The Seventh Night of Halloween: Deathdream

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Deathdream (1974), a Vietnam War-era take on “The Monkey’s Paw.”

A young soldier is shot in the jungle. As he loses consciousness, he hears his mother’s voice calling out for him to honor his promise to return home. Back in the US, this mother falls into a fugue state of denial after learning of her son’s death. She repeats her prayer for his return over and over, like a necromantic incantation. Later that night, he does return, but all is not well. He must kill others and inject their blood into his arm to keep himself from rotting. For he did die in Vietnam, and according to him, others must pay for his sacrifice.

The symbolism of this movie is obvious but powerful: many parents prayed for their sons’ return from Vietnam, only to find that when they did, they were dead inside—or they were addicted to heroin. Unlike the original “Monkey’s Paw,” where the mangled condition of the resurrected son is what causes his parents to regret their wish for his return, here the parents’ regret is given plenty of time to set in. The son looks normal, if a little pale; it’s just that he acts so cold. But the parents are sure this will wear off with time. The dawning psychological horror of the impact of bringing a senseless war home, in the form of walking death that wears human flesh, is what makes this a worthwhile development of “Monkey’s Paw.” (Here, one can certainly draw comparisons to Stephen King’s later Pet Sematary, though King was able to add his own further brilliant development to the fable by making the act required for resurrection so involved and by not only not revoking it but repeating it, despite the horrific consequences that the grieving parent knows firsthand will come.) 

Bob Clark would go on to direct the seminal slasher Black Christmas the same year, before abandoning horror entirely for comedies, including Porky’s and A Christmas Story (as well as, regrettably, Baby Geniuses). He always manages to infuse a lot of charm into his movies through his bit characters, which here include a sassy diner waitress, a hungry mailman, and an obnoxious deputy. Also, I think it was pretty daring to make such a direct statement about the psychological fallout of the war before it had even ended. This kind of strong and clear leftwing message has only ever really made it through to large American audiences in low budget independent horror and sci fi flicks.

The Sixth Night of Halloween: Onibaba

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Onibaba (1964), by Kaneto Shindo. It’s a period piece about civil war in 14th century Japan, but none of the main characters are samurai. Instead, we see the fallout of war on ordinary farmers. A woman and her mother-in-law have been reduced to murdering hapless deserters and selling their valuable kit for food. The women then dump the bodies into an eerie pit. The story soon takes a surprisingly erotic turn, involving nightly friends-with-benefits trysts in the tall grass. Consequences finally catch up to the women in the form of a man wearing a cursed demon mask.

Onibaba is quite beautifully made, with excellent cinematography, editing, music, and performances all dovetailing into the filmic equivalent of a moody Muromachi-period landscape painting. What qualifies it as a horror film is its rendition of a spooky folk tale (adapted from a Shin Buddhist parable called “niku-zuki-no-men” (肉付きの面) or “the mask with flesh attached”) revolving around the aforementioned demon mask, and this only gets started two-thirds of the way in. So, it’s really more of a mixed genre picture, at first a historical drama about the miseries of war for regular people, then an erotic melodrama, and finally a traditional supernatural thriller. Somehow it never feels uneven or disjointed though, since Shindo, in addition to blending the technical aspects together so well, is able to make these diverse narrative and tonal currents flow into a unified story. It’s great—though, what this story is ultimately about remains somewhat mysterious to me.

The Fifth Night of Halloween: Mad Love

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Mad Love (1935), starring Peter Lorre as a deranged surgeon whose obsession with a Grand Guignol actress drives him to frame her husband for murder. He decides to accomplish this by the rather circuitous route of transplanting a knife-throwing killer’s hands onto the husband’s wrists and then manipulating him through the power of hypnotic suggestion while wearing metal gauntlets and a sinister neck brace.

This is a wonderful piece of 30’s gothic horror that strings together a series of delicious nuggets. These include: the aforementioned Grand Guignol’s melodramatic staging of a medieval torture scene with a maiden tied to a wheel of fortune; a wax replica of the actress that the mad doctor smuggles into his study, hoping it will come to life like Pygmalion’s Galatea; lush dream sequences accomplished through match-cut dissolves; an execution by guillotine preceded by some gallows humor from the ambivalent convict; and German expressionist influenced interiors with jutting shadows. Of course, the main draw is the inimitably creepy Peter Lorre, who is allowed to let loose in monologues ranging from sorrowful longing to diabolical scheming to insane raving. Much more than the film noir roles he is better known for, Lorre here really earns his status as one of the top horror icons. 

