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Jim Mountfield goes guising again

 

© Legiron Books

 

Two years ago, under my horror-fiction nom de plume Jim Mountfield, I had a short story called Guising published in an issue of the magazine The Sirens Call.  As its title indicates, this story centred on the Scottish Halloween custom of guising, which in the opening paragraphs I described thus:

 

“Scottish people will tell you that guising isn’t the same as trick-or-treating, though it involves children dressed as ghosts, witches and monsters going to front doors and receiving confectionary or small sums of cash from householders.  The Scottish custom is transactional.  The children have to earn their rewards.  This means putting on a show for whoever they’re visiting.  A brief show, admittedly, like telling a story or singing a song.  Guising has its roots in the activities long ago of mummers who’d turn up at houses and taverns on special days such as Christmas, Easter, Plough Monday and All Souls’ Day, stage short plays, and afterwards collect money from their audiences…”

 

Unfortunately, Sirens Call Publications recently ceased business, so I can no longer provide a link to the issue in question.

 

Well, I’ve just had another Halloween-themed short story published, again as Jim Mountfield and again (mostly) set in Scotland.  And there’s more guising in it.  This one is called Bag of Tricks and it appears in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 24 from Legiron Books.  All the stories in Monster involve Halloween and the anthology should have gone on sale a fortnight ago to coincide with October 31st.  However, a last-minute glitch with Amazon meant its appearance was delayed into November.

 

While the guising in Guising took place in the working-class streets of a small mill-town during the 1970s, the guising in Bag of Tricks is more suburban and up-to-date.  It happens in 2023, smartphones are present, and the brattiest kid is dressed as a character from the Saw (2005-23) franchise.  The setting is a smart, edge-of-town estate and the guising party is accompanied by adults – in the feral 1970s, kids were allowed to roam free at night, but in the more child-safety-conscious 21st century, they’re supervised.  Those adults have “decided that, because some houses belonged to older folk who remembered how Halloween had been in Scotland before it got Americanised, the children wouldn’t just chant, ‘Trick or treat!’ and expect to receive sweeties. No, they had to be traditional Scottish guisers and perform – delivering a joke, a story, a song – so that they earned the confectionary.”

 

Obviously, this being a horror story, those guisers get more than they bargained for as the evening progresses.

 

A bumper beast of a book containing 416 pages and 39 stories from 37 authors, Monster: Underdog Anthology 24 can be purchased as a paperback here, and in its Kindle edition here.

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Thom is da bomb

 

 

I don’t know when I became a fan of the band Radiohead.  They seemed to creep up on me by stealth.  I’d been aware of them for years before suddenly, one day, I realised: “Hey! I really like them!”

 

Appropriately for a band who crept up on me, the first song by them I heard was Creep from their debut album Pablo Honey (1993).  Though a massive hit, I didn’t actually like Creep, finding it dull and plodding.  My disdain for it was shared by Radiohead themselves, with guitarist Ed O’Brien saying of their performances of the song during the early 1990s: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again.  It was incredibly stultifying.”

 

At this time I worked as a university lecturer in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo.  One day  in 1995 I received a gift from a cool indie-kid in one of my classes, Yoko Koyama, who’d discovered that despite my outward veneer of grumpiness and grouchiness I was, underneath, a sensitive soul who was heavily into music.  The gift was a cassette recording of Radiohead’s newly-released second album, The Bends.  I diplomatically accepted it, not expecting to like it much on the basis that I hadn’t been impressed by Creep.  But when I listened to it, I thought, “This is actually pretty good.”  Not brilliantly good, but definitely good.

 

Around then, Radiohead visited Sapporo and played a gig, but the night of their concert was one when I had to teach a couple of evening classes at the university.  So I missed the chance to see them.  The next day, I went into one of my regular Sapporo drinking hangouts, the Beifu-tei Bar, and got talking to a mate of mine, a Scotsman from St Andrews called Stevie Malcolm.  Stevie informed me, “Aye, thon English rock band were in here last night after their gig.  What dae ye call them?  Thingmie-heid.”

 

“You mean, Radiohead?”

 

“Aye, Radio-heid!”

 

I got the impression Stevie had chatted away to Radiohead barely knowing who they were.  Though from the band’s unconventional approach to the music industry and their discomfort with the trappings of superstardom, they probably liked chatting to strangers in bars with barely any idea of who they were.

 

In 1997 Radiohead released their third album OK Computer, which even my snobbiest, most purist music-loving friends, who’d dismissed Pablo Honey and The Bends with a contemptuous flick of the hand, had to admit was an awesome record.  It still figures prominently when music publications list the best rock albums of all time and retrospective reviews frequently award it a full five stars.  And though subsequent albums – Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), Hail to the Thief (2003), In Rainbows (2007), The King of Limbs (2011) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) – never created quite the same stir, and often made demands on the listener by veering off into the avantgarde, experimental and left-field, I’ve found all of them laudable.

 

It helped that, unlike other bands who at various times were massively loved by audiences and hailed by critics as world-straddling musical colossi, Radiohead never seemed in your face that much.  So you didn’t grow sick of them.  Whereas for a few years U2 or Oasis, or even REM, seemed to be everywhere in the media, with the result that their ubiquity led to a backlash – the public losing interest, the critics getting disenchanted, familiarity generally breeding contempt – Radiohead were more subtle, less intrusive and lower profile.  Perhaps their credibility endured because of that.

 

Even their appearances in popular culture tended to be wry and quirky and happened in unexpected, and cool, places.  For example, I remember the very last episode of Father Ted (1995-98) when the suicidal priest Father Kevin (Tommy Tiernan) gets cured of his depression by Ted playing to him Isaac Hayes’ joyous Theme from Shaft (1971) – only to lapse back into suicidal depression when he hears Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film) (1997) playing on the radio in a bus.  Or when they turned up in a 2001 episode of South Park called Scott Tenorman Must Die and added a final layer of torment to the unfortunate Scott Tenorman of the title.  Scott is a kid who’s been tricked by Eric Cartman into eating the minced bodies of his dead parents.  When he discovers what he’s done, he understandably bursts into tears.  Just then, his favourite band, Radiohead, happen to stroll past, see him and cruelly mock him for being a ‘cry-baby’.

 

From x.com / © Hat Trick Productions

© South Park Studios

 

Anyway, last week on November 5th, Radiohead’s vocalist and main songwriter Thom Yorke rolled up here in Singapore to play a solo concert as part of his Everything tour.  Yorke has a long history of making music on his own, from his 2006 album The Eraser, through 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, to 2019’s ANIMA, and he’s also been involved in a couple of side-bands like Atoms for Peace and The Smile, so it’s not a surprise to find him performing without the rest of Radiohead.  I attended the gig accompanied by my better half, Mrs Blood and Porridge, who wouldn’t have missed this occasion for the world.  She’s such a dyed-in-the-wool Radiohead fan that the other day she even made our cat watch the video for 2016’s Burn the Witch on YouTube.

 

Yorke played at the Star Theatre, which I’ve visited a couple of times in the past.  At previous gigs there, I was not greatly impressed by the crowd, many of whom seemed more interested in filming the event on their phones than getting into the excitement and vibe of the music itself.  As I wrote a while ago about a Deep Purple concert: “Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen…?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage…  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.”  But tonight’s audience, Singaporeans and foreigners alike, seemed to be genuine Radiohead fans and Thom Yorke-lovers who knew the great man wasn’t going to appreciate having a thousand phones pointed at him by a thousand glaikit dimwits.  So, thankfully, phone-usage was at a minimum.

 

It wasn’t the most physical of performances.  Yorke spent most of his time on a patch of stage encircled by musical equipment, including several keyboards, and looked like a cross between Rick Wakeman of Yes and Captain Nemo tinkling out Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on his organ.  He did, occasionally, venture towards the audience to play guitar or indulge in some shuffling dancing.  The latter drew affectionate cheers.  I have to say seeing Thom make his funky moves brought a smile to my face, as it seemed to prove there was at least one person on the planet whose dancing is even worse than mine is.

