- Phantasm: Don't have sex in a cemetery at night.
- The Night of the Living Dead: Frankly, just avoid cemeteries altogether.
- Dracula: Beware of illegal immigrants.
- Frankenstein: Early childhood education is vitally important to the development of a child.
- The Exorcist: Don't become a Roman Catholic priest: Low pay, high mortality rate.
- The Nightmare on Elm Street series: Don't take justice into your own hands, especially if it involves burning an alleged felon to death.
- The Friday the 13th series: Don't have pre-marital sex.
- The Hallowe'en series: Seriously, don't have pre-marital sex.
- Cujo: Have your pet regularly vaccinated for rabies and other diseases.
- The Omen: The Italian health-care system is a mess.
- The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Home gardening can be a life-changer.
- The Day of the Triffids: Green energy is bad.
- Gremlins: Have your pets spayed or neutered.
- Pet Sematary: If you have young children, don't live close to a road.
Showing posts with label dracula. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dracula. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Horror Movies Seen As Pithy Life Lessons
Monday, July 15, 2019
The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh
Julian Wolfreys' edition provides a lot of worthy commentary and context for the novel, especially in relation to the anxieties and obsessions of late-Imperial Britain. One should read his lengthy introduction after reading the novel, however -- it's one long Spoiler.
In sequence, the novel tells the story of The Beetle in the voices of a hapless, homeless, unemployed clerk; a gentleman scientist; a headstrong noblewoman engaged to a bedeviled Member of Parliament; and the Confidential Agent (what we would now call a Private Detective) hired to help sort out the Affair of the Beetle.
The eponymous Beetle is the star of the show, a shape-shifting, gender-bending emissary from demon-haunted Egypt -- as Wolfreys notes, Britain's travails in Egypt were a major source of Imperial agita in the latter part of the 19th century. Like Dracula himself, the Beetle is also a threatening Cultural Other, inscribed with a myriad of the fears of the period.
Like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Beetle ends with a train chase. At least it makes period sense here. Marsh's novel is a bit murkier in its climax than Dracula, but I'll leave that for you to discover. The narrative of the poverty-stricken clerk is certainly the most emotionally affecting of the four narrative streams. Marsh also does a fine job of writing a self-aware, independent woman's POV in the third stream.
The second stream is enjoyably wonky -- Marsh's scientist, a friend of the female narrator since childhood, is a pompous goof who's working on weapons of mass destruction (specifically poison gas) for the British Army. All of this is treated in a strangely off-hand fashion, and I'll go just a bit spoilery to note that none of the weapons research pays off in the climax of things. It's just there.
Our narrating Confidential Agent brings things to a somewhat orderly close -- mysteries remain, but like Van Helsing in Dracula, the Agent marshals the forces of Order against the invasive Other. The Beetle doesn't have the pulpy, bloody heft of Dracula, but it does have its own charms, racist and bigoted though those charms may be when it comes to any and all non-WASP characters in the novel.
Wolfreys finishes this edition with excerpts from a number of end-of-century source texts to situate the novel further in its context. In all, this edition and the novel, recommended.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Hallowe'en Horror Quartet!!!
A mysterious alien 'zone' named the Shimmer has enveloped part of the Southern United States. And it's growing. A team of five scientists goes in, other teams having vanished in the year or two the Shimmer has been active. They find a strange zone of mutated and mutating plants and animals. It's very much like H.P. Lovecraft's seminal piece of eco-horror, 1928's "The Colour Out of Space." But with a lighthouse. Lightly recommended.
Donald A. Wollheim's very short story "Mimic" simply presented the idea that there were lifeforms humanity wasn't aware of because they'd adapted to hide in the urban landscape. The movie gives humanity the blame for creating these things, albeit for a good cause -- the elimination of a child-killing, cockroach-spread disease in New York through the use of genetically engineered 'Judas Bugs.'
Giving the mimics an origin saps the story of much of its mystery. Guillermo del Toro does a nice job of conjuring up murk and mayhem in the underground vaults and abandoned subway lines of Manhattan. Making the story yet another iteration of Frankenstein, albeit with human-sized insects that can mimic human appearance, eliminates any sense of mystery or the Sublime. It's still a pretty solid piece of action-horror movie-making.
And kudos to del Toro and co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins for addressing the simple fact that a man-sized insect would need lungs to even exist. Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam are solid but a little bland as the scientists who are the cause of, and solution to, the problem of man-sized bugs in Manhattan. Lightly recommended.
The Grudge in this case involves ghosts that murder people over the course of years or even decades whenever those people have the misfortune to encounter these ghosts... or the misfortune to have a family member encounter these ghosts. That's some grudge!
