Visiting and Revisiting: After Life (1998) Pt. 1

Aaron: Welcome back to Visiting and Revisiting with Rik and Aaron, a somewhat regular feature where we take turns introducing each other to films that are important to us, but of which the other one has somehow missed. We then discuss the film in blog posts that span both of our sites, in Rik’s case, The Cinema 4 Pylon, and in mine, Working Dead Productions. This is our first installment since October, and also our first non-horror film discussion. The film this time comes recommended by me, and it’s one I’m very excited about discussing, so without further ado…

After Life came out in 1998, when its director, Hirokazu Kore-eda, was 36 years old. Though he had already made a name for himself among international film critics three years earlier with Maborosi, After Life cemented Kore-eda’s position as an important new voice in Japanese cinema. I have not been able to watch any of Kore-eda’s early documentary work, although it seems to follow that his beginnings there, particularly in documenting the emergence of AIDS in Japan, formed much of his style as he transitioned to narrative filmmaking. Maborosi and After Life flow with the unhurried, documentarian’s eye for mundane details that nonetheless speak volumes about his character’s lives, a trait that he has carried with him through the following years. Kore-eda’s films also feature a warmth and humanity that is surprising in its depth, and a gentleness that invites the viewer in, prompting us to find our own meanings and messages within the film. Kore-eda’s films feature a surplus of wonderfully realized individuals, and a distinct lack of recognizable antagonists (a fact that may be hindering his commercial prospects here in the West). Even the ripped-from-the-headlines drama Nobody Knows and his award-winning Still Walking, which both feature his most villainous characters, portray those people as complex and sympathetic rather than vile cutouts.

After Life, briefly stated, is an allegorical film built around one deceptively simple question: “What one memory would you like to take with you into eternity?” The film poses this question early on, and then dedicates two hours to delicately and perceptively exploring all of the ramifications implied by said question. As a group of 22 disparate individuals find themselves in a slightly rundown bureaucratic building, they are told they will be moving on to whatever awaits them beyond death within one week. For three days they will have regular interviews with a group of purgatorial social workers with the aim of choosing one memory out of their entire life that they would want to live within for eternity. After the third day, the staff goes about the business of filming the memory, and on Saturday all of the films will be screened, after which the dead will move on. It’s a concept that could easily devolve into high camp, black comedy, or sentimental drivel, and yet Kore-eda’s style grounds everything in a gentle, subdued manner.

When After Life came out in 1998, I was 20 years old and enrolled in the University of Alaska, Anchorage. I was aware of the film, having heard about it from a pair of teacher’s assistants in my Japanese class, although their critique left much to be desired. “It was OK. Interesting,” was basically what their reaction to catching this film in a theatre amounted to. I wish I had looked further into the film myself, because it would be another four years before I finally tracked down a DVD copy. When I finally watched the film, it was while my ex-girlfriend (current wife) was out of town for a few days, the longest we had been apart since moving in together a year earlier, and I had been in a bit of a melancholy state. Very early into the film I began smiling, and I don’t think I stopped until well after the end credits rolled. It’s not that the film is funny, per se, it’s that the overall feeling is so warm and inviting, so modestly charming, the characters are uniformly likable, the rundown building they work and live in is so homey. Everything works together to invite the viewer in and encourage them to stay. After each of my viewings I’ve felt the urge to immediately begin playing the film again. I think it should be obvious by now, but After Life is a film I absolutely adore. Over the last fifteen years I’ve come to the conclusion that it is as close to a perfect film as any I’ve ever seen.

Hirokazu Kore-eda has a pretty solid critical reputation, and most of his films get positive reviews at Cannes and all the other major festivals, and yet he’s never really broken out of that audience. Rik, I’m wondering if you’d had any previous awareness of this film or his other output, beyond the times when I might have brought it up. As much as I recommend his works, and this film in particular, you are the first person who has actually listened to me and watched the film, and so I’m really excited to see what you have to say about it.

Rik: I have been aware of Kore-eda’s reputation as a growing force in cinema for some time, but had just never buckled down and tried to watch one of his films. My massive database of “must-see” films comprised of titles that have been nominated for major awards or appeared at festivals like Cannes (for example) certainly has some Kore-eda titles contained within it, but I had yet to tackle his filmography. And yes, I do remember you telling me about him from time to time, but when you have thousands of films before you already, it really became a case of “throw another log on the fire”. I would try to get to it eventually. And now I have.

I was recently reading an article onThe Guardian website where Kore-eda was, not really upset, but just mildly anxious that people have been comparing his style to Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese master director whose style became increasingly minimalist throughout his career, as he created a series of profound, classic family dramas in the late ‘40s and through the ‘50s. Kore-eda considered the comparison a compliment, of course, but felt that his own films were more like Mikio Naruse, who created leisurely paced, working class dramas for four decades in Japan, or the British director, Ken Loach, known for his slice of life films about ordinary people, though with the occasional more political thrust of films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Hidden Agenda.

In all three cases – Naruse, Loach, and Kore-eda – the word we are looking for seems to be “humanist”. In Kore-eda’s films, at least the two I have now seen (Hana: The Tale of a Reluctant Samurai [Hana yori mo naho] being the other one), the concern seems to lie not so much with the world in which the characters thrive but in the day-to-day details of their lives and their emotional states. In After Life, I was struck by how quickly he was able to make me care about so many different characters in such a short time, often with a minimal amount of dialogue or personal details. If you are accepting of the premise – that of an existential agency that moves people from their lives on Earth to eternal rest in a heaven-like state – then it should not take much to get you wrapped up quickly in the comforting arms of this film.

