Hellboy in Mexico

Hellboy: House of the Living Dead, written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Richard Corben (2011): Fun original graphic novel set during Hellboy's "lost months" while on a bender in Mexico during the 1950's, during which time he professionally wrestled and fought various supernatural menaces, generally while either drunk or severely hung over. Forced to kill a young wrestling, monster-fighting ally after vampires turned the young man into a bat-headed monstrosity, Hellboy went on a blackout-inducing bender, the end of which we see here.

Richard Corben's art combines the grotesque and the voluptuous in a variety of fun, pleasing ways, while Mignola's script strikes the right balance between humour and heartbreak. Hellboy has to face his guilt before he can get out of Mexico, but the whole voyage of self-discovery avoids the usual rote, Afterschool Special platitudes and lessons we often see in such a story. Recommended.

Cold Hand In Mine: Strange Stories by Robert Aickman

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.

Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Scream Blacula Scream (1973): written by Joan Torres, Raymond Koenig, and Maurice Jules; directed by Bob Kelljan; starring William Marshall (Blacula/ Prince Mamuwalde), Don Mitchell (Justin), Pam Grier (Lisa), Michael Conrad (Sheriff Harley), and Richard Lawson (Willis): Shaggy, uneven, immensely enjoyable sequel to Blacula moves the action to New Orleans, where an ambitious voodoo, um, guy resurrects Blacula (ie. Prince Mamuwalde) from the bones a fellow voodoo practitioner has stashed under the floorboards. I guess evidence control at the LAPD lost track of Blacula's bones after the end of the first Blacula movie.

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.

30 Days of Night (2007)

30 Days of Night (2007): adapted from the Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith comic book by Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, and Brian Nelson; directed by David Slade; starring Josh Hartnett (Eben), Melissa George (Stella), and Danny Huston (Marlow the Lead Vampire): The Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith comic book had a great concept that would have been a lot greater had the comic book been set in, say, 1930 rather than the late 1990's. 

That concept is that vampires show up in Barrow, Alaska once the sun goes down for its annual 30-day night and slaughter all the inhabitants. Of course, the real Barrow, Alaska isn't much more isolated when the sun goes down that it is when the sun's up -- daily flights continue, and people continue to phone and email their friends and family who are not in Barrow, Alaska. In 30 Days of Night, nightfall brings an end to flights, a mass exodus from Barrow, and apparently a complete lack of people outside Barrow who would wonder why no one has heard from Barrow for weeks.

It just doesn't work in the movie or the comic once one thinks about it for, say, 30 seconds. But we'll give the film-makers their curiously isolated Northern town and look at how the movie works with the concept.

Um, not that well. 30 Days of Night was shot in New Zealand, and it shows -- only rarely does it seem plausible that these people are stranded in the dark and cold with angry vampires. The film-makers only rarely bother showing people's breath, compounding the problem. Giant fires erupt, burning everything around them... but not melting any snow. And so on, and so forth. 

Josh Hartnett and Melissa George, as the estranged couple who are also the only law enforcement that survives the vampire clan's first wild night, are dutiful but that's about it. The townspeople under siege by the vampires are a pretty bloodless lot (Heh heh!), leaving the viewer with no one to care about. The vampires themselves, led by a very good Danny Huston, are somewhat interesting. They speak an invented vampire language all the time, shriek a lot, and have facial prosthetics that make most of them unsettlingly resemble sharks.

The plot lurches from set-piece to set-piece, leaving one to wonder how we got to Day 29 by the end, or how the vampires failed to search that attic or that building for the preceding 28 days. We also have to endure a number of Mythbusters moments, including crude oil that ignites easily by having a match thrown into it and a sun rising in the North. Good times. Not recommended.

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 3 (2013)

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 3 (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

The third and weakest paperback volume of the Collected Basil Copper does allow the reader of the previous two volumes to survey the writer in full, and here that writer is in decline but still intermittently strong and vital.

An Interview with Basil Copper by Johnny Mains.
Introduction  (Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume 3) by Christopher Fowler.

