The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, by Jason Colavito (Prometheus Books, 2005), is a strange book. From the title and a quick check of the summaries available, I thought it would be more about Lovecraft’s work and its influence on pop culture in general. It’s not, not really.

It’s mostly a debunking of ancient astronaut theories and related fringe “science”, such as the work of Erich von Däniken. That’s fine, although it’s not so interesting, at least not to me. I read von Däniken back in the day, and found it sort of intriguing, but weak, and it’s been a long time since I considered any of it as anything but fantasy. Linking ancient astronaut theory back to a possible origin in Lovecraft’s fiction sounds like an interesting idea, though, and even though that’s a much more narrow analysis of Lovecraft’s influence than I was hoping for, it still seemed interesting. And to an extent, it is.

But the book fails on a number of points. First, and most importantly, the “linking” of ancient astronaut theory and the like to Lovecraft’s works just fails. The author keeps claiming there’s a link, but never shows much for it, and indeed, from his examples of parallels to other works, it seems much more likely that ancient astronaut theory had some of the same influences as Lovecraft, such as the writings of Blavatsky and Charles Fort, or the ancient civilizations craze of the late 19th century. Lovecraft used it as inspiration for fiction, while others have used it as inspiration for writings they pass off as fact, of course, but otherwise it seems obvious. Colavito is committing the same mistake as people who think humans descended from chimpanzees, while in reality humans and chimps have a common ancestor.

Even that would be excusable, though, since the book could be read as an investigation into the links between fiction writing and fringe science anyway. But there are other problems. There’s the never-ending smugness and feeling of intellectual superiority that oozes off every page, like the author is a particularly precocious and nerdy member of a high school debate team. He used to write for Skeptic magazine, which is full of this kind of arrogant attitude (and that’s probably why people in general don’t listen to them). It’s like hearing Penn Jillette’s debunkings on Bullshit, slightly amusing, but you get the feeling it would actually work better if he calmed down a bit and tried to be more objective, instead of frothing at the mouth. And that’s for a half-hour TV show, imagine a whole book of it.

Which brings me to the third and perhaps biggest problem. Colavito has that particularly American right-wing libertarian point of view, where society is seen as in decay, “everything is relative”, we’re overly politically correct, and people can study GAY HISTORY in universities! Imagine that, surely western civilization must fall. He links this to the rise of ancient astronaut theories, since apparently the gays have tricked people into not believing in science. It’s not surprising he’s a Lovecraft fan, since Lovecraft also ranted endlessly about the moral and racial decay of society and whatnot. He conveniently glosses over the racist and xenophobic aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction in an early chapter as well. Colavito sees western society as being in decline, the “rot” having set in “shortly after” the revolutions of the 18th century. All that because some people believe in UFOs? Let’s get some perspective here. How much scientific knowledge did an average person have in the late 18th century, as compared to now? Fundamentalist religion and superstition was almost universal back then, and that’s generally improved a lot now. It’s ironic that Colavito, as an obvious atheist and believer in science, can skirt so dangerously close to arguments we’re most used to coming out of the Religious Right.

All in all, this is an ok book, if you can get by the problems above. When it sticks to the facts, it’s interesting material. Just don’t read it without a healthy dose of skepticism towards the author and his motives. If someone’s claiming to be the only person who’s honest, unbiased, and without an agenda, just telling it as it is, that’s who you should scrutinize the most.

I’m in the Horror Roundtable over at The Horror Blog this week. Go and check it out, and The Horror Blog in general is worth reading too.

I just watched the uncut, unrated version of Alexandre Aja‘s The Hills Have Eyes, a remake of Wes Craven‘s 1977 movie of the same name.

I haven’t seen Aja’s previous movie, Haute Tension, which seemed like pretty standard slasher fare to me. The Hills Have Eyes, however, is much more than a standard slasher movie. I mean, it’s definitely a slasher movie, very similar to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it cranks it up to such extremes that I couldn’t help but be impressed, and I don’t even like slasher movies. It also helps that the script, while fairly simple, is well-written and in general makes sense. People don’t do overly stupid things, and with the exception of some overly broad caricatures of the American nuclear family, these people and their actions are believable. Which, of course, makes it even more uncomfortable to watch what happens to them.

