The boys at SF Signal recently asked me to participate in one of their Mind Melds.
This time round, I was asked which genre tropes need to be retired and my response was to completely dodge the question. I’m a slippery fuck that way. The problem is that there already is a system in place for dealing with tropes and ideas that have had their time. It’s called ‘The Market’.
Videovista have my review of Scott Murden’s The Dinner Party, an Australian psychological thriller.
Though rather unyielding in tone (it contains no changes in tempo or plot twists that might vary the mood or allow the degree of tension to vary), the film contains a really insightful commentary on the potential of friendship, love and politeness to enable the worst kinds of transgressive behaviour. In essence, the film is an assault on the glaze of consent and agreement that we apply to all of our social interactions.
Nice to see an Australian film filtering through to UK release too.
THE ZONE have just put up my review of Peter Straub’s novella A Special Place – The Heart of A Dark Matter.
As I mentioned in the post linking to my review of A Dark Matter, A Special Place is a spin-off novella that digs into the past of one of the book’s secondary characters. Ostensibly a serial killer story, the novella takes a completely different tack to most serial killer films and books by stressing not the otherness of the serial killer but the fact that he is an ordinary person. An ordinary person with a few quirks who is lead into a life of horror by the same desires and motivations that affect us all. A Special Place is effectively the story of how love can turn us into monsters.
Strange Horizons have my review of Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter.
In a year that has thus far been filled with great reads, A Dark Matter is still one of the best things I have read all year. It is a beautifully written and relentlessly intelligent examination of the way in which regret can destroy a life.
I enjoyed the book so much that I even sought out A Special Place (2010), a spin-off novella written by Straub to fill in some of the back story behind one of the book’s secondary characters. I am planning on writing about A Special Place when I get the time but as with A Dark Matter, I think that the story’s strength lies not in its effective manipulation of genre tropes but in the amount of humanity it manages to slip into the `cracks that surround the tropes.
VideoVista have my review of Jonathan auf der Heide’s Van Diemen’s Land.
The film is all about Alexander Pearce, a man who escaped from a British penal colony only to wind up killing and eating the people he escaped with. The film itself is almost a remake of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising (2009), a film I reviewed and ranted about at some length for its generic style. Much like Valhalla Rising, Van Diemen’s Land fails to say anything of substance about the issues it raises. This is largely due to a failure on behalf of both directors to understand their literary source material : Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
On the plus side, watching this film did prompt me to seek out James Rowland’s The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008), which is a much better and more thought-provoking film that really gets to grips with what it is that might transform a man from a petty thief into a monster.
The kindly souls at SF Signal are hosting my third annual Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.
It is effectively a short-list of some of the best genre films of 2009 as well as a discussion of some of the not particularly good genre films from 2009 that managed to make their way onto the Hugo shortlist. For some deeper thinking on a few of the films mentioned in the piece, please take a look at :
Existentialism exists as a result of two cultural forces :
The first, which inspired early 19th Century existential authors and thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, was the hollowing out of traditional culture by the advances made in science and bureaucracy. A process referred to by the sociologist Max Weber as the disenchantment of the world. This rising tide of scientific thought washed away many old certainties about the meaning of life and the nature of the Universe and left behind it a beach of mere facts. This left an unexpected hollow at the centre of European cultural life and the work of the first generation of existential thinkers can be seen as an attempt to address the question of how to live with this void of meaning.
The second, which inspired 20th Century thinkers including Sartre, Camus and the Frankfurt School, was the cultural fallout from the Holocaust. If the first wave of existentialist thought was trying to grapple with the god-shaped hole at the heart of the human condition, then this second wave was an attempt to deal with humanity’s unexpected willingness to fill that hole with monsters. Indeed, far from heralding a new golden age and a dismantling of the old taboos and prejudices, the disenchanted 20th Century saw humanity choosing to surrender its new-found existential and moral freedoms to a series of psychotic deities who were more than happy to obliterate anything and anyone who stood in the way of their attempt at imposing a moral order upon an otherwise chaotic universe.
Erich Fromm attempted to understand why it was that humanity had decided to surrender its freedoms in such a shocking manner. His first book The Fear of Freedom (1941) argues that Humans find freedom to be an unpleasant experience. When the rules that bind a society start to decompose, there is initial elation but before long, people find that being merely free from impediment is not enough. They need values and boundaries that will give their lives meaning and allow them to orient themselves. This pushes societies confronted with radical freedom to seek out new ideologies that will lessen the feelings of anxiety, emptiness and isolation engendered by negative liberty.
Christopher Smith’s fourth feature film Black Death is an exploration of these kinds of themes. Set in medieval England at a time when plague and violence stalk the land, it seeks to answer the question of what it is that is so attractive about a well-ordered moral universe and why it is that humans are prepared to commit all kinds of atrocities in order to defend their beliefs even when they themselves are assailed by doubts.
THE ZONE has my piece on the Dario Argento and George A. Romero Poe anthology film Due Occhi Diabolici.
I have written about Poe anthologies before… once for Strange Horizons and another time as a part of a longer piece about great French Horror films.
