A couple of weeks ago, I went to an audition. A week or so later, I got a call to come back and see the director, which I did. However, since we’re now past the date production was supposed to start, I guess I didn’t get it, since they didn’t call me.

Which kind of sucks, since it was a real movie, namely The Air I Breathe, an American independent movie with stars like Kevin Bacon, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Diego Luna and Ken Watanabe. I can’t imagine the amount of blogger cred I would have gotten from being in a movie with Buffy. I auditioned for a speaking role, that of a gangster/bodyguard (what, me typecast?), in the “Pleasure” chapter of the movie. The director, Jieho Lee, was nice, although he was mostly concerned about whether or not I could grow a beard. When I told him I didn’t have much facial hair, he seemed disappointed. In retrospect, that might have been why I didn’t get the role.

Oh well, on Monday I’m going to be an unpaid extra in a Mexican independent movie. At least I get a credit, and some food.

I was all settled in to watch Mario Bava’s La Maschera del demonio (aka. Black Sunday) last night, but I paused it to eat, and flipped through TV channels. On AXN, I came across a guy who looked familiar, being left in a darkened basement by a goth elevator operator. The guy was Bruce Davison, and the scene was instantly recognizable as horror. I decided to watch for a few minutes, and things started to look familiar.

Indeed, it was an episode of Kingdom Hospital much-vaunted Stephen King-scripted remake of Lars von Trier’s Riget. It was similar enough that it was recognizable to me within less than a minute, which I suppose is good, since I’m a huge fan of the original miniseries (and also, although slightly less, of the sequel). But then things started to go downhill.

I don’t think the concept of Riget is impossible to translate to a US setting, it’s pretty primal and international in itself. But Kingdom Hospital totally misunderstands what’s going on. The implicit (there are ghosts and spirits roaming the hospital) is made explicit (we spend a lot of time roaming around darkened corridors under the hospital, which are filled with spirits, and a guy who’s in a coma walks around there talking to them). The ghost of the mysterious young girl, Mary, which was rarely seen, enigmatic, and uncommunicative in the original, is now a cute waif with lots of dark eyeshadow, and she walks around and talks to the coma guy, explaining to him what’s going on. There’s a giant needle-toothed ant-eater spirit around too, whatever the hell that means, and there’s pop-punk music on part of the soundtrack.

It just doesn’t work. It feels like a mix between ER and one of those crappy horror/SF TV series like Supernatural or Stargate, complete with acceptable but annoying acting. In addition, the writing is full of Stephen King touches, from his most standard repertoire. I like Stephen King’s writing, but he’s prone to repeating himself, and repeating themes. Here, there’s a guy in a coma after being hit by a car, who King himself has apparently stated was directly based on his own much publicised accident. There’s also an old-fashioned, weird expression, “It’s called doing a solid”, repeated with mystical significance. There are self-consciously quirky characters, in contrast to the natural, charmingly quirky ones from the original. Etc., etc.

To add insult to injury, reportedly Sony Pictures wanted to shoot it on HD, but the director, Craig R. Baxley, whose most recognizable earlier effort was a few episodes of The A-Team, wanted to shoot on 35 mm, so Stephen King personally paid the difference in cost. That’s just silly for several reasons, the first being that the original was grainy and weird looking, because it had been shot on Super 16, edited on various video formats, and blown up to 35mm, on purpose. Also, insisting on 35mm instead of HD might make sense for something that’s going to be shown in theaters (possibly), but for something that’s primarily for TV, it’s just stupid. It stinks of hubris and pretentiousness, Stephen King and the director both wanting to make a “real movie”.

Avoid, avoid. I watched the majority of one episode only, but I can assure you I’m not watching any more. Stick with the original, which is available as a region-free DVD release (although with burnt-in subtitles, last I checked).

To top it off, I got annoyed and didn’t get around to watching my Italian horror movie.

About two weeks ago, I asked the horror blogosphere what made them get into horror. Due to external circumstances not limited to celebrating a friend’s birthday (with absinthe), celebrating my own birthday, and going to a casting, I haven’t answered my own question yet. But others have. Son of Michael May answers, and talks about his exposure to classic horror films, which is how a lot of people got started, I think. Sean T. Collins has an origin more similar to my own, with no clear defining moment, but a gradual discovery of the genre.

And with that, over to my own origin story.

Far from the archetypical teenager who covertly reads horror comics their parents would be appalled at if they knew, I come from a long lineage of horror fans. Well, at least one generation back. My mother, Edel, was and is into horror, although she’s a bit out of touch with the latest of the genre. In Norway in the 80s, there was a series of cheap paperback horror novels called “Casino Grøsser” (literally “Casino Chiller”, I never figured out where casinos came into the picture), little black paperbacks with a hole in the cover to show a tacky illustration on the first page, and the title in metallic green letters.

Most of them were cheap and pretty unoriginal, but there was also the occasional gem, Stephen King’s Carrie, and a book that from what I remember must have been Dean R. Koontz’ Phantoms were a couple of the early ones. I can’t have been much more than 10 or 11 years old when I started working my way through everything in my mother’s bookshelves that looked interesting. I read Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain around the same time, and also Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Alien, long before I saw the movie, and it scared me to death, much like the movie did a few years later.

