...four more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween...
I had written a review for you, by my computer ate it, so for now, here is something else to look at until tomorrow.
An interesting place to go, while we are feeling all supernatural and creepy, is The Flicks that Church Forgot. This link will take you to a series of excellent, open minded podcasts on horror movies from a Christian perspective. The guy doing them is a massive fan of scary movies and it is refreshing to see someone approaching these films from a theological perspective that embraces the subject matter. The podcasts on the history of Halloween itself, and his rebuttals to common Christian complaints about the holiday, are well worth checking out.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Why have you disturbed us..?
Rob's journey towards Halloween leads him back through the eighties, through the woods, and into a run down cabin...
My general dispostion when watching a horror film is one of enthusiasm and joy. Typical behaviour includes hysterical laughter when a flesh eating beast bites off somebody's fingers, or bouncing up and down, pointing at the screen whenever there are zombies. It may come as a surpise to anyone who has experienced a scary movie in my company to know that it was not always thus. In fact, the truth is this: I used to be very, very scared of horror films.
In the early 1980s I was a nervous and insular child, scared of almost everything. And I mean everything. Old people, young people, trees, the sky, breakfast cereals, insects, bits of fluff that might be insects... everything. And I soon found that, as if the world did not contain terrors enough, some vile peddlars of fear had decided to make films with the express intention of making me piss myself into oblivion.
Clearly I avoided these things as best I could, fleeing in terror if the television looked like it might be about to vomit some hideous tale of monsters into my mind. Fate, however, had other ideas. By some confluence of economic, technological and societal factors, the onset of my childhood anxiety coincided exactly with the advent of the home video recorder. My dad had just started working at Rediffusion - cutting edge home entertainment supplier - and one day he came home with two things: in his hands a shiny new VCR, and on his face a mental grin that I had hitherto associated with alcohol.
The first - and in all honesty only - thought that went though my head was 'Hurrah - I never have to miss Doctor Who again.' (The previous year I had sulked all the way through Raiders of the Lost Ark at the cinema because I was missing part 4 of Doctor Who - The Visitation. In retrospect, my priorities were perhaps in need of some refinement.) I was most excited at the idea of videoing Doctor Who and watching it endlessly, repeatedly, forever, until I died.
My dad had other ideas. To him the VCR was a wonderful new device with which to torture his eldest and most disappointing son. Every night he brought a fresh stack of terrifying films home from work to insert into the yawning, evil maw of the Betamax. And what films! This was the early 80s, remember, in that brief but astonishing period when there was no regulation for the video industry, and so all manner of nightmares clawed their way onto magnetic tape. Barely 24 months would pass before a number of these films would be banned outright, but for now they were all free to roam the land, crawling into my house, my television and my dreams.
Many fearful monstrosities flickered their fuzzy way across the screen in those months. Michael Myers was present, though not yet beloved. Zombies of all shapes and sizes. Men with axes, drills, machetes. All glimpsed briefly as I hurried back to the comforts of a Dalek paperback in my bedroom, muffled screams and 80s synths chasing me up the stairs.
Grandaddy of them all, though, was The Evil Dead. Possibly the most concisely and brilliantly named film ever (unless Bikini Ski School is any good, I never got round to renting it), Sam Raimi's masterpiece became the poster child for the video nasty scandals of the mid 80s. It was famously withdrawn from rental shops, lest it corrupt the brains of those watching. And though I now deplore the weak-minded reasoning that went into banning the film, my twelve year old self was all in favour of such knee-jerk moral conservatism. Yes, ban the thing. Make it go away. I'd seen a clip of it, in which a woman's leg went all spider-webby and she started cackling and her eyes went weird. For weeks afterwards I literally could not sleep, staring at the foot of my bed where I expected the demonic visage to rise up any moment. Whatever needed to be done to protect the children - me - was a good thing. Damn the long term aesthetic consequences. Withdraw it!
