Thursday, October 31, 2024
10:06 PM |
I Hate Gay Halloween...
... what do you mean you’re Patrick and Art in the churros scene from Challengers?
This is our annual Halloween tradition, Renz Torres and I, dressing up as iconic queer characters of every year. This is me as Patrick Zweig [Josh O’Connor] and Renz as Art Donaldson [Mike Faist] in the infamous churros scene from Luca Guadagnino's Challengers (2024). Many churros were eaten in this attempt.
Labels: halloween, life, love
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Tuesday, October 31, 2023
1:31 PM |
Presenting Our Halloween Couple Costumes for 2023!
We come as Alex and Prince Henry from the film
Red, White, and Royal Blue, and here we are trying to mimic
the iconic poster. [Thanks to Sintral by The Bricks Hotel for giving us the space to do this.]
On becoming Alex...
On becoming Prince Henry...
Renz and I never planned this, but we've always done couple costumes for Halloween. Here's a pictorial and brief history of them, but I couldn't find our photos of the others:
Labels: halloween, life, love
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Monday, October 31, 2022
4:30 PM |
Halloween Couple Costume 2022
I’m Lilo and he’s Stitch. Not one of our more elaborate attempts at Halloween couple costuming [one year we did
Call Me By Your Name, and another year we did
Gameboys], but this will do. Halloween is another reason why Renz is such a great partner.
Labels: halloween, life, love
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Monday, October 17, 2022
6:10 PM |
Finally, Halloween Ends
I never liked David Gordon Green’s take on the Halloween story, which is sad because before the first one came out in 2018 I was actually excited for it — and the first act of that film was indeed ferocious, complete with stunning cinematography. [That sequence of the podcasters at the asylum was fantastic and terrifying, and felt new.] And then it all went downhill, complete with so many illogical turns that just made me hate the whole thing, stretching into the trilogy the film became. My nadir was in Halloween Kills when they showed Michael Myers riding a car, and I was like: “Michael Myers knows how to drive a car?” Now it ends with Michael Myers the Murder Mentor in Halloween Ends, and I’m just here for the ridiculousness of it all.Labels: film, halloween, horror
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Saturday, October 31, 2020
11:17 PM |
Pass or [Cos]play?
Last year for Halloween, the s.o. and I decided to dress up as Elio and Oliver from Call Me By Your Name. That may have started an end-of-October tradition: this year we decided to dress up as Gavreel and Cairo from #Gameboys. Fun, fun, fun.Labels: BL, costume, film, halloween, life, love, popular culture, queer
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Monday, October 30, 2017
12:44 PM |
A Halloween Story
Years ago, I had a strange visitation. I had decided to move back to my old apartment in Tubod, where I still live, because campus housing was not for me and my huge library needed proper shelving. It must have been October, during a semestral break, and I had spent the day directing the move from Acacia Cottage to this bachelor's pad hidden away in a corner of a compound with its own entrance.
I loved the dilapidated look of the pad from the outside -- a swirl of vines, an unfinished fence of concrete blocks, a "front gate" of grills, a pile of old lumber in the adjacent backyard -- because it felt like a good illustration for the truism to never judge a book by its cover. Inside the pad were walls of books and paintings and what-not. It's a small pad, a long rectangular box really, with a kitchenette.
That moving day, everything was still in boxes, and my bed had just been installed in, its mattress still naked. I was so exhausted I decided to take a nap, naked. The minute my head fell on the pillows, I was gone. I'm not sure how long I slept. Two hours? Three? But it was almost dark when I woke up -- and I had awakened because even in my deep sleep, I was aware that someone was watching me.
I came to groggily, and towering over me was a woman in dark rags, and she was looking down at me with glaring eyes. For some reason, I didn't panic. Still lying down completely vulnerable in my nakedness, I asked her in genuine confusion, "What are you doing here?" She didn't say anything, just glared at me, and then she gave me a terrible smile. That felt like eternity. After a while, she walked, or glided, slowly to where the door was. I had managed to scramble up from bed. Again, I asked her: "What are you doing here?" She slowly turned to face me; this time her face was a complete blank, completely expressionless, completely unnerving. I scrambled to dress up. But by then she had disappeared. I raced outside, to an evening that was devoid of traffic and people, and looked up and down the street, but she was gone.
Sometimes, I still forget to lock my front gate.
Labels: halloween, life
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Tuesday, November 01, 2016
1:21 PM |
8List's Halloween Horror Fiction Marathon 2016
8List's
Karl R. De Mesa invited a bunch of writers to contribute to their Halloween fiction marathon stretched for several days. All stories are in, and here's the final roundup! Thanks, Karl, for the opportunity, and it has been an honor to be part of this roster of brilliant fictionists...
Eliza Victoria: Blessed Are Those Who Suffer
Vince Torres: Goto Paradise
Joseph Nacino: The Last Midnight Game
Yvette Tan: Demon Summoning Made Easy: Introduction
Dean Francis Alfar: Brother and Sister
Gabriela Lee: Dog Gone Days
Ian Rosales Casocot: The Bodies
Timothy James Dimacali: Torn
Enjoy the scares!
