Source:

“The Black Cat,” by Edgar Allan Poe

Screen:

Masters of Horror: The Black Cat

Compare/Contrast:
I have a confession to make. I write fiction (not the confession), and I’d say I’m reasonably good at it (still not the confession), but I think I may have to consider myself a failure because, despite what Hollywood has taught us time and again, my real life and the fiction I create have never become hypnotically intertwined in a nightmare of my own invention. I’ve never woken up in the middle of the night to find one my characters sitting on the edge of the bed, muttering sentence fragments. I’ve never confused the people I care about with people who aren’t really there.

I’m sorry about this. I’ve been letting down the team.

Thankfully, this was not a thing that Edgar Allan Poe was guilty of, at least according to Stuart Gordon’s terrific Masters Of Horror episode, The Black Cat. In Gordon’s world, Poe had phantoms up the wazoo, and some of those phantoms inspired his work, and vice versa. It’s a conceit that usually bores the crap out of me—there’s something agonizingly literal about reducing art to the plugged in variables of an algebraic equation—but Gordon makes it work. Between him and an excellent lead performance from Jeffrey Combs, we have on our hands a true rarity: a great Poe adaptation.

The IMDB credits Poe with an astonishing 214 movies and TV shows, ranging from the early 1900’s to sometime next year. Most of them suck. The best are probably the Corman films, like Masque Of The Red Death; weird, unsettling concoctions that represent some of the strongest things Corman ever directed. The rest, well… Let’s be honest—I haven’t seen that many of the 214. So it’s bad form for me to pass judgment on them, as I’m sure they’re not all terrible. But when it comes to writers who’s work inspires great cinema, Poe is not a name that leaps to mind.

Why is that, exactly? He’s an effective writer, no question, and that his stories have lasted this long has to mean something good about them. I grew up reading “Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” (occasionally in expurgated form; I didn’t know about the dismembering bit in “Heart” until I got to college), and the rest, and the their plots have been an accepted element of popular culture for a century at least. Admittedly, their power to shock is mostly gone. It’s hard to imagine anyone responding these days in the same way audiences responded when the stories were fresh, experiencing for the first time the way the sophisticated tone (“He uses all these words, it simply must be literary!”) belies all the carnage and unsettling, intimate psychological terrors. We can still recognize that in his fiction, but we’re expecting it.

But the work persists, so there’s power there. The language Poe uses is a big part of that power, and it’s one of the most obvious reasons why adapting his work for movies has proven so difficult. Without the set tone, the plots aren’t anywhere near as haunting. Plenty of things happen in Poe’s stories, but most of them are too short to fill a feature length film; and stretching out, say, the revenge plot of “Cask of Amontillado” isn’t going to do the narrative any good. Without his voice, it’s just creepy stuff done by creepy people. There’s no art to it, no soul.

Take “The Black Cat.” The actual story isn’t simple, exactly, but there’s barely enough there for an episode of Night Gallery. A man with a drinking problem indulges in some animal torture on the family cat. He kills the cat, and a house-fire hides the evidence. Then he kills his wife and walls up her body in the basement. Only he accidentally walls up a cat in there too (which may or may not be the reincarnation of a cat he’d earlier killed), and when the cops come, they find the body of the man’s wife because the cat keeps screaming.

It’s freaky, but it couldn’t last 90 minutes. We don’t really see how the narrator changes, there’s no real arc to his character (there should be, as he’s supposed to be a loving husband who turns into a psychopath, but there’s no change at all between the two points, apart from his actions), and while a movie could provide those details, it would only be doing so to fill time. Anybody who reads “The Black Cat” and really wishes for a flashback to the narrator’s childhood where he watched his father drown a kitten is missing the point.

“Cat” is one of the few Poe stories that still gets under my skin these days. It’s very gruesome; there’s something viscerally unpleasant about that cat getting its eye plucked out, and that final image, of the cat sitting atop the narrator’s wife’s corpse, is vicious. Plus, there’s that sense of personal betrayal. The narrator doesn’t just kill a friendly landlord or entomb an acquaintance, he torments a pet and murders his wife. Women in Poe’s fiction generally don’t amount to much, and the wife here barely exists beyond her role in the household, but she’s still enough of a presence that her death is upsetting.

I wasn’t exactly desperate to see all this brought to the screen. I like the Corman adaptations I’d seen, but none them were exactly scary; more spooky and fun. A proper adaptation of “The Black Cat” would have to be claustrophobic, frightening, and it would have to simulate the animal cruelty to work. This, I would expect, would’ve been the sticking point for most folks.

So god bless Stuart Gordon for not skimping on the gore when it came time for his version. The Black Cat is his second Masters of Horror episode; the first, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams Of The Witch-House is good, but Cat is something special. At sixty minutes, (including opening and closing credits) it doesn’t quite count as a full length feature, but it’s close enough; and really, the length works to the film’s advantage. It’s a deeply unsettling character study that has, at its center, the perfect lead for one of Poe’s stories: Poe himself.

This is a different Poe than you might expect, though. He’s a drunk, sure, and he’s got that crazy black hair and club-shaped nose, but this Poe has a Southern accent, and instead of the dour, timid melancholy suggested by nearly every photograph and painting of the man in existence, Cat’s Poe is theatrical, impassioned, and deeply self-loathing. We’ve talked about Jeffrey Combs before, and this is some of the best work of his I’ve seen. This is a Poe who, while almost certainly exaggerated, feels real, and not just a reflection of his stories.

Still, Combs’ Poe is haunted by his work, and one of the clever touches of Cat is to show him despondent about muted critical reception to his poetry, while at the same time demonstrating why he may have been less than willing to celebrate the “macabre tales” that made him so famous. Gordon manages to take the old saw of the artist trapped in his art and make it seem fresh; here, Poe’s obvious feelings of inadequacy, both in his failure to provide for his ailing young wife Virginia (Elyse Levesque) and the alcoholism that eats up his income and leaves them destitute, are translated into the more explicit horrors that the author is best known for today. While he seems honest in his passion for poems, might not there also be an element of fear? Of wanting to avoid going back to the well that dredged up “The Tell-Tale Heart,” simply because it would mean facing his demons in a more direct fashion than he’s truly comfortable with?

Again, there’s no way of telling how the real Poe felt (although he did consider his poetry to be the best of his work), but the delicacy with which this is all convey is impressively deft. “Delicacy” may not be the word that springs to mind when trying to describe a story that involves more than its fair share of gore (one of the joys of watching Gordon is that no matter how intellectual he gets, if a situation calls for the gruesome, he brings it in spades), but there’s a maturity there that’s remains impressive even on repeat viewings, after the initial shock-value has worn off. In general, Masters Of Horror episodes are wed more to plot than character, as is usually the way with anthology shows; but here we have a character study that manages to satisfy the requirements of the series without sacrificing depth.

The story uses elements of Poe’s fiction, most particularly the original “Black Cat,” and combines them with some basic biography. We have Poe and Virginia living in near poverty, with Virginia already on her way to death by consumption, and Poe switching between attentive husband and useless souse. He begs an advance off a publisher on the strength of his next story, only to waste that advance at a tavern—and there’s a terrific gag here where Poe bets the bartender he can “stand on one finger,” and then proceeds to stand on the bartender’s own index finger. Poe’s a drunk, and something of a mean one. There’s a certain air of desperation about Combs that runs through the hour, of a man who knows he’s failing at life, and knows the blame lays entirely at his feet, but can’t stop himself from making the same mistakes.

Back home, Poe finds his wife preparing to sell her piano to a stranger; Poe insists she play and sing something for them, and she does, but in the middle of a song, she coughs up gouts of blood. When the doctor comes, he tells Poe his wife is consumptive (“the white plague,” Poe calls it), but refuses to do much more for her because Poe can’t pay him. So here he’s stuck; he has to write a story to get the rest of the cash to help Virginia, but, as always seems the case when things are desperate, he can’t come up with a single idea.

And that’s when the cat starts screwing with him. Pluto first appears in the opening scene, hissing at Poe and watching him and Virginia in their unsuccessful attempt to make love. (Both parties are willing, but when Virgina coughs up some blood, it ruins the mood.) Poe starts to blame the cat for his wife’s poor health, and when Pluto attacks their pet canary, Poe snaps, and gouges out one of the feline’s eyes. Virginia hears the noise and gets out of bed, her nightgown still covered with blood, but before she can figure out what’s really going on, she dies.

Okay, we’re going to get spoiler-y now. It won’t wreck your enjoyment of the episode, and you’d probably figure out the twist on your own without my help (you’re smart, that’s what I’ve always liked about you), but in case you want to see this cold, you should just skip out now. Don’t worry, the rest of the paragraphs will be here when you get back.

So then, it turns out—and we won’t actually find this out till the end—this is all a dream. Poe goes into some kind of fugue state after the doctor leaves; he doesn’t mutilate his cat, Virginia doesn’t die (then), and all the other crazy stuff that follows is basically just his worst fears mixed with whatever creative impulses drove his writing. Probably the earliest clue we get of this is at Virginia’s funeral; two men are discussing how Poe couldn’t support his wife, and how she was so much younger than him, and his cousin. All of these things are true, but it’s not the sort of talk you’d have over a corpse with the bereaved not five feet away. It’s more an expression of Poe’s worst fears about his relationship with a woman he clearly loves.

If that clue was too subtle for you, then there’s the fact that, after Poe sets the apartment ablaze and hangs his cat, Virginia wakes up. The two managed to escape the fire, and set up shop in another town, attempting to start over; but Poe’s still drinking their money away, and Virginia’s still sick. A new black cat arrives, this one with a white ruff around its neck just where the rope went its neck, a persistent symbol of Poe’s unshakable guilt. Things proceed much like the original story from then on; Poe tries to kill the new cat, kills Virginia instead (although here it’s more of an accident), and is undone when he accidentally walls the cat up in the basement besides his wife’s corpse.

Obviously Poe is dealing with some personal issues here. The reoccurring cat is, essentially, unshakeable guilt, that feeling of deep shame and inwardly directed loathing that one has committed such terrible offenses that no escape or forgiveness is ever possible. Poe’s stories are always told in retrospect; his narrators are already despicable before they utter their first word. What makes “Cat” so compelling is the grain of identifiable truth under all that malevolent embellishment. Who hasn’t been ashamed of themselves? And who hasn’t, deep down, suspected that shame never would follow on our heels no matter how far we traveled?

As well, there’s the relationship between Poe and Virginia. One of the biggest weaknesses of Poe’s writing is his inability to deal with female characters; they’re either lost souls to be pined for, or props to be eliminated. Here we have a suggestion at the cause. Virginia is loving, attentive, beautiful, and kind, and Poe clearly adores her. But she’s also a constant reminder of his failures. Bad enough to let down someone you love. Worse still to let down someone who loves you, who is endlessly patient with you and forgives you your sins. The narrator of “The Black Cat” kills his wife because she tries to protect their cat, but in his Poe’s fantasy, while it’s accidental, the act still has an air of inevitability to it. And while he mourns her, he’s also relieved. There’s no one left to disappoint.

The end of Black Cat has Poe coming back to his sense. Virginia is still alive, Pluto’s just fine—and there’s still those blank sheets of paper sitting on his desk, demanding he fill them. But hey, he’s got this terrific story now! Just needs to change some names and maybe pare it down a bit, but it’s all there. So a happy ending, of sorts. Too bad Virgina’s nightgown is still spattered with blood. She’ll die soon, and Poe will still fail her, and he’ll still be a drunken son-of-a-bitch. The pages will be filled, though. Whatever else happens, the pages will be filled.

Anyway, check it out. The DVD shouldn’t be too hard to find, and it’s got a great audio commentary with Gordon and Combs.

Source: QQQ.5
Screen: QQQ.5

Now check out (if you haven’t already) the reviews at And You Call Yourself A Scientist and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly:

Lyz’s reviews:
Edgar Allen Poe
The Avenging Consience
The Raven

Chad’s review:
The Premature Burial

And here’s our conversation.

Source:
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931)
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1941)

Okay, before we get into this, you may want to re-visit my first review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde here. It is considerably longer and more interesting.

Even more importantly, you should check out Lyzard’s review of the 1931 film with Frederic March and Chad’s take on the Spencer Tracy remake. What you’re reading now is a brief look at the nature of both those films in relation to Stevenson’s original novella; Lyz and Chad take a much more in-depth approach, and if you’re unfamiliar with the movies and are the sort of person who regularly goes beyond the assigned reading, their essays will fill in the gaps. (Also, I expect they’re excellent, thought I haven’t read them yet.)

That said, here’s another preface; as a life-long throat clearer, I don’t feel comfortable starting any commentary without getting out my share of “ahems.” It’s been a while, hasn’t it? For all intents and purposes, The Duck Speaks has been in loose retirement for a few years now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. These reviews take a lot of time, and I’ve never been completely satisfied with my output here; non-fiction writing isn’t exactly my cuppa, and while there are a few pieces in the archives that aren’t entirely humiliating, by and large, I give this site more points for concept than execution. Dear lord, some of the sentences I’ve come up with here. You’d think I was getting paid but the sub-clause.

But it’s not a completely lost cause. I wouldn’t except DS to start updating any time soon, but that doesn’t mean I’ve quit writing all together. In fact, one of the reasons this place has languished so terribly in the past months is that I’ve got an actual job these days doing criticism. Yeah, no joke—somebody’s paying me to do this stuff. If you need to get your Zack Handlen fix, go to The Onion AV Club. I started doing book reviews back in February, and these days I’m also covering some shows for the TV Club section. It’s fun stuff, but it takes a lot of time; four shows, plus a book a week, plus my library job.

Oh, and there’s also the novel I’m editing. Some of you may have read the first draft a couple years back when I posted it online. There’ve been changes since then (most significantly, I’ve taken out a lot of the crap); I’m on the final go through, and I should be finished by the end of November. Then it’s time to start collecting rejection slips from literary agents.

So things are going well for me, but in ways that mean The Duck Speaks is essentially caput. Before we go, however…

Of all the different versions of Jekyll & Hyde I’ve seen, not one has made a real effort at staying true to the original story. That’s not surprising in and of itself; the liberties taken with Dracula and Frankenstein set a definite precedent, and Stevenson’s book does have certain structural quirks that make it difficult to faithfully adapt. And yet, of the Big Three, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde seems the most suited to a literal translation. Mary Shelly’s novel is clunky and poorly paced, Stoker’s book wanders a bit through the mid-section, but Stevenson stays on target from the opening chapter to the final page. It’s a superbly lean piece of writing, short enough that nothing cries out to be cut, but long enough not to demand any extraneous subplots.

But time and again, we see those subplots interjected. The March and Tracy films both follow the same rough trajectory: Jekyll is a brilliant doctor with an interest in the duality of man’s mind. He’s got a fiancée he’s smitten with, but his soon to be father-in-law is a bit of a stick in the mud; he’s set the date for the wedding months in the future, and no amount of argument will change his mind. One evening while walking home, Jekyll saves a beautiful young woman from a beating—the young woman, seeing Jekyll’s gentility, makes romantic/sexual advances, which Jekyll fends off. But he’s clearly intrigued, and his frustration over his absent fiancée drives him to finish his experiments and create a formula that will bring out his evil side: the loathsome Mr. Hyde. Once freed, Hyde immediately seeks out the young woman, sets her up in a lavish apartment, and proceeds to abuse and torment her; the abuse has a sexual component we never see directly, but there’s no denying that the poor captive has been raped multiple times, and put in fear of her life. Jekyll’s fiancée’s father finally relents and approves of a faster wedding, and Jekyll swears of his potion for good. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy; after the young woman Hyde’s been abusing tracks Jekyll down, Jekyll spontaneously turns into Hyde and murders her. He manages to transform back into Jekyll and breaks off his engagement to his fiancée; but the change happens again, and this time, Hyde murders the father. In both films, Jekyll/Hyde is ultimately trapped in his own laboratory, where he is shot and killed after turning into Hyde one last time.

There’s a lot of subtext here about sexual repression and the presumption of male privilege, but that’s more for Lyz and Chad; for this site, what’s most interesting is the transformation of Stevenson’s Jekyll. Instead of a middle-aged bachelor, he’s now a young (or, in Tracy’s case, apparently young) up-and-comer, a leading figure in the scientific community, and, perhaps the biggest change, he’s engaged. We’ve seen this before in the Barrymore version, but it’s worth saying again; the engagement puts Jekyll into an entirely new light. He was always a bastard, but by giving him a hostage to fortune, he’s entirely unforgivable.

And that’s not even taking into account the presence of Hyde’s hostage. One of the key aspects of the original version is his baseless, undirected malevolence. Hyde was a creature of impulse and unchecked rage; he had a certain base cunning about him (as seen in the way he handled the trampling incident), but he wasn’t much of a plotter. As far you can tell from the original story, he does some drinking and whoring, probably beats up anybody who looks at him crosswise, and then comes home. There’s no indication that he’s a perpetual threat to anyone; while he does violence (and eventually murder), his effectiveness as a threat is relegated largely to an internal one. In other words, we’re not scared of Hyde because he might hurt us; we’re scared of Hyde because he might be us.

Contrast that with the March and Tracy films! Poor Ivy-1 and Ivy-2 (as Lyz dubbed her) are put through what we can only imagine to be a series of degrading and painful sexual humiliations. Neither version goes in to much detail—standards of the time being what they were—but for once, we get a clear sense of a character suffering long term damage from their association with Hyde. It’s not simply about him lashing out in a fit of pique; his treatment of Ivies is habitual and extends over a period of weeks. In Stevenson’s book, the relationship between Hyde and Jekyll was at least understandable; monstrously selfish, no question, and Jekyll certainly got his just deserts, but you could at least sympathize with someone wanting to through back the rigors of repression without any of the consequences. Here, it’s nearly impossible to justify Jekyll’s willingness to become Hyde again and again. March’s Jekyll is a passionate, somewhat arrogant romantic, while Tracy’s Jekyll is equally arrogant but more composed; neither men give any indication of their apparent potential as gruesome sadists.

If the point is to tell us that every man has a dark side, it doesn’t work. The March version fares somewhat better; his intensity as Jekyll gives the spastic, ape-like Hyde some justification. You could argue that Tracy’s more reserved performance as both character increases their connection as well—his Hyde is a raspy-voiced sociopath, as opposed to March’s more energetic psychotic. But where both movies fail is creating a believable connection between the two characters. We’re given a reasons as to why they make their change—again, March more than Tracy—but we never really understand how aware Jekyll is of Hyde’s actions. After the initial choice is made, even though both Jekylls intentionally take the potion, the stories play out more like a werewolf tragedy. The sense of personal responsibility is somewhat diminished; in either version, Jekyll seems to disappear for the climax. We see him in his laboratory as the police track him down, we see him deny his guilt, but his personality is gone.

By introducing a fiancée and a “mistress,” the filmmakers have created an insoluble problem. The original Jekyll’s actions were consistent with what we knew of his character; a hypocrite who surface actions masked a deep fury against convention and standard morality. When he dosed himself, and kept on dosing himself, it made sense for him to do so. But by trying to present Jekyll as a more traditional hero at the outset, one with an actual fulfilling life and people who cared for him, the movies make his motivation far difficult to follow, turning the ending into a sort of contractual obligation: he tampered in god’s, etc, etc, enjoy the bullet wound.

