Tag: inspiration

Red Lips in the Castle of Blood

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

“I loathe that portrait.” Julia Alert says, her elbow locked with her companion’s, her nose upturned, the scowl on her perfect face all too clear.

Valerie looks up at the framed painting on the wall, inclining her white blonde hair slowly, glacially, in deliberate consideration. “It is a beautiful piece of art. The artist captured, at least, the surface feeling of you. Your forbidding look. Your tempestuousness. Your passion.”

Both women wear fine lace gowns, low cut, their skirts billowing out at the ground like flowers. Julia’s dress is made from a fine black material, while Valerie’s is white. Julia regards her companion, and her dark eyes seem to smoulder almost as much as that of her likeness in her painting. “Flattery.” She pats Valerie’s hand. “I’ll admit,” her eyes narrow, “that is the first time someone had assumed that this was my portrait, and not that of an ancestor’s.” Her eyes narrow. “Or an ancestor of Elisabeth’s.”

A faint smile forms on Valerie’s lips. “Interesting. It seems as though we have been both defined by an Elizabeth in our lives.”

Valerie’s pronunciation of the name comes out as a drawl, a dactyl vanishing in the shadows of the torchlit castle hall. Julia inclines her head, a resigned but amused smile acknowledging the other woman, as though noting that detail as well. She runs a hand through her dark golden hair as she turns back to look at the painting. “Do not misunderstand, Valerie. I used to love this portrait. It is well done. It has lasted years. Even decades. It was made to capture my beauty. To celebrate it. That is what they tell me.”

“But it is just so still. So … static.”

Julia stares, directly. The latter woman, for her part, keeps her eyes on the painting above them both, looking down at them all. “Yes. Precisely.” She regards her companion with as much intensity and focus as Valerie had the painting, before looking back at her facsimile and shaking her head. “I am tired. Of being here. Of being stuck here. In this place. In that time. Never changing. Never moving. A pretty good little thing to entertain, but that is all the meaning there will ever be. Just a bauble to be admired in an old house always having the same parties.”

Valerie takes Julia’s arm more firmly, inclining them away from the painting. They start to walk. Slowly. Languidly. It’s as though their gown hems are gliding on air. Julia takes one last look at her picture before moving full step, side by side, with Valerie. “I’m sorry.” She says, after a time. “I used to enjoy these ballroom parties. These celebrations. But I forget myself. There is nothing that can be changed. That is what I said. That is what I told her –” She sighs, and looks down for a moment, a rueful quirk forming on the corners of her mouth.

“You mean, to your Elisabeth.”

“Every time.” Julia says, without hesitation, caught in her own inner momentum as Valerie steers them onward. They move through the corridors, away from the music, away from the conversation, the sounds becoming more distant, ethereal, lost to time. “But it seems, at times, as though I’ve trouble heeding my own advice.”

Valerie moves her head, slowly back and forth, a bemused expression on her face. “If only our portraits could rot from our excesses and debauches, showing the marks of our years and experience, while we celebrate our lives, young and whole, eternally.” She sees the blank look on her companion’s face. “I believe that came from the work of an Irish author, of your Commonwealth?”

Julia rolls her eyes. “Probably after our time. Though it does sound familiar. Perhaps one of our other guests mentioned it in passing.”

“And imprisoned as well. Broken by it, at the end.” Valerie looks out into the darkness around them. “Perhaps you can only celebrate, only flout life, so many times before the walls of your bower become your fortress, become your jail, and then your only company. Your tomb.” Valerie stops, suddenly, her white dress standing out in the gloom. She places both hands on Julia’s shoulders, leaning in, conspiratorial, smirking. “And so, you continue. You defy that end. You escape those walls. That fate. A coward dies a thousand deaths, but a traveler lives a thousand more.”

There is a sour look, almost a pout on Julia’s face as she stares into Valerie’s, though it does not match the fire in her eyes. “You almost sound like Elisabeth’s journalist companion, misquoting the Bard at me.”

Valerie smiles, pushing back a strand of hair from Julia’s face. “My friends will be at the ball for a while?”

Julia leans her own face into Valerie’s, running her hand through her soft hair the colour of platinum. “You mean the young couple you brought with you?”

Valerie nods, resting her forehead against Julia’s. “I know that, especially to this fine … how do you say … Victorian -themed ball of yours, it is customary when visiting another’s home to bring gifts. A part of guest right.”

“It is very Continental. Or Old World as the Americans say.” Julia’s arms wrap around Valerie’s waist. “But it is also the duty of a hostess to provide party favours.”

“Well, Lady Alert.” Valerie’s lips brush the other’s, the ghost of a kiss. “I have enjoyed these appetizers. Shall we come to the main course?”

“Mes chambres.” Julia’s stringent tones have become quiet, husky. “Elles ne sont pas loin. Les autres seront occupés avec leurs nouveaux… millésimes de bourgogne.”1

“Bon.” The two of them regard each other for a long moment, with a whole other kind of hunger before separating, and holding arms again. “J’ai vraiment hâte de goûter au mien, ma chère.”2

“De même.”3 Julia replies, before inclining her head and her body towards another direction, another set of stairs. “But before my chambers, another detour. There is something else. Before midnight.” Her eyes are deep. “Something that I would like to show you.”

*

They lie together under the drapes of the canopy bed. The room is a gentle, but pervasive red. Valerie traces a finger tip down Julia’s exposed neck, a lazy, amused smile forming. “I cannot hear your heartbeat.”

Julia lies on the mattress, her hair, once neatly in a bun now completely down but not hiding her one thousand yard stare into the shadows made by the candles in her room. Finally, she turns towards Valerie on their pillow and smiles back. “Then you have done your job, Lady Chilton?”

Valerie laughs. A crystalline tinkling sound. “What fire. I am glad that it remains. I hope that we can appreciate this night. We have survived the time between the commemoration of Saints, and the place of all lost souls.”

“Your hair, gliding across my chest, my skin …” Julia strokes Valerie’s collarbone absently, “it certainly elevated me from any Purgatory where I might have been. I can understand, even remember now, why Elisabeth seeks such solace in the sensual. The ultimate escape. I would, and I will, do anything for that.”

“For you.” Valerie gets up, and begins to put on her dress, red this time, and a long, feathery white boa.

“Red becomes you.” Julia drawls, resting her chin on the palms of her hands, her elbows in the pillows.

“And you have become the red you were always meant to be, long ago.” Valerie straightens her garb. She smiles down at the other woman. “Are you ready?”

“Aren’t you scared?” Julia inclines her face. There is a defiance there, but her eyes are distant.

“My dear.” Valerie leans forward, and holds her face in her hands. “Look at me. A letter-opener, a book-knife in the heart. I have seen death more times than you can imagine. You are more than just art for men to admire, and for your Elisabeth to disdain and take for granted. This is an opportunity. Death is the first part of the greater journey. I am honoured to have seen the start of yours. Now is the time for new cycles. New dances. New stories.”

“Of course, Lady Chilton.” There is a reverence and, perhaps, a bit of playful mockery in Julia’s tone as she gets up to get dressed herself. “You know, having known the Blackwoods and the other families, I must confess that you do not look like a Chilton.”

“Only by marriage.” Valerie shakes her head. “Or so I thought.” She smiles at Julia’s questioning glance. “Let us just say that my husband was a bad little boy, titillated by young blood spilled in Bruges, but too cowardly to take anything in Ostend, or in your Mother Country. The Elizabeth I knew, she was the real thing. Far more than the ‘Mother’ that he left behind. So no, my dear Julia, I might be a Chilton, but in name only. And not in deed. If anything, I come more from a Countess ‘ line than from where I had ever been solely with him.” She straightens out her shoulders. “Now then, the hour is late. It is almost morning. Come, Julia. I will take you from this place, and we will continue our journey together.”

Valerie holds out one hand, waiting for Julia to take it. There is a wistful smile on her face, but an imperious mien to her gesture. Julia laughs, bowing her head, slightly but visibly.  She takes the other’s hand, letting her come to her feet. “You have a lot of confidence, my Lady.”

“Only in you.” Valerie responds. “You know the way out. I have only secured it. For the both of us.”

“And the others?”

Valerie looks lost in thought for a moment, her blood red fingernail tapping at her lip. “My friends are already permanent guests by now, yes.” Julia doesn’t answer, but that is a reply in and of itself. “I am sure they will remain entertained, and for entertainment. As for your friends, well you know the wager.”

“The reason you are here at all, yes.”

“The attorney made it clear to me.” Valerie and Julia step towards the doors. “One night. A … carriage, or conveyance will be waiting for us. This place, your prison, will become mine. My property. And I will raze it, to the ground, on your behalf. No more exhausting dances. No more deaths. No more men to compete with. No more Elisabeth. Just as I escaped from the shadow of mine, so you will yours. Only the voyage. Only the limits of Oceanus. Only the Night, for the two of us.”

Julia takes this in, and she smiles. “Yes.” Her face twists into a grimace of hatred for a few moments. “They have made their choices.” She turns back to Valerie, her benefactor, and so much more. “Now, we can make new ones.”

*

The castle walls and passageways warp and shift. But Julia, obediently, leads Valerie onward, knowing the way, seeking their final destination out of this place. Julia opens the passage in the wall, directing them both into the darkest chamber. They descend deeper, and deeper down until they finally come to the basement.

“Just a little further, my Lady.” Julia intones. She guides them, through boxes and tables. Mists, swirling at the edges of the chamber, begin to grow, obscuring the visibility of everything else in their way. Her cloak, the one she brought with her to the castle in the beginning, settles around her shoulders. There is something … familiar about some of the objects that they pass. This place, it looks like catacombs, older than the castle itself. She closes her hand over something in her cloth that she took with her as they move farther inward.

“What is this place?” Valerie murmurs. “They remind me of a family crypt … I sense much death here.”

“I believe,” Julia says, her own tone absent, “that Elisabeth’s grandfather, the first Lord Blackwood, meant it to be a family plot. But for some reason, his family never chose to inter their remains here. You saw the gravestones outside when you came in? That is where most of them … most of us lie.”

“Then what … or better yet … who is here?” Valerie’s grip under her cloak tightens, just a bit. “Tell me, my Julia. What should we expect here?”

Julia comes to a stop. The mists begin to rise higher. Two objects, in front of them, strangely enough become more definite. “You are a connoisseur, yes my Lady?” She peers back at Valerie. “The Blackwoods had another name, before their founder was given this land and title. Before he chose to build his castle here. I don’t think you would have enjoyed the taste of them, my Lady. They were called … Blackbloods.”

Valerie chuckles at that. “Blackbloods. You told me their founder was a Hangman? If they’d only known the Countess …”

“It’s true.” Julia nods. “Elisabeth’s grandfather was given this power for his executions. Her brother, from what I was told later, Thomas is worse. Yet it all started here. At the foundations. I imagine that Blackblood did more than just kill criminals and dissidents to the Crown to get this privilege. I think this is where he held the … other bodies. I am sure you can understand such things. Personally.”