 

 

But what of the music?  I’d read a worrying review of a gig from earlier in the tour, in Sydney, where the writer observed, “Each Radiohead song that’s played – they make up just under half the setlist – is met with a hushed reverence, while loud chatter is heard every time something else gets an airing.”  Maybe that means modern-day Sydney concertgoers are disrespectful bozos, for that certainly wasn’t my impression of the Singapore crowd.  Yes, the ten Radiohead numbers he played during the set – coming from a range of the band’s albums, though nothing featured from Pablo Honey, Hail to the Thief or The King of Limbs – were enthusiastically received.  But the audience showed their appreciation of the non-Radiohead stuff as well.  This included material from all three of Yorke’s solo albums, two new songs (Back in the Game and Hearing Damage), and two he’d composed for the 2018 soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the Dario Argento 1977 horror classic Suspiria.

 

It all meshed together nicely.  The solo material evoked at different times the sounds of the Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails and I even wondered if Yorke was getting a bit disco-y at one or two points.  Naturally, electronica-rooted Radiohead numbers like Idioteque, Everything in its Right Place or Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (off Kid A) slotted in seamlessly among that lot.  Surprisingly, though, the band’s more conventional – dare I say more tuneful – songs, like How to Disappear Completely (Kid A again) Fake Plastic Trees (off The Bends), and All I Need (off In Rainbows) fitted in smoothly too, making it an impressively cohesive set.  Maybe it was because Yorke’s falsetto – often mocked, but inimitable, haunting and gorgeous – provided the aural thread that stitched together all these disparate pieces of musical cloth.

 

 

Praise is due too for the accompanying light show, with several tall screens treating the audience to dazzling and dizzying displays that, during the evening, seemed to range from daubs of luminous green graffiti to blizzards of multicoloured confetti, from drizzles of Matrix-style code to what looked like, frankly, masses of glowing spaghetti.  Occasionally, these gave way to stark white light, and darkness, where, at his consoles, Yorke looked like a torturer operating his torture-machines in a gothic dungeon.  Occasionally too, the chaotic patterns coalesced into the ghostly features of the man himself.  Thus, the show was an impressively visual as well as aural experience.  I have to say it was easier on the eyes than the screens at the previous gig I’d been to at the Star Theatre, which’d subjected me to regular, unflinching close-ups of the 78-year-old visage of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.

 

By the concert’s end it seemed the many diehard fans in the crowd had got their money’s worth.  Their frequent cries of “I love you, Thom!” had never lessened in enthusiasm while the 22-song set wound on.  And presumably the guy who shouted, before the gig and behind us on the escalator while we rode up to the theatre’s entrance, “Please, Thom, don’t play Creep tonight!”, went home happy too.

 

A good evening, then.  It certainly took our minds off the horror that was happening elsewhere on November 5th.

 

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The controls are set for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

In my previous blog-post, I cited the ending of the apocalyptic 1961 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, where we’re inside a newspaper office and see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One page’s headline announces WORLD SAVED.  The other announces WORLD DOOMED.  Which headline, I wondered, would be appropriate after the US presidential election on November 5th?

 

Well, the results are in.  And it’s…

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

I think I’ll stay away from the news for the next week or so, as it’s going to be full of the sights and sounds of the very worst people on the planet popping open the champagne and jeering and crowing about Trump’s win – from despots and corrupt authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban and Aleksandr Lukashenko to billionaires who believe (probably rightly, given the evidence now) that democracy is something that can be bought and sold in the quest for profits, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Marshall and all the other media tycoons, hedge-fund moguls, oligarchs, oil barons and would-be tech overlords.

 

Despite a majority of British people hating Trump’s guts, Britain’s press and social media will be particularly infested with sycophants drooling and slobbering over the orange turd’s victory.  These range from online grifters who make their money whipping gullible people into frenzies of paranoia and hatred, such as Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Neil Oliver, Tommy Robinson and failed nepo-baby thespian Laurence Fox; to the preening hacks who pen vitriol for the country’s right and far-right-wing publications, like Brendan O’Neill, Alison Pearson, Douglas Murray, Piers Morgan and Isabel Oakeshott; and to its most discredited, unsavoury and opportunistic politicians, such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.  So, I’ll avoid that lot too for a while.  I don’t want to be put off my food.

 

Many hideous people are no doubt licking their lips at the prospect of the dystopian years ahead, thinking about what they can do as part of the Trump bandwagon and how they can line their pockets from it.  I’m sure that includes all those I’ve mentioned above.

 

Finally, I now find myself thinking of the ending of another 1960s sci-fi film, that of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968).

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Not only does this conclude with Charlton Heston discovering the Statue of Liberty buried up to her chest in sand – indicating that the USA, plus the rest of human civilisation, are now extinct and lie hidden under millions of tons of sediment – but it shows Heston having a meltdown in front of this haunting and pitiful spectacle.  “You maniacs!” he rages.  “You blew it up!  Damn you!  Goddamn you all to hell!”

 

He could have been referring to those millions of Americans who thought it was a good idea to vote Donald Trump back into office the other day.

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

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Set the controls for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz.  (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, 1957’s Quatermass II and 1960’s Hell is a City, that I also like a lot.)

 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth’s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events.  Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others.  The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise.  The film’s heroes – a pair of London-based journalists – discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth’s nutation, its axis of rotation.  Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months’ time will plunge into it.

 

Yes, the film’s science is wonky.  A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that’s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit.  Also, what’s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express – a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable.  Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit / crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.

 

However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is both affecting and chilling.

 

The film ends ambiguously.  The world’s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they’ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit.  Meanwhile, in the Daily Express’s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED.  And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.

 

I’ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire a lot today.  November 5th, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president.  That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.  The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is ‘unmolested by the rumbling of a soul’.  A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him ‘that rancid man-slug of evil.’

 

Trump has been open about what he’ll do to the USA if he’s re-elected president.  He’ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief.  Even if the American public are stricken with buyers’ remorse after voting him in, he’ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can’t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who’ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance).  The Trump Reich will be here to stay.

 

Along the way, he’ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin’s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who’ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or ‘X’ as Musk calls his debased platform these days).  Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded.  Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.

 

Worst of all, Trump, a climate-change denialist, will add billions of tonnes of US carbon emissions to the earth’s atmosphere, probably thwarting any last chances of humanity doing anything to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe.  Yes, the earth really will be catching fire, if slightly more slowly than it did in Guest’s movie.

 

So, world saved or world doomed?  We’ll find out a little later this week.

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

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Rab Foster gets grim

 

 © Schlock! Webzine

 

Rab Foster, my penname when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published.  It’s called The Mechanisms of Raphar and it appears in the November 2024 – Volume 18, Issue 13 – edition of Schlock! Webzine.

 

Once upon a time, I believed fantasy fiction came in two varieties only.  There were 1000-page-long, telephone-directory-sized epics whose narratives involved quests, wizards, kings and queens, elves, hobbits and orcs and the first thing you saw when you opened the books was a lavishly detailed map of the fantasy-land in question.  This J.R.R. Tolkien-esque variety was known as ‘high fantasy’.  And then there were short stories where Conan the Barbarian, armed with only a broadsword and a leather jockstrap, cut a bloody swathe through enemy warriors, slew the occasional giant snake and earned himself the adoration of the occasional busty maiden.  These were examples of the more down-and-dirty ‘sword and sorcery’ variety, of which Robert E. Howard was the leading practitioner.

 

But not anymore.  Nowadays, if I type the question, “What are the different types of fantasy fiction?” into Google, it gives me 24 sub-genres.  These include all sorts of nice, cheery-sounding things such as ‘hopepunk’ (“about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”), ‘romantasy’ (which are “typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles”) and ‘cosy fantasy’ (“works that contain or portray a comforting healing ambience to the story… centre on slice of life moments… and are often gentle in their narratives”).  A well-known example of that last sub-genre is Travis Baldree’s 2023 novel Legends & Lattes, in which an orc and a succubus join forces to… open a coffee shop.  Now I’m not going to slag off Legends & Lattes because it’s wrong to diss a book I haven’t read.  Let me merely say it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.  Or indeed, cup of coffee.

 

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the niceness spectrum from hopepunk, romantasy and cosy fantasy is… grimdark.  This is the nihilistic, blood-soaked, everyone’s-a-bastard variety of fantasy most famously essayed in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1996-2011) and TV series (2011-19).  The science-fiction author Adam Roberts has described grimdark as fantasy stories where “nobody is honourable and might is right”, and which “turn their backs on the more uplifting Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealised medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then really was.”

