Nightlife, by Dale Lazarov and Bastian Johnsson, published by Bruno Gmunder

Lazarov’s third collection of wordless, gay erotic comics lives up to the standards set by his previous works. These are funny and human stories, porn fodder with recognizable and realistic scenarios and characters that reflect a diversity of types rather than an abstract porn ideal. Johnsson’s art has a clean, simple line that gives the stories an appealing, cartoony look that complements the stories nicely. Of particular appeal is the third story in the collection, “Closing Time,” featuring a casual encounter between a disparate pair of men that develops into a long term relationship. It’s a good closer to the book, a touchingly romantic moment from Lazarov, and a nicely drawn and subtle aging in the art by Johnsson.

The Chill, by Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi, published by DC/Vertigo

I had high hopes for this, the first of the new “Vertigo Crime” line I held out much hope for. It’s a mystery about a serial killer, with roots in Celtic mythology and a supernatural edge. It’s exactly my kind of thing. I’d hoped for something along the lines of Phil Rickman or John Connelly. It’s not…bad, and Bertilorenzi’s art looks quite good in grey tones, and he knows when to overplay a scene for dramatic effect. But it does read, strongly, like a first effort in the comics form, the kind that would have been helped by a stronger editorial hand. It’s generally preferred in the comics format to “show not tell” but there a number of moments here when a little more exposition would have been useful. For example, when our short on personality lead suddenly decides to take the raving Irish man who might also be the lead, maybe, seriously and accept a supernatural explanation for the murders. That the book can’t quite seem to decide which character is meant to be the protagonist is problematic. While a certain amount of ambiguity is acceptable in a mystery, we don’t really have a mystery here. We know all along who is killing people, and mostly why. There isn’t even any real question as to whether the killers are using supernatural means. In this scenario, a little clarity on who we’re supposed to root for would have been helpful.

Grandville, by Bryan Talbot, published by Dark Horse

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first; this is a simply beautiful object. Textured, embossed covers, a gorgeous art deco, high-contrast design. It’s the kind of book that deserves to be faced front out on our shelves so that everyone can stop and admire it. The story delves into the kind of alternate world history that Talbot did so well in Luther Arkwright, but mixed here with a sharp, anthropomorphic design. It’s a bit like what you’d expect to get if Beatrix Potter turned her hand to gritty noir thrillers instead of children’s books. The story itself is fantastically crafted, with nice twisty conspiracy theories and political intrigues that fit the tone of the setting, while at the same time creating a nice parallel to more modern demands of mystery and thriller storytelling. The long and short of it is, this is a must have book, the sort of thing everyone who claims to love comics needs to get and spend time poring over.

This film and Psycho are pretty much the co-parents of the slasher genre. To be sure, there were plenty of films about maniacs carving up women with sharp implements released between those two films, but if Psycho established the tone of the genre, Halloween polished it into its most recognizable form.
(In this rather strained analogy The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the creepy uncle.)

Many of the standard tropes of the slasher genre become popularized here. There’s the use of POV shots from the killer’s perspective, a film technique that was lauded at the time but is sometimes criticized now for identifying the audience with the killer. There’s the explicit connection being made between sex and death, with the more chaste a character is increasing their likelihood for survival. And there’s the “final girl” character transitioning from a passive figure that requires rescue to one that fights back. Though, in fairness, Laurie is very much on the line there; she fights back, but she still needs Dr. Loomis to deliver the killing blow.

What I find interesting is, despite how much of an influence this film was on the genre, particularly through the 80s and into the 90s (the genre seems to be strongly in decline now, with the few contemporary films that dabble in it borrowing more from the self-awareness of the Scream franchise), is that so many film-makers seem to have learned the wrong lessons from the film. Even John Carpenter and Debra Hill did, as Halloween 2, and all other films in the franchise, can be safely ignored, and it would be advisable to do so. Chiefly, the ramping up of sex and violence that occurs in other films. Yes, there’s a link between the two here, but later films magnify it in such a grotesque way it’s hard to dismiss the charges of reactionary politics and misogyny that the genre attracts*.

