Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 262: Sarah Orne Jewett, In Dark New England Days (#262)

Sarah Orne Jewett, "In Dark New England Days" (1890) from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps:

I recently wrote a story--first draft, nothing I'll share with you--where I avoided the big action scenes (not that they were all that big or full of action) and instead wrote around them. Should I show the hero getting captured by aliens? Nah, let's show the hero in a cell instead and let everyone imagine what happened. (What happened? He got captured by aliens.)

Why? Because it doesn't really matter how he gets caught; what I was really interested in was how he and his captor would get along afterwards.

And in her own way, Jewett does something very similar. Not with aliens--I'm not that lucky. But her story of two daughters dealing with two losses gives us a very particular view of the scenes that would make up this story.

We don't see the daughters dealing with their overbearing and stingy father. We see them after his funeral. We see them uncovering the treasure he hid all these years--but then we skip the robbery and jump straight to the court case against the neighbor, given the ultra New England name of Enoch Holt. And we don't see the younger daughter's curse take effect, we hear two townsfolk talk about how the Holts have a tendency to, well, lose their right hands.

Given my taste for the Gothic and horror, I tend to love these ambiguously eerie tales of Jewett: the narrow towns, the open secrets, the simmering feuds, and the great unknowable world that envelopes it all. So here, she's certainly at her ambiguous best: is there a real curse or just happenstance? Are the daughters really visited by the cobwebby ghost of their tyrannical father?

But I'm still hung-up on the structure, which seems to capture something of the themes of the story: here we have a story where two adult daughters are waiting for something to change their lives--and it never quite happens. That is, the death of the father should free them up, should enrich their lives, quite literally with all of dad's hidden gold. And instead, poof, the wealth disappears. It's a story about absence: the marriage that never happened, the wealth that was only there for a moment, the neighbors not invited to stay the night, and the empty sleeves of the Holt family members. Goddamn, she's good.

(If you wanted to, we could connect this notion of absence with the idea of patriarchal power and the nullification of women. One of the first man-woman scenes we see is one neighbor carefully crafting her response so as not to set off her husband. Though the wife is upset, she has to cover those feelings.)

I mean, look at that final scene: two friends walking home (one will stay over because the other's husband is absent), out of breath (another absence), the landscape suffused with golden light of sunset (both a presence--gold, like dear old dead dad's treasure--and the upcoming absence of sunset), and Enoch Holt making his way across the landscape with only one good hand.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 249: Seabury Quinn, The Curse of Everard Maundy (#249)

Seabury Quinn, "The Curse of Everard Maundy" (1927) from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps:

Not much to say about this: at first, I thought to crow over Halloween, when everyone else comes around to the idea that horror/fear is an important part of our emotional register. But this story, while it might have worked in 1927 in the pages of Weird Tales, feels a little flat in all the wrong ways.

For instance, I really like paranormal investigators; I really like the standard genius-and-ordinary team (Holmes and Watson); and I don't mind the "genius explaining" scene. But Quinn (who was a very popular writer of the time and whose stories I have run across before) doesn't really do much more with those characters. When the genius detective whips out a sword cane, I didn't feel any thrill. I felt "I was waiting for that to happen."

There are some things that set this story apart: for instance, the potshots at spiritualism; the two-three instances of same sex friendships/crush (the genius saves the ordinary from a nightmare, then gets into bed with him to watch out for more monsters); and the ending wherein the genius totally mutilates and hides a dead body. Which is at least something we never saw Holmes do.

Super short review: The Conjuring

The Conjuring got very good reviews and did really amazing business--so much so that there's going to be both a sequel and a spin-off.

And there's a lot to like here: fine, grounded acting; fun, practical effects rather than CGI; some spooooky bits.

But there's also a lot not to like. Here's a spoiler: when the two demon-hunters start to look into the past of this haunted house, they find a murder. OK, that's pretty standard in horror films: people find some horrible history. Sometimes, in some films, the investigator discovers the horrible history and a red herring horrible history. ("Oh no, there was a murder, but this haunting is from this other suicide!")