The overall narrative is a little too reliant on coincidence, and it meanders in places, but the high quality of the sights along the way make up for the patchy road getting to them. The conceit of a pair of hands that belonged to a killer and take on a mind of their own once removed was adopted from the 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac, and it would go on to reappear as a trope in many other works, including The Beast with Five Fingers (1946, also starring Lorre),  Hands of a Stranger (1962), The Crawling Hand (1963), The Hand (1981), and Body Parts (1991). 

It might seem like kind of a silly idea, but it’s inspired at least in part by a real phenomenon called alien hand syndrome. This occurs when a neurological disorder causes a person to lose conscious control over her hand. The hand often needs to be restrained when she can no longer prevent it from attempting to harm herself or others.

The Fourth Night of Halloween: Inside

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Inside (2007), a French “new extremity” horror flick by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. It’s about a stubborn woman’s quest to become a mother. She has decided the best way to do this is to extract an overdue baby from another woman’s belly with a pair of scissors. The story is based on a real phenomenon called fetal abduction. The first recorded case occurred in 1974 when an assailant hacked an at-term pregnant woman to death and performed a crude cesarean on the body with a butcher knife. The infant survived. Since then, there have been at least 23 more cases-- two in 2020. Many of them involved the mother being first lured by the kidnapper to the abduction site with promises of free baby supplies. 

So, fetal abduction would provide pretty rich material for an artful, serious work of horror, particularly if made in the excruciatingly intimate tradition of French cinema, right? Yes, but that’s not what this is. Despite rave reviews and continued high estimation alongside the other new extremity films, like the far superior Martyrs (2008) and In My Skin (2002), Inside is a fairly silly, predictable slasher. I enjoyed it, the over-the-top practical gore effects are really fun (and the terrible digital effects, including a particularly egregious womb’s-eye view of a CGI fetus, are hilarious), but it’s not the meditation on the trauma of childbirth I was expecting. 

Is sympathy for the protagonist elicited through the death of a spouse whom we never actually learn anything about? Naturally. Does the antagonist just so happen to be the mysterious person who was caused to miscarry in the opening scene's head-on collision? Of course. Most aggravating to me is that it’s glaringly obvious the cute moments spent introducing the bulging hero’s pet cat only exist to set up an impending cat murder scene, so as to demonstrate how bad the villain really is. This would be a great opportunity to subvert that trope and have the killer for once be a cat-lover-- which in this context would make sense as an interesting character beat, showing that she really is driven by maternal instinct, despite having ruthless disregard for mature human life. Nope! I was angered. 

But again, it is a fun slasher movie with some clever kills, and it’s worthwhile if you go into it with that expectation. Meanwhile, a great and resonant work of horror cinema remains to be made on the topic of fetal abduction.

The Third Night of Halloween: Häxan

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Häxan (1922), the seminal Swedish quasi-disquisition on witchcraft by Benjamin Christensen. I’ve seen clips of it before, but this is the first time I’ve watched the whole thing. It’s incredible! I think that more than even Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Häxan pioneered much of the visual language of cinematic horror still in use today, particularly for exploitation. Nearly every shot is as masterfully composed and stuffed with mesmerizing details as a painting by Bosch or Brueghel. 

In fact, Häxan’s introductory lecture incorporates period woodcuts depicting orgiastic witches’ sabbaths, the torture machines and human bonfires of the Inquisition, and the macabre monstrosities of hell per church doctrine. In some shots, our lecturer, Christensen himself (a ploy that would later be repeated by such classics of exploitative pseudo-documentary as Mondo Cane, Cannibal Holocaust, and Faces of Death), even uses his pencil to lovingly point out grisly details in these prints, such as a demon pouring hot lead into a sinner’s mouth. Most of these images are brought to life in what follows, sometimes fairly closely replicating their staging. And this is what makes Häxan still quite shocking today, and what caused it to be banned in many countries when it was released: in full graphic and often quite convincing detail, it shows us nude witches dancing and making out with demons, bloody infants thrown into boiling cauldrons, dismemberment and cannibalism, the birthing of hellish abominations, and the application of literal rack and scourge.

Following the introduction, the film in structure consists of a loose anthology of narratives, involving, first, a coven of old wisewomen reenacting archetypal scenes of witchery drawn from lore found in such sources as the Malleus Maleficarum and Armand Bénet’s Bibliothèque Diabolique; second, an inquisitorial tribunal that spirals into a frenzy of accusation, torture, spurious confession, mass hysteria, and fiery execution; and finally, more modern scenes of “nervous conditions” like sleepwalking, night terror, and kleptomania, so as to provide 1922 psychiatric medicine’s take on the underlying causes of the witch craze. 