 

I’m not that big a fan of grimdark.  I sometimes find its ‘everything sucks’ attitude rather adolescent.  But The Mechanisms of Raphar is pretty grim, and pretty dark, so I guess it qualifies as a story of this type.  I’ve experienced a few lows recently, especially in my professional life, and I can hardly say I’m enchanted with the state of the world in 2024, so perhaps the story is a manifestation of my current discontent.

 

The Mechanisms of Raphar was vaguely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum.  Unlike the famous 1961 movie version directed by Roger Corman, which was about Vincent Price mourning his dead wife in a castle that coincidentally happened to have a few torture instruments stowed in its cellar, Poe’s original tale is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who tries to withstand the various devices of torture they use against him.  In The Mechanisms of Raphar, the villains are an insane, sado-masochistic religious cult who worship a god of pain, have a giant temple that’s packed full of torture-machines, and make their services available – for a fee – to people who want other people to suffer horribly, such as despots and their prisoners or other religions and their heretics.  I’m from Northern Ireland, so I don’t have a high opinion of organised religion.  I think this shows in the story.

 

Incidentally, the name ‘Raphar’ is an anagram of ‘Har Par’, which is my tribute to Har Par Villa, the most extraordinary museum in Singapore.  Har Par Villa’s most famous – or notorious – attraction is a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell where you can see the souls of sinners being horrifically tortured and punished for the crimes they committed while they were alive.  Indeed, the ‘Tree of Blades’ that features in the story is inspired by the ‘Tree of Knives’, festooned with bloodied bodies, on display in Har Par Villa’s depiction of hell.

 

 

Until the end of November, The Mechanisms of Raphar can be read here, while you can access the contents page of Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine here.

 

And now that I’ve hopefully worked that bloodlust out of my system, maybe I will write a cosy fantasy next…  Maybe my next Rab Foster story will be one where a kelpie and a balrog join forces to open a tea-room in Goblin-land.

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2024

 

From pixabay.com / © Benjamin Balazs

 

It’s that time of year again – October 31st, Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween.

 

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by displaying ten items of creepy, frightening or unsettling artwork that, during the past year, I’ve stumbled across in my Internet wanderings and taken a shine to.  And this time, I’ll feature a few pictures that aren’t just dark in tone but actually relate to Halloween.

 

So, to set the mood, here’s a picture called Halloween by the Ohio artist Maggie Vandewalle who, her website explains, “has used watercolour or graphite to convey her love of the organic world and that of a really good story.”  This has led to her producing many images of animals linked to the occult: cats, bats, crows, hares.  She also does a good job of drawing trees, and I find this landscape particularly gorgeous.  Few things are more evocative than looking at the colours of an evening sky through a mesh of darkening tree-branches.

 

© Maggie Vandewalle

 

Earlier this month – October 7th – was the 175th anniversary of the death of America’s premier writer of macabre fiction, Edgar Allan Poe.  Here’s something Poe-esque, an illustration for his story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by the New York-born, New Jersy-raised and Connecticut-dwelling writer and illustrator Robert Lawson.  Lawson’s speciality was children’s books – his work adorns such classics as Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) – and as this gallery page for the Goldstein Lawson Collection shows, he had a flair for drawing fairy tale and mythological creatures.  However, in 1931, he won an award for creating an etching for Poe’s famous tale of familial decline, madness and destruction.  As my digital copy of the etching is murky and wouldn’t look good in the cramped confines of this blog, here’s the clearer, preliminary pencil-drawing Lawson made for it.  As the late Roger Corman, director of the famous 1960 film version House of Usher, once commented, “The house is the monster.”  It certainly looks it in this.

 

From feuilleton / © Estate of Robert Lawson

 

From Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker.  With yet another Dracula film adaptation, Roger Eggers’ Nosferatu, scheduled for release at the end of this year, I thought it timely to include this illustration featuring Stoker’s legendary vampire count by Spanish painter and illustrator Fernando Vicente.  It depicts the scene where Dracula crawls down his castle wall, “face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”, fingers and toes grasping “the corners of the stones”, descending “with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.”  In keeping with Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula is still an old man at this point – but Vicente’s version is an old man who looks like he can take care of himself and whom you wouldn’t want to mess with.  Indeed, he makes me think of the late silver-haired American character-actor Dennis Farina, who specialised in playing tough mobsters and cops (and who’d been a Chicago police detective before taking up acting).  Though it’s Dennis Farina with red eyes and fangs.

 

From bookpatrol.net / © Fernando Vicente

 

And from Bram Stoker to H.P. Lovecraft.  Just over a year ago, the Scottish actor David McCallum – best known for his TV roles in The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), The Invisible Man (1975), Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) and NCIS (2003-23) – passed away.  In the tributes that followed, there wasn’t much mention of the fact that McCallum was also a musician and writer.  And nothing was said about his prolific career as an audiobook narrator, a career that extended to the weird, baroque and morbid world of legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Among the Lovecraft stories he narrated was The Rats in the Walls (which can be heard here on YouTube).  I like this cover illustration from the original LP of the recording, designed by Brooklyn artists Leo and Diane Dillon, with its giant skull (composed of normal-sized skulls and other bones) and an insane green face, seemingly spewing yellow bile, emerging from the bottom of the wall behind.  More on the Dillons can be found here and here – the latter site featuring some cracking cover art they did for the 1972 Ray Bradbury novel The Halloween Tree.

 

From pinterest.com / © Leo and Diane Dillon

 

Old bones are also on view in this image, which I’ve seen called The Boy in the Skeleton on social media.  It’s by the Dutch engraver and woodcutter Christoffel van Sichem the Younger, who lived from the late 16th to the mid-17th century.  I presume the panic-stricken lad, inside the larger and rather insouciant-looking skeleton, serves as a metaphor for how the human soul is imprisoned within a cage of flesh and bone, despite that cage being a fragile and ultimately perishable one.

 

From x.com

 

Right, back to the theme of Halloween.  I love this picture by the Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort.  Entitled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s obviously inspired by the much-loved, animated TV Halloween special of the same name, which was based on the cartoon-strip creations of Charles M. Schultz and first broadcast in 1966.  It shows the thumb-sucking, security-blanket-clutching Linus Van Pelt venturing into his local pumpkin patch to await the coming of the alternative Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin.  Linus can be discerned in the middle distance of Delort’s composition, while the Great Pumpkin – possibly – can be glimpsed on the end of a faraway cloud.  But it’s the satanically-grinning pumpkins in the foreground that command your attention.

 

© Nico Delort

 

Also satanic is this picture by British artist Dave Kendall, who’s worked in collaboration with talents as diverse as Pat Mills (founder of the world’s greatest sci-fi comic, 2000AD), heavy metal titans Metallica and the late Lovecraftian author Brian Lumley.  Among Kendall’s dark, brooding and frequently twisted creations, I find this one of the most disturbing.  Its image of a bloody-faced nun, with grotesquely elongated fingers, is inspired by a short story called The Hands.  This was penned in 1986 by the esteemed Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell and can be read here.

 

© Dave Kendall

 

More female monstrosities are displayed in this picture.  All I can determine about these bat-ladies is that they’re the work of an Austrian artist called Robert Loewe and appeared in the February 11th, 1913 edition of the weekly satirical magazine Die Muskete.

 

From thefugitivesaint.tumblir.com

 

Meanwhile, it’s a female doing the screaming – in impeccable, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed Japanese manga style – on this cover illustration for the appropriately named Halloween Comics.  The artist is Kazuo Umezo, known in Japan as ‘the god of horror manga’.  For inspiration, Umezo has often drawn on traditional Japanese folklore and legends and he’s made this argument against the many people – parents, editors, educators – who’ve urged him to ‘think of the children’ and tone down the horror content of his work: “Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal.  They come from a time when tragedy and carnage was an everyday part of life.  Now we have people calling to water them down, which essentially whitewashes history.  It’s insulting to the memory of those who suffered to bring us these stories.”  More of Umezo’s work, definitely not toned down, can be viewed on this entry dedicated to him on the website Monster Brains.

