Reflections of a Polymath in an Age of Specialists

I know it's been a long time since I updated here, but I've been busy with my DeviantArt and my Twitter, which has received bulk of my updates.

Yesterday, I bought the eagerly-awaited Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut. I've been waiting for this sucker since March 2009. First off, I want to say that the front cover is atrocious — a beveled yellow circle with a skull-and-crossbones and a blood splatter. And I thought the DVD covers for the Theatrical Cut and Director's Cut were uncreative! Seriously, what is this? Just because it has Tales of the Black Freighter you have to put a bland little skull-and-crossbones? Despite the awful front, the construction of the box set is beautiful. It's of high quality, with "The End Is Nigh" on the back, along with blood splatter and silhouette of the seaman's makeshift raft. The box folds out with a gorgeous Doomsday Clock and promotional posters of the all the Crimebusters inside. It has two DVD cases inside: One is the The Motion Comic, which means now I have two copies of this, and the fold-out case for the film DVDs, again with the ugly skull-and-crossbones, with Ozymandias, the Comedian, and Nite Owl II.




This third variation of the film integrated with the 2D-animated The Tales of the Black Freighter, starring by Gerard Butler, which is a symbolic meta-fiction describing the tragedy of Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt. I have to say a few sentences on Black Freighter itself. I do own the individual DVD, with the Under the Hood mockumentary, and as an animator myself, I cannot help but critique. The story itself is beautiful, the compositions are attractive, the acting is emotional, and the overall feel is wonderfully gritty and atmospheric. Because I really hate the Japanese anime stylization. It's overdone and overrated. It's a stylization that's in vogue, it's not timeless, and it definitely does not fit with the 1980s period. When you have character designs that are very detail-oriented and the studio is one a tight schedule, like this film was, the results are rarely good. I abhor the 3D water, ships, and other models; they stand out horrifically, like you're missing you're big toe. The animation goes from decent to godawful. It's very, very rushed. I would have much preferred Dave Gibbons' naturalistic comic book art style an, I feel, would have produced better results.

With all of that said, how does the Black Freighter work in the overall film? Extremely well, in fact! I adore the Director's Cut and I didn't think one could approve the film beyond. I was extremely surprised that I enjoyed the Ultimate Cut just equally to the Director's Cut. Some have complained that the film stops whenever the Black Freighter sections come in. In a way, yes, it does, but it still continues the story on quite well. I really love the extended footage with the two Bernies, the Knot-tops, Hollis Mason, and unmasked Walter Kovacs. I particularly loved when the Knot-tops harass Lil' Bernie, grabbing the comic book away from him, and became quite ominously threatening characters. Watching the two Bernies embrace (a metaphor to the Hiroshima lovers) when New York City was bombed, I cried. I really did cry, just as I did when I read the graphic novel. I do think it might have integrated better if the narration boxes and/or speech bubbles were used. Therefore you have a pop-up narration box with a Butler's voice over live-action footage and still work.

The commentaries are a delight. Director Zack Snyder sounds ill with a flu, so his voice is crackly, but still has the exuberant with a great love of the material. He's a trooper! Dave Gibbons, who illustrated the original graphic novel of Watchmen, is not as talkative as Zack. It feels like he's watching the film, sitting next to you on the sofa, and commenting here and there, enjoying himself. I'm actually a follower of Dave Gibbon's Twitter and messaged him on how much I enjoyed his commentary, expressing my opinion on the Ultimate Cut in several 140-character messages. I had no idea that he'd answer back! I was grinning from ear to ear for an hour!


I'd like to take the time to rant about something. I hate Digital Copy DVDs! When I buy a DVD I expect a special features. It's the reason why I buy them. I don't buy the DVD to get two versions of the same film. That's just stupid! What I want is special features! I really hope Digital Copies are just a vogue because it's really ruining the concept of DVDs for me. (See previous entries for a more complete rant on Digital Copies.)

Unfortunately, we get the bare minimum when it comes to special features:

11 (extended cut) video journals

My Chemical Romance's "Desolation Row" music video (which is I dislike)

"The Phenomenon: The Comic that Changed Comics" (which is basic, nothing really special)

"Real Super Heroes, Real Vigilantes" (boring!)

"Mechanics: Technologies of a Fantastic World" (which is cute)

The amazing Under the Hood mockumentary and its featurette, "Story Within A Story: The Books of Watchmen" (which is awesome)

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comics (which I already own)

But there are things missing in this edition. I don't get the option to see Tales of the Black Freighter as its own short, like in the separate Black Freighter released awhile ago. We don't have the Maximum Movie Mode, which was on the Director's Cut Blu-Ray, where the film would pause and director Zack Synder would come how and give his own personal commentary on the scene. I saw a preview of his on Amazon and I loved it. I really wish it was on here, but we're just given the simple audio commentaries. Hurm.

In conclusion, the Ultimate Cut is not for the general audience member. I recommend the Director's Cut for a regular viewer, but this is really meant for the fans! Those who can't get enough Watchmen! Enjoy!

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Mood of the Moment:  awake

Music of the Moment:  "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Media of the Moment:  Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut (2009).

Book of the Moment:  Watchmen: The Film Companion, by Peter Aperlo.

Food of the Moment:  Jell-O.

Lust of the Moment:  Walter Kovacs.

Research of the Moment:  Watchmen.

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "Prison's a prison" (Rorschach, Watchmen).

Welcome back to 31 Days of Horror! The countdown to Halloween continues and we still have a ton of films to get through, so let's get started...

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21 - A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) / WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1990)

“Slasher” films are a subgenre of horror that relies primarily on large body counts, with excessive blood and gore and sex, done by mindless killing machines. Typically, they have no plot, no character development, no suspense, no charm, no thought, no focus, no structure, as if it was made for middle school teens with tourette syndrome who somehow snuck into the R-rated theatre by making googly faces at the ushers. It’s popcorn entertainment and these films really give horror a bad name. However, to be fair, once in awhile, you can find a “slasher” that really impress you, and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise was the one that did it for me — and I’m going to talk about two films in particular which are essentially the same. I’m getting down and dirty with this one, so watch out:
     New Line Cinema is known as “the house that Freddy built.” Created by writer-director Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was the film that started it all and, unlike so many of the genre, this was surprisingly cerebral “mind fuck” film, taking full advantage of the “slasher” genre with a completely new and fresh approach. Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was a serial child molester-murderer with a razor glove who terrorized the suburbia town of Springwood and was burned alive by a mob of angry parents after he was released from prison by a technicality. However, he became something much worse. Years later, he sought revenge on the parents by violating the dreams of their now-teenage children. When he kills you in your dream, he kills you in real life; and the only way to defeat him is pull him out of the dream and to kill him in the real world, which the resourceful heroine Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) does. The film blurred the lines of reality and fantasy, where you’re never sure where the real world ends and the dream world begins and vice versa. Because he’s a dream figure, he can transform himself into anything, into your worst fears and enjoys every minute, and create anything as well, making the atmosphere creepy, the deaths creative, the visuals terrifying, and the villain extremely powerful because, no matter how much you try, you can’t resist sleep! However, the biggest and most fatal flaw about this film was the last five minutes: The production ran out of money and halted, and the original climax in the script could not be filmed, so it just ends abruptly, with little to no explanation, leaving the audience scratching their head in complete confusion! Subsequently, the five sequels were released, one by one, over a span of a decade, which spiraled down in quality each time, focusing more on cheesy comedy and moving further and further away from the scariness and intelligence of the original. And this is when Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) came in...
     Just when I thought the franchise had ran its course and Freddy could do no more, the seventh film New Nightmare blew me away! Wes Craven returned to the series after years of avoidance, with a bigger budget and more freedom, and he went out to “remake” the 1984 original film the way it was meant to me, as something completely original, being back the original cast whom are now 10 years older. The film takes the phrase “art imitating life” to a whole new meaning; it ran like a reality show (before they became popular) and a behind-the-scenes documentary in one, where the cast of the first film, including its crew and executives, are playing themselves in a pseudoistic real life setting: Robert Englund, as himself, has a become a horror icon by portraying “Freddy Krueger” in Nightmare on Elm Street films and questions his former co-star Heather Langenkamp, as herself, whose become an icon by playing “Nancy Thompson,” if she heard anything about a new Nightmare film project that Wes Craven, playing himself, has been secretly working on. Heather Langenkamp is asked by New Line Cinema producer Bob Shaye, as himself, if she would like to star in the new Nightmare film, but she is apprehensive about it. For months, she’s been getting death threats by a stalker who’s pretending to be Freddy Krueger, which has unnerved her so much that she’s been getting Freddy nightmares as well, but so is her 8-year-old son, Dillon. Heather soon realizes that has to come to terms that Freddy Krueger might actually be real and is after her son in order to get to her; and she has to enter her nightmares as “Nancy” in order to get Dillon back. Did you get all that?
     New Nightmare brought the character back to what Wes Craven originally intended to be, the personification of evil, by bringing him back to this original roots as a child molester-murderer. He’s darker, sicker, scarier, more menacing than ever before, and I was happy beyond all belief! Freddy Krueger has finally earned back his claws! And it brought back the original ending of the first film, with action and emotions and closure! The film was a praised by critics, but was box office failure. Audiences just didn’t like it, which was a damn shame; and, I feel, there were two main reasons behind this: (1) The Nightmare franchise is a series primarily remembered by its sequels. We were introduced to Freddy during the original film, primarily as kids who shouldn’t have been watching it in the first place, and for 10 years, for a solid decade, we watched the sequels, primarily as teenagers! Audiences were used to and were expecting “Freddy the Clown” — and we didn’t get it! This was “recon” before it existed! Nobody fuckin’ expected that! They didn’t want to be scared; they wanted to laugh! There’s a hypocrisy to this that just blows my mind! (2) Up to this point, nobody had ever seen a film like this; nothing like this had never been done! It was too original, too self-aware, too ahead of its time. It didn’t just push down the fourth wall, it shattered it! It was too real too soon! And a few years later, what happens? Wes Craven moved to Dimension Films and churned out Scream (1996), which was a blender re-packaging of New Nightmare, and it became an international blockbuster — bullshit, bullshit, buullllllllshit! I’m in a rare minority that considers Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was the best sequel and the best film of the entire franchise, beating the original by a whisker! I hoped beyond hope that this film was going to revitalize the series! No more jokes! No more clowns! Freddy is going to be a badass again, scary again, awesome again, and what the hell did we get? Freddy vs. Jason (2003)! Suck my nonexistent balls, Hollywood!

22 - GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)

Who ya gonna call? I religiously watched the films and cartoons, played the games, bought the toys, dressed up as them, I love the entire franchise! When I grew up, I wanted to be Ghostbuster (and marry Egon Spengler, but that’s beside the point), so it would have been a crime not to add this film to my list: After the university downsizes the parapsychology department, a group of geeky paranormal investigators move into business for themselves as paranormal exterminators, known as the “Ghostbusters,” which is made up of the sarcastic Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), the enthusiastic Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd), the technologically savvy Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), and the pragmatic Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). When the bewitching Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) discovers her refrigerator has become a portal into the spiritual dimension, our heroes come face to face with an ancient evil force with plans to raise hell in Manhattan to save the world from Armageddon.
     This “horror comedy” has it all, something from everyone — humor, thrills, spills, special effects, and a catchy theme song! Even the best films lose their edge after you see them a few times, but this one doesn’t! From the opening scares to the ending credits, this film consistently reels you in and, over the hundreds of times I’ve watched it in the 20+ years, it’s always makes me laugh! The film is perfection! Not only is it hilarious and enjoyable, it’s quotable! I don’t think there’s a week that goes by that I don’t quote this film in some manner. If you haven’t seen this film, I would think you lived in another dimension! It’s one of my top 10 favourite films, memorized it backwards and forwards, and on my list of “films to see before you die” — it’s that awesome, so check it out!

23 - H.P. LOVECRAFT FILMS, PART I

First off, I love H.P. Lovecraft, but until 1960s, his works were practically forgotten, were never reprinted, and were seldom adapted on celluloid — and, with the runaway success of Re-Animator in 1985, a surge of interest into his works came in full force and marked a large collection of Lovecraftian films, which continue on strongly even today. However, unlike the Roger Corman-Poe Films, as the stories have gone to public domain, the Lovecraft films don’t have fixed directors, actors, or studios, so I’m going to talk about my favourites:
     RE-ANIMATOR (1985) – Based on the short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, which were loosely based on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, Re-Animator (1985) is perhaps my favourite horror film and definitely one of my all-time favourite films, in the top 20 at least. Directed by Stuart Gordon, the story involves around Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a medical student obsessed with death, who develops the serum of green glowing ooze that brings the dead back to life in the form of zombies gone completely ballistic, with the help of Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), despite the pleas of his girlfriend Meg Halsey (Barbara Crampton) who distrusts West. Even though the formula doesn’t work too well, his plagiaristic professor wants to steal it and claim is as his own. It’s a horror, comedy, monster movie, and exploitation film in one; it’s fun, silly, sick, and witty, but what makes it really memorable is the character of Herbert West who completely steals the show! He’s a complete asshole, no nonsense, obsessed with his work that he would destroy anything and anyone his path — he’s a 1980s version of Peter Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein from the Hammer Horrors — and yet you can’t help but love him! Why can I say? I have a thing for mad scientists! The film, unfortunately, got an NC-17 due to its excessive gore and sexuality and was failure at the box office due to its limited release, so the success of the film came with the new video rental business, making it sleeper hit. The film spawned two sequels: Bride of Re-Animator (1990), a parody of Bride of Frankenstein (1935), is actually an excellent film, too, however Herbert was a slightly out-of-character, which miffed me, and is really the only real flaw of the film. The second sequel Beyond Re-Animator (2003) is a “meh” film — the story was boring, but Herbert was at least in-character; Herbert West is the only thing that made the film watchable for me.
     FROM BEYOND (1986) – After the success of Re-Animator comes another Lovecraftian tale based off the short story of the same name, directed by Stuart Gordon. The shy Dr. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), who assisted Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel) in creating a resonator with the intent to stimulate the pineal gland in a dormant part of the brain to create a sixth sense, is committed to an asylum for the murder of his superiour. His equally nerdy psychiatrist Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) wants to learn the truth, bring her shell-shocked patient face-to-face to the resonator again. Hoping to get an R rating this time around, blood and gore are at a minimum; instead, it was replaced by slime, which apparently grossed out audiences even more — why are people so damn fickle? I have to give praise to Jeffrey Combs as well: The characters of West and Tillinghast are complete opposites! In fact, I feel Combs is one of the most underrated actors; I consider him a true horror icon who deserves to be mentioned up with Lugosi, Karloff, Lorre, Price, Lee, Cushing, and Englund, so I hope one day, Jeffrey gets the credit he deserves.
     NECRONOMICON (1993) – Here’s a horror anthology of four Lovecraftian shorts: The film starts H.P. Lovecraft (Jeffrey Combs again), based on “The Library,” visiting a secret library to check out the legendary tome of evil Necronomicon, in research for his stories he’s writing; it’s a wraparound that unifies the three other stories into the omnibus: The first segment “The Drowned” follows the story of a house in which a man resurrected his dead wife and son with the help of the Necronomicon, directed by Christophe Gans of Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) fame. It’s grim but beautifully executed. The second segment “The Cold,” based on “Cold Air,” where a young runaway discovers the truth of a series of murders committed by a lonely, reclusive scientist with a freezing disease to gain immortality. Directed by Shusuke Kaneko, who’s known for Death Note: The Last Name (2006) and several Godzilla films, the segment is highlighted by its cast of David Warner, Gary Graham, and Dennis Christopher. However, I wished his section was longer because it came off as rushed and emotionally unsatisfying, but has a great twist in the end. The final segment is “Whispers” is about a gung-ho female cop who stumbles across the dark and forbidding underground lair of these ancient subterranean monsters with a voracious appetite for flesh and bone, directed Brian Yunza. This one is graphic, gory, and visceral. This is an enjoyable film, but it’s flawed and I can’t help but nitpick: One thing that made me scratch my head in confusion is that Lovecraft is writing all these stories around the 1930s, but why does “The Cold” take place in the ‘60s and “Whispers” in the ‘90s? I really don’t have an answer for that! Personally, I would have preferred if they kept it in the ‘40s or earlier because, I feel, the world needs more period horrors! Another weird thing is that Combs’ Lovecraft makeup made him looked like Bruce Campbell, so why didn’t they just hire Bruce Campbell? In fact, why couldn’t you just have Bruce Campbell as Lovecraft and Jeff Combs as the Librarian? Two of the sexiest men in horror in one film would have been totally awesome! Come on! Listen to the fangirl!