SaveSaveLabels: fiction, halloween, philippine literature, writers
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Thursday, October 13, 2016
12:01 AM |
Women in Peril: Cujo, The Bad Seed, The Witch, Lady in a Cage, Sudden Fear, and the 1975/2004 Versions of The Stepford Wives
Every year since 2010, I've devoted the month of October to watching horror movies of all kinds, from slasher films to psychological thrillers to haunted house movies, from the classic to the contemporary. (Except torture porn. I draw the line there.) This year, I've decided to do "Women in Peril" as a theme. It is an intirguing subgenre of horror, and I intend to catch a full range of its varieties. I'll try to stay away from the "final girl" trope, however. So, no Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween
for me. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line in the comments.
[6] Lewis Teague’s
Cujo (1983), the now cult adaptation of Stephen King’s tenth novel is remarkable for its capability to heighten and embellish the plain conceit of its horror: it is simply a rabid dog story. That King managed to conjure an entire novel out of that premise really does tell me that structure is all, that perhaps a man vs. wild animal narrative could be a true source of terror if you invest it with something to root for. Who we root for is Dee Wallace’s Donna Trenton, a likeable, if harried, housewife whose life is made more complicated by three things: she is having an affair with her ex-boyfriend from high school, her husband’s advertising campaign for a cereal commercial is failing, and her young boy is exhibiting disturbing signs of being a little too sensitive. Apparently, domestic difficulties get their resolution by an encounter with the diabolical: a good-natured St. Bernard has been bitten by a rabid bat, and has become a lunging mass of droopy murderousness. Away in the city from their little town to salvage his cereal campaign, he tells his wife their car needs servicing. She goes to the town mechanic with her son, and before she could even say, “This is a good parking spot,” the dog has lunged after them, trapping mother and son in the car, whose battery has died. The film’s prototypical set-up is complete: our helpless protagonist is trapped, the geography of the trap is laid out well, and the monstrous creature is circling around the trap. What follows is truly a surprisingly nerve-wracking unfolding of the dog’s uncanny mercilessness, underlined of course by Dee Wallace’s wrenching performance and the growing problems she encounters in a closed car without food or water, the sun making its interiors a frightful oven. Throughout the ordeal, the boy weakens with a deadly swiftness – and tests the mother’s resolve. I like the film, I like its pace, I like its haunting score, I like how it handles atmosphere, and I like that I’m genuinely bedevilled by this dog.
[7] Melvyn LeRoy’s
The Bad Seed (1956) is a peculiar horror film that for me becomes a perfect snapshot of its time: the 1950s. By contemporary standards, it fails as a horror film – but taking into context the time it was produced in, it becomes a beguiling artefact. It was a popular film, a major hit for its studio during its release, and subsequently earned four Oscar nominations, three of them for its cast. Only those performances remain indelible, the production not much so – because the immediate thing one notices about it is how stagey it is directed and rendered by LeRoy, which may spring from the fact that it honors more the 1954 stage adaptation of the story rather than the breathtaking novel by William March, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Thus, the story never leaves its primary location, the house of housewife Christine Penmark, which she shares with her husband Kenneth, a colonel, and her precocious and lovely little daughter Rhoda, and which she rents from the lovely landlady Monica, who lives upstairs. The only time it leaves the house is at the end with the scene at the lake, a coda that was added to the film to satisfy the Hollywood Code censors, and provided a marked departure from the more cynical original ending of the play and the novel. That meant most of the vital turns of the plot – in particular, the three murders of the story, as well as the mother’s backstory – are staged off-screen, reported over radio news, narrated by visitors, or unfolding solely through the reaction shots of witnesses. It is a strange filmic device, perfect for theatre but fatal for cinema. That theatrical borrowing is even taken further, with the actors exiting and bowing at the end, like in a curtain call. It left me cold and uninvolved, the very thesis of the excesses of exposition. But the story does posit interesting questions. Can evil be inherited genetically? And if so, if you are a blood relation of someone evil, can you do something about it? Those questions haunt Nancy Kelly’s Christine Penmark, who begins to suspect her perfect daughter, played with such sweet malevolence by Patty McCormack, may in fact be a sociopath (in a time when the term had yet to be invented). When she also finds out that she has been adopted and that her real mother was in fact a serial killer, she recoils from the full implication of her genetic inheritance – that her mother’s killing instincts had skipped a generation but has it passed it on to her daughter. What’s a mother to do? Do you turn over your daughter to the police? Do you do something distract? How do you exactly fight a monster if the monster is your own blood and genes? LeRoy employs a clumsy Deux ex machina to solve the dilemma, which diminishes this adaptation further – but even that is a sign of 1950s social imperatives. While the end credits roll, Nancy Kelly playfully spanks Patty McCormack, in a hopeful suggestion to 1950s audiences that all they had seen so far is just fiction, that they are just actors playing roles. It is a timid comforting hug, and it robs the film of its possible powers to truly terrify.