 

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Kazuo Umezu

 

Finally, to end things on a gentler note, here’s a picture I appreciate both as a cat-lover and as someone who finds graveyards fascinating – one of a cat (black, of course) exploring a graveyard at night.  It’s from the cover of a ‘cozy mystery’ novel entitled Witch Way to Murder (2005) by Shirley Damsgaard and it’s by the New York artist Tristan Elwell.  A more recent and better-known cover illustration by Elwell, which also involves a cat, is the one adorning John Scalzi’s bestselling and award-winning satirical novel Starter Villain (2023).

 

From unquietthings.com / © Tristan Elwell

 

Enjoy Halloween!

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Malaysian macabre 2: The Muse and Other Stories by Chua Kok Yee

 

© Penguin Books

 

More Halloween-inspired stuff…

 

The Muse and Other Stories is the second collection of Malaysian horror tales I’ve read recently.  The other was My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim, which I reviewed on this blog a few posts ago.

 

The Muse… is the work of Chua Kok Yee.  Like Tunku Halim, he seems to have led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence – turning into a horror writer after sunset and penning stories of gruesome terror, but during the sunlit hours doing the sort of respectable, wholesome job that your parents would boast about you doing at dinner parties with friends.  In Halim’s case, he combined horror writing with being a legal expert who practised corporate and conveyancing law.  In Chua’s case (if I’ve located the correct person on social media), the non-horror world knows him as an accountant and ‘Adjunct Professor at University Putra Malaysia’, with ‘a history of working in the food and beverage and consumer goods industry’.  Which shows you should never judge by appearances.

 

There are eight stories in The Muse…  It starts strongly with the title tale, a cynical take on the idea that there are beautiful (inevitably female) muses whose only function is to channel inspiration towards great (inevitably male) artists.  In reality, this has often been a case of women who were talented artists in their own right having their work ignored and being used, abused and eventually abandoned by those supposedly drawing inspiration from them.  See, for example, Camille Claude, muse to Augustin Rodin, an artist herself, who ended up spending 30 years in an asylum; or Dora Maar, muse to Pablo Picasso, a photographer, who ended up needing psychiatric treatment and afterwards took solace in religion.

 

In Chua’s story, an up-and-coming novelist, and married man, called Mark Lee Wing Sen has an adulterous relationship with a younger woman called Leanne, which seemingly causes a new fervour and intensity in his writing: “…Leanne’s voice kept echoing in my head.  The characters, plot and structure of the story flowed into my mind as if it was demanding to be told…  I was almost like a new person after Leanne and I started our affair.  Throughout the years, she inspired me more than anyone or anything else in the world…  Her fingerprints are all over my books.  She was my muse; a flowing river of inspiration that provided sustenance to this storytelling.”  However, their relationship turns sour and worse, leading to causing obsession, murder and madness.  And it doesn’t stop there.  The ‘river of inspiration’ continues to flow into Mark from Leanne, but the writing she induces in him now is deadly in nature.

 

Rather brilliantly, the story’s two heroes – Mark’s agent Arun and a physician called Dr Leong whom he summons when he discovers Mark in shockingly poor health – cite the works of Stephen King when they realise they’re up against a supernatural foe and find themselves speculating on matters of good and evil.  In particular, they discuss Father Callahan, the weak-willed priest in Salem’s Lot (1975), who’s unable to stand up to the chief vampire despite being armed with a cross.  This is because his faith isn’t strong enough, which renders the cross useless: “At that moment, the cross lost its power and the vampire won.”

 

© New English Library

 

Elsewhere, two stories have scenarios where a pair of characters who knew each other as children meet up years later – and with their unexpected reunions come unsettling twists.  In Remember, it’s a boy, Ah Hong, who’s suddenly contacted by his long-lost sister, Yee Ching.  In Under the Mask, a young girl called Anna encounters a young man called Jiang whom she recalls was an orphan from a charitable institution sent to live in her household for a time.  The institution had a programme whereby its orphans were temporarily given ‘a chance to be part of a natural home.’  Remember’s twist is slightly predictable, but the one in Under the Mask is shocking and upsetting.

 

Several stories showcase Chua’s sense of humour.  Sword of Angel amusingly combines a gritty Malaysian crime drama with a fantasy story in the manner of the classic Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger movie A Matter of Life and Death.  Admittedly, this is a pretty warped variation on A Matter of Life and Death.  An incompetent gangster gets himself killed whilst on his way to rub out an informer, but then is raised from the dead by a mysterious shapeshifting angel known simply as ‘Mike’.  The angel wants him to carry out a different assassination – that of a seemingly innocuous kid called Calvin, who needs to be terminated because “the angel in charge of his Fortune Scale screwed up” and made him supernaturally and harmfully lucky: “He’s not merely ‘lucky’.  He is an abomination!  You know, luck is not infinite.  It comes from a pool, and every time this Calvin drinks from it, someone else is deprived of their rightful share.  And I’m telling you, he is guzzling it down.  I have to put a stop to it.”

 

The gangster is less than happy to find himself back in the world of the living in a zombie-like state, bearing the scars of a recent autopsy: “…my body was festooned with stitches.  They looked like huge, black centipedes on my arms and thighs.  The worst was the huge Y-shaped incision that ran down my torso.”  Later, he’s also displeased to learn that he’s not the only dead gangster Mike has reanimated in order to take out Calvin.  The story is enjoyable largely because of its hapless and grumbling protagonist and it’s gratifying when he finally figures out a way to turn the tables on the devious Mike.

 

Similarly, Duke of Zhi has supernatural forces making an intervention in the world of the living and compelling an unfortunate mortal to do their bidding.  The reason this time is more mundane.  The denizens of hell, led by the narrator’s deceased mother, are concerned about the Loh family, who ‘run the Chinese funeral paraphernalia shop called Loh Paper Enterprise’ and are ‘the best funeral paraphernalia shop in Kuala Lumpur.’  The highlights of their ‘funeral paraphernalia’ are their lavishly detailed paper mansions that, according to Chinese custom, are burnt at funerals in the belief they’ll be passed on to the deceased in the afterlife, where those dead souls can live inside them in comfort.

 

The narrator gets a glimpse of the paper mansion he purchased from the Lohs for his mother, which now accommodates her in hell: “I was inside a huge hall, filled with exquisite-looking furniture.  The chairs were carved from wood, painted in gold and decorated with intricate carvings…  A crystal chandelier hung majestically high above, while every inch of the walls was adorned with abstract motifs of animals.  Yes, it was the most elegant room I had ever been in…. ‘Hey!  I know this place!’ I exclaimed, and jumped to my feet.”

 

It transpires that the young man set to inherit the Loh family’s business, despite having ‘talent that could rival his grandfather,’ isn’t interested in taking it on.  “He doesn’t know his importance to us here in the afterlife, because he’s a non-believer…  Despite his gift, he prefers to run a hipster coffee shop instead…  Millions of souls would be forced to stay in substandard mansions…”  The bewildered narrator is tasked with convincing Loh Junior to abandon the coffee shop, keep the family business going, and keep providing  the spirits of the dead with opulent housing.  It’s a task that, predictably, he bungles.

 

Duke of Zhi is amusing with its depiction, in these Trumpian times, of an afterlife whose inhabitants of are just as obsessed with real estate as living souls are.  It also touches on a rather sad fact in the real world, which is the art of the “traditional Chinese paper house crafters… is quickly dying as an increasing number of people seek alternative ways to honour their deceased relatives.”

 

I also like the story because it features the demon Horse-Face, one of the guardians of hell in Chinese mythology.  You can see a human-sized effigy of him at Har Par Villa, the most fascinating museum in Singapore.  There, he stands at the entrance of the Villa’s most famous (or infamous) attraction, a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell.  I wanted to write something about Har Par Villa on this blog during the run-up to Halloween 2024, but couldn’t find the time.  I will soon, though.

 

 

Also touching on local folklore are the stories Akuan, which draws on legends of the harimau akuan, that is, ‘were-tiger, were-leopard or were-panther’, and Feed the Boy, which features a toyol.  A toyol, the latter story’s protagonist hears from a mysterious antiques dealer, is “the soul of an unborn baby possessed by a djinn.  By nature, a djinn is wild and fiery.  It’s the baby’s soul that tempers its more dangerous side, turning it tame and obedient.  The soul will be weakened if it’s not fed by the blood of its master.  When that happens, the wild nature of the djinn would take over.”  But fed by blood, and kept ‘tame and obedient’, a toyal scuttles off to commit crimes on its master’s behalf.  It uses its diminutive size to enter other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their valuables.

