Tobe Hooper’s work has always been uneven. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is of course the original modern slasher movie (although the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 60s came first, they were not even close to as grueling). It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of slasher movies, but TCM has an intensity beneath the rough look and low production values that’s very real, and very unsettling even today. Poltergeist is one of my favorite horror crossover movies, although Hooper’s exact involvement with it is somewhat disputed. And, unlike some people, I liked The Toolbox Murders quite a bit, at least the supernatural non-slasher parts of it.

On the other hand, he’s also made some really bad movies, so I was uncertain what to expect of Dance of the Dead, the third installment in the Masters of Horror series. As it turns out, it’s not bad, although it has problems. In the near future, chemical warfare and terrorist chemical attacks have killed millions of people in the US, and disfigured and scarred many more. Society is falling apart, anarchy reigns, and as usual when anarchy reigns, there are seedy nightclubs, people in leather and latex sporting piercings, and a whole lot of drugs.

You may have heard that this is a zombie story, but that’s not really true. There are reanimated dead in it, but their reanimation is a side-effect of chemical agents, and they’re not aggressive or cannibalistic. Instead, it’s the story of an overprotective, secretly evil mother, and her daughter, who wants out, and falls in love with a young criminal. On the way, daughter discovers what really happened to her rebellious older sister, and mother’s dark secrets.

Apart from the fact that this is basically Cool as Ice in the post-apocalyptic future with zombies, it works fairly well. The mother overacts, people’s motivations aren’t always clear, and the inevitable twist isn’t so amazingly shocking as you’d like it to be, but in general it’s a decent story. There’s also a scene of the reanimated dead being coldly dispatched into a dumpster and set on fire, which is quite effective and concentration camp-like, but it would have been better if Hooper didn’t try to milk it for emotional effect quite so much. As it is, something that could have been chilling and uncomfortable becomes exploitative and a bit cheap. And speaking of exploitative and cheap, there’s an enormous amount of naked tits in this movie, both reanimated and otherwise, and I think Robert Englund gets a blowjob from a reanimated corpse at one point. Possibly a little excessive, I think.

But why is there a horrible visual effect, a sort of splitting of the image into several superimposed versions which then shake around for a second, accompanied by a screechy sound, that gets used all the time? It’s literally used at least once per minute, and it happens equally in a quiet dialogue scene as in the climactic scenes of the dead dancing. Did someone get a new Shake plugin to play with? I found myself shouting “Fucking stop it!” at the screen several times, through gritted teeth.

But all in all, I think this is the best Masters of Horror episode so far. The setting and concept are original and decently interesting, and it held my attention. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely watchable.

Stuart Gordon, along with longtime collaborator, producer and director Brian Yuzna is definitely the foremost adapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for the screen. The classic horror comedy Re-Animator is probably the best known example, but the recent Dagon is supposed to be quite good too. I admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Gordon’s work. It has the trappings of Lovecraft’s fiction, but none of the mood. The adaptations to modern times are often incongruent, especially given Lovecraft’s insistence on archaic vocabulary and a gothic mood. Also, there’s frequently both sex and comedy mixed in. Lovecraft himself probably never laughed in his life, and had little if any sex life to speak of. So the tone, for me, just doesn’t work, although I think Re-Animator is hilarious, of course.

Episode 2 of Masters of Horror is an adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House, one of my personal favorite Lovecraft stories, along with The Rats in the Walls. Both of these stories prominently feature rats that are heard scurrying around inside the walls (which, in turn, makes me wonder how much of horror/comedy classic Of Unknown Origin was inspired by Lovecraft), but that’s not what I like or find scary about them. Unlike some people, I’m not particularly scared of rats. Indeed, the first year I was in Mexico, we trapped a rat by hand in the kitchen of our rented house, Hans Petter, in an act of physical elegance and swiftness I’d thought him incapable of, trapped the fleeing rat under the sole of his combat boot, holding it fast without killing it, and it fell upon me to bash its head in with a piece of pipe. I didn’t particularly enjoy that experience, and I was shaken by it, but it didn’t scare me.

What always scared me about Dreams in the Witch-House was the brooding, creeping menace of the setting. It’s told in retrospect, so there’s an inevitability of the goings-on, and, as in many other Lovecraft tales, the certainty that they can only end badly.

