What few readers I have might have noticed that I’ve not been writing much here lately. I’d like to, but I’ve been insanely busy. I’ve hinted at this before, and not said why, since I’ve been trying to establish a few things. But well, here it is. I co-founded a postproduction company (preliminary website) with my good friend Øyvind Stiauren, another Norwegian living in Mexico. We’ve been at it for about 8 months now, and results are starting to show, specifically, the first movie we’ve worked on to show up in IMDB, Ana Laura Calderón’s “La Isla de la Juventud“, a documentary shot on Cuba. That’s not the first movie we’ve worked on, though, the first was a feature film that was shot mostly during April-May. They’re doing pickups now, and post starts in November. There’s also a couple of other documentaries we’re working on right now, as well as several large feature films coming at the end of the year/beginning of next. We’re doing very well, and I’m quite happy.

This also means my IMDB page got updated. There’ll be much more there very soon.

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.

In a round of poster-hunting in second hand shops, I came across this gem. It really doesn’t need much explanation, it’s the definition of Mexploitation right there: Half-naked women, foreigners (and US border patrol agents, even!) as bad guys, even more half-naked women, etc. You need to click on this image to take a closer look. And probably also make it your desktop wallpaper. Or print it and hang it on the wall.

As an additional bonus, the scantily-clad woman in the photo on the right is Lyn May, an ex-prostitute and stripper turned actress who is one of the central characters in Mexploitation history. As if that wasn’t enough, she has an enormous ass. She probably warrants a post of her own, and since I know you want to know more about enormous mexploitation asses, I will give it to you. Just not right now.

The title of the movie, Las Braceras, is the feminine plural of “Bracero”, roughly “guest worker”, but read up on the Bracero Program for some important background on US-Mexico relations and immigration.

(And yes, I blog too little. People have let me know. But I’m doing very cool stuff, and it’s definitely worthwhile, I just want to wait a little longer before I announce it here. Be patient.)

This is a special treat. This amazing poster belongs to my girlfriend Aline, who lent it to me for scanning and touchup. Her copy has a bad tear down the middle, as well as other defects, but I fixed it up pretty decently, I think.

This is “El fantástico mundo de los hippies“, a 1972 movie that’s the only example I’ve seen of Mexican hippiesploitation. The poster is pure exploitation, the stuff the genre is made of. Check out the breathless descriptions, as well as the priceless addition to the cast in the bottom right corner. Also, I don’t know if it can be seen, but the plot seems to involve some straight-laced detectives or something solving murders amongst the hippies, judging from one of the photos… I’ve added translations for the texts, have a look.

Did you ever scoff at the idea of being driven insane with fear at the sight of Cthulhu? “A humanoid with tentacles on its face, that’s ridiculous”, that sort of thing? Well, Lovecraft’s description can be interpreted in lots of ways. Some are pretty scary.

And some are downright terrifying (click the mostly dark second image to see it in full detail).

Sweet dreams. (Via Monster Brains)

I came across this rather bizarre ad at the pharmacy today. It’s for a strong painkiller, which, according to the ad copy, “cuts off the strong pain”. The chainsaw as an instrument of pain relief. I think that’s a first.

Oh, I know I’ve been away for a long while. I’ve been very busy, big things are afoot. More about that later.

This small essay was inspired by the convergence of several random things. Warren Ellis, whose blog is always worth reading, posted a short rumination about “the semiotics of shades”, as a comment to a YouTube clip showing a CSI character putting on sunglasses in a whole bunch of episodes. I thought it was interesting in itself, but also as an example of how you can learn interesting things by focusing on a small detail that seems to repeat itself a lot, and try to figure out what it means.

Then there was some reading my old blog, which turned up a few interesting quotes, and then Sean T. Collins posted about a new Chris Cunningham music video called “Sheena Is A Parasite”, which is very typical Chris Cunningham, and very cool. Have a look.