Still, for all the problems the changes create, both Jekyll & Hyde films have a lot to recommend them. Simply comparing and contrasting March and Tracy’s respective performances is a treat. At his best, March’s intensity gives his Jekyll a magnetism and his Hyde the terrifying threat of unpredictable violence; at his worst, Hyde comes across as a buffoon. With Tracy, it goes the other way—he’s a far more controlled actor, and occasionally that lets the tension ebb when it should be growing. Perhaps some sort of Brundlefly version of the two would’ve worked better…

As for the secondary characters, March’s fiancée Rose Hobart is a bit stronger than Tracy’s bland-and-blonde Lana Turner, but both Ivies are effective, and nearly justify the confusion they cause in the movies’ thematic content. Miriam Hopkins gets to be a bit saucier than Ingrid Bergman, but Bergman’s striking screen presence makes her victimization more horrifying. In either case, Ivy’s arc is a painful one, and at times, it’s more compelling than the main plot. (Not to get all Mary Reilly or anything, but I would’ve loved to have seen a whole movie from Ivy’s perspective. As it is, once she gets killed, both movies lose a lot of their drama.)

There’s more, too, including a damnable creepy whistle and a pair of fever-dream transformations that are waaaay riskier than you’d expect. But I’ll leave those up to Lyz and Chad, since this piece is hella late. Good news: there’s also another three-way conversation for your reading pleasure, where my contributions are nearly as marginal as this essay was. (Although in the conversation, I don’t get to waste a page talking about my life.)

Jekyll (1931): QQQ
Jekyll(1941):QQ.5

SCREEN:

Buy This
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by John S. Robertson

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
Alan Moore once wrote that the world needs new heroes. The old ones, he argued, were no long relevant; too much of their exploits have been exposed by time, now seen in the light of modern psychoanalysis and cultural empathy to be at best obsolete and at worst, actively harmful.

What, then, of villains? If the newly recognized complexity of the human mind defeats the standard square-jawed protagonist of old, what becomes of the antagonist, that mustache twirling bastard burns down orphanages for no clear reason beyond his designated nature? He seems just as diminished as his traditional foe, albeit in the opposite direction. Dracula loses his bite (sorry, sorry) if he’s being driven by lost love and a penchant for young hotties. Darth Vader’s growls become asthmatic gasps when the man behind the mask is Hayden freakin’ Christensen.

Written decades before any of this became an issue, Steven’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manages the neat trick of providing an answer without ever really acknowledging the question: it’s pro- and an- tagonist are one and the same person. While the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, serves as an audience surrogate for most of the novella, (sort of) heroic Jekyll is the driving force, and his struggles against the villainous Hyde transform the Victorian’s thoroughly capitalized notions of Good and Evil into inescapable flesh.

Utterson, whose character can be best described as “consistent,” is out for a walk one evening with his friend Richard Enfield. While on their rambles, they come across a particular doorway that strikes both men as disagreeable. Enfield informs Utterson that the door reminds him of a most peculiar incident. Some night earlier, he happened to be passing by the very spot on which they now stand, and witnessed a thoroughly horrid man bump into and then trample over a young girl. The man was quickly accosted by Enfield and a crowd of concerned citizens, who demand he pay the recompense to the injured child.

Hyde—for that was the man’s name—is forced by the size of the crowd to give in. He enters the disagreeable doorway and returns moments later with a check, signed by the respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll.

The news of Jekyll’s involvement distresses Utterson, as he is both lawyer and friend to the good doctor. To think he might be associated with such a immoral fiend-! Utterson questions Enfield more as to the nature of this Hyde, but all Enfield can say is that Hyde is utterly repulsive for reasons which lie beyond his abilities to adequately describe. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the man; but his features, when combined, result in a shockingly abhorrent whole.

Over a period of time, Utterson learns more of Hyde and his inescapable connection to Jekyll. The door which Hyde entered in Enfield’s story is actually the back entrance to Jekyll’s own laboratory, located just off the doctor’s home. Jekyll changes his will to include Hyde, and instructs his servants that the contemptible creature is to be given full authority of the household. Hyde’s misdeeds continue, culminating finally in the brutal, unprovoked murder of an elderly man. This attracts the attention of the law, forcing Jekyll to officially (and with a good deal of guilt) cut ties with his apparent protégé.

But the connection between the two men, whatever it may be, is not so easily severed. Utterson becomes ever more concerned about the fate of his friend, until he is called to Jekyll’s house one night by a servant who believes that the doctor is no longer in his right mind. They break into Jekyll’s laboratory to find Hyde’s dead body on the floor; and a confession written in Jekyll’s hand explaining his relationship to the murderer and his own terrible fate.

To a modern audience, the structural dancing about the bush which takes up most of Stevenson’s story seems frustratingly unnecessary. Everyone knows that Hyde is Jekyll, Jekyll Hyde, and the time spent with Utterson as he unravels the plot keeps us away from what perhaps should’ve been the novella’s true focus—the horrible Mr. Hyde. For all the intimations made about his character, we’re never really privy to Hyde’s misdeeds; the two acts of violence he commits that we know of happen while he’s on his way home. One can’t help but wonder what mischief he gets up too while out on the town. (After all, it’s doubtful that Jekyll willingly transformed himself into his evil alter ego simply to rough up a child and beat an old man to death.)

But perhaps concessions should be made to the times—perhaps the suggestion of vice was more acceptable than any explicit description might have been. There is something to be said for insinuation; in the hands of a talented writer (and Stevenson is one, no question), implication and conjecture are often just as unsettling as real facts. Seeing Hyde getting drunk and groping the waitress, while transgressive for the period, wouldn’t hold much weight today; without any hard facts, Hyde’s dalliances take on a surprisingly sinister quality, as though he were committing acts to atrocious for the human mind to contemplate.

The novella’s structure also introduces the premise in a way that makes it difficult to ignore. There’s a fundamental reality to the London Stevenson gives us, with gossip and conjecture providing a surprisingly concrete foundation for the story’s supernatural core. And it is supernatural, science be damned; one of Jekyll’s colleague’s, Dr. Lanyon, repeatedly expresses his objections to the man’s pursuit of the standard Things Which Are Not to Be Meddled With. Once you start making potions that change your personality and drastically alter your physical appearance, there’s at least an intimation of sorcery, even if no one is wearing a pointy hat.

The terribly repressive nature of Victorian society has been well-documented, and that it would lead to the sort of schizoid personality that Jekyll works so hard to encourage isn’t much of a surprise. We can assume that Jekyll’s unfortunate impulses were towards sexuality activity and drug use; and even drug use may not have been of much importance, given that people generally indulge in drink and worse to remove the restraints that Jekyll has already dealt with through less conventional means. (You could use the novella as a metaphor for any sort of addiction, really—the fact that a literal drug is needed to begin the doctor’s downfall makes the narcotic connection inescapable.)

So, let’s say sex, then, for want of any hard facts. (Good lord, I hope that wasn’t a pun.) There’s something pitiful about a fifty year old man who’s so desperate not to lose the respect of his peers that he’s willing to break all natural laws, just so he can get some tail on the side. (But maybe it’s not female tail he’s after?) To the Victorian mind, biological urges existed largely as a way to test one’s commitment to God and civilization. Indulging in any sort of desire could only be permitted through the most rigorous of social contexts, which meant personal standards were inordinately high. So high that failure was nearly inevitable; the sort of failure Jekyll finds himself rushing towards, torn between the demands of society and his own internal needs. The solution he finds, while ultimately a failure, does have a certain ironic elegance to it.

A phenomenal success upon publication, Jekyll & Hyde would inspire stage plays and, eventually, a long series of film adaptations. One of the earliest, and best, is the 1920 silent movie John Barrymore in the title role. Filmed in 1920, the movie marks the first full-length version of the novella, although the story had been making the rounds nearly since the invention of film.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde wastes no time in introducing us to the title character. After an opening title card setting up the moral of the story ("We are who we most want to be,"), we see Barrymore laboring over a microscope and conferring with a colleague, Dr. Lanyon (Charles Lane). Lanyon is impressed with Jekyll’s work, but advises him to stick to the “natural sciences.”

While this scene doesn’t exist in the original story verbatim, it does agree with what we’re told about the relationship between Lanyon and Jekyll. The movie then establishes the utter purity of Jekyll’s character; others discuss how he gives his life to his work, and he even runs a health clinic for the poor and destitute. The long hours he spends there make him late to any social engagements, and also attract the attentions of Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), an older man of some great experience. Over dinner, Carew questions Jekyll as to how he can be sure of his soul if he’s never been truly tempted. Jekyll, while initially hostile to the idea, reluctantly agrees to a night on the town, so that Carew can give him a better idea of what he’s missing.

One surprisingly hot dancing girl later, Jekyll has his world tilted and decides to take his dabbling in “unnatural” science one step further; he will transform himself in to a different person in order that he might indulge the sweet tooth that Carew has instilled in him. He succeeds, and Hyde is born, an evil grinning embodiment of Jekyll’s own newly awakened lust.

Initially, Jekyll’s plan seems to be working. Hyde rents a room for himself and hooks up with the hot dancing girl, while Jekyll maintains his usual noble self. But the wear and tear of leading a double life nags at him. He establishes a relationship with Carew’s daughter, Millicent (Martha Mansfield), and swears off his other life. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite “take,” and the next time he turns into Hyde, the connection between the two men becomes publicly known. Sir Carew visits Jekyll to demand he explain his relationship with such a villain. Jekyll angrily rants that it’s Carew’s fault for tempting him in the first place. Then he changes into Hyde potion-free and beats Carew to death in the courtyard.

Clearly, some changes have been made from the Stevenson’s version. Instead of Utterson’s discovery of the Jekyll’s dual nature, the doctor takes center stage, changing the emphasis from cautionary tale to tragedy. The moral is still there, unquestionably, but presenting Jekyll’s downfall in chronological order makes us more accomplice to his choices than in the original story. In keeping with this change, Jekyll himself becomes more of a tragic hero; his initial goodness is given greater stress, and when he experiments with Hyde, he only does so after being led to corruption by the wicked Carew.

Or is he wicked? It’s possible to paint him as in some way responsible for the events of the film, but there’s something in what he tells Jekyll, about the values of fully experiencing life. While Carew may have sampled too deeply of vice, it’s repeatedly stressed that he’s managed to bring his daughter up “right,” ("right” at the time being “virginal and naïve,” admittedly, but he clearly loves her and wants to protect her), and he’s made more peace with his inner hungers than Jekyll ever manages. There’s a definite sense of Jekyll trying to achive perfection with his acts of goodness, and that when Carew questions the nature of his worth, he is vulnerable to the temptation because of his absolutism of purpose. Perhaps he’s a victim who would have led a blame-free life had it not been for a Carew’s influence; but one can’t help be at least a little suspicious of one so easily led.

While their routes to sin were different, both versions of Jekyll create Hyde in order to indulge themselves without having to worry about the consequences. Here the film version really gets going; Barrymore makes a solid, charismatic hero, but as lechery personified, he’s nothing short of brilliant, conveying bottomless contempt and debauchery by a simple twist of the hand. (The make-up is excellent too.) Any scene with Hyde makes for compelling viewing, and unlike the novella, here we at least get a clear impression of where his yearnings take him—it’s sex, no doubt whatsoever, and there’s even a brief insinuation of deviance that seems remarkably bold for the period. (We talk about this briefly in the discussion linked to at the end of the review; Lyz suggests the moment may just be about Hyde passing up one barfly for another, but if you watch closely, right before the cut, Hyde is embracing both women. Yowza.)

One of the reason’s Barrymore’s Hyde succeeds so nicely is that, even with Evil practically stamped across his forehead, there’s something undeniably charismatic in the man. It’s easy to believe he has enough magnetism to attract various lowlifes, which makes it all the more shocking late in the film when he snaps and murders Carew. Up until that moment, it’s possible to believe that Jekyll’s dalliance with the dark side of things is ultimately harmless; he hurts some feelings, and there is the bit of trampling, but it’s largely the act of a heretofore restrained temperament finally getting a little breathing room. Nothing unredeemable happens; Hyde is a jerk, but who isn’t a jerk from time to time?

But the Carew murder changes this. It’s one of the movie’s most effective sequences; the two men argue, and then Jekyll just snaps. For the first time, he changes into Hyde without benefit of his magic potion, and the hideous grin on his face forces you to realize that all the apparently harmless indulgences were leading to this fatal moment. He beats Carew to death still grinning, and from then on his doom is sealed.

In Stevenson’s story, the most disturbing thing about Hyde committing murder is the sheer arbitrariness of the act. As far as we can tell, he doesn’t know his victim at all; the man simply passes a pleasantry to Hyde on the street, and Hyde snaps. In the movie, Hyde’s motives are quite clear. Carew is both the symbolic cause of Jekyll’s growing self-hatred and the obstacle in his path to happiness. The change shifts the focus from the general to the specific—Stevenson is making a case for the evil in every man’s heart to be the unrestrained potential of destruction, while in the Barrymore film, evil is a surrender to the worst of one’s impulses. The Hyde in the novella would be the same for anyone who repeated Jekyll’s experiments; the movie-Hyde is an intimately personal monster.

There’s also the fact that the novella had no fiancé character for Jekyll to latch on to. There are no prominent female characters in the story (future Julia Roberts vehicles notwithstanding), and Millicent’s presence in the film humanizes Jekyll, and changes his eventual self-sacrifice from a shamed suicide to a surprisingly selfless attempt to save the life (and virtue) of the woman he loves. It also makes Jekyll as much of a hero as is possible in a tale where every moment of violence and horror stems from his own poor choices.

Novella-Jekyll and movie-Jekyll finally find themselves at the whim of their own worst nature, unable to control their transformations and left to hide from the eyes of the world their own inescapable guilt. This is just desserts, no question, but it’s possible to pity the doctor’s fate. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde posits that, just as a nation, a man divided against himself cannot stand. Unintentionally or not, there’s also the suggestion that impossible to achieve standards cause more harm than good; and that those who cannot accept their capacity for sin are doomed to damn themselves over and over again. The Barrymore film remains an effective expression of such concerns, and a terrific example of early horror cinema to boot.

SOURCE: QQQQ
SCREEN: QQQQ
Whoever put together the Madacy DVD release really needs to rethink their music choices.

But you’re not done yet!

And You Call Yourself a Scientist:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1912)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1913)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1920, Sheldon Lewis version)

And when you’re finished, check Lyz, Chad and my discussion of all four films:

SOURCE:

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The Shining, by Stephen King

No parent is perfect; no child escapes.

We try so hard to be good. Most of us, anyway. We struggle to be kind, to be decent, to never let our anger get the best of us. But the danger is always there; it’s impossible to live a life of complete serenity. One of the painful ironies of our common humanity is that the ones we come the closest to, the ones whose good opinion of us matters the most, are the ones who render us most vulnerable to our worst impulses. The more you care about a person, the more the mask slips, and if we are successful in our relationships, we are also at risk. We can never be completely safe from the ones we love. Not from them, not from ourselves.

The Shining, Stephen King’s third published novel, talks about the damage parents can do to their children, and the way that damages echoes down as the children become parents in turn. It’s also a terrific ghost story; much like Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, it uses the central characters’ flaws to augment the spiritual danger around them. But where Haunting has the majority of the damage happening internally, The Shining presents us with a different set of stakes, using supernatural pressures to exploit the cracks in an already shaky family unit.

Jack Torrance is the new winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel. The Overlook rests in the mountains outside Boulder, Colorado, and during the winter, snow blocks the roads surrounding it, closing the hotel and leaving anyone inside stranded from the rest of the world. For the next seven months, Jack, his wife Wendy, and their five year-old son Danny, will be the Overlook’s only guests. Jack will spend his time fixing whatever damage the winter brings. He also has a play he’s working on, and a wounded marriage to salve.

But every hotel has ghosts, and the Overlook’s are more potent than most. Powered by Danny’s psychic abilities (his “shine,” as the hotel’s cook Dick Hallorann calls it), the dark engine at the heart of the place comes to life and starts to attack the family from the inside. The last caretaker, a man named Grady, murdered his two daughters, his wife and then himself. But Grady was a drunk, and Jack has sworn off the stuff. Besides, he would never hurt the people he cares about.

But the snow is falling fast. Jack’s thoughts have gone queer. And when he is riled, oh he has such a temper….

As a horror novel, The Shining is full of great set-pieces: the topiary animals and their malevolent games of “Red Light,” the unending masquerade ball with its decadent promises, the horrible inevitability of Room 217. Just as upsetting, and much more easy to relate to, are the psychological horrors. There’s a chilling reality to Jack’s descent, a recognizable progression from self-loathing to hatred to blinding, undiscriminating rage. By the halfway point in the novel, nearly all of his conversations with Wendy are bitter. If you’ve ever spent time with a couple in a difficult marriage (or if you’ve had the misfortune of being in one yourself) those moments will ring painfully true. There’s nothing exotic about sniping at someone, at loathing every word that comes out of their nagging, bitching lips; and it’s far to easy too understand the fear that comes from dreading every conversation, of trying to placate while knowing that the battles already lost.

And all the while, your son is listening in to everything, understanding more than he should, and being damaged in ways you won’t see until it’s far too late to fix them.

One of the biggest challenges for anyone working on a “haunted house” story is coming up with a plausible reason for the hauntees to stay in the house long enough for the story to play out completely. Paranormal investigators are a possible solution, but at some point, when the chairs are flying and the walls bleeding red, one has to question one’s devotion to Science. King solves this problem neatly by giving the Torrances two undeniable pressures. Once Jack loses his teaching job in a fit of anger, the family’s financial situation becomes increasingly dire, so dire that to pass up the sort of paying job that the caretaker position represents becomes impossible. And when even that pressure pales in comparison to the dangers of the hotel, the weather and Jack himself (under the influence, so to speak) conspire to keep the Torrances at the Overlook.

That Jack is vulnerable to the sort of corruption the hotel specializes in is immediately clear. The very first line of the novel ("Jack Torrance thought, officious little prick.“) sets the tone, and in short order we learn not only that Jack has a drinking problem, but that his drunkenness actually led him to break his child’s arm. He’s since quit drinking, but that hasn’t stopped his tendency towards despair and self-pity—which leads to wanting to drink, which leads to more despair, etc. Abusing his son (the fact that the abuse is largely unintentional—Danny’s arm breaks when a furious Jack yanks him too hard—doesn’t make him feel any better) plays into this cycle, and also into Jack’s own history of abuse; something which the book doesn’t really get into until much later, but makes a good deal of sense when it’s finally revealed.

The Overlook initial machinations are fairly subtle. The first indication that anything is wrong comes when Jack goes up to reshingle the roof, a month or so after his family moves in. He discovers a wasp’s nest and gets stung a few times, nearly going over the side. This prompts a long introspection about how his life is sort of a “wasp’s nest,” and that most of the bad stuff that happened to him isn’t really his fault. (Incidentally, this whole wasp nest metaphor, while initially evocative, gets overplayed; it’s mentioned so often than by the end you expect some sort of giant stinging insect to be at the heart of the Torrance’s woes.)

One of the most important lessons taught in Alcoholics Anonymous is that some things are out of your control. AA attributes this to the presence of a higher power, but really, the most important thing to take from it is a firm understanding of your limitations. You can’t reform your life if you can’t put boundaries on what that means. In this light, Jack’s bout of acceptance is a positive thing. But it gets tricky when you notice how much of the blame he shifts off himself. By the end of the chapter, he’s achieved the queasy peace that comes from thinking you can leave your problems behind without ever really facing them.

When Jack discovers a scrapbook of the Overlook’s history, the hotel’s effects become even more apparent. His old drinking habits return—he wipes his mouth constantly, chews Excedrin, and, worst of all, his resentment at his wife keeps growing more and more pronounced. It’s the sort of progression that anyone with an anger control problem can relate to, with fits of irrational fury and the way every conversation, every mistake, every grating, whining question finds your hands squeezed into fists and your teeth grinding. Ever day sends him further along the downward spiral he’s been riding since October. Increasingly, Jack believes that the world is against him, and that he and the hotel have a bond which no one else is capable of understanding.