Stuart Gordon keeps a lot of the main threads of the story in his adaptation. Most of the characters are maintained, merely updated to the modern-day setting. There’s also little to no comedy elements, which seemed like a good idea to me. However, there are also large changes. Gordon’s Gilman character knows nothing of the house and its history when he moves in, which presses the plot into a standard complex discovery pattern. Also, Gordon introduces a love interest, a poor next-door neighbour with an infant child, and then uses a vision of her naked body in a gratuitous scene whose ending echoes the beauty-to-crone transformation in The Shining, but is much less effective.

The updating of the “science” is surprisingly effective. While Lovecraft’s original concept was based on (then very new) quantum physics and a somewhat twisted reading of non-euclidean geometry, Gordon updates it to involve superstring theory and brane cosmology, and doesn’t even screw up the terminology or the explanations too much. Within the setting of the story, it makes a lot of sense, even though our protagonist’s acceptance of the weird angles in his room being exactly like the ones he’s working on for his thesis is a bit convenient and hard to believe.

In what I think is the biggest problem, the Cthulhu mythos aspects of the story are replaced by a rather conventional setup involving a traditional witch, satan worship, and the blood sacrifice of infants. Instead of making the traditional witch folklore of New England a part of the greater cosmic horror of the mythos, with the witch sabbat Black Man being a form of Nyarlathotep, like Lovecraft does, Gordon takes the witch stories at face value, making the story much more small-scale. The love interest’s child is of course the one chosen for the blood sacrifice, and Gilman himself is compelled to perform the deed.

Also, Brown Jenkin, the rat-human hybrid familiar to the witch, is not at all as creepy and monstrous as in the story. It’s a human actor’s head pasted onto a rat’s body, and although the compositing effect isn’t bad, the result is more slightly comical than it is terrifying. And Brown Jenkin was scary as hell in the story, so that’s a bit of a disappointment for me.

It’s not particularly creepy or scary throughout, and it’s largely predictable, especially the parts that are different from the original story. What does work is the ending. Instead of shying away, Gordon forges ahead with a downer ending in which almost everything that can go wrong, does. People end up in insane asylums, commit suicide, are tunnelled through by rats, etc., and those final 5-10 minutes work well. The final shot of the “Room for Rent” sign outside of the witch-house is slightly reminiscent of 80s horror which always ended with a “get ready for the sequel” shot, but it works. If the tension and stakes had been higher throughout, and perhaps the special effects a bit more subtle, and more emphasis had been placed on the mood, this would have been great. As it is, it’s actually pretty good, definitely one of the better Lovecraft movie adaptations, and one of Stuart Gordon’s best works, too. Like the first episode of the series, it’s not particularly scary, but it is enjoyable.

Masters of Horror is definitely worth watching, and my respect for Stuart Gordon as a more serious horror movie director has increased. I’ll be on the lookout for Dagon now, I want to see if this is part of his development as a director, or just a fluke.

I’ve just started watching the Masters of Horror TV series. Episode one is Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, by Don Coscarelli, creator of the Phantasm and Beastmaster movies, as well as Bubba Ho-Tep. Like with Bubba Ho-Tep, Joe R. Lansdale had a hand in writing this episode.

It’s fairly straightforward slasher fare, really, with an above-average resourceful female protagonist. The serial killer is called “Moonface” (can we get a moratorium on -face serial killer names, please), and is big and ugly and mean and whatnot. He has a leatherface style cabin in the woods, surrounded by rotting corpses on stakes, and is quite unpleasant. The twist here is the female protagonist, who not only proves to be quite a match for Moonface, but also has some secrets of her own, revealed in flashbacks.

It’s not bad, but it’s not terribly exciting either. It’s competent enough, but I felt like I’d seen most of it before. And, like most slasher movies, at least to me, it’s not scary at all. There’s maybe a jump or two, but jumps don’t equal scares. The series introduction is actually scarier and moodier than the episode itself, which is not really a good sign.

The acting’s uneven, the protagonist is good enough, and Moonface is fine for what he is, but the protagonist’s wacko survivalist husband is not too great, and an old guy who’s trapped in Moonface’s cabin with our protagonist, well, he gets very annoying after two sentences, and he won’t shut up.