Well, as it turned out, my dad was in charge of withdrawing it from Rediffusion, and he withdrew it to our house. Great. So now this giggling horde of demons was living in a plastic case under the VCR in the living room. The tape itself seemed like a living thing - or perhaps more properly an undead thing. I hardly dared touch it. My brother, who has always been way cooler than me and was instantly fine with the film, used to chase me about with it when arguments got out of hand. Tosser.
And the, one day, The Evil Dead changed my life forever. I was in by myself, and I was bored. I went into the living room, picked up the tape, and looked at the monster. What would happen, I wondered, if I just watched the thing? Now? With massive trepidation I inserted the cassette, sat down, watched the thing from start to finish and fell in love with horror films.
The Evil Dead is brilliant, and funny, and scary, and horrific. There is something about it that I find profoundly disturbing, even now. It is, in places, truly horrible and it deals with demonic possession in a way that knows no boundaries. It is not a film I would freely recommend to all comers. Some will find it gratuitous and unnecessarily nasty. It is well made, but in a very different way to the cinematic craftmanship of Halloween. This is a kind of insane, primal film-making that has rarely been seen since, and it is deservedly regarded as a classic of the genre.
Halloween is an interesting time for me. It used to be a time when I was genuinely scared of the supernatural. Part of me is still afraid, and fascinated, by the idea of a world just underneath the one we see, and of a time when the walls between the two worlds are thinner than normal. I like to remember the scared child I used to be, and I hope he hasn't gone away completely. Films like the Evil Dead remind me of him, and that is, I think, a good thing.
My general dispostion when watching a horror film is one of enthusiasm and joy. Typical behaviour includes hysterical laughter when a flesh eating beast bites off somebody's fingers, or bouncing up and down, pointing at the screen whenever there are zombies. It may come as a surpise to anyone who has experienced a scary movie in my company to know that it was not always thus. In fact, the truth is this: I used to be very, very scared of horror films.
In the early 1980s I was a nervous and insular child, scared of almost everything. And I mean everything. Old people, young people, trees, the sky, breakfast cereals, insects, bits of fluff that might be insects... everything. And I soon found that, as if the world did not contain terrors enough, some vile peddlars of fear had decided to make films with the express intention of making me piss myself into oblivion.
Clearly I avoided these things as best I could, fleeing in terror if the television looked like it might be about to vomit some hideous tale of monsters into my mind. Fate, however, had other ideas. By some confluence of economic, technological and societal factors, the onset of my childhood anxiety coincided exactly with the advent of the home video recorder. My dad had just started working at Rediffusion - cutting edge home entertainment supplier - and one day he came home with two things: in his hands a shiny new VCR, and on his face a mental grin that I had hitherto associated with alcohol.
The first - and in all honesty only - thought that went though my head was 'Hurrah - I never have to miss Doctor Who again.' (The previous year I had sulked all the way through Raiders of the Lost Ark at the cinema because I was missing part 4 of Doctor Who - The Visitation. In retrospect, my priorities were perhaps in need of some refinement.) I was most excited at the idea of videoing Doctor Who and watching it endlessly, repeatedly, forever, until I died.
My dad had other ideas. To him the VCR was a wonderful new device with which to torture his eldest and most disappointing son. Every night he brought a fresh stack of terrifying films home from work to insert into the yawning, evil maw of the Betamax. And what films! This was the early 80s, remember, in that brief but astonishing period when there was no regulation for the video industry, and so all manner of nightmares clawed their way onto magnetic tape. Barely 24 months would pass before a number of these films would be banned outright, but for now they were all free to roam the land, crawling into my house, my television and my dreams.
Many fearful monstrosities flickered their fuzzy way across the screen in those months. Michael Myers was present, though not yet beloved. Zombies of all shapes and sizes. Men with axes, drills, machetes. All glimpsed briefly as I hurried back to the comforts of a Dalek paperback in my bedroom, muffled screams and 80s synths chasing me up the stairs.