What we are supposedly meant to take away from all this is a thesis about the connection between superstition and mental illness, and how the humane treatment by scientific medicine of women and the elderly suffering from various infirmities that would have been labeled demonic in another age should supplant irrational religious persecution-- and so forth. But as in so many works of later exploitation cinema with solemn messages tagged on the beginning and end, the audience and the filmmaker both know that’s not really what the movie’s about. It’s about the titillation and shock of demonic orgies and medieval torture! Häxan is brilliant not only because it blazed the path for pretty much all exploitation horror that would follow, but also because it reveals that that had always been the purpose of those grisly woodcuts, paintings, and works of literature depicting hellish and damnable scenes, going back at least as far as Dante: they only ostensibly exist to instruct but really serve to give the audience a sensational jolt.

The Second Night of Halloween: They Look Like People

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched They Look Like People (2015) by Perry Blackshear. This is a micro-budget indie movie about two New York bachelors reconnecting and each slowly learning that the other is descending into madness. For Wyatt, this madness takes the form of onset paranoid schizophrenia, which has lead him to believe that most people are infected with demons and that it is his duty to prepare for a bloody war against them. Christian’s madness, on the other hand, is more of a social pathology. Due to insecurities from being bullied in the past, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of male toxicity as a solution to all his problems, which involves obsessively pumping iron and asserting "dominance" in his workplace. 

When the focus is on Wyatt's story, which it is for most of the runtime, it's riveting. This is in spite of the sometimes painful flaws due to budget limitations, which include poor audio and dubbing, spotty acting, and awkward misfires at naturalistic conversation. The film achieves this by pushing against horror audience expectations with regards to possibly delusional protagonists. Going back to the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and continuing through modern horror like the highly underrated The Forgotten (2004) and Oculus (2013) (which was part of last year’s series), when the suspense depends on the reality of malevolent entities perceived by only the hero, almost without exception those entities' existence is well-substantiated by the third act. Frailty (2001), about a father who abducts and murders people he believes to be demons, which we learn in they end they are in fact, is an example that They Look Like People parallels especially closely. All of this narrative pre-programming allows Blackshear to leave us in rapt anticipation of the outcome almost until the last second, both in terms of the truth of the demonic invasion, outside of Wyatt’s head, and in terms of whether or not Wyatt will commit to fighting the invasion by murdering his possibly ersatz friend. For this reason, They Look Like People strikes closer to the isolation, sadness, and terror of real madness than many other works of horror.

On the other hand, Christian’s struggle with male toxicity, while more topical, does not work as well, mostly because it is relegated to undercooked b-story status. We simply don’t learn enough about how Christian used to be to understand what is driving him to become macho now. We don’t even see enough of the “dominance” behavior that other characters, we are told, are angered by in the present. Maybe a different actor would have been able to sell these aspects without further narrative tangents, but Evan Dumouchel, while enjoyable to watch, is simply too puppyish. This doesn’t detract overmuch from the impact of the rest of the film’s effective exploration of paranoid delusion, though.

The First Night of Halloween: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I have returned for another 31 Nights of Halloween series! 

To start things off, I watched The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), directed by Nicolas Gessner and starring a twelve year old Jodie Foster as a mysterious girl who is a bit too dedicated to preserving her latchkey kid way of life. What's great about this film is that it doesn't seem to be a work of horror at all until we are well into the second act. That's when it dawns on us-- along with the girl's new beau, a teenage magician with a limp-- that the characters have literally been sitting on a horrific scene the whole time. By the same stroke, we realize that there is something much more disturbing than we had imagined going on behind the powerfully sympathetic eyes of Foster's Rynn Jacobs. This is a clever trick, since we have seen her constantly lie through her teeth to everyone she's met from the beginning. Even as a pre-teen, Foster was able to bring a layered and restrained complexity to Rynn that lures us into trusting her and rooting for her, all while we strongly suspect that we shouldn't-- and perhaps even after our suspicions are confirmed. Notwithstanding the patient ironies and delicate autumn compositions of Gessner's directing, I doubt this could have worked as well with anyone else in the role. I love a melancholy 70's horror film with unsettling undercurrents!

The Drive to Paradise

The driver was an ancient man in a black Lincoln. 

He arrived unbidden and offered to take us anywhere, for free.

Robert, laughing, asked him to take us to paradise. 

He readily agreed, saying he knew the way.

Smirking, we three piled in the creaking back seat. 

As the car drove off, we noticed the engine’s eerie silence.

All that month, Gertrude had been goading Robert and I on. 

That had made us easy marks.

Robert asked the driver if he was a pervert

or just liked to show off his weird electric vehicle.

The driver replied coyly, “It’s not electric.

You’ll soon learn what it uses for fuel, when we reach paradise.”

That moment we entered a stygian tunnel. 

When we emerged, the world was different: ashen and dream-twisted.

