Countdown to the Countdown to Halloween

For a few years now, off and on, I've been taking part in the Countdown to Halloween blogging event. A loose assemblage of blogs covering various themes, but all posting frequently about something Halloween related during the 31 days of October. I'm taking part once again, and while in years past I've tried to keep to daily posts, or 3 times a week, or some other self-imposed schedule, I'm under no such delusions this year. I plan to keep posting as long and as often as I can this month, but I'm working odd and lengthy hours, while also dealing with a 3 month old at home. What I'm saying is there may be gaps in my activity, but I hope to at least drop in here regularly with a quick review, some reminisces, or maybe just some awesome music to add to your Halloween party mix.

I'm finishing up a few posts that will be going up over the next couple days, so for now I just wanted to promote the Countdown itself. Heading over to the Countdown to Halloween site will give you a list of contributors, as well as instructions for joining up if you feel so inclined. You'll notice on that list my pal Rik, who is going to be celebrating the month on his main blog site, The Cinema 4 Pylon, as well as his awesome animation blog The Cinema 4 Cel Bloc. We're also putting together something special over on our shared blog, We Who Watch Behind the Rows, where we pick a Stephen King book or story and then discuss the written word and the filmed adaptation(s). Head over there to read out latest post on The Woman in the Room, and an announcement for what our Halloween plans are.

I know this is a brief and somewhat low-key beginning to the month, but my plan is to build up to a pretty great Halloween this year. It should be fun, and I hope you join me for the party.

We Who Watch Behind The Rows: Graveyard Shift (1990) Pt. 1

Welcome to our first installment of We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King Print vs. Film. The focus of this new column is to compare the written works of author Stephen King against the numerous adaptations made for either the movie or television screen. Since there are what seems to be about 4,000 such adaptations released into the wild to this point, we expect catching up with all of them will take a good amount of time on our parts.

As with our other semi-regular column -- Visiting and Revisiting -- your hosts are myself, Rik Tod Johnson of The Cinema 4 Pylon and Cinema 4: Cel Bloc websites, and Aaron Lowe of the Working Dead Productions website. We are both hardcore, longtime cinema fans, but we are also, to varying degrees, big Stephen King fans. 

The difference between us is that I, after following King earnestly and faithfully around every turn in his career since I first read The Dead Zone around 1981, largely gave up on his writing (with a couple of notable exceptions) post-Gerald's Game (that would be around 1992). So with this project, I will basically begin my personal reintroduction to each of King's stories and novels as we make our way through his oeuvre.

Aaron, what is your personal experience with the written works of Mr. King?

Lllllllaadies...

Aaron: I actually started reading Stephen King and stopped reading Stephen King around the same time. I read my first novel from him in 1990, when I was in 6th grade, and I more or less stopped following his career post-1992. That isn't to say I stopped reading King after those two years; no far from it. By the time I came on board, Stephen King had twenty-three novels and five story collections in print, which means I had a wealth of material to dive into. It also means that, much like you, I stopped keeping current with him sometime around Gerald's Game. There were a few exceptions to that, when I would get gifts from relatives who knew I liked Stephen King and not much else about me, but for the most part I fell out of touch with him once I'd caught up, and didn't start buying his novels again until Black House (2001). That may not seem like a lot of time to not be reading Stephen King, but it means that I missed seven novels that I still haven’t caught up with.

Along with reading Stephen King, I was watching his movies nearly constantly. I was a child of the video age, and it seemed as if nearly everything King had written had become a movie or short film or episode of some anthology horror show. There were four filmed adaptations in the year I began reading him, and the world was entering a golden age of Stephen King television, with mini-series versions of some of his biggest books (and, ahem, The Langoliers). It’s certainly no coincidence that I first became acquainted with Mr. King at this point in time.

I’ve pretty much reached the point where I’m back to looking forward to each Stephen King novel or story collection with quite a bit of low-key excitement. It’s no longer a pressing issue to buy the latest King novel as soon as I see it, since he still has one or two books come out a year, but every birthday or Christmas the first thing I use my gift cards on is whatever his latest offering happens to be. And I can say honestly; I’ve never not enjoyed a Stephen King novel. Even a King novel I end up disliking on the whole entertains me and speaks to me in such a way that I never feel like I’ve wasted my time on it. Whatever the outcome, I always enjoy the experience of reading Stephen King’s prose.

Rik: Since rereading each novel takes a bit more time, we have decided to jumpstart We Who Watch Behind the Rows by reviewing the varied pieces in King's 1978 short story collection, Night Shift. From the twenty stories in Night Shift, there have been eight feature films and four television adaptations made thus far. Of the remaining stories in the collection, most (but not quite all) have been adapted into short, amateur films known by King and his fans as "Dollar Babies". Overall, this gives us quite a surplus from which to begin.

The Story: Graveyard Shift [Night Shift, 1978; first published in the October 1970 issue of Cavalier magazine]

Original Cavalier appearance of the story 

Aaron: I’m not entirely sure when I first read the Night Shift collection, but it would have been in the early nineties as I was in the midst of my full-blown King obsession. I remember reading other stories from the collection in the back of my uncle’s pickup truck on a family camping trip, but Graveyard Shift kind of melds into the pile of stories I was reading at the time. There are a few tales in this collection that I have some fairly strong sense memories of where I was when I read them, but Graveyard Shift isn’t one of those. It’s not that the story is bad or lackluster, it’s just that it lacks a central image as striking as that of Grey Matter or I Am the Doorway (the latter of which inspired the cover of the paperback in which I first read these stories).