The DVD made for an interesting review as it opens with a film that left no doubt in my mind that George Romero is one of the most over-rated and talentless directors ever to pick up a camera but closes with a film that really brought home to me how much I adore the work of Dario Argento and how much I need to see more of his films. So a mixed bag really…
May is now drawing to an end and the much yearned for but immediately regretted embrace of a London summer threatens to engulf us. However, for one particular blog, it has been a very good month indeed. Over at nextread.co.uk, Gav has been hosting pieces by book bloggers about their favourite pieces of short genre fiction. This has proved to be a fascinating exercise for two quite different reasons :
The first is that Gav is part of a wave of book-bloggers who have recently become aware of themselves and the fact that they form a distinct blogging community. The group skews towards youth, towards Britishness and towards a fondness for genre. Anyone with an interest in the mechanics of blogging and social networking could really benefit from checking out the way these bloggers interact as they form, in a sense, a microcosm of the internet (I particularly adore the fondness for interviewing each other — an activity that serves to break the ice between blogs and introduce each other’s readers to the minds and tastes of other bloggers).
The second is that Short Story Month has allowed me to write about two rather elderly pieces of Horror fiction — Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (1910). More on which below the fold…
A little while ago, I reprinted my Vector piece on cinematic adaptations of the works of J. G. Ballard. One of the themes of Ballard’s work I used to pull together the different films was the concept of a benign psychopathology. This concept serves to unite the different works from the various stages of Ballard’s writing career and also forms the heart of his development of an old surrealist saw into a form of proto-postmodernism. The idea, at its simplest, is that Humanity has become detached from the environment in which its emotional hardwiring evolved. From a world of mountains, deserts, forests, swamps and plains we have moved into a world of cities, motorways, cars and conference centres. A world constructed largely by us, for us. However, despite this world being supposedly designed to suit our needs, we find ourselves paradoxically distant from it : Either the architecture surrounding us reflects our position and role in society thereby dehumanising us, Or it is an abstract expression of some impractical aesthetic ideal and it alienates us. Our reliance upon the car and the city is physically and psychologically toxic and yet we cannot return to the state of nature we once lived in. We die in car accidents by the hundreds of thousand and yet we still drive to work. We self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, losing ourselves in the pleasures of consumerism and empty sensuality and yet we do not seek to change the world. The co-dependent and unhealthy relationship we have with our environment is a benign psychopathology, a form of madness created by an attempt to adapt to an unnatural environment. A form of controlled and evolutionarily beneficial madness. A form of high-functioning dementia this benign psychopathology is an attempt to reformat our emotional hardwiring and set up a new set of stimulus-responses that are better suited to our new world.
In Ballard’s early Science Fiction novel The Drowned World (1962), the character Dr Robert Kerans is horrified when Captain Strangman drains the lagoon and makes it possible for humanity to resettle the ruins of a drowned city. In Crash (1973), the character of Ballard develops an attraction for people maimed in car crashes as automobile accidents become fetishised. In Cocaine Nights (1996), Charles Prentice comes to realise that rape, arson, theft and murder are not anti-social activities but rather necessary tools for the creation of social cohesion. Throughout Ballard’s work, the severing of Humanity’s emotional connection to the environment allowing the development of benign psychopathologies invariably results from some terrible event. An event which Ballard scholars have come to refer to as The Death of Affect, drawing upon a chapter in Ballard’s central work The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) in which a couple visit the scene of a car crash only to find that the site has been drained of all emotional content :
“These infrequent visits, dictated by whatever private logic, now seemed to provide nothing. An immense internal silence presided over this area of cement and pines, a terminal moraine of the emotions that held its debris of memory and regret, like the rubbish in the pockets of a dead schoolboy he had examined” [Page 108]
Of course, benign psychopathologies do not have to take the form of a sexual predilection for car accidents. They can be much more mundane. Much more common. Much more familiar. Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector — based upon the French novel La Question Humaine by Francois Emmanuel — is an exploration of the idea that certain psychopathologies can survive the death of their host organism, living on in the cultural aether to rewire whole new generations to fit with new and emerging forms of environmental unpleasantness. A process of adaptation that is noticeable in certain chilling linguistic similarities.
Videovista have my review of Van Hees’ wonderfully unpleasant Horror film Left Bank.
Left Bank is reminiscent of films like Irreversible and Cruising in so far as it manages to engage with a set of unpalatable attitudes in a critical way despite embodying those attitudes in the cinematography of the film. In Cruising, the attitude in question was homophobia, in Left Bank it is misogyny.
Videovista have my review of Dario Argento’s rather splendidly weird The Stendhal Syndrome.
Oddly enough, despite being a fan of Horror and a fan of world cinema, I had never really encountered the films of Dario Argento before seeing this film. I have seen films inspired by his works and gialli that tried to copy it but I had never actually experienced proper Argento before. Needless to say, I loved it: A psychological thriller about a descent into madness that brilliantly doubles as a scathing critique of Italian attitudes to women. Great stuff.
THE ZONE have my review of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
The star rating is, perhaps, a little harsh given how much I enjoyed the novel. I think that the book is filled with fascinating ideas and that, more than any work of SF I have read recently, it tries to engage with some of the big political issues that are affecting our time. However, at the end of the day, I was not convinced that these ideas had been successfully knitted into a coherent narrative. I think that the shift from short stories to novels has raised some serious issues over Bacigalupi’s approaches to characterisation and plot which, though perfectly understandable in a first-time novelist, are still somewhat disappointing.