Aaron: Rik, am I alone in getting a little bit of a Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry vibe from the final parts of this film, where the memories are being recreated on a small soundstage? It seems not-so-distantly related to films like Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Synecdoche, New York, though of course predating those works by several years.

Rik: You are not alone at all, sir. I definitely sensed a similar Gondry-esque vibe, though of course it is not taken to the same level of absurdity as things in those others films. The effect here is more workmanlike; even when the agency workers meet up with problems in the course of recreating memories, and even when Shiori’s boss takes her to task for supposedly screwing up, the means of achieving their goals are through reason and hard work, and never centered on fantastical means (even taking in the actual setting of the film into consideration).

Aaron: I’ll agree with you about the workmanlike nature of the film, which I think keeps things from becoming too precious or twee. It’s like the common explanation of the difference between an artist and a craftsman. I’d argue that Kore-eda is both, but I think in temperament he falls closer to craftsman. His concern is telling the story clearly, and in documenting the actions and emotions. I don’t think he’s quite so worried about imparting a general message. As I’ve said, I believe his films allow you the freedom to make up your own mind as to how to interpret them. Which, of course, mirrors what the characters in After Life are doing. Their job isn’t to leave their subjects with a sense of power, beauty and towering importance; their job is to recreate, as accurately as possible, what an actual moment felt, looked, sounded and smelt like. And because these characters are not artists, they approach everything from the pragmatic mind of a social worker, coming up with ways to get a breeze just right, or to mimic the look of an outdoor park bench from inside a small soundstage. Again, they aren’t trying to dictate the emotion; the emotion comes from the viewer. This film is such a perfect melding between style and content.

Of course the big question here is; have you been thinking about what one memory you would choose? I won’t ask you to share it if you have, but I imagine you’ve been giving some thought to the subject. It’s one that has returned to me quite regularly since I first saw this film, and it seems to change from year to year. Once, it was a memory of sitting on the shores of Loch Ness at midnight, later it was a memory of me and my wife laying in the grass in Washington after a particularly epic outdoor concert, after the birth of my daughter I’ve had plenty to choose from, and now I might risk Shiori’s ire by choosing that most clichéd memory; a trip to Disneyland. Our last trip to Disney, my wife and daughter and I, and it was just a relaxed, good day where everything went right, and we ended it with a quiet, fancy dinner where we sat around making easy conversation. That hour at the restaurant, where we sat at a table warming ourselves (it was a chilly day) with good food and laughter seems as nice a moment to live in as any I can think of.

Rik: That answer is easy: I can’t think of one. Or rather, I can’t decide on one. If you were to ask me in one of my more depressed states, I might say that I would like to remember the moment of my death throughout eternity. That is not to be shocking or maudlin, but remembering when you died is a solid way to remind yourself that you were once alive. But if you were to ask me when I was in a good mood (which is rare these days), it might be a moment where I am at dinner with all of my old friends in Anchorage, or a moment when I was creating surrealistic cartoons in my dad’s camper a couple of years ago with my brothers, or when I was four and played on the steps of the 4^th Avenue Theatre while going to a showing of Pinocchio. Or it might be an image of me watching Destroy All Monsters on the Channel 11 monster matinee show, where I am sitting on a blanket in our living room eating a bowl of freshly made buttered popcorn. There are a number of moments I could choose – and unsurprisingly, most of them would have nobody else in them -- and it really would depend on how much I would wish to reward or punish myself at that moment of choosing.

It might surprise many that know me to find that a visit to Disneyland wouldn’t be my choice, considering how important it was for me to finally get there and also just how much I have been there over the past decade. That is mainly because, with being there so much now, it would be hard to pick a single memory. Also, I wouldn’t want to tee off Shiori, because she is a cupcake.

Aaron: One thing that bothers me a bit about the ‘one memory for eternity’ concept is that it kind of discounts how our memory works. When we think of one single event from our past, we’re actually thinking of hundreds of other tiny things that went into that one moment. When one of the deceased chooses to remember sitting on a bench with her fiancé before he goes off to war, how much of that context remains once every other memory is gone? Will she remember that her fiancé went to war? That her fiancé died? Will she even remember who the man was? This puzzle isn’t enough to dampen my enjoyment of the film in the least, but I find myself bumping up against it nonetheless whenever I think back to it.

Rik: I agree with you about the workings of memory, or at least our perception of how it works. But that brings up another problem that I had with the memory constructs in the film (and in many other uses of memory in films beyond After Life).

In my experience, our memories don’t have our faces in them. I remember the faces of other people that were at someplace or were doing something, but for myself, there is just a sense of myself, not my image. That is something that bothered me with their recreations in this film. I never see my face in my dreams, and when I have memory flashbacks, the same is true. That may not be true for everyone, especially narcissists, but I would have to believe that it is probably common.

Movies that hew closely to not showing faces in memories or dreams still often cheat and have the protagonist look into a mirror or pool of water, but I cannot recall that ever happening in one of my dreams, nor in my memories. This may be due to low self-esteem in how I see myself (or prefer not to, as it were). What I do have in those dreams and memories, however, is a complete awareness of myself, sometimes to a negative effect, but I am always in control of my sense of self, if not anything else in the dream.