But the big problem, as I see it, is that the imitators came away from the film thinking it was about Michael Myers. It’s not, not really. By design, Michael has no personality, no real face. He’s a blank canvass. There is one, and only one, moment of personality to the character, and that is when he pauses to admire his handiwork in the kitchen. Everything else is projected onto him by the audience. He’s not “real” in a certain sense. Even Loomis thinks of him as an “it,” as a force of evil. But because of his distinctive look, he became the “face” of the film. Which leads us to Jason and Freddy and Chucky and a whole host of horror movie villains that become the “hero” of their films. Which, I admit, I find problematic. It shifts sympathy from the victims; the film becomes about checking out the new and inventive ways in which people are killed. And that eventually just leads us to plotless dead-end films.

I mentioned Halloween 2 earlier, and I think it’s a good example of how the point can be missed, even by people who got it right the first time. The sequel is the film in which various motivations get piled on to Michael. Oh, Laurie is his long-lost sister. Oh, he’s actually cursed by a Celtic demon. Let’s up the gore and the sex and make Michael the focus of the film, because all these people ripping us off are making so much money, we need to hop on that bandwagon too. None of that “extra” information makes the first film any better. It actually hurts the film to watch it with the idea that Michael has been plotting to kill his sister for fifteen years, and has been able to track her down without even knowing what she looks like or where she is (it all becomes a remarkable coincidence). Laurie and her friends were just in the wrong place at the wrong time originally. Now they’re the victims of an orchestrated plot by a cult of evil Irish people? It ruins the drama of the original film.

_{*I don’t entirely subscribe to the idea that horror films are necessarily misogynist. Yes, there are misogynist films in the genre, lots of them. But on the whole I think the genre is less prone to it than, say, action films or comedies.}

And here we are, the masterwork of the modern werewolf film. It’s been written about extensively everywhere, including here in the past, so I’m no sure what more there is to say.
I will anyway, of course.

A big part of why the film works is the focus on the protagonist’s mental state. The film opens with long scenes of empty roads and moors, with only David and his friend Jack’s conversation breaking up that monotony. We’re given reasons to like these kids right away; they’re good natured, if a bit full of themselves, but more importantly they’re likeable. After the attack, the bulk of the film’s shocks and scares are confined almost exclusively to David’s nightmares. It’s not until relatively late in the film that the audience is given any definitive proof that the supernatural is really at play and it’s not all just inside David’s mind. This works because, since we already like David, we sympathize and relate to his suspicion that he’s going crazy. Given the dictates of the genre, of course, we know on an intellectual level that he really is a werewolf, but on a craft level it helps keeps the focus on David as a relatable protagonist.

Which isn’t to say that the film is without flaws. The whole notion of David being haunted by the ghosts of his friend and the people he has killed, while a solution to the necessary exposition dumps, never quite comes off. It feels more like a shoe-horned excuse to bring some more gore into the film, especially when there’s a whole village full of people who know all about werewolves and what really happened to David right there from the beginning of the film…and David’s doctor actually goes there to investigate the original attack.

But apart from that, it is a superlative film. And the sequence where David stalks a hapless commuter in a subway station is easily one of the best horror film scenes ever.

This is one of the two vampire movies I actually like. (The other is this big slice of coded gay panic.) It largely got lost in the shuffle when it was released, probably partly because it was preceded in theaters by the only sort of okay The Lost Boys, and the fore-runners of the Twi-hards were too busy swooning over Jason Patric, Kiefer Southerland and the Coreys to appreciate the brooding intensity of Adrian Pasdar or the under-rated charms of Bill Paxton.

A big part of why the film works for me is that it resists the trends of that era regarding the “classic” monster types. Most monster movies were going for tongue in cheek or dark comedy, reserving real “scares” for the slasher genre. And the Anne Rice-ification of the vampire as tragic romantic figure was coming into full bloom as well. Kathryn Bigelow resists that. The vampires in her film are unrepentant murderers, inhuman monsters, something sickeningly unnatural. And being in that state has warped their minds in indescribable ways. They’re not romantic, they’re not tragic. They’re just wrong. They’re so wrong, there isn’t really a word for them. The word “vampire” never occurs in the film. There’s no garlic or crosses, no niceties about being invited in.

