Truth or Dare (2018): written by Michael Reisz, Jillian Jacobs, Christopher Roach, and Jeff Wadlow; directed by Jeff Wadlow; starring Lucy Hale (Olivia), Tyler Posey (Lucas), Violett Beane (Markie), Hayden Szeto (Brad), Sophia Ali (Penelope), Nolan Funk (Tyson), and Landon Liboiron (Carter):
So-so horror flick from the ubiquitous Blumhouse. Most of the cast is way older than the early 20's college students they play, a sometimes-distracting fact. A game of Truth or Dare turns supernaturally deadly because of a mysterious supernatural force.
I think the message of the film is 'Don't vacation in Mexico,' or maybe 'Don't play stupid teen-aged games in a sinister, abandoned church in Mexico.' Certainly an adequate time-waster, though even at a bare 90 minutes it feels about 15 minutes too long. Lightly recommended.
Ghost Stories (2017): written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman; starring Andy Nyman (Professor Goodman), Martin Freeman (Mike Priddle), Paul Whitehouse (Tony Matthews), Alex Lawther (Simon Rifkind), and Paul Warren (Woolly):
Adapted from a play by co-director Jeremy Dyson and starring co-director Andy Nyman as a psychic debunker, Ghost Stories creeps up on the viewer, building towards a harrowing final 20 minutes or so. The three ghost stories investigated by Nyman's rigid, unsympathetic Professor Goodman have changed their participants irrevocably, and not necessarily for the better. Goodman tries to remain unchanged as weirdness increases in his own life.
Some viewers (like me!) will be initially put off by the characterization of a psychic investigator as a bad guy, even as he exposes a fraud early in the movie in pretty much exactly the way that longtime debunker James Randi did. Stick with it, though. What seems like a general observation on the part of the movie may turn out to be something very much else.
I'd love to see how this play was originally staged. The movie has done such a terrific job of 'opening it up' that I'd be hard-pressed to cite any moments in which it seems like an adaptation of a stage play. Recommended.
Cold Hand In Mine: Strange Stories (1977) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories:
"The Swords" (1969): A retrospective 'Coming of Age' narrative takes Aickman into some unfamiliar English regions -- the lower-class reaches of Wolverhampton. His working-class narrator is a 'typical' Aickman narrator, however -- sympathetic and baffled by the weird situation he finds himself in. It's also a very representative Aickman tale insofar as the weirdness is fully described and fully unexplained as to its meaning and mechanisms.
"The Real Road to the Church" (1975): Rarefied and attenuated tale features one of Aickman's many, finely drawn, and sympathetic female protagonists. Its finest moments are dream-like without being obscurely drawn. As much an exploration of the numinous as the horrifying.
"Niemandswasser [No Man's Water]" (1975): Something of a misfire, though still possessed of a fascinating scene or two of horror. Aickman goes way out of his comfort zone in focusing upon the travails of the prince of a small European country as he loses love and becomes suicidal. It's almost a curiosity, as if Aickman had something like The Prisoner of Zenda stuck in his head and had to get it out in as strange a way as possible.
"Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (1973): Winner of a 1975 World Fantasy Award. This may be Aickman's least Aickman-like story, as it explores a very conventional horror (vampires), albeit through the eyes of an English girl bored out of her mind during her parents' tour of Italy. Our narrator is sympathetic and, suitably, young, callow, and reckless. One of the finest vampire stories ever written in English, often oblique but always involving.
"The Hospice" (1975): Cited by many as being one of Aickman's most 'English' of strange stories. This tale of a businessman who finds himself stuck for the night at an unusual hospital/hospice is often reprinted. As with many of Aickman's stories, the horrors leave one disquieted even though one is hard-pressed to explain what's so horrible about them.
"The Same Dog" (1974): Slightly more conventional-than-normal Aickman story gets stranger as it goes along, and ends on a capital 'M' Mystery.
"Meeting Mr. Millar" (1972): A young writer is plagued by the arrival of a mysterious accounting firm on the floor below him in his apartment building. The story grows its disquiet from the accumulation of just-slightly-off moments experienced by our young narrator. The intersection of a mysterious yet mundane business and Strangeness now reads like a precursor to much of Thomas Ligotti's work.
"The Clock Watcher" (1973): A seriously WTF tale of sinister clocks and suburban, post-WWII suburban life. What's really going on? I have no idea.
Overall: If nothing else, Robert Aickman was the greatest writer of Robert Aickman stories who ever lived, 'strange stories' as he wanted them dubbed. For me, he marks the borderline between horror and all the weirdnesses that don't horrify -- absurdism, New Weird, what-have-you. Writers will occasionally make one-story forays into Aickman Country (Ramsey Campbell's "The Companion" is a good example; so, too, stretches of Peter Straub's Mrs. God). But only Aickman lived in Aickman Country. Highly recommended.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson: 60 years after its first publication, The Haunting of Hill House remains the finest haunted-house novel in the English language, its nearest competitor a very distant second.