24 - H.P. LOVECRAFT FILMS, PART II

More from the imagination of writer H.P. Lovecraft:
     IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1994) – After the failure of Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), director John Carpenter returned to the horror genre with one of my favourite Lovecraft stories since Herbert West – Re-Animator. The film begins with the protagonist telling his story to his doctors (David Warner and John Glover) in a mental asylum: When Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), this century’s most widely-read horror author à la Stephen King, disappears, his publishing company Arcane, run by the very gruff-looking Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), enlists John Trent (Sam Neill), a freelance insurance investigator, to find him. Along with Arcane editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), Trent find Cane’s fictional town of Hobb’s End and then all hell breaks loose... The film is a powerful ride to the dark side where the line of fantasy and reality disappear, with a wonderful atmosphere of dread and madness, creating a stylish, intelligent, and insightful little horror tale with a great cast and a startling ending! Plagued with a lot “boo” scares, the gore and violence isn’t graphic, yet it’s certainly bizarre and bloody, which is just screams Carpenter, and it’s done with CGI, which is rare for ‘90s film.
     CASTLE FREAK (1995) – Full Moon Productions doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to their low-budget horrors, but they do rather well when it comes to Lovecraftian stories or anything with Jeffrey Combs. Loosely based off the short story “The Outsider,” bring back the Stuart Gordon-Jeffrey Combs-Barbara Crampton triumvirate of Re-Animator and From Beyond, this film revolves around the pitiable John Reilly (Combs), a former alcoholic whose wife Susan (Crampton) blames him for a car accident that blinded their daughter and killed their son, inherits an Italian castle from his long-lost aunt, only to find that there is a secret lurking deep inside of it. This is a grim and downbeat gothic horror, punctuated by intense gore, with a gorgeous dark atmosphere and a sad, sympathetic antagonist.
     DAGON (2001) – Strangely, this film is based more on the story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” than “Dagon,” but it stands as perhaps the first true adaptation of Lovecraft’s story than an inspiration. A boating accident off the coast of Spain sends Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden) and his girlfriend Bárbara (Raquel Meroño) to the decrepit fishing village of Imboca looking for help, but finds himself pursued by the entire town à la Night of the Living Dead when he uncovers they worship the ancient blood-drinking and flesh-eating god of the sea known as Dagon who’s now running the loose in Imboca. I think this is the first time I’ve heard the name “Cthulhu” mentioned on film since the “The Collect Call to Cathulhu” episode from The Real Ghostbusters animated series some 20 years ago. Unfortunately, because it deals so much in the Cthulhu Mythos, I don’t think this film as accessible to the non-Lovercraft fan, as they would probably scratch their head at the wacky idea of fish-people being somehow scary.
     THE CALL OF CTHULHU (2005) – Many fans have noted that there isn’t a Lovecraft story presented on film the way it was written, and that’s very true. His works are a genre of “weird fiction” that are long deemed unfilmable until first-time director Andrew Leman took up the challenge. This is an independent, low-budget 47-minute fan-film made by loyal group called the H.P.L. Historical Society that has won multiple international awards and has been touring film festivals all around the world to this every day. I’ve heard so much about this film that, when I finally found an official limited edition DVD at a horror convention, I bought it for $45 — that’s nearly a dollar a minute — and, I assure you, it’s totally worth it! (Today, one get the DVD for $13 on Amazon.) When a man (Matt Foyer) uncovers the ill-fated research of his late uncle, he comes to learn of a dangerous and enigmatic cult that worships a monstrous alien deity named Cthulhu. Through dreams, journals, and historical documents, via flashback within a flashback within a flashback within a flashback, the man uncovers a baffling string of inexplicable coincidences, and uncovers the truth behind the disappearance of a ship’s crew on an uncharted Pacific island of R’lyeh. This is the finest and most faithful adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s stories, done as though it had been produced in the 1920s, as a black-and-white silent film, in the style of a newsreel-like nightmare. It is an affectionate and endearing homage to the gothic silent horrors, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Faust (1926), and has all the stylistic elements of the era — the emphatic overacting, the pantomiming, the peculiar special effects (done without any CGI), the distorted cardboard sets, the German Expressionistic lighting, the experimental camera angles — contribute effectively towards evoking the dark and ominous atmosphere. The musical score adds a dramatic touch to the proceedings, particularly at the climax, which made my jaw drop when I saw it.

25 - MANHUNTER (1986) / SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

I have a great interest in abnormal psychology of serial killers. It’s a fascinating subject, so these two films are near and dear to my heart. The genius psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial murderer “Dr. Hannibal Lector” was voted by the American Film Institute to be the most memorable villain in film history at #1, appearing in five films based on four novels by author Thomas Harris. Although I’m not going to talk about the whole series, instead I wanted to talk about my two favourites:
     I’m going to discuss about Silence of the Lambs (1991) first, as it’s the most recongized film, before the lesser-known Manhunter (1986). Based on the the novel of the same name, Silence of the Lambs was the first horror film that swept the Oscars since The Exorcist (1973), winning Best Movie, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay, and became a modern-day masterpiece! Directed by Jonathan Demme, It’s the story of a young FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) who is summoned to help find one serial killer called “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine) by interviewing another, the incarcerated Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lector (Anthony Hopkins, who would reprise the role in twice), as they play a complicated chess match of words which results in one of the greatest films in the cinema history! It is a creepy and taken-by-storm experience — the atmosphere is chilling, the music is ominous, the plot is brilliantly constructed, the direction is skilful, the conversations are thought-provocative, and to crown the whole, Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkin are the cream. Hopkins’ Dr. Lector is, hands down, the show-stealer, with a complex mixture of intelligence, confidence, cruelty, insanity, grace, and charisma, winning an Oscar for a Best Actor, even though he appeared for only 16 minutes in the 118-minute film. And have you ever noticed Lector rarely blinks? And when he does close his eyes, it’s very heavy and forced; he doesn’t even move and, when he does, it’s very purposeful, which makes him appear as such an unnatural, inhuman character. However, the guy that scared everyone is Ted Levine’s Jamie “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, in which the entire film rides on the search of this man, and yet he always seemed to get the short end of the stick. Gumb is the antithesis of Lector — strange, uncultured, repulsive, and wholly unlikeable. Lector gets in your head, but Gumb gets under your skin — no pun intended.
     Did you know there was a Lector film before Silence? Based on the novel Red Dragon, directed by Michael Mann, Manhunter (1986), I feel, is far superiour film than its 2002 remake, and yet it’s an equal to Silence of the Lambs. FBI Agent Will Graham (William Petersen) has captured the diabolical Dr. Hannibal “Lecktor” (Brian Cox), nearly losing more than just his mind in the process; but when Graham is called out of retirement to hunt the serial killer known as “The Tooth Fairy” (Tom Noonan), he must once again confront the horrors of “Hannibal the Cannibal.” While Silence is very dark, gritty, coffinous, and bland, murky colours, Manhunter is a product of a small but extreme class of “artsy horrors” came out during the 1980s, when “slashers” were vogue. It trades the “film noir” dirty alleyways and rain-swept cities, for 1950s modernism, expansive glass panes, geometric divisions, uncluttered compositions, minimalist landscapes, and contemporary, linear houses, with pastel costumes, music montages, and intense use of colours. Each colour has its own values, representing different emotions or desires, such as the sterile whites of Lecktor’s prison, the sick green hues of the Tooth Fairy’s, the cool blues of Graham’s bedroom, then how blues slowly turn to whites when he investigates a crime scenes. Mann has re-imagined “noir,” exploding its signifiers, transforming clutter, confinement, and oppressive darkness, into a world of slick neons, expansive spaces, and transparent walls, as a crime was commit the whole world is made of glass — the atmosphere is isolated, the music is spooky, the plot is beautiful, the direction is stunning, and the acting is up to the beholder. So many people are so dead loyal to Anthony Hopkins that they overlook and ridicule Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecktor. The problem I had with Hopkins in Red Dragon (2003) is that he was out-of-character; he play Lector angrier and less controlled, rigid and stiff, as it came off that he was trying too hard. Cox, on the other hand, is the original “Hannibal Lector” and he plays him much closer to the book than Hopkins ever was, with his effeminate influence, gossipy language, icy confidence, racing intellect, decisive tics, effortless mind games, and above all subtlety. William Petersen’s is a magnificent Graham, a good man drives himself further and further into this abyss of evil, away from humanity; he’s haunted, worrisome, and remorseful, turning cold, detached, and apathetic. Then we have Tom Noonan’s character, the serial killer Francis “The Tooth Fairy/The Red Dragon” Dolarhyde, who was described by Entertainment Weekly as “one of the freakiest madmen Hollywood has ever given us,” well after Silence’s big release. Dolarhyde is the antithesis of Graham, fascinating and frightening, who begins to re-connect with humanity when he falls in love with a blind woman, and for the first time in his life, experiences a normal human relationship. On one hand, we have a good man spiraling into darkness; on the other, we have a serial killer climbing back towards humanity; and Lecktor pulling the strings of both character to his own benefit. My favourite scene in the entire film is Dolarhyde’s tragic breakdown to Primer Mover’s song “Strong as I Am”: The glimmer of hope that he may stop is dashed away in a manner of minutes due to a simple misunderstanding. You just feel for this man! The film is relentless and it suffocates you, and that’s where the horror lies.

26 - HELLRAISER (1987)

Stephen King once quoted, “I have seen the future of horror, and his name is Clive Barker.” Clive Barker is a best-selling author of horror and thriller novels, plays, and comics. He had become dissatisfied with the way Hollywood had treated his work on film, so he went out to directed his own feature based on his novella, The Hellbound Heart. Hellraiser (1987) is certainly one of the most inventive and engagingly dark and twisted horror films of the 1980s, during a time the genre was nearly taken over by “slashers.” The “artsy horror” is more than a scare and gore show; it’s a psychosexual thriller, a gothic romance, a Shakespearean drama, a Greek tragedy, a fairy tale, and a morality tale. After Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman), a hedonistic explorer of pleasures, disappears after opening a puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration, his older brother Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson) inherits his house and moves his family whom he loves dearly in to provide a better life for them; he’s a kind but dull-as-paste husband who genuinely loves his wife but doesn’t quite understand how to treat a woman; he’s an everyday, mundane man mowed under by his own unspectacular existence who doesn’t see what’s coming, as he possesses no imagination or foresight. Julia (Clare Higgins), Larry’s wife, is a relic of baggage and fallen dreams, because she bears so many dark secrets, one of which is an affair with Frank. Larry’s blood, after a minor accident, spilt over a hardwood floor, brings Frank back to life from an excruciating death, in one of the finest special effects sequences in cinematic history, but only he’s only half-formed bag of bones and flesh. Once Julia and Frank reunite, their love (or lust) is more dangerous and powerful than ever imagined, and they conspire together in the grand tradition of Macbeth and Othello to reign in pleasure once again. Enter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Larry's daughter, a warm-hearted but determined soul who crosses paths with Julia and Frank before they can finish their diabolical plan, and eventually encounters the dark secret beheld Frank upon his death — the Lament Configuration. Creatures of darkness known as the Cenobites (hypocoristically named by fans as Pinhead, DeepThroat, Butterball, the Chatterer, and the Engineer), angels to some, demons to others, come to Kirsty when she accidentally calls upon their hellish powers of the box. Once unleashed, they must take someone back, and Kirsty knows now, how Frank is back, and she intends to return him to his deathly justice, and save her family...
     It is a grim tale about love, lust, treachery, where pain and pleasure is indivisible. Clive Barker has given us people, humans, planted in their own desires and determinations, and he tears them apart with fear, pain, death, destruction, total degradation, and crosses the line between reality and fiction. The Cotton family is the perfect example of purity, torn to shreds by hate, desire, and anguish, and he takes great glee in showing us all the gory details. This film, for a directorial debut, is remarkable and unique: The writing is deep with character-driven plots and mythos, the production is high for a low-budget film, the music is chilling and dramatic, the acting is realistic, the special effects are classy, and the Cenobites, although they appear for no more than 10 minutes throughout the film, steal the show for some reason! Perhaps because we get so wrapped up in the family drama that the Cenobites seem to come out of nowhere, but they’re the beautiful bookends of the picture that set up the universe; they’re the reasons why the film was so successful. Beautiful, dangerous, expressionless angelic demons in black leather and fetish wear, bathed in bright light, led by the majestic Pinhead (Doug Bradley, who is never technically addressed by that name, or any name, in any of the eight films), they come into our world equipped with chains and hooks and all manner of painful devices, literally ripping their victims apart without batting an eye. They are what Frank wants to be, but Frank is not strong enough. He collapses beneath the weight of his own ego; he wants to think he is a god, but he is only an insect, after all. And yet Kirsty, the young, fresh, but not-so-innocent, unvirginal heroine, is the one they seem to spark their ghoulish interest in. For me, I always loved the family drama and the Cenobites with equal zeal. Admittedly, the film is far from perfect, as there are parts of this film that make no sense. I feel the only thing that really ages the film is the frizzy hair and the fashions, which is all very 80s; and, like Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), I do have major complaints about the final 2 minutes of the film, where the production ran out of money and finished the film with something very cheap. Personally, I would have loved the original ending in the book where Kirsty was given the “honour” of becoming the new Guardian of the Box, but that might be just my own personal opinion about it... This film received an NC-17 rating when it was first released, but that was most likely due to the films unrelenting themes of sadomasochism and wanton incest that just stick deep into your skin like hooks. It’s sick and remorseless, but innovative; nothing like this had ever been seen before, and it still remains an original and refreshing to this day. And even though he done so many horrible things in eight films, does it seem weird that I want to sire the unholy love child of Pinhead? Maybe I just need a boyfriend, or a call for help...