Grandaddy of them all, though, was The Evil Dead. Possibly the most concisely and brilliantly named film ever (unless Bikini Ski School is any good, I never got round to renting it), Sam Raimi's masterpiece became the poster child for the video nasty scandals of the mid 80s. It was famously withdrawn from rental shops, lest it corrupt the brains of those watching. And though I now deplore the weak-minded reasoning that went into banning the film, my twelve year old self was all in favour of such knee-jerk moral conservatism. Yes, ban the thing. Make it go away. I'd seen a clip of it, in which a woman's leg went all spider-webby and she started cackling and her eyes went weird. For weeks afterwards I literally could not sleep, staring at the foot of my bed where I expected the demonic visage to rise up any moment. Whatever needed to be done to protect the children - me - was a good thing. Damn the long term aesthetic consequences. Withdraw it!
Well, as it turned out, my dad was in charge of withdrawing it from Rediffusion, and he withdrew it to our house. Great. So now this giggling horde of demons was living in a plastic case under the VCR in the living room. The tape itself seemed like a living thing - or perhaps more properly an undead thing. I hardly dared touch it. My brother, who has always been way cooler than me and was instantly fine with the film, used to chase me about with it when arguments got out of hand. Tosser.
And the, one day, The Evil Dead changed my life forever. I was in by myself, and I was bored. I went into the living room, picked up the tape, and looked at the monster. What would happen, I wondered, if I just watched the thing? Now? With massive trepidation I inserted the cassette, sat down, watched the thing from start to finish and fell in love with horror films.
The Evil Dead is brilliant, and funny, and scary, and horrific. There is something about it that I find profoundly disturbing, even now. It is, in places, truly horrible and it deals with demonic possession in a way that knows no boundaries. It is not a film I would freely recommend to all comers. Some will find it gratuitous and unnecessarily nasty. It is well made, but in a very different way to the cinematic craftmanship of Halloween. This is a kind of insane, primal film-making that has rarely been seen since, and it is deservedly regarded as a classic of the genre.
Halloween is an interesting time for me. It used to be a time when I was genuinely scared of the supernatural. Part of me is still afraid, and fascinated, by the idea of a world just underneath the one we see, and of a time when the walls between the two worlds are thinner than normal. I like to remember the scared child I used to be, and I hope he hasn't gone away completely. Films like the Evil Dead remind me of him, and that is, I think, a good thing.
Thursday, 21 October 2010
all the rage
Continuing my journey into Halloween, I stumble and grunt my way through the empty streets of London, 2002.
One film that gets better the more I see it is 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's pulse quickening tale of things-that-definitely-aren't-zombies chasing Cillian Murphy around a deserted England. One the surface it looks like a 21st Century riff on a tale that has been done dozens of times before - boy awakes alone, boy finds world deserted, boy gets chased about by monsters for a bit. The two tales it calls to mind most are Matheson's 'I am Legend' (filmed a number of times with increasing degrees of stupidity) and Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids', the 1980 version of which still renders me terrified of rhubarb. And, of course, it is hugely indebted to the horde of zombie films that shambled in the wake of Romero's 'Dead' trilogy.
28 Days Later is, however, not a zombie film. Oh no. Ask Danny Boyle, see what he says. In fact, I'll save you the bother. He'll say no. Not zombies. No. Rage infected humans, he'll say.
But, but, you might splutter, society has collapsed due to a phenomenon which causes perfectly normal people to transform into flesh eating monsters who hunt without reason. What are they if they aren't zombies?
And here Boyle will point out two things to you. The first, he will say, energetically nodding his weird shaped head, is that you have mistakenly assumed cannibalism to be an essential characteristic of the creature we call a zombie. Whcih is, of course, untrue. Zombies only became cannibals in the 60s, some 30 years after their cultural birth. The original, 1930s, ready salted version of the zombie did little more than stumble about looking stupid, occasionally fetching you things if you asked. Didn't eat anything. No.
Secondly, and more importantly, Boyle would say, taking off his glasses and rubbing his nose, it is important to note that the infected are not dead. They are still alive. So not undead. So not zombies.
Now, I'll admit that for quite some time I was in the 'They are zombies, whatever you say' camp. Generically speaking, 28 Days Later has all the iconography and narrative structure of a zombie film, so who cares about technicalities like how dead they are? A number of commentators have said similar things, and put Boyle's insistence on the 'infected'ness of his creatures down to a reluctance to associate with the little-regarded subgenre of the zombie movie. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. I think it is probably quite important that the rage infected humans are alive.