Through all of this, Wendy and Danny have been having problems of their own. In counterpoint to her husband, Wendy has her own issues of parental abuse to cope with. But while Jack’s father dealt largely in physical abuse, Wendy grew up in the shadow of her mother’s hateful mind games. Yet another in a long line of overwhelming maternal forces that runs through much of King’s writing (Mrs. White in Carrie, Mrs. Kaspbrak in IT, and Mrs. Cunningham from Chrstine, to name a few), Wendy’s mom is the sort of destructive, hateful person who’s spends her life grading the world with a never-ending supply of red ink.

Now a mother herself, Winnifred is constantly struggling against her past, unsure how many of her own choices are hopelessly tainted by the woman who raised her. It’s no surprise that she’s stuck with Jack as long as she has. The hotel’s spirits never work on her as directly as they do her husband, but they hardly need to. Any path that would begin with her taking Danny and leaving the Overlook and Jack to their mutual damnation would inevitably end up back at her mother’s door. It’s a choice that a few bad dreams and snappish conversations aren’t deadly enough to force her to take.

And then there’s Danny, menaced by dangers he can neither understand nor communicate fully to either parent. Blessed and cursed with extraordinary psychic ability, he is witness to Jack and Wendy’s internal struggles, as well as glimpses of the future from his “imaginary” friend Tony. Danny was sure he was the only person who could do what he does, until he met Dick Hallorann, head cook of the Overlook. On Danny’s first day at the hotel, and Dick’s last, Hallorann pulled the young boy aside and told him a little something about the gift they both share, a talent he calls “shining.”

The hotel, Dick said, can be unfortunate place for folks with a shine to them. After the thousands of guests who’ve stayed there at some point or another, the place is bound to have more than its share of bad memories and pain; these memories occasionally manifest themselves as pictures of the past to people like Danny. But pictures are all they are. If Danny saw something that frightened him, Dick told him all he needed to do was close his eyes and count to ten, and everything would be fine.

Hallorann left Danny with this dubious comfort, plus a promise that, should things get too unpleasant for the boy, all he needs to do is give as loud a mental shout as he can, and Dick would come running. Only, Dick is in Florida now, and that’s a long ways away. The storms keep coming. And Dick was wrong—sometimes, pictures do hurt. Sometimes, so do Daddies, no matter how they might promise otherwise.

As far as set-ups go, there’s a lot to work with here, and for the most part King manages to satisfy the novel’s potential. It’s not perfect, though. The foreshadowing of “that which will be forgotten,” a somewhat important plot point during the story’s climactic confrontation, is mentioned so many times the phrase itself becomes a joke. The pacing gets a bit thick near the climax just when it ought to sing; there’s a lot of intercutting between events at the hotel and outside, and while I understand the necessity of it, it’s still frustrating.

Most damning is King’s reliance on catchphrases as, apparently, the ultimate indicator of evil intentions. While hearing “Where do you want to go today?” for the ten millionth time may drive one to kill, it hardly works as suitable dialogue for a man who’s succumbed at last to the pressures of his own demons. Jack becomes increasingly threatening as the novel progresses, and his bitterness towards his wife is unpleasant and convincingly upsetting. Unfortunately, once things get past a certain point, Jack changes from the lead in an Edward Albee play to a Freddy Kruger clone. His constant exhortations that Wendy and Danny “come and take [their] medicine” are ludicrous in all the wrong ways. He becomes the first in what would be a long line of pointless madmen, and when he does, the story loses much of its intimacy, and the horror becomes “safe” in a thoroughly disappointing fashion.

The only other major reservation with the book (apart from King’s usual stylistic tics) is Danny’s “shine”. In general, psychic children give me hives. Psychic anything is usually a tricky business, since it puts the writer at risk of the worst sort of lazy, muddled plotting—people are always conveniently “sensing” things, and then just as conveniently failing to sense other things, or else being unable to explain what they sense in clear declarative statements. ("There’s a monster. It wants to eat your eyes. Run like fuck.") And of course a child psychic is even worse; nobody’s listening to them even on those rare instances when they do make sense.

Danny’s abilities actually work, though, because his “shine” is the fulcrum on which the entire plot rests. Without him around, the hotel’s ghosts would be largely formless—perhaps responsible for a few bad dreams, but none of the nightmares that the Torrance family suffers through. There’s a rather nice metaphor buried in there under all the supernatural mischief; something about how our children bring out the best and the worst in us, and how the cycle of abuse for Jack Torrance would have ended for him had he not had a son. We are all just as much the product of the poor choices of the ones who raised us as we are their love. And it is only when we try to carry on with our own families that we see how truly deep the damage goes.

All caveats aside, it’s a largely excellent novel, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone.

SCREEN:

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The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick

Included in the late nineties VHS release of The Shining (and all subsequent releases) is a brief behind-the-scenes documentary shot by Stanley Kubrick’s wife, Vivian. It’s a fascinating piece, existing long before the glossy, puffed up studio docs one gets today; there’s a charming off-the-cuff feeling to it, with Nicholson at the early height of stardom still not quite the iconic monster he’s become, and Kubrick himself huddled around the edges, two steps away from the crazy guy who mutters in your ear on late train rides home.

Most telling, though, are the moments we get with Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers. Crothers plays Hallorann, and in a brief interview, he expresses his gratitude for the role in a voice that verges on breaking. It’s a disconcertingly personal moment; while Nicholson and Kubrick are out goofing around, Crothers is damn close to bursting into tears. And Duvall is worse. Her smile jitters around the edges, her hand holding a cigarette shakes, and whatever she says, all you really pay attention to are her eyes. They’re wide open, as though she were just recovering from a blow—and already preparing herself for another.

These tremors run through Duvall’s entire performance, as does Crothers somewhat disconcerting sentimentalism. As Nicholson cavorts and grimaces his way into liberating madness, Duvall takes on the harried, shell-shocked expression of serial abuse, living in the moment to moment where every word, every step, every breath is fraught with dangers. Meanwhile, Danny Lloyd (as Duvall and Nicholson’s son) pedals down endless hallways, split between apathy and stark terror, as removed from his parents as they are from each other.

Kubrick was always interested in getting at the alienation that underlies the most intimate of human relationships. Even 2001: a Space Odyssey, arguably his most optimistic film, has a sense of profound awe at the climax of just how little any of us understand about anything—and how the comforts of personal contact are largely illusions we use to distract ourselves from the space around us, rather than a true panacea to loneliness.

Alienation is certainly the name of the game in The Shining. The opening sequence looks down from on high over seemingly endless mountains and rivers, watching a tiny car making its way down the road while the credits roll by in stark white font and the score pounds into our ears. There is so much space out there, between the mountains, along the water; even inside the Overlook itself. Once the winter begins, Jack spends most of his time in a living room the size of a gymnasium—huge windows loom over head, and you wonder what the pressure must be like. Danny’s riding through the corridors. Wendy cooking in the gargantuan kitchen. All that emptiness. All that space.

I remember the year after I graduated college being, for some brief time, utterly obsessed with this film. I’d seen it multiple times, and I knew it scared me—but I just couldn’t get my head around what it all meant, exactly. King’s novel was easy enough to grasp, but the movie was a mystery. What was the point? Nicholson and Duvall’s marriage is a ruin, and his relationship with his son nearly as bad; there was nothing to root for, nobody to invest in, no themes to focus on.

So, like any other enterprising cinesthete with no real social life and web access, I logged in and hit up Google for some answers. (This was pre-Wikipedia. Or at least, it was pre-me-hearing-of-Wikipedia.) By and large it was a wasted hour—did you know there’s Strangelove slash? I sure wish I didn’t!—but I did stumble across one site of interest. The author believed that The Shining was actually a symbolic examination of the tyranny of the white man against the American Indian, women, black folks, and pretty much anybody that ole whitey has a history of keeping down. He referenced the Overlook being built on an Indian burial ground (original to the movie), the Indian designs of the carpets and wall-hangings, even the cans in the pantry with Indian heads on them.

I thought this was the silliest thing I’d read in a long time (Dimitri/Muffley sex notwithstanding), and for years would describe it to friends as a perfect example of the foolishness of overwrought criticism. You can read anything into anything, we’d tell each other. Gosh, aren’t intellectuals funny! And we would laugh and nibble our crutons and speak of Pynchon long into the night.

The joke may have been on us, however. The more I watch The Shining, the more I wonder if that long-forgotten online reviewer wasn’t on to something. Hell, it might even be a major premise of Kubrickian criticism these days—and there’s certainly evidence in the film to back it up. The Indian textile work is hard to argue against, especially considering some of the outfits Duvall wears, and there’s a definite old boys vibe to Nicholson’s interactions with the hotel spirits. (The arrogant disgust in the dead Grady’s voice when he describes Hallorann is hard to forget.) Maybe it is all an allegory of American policy in the West, an examination of the indulgent selfishness that drives so many men to crush and disdain their fellows.

But what of it? I’ve seen the movie half a dozen times at least, and I’ll watch it again soon. It’s not the subtext that brings me back. I have no doubt that, if such subtext is there, I’ll find it eventually; Kubrick is too excellent a filmmaker to half-ass that sort of thing. That isn’t what keeps me watching, though. It’s the shots over Danny’s shoulder as he rides around and around; the twins and their pasty plump faces; the woman in 237 who seduces Jack, only to reveal the horrorshow underneath her illusory charms; the man with the bloody face who tells Duvall, “Great party, isn’t it?” There is a quality of filmmaking at work here that remains a delight to experience no matter how familiar it becomes.

Oh, and it’s remarkably scary, too. Not many jump scares, but just a thudding sense of dread that envelops you from those opening credits to that final, lingering shot.

Much has been made of Nicholson’s work here; I’ve heard it argued that The Shining is the first time he let the mannerisms do as much work as the rest of him. Whether that’s true or not, I think we can safely assume that he and the rest of the cast deliver exactly the performance Kubrick wanted out of them. Which makes Nicholson’s transformation from restrained, distant husband to gleeful lunatic an interesting twist on expectations—while Jack is certainly believable in both aspects, it’s only when he goes over the edge that you really start to enjoy watching them. Much like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange, there’s the fascinating charisma of psychotic men; only where modern filmmakers chose to give us mad geniuses capable of the most implausibly Goldbergian punchlines, Kubrick is more concerned in showing us a level of evil that we can entirely relate to. How fun it is to hate! we remember. And how tiresome all the conventions that keep us restrained.

In which case, Shelley Duvall’s winces and Danny Lloyd’s blank eyes make sense; we can pity for them, but it’s nearly impossible to root for them. There’s no warm center at the heart of movie, nothing to make you think that, were the Torrances somehow able get away from the Overlook that their lives would be at all improved. You can’t care about the family because there’s no family worth caring about.

There any number of ways that you can interpret the film: the whole Indian thing, a parable about man’s unsteady relationship to the people he’s supposed to protect, maybe something about the unheralded dangers of the hotel caretaker industry. Any of these could make for a pretty good Film Studies paper. But the movie doesn’t need them. It’s just a terrific horror picture by a director who knows exactly what he’s doing. Why he does it only matters when the lights come up and you notice the shadows are darker than they used to be.

COMPARE/CONTRAST:

Stephen King has talked about his dissatisfaction with the original film version of his novel any number of times, but the most telling point he brings up comes in the form of an anecdote. While Kubrick was making his Shining, he would often call King at odd hours to ask him some seemingly random question. Late one night, Kubrick rang and said, without much fanfare, “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes, I do,” King told him.

“I don’t,” Kubrick said, and hung up.

While the story itself is probably unverifiable (it’s on the IMDB trivia page for the movie, but I’ve misplaced the book I first found it in), it serves as a perfect way to approach the novel and its startlingly different adaptation. It would be difficult to find a movie based on a book that plays more havoc with its source material, while at the same time remaining true to the major details. Jack Torrance is still a reformed alcoholic with a history abuse, and he’s still the winter caretaker at the Overlook. His wife is Wendy, his son is Danny, and Danny has some peculiar psychic tendencies. And the Overlook itself is still full to the brim with nasty, mind-screwing ghosts.

But the gulf between King and Kubrick is remarkably vast. Reading the novel and seeing the movie, the connections are apparent—but I can’t imagine someone experiencing only one and somehow managing to successfully anticipate the other.

What we have here is a rarity: an adaptation which, while failing in the strictest sense of the word (translating the original author’s plot and themes into a different medium), stands quite nicely on its own as an equally valid work of art. It’s not exactly new territory for Kubrick. In addition to ignoring the final chapter of Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, he turned the straight-faced nuclear-era thriller Fail Safe into Dr. Strangelove, one of the most bitterly funny dark comedies ever made. A strong enough director to put his stamp on any material he chose to use, Kubrick was always more interested in using the work of others to make his own points—and if those points seemingly directly contradicted the original (as they do here), it certainly never stopped him.

Both novel and film have their first scenes in Stuart Ullman’s office; but where novel-Jack is irritable and humiliated, struggled to hold on to his temper and impress this thoroughly unimpressable man, movie-Jack just grins and passes the whole thing with flying colors. There’s not a hint of tension in the movie version, and movie-Ullman certainly never suggests that Jack might not be appropriate for the caretaker position.

Back home with Wendy and Danny, things are significantly less pleasant. While the novel has both characters somewhat worried for Jack (and Wendy depressed at the current state of their lives), the movie shows Duvall desperately eager to please, and Danny distant and closed-off. When Danny has a fainting spell, brought on by the imaginary friend who lives in his finger, Duvall calls in the doctor; with her son pronounced healthy, Duvall proceeds to tell the doctor, in her forced-smile, everything-is-okay voice about the time Jack broke Danny’s arm.

Clearly, it’s something she’s nervous of mentioning, but we never see movie-Jack expressing the same sort of sentiments. In the novel, it’s made explicit that Wendy seriously considered leaving her husband during his drinking days, especially after the incident with Danny. Only Jack’s remarkable reformation, and her love for their family as a whole, kept them together. In the movie, Duvall seems to be staying with her husband because she’s too frightened to do anything else. I doubt movie-Jack is physically abusive (apart from the arm break) before coming to the Overlook, but Duvall’s tentative neediness speaks to years of mental anguish. The film is probably more realistic in its approach to domestic violence—I’m sure there are more couples in the world like Duvall and Nicholson than the novel’s leads—but Kubrick’s detached approached means there’s already horror enough before the ghosts come out.

While the novel charts Jack’s gradually deteriorating mental state with a sort of tragic inevitability, Nicholson’s transformation seems to be headed in a different direction entirely. He’s been criticized for “starting crazy,” but this isn’t the case—it’s more that he begins the movie as a sort of low key kiss-ass who’s barely able to able to withhold his contempt for his wife, and ends it as screaming manifestation of his own Id.

There’s no question that it’s more difficult to convey an internal conflict on film than it is on the page, but this is something different. In the novel, watching a loving father forced against his will to turn into the man he grew up terrified he would one day become is moving and sad. There’s no equivalent sadness to the film; the transition seems more a revelation of what was there all along. As mentioned before, there’s no family in need of saving. It makes you wonder if there’s anything worth saving anywhere.

Another change requires some spoilage, so consider yourself warned.

In both versions, Dick Hallorann re-enters the narrative around the climax, in response to Danny’s desperate mental call. In the novel, after surviving attacks from the hotel and a drunken, possessed Jack, he helps Wendy and Danny escape while the Overlook burns. There’s a bittersweet (and, admittedly, somewhat pointless) epilogue, we see the remaining Torrances staying with Hallorann while they both recuperate from their injuries.

The movie has Hallorann making the same cross country trip, only instead of wrestling with the topiary animals and getting a roque mallet to the gut, poor Scatman Crothers is axed to death almost immediately after stepping in the hotel’s front doors. It’s nastily funny, like much of the film’s third act; even though his arrival does do some good, by distracting Jack long enough to let Wendy to get free, and providing both her and Danny with a Sno-Cat they can drive to safety in, all everyone remembers is his crumpled body on the lobby floor. It’s perhaps the most explicit contradiction of the source material in the entire movie. King’s Hallorann serves as a moderate deus ex machina; but stripped of his deus-hood by Kubrick, he has no place in the brutal machina that remains.

Oh, and while we’re in the spoiler section–what is up with that ending, anyway? The last shot of the movie is a photograph of a decades gone party during the Overlook’s heydays, and as the camera slowly closes in, we see a shockingly young Jack Nicholson in the front of the festivities, grinning like a loon. What to make of this? The most obvious conclusion is that Jack, after freezing to death in the hedge maze, has been assumed into the hotel’s crew of haunts and spooks. But unlike nearly every other horror film with a “kicker’ ending, there’s not the slightest hint that this is a bad thing. Torrance wasn’t punished for failing to kill his wife and son, nor did he discover that the Overlook wasn’t as welcoming as he initial believed, as would’ve certainly been the case in King’s novel. In fact, the ending seems like a happy one, at least for Jack. Which, again, is rarity. How many ghost stories can you think of where a murderous, hateful collection of spirits is actually the happiest place on earth?

There’s the end of the spoilers.

King has been very public about his disappointment in the first film version of The Shining. He even went so far as to write the teleplay for a disastrous ABC miniseries, trumpeting it as the book’s first “faithful” adaptation. Hopefully he’s mellowed in the years since then, because while it’s easy to understand his frustration, there’s no denying that Stanley Kubrick’s Shining is going to be sticking with us for a long time.

If no parent is perfect, and no child escapes, the reverse is equally true; but in the end, King doesn’t think that’s quite as terrible as it sounds. Redemption is still possible, he believes, even if it sometimes comes at the cost of all we have. But the movie, stripping the novel of its humanistic core, whispers another message entirely, describing a world where redemption is so alien as to be absurd, and that every relationship has too many rooms and too many closed doors. And that behind those doors are parties that we long to join, even if we cannot possibly comprehend them.

SOURCE: QQQQ
SCREEN: QQQQ
That “237″? Not a typo.

NOTE: Due to a tech glitch that I still don’t understand, sometimes this page (and all the review pages) doesn’t load correctly. If you have any problems, trying refreshing the page, as that seems to work.

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“From Beyond,” by H.P. Lovecraft

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From Beyond, directed by Stuart Gordon

Look I’m standing naked before you
Don’t you want more than my sex
I can scream as loud as your last one
But I can’t claim innocence…
-Tori Amos
“Leather”

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us will admit to being at least a little uneasy about sex. We think about it a great deal, and there are times we want it so badly we can hardly think of anything else—and isn’t that sort of off-putting? You get used to your body making demands which supersede the intentions of your rational mind; but when you get right down to it, most of what matters happens in the base of the spine, the impulses that drive us to decisions we can only justify after they’re made. Lust makes us vulnerable in ways we can’t avoid. The drive, with all its squishy, dangling moments, is both too intimate and too alien to be completely understood.

Most of us make some kind peace with this. After all, sex (or the idea of sex)(sigh) is exciting enough on the surface that there’s really no need to actually think about it; and some would argue that it’s the thinking that gets us in trouble. But then there are those who don’t have the luxury of reflex. The ones who can do nothing but think.

While it’s dangerous to speak for the dead, we can be reasonably sure that H.P. Lovecraft fell in the latter category. Sex itself, even of the most formal and oblique variety (ie, love), is a very rare occurrence in his writings, surfacing only in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”—and since “Innsmouth” revolves around a particularly disgusting series of miscengenations, it’s not exactly a positive spin. Even beyond “Innsmouth,” however, the fear of sexual intimacy runs through nearly every short story the man produced.

It can be argued that Lovecraft’s central preoccupation was the horror of the Other. By translating his racism (and xenophobia, since xenophobia is just racism with a better Scrabble hand) into something far more potent and obscene, he transcended his limitations as a person and achieved something that resonates in even the healthiest of minds. Sex is just another extension of this concern. While its presence in his fiction is largely subtextual, it is the ultimate Other-dread. It represents an invasion of the horrid unknown on a most personal level. There’s something awfully–vulgar–about the goings on down in R’yleh land, with all those great chasms and tentacled beasties. It’s not something nice people talk about. It’s too damp.