Where the Road Ends

Do you doubt my ability to recall every detail, exactly as it was,

that night at the end of the road?

Perhaps if you know more about me:

I was raised in squalor by neglectful parents.

I taught myself by watching.

So, as a good student of life, I etched in my brain what occurred that night,

down where the road ends.

Past the grass and broken windows,

they showed me things I’d never seen or heard of.

I was transformed.

Impaling her between her thighs,

the hook cracked out through her sternum—but that came later.

I imagine those who will read what I’m telling you now

will be anxious to know whose body that was.

The same curiosity brought the others there, though, and brought me. 

We wanted to know who would be chosen.

Grandfather called us,

guided us to meet him at the place where he would choose among us. 

And we came.

He’d whispered to us each of the ordeals we must complete before coming,

bringing severed bits to show.

Carrying my box of proof, I set out on the road. 

In the woods along the way were skeletons of wrecked cars.

People in the dark shacks on either side peeking at me

would’ve seen a stumbling, gray-skinned beanpole.

Once, I was shapely, vivacious, before the addiction. 

I’d be dead if not for Grandfather’s guidance.

Coming to the end of the road, beyond,

I heard the ugliest grandchild singing, strumming out an old ballad.

There, we all looked in one others’ stricken faces, boxes at our feet. 

We puzzled over who’d be chosen.

To become his grandchildren,

we’d each murdered our birth parents and anointed ourselves in their blood.

When he freed me,

his unearthly shadow had bent to whisper how my murders made me his.

As did I, so did the others, all with the same withered looks: 

we opened our boxes and looked into them.

That’s when I recognized her, standing across from me: an old lover. 

I’d not known she was one of us.

She saw me too, and the fear was in her eyes. 

Carnal knowledge between grandchildren is forbidden.

We laid out our offerings: pieces of our parents. 

We looked up. 

Grandfather was there. 

He asked us to choose.

Believe me: my former lover, she chose herself,

out of fear I’d let slip the truth—it wasn’t me.

concept art

A gif

The Little Man in the Red Tree’s Roots

As children, we would go into the woods

to learn secrets from the little man who lived in the red tree’s roots.

I wanted to know, so I did as the others instructed. 

I knocked on the root knob and asked the secret of love.

Soon, I saw a dark shape shifting under the roots. 

The little man spoke: “I’ll tell you your true love’s name.”

I’d never thought to fear the little man until then.

But his buzzing voice revealed a hideous truth.

I wanted to betray my peers, to run and tell our parents of this horror. 

That’s when I felt his fingers grab me.

Despite my thrashing,

the fingers of the pink limbs reaching up from between the roots pinned me fast.

“Faith is your true love’s name,” the little man said. 

“She led you here, my son. Now join my other children.”

A Fate Worse Than Hunger

Three travelers arrived in a town on the mountain steppes

to find mass pyres smoking in empty streets.

Only a ponderous crone would come out to speak to them. 

She said, “This famine is our true king’s will.”

The swordsman of the three gripped his blade and stepped forth boldly,

wanting to slice into this king’s neck.

The crone cackled as if seeing the picture in his mind directly.

“No, our king is no villain in need of slaying.”

She gestured to a bone-thin woman

trembling with her children in a crooked door nearby.

“They suffer hunger willingly,

to avoid the creature who feasts upon only the well-fed,” she explained.

The crone stroked the swordsman’s arm,

judging him to be the meatiest of the three.

Just Another Delusion

The worm-thing leapt and clamped onto my throat. 

Its yard-long body thrashed in the dark.

They’ve said it’s just another of my delusions, but you have to believe me.

The nanny, the one who used to recite her eerie poems, once took me for a walk. 

She led me into a shed.

She told me she wanted to introduce me to a friend

she’d found again after years of searching.

The windows were dark, and the inside smelt of old meat. 

I wondered what kind of friend could live there.

Since that day, I’ve had trouble keeping memory separate from imagination. 

Now they’ve committed me.

But I tell you, that thing took a part of my mind. 

I could feel it laughing at me, at all of us.

The Benefactors

We see through the eyes of the villagers, feel their sentiments,

control their actions.

The pharmacist’s daughter,

straining over a chemistry text, hoping for a scholarship:

we see it all inside her.

And we feel the aging mayor’s lust

as he spies on her from his office across the way, through his blinds.

In other villages, we ended things by inducing blood orgies,

sweeping arson, catastrophic collapses.

But such climaxes left us wanting.

Instead, we’ve decided to weave a beneficial outcome for this village.

Searching through the details of their lives stored in their skulls,

we puzzled over how to help them.

We finally chose to freeze them in an eternal loop of placidity:

the pharmacist’s daughter forever hoping, forever lusted after.