It also suffers from the curse of format. Everything has a format, if you want to make a feature film, it’s one and a half to two and a half hours, sometimes more. If you want to make a Masters of Horror episode, it’s one hour, and so on. This idea isn’t really complex enough for one hour, it’d be better as an half-hour movie. But, of course, there’s absolutely no market for half-hour short movies.

I’m hoping the later installments in the series will be better, it’s a promising start, after all. I hear good things about the Dario Argento (DARIO ARGENTO!) and Tobe Hooper episodes, so I’m looking forward to those. The John Carpenter one sounds interesting too.

I just saw King Kong today, and this isn’t so much a review as it is some general first impressions.

I used to be very skeptical about this project, when I first heard about Peter Jackson doing it, right after Lord of the Rings. I had seen the original once, and the 70s remake once, and I didn’t think of it as anything special. I didn’t think the story was good enough to work as a modern movie. But now that I’ve seen the remake, I have to say that there’s more than enough story there. And if this was the movie Peter Jackson saw in his head when he thought back to the original, I see why he liked it so much.

Just to get the complaints out of the way: It’s a tad too long. It could have been cut maybe 15 minutes in total, and it would have had better flow. Also, a few effects don’t look great, the compositing is a little lazy, and the perspective is a little wrong. But the vast majority of the effects look amazing, so all in all, I’m not going to complain too much about it.

Peter Jackson hasn’t forgotten his horror skills either. The second act is grueling, and it goes on and on. About midway into it, I was thinking “Peter Jackson should do a horror movie again, and make it this intense. It would be the scariest, most impacting thing in the world”. A while later, though, I was revising that thought. If this much intensity was put into a pure horror movie, of the kind I like, where there’s little humor to offset the grimness, it might well become totally unwatchable. At the very least, it would create reactions like the ones people had to The Exorcist when it was new; people in hysterics running from the theater, sobbing and screaming.

There’s hardly a phobia, at least not a phobia of mine, that this movie doesn’t poke at. There are confined spaces, wild animals, giant insects and spiders, heights, darkness, giant bats, and god knows what else. And the fucking centipedes. I hate centipedes, and I feel like this movie made everyone else in the audience understand me completely. Burroughs would know what I’m talking about. And giant fleas, and leeches, and spiders, and ants, and dinosaurs, and breakfast cereal, and I was pretty exhausted. But in a good way, like after a lot of good sex. But with giant leeches. You understand.

(Sean T. Collins seems to agree with a lot of the things I’m saying, only, as usual, he says them better. Check out his review.)

Hans Petter: Thanks for the comments. Yes, technology-enabled monsters are interesting, and a relatively new thing. They seem to be more common in Japanese horror, perhaps because of the Japanese technology fetish. As technology has been integrated into our lives, technology’s role in horror has changed. Compare the medical examinations in The Exorcist, portrayed as terrifying, invasive, and unable to help, in stark contrast to the spirital world of demons and priests, with the use of technology in The Ring, where technology is key both to the monster and curse itself, and to the means of avoiding a horrible fate at its hands.

In what Noël Carroll calls “the complex discovery plot”, with its four phases of onset, discovery, confirmation, and confrontation, technology is increasingly used in the discovery and confirmation phase, to research and discover more about the monster. Your Sixth Sense and Alien 3 examples are typical of this.

To reveal the hidden in an indirect way is a staple of horror. It’s more suspenseful if the monster’s existence is implied by seeing the results of its rampage, than by looking directly upon its tentacled visage. An animal staring at or fleeing from something unseen implies danger without having to show it, which contributes to the feeling of uncertainty and tension, in addition to having obvious budgetary advantages. Children sometimes take the role of animals in the same way, because they’re on one hand very honest and open-minded, and on the other hand are seen to have problems telling reality and make-believe apart, again creating an uncertainty that wouldn’t be possible by just showing the monster directly.

The motion sensors in Aliens, the infrared video camera in The Descent, the machine that makes invisible monsters visible in Lovecraft’s From Beyond, the flashlight in Doom 3, the sprayer with the powder of Ibn Ghazi in The Dunwich Horror, and the ghost-viewing glasses in the rather awful 13 Ghosts, all make visible the hidden monsters that we suspect exist all around us, but that we disconcertingly can’t see.