[8] Robert Eggers’
The Witch (2015) makes no pretense at all to make you think that the witch of the title is metaphorical, or that he has made a film where the supernatural darkness is an allegory for human depravity and the abuse of superstition and religion. (In Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible, for example, the “witches” are liars, and whole Salem debacle is an allegory for the McCarthy political witch hunts of the 1950s.) The witch is real in Egger’s film, and we encounter her immediately before the ten-minute mark, coating herself in the pulped flesh, blood, and fat of an abducted and subsequently murdered baby. (Ack.) With that abrupt end to Act 1, the film then ushers into completely unexpected territory: the terrors that bedevil the Puritan family we are following, as they try to work new farm away from the settlement they have been banished from because of religious differences, are real – and the Devil himself taunts them through visions and the demonic possession of assorted animals, including a creepy rabbit and a creepier goat. The family has made the crucial mistake of setting up a farm beside a forest that now has revealed itself to be truly forbidding, its dark innards the encampment of diabolical beings. First the baby disappears, then the young twins start to act strange, then the older boy gets sick after a seductive encounter with evil and then dies, but not before spewing out a fervid litany addressed in cold terror to the Divine. All throughout, we see the Puritan stranglehold on the family adding further to the devilish stew, with mother and father now becoming holy inquisitors. The malevolence surrounds young Thomasin, the family’s teenage girl whose burgeoning sexuality may be attracting the very evil now taunting them. The twins accuse her of witchcraft, and the mother and father – fervent in their puritanism – now must decide how exactly to resolve this losing skirmish with the diabolical. It is Thomasin’s viewpoint we follow, as she sees everything around her – her life, her family, her home – getting demolished bit by bit into madness. The film works as a study in tone and mood, as well as its astonishing embrace of historical detail, helped tremendously by all the actors who are outstanding in their embrace of their characters. It is a film almost without a false note – although it leaves us with a conclusion, concerning Thomasin’s final fateful decision, that doesn’t seem organic to the rest of the unfolding. It is a film that is slow in its scares, which may put off the most pedestrian of horror aficionados, but it is best enjoyed in the cumulative experience of its terrors.
[9] In the 1960s, there was a brief trend of Hollywood queenly royalty reacting to the dissolution of the studio system by doing macabre horror. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). Joan Crawford in
Strait-Jacket (1964). Bette Davis in
The Nanny (1965). In Walter Grauman’s
Lady in a Cage (1964), Olivia de Havilland – with Ann Sothern in a supporting role as an ageing prostitute – does extra time in that trend of horror movies in a home invasion story that would have been truly terrifying were it not for its obvious, hilarious leaning towards Republican conservatism in panic mode. Ostensibly, it’s the story of a wealthy old widow played by De Havilland and one unfortunate day in her life. She has been incapacitated by a fall, breaking her hip, and thus must walk around with a cane and must use a newly-installed elevator to access the bedrooms in the second floor of her big house. On the weekend the film opens with, her only son (who’s a closeted gay man) leaves for a trip (with a plan to commit suicide later). A power failure occurs just as she is riding her elevator, trapping her. She pushes the alarm, which attracts only a wino, and later, Sothern’s prostitute, and much later, a murderous trio of hoodlums (two white trash and a dimwit Latino) who proceed to trash the house, burgle it, and unleash bloody terror. All the while, De Havilland is trapped in the cage of the elevator, shouting “Help! Help! Help!” And all the while, the film makes broad editorial comments about the undertow it wants highlighted: how this is really a parable of the best of American [white] society dying, terrorised by new 1960s realities with its liberal progress. We know this because the film is intercut by images of the outside world – rallies, technology, traffic, etc. – that indicate the symptoms of contemporary madness. And we know this because De Havilland’s character makes both voice-over narrations and monologues where she decries the evil and the indifference of the new world. And we also know this because, in response to James Caan’s hoodlum taunting her, she spats at him: “You’re one of the bits of offal produced by the welfare state… You’re what so many of my tax dollars go into the care and feeding of!” So, in sum: white privilege gets terrorised, gay man commits suicide, the welfare state produces hoodlums, and Latinos are dimwits. It’s a film begging to be Trump’s favourite movie.
[10] David Miller’s
Sudden Fear (1952) is a thriller that warns us never to fall in love. In this curiously engrossing film noir, Joan Crawford plays an heiress who also happens to be a very successful playwright. (Which renders the story pure fantasy, of course.) In an audition for her new play, she dismisses an actor [played by Jack Palance] who seems to know how to get to the meat of the character, but alas – according to Ms. Crawford – lacks the physical rightness of the part. She tells Palance he just doesn’t look like a romantic lead. (She should have followed her initial instinct.) On a train tip to California a few months later, she encounters the actor again – and what do you know, romance develops. He sweeps her off her feet and the film seems destined for a melodramatic romance about second chances when it suddenly makes a left turn: we find that he is in fact in cahoots with another girl, and they are planning to steal her fortune after killing her off. Of course, Ms. Crawford soon stumbles on the plan, and finding no other possible recourse [the film makes painstakingly lays out the impossibilities of her situation], she pretends not to know, but is aware that a deadline is looming that is actually quite literal. The film is a showcase of Crawford’s luminousnesss, and her smart, lovelorn woman is rendered quite beautifully that we genuinely fear for her danger, and at the same time, her confusion about what to do when you find out that the love you’ve found is actually quite a dangerous thing.