What ths film is about, I think, is civilisation. More specifically, it is about the vague and shifting line that divides our concept of civilisation from its opposite, whatever we might call it. Barbarism? Third-world-ism? The thing about the infected is that they have not really gained the desire to become something monstrous. It is more like they have lost something. The infected have lost the ability to keep themselves in check, to suppress their base desires and act in accordance with everyone else. Once free of these civilising instincts, they are free to do whatever they want... and what they want to do is scream, and run, and smash, and hurt. Not like monsters, but like children. Or like me, inside, lots of the time. Sometimes all I have to do is drop a spoon. You want rage? Try hiding the remote control for the TV, or watch to see what happens if my PC disobeys me.
Boyle's direction, and Alex Garland's script, give us two excellent pointers as to how problematic the concept of civilisation is. First, and perhaps most obviously, we have Major West's soldiers. It is no accident that they live in a big country house, full of culture (check out all those lingering shots of statues). Our heroes reach civilisation, and find it worse that what they run from: monsters disguised behind soft words.
And then there's Jim. Ostensibly our hero, Jim is a walking critique of the hero's journey experienced in most Western texts. Overtly feminised at the start of the film, he transforms himself by steps into a 'real man', so that by the end he can defeat the monsters and win the girl. He has got there by killing a child, murdering men and finally by resembling the very creatures we are meant to be afraid of. The camera starts to treat him as it does the infected: the frame rate drops and jerks, Jim flashes past the frame in silhouette.Finally we see him plunge his thumbs into another man's eyes. Compare this to Will Smith's clean cut scientist-cop-hero-genius-Jesus in the narratively similar I am Legend and the ideological differences become hard to ignore.
This is a film about our definitions of civilisation and how they can make us blind to our own monstrous nature. We exclude ideologies that seem less rational and trust in our intellectual superiority. But doesn't it seem like that intellectual edge is used, more and more, to mask the horrific things we do? To give comfortable words to horrible ideas so we don't have to face up to the insanity of our culture.
Anyway, that's what I think. It is also a top monster film and I really like the scary bit in the tunnel.
One film that gets better the more I see it is 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's pulse quickening tale of things-that-definitely-aren't-zombies chasing Cillian Murphy around a deserted England. One the surface it looks like a 21st Century riff on a tale that has been done dozens of times before - boy awakes alone, boy finds world deserted, boy gets chased about by monsters for a bit. The two tales it calls to mind most are Matheson's 'I am Legend' (filmed a number of times with increasing degrees of stupidity) and Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids', the 1980 version of which still renders me terrified of rhubarb. And, of course, it is hugely indebted to the horde of zombie films that shambled in the wake of Romero's 'Dead' trilogy.
28 Days Later is, however, not a zombie film. Oh no. Ask Danny Boyle, see what he says. In fact, I'll save you the bother. He'll say no. Not zombies. No. Rage infected humans, he'll say.
But, but, you might splutter, society has collapsed due to a phenomenon which causes perfectly normal people to transform into flesh eating monsters who hunt without reason. What are they if they aren't zombies?
And here Boyle will point out two things to you. The first, he will say, energetically nodding his weird shaped head, is that you have mistakenly assumed cannibalism to be an essential characteristic of the creature we call a zombie. Whcih is, of course, untrue. Zombies only became cannibals in the 60s, some 30 years after their cultural birth. The original, 1930s, ready salted version of the zombie did little more than stumble about looking stupid, occasionally fetching you things if you asked. Didn't eat anything. No.
Secondly, and more importantly, Boyle would say, taking off his glasses and rubbing his nose, it is important to note that the infected are not dead. They are still alive. So not undead. So not zombies.
Now, I'll admit that for quite some time I was in the 'They are zombies, whatever you say' camp. Generically speaking, 28 Days Later has all the iconography and narrative structure of a zombie film, so who cares about technicalities like how dead they are? A number of commentators have said similar things, and put Boyle's insistence on the 'infected'ness of his creatures down to a reluctance to associate with the little-regarded subgenre of the zombie movie. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. I think it is probably quite important that the rage infected humans are alive.
