Archive for the 'Horror' Category
“City of Pillars,” Chapter 4 is Now Live!
July 17th, 2008
Damn. Took me long enough, didn’t it? But you’ll definitely get your money’s worth with this chapter of “City of Pillars,” as it takes you into the North Tower of the World Trade Center after the impact of the first plane, and…well, let’s just say that the impact is the least of the survivors’ worries. Check it out:
There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, no, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate, and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door but Raj said, “Stop it, goddamnit, I got him! I got him!”
And then Raj just disappeared.
One second he was there, the next…gone.
One of the men at the door went in after him—I guess they thought he’d gone back into the stairwell for Ray. We all heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?!”—and then the…the worms came through the door.
Well, they looked like worms. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. And covered with ash—there was ash all over them, like they’d come out of the fire…and I think I even saw one of them still burning.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Two of them whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say anything—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door! There’s more of them!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. Hard. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.”
Oh, it gets a lot worse than that, too.
So take a look, and lemme know what you think!
“City of Pillars” Chapter 6 now in theatres! Shown in Sense-O-Rama!
April 23rd, 2008
Just like the title says: The long-awaited (since last week) sixth chapter of “City of Pillars” hath been posted on Footnotes to the Human Species.
But some of you may still be skeptical. “Do I really want to read about giant betentacled transdimensional monsters destroying a city? I mean, you’re clearly ripping off Cloverfield, Pegritz—that’s sooooo obvious.” Well, yeah, I am. Unabashedly. But here, why don’t you read this and then tell me what you think:
I don’t know how many times I almost fell. Wainwright wasn’t a real big guy, but he was still wearing most of his gear, and I had him over my right shoulder, so I kept leaning right. Muroni’s jumping down the stairs like he’s a fucking kangaroo and Kelly’s neck-and-neck him. “Wait for me!” I yelled again and again but they didn’t even here. I wasn’t even paying attention to the floor numbers, I was just running, jumping, practically falling down the stairs just like this paramedics we’d seen coming down in Stairwell B who’d said there was something up on 36.
We were outpacing the thing—we were actually getting ahead of it!—and I was, like, We’re gonna make it, we’re gonna outrun the Thing From Another World and then we ran into another unit coming up—I mean, we literally ran into them.
No one could see each other in the smoke. These guys must’ve been coming up the stairwell dragging hoses behind them to put out individual floor fires. Next thing you know there’s a pile-up and I’m falling facefirst down the stairs in a big crush of bodies and screaming and water—somebody had pulled the valve on the hose. I dropped Wainwright. I don’t even know where he went—I just fell. I hit the landing so hard my forehead cracked off the tiles and oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, the pain blacked me out for a couple of seconds.
And then I came back to myself. I heard men screaming like girls and the guy lying next to me just flew up into the air; those worm-things had bit into him and just yanked him straight up. I looked up and oh, my God, the entire stairwell was…there was a ceiling of thing, and it was reaching down with worms and now these long, jointed bony hooks, picking up men and just stuffing them into itself. My mind went blank then and I got up and I ran; shoving past any body in my way, grabbing men and pushing everyone out of my way, fuckin’ throwing them down the stairs. Another guy beside me screamed and shot up into the air and that was it—no way was I going out like that. That was the point that I lost my mind like Wainwright had. I barely remember what I was doing. Shoved anyone out of my way, just kept going down, stiff-arming my way through that bottleneck in the stairwell like I was Jerome Fucking Bettis.
Chapter 6 is told from the point of view of one Rudy LaCava, an FDNY fireman who runs into some pretty awful things in the North Tower and narrowly misses dying in the collapse…only to discover that the worst is yet to come.
More “City of Pillars” Evil Has Arrived!
April 9th, 2008
Wow. After so many busy weeks, I’ve finally gotten back into the swing of writing, and that means that the fifth chapter of “City of Pillars” is online! Here’s a sample:
“The world did not end with the destruction of Manhattan,” the bored old general in charge of Project Reclaim Manhattan had said to close the pre-tour briefing. “America did not end with the destruction of Manhattan. Not even New York City ended, though it was grievously wounded. Despite the incredible loss of lives and property on September 11, the Azifist mission to wake the Great Old Ones did not, after all, succeed. Great Cthulhu still sleeps. Irem, the so-called ‘Nameless City,’ today is secure under Coalition forces. With the loss of their capitol and their leadership, the Cthulhu cultists have been driven underground like rats; they will be hunted down one by one, if necessary, and made to pay for their crimes against Humanity. The Great Traitor, George W. Bush, is no more and his Xinaian cabal has been driven back to K’n-Yan to face prosecution by their own people. As President Obama recently stated, ‘Now is not the time to think of all the terrible things that have passed, but of the fruitful, bountiful days that are just now beginning. ’ The Revised Manhattan Rebirth Initiative is both a practical and symbolic example of our nation’s willful resilience. Manhattan will someday rise again; the Five Boroughs will be complete once more. So remember, all of you: what you will see today is going to be disturbing. But you must not dwell on the sundered past. Look beyond the wreckage to the future: Manhattan reborn like a phoenix from the ashes. The clean-up has, for all intents and purposes, only just begun. It will take many more years. But never forget: this is a time of beginnings. And the rebirth of not only New York City but of the United States begins here.”
It was obvious from the way that he read the speech from a typescript and never once looked up at the audience that he didn’t believe a word he was saying. Desultory applause followed him off the podium and out the back door. We were divided up into groups, given packets of information containing “all we needed to know” about the Project and plastic protective overalls to wear over our clothing, then we were hustled out to the waiting choppers. Once I was seated and strapped down, I closed my eyes and listened to the speeding beat of the rotors, trying to think of nothing but the whup-whup-whup of metal slicing air. The helicopter lifted off so smoothly I didn’t even know we were off the ground until Greg leaned over to me and muttered: “Look at that. Dave. Dave. Look.”
See what I did there? It’s horror plus witty, contemporary political commentary! Hell, y’all might as well start calling me The Bill Maher of Lovecraftian Fiction!*
*Please, don’t. My head is big enough already.
Chapter 4 of “City of Pillars” is now live!
March 31st, 2008
For those of you who follow this blog but may not be aware of my grand fictional exercise in blatantly ripping off H. P. Lovecraft, Footnotes to the Human Species, please hop on over there and check out my novella “City of Pillars,” the fourth chapter of which has just gone live! If you enjoy my nonfiction writing, there’s every chance you might dig my fiction as well—but do be aware, however, that my fiction is relentlessly depressing, frequently so violent it would make dear little Alex of A Clockwork Orange shrink in fear, and always, and I do mean always, very vicious and despairing. Here’s a little sample to try out before jumping in headfirst:
The only way I knew we’d made it out onto the 107th floor was that there was noise all around me again and the heat and smoke were a little less horrible. I opened my eyes and Raj was there, asking me, “Where’s Ray? What happened to Ray?”
