Song of the Day (10/31/09: Halloween Edition) October 31, 2009
Posted by monty in music.Tags: Bauhaus, music, Nine Inch Nails, Peter Murphy, Song of the Day, TV on the Radio
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Is there any band that says “Happy Halloween” more than Bauhaus? Whether or not you agree with the Godfathers of Goth label they got tagged with, there’s something undeniably creepy about their music, and it’s never been better illustrated than on their quintessential track, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” This is the reunited band performing it in classic style – frontman Peter Murphy dangling upside-down, batlike – at my spiritual home, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
And, just for the novelty value, here it is again, performed by Murphy, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, and TV on the Radio. Enjoy.
Seven Years of Letters October 31, 2009
Posted by monty in books.Tags: creative writing
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I’ve never been particularly inclined to write a novel before. I like writing, and I’ve certainly played around with short stories and poetry, but the commitment I think it would take to slog through a novel has always been daunting to me. I’m kind of lazy, and the work ethic I know it would take to be a novelist – on top of the work ethic I already have to have as part of my job – has been about as appealing to me as going outside and licking the sidewalk.
But here’s the thing. A little over two years ago I wrote the first fifty pages of something that could be a novel. It features a kid named Garrett. I shared it with a good number of people, and its popularity surpassed anything I could have anticipated. These were people I respected – acquaintances, yes, but not many of them friends, and very few of them would have felt obligated to pat me on the back the way some people might. Ten days ago I shared it with some new people, and they enjoyed it, too. I posted an excerpt of it on this very blog not too long ago. You can read it here.
In the two years since I wrote it, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out where to go next. I’ve considered and discarded a lot of ideas, some because they didn’t seem very entertaining, some because they weren’t very good. And I have to admit that the weight of expectation has settled heavily on my shoulders. People like the story in its current state so much that I feel the only realistic outcome of further writing will be disappointment. I can’t be unveiled as a fraud and a charlatan if I don’t try. I can coast on those 50 pages for the rest of my life, if I want to.
Earlier this week, though, I think I figured out where to take it next. I think. Maybe not. But it seems more promising than anything else I’ve come up with, and I’m suitably excited about it to feel like I want to at least give it a shot. I don’t necessarily feel any more confident about my ability, but I figure if I wait to feel confident, I’ll never get anything done.
This development just happens to coincide with the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which starts tomorrow and runs through November 30. I have no idea when or how this got started, but there’s a website that sponsors a novel-writing contest. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel (roughly 110 pages) during the month of November. You write it on whatever software you wish, update your daily word count on the site, post excerpts, and then upload the whole shebang at the end. I think you get a certificate if you complete the challenge, but obviously the real reward is just the act of finishing the novel.
My thought, as of Saturday afternoon, is to take the plunge. It’s 30 days. I can fake a work ethic for one month, I think. You can’t use any writing completed previously, so I have to figure out how to make my continuation of the established story a logical place to begin. I think I’ve got it worked out. And even if I don’t, this will be good for me. I’ll post it here as I write it, just to keep myself honest. The main thing, though, is simply to keep moving, keep writing. Or, as screenwriter William Goldman says, just get the fucking train over the mountain.
Here we go.
*****
Current listening:
Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat
Black Heart of Mine October 31, 2009
Posted by monty in movies.Tags: Halloween, horror movies, movies
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What would a Halloween edition of Three Seconds of Dead Air be without a horror movie countdown? It’s a little cutesy, but it gives me a chance to revisit some of my classic and more recent favorites (and also allows me to figure out what I’ll be watching later tonight). I don’t have any rigorous criteria for the list, but I did have a few guiding principles:
1) I confined myself to movies I actually own. Rather than have an incomplete list because I forgot a title or two, I decided it made more sense to simply rely on what I owned. So, no Poltergeist or Rosemary’s Baby, even though they’re very good.
2) I tried to stick with “traditional” horror movies, as opposed to movies that bleed (har har) into action or comedy or science fiction. So that means no Alien or Shaun of the Dead or The Thing. (This is a fairly malleable criterion, though, as one or two inclusions on my list will make clear).
3) For no good reason other than I feel like it, I’ll be lumping together foreign films and their American versions, as well as original films and their remakes. I often find I like both iterations of a movie, and sometimes for completely different reasons. Rather than take up two spots, I combined them into one.