The capricious nature of the supernatural attacks, and the presentation of them as being wholly inexplicable, make Ju-On a success. Some of its tropes have been recycled and parodied nigh onto exhaustion in the years since, but the source still contains the power to shock and disturb. On the other hand, there's a cute ghost cat! On the other other hand, these ghosts can materialize literally anywhere... and they can drag you off to some hellish netherworld! Highly recommended.
Any Dracula movie with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it is going to be watchable. Lee is only on-screen for about ten minutes, leaving the always capable Cushing to do the heavy lifting in a dual role as both the Van Helsing of 1872 and the grandson of Van Helsing in 1972. Stephanie Beacham overcomes the movie's focus on her ample, heaving bosom to deliver a solid performance as Van Helsing's grand-daughter.
As always, though, it's Cushing and Lee we come for, whether in a Dracula movie or some other horror or thriller. They deliver, as always. The opening battle, on top of a runaway carriage, is one of the high points of the series. The scene in which we discover that the running water from a shower head can incapacitate a vampire, not so much. Recommended.
Friday, March 9, 2018
Scream Blacula Scream (1973)
William Marshall really towers over this movie with a charismatic performance that manages to convince one of the tragedy of Mamuwalde, turned into a vampire against his will by Count Dracula while Dracula was vacationing in Africa during the 19th century. Effective moments of bloodsucking horror occur throughout the film, but the most interesting parts involve Marshall talking to people. He may be tragic, but he's also a monster. And he knows it.
A subdued Pam Grier heads the rest of the cast. She and Don Mitchell wisely choose to soft-sell their characters, leaving the over-acting hijinks to Richard Lawson as the voodoo practitioner who resurrects Blacula and gets a lot more than what he bargained for. Michael Conrad (Sgt. Esterhaus on the first two seasons of Hill Street Blues: "Hey, let's be careful out there") plays the only major white character, a local sheriff who grudgingly comes to believe in vampires. Recommended.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Nosferatu (1922)
The trick is to see a decent restored version, as Nosferatu has endless, crappy, public-domain versions floating around on the Internet and on cheapo DVD's. If it's in black-and-white, it's probably crappy: Nosferatu was tinted different colours throughout. The late Nash the Slash used to tour bars with a copy of Nosferatu to accompany with electronic music. Good times!
The film itself remains the finest adaptation of Dracula, legal or otherwise, ever made. It's the sinister, otherworldly quality of Max Schreck as Count Orlok that dominates the film, and memories of that film, a triumph of make-up and silent-film acting and Murnau's compositional talents.
Schreck looks so bafflingly inhuman that a movie was made about Schreck actually being a centuries-old vampire (Shadow of the Vampire). The Schreck vampire designs continues to pop up again and again in pop culture, whether in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu, the 1970's TV adaptation of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, or in that episode of Angel set mostly on a submarine during WWII.
Unless you're stoned immaculate, you'll probably want to watch Nosferatu over at least a couple of nights. The pacing is deliberate, which is to say slow and a bit scattered. But again and again visuals show up that are striking and disturbing.
Silent film hadn't started to 'move' much in 1922, so most of the striking visuals are static. Peculiarly effective are shots of forests with the negative flipped, and pretty much any scene with Orlok in it. At times, he's a grasping shadow against a wall. In other shots, one waits in suspense for his appearance. Everybody run! Ship-board shots in which Orlok comes creeping out from hiding or rises board-straight from supine to erect still conjure a sort of abject dread.
The TCM copy I watched was extremely text-heavy -- it made me wonder if Murnau later made the almost-text-free The Last Man/ aka The Last Laugh in part as a reaction to the preponderance of explanatory intertitles required for Nosferatu. Oh, well.
There is some humour in Nosferatu, though most of it is unintentional. The sequence following Orlok's arrival at the town he will soon start depopulating is the height of this inadvertent humour as we follow Orlok, coffin under his arm, as he searches for his new home. Funny as it is, it's still better than anything in any of Bela Lugosi's Dracula films. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
The movie works beautifully for long stretches. Its main problem (aside from some wonky historical moments) is its unevenness of tone. Certain deaths (well, murders) of innocents are treated lightly and even comically, as is the character of 'Max Schreck,' the actor who is really an ancient Eastern European vampire. But the climax of the film is pure horror that's undercut by the movie's earlier, lighter tone.
Still, Shadow of the Vampire is a delight in many ways, parts greater than the sum. Willem DaFoe and his make-up job command the screen whenever he's on it as 'Max Schreck.' And Dafoe plays the mix of low comedy and bleak horror better than anyone else in the cast. One doesn't feel sorry for him, but one does feel sorry for the state he's in. A brilliant monologue by 'Schreck' about the saddest scene in Bram Stoker's Dracula fixes the character in our minds as a character (a sad and awful one) and not a caricature.