What ths film is about, I think, is civilisation. More specifically, it is about the vague and shifting line that divides our concept of civilisation from its opposite, whatever we might call it. Barbarism? Third-world-ism? The thing about the infected is that they have not really gained the desire to become something monstrous. It is more like they have lost something. The infected have lost the ability to keep themselves in check, to suppress their base desires and act in accordance with everyone else. Once free of these civilising instincts, they are free to do whatever they want... and what they want to do is scream, and run, and smash, and hurt. Not like monsters, but like children. Or like me, inside, lots of the time. Sometimes all I have to do is drop a spoon. You want rage? Try hiding the remote control for the TV, or watch to see what happens if my PC disobeys me.
Boyle's direction, and Alex Garland's script, give us two excellent pointers as to how problematic the concept of civilisation is. First, and perhaps most obviously, we have Major West's soldiers. It is no accident that they live in a big country house, full of culture (check out all those lingering shots of statues). Our heroes reach civilisation, and find it worse that what they run from: monsters disguised behind soft words.
And then there's Jim. Ostensibly our hero, Jim is a walking critique of the hero's journey experienced in most Western texts. Overtly feminised at the start of the film, he transforms himself by steps into a 'real man', so that by the end he can defeat the monsters and win the girl. He has got there by killing a child, murdering men and finally by resembling the very creatures we are meant to be afraid of. The camera starts to treat him as it does the infected: the frame rate drops and jerks, Jim flashes past the frame in silhouette.Finally we see him plunge his thumbs into another man's eyes. Compare this to Will Smith's clean cut scientist-cop-hero-genius-Jesus in the narratively similar I am Legend and the ideological differences become hard to ignore.
This is a film about our definitions of civilisation and how they can make us blind to our own monstrous nature. We exclude ideologies that seem less rational and trust in our intellectual superiority. But doesn't it seem like that intellectual edge is used, more and more, to mask the horrific things we do? To give comfortable words to horrible ideas so we don't have to face up to the insanity of our culture.
Anyway, that's what I think. It is also a top monster film and I really like the scary bit in the tunnel.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
The night he came home
Halloween creeps ever closer, and so it is time to give you another great seasonal film recommendation. And I'm going to jump straight to the best Halloween film of all time; the one that bears the name of the season itself.
There are probably too many reasons I love Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) for me to be coherent. I may as well just put the film on and stand there, pointing at it, shouting "That! That! That!" Alternatively, I could pile dozens and dozens of copies of Rob Zombie's godawful 2007 remake in to a pit and then urinate constantly onto them, simultaneously drinking gallons of cheap lager to ensure there is no pause in my stream of contempt.
I really, really love this film. And because my love is an inarticulate, violent beast, I am going to simply list five reasons why Halloween is great.
1. The music.
I'm listening to it now. It's magical. Hey - you should listen to it too! Let's see if this works:
Ok, so hopefully you can now listen to it while reading. Cool. Anyway, the score, written by Carpenter, is a thing of eerie wonder. It is at once minimal and deceptively complex. The layers underneath the main theme build a sense of real dread. For me, anyway.
2. Mr Myers
This slim, spectral nightmare of a figure has wandered through my dreams ever since my young self first saw the film. Subsequent incarnations of the character have been somehow wrong - too bulky, too short, too 'I'm a monster'y. The origial Myers doesn't really seem to exist in this world, as if he's just passing through on the way to... I don't know, killing some angels. He's utterly unknowable, and thus utterly terrifying.
3. The structure
Like all great drama, the film is tightly focused. Outside of a brief prologue, setting up Michael's childhood discovery that he really likes big knives, the film takes place over the course of 24 hours. Much of the story is set at day, which, for me, is when monsters are really scary. I mean, they should come out after dark, right? What kind of bold-as-brass psycho wanders around at day? Answer: a confident, patient one.
I love the time the film spends developing the town and the characters. The eventual descent into evening darkness is all the more creepy for having got used to the day. And, of course, once the night comes, it's here to stay. 30 Days of Night could have learned a trick from this.