Dig through the history of Horror and you will find, buried beneath the Vampires and the Werewolves, a more enduring monster. A monster that fits uneasily on the cinema screen because his depiction requires no make-up or special effects. A monster that looks exactly like you. A monster which, in fact, is you.
From Poe’s “William Wilson” (1838) to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846) through to Kurosawa’s Doppelganger (2003), it is clear that one of the greatest fears humanity has is to wind up face-to-face with itself. Terror is dealing someone who knows all of your secrets, who knows all of your bullshit, who knows what you are capable of… and who can do it too. The doppelganger is a reminder that as much as humanity fears the Other, it fears the Self just as much. Perhaps there is a reason for this. Perhaps what we hate about the Other is what we hate about ourselves. Perhaps all hatred and fear is externalised and projected self-loathing? This idea has a nicely psychoanalytical feel to it. You can imagine Uncle Sigmund whispering it in your ear as you cough up his fee and prepare for the long slouch back home. Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s you. How far can we take this insight into our fears and terrors?
Johan Grimonprez’s documentary essay Double Take attempts to answer this question by using the doppelganger as a device for examining not only the politics of the Cold War but also the relationship between television and cinema.
SF Signal have my review of Ellen Datlow’s Horror anthology The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 2.
I really enjoyed some of the stories in this collection and I would definitely recommend it as a good starting place for anyone who is interested in getting into the genre. I was really impressed by quite how stylish some of the stories are and by how aggressively the authors sought out new tropes to play with.
I had read three of the stories included in the volume before when I reviewed Datlow’s Poe (2009) for Strange Horizons. In the intervening year or so I warmed to Charnas’ “Lowland Sea” but fell even further out with Barron’s “Strappado”. My Poe review was memorable as my lack of enthusiasm for the collection lead to the editor siccing her flist on me.
The Zone have just put up my twin reviews of The Crazies :
It is interesting to note that both films deal, on a thematic level, with the way in which America wages its wars : Romero’s version is a tightly focused critique of the idea that one can wage war in an ordered and rational manner. The film paints a viciously satirical portrait of an American military weighed down by petty bureaucracy and staffed by incompetent boobs. Meanwhile, Eisner’s version is a much vaguer indictment of the savagery stirred up by America’s decision to topple the Iraqi and Afghan governments.
My first ever review for SF Signal has just gone up! I am taking a look at TTA Press’s Horror and Dark Fantasy short fiction zine Black Static, an issue of which I also reviewed for The SF Site last year.
After much humming and hawing I decided to subscribe to Black Static and I am hoping that the guys at SF Signal will allow me to review all the issues I receive, so this little dalliance in Horror short stories may turn into a regular thing, who knows? On the whole, I enjoyed the issue. It contains one particularly strong story by Sarah Singleton entitled “Death By Water” but I also really enjoyed Simon Kurt Unsworth’s “The Knitted Child”.
Videovista have my review of Dom Rotheroe’s British family drama Exhibit A.
Exhibit A is the kind of film that, at a stroke, entirely justifies all the hours I have spent watching and reviewing straight-to-DVD releases. It is an intensely real and emotionally harrowing exploration of a family in crisis with some lovely performances and a script that is tighter than a duck’s arse. However, what really makes Exhibit A and exceptional film is the fact that it uses the increasingly elderly saw of pretending to be found footage shot using a camcorder, but applies it to mundane events rather than supernatural ones. If a bit of jerky camera-work and a few glitches are enough to make a crushingly formulaic monster film like Cloverfield appear special, imagine the effect those quirks might have on a well constructed family drama. A joy.
Videovista have my review of Christian Alvart’s Science Fiction Horror film Pandorum.
This was a terrible film to watch but an interesting film to write about as its action sequences have some quite interesting technical flaws and because its overburdened narrative demonstrates one of the more depressing tendencies in Horror film-making, particularly when that Horror takes place in a Science Fictional setting.
Strange Horizons have my review of Philip Palmer’s catastrophic Red Claw.
It was interesting reviewing Palmer’s book after I reviewed Bernard Beckett’s Genesis last year. Genesis‘ ending annoyed me so much that I was ready to eviscerate the novel in my review. However, I decided to sit on the review for a little while and when I came to actually write it up, my feelings turned out to be a lot more positive than I expected. My anger was evidently hot and it burned itself out quite quickly.
Conversely, reading Red Claw was depressing. I felt no anger or irritation just a sense of grinding hopelessness as any hope of the book eventually improving was slowly crushed with the passage of pages. My review is an attempt to communicate my feeling that the novel is simply a failure. An absolute failure.
Videovista have my review of Francis Xavier DeGennaro’s Torture Me no More.
It is traditional when reviewing low budget films to be surprised at how good it looks. Torture Me No More elicits the opposite response : Making films is really difficult and most people are not likely to be any good at it.