The rest of the cast is also solid, especially John Malcovich as obsessed director F.W. Murnau and Udo Kier as Murnau's mournful assistant. Catherine McCormack's Greta is the most problematic of characters, treated as a vain, morphine-addicted punchline until suddenly... she's supposed to be a sympathetic subject of horror? Tonally, it doesn't work at all.
Writer Stephen Katz and director E. Elias Merhige have worked sporadically since this film, which is a shame. The movie looks great. And the writing, while tonally uneven, is interesting throughout. And Dafoe... what a performance! Recommended.
Monday, November 7, 2016
Vampires, Deserts, Forests, and Christmas
Bela Lugosi is great, especially in the first section set at Castle Dracula. Dwight Frye is a hoot as Renfield, the foundational figure for so many crazed characters to come in horror movies. Once the action moves to England, things become a bit tedious. And the censorship people ensure that Dracula dies off-screen with barely an "Argh!" to mark his passing. F.W. Murnau's bootleg Dracula, Nosferatu (1922), is a far superior work, as are many of the later adaptations. Still, Lugosi remains a bracing presence. Recommended.
Thankfully, Krampus and his twisted minions -- horrible snowmen, horrifying toys, homicidal gingerbread men, and a really nice looking evil Christmas-tree Angel -- do arrive to scare and stalk Adam Scott's family, who are too angry and fractious for The True Meaning of Christmas to take hold. There are some lovely effects both mechanical and CGI animating the various monsters, including Krampus itself. And there's a real sense of menace as things roll towards the end.
Depending on one's interpretation, Krampus either manages a treacly happy ending, a slightly menacing happy ending, or a refreshingly bleak ending in which not even a baby is safe from damnation. Seriously. At 100 minutes, Krampus feels about 15 minutes too long and two sugar packets too sweet for some stretches. But I still enjoyed it. I also enjoyed that it offers an odd commentary on this year's U.S. election: Republican or Democrat, Krampus is taking none of your self-serving bullshit if you're committed to a world where only money matters. Recommended.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
What We Do In The Shadows (2014)
One of the things that makes the movie so enjoyable is its rigorous attention to the details of living as a vampire, spun at most points for maximum hilarity. It's hard to groom when you can't see yourself in a mirror, for instance, and for a young vampire, learning to fly can be a real hassle. The vampires are aware of fictional constructions of their habits -- they even crib one bit of hypnotic shenanigans from The Lost Boys, all the while mispronouncing 'spaghetti' as 'basgetti.'
The laugh-out-loud moments are often truly gross -- Dandy vamp Viago's problems with tapping the vein of a victim lead to an awful lot of spurting blood, while new vamp Nick learns the hard way why vampires shouldn't eat chips. Meanwhile, 8000-year-old Petyr lurks in the basement listening to his headphones and refusing to attend house meetings. But he's a good listener!
I mean, really one wishes a 'serious' vampire movie would be this well-thought-out. The writers know their vampire mythology. But they also work some ridiculous changes on their sources, whether it's through Vlad's problems with shape-shifting or the eternal war between vampires and werewolves. What We Do In The Shadows is a sheer delight. Leave your reflection at the door. Highly recommended.
Monday, September 14, 2015
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)
The novel may be set in the late 1970's, but Neville is very much a 1950's Everyman figure. He dwells in a suburb of Los Angeles with a wife and a daughter. He carpools to work with a neighbour. He drinks a lot of cocktails. But a vaguely defined war in which Neville himself served overseas may have unleashed the disease that caused all those stories of vampirism in Eastern Europe during the 18th century. In the now of the novel, which we join in media res, Neville is alone but under siege by multitudes of vampires every night. He's turned his house into a fortress. And every day, he drives around pulling vampires out of their hiding places and staking them to death.
For a short novel (maybe 70,000 words soaking wet), I Am Legend is packed with heady goodness. There's the characterization of Neville, who reveals hidden depths as we spend more time with him. There's Neville's scientific approach to understanding just how these vampires work, and what works against them, and why. There's the back-story of the fall of society, with mass graves and an incompetent government and growing paranoia.
And there are the vampires themselves, split into two groups: living vampires who've been infected and changed, and dead vampires who continue to be animated by the contagion. Both die when you stake them, though the second group occasionally disintegrates. Neville's quest to understand what's going on in a scientific sense helps him to hold off the encroaching loneliness. He's Robinson Crusoe with a microscope and no Man Friday. He doesn't even have a parrot to talk to. But he does have his books and his classical music.