“He let go,” I choked, “But he was right behind me. Hasn’t he come up yet?”
There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door when Raj said, “Stop it, stop it—I got him!”
And then Raj just…vanished. It was like he was yanked into the stairwell.
[Cressida pauses again to take a bottle of pills out of her purse. She takes two of them—Klonopin, to help control her anxiety—then resumes with a feverish urgency, clearly desperate to tell the rest of the story and be done with it.]
One of the doormen went in after him. I heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?! BOB!”—and then the worms came through the door.
[“Worms?” I ask.]
They looked like worms—that’s how I keep seeing them. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: two of the things whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say a single thing—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people—people who must’ve seen the same thing I did—and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.” I was shoved aside and two boys in black-and-white waiters’ uniforms came through the smoke carrying a metal desk. They threw it up against the door but the…the worms on the other side were still pounding—pounding so hard it sounded like someone was throwing bricks at the door. People were standing on each side of the desk holding the door shut while the waiters and some others went back and forth dragging dining tables and chairs behind them, heaping them up in front of the door. “Get out of here if you ain’t helping,” someone said to me, so I just…wandered away into the crowd.
So there you go! Intrigued? You know what to do.
Footnotes to the Human Species (re)Begins with "City of Pillars"
January 31st, 2008
Footnotes to the Human Species has returned with an brand-new website and a brand-new story, “City of Pillars”!
For those of you who were enjoying “Trois Freres” on the previous, “beta-test” version of Footnotes–fear not: that story will return in a much-improved, edited, and greatly revised version shortly. The official launch of Footnotes to the Human Species begins with “City of Pillars”, however, simply because “City of Pillars” sets up characters, concepts, and major worldbuilding events that explain more about what is happening in “Trois Freres” and related tales. In other words, “City of Pillars” is the starting point from which all other tales in the milieu, whether they come before or after the events of “Pillars”, originate.
“City of Pillars” begins my re-telling of the history of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries from a Lovecraftian standpoint by supposing one simple thing: What if the terrorists who attacked New York City on 9/11/2001 were Cthulhu cultists armed with an authentic copy of the original Al-Azif of Abdul Alhazred? What if the attack on the World Trade Center was not a goal in itself, but merely a means toward achieving a goal–namely, opening a gateway to unhallowed dimensions of whirling chaos so that the Other Gods and their minions could begin again their colonization of our universe?
All of the stories in the Footnotes milieu are derived entirely from the works of H. P. Lovecraft himself. Readers don’t need to be familiar with Lovecraft’s works to enjoy them, but it sure does help! “City of Pillars”, for instance, features appearances by or mentions of the fungi from Yuggoth, the Great Race of Yith, and Yog-Sothoth, as well as Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos and, of course, Cthulhu itself. In some fashion, “Pillars” is a sort of “sequel” to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Shadow Out of Time”, and “The Call of Cthulhu”–but you needn’t read all of these original tales to understand what’s going on in “City of Pillars”. Lovecraft fans will find hundreds of references to all things…well, Lovecraftian–but even readers completely unfamiliar with Grandpa Theobald’s works will be able to enjoy the stories!
So do have a look at the new tale and the new site. Subscribe to the RSS feed and have new material delivered right to your doorstep. And most of all, feel free to leave comments!
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Good Writin’: Two Excerpts from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth.”
January 25th, 2008
Very few readers of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction know that Lovecraft was a reasonably accomplished poet as well as a prose stylist. In fact, Lovecraft began reading–and writing–poetry at a very early age: he had read Homer’s Odyssey and produced his own “young readers” abridgement of the epic by age six! Lovecraft is generally not known as a poet, however, because, unlike his prose, very little of HPL’s poetry was ever published outside of letters and amateur-press ‘zines. The majority of Lovecraft’s poetry is modelled on “Georgian,” that is, 18th Century, British verse forms. Lovecraft adored Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and other topical satirists of their day, and modeled his own verse very closely on theirs; hence, much of HPL’s poetry is based on “current events” of Lovecraft’s time and experience, especially events and controversies within his amateur press circles. While these poems may very well have been extraordinarily witty to the folks who understood their allusions, to contemporary readers they read much like extended “in-jokes” that make little sense outside of their original contexts. Furthermore, Lovecraft’s poetry often comes across as very stiff and stilted, as HPL was more concerned with the “harmonious regularity of metre” than with the imagery, ideas, and symbolism which truly fuel poetry.
Nonetheless, Lovecraft has produced some poetry of extraordinary beauty and power. None of his verse works are as stunning as his sonnet sequence “Fungi from Yuggoth” (1929-30). In these thirty-six sonnets, Lovecraft has created a number of fourteen-line mini-narratives, poetic remixes of several of his prose works, and gorgeous congeries of weird words that evoke the same delerious atmosphere of his best-known stories.
For your appreciation, I present you two of my favorite sonnets:
XV: Antarktos
Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!XXI: Nyarlathotep
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.
Modern Monsters and Modern Humanity
January 21st, 2008
Part One: A Quick Primer on Giant Monsters
Cloverfield (IMDB link) is, simply put, the best giant monster movie ever made. In order to understand why this is, let’s take a look at some other sterling examples of the genre in order to, first, understand what made a few sterling examples of the genre so good, and second, to understand how and why Cloverfield goes beyond them to break new ground and inject new life into an otherwise moribund horror concept.
We must, of course, start with the two most recognizable names in the genre: Merian Cooper’s King Kong (1933) and Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954), better known in the US as Godzilla. Cooper’s Kong was a landmark in that it was the first film to ever portray a gigantic, superhuman creature attacking a city, thereby establishing the basic identity of the monster-movie genre: an oversized creature, representative of Nature at Her Most Powerful, attacks that most recognizable symbol of contemporary, technological human civilization—the glittering, glowering metropolis. In King Kong, the monster, a giant, primal ape removed from his Edenic jungle paradise is brought into the cold, angular realm of New York City—the very archetype of the Modern City—and wreaks all manner of havoc before finally being defeated by human might as represented by biplanes, the height of 1930s technology. Twentyone years later, the same basic plot was transplanted to Japan but essentially repeated in Honda’s Gojira: the monstrous, saurian Gojira emerges from the primal Pacific Ocean and proceeds to pound Japanese civilization (typified by the capitol, Tokyo) into the dirt until finally defeated by the technological superiority of Dr. Daisuke Serizawa-hakase’s “oxygen destroyer.”