• When Greek Meets Greek (1997): Vague, disturbing slow-burn revisionist vampire novella.
• Line Engaged (1999): We've seen the twist more than once.
• One for the Pot (1999): One of those 'The killer is really...' stories, short and mostly sweet.
• In a Darkling Wood (1999): Absolutely loopy period piece involving black magic in the 18th-century English countryside. The last 20 pages are weird but utterly unconvincing.
• The Grass (1999): A piece of juvenalia written when Copper was 14.
• Riding the Chariot (1999): Psychological horror flips over and crashes over the last few hasty, unconvincing pages.
• Final Destination (1999): Technically, the final line makes this horror story a 'Paul Harvey.'
• The Obelisk (1999): Unconvincing tale of invasion from an alternate Earth.
• Out There (1999): Until the last three pages or so, "Out There" is up there with Copper's superior, earlier stories along similar lines, "Shaft Number 247" and "The Flabby Men." The last three pages are startlingly rushed and ridiculous, but the rest of the story is very satisfying.
• The Summerhouse (1999): A creaky tale of a child's revenge on a father completely loses its way as the events are explained to us over the last couple of paragraphs.
• As the Crow Flies (2002): Mildly interesting tale of a crow that hates a guy, but so long.
• Poetic Justice (2002): Almost a story fragment about the evils of vivisection.
• Ill Met By Daylight (2002): Fun, M.R. Jamesian tale of a graveyard haunted by... what, exactly?
• Charing Cross-Dover-Charing Cross (2010): Very much a Twilight Zone fantasy of revenge.
• There Lies the Danger ... (2002): A real time-waster about rejuvenation treatments leads to a real dud of a final line. 
• Queen Bee (2005): Mildly interesting tale of a bee that loves a guy, or maybe hates him..
• Death of a Nobody (2005): Yes, another one of Copper's 'Paul Harvey' stories that eventually reveals it's about a real, historical personage. Zzz.
• Reflections (2005): There's an evil mirror in this overlong story about... an evil mirror that belonged to a real historical personage!
• The White Train (2005): Holocaust revenge story is very, very familiar.
• Hunted by Wolves (2005): Science-fiction background adds nothing to a story about a guy hiding in a tree from some super-wolves.
• Storm Over Stromjolly (2005): Dud of a revenge story... with a twist!
• The Silver Salamander (2005): Very slow thriller about a man, his mistress, her husband, and a piece of jewelry.
• Voices in the Water (2005): Fine, building piece is technically Lovecraftian in its monsters. Not a bad story to finish a career on.

Overall: Lightly recommended, and best read after the first two collections.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Shadow of the Vampire (2000): written by Steven Katz; directed by E. Elias Merhige; starring Willem Dafoe ('Max Schreck'), John Malcovich (F.W. Murnau), Cary Elwes (Fritz Wagner), Udo Kier (Albin Grau), and Catherine McCormack (Greta): What if that guy who played the spooky vampire in the classic German silent movie Nosferatu (1922) were actually a vampire? That's the premise of Shadow of the Vampire.

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.

Vampires, Deserts, Forests, and Christmas

Dracula (1931): adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from the play by Garrett Fort adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker; directed by Tod Browning; starring Bela Lugosi (Dracula), Helen Chandler (Mina), David Manners (John Harker), Dwight Frye (Renfield), and Edward Van Sloan (Van Helsing): This stagey, bloodless Dracula was a big hit in 1931. It has the hallmarks of early sound film -- that super-heavy, static sound camera pretty much necessitated a nearly immobile, stagey shot. 

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.

John Carpenter's Vampires (1998): adapted by Don Jakoby from the novel by John Steakley; directed by John Carpenter; starring James Woods (Jack Crow), Daniel Baldwin (Montoya), Sheryl Lee (Katrina), Thomas Ian Griffith (Valek), Tim Guinee (Father Guiteau), and Maximillian Schell (Cardinal Alba): One of John Carpenter's crappier offerings. Oh, sure, it has its moments. But it's crippled by a totally uninteresting vampire antagonist (Thomas Ian Griffith), sloppy writing, and the perplexing choice to have Daniel Baldwin play a character named 'Montoya,' complete with dyed-black hair to, I suppose, trick the audience into thinking Baldwin is Hispanic. The treatment of women is a bit... problematic, given that women in this movie are either prostitutes or vampires (or in Sheryl Lee's case, both).  I was entertained, but not a lot. Lightly recommended.

Krampus (2015): written by Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields, and Todd Casey; directed by Michael Dougherty; starring Adam Scott (Tom), Toni Collette (Sarah), David Koechner (Howard), Emjay Anthony (Max), and Conchata Ferrell (Aunt Dorothy): Michael Dougherty's ode to Gremlins isn't as good as Gremlins (which was also set at Christmas), which may be more an indictment of studio interference than anything else. Krampus, which visits the Germanic anti-Santa Claus on a small American town that has forgotten the meaning of Christmas, needs sharper editing in its first half, which seems to run on forever while we wait for Anti-Claus to show up.

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.