The list of later works with I Am Legend's DNA in them could probably fill a book. From Matheson's succinct glimpses of plague-fueled societal breakdown come World War Z and The Stand and so many others; from the monsters whose origins seem to be scientifically explicable come legions of infected zombies and vampires whose blood teems with bacteria or viral loads instead of magic. It's the loneliness of Neville that hasn't been replicated that often in subsequent works of horror.
Thankfully, there's also grim humour throughout the novel, much of it supplied by Neville's dead but lively vampire neighbour Cortman (!), who yells endlessly at Neville by night but whose diurnal hiding place Neville searches fruitlessly for by day. Good old Cortman. He never shuts up. Highly recommended.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Holmes Vs. Evil
The Lost Boy by Barbara Hambly; His Last Arrow by Christopher Sequeira; The Things That Shall Come Upon Them by Barbara Roden; The Finishing Stroke by M.J. Elliott; Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World by Martin Powell; The Grantchester Grimoire by Rick Kennett and Chico Kidd; The Steamship Friesland by Peter Calamai; The Entwined by J.R. Campbell; Merridew of Abominable Memory by Chris Roberson; Red Sunset by Bob Madison; and The Red Planet League by Kim Newman.
The first of Canada's EDGE Publishing's anthologies of weird Sherlock Holmes homages is fun, for the most part, with a few stand-outs. When putting Holmes into supernatural situations, writers tend to either make Holmes a stubborn denier, regardless of the evidence, or to make his detection ethos flexible enough to admit any possibility. Sometimes writers go even further, generally by reimagining Holmes as someone who's always been a believer in the supernatural.
The 'fantastic' herein involves a lot of stories that combine Holmes with other fictional or historical characters. Team-ups pair Holmes with Peter Pan ("The Lost Boy") , supernatural investigator Flaxman Low ("The Things That Shall Come Upon Them"), supernatural investigator Carnacki ("The Grantchester Grimoire") , and Arthur Conan Doyle's own Professor Challenger ("Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World"). Holmes also visits WW2-era Los Angeles to play a part in a horror/hard-boiled detective mash-up ("Red Sunset").
And it's a Holmes-homage tradition to have at least a couple of stories about cases briefly mentioned during Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories but never fully told. These references have always formed a sort of Black Casebook of Holmes adventures for later writers to imagine in their entirety. Here, "Merridew of Abominable Memory" and "The Steamship Friesland" develop these fleeting references of Doyle in unusual ways.
Finishing the anthology is Kim Newman's blackly comic, Holmes-and-Watson-less adventure of Professor Moriarty and his right-hand man Sebastian Moran. Newman riffs on H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, but probably not in the way one expects. In all, an enjoyable anthology. Recommended.
Sherlock Holmes and the Diving Bell by Simon Clark; The Greatest Mystery by Paul Kane; The Adventure of the Six Maledictions by Kim Newman; The Comfort of the Seine by Stephen Volk; The Adventure of Lucifer's Footprints by Christopher Fowler; The Deadly Sin of Sherlock Holmes by Tom English; The Color That Came To Chiswick by William Meikle; A Country Death by Simon Kurt Unsworth; From the Tree of Time by Fred Saberhagen (1982); The Executioner by Lawrence Connolly; Sherlock Holmes and the Great Game by Kevin Cockle; and The House of Blood by Tony Richards.
The third of EDGE Publishing's series of Weird Sherlock Holmes anthologies is solid and often deadly serious as these things go. The editors pay homage to one of Holmes's finest homagists, Fred Saberhagen, by reprinting a 1982 short story featuring Holmes and his distant ancestor and sometime-ally, Saberhagen's semi-heroic version of Dracula.
The rest of the anthology is new and, for the most part, ranges from enjoyable to excellent. Stand-outs include Stephen Volk's excellent chronicle of a young Sherlock Holmes in Paris, Simon Unsworth's horror story, and Kim Newman's comic adventure of Moriarty, Moran, and six dangerous supposedly magical items. Along the way, Holmes will also visit modern-day Las Vegas, hang out with Frankenstein's Creature, and battle Lovecraftian horror and Death itself. Recommended.
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Blacula! (1972)
Credit to the film-makers for actually working the name in the title into the film once, and then never referring to it again. Dracula dubs the African prince Mamuwalde 'Blacula,' because why not? Then he locks him in a casket for 200 years. An unambiguously gay duo of antique dealers buy that casket in 1972, ship it back to Los Angeles, and then make the colossal error of opening it.
