Clive Barker’s Riding the Midnight Meat Train remains one of my favourite pieces of fiction. A young man moves to New York City, the mythical city of his dreams, only to find the ugly monstrosity that permeates every layer of the grim metropolis. The piece follows twin narratives from the perspective of the newcomer to New York City and a deranged, serial murderer who ritually slaughters people on a late night train service. Naturally, when I discovered that a film adaption had been made, I did everything in my conniving little power to obtain a copy and devour it. The results were very …satisfying. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, America, I want to play a game.

-Tagline, SAW III

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

-H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

If we examine American horror films from the 1950s leading up to the present day, we can see that, broadly speaking, decade by decade the fears which they exploit in their audiences have an undeniable root in the contemporary socio-political fears of the American populous at large. The 1950s saw a spate of so-called B-grade horror films which terrified people with their strong undercurrents of Cold War paranoia (with a particular focus on invasion by ‘the other’), such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Donovan’s Brain (1953) and, most notably, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The 1960s, on the other hand, saw a transition of focus from the Cold War to the more domestic issues of distrust of the establishment, the changing face of the American way of life and a condemnation of the Vietnam War with City of the Dead (1960), The Birds (1963) and Night of the Living Dead (1969). Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to warn you that this article contains some serious spoilers as it is more of a film-history piece than a review. If you’ve not seen the film, there’s really no excuse as it exists, free for all to see, as a public domain film. You can freely obtain it here and here. In fact, a google serach of “night of the living dead” should result in hundreds of sources. Go to it, it’s one of the best film’s ever made and, if after seeing it you disagree, my case is laid out below.

The modern horror film is an extraordinarily diverse group of texts that epitomize the tangled workings of American popular culture, which is at once business, art, and purveyor of entertainment and ideology.

-Waller 1987

The social, political and economic turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the rise of American exploitation cinema. The simultaneous changes in both American culture and the American film industry created a zeitgeist of distrust for the scientific-military establishment and a media outlet for the expression of that distrust. This essay will explore the cultural landscape which gave rise to American exploitation cinema and explore the stylistic and thematic elements of it. We will focus on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as the definitive example of American exploitation cinema. It is the contention of this essay that exploitation cinema was more than a commercially opportunistic fad but that the industrial and political climate allowed young film makers to make statements with their work which were impossible to make under the previous restrictions imposed on American cinema. Before we can understand the thematic and cultural significance of these films, however, we must understand the political and economic climate of both the American film industry and America itself. Read the rest of this entry »

I had read only a few reviews of the latest Dylan release, “Bootleg series 8: Tell Tale Signs”, before becoming fatigued and mildly irritated. Oh, they all say the same things, these music journalists, and they recite them over and over. Dylan is described as a ‘curmudgeon’, he is said be to ‘obsessed with his own mortality’ and exploring ‘darker and darker themes in his music’ and so on. What has Bob Dylan done to deserve such critics? I might agree that 1997’s “Time out of mind” and 1989’s “Oh Mercy” contained lyrics which could be said to contain a certain bitterness and cynicism – but I might have said the same about ‘Highway 61 Revisisted’ or a dozen other Dylan albums. If anything, his two most recent albums – “Modern Times” and “Love and Theft” - contain some of the most freewheeling and – yes – even fun music of his entire career. This is, after all, the man who on “Modern Times” sings,

I got the porkchops, she got the pie
She ain’t no angel and neither am I

More eros than thanatos there, to merely continue the theme so many journalists love. Read the rest of this entry »

Neo-noir, its pitfalls and its triumphs in Rian Johnson's "Brick"

American cinema has been going to darker and darker places with the high school institution since the nineteen eighties tried to pass it off as a funland of pretty people and carefree antics. John Duigan’s Flirting (1991) wanted to give the trope of high school romance the proper tragic angle of which Shakespeare found it so deserving. Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) introduced a genuine savagery to the picture that had not really been seen outside of horror films (Brian De Palma’s Carrie trumps all cards in this regard). The Virgin Suicides (2000) upped the ante considerably by portraying High School and the years of adolescence as an oppressive Hell. However, it took until 2005 and an under-experienced independent filmmaker named Rian Johnson for high school to finally undergo marriage to that cinematic pinnacle of bleakness and despair that exploded onto Hollywood in the forties. Brick, the film in question, is exactly what people say it is: a teen film noir.