The Forest (2016): written by Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai; directed by Jason Zada; starring Natalie Dormer (Sara/ Jess Price) and Taylor Kinney (Aiden): Dull film set mostly in Japan's 'Suicide Forest' (but filmed in Serbia) wastes a solid turn by Natalie Dormer as twin sisters. That this movie is actually inferior to the straight-to-cable, bafflingly titled The Last Halloween/ Grave Halloween is an extraordinary feat of wasted opportunity. Among other things, features characters following a river by walking away from said river at a 90-degree angle. OK! Not recommended.

What We Do In The Shadows (2014)

What We Do In The Shadows: written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi; starring Jemaine Clement (Vladislav), Taika Waititi (Viago), Jonny Brugh (Deacon), Cori Gonzalez-Macuer (Nick), Stu Rutherford (Stu), Ben Fransham (Petyr), and Jackie van Beek (Jackie) (2014): Hilarious fake documentary from the people who brought you Flight of the Conchords centered on the exploits of four vampires rooming together in the Greater Wellington Area of New Zealand. There are jarring moments of violence throughout, but the movie overall is surprisingly genial in its portrayal of the vampires and their kith and kin. 

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.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954): Matheson's first novel begat Night of the Living Dead which begat pretty much every zombie apocalypse of the last 50 years on TV, in movies, and in print. While I Am Legend has been adapted for the screen three times, no one has ever captured its portrayal of abject loneliness. Humanity may have been devastated by a plague of vampirism, but protagonist Robert Neville's tortured thoughts and actions make the novel special as a work of literature and not just as a massive cultural influence.

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.

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988)

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988): Babylon 5 creator  and long-time Spider-man writer J. Michael Straczynski has also written three horror novels over the years, with this being the first. It almost seems parodically like a Stephen King novel at points. It's laced with portentous and generally pretentious quotes at the beginning and at each section break, which is very much a King trademark (lest we miss the point,  Straczynski quotes King on the novel's main epigraph page). It's set in small-town Maine, it involves a former resident of that town as a child returning as an adult, and it involves an ancient evil awakening and transforming townspeople into monsters. Yes, it bears more than a passing resemblance to King's Salem's Lot, only with possession-crazy demons rather than vampirism as the culprit. 

The cast of characters who battle the evil includes a struggling writer, a Roman Catholic priest, and a medical doctor. OK, that's also quite a bit like the good guys in Salem's Lot. But wait, the protagonist has a wide array of psychic and telekinetic powers with which to battle the evil. So it's like Salem's Lot mashed up with Firestarter, The Shining, and The Dead Zone. There's also quite a bit of It. And there are Native American tribes mixed in because you can't have an American horror novel without a mysterious location tied into Native American spirituality.

Basically, if you haven't gotten enough Stephen King, Maine-based horror over the years, this novel may be for you. Straczynski offers generally well-drawn, sympathetic characters. The antagonist leaves a bit to be desired -- its speechifying, when it comes, is something of a disappointment. There's also a description of the Thing in its final form that really, really seems to anticipate South Park's ManBearPig. Snakes, cockroaches, and what appear to be malevolent, wall-crawling lobsters (well, it is Maine) show up in such a cursory fashion as obstacles to our heroes at the end that they seem to have accidentally wandered in from an Indiana Jones movie. 

And it's interesting to see a Wild Talent novel collided with a horror novel in this way, at least at the end when a full array of telepathic and telekinetic powers are needed to combat the antagonist. There's maybe a bit too much superhero in the main protagonist, but he's a relatively likable fellow for all that he's a Chosen One in the long tradition of genre Chosen Ones (though the Chosen One tends more to the epic fantasy and science fiction areas of genre).

The gem of characterization is the Roman Catholic priest, however, who takes a beating without ever losing his stubborn dignity. Why do atheists write the best characters of faith? In any case, I enjoyed the novel, though there's nothing that really stands out about it. Lightly recommended.

Blacula! (1972)

Blacula: written by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig; directed by William Cain; starring William Marshall (Blacula/Mamuwalde), Vonetta McGee (Tina/Luva), Denise Nicholas (Michelle), Thalmus Rasulala (Dr. Gordon Thomas) and Gordon Pinsent (Lt. Jack Peters) (1972): Blacula may be a cheesy slice of 1970's blaxploitation, but it's a lot of fun. It's also got a terrific performance in the title role by William Marshall, a stage actor otherwise best known in genre circles for playing computer genius Richard Daystrom in the original series Star Trek episode "The Ultimate Computer."

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.