27 - THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1989)

How the time flies! Halloween is around the corner, so I’m going to talk about something really fun! This film has been one of my ultimate “guilt pleasure” flicks! I rented it from my local rental store frequently, but the business went under in the early 90s; it would air on TV on rare occasions (and I didn’t have cable at the time) and I would drop whatever I was doing, no matter what it was, to watch it; and it wasn’t until the advent of DVDs did I finally get to own the film and watch it again after a decade of withdraw, and I still enjoy the hell out of this film. Throughout my life, I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of adaptations of the Gaston Leroux’s novel — the recent Joel Schumacher film of the musical was atrocious, by the way — and they vary in quality, but this adaptation always left an impression on me: The film starts off in present-day 1980s where Christine Day (Jill Schoelen) is auctioning for a part in a musical, singing an aria from an unknown composer named Erik Destler; but through an accident, she is transported to the 1880s, as the understudy to the prima donna and the obsession of Erik “The Phantom” Destler (Robert Englund). Destler, originally, was a struggling composer from the 1780s who sold his soul to the devil to make his music immortalized; but the pact backfired and he’s cursed to walk the streets as an immortal, as his music became more and more obscure. Although he’s a passionate lover of music and art and beauty, he’s also a serial murderer, along the line of Jack the Ripper, who skins his victims and wears sewn-up flesh as his “mask.” This is perhaps the only occasion where the Phantom’s “mask” is scarier than his “face” — it’s pretty twisted! He “arranges” for his muse to land the lead in Faust, leads her to his layer underneath the opera house, she sings his unfinished opera of Don Juan Triumphant, which is one of the most stunning scenes in the entire film and done better than that Webber version, forces her to be his monstrous bride, and as the police attempt to get closer and Christine attempts to get away, shit hits the fan...
     Despite being a wonderful, exquisite, and entertaining film, it was a box office failure, and there are a few particular reasons why it failed: (1) The film was released during the sensational height of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical and it hoped to take advantage of the surge of new interest in the original story. However, people thought this film was going to be the musical, saw it as a “slasher” horror, was abhorred, and brushed off as trash. First off, I think that’s pure stupidity that audiences did that because to say “Oh, it’s a Phantom film, but it’s not the musical, and I love the musical, even though I never read the novel, so this film sucks” is a downright awful thing to do! This is an adaptation of the novel, not the musical, and should be treated differently. Secondly, yes, it does admittedly have “slasher” elements, but it’s far more than that: It’s a technically gothic romance, with drama, suspense, thrills, chills, action, pathos, mythos, love, lust, beauty, tragedy, history, intelligence, elegance, charm, dark humour, and depth. (2) The film was wrongly advertised as a “Freddy” film. If you look at film posters or the video cover, they composited the Freddy Krueger’s scar makeup onto the Phantom, even though it looks nothing like that in the film, which rightfully pissed Robert Englund off. (DVD cover was a far more proper image, but it’s already 20 years too late.) By the time of its release, the “campy” sequels of the Nightmare on Elm Street were at its height. He did this role to get away from Freddy fame. Even though roles seem similar, with the scarred face and witty one-liners, this was exceedingly different! The Phantom is a surprisingly deep character: He’s a lonely, isolated, sad, grim, confused, hot-tempered, violent individual outcasted by his looks, lost his humanity due to his immortality, who wants to grab hold of it again through the love of a woman who unfortunately rejects him, but is eventually undone by his passions and obsessions. That is Phantom from the book! Englund took an otherwise banal role in less capable hands, like so many other Phantom films, and turned it into something exceptional! His character is stunning, fun, and operatic, carrying the film to a new, fresh level, and I equate his performance to Lon Chaney. When I met Robert Englund and asked him about the film, he talked about it with great enthusiasm; it’s his favourite role! (3) The film does have a lot really weird juxtapositions, such as the 1980s scenes that bookend the story, but all that can be explained: This film, according an interview with Robert Englund, was originally intended to be a two-picture deal. The second film was going to be a loose re-telling of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, which is actually one of my favourite silent films, set in the 1980s, where the Phantom is living the sewers in the present-day 1980s, falls in love with a blind woman, and goes on a rampage after her father is murdered, but the second film was cancelled due to the box office failure of the first film, much to Englund’s dismay; he apparently enjoyed the script of the second film more than the first. (4) With the height of the musical and Freddy camp, its failure was simply a product of very, very bad timing, and in Hollywood, timing is everything! This is a great film, but it was just never allowed an opportunity to prove itself — horror fans didn’t give it a chance and classical fans didn’t give it a chance! — and it’s a grave misfortune that it disappeared off the face of the earth shortly afterward. The direction is beautiful, the sets are exquisite, the music is breathtaking, the acting is wonderful, and the story is delightful as hell! While it has some inaccuracies and flaws, the 1989 adaptation is most faithful rendition of the book ever made. It’s also one of the few Phantom films that genuinely embraces opera (and I’m an opera lover). You might laugh at that, but you’d be amazed at the amount of films based on Phantom of the Opera that doesn’t actually have real opera in it! I guess people are more scared of opera than of decapitating heads, which I just find both surprising and utterly laughable! It’s flawed but enjoyable! Thankfully, the film does have a small but loyal cult following and I’m true member of that following; I defend it a great deal because it’s worth it. It’s one of my favourite films, my favourite Robert Englund film; it’s one I can watch over and over again, and never get bored of it! It’s like a sinful delight of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, New York-style cheesecake dripped strawberry syrup, and messy powder sugar-covered beignets! Yum!

28 - THE PROPHECY (1995)

Religious films have always been a staple in Hollywood, with mystery, miracle, and morality plays at its beck and call, but few take the chance to challenge the established order to come up with something new and original — and good for them! I’ve always been fascinated by supernatural thrillers of the eschatological variety, but people (and you know exactly who you are) complained high and low about this film because religion has always a touchy, cloudy subject, and the fanatics just don’t like that when you play with it, whether or not the film is good. Look at the amount of guff The Exorcist (1973) and Dan Brown has receive. These films are risky for studios, lawsuits galore, but people freak out over little reasons, and it’s a pity because The Prophecy (1995) film is just a gem: Detective Thomas Daggett (Elias Koteas), a priest-turned-cop, stumbles across the corpse of a creature that isn’t quite human and an ancient Bible with an extra chapter to the Book of Revelation, which mentions the ongoing second war in heaven, where angels had become jealous when God came to love humans more than them, because they have “souls,” and rebelled in the hopes to have God’s love back “before the lies, before the monkeys.” (A film of a creationist religion with foundations in evolution? Surely, you jest!) To win the stalemate that has lasted for centuries, the anti-villain leader of the rebel army, the Archangel Gabriel (Christopher Walken), must steal the soul of the most amoral and most heinous human that ever walked on earth. Thomas must find a way to stop Gabriel, even if it means working alongside the Devil himself, the fallen angel Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen). This is a dark, intelligent, thought-provoking, entertaining but seriously underrated cult film, with dry humour, grim atmosphere, and hardy suspense, which comes off as being too smart for its own good (and I mean that in the best way). Creator-writer-director Gregory Widen, of Highlander fame, really did his research on the theology of the Christian text, Jewish kabala, and Persian sources, where the heavy bulk of angelology and demonology technically lies, to create a complex world where reality, fantasy, and divinity intertwine, and where angels, demons, religion, and God are not as cut and dry, good and evil, black and white, as they seem.

29 - SE7EN (1995)

Vampires, werewolves, demons, ghouls, ghosts, mad scientists, slashers, and Darth Vaders no longer scared audiences. Appetites change and evolve. The 1990s was an new age of the re-emergence of “psychological horror,” introducing a new brand of monster — the serial killer. With Ted Bundys, Jeffrey Dahmers, and Hannibal Lectors, films are about escapism, yet this new genre of horror allows us to peek into the corners of humanity’s deepest, darkest secrets, and then shoves down our throats where it becomes inescapable to breathe. Because serial killers exist. They’re not creatures you can stop with a crucifix and a prayer. They’re real people who are out there living amongst us, eating at the same restaurants, sitting next to you on the bus, walking pass your front door, playing with your children. You glance into their empty eyes, brush past them without even acknowledging their presence, oblivious to the sheer horror that they are capable of, of the monster they keep inside. They are the products of abuse, cruelty, and society’s devalues. The most terrifying monsters are those that wear a human face — and the relentless and senseless reality of life scares us more than anything supernatural! Directed by then-newcomer David Fincher, Se7en is a modern masterpiece about two homicide investigators of an unnamed city. The older, world-weary Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), 6 days from retirement, has seen more terror and sadness in his lifetime than any man should ever be forced to see; he cares about people but has seen too much of the dark side of life to have much hope for society. His younger, cockier partner David Mills (Brad Pitt), eager to take over Somerset’s position, lives by a simplistic belief in the power of law enforcement to change the world, where people and their crimes can be explained simply, and has never truly questioned the simple “values” he was raised with, and is thus unprepared for the terrors that await him. Together, they investigate a number of murders patterned after the Seven Deadly Sins — Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wraith, Pride, Lust, and Envy — as they hunt the trail of the enigmatic serial killer responsible.
     Seldom has a film expose the culpability of our culture, of our society, in the mayhem and madness we often find in everyday life. The film is a bleak, relentless, cerebral, powerful, terrifying, unforgiving film noir, free of clichés, that doesn’t pull its punches. Everything from set design to lighting, selection of film stock and processing techniques, camera movement, frame composition, and editing work together to create an entirely new level of visual brilliance. The murder scenes — the bodies, maimed and tortured, and inexorably piling up — is art direction at its finest, beautiful but unbearable, which it owes a great deal of the Italian horrors of 1970s called “gialli” — a genre of crime mysteries that combines with extremely graphic horror and eroticism, filtered through Italy’s long-standing tradition of opera and grand guignol drama, with strong psychological themes of madness, alienation, and paranoia, as if the world around them is falling apart. The funny thing about this film is that we only see it through the eyes of the detectives, so we never see the crimes committed. We only see the results of the killings, we watch the characters talking of what the victims were going through, we see photographs, and we hear interviews reactions of the witnesses, and our imagination fills up the rest and what you imagine cooks up is far worse than something you see. Somerset and Mills aren’t allowed to minimize the horrors they're forced to find. Each new corpse brings a true feeling of revulsion and of dread, as the realization hits that another body will be forthcoming unless the murderer is found. The story is fantastic, filled with misdirection and red herrings, and just as the audience starts to think that the unfolding events of the film are starting to become predictable, the film lurches further into the unknown darkness, keeping the edge of uneasiness that it pervades, and everything fits together perfectly by its climax. Everything about this film is pure perfection!

30 - SAW (2004)

Today, there has been a resurgence of “splatter film” genre that depict nudity, torture, mutilation, and sadism, that critics have disparagingly labeled as “torture porn.” For me, there is huuuuugge different between “being scared” and “being grossed out” — they are not the same thing! Nowadays, it’s difficult to find a horror film that genuinely impressed me — and Saw (2004) was one of the first films of the new millennium that did that! Written and directed by newcomer James Wan, originally intended as a direct-to-video, this independent film made during the cusp of the 1990s “psychological horrors” were coming to a close and the 2000s “torture porns” were about catch on. It’s a “gialli” film in the same sense of Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995) are, thus it’s more of a thriller than a horror.
     The story opens with two men — freelance photographer Adam Faulkner-Stanheight (Leigh Whannell) and surgeon Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, who I completely didn’t recognize until I read the end credits of my third viewing) — who wake up in a dilapidated public restroom, chained to the floor, confused and terrified, with no memory of how or why they are where they are. Together, they begin to piece together the memory of what happened to them as the serial killer named the “Jigsaw Killer” taunts them to play a series of mind games of survival. Jigsaw has earned his place in the lexicon of movie monsters, but he’s unique amongst them. He is an vigilante anti-villain with extreme beliefs who thinks he’s making a difference by putting his victims through tests of survival, often with a symbolic representation, to help them appreciate their own lives by testing their willingness to live through self-sacrifice: What would you do, how far would you go, to save your own life? Much of the film plays out like a two-actor play, with tense atmosphere, heavy suspense, claustrophobic sets, fantastic acting, intense emotions, shocking visuals but minimal gore, revealing flashbacks (within flashbacks), stylish moments of sped-up tracking shots and fast editing, moments of uncomfortable silence, some amusing one-liners, and one of the craziest endings I’ve seen in a long time, which just sends chills down my spine! I often describe this film as, “If Hitchcock was alive today, he would have made (the first) Saw.”
     Also, check my friend shadowsofthought’s journal who will reviewing the all current five Saw films. See you guys tomorrow as we close off “31 Days of Horror” on Halloween...

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This is it! This is the last day! Are you excited? Are you sad? Well, let’s recap on our list of 31 Days of Horror so far: We started the silent horrors of the 1920s, the Universal Monsters of the 30s and 40s, the British Invasion of Hammer Horrors of 50s, the gothic horrors of 60s, the exploitation films of 70s, the “slashers” of the 80s, the psychological thrillers of the 90s, and the rise of violence with the “torture porns” by the 2000s, and I’m going to end the list with my one of my favourite horror films in recent years, the defining return to “the classics”! I feel this is a painfully overlooked modern-day mini-masterpiece:


31 - “The Black Cat” from MASTERS OF HORROR (Season 2, Episode 11, 2007)

Masters of Horror is a horror anthology TV series that aired on Showtime, where a group of well-known horror writers and directors would produce one-hour feature episode; this is very much on the same wavelength as 1980s HBO series, Tales from the Crypt. Many of these films are hit and miss, but there was one that really stood out for me called “The Black Cat,” based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Jeffrey Combs, the team that brought us Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), and Castle Freak (1995), the story takes revolves around the sensitive, troubled Edgar Allan Poe (Combs) and his beloved wife (and first cousin) Virginia “Cissy” Poe (Elyse Levesque), where he’s eking out of meager living in Philadelphia 1840. When his publisher commissions him for another one of his “fantastic tales” of horror, he’s plagued by writer’s block, money troubles, alcoholism, his wife’s declining health, and the constant tormentings of their mercurial pet cat, Pluto.
     Merging the “The Black Cat” story with Poe’s real life (which was heavily researched for the film) creates a beautiful, sensual, haunting, grim autobiographical tale in honour of the Roger Corman’s Poe gothic horrors of the 1960s. This is actually the most faithful adaptation of Poe’s original story, which includes the infamous eye-gouging scene that has never before been incorporated on film (and gloriously uncensored because it’s the Showtime channel). It builds slowly, with his heavy atmosphere, thrilling suspense, breathtaking visuals, beautiful cinematography, outstanding acting, and a chilling musical score; the film’s palette is a gorgeous, using a bleak, washed out, black-and-white-esque colour scheme punctuated with dramatic colours, such as the red blood and green eyes. In fact, Jeffrey Combs is currently reprising the role of Poe in a critically-acclaimed one-man show “Nevermore,” directed by Stuart Gordon, at the Steve Allen Theater, Hollywood. It’s so refreshing to see a blessed homecoming to the roots of classic horror, seeing it come into full circle.