That is when the objects in front of them come into focus. Two boxes. Oblong. One of them has a face inscribed onto it.

“Doesn’t that seem familiar to you, my Lady?” Julia asks, pointing at them. “They are not quite Iron Maidens, but …”

“Iron Maidens.” Valerie’s eyes narrow at Julia, at her impertinence. “How would I know of such things? They were before …”

“In a way, wouldn’t that be you?”

The figures materialize from the mists. There are so many of them. Most of them are garbed in nineteenth century clothing, but others wear clothing from different ages of England, and across the world. Valerie’s chin tightens. “I see that many others made the wager, then.”

“That is one thing I understand about gambling,” Julia says, stepping right to Valerie’s side. “The House always wins.”

The figures walk closer to the two women. Valerie remains tall. She does not flinch.

“Julia.” She says in a low voice. “I order you. I command you to see us through this.”

“I will see us through this, Valerie, if that is your real name.” Valerie turns to see Julia smiling at her. The other has let go of her arm. “You know, something occurs to me.”

“Julia.” Her name in Valerie’s mouth is iron. A warning.

“It’s just … well. I suppose traveling all across Europe, all over the world even, costs you a considerable amount of money.”

The apparitions of the castle loom closer. 

“Julia.”

“I mean, truly. You benefited from the good graces of your wards at first. I imagine the Chiltons did not give you the money you seek. And judging by your existence of wanderlust, of not being able to stay still, you must have run out of your original funds long, long ago. Let me guess? If you were to get out of here, you would raze this place to the ground, sell the land, and take all the money for yourself?”

“Julia, you are my –“

Julia laughs. It is a mocking, scornful sound. “Did you mean anything you said, Valerie, or whoever you are truly? Would you have let go with you?”

Valerie lunges forward, suddenly. Julia’s mouth widens into an O. A slender blade pierces through her chest and out of her back, where her heart would have been. Valerie withdraws the blade, as Julia staggers back, and crumples onto the ground. In the mists. But her laughter doesn’t end. It rings on, and on.

“Oh come on now, Valerie! Stabbing me in the heart, at this point, is a little on the nose!”

Suddenly, Valerie is surrounded. There are two men. One of them is in frilled finery. The other is topless, and heavily muscled. They hold both of her arms. She struggles, but it is no use. Julia steps out of the mists again, in front of the other figures, completely unharmed, her gaze piercing into Valerie’s with a sly smirk on her face.

Valerie’s face twists into shock and rage. “I turned you. I could not feel your heartbeat! You were mine!”

“My heart never beat, Valerie.” Julia says, with sweetened venom, as she comes closer. “And I never felt yours.” She leans in closer to her as the two spectral men hold her in place. “And I was never yours.” She turns to the men. “Thank you, William. Herbert. You know what to do.”

Then the figures surround Valerie. Their hands, their fingers, scratch at her. Their teeth find themselves in her flesh. Valerie shrieks Julia’s name until they, all of them, are swallowed by the mists and the darkness.

*

Julia Alert stands in the basement on her own. Her hands are folded in front of her as she regards one particular object. She looks at it almost as intensely as she had the painting of herself in the hallway of the castle. After a moment, she speaks in the direction of the object.

“Dr. Carmus finds you fascinating, you know. He believes that we are, in his words I believe, ‘localized’ versions of what you are. We’ve had so much time here, in this place, that we read a few of his works. I suppose that is one more way in which we could be related, you and I.”

Julia sighs, running her fingertips up and down the object in front of her. “Usually, we can only consciously exist one night once a year. The good doctor told us that human beings have three forms of life. Our bodies, that die quickly. Our souls, that we never truly understand … and our senses. I know our senses can continue a long time after we’ve died. The sensual life is long, and majestic. Blood is the best way to keep it going. I think, perhaps, that is how you have kept yourself going .. though you have been able to move, unlike ourselves. Blood feeds the five senses after we’re gone. And violence, well, it makes it feel all the more poignant. I am sure you find this very familiar.”

She moves around, her skirts twirling. “The young couple you brought us are new. But you are different. You always were. You weren’t exactly subtle, my dear Valerie. Even your voice sounds much older than how you look. Frankly, if anyone deserves to exist in a Castle of Blood, it is you, Countess .” 

She shakes her head, splaying her fingers out on the object in front of her. “Oh, I know who and what you are. I know you’ve killed many people. You like little girls, if I recall the stories. Alan wouldn’t understand. He was always such a do-gooder, even now. And poor, sweet Elisabeth is too squeamish for that sort of thing. Do not worry. We will not kill you. We are after all, all of us, murderers. By necessity. Lord Blackwood, Thomas, feeds us blood once a year to keep us in existence. To give us company. And I have it on the good doctor’s authority that we can use your blood to extend our existence for another year. To increase our sensual life. And we, darling, are nothing if not sensual. But with your blood in particular, even more than that of your darling couple, we could have longer. We might be able to even leave the Castle and its grounds. That is what you promised me, even though I suspect you never believed it would work. Just one more pawn discarded for the Countess, yes? But who knows?”

Julia shrugs her shoulders. “We might even be able to go as far as paying Thomas himself a visit. To … repay him for his generosity in keeping us existent. But you needn’t worry.”

Julia walks away. “Alan was a journalist before he joined us. He interviewed Poe. He likened your situation to ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ you know? I think he almost feels sorry for you. It is a pity. I once thank you beautiful. Like a worldly Galatea. But really, I think you remind me more of a Ligeia than anything. Yes. Legends. Your fate, right now, reminds me so much of that legend of how you spent the remainder of your days locked in your room in your own castle for your crimes, slowly starving to death. How that must have driven you mad. No wonder you could never stay, willingly, in one place.

“But it is all right now, my dear Countess. All you have to do, now, is lie back, be still, be beautiful. And be useful. Yes. Close your eyes, and think of … well, not so much England, as we are already here, but Hungary perhaps. Yes,” Julia slowly grins. “That should be appropriate.”

Julia leans down, and kisses the sarcophagus in front of her. She gazes down at it, her gaze filled with transfixed contempt. There is a determination in her eyes as she rises fully to her feet. She takes a piece of cloth in her hands. It is Valerie’s cloak. She looks, meaningfully, at the sarcophagus and drapes the cape around her shoulders. She pushes back her hair from her face. Then, she walks away, leaving the sarcophagus and the other coffins in the darkness and blood. Beautiful. Marble. Still. 

  1. My chambers. They’re not far away. The others will be busy with their new… burgundy vintages. ↩︎
  2. Good. I really can’t wait to taste mine, my dear. ↩︎
  3. Likewise. ↩︎

Happy Halloween

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

For Diana Prince, Darcy the Mailgirl, of The Last Drive-In. Happy Belated Birthday.

From a shattered store window, a black and white television screen flickers with static. There is a picture on there, barely visible to anyone who might see it, who might remain. It’s as though a mashed pumpkin leers out from a space long dead, or alive not so long ago. 

Happy happy Halloween Halloween Halloween, the device chirps out, faded, stuttering, discordant, happy happy Halloween, Silver Shamrock …

It is the only sound in the silence that is Haddonfield now. 

It lumbers into the deathly quiet town. It had never left. Its breathing is laboured, muffled, from its exertions. The Shape tilts its head to the side, to look at the treats that another’s trick had made. It kneels down, bending on one knee, at one small form. It moves its mask off what’s left of its face. Just like the others, it notes to itself, filled with insects and snakes. They chitter and hiss in the growing darkness of the night, and the chill of autumn. The Shape sees them in the gloom and the dying street lamps, feasting on burned and rotted faces. Some of the masks have survived. Green warty witch faces. The leering facades of skulls. The visages of Jack O Lanterns. 

All these small shapes, their brains burned from the inside, boiling their blood, sizzling their nerve-endings, the ozone of electricity and elemental power unleashed, and then releasing compartments or using fragments of power to release the spontaneous generation of pestilence to swarm, and eradicate the larger forms nearby. The Shape feels nothing as it peels off those rubbery death masks, looking at the paroxysms of screams from the remains of the adults. It notes how some of them held the children, spilling candy and chocolate and apples all around them, offerings to a grim, arbitrary harvest that only The Shape can appreciate now, reluctantly. 

It looks at the remains of one of the masks, with its silvery component, its medallion and its piece of stone. For a few moments, it thinks it sees the rune of a Thorn on it. It pauses, and something shifts inside of it. Something deep in itself, in the place where its chest is, where it lungs are, and its heart resides. It can feel it. 

Nothing in this town is alive anymore. Nothing is alive anywhere. 

It can’t explain how it knows, even if it talked, even if there was anyone around to talk with about it. It looks at the knife in its hand, stained with chemicals instead of blood. There were trucks. After the televisions played the song, the endless cycle still reverberating through the town, through the country, perhaps even the world, it had made its way to those vehicles. They had been around the stores, the houses of families. These strange suited constructs, The Shape noticed they didn’t bleed or come apart like the others. Only chemicals and wires. Only plastic faces. One, if one still lived, might have believed The Shape to be disappointed by it all: to see these ends as anticlimactic. 

But The Shape doesn’t feel that way. Not at all. 

It feels … different now. These were all treats. And this was a trick. Something is lifting from The Shape, something it cannot name. 

It walks on. It breathes, more shallow, behind its own mask. It recalls finding it in a store, and even now it smells like devil’s rain. It considers going to another house. It pauses. It knows how far it would be. How easy it would be. But somewhere, deep in the void that it is, The Shape can’t find itself to bother. 

It knows that she is already gone. Perhaps gone while babysitting another child. Or hiding. It didn’t matter. Not anymore. 

There is only one place now. The Shape steps on crisp fallen leaves, scattered confections, slithering vermin, the burned and rotted corpses of parents and children, the scattered grains of broken dreams.

Until it finds the house. 

Its footsteps become heavier on the old floorboards. It closes the door behind it, more out of habit than any other purpose. It has been habit and instinct for so long, in any case. Blood, viscera, pain, killing has been the only thing it ever cared about. As it stomps slowly, ponderously, up the steps where a family used to be, long before this last Halloween, it remembers how disgusting it had been. Before it had been darkness, before it had been perfect. Before the doctor tried to mould an intelligence from it, before all of those experiments, before the fear, it remembered the revolting smell of skin and lust, and grossness of being. Of human bodily function. Flesh making flesh. It couldn’t stand it. The idea that something tied it by blood to blood. The knife had been cold and perfect. Then it moved on, it recalls as it comes to the room where it started, to the vessel that carried it, and the other thing that put it in that vessel. That girl. That woman. That man. 

Sister. Mother. Father. 

Little Sister. 

Ugly, there should never have been more than one of him. Stars and cycles. Blood. How much of it had been real? How much had any of it mattered? He stared that day into his own darkness, and knew that it wouldn’t stop until there was no one, and nothing left to kill. But it is quiet now. There is nothing. There is just the night. 