One of my greatest bugbears in fiction is the concept of the “well-drawn character”. If we wants to talk about a film in terms of its mis-en-scene or its shot selection then we can read books and treatises about such matters. Books filled with Eisenstein’s montages and Welles’ long takes. Similarly, if we want to talk about a book in terms of its narrative structure or its subtext then one can read Aristotle’s Poetics or the countless introductory guides to literary theory that fill the book shelves of people who really should be reading the original source material. These elements of fiction are well understood. Their subtleties catalogued. Their aesthetics understood. But what about the aesthetics of character construction? What distinguished a well-drawn character from a tissue-thin one-dimensional empty suit?
Presumably this area of aesthetic achievement is comparatively less well-travelled because, as humans, it should be obvious to us which characters are believable and which are not. We humans deal with each other quite a lot and so we presumably have a firm enough grasp of human psychology that we should recognise a character who is ‘off’ and unbelievable. Perhaps they behave in an erratic manner, perhaps they do not speak in a voice of their own, perhaps their actions do not follow from what we know of their character. In effect, we our ability to detect poorly drawn characters flows from the same place as our ability to read and interpret other people’s emotional states, the catalogue of theories, intuitions and received opinions that philosophers call Folk Psychology. However, some philosophers question the validity of folk psychology. They argue that most of our understanding of human behaviour is based on absurdly simplistic theories that are little better than superstitions. I share this doubt. This is why every act of characterisation strikes me as explicitly theoretical. Underpinned by all kinds of beliefs about the way humans work which may, in fact, be profoundly flawed or ludicrously simplistic.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie is a film that wears its Folk Psychological assumptions on its sleeve. It is a work of drama where the character arc of the main character is sketched not in bland generalities but in explicitly Psychoanalytical terms. The result is not only a fascinating character study, but also a meditation upon the moral status of psychoanalysis as an activity.
Videovista have my (rather long) piece on German Expressionist film entitled Apocalyptic Adolescence.
The piece gives a list of eight particularly noteworthy works of Expressionist cinema and ends with two works which, though not Expressionistic, seem like logical reactions against the trend. One of the challenges of writing this piece was the slow realisation that the term “German Expressionism” is now effectively meaningless. So I attempted to keep track not only of how the term changed, but also to look at all of these films through a rather definite understanding of what it meant to be a part of the Expressionist movement.
The list includes : The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Student of Prague, The Golem, From Morn to Midnight, Genuine : A Tale of a Vampire, Waxworks, Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Last Laugh and Pandora’s Box.
The New Look Videovista have my review of Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Walled In.
Intriguingly, the film is based upon a work by one of the pillars of the Francophonic genre scene Serge Brussolo. A Horror/Thriller all about architecture. Sadly, despite having some wonderful ideas to draw on, the film itself feels limp and lifeless.
VideoVista has my review of King of The Hill (El Rey De La Montana). Not the long-running animated comedy but rather a taught and atmospheric Spanish thriller directed by Gonzalo-Lopez Gallago.
King of the Hill, along with a number of other films I have reviewed in the last year, suggest that Europe is going through something of a genre boom at the moment. Britain and France are churning out genre films like nobody’s business and places like Spain and Norway are following suit. Sadly, while a lot of these films are very well directed indeed, not that many of them are well written and King of the Hill is further evidence of that observation’s validity.
Two books have recently been weighing quite heavily on my mind.
The first is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a novel that is as striking in its imagery and ideas as it is in its formal innovation. Rather than providing a coherent narrative, Ballard chops the book up into short paragraphs that are more or less conceptually and thematically related. Themes, motifs and characters re-appear (sometimes with different names, sometimes filling spaces previously occupied by other characters) but between the disjointed writing style and the abstraction of Ballard’s ideas, it is clear to me that any story one projects upon the book is exactly that – a projection. The haecceity of the book is not a matter of plots and characters and events.
The second is Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – Enlightenment and Extinction (2007). A work of surprisingly accessible wide-spectrum philosophy, Nihil Unbound opens with an important distinction between what he calls the scientific image of man – the best scientific model for human cognitive functioning – and the manifest image – the model we use when thinking about and describing others. The manifest image is grounded in what is known as ‘folk psychology’ and it represents centuries-worth of little theories and assumptions about how humans think. This image is made up of relatively complex ideas such as Freudian projection as well as more fundamental ideas such as the idea that there is such a thing as the self and it is that which works the controls of the body. The problem is that the clearer the scientific image becomes, the more the manifest image comes to resemble a collection of empty and surprisingly brittle superstitions.
One of the things that I have taken away from these books is the artifice and ubiquity of the story and of the narrative form.
As humans, we are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us. Our brains are optimised for pattern-recognition and, when confronted by a stream of random and unstructured data from our sense organs, our brain starts trying to make sense of it. We see stories everywhere. We even tell stories about ourselves, stitching causal histories composed of random fluctuations in hormone levels and neural pathway activation into neat little just-so tales about why we do the things we do. We are addicted to the story…
We build religions around this need to tell stories, we construct therapeutic models encouraging us to piece together the stories of our selves and, when it comes time for us to depict the world around us through art, we happily continue the pursuit – Building characters out of our woefully inaccurate folk psychological notions and marching them through worlds far more ordered and simple than our own. Sometimes we even confuse our understanding of the world with the world itself and write stories we claim to be ‘realistic’, ‘accurate’ or ‘authentic’. But all too often, what we take to be the world is just another story… a simplified and conveniently understandable abstraction. This poses a theoretical challenge to art : Can it ever capture the truth about the world, or is it necessarily a simplification of it? If it is possible then the chances are that the results will resemble something like Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog, a film about boy soldiers based upon the novel Johnny Chien Mechant by Emmanuel Dongala.