In both cases, the giant monster clearly depicts the unbridled, inhuman power of Mother Nature rising up to humble Mankind. As Blue Oyster Cult notes in their musical tribute to Godzilla/Gojira, “History shows again and again / How Nature points out the folly of Man.” Eventually, humanity prevails not through physical prowess—we are individually little more than dolls in the big simian mitts of Kong and little plastic figurines beneath the clawed feet of Godzilla—but through our intellectual/technological capacities. Where the two films greatly differ are in their explanations of their monsters’ origins.
In the 1930s, there were still unexplored black spaces on the global map where dragons (or, at least, dinosaurs) and huge apes could still exist untroubled by mankind. King Kong, like the other dinosaurs on Skull Island, is a living, breathing chunk of the prehistoric world which, supposedly, has vanished forever beneath the pavement and electric lighting of civilization. To have a piece of that prehistoric world of archetypal nightmares dragged back to the urbane surrounds of New York City was a source of wonder that soon turned to terror as Nature’s champion, Kong, breaks loose and brings the horror of unrestrainable Nature into the very heart of civilization.
However, after the technological horrors of the Second World War, human civilization itself is shown to be responsible for the birth of Gojira, a gargantuan mutation summoned from the depths and given flaming radioactive breath by the fallout of atomic weapons testing. To Japan, the only nation in the world to have ever experienced the unbelievable destructiveness and virulent aftereffects of that very pinnacle of human weaponry, the Atom Bomb, nothing could be more horrible than a perversion of nature produced by the most awful weapon ever developed.
From the beginning, therefore, the giant monster movie has always followed the basic trope of Giant Primitive Thing attacking Civilized Human World (in the form of a large modern city). Pick any of the myriad monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s—Them!, The Monster that Challenged the World, or Gorgo—and you’ll find either the King Kong formula or the Godzilla formula repeated virtually unaltered. Aside from featuring different prehistoric or radiation-enlarged monsters, and from differing locations (some take place in rural areas, swapping the Big City with the bucolic imagery of America’s heartland as symbolic of civilization) these films are all virtually indistinguishable. Entertaining, yes, and sometimes revolutionary in terms of the special effects artistry used to depict the monsters on screen, but all more or less the same.
Same, too, are the depictions of human characters in these films. No matter how grand the destruction depicted in the movies, the scripts’ focus is always on a small number of people—almost always featuring:
- the person responsible for bringing the monster (or monsters) to the mainland,
- a scientist of some sort who’s usually there to explain the monster’s origin and/or provide a means to stop it,
- a military character who is often to person who spearheads attacks on the monster,
- and usually a few “everyman” characters who just happen to get caught up in the fray.
This way, the large-scale aspects of the giant monster’s rampage are humanized and made real for the audience by focusing on the destruction’s effects on this core group of characters. Monster movies are not just about the monsters, of course, but also concern the impact of the monsters on humanity; and in order to give the films a measure of pathos so they remain interesting to viewers, a tight focus on a number of people with whom the audience can empathize is necessary, or you’d just end up with a documentary about the monster’s attack.
Over the decades since the ’60s, though, giant monster movies have been in sharp decline, mainly because the sameness of their plots eventually wore thin. Godzilla films devolved into campy kaiju versions of Wrestlemania. Giant monsters were traded for man-sized monsters that didn’t need massive FX budgets to portray (just put an actor in a latex mask and, well, there you go). Every now and again during the 1980s and 1990s, a new giant monster movie would appear in the States—for example, The Relic (1997), the abysmal 1998 American “remake” of Godzilla, and 2006’s surprisingly good (and funny!) Korean entry, The Host (Gwoemul). But for the most part, even younger movie-goers and monster aficionados born after the heyday of the giant monster movie have come to identify the genre as primarily a 1950s/1960s phenomenon.
But now Cloverfield has come to reinvigorate the giant monster movie with a cleansing shot of cosmic horror mixed with ultra-realistic, street-level depictions of humanity.
Part Two: Cloverfield and the Giant Monster Reborn!
Cloverfield broke box office records for January, raking in $41 million dollars in its opening weekend alone. Not only did it make money, it also debuted to extremely positive reviews by various film critics—an almost unheard-of occurrence in the giant-monster-movie world! But…what’s so special about Cloverfield?
Fundamentally, the movie adheres to all the basic tropes of the genre: a giant monster appears and proceeds to terrorize and devastate New York City while a small “focus group” of human characters scrabbles for safety in its considerable shadow. The military naturally shows up to combat the monster (ineffectively), there are plenty of tense moments and furious action sequences, and viewers get to witness the heroism of “everyday people” dealing with an extraordinary situation. But, aside from those basic similarities, director Matt Reeves, screenwriter Drew Goddard, and produced J. J. Abrams—well-known for his clever, postmodern television dramas Alias and Lost—have created a film that brings a completely new perspective to the giant monster film. It does so in two ways: stylistically, in the hyper-realistic “handcam” medium in which the film is shot, and conceptually in the inexplicable, utterly alien depiction of the monster as a force of destruction whose origins, motives, and very nature are left entirely(?) unknown.
The first thing any viewer will notice about the film is that it is presented as video “evidence” taken from a video camera recovered in the ruins of what was once New York City’s Central Park. The videotaped evidence initially depicts characters Rob and Beth’s burgeoning relationship, establishing a measure of pathos and sympathy for these characters and establishes a “before-the-disaster” view of workaday New York City life, but then properly begins with Rob’s going-away party, which viewpoint character Hud is taping over the previous material. The entire film, concerning characters Rob, Beth, Marlena, Lily, and (behind the camera) Hud, is shot entirely from the subjective viewpoint of this one small group of people as they attempt to survive the monster’s rampage. There are no “omnipotent” scenes depicting the monster’s origins and overall chaos, no chunks of exposition or infobites—all we see is filtered through Hud’s limited lens.
This leads to some very clever means of exposition that serve to highlight the down-in-the-streets realism of the film rather than detract from it. When the monster initially strikes, the crowd at Rob’s going-away party pause to turn on the television and watch a news broadcast breaking the news of a mysterious “earthquake” in Manhattan and an oil tanker capsized in the bay. Later, as the characters are scrambling around the city looking for safety, Rob and Hud enter an electronics store in the process of being looted and witness, on a number of TV screens, more news broadcasts of the monster tearing up buildings and shedding vicious arachnid “parasites” that magnify its destructiveness by unleashing another danger on the streets around it. All of this exposition is delivered in a naturalistic fashion.