The knife drops from his fingers as The Shape loses cohesion, leaving him empty, possibly bereft. The mask feels artificial now, fake and dead. He slowly strips it off of him. The clatter of the knife echoes through his home. The cool fall air kisses his face almost unbearably, making him raw. Tears flow down his face. He kneels on the floor, near the window, looking for something. He remembers now. Before the doctor tried to kill him, before he tried to lock him away, before he experimented on him silent and helpless, before his parents locked him away, before he started all of this by ending it. 

He finds it in the floor boards. He sits down, cross legged, all of the force and momentum of what has kept him going now long gone. He has just enough wherewithal to put it on. And as he puts the old, small clown face on, he knows The Shape is gone. He smiles behind his old face to match it. He takes his treat. He sits against the wall under the window for a long time, before slowly sliding to the side, and slumping over onto the old, hard wood.  

And this is how Michael Myers spent his best Halloween ever.

Macabre Nostalgia: Ray Bradbury’s Homecoming

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

The thought grows like the branches and roots of The Halloween Tree, nebulous and almost lost to time, but something always cycles back every year in the Fall. Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming” was a short story I discovered by accident. As a child, I had this anthology called Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum: one of the many hand me down books that my aunt would give me over the years. I didn’t realize, in the Eighties or Nineties, that Hitchcock hadn’t actually written those stories, nor had any hand in them really. All he’d done was written an introduction to the book itself, where he posits that anything can be a monster. 

And this sentiment applies well to “Homecoming.” Ray Bradbury’s story is situated at the very back of the anthology, where I didn’t even look, until one day, in my parents’ third house, in the basement, near the family computer, I did. It must have been October, close to Halloween. I remember having no plans; I had only the memories of All Hallows’ Eves that I would never have again (many of my old friends had moved on, and most of the people that I knew were gone). I was feeling sorry for myself in that basement: sitting in front of my parents’ old Windows Vista computer, I looked at the nearby bookshelf, and discovered this old friend I’d barely even read as a child, sitting with the likes of the abridged and complete version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

But I did know Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 was required reading for high school, which is where I was introduced to his writings, and it just so happened to fit part of my goal to read all the dystopian literature I could find. I also continued on with Bradbury due to Neil Gaiman as he is also a tremendous fan of his, reading some of The Martian Chronicles he loved. I had tried – and failed – to write a story called “The Man Who Forgot Neil Gaiman,” in the vein he did for Bradbury before him. But in order to potentially forget something, you need to find out what it is. So I had to check out this story. And it is a tale about monsters and what they can be; Hitchcock describes the anthology’s publication date of 1965 as “the Age of Monsters,” and refers to someone starting a “Monster Pen Pal Club.”

The above is an appropriate choice of words when you consider the idea of a group of monsters coming together, acting like people even though they are clearly not human, but something different – though it doesn’t take away from their sense of solidarity with each other, or with the reader and viewer. Take the 1981 film Monster Club, for instance, with Vincent Price’s Eramus introducing John Carradine’s version of R. Chetwynd-Hayes to a whole underground social club world of different beings, and species, and cross-species with their own rites and rituals, after saving him with a bit of his blood. There is this sense of an old world of (if you will pardon the quotation from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein), “gods and monsters” coming to an end; these beings no longer have the same level of fear or respect they once enjoyed.

There will be Spoilers. Reader’s discretion is advised.

Ray Bradbury published “Homecoming” in the magazine Mademoiselle back in 1946, and I found it ages later, reprinted in my weathered copy of the Monster Museum anthology. The story itself deals with the Elliot Family that has come to dwell in an old house in the Midwest, specifically in Illinois, who is preparing for an annual reunion. The main character is a member of the family, a boy named Timothy Elliot, who desperately wants not only to be part of the festivities, but to be accepted by his relatives.

It’s hard for Timothy to fit in. He’s been led to believe that he is ill or deformed: with “poor and inadequate teeth nature had given him,” and, as he tells his pet spider, appropriately called Spid in the Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum reprint, and in later versions included in From the Dust Returned and The Homecoming apparently named Arach, “I can’t even get used to sleeping days like the others.” Despite this, he enjoys the prospect of his family’s nocturnal existence, “He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking; sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.”

In this, Timothy Elliot shares a lot in common with someone like Marilyn Munster: just as the latter has always been considered the “uglier” or “more unfortunate” member of the Munsters, the former is tolerated for his deficiencies, as he is always on his family’s side. The Elliots, a family “of ghosts and monsters,” are a lot like the Munsters, both supernatural beings living in modern America. In fact, they also have a lot in common with the Addams, who also attempt to coexist with American society. Indeed, Bradbury wrote a letter to Charles Addams wanting to make the equivalent of a Halloween Christmas Carol novel with Addams’ illustrations and collaboration; while those plans fell through, they eventually led to a fix-it fantasy novel called From the Dust Returned that links older Elliot Family stories with new ones to create a sense of continuity.

But while the Munsters have Lily, Herman, Grandpa, and Eddie – vampires, a Frankenstein’s creature, and a young werewolf, who are all kind – and the Addams Family have Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Cousin It, and Grandmama, also largely benevolent, with a few naturally violent tendencies here and there, their “creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky” selves, the Elliots are more traditional monsters: more alien and predatory, and less inclined to interact with humans beyond bloody necessity.

If we go purely by “Homecoming” alone, the Elliots don’t have as many defined personages as the previous fictional supernatural or eccentric families. Even so, they have the following kinds of family members: Grandmère who is a thousands years old mummy and ancestor who barely moves, a Niece Leibersrouter who changes into a mouse and back, Timothy’s siblings: Ellen who seems to do something with collecting body parts, Laura “who makes people fall in love with her,” Samuel who likes to read eldritch books, and Leonard who “practices medicine,” and a host of uncles, aunts, and cousins. Aside from Timothy’s unnamed vampiric parents “Mother” and “Father,” the most notable members of the Elliots are his Uncle Einar and his sister Cecy, or Cecilia Elliot. Timothy’s Uncle is a large, bat-winged man that always favours his nephew, taking him on various flights, while Cecy is a girl who sleeps most of the time, and possesses the bodies of various beings throughout space and time. Cecy has one of the most inhuman mentalities: just as willing to change the life and abandon a woman she’s “living through” to drown in mud pits as she is to enter the body of a bird. 

There are a whole host of beings in the Elliot Family, but Timothy has exhibited no powers of any kind like theirs. He goes as far as praying to “the Dark One” to “Please, please, help me grow up, help me be like my sisters and brothers. Don’t let me be different.” In a family of diverse supernatural creatures, Timothy is an ordinary human child. 

He sees himself in a disquieting, disassociated manner: “Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and kept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing. In imagination he was outside staring in.” It is reminiscent of the unnamed protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” escaping from their tomb, seeing the living celebrating, and wondering why everyone is scared of them. In this case, it’s a mortal boy knowing he’s different; in an All Hallows’ Eve family party of the undead and unnatural, a child wants desperately to belong, feeling like no matter how hard he tries, he will fail. 

It is an interesting existential juxtaposition here. It isn’t just Timothy being terrified that he doesn’t fit into this familial multitude of witches, ghouls, and goblins, but there is a sense of impermanence within what should be an immortal tribe of nightmares. As the Elliots observe: “Dawn grew more apparent. Everybody was embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation.” 

It makes me think about what Ray Bradbury writes in “Afterward How The Family Was Gathered” in his From the Dust Returned that fleshes out “Homecoming” and other Elliot stories: he mentions that his inspirations for the family came not only from his own childhood Halloween experiences, but those with his family members now long gone. It is no secret that most beings, most families, are mortal; as older relatives will eventually decline, younger members potentially scatter. It is a spectre most of us face. As time marched on through the faded leaves of this world’s Fall, Bradbury dealt with this inevitable sense of loss and memory by writing about the Elliots, and other fictional characters. 

But even Ray Bradbury himself is gone now. His memories of tricks and treats, and fun aunts and uncles only exist now in the words he’s left behind. “Homecoming” is written as a children’s story, depicting an old House and trees in constant motion, along with leaves, along with the darkness. The prose is poetic. Sad. Mirthful. It is transitory. Like the autumn wind it references, like another Halloween, another year, this story is magical, existentially scary, and all too brief.

Like Timothy’s life. 

Imagine being that child who realizes not only is their family going to be gone one day- the same people they know deep down they are not a part of, and that even if they continue to exist, you are going to die. You won’t be there for Salem of 1990, or there is a good chance you won’t. And all your mother can say to you, in words that still haunt me, is this: “we love you. Remember that. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day […] And if and when you die, your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that. You’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come see you every Allhallows’ Eve and tuck in the more secure.” 

There is a reason why this story ends with Timothy crying all the way upstairs to his room. This part hits hard even as it inspires, in a terrible reversal of Robert Munch’s I’ll Love You Forever – where this time the mother is inured to her mortal child’s inexorable death. Certainly, the lyrical childlike prose combines with cold adult truth under the soft, dry, rasping blanket of dark fantasy, making “Homecoming” unique.

I also suspect this story inspired others. The Nightbreed from Clive Barker’s 1990 film of the same name, and its 1988 original novella Cabal, find beings hiding from humanity to keep themselves alive, originally under a cemetery called Midian. While the Breed have been persecuted for centuries, there are others – such as an old man tortured by a psychopath – who desperately want to belong to a people of such difference. It takes an outsider by the name of Boone, who becomes Cabal, to cause a further diaspora of his own people, already scattered from their former lands and holdings, to attempt to find something more, to gain something new. 

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book features a male child named Nobody Owens who is raised by ghosts in a cemetery along with a vampire, and a Hound of God, has shared traits with Timothy, who we find out in Bradbury’s other stories was adopted by the Elliots. And then there is the fact that while Charles Addams never collaborated with Bradbury on the Elliots, one of Neil Gaiman’s collaborators, Dave McKean of Sandman and Vertigo Comics’ medium fame, as well as his independent work, used his trademark abstract and Expressionist pastiche or collage art style to adapt Bradbury’s story into the illustrated novel The Homecoming.

It would be easy to leave this story on a downer note. However, Timothy Elliot has more stories to tell, and a bigger role in his family as time goes on: in From The Dust Returned, he is found helping others to maintain their beliefs and through keeping them in existence, becomes a storyteller in his own right, solidifying the idea of Timothy as an Elliot, despite his differences. I’ve already mentioned how the Elliots are parallel with the Monster Club, the Addams, the Munsters, and even the Nightbreed. Perhaps they can also be referred to as “the October people” in one Elliot story of the same name, or “the autumn people,” as Ray Bradbury described the carnival folk in Something Wicked This Way Comes, those who essentially live and breathe the Fall and Halloween.

But even without eternal life, how many horror lovers can be said to be similar? To be the same? Diana Prince, also known as Darcy the Mailgirl on The Last Drive-In has said that Halloween never ends (which is great for this article I’m writing in November). The show she co-hosts with Joe Bob Briggs identifies its viewers with the Nightbreed – with Mutant Family – and I’d argue even the autumn people. Blood, breasts, and beasts is the creed of that viewership; the acceptance of grisly death, darkness, alongside glorious celebration of childhood and the past. 