The Horror of Dracula (a.k.a. Dracula) (1958)

The Horror of Dracula (a.k.a. Dracula): adapted by Jimmy Sangster from the novel by Bram Stoker; directed by Terence Fisher; starring Peter Cushing  (Doctor Van Helsing), Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), Michael Gough (Arthur Holmwood), Melissa Stribling (Mina), Carol Marsh (Lucy), John Van Eyssen (Jonathan Harker), and Olga Dickie (Gerda) (1958): Deft hyper-condensation of Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel introduced the horrors of England's Hammer Studios to the world -- along with actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Their appearances in Star Wars and (for Lee alone) the Lord of the Rings movies can be traced directly to their beloved work in movies such as Horror of Dracula.

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.

The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2009-2011)

The Strain: Book I of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2009): Apparently, the new F/X series based on this vampire trilogy is something of a slow-moving mess. That's too bad, as this book and the next two may have flaws, but being slow-moving isn't one of them.

Guillermo del Toro seems to have come up with most of the concepts, monster designs, and all-around ickiness for the series, with thriller writer Hogan supplying the actual prose. It's a pretty good match, as del Toro's main flaw in his film work has been the occasional aimlessness of his plotting.

The Strain builds to a climax that really sets the stage for greater, more apocalyptic events to come. The chief villain is a vampire known only as the Master, one of seven Vampire Ancients who have existed since pre-history. With the help of an extremely unscrupulous zillionaire named Eldritch Palmer (a nod to Philip K. Dick's malevolent cyborg Palmer Eldritch), the Master comes to New York to break the long truce with the other six Ancients and take over the world.

Against the Master are set a Van Helsing figure -- Setrakian, a survivor of the Holocaust who first encountered the Master at Treblinka -- and a ragtag group that also includes Ephraim Goodweather, a top-ranking doctor with the Centres for Disease Control; Nora Hernandez, his female co-worker; Gus, a Hispanic gang-banger; and Fet, a New York exterminator.

The Strain focuses on the quasi-scientific aspects of the vampire plague, while dropping hints throughout that these are nonetheless not simply the products of the world's worst Ebola outbreak. Scenes set beneath the streets of New York and in its increasingly vampire-infested bedroom communities are the strongest. Hogan keeps the plot zipping along while also doing a fairly strong job of arousing sympathy for both our heroes and for the unfortunate victims of the Strain.

As the first book of a trilogy, The Strain asks more questions than it answers. But the questions are pretty interesting. And the mix of science and, well, magic, suggests a world in which supernatural forces must occasionally work through scientific means to achieve their ends. The vampires have a viral pathology that's fairly well-explored herein, in the manner of Richard Matheson's landmark 'rational' vampire novel I Am Legend. But it's in service to something from Outside human and scientific experience. The scientific explanations for the efficacy of silver and UV-C rays against the vampires don't fully explain the speed with which silver and sunlight work in dispatching them.

As in his work on Cronos and Blade 2, del Toro heavily invests in de-eroticizing the vampire and returning it to its plague-bearing, rotting, drooling roots. The vampires here share some physical traits with his super-vampires in Blade 2. However, the squalid pathos of the turned also echoes some scenes in Cronos -- these are vampires who foul themselves while eating, and rapidly lose their sexual organs as the cancer-like apparatus of the vampire physiology takes hold. Shiny and sparkly they are not. Recommended.


The Fall: Book II of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2010): The vampire apocalypse accelerates in the second book of The Strain Trilogy, with lots of ickiness and tragedy for all. The supernatural starts to assert itself, as we gradually see that while the vampire plague seems to be viral in nature, it's supernatural in origin and intent.

There are a lot of nice set-pieces here, ripe for visual interpretation. One of the threads -- that the Master has learned new ways to be cruel from humanity -- begins to come to the forefront. So, too, the weaknesses of his human opponents, who are themselves compromised by their fear for their relatives, by old age, by alcoholism, and by ignorance of the Master's origins.

Part of the novel involves the quest to secure an ancient book that explains everything you need to know about vampires and how to kill them. Thankfully, the quest for this item is handled in a refreshingly off-beat but pragmatic way: the book is up for auction at a major New York auction house. It's these touches of the mundane that help make the second volume stronger in many ways than the first. Recommended.


The Night Eternal: Book III of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2011): This is the end. The Master, his vampires, and his human collaborators have won. Much of the Earth has been enslaved. Society continues to function under a pall of nuclear winter which has blotted out the sun for the most part. Inspired by his experience with the Nazis, the Master has created concentration camps to provide his vampires with a reliable source of liquid nourishment. People still live and work outside the camps, either as collaborators or as the cowed servants of the Vampire elite. The world is now one big factory slaughterhouse.