At its heart, Graveyard Shift is a simple, straightforward, grisly little shocker equally inspired by Poe and EC Comics. That’s not to say it’s derivative or unenjoyable. Quite the contrary; this is an economic, fun shock story that I’ve read through twice now in a short time period and enjoyed each time. Stephen King would, in just a few years, be known for epic, encyclopedia-sized books, and he himself would self-deprecatingly discuss his tendency to ramble on and on and on. But this collection proves that he was just as adept at sketching in characters that seem fully realized within the span of only a handful of pages, and possibly only a couple of lines of action. It’s true that most of the characters in this story are basically background, given only a name or a single line of dialogue, but a few of them become living, breathing characters on the page in a very short span.

I have quite a few friends who only really like Stephen King’s short stories, and avoid his novels. While I don’t agree with that stance, clearly, it’s one that I can understand. His short stories tend to be swifter, nastier, and stranger than his novels. It’s almost as if he lets his imagination run wild for a dozen pages or so and puts no restrictions on his concepts, no matter how bizarre or unsettling, while his novels tend to rein things in a little bit. Also, one thing I discovered early on: Stephen King loves a happy ending. With very few exceptions his long form work (novels or novellas) end with a positive outcome, whereas his short stories have no such assurances. In a Stephen King short story, all bets are off, and no one is safe.

How about you? Where do you stand on this divide? Do you prefer his short stories to his novels, or are you a fan of each in equal measure? How did you feel about his ability here to sketch in a believable world within 26 pages?

Rik: Until I reread Children of the Corn in this same collection a few months ago, it had been so long since I had read any of King’s short stories that I forgot just how economical he could be in his writing. Part of why I started to have a falling out with him is that I felt that he had grown too much in love with his voice, and that voice had definitely developed a rambling tic that I found somewhat annoying, and therefore rendered King a chore to read at times. He had also started to veer slightly away from the supernatural around the time of Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, and I was mostly uninterested in the topics he was starting to explore. Even when he touched on the supernatural in that mid-‘90s period – such as in Insomnia or Rose Madder – I couldn’t muster much excitement. I read the first couple of chapters of each and gave up. And for the novels leading up to that period, his record was hit or miss with me; mostly miss really. I did not like The Eyes of the Dragon, The Tommyknockers, or Needful Things. While I was a big fan of most of his early novels (especially The Stand and The Dead Zone), the last novel of his that I really liked was The Dark Half.

But his short stories? Loved them. The tales in both Night Shift and The Skeleton Crew were constant re-reads for me throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s; likewise for his classic novella collection, Different Seasons. It was thrilling in those days that so many of these pieces were being made into films in theatres and on television as well, even if the quality varied greatly from project to project. But perhaps it is telling that his ‘90s work in the short story and novella area also failed to grab my attention as well. I liked Nightmares and Dreamscapes well enough; I read through it a couple of times, and some stories, like The Night Flier, really stuck with me. But I really did not enjoy Four Past Midnight all that much, so maybe that is where my real ennui with King started to set in for me.

The beauty of the short story is in its succinctness, in the sparing of details unnecessary to the moment at hand. In those early collections, King is brilliant in keeping a tight grip on information, his pen is sharp and concise, and he even seems to practice a form of subtlety – no matter how fantastical the situations, characters, or creatures – that would run away from him sometimes in his longer novels. Since I have rarely read King in recent years (and that would almost entirely be non-fiction and his pop culture columns in Entertainment Weekly), I don’t know if I would still perceive this problem with him.

Just like you, my friends and I – many of whom were also massive fans of King in those bygone days (I am unsure if any of them still read him; many were having a similar falling out with his ‘90s work) – had many discussions regarding “short stories vs. novels.” The short stories usually came out on top about two-thirds of the time. While I did love many of his early novels, I too ran with the short story crowd. And I would have to say that I am probably still with that group today.

Without diving fully into the actual movie version of Graveyard Shift until a bit further on in this discussion, I must admit that my initial re-read of the short story was colored by the fact that I did my re-watch of the film first. (I will not do this with future installments of this column.) Although only two characters truly bear the same name and gender (more on this later), I kept hearing the dialogue in the voices of the actors in the film, one actor (Stephen Macht) in particular. Did you have this problem, or did you do the smart thing and read the story first? If not, were you able to divorce yourself from the screen experience enough to enjoy the story without being influenced by the film?

UK Poster

Aaron: My process went like this; I read the short story, and then watched the film. A few days later I read the story again in preparation of writing this article. I have to say that’s probably the path I’ll be taking from here on out, as it provided me with a few neat insights into both. In fact, I’d like to try and watch the movie one more time before we truly wrap this thing up, and may end up doing so. One thing that I noticed on my second reading of Graveyard Shift (which would actually be the third or fourth lifetime read for me) is how much the film actually stuck to the brief descriptions in the story. We’ll get into the film later, of course, but almost every word Stephen King wrote found some form of representation in the filmed version in one way or another.

The story takes place in just under one week, divided into short sections, each covering one night on the titular graveyard shift as a crew of textile mill workers cleans out a disused basement. Though the narrator is omniscient, the focus of Graveyard Shift is Hall, a college dropout who has been drifting around the country taking odd jobs and searching for something in his life. The only other character of real note is Warwick, the foreman of the textile mill who seems threatened by Hall’s youth and college background. Warwick is the character Stephen Macht plays, and at the risk of getting ahead of myself, I felt that he was the best at capturing the flavor of the character as written. A few of the other mill workers have lines here or there, like Wisconsky or Ippeston, but they’re basically background characters, extras in this story.

