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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Thursday, May 28, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 34
[34th of 100]. People who know me well enough know that I have an almost morbid interest in horror films, devouring everything from supernatural horror to the weird, from psychological horror to the slasher, from creature features to body horror, from monster movies to comedy horror -- although I draw the line at the unexcusable sadism of torture porn, and anything dealing with snakes. Around October of every year, I program for myself a monthlong Halloween marathon centering around a theme. In 2018, I did "Women in Peril" films. Why do I do this? I like that horror takes me out of myself, allowing me an experience of utter terror but within the controlled confinement of a fictional story. Horror becomes an exercise of trauma experienced in mithridatism. [It also gives me the absolute pleasure of watching my significant other squirm in his seat with every drip of dread and drop of shock. His response to horror is experiential, he feels every blow and every bite, and he recoils from them. Needless to say, he hates watching horror movies, but I love bringing him to them.] Why do I devour horror movies? I can trace it to my first movie experience: a 1978 disaster film titled The Swarm, which I saw in a movie theater in Bayawan. I must have been only 3 or 4 years old, and the memory of seeing children being attacked onscreen by a wild swarm of bees proved indelible, the menace of the scene magnified by the oversized image pulsing with light from the screen and the embracing darkness of the El Oriente Theater. The Swarm was a singular scare -- although watching the film again so many years later, I was amused by how silly and stultifyingly unscary the movie actually was. But if I have to pinpoint a particular film that first defined for me what unadulterated cinematic horror was -- something visceral that gripped you -- it has to be this demonic horror from 1973. It has not lost its power to disturb even after all these years, and I think it sprang from the sure control the director, William Friedkin, had over the material, shaping it from the pulp fiction of William Peter Blatty. Note that it does not shy away from its backstory, that extensive epilogue in the deserts of Persia where the titular exorcist, Max Von Sydow's Fr. Lankester Merrin, goes through an archaeological dig and finds himself confronting ancient evil. That epilogue sets the tone for the cumulative evil that soon explodes in a Georgetown townhouse -- the kind of evil that eclipses all others because it has a religious dimension, and the weight of the possibly true. All the Regan scenes for me -- from the dehumanizing discomfort of the hospital tests in the beginning to the suffocating demonization that would soon occupy all -- shocked because no one had ever dramatized this kind of horror in such visceral compositions. I have no doubt this film gave me sleepless nights when I first saw it. I re-lived a bit of that trauma years later when I saw
The Exorcism of Emily Rose [2005], a film which owes a lot of its existence to the Friedkin masterpiece. After watching it, I found myself waking up at 3 AM sharp every morning [the film's designated evil hour], as well as get the whiff of a burning smell [the film's designated sign for an evil presence]. That went on for six months straight, a tiring extended episode of my own psychology torturing me in light of a horror film. And still I watch, daring myself once and again with this morbid exercise. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film, horror
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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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Thursday, December 04, 2014
11:09 AM |
The Delicious Horror of Children's Books in Film
Jennifer Kent's
The Babadook (2014) is perhaps the year's most interesting horror movie, a tantalising amalgam of common unspeakable horrors that even William Friendkin, the director of
The Exorcist, tweeted that it scared him. And that's a commendation above all commendations. It is ostensibly about a haunted book, gloriously unexplained by the movie, that hides a monster -- but it is also about post-traumatic nightmares, the horrors of single-parenthood, the stress of a wilful child, the embracing awfulness of popular television programming, the despair of having uncaring family, and the dank darkness of insomnia. Going through the film, it struck me that there are many moments in the life of the harassed single mother in the story -- alone, lacking sleep -- that veered so close to the zombie days I've had when there's too much work and the hours pass by so quickly we don't even have time for much-needed slumber. There are zombies among us, and it's us.
And there's the book. Forget
Annabelle and demon-infested dolls. Children's books are scarier, and Mister Babadook most of all.
