While not for everyone, Phantasm is an ode to boyhood, brothers, sci-fi, and not taking any shit.
nerds of a feather, flock together
Hugo and Ignyte Award Winner
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
First Scare: Phantasm
Monday, October 28, 2024
First Scare: Poltergeist
A house that hides much worse than skeletons in its closet
My most persistent thought during the runtime of Poltergeist was about how much of this movie's DNA can be recognized in Stranger Things. The tropes of nightmarish suburbia, a childhood immersed in pop culture, electric devices as a conduit to the paranormal, a child trapped within the walls of a house, and a danger too big for parents to protect against are elements that the Netflix show clearly inherits from this '80s classic. I wasn't so much scared as amused by its visual effects, at times reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which in my book is not a good sign. When it aims for spooky, it overshoots and lands on goofy. I admit that in my childhood this movie would have terrorized the hell out of me, but watching it now leaves me with an impression similar to live-action Scooby-Doo. I suspect this is a recurring trait in the Spielberg-Lucas axis of storytelling: if it doesn't hook you when you're young, it never will.
Poltergeist feels like a condensation of mystical currents of thought that had gained strength during the hippie era but really date back to the spiritualist fad of the 19th century. Advances in the understanding of electromagnetism coincided with a growing interest in the inner workings of the mind, and it was only natural that a theory eventually formed linking electromagnetism with the paranormal. If you didn't know any better, it made some sort of sense: if you consider radio waves, they're an invisible force that exists all around us and can even pass through us, and have very tangible effects if you have a properly sensitive machine at hand. So it wasn't too much of a stretch to suppose that ghosts worked the same way. Poltergeist is an heir to over a century of superstition that viewed in electrical devices a viable tool for contacting the spiritual realm.
But Poltergeist does more than that. It also takes advantage of the moral panic that was forming around mass media and the way the TV set ended up altering not only the inner dynamics of the American family, but also the rhythm of daily life. People in Poltergeist time their activities by the programming schedule of TV; their day ends when the last broadcast ends. Even before malevolent spirits jump out of the screen, they're already under the spell of TV.
Putting spirits in the TV suggests an unspoken pun, as a riff on Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message." The movie plays with a medium (as in channel of communication) but also with a medium (as in speaker with the dead), and by blurring the difference between the technological and the mystical, it opens space for a new discursive position, one that treats electronic media as another battlefield between good and evil. Instead of a mindless machine, the TV set becomes a subject of moral analysis. And because anything that can make moral choices is effectively a person, the TV set becomes a character in the movie. You can talk to it, and it will answer. It has wants and goals. And it is very angry with you.
The family to whom all this happens in Poltergeist is presented as aspirational: upper-middle class homeowners who genuinely love each other and whose biggest headache at the moment is the construction of their private swimming pool. They don't have problems in their lives. Why make a movie about happy people?
As it turns out, their comfort rests on a pile of hidden cruelty. Their entire suburb was built on a cemetery that the developers didn't bother relocating. And this serves as an indictment of an entire way of life: these are the Reagan years, when the individualistic model of success was being preached as the definitive fulfillment of every human need. Our protagonists certainly look like they have nothing to worry about. But their happiness requires literally sweeping a lot of suffering under the rug. I don't need to recount the centuries of injustice and violence upon which American prosperity was amassed. Nor does Poltergeist pause for a single moment to moralize against our protagonists. The nightmare scenario it proposes speaks for itself: all your comfort created a debt, and that debt will come calling. And it will devour your children.
It's interesting that '80s suburban mythologizing focused so much on the children who were growing up in that space. The quasi-Puritan anxiety that rose against cities as alleged dens of vice and crime led to the creation of those artificial bubbles for raising children. But in those same '80s movies, the children are the first to fall through the cracks on that bubble.
In Poltergeist, the suburban children couldn't be more absurdly privileged. Their bedroom boasts a hodgepodge of product placement that must have sufficed to pay for the movie. They're innocent of the evil awakened by their parents, but they're its chosen targets, with their instruments of everyday joy, their toys, serving as the weapons through which their lives are snatched away. And at the top of those toys sits the ultimate entertainment invention, the provider of hours upon hours of cheap smiles: the TV.
It would seem odd to pair the unacknowledged blood left behind by American growth and the specific concerns that were circulating about the omnipresence of TV. They're two very different sources of fear. But what the TV symbolizes is precisely that prosperity. The medium is the message, and the message is that you now have luxury of spare time to sit and watch. The moral panic warned that guiding your life by the TV schedule was a scourge on society, but in reality, if you even have the time to live by the TV schedule, you're immensely fortunate. In the '80s, the TV is one of the ultimate signifiers of mass-accessible affluence (along with other traditional American life milestones, such as owning a car). So it's fitting that Poltergeist turns the TV into the executioner's weapon that will collect the old debt.