But the Resistance lives on, outnumbered and outgunned. The surviving protagonists of the first two books have been bloodied and beaten. The Master has now survived two attacks that should have killed him, were he simply a vampire like all the other vampires. Madness, alcoholism, and in-fighting plague the surviving rebels as much as the vampires do. Ephraim Goodweather, nominally the leader of the Resistance, has almost succumbed to alcohol-fueled despair when the novel opens. Can he get off the mat?

The supernatural elements introduced in Book Two now become ascendant, as del Toro and Hogan's narrative begins to resemble The Lord of the Rings more than anything else (and remember that del Toro was going to direct The Hobbit movies before he bowed out, and retains a screen-writing credit on them). The book delves into the secret history of vampires, thanks to the book that was the quest-item of The Fall. There is a way to end vampirism forever, one that the Master himself has shown them in the way he eliminated the other six Vampire Ancients at the end of Book Two. It's time to nuke it out to duke it out!

Even with a certain number of scenes of psychological anguish and equivalence on the part of several characters, the plot of The Night Eternal moves quickly and efficiently towards its climax, with a few enjoyable stops in the realms of myth and legend. The Master's origin story is bizarre and striking, as is the explanation for all the weaknesses of vampires derived from that tale. I was entertained. Recommended.

Vampires Like Us

I, Vampire: written by J.M. DeMatteis, Bruce Jones, Dan Myshkin, Gary Cohn, and Mike Barr; illustrated by Tom Sutton, Paris Cullins, Joe Kubert, Mike Kaluta, and others (1981-83; collected 2011): DC's first foray into an ongoing vampire series appeared in the soon-to-be-defunct House of Mystery back in the early 1980's. It shares a few attributes with Marvel's earlier Tomb of Dracula and Blade vampire mythos, but looks a lot more like the obvious forerunner to TV shows that include Angel and Being Human.

400-year-old 'good' vampire Andrew Bennett wages a war against Mary, Queen of Blood, a vampire he himself created just after being 'turned' himself. He's got two faithful human companions. She's got thousands of vampires and humans at her command. Fun times!

J.M. deMatteis created the character along with artist Tom Sutton. Sutton remained on the series for pretty much its entire run, but deMatteis was gone after about eight issues. The next third of the series was written by Bruce Jones, who moved the proceedings into more traditional horror and ditched the supporting cast. Dan Myshkin and Gary Cohn came on board for the final third of the series, and returned it to its original format.

Like most 'good' vampires, Andrew Bennett is a bit of a Gloomy Gus, plagued by guilt over the sins he's committed as a vampire. A host of complications would soon ensue, from a lengthy time-travelling storyline to a mysterious plague that starts wiping out vampires. Bennett keeps his personal blood supply in wine bottles. Is this really a good idea from a food-preservation stand-point?

The deMatteis- and Myshkin and Cohn-scripted portions are much stronger than the Jones section, which at points becomes one of the most depressing horror comics ever, and one that I'm surprised made it through the Comics Code Authority at points. Because nothing says Comics Code like having a normal 10-year-old boy accidentally staked through the heart.

Sutton's art remains strong throughout whether he's pencilling or inking others -- he was always much more suited to the horror genre than anything else, as he's got a decent eye for both the grotesque and the fantastic. The covers for the series, by comic greats Joe Kubert and Michael Kaluta, are terrific. Recommended.

Reassuring Tales (2006) by T.E.D. Klein

Reassuring Tales (2006) by T.E.D. Klein, containing the following stories: Camera Shy (1988); Growing Things (1999); Curtains for Nat Crumley (1996); Magic Carpet (1976); One Size Eats All (1993); Ladder (1990); Well-Connected (1987); S.F. (1975); They Don't Write 'em Like This Anymore: A TV Treatment in Two Versions (1989); and The Events at Poroth Farm (1972).

Oh, T.E.D. Klein. One of the four or five great editors of horror of the past fifty years. Writer of a handful of the scariest novellas ever written. Writer of one great horror novel, The Ceremonies (1984), which should be read by anyone who enjoys reading literate horror. And so, so, so writer's-blocked since the mid-1980's, though rumour has had it for years that lurking somewhere in Klein's house is a lengthy, unfinished horror novel which may yet be completed and see the light of day.

This relatively recent volume collects pretty much every piece of short fiction not collected in Klein's cyclopean masterpiece of a collection of four novellas, 1985's Dark Gods. And Reassuring Tales is for Klein completists, really, and perhaps no one else. Though the great, early novella that Klein would expand into The Ceremonies, "The Events at Poroth Farm," is indeed collected here.