Right away, King introduces a stylistic flourish that will eventually become a trademark: grounding his story in the mundane details of everyday life while introducing characters that speak in exaggerated vernacular. The details of the mill are made more real through King’s use of actual product names or pop culture references. The Orange Crush thermometer that Hall keeps checking, or the cans of Nehi that he throws at the rats. There’s no reason for King to point out that the thermometer is a promotional item from Orange Crush, nor that the aluminum cans Hall launches are Nehi, yet doing so gives the story a quick jolt of verisimilitude. We recognize these items from our own lives, and it places this story directly within our understanding.

King also has his characters speak in a weirdly poetic, often stilted, frequently profane style. He claims this language came from his youth surrounded by older blue collar New Englanders, and yet I have a feeling no one actually spoke like he writes. Like when Carmichael gets bitten by a large rat, and complains that he wants compensation, Warwick’s response is “Sure. You got bit on the titty.” This isn’t the most outrageous example in his bibliography, but you get the point. King himself has credited most of his success to this simple act of having his characters say bizarre, distinctive things.

I think Graveyard Shift turned out to be an unexpectedly subtle way to start this project. It features a lot of things Stephen King is known for, but toned way down to the point where it would be easy to miss them. Reading ahead in this collection (though skipping for now the ones we’ll eventually cover for this series) I can say that his stylistic tics become more pronounced the further along we go. Have you read ahead yet? What do you think of his penchant for cultural references and idiosyncratic dialogue? Anything else in the story we should cover before jumping into the film?

DVD Cover

Rik: I only read ahead through the next story, Night Surf, but that was because I remembered that it is connected to The Stand (the use of the Captain Trips influenza as a device), and I loved The Stand. (As to whether I still do, that remains to be seen for future columns.) It was amazing to me how I had almost completely forgotten the story over the intervening years, but the second that I started to read the story, details came flooding back into my head mere sentences before I happened upon them on the page (or really, on the screen, since I was reading it on my iPhone).

We had three constant battles in my gang when we seemed to be group reading King’s latest book back in the day. (Many of us worked for the same bookstore chain, so we were able to get discounted copies of each release, and thus nobody really had to wait to read each one.) One battle was over the overtness of his use of sexuality in his stories, and by that, I mean his descriptiveness and openness. (We had a couple of people in our group who felt he went a little bit too far with the details and sordidness in some scenes, and others, like – ahem -- me, are pervos who felt he never went far enough.) (That I ultimately found happiness in the far sicker and gooier writings of Clive Barker is no surprise.) The second battle was indeed about his use of product placement to sell the reality of his settings to the reader. Certainly he wasn’t getting paid to use any of these trademark names, and I agree with you that it made his stories seem like they were taking place exactly within our own dimension. We again had a couple of dissenters, who felt that it actually cheapened his writing, as if he were taking shortcuts instead of relying more fully on his imagination to set a scene. I saw their side of it as well, but overall, felt that King’s concentration on Nehi and other brands is part of what made him popular: his ability to make us imagine ourselves in his outrageous scenarios.

Such scenarios might even make us say the most outlandish things in the midst of trying to stay alive. That third battle was most certainly over his dialogue. I have always been torn on it myself, but he certainly makes his characters more memorable by his use of it. His characters sometimes employ the most ridiculous, out of left field wording, but King generally gets away with it. While the words may not jibe with our own understanding of the English language, you definitely can’t forget those characters.

In the case of the most egregious user of such language in the story version of Graveyard Shift – the foreman Warwick – he is definitely memorable, though that doesn’t excuse him from how profoundly (and purposefully) annoying he is. Warwick speaks in a manner that I could only proscribe to Stephen King; I have never met anyone in real life who converses as he does, at least when combined with an inability to even attempt to relate to anything living thing on even the smallest level. I will save any discussion of his movie counterpart until the appropriate section of this article. Taking the written Warwick as is, he is probably one of the best examples of how far King was willing to take a character into the realm of the completely unlikable.

Look, I’ve never been to Maine, and I probably will never go there. I am not knocking the state, but I grew up in Alaska, so there is not much in Maine that I can’t get by just going back home for a visit. And I am allergic to shellfish, so in a gastronomic sense, why would I even? Nor have I ever met (to my knowledge) anybody directly from Maine, so I have zero experience in any actual dialect from that state. What has always struck me in the King adaptations (when they stick to that region) is how phony the dialogue sounds to my ear. Period. No one speaks like that at all, I tell myself, and the overriding effect has been that if there is a feature of pure artifice to King’s stories, it is not the fantastical creatures that never have or never will be in this world, but the words that fall from his most annoying characters mouths and the odd angles at which those words hit my ears.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy some of those words. I find their use annoying, but at no point would I admit that King doesn’t achieve the exact goals for which he is striving. When I saw George A. Romero’s (and King’s) Creepshow in the theatre for the first time in 1982, and saw King on the screen as the doomed Jordy Verrill – or even in his cameo role as a loudmouth spectator in Romero’s earlier but equally fascinating Knightriders -- I got the sense (apart from King being a shitty actor) that in his head, all of King’s characters spoke within those parameters – as annoying as possible and with accents so outrageous they may as well be the “Frenchies” in Monty Python.