Hide & Shriek: a Board Game

 

Whispering Friend

As a child I found a worm in the woods that stung me and sickened me.

My friend came after I recovered.

He's been at my side since, helping me through ordeals, whispering advice,

though others cannot see him.

It was he who convinced me to leave home and seek the one he calls the Queen.

Following his insistent directions, 

I crept along stinking alleys, through twisting catacombs.

At the end of a tunnel curving into the earth,

we met a cackling ghoul who guards the Queen's lair.

The ghoul could see my friend, and to him he posed a riddle.

My friend solved it in a cryptic tongue.

When I woke a nurse told me it was all a fever dream,

but I know she is indeed the Queen, testing me.

a spooky boy

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #13: A Page of Madness (1926)

On the THIRTEENTH night of Halloween ... a special treat: I re-watched one of my favorite horror films, A Page of Madness (1926), directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa and written (in whole or in part) by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. 

This is one of the most chilling and memorably creepy films I've ever seen, not only in itself, with its cursed surrealistic imagery of ghostly and insane dreams in a remote island asylum-- which a family has become perversely entangled with in some obscure manner-- but also in the mysterious circumstances of its creation. 

First, the film was made by a cryptic pre-war Japanese avant-garde group called Shinkankakuha, or "The School of New Perceptions" (both Kinugasa and Kawabata were members), with the almost cult-like stated aim of seeking to inhabit "a subjectivity that peels away the naturalized exterior aspects and leaps into the thing itself." 

Second, it was a lost film for 45 years, until a print was discovered in a storehouse in 1971, and as such it is one of the few surviving silent-era Japanese films. Consequently, there is scant information about its production-- it seems to have been filmed in an actual asylum, perhaps with real inmates as background actors. 

Third, it never had title cards but instead the narrative was filled in at showings by live performers who either read from a script or came up with dialog improvisationally. For this reason, much of the literal narrative remains disturbingly ambiguous: we know that the main character is a janitor who works at an asylum where his wife is kept as an inmate, but are his children who visit him real or are they ghostly hallucinations, their deaths having precipitated his wife's madness? Or is he himself an inmate who is merely imaging one of the other inmates to be his wife? Or are the rare appearances by psychiatric staff the actual illusions, and the truth is that all of the characters are in hell, depicted here as an asylum run by its inmates and filled with acquaintances and relatives from one's former life? 

All of these mysteries surrounding the work's production and narrative, together with the film's phantasmagoric imagery, make it feel like a forbidden, otherworldly artifact. We may never fully understand its secrets or the ghosts that haunt it.

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #15: The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

On the fifteenth night of Halloween ... I watched The Eyes of My Mother (2016), written and directed by Nicolas Pesce. 

This film opens with a trucker playing a cassette recording of the 1930 murder ballad, "The Murder of the Lawson Family," which tells of the gruesome 1929 familicide of the Lawsons, a clan of North Carolina sharecroppers. And the film closes with Amália Rodrigues' 1970 recording of the soulful Portuguese ballad of love lost, "Com Que Voz," which the main character is earlier seen playing on a gramophone while dancing with her father's taxidermized corpse. These two songs underscore what Pesce wants to create: a rural gothic folk tale of a family's grisly deeds, hidden away on a farm that seems isolated in both space and time-- a folk tale that is in turn embedded in the haunting exploration of one woman's loneliness after her parents' deaths and the circumstances of her upbringing have left her with a twisted, almost inhuman, mind. Pesce largely succeeds in this aim through the stark beauty of his black and white compositions and through Kika Magalhães' empathetic performance as the deeply confused Francisca. 

Perhaps I was expecting something a bit more otherworldly, something leaning more into folk horror, and not quite as narratively frank-- but in any case this is definitely a strong, memorable work.

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #12: Ganja and Hess (1973)

On the twelfth night of Halloween … I watched Ganja and Hess (1973), written and directed by Bill Gunn. 

This wonderful gem of a film has many facets: it is an independently-made, experimental, gothic, erotic-romantic, African American, art-horror vampire film. The plot is pretty straight-forward, though: Dr. Hess (played by the excellent Duane Jones, who starred in the original Night of the Living Dead) is a wealthy anthropologist who has recently returned from Africa with a ceremonial dagger made by a mysterious vampire cult. When an unstable houseguest (played by Gunn himself) stabs Hess with the dagger in his sleep, Hess rises from the dead and begins thirsting for blood. After a series brief adventures that allow Hess to learn to control his powers and become comfortable in the role of a Dracula-like vampire lord, he meets the houseguest's wife, Ganja (played by the equally excellent Marlene Clark of Black Mamba, Switchblade Sisters, and Enter the Dragon fame), and falls in love with her. They soon marry. Out of fear of losing Ganja, Hess decides to turn her into a vampire too. I suppose Hess' sadness upon seeing his wife's horror at what she has become drives him to commit suicide by standing under the shadow of a cross (the only way to kill a vampire, according to this film's lore). Ganja, however, decides to go on as the new vampire lady of the estate and take a new lover.