And speaking of the classics, I want take a moment and talk about the downhill spiral of horror films today. It seems, at this point, that every classic horror film has been remade. The turn of the century has been contaminated by remakes after remakes:

Remakes of old films - THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (2005, which is a great film actually)

Remakes of not-so-old films - NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010), HELLRAISER (2011)

Remakes of films that already have been remade - HOUSE OF WAX (2005), I AM LEGEND (2007), THE FLY (2008)

Remakes of famous films - PSYCHO (1998), THE MUMMY (1999), THE WOLFMAN (2009)

Remakes of not-so-famous films - THIR13EN GHOSTS (2001), SLEUTH (2007)

Remakes of foreign films - THE GRUDGE (2004)

Remakes of foreign films that have already been remade - THE RING (2002)

Remakes of TV series - DARK SHADOWS (2011)

Prequels - DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST (2005), THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING (2006)

And sequels - SAW VI (2009)

Hollywood has lost all its creativity, and originality just seems like a thing from the past, but if you look at the right places, you might be thoroughly surprised. Independent horror films — my recent favourites being METHODIC (2007), a smartly done “basher” horror, and TRICK ‘R TREAT (2009) — are grabbing attention of audiences worldwide, with limited venues, and these are films that are not saddled down by the “big studio” mentality. Foreign films, particularly in Korea and Japan, are among the most original and best horrors that are coming out today, such as AUDITION (1999) and OLDBOY (2003). With the advent of the internet, we have web serials. The most recent horror web series that has grabbed my attention is FEARnet’s FEAR CLINIC (2009), with Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) and Kane Hodder (Jason Voorhees), which revolve around doctor who “cures” phobias.

And then there’s fan-films! It’s a beautiful thing when fans come together to dedicate their time and what little money they have to create a “tribute” to their favourites, with love and affection — two things Hollywood currently lack! Admittedly, with all the mindless shit floating around the net, it’s extremely different to find the true diamonds in the rough and you just have to look out for them! In fact, in the list is so long that I might as well compile them into a section of new reviews. Therefore, I’m going to a month long break, which is much needed, and in December, I’ll review my favourite fan films, based on overall quality, production, and originality. There’s a lot of talent out there! Who knows? You might find your own fan film on the list...

Have a Happy Halloween, friends!

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Mood of the Moment:  exhausted

Music of the Moment:  "Tainted Love" by Marilyn Manson.

Media of the Moment:  Horror films!

Book of the Moment:  None.

Food of the Moment:  None.

Lust of the Moment:  Pinhead.

Research of the Moment:  Horror films.

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "It's the rules" (Zepp, Saw, 2004).

Welcome back to 31 Days of Horror, counting down each day until Halloween with one of my favourite horror films, plus clips.

I hope you've enjoyed the list so far, watching films you haven't seen yet or just re-watching the old favourites, and there's still twenty-one more days to go. Now, on with the show!

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11 - ALFRED HITCHCOCK FILMS

He’s been called the Master of Suspense! Alfred Hitchcock is, without argument, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Horror is habitually chided by mass audiences as juvenile throwaway films. The genre rarely get nominated for awards and are often placed as mere footnotes in film history books, so calling Hitchcock films “horror” has been considered, by many, an insult and people seem to be more comfortable referring to them as “suspense films” or “psychological thrillers,” but those are branches of the horror and, with Hitchcock, he always seems to straddle all three genres!
     REAR WINDOW (1954) – This is my favourite Hitchcock film to date, winning out on Vertigo by a whisker! This is a film about voyeurism at its best (or worst, as the cast may be). L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) is a restless international photographer who’s caged up in his bachelor apartment due to his broken leg and to pass the time and to cope with the appalling summer heat and humidity by watching the comings and goings of his neighbours outside his window and suspects that he might have witnessed a murder across the way. This unassuming, everyday kind of setting turns into an area of intrigue! Quintessentially, this seems like a simple story, but it’s laced full of subplots, both humourous and moving, and the most of the movie is set entirely in the apartment, giving a kind of claustrophobic effect, which is relieved by the escapism through Jeffries’ binoculars and camera lenses, and his roving eyes that swoop down across the courtyard into the lives of the 31 adjoining rooms, entering the mind-set of the photographer seeing the world through his images. It’s a thriller, a romance, a mystery, and a gross comedy of manners that’s both mesmerizing and frightening.
     VERTIGO (1958) – Based on a novel The Living and the Dead by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, San Francisco police detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) was forced to retire due to his severe acrophoba (fear of heights) and he’s hired as a private investigator to shadow the wife of an acquaintance (Kim Novak) who is supposedly having an affair with another man. He believes this is his chance to put the past behind him, but sometimes the future becomes even darker, as he falls in love with Novak and the love turns into this dark, twisted obsession that becomes deeper and deeper as the film progresses. Hitchcock, like with all his films, uses a complicated story, interesting characters, lavish visual detail, deliberate pacing, and fine musical scores to produce a mysterious, almost unearthly, atmosphere, as you watch the character’s downward spiral of madness. It’s hypnotic, emotional, surreal, haunting, sinister, brutal, grim, sick, and cruel: It’s the ultimate “mind fuck” masterpiece!
     PSYCHO (1960) – Whether you’ve seen this or not, everybody has at least heard of this film! What can I say about a film that's been talked about to death? If you looked up “horror film” in the dictionary, a photo of Janet Leigh screaming in the shower should be printed next to it. Marion Crane (Leigh) is a bored office drone who decides to steal some loot from her boss’ obnoxious client and parlay it into a new life with her all-too-distant boyfriend. All is going more or less according to plan until she stops in at the wrong motel, where she befriends an unassuming desk clerk named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) whose overbearing mother “is not herself today.” The most epic understatement EVER! Even to this day, most horror film killers are portrayed as inhuman, grotesque, unimaginable monster in order to scare the audience out of its wits, which comes off as generic. Psycho does not adhere to these restraints and clichés. The story is incredible, the acting is excellent, the cinematography is godly, and the soundtrack is iconic. This film is perfection, it’s flawless, there is nothing out-of-place!
     THE BIRDS (1963) – It could be said that the plot of The Birds is ridiculous, and it is. The idea of birds, a type of animal, as aggressively attacking humans, despite living with us for millions of years, seems preposterous, but it is here where the film’s potency for horror lies. Humanity has outstayed their welcome. Nature has gone to war! Sounds silly, uh? Well, I thought so when I first saw it...but when the birds started migrating by the millions that fall, perched over every tree, telephone wire, traffic light, rooftop, and I locked my car doors and rolled up the windows in complete terror and dread — still do every migration — and there begins my introduction to all things Hitchcock! This film is a masterpiece of misdirection, starting off like a romantic chick flick and then Hitchcock suddenly pulls the rug from under your feet and the plot takes a harsh, unflinching left turn into uncharted territory, so begins a sequence of events that proceed at the vertiginous crescendo of domino’s falling, as the birds amass by the billions and attack with increasing ferocity. The scene where four characters trapped inside the house with the birds waiting outside resemble the relentless zombies from George A. Romero’s classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968). My favourite scene is when the heroine is stuck in a tiny phone-booth, as watches millions upon millions of birds attack the city and try to smash through the glass. It doesn’t get any better than this...

12 - ROGER CORMAN POE FILMS

Hammer paved way to the horror revival of the ‘60s, bring back gothic horror and leading the way was writer-producer-director Roger Corman with a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s works have never been adapted perfectly because it’s difficult to translate a short story or a poem visually into a feature-length film, but Corman Poe series did a great job, paying tribute to the author and his legacy, with the irresistible Vincent Price as the star.
     HOUSE OF USHER (1960) – This film began the Corman Poe series and is, undoubtedly, my favourite of all the films (and my favourite of Poe’s stories). The cadaverous Roderick (Price) and ghostly Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), a pair of siblings, are the last of their family line tainted with criminality, depravity, and madness. Young and handsome Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) travels to desolate, decrepit mansion to whisk Madeline away as his wife, but Roderick objects to this rival, wanting the Usher family curse to die with him and his sister. This is a beautiful gothic thriller of immorality and decadence. It’s stunning from the first shot all the way to the end, from the moody atmosphere, gorgeous art production, tomb-like sets, solid story, brilliant acting, and it’s was first to retain the incestuous themes of the original story. It’s surreal, sick, disturbing, erotic, elegant, and so poignant.
     THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961) – Set in 16th-century Spain, a young Englishman (John Kerr) visits a forbidding castle to investigate his sister’s mysterious death, meeting the brother-in-law Nicholas Medina (Price). During dinner with family physician, he reveals that Nicholas’ wife died of a massive heart where she “died of fright,” as she became obsessed with Nicholas’ past. His father Sebastian Medina was a prominent member of the Illuminati who slowly tormented his victims in the torture chamber below the castle, among them his wife right in front of their son’s eyes. This is one of the rare cases where the film is superior to the original story. The narrative was created in the vein of Poe’s style, while the original story itself, which was only two pages long to begin with, takes place in during the fantastic and suspenseful climax. Vincent Price proves that horror can be an actor’s medium: It’s one of his best performances!
     TALES OF TERROR (1962) – This is one of the best horror anthologies ever! Three individual Poe shorts in one glorious film: The first segment “Morella” is about a young woman dying of cancer who travels far to meet with her long-lost father (Price) who was once a man of respectable now a drunk, drugged out chronic depressant who keeps his wife’s rotting corpse on his bed where she died during childbirth. Morella’s spirit returns, kills the daughter, takes over her body, and tries to seduce her horrified husband. It’s a merry-go-‘round of necrophilia and incest, yeahhhh! The second segment “The Black Cat,” which also combines with “The Cask of Amontillado,” is about the alcoholic Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre), taking a rare advantage of the actor’s comedic timing, who hates his beautiful wife Annabel and her adorable pet cat. He crashes a wine-tasting event and challenges the world’s foremost wine taster Fortunato Luchresi (Price) to a contest, wins, and Luchresi begrudgingly has to escorts him home, and meets his Herringbone’s wife. Eventually, Herringbone finds out Luchresi and Annabel are having an affair right under his nose, kills his wife, drugs Luchresi, and walls them up in the basement. Hurrah for debauchery! The final segment “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is about the elderly Valdemar, dying from a painful disease, employs a hypnotist named Mr. Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) to alleviate his suffering, however Carmichael has an alternative motive and he places Valdemar under a trance that places him between the world of the living and the dead, as his body decays in bed, and blackmails Valdemar’s wife to have sex with him in order to have him die in peace. Dude, it’s Rathbone! Say “Yes!” The film really suffers from its budget, reusing footage from House of Usher (as well as the Roderick Usher’s dramatic floor-length red coat, which looks ravishing on Rathbone).
     THE MASQUE OF RED DEATH (1964) – I always thought this story was unfilmable, so it was a shocker and a delight to see this film and see it done so well. The corrupt Satanist Prince Prospero (Price) invites several dozen of the local nobility to his castle for protection against an oncoming plague, the Red Death, terrorizing a plague-ridden peasantry while merry-making in his colourful castle with his courtiers, with the stipulation that no one is to wear red. During the masked ball, a mysterious hooded figure dressed in red amidst a general atmosphere of debauchery and depravity of the party. This is a visual spectacular; it’s luscious, with the exquisite seven coloured rooms and the magnificent costumes, and yet this is an unsettling story, showing the worst of humanity, with its foul, repulsive characters whom take delights to be controlled by Prospero’s every whim. This is really the “ugliest” story of all the Corman-Poe series.

13 - WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)

Up to this point, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film as brutal and as vindictive as this! Is this a “horror” though? I suppose it’s like calling Mommie Dearest (1981) a horror. It’s a psychodrama, a black comedy, a suspense thriller, and a gothic horror in one. The story is very character-driven and dialogue-heavy, with few action scenes, yet it’s so tense, unnerving, merciless, sadistic, and physiologically violent that the film becomes a too gruesome to watch at times. Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) was once a famous song-and-dance child star on the vaudeville circuit in the 1910s. By the 1930s, the spoilt Jane fades into obscurity while her shyer sister Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford) becomes a renowned Hollywood dramatic film actress, but she becomes paralyzed after an accident and Jane, who was drunk behind the wheel, is blamed. It’s now present-day 1960s, the two aging sisters turned into recluses in their decaying, claustrophobic mansion, where Jane “cares” for the wheelchair-bound Blanche, as she lives in a world of false hope, thinking that she may be able to reprise her childhood career, putting on the same makeup and keeping her curly hair intact day-to-day, and her continued jealousy burns on as Blanche’s films re-run on television, and increases her twisted and sadistic verbal, emotional, and physical abuse. Throughout the film, we watch the sister try to out “bitch” each other, as Jane spirals further and further madness and Blanche grows weaker and more helpless as the abuse goes on. It’s like a grown-up case of sibling rivalry between two of Hollywood’s leading women being so openly “ugly” in front of the camera that they become parodies of themselves. It is kind of ironic, also, as it was well known that Davis and Crawford despised each other behind camera, they were both major award winners with legendary status in cinema, practically rivals themselves, which could have played into the way they treated each other in the film. That aspect of their lives and careers is embraced — if not exploited — in the film. Needless to say, they’re both fan-bloody-tastic and completely insane in this film! The character of Baby Jane Hudson has become of the greatest horror “monsters” in cinema history, as a precursor to the “psychotic women” horror trope, who is terrifying, repulsive, delusional, funny, and yet so extremely tragic!

14 - THE COMEDY OF TERRORS (1963)

This is a delightful horror comedy, along the same vein of The Raven (1963) and “The Black Cat” segment from Tales of Terror (1962), bring together four horror greats — Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. I had always known Price and Lorre were great comedians, with Champagne for Caesar (1953) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but Karloff and Rathbone came as a surprise. Rathbone had been in comedies with Red Skelton and Danny Kaye, but only as the straight man. Karloff did comedies with Kay Kyser (with Lorre and Lugosi, actually) and Abbott and Costello, but he played them as serious roles. So not only are they all hysterical in this film, bouncing off each other, but you can tell they’re having the time of their lives just being together (as the four were all great friends) and hamming it up for the camera!
     Set in the 19th-century, the sarcastic, amoral drunkard Waldo Trumbull (Price) of a decaying undertaking business, who loathes his voluptuous, opera-loving wife Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson), mistreats his deaf, senile old father-in-law (Karloff), and lords over his hapless servant Felix Gillie (Lorre), who’s smitten with Amaryllis, murders people in their own homes in order to keep himself in business and to have enough money for more drink. To escape his debts, he decides to kill his imperious, Shakespeare-loving creditor Mr. Black (Rathbone) and stuffs him in a coffin. However, Black suffers from catalepsy that places him in a death-like sleep and he wakes up shouting lines from Macbeth, forcing Trumbull to kill him again, and again, and again. What can I say? I adore this film! The verbal gymnastics alone are worth the price of admission, yet also has wonderful visual gags and wacky slapstick. There are moments in the film that are sick and unsettling, such as when Price takes a pillow, gently fluffing it up, and suffocates his first victim, as we hear the ghastly cry of his final breath echo down the hallway of his home, and yet there are scenes that are so endearing and sweet that make me squee “Awwwwwwww!” and scenes that are so uproarious that I might cough out my spleen by laughing so hard. It’s a magnificent, witty little black comedy! It’s a must see! (Some slight spoilers in the clip, but the trailer doesn't really show off the film all that well...)

