The line “Produced by Michael Bay” isn’t a good sign, but David S. Goyer has done some good stuff, and this trailer is at least chock-full of really disturbing, creepy stuff. It might be that that’s all the movie will have, but at least that’s something. Erratic and weird movements as a horror element is officially very mainstream, at least. Go to The Unborn trailer at the Apple site to check it out.

I had heard good things about [•REC], the somewhat obnoxiously titled second horror feature from Catalonian director Jaume Balagueró. His first film was Darkness, from 2002, which I’ve mentioned on this site before as being generally boring and mediocre. The last 10 or 15 minutes were actually very good, however, (but couldn’t quite redeem the rest of the movie).

While Darkness was supernatural horror with devil worshippers, dark rituals, and opening the gates of hell, [•REC] (I get the feeling I’m going to get very tired of typing that before the end of this review) is a modern zombie movie in the style of 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, with a touch of Blair Witch Project style “this is real footage from people who happened to be filming the event” pretenses.

In short, Barcelona local TV reporter Ángela (slightly annoyingly perky) and her camera man Pablo make a show called “While You Sleep“, basically feature reporting about what goes on in the city at night. This particular night they’re visiting a fire station, and goof around getting bored waiting for some sort of alarm so they can accompany the firemen and film some action.

Of course, that’s what they get, when they get called to an old apartment building whose inhabitants have been hearing screaming from the apartment of an elderly woman. When they break in to the apartment, accompanied by the police, the woman is bloody and behaves erratically, and then suddenly bites one of the police officers. A short time after, when attempting to get out of the building with the wounded guy, they discover that the local health authorities have sealed it off, posting armed guards outside and wrapping it in plastic.

You can probably see where this is going, and you’re right, there are handbaskets involved. It’s not horribly original, but it’s fairly realistic (especially the stuff at the beginning looks very much like what I’ve seen of unedited documentary footage), and while the start is maybe a little slow, it quickly picks up. The last 10-15 minutes in particular are extremely intense, to the point of giving me a good, solid adrenaline rush in the theatre. Also, the direction the plot takes at the end, where things get quiet and brooding and creepy, and you get a sort-of explanation of why all of this is happening (which mixes in just the right amount of supernatural horror and that particularly unsettling Catholic fanaticism), followed by one of the scariest movie monsters I’ve seen in a while, and a scene so tense I could hear people holding their breath in the theater), really, really works.

The whole “real footage” conceit is pretty good, but it fails in a couple of places. First, there’s a scene where Ángela demands that Pablo show her the footage he just shot, to make sure it’s on tape, and we actually see the rewind and then the footage play again, then cut back to “now”. I guess this could be explained that we’re not watching the footage, but the events as they unfold on the monitor of the camera, but it’s sort of unneccessary and weird.

The other thing, which is less of a problem, is that the movie has music. It’s fairly subtle, typical incidental music, but I noticed it a couple of times, and it does distract a little from the documentary feel of the whole thing. Also, if you’re really going to nitpick, people in the movie speak Castilian Spanish, while they’re in Catalan-speaking Barcelona (all signs, uniforms of the firemen, etc. on screen are in Catalan).

But these are minor problems. Once it gets going, [•REC] has you on the edge of your seat, adrenaline pumping, until the very (abrupt) end.

The same guy who made Chainsaw Maid has a lot of claymation horror stuff on YouTube. This one is pretty derivative of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but then at the end, there’s a vagina dentata-mouthed goat demon thing that freaks me the hell out, even though it’s a cute clay figure.

This claymation short is a pretty pitch-perfect take on zombie movies, especially the variety common in the seventies, like Dawn of the Dead. And somehow claymation blood and gore works really well.

You might have seen this video, which is a compilation of the best unintentionally hilarious scenes from the (by all accounts dire) remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage:

As if that wasn’t enough, however, there’s this mixture of the audio of the idiotic final scene from the movie with video from Mega Man, and, well, here’s Mega Wicker Man:

I wish I had the time to watch and blog about 100 movies in 100 days. Luckily, I don’t have to, since Scott Hamilton did it first. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including many horror movies, and the reviews are well-written and witty. And it includes a review of a Korean war/horror movie called R-Point, which I really want to see.

This video, titled “Cell phone in microwave”, starts out as a typical “let’s destroy stuff in wacky ways” YouTube video, but isn’t quite that… Nice work, too.

A while ago, I finished Thomas Ligotti’s short story collection “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World“, and I’ve now read one and a half of the three “Tales of corporate horror” in the collection of novellas “My Work is not Yet Done“, and I’m starting to feel like I’m ready to say something on the subject.

Ligotti’s been called “philosophical horror”, and although the most obvious comparison is to Lovecraft, although there are apparently also comparisons to Borges, William S. Burroughs, and Kafka. That’s impressive praise, and since I deeply love both Lovecraft and Burroughs, and very much respect and enjoy both Borges and Kafka, I figured I would at least like Ligotti’s writing.