While Timothy Elliot isn’t biologically immortal, as his mother said, in his heart he is part of the Family, and their stories that he tells will keep them alive. He even goes as far as to help save some of them: especially their central ancestor. Timothy remembers them, and we, as the readers, remember him. Family becomes more than blood; more than magic. It’s a place that never goes away.  October Thirty-First ends, but will always live on in those that cherish it. Halloween, horror, and the stories we tell, will last forever. While Timothy and the rest of us are all mortal, autumn children who will one day be ready to be tucked into our cold, silent graves, we have some remembering, believing, and partying to do in the meantime. Our stories will live on, in the deep, colourful, and shadowy places that wherever we are, we will always call home.

How is The Horror Doctor?

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It’s been two years since I started The Horror Doctor.

I wasn’t sure what I was attempting to make here exactly: if The Horror Doctor was going to be something of a horror host moniker for myself, or a placeholder until I came up with a better name. It just … pretty much stuck, you know? It was going to be the blog’s prototype name: some dissected skeleton with sinew and nerve-endings that would eventually have a fleshly descendant. 

But I suppose what I made, at the time, was less a ghoul from Night of the Living Dead to be replaced with vastly more improved Savini zombies, and more an abomination from Return of the Living Dead that simply can’t die, but can only be stopped through containment and neglect. 

My other pastimes aside, it’s been a long road through Hell. Like most horror franchises, the origins of my love of horror and even the creation of this blog can differ. I’ve thought about it today, independently, completely forgetting that this is the anniversary of the day when it officially began. 

I’ve mentioned before that my partner had passed away earlier the same month I eventually came back to The Last Drive-In: this time more permanently than the Halloween Special with which I visited on Shudder TV, and Twitter back in 2019. I’ve not always been good with time in the best of moments, and it kind of sank in that I found this series again, and the community around it, not long after she was gone: literally weeks. 

I know I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stick around, but I needed something stable during this period of loss, sickness, and quarantine. I’d found Darcy, or Diana Prince, on her Twitter about a year ago after the platform had put her into jail for a horror burlesque photograph far tamer than the other stuff I’d seen on there, and we Followed each other after talking about how ridiculous that had been. But I wasn’t sure how long the Drive-In was, or even when I realized it was five hours if I could sit through all of it. The first episode of Season Two was rough for me, though I loved the spectacle of Chopping Mall. It really is a commitment to watch something for that long, but it also got my mind off of the hell of the real world, and put me into a place of ridiculous and entertaining films not unlike those independent films shown at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. I think that was the key thing for me: that the event that Kaarina and I went to every year was canceled after her death and the Pandemic, and I wanted to celebrate it for the two of us.

I also remembered what my partner said about my writing, and she believed I could write something about horror films and that I had something important to say. You have to understand that before this point, I was writing my thoughts on Facebook, but also Twitter, and I was reaching out to the creators of these films so they could get that feedback. Sometimes, like Impossible Horror, I even wrote homages or fanfiction for them. And once I began really watching the Creepshow series, I wanted people to see my thoughts in a place that wasn’t the black gap into emptiness that is the Shudder comments section. 

I’d been thinking about making something like the Horror Doctor for a while, and began making the thematics behind it. I was considering creating something that would stand out: that would be unique. I seriously wanted to rewrite Demon Wind, to the point where I have notes on what I would do differently. I was going to transmute it from a script into a story, and post it serially on this blog. The reviews were something that would happen every once and a while, along with insights into my writing process to buttress this experiment while the real work occurred.

That didn’t happen, of course. The reviews, the deep-dives, the grave-digging began to take more precedent along with my smaller fanfiction experiments. It was between the Drive-In’s showing of The Exorcist III and Deadbeat at Dawn, and Dead Heat and Cannibal Holocaust that I launched the Horror Doctor. I even posted it on Twitter where Darcy took note of it, and wished me luck in my endeavours. One of my new partners at the time had encouraged me to do all of this.

The Horror Doctor was a strange hybrid. At first, it was a place to hone my horror writing again past my original online writing: to perhaps one day pitch and submit something to Fangoria. Certainly, I took the opportunity to have the Blog featured after buying a spot for its showcase on Fangoria: even if I had very little content on it at the time. But The Horror Doctor was definitely a space where I wanted to have a place where I could be seen. Where I could be heard. I wanted people, like Darcy and others, to see I was intelligent and I had something to add to the discourse on horror and exploitation and the weird. It also didn’t hurt that by Season Three, I wanted to be a contender for a Silver Bolo Award, and I am big enough to admit it. 

And it made me engage more with horror people on Twitter. It made me think more about horror and franchises and mythologies. But more than that, The Horror Doctor was a place where I could talk about weird shit without it being overshadowed by my other writing elsewhere. The Horror Doctor is pretty much my weird place here, or so it was for some time.

A lot went down since I made this blog. I participated in the Iron Mutant Citation Challenge for VHS Appreciation Night: the certificate of which I am still waiting to get in the mail to this very day. I met TheDude and Mia Chainsaw, the incredible horror couple whose endeavours attracted me as part of the MutantFam, and I have stayed with them ever since. I made more friends. I found The Lost Drive-In Patreon, and then the Discord where I got to know many more Mutants – including the brilliant Magi Savage who got me involved in a film roulette challenge, and made me a Moderator. I started some conversations on Moon Knight, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And because of Magi, I also realized that Letterboxd is basically Goodreads for film. That is one reason I don’t write on here as much anymore. I find that I like to just get to the heart and meat of something that I like, or I don’t – and many of the articles I write here, while I am proud of them, they take a lot of time and actual reading and research at times to make something approachably good.

It’s a strange thing: to be on that line between wanting to be recognized as a professional, and a fan. You know there are connotations to both, though I would love to be called an amateur or, if you will, a student of horror as the only thing that is missing is the established recognition. To have the skill, and the will, and the passion is what is often enough for me. 

But I came a long way. To think that two of the actresses in Chopping Mall, Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton not only Follow me on Twitter because of some of the work I’ve written on the films they’ve had roles in, but that sometimes we interact, really puts it full circle. Yet I value the rest of it as well: the Fear Street films Mia Chainsaw, TheDude, and the rest of our friends have watched, The Lost Drive-In events that you too can be a part of should you want to become a Patron Saint on the Patreon, watching all the films with Magi Savage to become a better cinephile.

I know I’ve slowed down a bit, but only because I have gotten more social in these aspects. Perhaps it’s because of my Blog, and its part in getting me to put more of my stuff out there, and interact. Or maybe I did this more in lieu of those exchanges until those conversations began to happen. I don’t really know. It’s not always easy. Quarantines seem to be over, for now, and inoculations keep happening. There is a space of two years where so much loss occurred, but in all of that, I gained this, and that is more than nothing. 

So I don’t know how long The Horror Doctor will continue. It has changed over time, along with my focus, but I have one or two articles I still feel belong here, and that I want to share with all of you. Thank you for following me, so far, into the darkness with all of its twisting roads, explosions, and blood and breasts and beasts.

I dedicate this day: to the fiends that I’ve made along the way.

Journal of an Olympian

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Yo, Chris. Like we said, they were going to wrap up that Armitage Racist Sex Cult shit faster than DJ Jazzy Jeff getting thrown out of a Bel-Air Mansion. I still can’t believe the depths of this evil, crazy shit. It’s almost literary levels of what the fuck. How I get these? Groundskeeper Grandpa’s shack built more solid than that fucking house of horrors. Damn, man. I told you not to go in there. And hey. I’m TSA, remember? I got friends. Just, Jesus Chris. This fucking title too. Made a whole fucking memoir. Like Mein Kampf. Kind of glad most of it got burned in your fire. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

— Rod

It won’t be long now.

I’m afraid, of course. Any sane man would be, even at the cusp of an achievement like this. If there is even the slightest margin of error, I …

Marianne is worried too, but I’ve assured her that I will be all right. We will be all right. 

I’ve taught Dean well, and he already has a fine family of his own. They know exactly what to do. I see all of the issues now, in retrospect. The mind has to be prepared for the process, both parties to form the Coagula. It isn’t just the host, but the brain — the mind — of the pilot as well. I am so glad that I detailed that video recording while I still could, before this vessel fails, and I can finally get a new one. I hope it will be comforting to those who will join our Order. Perhaps, even our family. That Missy, she is a fine woman for Dean, and the rest of us as well. 

There were mistakes, I will admit it. Perhaps some hubris on our part. On mine. The Doppelganger Experiment was supposed to make this process easier. After all, while they did fail to have any influence over the populace despite what we might have promised that Administration, I still think they would still stand to be fine donors for those of us who are more fortunate. It was a stepping stone, certainly, to gaining the resources that we’ve needed to make this Transmutation possible, and the friends and allies to keep us strong and focused. The poor coloured Doppelganger already lost his original counterpart. I still think it’s unfortunate that the initial process was messy, at best. I suspect that that brain had been too damaged, even with Dean’s brilliant hands and the teachings of our Order such as we established them. Again, we didn’t account for the psychology of the mind, or needing another mind as a foundation to bolster the parts of the brain required to function. Or Missy. We really needed a Missy, back then. Even so, the subject survived with a few of his memories intact, though not enough to grant us — or our allies — any other leverage. If only we could have told the world that we saved such a man, such a politician. 

I’m so sorry, Mr. President. 

That had been our first real experiment. And it was a long road. Up until my time, the Order had pursued Transmutation, immortality, the Holy Grail, through spiritual means. There were so many leads. We had people, family even, in all different branches of endeavour, especially our greatest and most prominent American institutions. We even had a family member in the Orne Library itself, at that University in Massachusetts. We regained so much lore from him, back when we were the Knights Templar. He did a fine job, keeping out the … undesirables, the riff-raff, the dilettantes, and the unclean, while leaving the choicest morsels to us, and our friends. Recommended scholars only. Unfortunately, he was never the same after the Late Spring of ’27. He’d already been a fierce opponent of miscegenation, but that business in that village of inbred hicks broke him. He couldn’t see what needed to be done. It’s a shame, what happened to him in the 1930s, but he’d already been a shadow of his former self. He’d have been horrified at what we’re trying to do now, at what we are transforming into out of pure necessity. But we never had time for short-sightedness. We had to move on.

The Manuscripts were too fragmented, and only hinted on ways to do what we had to bloodlessly. Transcendence and a simple exchange of minds would have been nice, but we are still not evolved enough. It would have been too wasteful to let those other minds, and their skills die. Or worse, allow them to exist in our old shells without proper guidance. No, the body is still the only thing we have to work with, and the more sophisticated, if crude the better. No, two things from the University encouraged us, and me once I took over. I’d heard the stories about the coloured boxer in Bolton, and it was easy for those doctors to revive him. Even if my time in Germany hadn’t happened, even if I didn’t see the future in blood and muscle overtake me, I already knew achievements like these would be possible. That strength. That endurance. That resiliency. But then, there were the records. From Pluto. To think the world doesn’t believe it is a planet anymore. If only they knew the extent of it. Those records were incredibly useful. Only, we don’t want canisters. 