4) I’m crap at ranking things, so my list is alphabetical, as opposed to in order of preference.
So, here they are – My Alphabetical Top Ten (or Twelve or Fourteen, Because I’ve Combined Originals With Remakes) Horror Movies That I Own That Are Traditional Horror and Not Action or Comedy or Science Fiction.™
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) This is one of those polarizing movies, which usually means it’s doing something right. The people who didn’t like it thought it wasn’t frightening, but the people who liked it thought it was one of the scariest things they’d ever seen. Count me in the latter camp. Aside from its masterful conceit – the movie is the recovered footage from three filmmakers who went missing in their search for the titular witch – the film’s naturalism (down to the occasionally obnoxious characters) made it seem all too real. What really made the movie work, though, is the way it played on the audience’s fear of the dark and the unseen, as well as the anxiety of being completely powerless. It’s the sense of hopelessness and desperation permeating the end of the movie that gives it its kick. You know exactly what’s going to happen in that house, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.
Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978; Zack Snyder, 2004) The original version – like all of Romero’s zombie movies – is not just a horror movie. Yes, the gore is gruesome and shocking and plentiful, but the movie also functions as a sly satire of consumer culture. When the survivors take refuge in an indoor shopping mall, the parallels between the shambling zombies and brain-dread shoppers are writ large. Snyder’s 2004 reboot strips down the satire, turns the zombies into sprinters, and delivers a bare-bones monster movie whose acting is a cut above the standard horror-movie fare. The always-terrific Sarah Polley takes a break from independent films to head up this scary, fast-paced, no-fuss zombie flick. The fact that this is – so far – Snyder’s last decent film before disappearing up his own ass makes it all the more worthwhile.
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005) A movie that’s far scarier than it has any right to be, The Descent manages to transcend its potentially hokey premise (female spelunkers are terrorized by a clan of mutated cave dwellers) to become one of the most genuinely frightening films of the last ten years. Like most good horror movies, The Descent works precisely because it preys on the audience’s own fears. Marshall takes our natural aversion to darkness and claustrophobia and uses it as another monster. The creatures don’t show up until well into the movie, but by the time they do, the audience’s nerves are already fried from anticipation and the natural stress of the situation in which the women find themselves. The terror comes on multiple fronts, and Marshall makes it look effortless. Be sure to watch the movie’s original, blacker-than-black ending from its European release.
The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) I don’t know if anyone’s ever done a ranking of the goriest movies of all time, but this one has to be close to the top. Sam Raimi’s calling card as one of cinema’s most inventive, playful directors was this creepy, gruesome take on demonic possession that also launched the career of Bruce Campbell. Not so much a horror movie as an assault on the senses, I first saw The Evil Dead in high school and was unused to a movie sticking with me the way this one did. The series got progressively sillier, culminating with 1992′s Army of Darkness, not a horror movie as much as a comedic riff on time travel. The Evil Dead, if not Raimi’s definitive masterpiece, is at least the movie that most effectively illustrates what he’s capable of as a director. As a sidenote, it was so good to see him return to this territory earlier this year with Drag Me to Hell, surely a contender for future versions of this list.
The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) Man, this movie. I don’t remember when I first watched it, but images from it are seared into my brain to this day. One of the reasons it works as well as it does is because it takes its sweet old time getting things established. Watching its re-release in the theater several years ago was a fantastic experience, but it struck me that this movie would never be made today. It’s slooooow – especially as it establishes Father Merrin’s experiences in the Middle East and introduces Chris MacNeil and her soon-to-be possessed daughter, Regan. The leisurely pace is key to the movie’s success, though, because we come to know and care about these characters. And when it swings into action – with all the head-rotating, pea-soup-spewing, crucifix-abusing notoriety it gained – it never lets up until the final climactic moment. I love horror movies, but there are very, very few of them that actually bother me – not just scare me, but lodge in the back of my brain for days afterward, where I worry at them when my mind is otherwise unoccupied. The Exorcist is, for my money, probably the greatest horror movie of all time.
Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Unfairly sullied by an abundance of inferior sequels (as well as by Rob Zombie’s pointless reboot), Halloween remains the archetypal slasher movie. It also shouldn’t be held responsible for the raft of slasher movies that followed in its wake (and which continues to this day). Carpenter’s original is genuinely frightening, from the big reveal at the end of the prologue to Michael Myers’ escape from the psychiatric hospital to his inevitable appearance in and terrorizing of bucolic Haddonfield, Illinois. Throw in the bookish heroine played by Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as all the other devices that have since become horror movie cliché (Horny teens! Booze! Boobs!), and it’s easy to see why Halloween became the template followed by many less inventive filmmakers. When it comes to slasher movies, accept no substitute. Halloween is all you need.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) It’s fitting that Wes Craven’s tour de force follows Halloween, because A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s influence has been diminished for many of the same reasons as Carpenter’s film. An abundance of genuinely shitty sequels makes it easy to forget just how awesomely spooky and disturbing the original was. While Nightmare is sort of a slasher movie, it goes deeper than that, plumbing the frequently surreal depths of the characters’ dreams. And bogeyman Freddy Kruger (a child molester burned to death by the parents of the children now haunted by him) is a horror movie character fit for a time capsule. He’s bent on revenge, but that revenge takes increasingly uncomfortable forms. As a result, A Nightmare on Elm Street provides just as many memorable images as The Exorcist (Johhny Depp’s girlfriend being dragged across the ceiling is just one that stuck with me for a long time), and is, in its own way, just as frightening.
[•Rec] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007)/Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008) A surprisingly creepy variation on the zombie formula, [•Rec] is a Spanish movie that tells the story of a TV film crew that gets more than it bargained for when it goes along with the fire department on what was supposed to be a routine emergency run. Upon arrival at the apartment building, the situation quickly spirals out of control as they discover – but of course – that the building’s residents have been infected with some sort of virus that turns them into feral, zombie-like carnivores, and now the authorities aren’t letting anyone out. Related, documentary-style, from the perspective of the TV news reporter on the scene, [•Rec] puts the viewer right in the middle of the horror, and as a result, it hits even harder. The final sequence is, to put it simply, one of the most viscerally frightening things I’ve ever seen. Quarantine, the American remake, sticks close to the original but manages to find its own voice and adds one or two kicky little twists of its own. Most impressively, the final scenes are every bit as effective as in the Spanish-language original, which means, as remakes go, Quarantine is an emphatic and unqualified success.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) One of the other big guns of modern horror movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a movie I watch at least once a year, and I always feel like I need to bathe afterward. Focusing on a group of 20-something’s on a road trip, the entire movie seems coated with a patina of grime, from the first interaction with the hitchhiker to the shots of the cattle in the slaughterhouse to the confrontation that gives the movie its name. It’s a crude, disturbing movie that left me feeling profoundly uneasy. It was only after I thought about it, though, that I realized how little gore we actually see onscreen. The movie is horrific, to be sure, but most of the violence is implied, leaving our over-active imaginations to fill in the blanks. Often incorrectly labeled as a slasher movie, it seems to me that Chainsaw Massacre actually has more in common with the recent “torture porn” movies (Hostel, Saw, etc.). The difference, of course, is that Chainsaw Massacre is genuinely frightening without being especially graphic, while the movies that emulate it only get the graphic part right, and almost completely leave out the fright.
28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) In terms of pure entertainment, it doesn’t get any better than 28 Days Later. Jim wakes up in a deserted London hospital, wanders outside, and finds that the entire city is a ghost town. These shots of empty British streets are breathtaking, and it’s this visual panache (courtesy of Danny Boyle, one of my favorite directors, and his frequent director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle) that helps establish 28 Days Later as being more than a garden-variety horror movie. Jim comes to discover that the population has been virtually wiped out by a virus that turns the infected into hyper-aggressive (and very hungry) cannibals. A movie about human nature as much as it is about survival, 28 Days Later is an intense and harrowing experience. If the ending feels a little like an optimistic cop-out, I forgive Boyle for wanting to give viewers a single ray of sunshine after the 90 minutes of pitch-blackness that preceded it.
So there you have it. It’s certainly not a comprehensive list, but it pretty accurately captures what I look for in a horror movie. Please feel free to argue with me in the comments.
*****
Current listening:
The Delgados – The Complete BBC Peel Sessions
Current reading:
Jeff Gordinier – “The Lost Boys” (in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, ed. by Dave Eggers)
Last movie seen:
Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, dir.)