Which is why it’s sort of interesting that so much of the film revolves around adolescent ideas of romance. Farm boy Caleb meets a mysterious girl, Mae, who speaks in cryptic riddles before biting him on the neck and running away. The next thing he knows, he’s been abducted by her “family” who debate how to kill him before realizing that he’s “turned” and is one of them now, whether they like it or not. The next few days of Caleb’s life alternate between falling deeper into love with Mae and trying to somehow survive the horrific violence and carnage her family revels in, before a chance encounter between Homer, the eldest vampire ironically trapped in the body of a pre-adolescent boy, and Caleb’s sister provides Caleb with a chance to escape and the most plot convenient cure for vampirism ever contrived.

Caleb’s love for Mae is adolescent. It’s your stereotypical “love at first sight” and “Rome & Juliet” type of love, the kind of love that only exists in romance stories about adolescents. The conflict this creates in Mae’s family is adolescent as well. Homer “turned” Mae, and is jealous that Caleb is essentially stealing her from him, and the other members essentially bully Caleb in a, well, dickish sort of way. The turning point of the film is Homer’s entirely bizarre and sudden infatuation with Caleb’s sister, which seems motivated more as a means of getting back at Mae than an actual obsession.

In a larger sense the world of the vampires is one of an eternally arrested adolescence. While there is some indication that most of them were probably “bad” people before joining the ranks of the undead, their current motives are as much boredom as anything else. They need to drink blood, yes, but the savagery and ways in which they “play” with their food are borne out of having lived so long that they’ve seemly devolved to a child-like, amoral state. It’s effective because it makes good use of the lack of supernatural overtones to their vampiric state. When a vampire is overtly supernatural, it’s easy to accept that they’re evil just because they’re evil. Here, were care has been taken to make sure that the vampires are as “natural” and “real” as possible, their evil becomes slightly banal and pathetic. Again, appropriate to the tone of a vampire being something wrong and despicable, that line between contempt and pity being thin.

This is one of those very few ghost movies that manages to get everything right. This isn’t really that surprising; the 70s/early 80s was the height of talent working in supernaturally themed films in America. I’m not sure why this particular era was so good for horror films, but it produced too many highlights of the genre to overlook the coincidence.

One of the reasons the film works so well is it keeps the bulk of the hauntings psychological. Much of the film revolves around George C. Scott as a composer whose wife and child recently died reacting to things only he can hear or see. The question is raised as to whether this is really happening or if it’s all in his head. It’s not until he confides in others that the hauntings manifest in an overt enough manner to be beyond question.

Cleverly, the film largely avoids metaphor or symbolism in its use of a haunted house. A parallel is drawn between Scott’s recent loss of a child and the dead child who haunts his house, but there’s no “grieving process” going on here. Instead, the haunting is cast not as an emotional or spiritual problem, but as a mystery. The film is essentially a detective story, with the victim providing supernatural clues as to his identity and the motive for his murder. As the extent of the mystery widens, eventually reaching high political stakes, the power and extent of the haunting increases as well, until the secrets of the past reach an apocalyptic conclusion in the present. Interestingly for the genre, the film also presages the contemporary motif in ghost and haunting stories that, in general, helping a ghost is ultimately the wrong thing to do.

I hate zombies. Even more than I hate vampires. They’re a stupid, derivative and over-used monster that has come to prominence because it’s been embraced by people who watch cheesy 70s Euro-horror films ironically and film-nerds who remember reading an essay once about how the zombies in Dawn of the Dead “were a metaphor for consumerism, maaaan…”
That being said, there are a small number of zombie films I enjoy. Shaun of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Brain Dead and this Australian film. Of course, the three things those films have in common is that they treat the subject matter with all the reverence it deserves. That is to say, none.

