Without fanfare...

... the Horror Blog is baaaaaaaaaaaack. Out of the game for a year, the site was once a cool clubhouse for a clutch of film bloggers with a passion or at least an interest in horror. Lists, roundtables, opinions galore (plus Steven's wonderful illustrations)... and nobody ever got into a fight. Although I was asked to contribute a list of top 10 horrors a while back, I never knew when the HB was coming back online and missed an entire month of posts through October. Well, no point in shaking my fist at the heavens. Time to play catch-up and I encourage you to do so, too.

They belong wed

Ever since I included Elsa Lanchester's BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) in my 31 Screams round-up for this Halloween, I've been thinking of her brief and troubled "marriage" to the Frankenstein Monster. For matrimonial brevity, these two beat Britney Spears and that guy she was married to for 55 hours a few years ago. But the funny thing, the thing I keep coming back to, is how our culture has made them into a happy couple for the purposes of posterity.

Part of the problem, if you want to view it as a problem, is that they just look so damned good together. To put it another way, they were literally made for each other. In so many ways, they were the Dick and Liz of their day, the original Brad and Angelina... with the difference being that they will be remembered - and remembered as in love and happy together - long after Brad and Angelina have aged, shrunk and crumbled to immemorial dust. Plus, the one movie they made together is an inarguable kick-ass classic, which is more than can be said of MR. AND MRS. SMITH (2005).

Another part of the problem is that people are stupid and they haven't actually seen BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, so they don't know that the Monster actually kills his Mate and himself in a fit of electro-homi-suicidal pique, which is actually rather grim in a STAR 80 (1983) sort of way. I mean, yeah, we all sympathize with the Monster and it sucks that the Bride didn't go for him but divorced from that emotional angle it's quite plain that the Bride didn't deserve to die, especially on her birthday. But as I have said, people are stupid and they move forward on dim memories and vague allusions and second and third generation references, which is why most people think Grant Wood's iconic 1930 painting American Gothic depicts a man and wife when it actually represents a man and his daughter.

But another part of the problem, which isn't to my mind so much of a problem, is that people love these characters and they want their relationship to work, even if only on a meta level. A lot of the folks who dress up as the Monster and his Bride for Halloween or who have even gotten married in costumes representing these characters do know the facts of the film and its sad denouement but they prefer to remember things in their own way...

... and in that way the man-made man and his man-made mate remain deeply in love, in synch, and supportive of one another's dreams and goals. And there's no crime in that, there really isn't... but imagine if we worked the same revisionist history with other combative movie couples. Imagine holiday greeting cards depicting Gregory and Paula from GASLIGHT (1944) or Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald from REAR WINDOW (1954). Imagine kids at a county fair poking their freckled faces through cut-outs of Vince Stone and Debby Marsh from THE BIG HEAT (1953) or George and Martha from WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1966).

I guess it's the nature of le fantastique that we are more forgiving of patently unbelievable imaginary constructs than we are of the ones who are grounded in a tenable verisimilitude, who look like us. And, mind you, I'm not exactly complaining that the Monster and his Bride have become pop culture icons - I love 'em as much as the next guy - but I do feel that some of us should be on call to remind the rest how the story really went down.

In my lifetime

Time flies, no?

Best of luck

While I skipped through NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) this morning I stopped to watch this brief exchange between Tom (Keith Wayne) and Ben (Duane Jones) that I'd never really noticed before. It occurs just before the protagonists make their first proactive move to flee the farmhouse together. In the process of taking down the door that is being used as a barricade across the main entrance, Tom hands Ben a hammer. Ben says...

"Good luck." Tom says "Yeah." And they get busy.

And that's it. Just a simple human moment between these two characters, placed with gentleness and care between bigger, louder, more violent setpieces. In the vernacular of modern day producers and directors, it's "functionless." And yet watching the movie (if only in bits and pieces) for the, God, thirtieth, fortieth time today it struck me as uncommonly beautiful, as poignant, as so absolutely necessary. If you've seen the movie, think about how successful these characters are going to be in the execution of their escape plan. Think about where both of them are at noon of the following day. Think about the time they've got left and how they use it and then reflect on those simple words... "good luck." Yeah.

THE DEAD, it's all messed up

Forget about the feckin' f'ugly keepcase art, which makes John Huston's THE DEAD (1985) look like a winsome MOONSTRUCK (1987)-style rom-com about a dreamy old spinster who finds love at long last - the reason this Lionsgate release has to be killed now by the popular consent of the informed is that the new DVD is (in addition to be improperly framed) missing ten minutes, roughly from the 8 minute mark to 18 minutes in. Just cut out. No good reason. If you don't think this is a big deal (then you're an idiot, but beyond that), throw on your favorite movies, watch until 8:00 and then fast forward to 18:00 and see what's lost. For one, the first act! Imagine, say, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) getting this treatment. At 8 minutes in, Zombie One has just ankled Johnny in the cemetery and Barbra has taken refuge in her car. She jabs the door lock down at exactly 8:00:00. Cut to 18:00:00 and some black guy we've never met is cracking the skull of another zombie inside some house we don't know how we got in.