Of course, I exaggerate – as King does as well -- and it does bring me to my point. I can say “No one speaks like that in real life!” but what do I know? Right down the street, in any direction, there are groups and nationalities and subgroups and cultures that speak to each in ways that I have never heard. Nor am I likely to hear if I don’t immerse myself in their cultures. I am no expert on anything. Do I know anyone from the backwoods or small towns of Maine? No. So how can I say that Warwick doesn’t exist somewhere, and that people just like Warwick influenced King? I cannot know. It doesn’t mean that I have to accept every frustratingly odd piece of dialogue, but I will give King the benefit of the doubt in most cases.

There is some memorable imagery in Graveyard Shift – such as King’s vivid descriptions of the mutated creatures –but the one that gets my mind racing is the lock on the underside – yes, the underside – of the trapdoor that is discovered, which will eventually lead to a hidden sub-basement and much carnage by the end of the story (and possibly portends more carnage post-story). The rusted lock is a marvelous tension builder, and the “hero” character, Hall, seems to revel in its discovery, if only because it helps continue to cut through Warwick’s blusterous façade of toughness. Trying to fathom exactly what purpose led to its necessity almost distracts me from the exploration of the dank subbasement and the mutant rat-bat action that occurs next. Did the lock perform similar black magic on you? What other imagery stuck in your memory the most?

Aaron: Definitely the lock is the big, glaring, flashing light at the center of this story. It hints at something grander and stranger than the inbred, mutant rat action we get. At first glance it seems like an early example of yet another Stephen King tic; the offhand remark or briefly mentioned artifact that hints at an older, more horrific story only tangentially related to what we’re seeing. Eventually those digressions would get the best of him, and Stephen King would devote hundreds of pages to ideas that were only really incidental to the main plot, but I’ve always loved them. Even when they threatened to overload the main story, my favorite parts of King books tend to be the brief (or not-so-brief) detours that give the impression that the world is weirder and scarier than you thought. Right now I’m going to take a page out of Stephen King’s book and back up a bit and work my way back to answer your question.

On my first re-reading of this story, I felt the ending had a few rushed elements. After some pretty leisurely storytelling, and without much foreshadowing, the ending comes rushing at us in just a couple of quick pages. Warwick and Hall seem to undergo some pretty major shifts in personality, and Hall in particular gets a new motivation that seems to come out of left field. I’m speaking, of course, of Hall’s decision to not just force Warwick into a rat infested basement in order to prove his aggressive blustering is merely a show, but to actually take an active role in Warwick’s death as almost a sacrifice to the rats.

As soon as Warwick and Hall enter the sub-basement, Hall’s entire attitude changes. Where earlier in the story he had been silently acquiescing to Warwick’s demands and insults (though often with some passive aggression), here he begins to take charge of the situation, to badger and harass Warwick openly. His inner thoughts change as well, as he begins to feel a wild elation, ‘something lunatic and dark with colors.’ He feels a sense of purpose drawing him on, and his inner thoughts remark that ‘he had perhaps been looking for something like this through all his days of crazy wandering.’ This change happens so suddenly, over barely a page, that at first blush it seemed unearned. Then, when re-reading the story it all fell into place; of course Hall was unmoored and probably a little unhinged, despite his seeming sanity at the story’s outset. And of course a drifter who seems to be searching for his place in the world would find something almost religious in the mystery and violence of what happens in that sub-basement.

Which brings us back to that lock on the underside of a trap door. Why would it be there, on that side of the door? The characters in the story all wonder this, but it’s glossed over rather quickly. As I see it there is only one real reason you would lock the inside of something; you are locking yourself in and something else out. Based on the disused nature of the basement, and the certainly even more disused nature of the sub-basement, neglected for decades, who could have set that lock? And what must their rationale have been? How could anyone with even the barest sense of curiosity not be tempted down those stairs?

But there’s more to this mystery, and although we never get a definitive answer we get a lot of weird clues. First off is the basement itself, which is ancient and full of weird fungi the characters have never seen before, strange and swarming beetles, and of course giant rats and bats. The basement is also larger than the mill that lays on top of it, extending past the mill’s borders, and we get explicit evidence that the basement might predate the above structure by several decades. Warwick and Hall discover a large wooden box with a name and date painted on it; “Elias Varney, 1841.” At the discovery of that item, Hall asks Warwick if the mill is that old, to which Warwick answers that the mill was built in 1897.

In the sub-basement Warwick and Hall find one skeleton, and though no connection is made in the text, I think it’s a fair assumption to make that the skeleton belonged to whoever locked the basement from the inside. I think another assumption could also be made that the skeleton and Elias Varney are one and the same. So now the question remains, who is Elias Varney? I’m going to get a bit extra-textual here, and go outside of the book for a theory I’d like to put forward.

Knowing how much Stephen King likes to make allusions to his own works I went online to look up any other instances of an Elias Varney in his work, or even just another Varney, and could find nothing (Stephen King fans have tirelessly plotted most story connections throughout several websites, so if a connection existed I should have found it). What I did find, buried in a forum thread from ages ago, was the idea that the name meant nothing in and of itself, it was just there to identify the skeleton, and perhaps Varney had been chosen because King is a ravenous fan of horror literature, and wanted to give a shout out to Varney the Vampire, the first English-language vampire tale.

But what if the naming wasn’t random? What if it was a clue to the very origins of the story? The wooden box they find isn’t really described, other than it is apparently huge, but what if it was a coffin? What if Elias Varney is related to Francis Varney, the titular vampire of that story? Or, what if he had nothing to do with that story and was simply a clue as to the nature of the trouble beneath the mill. There are a couple ways it could go from there. This vampire had sealed himself away from the dangerous humans above, or perhaps this Varney was as self-hating as the original, and had sealed himself away to keep humanity safe. Either way, it’s clear that he died beneath what would eventually become a textile mill.