“From Beyond,” the story that serves as inspiration for today’s review, is one of Lovecraft’s underachievers: short, somewhat generic, and sustained by a premise which, while compelling, never intrudes on the reader as successfully as his best writing. The plot is simple—an unnamed narrator describes his last encounter with the ill-fated Crawford Tillinghast, a scientist obsessed with expanding the limits of human perception.

From the beginning, the narrator is both intrigued and apalled by his friend’s work:

That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.

(Transcribing this, I can’t help but wonder what Lyz Kingsley of And You Call Yourself a Scientist would make of it. The logic fascinates me—does this apply to all scientific disciplines? Is there a certain level at which every possible area of study begins to yield poisonous fruit?

It’s a shame Lyz hasn’t done more Lovecraft. But then, it’s not like she needs to concern herself much over “feelings,” as anyone who’s faced her army of remote-controlled, flesh eating zombies can attest.

I miss my other leg.)

Back on topic—the narrator’s apprehensions, when voiced, lead to his expulsion from Tillinghast’s house. A few weeks later, however, he is invited back. It seems the good doctor has had a breakthrough, and is desperate to share his good fortune with a former friend.

In his efforts to go “beyond,” Crawford has constructed a machine which stimulates the pineal gland, giving him (and anyone else in the room while the machine is on) glimpses into the unseen world. The narrator agrees to sit in on a session, and soon finds himself witness to monstrosities undreamt of; thick wriggling creatures that fill every millimeter of the space around us. Crawford tells the narrator that he must stay absolutely still. If he doesn’t, he’ll attract the attention of even more dangerous fiends—because if the narrator can now perceive the beings around him, those beings can perceive him. And They are hungry. Always hungry.

Which might explain the absence of servants downstairs, but it doesn’t justify the growing predatory gleam in Tillinghast’s eye….

In terms of adaptation, “From Beyond” is strictly one act. A faithful screen version would run no more than a half hour, and that’s if Crawford had a serious stutter and wanted to show off his etchings. If you’re shooting for much more than a punchline, you need to expand on the central premise—and if you’re making a movie, you need to find a way for Lovecraft’s standard unimaginables ("Oh god … I see it … the all-seeing eye, the endless awful shifting— Ooop, damn, I’ve been driven mad. Purple monkey butterscotch.") to be as effective visually as they are on the page.

Stuart Gordon, the man responsible for one of the few truly excellent Lovecraft adaptations out there (Re-Animator), chose a unique approach to the problem. Like Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Gordon’s From Beyond seeks to exploit the connection between terror and physical attraction on a level that goes largely unvoiced in most genre films. But where Barker was using his own work—a novella already hugely concerned with the extremes of sensation—Gordon merged his intentions with the prim and proper musings of horror fiction’s greatest prude. The results, while not as consistently brilliant as his previous film, still make for an entertaining, freaky picture. And it’s got Barbara Crampton in fetish gear. Huzzah.

Instead of using the short story as the movie’s climax, the filmmakers (Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna and screenwriter Dennis Paoli) position an altered version of the events of “From Beyond” in the film’s prologue. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) is now the name of the “narrator” figure, while the story’s Crawford has transformed into one Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel), a fifty-something sado-masochist with a taste in old flags and chains. Crawford is living with the doctor and assisting him in his experiments; during the pre-credits sequence, we see them crossing that fabled line between Man and God Forbid. Crawford flees in mortal terror, and Pretorius (note the nod to Bride of Frankenstein) just plain loses his head.

Definite echoes of Re-Animator here, with Combs once again in attendance for an older colleague’s gruesome death; but while the sociopathic Herbert West manages to give authorities sufficient explanation to avoid incarceration, Tillinghast is so disturbed why what he’s seen that he’s promptly arrested and thrown in an asylum.

Enter Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton). An expert in criminal psychology, she’s called in to determine whether or not Crawford is mentally capable to stand trial. After speaking briefly with him, she becomes convinced that his story has some elements of truth in it; his comments on the stimulation of the pineal gland especially interest her. McMichaels decides that the only course of action is for her and Crawford to return to Pretorius’s home. There, under the watchful eye of Officer Buford “Bubba” Stevens (Ken Foree), they’ll attempt to reproduce the experiments, both to clear Crawford’s name and satisfy Katherine’s curiosity.

Unsurprisingly, this is a Very Bad Idea. During the last abortive test, Crawford took an axe to the Resonator, the machine he and Pretorius used for their explorations; but it doesn’t take too long before he’s got the thing up and running again. Bubba makes some unsavory discoveries about the headless man’s private life—lots of S&M, lots of whipping, and everything on video tape—but that’s only a preview of the main attraction: the triumphant return of the man himself. Buck naked and apparently none the worse for wear, Pretorius appears before Katherine and Crawford while the Resonator is running. Crawford is confused, and Pretorius insists that Crawford “touch” him; when Crawford does, Pretorius’s skin sloughs off and he starts turning into something else.

Crawford turns off the machine, but the damage has been done. Something’s happening inside Katherine’s mind, and a compulsion she barely recognizes is growing. She becomes more and more interested in the Resonator and its potential; and she seems to be increasingly more sexually aware. Despite the objections of Tillinghast and Bubba, she re-activates the machine, and in the ensuing carnage, Crawford is devoured by a monstrous worm in the building’s basement. When the Resonator is turned off, Crawford re-appears, covered in bruises and completely bald. Apparently, this is a turn on for Katherine; while Crawford lies unconscious in Pretorius’s old rec room, his psychiatrist becomes entranced with the dead man’s “toys,” ultimately putting on a dominatrix outfit. In perhaps the movie’s signature scene, she straddles Crawford and starts rubbing him up and down … and down … and down…

It’s supposed to be a good thing that Bubba breaks up the scene before things get too serious, but I’ll be damned if I can explain why.

Things get worse, as Pretorius (or whatever it is that’s calling itself Pretorius) has now figured out a way to turn on the Resonator himself. Can Katherine, bald Crawford and Bubba stop him before he oozes in to our reality? And more importantly, do they really want to? And even more important than that, will Crampton ever get back into that fetish gear?

Sadly no on that last count; much like Re-Animator’s infamous “head giving head” scene, the bondage outfit lingers on in memory long after its brief moment has past. Still, it’s a pretty great moment, and a fairly shocking one at that; while From Beyond is full of truly excellent monster make-up (lotta goo, lot of giant tube worms), the air of sexual deviancy is perhaps its most surprising element, if only because it’s not something you expect to see in this sort of film.

When we learn early on that the pineal gland, in addition to moderating what we see, is also connected to the sexual impulse (busy ####ing gland), it’s inevitable that there will be at least some level of naughtiness on display. Crampton’s lascivious entry into the world of S&M is at once over the top and entirely logical; it’s the sort of great scene only a horror movie can give you, and it’s made all the more powerful because it’s the transgression of a taboo.

At its heart, horror is an intensely conservative genre. We fear death and misery because of what they are, but also because they represent a change in the acceptable status quo. Horror revolves around the danger of that change—a monster isn’t just a physical threat, but a psychological one, especially a monster that exists outside our understanding of the natural world. While From Beyond isn’t exactly a whole-hearted embrace of sexual sadism, it does unmoor us enough by speaking to the private urges that we try to hide; urges which make the danger of change largely an internal one.

It’s not a perfect movie, despite these excellent qualities. There’s no question it’s an enjoyable one; even apart from the bondage scene, there is some inventive creature work, and the plot itself remains unpredictable and involving through-out. The acting is solid: Crampton is as game as ever, although I find her first scenes as the apparently “repressed” doctor (ie, her hair is in a bun and she’s wearing glasses) unconvincing. Ken Foree is probably the most obviously comic character, but he never sinks into caricature. And Jeffrey Combs is, of course, excellent—although it’s strange to see him play a somewhat “normal” character.

That actually brings me to one of the movie’s few flaws—while it has a sense of humor, unlike Re-Animator, it lack a particularly strong driving force. Where Herbert West managed to be both the hero and the villain, here we have the grimacing, grunting Pretorius in the baddie role, spouting one liners and drooling while his body mutates into some new horror. It’s just not as memorable; gone is Combs’ arch wit and iconic misanthropy. The heroes are far too earnest to be much better. There’s a moment near the end when Katherine bursts out with an “I love you, Crawford!” and I still can’t tell if it’s intentionally a joke. It certainly feels like a joke. While Re-Animator’s conclusion is surprisingly affecting, here, we just leave feeling vaguely creeped out. Oh, and thinking about handcuffs.

The pacing is slightly off, too. I watched the newly released “Director’s Cut” DVD for this review, and while it’s been a while since I’ve seen the original, it looks like they just added in a few more gore scenes. Much as I love gore, at times it feels sort of self-indulgent, especially in the last act—a couple of murders are largely gratuitous, as once you’ve seen once person get their brains sucked out through their eye socket, you’ve probably seen them all.

There’s also a weird bit in the climax when Katherine somehow gets ahold of a homemade bomb. Now, I have no problem with anyone wanting to blow stuff up, but this is a seriously professional looking bomb—five or six sticks of dynamite wired together under a digital clock, all neatly arranged and organized. Is this a talent of hers the screenplay forgot to mention? Is it the work of a former patient? Or did she just put on her leather doodads and seduce someone into building it for her? (If it’s the last, damn them for not including the seduction scene in the final cut.) Realistically it would’ve made more sense for her to show up with a can of gasoline and a box of matches; having an explosive device straight of a Chuck Norris movie is stretching credulity.

But these are just minor quibbles. While it’s never a particularly scary film, From Beyond is a ton of fun, and its willingness to go as far with its premise as it does raises some intriguing issues. Our sexual yearnings are generally a mystery, operating at a subconscious level where we can only judge the stimulus and not the response. But if someone (or something) were to start manipulating those impulses, how would we know? If I woke up tomorrow morning with a sudden lust for brunettes dressed like turn of the century carnival barkers—and if that afternoon I ran into just such a woman—should I be suspicious? Grateful? Who knows how far things might go. We can’t control what we find attractive, we can only control how we respond to it; and if even that control is taken away, what manner of creature might we become?

According to Stuart Gordon, it would probably involve laytex and a lot of grunting. I can live with that, even if Lovecraft most likely couldn’t.

SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQQ
It looks like we have a new contender for TMBOLWTWHHTMIHESI.

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“1408,” by Stephen King

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1408, directed by Mikael Håfström

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
A few years ago, a friend of mine came into Portland with his new girlfriend. I drove down from Lewiston to meet them on a Saturday night; we went out to dinner and then did some barhopping. Eventually, we all got drunk enough that I wasn’t going to be able to drive home. So we found a Motel 8 just off the turnpike and rented two rooms—one for them and one for me. There was more drinking, a bit of talk, and sometime after one, I made my way next door to crash.

I woke up at eight the next morning, and for a few seconds, I was very confused. This was not my beautiful bed by a long shot. But then I heard noises from the other room; I remembered the night before, recognized my reflection in the mirror over the dresser and realized the sounds I was hearing were my friend and his girl having (fairly enthusiastic) hangover sex.

Breakfast was awkward.

Mike Enslin, the writer cum paranormal investigator of 1408 tells us that hotel rooms are scary places. He’s not far off; but while Enslin talks about the people who’ve used the room before you, how the person who last slept in the bed you lie on could’ve murdered his whole family and you’d never know, I think the situation is more complex. What bothers me about hotels—about the neat homogenization of human needs, the sterility that resists even the slightest hint of permanence—is that they pretend at intimacy without ever truly achieving it. It’s a bedroom, and that’s where you sleep, but it’s not yours. The hundred small gestures we use to make a space our own become irrelevant in a room where furniture placement follows a rigid conformity; where toothbrushes come in plastic bags and shampoo in personal sizes.

That impermanence leaves you vulnerable. Those noises I heard were nothing to worry about, but what if they had been? And what if after a few moments, those noises had turned into screams?

As Stephen King himself admits in its introduction, “1408″ was a story he never intended on finishing. He wrote the first ten pages as a way to demonstrate some of the principles he’d been laying out in his non-fiction book On Writing; but the story turned out to be less disposable than he’d initially believed.

Which is interesting, because that opening is easily the least compelling thing about the piece. Mike Enslin, as described above, arrives in the lobby of the Hotel Dolphin where he is immediately pulled aside by Olin, the hotel manager. Olin takes Mike into the manager’s office and does his best to convince him not to stay in room 1408. Clearly, Olin would like to forbid the use of the room entirely, but due to an obscure civil rights law, if a room is open, a hotel has to let it to anyone who specifically requests it.

We learn that Enslin makes his living by visiting supposedly haunted locations, like graveyards and mansions and writing about them in lurid (and often trumped up) detail. But he has never seen an actual ghost; he doesn’t believe they exist. Olin thinks this arrogance makes Enslin uniquely ill-prepared to face whatever’s waiting for him upstairs—something that isn’t a ghost, exactly. Something that’s much, much worse.

Structurally, “1408″ is relatively straightforward, and this first scene is no exception. The “Don’t dare go inside the abandoned house/factory/bumper cars” speech is one of the hoary standards of horror writing, and the conversation between Olin and Mike does nothing to subvert our expectations. Olin brings out the body list, tells Enslin a whole host of bad things, and Enslin does his level best to Scully them all. Of course he refuses to leave. They always do.

This feeling of familiarity isn’t helped by the fact that King himself has already written a very similar scene in the first chapter of The Shining. The relationships are somewhat changed—in the novel, the manager is talking to a prospective employee, neither man likes the other very much, and Ulman (the manager) doesn’t go into the same depth as Olin does. But it’s still a hotel, there’s still a lot of foreshadowing, and it’s still one man trying to convince another where his best interests lie after all other recourses have failed.

“1408″ suffers in comparison because the writing simply isn’t very good. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what’s wrong (Enslin’s explanation for the cigarette behind his ear is clunky, but that’s the most specific example I can think of); it’s more the sense that you get in a lot of King’s late-period work that everything is going on longer than it needs to. A set-up works best when the writer gets as much of its way as possible: hook the reader, give the premise, and then move on to other things. Here, it just drags.

We learn that Mike considers himself to be slumming with the kind of work he’s doing; that he used to be a “real” writer, but now just sticks to fake spook hackery. He’s defensive about it, too—always jumping to the wrong conclusion if there’s any chance Olin might insult him. This is decent character building, until you read the story a second time and realize that it never actually goes anywhere. Clearly, Enslin is being set up as the traditional skeptic who must learn the Error Of His Ways, but once he goes inside 1408, he could be anybody. All the talk about the room’s deadliness is nice, but it’s so rote that it’s not really scary; you can’t help but feel that King wrote the scene not because the story demanded it, but because it’s tradition.

Still, one reason sequences like this are so common is that they work, and even with all its problems, this one isn’t a total loss. I especially liked Enslin’s surprise when he learns about all the supposed “natural” deaths in the room—he’s done the research, he knows about the six or seven suicides, but he never thought to take into account simple heart attacks. The sheer volume of mortality takes him (and us) off-guard.

Things really kick in once the exposition gets out of the way, and when “1408″ gets going, the pay-off is surprisingly excellent. King makes an effort to subvert the usual haunting tropes; there are no specters, no rattling chains, nothing that ever was or could ever be human. Just a terrible randomness that only makes sense when it runs down your spine.

It’s worth getting into in more depth, but we should probably talk about the film version first, so as not to repeat ourselves. (Not sure why we slipped into first person plural there. Should probably consult an exorcist.)

1408 starts strong. We watch Mike Enslin (John Cusack) spend the night in a supposedly haunted bed and breakfast; ghosts and goblins fail to make an appearance. We then follow Mike to a signing for his 10 Nights at 10 Haunted Spots series, where an audience proves just as elusive as the previous night’s ghouls. Maybe three people show up. One of them asks Mike to sign one of his pre-ghost novels, an achingly “serious” thing called The Long Road Home. He asks her how much she paid for it; somewhat embarrassed, she tells him, “not much.”

All of this is nicely done; in quick sketches, we get an idea of who Enslin is, what he does, and how he may not be entirely satisfied with doing it. There’s a surfing sequence that practically screams, “This will be important later!” but the first real sign of trouble comes when Mike picks up his mail. He finds a postcard with a photo of the Dolphin Hotel on the front; on the back, the message, “Don’t go into 1408.”

This was when I started to adjust my expectations.

A closed room story works best when operating under its own inherent limitations; the rule is, the hauntee is only in danger when actually inside the affected room. We never learn who sent the note. Since there’s no indication that Mike had plans on to visit the Dolphin before he got the postcard, it’s doubtful that Olin or anyone else involved in the hotel would’ve tried to contact him. The most likely suspect, given how the rest of the movie plays and the surprisingly artful handwriting on the card, is that the room–or whatever malicious force resides there—somehow managed to mail a postcard for the simple purpose of luring Mike inside.

That’s about an 11 on the idiometer, honestly. (Though it’s only a rough 7.2 on the You’ve Got To Be #%*@ing Kidding Me scale.) All you need for a follow-up is to learn that 1408 already killed Mike’s father, and that Mike’s grandfather was the hotel’s original architect.

Fortunately, things never get that bad. Instead, we get an in-between movie—one where the best impulses are in constant struggle with the worst.

1408 is in many ways a one man show, so it’s a lucky thing that one man is the film’s greatest asset. Much like Johnny Depp in Secret Window, John Cusack is the sort of actor who can be called on to make the best out even the most dreadful scripts. (Hell, I actually dug him in Identitiy.) Here, he’s able to redeem a good number of the movie’s less than inspired choices; and when there’s a choice that does work, he more than rises to the occasion.

The rest of the cast doesn’t fair quite so well. In their defense, apart from Samuel L. Jackson as Olin, their characters are largely superfluous. (I suppose the screenwriters would disagree when it comes to Mike’s wife, played by Mary McCormack, but we’ll get to that.) Even Jackson’s role is beefed up unnecessarily; he appears near the beginning, as in the story, but comes back for two later scenes, once as an apparent hallucination and then again after the climax, in a moment so poorly conceived it’s hilarious.

The conversation between Enslin and Olin that began the short story remains much the same for the film version. It actually felt a bit less effective, oddly enough. While some bits (like the cigarette thing) play better when spoken, much of the dialogue falls flat, and the blocking for the two actors is distractingly labored. (Lots of getting up and sitting down for no more reason than the director wanted the shot to have more action.) Plus, you can’t completely disregard the suspicion that Jackson—generally a dynamic screen presence—is miscast in the role of handwringing middle management.

However, much like its source material, 1408 picks up considerably after the preliminaries are dispatched. It never quite achieves consistently the excellence of its best moments, but it’s better than its worst moments suggest.

In the story, Mike Enslin’s trip into 1408 lasts seventeen minutes. The effect of whatever presence is in the room on a visitor is described as being similar to poisoned gas, and few people are able to stay inside for very long without suffering long term adverse affects. For Mike, things start to go wrong almost immediately; when he arrives outside the room, he finds the door is crooked. The jamb is even, but somehow the door itself is off-kilter. The moment passes—sort of—but we’ve just been given a glimpse into the nature of the evil we’re about to face. It’s not something that can be directly handled. Fighting through it is like wrestling a particularly vivid fever dream.

The seventeen minutes that follow are extremely creepy stuff, although not in a way I feel comfortable describing explicitly. There are three paintings on the wall of the room, and all three are hanging wrong. Mike fixes them. They go wrong again. He talks into the microphone of his tape recorder and speaks rational assessments that slowly degrade into gibberish. (My favorite line: “My brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut turnpike.") The phone rings and a disembodied voice shouts numbers at him ("Five! The number is five!") Then the walls start melting and he hears the sound of something coming for him—something that will rend him utterly, but will leave behind a corpse that looks remarkably like it died a natural death.