Thankfully, intrepid police scientist Gordon Thomas and Canada's own Gordon Pinsent are on hand to stop the vampire invasion of Los Angeles. Some pretty crazy and remarkable scenes occur along the way, including a completely bonkers vampire attack by an undead lady cabdriver and a warehouse battle that features a fortuitous crate of what appear to be explosive, vampire-killing light-bulbs.
Marshall invests Mamuwalde with about as much gravitas as can be expected under the circumstances. He's certainly a far more sympathetic vampire than any Dracula up to the time of the movie. Blacula also throws in a reincarnation sub-plot that would later appear in Bram Stoker's Dracula, among other subsequent movies. That sub-plot will be familiar to anyone who's seen the original 1930's The Mummy. Is this the first time that particular sub-plot has vectored into the vampire genre? I don't know. There's also a groovy soundtrack/score and a brief appearance by Elisha Cook Jr. as a coroner with a hook for a hand. Cool. Recommended.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
The Horror of Dracula (a.k.a. Dracula) (1958)
Or just Dracula. Hammer changed the title for the 1958 American release because the Bela Lugosi 1930's Dracula still made the rounds of movie theatres at the time, though it would soon be sold in a package to television and mostly vanish from conventional theatre chains.
Did Stanley Kubrick watch a lot of Hammer horror movies? Because Horror of Dracula is a horror movie with very little darkness in its scenes of horror -- instead, we've got colourful sets and colourful cinematography that anticipate The Shining's super-saturated palette. Castle Dracula is very brightly lit. Especially given that it's 1888.
I'll leave a dissection of alterations to the original text to the viewer. They mostly work. And they're pretty necessary, given that the market of the late 1950's pretty much required that Horror of Dracula clock in at 90 minutes or less. So the movie hits the ground running.
Lee is terrific as Dracula, far and away his defining genre role (sorry, Count Dooku and Saruman). The film-makers use his height to good effect. Smooth and charming in the opening scenes set at Castle Dracula, Lee's Dracula becomes a mute monster once the action shifts to nemesis Van Helsing's home-town. Once Dracula's status as a vampire has been confirmed, he no longer has the need for social niceties. Or dialogue.
Peter Cushing is also terrific as vampire-fighter Van Helsing, investing this version of the character with a sort of Holmesian stature. His final battle with the bloody Count now seems iconic and much-imitated. A young Michael Gough does solid work as Arthur Holmwood, and Melissa Stribling is suitably conflicted as Dracula's final object of exsanguination, Mina. Terence Fisher keeps things moving at a rapid pace. Probably the best official adaptation of Stoker's novel, for all its changes to the text. Did I mention it's 82 minutes long? Highly recommended.
Monday, June 9, 2014
The Historian (2006) by Elizabeth Kostova
Honestly, that should be the blurb on the front cover: "Like Dan Brown, only four times as long and with Dracula in it!"
The Historian's what I'd call a horror novel for people who don't read horror novels. And that's not praise, as it also reads like a horror novel from someone who's never read a horror novel (with the possible exception of Bram Stoker's Dracula). Actual frights are few and far between.
Between those frights loom lengthy stretches of travelogue and food tour (food-o-logue?) as the novel slowly and deliberately takes us through Istanbul, France, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, England, Greece, and an unnamed city in America. Much landscape description, cultural tidbits, and assessments of local food and drink are to be had. If you've always wondered what would happen if Rick Steves fought vampires in every foreign country he visited, this may be the book for you.
The Dan Brown apparatus comes from the novel's quest for Dracula through information gleaned from various archives, libraries, churches, history books, local historians, and local legends. Dan Brown gave us a dashing symbolologist; Kostova gives us two dashing historians and a fetching, tough-minded anthropologist. And for about 900 pages, we follow Dracula's trail all over Europe.
And by Dracula, the novel means Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, the historical ruler of Wallachia upon whom Bram Stoker based his vampire character. Did he really become a vampire after his death in battle against the Turks in the late 15th century? Is he still up to vampiric shenanigans now? Where is he really buried?
Well, over the course of 900 pages, perhaps you'll find out. I started skimming much of the landscape description by about the midway point, primarily because there's so bloody much of it, but also because it pretty much is just landscape description: it doesn't attempt to summon up dread or horror. It's just there to take you on a little trip.
Kostova also sets up a mystery near the beginning that the book doesn't really address at any point until near the end, at which point the solution is tossed off as if unimportant. But in a novel in which we're told and shown again and again how clever everyone is, that mystery seems to be the first thing everyone should be addressing as it should affect the entire rationale of the search for Dracula. Don't worry. If you read the novel, you'll quickly figure out what I'm talking about -- and become increasingly frustrated by the novel's increasingly unbelievable skirting of a fundamental plot question.
