THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

 ON THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN (delayed post) ... I put together and finished "The Feeble Light of Dreams," as you can see below. My plan had been to do at least four of these illustrated poems, but as usual, my monsters wound up eating much more of my time than expected.

Meanwhile, I continued watching heaps of horror flicks, including the following group of non-supernatural but also not traditional slasher ones: The Invitation (2015); The Beast in the Cellar (1971); High Tension (2003); Creep (2014); and Dementia (1955).

The Invitation is another one I've had on my watch-list since it came out, but put off due to lack of interest in the subject matter, in this case a yuppie dinner party gone awry. The first two thirds seemed to confirm my suspicions, but the cold and sudden brutality of the betrayal that precipitates the climax won me over, making the long windup worthwhile.

The Beast in the Cellar is similarly very dull until the last third, when it is redeemed by a flip of the script with the identity of the monster, contrary to both narrative and social prescription. This British work of biddie horror masquerading as a subhuman maniac slasher has some great ideas, but it would have worked much better as 45-minute Tales of the Unexpected episode than a 90-minute feature.

High Tension has the opposite problem: its first two thirds functions as a bone-crunchingly well-executed (ahem) slasher that is fatally tripped up by a nonsensical "twist" with no clear point (other than maybe casual homophobia?). Maybe the twist was more effective in 2003-- plots where it turns out one of the main characters was the whole time a figment of another character's imagination, with the latter actually carrying out all the hallucinated character's actions, have since become obnoxious and laughable through overexposure.

Creep doesn't have either problem: it is incredibly tense and hypnotic from beginning to end. It's a first-person mockumentary/found-footage film that serves as a claustrophobic character study of the titular psychopathic Creep, who has enlisted the POV videographer through a Craig's List ad to come out to his remote cabin and document a day of his life before his supposed imminent demise from cancer. Though there is no gore until the final shot, the emotional violence of Creep is more jarring than most slasher kills.

Dementia is an awesome '50s art horror film with no dialog. It documents the nightmare of young woman lost in a labyrinthine expressionist city populated by film-noir archetypes. Every moment is beautifully shot and contributes to the propulsive narrative's momentum, which mirrors the way the protagonist is carried along by the dictates of dream logic and her own urges. It was shot outside the studio system, self-funded via the filmmaker's profits from the theater he owned in Portland (the J.J. Parker theater, which is still operating as the Guild Theater on Taylor and 9th). As a result, it mystified critics at the time and was pegged as an experimental film by an outsider artist, which it really isn't. It's a straightforward and entirely legible work of noir-infused, Twilight-Zone-esque horror that just happens to have no dialog.

THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

 ON THE TWENTY THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finished drawing this, the last drawing for "The Feeble Light of Dreams." On to the next sonnet!

Since previously, some of the horror movies I've watched include the following supernatural witchy ones: To the Devil a Daughter (1976), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), The Devil's Candy (2017), A Dark Song (2016), and Saint Maud (2019).

To the Devil a Daughter is a mash-up of The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby. It is very much an attempt by the legendary Hammer Productions to eschew their usual gothicism and cash in on in the 70s satanic possession craze. The result is an awkward, often dull narrative that nevertheless contains elements that Hammer can always be counted on to nail: an awesome Christopher Lee performance as a warlock cult leader; charming and surprisingly bloody creature effects; and innovative ritual sacrifice scenes.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Devil's Candy, A Dark Song, and Saint Maud are all recent indy horror films that critics lauded and horror fans embraced, as reflected by their frequent appearances on best-of lists. However, I've put them all off until now, and as it turns out, in all but one case, my lack of interest was justified. The Autopsy of Jane Doe is well-made, competently written, and stars the highly entertaining Brian Cox. But it really fails to capitalize on its setting, instead betraying a weird prudishness toward both disgusting anatomical detail and the suggestion of salacious deviance. It's also unclear why the reveal of centuries-old witchcraft as the culprit comes so late, given that this is the film's only intriguing aspect. The Devil's Candy is also well-made but fairly rote and safe in delivering its whispering demon house narrative. It drops a lot of references to metal music culture, with a metal-infused score, but since metal has no clear and direct connection to the plot, the main purpose with this aspect seems to be to pander. Saint Maud is well-made too, even exceptionally well-made, with powerful performances by its leads. But once again, it could have gone much further with its subject matter, which in this case is monomaniacal religious delusion. I'm not sure why these three films are so widely recommended when God Told Me To, Carrie, The Shining, Necromantik, and various other classics do so much more with their respective topics.

A Dark Song, however, is worthy of all the praise it's received: its exhaustively well-researched tale of a protracted and brutal occult ritual both pulls no punches and is truly unique.