My mother was sceptical to video rental (and given a friend’s collection of uncut pirated VHS tapes his father had brought from Lebanon, she was probably right), so she never got a VCR. However, there were rental VCRs you could get from the rental places, and she was happy to get one of those and a movie once in a while. Early horror movies I still remember include Night of the Demons, early H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Curse, aka. The Farm, The Outing, aka. The Lamp, and TV sci-fi horror series V. My mother also reluctantly let me watch The Omen and Cat People on TV.

The next big revelation was reading the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft at the age of 15 or so. I liked the more low-key stories the most, like Dreams in the Witch-House and The Rats in the Walls, but At the Mountains of Madness is also very influential in my love for the “slow reveal” and creeping unease in horror narrative, I think.

Around the same time, I started reading Clive Barker. Most teenagers start out with the Books of Blood when they read Clive Barker, which I think are imaginative and interesting, but not great. For some reason, though, I got my hands on The Great and Secret Show from a friend who had bought it, but found it impossible to get through. It wasn’t a problem for me, I was hooked a couple of pages in, and finished it in one all-night sitting. Imajica and Weaveworld followed, and to date I love “hidden world”/”urban fantasy” as a genre, as exemplified by mid-period Clive Barker, as well as Neil Gaiman and others. I think I also liked the mixing in of sex that Barker delighted in. I already felt instinctively that sex, violence, and magic were closely intertwined, and his novels confirmed that for me.

There are other watershed moments, like when I discovered David Cronenberg (I think I was sitting completely still and slack-jawed through Videodrome), and with it the metaphorical power of horror, but in general, these are the things that shaped me.

There are a bunch of classic horror that I didn’t get around to until I was already a full fledged horror fan, and sought them out for completeness, including George Romero’s movies (not entirely true, I’d seen Monkey Shines in the 80s, but that doesn’t quite count), most of John Carpenter’s production (I like the old stuff, generally hate the newer), and so on. The slasher stuff never interested me much, and some horror was too sadistic for my tastes; I empathize too much with the protagonists, I think.

I keep learning about horror. As I’ve taken more of an interest in movie production, I’ve started analyzing more, which leads to some of the articles on this blog. I’m interested in fear as an emotion, and the evolutionary psychological reasons for why certain things are scary, as well as the metaphorical power of art-horror. Fear is a very basic human emotion, and one of the most commonly manipulated. I think it must be understood to be overcome, and one of the ways to understand it is to challenge it, poke at it from the safety of a movie screen or a printed page, to try to understand ourselves.

Screamwriter tagged me for answering this set of questions about me and my tastes. It’s a good warm-up to writing my “what made me get into horror” post, which I haven’t gotten around to yet.

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:
I remember watching Linnea Quigley’s infamous lipstick scene in Night of the Demons, which my mother perhaps irresponsably rented and let me watch. It scared the shit out of me, but was also exciting, both sexually and otherwise, and it probably warped my little mind for life.

TWO (2) favourite lines from movies:
I’m not big on lines, I’m more of a context guy, but probably a couple of those that run a chill down your spine, like:

THREE (3) jobs you’d do if you could not work in the “biz”

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside of the industry

THREE (3) book authors I like

TWO (2) movies you’d like to remake or properties you’d like to adapt

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated
David Cronenberg. In addition to being one of my favourite directors, he actually managed to make amazing adaptations of Naked Lunch and Crash, and great original material, like Dead Ringers.

THREE (3) people I’m tagging to answer this meme next
Sean T. Collins
I apologize for not knowing any more writers online.

I just auditioned today. I think it went fairly well, although who knows. They’re supposed to call me next week. I won’t say anything about what movie it is yet, since if I get the role, I might be unable to say much at all. But suffice to say it’s not in the mexploitation genre, it’s a real movie, to be shown in theaters, and it’s an international production. If I get the role (a small one, but with lines, and several scenes), it’ll be by far the biggest thing I’ve done in cinema. Not that that’s saying much. Cross your fingers for me.

Dario Argento is worshipped by horror fans, and largely unknown to everyone else. His Suspiria, a supernatural slasher, is still considered by many one of the best horror movies ever made. Visually, his movies are almost always stunning, although his scripts and directing of actors often leaves a lot to be desired.

And now he’s made an episode of Masters of Horror, with an annoyingly misspelt title. A policeman rescues a disfigured young girl from a crazed vagrant who’s trying to kill her, only to start an affair with her, ignoring her tendency to kill and eat small animals and children.

It’s… not great. The idea isn’t too bad, and fairly original, a sort of succubus myth with added gore and cannibalism. That specific touch makes me think that Argento’s incapable of considering horror that doesn’t have gore, which is a rather limited mindset.

Also, this has Dario Argento directing sex scenes, a thought that made me imagine a lot of things, none of them pleasant. In actuality, those scenes work fairly well, but the rest of the movie is illogical, shallow, predictable, and honestly a bit boring. You can guess where it’s going within the first 10 minutes, and sure enough, that’s where it goes. The makeup and effects on “Jenifer” are good, and the initial reveal of her face is creepy, similar to the initial reveal of the children in Cronenberg’s The Brood.