Throughout the film, the camera is as much in motion as the characters themselves—leading to inevitable comparisons with The Blair Witch Project (in fact, the movie has occasionally been called “The Blair Witch meets Godzilla”). This presents some action scenes in a dizzying blur of panicked scenes, in which the monster is often glimpsed but not directly seen. In fact, the monster’s appearance is kept vague and fragmentary throughout most of the film, as the characters run from it. This is not a film that glorifies in revealing the monster and focusing on its destruction; rather, it is a film that by dint of its stylistic “shakycam” narrative device focuses on the human characters just trying to live through the experience. In that fashion, Cloverfield redefines the giant monster genre by altering the viewpoint of the entire flick.
Also, the ensemble of viewpoint characters is strictly limited as well: there are no Merlin-like scientist characters or tough-as-nails military men in the party—the main characters are just a handful of ordinary (if relatively well-off) New Yorkers. Hud and the others occasionally speculate about the origins or identity of the monster, but there are no wise scientist characters even encountered in passing who identify the monster or attempt to offer up a rational, scientific means of defeating it. Military characters are only encountered briefly, and are shown to be barely keeping themselves together as the monster and its parasites attack. They are not stalwart, all-American heroes whose technological prowess and cool-headed, can-do resilience is guaranteed to ultimately overcome the monster, but frustrated, scared, and confused bystanders of the monster’s seemingly unstoppable rampage. The National Guard is not here to Save the Day in Cloverfield; like Rob and Hud and the others, they, too, are just trying to live to see the sunrise while the monstrous horror stampedes through their ranks.
In the absence of “authoritative” characters who offer up even a possible explanation of the monster, we have only the monster itself: a hideous, aberrant cipher whose origins, motives, and meaning are left entirely unanswered. The monster is a Complete Unknown: not a giant ape captured in the wild, nor a lizard or ant colony grown to great size by atomic radiation, nor even an alien come to earth in a meteor—it simply shows up and begins ransacking the city. This is the point at which Cloverfield departs most strongly—and most effectively—from the established giant-monster ideal and therefore adds a refreshing novelty to the otherwise played-out genre.
Throughout the months leading up to the film, during which the monster’s appearance and most of the film’s plot were a closely-guarded secret, speculation abounded as to who or what was the thing attacking New York. A common suggestion was that the monster was H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, a popular gigantic “monster” invented by Lovecraft to embody the great Fear of the Unknown which he so brilliantly wrote about. Though the Cloverfield monster is not Cthulhu itself, it is still a highly Lovecraftian monster in that it, too, represents the Lovecraftian idea of an entity without identity, or convenient explanation.
In his essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927, revised 1933-1935), Lovecraft notes that:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.
What can be more unknown, more alien to all contemporary human experience, than a gigantic, incomprehensible thing whose actions and motives are left entirely unexplained? In past giant monster movies, the terror of the creature was often blunted and, eventually, defeated by explanation: once it was understood that Gojira was a radioactive mutant, a certain amount of mystery concerning the monster was dispelled and effective means of eliminating it were then suggested based on the knowledge of its identity. Oftimes in giant monster movies, understanding what the monster is will usually lead to the human characters’ development of a way to defeat it. In many ways, these films frequently have a “didactic” nature, too, which serves to “uplift” the viewer (as HPL notes) at the end by offering an optimistic resolution brought about by human ingenuity and technical superiority. The “lesson” inherent in King Kong and Gojira is simple: treat Mother Nature with respect or she will lash out at you—but, because you are human and therefore smart and powerful, you will always prevail in the end.
So what are we to believe about the Cloverfield monster? No one has any idea where it comes from; its origins are totally unknown (with one potential caveat: see appendix below for explanation). The characters speculate on this, but there are no definitive answers. What is it? Don’t know. Why is it attacking New York? Don’t know. What are the spider-things it brings with it—parasites, children, symbiotic organisms? Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Can the monster even be stopped? We. Don’t. Know.
The Cloverfield monster is an ultimate enigma. It is a ten-story-tall chunk of the fearful Unknown.
The monster is a thousand times more terrifying because nothing is known about it. Humanity has no clue as to where it came from, how to stop it, or what to do with it. Bullets don’t phase it. Tank shells don’t phase it. Even five-hundred-pound bombs, symbolic of undefeated American aerial might, do nothing to it.
Hence the reason the movie is, quite literally, a rebirth of the genre. The monster is a truly monstrous unknown, and the narrow, immediate lens of the narrative device lets the film maximize that unknowability by focusing on a small handful of average folks caught up in the destruction. Even at the very end of the film, the fate of the monster (and the human protagonists) is left undecided—and, perhaps, undecideable. Unlike King Kong, Gojira, or a hundred other giant monster films, this one manifestly does not have a comfortable ending. Humanity does not prevail. The monster may or may not be defeated. Either way, the usual resolution of humanity standing triumphant over the monster’s carcass thanks to our innate technological superiority is thwarted. The horror does not end with the “smirking optimism” of those who have lived to see a Bright New Day.
The film ends, but the horror does not end.
A quick survey of criticism shows that many of the people who did not like the film objected to either the fact that there is no tidy resolution or to the limited viewpoint. These folks either misunderstand what the film was aiming to do, or, perhaps, are just too in love with the basics of the genre to see them turned on their heads. Either way, critics have noticed that the film is an excellent example of genre-bending. In the case of the giant monster genre, a little bending is a good thing. Even Godzilla needed to reinvent himself periodically.
With Cloverfield, Abrams et. al. have managed to make a film genre once thought completely milked dry entirely relevant again by tweaking the sacred fundamentals of the genre. Forget the post-9/11 imagery, the commentary on the “YouTube generation”’s so-called individual absorption. At the bottom of all that, Cloverfield’s incredible success has everything to do with its producers’ desire to revivify the giant monster drama by stripping away all certainty and focusing the camera narrowly. What makes Cloverfield so great is not what is seen, but what is unseen. The mystery of the gigantic Unknown drives the film and brings the giant monster movie up to date.
—
APPENDIX: The Cloverfield monster’s “origin” may not be a complete mystery. In the final frames of Rob’s tape, when it jumps back to Rob and Beth’s adventure to Coney Island, if you pay close attention to the ocean in the background, you can catch a glimpse of something falling from the sky to splash down in the ocean. Some viewers have suggested that this is the monster (or an egg/vehicle of some sort) coming to Earth. Setting aside the elaborate viral marketing scheme that built up interest in the movie over the last year and concentrating only on the contents of the film Cloverfield, as such, this subtle little hint does seem to suggest an extraterrestrial origin for the monster—however, this still does nothing to explain the monster’s actions or nature.