Undead is another one of those horror films that’s a bit short on plot, but makes up for it in other ways. Most of the characters are one-note, but drawn well and fairly archetypal (power tripping authority figure, bitchy beauty queen, useless boyfriend, terrified rookie). On the surface level, it’s just the story of a woman trying to get out of her stifling small town to start a new life, and the zombie apocalypse that gets in her way. But it’s the complications to that basic plot that make the film interesting, combined with a certain black humor and zeal for the self-consciously “awesome” in a way that Chris Sims would approve of the word. See, it’s not just enough that, following a meteor shower, townspeople start turning into flesh-eating zombies. No, then the caustic rains start to fall. Followed by the alien abductions. And the giant thorny wall that materializes around the town, cutting off all contact with the outside world. And then our farm girl turned reluctant beauty queen turns to a hillbilly gun-nut who knows gun-fu to mentor her in the ways of the zombie fighter.
It’s all just over the top enough to work.

Zombies have become the convenient cypher for horror fiction and films in recent years, a catch-all metaphor for whatever social movement or concern at hand, and this film is no exception. Their use here is actually a bit heavy-handed in that regard, especially when coupled with the giant wall around the town. Our heroine wants nothing more than to escape her old life, but she’s literally trapped, and all the townspeople who were holding her back now literally want a piece of her. And, as she’s reminded by her bitchy beauty-queen rival, taking care of the town’s needs is her responsibility, a point driven home in the now apparently mandatory ironic ending.

But aside from all that, there’s another element of the film that I enjoy, and one well worth mentioning, though it borders on the spoilerish. The zombie massacre, where our heroes rack up an impressive number of zombie killings, is a staple of modern zombie films. It’s expected by the audience. The neat trick pulled here is the dawning awareness in both the characters and the audience that indiscriminately killing zombies is exactly the wrong tactic to take in the long run. It’s the sort of response that people who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t know the nature of the situation they’ve found themselves in would take, because it’s the sort of thing they think they’re supposed to do. It’s the sort of thing that people who watch zombie movies would do, and it only ends up making things worse.

This is truly one of my favorite, under-appreciated horror films. It works beautifully, with an exceptional cast, and a surprisingly subtle, for the subject matter, metaphor at it’s heart. It blends wonderfully different strands of horror themes; ambiguity, the supernatural, isolation, a Cassandra-like hero.

The film opens with disquieting imagery, possibly the most disturbing piece of steak I’ve ever seen, and Captain Boyd, recently promoted hero of the Mexican-American war physically sickened by the sight of his fellow officers eating meat. We soon find out that his revulsion is related to his promotion. Far from being a hero, he pretended to be dead, and the blood of his fellow soldiers dripped into his mouth as their bodies were piled on top of him. When he emerged from the pile, after a sudden burst of strength, he just happened to capture the Spanish commanders. Since exposing him as a coward would be bad for morale, his commanding officer punishes him instead by sending him to a remote fort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, staffed with a skeleton crew for the winter. Shortly a half-starved man arrives at the camp, telling the soldiers the story of his escape from a lost wagon train that has turned to cannibalism and murder to survive. The soldiers go to investigate, only to discover that the strange man was not entirely telling them the truth. From that point on, the story largely becomes a battle of wits and determination between Boyd and the cannibal, with the Native American legend of the Wendigo hovering over them, as it seems that eating human flesh really does make people stronger.

It’s the battle between Boyd and the cannibal that really drives the action. Boyd feels shamed for his cowardice in the war, and the cannibal is a charismatic figure who seems to offer a practical method of dealing with shame by joining with him in a sort of sect, and it is only by resisting the cannibal through an assertion of morality that Boyd is able to ultimately triumph. What’s intriguing about this is, by this point in the film, it’s clear that Boyd and the cannibal are not actually talking about eating people anymore; they’re actually talking about the concept of “Manifest Destiny” and American imperialism. It’s not that far off, as far as metaphors go, as the proposed “victims” of the cannibal’s plots are chiefly planned to be those who are heading over the mountains to California out of a desire to join in the Gold Rush. He plans to live off those whose goal is unfettered capitalism and commodity exploitation. The tone is darkly comic through much of this, very black-humored, and the ultimate resolution is both fitting and somewhat cynical in its acknowledgement that, however the drama between Boyd and his adversary works out, there will always be more men willing to live off their fellows to come along.