Aaron: Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m thinking back to various memories and trying to determine whether I visualize myself in them or not. But now I’m putting myself in all of my memories, and I can’t be sure if it’s because you called attention to it, or if I’ve always done that. I think, honestly, it might be a bit of a mixture. I know a lot of my really old memories I see from a third person perspective, because I’ve formed those memories as much from what people have told me about them as from my actual experience. As an adult, however, I do believe you’re correct, and I don’t see myself in them. But for dreams, that’s another story. I tend to shift focus a lot in dreams, where one minute I’m me, doing something, and then another I’m in a different body seeing what I’m doing.

I think that might help explain how the memory constructs would work; perhaps they’d give you the shifting experience of both seeing and feeling what is going on. Or perhaps the memory itself will lock you into your own perspective. Or perhaps, because we are given no information at all about what happens after this one week, the memory is literally a keepsake you take with you as a memento of your life. Maybe eternity does resemble the popular perception of heaven, and the film is something you can put on one night to remind yourself of what you were before. There are so many possibilities that exist, and we’ve got so little information with which to narrow down the options.

Part Two of this discussion can be found on the Cinema 4 Pylon blog by following this link: http://bit.ly/1V2tcBd

Visiting and Revisiting: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) Pt. 2

This is Part II of a two-part article in which my friend Rik Tod Johnson (The Cinema 4 Pylon) and I discuss the 1977 film version of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. To read Part I on Rik’s website, click here.

Rik: Besides the character of Montgomery, whom you mentioned in passing [in Part I] (and who I feel is still played very strongly by Nigel Davenport), there are a couple of other major characters in the film we haven’t touched on. First, there is the Sayer of the Law, who serves as quite literally what is imparted in his name. In this version, Richard Basehart, whom I knew very well from television on Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, plays the Sayer. When I first saw the Sayer of the Law in this version of Moreau, I never made the connection that it was the captain of the Seaview wearing a mask, even though upon reflection, his basic features can be made out underneath the makeup. Because I was never enamored of Basehart as an actor (I always thought he was kind of stiff), I likewise never really connected with his performance here. I did spend time teaching my brothers to recite The Law after I saw the film, as I coached them into performing scenes from the film so we could run around as Beast-Men, but it really wasn’t because of him.

Aaron: Of the three films, Richard Basehart struck me as the most forgettable Sayer of the Law. That may be a combination of both acting and makeup, as I found the look to be fairly nondescript. It’s basically a ring of white hair around his face and a vaguely canine nose that from many angles looks merely like a larger-than-average schnozz. Obviously this is to give the Sayer of the Law a distinct appearance, apart from the humanimals but yet not quite human, and yet it lacks anything distinctive. He could just be another shipwrecked soul. Bela Lugosi’s Sayer of the Law was also less distinctively animal than some of the other beasts in Island of Lost Souls, wearing what was essentially fur glued to his face, but Lugosi has that voice, and those eyes! He’s a captivating presence even when he’s not speaking, and seems otherworldly at all times. Richard Basehart basically let the makeup convey the animalistic side of the character, while remaining fairly human in his actual performance.

Rik: Lugosi has always seemed like the perfect choice for the Sayer to me. His performance resonates with me the most (as I expect it would with a majority of humanity). The casting of Ron Perlman in the 1996 version seems like the most obvious one to make, especially given his success in playing characters saddled with extreme makeup effects. And Perlman is a very strong actor. The problem for me is I cannot recall his performance at all when I think back to the film. For that matter, I have a hard time recalling anything except Brando and his little person pal. And that ice bucket. Oh, that ice bucket…

Aaron: Yeah, Perlman had a great look to him in the film, and he was fine with what they gave him to do, but that film is such a mess that it’s hard to pick anything out aside from Brando and his increasingly bizarre character choices.  

Rik: I would love to remember his performance, but I simply can’t. I saw the film last when it came out in the theatre, and I think, apart from seeing scenes in the Stanley documentary, have largely expunged it from my mind.

The last major character we haven’t tackled is the one I would most love to, and that is Maria, played by a lovely, fragile-looking Barbara Carrera. In my memory, I continue to think of Carrera as a Bond girl of that period, but she wasn't in a Bond flick until the non-Broccoli Never Say Never Again in 1983, where she played Fatima to Connery's returning super-spy. I fell in love the instant I saw her on the cover of that Moreau novelization. She basically represents the puma in the novel who will ultimately battle Moreau to the death, and Lota the Panther Woman in the 1933 version who is at the center of all the bestiality hubbub regarding that infamous take on the tale.

Here, her character is sweet but really rather dull, almost like she is being used only for scenery (much like the cover photo that drew me to her) and/or to throw us off the scent a bit. I had always assumed just from her appearance on the island that Moreau had experimented on her. She also walks around holding an ocelot much of the time, which says to me they were at least trying to make us believe she is more than what she appears. The final scene on the boat, when a passing ship discovers them, is very strange. When we first see the lifeboat (the Lady Vain, the one in which Braddock first arrived, so that now he leaves the island the same way), we only see Maria, her face obscured by her hair. When Braddock, now changed fully back to his human form, crawls out from under his blanket, her back is to us. It is pretty clear to me that they are at least hinting that she has transformed into something else. Braddock gets distracted by the noise of the ship's horn trying to get their attention, and we see only one shot of Maria's face, and she looks unlike she does anywhere else in the film. Yes, she is crying, but her eyes seem very odd and her face seems puffier. Then the film is over.

