theme, or at least it uses the popular language of such. Lydia is a high-powered executive that passes over her lover Celia for a position in Switzerland, to keep her as a trophy-wife, and under her heel while paying lip service to the power of women advancing in a patriarchal world and the destruction of a glass ceiling. It is, ironically, her glass achievement award that impales itself through Celia’s brain after she attacks her, when Celia plans to tell the press about both the passing up of her for the position in favour of a man, and the result of a physical attack.

Lydia pretty much falls under the crooked archetype of the hypocrite that deserves retribution in the style of EC Comics’ ‘Tales From the Crypt’ as she attempts to hide her crime, to protect her reputation and power, and reveals that Celia had just been a plaything the entire time, while moving her body and attempting to make it look like she died in a car accident. Instead, she gets stuck. In an elevator. With a rotting corpse of the woman she claimed to love. For 24 hours. 

You don’t know if what happens to Lydia — who has no real remorse for what she has done to her jilted lover — is the result of insanity, or supernatural justice. All I know is, when she climbs on Celia’s body to attempt to escape, to continue her literal climb to power, and her place at the top it has social and gender connotations there that are painful to see, and what happens to her afterwards — as her erstwhile companion seems to get her revenge — is poetic. 

Both stories are incredibly strong, and I look forward to seeing where ‘Creepshow’ goes beyond this. Five skulls. 

October 28/19

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 5: Night of the Paw / Times Is Tough in Musky Holler

What can I say, both of these stories in this episode feel like homages. I’ve just come fresh off the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, and its showing of Ryan Spindell’s ‘The Mortuary Collection’ — which is an anthology of tales told through the frame of a creepy narrator done right, and its story “Till Death” an eerie parallel to ‘Creepshow”s “Lydia Lane’s Better Half,” elevator and impaled head of a murdered partner’s body and all, but this latest showing has callbacks to specifically literary sources.

I mean, look at “Night of the Paw.” At first, I didn’t know where this was going until — inevitably — the Fakir of Mumbai’s Paw is introduced: a relic borrowed from the classic “The Monkey’s Paw” written by W.W. Jacobs. Interestingly enough, the old man who has saved the woman he found at his doorstep is called Whitey: a parallel to Mr. and Mrs. White of the aforementioned story. And like the couple, both he and the woman he summoned with the Paw attempted to resurrect a loved one from death … and unlike the short story, it doesn’t shy back from the gory, horrific consequences. I will admit, having the woman be a murderess who killed her husband to euthanize him with a gun was a little heavy-handed, a bad pun when you consider both the fact that she loses two fingers in her hand, and the Paw itself, and I am confused as to why the Paw resurrected all the corpses in the morgue including her husband’s, but the theme of doing something gruesome and horrible in the name of good names, and receiving one’s poetically ironic fate as a result is something that carries over to the next story. I will also state I like how this story utilized the comics panels segments more, and made you read them and see them to fill in some of the blanks between the live action sequences. 

And this brings us to “Times Is Tough in Musky Holler.” At first, I thought the former Mayor Barkley and his inner circle were in hell, going to be judged by the people they had betrayed and killed. But as the story continues, you realize that it is taking place after a major event: namely, a zombie apocalypse. It turns out, Barkley and his cronies used the chaos of the dead rising to seize power in the town of Musky Holler and in a ‘Battle Royale’ or ”Hunger Games’ fashion they created arena games where their political opponents would be fed open, publicly, by the dead. What we get to see is an extension of a EC Comics Horror ethos — think the story “Foul Play” from ‘The Haunt of Fear’ except with a zombie, or a series of crimson-hued undead resembling Nathan Grantham from the first ‘Creepshow’ film’s “Father’s Day” of so many decades ago — play out, and all of the war criminals get their … just desserts in a game — the last game of its kind to punish its creators — called, fittingly enough, “Hot Pie.” 

You can argue that both stories utilize the theme of people rationalizing to themselves undertaking horrific actions for a greater good — to reunite with a deceased loved one, or to help a town survive an undead invasion, though the latter was far more self-serving — or that they both have the undead rise to deal karma on the protagonists, or that fate cannot be avoided one way or another, but whatever the case it all entertained me. Greatly. 