It’s been noted before that 1981 was a good year for werewolf movies. True, you had Wolfen, The Howling and An American Werewolf In London, and while Wolfen and Howling are entertaining, and better than average, An American Werewolf is the one worth remembering.

Which isn’t to say that Joe Dante’s stab at a werewolf picture is without merit. It’s clever enough, with plenty of in-jokes sprinkled throughout. And the werewolf effects are actually quite good for the period. And, let’s face it: the film spawned six sequels. So either it was a very cheap name to license for derivative knock-offs, or something about the film resonated with the general public. Or possibly both. It’s actually, when all is said and done, a pretty good monster movie at the end of the day. It just suffered through the misfortune of being released very closely to one of the best monster movies, and one with a similar theme at that.

The meat of The Howling is strong as well. Karen White, a news reporter has been contacted by a serial killer, and with police protection she goes to meet with him. It is presumed that he nearly rapes her before being killed by the police, but she can’t actually remember what happened, and his body has vanished from the morgue. A helpful celebrity psychologist (played by Patrick Macnee, classing up the joint immensely) encourages Karen and her husband Bill to spend some time at “The Retreat”, a private colony he runs in northern California for his patients. Once there, Karen is further traumatized by strange howling noises in the woods, and Bill is seduced and turned into a werewolf by, well, a woman who dresses like this to go to a barbeque:

Which really doesn’t say much for Bill.
Eventually, Karen and a friend from work end up killing or burning to death most of the werewolves, but not before Karen is bitten. To warn the nation of the dangerous werewolf menace hiding amongst them, she turns into a wolf on live television and gets shot to death.

That whole “werewolf as sex” thing come to the fore here. Count the number of times a character says “repression” if you doubt me. A significant amount of time is spent at the start of the film showing the audience a pornographic movie clip. And Karen’s husband gets bitten by a werewolf because he goes catting around while his wife recovers from being assaulted. And, of course, there’s the notorious sex scene where Bill and the druid priestess wannabe actually turn into wolves while having sex. So, again, there’s some strong and engaging material here, slightly hurt by a subtly misogynistic tone weaved through it. It was a just a case of, in hindsight, bad timing.

I’m always slightly hesitant about watching supernaturally themed European horror films. While Italy, and to a lesser extent France and Spain, tend to excel in creating stylistic and visually arresting thrillers, their monster movies tend to lack something. Or, rather, they tend to go a bit overboard with the gore and don’t feel the need to interrupt the gore with a story. Or characters.

And this Dario Argento/Lamberto Bava collaboration is pretty strongly in that category. Plot is almost nonexistent. Characters have no real personality and are largely interchangeable. We’re given no real reason to root for our final couple other than that she’s less of a bitch than her friend and he’s not as much of a creep as his friend. And these are the heroes, mind you, and we spend less time with them than we do with a quartet of coke-snorting “punk rockers” who appear in a particularly inane subplot. As for the story, well…it’s your basic zombie movie, only the zombies are demons, and the action is confined, or so we’re led to believe to the interior of a movie house showing a Satanic film. So it’s cabin-spam, with demon/zombie killers, and ciphers for characters.
It’s the sort of thing I would have loved when I was a teenager, in other words, but don’t really have much patience for now.

And it’s a shame, because there are some nice touches that hint at a better film. The “film within a film” gimmick that presages the possession could have been explored more. Voyeurism is a popular theme in horror films, as it indicts the film’s audiences in with whatever bad act the characters are creating, and the audience watching people watch a film that causes demons to attack is a nice opening for some metatextual commentary on horror films and horror audiences. But it’s not explored. Just as how, exactly, the world falls to zombie/demon chaos when we’re pretty clearly led to believe that the possession is limited to the theater is dealt with in a manner that feels like a post-production pick-up shot so that the audience doesn’t ask questions about a massive plot-hole.