4. The cinematography
Carpenter really knows how to frame a shot. For years, I only had this story in a kind of sqashed up pan-and-scan TV version on VHS. This was back in the bad old days when TV broadcasters and VHS distributors alike thought nothing of lopping the sides of the picture off so it fit onto your resolutely square TV screen. But Michael Myers lives on the edges of the picture! That's where he lurks, all white masked and spooky. Only when I finally got to see a proper widescreen copy did I fully realise the brilliance of the film making. Rather than focus on the killer, as most half wit horror directors are wont to do, Carpenter keeps Myers on the periphery. He is occasionally to be glimpsed behind a hedge, in between washing, in a distant window; but rarely up close.
5. The lack of reason
Sequels and (sigh) remakes have all tried to find a reason for Michael's Octobery slaughterfest. Lost sisters, star signs, ancient cults... a host of reasons why the man in the white mask might have gone into the murder business rather than, say, IT support. All stupid, all diminishing the character. Michael is great because he really doesn't have a reason for what he's doing, at least, no reason fathomable to us.
One of the greatest sins of the remake is to recast the young Michael as an angry greaser child with abusive parents and a terrible home life. The minute this happens, Myers has a motivation and a context, and is thus potentially cureable or at least understandable. Carpenter has no time for such nonsense - his Michael is from a seemingly normal, well-to-do family, with no obvious motive for his subsequent love affair with screaming and blood. He remains inscrutable, and that is why he is scary.
So, there we are. Halloween. If you haven't watched it, you should. If you have watched it, you should do so again. If you are Rob Zombie, you should go have a long, hard think about what you have done.
There are probably too many reasons I love Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) for me to be coherent. I may as well just put the film on and stand there, pointing at it, shouting "That! That! That!" Alternatively, I could pile dozens and dozens of copies of Rob Zombie's godawful 2007 remake in to a pit and then urinate constantly onto them, simultaneously drinking gallons of cheap lager to ensure there is no pause in my stream of contempt.
I really, really love this film. And because my love is an inarticulate, violent beast, I am going to simply list five reasons why Halloween is great.
1. The music.
I'm listening to it now. It's magical. Hey - you should listen to it too! Let's see if this works:
Ok, so hopefully you can now listen to it while reading. Cool. Anyway, the score, written by Carpenter, is a thing of eerie wonder. It is at once minimal and deceptively complex. The layers underneath the main theme build a sense of real dread. For me, anyway.
2. Mr Myers
This slim, spectral nightmare of a figure has wandered through my dreams ever since my young self first saw the film. Subsequent incarnations of the character have been somehow wrong - too bulky, too short, too 'I'm a monster'y. The origial Myers doesn't really seem to exist in this world, as if he's just passing through on the way to... I don't know, killing some angels. He's utterly unknowable, and thus utterly terrifying.
3. The structure
Like all great drama, the film is tightly focused. Outside of a brief prologue, setting up Michael's childhood discovery that he really likes big knives, the film takes place over the course of 24 hours. Much of the story is set at day, which, for me, is when monsters are really scary. I mean, they should come out after dark, right? What kind of bold-as-brass psycho wanders around at day? Answer: a confident, patient one.
I love the time the film spends developing the town and the characters. The eventual descent into evening darkness is all the more creepy for having got used to the day. And, of course, once the night comes, it's here to stay. 30 Days of Night could have learned a trick from this.
4. The cinematography
Carpenter really knows how to frame a shot. For years, I only had this story in a kind of sqashed up pan-and-scan TV version on VHS. This was back in the bad old days when TV broadcasters and VHS distributors alike thought nothing of lopping the sides of the picture off so it fit onto your resolutely square TV screen. But Michael Myers lives on the edges of the picture! That's where he lurks, all white masked and spooky. Only when I finally got to see a proper widescreen copy did I fully realise the brilliance of the film making. Rather than focus on the killer, as most half wit horror directors are wont to do, Carpenter keeps Myers on the periphery. He is occasionally to be glimpsed behind a hedge, in between washing, in a distant window; but rarely up close.