15 - THE EXORCIST (1973)

I’ve met people who got ill while watching this film, I’ve met people who vomited during this film, I’ve been people who walked out twenty minutes into the film in tears, I’ve met people who fainted during this film, and I’ve met people who went into therapy because of this film. I even heard a story, which I have no idea if it’s true, where a man killed his entire family and attributed it to this film. So how do I talk about what is arguably considered “the scariest movie ever made” whose power still retains its potency 50 years later? This isn’t a film with wall-to-wall, credit-to-credit montage of gore that passes as a plot, nor does it have “boo” moments, where things leap out of the darkness, or false scares, with a hissing cat poppin’ out of nowhere, nor is it a film with gimmicks or clichés, where a group of stupid kids isolated in an environment with a “monster” on the loose carrying a sharp object. The Exorcist was a different kind of horror film that centres around an everyday 10-year-old girl from a modern-day suburbia neighbourhood who is possessed by the Devil himself. And everyone remembers the pea soup, the head spinning, the spewed vulgarities, the moving furniture, the levitation, the crucifix masturbation, the infamous cut (now restored) spider-walk, and they’re all show-stoppers in special effects, yes; but what makes this film memorable to me was how it builds and builds into this fully developed story, with fleshed out characters, associated arcs, and fantastic performances. This film doesn’t even want to admit itself what’s going on is true, it doesn’t want admit and embrace the prospect, trying to explore it with medical and psychological possibilities until they exhaust them, and it’s almost magical how the movie finally acknowledges the little girl’s only hope is when the mention of the words “possession” and “exorcism” fall into the equation, questioning the mystery of faith in its rawest form — the epic battles of good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, heaven vs. hell, the saint vs. the demon, etc. There’s no blood. There’s no gore. There’s no nudity. There’s no sex. There’s no glorious fanfare, nor is there boastful ultimatums. There’s nothing humourous or tongue-in-cheek about it. This film does not tiptoe cautiously around the subject, instead it surrenders to it, as we watch in terror at the images before us! It’s a “thinking man’s” film, but how this film affects you is truly a personal experience — and I’m going to leave it at that...

16 - THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

The year 1974, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Munich Olympics massacre, at the height of the Watergate scandal and the legal investigation into the shootings at Kent State, was the age of the exploitation films whose main attraction for an audience is sex, blood, and violence. I had the opportunity to watch this film at a grindhouse drive-through late at night at age 12 with my (then) college-aged uncle on a date and I fell promptly asleep in the first ten minutes, right after all the food was gone; so, for the longest time, I thought this film must have been crap if it was unable to hold my attention. Then I saw it, in its entirety, at the age of 20 and I learned that I saved myself years of therapy for not seeing as a youth! With its print in the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art, this film is truly a classic in cinema history.
     The film doesn’t even feel like a film. It runs like documentary, with a monotone-voiced radio newscaster introducing the events as true, when in reality it was only loosely based off murderer-necrophiliac-cannibal Ed Gein, the same one Psycho (1960) was based on, and starts off as a bit of a cliché: A group of teenagers take a roadtrip down an isolated stretch of countryside in Texas (and I live in Texas and, I tell you, it’s a dull state), pick up a crazed hitchhiker, and go exploring in a lonely farmhouse where they meet a deranged, cannibalistic family, as they get stalked and killed. It’s a storyline that has since became the staple for slasher movies; it’s simplistic but functional; and what the film is really about is creating an experience of sensory terror and doom by piling on images and sounds! The feeling of dread and mounting paranoia creeps over in slow but steady waves and the power of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre lies in its atmosphere, with its gritty and raw images, all-too-realistic visuals, and puzzling sounds of buzzing insects and machinery, like an avalanche of macabre spilling out of each frame that is impossible to stop once it starts. The performances are so believable that I’m still not sure if the cast was made up of actors who could act crazy or crazy people who could act. The monsters aren’t vampires, zombies, demons, or supernaturals; they’re real psychopaths, as you enter into their world with all its perversions and rituals. And I feel the genius of the Chainsaw is that the audience sees nothing: It’s remembered as one of the bloodiest and goriest film ever made, yet there’s essentially no blood and no gore! It’s all done behind closed doors, that the fear of the unknown, and audience makes up the rest — and what we see in our minds is ten times worse than whatever could be on screen. This film is bold, granular, relentless, revolting, visceral, offensive, and now I feel like I need shower!

17 - THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975)

Here’s a horror film for the ladies: Two women from the big city come to the quaint, idyllic little suburbia of Stepford, Connecticut, but soon discovers there lays a sinister truth that the men are murdering their wives and replacing them with perfect robots replicas who are designed to do nothing but cook, clean, and have sex. It’s an variation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), with connotations that tap into a woman’s worst fears, where your identity as a woman is stripped from your being, where you are no longer adequate, where your lover, your husband, your partner, the man you sleep beside for years, desires you with no identity, no personality, no individuality, no substance, no emotions, no bonds, no relationships, where a woman become an object of masturbation, servility, and submission. And you ask yourself, “Is this what men really want?” And the honest answer, to an extent, is “Yes...” (And vice versa...)
     The film, save the ending, is entirely illuminated with vibrant colours and clear whites oversaturated with bright light and cheery backgrounds, as if drunken leprechauns just vomited rainbows all over the screen! The men are portrayed as sloven and gross. The “liberated women” are presented as natural beauties and post-modern, career-driven feminists of the ‘70s, with loose, free-flowing hair, no makeup, casual clothes, restless minds, and rebellious natures. The Stepfords look like factory-made supermodels that somehow transported themselves into the ‘50s, with perfect hair and perfect bodies in cute, little happy dresses with cute, little happy aprons. It’s a film that is rooted in the ‘70s Women’s Lib movement, an era in which “a woman's place” was hotly debated on a national level, and still exceptionally holds well twenty years later. The film is intelligent, forthright, suspenseful, outlandish, satirical, funny, and politically incorrect, but that just makes it better!

18 - ALIEN (1979) / ALIENS (1986)

If you’ve been keeping track of my list, you’ve probably noticed how many of these films are “gothic horror” because I love that subgenre, with extreme emotions, awe inherent sublime, unshakable atmosphere, dark characters, Romancesque melodrama, and terrors that are both psychological and physical. The Alien series, the first two films in particular, is a gothic horror in space, where “no one can hear you scream.” The sequels never quite had the same subtlety and evocativeness of the original two.
     Alien (1979) starts slowly as the audience familiars themselves with the rough and tough crew of the ore mining spaceship Nostromo, is returning home from a routine mission and responds to a S.O.S. and set out to explore the hostile new world and come upon a derelict spacecraft where an alien stowaways onto the ship and, as it evolves, it kills off the crew one by one. Alien, whose plot is actually a spin on the “haunted house” story mixed with the sci-fi IT! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), is so filled with dread by placing us in an environment not of earth. At least, in a haunted house, you can run out the front door; but here, you’re surrounded by the vacuum of space, where you’re stuck, the terror is so genuine and claustrophobic which was something never seen and felt before. Ghostly steam, clinking chains, long dark corridors where anything can be hiding, the suspense is unbelievably suffocating and we actually don’t see the “monster” until the climax. The alien, however, is not the only menace to the all-too human crew; there are also soulless corporations and short-circuiting androids to be dealt with on top of everything else. Faced with these dilemmas, every single crew member of the Nostromo are absolutely believable. They're tired, stressed out, rude, bitchy, and they spend a good lot of time griping and snapping at each other, but they drop what they’re doing and stand together, protecting one another without hesitation when they must. It’s a grim, visceral film, which is extremely Freudian, with themes of violation and rape, filled with phallic and vaginal symbols courtesy of artist H.R. Giger. (Kudos to actor John Hurt for re-playing his role as Kane in the comedy Spaceballs (1987), making him the awesomest guy on the planet!)
     This was the first film where a theatre ever gave me complimentary barf bags and I just knew I was in for something special to come! Now that we know what the xenomorphs look like, let’s add hundreds upon hundreds of them to the “haunted house” in space formula, and we get the sequel known as Aliens (1986)! Now the character of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is fully developed, waking up 57 years later from hypersleep to discover that a terra-forming colony has been set up on LV-426, the planet wherein Nostromo first encountered the titular aliens. When Earth-based communications loses contact with colony, a band of marines are sent to investigate, taking Ripley and a representative. Its sequel took a different route — to make a fast moving, slightly tongue-in-cheek, boisterous action extravaganza, yet the suspense and terror of its gothic horror heredity remain in full in a seamless transfer. Instead of one alien, we get the entire nest, pushing the characters into a corner until there’s no escape and descend further into the labyrinthine bowls of hell in the climax in the greatest “cat fight” in cinematic history. Filled with amazing performances and an abundance of thrills, this film is one of the greatest of any genre it attempts — whether it's action, sci-fi, horror, or drama — and definitely one of my all-time favourite films! (Forgive the late addition of this film, life has its distractions.)

19 - DAVID CRONENBERG FILMS

One of the great originators of contemporary “body horror” is David Cronenberg. It’s a mistake to describe “body horror” as mindless blood/gore exploitation films; no, that’s not what it is: It is a the “man into monster” story, which is an exploration of corporal transformation and violation, the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body, to an “unnatural” state, whether scientific or supernatural. It’s not only grotesque and terrifying but beautiful and tragic; it’s both physical and the psychological — and, with Cronenberg, always cerebral as well. He straddles genres of drama, thrillers, suspense, gothica, sci-fi, and horror — often all at the same time. They’re thinking man’s films and I’m going to talk about my four favourite of his “body in revolt” flicks:
     SCANNERS (1981) – The vagrant Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is kidnapped off the streets and inducted into a top secret government program designed to develop the powers of “scanners” — people of telepathic and telekinetic abilities considered a threat to national security, if not controlled or quarantined — as weapons, with the help of a scientist named Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) and a mental suppressant drug called Ephemorol. Vale goes undercover and infiltrates an underground group of renegade scanners, led by the sinister Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) who is intent on building a new world order. The film has a general feeling of starkness and sparseness that brings an apt feeling of coldness and isolation, which is profoundly Cronenberg; it is a subversive, visceral, fly-on-the-wall take on racism and government, viewing the world as an outcast, dark and dysphoric!
     THE DEAD ZONE (1983) – This is perhaps my favourite of the Cronenberg’s “body horrors” yet, out of the four films, it’s goreless but equally as powerful as his other film; however, this film gets gravely overlooked, which is unfortunate because it’s a powerful film! Based on the novel by Stephen King, schoolteacher and all-around nice guy Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) wakes up from a five-year coma after a horrible car accident to have his job, his girlfriend, his family, his legs, and his life pass by him and it’s replaces with a gift — or is it a curse? — of precognition to see the past and future. Everyone he touches is an open book and, as his powers grow over time, poor Johnny gets more and more out of touch with humanity, becoming a recluse, and becomes more and more weak as the spells take what little life he has left. This is an emotional, sorrowful tale of loss, grief, and sacrifice. Johnny is no superhero, no butt-kicking killing machine out to stomp the bad guys, but a sad, lonely man with a terrible case of bad luck. The pain of the character haunts Walken’s expressive face of throughout the entire film, and the rage he feels at the rotten hand that life has dealt him is understandable, believable, shattering, and frighteningly intense. This is a man who has suffered every pain and loss that a man can suffer, yet is still determined to make the world a safer place for those he loves, even if it means losing them forever. You cry for this man! It’s a drama, a romance, a thriller, a horror, a tragedy, and a social commentary.
     VIDEODROME (1983) – This is perhaps Cronenberg’s weirdest film, which is saying a lot actually! I’m not exactly sure where to start with this one. It’s a surreal LSD, mixed with Draino, trip that is not for the faint of heart. Max Renn (James Woods) is a sleazy, low-rent TV producer who rapidly becomes obsessed with an unusual pirate satellite channel broadcasting perverse, exploitative torture, murder, mutilation, and pornography that may become a next new wave in television, where the nature of reality or the “perception” of reality will be either altered or distorted by television which has become in Dr. Oblivion's words, “the retina of the mind’s eye.” I feel this film was The Matrix (1999) of its day, ahead of its time, as a reality-morphing and philosophical “cyberpunk” social satire, which still hasn’t lost its power over the years, particularly now with the age of the internet! Cronenberg foresaw the importance of the media for mankind, influencing people with sublimated messages, manipulating audiences, and becoming very powerful, and how violence on screen can generate violence. It’s visceral, perverted, revolting, warped, and psychedelic. “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!”
     THE FLY (1986) – A remake of the classic 1958 film mixed with Frankenstein (1931), the film follows a pretty archetypical horror premise of “science gone wrong” — horribly wrong! Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is an independent scientific visionary who has been slowly designing a device that will “change the world as we know it” — a teleporter! When he shows his invention to his would-be girlfriend Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a journalist, but the wrinkles in the technology are still being ironed out, so Brundle takes one small step for man and tests the machine on himself. Unfortunately, during the teleportation process, his DNA is mixed up with that of a common housefly, and the two species soon begin to genetically merge and transform Brundle into a creature that has never existed before. Cronenberg, of course, never shortchanges his audience with graphic gore, which is sickening and just plain putrid, none more so than Goldblum’s slow physical transformation. What makes this whole affair really outstanding, however, is his psychological transformation: The truly disturbing thing is how front and centre the humanity of the characters and their world is kept. Davis and Goldblum are the doomed lovers in this regard — their chemistry is palpable, and her affection for him struggling against her disgust at what he is becoming, coupled with his own struggle to keep the fly in check, create the kind of riveting discomfort usually only commanded by train swerving out of control.