There's not much to say that hasn't been said already. Maybe nothing. Re-reading it again, I noted at how deftly Shirley Jackson balances the entire novel between two possible explanations, with a number of possibilities between them, right to the last words of the novel. And nevertheless leaves Hill House itself a horrifying mystery to linger in the mind long after one has finished the novel.
The Haunting of Hill House has proven to be almost unadaptable. The great 1960's adaptation dropped a huge amount of relevant material in order to fit into a two-hour window. The solid 2018 miniseries pretty much threw in the towel on any attempt at a straight adaptation and instead constructed an alternate narrative with entirely different character representations and plot beats. And the 1999 film adaptation was an unholy abomination about which we will no longer speak.
Jackson's novel is about as densely packed as one could ask of such an elegant, often sardonic piece of work. Eleanor's story is a tragedy of forced servitude -- as the unmarried sister, she was expected to care for her ailing mother for nearly two decades. She's either the perfect foil for the house, or the perfect time bomb ready to go off.
Her fellow characters, ostensibly there at the behest of a professor to investigate the famous ghost house that is Hill House, are sharply drawn, though the reader must be aware of how often their personalities are refracted by Eleanor's shifting perspective.
You will have your own answers to the mysteries of Hill House, and your own reactions to the marvelous characters whom Jackson puts in mortal peril at the hands of... What? Hill House is a bit of a paradox in American horror: a Lovecraftian horror rendered in entirely non-Lovecraftian prose and parameters. But in Hill House, as in sunken R'lyeh, all the angles are wrong. Highly recommended.
Elevation (2018) by Stephen King: A novella set in Castle Rock -- much like King's low-key 2017 collaboration with Richard Chizmar, Gwendy's Button Box -- Elevation is a story about a kinder, gentler Castle Rock, though not one without its flaws and magical weirdnesses.
In this case, our middle-aged protagonist discovers that he's losing weight. Not mass, weight. Steadily and perhaps even increasingly rapidly, he's gone from 240 pounds to 210 pounds without looking as if he's lost any weight. And anything he carries or wears loses ALL its weight. A recognizable medical condition, this is not.
However, unlike the vaguely similar Thinner, Elevation is not a horror story. It's a quieter fable of smaller kindnesses and redemption spurred by that weight loss. I'd compare it to Ray Bradbury if King were a poetic writer like Bradbury. In this case, though, King's own dedication -- to genre great Richard Matheson -- seems apt, at least for Matheson in his quieter moments.
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone would also be an apt comparison, with one Changed Premise illuminating the good parts of the human condition as well as the bad. Think "A Passage for Trumpet" or "In Praise of Pip," two gentle, sad TZ episodes starring Jack Klugman. And a middle-aged Klugman would actually make a good fit for our protagonist!
It's a slight work but an enjoyable one, and it's not going to take you long to read. I'd almost swear that an embattled lesbian couple in Elevation may have appeared in the first draft of King and his son's Sleeping Beauties before being cut. They're embattled because small-town Maine isn't ready to patronize the restaurant of two openly gay women. Or is it? Recommended.
Sleeping Beauties (2017) by Stephen King and Owen King: Not the worst novel Stephen King has either written or co-written (that would be The Tommyknockers). But it shares some commonalities with that terrible work.
One is that it's less a novel than a screed -- in the case of Sleeping Beauties, a screed against the patriarchy. There's nothing wrong with that, and the two Kings score a number of points against our male-dominated world. But screeds need to be relatively short. At nearly 700 pages, Sleeping Beauties is not short, and one wearies of the same points being hammered again and again and again, with little variation. We get it. Men are assholes.
The novel was so wearying that I put it down with 50 pages to go and didn't pick it up again (except to move it) for eight months. And that in the middle of an action-packed climax that seemed to be written with all four eyes of the writers squarely on a movie or television version. Explosions, gunfire, dogs and cats living together.
King has also never been good when he moves too far into pure fantasy rather than dark fantasy. The wheel of the plot turns on a magical woman named Eve who has magical powers and talks like a Buffy villain. She's not a villain. Or is she? In any case, she's tied to a worldwide phenomenon in which all women, regardless of age, go into a coma and sprout a cocoon as soon as they fall asleep. Attempts to get them out of their cocoons result in homicidal action by the otherwise still-comatose women/girls/babies.
All this worldwide turmoil focuses on the small Appalachian town in which the novel is mostly set, where the fate of the world will be decided by what the women of that town decide, and what the increasingly desperate men do.
I think maybe this would have been a dandy, angry yawp of a novel at about 300 pages. But the characters are all so flawed and so often unsympathetic -- men and women -- that things get pretty dire, pretty fast, and then go on forever.