Flesh and blood is the key. Flesh and blood are the tools to ascension. 

The coagula is the way, the merging of Lower and Upper Egypt into the body of an eternal empire. The gods knew this, in any culture. They could cleave themselves together. And like Aristophanes’ story, that is exactly what we will do as we find our other, better halves, and guide them into perpetual life. Adaptation is the key. It always was. Artificial selection, cultivation, and a gentle guiding hand is all that’s needed to shape the perfect form to marry towards the perfect minds. 

Dean and Missy are a part of that in a more metaphorical sense. Hands and mind. Jeremy is a little rough around the edges, but he will come around. He favours the body, just like his Grandpa. I can respect that. Hell, I will be able to keep up with him when this is all said, and done. But the true prize is Rose. My darling granddaughter. She’s saved me. In some ways, she’s saved me more effectively than her parents. She has a new friend. She’s bringing him here soon. And I can’t wait to meet him. 

I’m tired. It’s been a long couple of decades, and there were a few times that I doubted our path. That I doubted myself. I am afraid, but it is just a shadow of the adrenaline I used to feel when I ran those races. When I sprung down towards that finish line. It was the fear of failure, of being left behind, of collapsing under my own weight. It was the terror of being humiliated, shown up, used up as someone better than me took my place. Because I was too slow. Because I wasn’t fast enough. 

But soon all our hard work will pay off. Everyone: the Greenes, the Kings, the Wincotts, the Jeffries, the Waldens. Even Tanaka. They will all profit from the fruits of our labour, and the discoveries of our alchemy. Baser elements transmuted into gold and platinum.  From mud into marble. 

From Black to White.

And they will always remember that it was the Armitages that brought them these gifts. And we will always lead them, and the Order, well. 

I can’t wait for Marianne to feel my strong, dark arms wrapped around her, and a stamina that will never tire. And virility that will never end. And she will have her time as well. Rose already has a new friend for my darling. I am so proud of her.

And I feel so fortunate to you too, Walter. Hopefully we will get a chance to talk before the procedure. You deserve far more than just an impersonal video tape. You will be my new lease on life. You will be my ascension to a new space that was barred to me. Titans need to be protected, and restrained. Centimanes will guard our gates. And Cyclopes will create our lightning. And you will be my lightning, Walter. You will let me strike faster, and harder than I ever did before. I will be able to start again. 

Yes. Thank you, Walter. Thank you for volunteering to give me this new chance. 

Because I haven’t forgotten Berlin. I’ll never forget that day. I will finally do it. 

I’m going to beat you, Jesse. 

I’m going to beat you.

Holy supervillain rant crazy rants, Batman. Pretty sure fucker was talking about Cthulhu shit, bro. Cthul. Lu. Shit. And the Clones around America too. Damn, dude. Not sure what we’re going to do about that. Kind of above my pay grade.

But there’s a whole list of names here. All those old white families. Cocky sons of bitches. And a bit about what they were going to do to you. And what these asshole sons of bitches did to so many others. Don’t worry. We’ll find them, Chris. We’ll get them. One name at a time. 

Lost Cause

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

For Mia Chainsaw

I know what you did. 

Oh, it was clever. Those kids came in, on their fancy bus, with their millennial friends, and they were going to take away what was rightfully yours. Ssh. Don’t speak. You can’t speak now anyway. I always had a suspicion, you see, about this town. About Harlow. But I never had proof. I never had proof about this place, or the areas surrounding it. They came into that homestead, you know, to that window into hell, and they found all the toys. All the “art.”

But they didn’t find them. Any of them. 

That’s when this town started to die. Oh, I bided my time Ginny. Can I call you that? I feel like we are connected somehow, you and I. Viscerally. No no. They had you on that ambulance too long. I know the distances. The heat. We’re in Texas, and many people just die on the way here. This town never dreaded sundown, or maybe that’s not accurate, is it? No. See, this small place here? Right. This place, where you were born, where you grew up, and where you are going to die soon — very soon from what the doctors tell me — is more of a sundown town. I guess it makes sense. I had of time, and some contacts here: like the one who phoned me up. It figures your family came here from East Texas after the Civil War. None of you like outsiders, of any kind. 

I guess that’s why it took so long for people to go to that property when my friends, and my brother were slaughtered by your local heroes. Your unsung boys. Your glorious dead.

No no. I know. The time they got there, the whole family was gone. A regular old Sawyer Adventure, am I right? 

And Tom Sawyer is running around again.

You’re probably not one for liberal Seventies culture, right Ginny? My friends and I were. We just wanted to see if my grandfather’s remains were safe. The irony, or the poetry I guess, is that I did have family here. In this land. In this place. I took it over again. Refurbished it. I came all the way over from the old Hardesty place, from my land, and I waited here. I wanted you all to be nervous. I wanted to be patient. I was waiting you to slip up. 

The problem is, I found the others. Seventies counter-culture. One was an easy rider, but he got run over. The other, Sawney Bean, was a cackling, mean son of a bitch. Not surprised you don’t understand the reference, but he liked to cook too, and trick people off the road. And that old man .. you know, he was apparently one hundred and thirty-seven years old. It reminds me of a short story I read in college. “The Picture in the House,” even heard of it? By Lovecraft. No. You probably think he was a queer, but anyone was Grandpa, the character in that story would’ve been him while he was still up and about.

There were few other freaks, too. But I’m not interested in them. 

I want Tom Sawyer. I want Ed Gein. 

The Moonlight Killer had a sack over his head like some of your great-grandpappy’s friends, I’m sure. But that … piece of shit had many faces. I studied about him, after I got my mind back, such as it was, as it is. Austin University had a good Law Enforcement Program. I studied all kinds of killers too, and how they work. The problem is, Ginny, is that I never saw his face. He was large. Tall. I never doubted for a second he could still be a threat in, what his seventies, like us? He’s not like us. His whole inbred cannibal family of killers are mutants. His fucking Grandpa lived over a century. No. I know he’s going around, killing those kids. 

You told him to go into your room. 

They didn’t get all the evidence. He’s the only one that came back. He had no where to go, after his whole family was gone. I know. Between me and Lieutenant Boude Enright, my Uncle Lefty, we exterminated those sons of bitches. My uncle didn’t make it, but I continued what he started. 

And he is the only one left. 

I’ve been by the old place. Oh, I’m sure you never had a tacit deal with the Sawyers. You just looked the other way. It was silent. Implicit. Strangers came into town, or undesirables, and they’d just disappear. I don’t need to go into who they are, or were, right? I think it’s pretty clear. 

Your last boy. The one in the orphanage. I can’t believe how many teeth I had to pull, to find anyone who’d talk about someone so large. So easy to see. He was in that house. Wounded. You took him out. You brought him to town. Got him as your ward. Adopted him. The town found him “mentally incompetent,” or nowadays developmentally delayed. He was nothing without them. I remember that now. They always bossed him around. Beat him. Told him what to do. I’m sure he enjoyed it, but he couldn’t so much as take a shit without their approval. He played when left to his own devices. We went into his playground, and we had no idea we stepped into hell. And then his family unleashed him and hell on a DJ named “Stretch” Brock. She’s a hard-ass now, despite them. Told me a lot more about that son of a bitch than I knew. 

How long did you keep his chainsaw in that room? Oh when those kids came in with that deed, you were already planning it, weren’t you. How long did he have, to take those rusted pieces out, oil them, put them together again? Putting the gas inside? Does he have some kind of workroom under your house? 

It doesn’t matter, really. Because, you see Ginny, you did me a favour. Before all of this, he didn’t have his mask anymore. It, and the rest, probably rotted away ages ago like all the corpses of all his family’s victims that were left. He’s been killing those city kids, and anyone in his way. He’s fast now. Cunning. Playing. But he’d never do it himself. He’s just an empty, blank thing on his own. A whimpering animal. He was all docile and placid for you, for years, taking care of your kids, and you. No one knowing who he is, but suspecting. No evidence. No proof. 

But then these fucking kids come in. Poor kids. I knew their grandparents, too, you know. We all know each other here now, don’t we, around these parts. They should’ve listened to their grandma. 

I’m not a grandma, Ginny. I am the last Hardesty thanks to your ward. And he is the last Sawyer. And you are the last McCumber. You could’ve handed him into authorities. You could’ve avenged the lives he and his family had taken. You could’ve made up for all the people you turned a blind eye towards as they went to their deaths. You could’ve saved young lives. 

Oh I know. I followed the paperwork. They didn’t have the deed. Yes. They fucked up. You could’ve come here. Challenged them in court. Even won. They didn’t have a chance, even with that fancy city money. But you got angry. They threw your sweet tea right in your face. They disrespected your great-grandfather’s memory. They intruded into your home. Into his lair. They woke him up, out of that puppy docility, out of dormancy. They brought him out of hiding for me.

You brought him out of hiding for me. 

You know, I think he loves you. The sick thing is, I think despite you using him as a killer, you treated him better than his entire family ever did. I’d almost feel sad for him, pity if he weren’t a mad beast that needs to be put down. 

No. Don’t struggle. You’re done. Your heart is too weak. Broken. He’ll find out. He’ll know what’s happened. He’ll lose his cool, and he will rage like a wild animal. More people will die, like those city kids, I expect. But they were going to die anyway. But then he’s going to get sloppy. Careless. He’s going to want his “Moma’s” body. Sawyers honour their kin by mummifying, or wearing them. But I got you first. 

I got you, and I will play all Little Red Riding Hood but, this time, I will be the Big Bad Wolf. And that sick bastard is going to suffer a long time before I’m done with him. Maybe he’ll really know what it’s like when someone takes away the only people you love left. Go to sleep, Ginny McCumber. The South’s not going to rise again.

Doctor! Doctor! Come quickly! Her heart stopped! I don’t think —

*

Yeah, she’s gone right? I’m sorry to hear that Doctor. Yeah, this letter is legit. I have custody of her body, and I will take charge of the autopsy. Yes, it is part of the continuing investigation into the killings. Is the suspect her ward? He ran when the ambulance picked her up at the orphanage, yes? 

Right. 

I’ve been reactivated for this case. Thank you for your time, and cooperation. I will do my best to find this killer for the State of Texas. 

I promise. 

Stranger in the Land of Get Out

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

The first time I ever knew about Get Out was at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. Here I was, sitting with my partner at the time, watching this preview unfold at the theatre about a young Black man named Chris and his white girlfriend Rose going to her parents’: introducing him for the first time.