In many cases, what you can’t see actually can’t hurt you, though, so it’s not always such a great idea to use the technology to reveal the hidden. That’s common in the Japanese technology monsters too, when you see them, they look back at you, and they’re coming to get you. Seeing them is viral, just like a zombie’s bite, it inevitably leads to succumbing to and/or becoming part of the horror yourself.

Regarding Winona Ryder in Alien: Resurrection, I’ve seen your comparison before, and I think it’s both insightful and amusing, but I’m curious what it really means that the android is Winona Ryder in that movie. That technology is female, cute, and fuckable now? Or that it shoplifts? I’m honestly interested.

Federico was kind enough to link to some of my posts, especially the one that talked about movie production software. Since that’s led to a lot of people from free software planets clicking through to here, I figure it’d be good to talk a bit more about it.

Federico says that I talk about “obsolete tools”. That’s not strictly correct, Final Draft, for instance, isn’t so much obsolete as it is finished. In its current design, without substantial rewrites and rethinking of the philosophy, there’s not much more it can do, except for perhaps fixes for some annoying and random limitations (screenplays can be saved as PDF, but treatments can’t, for instance).

From what I’ve seen, when software is finished in that sense, there’s an opening for new software to come in and take its place. It usually takes all the good things from the old program’s user interface, and improves the underlying architecture and philosophy to the point where wholly new things are possible. I’ve used Final Draft 6 for several years, ever since I started dabbling in writing screenplays, and it’s actually quite slick for the basic writing process. Screenplays are written in a very strict format, and Final Draft is basically a text editor that does all that formatting for you, so all you have to think about is the text itself. For that, it’s great, and it’s by far the most used screenplay editor. The other main contender being a macro package for Microsoft Word, which does basically the same thing, but is somewhat more cumbersome, and obviously required MS Word.

What should a new, free screenplay editor do, ideally? A lot of work should probably go into the file format. The basic format is easy to define, since the screenplay format has changed almost nothing in the last 20-30 years (and little before that, too). XML is an obvious choice, the DTD wouldn’t even be particularly complicated or large. Then you would need to replicate Final Draft’s rough editing interface, which is that of a text editor with a monospaced font and some special formatting, and a few special hotkeys. That’s all you need for a basic editor, I could write a screenplay just fine with that.

From there, there are two directions you could go. One is to make it better for screenwriters, which on one hand would include things like advanced (optionally server-based) revision control and collaboration features. Final Draft has some rudimentary revision control, along the lines of the revision control in MS Word, and it’s had over the internet collaboration for a few years, where two people can work on the same screenplay, and do text-based chat. Free software could probably do both of these better, by offering a range of revision control and backup options, integrated with Subversion and Arch, and the collaboration stuff is perfect for GOCollab.

Additional features for screenwriters would be to improve the things that are not about writing the screenplay itself. Final Draft is very screenplay-oriented, and does little to provide tools for story development. You can write treatments, but they’re basically just text documents, and you can work with “index cards”, but that’s just another view of the scenes in a screenplay. A real index-card mode with color coding and various other features, some way to look at events and subplots, there are many things that can be done here.

On the other hand, there are a lot of non-screenwriter things that involve the script. The final version of the script (called the shooting script, the one with numbered scenes) is used as a backbone and reference for everyone involved in the production, from preproduction through shooting to postproduction. Production assistants, sound engineers, art department, location scouts, editors, CGI artists, everyone uses an annotated version of the shooting script as a reference for their work.

Final Draft uses a separate program, called the Final Draft Tagger, to do some of this breakdown. It allows you to tag bits of the script with various codes to signify cast member, prop, costume, sound effect, set dressing, etc., for use in budgeting and scheduling, but it’s fairly basic. Using XML namespaces and server-based revision control, everyone could add their own data to the script, maintaining a centralized copy where everyone could sign off on the information. Daily call sheets could be almost automatically generated from this, as could a wealth of other information.

