I’m on the Horror Roundtable over at The Horror Blog again this week. Go over and take a look.

Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film is an academic work, but a very light one, in a good way. Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror remains the definitive work in explaining and analyzing horror and its appeal, but Darryl Jones’ book is an excellent, more descriptive companion.

Breaking down themes in horror into chapters with names like “Hating others: Religion, nationhood and identity” and “Forbidden knowledge: Textuality, metafiction, and books”, Jones runs through an enormous corpus of works in a relatively compact volume. Each chapter starts out with the earliest literary examples of the themes, and usually ends up with modern horror movies that exemplify them, all the while running through possible symbolism and societal, political, and moral context for the themes. I don’t necessarily agree with every interpretation, but it’s still an excellent overview for people who are relatively new to the genre, and might think that horror is superficial and without deeper meaning.

Additionally, Jones has an entertaining writing style, full of dry wit, mixed with an obvious love of the horror genre. He repeatedly references the video nasties flap in his native UK, and lets no opportunity to dismiss this sort of hysteria pass him by. He’s no lover of just the “refined” in horror either, calling Abel Ferrara’s Basket Case “wonderfully grotty” in the chapter on body horror, as well as referring to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre his favourite horror film of all time. And then there are the repeated slams of Keanu Reeves…

All in all, highly recommended, both for the more academically minded, and for casual readers looking for an introduction to the themes and symbolism of horror. Personally, I’m passing this one on to my girlfriend, who’s had a somewhat negative opinion of horror, but was more interested once I started telling her about symbolism and horror as a representation of society’s fears.

This week’s horror roundtable over at The Horror Blog features me again, as well as a lot of other people, talking about movies that scared us when we were kids, but don’t anymore.

The time has come for the sequel to the craptastic Vacaciones de terror, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

First of all, credit where credit’s due, I guess. This movie is a much more successful and pure horror movie than the first one, but it’s still utter shit.

Julio, the guy who made out with himself in the mirror for the longest time, and used the anti-demonic amulet he found as a rear view mirror decoration, in the first movie, is now older and wiser, and passes his time as a paranormal investigator or something. He also wears a long black trenchcoat and a horrible mullet. He’s played, like the last time, by Pedrito Fernández, pictured to the left. He’s a very, very wooden actor, although he has some agility for the action scenes, which is useful when you’re going to be dodging magically flying and on fire plastic carved pumpkins. See, this is a Halloween movie. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Pedro Fernández is joined by another Mexican singer, Tatiana, who was a pop singer back when this movie was made, but shortly after switched to making music for children. She’s pictured on the right, and plays a girl who’s a successful pop singer, and also the daughter of a famous movie producer. You know, the kind of movie producer the people who produced this movie will never, ever become. She also has a little sister, who’s annoying, and will become important to the “plot”.

After a brief intro sequence that serves to introduce our two main characters to each other, and for Tatiana to invite Pedrito to her sister’s birthday party, which is on Halloween, and is to be held at the movie studios where their father makes his movies. When Tatiana leaves in the car with her little sister, Pedrito notices that the sister has a diabolical doll similar to the one from the first movie, and becomes worried. However, before he can do anything about it, he must confront a raving mad old man who warns him about the dangers of the doll, gives him magical stone seals that will protect him from evil, tells him about an ancient tome that will give him vital information, and then promptly runs out into the street and gets killed. I guess they hired that actor for just one day of shooting.

Pedrito, determined to get to the bottom of this, goes to the library to read the book. And there, in a typical Mexican library with cheap 70s metal shelving and all sorts of boring non-fiction books, he finds the ancient, crumbling tome of demonology. I think it’s right next to some sort of engineering textbook.

Skipping ahead a bit, at the party, Tatiana performs, the little sister cuts herself stupidly when trying to cut her birthday cake, causing blood to drip onto a witch figure on her cake, which is then eaten by the demonic doll, which sits under the cake. The doll transforms into some sort of lizard monster, kills a studio technician, and everyone runs off, except Pedrito, who stays behind to check things out. Oh, and the father gives the birthday girl seven silver coins.

Later, in the girls’ home, the little girl remembers she left the coins at the studio, so she and her older sister go to get them. In the middle of the night, to the place where someone was horribly murdered by an unknown perpetrator. And they seem to think it’ll be a fun adventure.

Once there, they run into Pedrito, the little girl has another attack of near-fatal stupidity, and gets grabbed by the monster, the silver coins get stuck to a wall and electrified, Tatiana disappears, but is somehow transformed into a sugar figure on the birthday cake, and Pedrito saves her by jumping into the burning cake (yes, it’s on fire) and sliding across it in his black trenchcoat, getting covered by frosting, which is gone in the next shot. The sugar figure transforms back into Tatiana, and now it turns out they must rescue the little girl before sunrise, or she’ll be gone forever.

In the meantime, a guard at the studio calls the producer father because Tatiana’s car is outside, and then gets killed by the monster. Producer dad gets out his revolver and sawed off shotgun, puts on a denim jacket, and goes off to the studio. Everyone runs around a lot, the monster flings burning magically flying plastic carved pumpkins at Pedrito, the father shows up, shoots the monster in the head, which has little effect, suspects and tries to beat up Pedrito, then finally realizes they need to do something else. They get the electrified silver coins out of the wall by splashing them with holy water from the studio Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, melt them down to make a seal that can kill the monster, and somehow free the little girl.

However, Tatiana is stabbed in the stomach by some sort of wood rod, and dies. Pedrito must face the monster, and after a lot of rolling around on the ground, he throws the seal into its chest, shuriken-style, which makes it catch fire, and Tatiana come back to life. Everyone’s happy, and the movie ends with not one freeze frame, but two (first one of Pedrito, then one of Tatiana).

