I’m up late, or early, perhaps, reading the script. I have a reading tomorrow afternoon at 2, and Alex wanted “feedback and ideas”, especially from me. It’s two thirty in the morning, I’m tired, I feel uninspired, and I have fuck all in the way of ideas and feedback, except for “your dialogue should be less expository”, and “maybe I could do something else instead of farting this guy in the face”. For some reason, I don’t think that’s what he’s looking for. I’ll have to reread this fucking thing one more time and try to pick out a few things that I want to suggest changes to, and ignore the rest, I think, it’s the only way I’m going to have something useful.

On a more positive note, yesterday night I wrote seven pages of notes/treatment for my other horror idea. It’s becoming quite substantial, and I feel like I’m starting to know the characters and the setting well. I also have the beginnings of a treatment, at least in terms of inciting incident, major turning points, etc. The ending is what’s most open at the moment, and I expect I’ll have to rework a lot of other stuff after the ending falls into place. But all in all, it’s looking good, I think.

Today in the afternoon I wrote three pages of notes and character study for my mexploitation screenplay. It feels good to get going with it again, and it feels like it’s going to work, too. In general, actually doing several pages of writing per day makes me feel immensely good. After weeks of thinking/procrastination, things are starting to flow.

Now, for another rereading.

I just got a mail that we’re apparently doing a reading of the script at Alex’ house on Saturday. This should be interesting, it’s also the opportunity to present comments and suggestions for the script. I should re-read it and take notes, I suppose.

Pretty much all screenwriting books and teachers will tell you to do your homework and research, and also to write down your ideas when they occur to you, especially if they’re not applicable to your current project. Personally, I find it a bit hard to write my ideas down in a form I’m satisfied with before I’ve done some research and let them churn around in my head for a bit. Today, I did a round of research and wrote some 5 pages of notes for an idea I had a few weeks ago. It led me to research, through the wonderful Wikipedia, topics as disparate as debutante balls, language isolates, caves, the ancient pueblo peoples, the Manchu language, acrolects, and a few other things. All for the same story idea, which is actually surprisingly simple and coherent. All of a sudden, a bunch of things you’ve known about for a while just come together in a new, strange way. It’s fun, especially since I’m the kind of person who actually reads random encyclopedia entries for entertainment. And I have the feeling that it might actually work as the kind of creepy, intellectual cosmic horror that I enjoy. Think of it as Lovecraft meets Focault’s Pendulum, protagonized by a linguist doing field work in the jungles of Mexico.

So that’s one idea written down, and I can feel that it’s not invading my thoughts so much now. I have another one which is also separate from the project I’m supposed to be working on, so I guess I’ll do that one next. Writing ideas out makes them crystallize too, although I’m often worried that they seem banal. It’s sort of like what happens when you tell people your dreams. They seem significant and highly weird when you wake up and the experience is fresh, but then they become trivial, flat, and uninteresting when you try to tell them to someone else. Although Hans Petter recently characterized my dreams as “Lovecraftian”, and that’s got to count for something.

I’m not going to make a habit of posting reviews, I think, but I just watched a movie that I thought it’d be worth talking about a bit. It’s Neil Marshall’s The Descent, a British horror movie that’s been talked about and hyped quite a lot. Neil Marshall made Dog Soldiers in 2002, a movie I liked quite a bit. Dog Soldiers was a fairly basic, but solid and tense horror/action deal, using werewolves as monsters in a “group of soldiers isolated and fighting against overwhelming odds” story along the lines of Aliens and Zulu. I know people who hated it, but I thought it worked well, and was a good example of what could be done with a tight script and a small budget.

I had fairly high expectations about The Descent, since it seemed like a good concept, a group of female cavers get trapped in an uncharted cave system and are hunted by strange predators. There’s a huge list of phobias to exploit here, from fear of the dark, claustrophobia, fear of heights, etc., to the more mythological fears of monsters living on the bowels of the earth, places we never see, Lovecraft’s “Dark corners of the earth”.

I watched this with Øyvind, who’s a bit of a caver himself, and knows a bunch of people who basically dedicate their lives to it. As I expected, there were things in the movie that were unrealistic from a caver’s point of view, but maybe not as much as I had feared. The cavers in the movie wear too little clothing, they act foolishly at times, and one of the main turning points is sadly unrealistic, but apart from that, it’s not too bad.

What really doesn’t work is very simply the script. Characters lack motivation for the things they do, especially the Sarah character at the end is acting totally irrationally, and quite cruelly. Although that specific incident can be explained by her mental state, it totally robs us of any sympathy for the character, and we simply don’t care much if she lives or dies. The plot is extremely simple, and the characterization scenes in the first act, that are supposed to build the characters and make us care about them, are unfocused and generally fail completely.