That’s basically it, but I’m getting a chill even writing it down. (Doesn’t help that it’s near on midnight, and I live alone.) The speed with which events deteriorate once Mike enters 1408 takes you by surprise, especially after the somewhat stately build-up that proceeds it. The “poison gas” description gives you something specific to connect with, and it’s disturbing the way you can never tell how much of what Mike sees is hallucination—how he keeps speaking into the microphone with utter confidence while his mind betrays him—and the final deep down terror that what’s real and unreal no longer matters.

Any movie attempting to do a strict adaptation of such material would need a particularly visionary director at the helm; I’m thinking of something like Eraserhead-era Lynch on cocaine. Mikael Håfström, director of 1408, chooses to go a different route. While I can’t exactly blame this decision, I can’t help but feel a little let down by the result.

While story Mike’s fate is decided less than twenty minutes after he enters the room, movie Mike is inside 1408 for a full hour before things climax. This changes the nature of the experience altogether; instead of a immediate and total break-down of perceptions, we get a gradual build-up of weirdness.

This weirdness can be said to fall into two broad categories: general environment warping and attacks specifically targeted at Our Hero. Of those two, the former (inevitably) works the best. Mike suffers through temperature changes, a bed that makes itself (leading to one of the greatest lines in any movie ever—I’ve quoted it at the end of this review), a psycho with a hook popping up at the darnedest times, visions of the room’s previous occupants, and the ever changing spatial geography of the hotel room itself. Not all of these are actually frightening; the appearance of the other guests is too predictable, and the phone conversation Mike has where a perky female voice tells him he has to take his life “of your own free will” was a little too on the nose for my taste. But the hook-wielding flannel dude was always good for a jump, and there’s a great bit where Enslin starts signaling for help to someone in an apartment directly across the street from his—only to realize that the other person isn’t just responding to his gestures, but copying them.

Besides, any movie that uses the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” as a cue for bad mojo has its heart in the right place.

It’s the other kind of attack that gave me the most problems—the scenes which are intended to play on Mike’s personal history and drive him to eventual suicide. There’s a brief sequence where Mike sees his father (Len Cariou!), hospitalized and confused, but for the most part, the room chooses to focus it’s Freudian malevolence against Mike’s ex-wife (Mary McCormacK) and, perhaps most importantly, the daughter whose death ruined his marriage and killed his more idealistic writing career.

One thing I will say in the movie’s favor: we don’t actually learn about the dead girl until Mike’s well into the mind-screwery. We know Enslin’s troubled, and when his publisher asks him if he’s sure he wants to come back to New York, we get a sense of some history there; but it’s only when the room starts showing Mike video of his previously happy family that the whole picture comes clear.

Too bad that picture is so thuddingly unoriginal. The trouble with having a plotline like this is that it allows you to distance yourself as an audience from the main threat. I’ve had some unpleasant things happen in my life, but I’ll freely admit that none of them come close to the horror of losing a child. While I can pity and feel for Enslin (largely due to Cusack’s excellent performance; the scenes with the kid are generally lousy, but Cusack sells them well), once 1408 starts hitting on such a localized trauma, I’m no longer threatened. There’s nothing in my past that would cut me this deeply. The situation becomes less about the room’s dangers and more about Mike’s unresolved issues, and those issues are just not that compelling.

(To give the devil his due, this does lead to one good scene near the end of the film where Mike confronts his daughter’s ghost. It’s not scary, as such, but the desperation in Cusack and the eerie calm of his child are actually surprisingly moving.)

The movie’s other big mistake is making Mike’s ex-wife Lily an active participant in the plot. As things in the hotel grow increasingly worse, Mike becomes desperate to contact someone from the outside to help him. Somewhat implausibly (since Olin told us at the start that “electronics don’t tend to work in 1408″), he’s able to get a wireless ‘net connection on his laptop, and go into a video chat with his ex. The presence of an outsider immediately ruins whatever claustrophobic momentum the film had been building. We can briefly hope that this is just another illusion—until we realize that the room has intentionally let Mike get a hold of Lily, so it can trick her into coming out to the hotel to rescue him.

It’s stuff like this that drives me insane, because it’s so thoroughly useless. You can argue that putting his ex in danger forces Mike to fight the room more proactively, but isn’t someone struggling for his own sanity and soul enough? Throwing in Lily just makes it all so safe, as though 1408 wasn’t a place where people lose everything, but a place they go when they need some really aggressive therapy. A haunting isn’t effective unless you’re truly alone; there’s a reason that Shirley Jackson’s Hill House is as much about social alienation as it is about bumps in the night. 1408’s clearest intention is to drive its occupant to a state of ultimate despair, and reminding Enslin he has someone out there who loves him enough to rush to his aid isn’t exactly a smart play.

(One last thing before we wrap up, but since it involves big ole spoilers, I’ll give you a chance to skip the next paragraph, should you be so inclined.)

Both short story and movie end in fire. But while in the movie version, Enslin uses an incredibly expensive bottle of booze to start a conflagration in 1408’s bedroom, thus “killing” whatever force is driving the room and saving his wife, story-Enslin sets himself on fire. The difference shows the crucial change in philosophy between story and film. One has a man ultimately triumphing over evil; the other has a man confronted with such an overwhelming doom that his only option is to damage himself in order to get free. I don’t know if I can say whether one approach is explicitly better than the other, but I damn well know which scares me more.

A hotel room can be an off-putting place because it reminds of us our relative unimportance. We are not the first person to use this room, and we will not be the last; but in terms of effect and consequence, who we are while we’re there matters hardly at all. “1408″ exploits this by giving us a threat whose attacks are devastating and entirely impersonal. 1408 uses some of the same tactics, but in the end, its central conflict is more about a hero desperate to redeem himself than a monster that likes to play with its food.

Which is too bad, really.

SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQ.5
“Let’s Encyclopedia Brown this bitch.”

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“The Call of Cthulhu,” by H.P. Lovecraft

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The Call of Cthulhu, directed by Andrew Leman

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

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Context can be a terrifying thing.

Imagine—a room. Just a regular old room. Which isn’t scary, until you realize the room is full of people. Of course, that’s not all that scary either; except most of the people don’t look quite right. There’s the guy with the hockey mask and the machete. The woman with the severe facial burns and finger knives. The pale man with fangs and a yellowed tuxedo shirt. The wolf on two legs with the ragged brown hair.

Still not exactly the horror to end all things, but it’s certainly something, right? Especially when you notice the little girl hiding in the corner. She crouches in the shadows, staring in all directions. Nobody’s noticed her yet, but dear god, it’s not that large a room, and sooner or later, heads will turn. And then—ah Christ, it’ll be terrible.

But it’s not quite done yet. Because you haven’t noticed the orange and black streamers. Or the punch bowl. Or the Jack O’Lantern on the window sill. The guy lifts his hockey mask to take a drink, the woman takes off her finger knives to give a friend a hug, and you relax. The vampire’s fangs keep popping out, and the werewolf has a zipper down his neck. Somewhere, someone screams, but you recognize it coming from the television down the hall.

The little girl is fine. Just up past her bedtime, is all.

Except… Her eyes don’t quite fit her face. She leans into the light. She’s perfectly normal—but there’s a zipper down her neck, too.

By themselves, few things are inherently horrifying. The knife troubles us only because of the arm that wields it; the dark infects our dreams because of what we suspect may be lurking inside. The trick of any good horror writer is to provide a context for a threat that resists assimilation. Perhaps no other writer of fantastical fiction understood this quite as well as H.P. Lovecraft. Much has been said of Lovecraft’s ability to conjure up ancient gods and gibbering beasties, but the single most important unifying fact of his oeuvre, at least in terms of its effectiveness, is his contextual genius—knowing that presentation and circumstance are at least as important as the event itself. The gloom beneath your desk isn’t nearly as awful as the darkness of a moonless night; only Lovecraft could combine the two, and present us with some terrible day when we look down from our work to see inky blackness spreading across our legs, a blackness that can neither be accepted nor repelled.

The Cthulhu mythos is the perfect example of this narrative knack, providing us with just enough information to suspect what’s at stake, but never enough for us to be sure. While most horror fiction is content to show creatures operating behind the scenes of a recognizable world, Lovecraft works to reverse the standards, inducing a queer sort of vertigo; humanity becomes a mere afterthought to the existence of beings so monstrous and ancient that we can barely begin to comprehend our danger, let alone confront it.

The typical Lovecraftian narrator is a man who, for reasons never precisely described, has striven to touch the face of God—and having succeded, become immediately desperate to forget the existence of his own hands. Francis Wayland Thurston, the protagonist of “The Call of Cthulu,” is no exception. In fact, the story in many ways represents the Platonic ideal of Lovecraft’s work; it’s certainly his best known piece, and the titular nasty his most infamous creation. “Call” give us the rules, so to speak: there are beings old as the stars themselves called the Great Old Ones, who slumber beneath the sea in cities of hideously aberrant architecture, worshipped by the criminally malformed, awaiting only the correct conjunction of the cosmos to awaken and lay waste to our presumption of civilization. Cthulhu itself has achieved a level of fame nearly beyond that of its creator; but no matter how many plush dolls are made in its likeness, the bewinged octopoid monstrosity still possesses at least some power to shock. There’s something unsettling about its very design—so clearly ludicrous and yet undeniably affecting. Like the infamous anti-Euclidian angles which compromise its home, Cthulhu works because it shouldn’t work, and that paradox of nature unmans us.

Or it unmans Francis Thurston, at any rate. While he may be the quintessential Lovecraft “hero,” Thurston has the rare distinction of never coming in direct contact with any of the mystery he unravels. Despite a good deal of globe-trotting, Thurston spend all of his time playing catch-up to the research and adventures of those who’ve gone before him. In the end, all he has are notes, some newspaper clippings, and the accounts of near madmen. The closest he comes to the Big Bad itself is the bas relief left him by his grand-uncle. But these bits and pieces prove enough to drive him to despair; because once combined, the picture they form is of a universe where man is an after-thought, and beings of unfathomable awfulness lurk just past the edge of sight.

This particular vision is what makes Lovecraft’s work so memorable; but it’s also why adapting his fiction to film has proved such an elusive prospect. We have certain expectations when we watch a movie, and primary among those is that we get to see. You can play games, you can be oblique, you can imply and hint, but at some point, you’re going to have to show us something—as soon as we see the giant moving pyramid things of “The Shadow Out of Time,” we’re going to start giggling, and the whole experience is ruined. Unquestionably, a writer whose work which relies so heavily on the terror of concepts which are beyond human comprehension is going to suffer in a medium that demands explication. But part of the problem as well is our modern expectation for special effects. We’ve been spoiled by technology into believing that anything that can be imagined, can be represented; so once Cthulhu makes his appearance, and it’s just a slightly weirder-than-usual looking kaiju, we fail to be impressed.

The Call of Cthulhu looks to solve this problem by ducking it entirely. Shot entirely on video and running just under fifty minutes long, it posits a rather clever “what if”—what if, after “Call”’s original publication in Weird Tales in 1926, it was optioned by filmmakers and made into an early silent feature. By changing the rules, expectations are subverted. It’s simply another bit of context trickery; while we know that modern movie makers have access to any number of tools, the silent era was forced to work within a stricter set of guidelines. Camera movement was limited, acting required already hammy theater-trained professionals to over-sell every unheard line, and, most importantly, the effects required a more aggressive suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience than the films we see today. If the standard Lovecraft theme is of Man faced with horrors which he is utterly unequipped to deal with, why not make a movie in a time where the director and crew are nearly as unable to render the horrors of their story as the story’s narrator?

First, the drawbacks: no matter how much digital distress is done to the image, video does not look like film. From the opening minute, any illusion you might have that this really is some sort of lost classic is shattered—not only are the movie’s digital origins exceedingly clear, the director (Andrew Leman) chooses to begin with a camera movement that seems sorely out of place for the intended time period. Also, the actors, while not terrible, look modern. It’s hard to describe it otherwise; it’s like the old saw that certain faces go out of fashion as time passes, and without a bit of effort, it’s impossible to imagine any of them existing in the same period as Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney.

But to the good, once that effort is made—and since this movie is a bit off the beaten path, one can assume that any viewer will be going in with at least some willingness to cut slack—the rewards are surprisingly rich. While the actors might not seem quite chronologically appropriate, their performances are aided immeasurably by the conceit of silent film; what would seem hammy or flat in a sound picture works quite nicely, due largely to the written dialogue and direction. (Which isn’t to say the actors themselves are poor. Only that, like the special effects and everything else, you end up judging them by different standards.)

The music, constant through nearly the entirety of the running time, is excellent, both period appropriate and wonderfully evocative. It lends each scene a weight they might not otherwise have. The script, hewing very closely to Lovecraft’s original story, keeps the pace moving briskly, and (at least partly helped by the running time) the movie doesn’t lag or seemed particularly padded. There’s no forced love interest, no attempt to alter the source material into a more conventional structure. While working outside a studio meant money was that much harder to come by, it also gave the filmmakers more creative lee-way, and the results are there on the screen.

As for the effects work, it’s quite neat. There’s a lot of green screen, some on-camera effects and a bit of nifty stop motion at the film’s climax; it’s not exactly seamless (the green screen in particular is impossible to ignore), but rather that throw you out of the story, noticing the strings (so to speak) in this case actually involves you deeper. Having willingly accepted the film’s chronological conceit, as well as understanding the real world somewhat humble origins, one find’s one’s self much more willing to see faults as virtues. Besides, it’s not as though cheap (or cheaper) effects can’t be spooky in their own right. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but something about the gap between what I’m watching and what’s being hinted at behind the clay and sets, is sort of eerie.

Adaptation-wise, as previously mentioned, the movie plays straight pool. Thurston is still following in the footsteps of his deceased grand-uncle’s investigation; we still learn of the terrible swamp rituals interrupted by Inspector Legrasse and his men, and the film climaxes, like the story, on an island in the ocean that simply should not exist. While I haven’t seen all the film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, I don’t feel all that uncomfortable going out on a limb and saying this one is the most faithful. It’s a nice change of pace, really; one hopes (in vain, most likely) that other filmmakers might follow screenwriter Sean Branney’s example in the future.

Still, there are a few changes worth mentioning. There’s a framing device that shows Thurston (referred to in the credits as simply “The Man") in an asylum, passing his work to another and pleading that it be destroyed. It’s a hoary enough cliché that I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary; on the one hand, it shows us how much Thurston has been affected by his travels, but on the other, we’ve seen this sort of thing so many times before that it’s lost what little power to shock it might have had. It does make for a rather nice shot near the end where Thurston is wheeled away into darkness, though.

Thurston’s involvement with the Cthulhu cult is altered slightly as well. While he still never comes in direct contact with any cult member, his studies do drive him to a nightmare not entirely unlike the dreams recorded by his grand-uncle. While the sequence itself is inventive (I especially liked the giant, slightly burned books), it again feels overly familiar. The implication in the short story is that original dreamers, suffered largely by artists and poets (ie, the more traditionally “sensitive") over a specific period of time, were experiencing visions because of events on the other side of the world. Thurston’s dream happens after the most immediate danger is past, and while you can argue that it’s a dream more inspired by his nature of his current research than by any true psychic phenomenon, it still somewhat undercuts the power of the recorded visions.

Both the story and the film climax with the ill-fated crew of the Emma and their discoveries on the Pacific Ocean. In the story, the Emma finds its way blocked by the aptly-named Alert, a gunship manned by dangerous, vicious men who order the Emma to return the way they came. The Emma refuses, and after the Alert opens fire, her crew is forced to board the attacking ship. Due to the abhorrent nature of the Alert’s crew, the men of the Emma murder every crewmember to a man; then the captain decides to continue on their way as before, sailing the newly acquired Alert (the Emma having been sunk) in the direction the criminals were so desperate to keep them away from.

In the film, the Emma is set on by a tremendous storm, and just happens to bump into the abandoned Alert. The Emma is again sunk, this time by the weather, and the captain decides to visit an area on the maps as indicated by the Alert’s logbook, largely because he’s found a statue of Cthulhu and he’s curious.

This seems sort of clunky to me. I’m willing to bet that the filmmakers didn’t have time to shoot a tremendous ocean battle, but the timing of the storm is all wrong; the big storm in the story happens after the Emma’s crew has stumbled onto Cthulhu’s island, being an indication that the island has sunk back into the sea. Plus, having the captain decide to go on a new course just because he’s curious as to what killed an entire ship’s crew seems sort of unmotivated. At least in the original, the island was in the way of their original path. Here, everyone goes significantly out of their way to die horribly, and it’s a little silly.

One last minor complaint: as I mentioned, the acting works quite well, but I do think there was one slight misstep. Part of the point of “Call,” as with most Lovecraft’s stories, is the decent of the narrator from a position of skepticism to one of haunted, doomed certainty. In the film, however, the main character doesn’t have all that steep a slope to fall down. As played by Matt Foyer, he seems wasted and ruined even before he realizes what he’s dealing with; comparing the first scene of him in the asylum with him later in the movie, and there’s no real difference between the two. It’s somewhat traditional to present Lovecraft’s protagonists like Edgar Allan Poe’s—all twitches and nerves and bad dreams. But Lovecraft’s work is most effective when you can clearly see how it convinces and destroys even the heartiest of minds.

Still, these are all quibbles. Call of Cthulhu is a labor of love aimed squarely at Lovecraft enthusiasts, and on those terms it succeeds without question. Its faithfulness does it credit (they even have the wonderful moment on the island where a sailor falls into angle which should not exist), as does its cleverness. Whether not it entirely rises above its central gimmick is a matter of personal taste; speaking for myself, it’s an enjoyable curiosity, more notable for the potential it represents than for the film itself. I’m not sure I’d want to see more adaptations of Lovecraft “set” in that time period, but it does put lie to the assumption that his work can never be translated to the screen.

I can’t help but wonder if more could’ve been done with the concept. If Cthulhu and his ilk are beyond the ken of human experience, how creepy would it be to have their presence in a film prove beyond the experience of the film makers? What if you spent forty minutes with slightly cheesy Dr. Caligari sets and goofy fake moustaches, only to have the last ten minutes become something else entirely? The giant door pulls back, and we caught the actors being “scared”—only there’s a sound. A terrible sound. And the actors panic and realize they’re trapped, and the camera starts to shake, and inexorably we are drawn back to the open space. Where something rises up to blot out the sun.

Regardless, the movie is worth checking out. It’s one of the few adaptations I’ve seen that might actually have gotten Lovecraft’s approval.

SOURCE: QQQQ
SCREEN: QQQ
“Ph’nglui mglw ‘nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

When one is about to delve into the works of Clive Barker, one must keep certain things in mind. There are things you’re going to find and there are things you’re not going to find. You’re not going to find super-eloquent prose or particularly likeable characters. What you ARE going find, however, is sex and violence in sick and twisted forms. You’re going to see disfigurements of body and mind that are as imaginative as they are frightening. You’re going to see sexual desire inextricably linked with sublime agony. You’re going to see slavering monsters lurking just beyond the pale of human perception, but those monsters are all too human. In a way he’s the punk rocker of horror writers: his works are not philosophically deep, but they come at you hard and fast and leave an impact. And that has its appeal, too. Barker has no interest in being genteel. He’s not going to waste time explaining WHY this horrible thing he’s describing exists; he’s just going to lovingly describe the horrible thing, and hope that he’s made you unable to sleep tonight.

And sometimes that’s all I need, frankly.

Like any ambitious horror writer, Barker has tried to craft an overlying mythos for his work, a set universe that all his characters share. It’s perhaps a grand irony that the most enduring mythos associated with his work is the one he perhaps re-visited the least: the world of Lemarchand’s Box, the Cenobites, and the Gash. It’s hard to believe that Pinhead, one of the icons of modern horror film, got his start in a small modest novella that went mostly unnoticed among Barker’s more ambitious works. But that’s life, I guess.