There’s much more that could be done, especially extending into the production and post-production, but as a starting point, something with this feature set would absolutely kill all the competition, and it’d be a great place to start for extending into production and budgeting, shooting, and post-production, and at some point becoming a complete system for movie production work, unlike anything that exists today.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between technology and horror lately. In most cases, technology is starkly contrasted with The Horror, shown as something that breaks down in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. Very often, it’s the weapons and tools that humans place their trust in that are shown as insufficient (as in Aliens), but other technology often fails too. The cage can’t contain the monster (Akira and many, many others), the readings are off the chart (too many to count), the computer’s going amuck and printing apocalyptic messages (Prince of Darkness), we can’t make sense of the data (again too many to count), the video tape doesn’t have a control track (The Ring), there’s nothing but static on the radio (The Mothman Prophecies), and so on.

Even in movies and stories where technology is brought in to record or control the supernatural, with some knowledge of what it’s up against, it usually fails. The paranormal researchers in Poltergeist see the time-lapse recording of a toy car moving a few feet in the span of many hours as their crowning achievement, and in the face of the movie’s haunting, they can’t believe what they’re seeing, finally cracking under the strain and giving up, leaving the resolution of the problem in the hands of a midget medium. The curse in The Ring is ambivalent in its relationship to technology, on one hand, it’s centered around and transmitted by a technological medium, on the other hand, the video tape has no control track, and those cursed can’t be photographed or videotaped without unexplained distortions of the image.

I think that’s a generally very unimaginative and maybe even luddite use of technology in horror. Instead of using science and technology as something that breaks down in the face of the horror, it’s much more interesting and chilling to let technology calmly document and verify the unthinkable, confirming to us that what we do not want to believe is, in fact, true. The technology confirms the impossible, discarding the possibility of the “it’s all in his head” mental illness explanation.

There have been a few attempts at this. I remember one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, Season 8, Episode 7, The Terror From the Year 5000, actually tries to do this. The example is interesting because it’s not a horrible idea, but it’s incredibly inept. The scientists in the movie attempt to carbon date something that’s come through a time warp from the future, and the carbon dating verifies that it’s indeed from the year 5000. It’s sheer idiocy, of course, given the way carbon dating works, but it’s at least trying to make technology into a cool, objective witness to the impossible.

In Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, technology is put to use once or twice to confirm paranormal phenomena. Specifically, a computer is used to enhance audio from an empty room until a ghostly voice is heard, to chilling effect. However, the whole of The Kingdom is very anti-science, with the premise of the story being that there’s too much science and rationalism (in a hospital!), and that’s what’s causing many of the supernatural problems.

It’s hard for me to come up with more examples, although they surely exist. It’s clear, however, that they are few in comparison to the counter-examples. It’s possible that the tendency to show science and technology as limited in scope and failing when confronting the Horror is something that we’ve inherited from horror’s romantic roots. The romantic poets were very opposed to rationalism and and reductionism, a mark that often shows in their work.

Horror as a genre has been good at using technology as a creator of the horror (Frankenstein and innumerable other over-reacher/mad scientist stories), sometimes as a medium for the horror to twist and distort or use for its own ends (The Ring, The Mothman Prophecies), and often as a feeble strawman for the horror to destroy as an illustration of man’s impotency (Aliens, Akira), but it’s rarely been used for that which science and technology is good at: Recording and verifying. There’s untapped horror potential there, I believe.

And for those who fear idiotic pseudo-scientific overexplanations of the paranormal that will destroy all mystery, a la the dread midichlorians from the Star Wars prequels, that’s not what I’m talking about. But if someone actually took the time to establish science as useful and not just for narrow-minded professors in tweed, it would at least be a bit more shocking when science finally failed to explain something. As it is, we’re pretty used to it.

Bolas Chinas was shot with a Panasonic DVX-100A camera, a very popular standard definition mini-DV camera. It actually has surprisingly good image quality, with very good color. With a little care, generally avoiding overexposure, it’s possible to get very nice results with it, which is probably why it’s become very popular with people doing low-budget movies, shorts, etc. Our director compared the quality to that of 16mm, which, while I think it’s a bit exaggerated, isn’t too far off, actually. The DVX-100A (or the newer, slightly improved DVX-100B) can be picked up for about 3500 dollars.