In the film, the monster from the book comes to life cloaked always in convenient darkness, which is understandable considering the low-budget nature of this enterprise. I'm not sure much CGI went into the making of this movie, perhaps just practical effects -- and thank God for that because all the more it makes the film effective. Because the clever use of shadows, slow-burning sound effects ("baaa-baaa-dooook!"), quick cuts, and misdirection -- which was last used so effectively in Alejandro Amenábar's
The Others (2001) -- make the terror more gripping and slithery. The monster has a nice "two-dimensionality" to it that makes its transition from the book's pages seamless.
And now, apparently they're trying
to make the book real, with illustrations done by Alex Juhasz, the same artist in the film. I love the idea of a real book, but I'm not sure I'd get one. The whole thing's honestly too creepy.
There's a certain relish to the idea of dark fictional children's books depicted in movies. The only other one I can think of right now is
The Door in the Floor, the children's book featured in Tod Williams's 2014 same-titled adaptation of one chapter from John Irving's novel
A Widow for One Year. The book, written by one of the story's flawed protagonists, the children's book author Ted Cole (who is played in the film with such gravitas by Jeff Bridges), is about the horrors of childbirth, told from the point of view of the unborn child.
And they actually made the book real, with illustrations by Jeff Bridges himself. (How meta is that. Also, I've blogged about this before,
here.)
And here's the entire story...
There was a little boy who didn’t know if he wanted to be born. His mommy didn’t know if she wanted him to be born either. This was because they lived in a cabin in the woods, on an island, in a lake—and there was no one else around.
And in the cabin, there was a door in the floor.
The little boy was afraid of what was under the door in the floor and the mommy was afraid, too.
Once, long ago, other children had come to visit the cabin for Christmas, but the children had opened the door in the floor and they had disappeared down the hole.
The mommy had tried to look for the children, but when she opened the door in the floor she heard such an awful sound that her hair turned completely white, like the hair of a ghost.
And the mommy had also seen some things, things so horrible that you can’t imagine them.
And so the mommy wondered if she wanted to have a little boy—especially because of everything that might be under the door in the floor.
Then she thought: “Why not? I’ll just tell him not to open the door in the floor!”
Yet the little boy still didn’t know if he wanted to be born into a world where there was a door in the floor.
But there were also some beautiful things in the woods, and on the island, and in the lake.
“Why not take a chance?” the little boy thought.
So he was born, and he was very happy.
And his mommy was happy again too, although she told the boy at least once every day, “Don’t you ever, not ever—never, never, never open the door in the floor!”
But of course he was only a little boy.
If you were that boy, wouldn’t you want to open that door in the floor?
So would you?
But my favourite one from the film is still "The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls," a very simple children's story that has the exact same devastating power as Shel Silverstein's
The Giving Tree and Maurice Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are. It goes...
Tom woke up, but Tim did not.
And Tom woke up his father... and asked him, “Did you hear that sound?”
“There’s the sound again,” Tom whispered to his Father.
“It’s a monster!” he cried.
“It’s just a mouse... crawling between the walls,” his father said, and thumped the wall hard with his hand.
And the mouse... scurried away.
“It’s just a mouse. That’s all,” Tom said.
And he quickly fell asleep.
But Tim, he stayed awake all night long.
And every time that thing crawling between the walls came crawling back, he’d hit the wall, and he’d listen to the monster... scurry away, dragging his thick, wet fur, and no arms and no legs with it.
I told you. Children's books are scary...
UPDATE: The Babadook just got nominated for Best Film in the
AACTA Awards, which is the Australian Oscars. Good for Jennifer Kent, who also got nominated for Best Director. And here's the scary short film,
Monster, that started the whole thing. Watching it now made the underlying themes of
The Babadook much clearer.
I get it, I get it...