In any case, just read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Or if you want revisionist Dracula material, Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series and Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series are excellent. If you want a tour through a huge swath of Eastern Europe -- not to mention a bed-and-breakfast in rural France and several historic spots in Istanbul -- you could do worse than this novel. Not recommended.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Don't Let Them In
Later works such as Fright Night (1985) and Justin Cronin's The Passage and The Twelve would run with the idea of a non-vampiric helper paving the way for the vampire. That Straker also has to perform certain rituals to let the vampire Barlow into the town of (Jeru)'salem's Lot also seems new to me.
The novel still purrs along like a dream. Some elements (the rapid development of love between protagonist Ben Mears and townie Susan Norton) come a bit too fast, even in a lengthy novel such as this. But both major characters (struggling novelist Mears, who's returned to the town at pretty much the worst time ever; Father Callahan) and minor (the sheriff, especially) are fleshed out with great sympathy and precision, or at least empathy.
King wisely keeps the vampire Barlow off-stage for much of the novel -- the few times when Barlow talks (or writes) are also a bit weak, as King has borrowed pretty much all of Barlow's attributes from the Dracula 101 class of king-vampire characterization. Straker, the Familiar, is much more interesting. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Dracula's Quest
Dracula is something of a droll narrator of events, this drollness counterpointed by sections narrated by Dr. Watson, who doesn't entirely trust his best friend's cousin. But while Dracula is a master of violence, he abides by his own code of honour in Saberhagen's universe -- and part of that code involves stopping vampires from preying on humans against their will. The events of Bram Stoker's Dracula were, after all, narrated by pretty much everyone BUT Dracula.
A seance meant to draw forth the spirit of a mysteriously drowned young woman seems to call forth instead a vampire. Holmes and Watson are on the case, but once vampirism turns up, Dracula must be called in for assistance. Soon, the unlikely trio are jaunting around the early 20th-century countryside on the trail of a vampire seeking lost treasure from more than a century before -- and wreaking vengeance on the descendants of his long-dead nemesis.
Before it's all over, we'll visit pre-Revolutionary Russia and have an encounter with one of the early 20th-century's most notorious mystery men. It's a good thing Watson packed the wooden bullets -- no metals, not even silver, have the slightest effect on a vampire. While lacking the near-epic scope of The Holmes-Dracula File, Seance for a Vampire is a fun read with some poignant moments set off by comparisons between the never-aging Dracula and Holmes and Watson, now in their fifties and beginning to show it. Recommended.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Hollywood Undead
They Thirst by Robert McCammon (1981; this edition 1988): McCammon may have been the most Kingian (Kingesque?) horror novelist of the late 1970's and early 1980's, probably because of sensibilities shared with Stephen King and not out of simple imitation. He was good at creating sympathetic characters and then running them through the grinder, and most of his 1970's and 1980's output seems to echo one Stephen King novel or another, and sometimes two or three at the same time. They Thirst seems to have been bounced off both Salem's Lot and The Stand as well as Dracula. Certainly the Vampire King -- Conrad Vulkan, a Hungarian prince who 'died' in the 14th century -- recalls Bram Stoker's Dracula more than he does any of King's vampires. But this vampire has specific, on-stage help from Satan, or at least an adequate stand-in, as a powerful supernatural being referred to as the Headmaster (a name that doesn't really work in the 'Inspires Dread' category) is backing the Vampire King's play for earthly dominion with some heavy magical mojo.McCammon's cleverest idea here lies in his choice of location for the Vampire King's D-Day: Los Angeles. McCammon's vampires can't tolerate sunlight, but Los Angeles appeals to the Vampire King because he/it, having been 'turned' at the age of 17, is forever obsessed with youthfulness. Los Angeles, home to both gleaming, artificial youth and a sordid, violent underbelly, is a perfect match for this vampire. No old people need apply for admission to this army of vampires. I'd guess no fat chicks either.
The vampires herein exist within a supernatural framework: they are most definitely not viral in origin. Set against the vampires are a ragtag but plucky mismatched group of heroes (is there any other kind of group in popular culture?) who must work together to save the planet from becoming a scrumptious, bloodsoaked buffet: a terminally ill Roman Catholic priest; an 11-year-old boy who loves monster movies; a successful but troubled young comedian; a middle-aged cop who escaped from vampires in his childhood home in Hungary; a mystical young woman; and a handful of other supporting characters. The last third of the book sails straight into the epic, recalling King's The Stand in its elevation of the stakes of the battle. The climax is apocalyptic: McCammon doesn't back down.