 

This suits the protagonist of Feed the Boy, Edry, a hard-up food-delivery man “feeling envious of old school friends who were driving new Japanese cars, while he could only afford a motorcycle.  He felt like a loser whenever he delivered food to beautiful houses and condominiums, because their bathrooms alone were more spacious than his rented room.”  Edry’s fortunes take an upswing when he acquires a toyol – which disconcertingly has a name, Aamir.  He grows rich thanks to Aamir’s ‘nightly heists’ and feeding it with his blood, which it extracts from his toes, seems a small price to pay.

 

He becomes less keen on the creature when, a few years later, he gets married and his wife becomes pregnant.  It’s then that he learns how “sometimes a toyol can become excited by the presence of another child in the household.”  What follows, chronicling Edry’s attempts – inevitably doomed attempts, because this is a horror story – to get rid of Aamer, makes this for me the best tale in the book.

 

With its mixture of the up-to-date and the traditional, and the gruesome and the funny, and with its references to both Malaysian and Western culture,  I found The Muse and Other Stories a solidly entertaining read.  So, I recommend you to purchase a copy of it and enjoy the products of Chua Kok Yee’s fertile imagination.

 

Alternatively, of course, you could send your tame toyol crawling into your nearest bookshop, library or Amazon book-warehouse after business hours and procure a copy that way…

 

From linkedin.com

Posted on

Mama Mia

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

One more post in advance of Halloween…

 

I’ve now watched all of the X trilogy of horror movies directed and written by Ti West and starring Mia Goth (who also co-wrote one of them).  These are X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024), which focus on the characters of ruthlessly determined actress Maxine Minx and frustrated wannabe actress Pearl Douglas, both played by Goth.  At its best, the trilogy is great.  At its worst, it’s still good fun.

 

X is the story of some city-folk heading out into the countryside and falling prey to a foe their slick city ways can’t deal with.  Yes, that’s the plot of half the horror movies ever made, from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), from John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), from Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002) to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).  In West’s spin on it, the city-folk are six young filmmakers, including Goth’s character Maxine.  The year is 1979 and they intend to make a porno movie on the quick and on the cheap.  As a market for their product, they’re eyeing the up-and-coming technology of VHS, which will allow people to pay money and watch steamy movies they’re never likely to see in their local cinemas.  The filmmakers have rented a building on an out-of-the-way farm for the shoot, a farm belonging to an elderly couple called Howard and Pearl.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

Incidentally, Howard and Pearl are also the names of an elderly couple featured in the BBC’s long-running, almost never-ending – and terrible – situation comedy Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010).  I guess an American like West wouldn’t have known that.  Though maybe Mia Goth, who’s English, could have warned him that those character names were likely to give viewers from the United Kingdom PTSD-type flashbacks to Last of the Summer Wine.

 

X‘s Pearl is clearly unhinged and she’s about to get worse.  Ruminating on her current wrinkly decrepitude, mourning the loss of her youth, and jealously resenting the nubile young bodies performing sex-acts for the cameras on the other side of the farmstead, the old woman flips.  Bloody mayhem ensues, involving guns, knives, pitchforks and a large alligator who hungrily lurks in a pond elsewhere on the premises.  The scene where Maxine takes a naked dip in the pond, not suspecting that its scaly occupant is slowly closing in on her, is one of the creepiest things in the movie.  Rarely have aerial shots been so unnerving.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

In all three movies, West revels in the setting.  X takes place during a Texas summer and the heat and sweatiness are nicely conveyed by the 1970s-aesthetic of the visuals.  The daytime shots, at least, have a faintly bleached and blurry look that evoke all sorts of bucolic American horror movies really made in that decade – the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the likes of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Jack Starrett’s Race with the Devil (1975) and Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm (1976).  Meanwhile, the way Pearl embodies the horrors of the aging process gives the film an extra depth.  This theme is touched upon both melancholically, as when Pearl realises how much Maxine resembles her when she was young, and queasily, with Pearl shuffling down to the makeshift film studio, spying on the actors doing their sex scenes and imagining she’s taking part herself.

 

But X’s greatest gimmick is its casting, for Mia Goth plays not one, but two characters.  She’s Maxine and Pearl.  The latter role required her to spend ‘a good 10 hours in the make-up chair’ in order to get the old-lady prosthetics applied.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

X ends with Maxine’s escape from the farm.  She drives off into the night, still determined to make it big as an actress.  But what comes next isn’t a sequel but a prequel.  If it was plausible for Goth to play Pearl with heavy make-up as an old woman, she could obviously play the character without make-up as a young woman.  Hence, we got Pearl, also released in 2022.  This is set in 1918 with the title character stuck on her parents’ farm (the same one as in X, though disarmingly smart and new-looking compared with the crumbling, rundown version of it in the previous film) whilst waiting for husband Howard to return from World War I.  She’s especially stuck because the Spanish flu pandemic, the early 20th century’s equivalent of Covid-19, is raging and Pearl’s family are isolating themselves.  It doesn’t help matters that her father (Matthew Sunderland) has been crippled by a stroke and her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is humourless, censorious and bitter.  Pearl responds to the situation by fantasising about becoming an all-singing, all-dancing silent-movie star – which increasingly provokes Ruth’s wrath.

 

Meanwhile, Pearl is already subject to the psychopathy that’ll lead to X’s bloody events 60 years later.  In an early scene, she takes a hay-fork to an unfortunate goose who didn’t display sufficient enthusiasm for a show she put on for the animals in the barn. She then goes to the pond and feeds the dead fowl to an alligator, whom she’s named Theda after the silent movie actress Theda Bara (and who’s presumably the granny of the alligator in X).

 

Though her mother is determined to clip her wings, other things seemingly pull Pearl in the direction of her dreams – namely, the flattery of a handsome but lecherous projector at the local town’s movie theatre, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a travelling dance troupe, the auditions for which are being held in the local church.  Predictably, during the ensuing conflicts, betrayals and disappointments, Pearl snaps.  The bodies pile up and Theda the Alligator gets some unexpected meals.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

Even more so than X, Pearl shows West and Goth at the top of their games.  The director excels in orchestrating the showbiz-y fantasies that Pearl weaves around herself, including one set in a cornfield and involving a scarecrow that’s inspired by The Wizard of Oz (1939).  We can’t help but pity her even though we know she’s turning into a monster.  And Goth is amazing.  She’s particularly awesome at the end, when Howard finally arrives back from the war and finds the farmhouse kitchen in a less than decorous state.  Pearl presents herself – “I’m so happy you’re home!” – with a rictus-like smile, simultaneously heartfelt and terrifying, that seems to stay on her features forever.  No wonder Peter Bradshaw, film critic in The Guardian newspaper, hailed Goth as ‘the Judy Garland of horror’.

 

Pearl isn’t around for MaXXXine, released in 2024 and set in 1985, six years after the events of X.  But we glimpse her in flashbacks and her presence is felt in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes.  This is when Maxine – now in Hollywood and trying to graduate from starring in porn movies to starring in something slightly more upmarket, i.e., horror movies – sits in a make-up chair and has a cast made of her head.  With her face buried in the cast, and blinded by it, she suffers a panic attack and imagines Pearl is in the room, caressing her, as she did during one creepy moment in X.

 

Whereas the action in X and in much of Pearl was confined to a farm, MaXXXine is far more expansive.  Its story unfolds all over Los Angeles, from the Hollywood Hills to the back-lots of Universal Studios (where, significantly, we see the Bates house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), from the city’s luxurious mansions to its ultra-dodgy strip-clubs, peepshows and back alleyways.  But it’s the time rather than the place that gives the film its vibe.  MaXXXine unashamedly immerses itself in the garish sleaze and excessiveness of the 1980s: big hair, Ray-Ban sunglasses, spandex, lip-gloss, neon colours, graffiti, cocaine, hustlers, flashy convertibles with personalised number-plates, X-rated video stores, lascivious hair-metal bands, gory slasher movies and general ‘me’-generation greed.  West depicts this world as a cesspit, but a somehow joyous cesspit.  Maxine, of course, has taken to it like a duck to water.