I get the impression that for many, a trip to the cinema is a religious experience. Note that I say ‘religious’ and not ‘mystical’. People commonly reach for transcendental terminology when groping for fresh panegyrics with which to adorn some film or another; said film is not merely good, watching it is comparable to what a medieval peasant might have experienced upon visiting a cathedral or what a fakir might experience after twenty years crouching upon nails in the sub-continental wilderness. This is not what I mean by religious experience. What I mean instead is that people go to the cinema (or read a book) in order to have their moral compasses reset. They go to see a romantic comedy in order to re-connect with what it is to be really in love. They go to see Pixar’s Up (2009) in order to know what it means to grow old with someone. They go to see a navel-gazing drama that deals in matters of identity and alienation in order to get some insight into who and what they are. People use films in the same way as they once used the Sunday sermon : As a form of guidance. Simple moral and psychological truths made accessible and easily digested along with pop-corn and diet Coke. Is it then any wonder that we treat successful actors as living gods? These people are not merely entertainers, they are the prophets of a secular age. Our need to constantly tell stories about ourselves drives our desire to consume the stories of others.
Most films are happy to play their role in this relationship. Modern romantic comedies have their relationship advice, Godard had his attempts at spreading Maoism and even nihilistic film-makers such as Noe are happy to sell their audiences on the horrors of existence, a belief which, in its own way, is no less consolatory than the more up-beat alternatives such as Sam Mendes’ bile-raising “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it”. However, some film-makers seem instinctively aware of their positions as moral teachers and reject the role. Directors such as Hanneke and Von Trier assume accusatory and playfully obtuse attitudes towards their audience in order to avoid it. Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, based upon the play This Story of Yours by John Hopkins is a film that seems to deconstruct this relationship, turning it into something unhealthy and disturbing.
Frequent visitors to this site will have noticed that, following my viewing of Pialat’s Passe Ton Bac D’Abord (1979) and L’Enfance Nue (1968), I have written quite a bit about cinematic depictions of childhood. Pialat’s take on the matter was almost wilfully perverse. He cast a load of kids, gave them parts to play and then stuck a camera on them as they improvised. The resulting performances being supposedly ‘more real’ than films such as Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) or Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007), which deal with childhood by projecting onto their child protagonists the fears, hopes and values of the film directors. Ann Turner’s Celia embodies a third approach to the problem of depicting childhood in that it examines the ways in which children process and try to make sense of the values and actions of the adults that surround them.
The SF Site published this review of mine back in August but evidently I weirdly overlooked it when it filtered through my RSS reader.
The review is of the May issue of Black Static, a short fiction magazine published by the same people who put out Interzone. The magazine was actually interesting enough that it prompted me to borrow a few more copies but I was struck by the fact that, as with Interzone, Black Static‘s non-fiction is of a systematically higher caliber than its fiction. This is not so much a problem with Black Static‘s editorial standards as it is with the fact that most of the genre short fiction floating about the place is of a shockingly low standard. Torque Control has been staging a series of intriguing discussion of works of short fiction but I don’t think that they have come across a decent piece yet. Every so often, a piece about the ailing health of genre short fiction magazines will do the rounds in genre circles but, to be honest, I’m increasingly surprised that there’s much of a market for this stuff at all. So maybe it’s just as well that both Black Static and Interzone are worth buying for their non-fiction content alone.
Futurismic have my nineteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.
It deals partly with the Resident Evil games but mostly with the evolution of the zombie genre. Originally, I was planning a much more expansive piece that also took in the games Dead Space and Prototype – as they also have a rather reactionary attitude towards the shifting conceptions of identity found in transhumanism – but I decided instead to focus my analysis a bit more.
There is something faintly Proustian about sitting down at a keyboard in order to write about Japanese Horror. As though biting into a madeleine, I am suddenly transported back to the horrible ICA seating I put up with in order to see Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998). I am swamped by memories of girlfriends past, trips to out of the way cinemas, sequels rented on VHS tape and vindictive reviews of terrible American remakes. It all seems like so long ago and yet it was only the early 00s. Tempus Fugit. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi…
Though historically accurate, mentioning Ringu seems somehow inappropriate as, despite having been a product of the J-Horror bubble (it even earned itself a terrible 2005 American remake), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo is no mere genre copy-cat. Clearly influenced by Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), the film uses genre formulae as a spring-board for exploring philosophical ideas with an almost poetical elegance and softness of touch. Kairo is, in every way, a remarkable film.
Videovista has my review of Lucio Fulci’s Quella Villa accanto al Cimitero.
What surprised me most about this film was how genuinely weird it was. By the early 1980s, the Italian film industry was doing a pretty god job of milking the ideas from successful genre films. In some cases, they even released unofficial sequels to American films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and even Terminator (1984) – more about which can be found in the interesting if rather bizarre videologs put out by The Cinema Snob – Fulci was very much a part of this tradition and The House by the Cemetery was a part of a series of zombie films he made. However, with little money and much repetition of subject matter, these Italian exploitation films had to find someway of getting themselves noticed and this seems to have spawned a culture of genre-bending where ideas were crammed together in interesting ways regardless of whether or not they made sense.