I recall a part of me inside cringing, knowing that something really bad was going to happen to Chris. This feeling only got worse at the sight of Georgina, the Armitages’ helper, with her Stepford wife smile, and tears slowly trailing down her face. This is complete with Chris being bound to a chair, and the presence of hypnotism, and the whole implication of slavery happening under a polite veneer at the Armitage property. You see, I thought that what was going to occur was that the Armitage family used mesmerism or brainwashing, even torture – physical and mental – to break down minorities, Black people,  and get them to serve them in modern day slavery: a racist cult that made their slaves appear to obey them out of freewill. In my mind, I was seeing Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner becoming a horror film version of Twelve Years a Slave. I didn’t know Jordan Peele at this time, or watch any of the work he did, which was comedy. But I knew this film was going to be a big deal. 

There has been a lot written about Get Out over the years, including how some people were surprised that white people, or other groups could relate to – and root for – Chris in the circumstances of the film. And while there has also been a lot of social commentary examined, and I absolutely believe that in the hands of anyone other than Peele the whole brain transplant element that skirted like the line between old B film horror, and genuine contemporary appropriation metaphor, might have fallen flat, I think I will lead with how I specifically related to Chris.

It’s, arguably, an intersectional place. There is a lot of baggage, and societal stereotypes around Black identity, and that carries its own resonance. That is not what I am attempting to unpack here, as it’s not my place. But the tension that Chris feels as he is introduced to Rose’s family, whose identity and background is different from his own is something with which I can relate. 

I was born into a Conservative Jewish family. That has its own cultural and historical weight when dealing with the rest of the world, and it’s even more impactful when you have interfaith, or interracial relationships. For the most part, when I have discussed this I’ve focused on my family’s perspectives and treatment of me and my partners, as most if not all of my partners haven’t been Jewish in the slightest. But one thing that is ingrained, on some level, from at least my experience is to always be careful of those people that aren’t Jewish: that are non-Jewish, or Gentile. There have been many experiences where Jews were considered allies by Gentiles, or even friends in different nation-states, and groups, only to get turned on later, and either become ostracized, exiled, abused, or even killed. And Jewish history has had its own Biblical and historical encounters with slavery, and genocide. 

This is something I was taught by my family, by synagogue, and by Hebrew School: the outside world will accept you to an extent, but it can turn on you quick when things go wrong, or even if you are doing too well, or you are too different, or you are “assimilating too efficiently.” And there are other groups who, historically, have tensions with my ethnicity, and even if they hadn’t been hostile interactions they grew up in cultures that believed in stereotypes, and might even subconsciously project them onto you. Now, for me, I wanted to live my life. I still do. I want to believe in the power of independence, individuality, and knowing where you come from, but not letting it dominate you: or keep you from new experiences, and especially something like love. 

But then we get to the other side, which is the strength of the bond you might make with someone who isn’t in your group, and being among their kin: in their territory, away from your own, or even the illusion of an open society. When Chris is invited to the Armitage home it seems friendly enough, but there are the awkward jokes, the looks, the things that aren’t said – especially the things that aren’t said – and sometimes little microaggressions that your partner might not see, or even participate in without consciously knowing. 

I can only speak for myself. One girlfriend’s mother sat with us in her car after she drove me home, and told us she knew that despite our different backgrounds, she was all right with us: all the while I knew she would castigate my girlfriend about it behind my back. Her siblings would be friendly to my face, but I always felt a tension there, and words that weren’t said. Her father never talked to me, or rarely did. It felt like there was this quiet, tolerance there. They were Eastern-European and Mediterranean respectively, raised by Eastern Orthodoxy, and they had a Jew in their household – that, granted, they invited – who nevertheless was dating their daughter. I would see the iconography of a culture that sometimes persecuted mine, even if Eastern Orthodoxy had a better relationship with Judaism than Catholicism or Protestantism arguably did. But I never once forgot that Eastern-Europeans did unleash pogroms on my ancestors, and that once in the Old World, a Jewish man being intimate with a woman from those cultures could result in his beating, or death: or worse.

In another situation, I had a partner with Northern European background, and their ties to Protestantism. And while they were nothing but friendly to me, we travelled there – the two of us – to see them deep in the North. I found myself in an old house, generations owned, not unlike that of the Armitages but without the forest or the deer as far as I knew. And that isolation, even though I met them before in my region, made me nervous: to be a household that wasn’t mine, alien but not, and I can remember Chris’s apprehension even as I can consider what I felt watching the city recede to the wilderness of the North, and away from what I knew. 

There is this idea of xenos: of guest-friendship. It is the idea that the stranger, or the outsider should be honoured and treated as one of your own. At the same time, there is xenophobia, which is the fear of the outsider, that can often lead to misunderstandings, and hatred. There is a barrier where it is all right to be friends with someone different, but anything beyond that can be difficult, and go bad. This is a lot of baggage. But you can see, looking at Chris at the Armitage residence, feeling his immense discomfort, and his sensitivity towards those gestures – even second-guessing himself and feeling bad that he;s feeling those emotions, wondering if he’s projecting them at times due the gaslighting of the family in this case – why I can relate. 

When I finally did get to watching it, I saw there were differences between my preconceptions of the film, and what I saw. Brainwashing and mesmerism were elements, but there is also the weird science of that brain transplant, the attraction of Chris as a commodity which is an extension fo the objectification of slavery in America. I never trusted Rose, not even from the previews, and sure enough I was right. She had a very Delilah resonance about her, and I knew she was going to betray him: that she was luring him to her family to be abused, and used for some malicious purpose. 

The fear of the outsider, and the Other is strong, and it can condition you if that is the culture – or a culture – in which you have been raised. Is that household kind and simply ignorant, or are you projecting? Or under that veneer of politeness and hospitality is there a genuine resentment, or hatred of you simply because of where you come from? Are you the friendly stranger to become potential family and are there expectations of you to bring something to the table as if you are a resource, or are you to be the Other sacrificed to maintain, or even increase the power of the group that despises you, or sees you only as that object with which they want to exploit, or be rid? Are you being treated by a host, or a potential enemy? Are you a guest or an outsider? These are ancient, human questions, and instincts. 
I’m glad I saw Get Out. And, looking back at this writing, and my attempt to explain how I relate to Chris and the soul of the film, it makes me wonder if I succeeded, or just projected my own experience in lieu of that understanding. It’s funny now, when I think about this film and how important it is, or could become. I think about how people equate the Jewish experience with whether or not someone has watched Schlinder’s List. And I wonder if, just like Dean Armitage and his vow that he would “vote for Obama a third time” if he could, if one day someone will claim to even begin to understand Black experiences and trauma because they watched films such as Roots, or Get Out itself?

Whatever the case, I wasn’t ever threatened or hurt. I definitely didn’t have someone wanting to use my body, or a cultural history of chattel slavery with which to contend. But the feeling of being isolated, being a stranger in a strange land and not knowing where I stood, but historically having negative cultural experiences howl at me from beyond the void of time, making me question if what I was feeling was valid, but ultimately wanting to at least leave the discomfort and tension of the situation  is something that I think is a human experience. And I think, at least once in our lives, especially from lived minority experiences, we’ve all felt the need to run, to get away from the stereotypes and perceived notions of others, to find our sense of people, of family again: or sense of self.

To Get Out.

At a Fork Between Space and Time: Phantasm and Doctor Who

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

It took me the longest time to realize where Ghostwatch came from.

In Russell T. Davies’ era of Doctor Who, during the time of the Tenth Doctor, the term was used by the British media to refer to the manifestation of strangely humanoid apparitions that appeared everywhere in the 2006 episode “Army of Ghosts.” Of course, these “ghosts” were actually Cybermen from an alternate reality attempting to come into this world: or that of the show itself. What I didn’t know, then, was that “Ghostwatch” was a reference to the BBC 1992 pseudo-documentary that terrified British television watchers everywhere by using their actual media spokespeople and staff to stage an elaborate tongue-and-cheek televised haunting turned bad. 

I could write a lot about Stephen Volk’s Ghostwatch in its own right, as it falls into my whole found footage and epistolary cinematic fiction kick, but it was another reminder of that intersection not just between fantasy and comedy with horror, but science-fiction – especially weird science-fiction – and the horror genre. And when you have something like Doctor Who, a particularly weird science-fiction series running from 1963 and onward, stopping for a time in 1989 and 1996 respectively, only to be resurrected in 2005, it is a bizarre and zany patchwork that has covered a few genres, and stories, and story concepts in its time. I used to talk about this series a lot. Hell, I once spent years at an online magazine covering entire episodes of the show, and speculating on all of its elements before truly digging into the horror genre full time in these latter years. 

And then, one day, I encountered Phantasm.

It wasn’t a direct path. It never is, with me. A lot of my interests, and discussions, result from a series of geeky tangents, kind of like my Horror Doctor Blog: which bears no relation to Doctor Who in any way, just to be clear. But one day, I was on the Angry Video Game Nerd’s channel, and James Rolfe and Mike Matei were playing an unofficial game called Terrordrome: Rise of the Boogeymen: a Mortal Kombat-like simulation where you could fight as your favourite characters. And they were all there, these horror icons from the late seventies to eighties and nineties: Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, Chucky, Candyman, the different Ghostfaces, goddamn Herbert West, and of course freaking Ash Williams. But there were some others too. I’d only known of Leatherface in passing back when I first watched this, and Pumpkinhead. I had no clue that Maniac Cop was a thing.

And then, I saw him.

I saw this giant of an old man in a formal black suit. And he was strong. Insanely strong. He could use telekinesis as well, but he also summoned creatures that looked mysteriously like Jawas from Star Wars to do his bidding in battle.

And he also summoned silver spheres. 

I had no idea who this gentleman was, and it bothered me. It especially concerned me whenever he got hit and, instead of bleeding red blood, yellow fluid came out of him instead. This wasn’t right. How could I not know who this fascinating, terrifying character was? I read up on him after the fact and saw that he was just called The Tall Man. 

And that was it. But this is where I also found out that there was a horror series called Phantasm: created by the architect of Bubba Ho-Tep – coincidentally one of my favourite films – Don Coscarelli. And yet, this wasn’t enough to get me to watch them, or i didn’t have access to them at the time before I encountered The Last Drive-In, again through James Rolfe and Diana Prince – or Darcy the Mailgirl – and found out there had been an entire Christmas event where most of the films had been shown. 

Why did I watch these films, and hunt down the illusive Phantasm II regardless of being a completionist? It’s because not only did this Tall Man, who as it turns out also inspired the creation of the memetic Slender Man, intrigue me as it looked like an extremely unlikely iconic villain, and one I didn’t know about, it’s that something about him vaguely nagged at my senses like Slender Man would people’s collective nightmares. I had seen him, or something like him, before – and not Angus Scrimm, the actor that portrays him. 

A Silver Sentinel from Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series.

It started with the silver spheres, I know that much now. In 2007, still under Davies’ tenure as showrunner, the Doctor Who episode “The Sound of Drums,” has The Master – The Doctor’s Time Lord archnemesis – working with, or possibly having engineered the Toclafane: a race of silvery sphered aliens that are supposed to help humanity, but actually serve him in decimating it in an event called The Year That Never Was. And, as it turns out, these creatures used to be human beings from a far distant dark future that all but had their brains regressed and changed to fit into their metal carapaces that possess blades capable of cutting many people apart. They are said to also be mostly ruled by their baser instincts, and to attack from those impulses. 