The characters are hard to tell apart, with the exception of Sarah, since she’s surly and depressed, Juno, since she’s Asian and good looking, and Holly, since she’s, god help me, punk rock or something. It gets better once some of the characters are knocked off, as they always are in movies like these, and when they get split up, Marshall sees fit to give them different color lights, so it’s easier to know who we’re looking at. But still, it seems like a defeat to have to color-code your characters for your audience to be able to tell them apart.

The main problem is simple. We don’t really know much about these people, we don’t care too much about them, when they die, we’re not sure who died, and by the time the ending rolls around, we’re tired of it all.

There are some visually and stylistically nice touches in this movie, though. There’s a car crash in the first act that is very naturalistic and comes on in an unexpected way, but still manages to maintain the horror movie standard gore. Right after that, there’s a “lights go out sequentially in a corridor” scene which is also nice looking, even though we’ve seen that in The Matrix Reloaded already (in the trailer, even). Some of the monster effects are nice, they’re shot in that strobed fast exposure look that worked so well for 28 Days Later, making their movements all chaotic and hard to follow, and also freeze-framing arcs of brilliant crimson drops of blood in the air. Also, the required claustrophobia works fairly well, although Øyvind was slightly dismissive, he seemed to think that the tightest corridors people in the movie squeezed through were quite roomy and comfortable compared to some he’d seen.

In summary, it’s decent, but it’s it’s not good enough. It’s interesting to see that some of the user comments on IMDB are praising it for being a break from “the usual Hollywood fare”, when it’s actually an incredibly typical horror plot, and it also derives most of its scares (or rather, jumps) from monsters popping up after 20 seconds of characters looking around in the dark while the creepy music builds. It’ll make you jump, and it’s tense at times, but it’s not particularly scary. I’m convinced there are much better movies that can be made about horrors that lurk in the dark, forbidden corners of the earth.

I don’t even know if claiming my blog on all these sites is worth it, but it doesn’t seem like too much work. So:

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

I seem to have left that last post a bit unfinished.

Reading Sean Collins’ The Monumental Horror Image again (it’d been a few months since I last read it when I wrote the last post), I see that in his conclusion he makes much of the same point as I wanted to make. He talks a lot about “Otherness”, and “Cosmic fear”, or “things that should not be”, which closely parallels a point that often comes up when I discuss what makes horror work for me; The feeling that’s something’s very wrong. It often takes the form of reality breaking down, like in The Ring and parts of Jacob’s Ladder, but it can also be much smaller, more localized things. For instance, Cronenberg’s The Brood is an uneven film, and towards the end it’s more tense than scary, but the feeling of wrongness is incredibly strong in a few places, especially the first time we see one of the Brood. It’s just a very short flash, but the monstrosity of the thing gives that particular sinking feeling, the one that says “Oh no, that’s not right at all”.

Some horror movies are pedestrian in general, but succeed in creating this effect in a few scenes. A recent example is Jaime Balagueró’s Darkness, which is generally quite boring and uninteresting, with a contrived plot. But the last 10 minutes, where the gates to hell are opened, are quite good, and feel very, very “wrong”.

There’s been a trend with many horror fans lately to denounce Lovecraft as being “interesting and cool, but not scary”. I don’t think that’s right at all. Certainly his prose isn’t wonderful, and he repeats himself a lot, but when he got it right, there are few that do it better. Dreams in the Witch-house, one of his less “cosmic” stories, has a rat-creature with a human face in it, described circumspectly and in vague detail, which evokes (at least in me), a feeling of wrongness so strong that the first time I read the story, I had serious problems turning out the lights at night.

Just to get a few more examples of what I see as typical “wrongness” off my chest: The spiderwalk scene in the rerelease of The Exorcist, any scene ever with kids acting like adults or in other abnormal or creepy ways, the card-guessing scene in The Evil Dead (a highly creepy movie, although people tend to focus on the comedy elements), or any of these two purportedly real stories.

So, horror is at its most scary when it shatters the audience’s perception of reality in a believable way. It can be anything from expectations of behaviour (this is why mentally ill people can be so scary), to the Order of the Universe.

I’m sure I have more to say about this, but this is getting long, and I’m tired. I’ll leave you with something I posted on my old activity log years ago, and which has stayed with me since. It contains several excellent examples of wrongness, some of which are very creepy:

At Luthz at the foot of the Vosges Mountains in May 1589 the villagers were celebrating a pagan festival. Claude Cothéze was returning in the evening from that village to the next, which is called Wisembach, and had already climbed a good part of the hill which separates the two villages, when he was suddenly caught in a whirlwind and stood looking about him in amazement to see if he could find any cause for such an unusual occurrence, for the air was most calm and still everywhere else.

Then he saw in a sheltered place six witch women dancing round a table sumptuously decked with gold and silver, tossing their heads about like people afflicted with madness; and near them was a man like a black bull watching them as if he were a casual passer by. He therefore stood still for a while collecting himself and making sure that he saw quite clearly; and when he had done so, they all suddenly vanished from his sight.