It makes me wonder if there was an alternate ending filmed where we see her eyes are yellow as she begins to transform. Honestly, I thought she was starting to change into a cat when I went to the film that first time. And it stuck in my head that she was, and every time I see it since, I always get riled up about the ending. But there are two very good reasons for my belief that she is some sort of ocelot or panther woman: the original movie poster. The top third of the frame is definitely a female who goes through the process of switching into a ferocious panther. Since this does not appear anywhere in the film, it leads me to believe it may have been filmed and then cut (I can't imagine why you would go to the expense and then trash it, unless it was really terrible).

The second comes from the novelization, which as I mentioned is based on the original screenplay. This is the final paragraph of the book: "Maria spoke no words. She only opened her mouth, revealing two fangs, two puma-like, animal fangs."

What is your take on Maria and the case of the missing panther-woman, Aaron?

Aaron: I think anyone with any sort of familiarity with this story would recognize Maria as a panther-woman from the very outset, when she first arrives on film. Certainly the ocelot she’s constantly carrying with her would be another clue, for those not yet in the know.

And so I find it odd that the film tries to be coy about it at all. Possibly that was a move meant to keep some of the stricter censors off of the film’s scent, because when Michael York and Barbara Carrera first have sex, my initial thought was ‘wow, so the film actually went there’. If the film had been more upfront in stating that she was actually a cat, I doubt those love scenes would have been included. But then, why continue that coyness even to the end? It’s obvious as soon as the two of them are adrift on the life raft, just from the character’s positions alone, that something is wrong with Maria, and yet the film keeps holding off on showing us what we already know, only to let the shoe drop with a literal blink-and-you’ll-miss-it insert shot of Maria with a slightly lumpy face. It’s strangely anticlimactic, giving the ending a weird shapeless feel, and leaves so little an impression that even the film’s Wikipedia page neglects to include this information in the otherwise rather detailed synopsis.

Rik: Not much respect has been paid to the film in its releases on video. I had a VHS copy for many years, which I replaced with the MGM Presents Midnite Movies DVD when it came out in 2001. The only special feature is the original theatrical trailer. It would have been really nice to have a commentary to confirm some of my suspicions about the Maria character. I just found out that it was released earlier this year on an all-regions Blu-Ray disc, but there are no extra features that I can find, apart from a widescreen 1:85:1 frame, which I already have on my DVD version. I doubt we will get many answers about it anytime soon, if ever.

While I loved the makeup of the humanimals when it came out, time has not been kind. They seem rather immovable and too inorganic to me. While I like his work, it is not surprisingly to learn that John Chambers, who won an Oscar for the original Planet of the Apes, was the creator of the makeup effects. Tom Burman is credited with the makeup design. I know Burman from many horror and fantasy films he did in the ‘80s and ‘90s (though he now wastes his talent on things like Grey’s Anatomy… still, steady work is nice). How do you feel about the makeup work?

Aaron: Well, I’ll say that it makes sense now that I know the makeup effects artist worked on Planet of the Apes, because the designs and execution here have a similar rubber-mask feel, and are not expressive at all. Everyone’s expressions are constantly fixed, and when characters speak the mouth remains almost motionless but the nose portion of the mask will wobble up and down unrealistically. That said, I don’t think they look horrible in their design. They do look a bit like mythical beasts, and not so much like what I imagine transmogrified man-animals would look like, but they are distinctive enough that I could see being impressed by them if I had seen this at the age you had seen it.

We keep going back to it, but if you look at some of the beasts in Island of Lost Souls, they look like what you’d imagine when you think of someone cutting up animals and piecing them together like jigsaw puzzles. Some characters will have features that look vaguely catlike, and then a segment of their face will be clearly avian. It’s truly nightmarish, and another example of why that film stands head and shoulders over the rest of the films made. Compare that with this version of the film, where many of the non-featured humanimals seem to just have lumpy, furry faces, like maybe their having an allergic reaction to something. Outside of the main creatures, I don’t think you can look at most of the humanimals in this version and deduce what animal they used to be. They all have very similar physiognomies.

Rik: Something of which you may not be aware, Aaron, and I really wasn’t at the time, but the character of M’Ling, the Beast-Man servant, is played by Nick Cravat. Growing up watching The Crimson Pirate (and another swashbuckler featuring Lancaster called The Flame and the Arrow), I knew Cravat as Burt’s right hand guy, a generally mute character with whom Lancaster would perform acrobatics in the film. They were best friends since childhood and real life, and performed in the circus together for years before Lancaster broke through in Hollywood. His appearance with Lancaster in Moreau was the last of their nine film appearances together. I also knew Cravat from a small role in Disney’s Davy Crockett film. I never picked up on Cravat even watching the credits, probably because I really didn’t know his name at the time, just his face, which is absolutely obscured by makeup (though once again, it is easy to make out his basic features if you know what he looks like in real life).

Aaron: I’m not familiar enough with Nick Cravat to have picked him out of a lineup, but I think you’re glossing over what may be his most pertinent bit of work history prior to this: Cravat was apparently the Gremlin in the original Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode of The Twilight Zone.