20 - THE EVIL DEAD TRILOGY

Bruce Campbell is the “Brad Pitt” of the horror! Guys wanna be him; girls wanna jump into bed with him! He plays the Ashley “Ash” J. Williams, the ultimate horror protagonist who fights evil spirits known as “Deadites” summoned by the Book of the Dead, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. Here’s the three films that make up the trilogy, taking the “cabin in the woods” trope into a new, fresh level:
     THE EVIL DEAD (1981) – This is the one that started it all and, unfortunately, it’s the least appreciated of the bunch. It was a serious horror film; it was not played intentionally for laughs, and it’s an excellent one at that: A group of four teenagers go to an isolated cabin in the woods for the weekend, but accidentally play a recording of a passage translation from the Book of the Dead and the Deadites answer the call! Poor Ash watches his sister, his best friend, and his girlfriend turn into zombies. The film took over 10 years to make, with a small, independent budget and guerrilla film-making tactics, and it was extremely controversial for its graphic terror, violence, and gore, mainly due to its infamous “tree rape” scene, and received a NC-17 rating in the US, while it was downright banned in other countries.
     EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN (1987) – Now with a far bigger budget, director Sam Raimi took the opportunity to remake his first film, rehashing the events in the first five minutes, and then expanded upon it, allowing the story continue further, but this time for laughs! This is truly one of the greatest horror comedies in creation, and poor Ash takes twice the abuse of the first film in a kind of schizophrenic frenzy, but takes it in stride, even to the point of cutting off his possessed hand and wearing a chainsaw on the stump. To get the film to a wider audience, the gallons upon gallons of blood that geyser in every direction were changed into different colours, such as yellow, orange, black, purple, and blue. Those silly censors and their silly fixations of red bodily fluids, what do they know!
     ARMY OF DARKNESS (1992) – By the end of the second film, Ash is transported to medieval 1300 CE England and is on a quest to return home by finding the Necronomicon. He finds, on his search, three books and must say a magic phrase to find the real one; however, he forgets it and it unleashes the Deadites, and Ash leads an army of war-weary knights in battle against the undead, led by his evil twin. This film is nowhere as bloody and gory as the first two films, instead it relies more on Three Stooges-esque slapstick. “Hail to the king, baby!”

Now, we're going to be finishing off the month with Part III...

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Mood of the Moment:  restless

Music of the Moment:  "Hellraiser" by Motörhead.

Media of the Moment:  Horror films!

Book of the Moment:  None.

Food of the Moment:  None.

Lust of the Moment:  Ashley "Ash" J. Williams.

Research of the Moment:  Horror films.

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "Groovy!" (Ash Williams, Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, 1987)

For those who know me, I love horror films! I grew up with it and still love the genre to this day. Halloween is coming up in a few days, so I want to do something special. Here I present 31 DAYS OF HORROR, where I show a thirty-one clips from thirty-one of my favourite horror films, starting from October 1st and ending on October 31st on All Hallows' Eve.

Nothing more to say than that. It's just something I wanted to do. These clips with be posted on my Twitter and placed in my favourites for easier access, but I'll post them here on DeviantArt journal as well, right here, detailing a small paragraph that explains my love of the film, its place in film history, and details about the scene itself. These aren't some list of the "greatest of all-time," but a list of my own personal favourites (and I'll do my best not to do spoilers)!

Hope you enjoy it!

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01 - NOSFERATU, EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS (1922) / NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1975)

What horror list doesn’t have this film in it or at the top of its list? It’s one of the pinnacles of the German silent era of film-making. Director F.W. Murnau could not secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula from his widow, so he went off and made the film anyway, changing some names, locations, and little more, calling his vampire “Count Orlock” and the title Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). You might look at Orlock and laugh at his goofy ears and rat teeth, but that’s what is described in the book and that’s what people at the time thought vampires looked like. It wasn’t until Béla Lugosi in the Dracula (1932) who re-invented the image to what we know today. Vampires were originally never intended to look human because they’re not human to begin with. Outraged by the film, the Stoker’s estate demanded that every single copy of the film burned. Fortunately, the reels survived in various parts of the world and, without those, we would have lost this film forever. But let’s talk about the film: Well, it’s Dracula! Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker) travels to Transylvania to meet with an Old World aristocrat Count Orlock (Dracula) who is vampire to finalize the sale of a house in Wisborg (London). But what makes this film is the vampire played by character actor Max Shreck and F.W. Murnau’s artistic direction, which is eerie, alluring, mythic, and dream-like, of acute, deliberate angles, long deep shadows, and painting with shadow and light by some crazed artist from the Dark Ages.
     Another film I feel I should talk about is the remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), another German film, which had a similar yet different and fresh take on the silent classic. (In fact, I love this film so much that I have a poster of it hung in my room.) The story is the same yet the original names have returned, with Orlock as “Count Dracula.” Although the film is in colour, it’s all strangely washed out creating a similar contrast to a black-and-white film; it has sound yet the film has lots of moments of long, uncomfortable silence; and the cast also use silent film makeup always looking as if they were stoned or coked off their ass; and yet this all works beautifully because it gives this peculiar, drug-induced, malignantly cancerous air, with that same eerie, dream-like quality and expressionistic direction of the original. I have to give a large “hurrah” to character actor Klaus Kinski who is not only downright creepy and vile as the vampire but, unlike Shreck, he brings a deeper sensitivity and sexuality to the character. The man, even in real life, is ugly as sin, but damn, Klaus, just damyummm! (There's two actual variations of this film — German and English — and I recommend the original German as it's a far superiour edition in every way.)

02 - THE UNKNOWN (1927)

Lon Chaney is, hands down, one of the greatest actors of all-time and definitely one of my top favourites! Although he has been immortalized as horror actor, he has actually done very, very few horrors in the 160 films of his vast career, but I wanted to talk about my favourite Chaney horror: The Unknown (1927), directed by Tod Browning, is perhaps his most brutal and unforgiving movie. The armless knife-throwing gypsy circus performer Alonzo (Chaney) is secretly a multiple murderer on the run who hides his arms because he has a deformity of double thumbs on his right hand. He has fallen in love with manager’s daughter Nanon (Joan Crawford) who has a pathological fear of hands — it’s heavy insinuated that she was molested and/or raped by her own father — yet she feels comfortable around Alonzo. But the manager eventually learns he does, indeed, have arms, Alonzo kills him, Nanon witnessed the murder but only saw the killer’s double thumbs, he alludes the police, he takes Nanon away and passively aggressively “grooms” for marriage, he blackmails a surgeon to amputate his arms, and this is where all the shit hits the fan. It’s a perverted love story with horror elements, or elements that are horrifying to watch; it’s beautiful and emotional yet sick and demented. Chaney is always a powerhouse performer and Browning is always a fantastic storyteller.

03 - M (1931)

This is considered the first film noir, the first psychological thriller, the first (serious) crime drama, and the first German sound film. Director Fritz Lang first establishes the fear and paranoia that grips the city of Berlin and its thousands of residents which is all caused one man, just one man — the first serial killer on film and the first child molester-murderer on film in the guise of this baby-faced, candy-chewing, soft-spoken Hans Beckert, based on the real-life case of Peter “Vampire of Düsseldorf” Kürten, played by the great Peter Lorre. The first ten minutes of the film is just bone-chilling, but my favourite scene is when we finally see the killer for the first time, thirty minutes into the film, where he sees a girl in a store mirror surrounded by knives. His eyes bulge, his body goes limp, he salivates, he hyperventilates, this monstrous haze of lust overtakes his entire being, and this is all done visually without any dialogue. He turns to stalk her, while whistling Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” but is foiled. He hides at a café to lull the beast; you don’t see do this, but you can hear him. The scene is candy for the senses! Strangely, this is the role that practically ruined Lorre’s career, before it even begin: This was his first big film, but he was so scary, so horrific, so upsetting, so believable, so powerful as Hans Beckert that you’re not sure if you should condemn him, help him, root for him, or cry for him. He only takes up a total of twenty minutes in the two-hour film, yet the impact of his character is forever immortalized in my brain: The minute I hear “In the Hall of the Mountain King” I completely freeze in my tracks and start looking around to see where it’s coming from. (In fact, I have the tune as my cel ringtone, which shows you how much self-punishment I inflect upon myself.)
     The film has a weird and wonderful, self-aware newsreel quality, which forces you to see all the wrinkles; and even though it’s a “talkie,” there are scenes of complete, uncomfortable silence and there is no use of a score — save the whistling, brrrrrr! (Lorre, ironically, couldn’t whistle, so it was Fritz Lang who did all the whistling in the back, sitting next to the camera, and purposely makes the song the loudest sound you'll hear in the entire film.)

04 - FREAKS (1932)

This is a serious “mind fuck” movie. I’m not sure where to start on this film: The circus is divided into “normals” (the strong and the beautiful) and “freaks” (the deformed and outcasted). Director Tod Browning, a true unsung hero of the cinema, assembled the largest of compilation of real-life sideshow performers who had real-life malformations and real-life abnormalities, from Johnny Eck the Half-Boy, Prince Randian the Human Torso, Daisy and Violet Hilton the Siamese Twins, Josephine Joseph the Hermaphrodite, Frances O'Connor the Armless Wonder, Peter Robinson the Human Skeleton, Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, Schlitzie the Pinhead, etc, and together they form a happy, tight-knitted family. The child-bodied dwarf Hans, a “freak,” falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist named Cleopatra, a “normal,” who cruelly amuses herself by flirting and manipulating him. When she learns that he’s rich, she marries “my little Hans” and, with her lover Hercules the Strongman, plans to kill him and the “freaks” take their revenge where they are going to do what Nature did to them! (Here’s a small spoiler: The scene that was edited out of the final cut was the castration of Hercules. If you listen at the beginning and ending showman scenes, you hear the angelic singing of castrato soprano in the background.)
     Banned in the U.S. and the U.K. until its re-introduction in counter-culture and cult theatres of the 1970s, now nearly seventy-five years has passed and still this film has never lost its power or lessened its shock value, because these aren’t puppets or special effects, they’re real people: It’s realism and surrealism at war! The first part of the film is a character study, the second is a murder mystery, the climax officially becomes a horror film, and the finale turns a morality tale. And what’s wonderful about Tod Browning is that he makes us comfortable around the “freaks,” makes us fall in love with them, and makes us completely at ease with them; and all of a sudden, everything goes utterly insane and we are appalled by them again, no longer by their looks, but their actions... It’s emotionally cruel, blatantly exploitative, repulsive and deviant, overwhelmingly sexual, downright unsettling, yet profound and powerful. To watch it is truly an experience!

05 - THE UNIVERSAL MONSTERS, PART I

Universal Studios dominated the horror genre in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the most iconic collection of characters in movie history. The minute you say the names “Dracula” and “Frankenstein’s Monster,” this is what everyone sees, whether you’ve seen the films are not. These were my first horror films, growing up with the series as a child, and will always hold a very special place in my heart:
     DRACULA (1931) / DRÁCULA (1931) – Dracula (1931) was an originally hit stage play, adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from Bram Stoker’s novel, brought to film, becoming the first horror “talkie” in America. The title role of the vampire was originally intended for Lon Chaney, but he died of lung cancer in 1928, so the title role was given to Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi, who was already a success playing the 500-year-old vampire on Broadway. The opening is splendidly atmospheric and chilling, in no small part due to the cathedralic set design and Lugosi’s charisma, with its giant cobwebs, fluttering bats on strings, and...uh, Transylvanian wingless bees, possums, and armadillos — okay, I admit that part is just weird, but then the last two-thirds have a staginess to it, filled with bland, static shots, long moments of silence, and no score. It’s still debated how much the film was done by director Tod Browning or cinematographer Karl Freund. But did you know there’s a superiour version of this film in Spanish? I heard about Drácula (1931) by its reputation, praised to vampire aficionado David J. Skal, watched it with no expectations, and was blown away: Before the times of dubbing, both were filmed simultaneously — the English by day, the Spanish by night, using the same script and sets, but with a Spanish-speaking cast. However, Spanish film had the advantage of watching the English test footage and then approving upon it. The shots were more dynamic, the costumes more revealing, the acting less stilted, the action is more violent, the last two-thirds are nowhere as stagey, and its scenes surprisingly more sexual and racy, but the film suffers from one big thing: There's no Lugosi... (I couldn't find any clips of the Spanish version, sorry.)
     FRANKENSTEIN (1931) / BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) – Based on Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name, Dr. Henry von Frankenstein (Colin Clive), a scientist, learns the secret of life itself and creates a being in the likeness of man by using dead bodies, which resulted in perhaps the greatest horror icon known as the Monster, which was originally offered to Béla Lugosi, fresh off of Dracula, but refused, so the role went to Boris Karloff. The film is teemed with homosexual themes. No, really, think about it: The story revolves around two men who create life without aid of a woman, defying nature (and god). This is even more prominent in its sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which is a superiour to the original film, with the effeminate Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) drags Frankenstein from his honeymoon bed, away from his new bride, in order to get to work, “the Monster’s Bride” from the sequel actually rejects “the Monster,” her intended mate, and so forth. While Dracula (1931) can come off as rather dated, Frankenstein is timeless, with its constantly moving camera, incisive editing, German Expressionist photography, eccentric set designs, dramatic use of close-ups, thick atmosphere, and ripe, minimalist dialogue.
     THE MUMMY (1932) – After Frankenstein (1931), Karloff became typecast, playing nothing but mute, lumbering, child-like characters afterward, until The Mummy (1932), which took advantage of his beautifully cultured, articulate voice. The story revolves around Im-ho-tep, a priest from Ancient Egypt, who attempted to resurrect his dead lover, a princess, and was caught, as punishment he was mummified and buried alive. Centuries later, he’s awakened by a pair of archaeologists, finds a woman bearing a striking resemblance to his lover, attempts to mummify her and make her his bride. The film is more of a gothic love story with an Egyptian setting than a true horror, with a darkly romantic, dream-like quality that is moody, understated, and succinct. It relies primarily upon atmosphere for impact rather action, making one of the more exotic Universal horrors.

06 - THE UNIVERSAL MONSTERS, PART II

Here we continue with the classic movie monsters of Universal Studios:
     THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933) – From H.G. Wells’ novella, a scientist develops a serum that refracts the light and tests it upon himself, but got more than he bargained for and turns him invisible and then grows mad from the power, wanting “the world to grovel at my feet.” Dracula does what he does to survive, the Monster to be loved and accepted, and the Mummy for love, they can all be sympathized with, and what’s interesting about the Invisible Man is how completely loathsome he is! Played by the always awesome Claude Rains, Dr. Jack Griffin is a nasty piece of work with practically no redeeming features — vain, rude, egotistical, bad-tempered, selfish, petty, vicious, distrusting, sneaky, callous, megalomaniacal, and yet oozing with charm, and then realize that he’s running around most of the film stark naked in the dead of winter! How do you fully protect oneself against someone who is physically strong, mentally smart, and totally determined to kill you if you cannot see him? The film is most well-known for its startling special effects, which is a showstopper every time. Although 75 years old, they’re still beautiful and impressive, and looks better than many modern-day CGI, bringing it a perverse, dark humour to the character that’s both funny yet sinister.
     THE WOLF MAN (1941) – The Americanized Larry Talbot arrives at the estate of his father’s Welsh estate due to the death of his beloved brother and his father wants him to take place as his new heir, but poor Talbot gets bitten by a wolf and is now condemned by a curse he doesn't understand or deserve. The Wolf Man (played by Lon Chaney, Jr, the real-life son of the silent superstar) kills without conscious and apathy at the full moon only to awake the next morning human again in horror and guilt at his actions. Chaney, Jr, brings out a heart-breaking performance as the tortured and conflicted Talbot. The film sports spooky atmosphere, beautiful photography, misty sets, moody forests, robust score, gorgeous makeup effects, and the overwhelming sense of mythology and legend that flows throughout the whole story. (The only good clip available was a total spoiler, so I'll have to settle for the trailer.)
     THE CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) – During the height of the Cold War, American audiences had lost interest in horror films and the demand was more for sci-fi and fantasy films, with nature gone wild or science experiments gone bad, and then comes the Creature of the Black Lagoon, which is a bit of both. It’s a “Beauty and the Beast” story soaked with tons of dirty Freudian metaphors. Originally made in 3-D, a science expedition travel aboard a vessel to the Amazon waters — a place of serenity, with its still waters, surrounded by palm trees and the sounds of monkeys and exotic birds — to find the Creature (or “Gillman,” which always makes me think he’s Jewish), a prehistoric link between humans, fish, and amphibians, with his fish-mouth opening and closing, his gills flapping, and his webbed hands stretched out in front of him like a sleepwalker. Creature lusts after the woman on the crew and steals her away into the water in the hopes of making Lil’ Gill-Babies! This is just a campy little film — great photography, nice script, melodramatic music, awesome effects and costuming, thrilling suspense, nice horror moments, but a bit bogged down by some stiff acting from the human characters. (I couldn't find any good clips from the film, so I'll have to settle with the trailer.)