[11/12] Ira Levin’s 1972 novel,
The Stepford Wives, is about a Connecticut town where the men has conspired to turn their wives into preening, submissive robots, and has since entered popular parlance to describe people who have surrendered to dull conformism. It follows the travails of a metropolitan woman newly transferred to the town, and slowly comes to realise that something is not right with all these displays of domestic perfection. The story has been filmed twice over the years -- in Bryan Forbes’ 1975 version, which imbibed the pure horror of the book, and in Frank Oz’s 2004 version, which turned it into comic camp. In all versions, just as in Levin’s other popular novels -- which include
Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys From Brazil, and
Sliver -- we get a good transfer and exploration of Levin’s theme of paranoia, this time centered around domesticity and the feminism that was quite a big deal in the progressive spirit of the early 1970s. I like both film versions of The Stepford Wives, although none of them are exactly perfect. The 1975 version is more critically acclaimed because it sticks to the gritty feminism of the book, and does delve into the horror of the story with a shattering clarity. The frothier 2004 version is truer to the colour palette of the novel, but gets no respect for its candy-colorer comedy, with its zings and wit and pop cultural references and unexpected role-reversals and the happy ending. And let’s face it, Oz’s film was also quite a mess, with inconsistencies everywhere, it becomes harder to forgive its flaws as it unspools. William Goldman’s 1975 script is actually quite a chore, and is never really able to give us a good and thorough introduction to the town of Stepford, and is also quite averse to showing us much of the “wives,” save for the creepy end at the supermarket. Rudnick’s 2004 script maps out Stepford with zany precision and gives us the “wives” immediately in a tight cluster (performing aerobics that’s based on household chores!), it is impossible not to see the robotic in them -- but it doesn’t gel together, and the horror is totally gone, rubbed away by an avalanche of pastels. Maybe in the future a better version could be had, but I’d rather they film instead Levin’s
A Perfect Day.
#2016HalloweenMarathon #WomenInPeril
Labels: film, halloween, horror, review
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Tuesday, October 11, 2016
10:33 PM |
Women in Peril: The Neon Demon, The Shallows, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Elle
Every year since 2010, I've devoted the month of October to watching horror movies of all kinds, from slasher films to psychological thrillers to haunted house movies, from the classic to the contemporary. (Except torture porn. I draw the line there.) This year, I've decided to do "Women in Peril" as a theme. It is an intirguing subgenre of horror, and I intend to catch a full range of its varieties. I'll try to stay away from the "final girl" trope, however. So, no Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween
for me. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line in the comments.
[1] It is easy to dismiss Nicolas Winding Refn’s
The Neon Demon (2016) as being all-surface and no substance -- which is understandable, given that the director’s work thus far, including
Drive (2011) and
Only God Forgives (2013), are intricate mood pieces made distinctive by a sharp consideration of “style is everything.” I admired
Drive and had no patience for
Only God Forgives, eventually finding them both a gilded kind of shallow. And yet perhaps the auterial drive that informs much of Refn’s filmmaking instincts has finally met its perfect subject matter in
The Neon Demon. It is after all a kind of tragic parable about a young almost innocent model (played by Elle Fanning) who is drawn to a cutthroat fashion industry in Los Angeles, and there finding her natural unbecoming beauty becoming a consuming muse for many of its creatives (agents, photographers, fashion designers) and a consuming target of jealousy for other models. In that simple premise we see Refn construct a glossy horror story that is kind of like a sombre, Prada-clad version of Dario Argento schlock. There’s blood, there’s cannibalism, there’s vampirism galore -- all done up to showcase a parable about beauty and shallowness and the extent to which our desperation allows us to become murderous animals. I’m sure I’ll never want to see this movie again, but for what it’s worth it’s intriguing, and it’s beautiful to look at, and its depravities glisten like blood under neon light.
[2] There is much to admire in Jaume Collet-Serra’s shark attack film,
The Shallows (2016), but it is also not surprising to note that its critical consensus has downplayed the film’s success as being that of pure B-movie variety – meaning that it may genuinely thrill audiences, but the thrill is … cheap. It is certainly not the 2010s’ version of Steven Spielberg’s seminal
Jaws (1975), but I’m not sure either if its thrills are indeed cheap. For me, they are perfectly earned in a movie that knows how to keep its thrilling sequences well-paced, with everything else perfectly anchored by a star-turn by Blake Lively. She invests considerable emotionality and physical bravado to her role as a surfer who finds herself in a beautiful but secret Mexican beach, where unfortunate circumstances lead her to do battle with a gigantic, very hungry shark. Sure, it’s not perfect, and sure we can see, even predict, the obvious clockwork mechanism of the plot – from the sick mother backstory, to the geographic clarity of the woman vs. shark struggle, to the introduction of the totemic stranger who must become the film’s first sacrifice to demonstrate the awesome terror of being shark snacks. But most of the film somehow work in a kind of cinematic organic unity, and gives us enough reason to root for Lively’s damsel in distress. Plus the cinematography by Flavio Martínez Labiano is gorgeous to look at, there are scenes where sometimes you cannot decide whether to scream or to go “awwww” in admiration of the images.