This summary doesn't begin to do justice to the film's creativity, though. By turns, it uses impressionistic, psychedelic, and improvisational techniques to address many different themes and symbols-- including both timely and timeless questions of love, class, history, and African American identity. I can't pretend to understand everything this film has to say, particularly in the context of early 70's Black politics and culture, but it's definitely worthy of broader appreciation and study. I'd also say that it is a foundational forerunner to the current indie art-horror renaissance.

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #9: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

On the ninth night of Halloween ... I watched Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), an English-Spanish production directed by Jorge Grau. 

This is a very British zombie movie (although Grau was Spanish, it was shot in Manchester and Sheffield with British actors). Most of the runtime is spent investigating one suspicious murder, which we the viewers know was committed by a lone reanimated corpse, but which a hardnose inspector is certain was the work of our "long-hair" leads. The long-hairs do their own investigating and find that an experimental pest-control device that uses "ultra-sonic radiation" to make insects kill each other is also agitating the recently dead into homicidal undeath. As one long-hair puts it, while barricaded against the fiends in a church rectory, “When a person dies, perhaps the nervous system goes on living for a while, perhaps in some very basic, crude way, like an insect or a plant." This kind of detailed but ludicrous deduction is often found in British horror films of the 60's and 70's, such as Quatermass and the Pit (a 1967 remake by Hammer Films of a 1959 BBC TV movie) and The Creeping Flesh (1973). So, it's interesting to see it applied to 70's zombies. The patient, cerebral approach here is very different from American Romero-style zombie flics of the time. 

Nevertheless, the brutal orgy of zombie action in the last half hour really works as a payoff in contrast to the preceding bucolic serenity. Also, it has a good message: the police will always ignore the real problem, whether it's poverty or an outbreak of zombie-ism, and blame the victims instead--ACAB!

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #8: In My Skin (2002)

On the eighth night of Halloween ... I watched In My Skin (2002), written and directed by Marina de Van, who also plays the lead.

It's one of the earliest of the New French Extremity horror films, which involve intensely intimate body horror and naturalistic narratives and acting. This is the best of them I've seen. It's very uncomfortable to watch! But quite affecting. de Van plays a marketing executive who begins to experience body integrity dysphoria after an injury. She becomes a detached observer of her own pain, and she is soon racked with sexually-charged cravings to cut pieces out of her body. The alienation she feels from her body is an extension and reflection of her alienation from herself in her role as a salaried professional, embedded in complex capitalist marketing schemes and in the sexual politics of her workplace relationships. As a result, she finds satisfaction in negating this role by taking herself apart. 

This film is so focused and direct and minimal that it becomes quite painful for the viewer, which is exactly what New French Extremity horror films aim for. In My Skin manages to go further than the other, more elaborate entries in this genre that I've seen, though, with just the spare vérité of one woman's quest for psychological and physical self-disassembly.

Premonition of a Burning

She’d searched headstones, articles, hospitals, and tent cities

for the huddled figure in her dreams.

In the burnt-out husk of an old hotel,

she at last found that huddled figure, in a wheelchair, still breathing.

She’d been a practical woman once, of little vision or mysticism,

until the dreamt premonition of her accident.

After losing her daughter, 

she turned against her academic colleagues to study precognition.

Despite years of effort, she never experienced another premonition,

so she turned to drugs.

This huddled figure, here,

she’d often seen in her chemical-induced trances,

but she’d never seen its face.

Now it looked up at her.

Lullaby in Starlight

One night, as her husband slept,

something came through the window and took the young wife away.

When a detective came to question the husband,

an unidentified military man stood behind in silence.

Through a gauzy haze, a hand was reaching for the young wife’s bare skin.

At first she thought it was her husband.

This thought vanished as soon as the hand touched her.

It felt like a snake’s belly.

She cried out, Where am I?

A voice came to her in her mind.

It tried to sooth her with an odd lullaby.

When she looked down, she saw that she’d been vivisected by spidery digits.

She could only hoarsely laugh.

Weeks later, in an asylum,

after she’d been found naked in a field,

she spoke of her organs’ beauty in starlight.

Perspectival Logic (masters thesis)

What We Will Become

I wonder, looking in the eyes of the spider, what we are to it.

It sits vast above me, meticulously preparing its traps, for so long it almost goes hungry.

In my chamber beneath it, I pleasure myself with my invented games.

I help the spider by devising ever better, more clever ways for it to obtain its prey.