07 - THE BLACK CAT (1934)

This film came out during the height of the Hays Code and I have no clue how this film got past censors! I loved this film, as a child, because this brought together two of my favourite horror heroes — Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff — and it’s just a delight to see these two interact. When I watched it again, as an adult, I was dumbfounded on how and why I was even allowed to watch this film because it’s just a vile story! The film has literally nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name; instead, it’s something completely original. Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), a psychiatrist, had left his wife and daughter eighteen years ago to fight in a war and fifteen of those years were spent in a concentration camp and, now released, he’s traveling to homeland in Hungry to see an old friend Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) at his home. His home is a state-of-the-art mechanical wonder built over the ruins of Fort Marmorus, which Poelzig commanded during the war, however Werdegast accuses him of betraying the fort to the Russians, resulting in the death of thousands of Hungarians, including Werdegast’s wife and daughter. But what he doesn’t know is that Poelzig preserved the lifeless bodies of the wife and daughter and has sex with them. Yeah, didn’t expect that, uh? And now he has his sight on a virginal honeymooner... The film is a daring, entertaining, surreal, disjointed mess of a movie. But when you have it deal with heavy issues of war, technology, life, death, greed, sex, murder, obsession, betrayal, revenge, rape, mutilation, necrophilia, S&M, and Satanism, can you really blame it? (And, oh, for the girls, Boris goes shirtless in this one! Oh, yeeeeaah, it’s yummy!)

08 - MAD LOVE (1935)

Peter Lorre hated doing this film. Back when studios used to own actors, body and soul, Lorre was virtually blackmailed to do this B-flick in order to win the juicier starring role in Crime and Punishment (1935), so he shaved his head to prove he would do anything for a good part and transformed into the “MGM Monster” named Dr. Gogol, a surgical genius of international renown, who is also a sadist (watching prison executions), a voyeur (going to Grand Guignol every night to see his favourite actress get tortured with hot pokers from his theatre box), and an agalmatophiliac (having sex with a life-sized wax doll of that said actress)! Yeah, it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it? A remake of the silent The Hands of Orlac (1924), it marks as Lorre’s debut into American cinema. The actress, the “virginal” bride for one year, whom Gogol desires comes to him for help when her husband, a brilliant pianist, lost his hands in an accident, so Gogol replaces the hands with those of a deceased murderer recently executed. However, “ze hands” seem to have a mind of their own, wanting to hurt and harm, and Gogol sees this as an opportunity to steal his wife to replace his sex doll for a real woman. For a role he reviled, Lorre brings such charm, grace, intelligence, sensitivity, sympathy, sensuality, depravity, madness, believability, and uniqueness to the character. Again, it’s another twisted love story, flawed but cerebral and poignant, grotesque and chilling, with a lot of deep sexual overtones.

09 - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)

For those don’t know me, I’m a great lover of Oscar Wilde, and this is my favourite work by him and this is, by far, my favourite production of any of his works on celluloid. It’s a Faustian psychosexual gothic horror about the beautiful, innocent young Adonis named Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) who becomes enthralled with the ideas of a new hedonism, as told by the sinful but delightful Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders, who was born to play this role), where the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses, and he begins to indulge in every kind of pleasure, moral and immoral, as the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging is transferred to his portrait, while he himself remains unchanged. This film is just scrumptious and it's definitely one of my top 20! It’s decadent and dangerous, intelligent and unsettling, beautiful yet sad, striking yet grotesque, with the philosophical witticisms and deep homoerotic themes from the novel still intact for a film during the height of the Hays Code. Although a black-and-white film, one of the most gorgeous ever made, it is punctuated with shots of full colour of the paintings to give the full effect, particularly in the disfigured portrait by “magic realist” artist Ivan Albright, which brings chills down my spine and shoots my lunch out my mouth. (This portrait is on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago, where I'm told is far more vile in person!)

10 - THE HAMMER HORROR FILMS

During the height of the Cold War, American audiences had lost interest in horror films and the demand was more for sci-fi and fantasy films, and this is where Hammer Studios came in, bring the horror to a new generation. They remade the many of the classic Universal Monster films; but, this time, there was an unprecedented dose of vibrant colour, blood and gore, eroticized violence, giant boobies, and actors like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing! For over two decades (1953-1976), British horror were among the best, most admired, and most imitated in the world that revolutionized the genre. And I’m going to discuss three of my favourites:
     HORROR OF DRACULA (1953) – A remake of Dracula (1931), the movie benefits from two astonishing central performances: Christopher Lee’s King of Vampires, with his slicked hair, swirling cape, and red eyes, is a creation of passionate intensity, to whom Peter Cushing’s fanatical, monomaniacal Van Helsing is the antithesis — it’s fire and steel, love and obsession, order and chaos, animal instinct vs. scientific reasoning, good vs. evil. But truly who is the real villain of the piece — Dracula or Van Helsing? It’s scary, sexy, action-packed, laced with atmosphere, and shows no signs at all of the low budget it was made under; the photography is gorgeous, the sets even better, the music just perfect, and the special effects are just dazzling; and the ending, a violent piece of hand-to-hand combat between the great literary enemies, was unlike anything else seen in British cinema up to that point.
     THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) – A remake of Frankenstein (1931), this film (and its series) is focused completely Peter Cushing’s Baron Victor von Frankenstein rather than his creations, which gives a new and fresh angle to the story, as it explores Frankenstein’s obsessions and how they begin to blind his ethics and consume his life. He doesn’t let anything get in the way of his work, even if it means pushing an old man off the stairs to do so. His Creature (Lee) is not really a misunderstood monster, but the literal symbol of Frankenstein’s failure and corruption. He is a true victim of hubris. The care of detail is just amazing in this film — direction, cinematography, costumes, sets, atmosphere, music, sense of sick humour, and use of 19th-century science!
     THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968) – Based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley, here’s a film, claimed to be “unclean” by one critic, that is extremely classy and very well made. It takes the familiar, eternal battle between good and evil and develops it in interesting ways about a religious fanatic named Duc de Richleau (Lee), along with his friends a Jew and an atheist, becomes caught up in the web of the dark arts due to the workings of a dangerous satanic cult, led by the charismatic, macabre Mocata (Charles Gray) who has the power to mind control. The people surrounding them just go from bad to worse. Full of atmosphere, portents, and escalating tension, this film could have come off as a chaotic mess, but it’s a terrific entertainment fest, with non-stop excitement and efficient scares. The premise is treated with the utmost seriousness and a sense of authenticity that just dives you into the world of Satanism, with genuinely believable and unsettling scenes of Devil worship, from the first encounter with a diabolical creature in the mansion’s attic, to the car chase through the countryside, the baptism-orgy in the woods, to the séance circles... The film is ethereal, visceral, and truly menacing!

Hope you guys are enjoying the list so far, as we continue on to Part II...

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Mood of the Moment:  excited

Music of the Moment:  "Psycho Man" by Black Sabbath.

Media of the Moment:  Horror films!

Book of the Moment:  None.

Food of the Moment:  None.

Lust of the Moment:  Norman Bates.

Research of the Moment:  Horror films.

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "We all go a little mad sometimes" (Norman Bates, Psycho, 1960).

Ever heard of Murphy's Law? Ever feel like the universe is secretly out to get you and you're not really sure why? Anything that can go wrong WILL go wrong for me: I am a little sphere in Murphy's Law's personal pinball machine. Murphy's Law just loves to vomit in my lap and spontaneously implode in my face. I should take it in good humour, but it's gone to the point of ridiculousness.

I'm having a bad year. In March, I feel in a 7-11, gashed my brow, bled all over the floor, and got eleven stitches. In May, I got braces for the first time in my life and now I even bit into a hamburger without some pain. In June, I fell off my bed and broke my arm — and I'm currently am typing this out with my one good hand. To make matters worse, this arm is my drawing arm. This is an artist's worst fear. Accordingly, I cracked my ulna bone in my right forearm — I'm right-handed — with connects to the thumb to the elbow. The break is more than a hairline but less than a fracture broken two inches from the elbow. Does it hurt? Yes, particularly when I move around and I'm not very good at sitting still. Will I be able to draw again? I don't know for sure, which is why I'm worried, but I have to meet a specialist to be sure. And parents won't allow me to do anything, while they insult me as they so it! I'm not THAT goddamn handicap! Grrr!

I got out of my cast a week ago, that was five-and-a-half weeks of torture there. And when I'm enjoying my freedom, I'm heading downtown and exited onto the highway. When I signaled and check my mirrors to get over to the next lane, a car zoomed forward and I swerved out of way, lost control of the car, smashed into a railing, totaled the car, got trapped in the wreckage of the car, had to get out by the "jaws of life," placed in an ambulance, got x-rayed, got catscaned, found out I fractured by pelvis, was hospitalized for two days (Saturday afternoon to Monday evening), had to get a urine bag shoved up my vagina, got food poisoning Sunday, vomited twice, been high on painkillers this whole weekend, which are now wearing off, I'm now stuck bedridden and stuck waddling in a pair crutches for next few weeks, maybe even months — it's also probably a bad sign when one of the nurses recognized you from last time (when I broke my arm) — and now I'm extremely bitter!

Murphy's Law, ladies and gentlemen.

On a good note, this will give me an excuse to concentrate on typing up my stories. Bad news is I'm already going to go insane from not being able to draw anything for the last two days that I feel like I'm about to scream!

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Mood of the Moment:  overwhelmed

Music of the Moment:  "Miracle" by Cascada.

Media of the Moment:  Saw (2004).

Book of the Moment:  Catwoman: The Dark End of the Street (Book #1), by Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, and Mike Allred.

Food of the Moment:  McNuggets.

Lust of the Moment:  Robert Englund.

Research of the Moment:  1950s films.

Quote of the Moment:  "I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy" (Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984).

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" (Lewis Strauss, 1896-1974).

Two days later...

ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

I got the Watchmen Director's Cut DVD today and finished through all the special features — and what to I think of it? It FUCKIN' SUCKS! I love the movie, but I LOATHE the DVD! I'm so emotionally DEVASTATED by this DVD that I am in tears and I'm angry beyond all belief! This is exactly why I hated the Dark Knight DVD! This DVD is bare bones, and I'm talking about the 2-Disc Special Edition Director's Cut, and it's useless! What is on this DVD?! NOTHING!

15-minute featurette of The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics - This is a good featurette discussing the history and cultural impact of the graphic novel, but it's not great and it's very "basic". Fans of the novel already know all this information. It's a something for non-fans, nothing more! And it's really nothing more than clips from the video journals.

Eleven video journals on the making of the film (30 minutes total) - These were part of the viral campaign that was all over the internet before the film was release. They're great and they're nice to have, but they're all freely available on the internet! It's just added for posterity, nothing more!

My Chemical Romance's "Desolation Row" music video - Actually, I hate this song! I hate the fact it was in the end credits of film, while a score would have been better! Again, nice to have, this is freely available on the internet!

Digital Copy of the Theatrical Cut - USELESS! I hate Digital Copies! Although, yes, it's great to have the ability to watch Theatrical Edition, but I can't watch it on a regular DVD player! I have to use a computer and a fuckin' password (which never works in the first place) to play it! Besides, NOBODY watches Digital Copies! That's why they're useless! They're a waste of space! What's wrong with having a DVD menu option to watch the original Theatrical or the Director's Cut, like in the Terminator 2 and Aliens special editions? Why is that so hard to do? It's 45 extra minutes! You can have BOTH on ONE DISC and have the second disc full of special feature all the way to the brim! It's NOT that hard! Why have it? Does the the existence of Digital Copies mean that you crapped up the quality of the DVD film itself? Isn't the point of Blu-Ray better picture quality than DVD? So why have Digital Copies?! THERE IS NO REASON!!!

And guess what? It's $30 to buy this piece of shit!

And you're being EXCLUDED because you — oh, poor little YOU — doesn't have $200 for a PS3 or $400 for a Blu-Ray player, plus $40 for the Blu-Ray disc itself, because the Blu-Ray has QUADRUPLE the features! That's BULLSHIT!

What's in the Blu-Ray? What special features did the DVD-ers were excluded from?

15-minute featurette of The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics - Okay.

My Chemical Romance's "Desolation Row" music video - Fine.

Digital Copy of the Theatrical Cut - Alright, even if it is idiotic to have Digital Copies of anything...

Featurette of "Real Super Heroes, Real Vigilantes" - A bit of a "seen-it" piece that examines the psychology and fascination with super heroes in culture. That's sounds great! Why doesn't the DVD have this? That's BULLSHIT!

Featurette of Mechanics: Technologies of a Fantastic World - About the science and technology in the film. Great! Why don't we have that? Again, BULLSHIT!

30-minute of BD-Live/Watchmen: Focus Points - These are the UPDATED "2.0" version of video journals, which has extra production information and behind-the-scenes edited out of the originals. That means the regular DVD has the "inferior" journal entries! — BULLSHIT! I don't even know what this Focus Points is! But from what I read it seems to be an extra video journal! Not only do we have "inferior" journals, but we are MISSING the 12th journal entry! FUCKIN' BULLSHIT!

4-hour "Maximum Movie Mode" - It's a split-screen director's commentary, a personal tour by Zack Sydner of the movie! Over four hours! The DVD doesn't even have a simple audio commentary! Dark Knight didn't have a fuckin' audio commentary! DVD gets nothing! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!!!

What the hell is this happening?! What's going on with WB?! Why are they screwing around with us like this?! Are we being prosecuted somehow?! Why??? IS IT BECAUSE WE'RE POOORRRRR!!! I AM INFURIATED!!! IT'S UNFORGIVABLE! THERE'S NO REASON FOR THIS!

(runs out and screams in a pillow)

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Mood of the Moment:  pissed

Music of the Moment:  "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel.