[3] It has been a while since I saw Curtis Hanson’s nanny thriller
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but I figured that it was about time I revisited this film given the beloved director’s recent death. I also remember this film as having pretty much scared everyone when it was released in 1992. It was a surprise sleeper hit that for a while it seemed poised to make Rebecca DeMornay – the film’s deranged villain – a huge star. (It didn’t happen. She had one or two high profile roles in big productions right after, but they didn’t climb the same reaches as Cradle.) There is a reason why it is DeMornay we remember most from this film rather than the top-billed Annabella Sciorra, who plays the witless mother and wife who slowly grows to realise that the ever-efficient nanny she has hired is actually a vengeful madwoman bent on undermining her, in a crazy plan to steal her family. DeMornay plays her nanny with a steely sheen we can recognise immediately as the iciness of a psychopath, but she subsumes it with an effortless sexiness and charm that undoes us. We are party to her plans right from the very beginning, but even when she pretends to be good, we readily believe her. DeMornay owned this role so much it has become an iconic turn of late 20th century villainous actressing, up there right beside Sharon Stone’s in
Basic Instinct and Glenn Close’s in
Fatal Attraction. Sciorra, on the other hand, is given the largely colorless role of unknowing victim; she knows instinctively that something is not right, but the screenplay refuses her agency – even her bravura final act that saves them all becomes perfectly perfunctory. It is of course Sciorra’s emotional battles (and her constant attacks of asthma) that become the lynchpin in our navigation of the brewing domestic horror, but it is DeMornay’s evil manipulations that finally prove delicious.
[4] Is there such a thing as a feminist comedy of manners about rape? The idea alone appalls, and seems perfectly impossible to execute – but apparently there is one, and it comes from director Paul Verhoeven (who gave us
Basic Instinct and
Showgirls), and it … works. The film is Elle (2016), and it follows the intimate goings on in the life of a resourceful and steely French businesswoman who has founded her very own successful video-gaming empire. Right at the very beginning of the film, we are thrust into witnessing something brutal and shocking: her rape by a masked assailant. In the immediate aftermath, the rapist leaves the scene quickly, and she gathers her nerves and her self, sweeps away the broken shards of glass and vase that are evidence of the intrusion, throws her torn dress to the trash, and then takes a long bath. Blood from her vagina coats the suds, and she brushes it away and prepares to relax. The next day, she goes to work like nothing happened, confesses to her friends and her ex-husband about the assault nonchalantly over dinner, and proceeds to nurse a strange fascination over the identity of her assailant. She somehow knows instinctively that it could only be one of the men that surrounds her life: her ex-husband who used to beat her, her best friend’s husband with whom she is ending a short affair, one of her video game designers who makes no effort to hide his hatred for his boss, her married neighbour with whom she has started a dangerous flirtation, her aging mother’s new and very young paramour, and even her good-for-nothing twenty-something son. She navigates these suspicions in a cat-and-mouse story that has her past as a shady backdrop: her father is a convicted serial killer who slaughtered 27 people in their neighbourhood one fine afternoon when she was a young girl. As played by the great French actress Isabelle Huppert, who made us wholeheartedly accept the dark titillation of sadomasochism in
The Piano Teacher in 2001, the character of Michèle Leblanc is a fascinating cipher, one who charms us with subterfuges of comedy as she goes about her life clearly having decided that she cannot be a victim of anything, and that she is indeed the captain of her own fate. I cannot exactly explain how this manages to work as a narrative that is empowering, compelling, and transgressive all at the same time – because in theory, it shouldn’t – but Huppert makes it work, and Verhoeven, working from a screenplay by David Birke based on the novel
Oh… by Philippe Djian, provides just the exact amount of imagistic sharpness, and depth in psychological knowledge to lift the material above the easy sinkhole of the sensational. Huppert’s Michèle Leblanc is a woman in peril, yes – but she turns that peril into her playground, where she eventually becomes its boss.
#2016HalloweenMarathon
Labels: film, halloween, women
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Friday, October 31, 2014
8:12 PM |
The Dead in Riverdale
Like with many staples of childhood, the love for
Archie Comics is something I think of fondly when I do remember it, but know that it is an artifact from more innocent days you don't really mourn for when you learn to let go. Sure, all those double digests were fun digressions in a teenager's life, and sure, we did learn to somehow sketch out with the ease of over-familiarity the outlines of Archie's orange top (with those strange hashtags for sideburns), Betty's blonde ponytail, Veronica's brunette mane, and Judghead's iconic crown (cap?). But when we let go, we let go. We only returned, once in a while, when we were trapped in some waiting room at the dentist's, and the only reading material handy was a well-worn squarish issue of
Archie. In those occasions, we dipped into the old pleasures, often chuckling to ourselves what made us think these storylines were funny. I think the publishers know this, and so it has tried in recent years to put some edge into Archie. They have taken our beloved characters from Riverdale and make them go through some new spin. And the latest is
Afterlife with Archie, wherein Hot Dog dies in the very first page, then Sabrina brings him back to life for the heartbroken Jughead -- and unwittingly unleashes a curse where bringing back the dead truly meant that: the undead in Riverdale, in the form of zombies. I heard about this series early this year, but never felt compelled to check it out. Because, like I said, relic from childhood you abandon without much guilt. But for some reason, this week, I found myself reading the first six issues, which completes the first arc of the story, and leads us to the second one that begins with Sabrina in limbo. And yet the first arc was delightful enough, if only to see many of our favorite characters -- Jughead, Ethel, Moose, Midge, Mrs. Grundy, Prof. Weatherbee, Coach Clayton, etc. -- turn to ravenous living dead, devouring everyone during a Halloween dance. But what I liked the best was the scrubbing of humor: this is a serious comics story, almost rivaling the dread of
The Walking Dead, although we have yet to turn to the part where the living would prove to be more monstrous than the dead. And the flashbacks, and the back stories, and the first-person narratives from such unlikely sources like Smithers. Archie Comics has grown up, and does it so via a horror trope we least expect it to embrace. It's perfect Halloween reading, and has much to do with teenage nostalgia, and pricking that nostalgia, and welcoming it with perverse delight.