THE SEVENTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE SEVENTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I continued working on this, the last drawing for "The Feeble Light of Dreams."

I also continued watching a bunch of horror movies, which included revisiting some I hadn't seen for a long time: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), Q The Winged Serpent (1982), The Night Flier (1997), and The Spider Labyrinth (1988). 

Killer Klowns is kind of like Human Centipede in that its concept alone suffices to immortalize it, but its execution is mediocre. It does have some truly creepy vignette scenes in the middle, though, when individual Klowns are out on the town. This movie absolutely terrified me as a kid, particularly the idea that some homovorus creature could pass as a grotesque human and perform light entertainment to get closer to us. Something about the mocking tone of horror comedy made it much scarier to me than straight-faced horror.  

Q The Winged Serpent is a Larry Cohen classic that I remember being played on late night cable a lot. It's one of the few giant monster movies that actually works as horror: first, because the titular flying creature is worshipped by a cult that offers it gruesome human sacrifices; and second, because the creature stalks, snatches, and devours individual victims on rooftops, diving unseen out of the clouds from above. Very fun, weird movie! 

The Night Flier is another one that I would see parts of on late night TV. It's the only TV adaptation of a Stephen King work that is both good and less than 2 hours long. And Miguel Ferrer is great in it as a compellingly detestable tabloid reporter. 

Finally, The Spider Labyrinth is an Italian horror film that should be much more renowned, up there with other late 70s-80s Italian classics like Suspiria, The Beyond, and Demons. It's the only Italian film that really understands and nails Lovecraftian horror. In fact, it's one of the few films period that accomplishes this so well with an original narrative. And that narrative-- wherein a young anthropology professor's struggle to escape his predicament in a strange Eastern European town only serves to entangle him more and more in the seductive web of a spider god cult-- is perfect. I wish there were 100 more movies with exactly this plot.

THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finally finished this, the drawing for the third stanza. Only the coda left.

While working on it, I also watched a bunch more horror movies, including: Humanoids from the Deep (1980), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), The Human Centipede (the first one), and The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). Humanoids from the Deep is notorious for its lecherous fish people, but I just found it disappointing: even the monster impregnation scenes were boring. The Human Centipede is obviously one of the most notorious exploitation films of the 21st century, but this reputation is entirely down to its concept (which is admittedly stomach churning). The actual movie is merely competent and much less disturbing than one would think. Meanwhile, the notorious I Spit on Your Grave is too disturbing for its own good, shocking us by venturing way out of its depth, into horrific trauma that its cartoonish slasher script can't handle.

But I'd definitely recommend The Taking of Deborah Logan. This is an excellent found footage horror film that both avoids the common absurdities of the sub-genre and delivers lots of surprises and genuine scares. It's best known for one "nightmare fuel" shot near the end, but it's no one-shot wonder-- instead, that shot is indicative of the creativity of the whole thing.

THE FIFTH, SIXTH, SEVENTH, AND NINTH NIGHTS OF HALLOWEEN

Catching up ...

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched easily the best Gray-alien horror movie, Dark Skies (2013). It does everything right. We never see the aliens fully or up close. To the extent they are shown, they look more like shadow people than typical rubbery sci fi aliens. Instead, the horror lies in what each member of the protagonist suburban family fails to remember about the traumatic intrusions they have been experiencing. This horror manifests in the harrowing psychophysical side-effects and fragmentary evidence of their brains being edited and remixed every night. Throughout, the Grays remain both incomprehensible and omnipotent, so that the characters never stop feeling as helpless as field mice under an owl's shadow. Dark Skies never even shows us a ship, wisely withholding any definite details that could trigger disbelief. 

And by disbelief, I don't mean the usual kind that we suspend in order to engage with supernatural fiction, but rather a stronger disbelief that describes the bounds of real plausibility. After all, this is what makes the Gray alien an interesting monster compared to ghosts or vampires or squirming abominations-- it retains a real plausibility for our secular world that the other legendary creatures have lost. The problem with so many Gray-alien horror films, though, is that they break one or more of the viewer's private rules of reality, which differ for everyone but are always far more fragile than rules of fictional coherence. 

Through flexible ambiguity and unrelenting focus on the characters' subjective experiences, Dark Skies somehow doesn't break even the strictest of these rules. And besides passing this crucial test, Dark Skies is just a really well-made thriller, with strong performances, nuanced characterization, and detail-attentive storytelling. Probably owing to a distaste for the subject matter at the time, it was poorly reviewed upon release, but it has since received positive reassessment and become a cult favorite.