5. The lack of reason
Sequels and (sigh) remakes have all tried to find a reason for Michael's Octobery slaughterfest. Lost sisters, star signs, ancient cults... a host of reasons why the man in the white mask might have gone into the murder business rather than, say, IT support. All stupid, all diminishing the character. Michael is great because he really doesn't have a reason for what he's doing, at least, no reason fathomable to us.
One of the greatest sins of the remake is to recast the young Michael as an angry greaser child with abusive parents and a terrible home life. The minute this happens, Myers has a motivation and a context, and is thus potentially cureable or at least understandable. Carpenter has no time for such nonsense - his Michael is from a seemingly normal, well-to-do family, with no obvious motive for his subsequent love affair with screaming and blood. He remains inscrutable, and that is why he is scary.
So, there we are. Halloween. If you haven't watched it, you should. If you have watched it, you should do so again. If you are Rob Zombie, you should go have a long, hard think about what you have done.
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
There's something in The Fog.
Many years ago John Carpenter made a wonderful film about fog. It was called, with a directness rarely seen nowadays, 'John Carpenter's The Fog'. I have just watched the remake, which eschews such solipsism and is content to be called 'The Fog' and not, for example, 'Some Fog, but not John Carpenter's The Fog, my Fog'.
Much to my surprise, I really liked it. A good remake! Well I never. Remakes are almost always rubbish, generally missing the point of what made the original special in the first place and giving you a horrible experience that is all the more upsetting for containing a faint taste of the original. Kind of like vomiting up a really nice wine. 'Mmm', you think, as puke flavoured shiraz shoots out of your nose, 'this was much nicer on the way in.'
The worst offender of recent years was Rob Zombie's truly idiotic 2007 remake of The Best Horror Film of All Time, that being 1978's 'Halloween'. (Note: not 'John Carpenter's Halloween.' He was young, then, and humble.) There are so many problems with Zombie's remake that it is difficult to start listing them without descending into a feverish spiral of everlasting hatred that renders one unable to speak, stand, or do anything beyond stare in horror at the wall, not seeing the wall, looking through the wall. So I won't.
(Even though it was awful. And stupid. And poor.)
But for now, I'll leave it alone.
(And badly directed. And an insult to the human race.)
But that's for another time.
(And just plain thick.)
Moving on. There has been one really good remake of a horror movie in recent years, and that has been Zack Snyder's mental re-imagining of 'Dawn of the Dead'. And, if we go back a little further, to the 80s when I was younger and possessed of voluminous hair, we have 'The Thing'. Sorry - 'John Carpenter's The Thing.' A great remake, which is about to be remade again. But on the whole, remakes suck.
In fact, if we're honest, most horror movies suck. I watch a lot of them, and though they please me in a base 'Oh look, someone's head has come off and that girl will probably get naked in response" kind of way, they are mostly a bit rubbish. The ones that are good, however, are wonders to behold. As we enter the spooky skies of the Halloween season, I thought I would share with you some of my favourites.
I'll just do one tonight, and briefly, for I have rambled enough. It seems appropriate to sing the praises of the reason I started to write tonight: 'John Carpenter's The Fog'. It's about zombie ghost pirates, which should be all you need to go and seek it out immediately. Having just watched the remake I am a little hazy on the plot details of the original, but I do know that it features the following:
Fog. Lots of spooky, pirate-concealing fog, that charges up the street and gets into your house through gaps and such. It is lit most beautifully, and probably tastes like evil candy floss.
Jamie Lee Curtis. She is good at screaming and being attacked by monsters. In this, she does both.
The cool and spooky line that provides my title tonight: 'There's something in the Fog'.
A classic 'small town under seige' feel, that keeps the dramatic tension... er... tense.
A small but well formed bunch of characters who make the town seem real and make you genuinely care when they are in peril.
A great, minimalist Carpenter theme that suggests all manner of eerie goings on, and brings a mythic feel to proceedings.
Look, it's me, John Carpenter's The Fog
So there. Go watch it on DVD. With the windows closed.
More to follow. Probably.
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