This hot house of creativity stands in stark contrast with the stagnant and moribund culture of gay indie cinema. As proof, Videovista has my review of Chip Hale’s Mulligans (2008). A review which marks round 273 in my on-going battle with TLA Releasing.
I went to see Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan over the weekend and found it to be a huge amount of fun. Firstly, because it has a script that is properly character-based and secondly, because it reminds me enormously of an old favourite : Curtis Hanson’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992).
THE ZONE has my review.
Videovista also have my extended essay on the history of French Horror film. Ostensibly a “10 Best…” list, I tried to explain how the current wave of French Horror films draw upon cinematical antecedents ranging from the gothic and exploitation to the properly art house. I have been slowly working on this for a couple of months but it is only in the last week or so that I managed to fashion a proper historical narative. Worth taking a look at if you’re interested in my views on films such as :
Georges Franju’s background was in theatrical set design. As a set designer, he would have learned to create atmosphere through the use of subtle visual queues but he would also have learned that every scene and every shot are a world of their own. Properly conceived, a single shot can convey as much information as an entire page of dialogue. Where the camera focuses, when people enter, where objects stand and how they are lit are not merely aesthetic variables, they are to cinema what words are to poetry and literature. As such, it is perhaps fitting that Ruthless Culture’s first look at a work of Franju should be a short film that is practically silent; His 1949 short film about Parisian slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts.
My Work is Not Yet Done is a novella published alongside two other stories. It is, to this date, the longest work of fiction produced by Thomas Ligotti. It is also a deeply vexing work. While the book is occasionally brilliant and incredibly twisted, it is also a deeply taciturn book that is forever seeking to wrong-foot its readers with a series of shifts in tone, style and even genre. The book’s ultimate target is work (that most inhuman and universal form of slavery) but I would argue that the book’s shifts in tone and sympathies also suggest a desire to deny its audience the vicarious catharsis that generally comes with a good story of revenge. It is this aspect of the story I want to discuss here.
There is no greater testament to the evolving nature of genre than the Vampire. Once upon a time, the vampire was the poster boy of the gothic romance. He stood for the dark side of the Victorian heart; The swarthy foreigner whose powers of evil and sensuality lured upstanding Victorian women to their fall not through force but through mesmerising gazes and hushed words. The horrifying nature of the Vampire lay in his mastery over the very elements of human nature that Victorian society sought to deny. His was the worst kind of evil. The evil that one wanted to give in to. As society changed and cultural attitudes shifted, the Vampire’s evil seemed to dim. As Horror peeled away from the gothic and what remained sank back down into Romance, the Vampire changed from a dangerous sensual evil into the kind of sensual creature that you would love to date, even if your parents wouldn’t approve : Male Vampires became leather-trouser clad pretty boys with fashionable hair styles and either a fondness for violence or a deep and brooding sense of artistic self-loathing. Female Vampires became invariably bisexual and more or less freaky. The kind of freaky that would scare you but which would also allow you to indulge all of the stuff you see in porn films but would never dare to ask of a real sexual partner. In other words, good freaky.
In the space of a hundred years Vampires have moved from creatures of pure evil to pathetic sexual Mary Sues for frustrated and repressed Westerners. The Vampires themselves haven’t changed. What has changed is our attitude to what the Vampire represents. That which the Victorians feared and denied in themselves, the people of the 21st Century indulge to the point of solipsism.
However, some attempts have been made to keep Vampires true to their role as creatures of Horror. Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995) saw in Vampires creatures more in tune with the violent and self-destructive urges that animate humanity as a whole. Creatures for whom the rational mind serves as an organ or self-justification rather than control or repression. Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008) presented Vampires as users, creatures who adapt themselves to the demands of the marginalised in order to slowly suck the life out of them. This essay is about a film that returned to one of the first non-romantic presentations of Vampirism.
Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is a remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu : A Symphony of Terror (1922). But while the remake is, at times, almost shot-for-shot, Herzog’s version presents Vampires as creatures that are not only deeply lonely but whose power is entirely dependent upon the Humans whose blood it drinks.
One of the running themes of this blog since its inception has been my on-again, off-again relationship with the approach to film criticism. In some cases I have argued that works should be seen as windows into the writer’s mind, in other places I’ve been happy to cast it into the dustbin of history on the grounds that a) if you buy into auteur theory then you really need to know quite a bit about the auteur before writing about their works and b) a lot of films become more interesting if you completely ignore what it was the director was trying to achieve.
Another reason for rejecting auteur theory is that it seems to be the case, in American cinema at least, that the clock has been turned back on the director/auteur in favour of a return to the days of the all-powerful producer. The poster boy for this development is, of course, J. J. Abrams.
But I see it elsewhere too…
Horror giant Wes Craven reportedly claimed that the violence of his debut feature The Last House On The Left (1969) is a reaction by his generation to the horrors of the Vietnam war. While this justification seems a trifle pretentious and self-serving, it does raise the issue of why it is that depictions of violence in film need to be justified at all.