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The Hellbound Heart

Our story begins with a young man named Frank, fiddling with a puzzle box. Frank, we are to learn, fancies himself a hedonistic adventurer, having travel the world over in search of pleasures. Along the way he’s committed crimes, he’s sampled drugs, and he’s seduced more women than he can remember, but now he’s bored. Firmly believing he’s sampled every pleasure this world has to offer, Frank is now seeking the pleasure of other worlds. To that end he’s acquired a magical puzzle box known as Lemarchand’s Configuration, which, when solved, will open a gateway to the realm of the Order of the Gash. According to legend, the Gash is a place where a group of ancient hedonists went to explore pleasures unavailable to them in this world, and Frank wants to join them.

When he finally solves the puzzle box, and the Cenobites of the Gash appear to take him back with them, however, Frank realizes that limitless pleasure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With endless time to experiment with physical sensation, the Cenobites have become twisted and sadomasochistic to the extreme, and before Frank realizes what he’s gotten himself into, he’s spirited away to spend eternity in their company.

Months later, Frank’s younger brother Rory brings his wife Julia back to the old family home, hoping to fix the place up and have a fresh start to his troubled marriage. He and their friends – among them Kirsty, the frumpy “pity friend” of the group who harbors a futile love for Rory – move them into the house, none of them aware that Frank had solved Lemarchand’s Box up in the drafty room on the second floor and still dwells there, trapped between dimensions, helplessly longing to escape the eternal torment the Cenobites subject him to. Another thing that no one else is aware of is that, before her marriage to Rory, Julia and Frank had a short passionate affair. To Frank it was just another conquest, but to Julia it was her last moment of physical passion before her marriage to decent but dull Rory. During the course of fixing up the house, Rory cuts himself and winds up bleeding all over the floor of the drafty room. This proves to be a happy accident for Frank: that blood, in combination with a tiny bit of living matter of his that still remains in the room, is enough to crack open the door between dimensions and give him a hope of rebuilding a physical body. Realizing that Julia is living in the house now, and hoping he can manipulate her just as easily as he did before, he appeals to her to bring him more blood. Julia, remembering the passionate affair she once had, and also turned on by the idea of Frank actually owing her something, agrees. It’s not long before she’s luring men up to the room and killing them, so Frank can suck their bodies dry of fluids and use them remake himself. Unfortunately, what neither of them count on is Kirsty dropping by one afternoon and finding out what’s going on…

The Hellbound Heart is an unlikely supernatural horror novel, as its primary focus is on the sexual soap opera between its human characters, rather than the horrible monsters waiting beyond the pale. This is to the best, as it’s the humans of the piece that are the real monsters, not the Cenobites. Both Julia and Frank are motivated by selfishness and lust. Frank could care less about Julia; she’s a means to an end, the end being his escape from the Gash. Julia, on the other hand, wants to “tame” Frank. To possess him, by making him dependent on her. And both of them are willing to murder relatively innocent people to further their goals. That makes them worse monsters than the Cenobites, who are at least honestly depraved and make no excuses for it.

The flaw of the book, however, is the flaw of Clive Barker as writer. Given that he started as a playwright, Barker is very good at crafting an image and evoking a mood. What’s he’s not as good at is backstory. He presents the reader with his characters, but makes only a perfunctory effort to provide motivations for their actions. Barker only gives you enough to get the story going, and a reader is left to infer a lot about the relationships between them. The character of Kirsty is the most glaring example. All we know about her is that she’s part of Rory and Julia’s circle of friends, and that she’s the mousey depressed one. We don’t know who she is, or why they bother to keep her around if no one seems to really like her (then again, I suppose every circle of friends has one of those…). She becomes a central character in the story – the heroine by default – and we don’t know a single damned thing of consequence about her. She’s a convenient plot device, is all. We’re not given enough to really identify with any of the characters, actually; they’re just there to move the plot along.

This makes the story more about theme than character, and at least the theme is a good one. The Hellbound Heart is a tale about desire and obsession gone wrong, about hedonism taken to a horrifically logical extreme (after all, what physical sensation does NOT simply become pain after a certain point?). It’s almost a dark fairy tale, a cautionary tale about not letting pleasures of the flesh get out of control. And at the same time, it’s a very small and intimate story. There are no vast-reaching cosmic machinations at work here; just the unraveling of the obsessions of a small group of people (granted, some of those people aren’t quite human anymore, but still…).

That being said, it’s an odd thing to consider that this book became the basis for Clive Barker’s most well-known – and most often-explored – fictional universe, a thing he probably never consciously intended. How did this happen? Through the movie adaptation.

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Hellraiser (1987)

The story in Hellraiser doesn’t waste much time getting going. Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) gets his hands on Lemarchand’s Box, solves it, and gets dragged into the Cenobite’s dimension by barbed chains within the first five minutes. Months later, Frank’s brother Larry (Andy Robinson), his wife Julia (Claire Higgins), and Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Larry’s daughter from a previous marriage, move into the old home. It’s clear from the very beginning that this family is disintegrating: Larry is desperate to “make things work” with Julia, and to at least try and have Julia and Kirsty get along well enough to be the same room together. Julia is cold and distant from the first time we see her, however, so it we’re pretty sure Larry is doomed to fail.

In the explorations of the long-abandoned family home, Julia finds the room where Frank was staying, and some of his personal possessions. While she has a surprisingly graphic flashback to her brief violent affair with Frank, Larry cuts himself on a rusty nail while moving furniture. After Julia and Kirsty ferry him off to the hospital, the floorboards of the room drink up the blood he’s spilled. Some time later, a pool of fluid – oddly, and no doubt intentionally, reminiscent of semen or afterbirth – is spewed out of the floorboards, and a skeletal wreck of a human being crawls out. Frank (now being played Oliver Smith with Sean Chapman’s voice overdubbed) has returned.

Later that night, Frank and Julia entertain guests who get drunk and tiresome very quickly, and Julia excuses herself early. Something compels her to return to the room where Frank waits for her. Frank begs her to help her, to spill more blood in the room, to heal him so he can finally escape the Cenobites forever. Remembering her passionate affair with Frank with fondness, Julia agrees to so do, and soon she’s luring lonely businessmen up to the attic room, where she bashes their brains in with a hammer and then lets Frank have his sustenance. As Frank recovers, he tells Julia about the Cenobites, and what they did to him, and impresses upon her the need to hurry with their work, so he can finally have a complete body and be free at least. Their arrangement works for a short while, but then Julia begins to crack under the strain. Having to commit murder on a regular basis is bad enough, but that combined with the stress of keeping the increasingly impatient Frank hidden from an increasingly curious Larry causes her to break down one day. Still clueless as to what’s really going on, Larry thinks she’s just stressed out by the relocation, and he urges Kirsty to visit with her and try to make nice with her. But when Kirsty finally does so, she comes at the worst possible time: right when Frank and Julia are dispatching their latest victim. She barely escapes, and somehow manages to get away with Lemarchand’s Box in hand. Playing with the Box later on, Kirsty accidentally solves it and releases the Cenobites. The horrific Cenobites are quite willing to drag her back with them to their dimension, but Kirsty offers them a deal instead…

Hellraiser occupies a revered niche among cult horror movies, largely due to good timing. By 1987, the horror genre had gone stale. Gone were the days of serious supernatural horror; by the mid-80s the slasher film was king, and even they were going downhill. By then there had already been six Friday the 13ths and three Nightmare on Elm Streets. Movies about wisecracking killers hacking up horny teens in creative and ironic ways were par for the course. To have a movie like Hellraiser come out was a breath of fresh air. Its thematic material is unconventional for a horror movie, and presented in a dead serious manner. The atmosphere of sexually-charged weirdness that permeates the film was something absent from its contemporaries. Sex and death have always been closely linked in horror film, but Barker does something different here. Lust is not punished with death by inexplicably puritanical killers. Rather, it is lust, twisted into sadism and murder, that motivates our killers. There are no innocents here; our protagonists are no less monstrous than the monsters they seek to escape. And at least our monsters have the decency to look monstrous. The struggle is not between good and evil, but between the grotesque and the even more grotesque.

When you consider the $1 million budget – a pittance, relatively speaking – and when you consider that this was the first feature film Clive Barker ever directed himself, with virtually no experience in film whatsoever, it’s a wonder the film got made at all, let alone be as good as it turned out. You see every penny of that $1 million on screen, predominately in the makeup effects. The Cenobites, members of Barker’s old acting troupe from his playwright days, are truly startling to behold. Their flesh is gray and corpse-like. Their eyes are black and empty, and their voices – or at least the voices of the two of that actually speak – sound dead and inhuman. Their disfigurements are as creative as they are grotesque, scarifications and piercings of such delicacy and intricacy that it’s clear a whole lot of thought was put into them. The leader, “Pinhead” (Doug Bradley), is of course the one everyone remembers, but my personal favorite is the “Chatterer.” He seems to me to be a more fully realized version of Barker’s idea of the Cenobites: he’s torn himself up so badly that he barely looks human any more, and he probably thinks he looks great.

Mention should also go to composer Christopher Young and his effectively creepy score. Like the film, his music is small but enormously effective, revolving mainly around this slightly off-kilter waltz that starts up whenever the Box is being discussed. The music really does convey the image of an ancient music box finally winding down, of a thing that was meant to be beautiful but has suffered the ravages of time and misuse and has become twisted and corrupt. Which is a pretty fair description of just about everyone in this story.

There are flaws to the film, however, and, just as in the book, the flaws can be attributed to Clive Barker himself. The mistakes made in the movie are those of a novice director. Although there are a few moments of cinematic brilliance – take the juxtaposition of Larry’s injury with Julia’s flashback, for example – for the most part Barker is a pretty workmanlike director. Very much from the “point and shoot” school. And there are several other scenes where Barker quite obviously wasn’t sure what to do, how to frame a shot, what motivation to give his actors. Barker also fails to successfully convey a sense of time and place; where never exactly sure where this story is supposed to be taken place. It was shot in England (and the old house was apparently Barker’s own house), and so the buildings and the locations are quite distinctly English. But half of the main cast are American actors, with American accents, and this includes Larry himself. It’s never fully explained how or why Larry would have an old family home in England, or how he’s able to drag up some boring old friends for a dinner party after moving in. And finally, if you look very carefully, you can see the exact moment the film runs out of money (and if you’ve seen it, you know where to look).

Flaws and all, though, it’s still a damn good horror movie. It’s a rare horror film that can successfully play with genre conventions and can genuinely disturb its audience with its imagery. This is a film with demonic creatures in it, but those demons are bound by rules that even they cannot break. This is a film where people die for sexual trespasses, but it is the woman who kills the man. This is a film where a cute terrified teenage girl still has the presence of mine to bargain with the monster for her life – and where the monster will actually consider her offer. That was a rare thing then, and it’s still a rare thing today.

Compare/Contrast:

It’s often the case when translating a book into a screenplay that not everything makes it up to the screen. Some books are just too long, plots too intricate, to film anything but the core of the story. And yet, The Hellbound Heart is such a short book. You’d think there wouldn’t be much to leave out. But left out some stuff is. The meager backstory of our characters that was told in The Hellbound Heart is gone. We never find out how Larry and Julia first got together, or what led to their current marital woes. They just…are. Perhaps this is related to the change in the ages of the characters. In the book all our characters were significantly younger than their movie counterparts: Rory, Julia, and their friends are all in their mid-twenties, while Frank himself is twenty-nine. This lends a certain poignancy and sympathy to the characters that is absent from the movie. These are young adults. These are people still figuring out who they are. Rory is the childlike “good brother,” who’s always done what he’s told and hasn’t quite figured out that that may not always be wise. Julia is the beautiful debutante who’s starved for adventure and excitement. From that standpoint, their behavior makes a little more sense. Of course Julia is bored with Rory, and of course Rory is clueless about it; they’re too self-absorbed to know any better. It’s unpleasant to think about, but it is understandable. More so than boorish movie-Larry and frosty movie-Julia, who just seem like they should know better by now. Although, making them older does serve to distance our characters even more than the usual teenage protagonists found in these films. And it does add more to the off-kilter feel of the film; these don’t seem like the right characters to be found in a horror movie. They’re too old and too ordinary-looking.

Making the main characters older might also have been an attempt to better deal with the presence of Kirsty, by making Larry old enough to have been married before and to have had a teen daughter. After all, in the book, Kirsty is just kind of there. In the book she’s the sad-sack friend whom Rory and Julia tolerate just because they feel sorry for her. Making Kirsty a relative at least gives the movie a better excuse to have her there. But on the other hand, it sends the film in an unpleasant direction. We have a scene where Frank attacks Kirsty, and his intentions toward her are…less than ambiguous, let’s say. She’s seen too much, and we know he’s going to kill her. What’s not clear is just what he’s going to do her before he kills her. In the book, this is pretty distasteful, but in the movie this is downright nasty. This is his brother’s daughter, for God’s sake! It gives Frank an entirely new level of depravity – not found in the book, but not entirely surprising in the movie. In the book, Frank is described as roguishly handsome, charming in a dangerous sort of way. The kind of bad boy that young women like Julia are always attracted to. It’s only after he gets his way that the sleaze in his nature comes out. Movie-Frank is sleazy from the start. We only see him whole in Julia’s flashbacks, where he is greasy and unshaven, and clearly not to be trusted. His seduction of Julia is brutal joyless rutting; he virtually rapes her. Granted, that’s not too far off from the book version, but at least from the book we know that Julia is remembering the affair through rose-colored glasses. No such thing happens in the movie. All we know is that some sleazy guy had his way with Julia, and somehow that makes her willing to kill for him.

I will say, however, that the for the most part, the movie handles the Cenobites better than the book. The Cenobites are creatures of twisted vision, and the movie conveys that vision better than the written word really could. Barker describes them in the book with somewhat oblique language, making references to scars and piercings but not going into a great many specifics. The movie-Cenobites are iconic. They are incarnations of BDSM carried to its logical extreme, all leather and metal and gangrenous flesh. And where the book did not give them names or characters, the movie gives us Pinhead. One of the great monsters of horror film, Pinhead conveys himself with a dignity that is rare among his movie-monster brethren. There is a certain imperiousness that defines his attitude during his parley with Kirsty, as if he’s just too important to be bothered with this puny mortal girl who summoned him by accident. You almost get the sense that she just pulled him away from a particularly good bit of torture, and he just wants to get this over with and get back to what he was doing. The affairs of the human race are, by and large, nothing to the Cenobites. They are not some elder race of dark gods clamoring to be released; they’re perfectly happy to poke each other with sharp objects in their own little universe and be left alone to do so. It’s only when people escape them that they deign to lower themselves by walking among us.

Of course, it’s the mechanics of the Gash, the Cenobites’ dimension, where the movie kind of goes wrong. In the book, we know from the beginning what the Cenobites are. We know what Frank thinks they are, and we realize along with him how wrong he was. In the movie, it’s not until Pinhead appears to Kirsty that we get a concrete idea of what they are. “Explorers in the further reaches of experience,” he tells her, “Demons to some, angels to others.” A bit vague, but pretty close to the original conception of the Cenobites. Super-hedonists who have gone to the point where pleasure and pain are no longer distinct sensations. Of course, the later movies in the Hellraiser series expanded on the mythology of the Cenobites: as the movies went on, we were to learn that the Cenobites are actually demons, and furthermore they were once humans who were lured to Hell by the promise of eternal pleasure (much like Frank himself was). It’s quite an intricate mythos that was eventually woven around the Cenobites, but it ultimately robs the story of its power. The most frightening idea put forward by The Hellbound Heart was that the Cenobites did it to themselves. Self-mutilation is perhaps the most psychologically repulsive of deviant behaviors, and this story plays heavily on the horror implicit in it. The idea that the Cenobites are human beings who derive some kind of sick pleasure from disfiguring themselves – and that there are other people who might want to be Cenobites – is perhaps scarier than any supernatural or alien monster. By instead turning the Cenobites into just another instrument of the Devil, much of what made them truly scary is taken away. But fortunately, there are few indications of that theme here in the first movie. When taken by itself, Hellraiser remains pretty scary and depraved.

(I should probably say a few words about Lemarchand’s Box itself. As a concept it’s a great one, a seemingly innocuous puzzle box that opens the Gates of Hell. There’s something Lovecraftian in it, in the idea of using arcane geometry to punch a hole in time and space. The featureless, beautifully-lacquered music box described in the book is quite fascinating, a challenging puzzle that plays a tune of increasing complexity with each solved piece. It evokes a Renaissance aesthetic, a melding of artistic elegance with clear scientific purpose. It’s a beautiful thing that provides no real indication of the horrors it unlocks. The demented Rubik’s Cube of the film, that grew more and more easily solved with each new movie, is less interesting. There’s a different aesthetic to be found in this Box. The movie version looks sinister and alien, carved with strange abstract patterns inlaid with metal. This thing looks like bad news long before anyone opens it, and the fact that it seems so easily opened doesn’t exactly help. The Box is supposed to be hard to solve; you don’t want to accidentally summon Pinhead. Nothing seems to piss him off more.)

All in all, both the book and the movie suffer from the same faults: great idea, great imagery, less-than-great execution. And that’s pretty much a problem that has haunted Clive Barker throughout most of his career. But if that’s Barker’s fault as author, then it’s not his alone. Many horror writers have the same problem, and it’s only that Barker’s images are so unlike most of what other writers do that his execution problems stand out more. And if the movie Hellraiser had one good idea behind it, that was frankly one more than a lot of its contemporaries had at the time.

And again, sometimes that’s all I need.

Source: QQQQ
Screen: QQQ1/2

B-FEST 2006

The recappening

B-movie fandom is one of the more modest-sized fan subcultures; we rank somewhere above Star Trek slash fiction writers, somewhere below the Goth bloggers, and frankly, that’s just how we like it. Nobody blames us for anything, nobody expects anything of us, so we’re free to wile away our lives watching hour upon hour of poorly edited garbage, never entirely sure why we do what we do (individuals have reasons, but on the group level, things get fuzzy), but never worried we’ll be called upon to explain anything. Oh sure, we’re part of the general geek climate that’s slowly but surely devouring pop-culture, but you don’t see a lot of T-shirts with Pia Zadora or Ray Dennis Steckler on ‘em. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is about as close to mainstream as our particular perversion ever got, and even that had to struggle for ratings for most of it’s lifetime.

So we don’t get the huge conventions with their speakers and their booth babes (probably for the best, I can’t imagine seeing someone dressing up as that grandmother in Space Mutiny and not running away very fast) and their sponsors and shiny lights. We get movie marathons. I suspect that this, ultimately, is what all of us really want anyway: to be stuck in the dark with our fellow fans and encouraged to hurl insults at the screen for as long as time allows. B-Fest, a tradition going back a quarter of a century, is currently the apex of such fesitivals, a 24 hour marathon of bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, and bad taste. Held the last weekend in January at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, B-Fest is the ultimate experience in crap movie fandom, a test of wits and fortitude that no other official movie marathon has yet to touch. It’s not for amateurs (but we show up anyway), nor is it for the faint of heart- but when it comes to cinemasochism, nothing else comes close.

2006 was my third Fest; if your curious, a recount of the previous two can be found elsewhere on this site. But of course, each new Fest brings with it new movies and terrifying new challenges…

PRE-FEST

If you’re fortunate enough to have ties to an on-line community, the activities before and after the marathon are nearly as important as the marathon itself; for many of us, that Thursday and Friday (pre-6 pm, of course) is a rare opportunity to spend time with some of our closest friends face to face. It feels as though you cram a whole year’s worth of jokes and conversation into those precious few hours, and while this can be a bit disorienting (especially for someone like me, who’s never been particularly comfortable in groups) (um, okay, I guess that would also include two-thirds of my fellow Festers), it’s exhilarating as well, and worth every strung out minute.