The Toclafane as designed by Peter McKinstry for BBC’s Doctor Who 2007 episodes “The Sound of Drums” and “The Last of Time Lords.”

Now, Phantasm watchers, what else has blades that come out of them and attack people directly and have human brains inside them obeying – or working with – a terrifying potential alien antagonist? Of course, the Silver Sentinels are more direct and will drill into a victim’s skull, and they are removed from the skulls of the transformed dead by the Tall Man to serve him directly and, as far as I know, only the Giant Sentinels from Phantasm V are capable of firing lasers instead of the Toclafane with their own energy weapons, and their hive mind, but the parallels are hard to ignore: to the point where I wonder if Davies had been inspired by Coscarelli’s films. However, science-fiction has its own share of strange and bizarre creatures, especially cybernetic humans gone wrong, and Doctor Who itself from which Davies could have more than easily been inspired. 

Of course, now that I’ve seen the Phantasm films I’m also thinking again about the Lurkers: those Jawa-like beings I mentioned earlier. These particularly strange and outlandish things are the result of the Tall Man mutating dead bodies, those he is supposed to be caring for in his guise as a mortician, into his own mindless servants: their brains taken specifically to power and pilot his Sentinels. They, like the Tall Man, have yellow blood: an ichor that slightly resembles the reagent used by Herbert West in the later Re-Animator films, except that solution is a light neon green instead. It is fascinating to note that, at one point in Phantasm IV: Oblivion, the Tall Man exists in the American Civil War injecting fallen soldiers with needles filled with the yellow substance in a manner not unlike something the good Doctor West would do.

But then there is the idea that the Tall Man attempted to access the realm of the dead, or a mortal incarnation of him tried to do so, that resulted in his creation, and the creations of the Lurkers, the Sentinels, and his other undead monstrosities. Years later, in Steve Moffat’s run as showrunner in Doctor Who, he introduces the concept of the Nethersphere where, as it turns out again, Missy – the female incarnation of The Master, having survived death once – downloaded the consciousnesses of all the recently dead into a Gallifreyan Matrix data slice, or hard-drive to upload into Cybermen obedient to her will. Essentially, she hijacks the deaths of countless humans to make her army of the dead: engineering an afterlife in the form of the Nethersphere to do so. It is reminiscent of something The Tall Man says to the priest in Phantasm II: ““You think that when you die, you go to Heaven? You come to us!” The Tall Man’s afterlife, or homeworld or dimension, is a dark place of endless storms in a black desert and binary sun mocking the landscape of the Jundland Wastes of Tatooine, and more like a purgatory or hell in itself of his own creation accessed through his Dimensional Fork Gates much like Missy’s Nethersphere is accessible through her own jury-rigged Gallifreyan technology. Could Moffat have been inspired by Coscarelli’s films as well? Who knows.

“Boy.“


Yet one interesting parallel remains in my mind, or from my sense of aesthetics. Look at William Hartnell’s depiction of the First Doctor. Consider his suit, and his hair colour and style. Now think about the fact that whenever he is grievously injured, he Regenerates. He shapeshifts. Doctor Who was made in 1963, and by 1979 – when the first Phantasm film was released – we are all the way at the Fourth Doctor who has a device called a sonic screwdriver that allows him to access and manipulate certain elements. He is also an inventor and he can create things almost on a whim from pre-existing materials, and he travels through space and time. None of this is news to those who follow the series.

“One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back.“


Now look at Angus Scrimm’s Tall Man. He is a lengthier old man with a similar suit, but whereas Hartnell’s Doctor is flippant and snappish, The Tall Man is grimmer and far more menacing, his voice rough and brusque. He was derived from the nineteenth century mortician Jebediah Morningside: a man was also something of an inventor or a scientist. Both seem to have less patience for the young. The Doctor himself is surprisingly strong, as Gallifreyans are made to be sturdy and do not have the same physiology as humans. The Doctor uses his TARDIS to explore, and The Tall Man utilizes his Gates to move around: the former primarily through Time and Space, and the other through what seems to be alternate dimensions of reality, and sometimes different time periods. However, The Tall Man also shapeshifts but not always when he dies, and even his limbs – when severed – can change into other creatures entirely. Fascinatingly enough, Davies does create a clone of the Tenth Doctor from a severed limb of his later in the series, but that is just coincidence as I feel that was an accident when it was combined with human DNA whereas The Tall Man’s mutations are all purposeful and malicious. And while The Doctor has a sonic screwdriver to help him, it seems a tuning fork in the hands of the protagonists often disrupt The Tall Man’s Fork Gates, his technology, and sometimes even himself. The Doctor does have aspects of telepathy too, whereas The Tall Man has telekinesis. The Doctor is able to Regenerate into different genders, and The Tall Man can change his shape to match different genders. The Doctor is impatient with his human Companions and the species in general but over time warms up to them, whereas The Tall Man sees them as resources, though he has a draw towards and wants to capture Michael Pearson – who he always calls “Boy” – and Reggie, who he loves to torment like some kind of multiversal pet of spite.

John Simms’ The Master and the Toclafane from Doctor Who’s 2007 “The Sound of Drums”


Interestingly enough The Doctor once said he was half-human, and as a Gallifreyan he has two hearts, and The Tall Man seems to have come from a human at one time. Also of note, The Master – who has the Toclafane and their version of the Cybermen – is seen as the antithesis of The Doctor, while The Tall Man with his Sentinels and creations, his own resurrections in the form of duplicates and even gender changing as well can be seen as another. I can go on, I’m sure, and I want to make it clear that I am not saying that Phantasm was inspired by Doctor Who, or that various eras of Doctor Who were clearly inspired by Phantasm, but the parallels are striking and I feel that creative “cyber-pollination ” is a thing.

Angus Scrimm’s The Tall Man and Silver Sentinel Spheres from Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series.


I feel like I might have managed to offend two fanbases in two different genres in writing this piece such as it is, but it all comes back to horror and science-fiction: especially weird science fiction again. Things like Doctor Who are almost ridiculous. In a few other writings, I’ve talked about how The Doctor is the sublime and silly answer to the malevolence and apathy of a Lovecraftian universe: a dream that delves into nightmare to emerge, sometimes with some loss, triumphantly to face alien bees, vampires, and B-List foes like Cybermen, and Daleks once again. But Phantasm, with the Tall Man? He is on that other road. He represents that place where reality is never fixed, always changing, always shifting, a dream from which you can’t awaken, and yet the fight and the struggle keeps going. Doctor Who is the madcap insanity that laughs in the face of cosmic madness. Phantasm is the horror that keeps coming back throwing dwarves, mutants, robots, and undead in your face. Neither should work, these chimerical juxtapositions, but they do because in the end, both are strange stories that constantly reinvent themselves. And both are different sides of the Weird. 

To a Queen of the Damned

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

I was in Thornhill Secondary School, going through the great variety of fantasy and science-fiction books there. 

I must have been in the horror section again. Up until that point, I’d read Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine books primarily. To this day, I’m not sure what actually did it. Maybe it was Buffy The Vampire Slayer becoming a formative part of my youth, and creative mind. It could have been my friend who was making her own vampire stories. And I’d heard of Interview With the Vampire as a film that girls loved.

And so, that afternoon, at my high school library I borrowed a copy of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire: card catalogue, and stamp, and all. I read it everywhere: at home, at my friends’ and even at the synagogue services I was forced to attend. It’s been years since that time, but I can tell you that my brain expanded reading that book. I saw the baroque writing, the lush descriptions, the sensuality that my younger mind was not prepared to process along with the homoerotic subtexts, and … the world-building. The world-building hit me like a fuckton of blood bags. It was one thing to discover what another child vampire like the Anointed One from Buffy but with far more personality like Claudia could do, and the idea that vampires weren’t affected in the slightest by holy symbols, or places, or even stakes of wood. It had no human hunters. No slayers. No Van Helsing groups.

It was just vampires. Vampires attacking other vampires, loving other vampires, trying to find out about themselves, trying to reconcile their predatory natures with their former selves, and their emotions. It was a vampire telling a human journalist a story about his miserable eternity, even if – as we find out later – it wasn’t the entire story, or even the complete mood of Louis. We find out about Revenants: of beings that were not given blood quite right, or in the precise amounts to make them anything other than beasts. Before The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned, it was more than possible – at least to Louis and Claudia – that these were some of the first, more primitive vampires who prey on even other vampires.  We got more description of how organized vampires are in Europe, compared to the New World: with covens and covenants, and their need to constantly reinvent themselves when they exist for too long. There was a period of time when ancients existed, but most of them were killed by younger vampires that rebelled against them, and only a few survived.

Interview With the Vampire is where I learned that vampires weren’t just soulless beings but remembered every part of their existence, and some didn’t acclimate to their new inhuman state well and either went insane, or mindless. Many would commit suicide. I learned they all had different powers depending on who their sires, or progenitors were, and some were better suited to their vampiric nature than others. There is a moment where you see Louis, who up until this point, had basically been acting like a human with supernatural abilities realizing that he isn’t a mortal anymore and fully embracing his reflexes, and instincts – his nature – which costs another obnoxious vampire his existence. And of course, older vampires are more powerful than the young, but they can increase their power by feeding off of even older vampires. Telepathy, telekinesis, inhuman speed, incredible strength – these were some of their powers, and we see how these beings have been venerated as gods by humanity, and demonized later on, and made into myths even later than that.

I made it from Interview to The Vampire Lestat, where we find out Lestat isn’t just some inhuman dandy serial killer monster, and has faced far worse than Louis and Claudia could ever dream: and tried to protect them from it. The fact that he had male lovers, and brought across – or turned – his own mother was strange to me, but Anne Rice showed me a world where other rules applied to other beings, and it got me thinking.

If White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, Clan Brujah was inspired by Lost Boys, and Clan Nosferatu by the film of the same name, then Clan Toreador are definitely descended literarily from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles: beautiful, swift, psychically gifted artists, poseurs, and obsessive beings whose morality is different from the humans that they hunt. Perhaps that’s why I gravitated towards that faction when I really studied that game lore. I was also fascinated with Lestat’s creator Magnus, who was a wizard that stole immortality from captured vampires, and experimented with various younger victims before settling on Lestat before killing himself. That obsession with experiments, and perfection, and making something better as horrifying as it was, really got to me – as did Anne Rice’s writing.

And I hadn’t even watched the film until after reading those two books. It led to a good time with my girlfriend, though I almost didn’t want to interrupt the movie in my living room as it was so good. And the film adaptation of Queen of the Damned, starring Aaliyah as Akasha the Queen and Mother of all Vampires, was the first film I saw with my girlfriend and my friends after my parents revealed – and grudgingly accepted – they knew she was my girlfriend. I remember her and I holding hands as we watched Queen of the Damned unfold on the screen, complete with that bloody bathtub of roses scene, and all. 