Now, I’m not saying that I’ve solved a mystery in a 26-page Stephen King story that no one had ever even noticed before, and I’m not saying that King wrote a secret sequel to a half forgotten penny dreadful from over a century earlier, but it does serve to highlight what I love most about short stories like this; the idea that there is a larger world and we are looking at it through a keyhole. In this case we’ve got Elias Varney, who may or may not be a vampire, but who has locked himself away in an ancient cavern that ends up full of mutated rats, bats, and other forms of life normally found in caves. Did he lock himself up before or after this change in the natural order? Did he do it because of the change? Did the change happen because of him? We’ll never know, and whether you want to buy my version of things or not, I think it’s a fun way to look at the story, and it got my imagination whirring.

Rik: I am willing to entertain the notion, though I really think King never meant anything more than simple literary name-dropping (at most) to add an extra spooky layer to his story’s trappings. But, just as the strange positioning of the lock lends itself to allowing the reader to wander off in epic flights of fancy regarding just exactly why it appears that way, so too does the box with the name of Elias Varney. Why not imagine such a connection?

I, too, had set myself toward scouring the interwebs for some corroboration of the Varney theory, but found nothing beyond the forum source that you did. Since I am not prone to jumping on theories without multiple sourced facts to back it up, I discounted the notion. But I will agree that it is a most engaging idea, and it caused me to head further to King’s non-fictional foray into the history of horror fiction and film, Danse Macabre, itself first published a couple of years (1981, to be precise) after Night Shift. In Danse Macabre, King name-checks Varney while discussing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but nothing beyond informing us that the novel “never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Varney the Vampyre.” So it is clear that King is well aware of Varney, but doesn’t hold it in high regard as literature. He also fails to include it in his list of important horror novels and stories in the appendix for Danse Macabre. Since there, by his own words, “roughly a hundred” such works included, it seems there would have been plenty of room if he wanted Varney there.

But it also doesn’t mean that he was beyond dropping a Varney reference into Graveyard Shift as a gag. And no matter how much certain writers might bemoan this fate, once the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, it is not going to go back in easily. Once he published the story and the readers took in his words, the fate of Elias Varney became their concern, whether a lightly implied joke or the doorway to further horrors left undiscovered and untold.

Our discussion continues over on Rik's site as we delve into the film and its differences and similarities to the short story. To read that part visit Rik's Cinema 4 Pylon here.

Halloween Movie Roundup Pt. 1

I've been slipping in my duties as a Halloween celebrant. I had planned to have mini-marathons of movies every week, and write something every day about horror (films/comics/music/books/games), and yet here it is halfway through the month and I've written less than I had originally hoped (though I am not displeased with my output, truth be told), and I've seen a lot less movies than I had planned. I still watch at least one horror movie a day, but I have had only one day in which I've had one of my desired mini-marathons. Extended hours at work for the season, on top of a bifurcated sleep schedule caused by past-midnight work hours and the need to get my daughter to school in the morning make it so my available times to write about and/or watch movies is a bit smaller than ideal. Add to that the fact that the Fall TV season has just started up, and I find myself falling behind (pun definitely not intended). I mean, I know I should be watching my recently arrived Vincent Price bluray set, but The Flash is just so much fun, especially now that they've introduced Jay Garrick and Earth-2, and are gleefully referencing the nerdiest of Flash mythology.

I've got a piece I've been working on for a few days, which I thought would be a quick and easy movie writeup, but continues to grow at a rate I hadn't anticipated. But in order to keep my blog active and try to keep some consistency, I feel the desire to get something out there today. So I've decided to do a quick roundup of the films I've watched this Halloween season, that haven't yet made it into longer pieces or reviews. Keep in mind I started my season back in mid-September, and then committed wholly to it around the 18th of that month, when Universal started their annual Halloween Horror Nights and I began spending my every work night in the Bates Motel. It seemed appropriate.

Darkness Falls (2003): This movie seems to have fallen from people's memories since it was released barely over a decade ago, despite the fact that it was fairly high profile at the time of it's release, at least for horror films. It opened at #1 in the box office, and more than quadrupled it's budget, and yet I don't know many people who could tell you what it's about, even those that have seen it. And now, just a month after having seen it myself, I'm having trouble remembering it. This film is like the supernatural menace in a Stephen King novel; you begin to lose all memory of it once it's been defeated. The film, if I'm recalling it correctly, concerns an urban legend concerning a kindly old woman who was burned as a witch by a nervous and angry mob who believed her guilty of child murder. She was innocent, of course, and now she appears to any child on the night they lose their last tooth and kill them if they look at her.

This film came out at a time where I was trying to see every horror movie that came out in theatres. Darkness Falls was one I just never felt any desire at all to see, and yet now when I saw it on Netflix I figured a bit of forced nostalgia could be fun. The biggest problem I have with this film is really one of editing. Every time the Tooth Fairy (the moniker given to the vengeful spirit, for obvious reasons) pops up on screen the film goes crazy, with tons of shaky, whip-pan camera movements and rapid fire editing. This makes the moments of the film that should be the scariest come across as goofy and nearly indecipherable, which is a shame, because the design of the Tooth Fairy is pretty cool, actually. Unfortunately you rarely get a chance to admire the design, and it's marred by some unnecessary CGI enhancements.