 

But it’s still water that contains alligators.  Maxine gets caught up in a murder spree by an apparently Satan-worshipping serial killer who’s targeting people close to her.  She also has to deal with a crooked private investigator, played with scenery-chewing magnificence by Kevin Bacon, who knows she was present at the bloodbath at Pearl and Howard’s farm in 1979.  These things happen while she’s pursuing what she believes is her big break – a starring role in a schlocky horror sequel called The Puritan II, about to be filmed by a hard-as-nails lady director (Elizabeth Debicki).

 

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

 

This leads to the first of a few unsatisfactory things in MaXXXine’s plotting.  Maxine is so determined to hold onto the film-role that she refuses to cooperate with the cops investigating the serial killer, because getting involved in a murder case will prevent her working on The Puritan II.  We know that Maxine is now in some ways as psychopathically ruthless as Pearl – early on, she’s shown dealing with a would-be mugger in a manner that’ll bring a grimace to the face of anyone possessing a pair of testicles – but come on.  Your friends are being slaughtered around you.  There’s a good chance you’ll be next.  How could you not go to the cops, important impending film-role or not?

 

Also awkward is the film’s ending, which veers off into a completely different style of movie – admittedly still a 1980s style, that of a Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson action thriller.  At the same time, when the identity of the villain is finally revealed, it’s scarcely a surprise, since it was heavily signalled beforehand.

 

However, criticising a film paying homage to the 1980s for being illogical is self-defeating, considering that bona fide 1980s movies were hardly known for their logic.  It’s telling that one 1980s movie  MaXXXine has been compared to is Brian De Palma’s violent thriller Body Double (1984).  (Both have scenes prominently featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs, Relax in Body Double, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome in MaXXXine.)  Body Double is regarded as a classic now, but on its release the critics dismissed it as De Palma at his most throwaway, as a series of stylish set-pieces in search of a plot.  MaXXXine is a similar, De Palma-esque mixture of splendidness and shonkiness.

 

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

 

Anyway, there’s much to enjoy in it.  Goth’s first scene as Maxine is brilliant.  It culminates in her emerging from the audition for The Puritan II and contemptuously informing the long queue of would-be starlets waiting outside that they’re wasting their time because she has the job in the bag.  She then struts off to the sound of ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’.  The cast is great too.  As well as Goth, Bacon and Debicki, it has Giancarlo Esposito playing Maxine’s shady agent.  Esposito, of course, was the terrifying Gus Fring in Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Better Call Saul (2015-22) and here he does a shockingly Gus Fring-like thing near the movie’s end.

 

In my opinion, then, X is the best horror movie of the three, Pearl is the best movie full-stop, and MaXXXine, despite its flaws, is very entertaining.  I wonder if West and Goth will get around to making a fourth film.  Goth has played Pearl young and old, but played Maxine only young.  How about a fourth movie set in the 2020s, with Maxine now as aged as Pearl was in X and living reclusively like the embittered Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

 

Being a horror movie, though, it would be in the vein of what used to be called ‘psycho-biddy’ or ‘hagsploitation’ movies.  These constituted a sub-genre of horror that featured aging female movie stars playing old ladies who’ve become psychopathically loopy: for example, Betty Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) Zsa Zsa Gabor in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and Lana Turner in Persecution (1974).  I have every confidence that the mighty Mia Goth, in old-lady make-up, would hold her own among the likes of Davis, Crawford, Bankhead, Gabor, Winters and Turner.

 

Come to think of it, she’s done it already, in X.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

Posted on

First blood to Rampo

 

© Tuttle

 

And another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Japanese writer Hirai Taro, who lived from 1894 to 1965, was such a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, America’s doyen of macabre and mysterious fiction, that he used the penname ‘Edogawa Rampo’.  English-language names sound somewhat stretched and distorted when converted to the syllable-systems of Japanese – my own name is pronounced ‘Ee-an Sumisu’ – and Taro’s penname was basically a Japan-ised version of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’.  Say ‘Edogawa Rampo’ quickly a few times and you’ll find yourself reciting the name of Baltimore’s greatest man of letters.

 

Accordingly, during his literary career, Rampo wrote in similar genres to Poe.  He didn’t merely pen horror stories.  Poe’s name is now so synonymous in the West with tales of terror like The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) and so on that it’s often forgotten how innovative he was working in other genres.  In particular, he helped create the detective story with his trilogy of stories about crime investigator C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Maire Roget (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).  And it was largely in detective and crime fiction that Rampo made his name.  He even helped to found the Japanese Mystery Writers’ Club.

 

Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956) is an English-language collection of nine of his best short stories.  Not only does it take its name from Tales of Mystery and Imagination, described by Wikipedia as ‘a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist and poet Edgar Allan Poe’, but it combines stories from those two genres Poe helped to popularise in the early 19th century, the horror and the detective / mystery ones.  It has to be said the two styles mesh together nicely in this collection.  There’s a weirdness in Rampo’s detective fiction that ensures it doesn’t feel that different, tonally, from his morbid horror stories.

 

Among the crime stories, you get villains attempting to commit the perfect murder with schemes that involve living a double life as an invented character (The Cliff), impersonating someone who looks exactly like them (The Twins) and the fear of sleepwalkers that they might do something ghastly whilst moving in a trance-like state (Two Crippled Men).  All three have a last-minute twist wherein the main characters get their come-uppance from someone who’s even smarter than they are, or by a small but fatal act of negligence – the sort of minor blunder that would have Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo swooping down like a hawk.  Talking of Falk’s beloved shabby-but-canny TV detective, The Psychological Test is a very Columbo-esque tale of how a pair of investigators use an ingenious method to get a suspect in a murder case to incriminate himself.

 

Meanwhile, The Red Chamber takes a trope popular in 19th and early 20th century English fiction, that of a comfortable, wooden-panelled gentlemen’s club where the tweedy members congregate after dark and, with the lights turned down, proceed to tell each other scary stories.  In Rampo’s gentlemen’s club, however, things get shaken up when the evening’s storyteller, a newcomer, boasts about being responsible for “the murder of nearly a hundred people, all as yet undetected’ and proceeds to explain how he did it and got away with it.  Several harrowing twists later, it’s no surprise that the story’s narrator, a long-term member of the club, concludes: “…we unanimously agreed to disband.”

 

The other four stories in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination are macabre ones.  They possess the same oddness and intensity of his crime stories, but cranked up to higher levels.  The Hell of Mirrors is about a man who becomes obsessed with optics, with ‘anything capable of reflecting an image… magic lanterns, telescopes, magnifying glasses, kaleidoscopes, prisms and the like’ and with mirrors: ‘concave, convex, corrugated, prismatic.’  Typically with Rampo’s fiction, this obsession spills over into another obsession, a sexual one.  The protagonist is soon using telescopes to pry through the windows of his female neighbours and using periscopes to ‘get a full view of the rooms of his many young maidservants.’  The story reaches its climax when he devises a mirrored, optical device so depraved it ultimately induces madness.

 

The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture, on the other hand, is the one Rampo story in this collection that veers off into the supernatural.  It reminded me very slightly of the M.R. James story The Mezzotint, though the picture in that story was a spookily lifelike one that recorded a horrific event.  In Rampo’s story, a similarly lifelike picture serves as a testimony to a sad, doomed and one-sided romance.

 

That leaves two stories, The Human Chair and The Caterpillar, which I think are masterpieces.  The Human Chair concerns an ugly and reclusive craftsman who makes a living fashioning luxurious chairs, whilst getting a perverse kick out of imagining ‘the types of people who would eventually curl up’ in them.  Eventually, driven insane by his desire to get intimate with the folk who’ll acquire and use his chairs, he designs a bulky one containing a secret, human-sized cavity, inside which he hides himself.  The chair and its maker end up in a hotel lobby, where the latter gets his jollies from feeling the bodies of the guests rest on top of him.  No one “suspected even for a fleeting moment that the soft ‘cushion’ on which they were sitting was actually human flesh with blood circulating in its veins – confined in a strange world of darkness.”