I can see why McCammon withdrew this, his fourth novel, from publication for nearly 20 years, citing the idea that his early novels, while good, marked a writer who was still learning. There's much that's derivative in They Thirst, and a bit that's silly, but McCammon's strength at propulsive plotting and at sympathetically drawn characters makes this well worth seeking out. Recommended.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Vampire Juice
Dracula (World's Classics edition), written by Bram Stoker, edited and introduced by A.N. Wilson (1897; this edition 1983): Tom Wolfe told us that great pilots have "the Right Stuff." Great pitchers have that mysterious "stuff" that very good pitchers never have. Or so we've come to believe. And some writers have "stuff" too, though for the sake of variety, I'm going to call it "juice." Juice has absolutely nothing to do with technical proficiency -- if art and literature came into existence solely through the mastery of formal and techical matters, then university professors would be the greatest writers and artists of them all. They're not, and it doesn't.
Bram Stoker, late middle-aged when he came to write Dracula, had juice for this novel and very little else. But what a crazy novel! Out of previous vampire stories, a smattering of mostly wrong Eastern European history and myth, and his own personal interest in (mostly paid for) sex, Stoker formed one of the most influential novels of all time. It isn't even a very good novel -- but boy does it have juice! The story of British estate lawyer Jonathan Harker's encounter with Dracula still resonates today because it's great, juicy, tranformative pulp.
Formally speaking, Dracula is almost archaic for its own time, much less ours. It follows the epistolary format of many early English novels, telling its story through letters and journal entries and the occasional newspaper clipping. This is all done ostensibly to add verisimilitude to the proceedings, and a lot of great horror from Frankenstein to Paranormal Activity has adopted a faux-documentarian format as part of an attempt to suspend disbelief.
There had been vampire novels and stories in English before, and Stoker lifts elements from many of them. His genius lay in bringing a foreign vampire to England, and in wedding the near-pornographic to both violence and a melodramatic depiction of morality. One attempted vampiric seduction plays like a thinly veiled blowjob scene (as Stephen King and hundreds of other critics have noted); another seems to parody Catholic Communion. Virginal British womanhood appears to be Dracula's target once he reaches England, the sexual threat of the Other made manifest and deeply kinky. And in a parody of the marriage bed, one male character has to stake his transformed beloved, with copious gushings of fluid concluded by a chaste kiss. Meanwhile, Professor Van Helsing's whale-oil candle drips "sperm" all over a female vampire's tomb. Great GooglyMoogly!
And there are also almost endless numbers of scenes in which men and women weep in despair, or clutch hands and swear allegiance before God -- sentimental Victorian melodrama at its wooziest, not helped in the slightest by the modular interchangeability of the four main male characters.
Moments occur which stretch and even break credibility. The insect-eating madman Renfield sets a modern-day record for most escapes from a mental institution in one novel. Dracula, in one of the great bait-and-switches in literary history, goes almost entirely offstage after the first 60 pages, his presence made known almost entirely by the effect he has on others. Babies are fed to vampires, and grieving mothers to wolves. Heads are chopped off, the mouths stuffed with garlic. Dracula does his own dishes and searches for his own money and makes Jonathan Harker's meals. He really seems like a helluva guy. Too bad he stinks like a rotting corpse.
And the whole thing ends with a lengthy, continent-wide chase scene by ship, boat, rail and horse. It's all completely ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining. Even the Dutch Professor Van Helsing's garbled English becomes almost hypnotic in its lack of resemblance to any English ever spoken or written by anyone in the history of the English language. But Stoker keeps throwing Van Helsing's comments in there, sometimes with the caveat that even the other characters have trouble understanding him. It's a decision born of mad confidence.
There are several truly riveting and horrifying sequences in the novel -- Harker's initial ride to Castle Dracula and his subsequent adventures there; the diary entries of the Captain of the doomed Demeter; and the references to the "bloofer lady" who preys on children being three of them. Elements of the adventure novel, the thriller, the romance, the Gothic...all get synthesized by Stoker's lurid, imitative imagination, which remains, 115 years later, a greater imagination than that of most of his best-selling vampire-loving, novel-writing brethren and sistren. Highly recommended.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Revenge of Beretta
Books:
The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories edited by Leslie Shepard: This relatively short hardcover anthology was released during the vampire boom of the 1970's, which explains the production values -- it's printed on amazingly thick and luxurious paper. It's not a great anthology by any stretch of the imagination (for one, it's too short to be so), but it does contain a number of fine stories. Most importantly, one gets the terrific novella "Carmilla" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, a pre-Dracula vampire tale that manages to be both sporadically erotic and genuinely horrifying. I've also got a soft spot for E.F. Benson's somewhat murky "The Room in the Tower" and Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla", also included here, as is the deleted prologue to Dracula, "Dracula's Guest." Recommended, though I was disappointed that Dracula was not in fact the editor.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: Collins produces a great Young Adult science-fiction novel here, in the first part of a trilogy that's satisfying on pretty much every level. In a dystopian future, war and environmental disaster have left most humans in North America confined to zones dedicated to specific agricultural, industrial and mining purposes, all ruled dictatorially from another zone.