I feel bad for not mentioning M’Ling before now, because he is quite a sympathetic character who also has some important bits of business to do. But the character seems underutilized in this film, showing up every once in awhile, and disappearing for so long that when he helps Braddock and Maria escape at the end I had kind of forgotten him. The character gets no real chance to develop on his own.

FINAL TAKES

Rik: My final take on the film is that I still enjoy it after all this time, though it pales in comparison to Island of Lost Souls. Lancaster's performance holds up for me, as do those of Davenport and York. But in the end, the film feels today like a Hallmark production (the ones regularly aired on NBC and CBS in the '70s, not the current TV network), or like a Reader's Digest condensed version of the tale, where they have scrubbed some of the more inflammatory material to make it palatable to the general public. For production value alone and the latent memories I have of it, this version still warrants a 6/9 on my scale, which is "good". But I would prefer people watch Island of Lost Souls if they want to see a really incredible version of this story (whether or not they end up loving it as we do).

Aaron: That’s a good point about this feeling like a condensed or sanitized version of the story, which also strikes me as a bit bizarre, because my favorite parts of this film, dealing with Braddock’s transformation and Moreau’s downfall at the hands of his creations, strive towards something that could be genuinely challenging. This movie hints at something more inflammatory than some of the other moments in the other versions, and yet the film seems to pull back from those ideas before completely committing to them. If it had gone farther in those directions, and actually addressed any of the philosophical implications of what it means to be human, or whether we can ever conquer our own natures, this could have been a classic for the ages. Reading this back, I feel like I come across as too harsh on the film, which is not as bad as I maybe make it out to be. As it is, I think my rating would be slightly lower than yours. I’d give it a 5/9 on the same scale you use, which in my eyes means it was worth seeing, but I didn’t completely like it.

Beyond the Beyond

Growing up in Anchorage, there was a distinct lack of arthouse theatres. We weren't lacking for theatres in general, as I can recall 5 within a reasonable distance from where I lived growing up. That may not sound like a lot, but it was more than sufficient for a population the size of Anchorage. But these theatres were multiplexes, albeit smaller than the 16 or 18 screen behemoths that would come later. As a budding cinephile, I was confined to whatever titles became big enough to play in these cinemas (and whatever I could convince my mom to let me see), or I had to wait- sometimes years- for a sought after title to make it to video. This could be a sort of hell for a young man developing an interest in moving beyond the mainstream, into the deeper, murkier waters on the fringe.

My discovery of the Capri Cinema in my Junior year of high school (which would have been 1995) came as a great boon. The Capri is one of the things I miss most about my teen years, despite the fact that I only saw a handful of movies there, and discovered the place just 5 years before it eventually closed down. It's no secret why it took me so long to find the place; the Capri was a single screen theatre, with a maximum occcupancy of less than 100 people, located in a strip mall near the edge of town, a place I never had a reason to visit unless I was heading north out of Anchorage. It also, for the 70s and 80s, showed porn films on the weekends, which probably kept it off my family's radar when it came time to find a movie to see. By the time I discovered the place it had transitioned to almost entirely foreign or arthouse films, with some retrospective screenings thrown in, though these were also usually cult or indie films.

The screen was small, even for what you might be expecting, and the seats were often threadbare. There was a small cafe attached to the screening room, where you could purchase your snacks, peruse lobby cards for various old movies, or play a game of chess by the shopfront window. The place was modest and empty, is what I'm trying to say. But before I give the impression that this was a quaint, old-fashioned movie house, I should confess that there was an air of dinginess about the place. A residual seediness left behind, possibly, from the Capri's former life as a porn theatre. The place was small and had that clean-but-dirty feel, and the bathrooms were located inside the actual screening room, down a short hallway right next to the middle row of seats.

The Capri, circa 1995 or so.

The first film I saw there was The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love, a coming-out and coming-of-age micro-budgeted comedy that a friend invited me to. While I remember enjoying its modest charms, I have a more distinct memory of feeling slightly uncomfortable at being the only man in the almost sold out theatre. That isn't incredibly bizarre, though, considering how small the occupancy of the place was. At least the men's room was empty. The final film I saw there was probably the deeply odd John Holmes film Disco Dolls in 3D, and yes, it was in actual 3D. Faded and faulty at over 2 decades old, but still in 3D. I did not check on the status of the men's room that night. There were a few more pictures in between, including the life changing weeklong run of Lost Highway, but the one I want to write about today is The Beyond, the 1981 magnum opus of Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci.

The Beyond was originally released in 1981, but garnered a re-release in 1998 through Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder distribution company. At the time Tarantino was honoring the exploitation films that had inspired him, while also distributing a pair of current films from directors he loved(Sonatine and Chungking Express). It was clearly a labor of love, not money, and after only 3 years and a mere 6 films Rolling Thunder shut down in 1998, At the time I was in my first of college, and a diehard zombie fan, seeking out any and all zombie films regardless of quality, and loving them all. If you were to tell that 20 year old man that within a decade he would be sick to his bones of zombies, he would have laughed in utter disbelief. Hard to imagine, but yes, we have reached saturation point for zombie entertainment. Back then, though, zombie movies were still largely the purview of the hardcore horror hounds. Zombies were definitely not the cool monster of the moment, which meant that a bad zombie movie pre-2000 was made, typically, by people with a love for the genre. A lack of resources and talent, maybe, but still a genuine love, which made even the worst films somewhat enjoyable to watch. And so 20 year old me was happily devouring the classics, like Dawn of the Dead, while also gleefully digesting the schlock, like Redneck Zombies. Seeing in the Anchorage Press that the Capri would be playing an infamously gory Italian zombie film from the genre's earlier renaisscance was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. The Beyond is bad, make no mistake about it, but it's also incredibly distinct and hauntingly bizarre. A real good-bad movie.