Why is it that Richard Curtis never feels compelled to speak about how the goings on in Darfur dictate that he must produce sentimental comedies involving smug upper class people? Is the production of a third Ice Age film a direct reaction to the death of Baby P? Were it not for the death of Princess Margaret, would Woody Allen ever have made Vicky Christina Barcelona?
A lot of the time, the way in which we justify things is only as interesting as the fact that we feel obliged to justify them at all. This is the issue that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) seeks to address.
VideoVista have my review of Daihachi Yoshida’s Funuke : Show Some Love, You Losers!.
They also have my review of Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil.
Funuke is by no means a perfect film but it does shed quite an interesting cultural light on one of my favourite social dichotomies. A dichotomy I have also been discussing over at THE DRIFT.
Videovista has my reviews of the rather disappointing Norwegian slasher Cold Prey (Fritt Vilt) and its vastly more entertaining sequel Cold Prey : Resurrection (Fritt Vilt 2).
I think that the difference between the two films lies in the quality of the direction but…
Drag Me To Hell marks Sam Raimi’s return to the world of Horror from the sunny shores of Summer Blockbuster island. As with his three Evil Dead films, Drag Me To Hell straddles the gap between Horror and Comedy by combining elements of slapstick knockabout humour with the major keys, creeping camera-work and build and release mechanics of the Horror genre. However, for a film that seeks to trade so heavily upon its big visual set-pieces, it is not only poorly written but grossly over-written too.
VideoVista have my review of Manhunt, the first film by Norwegian Horror wunderkind Patrik Syversen.
The film does not completely convince as it is more concerned with paying homage to great works from the past than it is with carving out new territory but Syversen shows a familiarity with the nuts and bolts of the genre that really suggests his next film could be something genuinely special.
Writing the review also inspired me to start researching a much longer piece. So watch this space.
In 1927 Bertrand Russell delivered a talk entitled “Why I am not a Christian”. In this talk he rejected the logic of the arguments for the existence of God before moving on to issues such as Jesus’ moral character and whether or not he actually existed in the first place. In the 80 or so years since Russell gave that talk, the question of whether or not to be a Christian has come more and more to resemble the question of whether or not it is rational to believe in God. This focus distracts from the fact, acknowledged by Russell, that even if the proof of God’s existence were overwhelming, there would still be good reason for refusing to consider oneself a Christian. For example, one can question the morality of Jesus’ teachings, the value of his various churches and whether ‘worship’ is really the kind of activity that civilised human beings should be engaged in at the beginning of the twenty first century. One of the reasons why I am not a Christian is that heaven does not sound like the kind of place I would want to spend eternity. Clearly, this is a thought that has also occurred to Jens Lien, the director of Den Brysomme Mannen, (2006) known outside of Norway as The Bothersome Man.
Polanski week has seen me write at length about the cinematic technique, intellectual pedigree and philosophical themes of Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy but for Rosemary’s Baby (1968) I would like to take a different approach. Arguably one of Polanski’s best known films, Rosemary’s Baby is wonderfully acted, perfectly paced and so tightly written and shot that not a single frame feels out of place or fails to pull its weight. From the famously ‘Doris Day’ soap operatic opening scenes to the macabre ending, it is close to being a flawless work of cinematic genius. However, where The Tenant (1976) and Repulsion (1965) are quite clearly about the descent into madness via sexual repression, Rosemary’s Baby deals in the more fantastical currency of witches, Satanism and the birth of the anti-Christ. The use of such fantastical imagery invites us to wonder what the film is really about. Rosemary is clearly not mad, nor is she sexually frustrated.
Rosemary’s Baby is a snapshot of social power dynamics in 1970s New York. It is a film not only about the treatment of women at the hands of a powerful Patriarchy, it is also an account of price exacted from the young by the elderly in return for the transferal of power to members of a new generation. Despite being a film about unearthly creatures, Rosemary’s Baby is ultimately a profoundly temporal film about man’s inhumanity to man (and especially woman).
In my piece on Polanski’s Repulsion (1968), I highlighted the homage paid by Polanski to the generation of Surrealist filmmakers who came before him. In this piece, I want to examine the similarities in tone between another of Polanski’s films and the branch of French Surrealism that provided the source material for one of Polanski’s best known films, The Tenant (1976).
By 1960, the vultures had started to circle the Surrealist movement. What had started out as a desire to destroy and rebuild the iconography of Western Art in the aftermath of the First World War now seemed like a circular and pointless endeavour through which one section of the bourgeoisie tried to shock and outrage another section of the same narrow social institution. While members of the Generation of ‘27 burned with anger at the Franquist government which had exiled and jailed them, the alliances with Marxism that would impact film-makers such as Bunuel were still a way off. Facing such creative stagnation, Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor came together to form Burlesque, a creative clique which would later inspire itself from the god Pan and name themselves the Panic Movement.
It is a pleasure to return to Cinematic Vocabulary and kick off Polanski Week by looking at what I consider to be one of Polanski’s less appreciated films. While The Tenant (1976) is the darling of cinephiles and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is second only to Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) in terms of mainstream appeal, Repulsion is sometimes overlooked as an early work, sandwiched as it is between Polanski’s break through film Knife in the Water (1962) and his more famous Hollywood projects.