Cottage Country (2013); Tyler Labine (Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil) and Malin Akerman (Children's Hospital) play a yuppie-ish couple heading out to the country for a romantic getaway at Labine's parent's luxury cottage. The arrival of Labine's bohemian brother, with girlfriend in tow, provides a growing list of frustrations, prompting Labine, in a fit of rage, to murder his brother. The two leads in this film, and the generally lighthearted tone, had me hoping for a nice dark comedy, and to be fair that's pretty much what this film is. Unfortunately, it really only has one joke; that of the two proper, uptight yuppies driven to murder and the complications that arise from trying to hide the crime. There's a good concept here, in the way the couple becomes more honest with each other the more people they kill and the more lies they have to tell everyone else. But as I said, there's no variation in the humor, and no deep exploration of that theme. Things just get more shrill and drenched in flop-sweat as the film progresses, culminating with a finale that, I think, was supposed to put an ironic button on everything, but really just felt like cheap cruelty to the characters.

Waxworks (1924): I'm not sure if this is the first true anthology film, but it's at least a very early example of one. It's also not much of a horror film, though it sometimes gets credited as one. In truth it covers several genres, mostly historical fantasy, and only the final segment could be considered horror. Directed by Paul Leni, whose earlier silent epic The Man Who Laughs is mostly remembered for inspiring the visual look of The Joker, the film concerns an unemployed writer arriving at a wax museum answering an ad calling for someone to write adventures about the wax figures to be used as part of their displays. Each segment casts the writer as a character in a drama concerning the figures, which include Ivan The Terrible, Harun al-Rashid, and Jack the Ripper. The final segment, where the writer falls asleep and dreams he is being pursued by the Jack the Ripper figure, is the only one that can be considered anywhere near horror. The segment is full of multiple exposures which lend the already-distorted sets an even more confusing and disorienting dimension.

Waxwork (1977) & Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992): I must have had wax figures on the brain, or perhaps amazon prime was acting as an oracle and had somehow divined that I had watched Waxworks earlier. For whatever reason, I chose to revisit this vaguely remembered film from my childhood, about, you guessed it, a wax museum where the exhibits come alive. About 10 minutes in I was regretting my decision, as the characters were all, without fail, obnoxious idiots. Not in a 'I'll enjoy seeing these people die' sort of way, but in a 'I can't believe I'm still watching these people' sort of way. I'll admit my enjoyment grew as the movie went along, and the cast of characters dwindled a bit. I'll also say that I think I enjoyed the second film, where the characters are no longer encountering wax figures but are just slipping through time to visit various horror themed incidents, to the first, though I enjoyed the plot of the first, where the exhibits were portals to alternate worlds, and each victim was a sacrifice to open the gates of hell (or something) more. The second film seemed to just go for broke in being fun and nonsensical. It's not a classic, it's not a great horror comedy, but it has more of a sense of humor and brings up some more inventive scenarios. Also it has a Bruce Campbell cameo, which was great fun.

To be continued...

Make Mine Midian

As I confessed earlier this month, The Thing scared me off of horror films for years, and it wasn't until 6th grade, maybe even Jr. High, that I actually waded back into the waters of horror films. This reintroduction was largely aided by a quartet of new additions to my family; four cousins by marriage raised on HBO and late night cable. It was through this motley group that I began to watch scary movies, and actually enjoy them. They gave me a new context through which to experience horror, as through them I learned the joy of being scared in a group, of finding humor in the leering monsters and outrageous death scenes. It maybe helps that the first movie I recall watching with them was Nightmare on Elm Street 4, which is grotesque, but also funny.

Surprisingly, considering my feelings now, I argued against this choice. I was, I'll admit, afraid of the film, and of betraying to my much more confident older cousins just how cowardly I was. I knew nothing about Nightmare 4, but I had heard all about the original NoES from a classmate who would entertain kids during recess by recounting the plots to all the R-rated horror films he was allowed to see. I remember the surprise I felt when I first saw Aliens and discovered it was a fun action movie, not the harrowing dread soaked nightmare I had been constructing in my mind. I had an idea of what Nightmare would be like, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

The eldest of my cousins, probably sensing my concern, reassured me that Nightmare 4 was far from scary, that it was more of an adventure film. Shockingly, this worked, and I say down to enjoy the film, which I actually did enjoy. My cousin was right; Nightmare 4 is one of the least intentionally scary films in the series (next to part 6). The movie was definitely a perspective changing event, but my full conversion was yet to come. I was less afraid to watch horror films, but I still did not seek them out, and they weren't what I would call favorites. I know I watched other horror movies during this period, but none of them really struck a nerve. I certainly can't remember any specific titles. At least, not until Nightbreed.

Nightbreed came out in 1990, but we watched it on HBO, which would place it, most likely, in 1991 or '92, which coincides with my memory of still being in Jr. High. I can vividly recall sitting in front of the TV in my cousin's living room in the middle of the night, the lights out and the house quiet. I'm not sure when in the film I realized I was watching something special, I just recall a slowly dawning realization that I had been looking at things from the wrong angle. The monsters in Nightbreed were, physically, some of the most gruesome I had seen, and yet rather than objects of fear, derision, hatred, or mockery, these monsters were noble creatures; men and women who inspired respect, empathy, and admiration.

Nightbreed was a revelation, or as close to one as a godless heathen like me can come. By the time the film had ended, with the monster tribes of Midian splintered by unbeaten by the cruel, pitiless humans who feared and envied them, my consciousness had shifted. I no longer viewed monsters with fear and terror, but with entertainment, awe and wonder. I was fascinated with the worlds of monsters, madmen, ghouls, and ghosts, and I devoured the stories and movies they inhabited with a fascination in their habits, their physiognomies, and, yes, the technical craft that went into their creations.