Technorati Tags: cloverfield,review,monsters,giant monsters,kaiju,gojira,godzilla,king kong
World War Z
September 26th, 2006
Zombies are fun. They’ve been a necessary part of the horror genre almost since Day One…but, oddly enough, zombies haven’t fared all that well in print. Anyone can name a plethora of zombie films, starting with The Mummy (a particularly dry and past-his-prime zombie, yes, but an example of the walking dead nonetheless!) and ending with Shaun of the Dead. But how many zombie novels, or even short stories, can you name? Hell, I only know of these because I’m a horror scholar, and it’s literally my job to keep track of this stuff! There were the landmark living dead anthologies Book of the Dead and Still Dead, both edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector, and more recently James Lowder’s collection The Book of All Flesh and its sequel The Book of More Flesh. And as far as novel-length works go, you’ve got new horror author Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead, and David Wellington’s Monster Island*, which first garnered acclaim when it was first released as a serial on the author’s blog. None of these novels are as familiar to horror aficionados as any of the zombie films, and for two good reasons:
1) the zombie subgenre is naturally better-suited to film due to the subgenre’s reliance on gore and very visceral horror, elements which just don’t come across as effectively in black-and-white print as they do on the full-color, blood-soaked screen; and
2) all of these novels suffer from being completely derivative of the raw visuals and survival-horror surface elements of Romero’s and Fulci’s definitive films without also dealing in the political and social satire of the films. This leaves those books as little more than one-trick ponies: Let’s just see how a varied bunch of people survive in a world overrun by the walking dead. Reading them is like reading someone’s notes on playing a survival-horror videogame. It’s just…dull.
The fascination with zombie apocalypses does not stem, ultimately, from how people survive the plague of biting, moaning undead - it’s who survives. The zombie subgenre is the most sociologically interesting category of horror because it doesn’t deal with just a family being haunted by a pesky poltergeist, say, or with a small group of knowledgeable people fighting off some Threat from Beyond - it deals with humanity itself being threatened with extinction by our own dead. In a certain light, zombie outbreaks are no different than plague outbreaks, but there’s a major difference: when someone dies from Captain Trips or the 12 Monkeys virus, that person doesn’t stand back up, gather together a posse of fellow reanimates, and go hunting living flesh to consume! Zombie films and novels are always about small groups of people - a microcosm of Society At Large, if you will - banding together to survive the onslaught of the Undead Masses. My god, the symbolism is ridiculously obvious! As is the potential for satire…and that’s exactly what you find in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Simon Pegg’s wonderful send-up Shaun of the Dead.
Watching zombie films or reading zombie stories is fun - and educational - because you not only get to watch the dynamic activities of a group of survivors battling the stumbling hordes, you also get to watch the social dynamics among that group of survivors. You get to see heads being blown off, brains and intestines being gnawed on, and living people acting out all manner of stereotypical situations, characteristics, and so forth. Without that extra dimension of social insight, all you have is a shoot-’em-up that ends when either the Last Surviving Human gets bit or the Intrepid Survivors make it to safety. There are thousands of bad direct-to-video zombie productions Out There that are just like that, and though they may be shallow, repetitive, and completely unmemorable, at least they’re somewhat amusing to watch because of the mindless gore and the action. But who wants to read three hundred pages of just that?
Zombie literature has to take a slightly different tack than zombie films. Zombie lit simply cannot emphasize the action, or the gore, or the mere mechanics of the survival-horror plot–that stuff just doesn’t do so well in print. Instead, if you’re going to write about zombies, you have to emphasize the sociological, the satire, the emphasis on the “human condition” as opposed to the slam-whizz-bang furor of popping maggot-infested crania. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a zombie novel that does that.
That is, until I picked up Max Brooks’ phenomenal new work, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (official Random House site here)!
Max Brooks - son of Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks, the comic genius behind History of the World: Part 1 and Spaceballs) - first ventured into the realm of zombie lit with The Zombie Survival Guide (official site here), a tongue-in-cheek, yet still practical, handbook to surviving the inevitable zombie apocalypse. “Organize before they rise!” is the book’s slogan, and it is at once dead serious (ha ha ha!) and completely hysterical. Why? Brook’s guide is not a silly, over-the-top comic farce, but a completely sober, serious piece of satire that examines contemporary American civilization and its various weaknesses by showing what could happen should the dead begin to rise and completely destabilize our individualist, technocentric civilization. It’s a proud example of that sophisticated kind of satire best exemplified by Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, which took the piss from Eighteenth Century Britain’s highminded social critics by expertly pointing out that the Irish famine could be eliminated if only the Irish would consent to eat their children. For all zombie aficionados, the practical, down-to-earth advice of The Zombie Survival Guide was a Major Publication, because it scraped together all the ideas about zombie uprisings presented over the years by Romero, Fulci, Savini, and the like and distilled them into a hands-on guide explaining just what could happen to YOU - and what you could do to survive it - when the apocalypse begins.
But World War Z one-ups not only The Zombie Survival Guide, but - quite literally - every other zombie novel and movie ever made. You heard me. But, you reply, them’s some tough words, there, Pegritz. How does a novel by a famous funny-man’s kid trump Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead (original and remake), or even The Evil Dead?! It’s simple: World War Z takes the social satire and survival-horror basics of Romero, combines them with the pervasive sense of Total Apocalypse of 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead, then blends them together with an extremely sharp perspective on the current state of world affairs to produce a “nonfiction” account of the entire Zombie War all around the planet. The novel is truly global in scope, not only because of its international characters and settings, but because it examines virtually everything that is Human in light of the Dead: foreign relations, domestic policies, cultural conflicts, technological issues, labor issues, psychological issues, public-health issues…hell, even pet issues!
Simply put: World War Z is the first of its kind - a worldwide zombie omnibus that doesn’t just restrict its POV to, say, a tiny sampling of Americans holed up in the Monroeville Mall. That approach is fine for something with the limited scope of a feature film, but a novel demands More Details. Brooks handles this by presenting readers with a wide range of perspectives: folks from around the world, ordinary people to governmental movers-and-shakers, military skullbreakers to abandoned children gone feral. He shows you the Zombie War from nearly every angle imaginable.
This book is exactly what zombie literature has been waiting for: its definitive text. Max Brooks has clearly eaten the brains of Studs Terkel, whom he thanks for the neural donation in the book’s credits-reel. In an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, Brooks notes that Terkel’s amazing oral history of World War II, The Good War, was an obvious influence on his own work. World War Z is not a “novel”, per se, in that it does not present a unified narrative propelled by the interactions of a limited number of characters: rather, like The Good War, World War Z is a collection of interviews in which the characters speak of their own experiences before, during, and after the Zombie War.