The film tells the dirty story of Californian teenagers who seem to exist adrift in a sea of guideless tension, completely void of adult involvement or assistance, hardened and wise to even the most vile acts of human nature. Johnson is not pulling any punches with this premise – his kids are all very real, damaged and dangerous people, some of them capable of murder, and one of them (loner anti-hero Joseph Gordon Levitt) capable of intense psychological warfare, the stakes of which are simply deadly. Read the rest of this entry »

Something's after something in the children

Note: All quotes from A Nightmare on Elm Street or its DVD commentary refer to New Line Entertainment’s 2007 2-disc release of the film.

Of every social and sexual terror that has ever gotten under the skin of Western civilization, the ones that disturb most deeply are indisputably those that involve children. There is something about children that society deems untouchable, in a range of ways. We firmly believe that they live in another world, an alien but safe world, and that all matters adult are forbidden there. When these lines are blurred, base fears are released inside of us. Violence and sexuality become fundamentally worse when children are involved, fundamentally reprehensible.

Although these are protective tendencies, there’s no denying that this separation has resulted in a mild fear of children as well. They are the final and most extreme of all Robin Wood’s examples of The Other, a completely alien creature whose psyche we are vaguely amazed that we ever shared. Because of this, Horror films had begun to integrate children into their canon of Others as early, I suppose, as Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968 ), although The Omen (Donner, 1976) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978 ) are better examples. It wasn’t until a certain Wes Craven made his mark on the cycle in the mid eighties that the concept of children in Horror was quite masterfully inversed. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984) the children are not the monster; they are the victims, and the monster is ours. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Weber looking ready to steal Christmas

The Shining is, at its core, a story about “human monsters”. The phrase is used more than once in King’s novel and deserves its place as a pivotal concept to his story because it is not a horror fable with social subtext, but one about social horrors with a supernatural backdrop. To those who are only familiar with Kubrick’s version, a brilliant film but poor adaptation, one very fundamental difference between the two should be addressed. In King’s vision, Jack Torrance is not The Madman in a Horror Film. He is a damaged, alcoholic, unfulfilled writer with a history of anger management, one who tries with all his might to be a good man and fails. The Shining is his story, and it’s a tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Credit: Leo Fuchs

Pool hustling, state-sanctioned deathmatches between heavily armed Japanese teenagers, and high-octane hybridised football/roller-skating skirmishes undertaken as a foil for the violent desires of the masses all may not, initially, appear to have an awful lot in common. Appearances being, as they are, deceptive, it’s important to note that all three cinematic narratives (respectively, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler [1961], Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale [2000] and Norman Jewison’s Rollerball [1975]) are ostensibly and verifiably films with game-based narratives, in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, points to be scored and sanctified sets of rules to obey or to break. They only vary in the degree to which they are willing to take and to run with the definition of the word ‘game’. Read the rest of this entry »

An Auteurist Approach to David Lynch

Since its inception the notion of an “auteur theory” has been a contentious one. More than just a framework for interpreting film it has extended to a framework for interpreting directors themselves. By examining the body of a directors’ work we can glean insight into their motivations, perspective, and understanding of people and the world that they inhabit. David Lynch is a man who has a very particular, strange and often frightening view of the world which he is not afraid of depicting in his films. This essay will examine the works of David Lynch with a particular focus on Lost Highway (Lynch 1997) and Inland Empire (Lynch 2006) (his most recent work to date) and attempt to interpret them with an auteurist approach. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s something endlessly captivating about Anthony Perkins’ performance as Norman Bates, cinema’s seminal psychopath. His boyish goofiness is part of it. His tragic schism from the reality of his mother’s death is another. But I don’t think it’s completely out of left field (nor, I imagine, was it completely out of Robert Bloch’s mind when he created the character) to purport that the most darkly fascinating thing about Norman Bates is his ostensible normalcy. When detective Arbogast firsts encounters Norman, in the scene on which I’d like to focus, he is relaxedly reading on a porch chair, munching from a bag of candy. He is soft-spoken but friendly, conversational but uncontroversial, open-faced but un-foolish. Even his name, one letter away from being the word itself, is blandly normal. Read the rest of this entry »