Labels: books, comics, halloween, life
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Thursday, October 30, 2014
7:42 PM |
Horror Hits and Misses
I get asked this all the time:
What are my favorite horror movies? I don't know how to answer, because I hate such questions, and because my choices are pretty personal -- all marked by a certain appeal that speaks only to me. I think of Todd Haynes'
Safe (1995) as a very effective horror movie, for example, but for most people it won't be. There are no monsters in it, after all. And if there is one, it is the mind of our protagonist/victim. And yet nothing is more horrific to me than a bewildering affliction of the mind -- I think of Roman Polanski's
Repulsion (1965), which I first saw as a 21-year-old living in an alienating city like Tokyo. And so I saw that movie as more than just careful, frightening study of the descent into madness; I saw it as a depraved, gothic articulation for alienation, a kind of warning for my own existence then. Julianne Moore's Carol White in
Safe, a prototypical suburban housewife who's starting to feel allergic to the world around her, has so much in common with Catherine Deneuve's Carol (
coincidence in names?) in
Repulsion, a beautiful but repressed French beautician living in London who's starting to mentally crack from what she perceives to be horrific advances by men who hound her. Polanski's film vocabulary fleshes out the horror elements more than Haynes does, but they're effectively the same movie. Horror is often mistaken for its tropes, which becomes problematic when you consider Arthur Penn's
The Miracle Worker (1962), which basically tells the otherwise heartwarming story of how Helen Keller gets saved from crippling blindness by her tutor Anne Sullivan -- but Penn films the story like a horror movie. It
feels and
looks like a horror movie, but it's not.
Which is why I hate answering the question above. I get defensive, and I become long-winded in my explanation of choices.
But every year, around Halloween, I do take time to almost exclusively watch horror films, taking note of the cult status and the iconic contribution each title has given the horror genre. In other words, I ransack the whole horror canon, an ongoing project that I doubt will ever end.
Last year, I started with six horror classics in black and white that have eluded me for so long. When I finally saw Jack Clayton’s
The Innocents (1961), what I couldn’t believe was how I’d missed out on this film in all those years. It being a Deborah Kerr starrer should have already recommended it, but I took my time getting to this film. It turned out that I loved it, so much so that a year later, I still remember its haunting set pieces, its incredible atmosphere. It is a taut, psychological thriller based on Henry James’
The Turn of the Screw, where we don’t exactly know the boundaries between sanity and madness, the ghosts and the living, the victim and the victimizer. It is, without doubt, a great horror film.
Then there was Lewis Allen’s
The Uninvited (1944). Its iconic for being the first film to take the haunted house genre very seriously, and not played for laughs or ridicule as was the practice before this. (Think of Scooby-Doo unmasking the human culprit behind the horror — that’s how it was usually played.) It won't play well for those seeking out a bloodcurling tale, and certainly not for a crowd inured by the torture porn of such films as
Hostel or
Funny Games or
A Serbian Film. Its horror is more subtle, which I admired, and in consideration of its place in horror film history, it proved quite educational, like you were seeing the genesis of a genre being played out in front of you, one trope being invented after another.
Jacques Tourneur’
Cat People (1942), on the other hand, does a good job of dramatizing, in tantalizing black and white shadows, what everyone who has had their heart broken has been through: rage, jealousy, lust. And the feeling of having a dark monster within us that threatens to come out because of those provocations. Here, Simone Simon’s cursed woman marries a man who loves her unquestionably, but she begs off from more intimate contact, because even a kiss will unleash some ancient evil in her. She turns into a predatory cat, and she can devour. But it’s not just lust that can consume her and make her transform — jealousy, too, and rage. She is, in a sense the grandmother of both Edward Cullen and Jacob Black. (
Hahaha.) I love this film. I love the perfectly staged fright pieces that involve nothing more but shadows, sound, and the darkness of our imagination.