October 31-November 4/19

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 6: Skincrawlers / By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain

Halloween came early this year in the form of this final episode of the first season of ‘Creepshow’ being released on Shudder one day early. I find I don’t have as much to say about this one. Both stories utilize the idea of hidden animals or creatures in Nature that can benefit humanity, and that those that hunt or seek them often find more for which they could have bargained. 

I wasn’t sure about “Skincrawlers” at first, though I knew based on the comics panel art it would be a body horror situation. It could have been that the fat-eating leeches were already controlling their human hosts, or they had laid eggs inside of the people seeking to lose weight. It was pointed out to me that throughout time people purposefully ingested tapeworms for a similar and grotesque reason. The protagonist looked like a man who unlike the others volunteering for the program realized he was actually happy with who he was, and how he looked, and that the leeches were too high a price to use. You kind of knew what was going to happen when the eclipse was mentioned on the news segment right before the leech demonstration was supposed to occur with the protagonist. I don’t know if there is really a moral here aside from the price one can pay when they try to skip steps, especially with their health, but the irony of the protagonist pushing a vending machine down on the larger leech, and being the only one of a few to escape it speaks of a particular karma or ethos. And for a man who wanted those creatures nowhere near his body, he really shouldn’t have eaten a candy bar coated in the remnants of the creatures and their horribly dead human hosts.

Now, “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain” seems like a much longer story. Written by Joe Hill, and directed by Tom Savini, the story is about Rose: the daughter of a man attempting to find a mysterious and elusive beast called Champ in the lake, whose obsession kills him before the story begins. She has a younger brother, and a mother who lives with a greedy, abusive alcoholic Vietnam veteran named Chet who always needs to be the Alpha Male in the area. Rose’s boyfriend looks like Rambo thanks to his bandana and knife, but resembles more someone from the old Cobra Kai dojo in the ‘Karate Kid’ days. Rose keeps records and clippings of any Champ, or Champy sightings. She ends up finding proof that Champ exists, and that her father wasn’t insane, only to have Chet threaten her boyfriend (I was totally waiting for someone to tell her boyfriend to “sweep the leg” — I just can’t get that Cobra Kai 1980s martial arts image out of my head) and herself when they believe they find the dead body of Champ … and realize that they are wrong. The karma is served here and Chet is devoured, but it is clear that Champ — this analogue to the Loch Ness Monster as an aquatic dinosaur-like being — isn’t good or evil, but is an animal that reacts to hostility, and may well have devoured all of them including Chet if she hadn’t been distracted by the death of her progeny. The mystery as to what killed Champ’s offspring, as claw marks are seen on its side, remains — and Rose’s boyfriend’s attempt to carve hers and her father’s name into the side of the dead creature, which is seen as sweet, becomes horrible and sad when you realize it is the real Champ’s child, and is just another example of humanity trying to mark something from nature that it doesn’t understand for itself. But the mother at the end finally believes in what her late husband sought and with the death of her abusive partner, everything has closure and feels sweet and almost saccharine, until Chet’s severed foot arrives on shore.

This episode was all right, but it just didn’t feel like a strong episode or duo of stories to end off the first season of ‘Creepshow.’ It does make its theme clear: of this is what happens when humans meddle in elements of nature and the unknown that they don’t understand, and that your actions have consequences in a moralistic vintage horror ethos fashion, I feel like the previous stories might have been more solid to end on, especially on All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween. Certainly, the “All Hallows Eve” story from Episode 3 might have been better here. Nevertheless, they were solid stories, and I definitely look forward to knowing that there will be another season of ‘Creepshow’ coming up.

October 30/20

Warning: Potential Spoilers for ‘A Creepshow Animated Special’: Survivor Type / Twittering From the Circus of the Dead

When I first saw this, I was taken aback. I already knew that this would be a special episode, but what I didn’t realize were a few things. First, it didn’t hit home that it would be its own entity: not an episode, but a Special in, and of itself. And second, when the Creep began drawing his pages, scarring them with his black ink quill, I found my mind awaiting the transition from the comics pages to the live action as I usually do … and I almost forgot that this whole Special is, like an undead construct powered by necromancy, an animated production. 

The animation studio Octopie succeeds in making something resembling EC Comics’ Tales From the Crypt shamble across Shudder’s video screen to a terrible and gloriously shaded semblance of life. Everything, as it was in the first Creepshow is a homage to EC Comics’ horror series. Even the illustrated Creep resembles the first incarnation of the Crypt Keeper, or some interstitial version between the robed white-haired man and the rotten, cackling skeleton that we all know and love.