I arrived in Chicago Thursday around eleven, and soon met up with Chris Holland of Stomp Tokyo fame. Chris had graciously offered to let me tag around with him in his rental car (Carzilla), so I spent the early afternoon with him as he picked up Chris Magyar (director of Making a Killing, best known to BMMBer’s as Icrywolf), met up with Amy Morrison (AmyMo), and paid Ken Begg of Jabootu a visit. Chris H. was then kind enough to drop me off at the Best Western where most of the BMMBers were meeting up.

It was good times hanging out with Chris squared and Amy (and, briefly, Ken), but I did feel like sort of a latecomer to a party that’s been going on for years; so walking in the door and having Josh (Hen Grenade) thrust his young son Darwin in my arms felt a lot like coming home. A home inhabited by bizarrely loud, cheerful people with a shockingly large collection of obscure one-liners, but home nonetheless. Everybody was either there or arrived there soon after- Tim (Telstar), Jessica (Juniper), Sean (Osco Sean), Adam (Preacher Quint), Chad (3Beerman), Tim G. (Professor Mortis), Josh S. (Bergerjacques), Ray (Nameless Ray Schaff) and some other names and faces that tragically escape me. We talked a lot, then went out to dinner at the Chinese Buffet (now inexplicable re-named Seafood Buffet, but with the same basic foods) and met up with the two Chrises and Amy at Hala Kahiki for drinking and waitress-frightening. The evening ended back at the hotel, where the more foolhardy among tasted Osco-brand scotch (ack!) and riffed on the colossally dull Larry Buchanan movie, It’s Alive.

Then it was Friday, and while others braved the city for sights and shopping, I snagged a spare hotel bed (thanks again to Quint, Mortis and Juniper for letting me crash in their room) and got an extra hour of precious sleep. Then it was off to the Norris Center at Northwestern, for some more socializing; everybody staked out seats in the auditorium, then grabbed a last minute meal for some much needed sustenance before the start of the Fest proper. I had a brief chance to catch up with Megalemur, and bumped into Paul (Kodos, owner and operator of the superb The Adventures of the Smart Patrol) and his friend Melissa (of the equally excellent Shakespeare’s Sister), but then it was into the theater- fresh pain awaited.

B-FEST

6:05 pm: Superman IV: the Quest for Peace

This was not the original choice for opening movie, but when some changes were made to the schedule to make for a more effective line-up, Christopher Reeve’s exercise in wish-fulfillment and Komedy got bumped to the top; a move that managed to get a somewhat unimpressive group of movies started on the right note. Reeve was a talented actor, and almost certainly a very nice guy, but he was not a writer, and Superman IV suffers for it (along with anyone who was the misfortune of watching the damn thing). Lots of terrible jokes, painfully sincere forced sentiment, and characters acting in inexplicable ways: Superman himself gets the worst of it in this regard, manifesting new powers, a formerly latent streak of fascism, and an inexplicable lust for farce. So much crappiness on display, from the mediocre effects (they can’t even get the flying bits right anymore) to the choppy plotting, that it’s hard to pinpoint the worst of it; still, the ten minute sequence where Superman/Clark Kent goes on a simultaneous double date with Lois Lane and, um, whomever Muriel Hemingway was playing takes the cake for me. Nuclear Man is stupid, sure, but this “Three’s Company” crap has nothing to do with the storyline- what little there is- and makes Superman out to be an absolute jerk. And a manipulative jerk at that; at one point early in the film, we see him (as Kent) throw Lois Lane off a building, then suit up as Superman and catch her, take her on a flying tour of an Imax movie (in an obvious throwback to the first film), and then suck the memories out of her with a Forget-Me-Now Kiss. Apparently, Supes has decided to give all that “Truth and Justice” crap a pass and just do whatever he damn well pleases. Which could make for an interesting movie, I guess; but instead, we get this mess.

7:40 p.m.: Creature From the Black Lagoon in 3-D!

Creature was the first movie in the schedule that I wasn’t entirely sure about- it’s a terrific monster picture, with some of the best imagery of all the Universal horror films, but B-Fest, in my admittedly limited experience, is not really about “terrific.” There are some great movies that fit naturally into a good Fest schedule, but those are movies which succeed in spite of their budget restrictions- Creature seems more a standard entry in a respected franchise,

Whether or not it belongs in a traditional B-Fest line-up, it was a pleasure watching it on the big screen for the first time; in 3-D, no less, that actually sorta worked. One of my favorite memories from this year was watching the sequence where the heroine swims through the lagoon while the creature stalks her from below, and having everyone around me fall silent as we marveled in the eerie beauty of it. In a way, it was as positive a communal experience as the riffing was.

Admittedly, Creature was the first movie to suffer from severe volume issues, and that enthrallment may have been more a result of my own deafness than any audience-wide effect.

9:05 pm: Godzilla (1998)

I saw this movie in theaters, and I kinda liked it the first time. That’s right; I recognized the lousy writing, unappealing characters and uninvolving plot, but I liked the special effects, and a couple of the actors, enough that I didn’t mind. Besides, the pedigree behind the camera (Roland Emmerich, best known at that point for Independence Day) ensured that I went into the film with appropriately lowered expectations. Besides, I wasn’t a fan of Toho’s Godzilla, the true Big G, so it’s not like anybody was lousing up a beloved icon.

Things change in eight years or so. I’m still not a huge Godzilla guy, although I’ve a great deal more appreciation for the character than I used to; but man, this movie is definitely not the sort of thing you want to sit through more than once. I made the mistake of trying to do just that, and found that not only do the horrid bits stay horrid, the stuff I used to like had lost what little novelty it originally had.

So going into the B-Fest showing, I wasn’t particularly enthused. I didn’t share the rabid hatred of most of my fellow Festers for GINO (Godzilla In Name Only), and the movie was just so goddamn long, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for over two hours of deep in the bone mediocrity.

Short answer: I wasn’t. Or, hell, maybe I would’ve been, but I decided instead for a quick nap and Internet check. So I caught the first fifteen minutes and the last half hour, got a few good riffs in, and felt suitably refreshed for the next stretch.

Raffle for Door Prize

I won nothing. In some situations, this would be considered a bad thing, and there were some utterly sweet prizes handed out here; however, any contest that lets me leave without hanging Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot! from my neck like the digital albatross it is, is a good contest.

11:45 p.m. “The Wizard of Speed and Time”

For those of you who attended B-Fest this year (which, I’m going to assume, makes up at least half of the people reading this), you may have noticed that I haven’t been mentioning the shorts. There’s an excellent reason for this- I didn’t take notes. And while I remember the shorts I did see, I don’t really remember what time they were shown, and I’m sufficiently anal not to want to just list them at random intervals.

I’m sure about “The Wizard,” at least, if only cause it’s listed on the official schedule. A long time favorite among the Fest crowd, “WoSaT” is just one of those things you have to experience yourself to really understand- I could tell you what happens, but it’s just the goofy exuberance of the thing that makes it such a treat.

The rest of the shorts were, by and large, excellent. One in particular, “You Are What You Eat,” was so freakishly bizarre that it was either accept you were insane while watching it or curl up under your chair and start eating somebody’s shoe.

Midnight: Plan 9 From Outer Space

Despite my previously mentioned refreshment, I made my way to the lobby for most of Plan 9, as is my usual routine. I can’t entirely explain why I do this; true, a number of Festers in my social group use the annual Ed Wood showing as a chance to socialize in comfy chairs, but for the most part these are people who’ve say through a B-Fest showing of the movie at least once. I never have. I guess I just wanted to hang out with the cool kids (no cigarettes, regrettably) the first year, and it stuck.

I must’ve been in a mood this year, though, cause I ended up going back into the theater for the last ten minutes of the movie. Having done so, I kinda wish I’d stuck it out for the whole thing- I haven’t seen Plan 9 enough times to be bored by it, and I am missing a rare opportunity to get hit in the head with a few packages of paper plates.

1:20 a.m. Coffy

Pam Grier! Sid Haig! Jack Hill! And lots of nudity and the good old ultra-violence. The post Plan 9 spot has become inofficially the blaxplotaition slot of the line-up, and while Coffy had already played a few years prior, and I’d already seen it at home myself, but none of that detracted from the sheer kickassery of seeing on the big screen. You really need a pick-me-up at this point, a movie that will held you accept the fact that yes, you are now staying up later than your bedtime and, if you’re hardcore, you’re going to be up for a very long time. Coffy was perfect- we got some good riffing in, and also just enjoyed the hell out of a movie that is much, much better than it had any reason to be.

3:15 a.m. Gas-s-s-s!

An escaped bit of chemical weaponry offs the entire adult population of the world; the survivors respond by becoming broad stereotypes in order to make a satirical point. Hilarity ensues. I’ve been informed by numerous people, whose judgment I had not previously had cause to question, that this movie wasn’t so bad- maybe someday, when the shakes have stopped, I’ll be willing to give it another chance. As is, it’s probably the movie that came closest to breaking me in the line-up; it wasn’t utterly horrid, and there were enough random actors (Ben Vereen! Bud Cort! Talia Shire! Cindy Williams!) and zany happenings to keep ennui from sinking in, but after a while, everything just started to mesh together into an amorphous, Komic blob that sucked on my dwindling energy like a bad set of fluorescent lights. The characters spent most of the movie intent on finding the Oracle, who would presumably deliver some sort of sage advice ala “One Tin Soldier” (Peace on earth, love thy neighbor, gosh everything would work better if we just gave up all our stuff and had sex all the time- dammit, I want that last one on a T-shirt), but when they do find the Oracle- cue Matrix jokes- the damn thing just keeps on going. All of a sudden all those “Moebius strip of a movie” riffs ain’t so funny anymore, eh college boy?

I’m not completely sure about this, but as a.) other people have mentioned it and b.) I’m writing a recap, which I only do after the Fest is over, I’m going to assume that I haven’t gone all Brazil on you, and the movie did, eventually, end.

4:40 a.m. Tromeo & Juliet

I’ve never seen a Troma movie. I sorta wanted to see this one; but after a few B-Fests, you learn how important it is to catch sleep when you can, and even more crucial, at timing your naps well goes a long way towards assuring their effectiveness. I’d rather have napped during Earth Girls Are Easy, as I actually own that one, but 8:35 a.m. meant sunlight and Northwester students accumulating in the lobby, so I went the safe route and grabbed a spare cushion for some much needed eyelid light-leak checking. Judge by the scarcity of spare cushions and the paucity of zonked out movie fans, I was not alone in this.

6:55 a.m. Graffiti Bridge

Judging by who you asked, this was either Deep Hurting or a cakewalk; while I’ve never been a fan of Prince’s music or his particular, um, style, I found this arrogant, confusingly symbol heavy muddle of a movie to be a breeze. It was the nap that saved me, I think, as this is not a very good movie, or a very bad movie- it’s not very anything, just dull and pretentious and self-congratulatory. Prince plays the Kid (which I guess is his character from Purple Rain), vying for musical supremacy with Morris Day (also from Purple Rain) on Sesame Street: After Dark. A woman shows up named Aura, who’s apparently supposed to be a muse, some songs are performed, sex is had, there’s a tragic death that reunites the various warring factions and the two houses mourn the loss of their dead, who is meanwhile slipping down a back alley probably congratulating herself on swiping a few of Prince’s choicer outfits.

I dunno. It was crap, but I felt up to riffing it. Plus, the musical numbers every few seconds helped it go by quicker even if the music did, for the most part, bore me to tears. Morris Day was a hoot, and Prince was, well, Prince.

8:35 a.m. Earth Girls are Easy

A misstep in the line-up, this mid-80’s vehicle for Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum is, by its very nature, unriffable; a campy comedy that never takes itself or any of its characters particularly seriously, it proved frustratingly joke proof. It’s not a bad movie, and I was surprised that it didn’t annoy me nearly as much as it had the first time I’d watched it (when a friend gave me a copy on VHS because “it has Jim Carrey in it!”), but it failed to be suitably invigorating on any real level. It’s the perfect movie to stick on in the background while you surf the web or write long overdue reviews, just not the sort of thing you want to help you break into a brand new day of awakeness.

10:15 a.m. Breakfast Break

Mmmmm. Breakfast. Along with all that sunlight and student stuff I mentioned earlier. You don’t really meet the new day at B-Fest; it’s more like a brief truce between two warring parties who loathe each other, but can’t help but admit the other’s inevitable existence.

Anyway. I think I had a muffin and some juice.

10:45 a.m. Rhinestone

Lovecraftian horror time, kiddos. It’s fairly disturbing to realize there was actually a point in time where Sylvester Stallone’s star power was strong enough for him to say, “Somebody film me while I sing like a strangled wallaby,” and have somebody actually do just that. In yet another retelling of the Pygmalion myth, Dolly Parton plays a country singer who makes a bet with her sleazy manager (Ron Leibman, who I knew mostly as Rachel’s dad from “Friends”) that she can take any person and turn them into a credible singer in just one week; if she wins the bet, he’ll tear up her contract, if he wins, she’ll sleep with him.

Already I’m a bit lost, since, while I think Dolly Parton is a terrific lady, I’ve never thought she really registered as much of a sex symbol; but okay, that’s a personal reaction (to me, she’s more of an icon than an actual warm body, if you follow), she’s got that bosom and the cute face and stuff going, so I’ll accept it. Good thing, because the biggest suspension of disbelief arrives in a battered taxicab, at the climax of one of the movie’s many Komedic sequences: Sylvester Stallone is the man Dolly has to turn into a singer, and god help us all.

Stuff follows. Richard Farnsworth shows up, as Dolly’s dad, as does Tim Thomerson as Dolly’s contentious ex, and they’re pleasant enough while they’re on screen. A “romance” supposedly develops between Stallone and Parton, which isn’t pleasant in any way. Plus, there’s some very bad music. What’s truly excellent is that we get some more volume problems, meaning the last third of the movie is REALLY GODDAMN LOUD. Bleah.

12:45 p.m. Cobra Woman

An actual b-movie! Black and white and everything! Only, I’m getting pretty wiped out at this point, and I keep nodding enough. There was a plot with a hero and his Indian buddy, Sabu, and there was a cobra and I do remember a woman doing a slinky dance in front of that cobra, and somebody got killed. And there was a pretty sweet spike pit.

2:20 p.m. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2

See, there are these babies. And they are damn smart babies. I’m not up on why they’re so damn smart, as I have not seen the original classic Baby Geniuses, and I was downstairs in the cafeteria getting some lunch for the first fifteen minutes of the movie. The damn smart babies (DSBs) live with Scott Baio and Vanessa Angel, who are married- I’m not sure if it’s a foster thing or a biological one, although the idea of Scott Baio being responsible for a passel of DSBs is pretty snicker-worthy. They’ve got this jail-bait babysitter (I think Hen Grenade might have dubbed her as such; whoever said it first is dead right) and they inadvertently get ahold of a CD that has all the secret plans of Jon “Pretty far off the river now, aincha?” Voight, who wants to rule the world through, yawn, mind control.

Eventually the DSBs (along with their JBB) get rescued from some thug by a genius toddler super-hero, who takes them back to his Chucky Cheese on acid hideout, where he proceeds to explain everything and provide the JBB with a boyfriend named Zack. (Yeah, I really need to talk to my agent about who he licenses my name to.)

Sound cute? I suppose I failed to mention the constant Komedy, the freaky CGI mouths, the terrifying holograms that assault the wisecracking infants in the TSH’s layer, Jon Voight’s goofiness, and the action sequences. Lord, the “action” sequences.

This movie shouldn’t exist. Apparently, because there is no God, Baby Geniuses made enough money to warrant a sequel. A sequel that has been stripped of whatever cleverness or integrity the original possessed- and since the original probably didn’t possess any, we’re talking going through the paint and scraping bare wood here. It wasn’t a bad B-Fest flick, but any parent shows this to their kids, their DVD player needs to be impounded.

3:55 p.m. King Kong (1933)

I love this movie. The characters, while sketchy, are likeable; the story moves fast with precious little flab; and the main attraction, Kong himself, is still remarkably entertaining and convincing, despite the advances those special effects folks have made over the years. So when I say that this movie has absolutely no business being played at B-Fest, you’ll understand I’m not disparaging the film’s quality. Far from it- Kong is waaaaay too good to be here. In my experience, B-Fest tried to end up on a crowd pleaser, either a Toho Godzilla picture of something equally rousing, and I suppose Kong is a clear step in that direction, but, man, it just feels wrong to watch something that everybody else knows about. I can’t explain myself better than that; I know there were some folks who enjoyed seeing this on the big screen, and I certainly wasn’t despondent about it, but ultimately, it was a mistake. If I’m going to see a movie like this in a theater, I’d rather not have stayed up watching crummy movies for the previous twenty-two hours.

(Originally Kong was scheduled to play much earlier- I was one of many urging that it be stuck at the end, and in spite of the previous sentence, I still say that was a good choice. The movie wasn’t going to work anywhere you put it; if you close on it, you can at least pay lip-service to ending with a giant monster pic.)

Post Fest

And that was that. There was the usual post-Fest festivities; I hung out at Paul and Holly’s place (of Jabootu fame) with Stomp Tokyo’s Chris, Icrywolf Chris, Lodore, Ken Begg (most famed Jabootu priest), Juniper, and a bunch of other fun folks. I ended crashing- drunkenly- on an excellent cot provided by Ken in his home. Oh lord, that first post-B-Fest sleep is so sweet; especially when it doesn’t involve having to sleep on somebody’s floor.

Sunday was more fun with Chris squared and the magnificent Lodore. I was feeling pretty funky by then; I hate to say it (cause it makes me sound like one of those dudes that cringes from the sun) but being around so many “new” people, and having so much to do crammed into such a short period of time, kind of breaks my mind. In the last few hours, I was both deeply content and seriously considering throwing myself off the nearest bridge; didn’t help that the folks I was with (awesome though they were) had known each other for years, and I felt like a sixteen year-old instead of my oh so mature 26 going on 27.

I only mention this admittedly bland personal detail to try and be honest in my re-cap- in a way different from my previous two B-Fests, this wasn’t an unqualified travel success. I don’t know if I’m just getting more familiar with the experience (and thus getting some of that sweet contempt that we all know familiarity brings), or if it just hit me at a weird period of my life, or, I dunno, gamma rays. Friggin’ gamma rays. (Well, this was the first year I had a cell phone with me…) It was worth it, but it wasn’t quite as easy as I remember; hopefully next year I will benefit from the joy of lowered expectations.

Still. As I listen to another one of Telstar’s masterful B-Fest mixes, and I think back on how great it was to see everybody old and new, I gotta say- it’s all good. Even when it isn’t, it’s B-Fest, which is better than usual.

SOURCE:

Christine, by Stephen King
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I didn’t own a car till I was in my twenties, but my two closest friends in high school had their own wheels by junior year. Both cars were clunkers, but Dave’s was the worst, I think–apart from the toxic waste in the back seat (you had to be very, very careful about where you put your feet, especially if you wanted your sneakers back), part of the bumper was held together with duct tape and there was something wrong with the engine. Whenever he started it up, the car screeched like a dying mule.

I went on a lot of rides in that car, and whatever its imperfections, I was always glad to see (and hear) it coming; as much as he bitched about it, I think Dave loved that hunk of crap even more. Because when you’re a teenager, what you really want to grow up and be is an adult. You can’t do that sitting in your bedroom listening to Dad vacuum and Mom swearing at the television. You need to get gone, to get away from them; you need the illusion that you can go anywhere you want whenever you want. And for that, you need a car.