And now, I’m very excited about Panasonic releasing the HVX-200, basically a 16:9 native HD version of the same camera. It records to DVCPro HD format, the same as Panasonic’s amazing Varicam, although on a somewhat stupid flash memory based media, but I expect HD recording will be the way to go, and it does 720p and 1080i, in 24, 30, and 60 frames per second. It also has variable frame rate, which is totally awesome. It’s supposed to come out at the end of this month, at about 5900 dollars, and I’m thinking about investing in one, for my own projects, and for rental, since I’m going to be coming into a bit of money within the next few months. I’ll need to check quality and so on, of course, but if it’s relatively speaking as good value for money as the DVX-100A, it’s going to kick ass.

I’m back, and I’ve slept a lot. We had a wrap party on Sunday, and Leo took some photos, presented here for your pleasure. As usual, the complete set is on his account on flickr.

Even though we wrapped on Saturday, we’re actually filming today. There’s a hip hop concert at a club, and we’re shooting a few scenes there, parts of the chase sequence, I think. As I understand it, several of the bands at the concert are going to be contributing to the soundtrack of the movie, so it’s a sort of required tie-in.

I’m not quite sure what the scenes are exactly, there was a big fight with parts of the audience in the original script, but I’m uncertain if that’s been dropped or not.

Either way, this is definitely the last acting I’m doing on this movie. Alex is going on vacation in a week or so, and will start editing when he gets back, which means the final cut will probably be done some time in February. There might be a photo session at some point to take pictures for the DVD cover, which I’ve volunteered to design. I’m not getting paid for it, I think it’ll just be fun to do some cheesy 80s video box art. Besides, it’s at most a few hours of work.

I’m back to writing now, focusing on getting my screenplay done. People who have read the initial outlines and treatment are very positive, so I’m charging ahead with it. It’s not particularly complex structurally, or very original in plot, I’ve mostly focused on a compelling story and believable and somewhat complex characters. I think it works, at least so far.

Now that I’m rested and back in the game after finishing work on Bolas Chinas (actually, we are supposed to do a single scene on Wednesday, I think, but filming has officially wrapped), I’ve been thinking about what it is I like about being on set.

Even in small, low-budget, and not terribly organized productions like Bolas Chinas, there’s a strong sense of common purpose within the cast and crew. Everyone’s trying to get the damn thing done. It’s on the level of the best software development teams I’ve been on, and that’s part of what makes it so fun, I think. There’s also that smooth feeling of people doing their thing, efficiently and without fuss (of course, that’s not always, or even often, true, but it very often feels that way). And you develop a certain camraderie with everyone in the cast and crew. No matter what you think of their work as such (which can certainly vary), you have the same purpose, and you sympathize with each other. You eat, chat, sleep, and wait for hours together, and it’s pretty much impossible not to feel a little bit like a family.

Now that I think about it, that feeling of family has always been something I’ve looked for in the jobs I’ve had. I loved working at Helix Code/Ximian in the beginning, for instance, since we were just 30 people, and everyone talked and knew each other. Later, when the company got bigger and more corporate, it wasn’t that much fun any more.

I think management consultants and their ilk could learn a lot from looking at movie productions. But on the other hand, I think movie productions could also be modernized quite a bit. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s basically hold-overs from the old days, and is particularly obsolete on small, guerrilla productions.

Øyvind and I spent a lot of our waiting time talking about uses for computers in movie production. There could be a huge amount of stuff done there, for screenwriters, directors, DPs, production people, continuity/script assistants, and whatnot. What’s available today is pretty pathetic in terms of integration and user interface, and I say that as a registered Final Draft user. If free software wanted to completely take over a relatively small, but high profile niche market, that would be it. Open formats, free software, and heavy integration would be perfect for this stuff.

A good place to start would be a screenplay editor. It’s basically just a glorified text editor with some formatting macros, and could be written in a short time by a couple of decent programmers. It also has the advantage of beign very well-defined. Current screenwriting software is developing so little that there was no useful new features in Final Draft 7 as opposed to 6. So duplicate FD’s functionality, with a slightly better UI, an open XML-based file format, and a Final Draft import/export filter, and you’d be on your way. Add stuff like integration with a revision control server, version diffing, collaborative editing, and a few other things, and you’d own that market.

Update: I’ve written more detailed about screenwriting software requirements in a new post.