Nightbreed became one of my first (and few) purchases on VHS, and considering the lower access to films in a pre-internet age, it was a film I watched repeatedly. It was a few years, however, before I read the novella the film was based on, Cabal. It was, perhaps oddly, on a spring break trip to Florida to visit my grandparents during freshman year of High School. I remember devouring the novella, and the other stories in the collection, while sitting in the back of my grandparent's RV. It was a revelation of another kind. I had been reading Stephen King for a few years at that point, and Clive Barker's style was quite unlike what I was used to in horror fiction. Stephen King is, for all his shocking violence and populist politics, a conservative writer at heart. His stories almost always enforce the status quo, and usually result in a return to normalcy, with the horrific or bizarre triumphantly defeated and banished from the world. Clive Barker, by contrast, is more anarchic, and his stories never return to the status quo. His characters are always changed by their encounters with the incredible, for good or ill (and honestly, it's for good more often than it's for ill).

I quickly devoured Barker's novels in the same way I had burned through King's works, and through it all I continued to return to Nightbreed. As I aged, some of the films flaws stood out to me, though I continued to love the work. There seemed to be an odd flow to the course of the story, as some elements that seemed like they should have been more important received little screentime. Suspecting the work of interfering studio hands, I did the almost unthinkable and wrote Mr. Barker a fan letter, expressing my admiration while also asking about the possibility of missing scenes. To my surprise, he wrote me back fairly promptly and said that yes, nearly 45 minutes had been cut out due to studio notes, but he was working on a DVD special edition that would be released that fall. This was in 1997. Fast forward a decade, and still no director's cut. Word got out that Warner Bros. had lost track of the original film prints, and did not see it as profitable to seek out the materials, let alone pay for the necessary editing and production work required to put the film out.

I gave up hope of ever seeing the extended Nightbreed, until online whispers began to mention the existence of recently discovered VHS master tapes in Germany that contained a rough cut of Barker's original vision. These sources were compiled with the existing film to produce the Cabal Cut, a Barker-sanctioned-yet-still-unofficial reconstruction of the film. The Cabal Cut used footage that Barker himself would have cut out of the film, and the quality of the new elements was... poor, to put it charitably, yet reaction was overwhelmingly positive. It turns the cult of Midian had been growing steadily over the decades, and the renewed attention finally sparked a determined effort to restore and release Clive Barker's original vision for Nightbreed. So, in 2014, after nearly two decades of waiting, I finally received my three-disc limited edition bluray of the fabled Nightbreed Director's cut.

It was more than I had hoped for, honestly. I watched it twice that first day, and adored every minute of its dark fantasy. Or, at least, nearly every moment; Narcisse's unexpected demise still hurts, but everything else is perfect. The added scenes redeemed every complaint I had about the film previously, as the romance between Boone and Lori gains much needed dimension and reality, where in the theatrical version it felt a bit forced The acting across the board improved, as instances of uneven performances proved to be due to lack of context. New scenes explained some previously odd line readings as we finally see what the characters were supposed to be reacting to.

For some it might seem odd that Nightbreed is the horror film that continues to be the most important in my personal development. The concept of monsters being merely misunderstood is an old one- only a fool with no reading comprehension skills would believe Frankenstein's Monster to be the villain of that story- yet I'd never seen it presented like this. these weren't piteous, confused freaks, they were individuals with their own mythologies, laws, and beliefs, with emotional lives as complex as any human character. The monsters of Midian present an ideal of sorts, an Eden for any child who has ever felt damaged, lost, or alienated. For a young me, just entering my teens, it was a clarion call I could never refuse. My home has been with the monsters ever since.

Hail to the King Pt. 1- Creepshows

As I've written here before, Stephen King is the author I feel the most personally connected to. This basically means that whenever I pick up a new Stephen King book I feel like I am immediately on the book's wavelength. There's no settling in period where I have to get used to the book's rhythms, I'm simply engaged in the story from page one. Whatever Stephen King's authorial faults and missteps(which can be many), I still enjoy reading the work. I may finish a novel and walk away disappointed with the final result, but I'm never anything but completely satisfied while actually reading the thing. This rose-colored fondness for even his lesser output even extends, to a much much lesser extent, to the filmed version of Stephen King's work.

I don't think it's a particularly controversial statement to say that the majority of Stephen King movies range from mediocre to outright awful, with only the rare standout rising about good to great. I think his film's get an unnecessarily bad rap, however, simply from having his name attached. In truth anybody as prolific as he is, with studios as eager to churn out movies with his name attached(even if only tangentially, if anyone remembers the lawsuit over Lawnmower Man, which originally ran with Stephen King's name above the title until he complained that the actual movie only shared a title and nothing else with one of his short stories) is going to see their fair share of flops. So despite this supposed truism, Stephen King's name still graces several films a year, and just about everything he writes is optioned for film or television before it's even been published. I think it's worth noting, though, how few of those works are actually making it to theatres these days, and how many are finding homes on the relatively lower-risk world of television. Stephen King's name doesn't bring quite the financial security to film as it used to, though a quick trip to IMDB will show there are currently 23 projects in development based on his novels or short stories. To be fair, though, many of those appear to be the so-called Dollar Babies, stories that he will sell the movie rights to for $1 to student or beginning filmmakers with some tightly controlled rules about how the film is distributed. Also, many of the projects seem to be in development hell, with cast and crew signing on and dropping off at regular intervals. The golden age of Stephen King at the cinema have passed, and I have a radical belief as to the reason his works have so often failed to connect with audiences and critics; Stephen King himself.