Some of the other stories are close to being juvenilia ("S.F.") while others are short gimmick stories ("One Size Eats All"). Klein's introduction to the volume is hilariously, almost troublingly self-deprecating -- if you've ever wanted to read a writer mercilessly trashing his own work even when it's decent material, then this is the collection for you.

But, "The Events at Poroth Farm." Pop pop! Some intelligent person at a publishing house great or small or in-between needs to publish a new edition of Dark Gods, with "...Poroth Farm" installed in its more reasonable place among those four other great novellas. Klein's output has been relatively tiny, but he still looms as a giant over American horror fiction for this exact handful of novellas and that one dynamite novel (and the editorship of Twilight Zone magazine for five years in the 1980's). Recommended for the novella, and for Klein completists.

Let Me In (aka Let the Right One In) (2004) by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Let Me In (aka Let the Right One In) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated from the original Swedish by Ebba Segerberg (2004): Well, if you're going to do a vampire love story, this would be one of the models for how to do it. 

Oskar, a bullied 12-year-old boy in a Scarborough-like suburb in Sweden in 1981, makes friends with a peculiar girl who only comes out at night and, initially, smells really horrible. The girl calls herself Eli. She's a vampire. Things good and bad begin to happen. Mostly good for Oskar and Eli, mostly bad for everybody else.

Lindqvist, who adapted his own novel for the immensely good Swedish film adaptation Let the Right One In, is well-versed in the horror genre without slavishly imitating anything. There are sly direct nods to Stephen King and James Herbert, along with allusions to H.P. Lovecraft's malign geometries, Richard Matheson's vampire classic I am Legend, and Shirley Jackson's sinister Hill House.

Like King, Lindqvist has published a first novel concerned with the traumatic effects of bullying and social ostracism on children. This is a distaff Carrie, though it also examines the effects of a vampire's presence on a small community, as did King's second published novel, Salem's Lot. The superficial resemblances are bolstered by Lindqvist's interest in the intersection of the supernatural and the mundane, and by his sympathetically drawn characters.

There's a bleakness to many sections of this novel that goes beyond anything in early King, though -- the secret origin of Eli, never shown in the movie, horrifies and repels. So too does the back-story of Eli's middle-aged companion at the beginning of the novel. Unspeakable rites glimpsed in Salem's Lot are here fully shown. Lindqvist's changes to the climax of the novel when adapting it for film are perfectly understandable -- I'm not sure what happens could be shown, or even implied, in a film meant for a wide release.

Throughout, we gain understanding and sympathy for lonely Oskar and lonely Eli and a few other characters, most notably Tommy, an apartment-mate of Oskar's who, while a tough teenager, isn't a bully, and is really Oskar's only friend when the novel starts, despite their difference in age. Oskar's enemies don't elicit much sympathy, but Lindqvist does firmly establish where their concluding, homicidal rage will come from, if it comes. There's empathy for the little monsters, but they're still monsters. Unlike Eli, they're not doing the things they do in order to eat.

Much of the engagement with the supernatural in the novel comes from either the young or the old, the latter represented by a loose-knit group of retirees and socially excluded men (and a woman) in their middle age. The liminal, the excluded, the forgotten and never-remembered, can see what's happening more clearly than the adult world and all the authorities. Eli murders decent people in order to survive. Will she be caught? Do we want her to be? Highly recommended.

Continent of Vampires

The Twelve by Justin Cronin (2012): Cronin's first book in his epic-apocalyptic-science-fantasy-vampire trilogy, The Passage (2010), was an enjoyable mess that derailed about two-thirds of the way through as it suddenly transformed into a pitch for a Hollywood CGI spectacle. Cronin had won literary awards for his mainstream fiction, but The Passage was his first entry into genre work. I think a better editor could have really elevated that work, in part by cutting about a hundred pages. The Twelve is the second book in that trilogy.

The Twelve is a better book in pretty much every way, though the horror elements have all but disappeared, replaced by a greater focus on epic fantasy and survival fiction and even a well-imagined dystopia. The battle between North America's surviving humans and the vampire-like armies of The Twelve -- the twelve super-vampires created in a Black Ops science experiment gone awry in 2015 -- continues in the future one-hundred years from now, and (roughly) the present-day, and twenty years before the (sort of) contemporary future of the narrative. And there's a frame narrative that will remind people of The Handmaid's Tale, notes from an academic conference approximately 1000 years after the events of the novel. Man, that's a lot of timelines to keep track of.