Recovering from his fright he then started on his road again and had already passed the top of the hill when behold, those women were following him from behind, throwing their heads about as before and keeping a deep silence, while before them went a man with a black face and hands curved like talons, with which he would have clawed his forehead if he had not turned and opposed him with his drawn sword; but then the man ceased to threaten him and vanished as if in fear of his life.

That’s from the Compendium Maleficarum, which was written in 1608. Whatever’s scary, it doesn’t seem to have changed much lately.

Just to take a little break from the mexploitation stuff, I’m going to talk a little about one of my favourite genres, namely horror. I’ve loved horror for as long as I can remember, and I’ve certainly read and watched a lot of it. For years, I’ve speculated about an interesting question that logically should come up a lot in discussions of horror, but for some reason doesn’t: What’s scary?

It seems simple on the surface, but it really isn’t. Noël Carroll’s The philosophy of horror, or, Paradoxes of the heart, one of the few serious scholarly works on horror, and as far as I’ve been able to figure out, the most recognized, touches on the issue only tangentially. Carroll defines horror as having a “monster”, a creature or force whose main trait is impurity, most often by virtue of transgressing categorical boundaries such as living/dead, man/animal, or by being incomplete or formless. It’s because of this that the monster arouses fear, repulsion, and also curiosity, argues Carroll. This explicitly excludes things like slasher and serial killer movies from the definition of horror, which is really fine with me, I’ve always thought of them as more suspense than horror anyway, unless the killer takes on some explicitly supernatural aspects.

Sean T. Collins, who writes the excellent horror blog Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, wrote an essay on “The Monumental Horror Image”, which also talks about some defining characteristics of the horror genre, specifically the appearance of a reality-defying image, either in the form of the sudden but static appearance of a being that shouldn’t be there, or in the form of a monument that attests to the presence of evil, madness, or monstrousness.

So, the impure and that which transgresses our category boundaries is scary. So is that which breaks with our perception of reality, for instance by appearing where it couldn’t possibly be. This is interesting, because the kind of horror I’ve always found most scary is where reality is blatantly violated. Jacob’s Ladder, one of the top movies on my personal “most scary” list, does this in interesting ways, for instance. So does The Ring, especially the US remake (which I actually prefer over the convoluted and illogical Japanese original). When reality breaks down, or your view of reality gets violated, things get scary.

On a tangent, there’s an interesting article on night terrors, sleep paralysis, and hypnic hallucinations over on Science & Spirit, which piqued my interest. Not only are the hallucinations described very horror-movie like, but the article ends with the author worrying that the hallucinations will come back, since she’s been talking about them too much. Doesn’t that just seem to echo a bunch of horror clichés, where people refuse to talk about the evil, monster, etc., for fear that it’ll haunt them? In Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Lovecraft-like Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time, which I finished a couple of weeks ago, the monsters are explicitly hunting humans who know about them, because the humans’ thoughts about the monsters disturb them. “Our thoughts make spirals in their world”, a character come back from the dead to warn the living says ominously.

That particular taboo is echoed elsewhere too, in urban legends of Bloody Mary (and Clive Barker’s fictionalization of the same legend, Candyman, saying the name of the monster calls it. It’s worth considering if this convention in horror fiction comes explicitly from night terrors and hypnic hallucinations, or from nightmares. Thinking a lot about dreams and nightmares, or talking about them, often makes them repeat themselves, more vividly. I think it could be a good explanation.

Just to claim this blog, here’s my Technorati Profile. Nothing to see here, move along.

As I work on my own mexploitation screenplay, I’m reading some screenwriting books. I’ve read some before, and I think I have a good idea of how structure works, etc., but it’s good to review. I got two of the most essential books a while back, Syd Field’s Screenplay and Robert McKee’s Story. Screenplay is perhaps most known for being the first text to formalize modern three act structure, when it was first published in the late Seventies. Story, on the other hand, is quite a bit newer, and has a more artistic, less formulaic approach. Both contain good information on screenwriting, I can say that much.

But if you’re looking for an enjoyable read with good prose and eloquence, stay away from Screenplay. It’s a pretty horrible text, full of overstretched metaphors (that are repeated almost verbatim several times), bombastic proclamations, not to mention misspellings and other problems. Story, on the other hand, is very well written, and McKee obviously has a passion for the craft. He’s also much more inclusive in his approach, which might appease those who have misgivings about “learning to write” in general.

I got mail yesterday that the dates for shooting have been set. We start on November 21st, and wrap on December 4th. That’s 14 days of shooting, which is insane. I’m doubtful we’ll make it, but we’ll see. I’ll work 4 of those 14 days, it seems. This slight delay means I might have a chance to go to the gym for a week or two before we start too. I could use that.

Also, I sent off my contact lens specifications to the producer. I get a fondue fork stuck in my eye late in the second act, and I’ll need an effect lens for the rest of my scenes. Presumably one of those white ones that made Tor Johnson near blind and walking into walls in Plan 9 From Outer Space.