Given how hotheaded film lovers can be, let's keep the hyperbole in check. This isn't absolute evil on the part of Lionsgate - it's just buck-toothed, bowl haircuted uh-do-dah-d0-dah-do doofustry of the first water. This is a major gaffe, this is major ignorance. This mistake wears bib overalls. It is the work of people who don't care, who don't know, and who in all likely don't want to know. So let's bring it home to them. Let's stop this subpar release of a wonderful film in its tracks. Tell your local video shop owners to avoid the release. Write to Netflix, to GreenCine, to other online video retailers you know. Pass the word. Share information. The only way Lionsgate is going to rectify the problem is if we hit them in their pocketbooks and show them that we don't want what they're selling.

Thanks to DVD Verdict and Tom Becker for bringing this problem to light.

Leftover Halloween Arbo Minis

This innocuous Disney retread is okay, I guess, but The Rock is no Eddie Albert, I'll tell you what. What's remarkable about RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN (2009) is how instantly recognizable are child actors Kimberly Richards and Ike Eisenmann in oh-so-slightly winking cameos - especially given that you won't remember the faces of their contemporary counterparts, AnnaSophia Robb and Alexander Ludwig, halfway into your first post-movie whiz. (Not only that, but the eternally weedy Eisenmann actually swings dick as a small town sheriff who gets between the good guys and bad guys for a couple of crucial get-away minutes.) Carla Gugino is, once again, wasted and actually pretty embarrassing as a UFO expert.

I don't mean Toby Wilkins' SPLINTER (2009) any disrespect by calling it a programmer. If anything, the horror genre needs more of this than movies promising - and failing, always failing to deliver - our worst nightmares. It's basically THE PETRIFIED FOREST set in a convenience store with a spiny parasite standing in for The Great Depression. Surprisingly, the monsters never steal focus, never become celebrities (as George Romero is ever trying to do, to deleterious effect) but serve as unsightly symptoms of a disease that remains undiagnosed even after the final fade out. Getting around the problem of the infected looking too much like the dancers in Michael Jackson's THRILLER (1983) is the notion of the parasite retaining physical traits of its previous hosts, causing the reanimated corpses here to literally bend over backwards in a demonstration of evolution gone horrifically awry or the theory's greatest triumph.

If you're stupid, you'll probably like FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003). I don't mean that as an insult so much as a statement of objective fact. Another tiresome logic-be-damned exercise by David R. Ellis (SNAKES ON A PLANE), this is a continuation of the semi-popular franchise that amounts to little more than watching people you don't particularly care about die in nasty and protracted ways. Some critics have praised the novel concept of a slasher movie without a slasher, where the slasher is death itself, but that's pretty much where innovation gets off the bus and gets hit by a taxi. And blows up. And its leg lands on somebody's picnic table.

EDEN LAKE (2008) goes in and out of tedium like a little kid who has just met his first set of electronic doors. Handsomely mounted and well-acted, the thing still lumbers through hoary moves you've seen a thousand times (especially if you grew up watching American TV movies of the early 1970s, where troublesome teens were always bedeviling their elders). The pace picks up a bit when twee leading lady Kelly Reilly goes native in the film's midsection and there is some good grisiliness toward the end but the wrap-up feels glib and actually lessens the horror of everything that has come before it.

I waited over 20 years to find out that BAD DREAMS (1988) is crap. I don't know where I read it was any good but I've carried that misconception forward as if it were granddad's pocket watch. Richard Lynch is well cast but thoroughly ill used as the Messianic but dead leader of a desert cult with a fire fixation whose spirit lives on like the aroma of burned popcorn to hag his only surviving acolyte (Jennifer Rubin) in visions, manifestations and, you guessed it, bad dreams. There are no scares and the typically 80s condescension - a group therapy set-up in which every member represents a different neurosis and is particularized by a single personality trait - is unforgivable.

Charming lead performances cannot mask the utter amateurishness of Sam Mendes' AWAY WE GO (2009), which is to independent film what Restoration Hardware is to the antiques business. I'm no fan of the director but even I was aghast at the sitcom quality of this endeavor, which has but two things to recommend it - a wonderful turn by former SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE trouper Maya Rudolph, which I hope points her to more leading roles in films, and you get to see Ricou Browning's name in the credits. Guy's going to be 80 in February and he's still getting into the water.