I went on to make my other vampiric mythos: with a Chalice of the Damned that had blood that was supposed to offer immortality to the wizards that created it, but whose magically generated blood only made monstrosities, and then blood-dependent vampires. I made a vampire magus who figured out how to remove his own heart, and became almost impossible to kill before I even knew about Koschei the Deathless. But none of this would have been possible without Anne Rice, and her work.

I think about it now, that she’s passed on: how Interview With the Vampire was that perfect combination of history, mythology, folklore, sex, sensuality, and epistolary fiction: that interview format that was essentially a dictated journal, or an autobiography of an immortal. And I think far before Frankenstein, and Dracula, this is the format that informed my writing interests to this very day. 

Over the years, I’d heard about Anne Rice and her personal views, as well as her other works, but I would never get over her vampires. I personally loved Marius: who was level-headed, an artist, and had started to master his advanced vampiric abilities. He was an ancient Roman that revelled in the Renaissance. But I think I related the most to Louis, to a nature of melancholy and bitterness that nevertheless hid a spark of true, and aggressive, potential. Perhaps these days, in some ways, I can more see the Lestat in my creative endeavours, but I think I will always try to endeavour to be a balanced and powerful creator like Marius.

And as I wrap up this commemorative retrospective, I truly hope that wherever you are now Anne Rice, that you know you were a true Queen of the Damned. Thank you for making me more interested in vampires beyond being blood-drinking monsters.  May Lestat brat you into the Afterlife. May this Interview never end.

Made Family: Clive Barker’s Nightbreed

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

I bought the Director’s Cut of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed in the latter days of Suspect Video’s existence: a unique Toronto movie store, and cultural landmark. 

You know, to this very day, I don’t know why I bought it. It wasn’t the discount, at least not completely. It wasn’t even because it had been directed by Clive Barker. As it was, I’d only read Barker’s Books of Blood, and I am almost ashamed to say that I’d not watched any of his mainline films: not Hellraiser, nor even something based on his work like Candyman. Seriously, I’d only watched The Midnight Meat Train, and Dread. 

But I bought Nightbreed, long after I read about a contest in which fans of that world were to write stories set in Midian. And I had no idea what any of it was about. All I can remember, like a half-unmade dream, is that the title, and the premise of a community of monsters against humanity stood out at me. Or maybe this is only what I remember in retrospect. I know that there were a few cuts of this film, and that its initial release had been compromised by many studio decisions, and that “Occupy Midian” was all about restoring Barker’s original vision of the film to its audience. 

I’m not going to talk about that, except for the fact that I am glad I got this DIrector’s Cut, and watched only this version. What I will tell you is that it was only far after I watched the first Hellraiser, and before Candyman, during the height of the 2020 Quarantine that I opened up my copy of Nightbreed, put it in my portable DVD player, and saw it in its infinitely dark and glittering world-building glory. 

I saw a protagonist suffering mental trauma, never really quite finding his place in the world, and getting gaslit by someone he trusted, and then slowly realizing after running from the woman he loves that his delusions about a city of monsters free in the night, hiding underground, were all true. Madmen became his allies, and his brothers. Humans reveal themselves to be the ignorant monstrosities they really are. And the monsters that the main character always feared kinship with, yet secretly yearned to be a part, were complex, beautiful, terrifying, and so very vital and alive. And there were so many different creature designs, and mysteries, and a story that felt like both an ending, and the beginning to another. I think what really got me was that throughout all of it, as the protagonist progressed, it wasn’t all about him, even as he navigated his way between two worlds the woman he thought he had to leave never abandoned him. Not once. 

And I watched this film all the way from the late insomniac night to the wee hours of the sunlit summer morning during a time of earthly purgatory. Yet, somewhere, I knew the monsters — the Nightbreed — were still dancing their labyrinthine, Dionysian dances of which no mortal could ever truly be a part. 

Monsters. Creatures. Outcasts. Dreamers. Beings of the night. All of them live in the city of Midian. Just think about it for a few moments. This film was released, such as it was, in 1990 and had antecedent in the late 80s. This was a movie about monsters where humans invade them, where the greatest murderer is a man, and the man who becomes one of the Breed is the hero: or at least, an exemplar of sympathetic beings that just want to maintain, and then be reunited with their home. During a time when markets were inundated with generations of films about evil monstrosities, things not human, things being different as threats to the humans that eventually destroy them — or are destroyed by them — I can see why executives couldn’t deal with that concept: even if they had read Barker’s 1988 novella Cabal from which it was based. 

I’ve read Cabal recently. And it read like an expanded story from The Books of Blood, all tight third person limited thoughts, otherworldly descriptions of monstrosity, sex, fear, and desire, and the petty parts of people warring with the melodrama, and the messy, hopeful life inside of them to show what they really are. I recognized Boone in this story, and his girlfriend Lori, and the tormented Narcisse, and the sadism of Decker. Certainly, the perspective on Decker himself — the psychologist who is both Boone’s gaslighter, and a secret serial killer with his “murder-hard” — was disturbing, and fascinating in turns. And it was particularly intriguing to see the psychic link that the young Nightbreed Babette made with Lori, and what they shared together. 

But honestly? I prefer the film version of this story: Nightbreed itself. Much of the plot is the same between both novella, and film. But there are differences. Lori has many more doubts about reality in the novella and has a distinct and instinctual revulsion of the Breed that she encounters when looking for Boone. We never see the strangely alluring spined beauty that is Shuna Sassi which we are introduced to in the beginning of the film. Rachel is more reticent and distant from Boone and Lori, even when the latter had saved her daughter Babette from being killed by sunlight. The priest Ashbury, who is a crossdresser blackmailed by the small-town Albertan police captain Eigerman, isn’t rendered into a mutilated, maddened torso by the scattering of Midian’s god Baphomet, but becomes a twisted version of Cecil B. DeMille’s Moses: killing the bigoted police officer to pursue his obsession on the Breed. Eigerman doesn’t survive to get petty revenge. In the novella, we see that Midian is a ghost town, but that the real Midian is established under the town’s cemetery, and Boone is first shot down in an abandoned house by Decker, getting the police to follow suit instead of claiming Boone is going to shoot him in the woods.

We see the brutality of human systems in the film, and their joy in it. Boone is brutalized by the police after they capture him when Decker frames him for another serial killing. And for a small Canadian town, we see that the police have a large armoury of weapons that would make some soldiers in the military envious when Decker mobilizes them to exterminate the people of Midian. This fervour reminds me so much of Barker’s  “Skins of the Fathers,” it hurts. And we see that this isn’t the first time. Indeed, in the film Rachel telepathically shows Lori the systematic genocide of the Nightbreed over the millennia by various human holy crusades that couldn’t bear their physical differences, and practices. It is graphic and upsetting, especially when you see how humanized they are, when you look at the Breed living their lives in the catacombs of Midian. It is the moment where you see the mural on the wall showing their history, and their underground markets, and rendez-vous that you realize what is at stake with this coming purge. 

And, like in the novella, Boone decides to save Lori’s life over the vows he made to keep Midian a secret: and it not only costs him the home he long sought, but even that place and people’s safety. However, when he returns and accepts what he is, and what he has done — like a more active Robert Olmstead trying to save the people of Innsmouth — he helps create a defense for his people. He even encourages Lylesburg to release the Berserkers: terrifying Breed not in the novella that are contained by their fellows because of their violence, just to allow women and children a chance to escape. 

But what gets me is that Boone isn’t alone. Lori never leaves him, and indeed goes back to save him from the jail, but unlike the novella it isn’t just Narcisse who aids her but both Rachel and Babette. There is this sense of comradery, this bond going deeper than a predatory bite turned into a supernatural rebirth, or baptism by the blood of a sundered, burning god. You see a disparate people, rejected by the world, or at least misunderstood by it, coming together to free one of their own: an outsider from even other outsiders, and they all return to where they belong: for as long as they have it. Narcisse’s death, after he sought Midian for so long and gained such power, to be killed by a psychopath like Decker is still heartbreaking, and there is something fearsome in Decker — in the film — having searched for Midian through the delusions of his other patients, just so the human monster can kill all other monsters that aren’t human. He is a counterpoint to Boone, especially in how he massacres families of both species, and I am for one glad that in the Director’s Cut Boone kills him for good. The tormented Boone dies with Decker, and after he encounters Baphomet one more time — with Lylesburg unfortunately dying in the film — he is re-baptized Cabal: to work towards gaining his people a new home that he lost them … no matter how long it takes. And meanwhile, Ashberry is a throwback to that terrifying Moses — chosen or marked by a deity beyond his understanding — to destroy these beings as so many so-called holy men had tried before: and all for a purpose beyond his understanding, and those of our own.

At the end of the film, we see the Breed did escape — though many also died — and they dwell in a farm. And the mural that we saw at the beginning shows both Cabal and Lori as Breed who will lead their people to a new home. 

When I think back to Nightbreed now, it reminds me of an older story I read years back. In Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming,” we see a young boy named Timothy who is raised by the Elliotts — a family of ghosts and monsters — attending an All Hallow’s Eve family reunion. He keeps hoping that his powers will manifest, or he will start drinking blood but he never does. He ends up realizing that one day, he will grow old and die like an ordinary human by his monster family, and it breaks his heart. Yet the poetry of it is that this story is part of a larger one where the Elliotts themselves begin to decline as humans stop believing in them, as their homes are obliterated and appropriated, and Timothy — the human among them — helps them survive by carrying their stories onward: even recording them for the new world. I wonder, now, if Cliver Barker read Bradbury’s story at one point as it has a few beats with itL but while Timothy never becomes a monster, he is part of that family that took him in, just as Boone for all of his mistakes, becomes Nightbreed as more than merely being an outcast, or vampiric: but in continuing to wander, and help his family search for home.

There are a few subtexts here. It is no coincidence that Barker created this film in the 1990s given many LGBTQ+ events such as the AIDS activism, and anti-homophobia marches occurring for a vibrant people and subculture trying to survive a world that wanted them dead or buried. Also, the intersectional addition of Hugh Quarshie as Detective Joyce as a Black officer who sees the atrocities of the police on the people of Midian is no accident either: as you can see the evil of what happens when one diverse or historically discriminated group is silent the poor treatment of another. At the same time, I can see how many queer-adjacent spaces of kink, and polyamory, and geekery and — yes — horror fandom can relate to this film. We that glorify in watching blood, and sex but also justice, and the search for a new home, and even as we sometimes hurt and reject each other too, those that remain and remember what’s important will bust each other out of the jail cells of our personal despair, will band together, and celebrate what we love in macabre and beautiful dances in the night. It means a lot, to think of those late night revelries — dancing spirits — finding where you belong all the way past the twilight.

And some of these things are why Nightbreed is important. Many of them are why Nightbreed is important to me.