The plot of The Beyond is a bit difficult to summarize, not so much because the plot is complex, but because the manner in which it all hangs together is not very well conveyed to the audience. I've seen the film well over a dozen times, and I'm still struggling with how to piece it all together in a way that makes sense. What I can say with some certainty is that the film concerns a rundown hotel in New Orleans that is situated over one of the seven doors to hell (there is a similar door to hell in Fulci's earlier film, City of the Living Dead, which is otherwise not connected at all to this film). When a young woman, Liza (played by Catherine McColl) inherits the hotel and decides to renovate and reopen, she inadvertently wakes the ghost of a painter who had been killed in the basement by an angry mob. The ghost begins opening the door to hell, causing a small but bloody zombie infestation, along with several other odd incidents which may or may not be supernatural.

Lucio Fulci was never a subtle filmmaker, and he never allowed budgetary restrictions to keep him from committing to film whatever crazy, ambitious special effects shot that came to mind. In the film Don't Torture a Duckling a man falls off a cliff, and lands face first on every sharp, gravelly, rocky outcrop on the way down. If that sounds gruesome, imagine that instead of a realistic fake corpse, he's filming what is clearly a department store mannequin with blood packs on its head. The budget is larger in The Beyond, but that level of effects work remains, and it appears that the extra money went into quantity not quality. And to top it off, Fulci shoots all of this in direct, bright light. Where another director would try to use shadows to mask some of the shoddiness of the effects, Fulci constantly puts them front and center.The effects are fake, but go so over the top and are so in your face that they attain a strange level of fascination and disgust.

When I first watched The Beyond at the Capri, my friends and I had the entire place to ourselves, save for one lone movie lover in the front row. We sat in the back and had an uproarious good time, laughing hysterically at much of what was onscreen. The other patron, I found out later from Rand, the Capri's owner/projectionist/ticket taker/concession-stand operator had left the movie at one point to complain about the noise we were making. I was grateful to Rand for not giving us a talking-to at the time, but age and wisdom have led me to sympathize more and more with that guy, out alone for a fine time at the movies, only to have his evening ruined by a quartet of loud know-nothing college kids. At the time, however, it seemed like a completely justifiable response to a film where a character researching at a library falls off a step ladder hard enough that he is paralyzed and unable to fend off a dozen or so tarantulas that look too cheap for dollar store Halloween sales. When these fake spiders begin clicking and squealing as they chew on a cheap foam head, what is the appropriate response, if not laughter?

As soon as The Beyond was announced on a DVD release, I snatched up the limited edition collector's tin from Anchor Bay, and invited every friend I had over for a night that turned out to be just as raucous and enjoyable as the theatrical experience, only now with pizza. The next night I invited over friends again, and had another screening for those that couldn't make the initial viewing, or who just wanted to hang out again. The night after that, as soon as I got home from work, I made some dinner and popped in The Beyond as I ate, and I watched most of the film before falling asleep on the couch. At the time I lived alone, and this became my routine for about a week. I would self-hypnotize myself by putting on The Beyond and just drifting off to sleep with the film's odd, dreamlike rhythms and bizarre Danny Elfman goes Prog Rock soundtrack. The music may be what really dragged me under the film's spell, as I also found myself listening to the CD while on my daily commute to work. A gradual shift began to happen in my attitude towards the film. At first I was simply trying to recreate that original fun-filled atmosphere, but increasingly I began to fall under the film's sway.

The defining moment where I realized the film had won me over from ironic enjoyment to authentic love was on the 3rd night watching it alone, when something in the movie legitimately chilled me. The moment comes when mysterious blind woman Emily, who has been warning Liza to stay away from the hotel, actually comes to the hotel to explain some of the plot to her. They speak of Schweik, the artist/warlock who had been murdered in the hotel. Emily touches one of his paintings, a grey, mist-filled landscape full of low rock formations that look like bodies trapped in the ground, and her hands begin to bleed. She screams in terror, and runs from the hotel. The scene sounds eerie on its own, but the way it's edited together is inexplicably bizarre. First we see Emily run out the door, then we get the shot again in slow motion, with all sound taken out of the film. The film repeats closeups of Emily's feet running across the carpet, still in slow motion and without sound effects, but intersperses them with shots of a man's feet running towards the camera at regular speed and with heightened sound effects. The final shot is a slow motion shot of Emily running away followed, finally, by her seeing eye dog (who has not been in any of the preceding shots). For some reason on this night, after seeing the film a half dozen times, I was finally seeing how bizarre this scene was. I found it completely inexplicable and utterly nightmarish, and that feeling never went away.

[For those curious, I now believe the scene described above is implying that Emily's seeing eye dog has been possessed by Schweick's spirit, as much later in the film Emily is mauled to death by the dog while surrounded by the other resurrected corpses and spirits from the film. But this is also after a strange speech where she says she doesn't 'want to go back' and that they cant take her back. We can assume 'back' means 'back to hell', but there's nothing else in the film that addresses this, so it's still a bit mysterious.]