Ghost stories, particularly the subset focusing on haunted houses, often feel like a distinctly feminine approach to horror. Which is not to say that they are effeminate, not at all, but that the genre seems to particularly focus on female protagonists. A haunted house is essentially an attack on a realm traditionally ruled by women, and hauntings, real or imagined, are frequently used as signs of some failure on a woman’s part to live up to an expected standard as wife, mother or care-taker. Richard Matheson’s novel, and his screenplay adapting it, seem like a response to that type of ghost story. Because Matheson takes that core concept of a psychic essence living on in a building, and makes it into a story of sexual repression and impotency rather than one of domestic shortcomings.

Matheson sets up this situation by introducing us to a skeptical physicist who has spent years trying to prove that “hauntings” are not evidence of life after death, bribed by a dying rich man to find some definitive answer. He is tasked with taking a small team of psychics into the “Belasco House”, a building in which such sexually and criminally depraved acts occurred that it has been tainted with evil. Evil so strong that of the two previous attempts to investigate the hauntings, only one person escaped sane and alive. Into this environment steps the skeptical, rationalist doctor, his wife, the sole survivor of the previous expedition, a psychic who refuses to use his abilities (played by Roddy McDowall, in one of those curious casting decisions where it’s not quite clear whether casting McDowall is meant to be an indication that his character is gay or not), and a mental psychic who believes her abilities are the powers of God made manifest. Almost immediately the groups finds itself at odds, with the doctor refusing to believe in a supernatural explanation for the haunting, even in the face of physical evidence, and the female psychic who believes that Belasco’s previously unknown son is trying to make contact with her. Relations between the group degenerate, as an occult force possesses the doctor’s wife and tries to get her to seduce McDowall and Belasco’s “son” tries to get the good Christian girl to “sleep” with him. When the doctor builds a device intended to destroy residual electromagnetic energy, thus disrupting the deus ex machina fields that make it appear that the house is haunted, the conflict between the doctor and the psychic becomes physical, and in short order she finds herself crushed beneath a large crucifix and he is impaled by a chandelier.

At this point, the theme of the film starts to become clearer. Everything to do with the haunting has had to do with sex, specifically the sex drives of the investigators. One psychic is sexually repressed, so the house attempts to seduce her with a lost soul needing comfort. The doctor already devotes more time to his work than his wife, and so the house attacks him by revving his wife’s sexual appetite. Belasco, we’ve been told, was a man of tremendous and disgusting sexual appetites, but…the big reveal, the source of the haunting, as discovered by McDowall, is that Belasco was a man of such tremendous inadequacy that he actually cut off his own legs and had them mechanically elongated in order to appear taller. The implication here, the subtext, is that if Belasco was that much of a fraud and failure, he must have been impotent as well. Just as McDowall was, in a sense, when he refused to use his psychic abilities. Just as the Doctor was when he ignored his wife’s needs. And when his machines failed. Hell House is essentially haunted because men can’t get it up.
Like I said, it’s Matheson trying to butch up the genre. It’s an interesting idea he’s going for, but in execution it comes off so misogynist as to be almost comical. Even if the bickering between the believer and the skeptic is resolved with the both of them being destroyed by symbols of their faith is a nice dramatic touch.

What eventually saves Hell House from itself is the superb use of atmosphere. Haunted house movies are tricky. If you go overboard with physical or visual effects to represent the supernatural presence, you turn your film into just another monster movie (or worse). If you keep your film purely psychological, you’ve got a movie about people going insane over nothing happening whatsoever. Hell House actually strikes a good balance, with one spectacular scene of overt menace, and then quieter, more restrained physical effects, with the rest of the haunting effects communicated by the actors and very carefully chosen and filmed close ups. With this approach, the essentially intangible nature of the haunting is made clear, but the audience is still given something to see and react to themselves.