Now, this video has several occurrences of what I wanted to talk about, namely erratic head movements. Once you start looking for them, they’re surprisingly common in horror narratives. The earliest I’ve been able to find is from the Montague Summers edition of the Compendium Maleficarum, a 1608 text on demonology and witchcraft, which has a lot of eye witness accounts of supernatural goings on. The (somewhat long) passage in question goes:

At Luthz at the foot of the Vosges Mountains in May 1589 the villagers were celebrating a pagan festival. Claude Cothéze was returning in the evening from that village to the next, which is called Wisembach, and had already climbed a good part of the hill which separates the two villages, when he was suddenly caught in a whirlwind and stood looking about him in amazement to see if he could find any cause for such an unusual occurrence, for the air was most calm and still everywhere else. Then he saw in a sheltered place six witch women dancing round a table sumptuously decked with gold and silver, tossing their heads about like people afflicted with madness; and near them was a man like a black bull watching them as if he were a casual passer by. He therefore stood still for a while collecting himself and making sure that he saw quite clearly; and when he had done so, they all suddenly vanished from his sigh. Recovering from his fright he then started on his road again and had already passed the top of the hill when behold, those women were following him from behind, throwing their heads about as before and keeping a deep silence, while before them went a man with a black face and hands curved like talons, with which he would have clawed his forehead if he had not turned and opposed him with his drawn sword; but then the man ceased to threaten him and vanished as if in fear of his life. The women showed themselves yet again, and with them the man like a bull, who, as I have said, was looking on at their dances. Cothéze now felt more confident towards this man, and went up to him, saying: “Are you not my friend Desirée Gazéte?” (for so he was named). “I beg you to protect me if you can; for I promise you that I will tell no one anything of what I have seen.” Hardly had he said this when he was encompassed by a fresh whirlwind or cloud, and when he had come out of it as soon as he could, he went home.

So there we have not only an extremely early example of erratic head movement as a marker of demonic possession or other supernatural events, but it’s even explicitly compared to a symptom of mental illness. In fact, inhuman and “wrong” movement patterns in horror (Samara’s walk in the US Ring remake, the spider walk in the Exorcist rerelease, and so on) could be triggers for deep-down instinctive fears of the mentally or physically ill (evolutionary speaking, it makes sense to be afraid of the sick, it makes you stay away from them, so they can’t hurt you in their madness, or infect you with whatever they’ve got). It seems to work quite well.

Erratic head movement seems to be especially common amongst the abnormal movement patterns in horror, though. Especially, a lot of very classic horror movies seem to feature it. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is a good and well-known example, where those possessed by demons, in addition to levitating and moving spastically, have their heads loll about in a very disconcerting manner, as if their neck was broken. It might well be that that’s the reference here: The head movement suggests a broken neck, thus the body should not be alive and moving, but it is, so it’s in an intermediate state between living and dead, thus fitting into one of Noël Carrolls categories of monsters in The Philosophy of Horror.

Similar is the infamous 360 degree head turn in The Exorcist. It’s a highly abnormal head movement, of course, but specifically, it’s one that is impossible to voluntarily perform, and that would lead to death if induced. The fact that Regan remains alive and taunting after performing it again suggests something’s amiss (although we already knew that, of course).

One of my personal favourite scary movies is Adrian Lyne’s beautiful, unnerving 1990 masterpiece Jacob’s Ladder, in which a postal worker experiences a terrifying mix of Vietnam flashbacks, reality distortion, and demonic creatures besetting him on every side. There are lots of abnormal movement patterns in the various creatures and demons in this movie, but specifically, there are many demons displaying very erratic, high-speed head movements which seem to erase their faces, that is, if they had faces to begin with. The effect is very unsettling, and might suggest that erratic head movement frightens because it denies the spectator a clear view of the face. The brain is a pattern recognition machine, first and foremost, and what it’s best at recognizing are faces, so when we see something that’s clearly human or humanoid, but the face is hidden to us, it throws the very humanity of the creature into doubt.

There are many possibilities here, I just wanted to explore a few. I’m not convinced that any of my loose theories above are correct, but the facts of the matter are hardly in dispute: Erratic head movements creeps me the fuck out. I’d like to know why. Thoughts?

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