 

The story is told in the form of a confession, sent as a letter to a famous lady novelist.  While she reads it, she begins to wonder about the suspiciously large and comfy chair she’s seated in, which has found its way to her study after being in a hotel.  There comes a final twist that nullifies what’s happened before – or perhaps doesn’t.

 

The Caterpillar, written in 1929, is an early, literary example of ‘body horror’.  The central character is an unfortunate young army officer so maimed and mutilated in battle that he comes home resembling the larval-form insect of the title.  This puts understandable strain on the officer’s wife, upon whom, totally helpless, he depends for care and attention.  In fact, The Caterpillar is more about the wife than the husband, with the hideous situation gradually pushing her into the realms of madness – of sadistic madness, because she starts taking her woes out on her husband, who can’t do anything to defend himself.  The story works both as a feminist tract, showing the plight of women whom society expects to be wholly devoted and subservient to their husbands, and as a horror story exploiting male fears of emasculation.  It’s a grim and powerful read, packing as much of a punch as it did when it first appeared, nearly a century ago.

 

I think the original Edgar Allan Poe would approve of Rampo’s tales.  They’re deliciously dark and twisted, and frequently ingenious, and sometimes funny too – a lot of the humour derives from how his villains, when telling their stories, like to revel in their own cleverness and degeneracy.  It’s just a pity that Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the only English-language collection by Rampo I’ve come across.  I’d really like to read more of his stuff.  Unlike a certain character played by Sylvester Stallone, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Rampo 2, Rampo 3, Rampo 4 and Rampo 5.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Mainichi Graphic

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Dad of the dead

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nicolas Genin

 

As Halloween approaches, here’s another entry with an appropriately creepy theme.  This time it’s a piece about one of my all-time favourite filmmakers in the horror genre. 

 

George A. Romero’s 1968 debut was Night of the Living Dead, a movie that’s been stupendously influential in at least three ways.  Firstly, it was filmed during nights and weekends over a period of seven months for a paltry $114,000.  The famous opening sequence took place in Pittsburgh’s out-of-town Evans City Cemetery for the simple reason that Romero figured he could film there for free, on the quiet, without getting hassled by the police.  Its success became a lasting inspiration for low-budget filmmakers everywhere, showing that with enough ingenuity, determination and talent you could accomplish something out of next-to-nothing.  No doubt when things were getting tough during the shoots of landmark but ultra-cheap horror films like the $300,000-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or the $350,000-budget Evil Dead (1981) or the $60,000-budget Blair Witch Project (1999), their respective directors Tobe Hooper, Sam Raimi and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez consoled themselves with the thought, “If old George could do it, so can I.”

 

Secondly, Night of the Living Dead wrestled horror movies away from the gothic costume dramas made by the likes of Hammer Films in Britain, Mario Bava in Italy and Roger Corman in the USA, which by the mid-1960s had become their comfort zone.  It dragged the genre into the present day and made it visceral, nihilistic and properly frightening.  The human characters having to cope with the horrible events in Night were ordinary Joes like those sitting watching them in the cinema audience.  This could happen to you, it was telling them.  And as none of those human characters got through the titular night alive, you really didn’t want it to happen to you.

 

Thirdly, Night introduced the world to zombies as it knows them today.  And today popular culture is swarming with them, not only in blockbuster Hollywood movies like World War Z (2013) but in other media like TV shows, computer games, books and comics.  Whereas before Night zombies had been depicted as poor, lost souls brought back to life by cruel, capitalist zombie-masters using the power of voodoo and put to work in flour-mills and tin-mines, as in Universal’s White Zombie (1932) and Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), after Night they had a new template.  They became apocalyptic.  They rose from the dead in hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, and fed on living humanity in scenes employing as much blood and gore as the movie-censors would allow.  If they bit you, you got infected, died and became a zombie yourself.  And the only way to stop the shambling, bite-y bastards was to “shoot ’em in the head”.

 

What I like about zombies of the Night of the Living Dead variety is that though they are mindless creatures, the movies themselves don’t have to be mindless.  Those shambling zombies can be a metaphor for all sorts of things – for proletarian workers, consumers, oppressed peoples, whatever – giving filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment.  Thus, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a modern Britain where anger is an increasingly common social phenomenon and terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ have entered the popular vocabulary; its sequel Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq; and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) satirises a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just pissed, hungover or stoned.  And again, Romero set the agenda with Night, which channels the fears of late-1960s America.  The country’s racial tensions are symbolised by the fate of the black hero (Duane Jones), who survives the zombie onslaught only to be mistaken for one himself and shot dead by a supposed rescue-posse of trigger-happy rednecks.  Meanwhile, the rednecks’ zombie-shooting / burning activities are not unlike things going on in Vietnam at the time.

 

© Image Ten / Laurel Group

 

However, Night of the Living Dead wasn’t the first George A. Romero film I saw.  That honour belongs to a movie he made five years later called The Crazies, which turned up on late-night British TV in the 1970s.  The Crazies has similarities to Night but isn’t a zombie movie because it features people turning into murderous lunatics rather than into murderous walking corpses.  The story of the US Army trying, and failing, to contain a virus that gradually infects the population of a small rural town and drives them insane, The Crazies sees Romero giving the military a kicking.

 

It’s the army who’ve secretly developed the virus as a potential biological weapon; who accidentally let it escape into the town’s water supply; and who prove useless in trying to maintain order – this is a rural American community and there are a lot of guns, and before long it isn’t just the infected townspeople who are violently resisting the gas-masked, biohazard-suited soldiers.  The army also bring in scientists to try to develop a vaccine but give them hopeless facilities – the local school’s science lab – and when one of them accidentally does stumble across a vaccine, more military bungling leads to his death and the smashing of the vital test tubes.  At the film’s end, they even fail to do an immunity test on the hero, who by now is the only uninfected person left in the town.

 

The Crazies isn’t perfect.  Its low budget sometimes means there’s a visible gap between what Romero aspires to and what he achieves on screen.  But to my 13-year-old mind its blend of anarchy, violence, rebelliousness and, yes, humour was astonishing.  I’ve never forgotten scenes like the one where a soldier bursts into a rural homestead and encounters a sweet old granny doing some knitting, who then stabs him to death with a knitting needle.  A remake appeared in 2010 and, while it has some good moments, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.  This is largely because it focuses on the civilian characters and hardly shows anything of the military ones.  It’s the soldiers and their half-comical, half-horrifying ineptitude that makes the original so effective and enjoyable.

 

© Cambist Films

 

In 1978, Romero returned to bona-fide zombie moviemaking with Dawn of the Dead.  The shopping malls spreading across the American landscape at the time inspired him to revisit Night’s zombie apocalypse and film a more expensive and expansive sequel.  This has four survivors, led by black actor Ken Foree, taking refuge in an abandoned mall and fortifying it against the living dead.  Romero uses the setting to poke fun at the sterility of consumerism, with the foursome’s lives rapidly growing tedious despite their unlimited access to everything in the mall’s stores.  He also shows its idiocy.  When more survivors show up, the two groups fight for possession of the building, though it contains enough supplies for everybody.  The zombies, meanwhile, become irrelevant.

 

The shots of zombies shuffling mindlessly through the mall’s aisles and thoroughfares, staring with glazed eyes at the goods on display, aren’t subtle.  The satire is sledgehammering.  But hey, Romero’s satire works.  45 years on, whenever I find myself in a shopping mall, I soon start imagining the shoppers around me not as human beings but as lumbering cadavers.  Also, in keeping with its theme of excess, Dawn piles on the bloodletting, courtesy of Romero’s regular special-effects man Tom Savini.  In the opening minutes, Romero and Savini treat us to a close-up of an exploding head and the gore rarely relents after that.

 

© Laurel Group Inc

 

Dawn has been remade too, with a Zack Snyder-directed Dawn of the Dead appearing in 2004.  It’s a film I have mixed feelings about.  On the one hand, the first 25 minutes are terrific and I love the credits sequence, which shows a montage of clips and images of unfolding zombie carnage accompanied by Johnny Cash singing The Man Comes Around (2002).  On the other hand, the film is devoid of satire.  The living dead spend nearly all the film not being in the mall, so there’s no identification of shambling zombies with shambling shoppers, and you get a general impression of things being played safe.  It’s a shame, as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation polemic No Logo (1999) had been published a few years earlier and a big gory horror movie poking fun at brainless brand-hungry consumerism and mindless corporate greed would have been just the ticket.