God, this movie is horrible. But if you want to see mariachi singers and children’s musicians battle lizard monster witches (for some reason, they call the monster a witch), then you don’t have that many options, and this movie is for you.

A Mexican comics collective that calls itself Parranda de Moneros has a comic out, “Paranormal Directo“, a collection of six short stories based on the two concepts “paranormal event” and “public transport”. I’m not sure it’s on sale yet, but the cover promises, well, ghosts and ghouls on a Mexico City subway train, and lots and lots of tits. The whole exaggerated female anatomy thing is overdone in comics, and I’d like to see less of it, but then again, Mexican horror comics, from an independent publishing collective, no less? You don’t see that every day.

I’m not sure it’s on sale yet, but I want it, and when I get it, I’m going to review it here.

Mondo Schlocko posts a YouTube clip of a Hijo del Santo cartoon. It’s actually pretty decently animated, and lots of recognizable Mexico City landmarks and stuff. Spanish language dialogue, and looks fairly modern, apparently from Cartoon Network. Go check it out.

The Horror Blog posts a short Bloomberg interview with Roger Corman. I’ve got a lot of respect for the man and his work, and while the whole interview is worth a read, there’s one quote that stands out. The Horror Blog also chose the same quote, and I think it’s worth repeating:

“The strategy was to make the best possible film for the money. I’ve seen so many people slough off low-budget films. You cannot do that. When Jonathan Demme did his first film, which was for us, it was a woman-in-prison picture. He said to me, “I’m going to make the best woman-in-prison picture ever made.” That’s the attitude that you must have.”

And holy shit, is he ever right. And more than that, he’s actually agreeing with me. Ok, that sounded pretentious. When I finally saw Bolas Chinas, the low budget movie I acted in last year, I was disappointed. Not because it was a low-budget movie with largely amateur actors; I already knew that. I was disappointed because the director, who also wrote the script and edited, had not realised the full potential of the thing. The script wasn’t particularly good, and it also wasn’t finished before we started shooting, and the editing was incredibly sloppy and careless.

The problem, again, isn’t the budget. It’s that people don’t care. In this case, lots of people involved were originally making “art film”, and did this project for fun inbetween other, more “serious” project. And it’s fine to make a movie for fun, I guess. But it’s not fine to not care about it. Making a movie is hard work, and lots of it. If the people who are doing it, when they get tired in the middle of the project, as always happens, say “fuck it, it’s just a project for fun, my real, serious art movies are what matters, I’ll just do this as quickly and carelessly as possible”, then what you get is a movie that sucks, instead of a movie that’s at least competent and decent for the resources you had available.

If you’re going to make a movie, make the best movie you can. Maybe even make the best movie of its type ever made, if you can bring yourself to say that (I’m not sure I could). But always do the best you can, give it 100%, because if you don’t, if you stop caring, it’s going to suck, no matter what the budget is. There are lots of big-budget turkeys that are obviously a result of people not caring, not caring because they don’t believe in the project, or they believe it’s going to be a blockbuster no matter what, or for any number of other reasons. And they flop. Low-budget movies where everyone does their best usually come out at least decent, and the people involved often get a chance to make another movie, maybe with a bigger budget.

If you’re going to do something, do it right. If not, just don’t bother, because it’s going to suck. Roger Corman agrees with me.

Well, this is funny. Adela Micha is a Mexican news anchor, who according to her Wikipedia page charges 15000 USD for a 45-minute talk on ethics. Sounds steep, I guess, but maybe she’s particularly ethical and gives very sagely advice.

Then again, maybe not. I was watching the news on Televisa, Micha’s home network, the other day, and when they took a commercial break in the news, suddenly the screen read “Newsflash with Adela Micha”, and I was treated to a commercial featuring her. A commercial, styled as a news broadcast, in the commercial break of a news broadcast, featuring a newscaster of the same channel as a spokesperson? Yeah, no conflict of interest or confusing the consumer there.

Ethics, my ass. In any country with a functional media, instead of lapdogs of the government and commercial interests, a journalist would be thrown out for even trying something like that. Here in Mexico, it’s just to be expected.

Bret Easton Ellis writing a horror novel is weird in itself. That it’s at the same time a postmodern rumination on his own life, featuring a first-person narrator with the same name and at least partially the same life as the author makes it stranger, but surprisingly, Lunar Park works quite well, both as postmodern novel and as horror.

The book’s Bret Easton Ellis has enjoyed a career as a celebrated novelist, but has also royally fucked up his life with drugs and meaningless relationships. One such relationship resulted in a child, and years later, he’s married the child’s mother to try to have a more normal life. Since, in the book’s world, the large cities are unlivable due to incessant terrorist attacks, Ellis and his new family relocate to the suburbs of New York City, where he tries to stay off drugs, and to connect with his sullen teenage son and his wife’s younger daughter by another man. Everyone’s on a cocktail of mood-altering drugs, even the six-year-old, and life in the suburbs is not really what Ellis is used to.

It starts getting strange and horrible, in a fashion very typical of Ellis, when things from his past seem to invade his present. Someone keeps showing up driving a car identical to that of his late father, the paint of his house, which is new and has never been painted another color, peels off to reveal the color of his father’s house, and so on. Add to this a classic demonic children’s toy, a serial killer reenacting murders from “American Psycho“, and boys his son’s age disappearing randomly from the neighbourhood, and some sort of vague form stalking the forest behind his house, and you have a very personal and postmodern horror novel. Essentially, Ellis is haunted by his past and the relationship with his father, but along the way, the book echoes both Stephen King and John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.

The ending is typical Ellis too, where things sort of resolve, but not in any neat and tidy way, and many parts of the story are left open to interpretation. I’m a longtime fan of Ellis, and this book is up there with his best, especially if you’re a horror fan too.