At their best, Fulci's films push their excesses into the level of sublime, dreamlike unreality. He's not the most artful director, and many of his films can be a chore to get through, but when he's firing on all cylinders his work succeeds almost in spite of itself. In The Beyond, many scenes appear unrelated to anything going on before or after, and though there is nominally a plot, the main characters seems strangely unaware of it. Liza knows creepy stuff is happening in her hotel, but doesn't seem to be aware of the body count or the supernatural nature of many of these deaths. David Warbeck, playing a local doctor who falls in with Liza, is closely connected to the zombie plotline, but even he remains blissfully unaware of the deaths occurring among his coworkers until almost the very end.

When I first encountered The Beyond I felt like this randomness and lack of connective tissue was accidental, the sign of amateurish filmmaking. Certainly the rest of Fulci's filmography did little to dissuade me of that belief, as things like plot and reality often take a backseat to mood and shocking gore. But as I watched the film repeatedly, I began to sense a certain intent behind the surrealism, a sinister dreamlike logic where scenes seemed to lead into each other even if the script didn't wholly support that idea. Researching the film today for this piece, I find that my assumptions were entirely correct, as the film began as an homage to Fulci's idol Antonin Artaud, the French playwright and sometimes surrealist. The movie was originally going to be a haunted house film where the carnage within the hotel was the only strand linking the narrative digressions. The German backers of the film wanted a zombie film, as zombies were considered the hot property of the time, so Fulci rewrote the script and made it more linear, though clearly some of that surrealism stayed in. Towards the end the film starts to go all in on the surrealism, as things like time and space begin to fall apart. Characters leave rooms only to end up in locations on the other side of town, and things finally end with Liza and her doctor friend trapped in hell, blindly returning to the same location no matter which way they run. It's amazing that I found this stuff funny when I first saw it.

After a week of constant viewing, my desire to watch The Beyond cooled, and my pace slowed to once every couple years, more often if I have a friend interested in watching it. The soundtrack remains in semi-regular rotation, jumping up in the charts every Halloween season. Today the film remains a cherished part of my own personal cinematic pantheon. Though it may not get the attention or respect that others in that company receive, it's still a strong and important reminder that every film is worth a deeper look, and that even the crappiest looking schlock can have it's strengths and secrets to tell. You've just go to be ready to listen.

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...

Visiting and Revisiting: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) Part 1

Welcome to the second edition of Visiting and Revisiting with Aaron Lowe (Working Dead Productions) and Rik Tod Johnson (The Cinema 4 Pylon). The focus of this column, intended to be a semi-regular feature on both our sites, is to review films that one of us has already seen, possibly even multiple times, but the other has somehow put off watching over the years. Sometimes we get surprised when one or the other has not seen a fairly well known film, so we felt this was a good way to not only give the film either a fresh or updated viewing, but also to allow us to discuss the film at length afterwards.

Aaron: I saw Ghosts of Mars in the theater in 2001, if not on opening weekend, it was pretty darn close. I was 23, and I loved John Carpenter. Despite a few films in the ‘90s that I chose to ignore, he had never really let me down. Vampires, his previous film, I had seen on opening night, and despite its less-than-stellar reputation, I really enjoyed it. The fact that I liked — but didn’t love — Ghosts of Mars was, I reasoned, a testament to Carpenter’s consistent history of ridiculously enjoyable genre fare. Its low ranking when compared to his previous efforts spoke not so much to Ghosts’ lack of quality, but to the fact that it’s hard to top yourself when your filmography contains Halloween, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China, to name just the first three that pop into my head. For nearly a decade, Ghosts of Mars appeared to be Carpenter’s last theatrical film, which meant that I felt more defensive of it than I might otherwise. I had more than a few discussions where I came to the film’s defense, but arguments such as ‘sure, it’s not his best, but it’s more fun than you remember’ struck me even at the time as apologetic and noncommittal.

Ghosts of Mars begins on the red planet, with a ghost train arriving in the city of Chryse. The train’s sole passenger, police officer Natasha Henstridge, is unconscious and handcuffed, and there is no sign of the crew or her fellow officers. Brought before a tribunal, she recounts the story of how she was sent to the small mining colony of Shining Canyon to retrieve Desolation Williams, a particularly nasty outlaw accused of slaughtering dozens of civilians. What she and her fellow officers find is a ghost town, with everyone either dead or missing, and Williams (Ice Cube) still locked in his jail cell, while just over the hills, a band of resurrected Martian warriors readies themselves for battle. The majority of the film concerns the cops teaming up with the criminals to defend themselves against the titular ghosts of Mars.

The flashback structure used here, where the hero is discovered by people in authority and forced to tell their story while some larger threat grows outside, is one that Carpenter had previously used for In the Mouth of Madness, and that sort of self quoting is something he does a lot in this film. The film’s most obvious precedent is his own Assault on Precinct 13, which told a similar story of cops and criminals forced to cooperate in order to defend themselves against a common enemy massing outside. The score and editing seemed designed to quote his ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ as well, most notably Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, while the isolated location and idea of being replaced by an alien intelligence recalls his classic The Thing. You mentioned in one of our discussions the connection to The Fog, which is his earlier film about a mist that brings violent ghosts with it. It’s such an obvious reference that I am utterly ashamed to have not noticed it all these years.