Sleeping Beauties has its moments. But I can't shake the feeling that the genesis of the novel came when King and son Owen were discussing Y: The Last Man, the comic-book series in which all men on Earth die in the first issue, all men but one. King called this entertaining, poppy series, written by TV guy Brian K. Vaughan, the greatest graphic novel in history. That comment tells you a lot about King's tastes, or at least that maybe he needs to read more graphic novels.
But Vaughan's anti-patriarchal comic was nuanced and subtle compared to Sleeping Beauties. Indeed, the scariest thing about Sleeping Beauties is a reference in the acknowledgements to a much longer first draft of the novel. Please, God, let that not be released! Not recommended.
The Dark Masters Trilogy (2018) by Stephen Volk, containing the following novellas:
Whitstable - 1971 (2013): The first of the three fictional novellas featuring real people stars Peter Cushing, days after losing his beloved wife to emphysema in 1971.
While sitting on the beach near his home in Whitstable, Cushing is approached by a boy who thinks Cushing IS Van Helsing, vampire fighter and nemesis of Dracula. And the boy believes he is being preyed on by a vampire -- his stepfather.
The truth is just as horrible. Cushing begins by trying to shirk responsibility, and then tries getting the authorities to help out. But in the end, the actor has to discover how to face Evil himself, as himself -- though the art of acting does come in handy.
It's a marvelous, sympathetic character study in which the metaphor of vampirism is explored sensitively through one of the real-world evils that it can be a metaphor for. Despite the grim and mournful subject matter, Volk injects appropriate humour throughout -- especially when it comes to people mixing Cushing up with his oft-time co-star Christopher Lee, or to only recognizing him from cameos on current comedy TV shows. Highly recommended.
Leytonstone - 1906 (2015): Alfred Hitchcock's anecdote about his father having him put in jail for a night as a young boy in order to teach him to be good is the spark for this meditation on childhood fears and the peculiar character of the world's greatest thriller and suspense director. As he notes in his afterword, Volk alters the real nature of Hitchcock's family to make him an only child, doted upon by his mother and worried about by his father, who decides on the police visit.
Needless to say, the police visit does not yield the expected results. Volk examines the roots of fear here in childhood trauma, while also having what seems to be a good time coming up with precursors for many of Hitchcock's most famous film scenes. His Boy Hitchcock isn't entirely sympathetic, but he is certainly sympathetically drawn when it comes to his motivations and fears. Highly recommended.
Netherwood - 1947 (2018): In the last year of his life, 'The World's Wickedest Man,' Aleister Crowley, summons England's most popular post-war horror novelist -- that would be Dennis Wheatley -- to a peculiar hotel in Netherstone. Why?
Because Crowley believes a recent apprentice has gained enough magical power to conquer the world -- and, more importantly to Crowley, who lost a daughter at a young age, to fully claim that power the apprentice will sacrifice his own infant daughter.
This really is a great work, straddling reality and the supernatural without ever conclusively establishing that Crowley's fears are "real." One of the things that links the two men is a concern with permanence -- as a philosopher and thinker for Crowley, as a novelist for Wheatley. The third-person narrative focuses on Wheatley's thoughts and reactions, leaving Crowley to be imagined throughout from the outside by Wheatley. This choice generates suspense (is Crowley really on the level or is he just 'aving a laugh?).
But this narrative POV also allows the reader to judge Wheatley as he's judging Crowley -- and equivocating in that judgment. This seems fitting because one's assessment of Crowley relies a lot on just how much one believes in what he supposedly did, and how much one believes HE believed in what he supposedly did. It all makes for a fascinating fictional trip through the lives of two people who are increasingly forgotten as the decades slip by. Highly recommended.
In all: A great book of 2018. Highly recommended.
Bird Box (2018): adapted by Eric Heisserer from the novel by Josh Malerman; directed by Susanne Bier; starring Sandra Bullock (Malorie), Trevante Rhodes (Tom), John Malcovich (Douglas), Sarah Paulson (Jessica), Jacki Weaver (Cheryl), Rosa Salazar (Lucy), Danielle Macdonald (Olympia), Lil Rey Howery (Charlie), and BD Wong (Greg):
Apocalyptic horror gives us monsters who cause people to commit suicide when they see them. Daredevil, where art thou?
The movie generates a fair amount of tension throughout, though improbabilities related to Sandra Bullock's ability to navigate the outside world without recourse to sight eventually swamp all credibility.
Alas, Bird Box is also one of those movies that curdles somewhat in the remembering. This is partially because at the heart is a very, very conservative story of how a single woman finds redemption in the ARMS OF A GOOD MAN and MOTHERHOOD.
Speaking as someone with bipolar disorder, I also found some stuff involving the mentally ill is tremendously iffy in the most retrograde way imaginable (and not needed in the story). And not one but two self-sacrificing African-American men! And one of them is literally named 'Tom'! Get out! By the end, you may feel Bamboozled. Lightly recommended.