The interviews are collected in a number of chronological “chapters” detailing various stages in the Zombie War: the early stages of the initial outbreak in China, the spread of the undead plague throughout the world, the Great Panic, the following harrowing years of attempting to stabilize the situation, the final “sanitization” sweeps, and the first few post-war years.
To begin with, Brooks does an amazing job at defining the epidemiology of the zombie plague (in fact, he defined it earlier in The Zombie Survival Guide, and World War Z can easily be seen as a dramatization of the Survival Guide’s ideas). He leaves no stone unturned when illustrating how the worldwide outbreak occurred, spreading like wildfire due to many governments’ snide unwillingness to even believe (and, later, acknowledge) that the dead could possibly be coming back to life. The author never goes into the biology of the zombie plague, of course - that information is just not necessary to the story - but he does pay close attention to its consequences, painting a VERY frightening picture of just how fast a virulent new disease could spread throughout the entire world thanks to our global transportation networks and the inevitable governmental bungling of public health crises. But that’s just the beginning of the horror.
There are moments of action in the various characters’ narratives (some of the first survivors’ tales deal specifically with their initial encounters with, and bloody, brain-smashing escapes from, the walking dead), but the true horror of World War Z comes from the atmosphere of mounting dread that pervades the early chapters. As the governments of the United States, Russia, China, and the EU attempt to deal with the outbreaks in secret to prevent widespread panic, Israel and South Africa - sites of some of the earliest outbreaks - close their borders and begin taking aggressive steps toward dealing with the contagion. In the US, an opportunistic biotech tycoon rushes a useless vaccine through the FDA and makes a fortune selling a defense against the “African rabies” epidemic, while China and Russia attempt to cover up the crisis completely under stories of “insurgents” and “civil unrest”. By the time the First World governments wake up and decide to take any kind of reasonable action, the contagion has hit the unstoppable point of exponential expansion. Cities have become seething wounds filled with zombies and terror. The Great Panic has begun…and as people desperately try to flee the contagion, they find themselves trapped in hundred-mile-long traffic jams, easy pickings for the shambling, biting undead.
The most interesting aspect of the zombie plague is that Brooks does not present his zombies as the quick-moving, furious cannibals of the Dawn of the Dead remake or 28 Days Later. No, his zombies are your traditional stumbling, moaning, hands-held-out-in-front-of-them Romero zombies. They’re slow, they’re stupid…they can’t really climb stairs or figure out how to open doors. So why are they so deadly? Simple: numbers. They might be slow, but how are you going to fight an enemy whose numbers grow with every bite? Who can take ten bullets to the chest, have his arms and legs blown off, and still keeps coming relentlessly? The United States military attempts a “Shock and Awe” standoff with the tide of the undead outside New York City, in Yonkers, and despite the soldiers’ high-tech gear, they are quickly overrun and butchered by the walking dead…who just keep coming, and coming, and coming, pouring out of the city like a tsunami of hungry ants. The soldiers empty all their ammo into wave after wave of zombies, and when they run out…there’s still another hundred waves of undead coming.
Brooks is particularly sharp at illustrating how high-tech is not always a guarantee for survival or military success. We in the U.S. have a major love affair with technology, and often believe that if we can “out-tech” an enemy we can beat them easily. But Brooks points out clearly that high-tech solutions aren’t always the best solutions. Later in the novel, for instance, when the U.S. finally begins to rally and the tide starts to turn against the zombie hordes, the primary weapon issued to soldiers is a modified trenching tool now called a “Lobo”, or Lobotomizer. A shot to the head is still the most effective way to take a zombie out, naturally, but what happens when you run out of bullets? The Lobo is incredibly low-tech, but works every time. It needs no reloading, no maintenance, and is very cheap to produce in bulk. Now, consider the combat laser weapons also mentioned in the novel: they can fry zombies, sure, but they cost millions to produce, are extremely fragile, and can easily malfunction. Why use a multimillion-dollar laser weapon to zap a handful of zombies when you can equip a number of soldiers with $10 Lobos that only need a little muscle-power to work? While that laser cannon’s recharging, a couple of guys with glorified sharpened shovels can take off ten times as many heads!
Brooks’ descriptions of how our advanced civilization could be brought down almost overnight by something as “simple” as a plague of the undead is particularly harrowing - especially if you are, like me, a citizen in a country like the U.S. Furthermore, Brooks gives us glimpses of the world after the Zombie War: a world in which many buildings are built on stilts with retractable staircases and ladders, United Nations patrols scour the northern countries after winter looking for frozen zombies that might thaw and cause trouble, and many people once again carry swords. Low-tech, but consistently effective, solutions to a low-tech problems. The lesson of the novel is quite clear: technology is only as good as the people using it, and if they’re not prepared to use it properly against a special type of enemy, it’s more a hindrance than a help.
This is a novel with many lessons - and many of them are political. Make no mistake: this is a politically-charged novel. Brooks wear his politics on his sleeve, and they are most definitely not the kind of politics our current administration, or the current administrations of China, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Russia want to hear. Brooks is unconditionally and unapologetically critical of China and Russia in particular - but he is not looking down on them from a high-and-might First World stance. The author clearly has sympathy for individual people, and flatout recognizes that the two most dynamic economies of the immediately pre-Zombie era were not the US and the EU, but China and India. These nations’ governments, however, are not to be credited for these economic strengths: it was the average people who made up the rank-and-file of these countries who kept them going. Brooks even shows how, after the collapse of Castro’s regime in Cuba, the Cuban nation becomes one of the greatest economic powers in the world thanks to the stability of the powerful capitalist system that emerges there when mainland banks flee to the safety of that little well-defended, offshore paradise.
But don’t take Brooks’ for a bleeding-heart liberal. He clearly - but not explicitly - points out that the great mistakes the U.S. government made in the early days of the zombie outbreaks were committed by a Democratic administration that made its way into power on a strict anti-war stance after the collapse of our involvement in “the last brushfire conflict” (Iraq? No…really?). Liberals of all stripes will no doubt be appalled by the “Redekker Plan”, developed in South Africa and implemented, eventually, under a variety of other names around the world, to save governmental and military systems by abandoning strategic population regions so they can serve as “zombie magnets”. These zones would draw the ravenous zombie hordes while governmental and military systems could mobilize, concentrate, and eventually strike back. But in a true total war like this one…sacrifices must be made. Individuals don’t matter as much as long-term stability.