A Chat with Simon Fisher Turner

It's almost fitting that Michael Almereyda's NADJA (1995) is largely lost within the annals of vampire cinema, as the film is governed by fragments of remembrance and the shadows of suppressed emotions. Nowhere near a box office hit at the time of its limited theatrical release, NADJA got a lot of press in New York, where it was filmed, but received middling to dismissive reviews across the board. Produced by David Lynch and Mary Sweeney and cast with New York stage and film actors (among them faces familiar from Hal Hartley's films), NADJA remains one of the few modern vampire films concerned with reclaiming, honoring and maintaining family. Partially filmed with a discontinued Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which gave the production the cottony aspect of a waking dream, NADJA is, for those open to its smudgy charms, an intriguing and intoxicating postmodern brew - and crucial to its hallucinatory properties is the truly haunting score by British musician Simon Fisher Turner.

Simon Fisher Turner began in the industry as a child actor in such projects as the BBC's 1971 adaptation of TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS and Michael Winner's THE BIG SLEEP (1975), starring Robert Mitchum and Oliver Reed. Shifting to music, Mr. T (as I call him) was signed to UK Records by the age of 17 and his first album was released two years later. He enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with the film director Derek Jarman that lasted until Jarman's untimely death in 1994. The composer was kind enough to consent to a brief interview about his work on NADJA, presented as an Arbogast on Film All Saints Day exclusive:

AOF: At a particular point in my life the NADJA soundtrack was very important to me. I was living in New York and going through a difficult patch of loneliness, offsetting rent-paying work with intense writing sessions late into the night. Exhausting myself, I'd drop into bed and spin the score and let it carry me off.

SFT: Isnt that odd? It really is a nighttime listen.

AOF: Were you familiar with Bram Stoker's Dracula before you were hired to score this reflection on it (and other things)?

SFT: I never read it but I grew up in a Hammer period. I’ve always rather liked vampires and felt sorry for them.

AOF: Were you a fan of the Hammer horrors?

SFT: I thought they were terrible but I loved them. I knew they were not beautifully made films in the sense that they always seemed cheap. They looked cheap and tacky. But I was too young really to understand that a lot of men watched them for the bosoms of the poor maidens. Hammer as a trademark was just about on its last legs when I started to go to the cinema on my own. We had the The Rex in Islington, which turned into the Screen on the Green by 1970, where the Sex Pistols played.

AOF: Did any of what became the score for NADJA predate the project? Was any of it laying in wait for a place to be used?

SFT: No music was in my head before I saw the rough cut of the film. Michael and I talked a lot about the sort of feelings he had towards a score. For me on this front I started with location, so I went to New York with a cassette recorder and walked the city, recording sounds. I also started sampling bits and bobs. The sampling keyboard was a very useful tool for me then. But always, the talking with the director sets me up.

AOF: So you and Michael Almereyda worked closely together?

SFT: In New York with Michael, and with Mr. David on the phone from LA. I enjoyed it a lot.

AOF: The score is certainly of a piece, but there's wonderful variety of influences and effects.

SFT: It's a compilation of all sorts of pieces I was working on, too, it seems. Bits from here, there and everywhere.

AOF: Those low strings really take you away.

SFT: The cellos we recorded in New York. Thomas Ulrich played wild and we then compiled and collaged with guitars and sounds from the city.


AOF: The intrusion of ambient sounds is key to this music, as it was for BLUE, which - as I remember - used hospital noise as if it was itself a musical section, like brass or strings. I've had it happen several times while listening to the NADJA soundtrack that a digital alarm will go off or something and I'll assume it's part of the music.

SFT: New sounds are always what I hear. Although I knew New York well I started to explore places I didn’t know so well. And I also started sticking microphones where I shouldn’t. I now use an Edirol but in NADJA times it must have been a Sony Pro Walkman, I think. I'm a big cassette fan. Never a Nagra man, and now my world is saved by the ever fabulous Edirol, from Roland - straight into the Mac and I’m away.

AOF: The use of the low, almost creeping organ in the third cut, "No Comfort in the Bloody Shadows," reminded me of old low budget horror movies, in particular CARNIVAL OF SOULS.

SFT: Low sounds, or low end orchestral compositions, have to my ears always been a good tool in a horror sense. As are indeed the very high end. The master of course was Mr. Bernard Hermann. His PSYCHO score changed everyone's idea of the horror score forever.

AOF: Did you ever think you'd score a horror film?

SFT: I never had ambitions to make music for films. It was Mr. Jarman's fault of course, and I thank him very much.

AOF: You seem to me a natural for it.

SFT: I love everyday life sounds interrupting and adding to mine or anyone else's works. When I'm in the studio, listening to a playback of some piece, its always great to look around the faces in the room and see who has reacted - generally with a smile - as we all recognise the added element. It's a good example of collage. I made an album for Mute Records and all the backing tracks were made first by tuning in, then out of local radio stations in Europe.

AOF: Well, thanks for talking with us today. What's next for you?

SFT: I spent a lot of the summer recording in Berlin with Tilda Swinton on a new film, THE INVISIBLE FRAME.

AOF: Can't wait to see it!