One problem from the previous novel remains, while a new one rises in prominence. The returning problem lies with Cronin's decision to divide the narrative among those various timelines spanning 1000 years. This doesn't help narrative momentum. More importantly, it's become obvious by this point that the division exists so that Cronin can keep some vital information about the origins of the vampire plague hidden until the climactic pages of the third book. It's a clumsy way to create suspense, and I think a good editor could have fixed this. And because of the frame narrative, we know that things must have turned out OK. See what I mean about dramatic problems?

The (mostly) new narrative problem lies with God. The Lord of the Rings probably represents the ideal form of how to have an epic fantasy in which God (or a God-like being, in that case Eru or Iluvatar) has rigged the game so as to ensure the triumph of Good without this fact detracting from the dramatic tension or, indeed, being apparent to the reader without at least some critical consideration of the events of the novel. Good ultimately wins in Lord of the Rings because good people -- most importantly Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam -- were in the right place at the right time and made the right choices. In a world run by a benevolent God, this is not a coincidence. But it should probably look like one because if it doesn't, even the illusion of free will vanishes.

Now imagine if, instead of Sam and Frodo having a conversation on the steps of Cirith Ungol about the story of Beren and Luthien and their own inclusion in that story that never really ended, we instead had five pages of Sam and Frodo listing all the coincidences and chance meetings that had occurred up to that point in the novel before realizing that these couldn't all be coincidences and that, instead, some higher power was moving them around the chess board. Now imagine this same sort of conversation happening with every character in The Lord of the Rings, every 50 pages or so, just in case you hadn't had the point hammered home enough that there were no coincidences. Throw in some scenes from the afterlife, too, so that we know characters don't simply die.

All this God stuff really saps the drama from the narrative even as it also verges on the metafictional. This is a work of fiction, after all, and the characters are pretty much going where the author tells them to. See, he's sorta like a god! No wonder they keep having these fortunate chance meetings, and no wonder even things that initially seem bad often serve ultimately to advance the cause of Good! So metaphysics becomes metanarrative.

As Cronin is a talented writer, at least in the stylistic sense, I imagine at least some of these problems will work themselves out. Right now, because of the big book deal he signed for this trilogy, we're watching him work them out on the big stage with a big advance whereas other genre writers have at least been lucky enough, if they were being published, to figure these things out in paperback originals and rejected novels.

The novel does do a number of things well -- the characters are well-drawn, even the terrible ones: Guilder, the CIA agent whose secret project helped start this whole mess, comes across as a convincingly self-deluded tin-pot dictator whose "best intentions" have been polluted by his essential qualities of self-interest and self-pity. Cronin also manages some terse, tense action set-pieces, though things seem to go a bit too easily in the novel's concluding battle with the eleven remaining lieutenant Virals. The uber-Viral has yet to be seen in his/Its entirety.

In summation, I'm glad I've read the first two novels in this trilogy, flawed and occasionally annoying as they are. I'll be interested to see if Cronin remains a genre writer after the third novel, or if he returns to mainstream fiction, hopefully in either case with some lessons learned. Recommended.

Small-town Bringdown

'Salem's Lot: adapted by Peter Filardi from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Mikael Salomon; starring Rob Lowe (Ben Mears), Andre Braugher (Matt Burke), Donald Sutherland (Straker), Samantha Mathis (Susan Norton), Robert Mammone (Dr. James Cody), Dan Byrd (Mark Petrie), James Cromwell (Father Callahan) and Rutger Hauer (Barlow) (2004): Very enjoyable, mildly unfaithful TNT miniseries adaptation of King's vampire novel could use another 80 minutes (which would have made it a 6-hour rather than a 4-hour miniseries). Most of that extra time could have been beneficially front-loaded: as is, we've really only scratched the surface with the main characters before we're headlong into the vampire narrative.

The most obvious change is that the story is now set in 2004 rather than 1975. There are the usual, necessary character conflations when dealing with a long novel (one sub-plot involving marital infidelity has been folded into the story of Dr. James Cody) and several pretty effective shifts made so as to show the viewer certain bad behaviours rather than explain different, more complicated behaviours, as the novel can do and a movie generally can't without a lengthy bit of spoken-word exposition. The small town of Salem's Lot comes across as more blatantly sinful than in the book, but that's partially because of the narrative compression. In any case, the evil from without still manifests itself at least partially as a mirror image of the evil within.

Rob Lowe does nice, nuanced work as protagonist Ben Mears -- watch this and an episode of Parks and Recreation to realize what a sharp actor he's become, handicapped though he is by being prettier than most of his female leads. Andre Braugher -- as Van Helsingesque English Teacher Matt Burke -- is solid and dependable in a somewhat underwritten role, while Samantha Mathis, Dan Byrd and Robert Mammone also do solid work as the unlikely, reluctant, disbelieving vampire fighters. Donald Sutherland plays the vampire's human henchman as a somewhat antic lunatic, more Renfield than the novel's version. Rutger Hauer wisely underplays Barlow the vampire, and the miniseries doesn't force him to deliver some of the novel's Dracula-esque Barlow lines, easily the weakest part of King's novel.