The more it learns from me, the more freedom I gain.

Beware what you will do and thus become to be free again.

I soon took myself as my own victim before I began to take others.

Twenty Dramatic Archetype Circuits

In Your Shadow

 

Halloween Drawing (panel 1 of Valley of the Unseen strip)

Halloween Drawing (panel 2 of Valley of the Unseen strip)

The Echo of His Words

More and more of us came to listen

to the stirring words of the man who took away our sick.

I will say I already had good reason to suspect him, from an incident years ago.

The gracious among us would invite him in for cider

when he called for our elderly and infirm.

His hearse would carry away our invalids as they lay mumbling on a stretcher in the back.

In listening to the man’s words, we were seeking health advice.

Instead, the words’ twisting echoes made us sick.

And that in turn lead him to ferry ever more of us away.

In the end, he told me:

“The sick—I’ve put them where they’ll mumble on forever.

In the mortuary walls.”

Changelings

 In summer, the lovely girls would come out to the pier

to be ogled at by the boys under the docks.

Their teacher’s warnings of disappearances along that part of the coast

failed to dissuade them.

Though searchers were always sent out on the rocks,

this fishing town seemed resigned to a cryptic fate.

The truth beneath the silence had seeped through and bloomed into nervous minds.

Heedless, one night the twin sisters snuck out to the pier.

They dared each other to make excursions further down the rocks.

But they’d never known the kind of terror they’d soon suffer.

A half-drunken sailor in his skiff heard the twins’ screams echo over the waves.

From the crack of a sea cave came their cries at the things that pulled them in.

Old men in the tavern listened to the sailor’s tale with glistening eyes,

shook their heads, turned away.

They pretended ignorance of the cavern’s changelings,

as they were sometimes called in whispers.

Meanwhile, the slippery things restraining the sisters in darkness stood awestruck.

The sisters’ similarity astonished them.

Many digits poked one sister’s face, then the other.

A synchronized droning said: “We drink you.”

One twin, hearing her sister sobbing as digits pricked her face,

tore loose in defiance.

She heard the things’ frightened gasps.

Using this fear, the twins would come to command the cave—

as they too began to change.

What the Voice Teaches

I am the voice that tells you to pick up the scissors

and stab the sleeping old woman in the eye.

You put the thought out of your mind by switching on the TV

to a cartoon about dead children.

In another voice,

I tell you there is nothing out of the ordinary

about the creeping wish to kill.

You’ve lived enslaved to this woman for so long,

in this house of dying shadows, why not end it?

I teach you a lesson about fate, of the strings you’re tied to,

and the act needed to cut yourself free.

Imagine the old woman was murdered and buried

before you were even brought here and gifted to her.

With no eyes and no hands, she will be your slave, locked below.

Forever Waiting

The century-ancient siblings dwelt as recluses

in the shuttered stone house carved into the cliff.

Seeking their rumored riches,

a sleuth came knocking,

pleading aid for her feigned accident in the night rain.

The wild-haired, stuttering brother

confusedly ushered her through dim, smoky chambers.

In the corners loomed the other siblings’ shadows.

The tall sister whispered, “We know why you’ve come.”

Nevertheless, they showed her, in the cellar’s back wall,

a fissure opening into a wailing red cavern.

The siblings let her go inside,

confiding how they wished they could follow,

instead of waiting at the edge.

She stumbled through time,

returning decades older,

years earlier,

to join them in waiting for her own arrival.

The Empty Room

From the massive woman's mouth came a small girl’s voice,

asking us, “Did you see my baby brother?”

She’d surprised us in the hotel lobby, by the stairwell,

saying she’d been a good big sister, till she lost him.

We escaped her wheedling and got to our room at last,

but in the night we were awoken by a child’s crying.

The crying came from our bathroom pipes,

which the proprietor at length told the history of.

“‘Devil’s veins,’ locals called ‘em a century past,”

he said tapping, “when they saw ‘em installed here.”

Half-awake, I heard the child crying again hours later.

I left my wife sleeping to follow it along the pipes.

I’d left the door ajar, not wanting to wake her or leave her without the key.

The pipes ran along the hall ceiling and bent left and down another stair,

splitting like roots toward the basement.

Needing to find those cries in the pipes made me abandon sense—

my wife was missing when I returned.

I close my eyes now and see

the marks her nails made in the sheets as she was dragged out.

The proprietor was disassembling electronics,

looking for bugs and finding only insects, when I ran in.

He told me how we couldn’t leave,

an exchange had been made, none of it was his choice.

To find her, I would have to become the kidnapper of the child I’d searched for,

the horror I’d feared in the walls.

Where other guests on other floors were kept,

I heard one say, hoarsely chuckling, “Never stop believing.”