Labels: books, children's books, film, horror, writers
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Saturday, October 25, 2014
4:10 PM |
Notes on a Short Story: The Flicker
I wrote "The Flicker" because I wanted to scare myself. Before this, I had written one other story -- "The Painted Lady" -- when I was still studying in Japan, which tried to limn the atmosphere of a horror story, but its eventual effect laid bare the true nature of its intentions: I had written it as a kind of commentary about the exit of an old flame. It was my heartbreak disguised as a vampire story. I think it succeeded more or less as an emo take on lost love, skirting much of the vampire lore and the horror tropes and treating the genre wholly as some vague metaphor to what I was feeling inside: betrayed, lost, in mourning, still hopelessly pining.
"The Flicker" was none of that. I set out to write a horror story, and I wanted to horrify myself as best as I could.
In preparation for this,
I read. I always read before starting a story, to soak up on the cadence, narrative structure, and effect that other writers have accomplished with similar projects so that I, too, could be able to at least kindle a bit of inspiration to start things off. I read a bit of Stephen King's
On Writing, his memoir of the craft. In it, he demonstrated some of the things he was talking about writing in his book, and these demonstrations eventually became a short story he titled "1408." It was a haunted hotel room story. The excerpts from the book weren't complete, so I sought out the entire story and read it in one go -- and it proved to be one of the scariest things I had ever read.
I wanted to carry over some of those feelings of dread into the story I wanted to write. I wanted to write about a haunted house in a Dumaguete subdivision. I wanted to have a twist in the end that was adequately surprising, but also inevitable. I wanted to have turns in the plot that would push the reader to expect something -- like the typical "jump scare" in a horror movie -- only to thwart their expectations. And THEN to plunge them into something totally unexpected soon right after. I remembered that old Charlie Chaplin story about being asked by the screenwriter Charles MacArthur what made something funny in a movie, say involving a woman and a bananan peel.
How do you make that funny and fresh on film? Mr. MacArthur asked Mr. Chaplin. The great man of silent comedy said that he'd show a shot of the banana peel on the street, then a shot of the woman walking towards it, then a shot of the woman seeing the banana peel, then a shot of the woman walking around it, then a shot of the woman walking away, looking self-satisfied with her caution -- and then a shot of the woman falling promptly into an open manhole.
All that, and also I really wanted to see whether I could accomplish a haunted house story -- that most hoary of all hoary horror tropes -- and get away with it without making it predictable.
I think I accomplished what I set out to do. I promised myself I would not work out an ending before even penning the story. I wanted the ending to come to me organically, whatever that meant. I still remember the night I came to the ending. While I was writing it, in the process horrifying myself with the ending I managed to come up with, I felt the hair at the back of my neck stand, and I could feel some spectre -- a ghost? a ghoul? -- standing behind me while I pounded out the last few words of the story. That image of knives and flesh and bone crept me out, and I swore right then and there I would never write a horror story again.
I wrote this story at the tail-end of 2007, a surprising year. It was surprising because I became quite prolific that year, some happy accident of circumstance, drive, and inspiration. I wrote a lot that year, and came up with a sizeable inventory of short stories slated for publication. Before that, I used to complete at the most two stories a year, and I was also just coming off a long period of writer's block, which lasted three years or so, and which I thought would proved to be permanently crippling -- I had no idea it was slowly tapering away. I wrote about eight stories that year. It was a magical year.
"The Flicker" was first published in Philippines Free Press
, 22 September 2007. It was later published in Philippine Speculative Fiction 3
, edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar (Kestrel, 2007). Later, it was anthologized in The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction
, edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar (University of the Philippines Press, 2013). It is also included in Heartbreak and Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror
(Anvil Publishing, 2011).