The filmmakers drop King's homage to Tolkien -- in the novel, crosses and holy water glow "with an elvish light" when a vampire is near. I think that's unfortunate, as one scene that uses that glow in the novel seems perfectly suited to filming (Father Callahan's confrontation with Barlow at the Petrie household). Creatures crawling across ceilings also don't have the same zing as they once did. There is something cool about the movie's depiction of vampire death, though, drawing as the visual effect does on a deflating balloon sputtering around.

Overall, there are a lot of good scares here and, because of changes made from the novel, a certain number of surprises awaiting King readers as well. Maybe the smartest decision made was to incorporate stretches of the novel's third-person narration as the first-person narration of Ben Mears. It's very effective, especially during the movie's opening and closing scenes. Recommended.

Don't Let Them In

'Salem's Lot by Stephen King (1975): Stephen King's second published novel did at least two new things I can think of: it collided the vampire novel with a sweeping character study of an entire town (as many have noted, it's Dracula meets Peyton Place); and it codified the role of the Familiar in a vampire's life in a way that many subsequent novelists treat as if it were derived from vampire mythology. King extrapolates the role of Straker in this novel from Renfield in Dracula and Renfield/Harker's altered role in the Bela Lugosi Dracula.

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.

Horror Lessons

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (2011): edited by Stephen Jones (2012) containing

Ramsey Campbell - Holding The Light
Christopher Fowler - Lantern Jack
Paul Kane - Rag And Bone
Gemma Files - Some Kind Of Light Shines From Your Face
Joel Lane - Midnight Flight
Tim Lebbon - Trick Of The Light
Gregory Nicoll - But None Shall Sing For Me
Alison Littlewood - About The Dark
Daniel Mills - The Photographer's Tale
Mark Samuels - The Tower
Peter Atkins - Dancing Like We're Dumb
Simon Strantzas - An Indelible Stain Upon The Sky
Joan Aiken - Hair
Steve Rasnic Tem - Miri
Geeta Roopnarine - Corbeaux Bay
Michael Marshall Smith - Sad, Dark Thing
Robert Silverberg - Smithers And The Ghost Of The Thar
Reggie Oliver - Quieta Non Movere
Joe R. Lansdale - The Crawling Sky
Conrad Williams - Wait
Simon Kurt Unsworth - The Ocean Grand, North West Coast
Evangeline Walton - They That Have Wings
Thana Niveau - White Roses, Bloody Silk
John Ajivide Lindqvist - The Music Of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer
Ramsey Campbell - Passing Through Peacehaven
David Buchan - Holiday Home

　
Enjoyable and somewhat controversial entry in Mammoth's Best New Horror series because of editor Stephen Jones' introduction, critical as it was of certain award winners in genre competitions, among other things. The anthology's lengthy Year in Horror and Necrology sections have also stirred controversy for being too...long.
　

Apparently, long anthologies are a problem for people reading things on e-readers, and make them want to stop reading because, um, I guess they're really stupid and lazy. When I don't want to read the introductory and framing material in an anthology, I generally just skip past it. Apparently this represents some kind of terrible burden for both e-readers and a few people using paper, as I assume their arms have atrophied to be more like a T. Rex's arms because they're all hunched over and texting all the time in between keeping their heads in their asses.

Seriously, people? I can think of a lot of major criticisms of this anthology series, but the non-fictional material isn't the source of any of them.
　

I don't know that there's anything surpassingly disturbing in this year's selection, but there also aren't any real stinkers. A couple of stories end with clunky twists, but that's about it. And not only do you get two Ramsey Campbell stories, you also get two posthumous publications, a nice little Joan Aiken story and a marvelous Evangeline Walton novella involving some particularly awful figures out of Greek mythology. Recommended, unless you're an idiot with little T. Rex arms.

A Clutch of Vampires by/edited by Raymond T. McNally (1970): Enjoyable anthology/commonplace book of fiction and historical accounts of vampires dating back to classical Greece. The whole thing is dominated by (most of) J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," the first great work of vampire fiction. What one gathers from the various non-fiction accounts from a dozen different cultures is that vampires really have odd habits in some countries. The ones that try to kill you by lying on you are surely the most annoying; the Chinese vampires that can't make 90-degree turns are probably the easiest to thwart. Recommended.