Nonetheless, Brooks’ zombie politics are, ultimately, about as anti-conservative as you can get. One can easily read World War Z as a scathing critique of our present world situation, with extra emphasis placed on the repressive governments of Russia and China, and no little scorn for the United States’ love of spectacle over responsibility. One of the best means of pointing out a nation’s problems are by setting up fictional situations that exacerbate them and make them obvious. Sinclair Lewis did so with It Can’t Happen Here, and throughout the first pages of World War Z that mantra, “It can’t happen here!” is repeated over and over by officials and civilians all over the world. But it can. The undead can and will find you. They are as inevitable and overwhelming as any force of nature.
And that’s what the zombie apocalypse, ultimately, is. A natural disaster for the entire planet, a worldwide Hurricane Katrina. Though clearly aimed at American audiences, I have no doubt that readers in other countries will be able to see the significance, because the rest of the world is much more familiar with natural disasters than the U.S. is.
In conclusion, this is the zombie novel of all time. No kidding. If you’re looking for vivid descriptions of arms being gnawed off or intestines being yanked out, then go and read one of those inferior other zombie novels. If you want to see the Full Picture of the Zombie War that Romero’s films only hinted at; if you want to read a masterful piece of satire; if you just want to enjoy a novel with a truly epic scope…then World War Z is what you’ve been waiting for your entire life! God knows, I have been waiting long enough to read something like this.
Also, the audiobook version is well worth checking out. it features the author himself as the interviewer, and such Hollywood greats as Mark Hammill, Jurgen Prochnow, and many others reading various characters’ stories! It is an abridged version, comprising only the lengthiest narratives from the book, but a wonderful companion piece to the novel.
And, yes…there will be a movie. Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights before the novel was even published! Now, this could be good news, or execrable news. If the film is designed to mimic the book’s “nonfiction” delivery and is presented as a documentary featuring actual footage from the Zombie War, interviews, and maybe recreated scenes, then it will be awesome. However, if it becomes “Hollywoodized” and turned into Yet Another Zombie Action movie like Resident Evil, then I fully expect to see a zombie horde marching on Hollywood to kill, maim, and eat the morons involved. Let’s hope the former prevails.
*Which also has sequels: Monster Nation and Monster Planet. Apparently zombie novels, like zombies themselves, travel in smelly packs.
Obligatory Snakes on an Obligatory Plane Post
August 21st, 2006
Snakes on a Plane is a not a Hollywood blockbuster. It is not Summer 2006’s version of War of the Worlds or Independence Day. It was never meant to be.
Practically from Day One, Snakes on a Plane was very obviously designed to be a Cult Film, and nothing more - and that’s exactly what it has proven itself to be: an amazingly good, entertaining, and oftimes even downright scary Cult Film whose greatest strength is its cinematic honesty, telegraphed unequivocally in its title. This is a movie about snakes on a plane. The end.
Whether Snakes on a Plane turned out to be any good as a film, or whether it proved to make tons of money or just break even, would ultimately be irrelevant to its fans, its stars, and its scriptwriters/director: as a Cult Film (much like The Blair Witch Project), it had earned its Cult and therefore its place in Cinematic History even before it hit theatres thanks to its creators’ brilliant viral marketing strategies and their brilliant willingness to actually make the film’s audience active participants in the film’s creation.
Snakes on a Plane was a guaranteed hit - albeit of a somewhat “limited” sort - from the second information about its production hit the net. First of all, the name: a true disaster-flick title if ever there was one, beating out even Towering Inferno, Meteor!, and Volcano by not only announcing exactly what the film was going to be about but also doing so in a catchy, tongue-in-cheek way that was bound to get peopled interested. The title was so great that Samuel L. Jackson purportedly signed up for the project just because the name was so great. Whether this is true or not, you now had Samuel L. Jackson, one of the Internet generation’s most beloved quote-generators, starring in a film called Snakes on a Plane that featured - what a premise! - venomous snakes loose on a plane!
Now, the film could’ve easily gotten by on its own merits at this point: it had a catchy title, and interesting basic plot, and a great actor in the lead - but the internet hype was only beginning. In the months following, the studio attempted to change the title of the film to the more understated Pacific Air Flight 121 - and the film’s “fans”, none of whom even really knew what the film would be about other than that it would have snakes plus aviation, went ballistic. Even Samuel L. wouldn’t take none a’that shite! So the title remained, and it was at this point that the nature of the film and the buzz surrounding it began to change.
The Blair Witch Project, arguably the first film to rely on Internet promotion to become a major hit, courted interest through its mysterious official website and by encouraging viral marketing (which back in my day was called “word of mouth”) to drum up excitement. This is prettymuch how Snakes on a Plane got started - but it went a step beyond when the filmmakers actually began to take input from people who wanted to see certain things in the film!
At some point, somebody said, “It just wouldn’t be a Samuel L. movie if he didn’t motherfuck the snakes at some point, as in ’I am tired of these motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane!’” Weeks of humor and parodies and the usual Internet silliness ensued. And, apparently, the meme was so strong the film’s producers finally decided to add the line to the movie! The film was originally being edited and shot for a PG-13 rating…but fans (or should I call them pre-fas, since, remember, no one had even seen the damn film yet!) wanted more hideous snakebite deaths, more violence, more Samuel L. Jackson cussin’ a blue streak!
And the filmmakers agreed. They called Samuel L. and company back in to film some more snake-attack scenes and, of course, the now-famous “Motherfuckin’ snakes on a motherfuckin’ plane” line.
Hell, you could even send personalized phone messages from Samuel L. Jackson to folks to encourage them to see the film! (I was driving to Washington DC when Samuel L. called me, and, believe me, I wasn’t about to NOT do what Samuel L. told me to do!)
In the week before Snakes on a Plane officially opened, the ‘Net was seething with buzz and anticipation of the film. Hell, some fella even went out and got a Snakes on a Plane tattoo - and he hadn’t even seen a preview for the movie yet! It seemed like every Internet geek in the world was going crazy for the film. Why, when this thing opens (some industry analysts and film-critics noted), it may very well even beat Pirates of the Caribbean 2’s box-office opening records! How could it not with the entire Internet poppin and fizzing with excitement over the film’s opening?!
But Snakes on a Plane only made about $15.3 million on its opening weekend. Now, this is not a bad sum, considerig the film only cost a modest $30 mil to make - so in three days’ time, it made back about half the money spent on it. But, of course, film pundits and blockheaded industry analysts are calling it a failure and saying “so much for the Internet hype” because it didn’t earn enough money to buy a mid-sized African country on opening day.