The one thing I’m most looking forward to with this entry of Visiting & Revisiting is that we’re both approaching this with different histories, but with a certain shared level of clarity; you, as a first time viewer, and I, without the rose colored glasses through which I first saw the film. If I’m being honest, the film has several glaring problems, but I still think it’s more fun than its reputation suggests, and is also clearly a film no one but John Carpenter could make, or at least no one else would make it in this way. That alone gives it some value in my mind, as I prefer the relative failure of this, which still feels like a Carpenter film, to the failure of The Ward, his first (and to this point only) theatrical production since. The Ward makes a good contrast, because it’s a competently made film, but completely devoid of anything you look for in a Carpenter film. The result felt lifeless and generic to me, which is not a comment that I believe can be made about Ghosts of Mars, despite what the title tells you.

I know you’ve only very recently seen this film, though I also know you’re a fan of Carpenter in general. Any reason for the fifteen-year wait?

Rik: Ghosts of Mars came out to theatres at a crucial time for me. I was still beat down from the previous two films from one of my favorite directors, John Carpenter. I had seen all of his films in theatres starting with The Fog in 1980 (I snuck in… too young to buy a ticket) through Vampires in 1998. Escape from L.A. (1996) had been the first cinematic beating I took from the Master (though frankly, I did not like previous film, his remake of Village of the Damned, all that much). I liked portions of Escape from L.A. well enough, and it was grand to see Snake Plissken back in action, but goddammit, that surfing scene is still absolutely horrible and murdered the overall picture for me to this day. Vampires came after I had seen so many better vampire films, I could not get into any of the characters, and I thought much of it was lazy filmmaking. Three years later, Ghosts of Mars comes out and I just look at the trailer and say, “Hmm… not today.” I thought Carpenter was just spinning his wheels, and had really sort of given up the ghost (without actually giving up the ghost).

I avoided Ghosts of Mars until a couple of weeks ago, when I decided that I should at least watch the one remaining film on his professional resume that I have not seen. After all, since Ghosts came out, Carpenter had shown there was still life in the old boy yet with a couple of episodes a full decade ago for the Masters of Horror television anthology, one which I thought was pretty good (Pro-Life) and one that I thought was amongst his best work (the more well-known and regarded Cigarette Burns). He also came back to theatres in 2010 with the aforementioned film, The Ward, which I liked a bit more than Aaron. I didn’t care if it was missing many prime Carpenter touchstones, chiefly because Amber Heard gives me serious Ward.

And so, one morning I popped in Ghosts of Mars, and while I did not like much of it, I did not hate it either. From the outset, it was pleasing to immediately fall into that sense you can only get from a Carpenter film, which has been my chief reason for sticking with him all these, well, decades. Carpenter is a filmmaker who sticks tight to his bag of tricks. Like De Palma, he is the sum of his early influences, but unlike De Palma, whose slavish devotion to Hitchcock is both his most charming component and his ultimate downfall, Carpenter is harder to pinpoint. Yes, he is admittedly and obviously a big Howard Hawks guy — and Ghosts of Mars’ referencing of Carpenter’s own Assault on Precinct 13 likewise registers new echoes of its forerunner, Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) — but Hawks himself was hard to hold to a set genre, and was comfortable adapting his fast-talking, tough guy style to anything thrown at him. Carpenter exists more in a specific genre, but is one of those filmmakers — whatever his influences — that has such a consistency of mood and tone to his overall oeuvre that it is hard to mistake most of his films for the work of another director. Cronenberg, Lynch, Maddin… they too have been able to do this, but except for Cronenberg’s last few films, their work has generally resided on the more extreme end of modern filmmaking (and in Maddin’s case, often the fringe), where a director can get away with this. Carpenter has been more of a Hollywood guy, and so the fact that even his most mainstream works still contain his undeniable essence behind the camera points to how strongly he has been able to brand his own style.

Aaron:  Yes, the film’s story is old hat for Carpenter, and many of the stylistic touches are as well, but there is one wrinkle in the film I really enjoy, and that is the film’s flashback structure. The entire movie is a flashback, but repeatedly the film bounces back even further as a new character is introduced and we learn their story. We also see the same events from different angles depending on which character we’re supposed to be focusing on in that instance. This isn’t exactly Rashomon, but I enjoy the way we get multiple perspectives all branching out from the main perspective of Natasha Henstridge recounting this story, and I enjoy the editing techniques he uses to differentiate which level of a flashback we’re in. The main timeline uses a lot of crossfades, as scenes fade directly into the next with no fade to white or black. Flashbacks are entered through use of one of those fades, while the flashbacks-within-flashbacks use various forms of screenwipes to transition between camera shots. The crossfade is something he uses a lot in normal scenes as well, as he uses it to cut out a lot of incremental movement. At first I thought this was Carpenter aping a then-popular technique, popularized by Robert Rodriguez in El Mariachi and Desperado, but listening to the commentary it seems like it was a choice Carpenter made in order to give the rather slow opening a sense of momentum. I have to admit, it does give a sense of creeping momentum to everything. I don’t think it entirely succeeds, but I believe it gives a sense of impending, continual danger. And as you said, it lends the film that distinctive Carpenter touch, as he’s always been a director that enjoys putting an ominous, pulsing score behind everything.

[To read part two of VIsiting and Revisiting: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, click here]

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.