Illustration for the story by Hersley-Ven Casero, also published in Heartbreak and Magic.Labels: fiction, horror, life, writing
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Friday, October 10, 2014
10:46 PM |
Devil May Care
What a disappointment this film was after such an intriguing premise. Alexandre Aja's
Horns (2013) centres on a hounded young man (played, with surprising dedication, by Daniel Radcliffe) who is
hated by his entire town -- a slice of Eden that is lazy foil for the hellish undertows of its population -- for allegedly murdering his longtime girlfriend. He grows weary from the endless persecution while awaiting trial, and then slowly widens up to the idea that everyone he knows --
even his family -- really sees him as the Devil. So one day he wakes up, and finds that he has sprouted a pair of devilish horns, and that suddenly snakes seem to take him like some grandmaster. Stranger still, this new appendages seem to affect people he meets with by making them own up, without much prodding, to their darkest desires. The delicious implications of this is the best part of the movie, but of course the story has to go on and solve the murder-mystery central to it. It does this in the most cliched, uninspired fashion, and with such a relentless overuse of flashbacks, that after a while you just do not really care at all about what happens next. This is proof once again that execution trumps story any time. #HalloweenMovieMarathon2014
Labels: film, horror
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Sunday, July 10, 2011
There is one simple reason why the horror stories of Yvette Tan come off with such a sense of satisfaction, and can be rightly considered as being among the best in the genre: reading her debut collection
Waking the Dead and Other Stories [Anvil, 2009], I soon realize that at their darkest hearts, these stories are really all about love and longing. The malevolence at the center of each story can be quite terrifying, but somehow Tan manages to go above the fray of mere horror to underline the human element that is at its core. This is what makes them transcendent. Consider the title story, where a lovelorn man unlocks a secret language that can summon the dead -- all to call from the other realm the woman of his affections. You read on, and you are confronted by a vast variety of horror -- both human and supernatural -- but it all goes back to this: there's one, and there's the other, and there's the longing to connect or to love, but there's the darkness between them that consumes. This is most darkly exploited in "Stella for Star," where a
tiyanak story becomes a dark fable of "motherly" love. In "Delivering the Goods," the precise and unfeeling butchering of a young boy for underworld reasons becomes a reflection for connection and fatherhood. In "Kulog," a
kapre makes a connection with a little girl, to his own detriment. In "Daddy," a father's ghost phones in, to leave one last
bilin. In "Boss, Ex?," a futuristic contraband movie chip becomes a means of dealing with the ghosts of the past, and loves lost. In the end, while you reel from the horror and the graphic details and the sense of dread of many of these stories, you are pulled in by the strange comfort of knowing that what lies beneath them is a pulsing heart -- bloodied and bruised, yes, but alive and filled with aching longing.
Labels: books, horror, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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There is one simple reason why the horror stories of Yvette Tan come off with such a sense of satisfaction, and can be rightly considered as being among the best in the genre: reading her debut collection Waking the Dead and Other Stories [Anvil, 2009], I soon realize that at their darkest hearts, these stories are really all about love and longing. The malevolence at the center of each story can be quite terrifying, but somehow Tan manages to go above the fray of mere horror to underline the human element that is at its core. This is what makes them transcendent. Consider the title story, where a lovelorn man unlocks a secret language that can summon the dead -- all to call from the other realm the woman of his affections. You read on, and you are confronted by a vast variety of horror -- both human and supernatural -- but it all goes back to this: there's one, and there's the other, and there's the longing to connect or to love, but there's the darkness between them that consumes. This is most darkly exploited in "Stella for Star," where a tiyanak story becomes a dark fable of "motherly" love. In "Delivering the Goods," the precise and unfeeling butchering of a young boy for underworld reasons becomes a reflection for connection and fatherhood. In "Kulog," a kapre makes a connection with a little girl, to his own detriment. In "Daddy," a father's ghost phones in, to leave one last bilin. In "Boss, Ex?," a futuristic contraband movie chip becomes a means of dealing with the ghosts of the past, and loves lost. In the end, while you reel from the horror and the graphic details and the sense of dread of many of these stories, you are pulled in by the strange comfort of knowing that what lies beneath them is a pulsing heart -- bloodied and bruised, yes, but alive and filled with aching longing.