As usual, the media has equated “internet buzz” with the term “guaranteed blockbuster” - and that’s like comparing “cult” to “Catholic Church”. They’re two totally different things, two completely different orders of magnitude. Devin Faraci of CHUD.com, one of my favorite cinema-related news’n'reviews sites, has this to say about the nature of the hype surrounding Snakes on a Plane and its so-called “disappointing” opening weekend numbers:
What’s funny is that Snakes’ modest showing now positions it to be a legitimate cult movie. You see, a cult movie can’t be touted as such by the studio. It can’t be designated as one before release by glossy Time-Warner magazines. And it certainly can’t be a big hit. By not breaking through to the mainstream, Snakes may actually become the cult movie New Line always thought it would be.
Now, Faraci prefaces this with a rather point-missing explanation that the internet buzz surrounding Snakes on a Plane arose through people mocking the absurdity of the premise, and that Samuel L. Jackson was going to star in it. Oh, certainly - a sense of “WTF?” was always present in the film’s hype from the very beginning…but, no, the film did not do “poorly” on opening day because its hype had burnt out by the time it actually opened. The filmmakers knew, at some point during the filming, that they were creating a Cult Movie, not a blockbuster. One look at the talk circulating around on the ‘Net for the past however-many years clearly would’ve indicated that this film was gathering a small but dedicated, damnear obsessed following…and that come opening day, most of the film’s earnings would come from that relatively small group of people more so than it would come from the General Public, who might be lured into the theatre by the title or the trailers, but certainly hadn’t been sitting around for the past three years creating hundreds of fan parodies, writing fanfic, and otherwise creating an almost Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque air of celebration about the film.
It seems to me that the studio was WELL AWARE of this….Else, why would’ve they brought Samuel L. Jackson back in to film the movie’s fan-supplied punchline? Why would they have spent the money to bump the film up to an R rating when, certainly, a PG-13 would’ve potentially drawn more people in to the theatres? Simple: the film was even before birth destined to be a Cult Movie, and what better way to please your Cultists than to let them take part in the process?
So. If you thought the film was going to be the Next Big Summer Movie of 2006…sorry, but that’s not what it’s all about. As Samul L. himself as said, “It’s not Gone with the Wind. It’s not On the Waterfront. It’s Snakes on a Plane!”
And it will live in film history forever not just due to its director, or its cast, or the studio that produced it…but because of all the people who got so worked up about the film that they literally ended up being a part of it.
And so we come to the Big Question I’m sure you’re dying to know: “Pegritz, what did you think of the film?” Simply put: it’s a great thriller with a great basic concept, a great cast, and a great tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. It is exactly what I expected it to be - no more, no less - and as such, it’s just a damn fun movie. Don’t expect High Art. Don’t expect Great Feeling. Expect snakes. On a plane. It’s almost Zen in its wonderful simplicity.
The Devil’s Rejects
August 17th, 2005
I’ve been a big fan of Rob Zombie ever since I first heard White Zombie (via a KMFDM remix of “Thunder Kiss ‘65″) waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1995. His music and public persona were both high-camp psychobilly metal, so obviously influenced by ’60s and ’70s horror/sci-fi/exploitation kitsch that I couldn’t help but love the dude - especially his artwork, which was so clearly derived from the artistic stylings of Vault of Horror and all those dear old comic shlock masterpieces, and his film-sampling mentality. You see, Herr Zombie is a fanboy: a bigger-than-life grungy nerd with an obsessive love of Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, Jess Franco, late-nite horrorfest hosts, giant killer robots, lesbian vampires, and all the blood-drenched schlock that made drive-in slasher flicks such a fun time in the 1970s. And when I heard he had a film coming out, rumored to be so gory and despicable that no major movie company wanted to touch it, well…I just had to see what might be this decade’s Cannibal Holocaust!
Too bad House of 1000 Corpses turned out to be more like this decade’s The Hills Have Eyes infernally crossbred with Orgy of the Dead: a very fun, sometimes creepy, but ultimately piecemeal pastiche of psychotronic kitsch that was more like a filmic Frankenstein’s monster built from pieces and images harvested from all those schlocky ol’ gorefests and creeper movies Zombie loved when he was growing up. Mind you, I still loved the movie…but, then again, I never believed any of the hype that Fangoria and other horror mouthpieces were slathering over the film (you know, “Zombie’s unique vision is going to revolutionize horror” and “Zombie singlehandedly reanimates the ’70s horror film” and blah blah blah) because I knew none of it could be true. C’mon, people: Rob Zombie is a very creative guy, but his creativity is much in the same vein as the creativity of some of the world’s finest mash-up artists - he takes bits and pieces of his influences and remixes them into new, but of course strangely familiar, creations. He’s not a pioneer breaking new ground in music and/or film, and I don’t think he ever meant to be. He just wants to make music and films based on his favorite influences. Nothing at all wrong with that, mind you, and I watched House of 1000 Corpses for the first time expecting it to be what it more or less was: a horror fanboy’s tribute to the lurid, bloodsoaked craziness of ’70s horror American and Italian horror cinema.
As such it was very amusing, and full of great performances - particularly veteran character actors Sid Haig as the hilariously psychotic Captain Spaulding and Karen Black as Mother Firefly, though Zombie’s own wife Sherri Moon does a great job as giddy sexpot Baby and Bill Mosely literally sweats criminal insanity as Otis - but it was ultimately just a glitzy, gory, 90-minute snuff film in which your standard bunch of lost young people get offed one after the other but a collection of backwoods crazies and comicbook monsters. Hell, I watch the film now as more or a very, very, very dark comedy with a uniquely sick sense of humor rather than as a horror film.
When I heard Zombie was working on another film, tentatively titled The Devil’s Rejects, I didn’t expect it to be a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses: it sounded like a whole new idea. Then I discovered it was going to be a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, and I got the usual sinking feeling in my gut: the first was fun, but do we really need a follow-up film that would probably just try to repeat all the tricks and concepts from the original and thereby run them into the ground? What more could you do with the Firefly family, Dr. Satan, Captain Spaulding, and the rest? Just feed them some more college kids to grind up? Well…as more and more detail came out about The Devil’s Rejects, I started to feel a lot more hopeful. Yes, it was still more or less a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, but Zombie was doing something totally different with this film. He had an actual story to tell with this one, and I wondered with a little trepidation just how he was going to handle taking a different tack–the film could make up for all of House of 1000 Corpses‘ weakness, or it could just magnify them….
The Devil’s Rejects is not so much a sequel to the first film as it is a complete re-imagining of it, a reworking of its characters into truly terrifying madmen, and a much better film that tells a harrowing and EXTREMELY intense tale of sunbaked, bloodcaked “Murder, Mayhem, and Revenge”…and does so with style, humor, and a vision 1000 times more cohesive and developed than House of 1000 Corpses. It’s still a fanboy film, but this time it shows just how good a film directed by a man who truly loves his subject can be.