The plot is simple, a family takes a “shortcut” in the desert and ends up beset by bloodthirsty deformed cannibals, the result of nuclear testing in the area.

There’s not much in the way of mystery here, but the buildup works well, you really, really hate the bad guys, and want to see them die horribly. Which, after a while, you get to do. The violence is extreme, both in terms of subject matter (large-caliber weapons pointed at infants, extremely brutal (but not graphic) rape), but also in how it’s shown, which is unflinching, no-nonsense, and very gory. There’s little dwelling on the violence here, it just happens, and it’s quick and horrible. Visually, it’s nice too, in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which, as Sergio Leone proved, does the vast desert landscape justice. The colors are muted and dusty, and the whole thing is shot with a very fast shutter, making it strobe a bit, but nicely conveying chaos and confusion in the action sequences.

If you have the stomach for it, I think I can recommend this movie. It’s uncomfortable on a level approaching that of Irreversible, but Irreversible was boring, pretentious, and badly made, while The Hills Have Eyes is a very competent effort.

I saw Silent Hill about a week ago. I’ve never actually played the games, but what I’ve been told about them makes me think I’d like them a lot. Director Cristophe Gans made the moody and very cool Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), which, although the script wasn’t wonderful, was very well executed, I thought. And, of course, Roger Avary wrote the script. Roger Avary is interesting, perhaps most famous for working in a video store with Quentin Tarantino, and then writing work on Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction. I’ve always wanted to like him and his movies more than I actually do, since he seems like a smart and cool guy, but Killing Zoe was a derivative nihilistic bore, and The Rules of Attraction was competent and at times funny, but didn’t live up to the source material at all, so I had my doubts.

And I was right. The movie is stylish and very cool, and at times really creepy, especially creepy looking, but what the hell is going on in this script? The dialogue, especially in the first act, is just screwed up. It’s stilted and unnatural, the sort of thing that makes you go “people don’t talk like that!” every few minutes. The set-up is weak and uninteresting, and you just want people to go to Helltown USA so people will speak fewer annoying lines, and get into the action.

When the main characters arrive in Silent Hill, things make a turn for the better. The first time the darkness falls and the town changes into some twisted nightmare hell version of itself, it’s awesome, and it gets better every time it happens. The effects are very nicely done, both the makeup and the digital stuff. It’s not directly scary, but it’s creepy and makes you jump, which is decent. People continue doing and saying things that make no sense, but it’s ok, you forgive it because of the other things that are going on.

Then, when the mysteries start being resolved, the group of wannabe witch-burners from Monty Python and the Holy Grail show up, wanting to burn some witches and claiming they were turned into newts. This goes on for a while, until you get mightily fed up with them, and they kill one of the secondary characters. You want them to die for being such an idiotically bad and cliched exaggeration of fundamentalist christians (such an idiotic group to begin with that you’d think it’d be hard to exaggerate them), and you get your wish.

The climactic scene is one of my favourites in the movie, a sort of Dante’s Inferno by way of Hellraiser and Japanese tentacle porn, with strands of sapient barbed wire snaking through a church, grabbing people, invading their orifices, and tearing them apart in detail, with characters unable to do anything but stare slack-jawed at what they’ve unleashed. Almost everyone dies, which means that almost everyone annoying dies, so it’s a nice pay-off.

The aftermath is also decent, but by then you’ve stopped caring.

This movie is a typical example of one of the ways screenwriting can fail. As a treatment, this probably looked very good, the general story they’re telling is not bad at all, it’s marginally original, well put together, and so on. But when writing out the actual scenes, something went horribly wrong, and every character became wooden, the dialog became stilted, and people’s motivations and actions made no sense. The devil’s in the details, as they say.

All in all, it’s probably worth seeing, for the nightmare visuals and climactic scenes of pandemonium, if nothing else. For anyone who’s not a horror fan, it’s going to be a waste of time, and even horror fans will likely feel at least a bit let down.