But I don’t. Not much, anyway. He has the occasional flash of an interesting idea, but this is basically a whole literary career built on social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder as the ultimate horror, and that’s honestly a bit laughable, and not at all scary. Most of the “horror” derives either from problems with relating to other people, or from badly defined feeling that there’s something wrong with the world.

The prose is not particularly good either, it’s exceptionally repetitive in a way that for some reason makes my entire body itch with impatience, the language in general is uninteresting, and it feels like it really wants to be good, without knowing how, like it’s written by a precocious 16-year-old with bad social skills and a badly-thought-through nihilistic worldview. If these stories were written by a 16-year-old, I’d be quite impressed, and expect the author to do something really good some day, but Ligotti’s born in 1953, so it’s probably hopeless to expect improvement now (although “My Work is not Yet Done” is newer, and noticably better, than most of the stories collected in “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World“).

There seems to be an elitism inherent in many reviews of Ligotti’s work. Lovecraft scholar T.S. Joshi seems to love him and consider him superior to most modern horror, for instance, and tends to blame the readers for preferring stuff like Stephen King and Anne Rice. Now, Stephen King is not a great author, he’s a craftsman with good horror ideas, and Anne Rice is fun when you’re 16, but I can’t see how Ligotti’s any better, he’s just more pretentious, and his writing is bad in a different (and, I suppose, artier) way. There’s a tendency to pedantry, with an accompanying overuse of pretentious vocabulary, for instance, in My Work is not Yet Done, the narrator berates another character for not pronouncing “lackadaisical” correctly, and the word is used at least six or seven times afterwards in the relatively short story.

Also, there’s the major problem of Ligotti’s writing not being particularly scary at all. There’s a moment or two when you think “well, that’s kind of a creepy idea, let’s see where it goes”, but the answer is invaribly nowhere. What horror there is is understated to the point of fading into the wallpaper, and, as I mentioned before, is generally based on things people with severe social anxieties feel are terrifying, such as being an outsider to etiquette and opaque codes of behaviour, be it in corporations (My Work is not Yet Done), queer little villages (The Last Feast of Harlequin), or in an art gallery (The Bungalow House). According to Wikipedia, Ligotti suffers from anxiety, so to him, this might be terrifying, I’m sure, but to the rest of us, it’s mostly tedious. The second major motif is a vaguely gnostic idea of the fundamental evilness of all of creation, which is hidden to most, but glimpsed by some, who invariably go slowly and boringly insane or indifferent to the world because of their knowledge. The characters so afflicted often end up joining Ligotti’s idea of horror in fading into the wallpaper as if they were never there.

As you can tell, I’m not liking this much. I think I’ll stop here, since I think it’s clear how profoundly unsatisfying I find Thomas Ligotti’s writings, both as horror fiction/weird tales, and as literature in general. I’ll just mention as a footnote that both Ligotti books are horribly, horribly ugly editions, no doubt at least partially a result of them being published by smaller publishers. The Shadow at the Bottom of the World in particular is horrid, seeminly set in Times New Roman and laid out in and old version of MS Word, the kerning all screwed up (or non-existent), tracking varying wildly, the margins tiny. In addition, there seems to be an annoying lack of proofreading, since typos abound. That, compared with my misgivings about the text itself, is enough to drive me up the wall.

In short, Thomas Ligotti makes me itch.

A strange thought struck me out of nowhere today. I was thinking about The Terminator, and how it was in many ways not typical science fiction. And then I realized: It’s actually almost as much a slasher movie as it is an SF movie. Or possibly a “monster movie”, those and slasher movies have blurry genre boundaries.

Think about it. A relentless, unstoppable killer slays his way through a bunch of people, mostly young. Although most are killed with guns (uncommon for slasher movies), one has his heart ripped out in an extended sequence complete with slasher style “I’m making a surprised face at this unexpected and incredibly painful bodily mutilation”. In another scene, a young couple has sex, the boyfriend leaves the room and is killed outside, the girl doesn’t notice, and is herself killed moments later. The final survivor who must defeat the killer is a woman whose boyfriend just sacrificed himself to try to save her.

There are a few things that don’t match up with slasher movie conventions, of course. The use of guns is one, another obviously notable one is the “final girl”’s lack of virginity. In fact, her having sex is a key plot point. On the other hand, the killer could be said to be punishing her for having sex, just as is common in slasher movies, after all, his goal is to prevent her son from being born.

That’s today’s unstructured random thought. Carry on.

A young woman was killed by an umbrella tip to the eye in Rome’s subway Thursday. Paging Lucio Fulci, a sharp implement to the eye he hadn’t, as far as I know, thought of. If horror and slasher movies really did influence people to imitate them, this sort of thing should be commonplace in Italy… Along with people being pulled through window panes head first, then stabbed in the heart, then thrown through a skylight and hung, the shards of glass killing some other people who happened to be standing under the skylight. Not to mention the seeing-eye dog attacks.