I’m not giving up Masters of Horror yet, though, but this episode is probably the weakest so far, and can safely be skipped.

When I read horror-related blogs, most of them from Sean Collins’ horror blog update page, “Where The Monsters Go”, I often think of the ways people come to enjoy horror, and perhaps even to work with it themselves. Horror fandom is big and quite multifaceted, despite the stereotype of all of us being overweight white guys in Burzum t-shirts (I’m wearing a William S. Burroughs t-shirt myself right now, totally blowing that theory out of the water).

Some people might come to horror through one defining event, seeing a movie or reading a book which was something totally new to them, and which made them life-long horror fans. Others, like myself, have had a more gradual process.

So I’m posing the question to the horror blogosphere, and anyone else who might want to tell: What made you get into horror? My own story coming up a little later.

I’m not going to try to be Joseph Campbell here, but there are certain patterns in horror narratives that are very common, even across cultures, and that interests me. I’m convinced that the most effective horror is so effective because it taps into archetypes, and those archetypes that cross cultural barriers are likely to be more deeply rooted and primal, and thus more effective.

One of those archetypes is a female ghost with long hair and/or an otherwise shrouded face and eyes, who’s associated with bad luck and death for those who see or summon her. She’s also very often dressed in white. If you’ve not been living under a rock the last few years, you’re thinking about Japanese horror movies right now.

And it’s true, Yurei have had a lot of exposure in media lately, most notably in Ringu, the US remake The Ring and their sequels and variants, but also in Ju-On: The Grudge and the US remake The Grudge. The original Japanese Dark Water also featured the concept, although less prominently. In most Japanese narratives, the figure is a harbinger of death. In The Ring, you bring the curse upon yourself by watching the cursed video tape, in The Grudge, it’s enough to come into contact with the ghost or her previous victims to be marked yourself. It’s also interesting to note the association with water in The Ring, water being a female element, and the TV screen as a window or gateway into another world (in the US remake, there’s also a reflection in the screen of a dormant TV set as an early sign of the spirit).

But it’s a mistake to think that the archetype is Japanese, just because it has a long tradition there. The predominantly Mexican, but generally Latin American myth of La Lllorona, the weeping woman, which I’ve mentioned here before, has many similarities. La Llorona murdered her children (the reasons and circumstances vary between versions, but almost always by drowning) and was doomed to wander the earth looking for them. She is often dressed in all white, and her eyes may be empty sockets. Seeing her or hearing her cries is often seen as a harbinger of death or misfortune; in some versions, she actively hunts children to drown them, perhaps to replace her own children. Again, there’s a strong association with water.

La Llorona is also quite similar to another powerful and very common female spirit, Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary is a witch or ghost which supposedly can be summoned by saying her name three times in front of a mirror in a dark room. Often named as “Mary Worth”, she is frequently described as a child-murderess, and she will stalk and/or kill those who summon her. If that sounds familiar from fiction, it might be because Clive Barker used parts of the legend in his short story The Forbidden, which formed the basis for the movie Candyman. In the Clive Barker version, the wronged and vengeful spirit so summoned is male, but other aspects of the Bloody Mary myth are retained.

In one of my favorite pieces of feature journalism, Myths over Miami, from the Miami New Times, there are powerful descriptions of urban legends and emergent mythology amongst homeless children on the streets of Miami. Female spirits feature centrally in this mythology, especially one known both as Bloody Mary and as La Llorona, who cries tears of blood from empty eye-sockets and feeds on the fear of children. Seeing her means you’re marked for death. To summon this particular version of Bloody Mary, the mirror must be coated with water from the ocean. The Wikipedia article on Clive Barker notes that he’s been working on a movie based on this article. Even though Barker’s adventures in cinema have been of uneven quality, it certainly fits in with his favorite themes.

The Miami New Times article mentions a possible reason for the mirror used in summoning the spirit: In an experiment designed to test reports that schizophrenics were prone to seeing hallucinations in reflective surfaces, even nonpsychotics reported seeing vague, horrible faces after looking into a mirror for about 20 minutes in a dim room.

In Gaelic folklore, the Banshee is a fairy woman who originally sang funeral laments for members of certain families. In the translation to English, she took on other characteristics, her wails were harbingers of death. Hearing the banshee’s wail foretold a death in the family, while seeing her presaged your own death. Banshees were often dressed in white, and had long hair (although the hair was fair, not black as in Japan, probably for obvious ethnic reasons).

The Nix in Scandinavian and German folklore is not female, but is a water-spirit who foretold drowning deaths by a wail that could be heard at the spot in the river where the drowning would take place.

There are a lot of common themes here. Femininity, white clothes, long hair, shrouded or missing eyes, the power of seeing and being seen (the motif of harmful sensation), a connection with water and reflective surfaces, presaging death or misfortune, revenge… And most of them occur in at least two relatively unconnected cultures, and across centuries.

I’m uncertain why the myth has worked itself into similar forms on separate occasions. There seems to be some deep archetype at work here, but it’s unclear to me what, exactly, is the basis for it. Comments are most welcome.