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I went back and watched the 1975 NBC TV-movie, The UFO Incident, which is a dramatization of Barney and Betty Hill's testimony in their 1961 case of alleged abduction. All subsequent instances of purported alien abduction derive from their paradigmatic encounter narrative. Flying saucer sightings had become a major public phenomenon by the 1950s, coinciding with the height of Cold War paranoia about Soviet spy-craft and nuclear weapons, along with the golden age of alien invasion B-cinema. But before the Hills' testimony (excepting a couple of cases in Brazil that diverge markedly from  the canonical tropes) there had never been a serious claim of direct contact and prolonged interaction with the extraterrestrial pilots of the saucers. With the Hills, all of the classic elements appear fully formed: sighting a UFO overhead while driving down a lonely road at night; electrical disturbances in the car; the deliberate suppression of memory of the subsequent abduction, resulting in "missing time"; recovery of the suppressed memories under hypnosis; small gray-skinned humanoids with very large eyes who communicate telepathically and control the minds of the experiencers; capture and conveyance aboard the alien craft, where the abductees are stripped, probed, and surgically altered in some sort of medical lab; and a concurrent rash of UFO sightings in the area. Even the proper name for the Grays, Zeta Reticulans, derives from Betty Hill's claim that she was shown a star map to the beings' home world, which she later drew and found to be a match for Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system about 39 light-years away. (Of course, it's quite possible that these events occurred in reverse order: she consulted stellar charts first, made the drawing, and then "recalled" under hypnosis having been shown something resembling her drawing.) 

The TV movie itself is a serviceable dramatization of the Hills' testimony. The Grays are only shown briefly in muddled dream-images during the hypnosis sessions, but even these glimpses are too much, given how terrible the masks are. Despite such flaws, however, I recommend watching it just for James Earl Jones' incredible performance as Barney Hill. Jones not only carries the whole production but actually elevates it to peak Gray-alien horror on par with Dark Skies. His portrayal of stark-frozen terror unto and beyond the brink of madness is so real, it honestly seems to shock the other actors. 

Only a few days after The UFO Incident aired, Travis Walton reported his own abduction by the Grays, which supplied the material for his book, Fire in the Sky. Then, in the wake of the Hills' and Walton's success, Whitley Strieber's Communion appeared-- and the genesis of a legendary American monster was complete.  

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I tried to watch something called The Fourth Kind, but it was so terrible, I gave up. Instead, I went through various lists of Gray-alien horror movies and watched a bunch of trailers. I didn't find anything notable that I hadn't already seen.

As for the reality of the Grays: My own personal rules for what a real extraterrestrial visitor could be and do are set by three suppositions based in hard science: (1) faster than light travel will never be feasible for a galaxy-scale civilization (at least, not for one that can avoid detection); (2) all or nearly all sufficiently advanced civilizations become post-organic machine or bio-machine civilizations; (3) if another civilization exists in our galaxy, it is almost certainly millions of years older than ours. From these suppositions we can conclude that if extraterrestrials have visited our solar system, they have done so using undetectable autonomous robotic probes. This scenario falls under the "zoo hypothesis" solution to the Fermi Paradox. (I.e., the paradox that is really more of a question: if intelligent life eventually develops on most planets with Earth-like conditions, then there should be many interstellar civilizations besides our own in our galaxy; why, then, have we not seen any sign at all of their existence?) The zoo hypothesis claims that at least one civilization has spread throughout our galaxy, but it masks its presence in order to prevent disastrous colonial contamination; instead, it opts to study other intelligent species surreptitiously. This would make Earth a kind of wildlife reserve. 

The Zeta Reticulan narrative also falls under the zoo hypothesis, but it violates supposition (2), if not (1) as well. It simply wouldn't make sense to send organic beings that require life support in large spacecraft so as to study an alien civilization for millennia in secret, nor would it be feasible without faster than light transportation, nor would this even be an issue for a post-organic civilization. Thus, extraterrestrials would not come in spaceships. They would be the spaceships. And these autonomous probes would not be large visible objects either. This still leaves open the possibility that something like the Grays could be real insofar as unseen alien zoologists in our solar system could be watching us and might even have come to Earth in the past to study human biology up close. But the canonical Grays derived from the Hills' testimony and made iconic by The X-Files et al. almost certainly don't exist. This in turn means that very few if any of the claimed alien contact cases can be enlisted in support, however tenuously, of the only plausible scenario involving the presence of intelligent extraterrestrials in our solar system. 

This realization has killed the capacity for most Gray-alien horror to terrify me, at least for any considerable duration. Which is what I'm actually concerned with here: the fear generated by the possibility of the Grays' reality. I guess what I have been chasing after with this topic is the experience of pure terror I felt as a child when I saw alien abduction documentaries on cable and believed 100% that the Grays were out there grabbing and experimenting on people and wiping their memories. No other monster has ever scared me so much. 