 

In 1986, Romero wrapped up his original zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead, which like The Crazies shows his utter contempt for the military – though by now his contempt for humanity generally seems intense too.  Day has the world overrun with zombies and focuses on an elite band of scientists and soldiers holed up in an underground nuclear missile silo, desperately trying to find a solution for the mayhem happening above.  Bitter arguments between the obsessed scientists and the brutish military eventually escalate into all-out warfare.  When the zombies swarm in at the end, they seem the least mindless members of the cast.

 

Admittedly, Day has a couple of sympathetic humans, namely a philosophical Jamaican pilot played by Terry Alexander – Romero’s third black zombie-movie hero – and a somewhat alcohol-pickled Irish radio operator (Jarlath Conroy), both of whom realise the battle has already been lost.  They just want to escape the silo, abandon the mainland and start afresh on a desert island.  However, the film’s most likeable character is actually a zombie, one nicknamed Bub (Sherman Howard) who’s been captured by the scientists and domesticated… sort of.  He can listen to music, pick up a phone and almost whisper a couple of words.  He has vague memories of his former life, when he was a soldier, because he knows how to salute and hold a gun.  He’s very fond of the scientist who looks after him (Richard Liberty) and when that scientist is murdered by the repellent Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), he’s genuinely upset and you feel genuinely sorry for him.  And a climactic scene where Rhodes is torn apart by Bub’s zombie compadres while Bub looks on and gives him a farewell salute is one of the most satisfying moments in horror-film history.

 

© Laurel Entertainment Inc

 

On a more intimate scale than Dawn, with more talk and less action, Day was regarded as a disappointment by Romero enthusiasts when it was first released.  However, over the years, its reputation has improved.  It’s my favourite Romero movie and one of my favourite horror movies generally.  Meanwhile – surprise! – a remake appeared in 2008.  Unlike the other remakes I’ve mentioned, this one is absolute shite.

 

After Zack Snyder’s version of Dawn of the Dead made a lot of cash in 2004, Romero got the go-ahead, and considerable studio money, to make his first zombie picture in nearly 20 years.  The result was 2005’s Land of the Dead which, although it received some decent reviews, was disdained by many hardcore horror-film fans who saw it as evidence that Romero had sold out or lost his touch.  I think that’s unfair as, to me, Land is three-quarters of a good movie.  Its opening sequence is superb, showing an abandoned (by humans) suburb whose zombie inhabitants now potter around in the way they did when they were alive.  A zombie commuter lumbers out of his front door with a dusty briefcase, some zombie musicians pathetically try to play their old instruments at the local bandstand and a zombie gas-station attendant shuffles dutifully to his pumps whenever something sets off the motion-sensor bell in his hut.

 

I also like the movie’s set-up.  Presumably taking place several years after Night, Dawn and Day, Land has Dennis Hopper as a megalomaniac who’s created a human sanctuary (bounded by a river and an electric fence) in the middle of a decaying city.  There, the rich and powerful humans live in a luxury apartment block called Fiddler’s Green while the less well-off live in Dickensian squalor in the streets below.  To keep his society going, Hopper regularly sends out a military force into the surrounding wasteland in a huge armoured vehicle called the Dead Reckoning, which is half-tank and half-truck, to scavenge for supplies.  Trouble is, the zombies inhabiting the wasteland are developing rudimentary powers of thought and self-organisation and, miffed at getting splattered by Hopper’s military expeditions, they start to march towards his little enclave.  Their leader is the afore-mentioned petrol pump attendant, played by black actor Eugene Clark.  In a series where the hero has always been black, this suggests Romero has now totally sided with the zombies.

 

Parallels with America’s growing wealth inequalities, its oil-driven foreign adventures and rising anti-American sentiment in the Middle East during the noughties are no doubt fully intentional.  I’d assumed that the Dennis Hopper character in Land represented George Bush Jr.  However, as the critic Kim Newman pointed out in an obituary for Romero in Sight and Sound magazine, the character is actually a property developer.  So maybe Romero had a premonition of who’d be sitting in the Oval Office at the start of 2017 (and quite likely again at the start of 2025).

 

© Atmosphere-Entertainment MM / Romero-Grunwald Productions

 

Land’s main problem is that it’s anti-climactic.  The end scenes where the zombies penetrate the human enclave and then Fiddler’s Green are suitably gory and carnage-ridden.  But you’re waiting for the military force in the Dead Reckoning, led by Simon Baker and Asia Argento, to ride to the rescue and start kicking serious zombie ass.  When Baker, Argento and the gang finally arrive, though, all they do is blow up the electric fence to allow a few survivors to escape.  And that’s it.

 

Still, Land is way better than the two zombie pictures Romero made subsequently.  2007’s Diary of the Dead has an interesting premise.  It’s a found-footage movie about a group of young filmmakers who’re working far from home when a zombie apocalypse breaks out; and they decide to record their adventures on film, documentary-style, as they journey across an increasingly chaotic landscape.  What’s particularly interesting is how they intercut their own story with clips that people around the world are simultaneously uploading to the Internet.  This being Romero, those clips often show human beings taking advantage of the mayhem to act appallingly.  However, after a gripping opening section, the middle of the film becomes predictable; and its final stretch is talky and ponderous to an extreme.

 

Survival of the Dead followed in 2009.  Set on an island off America’s northwest coast where a feud between two families escalates while society breaks down around them, it resembles an especially scrappy episode of The Walking Dead TV show (2010-22) and is a sad final instalment in Romero’s zombie sextet.

 

In between zombies, Romero made other types of movies and a couple are very good indeed.  That said, I’m not a fan of his two collaborations with Stephen King, Creepshow (1982), an anthology film scripted by King in the style of the old EC horror comics, and The Dark Half (1993), an adaptation of one of King’s novels.  Creepshow has its admirers and features an excellent cast – Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, E.G. Marshall, Leslie Nielson and Fritz Weaver – but I find it unnecessarily hokey and slightly unworthy of Romero’s talents.

 

© Libra Films International

 

But Martin (1978) is excellent.  It’s about a modern-day American teenager (John Amplas) who, clearly mentally disturbed, believes himself to be an 84-year-old vampire.  He ends up living in the Pittsburgh suburbs with his great-uncle, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant.  Steeped in the lore and superstitions of his old country, the great-uncle is only too happy to take him at his word.  A disorientating mixture of blood-spilling, dreaminess, humour and melancholia, Martin is worth seeing as a tonic to those wimpy Twilight books (2005-20) and movies (2008-12) that have defined teenaged vampires in the 21st century.

 

Also praiseworthy is Romero’s 1981 non-horror movie Knightriders, which has a young Ed Harris in charge of a travelling medieval-style fair where the central attraction is the re-enactment of knightly jousting tournaments.  The gimmick is that there isn’t a horse in sight.  The knights doing the jousting are bikers riding (and regularly falling off) motorcycles.  Furthermore, Harris, who sees his fair not as a business but a community, tries to live according to a knightly code of virtue and honour.  This does him few favours as the fair suffers money problems and attracts unwelcome attention from bloodsucking promoters and talent scouts, sensationalist journalists, crooked cops, rival motorcycle gangs and redneck crowds who just want to see motorbikes getting smashed.  Knightriders is overlong and meandering, has about 15 characters too many and is sometimes sentimental, melodramatic and hippy-dippy.  But it’s also endearingly high-minded and decent-hearted.  It again shows Romero’s disdain for materialism and mindless conformism, though this time in human rather than metaphorical terms.

 

© Laurel Productions

 

And Harris’s struggles in Knightriders reflect Romero’s uncomfortable relationship with the wider moviemaking industry, an industry that was all-too-happy to ignore him, exploit him, mess him around and rip him off.  It was still doing this to him near the end of his life.  Indeed, during the years before his death in 2017, Romero’s work that saw the light of day was in computer games and comic books.  None of his film projects came to fruition after 2009.

 

In closing, I’ll say this to the spirit of George A. Romero.  Sir, you were responsible for half-a-dozen movies – the original Dead trilogy, The Crazies, Martin and Knightriders – that are special ones for me.  I salute you.

 

© Laurel Entertainment Inc