The first time we see Arnie Cunningham–in fact, the first true moment of story, after a portentous prologue–he’s riding home from work with his best friend Dennis Guilder. They’re in Dennis’s car, and the more we learn of Arnie, the more we learn that, up until now, he’s always been more comfortable as a passenger than as a driver. But then he sees Christine and is instantly smitten. Christine’s a 1958 cherry red Plymouth Fury, and she’s in terrible, terrible shape; but Arnie immediately decides to buy her, in spite of Dennis’s strong misgivings. When Arnie gets home and tells his parents, they’re furious. Instead of backing down as he normally would, Arnie stands up for himself, even going so far as to rage against his mother for her constant need to run his life. In the end, Arnie finds a place for Christine at Darnell’s Garage, a storage space and front for Darnell’s criminal enterprises. It’s a compromise, but it gives Arnie a chance to fix up the Fury; but when he starts working on her, she improves at a pace beyond miraculous. In fact, the repair work Arnie does isn’t just great–it’s flat out impossible. But since none of the people who see the car ever compare notes, they all dismiss whatever uneasy suspicions they might have. After all, what else could it be? It’s not like the car is actually fixing herself.

As Christine improves, so does Arnie: he loses the acne that’s haunted him since the onset of puberty, and gets enough confidence to ask out Leigh Cabot, a transfer student who until then had been dodging any and all comers. Arnie starts working for Darnell at the junkyard to earn some money, and some of the stuff he does for Darnell isn’t exactly legal. But whatever he’s doing, he seems much happier now. For the first time in his miserable life, Arnie’s no longer losing.

Only–Christine. Something’s not quite right about Christine, even beyond the miracle repairs. The car creeps Leigh out, throwing a wet blanket over their necking and a confusing shadow over their relationship; even worse, something is happening to Arnie himself. His personality is changing, and while his increased aggressiveness is making life a little easier, it’s also threatening to destroy the decency that made him such a good guy at heart.

The situation worsens. Some punks from school wreck Christine, driving Arnie half-mad with rage and grief; but while anybody with any knowledge of automobiles considers the damage lethal, Arnie gets her running again in no time at all. And then, the punks get killed in shockingly violent hit and run accidents. No witnesses. Arnie has a convenient alibi for each death, but that doesn’t stop the police from getting suspicious. And it doesn’t stop Leigh and Dennis, who finds himself falling in love with his best friend’s girl, from drawing their own horrible conclusions…

In many ways, the plot of Christine is standard issue horror stuff: you have a disempowered loser who finds something that makes him powerful, he starts revenging himself on his enemies, and then it all comes crashing down when the loser finds out he can no longer control the power he’s unleashed. I call it “geek tragedy,” and there have been hundreds of movies, books, and television shows that run along the same lines. It’s a story pattern so archetypal that you don’t even acknowledge how familiar it is. There’s the scene where the loser is shown powerless in the face of bullies, there’s his gradually growing self-esteem, there’s the cute girl who shows interest in the ungeeked geek, there’s the worry that things are going too far, the inner turmoil, etc. Shelley’s Frankenstein serves as an antecedent of sorts, but modern versions have changed the gothic anti-hero of Victor Frankenstein into a long line of shuffling, snot-nosed social outcasts, whose only source of power is in obscure scientific or supernatural sources. Victor was punished because he tried to play God, but with characters like Arnie, God isn’t involved; we are asked to mourn them even as we shudder in fear at their attempts to break free from the social shackles into which they were born.

So, it’s been done, and it will probably keep getting done from now till doomsday. Most genre novels run down familiar, deeply worn ruts; what distinguishes successes from failures is the quality of the execution, like how well-drawn the characters are, how effectively seductive and horrifying the eventual threat turns out to be, and the myriad other small details that make up the parts of the narrative that aren’t, strictly, plot.

The characters in Christine are a mixed bunch. Arnie is the sort of outcast King excels at sketching in, a more likeable version of Harold Lauder in The Stand or Carrie. Unlike those two, Arnie is mostly free from the undercurrent of self-loathing that King generally invests his geeks with; which isn’t to say that Arnie is all that fond of himself, but we never get the feeling that the author is wrestling between compassion and contempt in writing him. This makes Arnie easier to like, but it also takes some of the tension and honesty out of characterization–one of the reasons Harold Lauder is so compelling in The Stand is that he’s never watered down to be more appealing. He has all sorts of icky sexual fantasies, he’s annoying, he’s ugly. While these traits may serve to push the reader away, they also lend a realism to Lauder that many of the heroes of that novel lack; he’s memorable, and his eventual fate is all the more moving because you weren’t manipulated into pitying him. You aren’t particularly manipulated into pitying Arnie, either, but he’s more generic than he should be, and because of this, it’s difficult to find the emotional center of the story.

The novel’s sometimes narrator, Dennis, doesn’t make it any easier. He’s likeable, but not much else–we know he plays football, that he has a family with the requisite comedy sibling, that he’s Arnie’s best friend, and that’s about it. Sure, a third or more of the book is from his point of view, but most of his observations are the sort of observations any narrator would give us, and there’s nothing that makes him stand out as an individual apart from his presence in the story he’s telling. Probably the most interesting thing about him is his friendship with Arnie; the scenes where that friendship contrasts against the person Arnie is slowly becoming are excellent. On his own, though, Dennis is just a generic hero, no more, no less. Nothing particularly wrong with that–genre novels are full of his ilk, and King makes him more appealing than John Saul would’ve–but it’s indicative of a larger problem. There’s very little spark to the story, and what little there is, while nice enough, doesn’t raise the whole thing to more than a slightly-better-than-average piece of disposable entertainment.

The other major character in the novel, Leigh Cabot, is far blander than her male counterparts; she’s in the book for two reasons, to show us how Arnie is becoming “cooler” after buying Christine, and to give Dennis a way to betray his best friend and bring on the final confrontation. There are a few chapters from her perspective, but she’s mostly just horny and scared; and whenever we see her through someone else’s eyes–like, say, Dennis’s–that narrative pauses so we can get a paragraph or two about how incredibly hot she is. It eventually becomes unpleasant to read, because she seems less a character than an object lust after. It’s understandable that Dennis would view her through the haze of teenage hormones, but we never really get sense of her as an actual person. We’re supposed to value her because she’s young and attractive and pure, and that’s about it.

The secondary characters fare a bit better. Will Darnell, the crooked garage owner, is a colorful scoundrel who proves to be too clever for his own good. He’s crafty, vulgar and just as memorable as he needs to be. Dennis’s family fade into the woodwork, despite some occasional conversations with Dad and the bratty younger sister–they suffer from the same basic disease as Dennis himself, “generic attributitus.” Archie’s parents, though, are real winners, and it’s with them that another common theme of King’s comes to the forefront: controlling, tyrannical motherhood. Arnie’s mom, Regina, is the very picture of an upper-middle class emasculating viper, having spent the entirety of her marriage dictating the lives of both her husband and her son. Arnie’s father, Michael, takes this as par for the course, and Arnie had accepted it as well, at least until Christine came along; but once he has his car, he’s starts fighting back on increasingly venomous terms.

It’s hard to know where you’re supposed to feel pity or contempt for the adult Cunninghams. Dennis himself is split between the two, and there are more than a few swipes at the sort of college educated ivy league elitists that they’re supposed to represent. On their own, Regina and Michael are compelling enough, and it’s easy to believe that someone like Arnie came from such a household. But viewed in the context of the novel’s other female characters, Regina becomes somewhat troubling. Leight Cabot, as mentioned, serves largely as the clichéd target of young male hormones–she accomplishes little, beyond worrying and forcing other people to rescue her. Dennis’s mom is, while sweet, basically a joke–she spends her time at creative writing courses, crafting elegant tales of intellect like, “Did Jesus Have a Dog?” Ultimately, the only woman of any real initiative is Regina. While she’s not entire loathsome, it is odd that the only human female with any personality is such a raging bitch.

Whether or not this is a problem is really up to the reader. Stereotypically, automobile obsession is a male concern, and the dearth of well-crafted, sympathetic women here just brings more attention to the novel’s most powerful, if voiceless, female presence: Christine herself. Arnie’s relationship with Christine is in many ways much more profound than his relationship with his girlfriend. While he professes to love Leigh, Christine is the one he always goes back to, and in her twisted way, she’s the only one who can give him the unconditional acceptance he so desperately craves. The more society turns its back on you, the stronger the desire to find someone, anyone, who will welcome you no matter how ugly you might be; and if the cost turns out to be all you have, you’re willing to pay because it’s all your worth.

As the novel’s main horror, Christine (and her former owner Ronald LeBay), is effective, perhaps inordinately so. Her powers are never specifically defined for us; apart from LeBay’s brother who appears only to give us some colorful backstory and dark hints, there’s no older, wiser character to cite precedent and help our heroes determine how to save themselves. This makes sense–if some wizened used car salesman appeared spouting tales of killer automobiles, the absurdity that lurks behind the concept would be even harder to ignore. The Plymouth Fury with a grudge against the world is a unique occurrence in this particular fictional universe, and if you can accept that, you won’t have much trouble suspending your disbelief for anything else in the book.

Unfortunately, this lack of demarcation means that Christine herself is damn near omnipotent, able to track and slaughter her prey in any environment and to recover almost instantaneously from damage that would cripple a tank. This makes her an especially enticing tool of vengeance, but diminishes her presence for the reader. An invulnerable threat isn’t all that exciting after it’s first few kills, because every attack sequence becomes a simple matter of watching the target’s shock turn into terror turn into, well, being dead. In order for a threat to be effectively terrifying, it has to reveal a weakness; at some point in the narrative, there needs to at least be the hope that the threat can be defeated or delayed, otherwise, you stop caring about the characters because they’re no hope for them. Short stories can get away with unstoppable monsters, but in a novel, it gets old, especially when the monster in question just keeps doing the same damn thing over and over again. By the end of the novel, Christine is stopped (or, at the very least slowed down), but it would’ve been nice if the struggle between her and her targets had been a bit less one-sided.

One more thing before we move on; it’s worth noting that the narration of Christine is split into two halves. The first half, which constitutes the opening and closing sections, are first person from Dennis’s perspective. The middle section, the longest of the three, is entirely third person narration, allowing us to see what’s going on in Arnie, Leigh, Will, and everybody else’s minds. While the viewpoint shift is an oddity, it doesn’t serve much purpose. Apart from a few half-hearted lines from Dennis in the third section which try and attribute the third-person stuff to him, King never bothers explaining it, which is just as well. Switching perspectives mid-stream is a trick for writers like Nabakov, who enjoy playing games with the nature of novels; King is a storyteller, and if going from first to third to first was the only way he he could keep telling his story, so be it.

Ultimately, Christine falls firmly in the lesser part of King’s canon, better than Insomnia, worse than The Dark Half. It has some enjoyably creepy moments (some of which I’ll be discussing more in depth below), and a decent villain, but the story never comes together as powerfully as it should, and the most effective moments are pale echoes of sequences from his other, stronger novels.

SCREEN:

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Christine, directed by John Carpenter

If your knowledge of cinematic history gets a bit spotty beyond the past decade, it’s entirely possible that you have no idea who John Carpenter is. Since the mid-90’s, he’s been on one of those deeply mediocre-to-awful runs that seem to strike all horror directors after they become Established Auteurs, churning out forgettable crap like Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, both of which, at their best, serve only to remind us of earlier successes. Those successes were terrific, though, and when Carpenter’s on his game, he’s capable of entertaining, well-crafted movies which rely on intellect and black humor as much as gore for their scares. His most famous film, Halloween, is considered a forerunner of the modern slasher picture, but don’t hold that against it; it’s status as a classic is well deserved, and unlike the many clumsy, hackneyed follow-ups, it turned an economy of plot and blood into an effectively primal bedtime story.

Christine isn’t anywhere near that level, but it’s also a hell of a lot better than, say, Village of the Damned. Carpenter has more or less disowned the picture these days, claiming that the concept was a non-starter from the beginning, and it’s true that, ultimately, the movie fails to deliver on the promised collaboration between two acknowledged masters of the genre. But by no means is it an embarrassment. There are enough solid performances and well-shot sequences to give it a passing grade from any reasonable critic.

Acting wise, the best work comes from Keith Gordon, as the doomed Arnie. As an actor, Gordon’s most famous for his work as Angie Dickenson’s tech-obsessed son in Dressed to Kill, as well as playing second banana to Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School; between those movies and this one, I’d say Arnie is his best role, if only because it allows him to show a wider range than the other two films. The changes the character goes through over course of the story are major, and serve to create what moderate tragedy there is; it was crucial to cast someone who could be convincingly pathetic (but still likeable) at the beginning, and would be equally adept at the gradual transformation from self-hating loser to bitter, vindictive prick. Gordon is excellent at this. He’s very convincing as a nerd–perhaps slightly Hollywoodized, but still managing to convey the frustration and agonizing loneliness that makes him such an easy target for Christine. He’s just as believable as the more self-assured asshole. The changes are clear, but never over-the-top, and you can see occasional hints of the person he used to be trying to figure out what’s going on. Without his performance, the movie would lose a lot of its pathos; he’s the human face you remember when you forget about the scares. Gordon has since gone on to director some of his own movies (his version of Mother Night is one of the best Vonnegut movie adaptations I’ve seen).

The rest of the cast is competent, if unremarkable. John Stockwell (another director!) is fine as Dennis, and his friendship with Arnie works well enough. Alexandra Paul, a future “Baywatch” lifeguard, is breathy and pretty as Leigh, but you get even less of a sense of who she is than you did in the book. It is fun seeing character actors like Robert Prosky and Roberts Blossom in smaller roles, as Will Darnel and George Lebay, respectively, and Harry Dean Stanton is always a welcome presence in film; he made Jenkins, the only police officer who comes even close to figuring out what’s going on, surprisingly memorable for the small amount of screen time he gets.

Really, though, the movie belongs to Arnie and his car, a 1958 cherry red Plymouth Fury. Car enthusiasts were apparently outraged by the number of rare vehicles destroyed in the filming, but man, it looks cool on-screen. Carpenter does his best to give Christine her own personality, relying on camera angles and well-placed music cues (as in the book, there’s a lot of fifties rock and roll), and while she never quite takes on a life of her own, she’s definitely memorable. The scenes where she mows down her targets are fun, if not particularly frightening. For my money, the best bits are when she regenerates whatever damage she’s taken; it’s all practical effects, and no the less convincing for it.

As with any competently made movie that somehow fails to make a lasting impact on its audience, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong here- or, really, if anything did go wrong at all. I vaguely remember liking the first half, and then reaching a certain point and deciding, “Well, I guess this is only so-so after all,” but for the life of me, I can’t remember what that point was. Which sums up the problem better than any specific plot concerns could; this is a movie I’ve seen at least three times, and yet I remember barely anything about it. That’s probably its most damning crime–it kills an hour and forty minutes and accomplishes hardly anything at all. Even Arnie’s eventual doom comes of more as a shoulder shrug, and while Christine is fun to watch, she certainly won’t haunt your dreams.

Of course, it’s not like the killer car genre is exactly overflowing with classics…

COMPARE/CONTRAST:

There are the usual cosmetic alterations here, most minor, a few more noticeable. While Christine opens, after a brief prologue, with Arnie first setting eyes on the car, the movie, after its own brief prologue (where we see Christine back on the assembly line in 1958, where she cuts off one guy’s fingers and kills another engineer outright), takes us through a Day in the Life series of scenes to show us Arnie and Dennis are, and just how frustratingly inept Arnie is at nearly everything. In the novel, the boys are still on summer vacation when Arnie buys his car, but in the movie, school has started, and Arnie is just as much an outcast as ever. It’s handled well, bits of pseudo-slapstick mixed with bullying: Arnie dumps garbage on the driveway when he’s trying to take it to the curb, Arnie can’t get his locker open till Dennis helps and then still can’t open it himself, etc.. It’s funny, but in a painful way, and in a few minutes, Carpenter gets the audience firmly on the side of his anti-hero. The climax is Arnie’s run-in with Buddy Reperton, a fight which occurs in the novel a few weeks after Christine is bought and paid for; it shows Arnie at his most helpless and his most stubborn.

By the end of this sequence, you know exactly who Arnie is, and as the movie progresses, it’s easy to look back on those opening moments and see why Arnie fell in love with Christine as quickly as he did. Both the novel and the film’s approach to his characterization work well enough, but the changes make sense when you consider the different requirements of prose and visual storytelling. Especially with Carpenter at the helm. Carpenter’s a traditionalist when it comes to structure, and, after the initial sting to get the viewer’s interest, usually likes to establish character before getting into the meat of the plot.

This brisk, straightforward approach probably explains the biggest change from the source novel, the elimination of Christine’s original owner. In the novel, Arnie buys his car from Roland LeBay, a veteran with a filthy back-brace and a nasty temper. During those scenes, Lebay comes off as nothing worse than a creepy old man, and when he dies a few chapters later, you expect that he’s gone for good. Instead, he becomes the unseen force behind Arnie’s transformation, with Arnie adopting phrases and curses LeBay had used in his brief appearance, as well as developing an overall cynicism and bitterness not in keeping with his normal, basically decent self. Arnie begins to see visions of LeBay’s rotted corpse riding shotgun with him, and as Dennis learns from George Lebay, Rolands relationship with his car while he was alive was far from healthy. Christine was involved in the deaths of Rollie’s infant child and his wife, in ways which eventually echo into the present. The car, it seems, was the most perfect extension and expression of Roland LeBay’s endless fury against life, a fury that became even more potent with the man’s death. (In fact, there are a few hints that Roland was waiting for Arnie to come by the day he did; that he somehow knew someone who’d be susceptible to Christine would be driving by, and because he was going to die soon, he let the car go for a brief period in order to get another shot at life in the body of a much younger man.)

In the movie version, Arnie buys his car from George Lebay, who, instead of being a mild-mannered teacher from the mid-west, is basically Roland as seen in those first few chapters. Once the car gets sold, apart from a brief scene about the fate of the car’s last owner, he’s no longer a presence in the story; Arnie still copies some of the same phrases, but it’s more indicative of a general personality change than it is of someone taking him over. Christine is entirely her own monster, a fact which is set-up from that opening scene in the factory.

So, what’s the big deal? Christine the novel often feels like a collection of spare parts that were never fit together into a believable whole. It’s not a terrible read, but most of the pleasure to be found in it lies in examining each of its disparate pieces for anything of interest. The Roland LeBay subplot is the most compelling of all these misappropriated bits, lending the nuts and bolts killer car plot a nasty edge it wouldn’t otherwise have. The brief descriptions we get of his life, mostly anecdotes about his contempt for anyone he came across, are memorable through their absolutism, and by the end, that uncompromising rage dominates the rest of the book. It’s the only thing in the story that seems truly frightening, and the only thing that really sticks with you afterwards.

By eliminating the more outré elements of the novel, Carpenter streamlines the story and sands off its rougher edges. As I said, this falls naturally into his basic approach to filmmaking; Carpenter cites John Ford and Howard Hawks as major influences on his work, and some of their clipped, economical approach is evident in nearly all his classic films. (In the Mouth of Madness is a bit of an anomaly, I suppose, but since that movie relies on its subversion of expectations for effect, it makes sense that it would work differently from the rest of his work.) While this approach generally works well for him, giving even his weaker movies at least a basic veneer of solid professionalism, with Christine, it just manages to make an unremarkable piece of work even less remarkable. By editing out Roland and his rage, he removes the unpleasantness. Stephen King, in defending/celebrating some of the more offensive aspects in his story “On Dedication,” said that, as a horror writer, he never wanted his readers to feel entirely safe; even if he’d become a mainstream icon, people should never forget that he was capable of biting, and biting hard, should the occasion demand it. Roland LeBay is the bite in Christine. By taking that out, Carpenter made the novel easier to adapt, but ensured that the end results would be toothless and forgettable.

SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQ.5
Still, pretty funny last line.