And sometimes, there's poetry in a horror movie. There is no denying the sheer poetry of Tourneur’s other horror classic,
I Walked with a Zombie (1943), which is a film scintillating with lines written by Inez Wallace, Curt Siodmak, and Ardel Wray — things like: “Everything good dies here … even the stars." I have a soft heart for this movie, about a good-hearted nurse who loves her married boss so much, she tries everything to cure his ill wife, the titular zombie. But a horror movie this is not. It’s a love story every which way. It’s a romanticized tale of life in the tropics, voodoo and all. Heck, even the zombie in this movie walks about in flowing gowns.
There was also Tod Browning’s
Freaks (1932), a curious film peopled by circus people of various sorts of deformities (the bearded lady, the Siamese twins, the dwarf, and so on and so forth…). But the one that’s crucial to the story’s tension — an evil deformity of the soul — is embodied in the film’s central villain: a beautiful, very normal-looking, but wily trapeze artist who uses her charms to seduce the circus’ dwarf who just happened to come into a great fortune. The film has been touted as an influential horror movie, a pre-Code artifact that has more in relation to German Expressionism that anything else. True enough, the assault in the end is chilling — but we are incredibly on the side of the freaks. In the end, there’s nothing horrific about this film. It’s a warm and fuzzy love story.
I now understand perfectly the cult status attained by Herk Harvey’s
Carnival of Souls (1962), which has reportedly influenced the aesthetics of David Lynch and George A. Romero. It’s quite an effective independent horror film, even counting the obvious ticks brought about by its low budget. (Then again, the low budget was what made many horror films — particularly Sam Raimi’s original
Evil Dead (1981) or Francis Ford Coppola’s
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) — effective. There’s something about the enterprising crudeness of the filmmaking that adds to the sense of the horrifying.) Even then, the pacing of its story — about the sole female survivor of a car crashing into a river, now suddenly being haunted by a pale-faced ghoul — keeps the tension tight, and the final reveal is worth it. I love how this predates the ghostly dimension of Christopher Gans’ atmospheric
Silent Hill (2006). And that visceral organ score! A chiller to the bone.
And then there are the more contemporary ones, and even some of them defy our expectations of a horror movie. Take Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
Black Narcissus (1947). This gorgeously shot, intricately mannered drama about five nuns battling temptation and altitude sickness in 1940s Himalayas is only a
kind of horror story: Deborah Kerr’s uptight and emotionally broken Sister Clodagh is the central character, but the growing malevolence focuses on Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth, a psychologically disturbed woman pushed to the edge (
hahaha, I made a pun) by carnal desires. The above shot of her is the most chilling image from the movie. It took me a while to get to this film, but now that I have, I can very well understand Martin Scorsese’s fascination over Michael Powell. I loved
The Red Shoes and
Peeping Tom — and
Black Narcissus just cemented for me Powell’s genius.
Then there is Masaki Kobayashi’s
Kwaidan (1964), for example. It is a visual feast above all. An anthology of traditional Japanese ghost stories, the film disregards conventional narrative for the most part (the last unfinished segment is a prime example) but never shies away from its attempts to seduce our senses while terrifying us with that kind of dread and unease only Japanese cinema can do: a face reflected on the liquid inside a teacup, or the slightly open smile of a wintry ghost to reveal a sinister
ohaguro (blackened teeth) inside. This is not Wes Craven or Shirley Jackson territory of horror. It is of the sublimated kind many might even find tedious. But the pace is made more unworldly by set pieces that borders with the surreal. Once you allow yourself to succumb to its tentacles, however, it will render you breathless.
And then there is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s
Kairo (
Pulse, 2001), which I watched because it landed on
Time Out London's list of 100 Best Horror Films of All Time, a comprehensive enough list that had me admiring the thoroughness of the editorial choices. It beat out so many other titles from the huge pantheon of Asian horror that was churned with so much horrific regularity in the last decade. But watching it only underscored for me how so many of those films — and there were a lot of good ones — really were just run-of-the-mill productions that tried to make dreadful presences of everything in our ordinary lives, from cellphones to acacia trees to dating. In Pulse’s case, it’s the entire Internet, and how our online lives make ghosts of us all. It makes a good point — heck, the online world is full of zombies whose lives are all Facebooked and Twittered and Instagrammed and so on and so forth — but the years have not been kind to this kind of movies. They’re suddenly so silly now, and
Pulse above all.
Haynes’
Safe (1995) is a horror movie of a completely different sort: the monster is the world, especially if you suddenly develop an allergy towards it. The film calls it “environmental illness,” and I know how that feels like. I saw this film way back in my cinephiliac college days, and it scared the hell out of me then — the slow descent to allergy hell of Julianne Moore’s pampered housewife, the slow buzzing score that underscores the dread, the insight into a world overrun by toxins… It gets didactic, at times — especially in the last act set in a desert retreat, but everything feels real. The horror becomes the realization that this could happen to you.