But that is another show, from another time. It’s been a while since I’ve written a review of a Creepshow episode and a lot has changed in just a year. This is the year of the Pandemic. This is the time of COVID-19. I don’t know if either of these stories, adapted from both Stephen King and Joe Hill respectively — father and son of horror — were animated by Octopie and directed by Greg Nicotero before or after the Pandemic, but they have some resonances.

I have to say, these stories are gross. Both of them. But they are gross in a way that doesn’t make them spectacle, but genuine existential and even empathic horror. In “Survivor Type,” created from Stephen King’s short story, animated in a manner reminiscent of Alan Moore’s own homage to old horror comics Tales of the Black Freighter with seagulls galore, we see a doctor stranded on a desert island named Richard. Aside from the fact that he is voiced by the great horror film veteran Kiefer Sutherland, which gives him a tremendous force of personality, he is quite relatable. Despite, or because of, his ties and drive to do whatever it is to survive you get driven into his story. Even though I know what kind of story this is, I actually wanted him to survive — to live. But when you look at the price of life, in that situation, there is a point where you wonder just how merciful it would be to exist at that point.

When you look at this current timeline we’re living in, where health specialists and professionals are practically on the frontlines of the Pandemic, not knowing how they are going to stop it but being painfully aware of what the effects of the virus will be on others — and themselves — perhaps even hoping for some miracle cure, some saviour that never comes. Or perhaps you can look at it as, through survival in a time of great isolation, we can go on through compartmentalization, but by doing so we lose little parts of ourselves and our humanity each day. Or if you go into even more existential extremes based on old EC horror comics morality — that humanity’s path to consume the world out of greed, as represented by the doctor Richard, will ultimately devour itself, this cannibalistic stretch practically makes itself.

Perhaps this read would be more effective in the adaptation of Joe Hill’s “Twittering From the Circus of the Dead.” It takes a while to get to where it needs to be, and while the red herring, if you will pardon the ghoulish pun and context, is a corpse that never gets eaten, the one in the following story is a “cock-sock” which I almost hoped would be a Chekov’s condom (and probably something Richard will never need again).

It is a story that is also narrated, but while Richard is the only character for the most part and it is easy to forget that he is narrating other characters too, Blake is around her family the entire time: on what will be their last family road trip. She is constantly on a Twitter analogue social media app complaining about her family and the trip “from hell.”

There is an attempt to humanize the characters but it is a little flat. And then they get to the Circus of the Dead. I will say, there’s a part of me that thinks this was an attempt to criticize the effect of the Internet desensitizing people to reality, or their own instincts. I don’t know. I wonder if a North American family would wonder why there is a Circus that has a zombie-theme and it doesn’t seem to be Halloween in their story. 

But I appreciate how the Circus arranges itself, how it operates like some kind of grisly Grand Guignol, and the audience isn’t so much a tough crowd as it is quite rotten, and … par of the course. Crypt Keeper humour all said and done, I personally think that Blake would have made a good social media manager for them, though the Ringmaster seems to have that all in hand.

I just, again, see the art of it reflecting this current time. The disease around the family and the few living audience members that they willfully ignore, the warning that they dismiss as spectacle, even the spray of undead gore that they don’t realize has already infiltrated them due to their carelessness all has eerie resonance now beyond a simple zombie story if the Hazmat suited circus member wasn’t enough for you.

Both stories in the Animated Special both have to deal with cannibalism, and the human desire and inclination to ignore the hard facts in front of them. “Survivor Type” haunts me long after watching it because you know the horror of it will just continue until the human completely becomes inhuman, and yet “Twittering From the Circus of the Dead” has only one human element at the end: that realization that Blake loves her family even though it’s far too late, and she must take the place of the announcer before her, who also lost someone she loved, and only continued to exist out of fear. In this time, isolation is the enemy: it makes us — borrowing from the above idea I wrote about  “Survivor Type” eat the different parts of us if we let isolation get to us, and forget the connections that we actually have. Both Richard and Blake scorned their connections, one thinking he could survive in life by his … own two hands, and the other wanting to get away from her family.

Yet, in the end, both of them wanted connection: both wanted to be saved, and both lost everything … including their humanity. Perhaps, in the end, in the time of a greater horror looming over us as we huddle with others or on our own, there is a dark morality lesson here to consider after all.