However, it is my contention that Repulsion is a substantial landmark on the the road of Polanski’s artistic development. The low-budget British Horror film allowed him not only to perfect some of the cinematic techniques that would feature prominently in his later works but also to tackle some of the themes dear to the generation of 1930s surrealist film-makers who clearly had quite an influence on Polanski’s thinking.
*Please Note – This Piece is Full of Spoilers*
There are ideas that seem to be of a certain place and time. Call them icons, if you will. One of the most powerful icons of the early to mid twentieth century is the femme fatale. Born of a cultural climate where gender was not divorced from sex and where women were expected to be virginal and submissive, femme fatales rejected this essentialist vision of gender by being sexually aggressive, socially independent and more than willing to use their sexual wiles to render men subservient to their own desires and goals. Decades after the arrival of the contraceptive pill and miles down the road towards sexual equality, you could be forgiven for thinking that a society such as ours has outgrown the need for bold cinematic challenges to our understandings of gender. Indeed, nowadays the femme fatale seems like little more than an anachronism; as out of place in the modern world as a cockney spiv might be in pre-Credit Crunch London. However, even the most liberal of societies falls into lazy thought patterns, habits of conception that need to be re-examined lest they go stale, rot and become oppressive dogma. Swedish Vampire film Let The Right One In (2008) is a film that rides out not only against popular theories of gender, but also against the commonly held belief that children are innocent, pliable creatures who need to be protected from adults. It does so by rejuvenating and reinventing that most iconoclastic of icons, the femme fatale.
Strange Horizons have my review of Ellen Datlow’s latest fantasy/horror short fiction anthology Poe.
As might be evident from the increasingly beligerent tone of the review, I did not get on with this book. The three stories (by Steve Rasnic Tem, Lucius Shepard and John Langan) that I singled out for praise are genuinely excellent but I found it depressing how many of the other stories misfired or seemed overly familiar. Looking back at the book now, I suspect that my expectations were shaped by the fact that the only horror short fiction I had read before this anthology were a few bits and pieces in Interzone and collections of stories by Lovecraft, Ligotti and James. One might argue that, as a result of this, my yardstick was a trifle too long but a) given some of the names associated with the anthology I do not think it is unreasonable to expect fireworks and b) if you’re going to buy a horror anthology I can think of no reason why you’d choose Poe over the recent reprint of Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done (2002).
EDIT 26/02/09 : Evidently my review has generated some discussion over at Ellen Datlow’s Livejournal.
Based upon the 1995 novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (literally Essay on Blindness) by the Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago, Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Blindness serves to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of the allegory as a narrative device. Where the book was an allegory about allegories, the film aims for the allegorical only to collapse into a film about the relationships between characters who were only ever supposed to be symbols.
It is difficult for me to write about Stuart Gordon’s Stuck without also ranting about the state of London cinema distribution. However, I shall curtail my habitual rant on the subject by merely pointing out that Stuck is, much like Durabont’s The Mist (2007) and Friedkin’s Bug (2006), a genuinely impressive piece of genre film-making that was cruelly stripped from cinema screens just as it began to generate some decent word-of-mouth and thereby find its audience. Although best known for successfully joining up separate Lovecraft stories in order to create Dagon (2001), Stuck shows that Gordon is also adept with contemporary horror. By ‘contemporary horror’ I mean horror films such as Bug, Wolf Creek (2005) or Eden Lake (2008). Horror films that are stripped of fantastical elements and which, instead of dealing with their different issues through metaphor, deals with them in a synecdochic manner by having certain characters stand in for trends in human nature or contemporary culture that the director and writers wish to address. Despite the apparent nihilism of its cynicism and violence, Stuck is actually a deeply moral film. Beneath the brutal gore-filled images and the (admittedly ill-judged and self-defeating) black comedy, the film speaks not only of the worst in humanity, but also the best.
One of the peculiarities of Western pre-scientific thought is its fondness for certain numbers. For example, consider the tenacity of the four elements that became the four humours or the trinity that also pops up in the works of Freud and Clausewitz. However, the undisputed king of pre-scientific theoretical numbers is the number two. From politics to ethics, metaphysics to epistemology, and cosmology to the philosophy of mind, humanity seems deeply wedded to the idea that reality can be seen as made up of two different kinds of things. I suspect that this strange fetish has its roots in some banal fact about us as a species; perhaps just as our fondness for base-10 arithmetic stems from having ten fingers, perhaps our love of dualisms comes from the fact that we can all hold up our hands and say “on the one hand… but on the other…”. Indeed, the near-universality of the concept of the ‘duality of man’ is unarguably behind the enduring popularity and the flexibility of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
Over the years, the story of a Victorian scientist who unlocks his darker side has been interpreted in a number of different ways. As well as the original duality of man as a mixture of good and evil, Jekyll and Hyde have also been used as personifications of introverted intelligence vs. extroverted cunning, superego vs. id and as metaphorical explorations of the use of drugs. However, while it would be interesting to compare and contrast all of the different tellings of Stevenson’s story, this review will deal only with one; the 1931 adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, an adaptation that deals with the tension between man as an animal and man as a civilised being.