When the veil of mystery is parted and we get to see the otherworldly creatures that threaten this life of comfort, they don't seem all that scary. Of course, I say this now, having survived through The Thing and Gremlins and The Fly and Predator and Hellraiser and Beetlejuice and They Live and Child's Play and plenty of others. It's too late for me to experience those images for the first time. I have no way of confirming how horrifying Poltergeist really was, and, as I said above, the stylistic resemblance to Close Encounters of the Third Kind does its scare factor no favors. I bet many moviegoers in 1982 must have drawn the same connection in their head. Poltergeist remains as a very acute piece of social commentary, but as a horror movie, I find it rather quaint. Almost cute.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
First Scare: Interview With the Vampire (1994)
A groundbreaking vampire film, tangled with misogyny and old-school monster melodrama
Vampire horror is not my favorite genre, so I generally avoid most of it. My most positive experiences with vampire fiction consist of an ill-advised beach vacation reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which I found surprisingly creepy and enjoyable); Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters book series (Magnus, Raphael, and Simon are all very different but likeable vampires); Twilight, which I found reasonably entertaining and, at least, not offensive; and the first season (British version) of Being Human, a slice-of-life story of a ghost, werewolf, and vampire trying to live a normal life in modern-day London. (I will also admit to watching Kate Beckinsale in Underworld more than once.) Beyond those diversions, I generally skip contemporary vampire content since a common premise is often alpha males hedonistically and cruelly murdering innocent people (usually women) to satiate an internal need. So, I unapologetically avoided the original 1994 Interview With the Vampire until this October’s First Scare project.
I remember the arrival of this film in theaters and the resulting rebirth of vampire trendiness. The stars of the film were the then super beautiful Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas (who I forgot was in this story). My college bestie loved the Anne Rice novels and, although I never read them, I understood the movie had several departures from the books. However, despite the traditional appeal of the sexy vampire trope, the film ultimately felt intensely misogynous—primarily violence by men against women, which is ironic since the source material is written by a woman. I know this film is a favorite for many, so I will just say… it’s not for me.
The story begins in the present (1994), with the eternally young vampire, Louis (Brad Pitt) telling the story of his life to a skeptical newspaper reporter (Christian Slater). Then we move to the flashback. Our protagonist Louis is a 1700s slave plantation owner in Louisiana. So, yes, any possible sympathy from me went out the window. His wife and baby have recently died so he’s depressed and making poor choices (nihilistically carousing, etc., because he wants to die due to his grief). Along comes Lestat (Tom Cruise), a blonde, French vampire hanging out in Louisiana. He offers Louis a variation of death: vampirism, to which Louis agrees. Again, no sympathy. After he becomes a vampire, Louis has some buyer’s remorse and is a bit disturbed at having to drink the blood of living creatures / humans (killing them) to live. Lestat has no such concerns and kills (mostly women) indiscriminately. Louis shows his moral outrage by initially mostly drinking rats’ blood, which Lestat eyerolls. However, Louis has no problems killing his Black female slave (Thandie Newton), especially after she says, “you haven’t come by the slave quarters lately.” Ugh. When Louis hands the dead woman back to the rest of his slaves, he laments that he’s a bad person. At this point I was definitely ready to stop watching. Then he randomly tells them to leave (they’re “free”). I mean, it’s the 1700s in the American South. They’re obviously not free. He can’t even be bothered to write an official document for them.
Later, during a plague epidemic in New Orleans, Louis finds a little girl (Kirsten Dunst), with her dead mother, and vampire-kills the child. Presumably, he thinks she has the plague too and is doomed anyway. Unclear. However, Lestat turns the child, Claudia, into a vampire so that she can be a companion for the always brooding / whining Louis. The three become a creepy family until little (one hundred year old) Claudia has had enough of Lestat’s controlling behavior and decides to put an end to him. Then the story shifts gears to true, epic violence.
I was surprised by how dated the actual, physical film looked and how dated the acting was. Lestat and later the European vampire king, Armand (Antonio Banderas), are so melodramatic as the alpha vampires that I struggled to take them seriously, despite the carnage. Louis is angsty, but simultaneously complicit in killing, in a way that becomes annoying. The second half of the film mostly consists of women being murdered while begging for their lives in some sort of sexualized context. Again, not for me.
Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia is the main bright spot in the story. She is wonderfully sharp-tongued, creepy, feral, and intense, and she is the only bit of girl-power in this story. Louis’s big revenge scene is somewhat satisfying, as is an earlier moment when Lestat goes monster-y feral after being set on fire. Other than that, this classic film is not one I’ll be watching on repeat. I can see why AMC thought a remake was needed. Apparently, I prefer my fictional vampires to be more grounded. I also, admittedly, prefer stories with at least one sympathetic protagonist. This film has none. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, there is at least a team of heroes trying to stop the killing. In Shadowhunters, there are vampire heroes and vampire villains, and meaningful discussions of the label of “downworlders.” Those stories are all more to my taste. But I appreciate Interview With the Vampire for its role in reimagining the vampire genre, taking it from monstrously alien to familiarly human, with all its flaws and moral questioning. In doing so, it opened the doors to a range of new interpretations, including many that I quite enjoy.
Highlights
- Another film carried by the child actor
- Problematic misogyny
- A groundbreaking change of pace for the vampire genre
POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.
Friday, October 25, 2024
First Scare: Dracula (1979)
The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice
With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.
The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.
Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.
Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.
For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.
Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
Thursday, October 24, 2024
First Scare: Dracula (1974)
The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace
Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.
It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.
The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.
This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.
It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.
Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.
Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
First Scare: Kill, Baby, Kill
Mario Bava's gothic classic is a masterclass in designing and executing absolutely top-shelf spooky vibes
Italian horror is hit or miss with me. I know it's essential to the genre, but the '70s stuff—even Suspiria—just doesn't do it for me. But then in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz's daughter, Astrid, states that Kill, Baby, Kill is her favorite horror movie. Of course, this is just Tim Burton spreading the gospel of his favorite filmmakers (which is awesome; the youth need to expand their spooky horizons).
But I took it as a sign to head back to Italy for some frights. Kill, Baby, Kill centers on a small town in the Carpathian mountains that is experiencing a rash of unexplained deaths. A doctor is sent to investigate the goings-on, and accompanied by a local medical student, tries to debunk what he fervently believes is just small-town superstition. The townsfolk, on the other hand, are sure that the spirit of a dead girl named Melissa is spurring people to kill themselves.
The plot isn't exactly groundbreaking, but in 1966 the "evil children" genre wasn't in full force quite yet, so it may have been more exciting back then.
What Kill, Baby, Kill does do well is absolutely immaculate production design and overall feeling. It has the vibe of Hammer horror films combined with the strangely formal feeling of a theatrical play.
Nearly every scene could be a frame-worthy spooky still. If you're looking for long, dark shadows that fall down staircases, grubby gravediggers in fog-laden cemeteries, and cobwebs encircling archaic sconces, this film's got you covered in spades. It could almost be one of the "Spooky Ambience — 10 Hour" channels you find on YouTube and leave on the TV during a Halloween party.
The version I found was dubbed in English, which makes it a little harder to evoke as much as spook, but one thing I really liked was the amount of female characters in this—from the local town witch, Ruth (who, oh my God, would Aubrey Plaza play the hell out of in a modern remake) to the hauntingly white spirit of 7-year-old Melissa, the ghost at the center of it all. It's also cool how Bava turns traditional color symbology on its head, using white for evil and black for the force of good.
Overall, not scary but fun to vibe to on a cool, dark fall night. Bonus points for the haunted dolls scattered throughout.
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
First Scare: House (1977)
This Japanese cult classic is a psychedelic romp that doesn't so much scare as bewilder
I'm a haunted house aficionado. I love all the tropes—the happy family finding a deal despite a sordid past, the bad smells, the stopped clocks, the distant fathers who can't stop chopping wood. I love it all. If we're being completely honest, The Conjuring is my idea of a perfect scary movie. Spooks, vibes, demons—that's what I'm looking for in horror.
But at this point, finding a haunted house movie from a different culture and time period felt like a must-do. House had always been on my periphery, though I'm not very knowledgeable on Japanese horror (apart from crossover hits like Ringu). Needless to say, I was prepared for some very grim and dark storytelling.
I went in blind, of course, but no one told me that it's technically comedy horror. That's a horse of a different color! House is like someone mixed together a Luis Buñuel film, a Benny Hill short, and an after-school special from the 1970s— complete with schlocky rock soundtrack.
It's known as a beloved as a cult classic in Japan, and I can definitely see how that came to be. I, too, have my cheesy Halloween movie from the past that I adore: It's The Worst Witch, featuring Tim Curry and a young Fairuza Balk.
House was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, who was approached by Toho studios in the '70s with the instructions to "make a movie like Jaws." It's unclear how he took that direction, exactly, but I will say that he definitely made something unlike anything I've ever seen.
The film follows a group of schoolgirls who travel to visit the reclusive aunt of one of them and spend the night in her huge house in the countryside. It's very clearly haunted, and over the course of the evening, girls disappear and die in mysterious ways—namely through traumatic deaths featuring household items such as:
- Mattresses
- A piano
- A grandfather clock
- Lamps
While it definitely won't scary anyone, I recommend that everyone checks out House, if only for the sheer surreal experience of it.
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.