And finally, there is the story of the tragic prom girl turned fire-starter, a horror classic I turn to once in a few years. What I love about Brian de Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s first novel,
Carrie (1976), is how the movie’s titular monster is not the evil presence in the story at all. It’s other people, the so-called “normal” ones. They’re the ones who are truly monstrous. Which is of course a horror movie staple. Take a look at James Whale’s
Frankenstein (1931), or Browning’s Freaks, or just about any of King’s greatest tomes, like
The Shining. It’s ordinary people we should be most scared of. I revisited this classic last year before I set out to watch the critically-reviled remake by Kimberly Peirce. And the horror has not lessened over the years — although I’ve observed that the telekinesis, strangely enough, doesn’t really figure so well in the film, save for the moving of ashtrays, the bursting of lightbulbs, and the bumping of kids in bikes. Until the massacre at the gym, of course. The central horror lies in the figure of the evangelical mom, whose godly pronouncements still send chills down my spine.
Labels: film, halloween
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Saturday, October 11, 2014
5:25 AM |
Don't Get Married
The race for the 87th Academy Awards has essentially started with all the online punditry abuzz with each new screening -- and as usual, I want to do my annual unflagging attempt to seeing all possible films in contention, even before the official nominations come on January. This blog series aims to chronicle this effort.
Lately, and without any design, I have been watching recent movies that have been doing a swell job in trying to convince me (and everyone else) that the only way to go about the business of marriage is a warning:
don't do it. First, there's Peter Askin's
A Good Marriage, based on the short story by Stephen King. And there's David Fincher's
Gone Girl, based on the novel by Gillian Flynn. Both are essentially telling the same story, but one is an unfortunate misfire, while the other is a bullet straight to the heart.
I watched these two titles and soon came to some conclusion that the closest film I could think of that resembled the acidic way marriage is regurgitated in these films was Danny DeVito's
The War of the Roses, his toxic 1989 film about the perils of divorcing.
True, there are other worthy contenders in this Cinema of Deadly and Dysfunctional Marriages, with the likes of Mike Nichol's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and
Closer (2004), Anthony Harvey's
The Lion in Winter (1968), Ingmar Bergman's
Scenes From a Marriage (1973), John Cassavetes'
A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Woody Allen's
Interiors (1978) and
Husbands and Wives (1992), Brian Gibson's
What's Love Got to Do With It (1993), Tod Williams'
The Door on the Floor (2004), and Derek Cianfrance's
Blue Valentine (2010) -- and here I'm only considering those where the husbands and wives take to war to viciously tear each other apart, physically, emotionally, or mentally -- but DeVito's film seems a shade darker than any of these because it dared to present utter domestic darkness as comedy. I screened the film again and found the increasingly mad retaliations between the warring Michael Douglas' Oliver Rose and Kathleen Turner's Barbara Rose very icy, murderous, and inexplicably delicious. The film sells revenge with such contraband relish, and makes such a game of it. That we are actually capable of unleashing such nefarious torments on people we once truly loved and cared for deeply is the film's ultimate thesis. We may cringe at the idea, but we cannot deny its probability: the film has shown us, step by step, how easily we can traverse the very thin line between loving and loathing.
Joan Allen's character in Askin's
A Good Marriage has reasons to loathe her husband played by Anthony LaPaglia. Truly gifted by an adoring family whose love for each other is genuine, the wife soon unravels fast upon the discovery of a terrifying secret: her husband is the serial killer now hogging the news headlines. How does one deal with that? Cheating as a marriage problem seems suddenly so much more desirable.
Lesser scribes would concoct a story where the husband would now terrorize the wife for her discovery, in an attempt to silence her. But this is Stephen King territory, and he knows how to avoid the cliches of horror narratives. Mr. King must have asked himself: What happens if a loving wife does make such gruesome discovery about a loving husband? His answer: The husband confesses, the wife accepts his apology -- and makes him promise to stop from further killing. That is an even better, more disturbing, story: because how do you knowingly live with a monster, who may be a ticking time bomb? And this is where the film -- and the short story -- takes its critical and unique turn.
Askin's film is faithful to the source material, but unfortunately it is a film with an execution problem. It is not terrifying. There is no atmosphere of dread, only a smattering of horror movie cliches. It does not get under our skin. It has not been able to delve deep into the wife's horror of a balancing act of playing devoted wife to evil. The actors seem listless, which is a surprise given the strong cast, but I'd attribute all these from the uninspired direction. When the film was over, I found myself thinking: David Fincher should have made this film.
Alas, Mr. Fincher did make a similar film, and that is
Gone Girl.
What else has not been said about this film? I like best
Joshua Rothman's take on it as a postmodern murder-mystery in The New Yorker.
Gone Girl -- a cold, calculating, and surprisingly funny film -- is without doubt a disturbing and absorbing piece of cinema. If you have studied the genius of Fincher's cinema, it feels like an amalgam of bits and pieces from his entire oeuvre: from the cold woman playing with fire from his "Bad Girl" music video for Madonna, to the man who must be played with from
The Game, from the sociopaths of severe cunning from
Zodiac, Seven, Panic Room, and
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, to the generational ennui that defines some zeitgeist from
The Social Network and
The Fight Club.
But it feels, ultimately, like the unveiling of the maggots that lie within the institution of legal togetherness. Nick and Amy Dunne are our generation's Oliver and Barbara Rose -- but with a sicker twist I cannot divulge. I guess each generation deserves its own Marriage Monsters. I wonder what this new breed says about mine.
#HalloweenMovieMarathon #RoadToOscar
Labels: film, halloween, oscar
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