But I feel that the Gray is now going the way of the changeling and the vampire and becoming simply another nightmare creature that serves as an analogy for terrestrial human pain and helplessness, as exemplified by No One Will Save You. In any case, I have found that with even the best Zeta Reticulan horror films, I'm only able to make contact with ephemeral flashes of the excitingly sleepless, look-over-your-shoulder terror I once felt. Which is sad. 

ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I wrote this! And drew some more. Up next: more drawing. 

Pictured: Betty and Barney Hill and Delsey the dog

THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I worked on this, the third stanza illustration. 

I also continued watching a bunch of horror movies featuring the Grays, aka the Zeta Reticulans,  which I will report on soon in a gap nights list.

THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN (and into the FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN) ... I finished drawing this, the second stanza illustration. Phew, spent more time and energy on it than planned! I did also continue my investigation into the Grays in horror movies while completing this. I actually found a good one! Will report on tomorrow night.

THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I started this, the drawing for the second stanza of the same sonnet.

While drawing, I continued on down the rabbit hole of horror movies about being abducted by the grays and re-watched Fire in the Sky (1993). Like Communion, this movie adapts a purported real-life abduction case. Though it definitely breaks my rule of never directly showing the grays, it does at least delay their reveal until literally the last 15 minutes. I remember watching this movie in the theater with my dad when I was a kid and being quite terrified by the ending. And it does hold up. Even among horror films that don't reveal the full monstrosity until the climax, Fire in the Sky is unusual in that for first hour and ten minutes it doesn't even try to be a frightful-- it's all just unspooky character melodrama. So, it has the structure of a movie-length jumpscare. The abduction sequence is also intrinsically horrific because it's so disorienting. Nothing in the grays' ship makes sense, and most of it is disgusting. It's quite inventive and well-executed. Nevertheless, I would still say it doesn't make good use of the grays per se because it turns out that these aliens actually look like unshelled turtles. They just wear space suits that resemble the Communion grays. More importantly, they don't have the mind-control and memory-altering powers that make *True Grays* distinctly scary.

THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finished this drawing. Which, again, is an illustration for the first stanza of "The Feeble Light of Dreams." On to the second stanza.

While working on it, I decided to go ahead and watch the movie I mentioned last night, Communion (1989), about Whitley Strieber's purportedly real-life abductions by the grays. I had seen parts of it previously but never the whole thing.

It is deeply silly. The best thing about it is Christopher Walken's iconically unhinged performance as Strieber. However, I will say it is creepier than No One Will Save You (and similar fare like Signs), as the grays remain both inscrutable and godlike throughout. There is also a meta-creepiness to projects like this, where at least one of the main people responsible devoutly believes the grays and their doings to be factual. Inhabiting the mind of such a person is unsettling regardless of the credibility of their claims.

The biggest mistake Communion makes as a horror film is showing the grays too much-- or showing them at all really. All of the alien effects are laughably bad. But more importantly, because of the all-powerful mind-control and memory-wiping powers of the grays, there are some truly tense scenes before we see them, where the characters know that what is happening at that moment is terribly wrong, that there is something unbelievably horrifying in the room with them, but they can't see it. And they can't remember what happened later. And the film doesn't show us what it is either. It just confirms that the terribly wrong thing is real. Communion could have built its paranoia up to genuine terror if it had never violated this constraint. Just never actually show the grays first-hand. Only show second-hand evidence, e.g. drawings, along with objects or animals that remind the characters of them. Moments like this when done right are look-over-your-shoulder spooky!

THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I drew this. I decided to do Inktober-ish posts this year instead of another horror movie analysis marathon. The drawings will mostly be illustrations of stanzas from some creepy sonnets that I have written. Probably one drawing every two-ish nights, four drawings for each sonnet. This first one is for the first stanza (in red) of the sonnet to the left, "The Feeble Light of Dreams." 

I did watch while drawing this (so, giving it only about 70% attention) a new horror movie I already knew I wasn't going to love, No Will Save You (freshly released to Hulu streaming). It was well-directed, well-acted, and had a clever ending I quite liked. But it banged again and again on my rawest pet-peeve nerve concerning aliens. The aliens in this are the classic Whitley Strieber Communion grays (if he had copyrighted that stunningly creepy design instead of claiming he really encountered the grays, he'd be very rich). But instead of vastly more intelligent beings, these grays behave like rabid bears, chasing the protagonist all around her house and getting stabbed by her-- even though it's later shown they can easily anti-gravity-beam freeze her wherever she goes and zoop her up without ever getting out of their ship. This is such a waste, repeating the mistake of Signs et al., because the grays remain creepy only because they are one of last otherworldly creatures the scientific secular mind can almost believe are real. That is, you don't necessarily have to suspend rational thought to be scared by them. But in order for this to work, maintaining strong credibility throughout is paramount. Anyways 😤