Media of the Moment:  Watchmen (2009).

Book of the Moment:  Watchmen: The Film Companion, by Peter Aperlo.

Food of the Moment:  Rice with boiled eggs and fish sauce.

Lust of the Moment:  Walter Kovacs.

Research of the Moment:  Watchmen.

Quote of the Moment/Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "Excuse me, need to visit men's room" (Rorschach, Watchmen).

Just came back from watching the limited release of the Director's Cut of Watchmen in theatres on Sunday. Only four cities are showing it — New York, Los Angeles, Minnepolis, and Dallas — and I'm in Dallas. Well, technically, it was being showed at the Rave Motion Pictures Theatre in Hickory Creek, Texas, which is considered part of the DFW metroplex, barely so. It was a hour away from my house!

What did I think of the film? It is fan-bloody-tastic! And I'm a person who HATES and DESPISES extended cuts! But this is how Watchmen was really intended and it is amazing! The Director's Cut is far more superior to the Theatrical Cut, without question. I am still quite surprised at how adding forty-five extra minutes could make such a difference! It doesn't feel rushed or exhausting. It flows a great deal better. It grabs your attention better as well which, ironically, makes the film feel shorter than the Theatrical Edition. It does seem like the film is saving the all the Bernie scenes for the Ultimate Edition scheduled for December, sigh!


My favourite parts are:

The first extended scene with Rorschach searches through the Comedian's apartment. Two police guards hear the noise he makes and investigate and Rorschach's knocks out one of the cops, scares the hell out of the other cop, and leaves. At first, I wasn't sure why this new scene was added, but it was then followed by two more extended scenes, which were equally awesome. The Director's Cut finally established why the police hate and fear Rorschach and, as a result, made their attack on him at Moloch's even more powerful, which was extended by a new scene with the grappling gun knocking the wind out of one of the SWAT men, as it was meant to be!

Comedian's scenes in Vietnam are extended, where we see him come out of a helicopter and a longer scene of burning the VietCom solider, and made it more AWESOME!

Crimebusters Meeting is longer. Ozymandias' and Comedian's talk is extended, of course, but what makes this scene EPIC is Nite Owl II and his adorableness, such as his nervous ticks, his line about "no drinking," giving not-so-secretive flirtatious glances toward Laurie (and finding himself pitifully defeated by the "manliness" of Manhattan, d'awwww!), and him holding back Rorschach as he verbally attacks the Comedian — and then he apologetically straightens his trench-coat collar. It is sooooo fuckin' cute! It's a such tiny, tiny little gesture that happens to speak volumes! The Happy Harry scene is also extended greatly and, again, Nite Owl II steals the scene!

Rorschach's scene is added where he gets his costume out of a dumpster and stops a "rape/mugging/both" — and it's a fantastic scene!

The gore is more intense with the extended scenes of the murder of Gerald Grice, Roy Chess' attack on Adrian Veidt — What the hell! That poor secretary didn't do anything to you! — and, of course, Dr. Manhattan's attach in Moloch's vice den. They look fantastic, but....DAAAYYMMMNNN!

"Possibly homosexual" and "We're all puppets" are back in the film — and they rock!

Laurie has a lot of new scenes: While she was just "meh" in the Theatrical Cut, she advances greatly in these new scenes. She really got the short end of the stick in the Theatrical Edition! I actually ended up really, really LOVING her in the Director's Cut (even though I despised her in the book!) and my favourite scene with her is when she returns to the research facility, learning that Jon has vanished, and beats the shit out of one of the creep-o agents. It was epic!

The scenes with Kovacs and Dr. Long, the psychologist, have been extended as well, however the Kitty Genovese speech is still missing from the film, but I'm rather glad they didn't add it in because what they did add was excellent! It's a real improvement from the Theatrical Edition, making the flashbacks appear a little more intense and emotional than before. The ending is wonderful, I ended up busting out in laughter, and I won't spoil it for you! You just have to see it!

Anything with Moloch, even if they were just a total of twenty seconds, he really makes the most out of these seconds and made me squee! He comes off a little more pitiful and all the more tragic in those little glances we're given into his life. We even get to see him a shot of him in his glory days, which made it all the more GLORIOUS!

Anything with Hollis Mason is AWESOME! He's my favourite character after Rorschach and I'm a huge fan of Stephen McHattie (or as I petnamed him "McHottie"). He has three-and-a-half new scenes and each one gets better as the film progresses. The highlight event, of course, his death, which was my major complaint about the Theatrical Cut editing the scene out and it was well worth the wait: It is so emotional, so brutal, so beautifully executed that it gave me chills and broke into tears! My one problem is that it was not milked enough and, instead, it quickly dissolved into the next scene. I wasn't given enough time to recover my tears!

In the restaurant scene, where Laurie and Dan are meet for the first time in years, did anyone else hear someone in the background say "four-legged chicken"? Perhaps a possible reference to the four-legged bird seen in Karnak in the novel?

Ozymandias' "asshole smile" (or "shit eating smile") is still rad!

Walter Kovacs + Wifebeater + Ripped Shirt = SQUNF!!!

There are several more extended scenes besides these mentioned. I just wanted to talk about my favourite ones.


My complaints are (which I can't help but nitpick):

Although they are still fantastic scenes in themselves, there are three minor little things that I wished they added into the film: (1) It would loved it if the Comedian shot his pregnant Vietnamese mistress twice because it would have been crueler (and cooler) if he did! (2) I would have loved it if Gerald Grice, the pedophile, would have added another one tiny sentence to his speech: "Alright, I confess. I kidnapped her. I killed her," and then add "I fucked her," and continue on with "Arrest me," because it would have driven the point further and made the extended "killing" even more dramatic and emotional. (3) I wanted more on Adrian Veidt's mysterious background, which wasn't expanded in the book anyway. Actor Matthew Goode theorised and played Adrian as that parents were Nazi sympathisers and members of the Third Reich, gaining wealth by stealing valuables from the Jews taken to concentration camps, and his birth may have been attributed to the practice of Eugenics. Now, this, of course, was not mentioned in the film because it wasn't in the book, it doesn't change what is in the book, but what it would have done is fill in the blanks. It explains his motivations of why he gave away all his entire inheritance and re-started his life and wealth from scratch, and explains his obsession with "world peace" in a clearer light.

Laurie's surname is still "Jupiter" and not the original "Juspeczyk". It was a complaint I had with the Theatrical Edition, which I still befuddles me. In the advertisements and merchandise, such as the movie posters, the Film Companion, and the action figures made for the film, they address her name as "Juspeczyk" and credits her name in the end tiles as "Juspeczyk" — and yet the film, they call her "Jupiter"! What the hell is going on? Is it a goof? Or is it a last minute change?

In the same scene, we see Dan and Laurie leave the Gunga Diner and walk past Kovacs, where Rorschach's Journal voice-over said that they "didn't recongise me without my mask". Doesn't he mean that they didn't recongise him because he wasn't wearing "his face"? He is suppose to call his Rorschach mask "his face", while his Kovacs face is referred to as "his mask". In the film, he does say this when the Rumrunner scene where he is unmasked by the cops and when he threatens the psychologist. Was anyone else confused by that?

Although the scenes of Rorschach leaving Moloch's to walk to the Comedian's grave are extended, the "American love" speech is still missing from the film. The entire monologue at the end of Chapter 2 is my favourite Rorschach's Journal entry in the novel and possibly my favourite part in the novel as well. (I love that monologue so much that I've actually memorised it!) To be fair, I understand why it was edited out because, in reality, it wasn't really that important to the film. However, because of the fact that it's missing, the scene isn't as powerful and as emotional as it should be. The Motion Comic adaptation of this scene is far superior!

The scene of Rorschach looking up at the nude woman in window wasn't added to the film. The scene really is a window into Rorschach's sexuality. In the book, particularly emphasized in the Motion Comic, Rorschach stops to watch a nude woman up in an apartment window from the street. He stares at her — we don't see her face — and Rorschach does leave until he sees her lovers wals in and closes the curtains. He doesn't even write about this encounter down. Does he feel loneliness? Does he feel sexual attraction? Does he feel pain? And I would have loved to see the film's take of this scene.

The film never explains Bubastis yet again. I do love the character and I do appreciate that she's there, but in the context of the film, she's useless. They should have removed her completely from the film.

Where is the Nite Owl Dark Roast Coffee (by Veidt) scene? (I strongly believe the lawsuit against the film forced this scene to be removed, not the one by Fox, but an equally stupid one done by Chock Full o' Nuts! Arrghhhh!)

I demand more Minutemen, particularly of Dollar Bill, Mothman, Silhouette, and the sexiness that is Nite Owl I!

Were there any of the extended scenes that would have been considered superfluous? Honestly, no. ALL the extended scenes, I felt, fit in beautifully and perfectly in the film and were all quite necessary for the film and I'm more shocked at WHY they were even removed in the first place! Damn WB suits! You can probably say "insert-scene-here" could be removed, like the gore, the nudity, the sex scene in Archie, blah-blah-blah-blah, yak-yak-yak...but seriously TOUGH NOUGHIES! I'm sticking to my guns! This is a great story and it's a great film! If you don't like it, go watch Twilight!

If you liked the Theatrical Cut of the film, guaranteed, you will LOVVVE the Director's Cut! And I honestly loved the Theatrical Edition, I really do, and my original intention is to get both DVDs, but after watching this, I will probably never see the Theatrical Cut ever again and, even if I did buy it, for posterity, I would probably never open it. The Director's Cut is THAT great! Check it out!

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Mood of the Moment:  excited

Music of the Moment:  "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Media of the Moment:  Watchmen (2009).

Book of the Moment:  Watchmen: The Film Companion, by Peter Aperlo.

Food of the Moment:  Rice with boiled eggs and fish sauce.

Lust of the Moment:  Walter Kovacs.

Research of the Moment:  Watchmen.

Quote of the Moment/Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "We don't do this thing because it's permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we're compiled" (Rorschach, Watchmen).

The Director's Cut of the Watchmen film is coming to DVD in July, hurrah! I know I'll be getting the both the Theatrical Release and the Director's Cut DVDs for sure, however there's no news about the eagerly-awaited "Ultimate Edition," which will have animated Tales of the Black Freighter incorporated inside with extra footage of the two Bernies, as of yet. Nevertheless, in celebration, I'm going to post up Rorschach-related icons I made for everyone! Enjoy!

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Preview:

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Mood of the Moment:  horny

Music of the Moment:  "Move Along" by All-American Rejects.

Media of the Moment:  Ghostbusters (1984).

Book of the Moment:  My sketchbook.

Food of the Moment:  New York-style cheesecake

Lust of the Moment:  Dr. Egon Spengler — he's a childhood crush!

Research of the Moment:  Parapsychology.

Quote of the Moment:  "I think this building should be condemned. There's serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members, the wiring is substandard, it's completely inadequate for our power needs, and the neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone" (Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters, 1984).

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane" (Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900).

Wow, it's been a while! Life has a way of distracting you, yet again, more and more... In case, you're curious, I did, indeed, get a new laptop, hurrah, which actually works!

Well, allow me to return with a bang! I've been re-watching the Nightmare on Elm Street film series for the past few months in preparation of the upcoming remake, which will star Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach from Watchmen) as the horror icon. And, with that, this is a random fan-fic, short and sweet, about the events that led to the birth of the "Springwood Slasher" — the serial molester and murderer, Frederick Charles "Freddy" Krueger.

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Title:  Red in My Eyes
Author:  Diane N. Tran
Fandom:  A Nightmare on Elm Street
Time:  Westin Hills Asylum, Springwood, Ohio, December 1937
Archive:  DeviantArt
Character(s):  Amanda Krueger (Sister Mary Helena), Featured Maniac ("Ted")
Length:  384 words
Genre:  Horror/Psychological Thriller: Poetry
Rating:  M (for sexual themes)
Summary:  17-year-old Amanda Krueger, a hospital volunteer, is accidentally locked in an upper floor of the Westin Hills Asylum — along with a hundred of maniacs.


(''...The doctors looked upon the crowd of a hundred in the zoo'')

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Mood of the Moment:  distracted

Music of the Moment:  "If U Seek Amy" by Britney Spears.

Media of the Moment:  Gran Torino (2008).

Book of the Moment:  Kingdom Come, by Mark Waid and Alex Ross.

Food of the Moment:  Lemonade.

Lust of the Moment:  Robert Englund.

Research of the Moment:  Nefertari.

Quote of the Moment:  "Welcome to prime-time, bitch!" (Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, 1987)

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "My love is unique — no one can rival her, for she is the most beautiful woman alive. Just by passing, she has stolen away my heart" (Rameses II, 1279-1213 BCE).

It's Christmas in Texas and the night is frozen, but there's not a snowflake in sight. I'm wrapped up in a comfy blanket and drinking hot cocoa, cursed with insomnia. But I don't feel the holiday spirit and I'm not exactly sure why that is. I suppose I've been feeling very gloomy. My mind is still in "finals" mode, even though it's been over a week since school ended. Perhaps I just need some pick-me-up to get myself in the season?

Therefore, I'm posting up the revised edition of my GMD pastiche, The Landlady and the Poet. Several Basilians from DA assisted in cleaning up the mistakes from this pastiche and I'd like to thank them from the bottom of my heart! I'm always surprised that I have "fans" out there: I felt like Sally Field, hahaha! After Christmas, I plan to write a "commentary" to accompany this pastiche, telling the origins and inspirations of this story, as well as the creation of Oscar Milde as a character — if any one is interested, of course. (And, yes, I need to write the second part of Wizard World, too. So much to do, so little time...)

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Title:  The Landlady and the Poet
Author:  Diane N. Tran
Fandom:  Disney's Great Mouse Detective
Time:  Lower 221B Baker Street, London, December 1881 (Post-Oxford: The Case-Book of the Great Mouse Detective)
Archive:  DeviantArt
Character(s):  Mrs. Judson, Oscar Milde, Sherringford Basil
Length:  5273 words
Genre:  Philosophy: Aesthetics vs. Ethics
Rating:  G
Summary:  A lonely landlady receives a Christmas visit from the detective's friend — a poet.


(''...It was a bitterly frozen December evening'')

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Mood of the Moment:  gloomy

Music of the Moment:  "Name Your Poison" (from The Return of Captain Invincible) by Christopher Lee. Yes, he can sing — and (kinda sorta) dance!

Media of the Moment:  "The Suburbia Affair" from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1967).

Book of the Moment:  Wit, by Des MacHale.

Food of the Moment:  Chao ga chien vit bo (or Vietnamese rice porridge, with chicken, ox tails, and preserved duck eggs, or "century eggs")

Lust of the Moment:  Illya Kuryakin!

Research of the Moment:  Historical perfumes.

Quote of the Moment:  "I should have known who is was when I saw you trip over your own feet!" (Illya Kuryakin, "The Arabian Affair" from The Man from Uncle, 1965)

Philosophical Perspective of the Moment:  "The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?" (Zhuangzi, 369-286 BCE).