It’s not that often that I get to review a Norwegian movie, and especially not a Norwegian psycho-thriller with horror elements, reminiscent of Polanski and Lynch. Naboer is that film, which finally found its way to Mexican theaters, and surprisingly, it was a quite pleasant experience. By pleasant, I of course mean unpleasant, but in a good way.

The plot is rather simple: John lives alone after his girlfriend left him, and bumps into his next-door neighbours, two young women. They are acting… strangely, and seem to know things more about him than they should. Things go rapidly downhill from there. It’s not the sort of movie you can explain too much without giving it all away (although the truth wasn’t too hard to figure out about halfway through anyway).

It’s not particularly original, I have to say, and it’s very fair to compare it to and consider it inspired by movies like The Tenant, The Machinist, Spider, and Lost Highway, but it’s quite well done, and it works. Visually it’s also quite nice, all muted tones and old, worn-down Eastern Oslo apartment building interiors, second-hand sixties furniture, and a thin layer of grime on everything. I was also amazed by the incredibly fractured space in the movie, you literally don’t know how things in these big, old, cluttered apartments connect and relate to each other, and that’s kind of the point. It’s done subtly, though, not the jarring cuts that breaking basic rules of cinematography would imply, and it gives you a sense of being lost and paranoid, just like the lead character.

The acting’s a bit uneven, Kristoffer Joner, perhaps the finest actor in Norwegian cinema today, does a great job, while some of the others put in a somewhat less convincing performance. But none of it’s too bad, and if you don’t know Norwegian, and you watch the movie subtitled, it probably won’t bother you at all.

Oh, and there’s an amazing sex scene. I know people have reacted strongly to it, but I thought it was amazing, an incredibly visceral mix of sex, violence, blood, and base instinct, with a raw urgency and credibility to it. And so very sexy, the sort of thing you get excited by despite yourself, similar to some of the stuff in Crash. Actually, thinking about inspirations and influences for this movie, I think Sletaune is definitely in the same idea space as recent Cronenberg, the general concept reminded me of Spider, while the sex scene made me think of both Crash and A History of Violence.

If you like psycho-thrillers, violent sex and nice visuals, well tied together although perhaps not incredibly original, you should definitely take a look.

I finally got around to watching Tesis, a Spanish horror/suspense movie by the director of Abre Los Ojos (remade as Vanilla Sky) and The Others.

It’s an early effort, and not at all as polished as his later work, but it’s very effective. It’s not a horror movie per se, but it’s definitely a suspense movie, to an extreme degree. It shouldn’t really work, using clichéd conceits like snuff movie production rings and multiple twists as to who our main suspects are, but it does. The twists come a little thick at the end, and it becomes a bit hard to believe, but in general, it’s very edge of your seat stuff.

Some nice touches, too. There are several nice reveals. When Angela, the protagonist, first gets her hands on a snuff tape, she’s uncertain what’s on it, but suspects that it’s something horrible. So she turns the brightness on her TV down as she’s starting to watch it, and all we get is the sound, screaming and begging. Later, when she’s showing it to her friend, he watches, but she can’t, and neither can the audience, until she finally peeks between her fingers, and we see what’s going on. It’s quite nice, by the time we see parts of the tape, the sound’s made us imagine far worse things than what we actually see.

There’s also a “trapped in the dark” sequence around the middle of the movie that’ll freak out anyone with claustrophobia, and Angela’s fear is often very believable and real.

On the negative side, there are a few very convenient turns and some hard to believe setups. The Chema character is kind of a stereotype, especially in the beginning, as a dorky, antisocial horror nerd. He gets a bit more depth later on, and becomes more likable, but he could still have done with at least a couple of personality traits that went against type.

Also, while the “message” of the movie, seeing snuff films as just an extreme version of commercial cinema’s “give the audience what they want” philosophy works, it’s not that hard to tell what the writer/director thinks of that particular attitude, and that makes it unsurprising when the college professor who espouses it turns out to be one of the snuff-producing bad guys. In the end, though, the movie redeems itself by saying, as it’s been hinting all along, that we are the consumers of this, our morbid curiosity is what drives it. It’s not particularly profound, but it’s well executed.

All in all, though, this is good suspense stuff, well worth watching if you like stuff like Silence of the Lambs.

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.

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.