Occult Streets

We catch a glimpse of our death in the face of a stranger,

down an occult street.

Along an alien alley once,

I heard a child at a window whisper my name without opening his mouth.

A gathering under the window seemed to recognize me

and came at me with open arms.

One of them, a woman in a guard uniform,

clasped my shoulders hard, as if to detain me, then laughed.

She leaned toward a gaunt, faintly familiar man and stroked him,

grinning, watching for my reaction.

Following her inside, I found the child standing beside an urn. 

All the others had withered into husks.

“Tell me what it says,” whispered the child, pointing to the urn’s inscription,

but I refused to look.

A Visitor’s Souvenirs

After the mine’s veins were exhausted,

the town shriveled on the mountainside, skeletal, lonely.

Even the last holdouts had lost hope.

But then a surveyor broke through a passage to a long, thin chamber.

The sheriff grabbed the wild-eyed surveyor’s map,

blocking him from contacting his home office.

Alluring memories bloomed in those townsfolk’s minds

as they followed the sheriff into the mine’s mouth.

Only the two church women refused to follow.

They stood muttering warnings about an ancient visitation.

The townsfolk each saw the visitor in the chamber as an old friend,

rather than as a collector of minds.

Today you’ll find the few elderly inhabitants left from that time

to be free from much thought or speech.

Meta-Philosophical Logic

Consider philosophical tropes as approaches to taking a position on a topic. If T is a topic, such as identity, knowledge, value etc., then one can answer a What (object) question, seeking to define T, a How (manner) question, seeking to explain T's workings, a When-Where-Who (time, place, subject) question, seeking to provide T's origin, or a Why (purpose) question, seeking to define T's value or purpose. Call the What route D for definition, the How route P for process, the When-Where-Who route O for origin, and the Why route V for value.

Then for D, there might be several main lines of answers. (1) one could answer in the negative (n), that there is no such thing as T. (2) one could answer reductively (r) and say that T is only some assemblage or name for other objects. (3) one could assent to the full reality of T and seek to define what differentiates (d) it from other like things. Or (4) one could assent to T's reality but instead seek to define it intrinsically (i) according to necessary and sufficient properties. So, D_n(T), D_r(T), D_d(T), or D_i(T) are possible definition-approach functions on T.

Likewise, it seems one could perform these moves with P, O, and V—with the added change to i for P where functions and mechanisms, with inputs, outputs, and conditions, would also have to be given along with necessary and sufficient properties; with the change to i for O where a particular event description, with a reason for its historical novelty, would have to be given along with necessary and sufficient properties; and with the change to i for V where an account of T's valued effect would have to be given as a product of its necessary and sufficient properties, or those properties themselves would have to be shown to be valued.

So, we have:

1. Conceptual Definition of T: D_n(T), D_r(T), D_d(T), or D_i(T)    

2. Procedural Explanation of T: P_n(T), P_r(T), P_d(T), or P_i*(T)

3. Historical Origin of T: O_n(T), O_r(T), O_d(T), or O_i**(T)

4. Practical Value of T: V_n(T), V_r(T), V_d(T), or V_i***(T)

On a given philosophical topic, these seem to be the available philosophical tropes. Then, within each of the four moves for the four approaches, there are a variety of more nuanced sub-choices that may be available. Broadly, one might begin to map out the entire philosophical discourse generated on any given topic by outputting the available primary theories, objections and other responses to those theories, and defenses against the objections, along with various combinations of compatible theories to form new primary theory-objection-defense sets. One could then look for applications for the resulting maps as they intersect with other fields, if there are any.

However, one might begin to worry about the partiality of the set of T’s. Perhaps the implementation of discourses on T’s provides us true knowledge and benefit with respect to real facets of the world—but is there not something myopic here? What is the set of all T’s? What are T’s on such that they are T’s? What do all philosophical topics share and how are they generated? How do they function as topics such that they are philosophically relevant? How do they attach to the world and become applicable? Could our trope functions range over the whole set T rather than an individual T?

It seems that one could (1) negate the set of all philosophical topics as such by denying that there is ever any such thing as a philosophical topic (or philosophical activity onto such); (2) reduce all philosophical topics as such to some other object or field (or some other type of activity onto such); (3) differentiate all philosophical topics as such from other types of topic; or (4) identify the necessary and sufficient properties of a philosophical topic as such. From this, a total meta-philosophical mapping could be produced. This would provide a formal domain description for philosophy.

Possible schemas for functions D, P, O, and V:

n = ("x(Tx à ~x)

r = (T = φ(x, y))

d = ((~(u ⊆ T) ↔ (T = S)) & (u ⊆ T))

i = (T ↔ φ(x, y))