There is a reason one of his most widely respected adaptations, The Shining, is a radical departure from the source material, while one of his most widely derided adaptations, the television version of The Shining, is slavishly devoted to the original words. Stephen King has a very distinct way with dialogue, a filthy patois of regional New England phrasing and speech patterns. Stephen King characters speak, at risk of being circular, like Stephen King characters. Not like anyone else. His characters speak in a way that no one on Earth actually does. It's distinctive and striking, and on the page it's enjoyable to read, but once you hear those words coming out of the mouths of real people, everything grinds to a halt. For this reason, whenever Stephen King gets personally involved in the production of a film(something that used to happen more often than it does these days), he requires a collaborator with a voice strong enough to be heard over King's, and a willingness to say 'no' to some of his more ridiculous tendencies.

Art by Berni Wrightson from the Creepshow graphic novel.

Or, in the case of Creepshow, a collaborator operating on a sympathetic frequency. It also helps that Creepshow's conceit- a collection of short vignettes inspired by and mimicking the old EC Comics- turns King's penchant for overdone dialogue into a strength instead of a weakness. With a script written entirely by King, and directed by George A. Romero, the film is basically a series of one-act Grand Guignol stories utilizing occasional visual flourishes designed to evoke panels from a comic book. The unity of the film, the way everything holds together, is a testament to just how simpatico the two masters were at the time. It was the beginning of the 80s, and Creepshow was the 4th of the eventual 19 full feature films based on Stephen King's books and stories within that decade. George Romero was coming hot off an unparalleled run of interesting, unique work in the 70s(Martin, Dawn of the Dead, and Knightriders were the three films leading up to this). While certain aspects of the film have aged poorly(some of the comic panel transitions feel a bit creaky, and Romero's often un-stylish directing style sometimes fails to complement the film's more chaotic tendencies), it remains a superior example of the horror anthology.

Anthology films are notoriously- one might say inevitably- hit or miss. Even the best anthologies can't quite please all people all the time, and will have one or two segments that are best forgotten. In that regard, Creepshow puts all other anthologies to shame, as there isn't really a bad story in the bunch(though of course I have my favorites). Perhaps it's the strong authorial voice from Stephen King, the consistent visual tone of the movie, or the clear template of one act, blackly comic, inventively gory morality plays. For whatever reason, Creepshow remains consistent throughout, and features a nice mix of types of story. Though the movie was directed entirely by Romero, each segment is edited by someone else, which gives the film a nicely varied pace. One story might go one for a little while, but then it'll be followed up by a quick, 5 minute short story about a man being devoured by alien fungus(The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verril, probably my favorite bit from the film). When the film is over, it does leave one with the feeling of having just read one of the old Tales From The Crypt or Weird Tales comics.

When it came time for the inevitable sequel, both of the creative minds behind the original decided to take one step back from their original roles, and the film greatly suffers for it. Stephen King steps back from screenwriter, serving only as the author of the original short stories(and as a truck driver in a quick cameo during the final story). George Romero steps back from directing to write the screenplay, and nothing else. Stepping up to direct is Michael Gornick, Romero's cinematographer on many of his best films. He had previously directed four episodes of the Romero-produced Tales From The Darkside television show, including one written by Stephen King, so he clearly had the chops to take over. But for whatever reason, the material fails to connect with audiences, and though the sequel has developed a bit of a following, it's clearly a lesser effort from the original. Less fun, less profane, and less idiosyncratic.

To be honest, I have a bit of leftover affection for the movie, which I was introduced to before seeking out the original. As a young teen I quite enjoyed Old Chief Wood'n Head, the opening story in the film. I liked the image of the wooden cigar-store Indian chief creakily and slowly seeking vengeance for the kindly old couple who owned the shop he stood in front of. I remember enjoying the animated segments, featuring Tom Savini voicing the Creep(this films version of the Cryptkeeper or Cousin Eerie). The third segment gave me a little salacious thrill at the opening sex talk as the callous bored housewife who kills a hitchhiker first haggles with the male prostitute who has just given her six- count 'em, six!- orgasms. And then, of course, there is the second segment, The Raft, which holds the distinction of being the only piece of filmed entertainment to give me a nightmare. I can still recall the nightmare, over 20 years on, and the feeling of terror as this inscrutable, smeary blob of oil came to me with unavoidable, inescapable intent. These days The Raft is usually the only part of the movie I'll sit down to watch. It's not so scary these days, but it still carries a strong dose of that original panic I felt when I first saw it. Plus the effects in it are stellar, and the quickly decomposing bodies as the sentient oil slick traps a quartet of unlucky swimmers still look disturbingly realistic.

Pure nightmare fuel.

I think the problem with the film is best explained by viewing the original Creepshow, and studying why it works so well. Creepshow one had 5 short stories of varying length of tone. Creepshow 2 has 3 stories, each about 25 minutes long, of strikingly similar pace and humor. The film also drops the comic book panel conceit, which it consigns to a few minutes of poorly animated interstitials between the actual shorts. These segments entertained me as a kid, but as an adult I can only notice how choppily animated they are, and how the character drawings change shockingly from shot to shot. The film is not the worst horror sequel, or even the worst anthology film, but it is fairly forgettable. It's no surprise that it took 20 years for an (unofficial) sequel(which I haven't yet seen) to slink its way onto the shelves of rapidly disappearing video stores.While I say the original Creepshow is showing it's age, it still remains unique. Creepshow 2 has not aged as poorly, but remains just as flat and boring as it did in 1987, though my 13 year old self would probably argue with me.