To fulfill a Bread-and-Circuses mandate while also demonstrating its absolute control over everybody, the government stages The Hunger Games every year. Two teenagers from each zone a male and a female) are dropped into an artificially manipulated 'game' zone in which they must compete to the death until only one winner remains alive. We follow our appealing, pragmatic, rebellious protagonist as she is selected for the games, undergoes training, and then must battle to win while trying to come up with a way to keep her fellow conscript from her zone alive.
Collins creates lively, appealing, flawed characters, and she really ratchets up the tension during the length section of the novel devoted to the games themselves. What I also like about the novel is the growing realization on the part of the reader that this future must be a long, long way from now: genetically modified plants, animals and insects abound; the technology available to the government is staggeringly advanced; the majority of the people, kept from both this technology and from any understanding of their true history, mostly have no conception of 'our' time. We've become less than myth.
This is a dandy achievement in a sub-genre that includes works like The Running Man, Series 7 and "The Most Dangerous Game." Highly recommended for anyone 14 or over.
Movie:
Iron Man 2, written by Justin Theroux, directed by Jon Favreau, starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Mickey Rourke, Scarlet Johannsen, Sam Rockwell, Garry Shandling and Don Cheadle: The first Iron Man movie was notable for the unusual fact that the non-superhero sequences were far more interesting than the superhero battles, primarily because of the charm of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony "Iron Man" Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow as his long-suffering personal assistant "Pepper" Potts.
The strength of the original is pretty much the strength of the sequel as well. Unfortunately, sequelitis sets in to such an extent that an abundance of new characters threatens to push Downey and Paltrow aside for long stretches of the movie. The movie grunts and sweats to not much effect because of the heavy lifting involved in getting characters such as War Machine, Black Widow and Nick Fury enough screen time to prepare us for upcoming Marvel-franchise movies Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. It doesn't help that director Favreau seems to be profoundly uninterested in the dynamics of action sequences -- we're subjected to lengthy CGI battles among various permutations of people wearing metal suits and robots, none of them executed with much flair.
What's supremely odd is that the movie replicates many of the flaws of another superhero movie sequel, Batman Returns. We get a filthy, vaguely disgusting villain who doesn't much resemble his comic-book progenitor (here, Rourke's Whiplash; there, Danny DeVito's Penguin). We get a superhero woman in a catsuit (Johannsen's Black Widow; Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman). We get a climactic army of rocket-wielding, civilian-threatening beings (Rourke's robots; DeVito's penguin army). We get a scene-stealing evil industrialist (Rockwell's Justin Hammer; Christopher Walken's Max Schreck). Both Iron Man and Batman are publically disgraced early in the movie. And so on, and so forth. The Penguin's army of of penguins with rockets strapped to their backs is actually a much more credible threat than Rourke's robot army, which proves incapable of much more than property damage.
Heck, Whiplash even has a pet bird -- a cockatoo, not a penguin, alas. Articles on the making of the movie have noted that Rourke came up with Whiplash's cockatoo companion himself, as if this were a bold bit of Method character creation and not, as I thought every time the bird was onscreen, Rourke unintentionally paying homage to the 70's cop show Beretta. So many characters. Recommended, though just barely.
Across the Pacific, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet (1942): This unremarkable wartime thriller gives us Bogart at the beginning of his stardom after more than a decade in Hollywood -- he even gets his name above the title thanks to the success of the previous year's Maltese Falcon. Astor and Greenstreet were also in the much-superior Falcon, while Falcon director Huston had to leave this picture with several scenes left to be done by another director thanks to wartime committments.
Basically, Bogart seeks to thwart a Japanese plot against the Panama Canal on the eve of Pearl Harbour. Unfortunate ethnic and racial stereotypes abound, including an American-born Japanese man who is really a Japanese collaborator. It's like a promo for the Japanese internment camps. And he wears really thick, distorting glasses! Ha ha! That is hilarious! Not recommended, though some of the visual effects and model work are unusually incompetent, even for the era -- both a ship and a plane appear to have been designed and animated by a five-year-old child with a bad case of the shakes.
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