Similarly, in this film--and many other horror films--the investigators look for some evidence and find some.

In The Conjuring, once the investigators start to find out the horrible past, it piles up almost comically. Similarly, the evidence is so over-the-top that it's hard to take these people seriously. A woman hung herself? Someone drowned a kid? There's an evil doll? Birds keep crashing into one wall of the house? The house is freezing and smells like rotten meat?

At some point, this seemed more like an SNL parody of horror than a horror film to me.

True Detective (filmic, weird, character review)

Last time, I noted that True Detective gets a lot of adjectives applied to it, such as filmic and genius. One thing that I would like to note at the outset is that I understand both why people loved it and why people hated it. And, related, one thing that I think HBO is uniquely positioned to do is to produce this sort of mini-series that is the unique vision of a few people. That is, a typical tv show will have a bunch of writers and directors; True Detective is credited to just one writer and just one director. So the show has a real coherence in tone that not a lot of shows achieve. And if you don't like that tone/style/whatever, you won't find anything to keep you coming back, and vice versa.

In other words, it's the tv equivalent of Wes Anderson or someone like that: a writer-director with a particular vision. If you don't like a Wes Anderson film, it's more than likely that you won't like any of his films. (Note: "likely.") This is probably one reason why the adjective "filmic" or "cinematic" got attached to True Detective. Another reason is that the direction often lingers, especially on the landscape and panoramic scenes, which is definitely something that makes the tv show seem like it wants to be on the big screen. Honestly, if you can't tell, I think comparing this tv show to film doesn't quite hit the mark, while at the same time pointing to something real. Sure, this tv show loves this Louisiana bayou-world as much as a Western loves its Painted Desert and Monument Valley. Sure, the pace may at times be leisurely--but we can say that without falling back on some notion of "cinematicness" that is never really defined.

(Also, a moment of silence to honor the music choices of T-Bone Burnett.)

One reason why I want to emphasize the odd pacing is because the hurry-up-and-wait structure gives the scenes of action a shocking feeling, while also giving us time to watch these people in bog-standard life that isn't iconic. I mean, in a film or a tv show, we might see a happy family at dinner, which is such an iconic scene that the audience is meant to read this as "sign of happy family." But here, in between some shocking violence, we have a lot of awkward car rides and drunken discussions and family affairs of all sorts. It's enough space for the characters to breathe as characters, rather than as stereotypes and icons.

And it would be so easy for these characters to turn into stereotypes: the unhappy wife, the philandering husband, the faux-philosophical nihilist with the dark past. So how does the show prevent that? Well, first, I would argue that it doesn't entirely. As any good improv teacher will tell you, sometimes you use those stereotypes to set up the characters quickly and then complicate them. Here, we see the two detective at two different times in their lives, which gives us two different looks: Rust is a nihilist and a burn-out; Marty is a philandering husband and the comfortable PI. The show also gives us many different scenes and locations for bringing out these characters, with Rust's bizarre, penitential apartment contrasted with Marty's house--which is especially contrasted since we see them each crossing over to the other's world.

Which brings us to the notion of the world as a whole: what sort of world do we live in? Rust believes in nothing, eternal darkness, the end of all life--and possibly in the corruption of institutions by some extra-dimensional horror. (Carcosa, the Yellow King.) Marty believes in getting along to get on, in the innocence of children. Ultimately, unlike Lost or some other shows that give us no option other than the Weird, True Detective hovers on the edge: everything we see that's weird could be drug-induced or up to bizarre backwoods weirdness. But this is where the tv show really shines for me; because, in the very last moments, we're given a double view of the heavens: either the sky is all dark with only a few stars--or maybe the light is winning and banishing the dark. It's an interesting viewpoint and character switch--Rust is the one who offers the happy reading of the night sky and it's a transition into a qualified happy ending that feels earned by all the horror and weirdness that they slogged through earlier.

True Detective (summary and note on format)

True Detectives is another HBO show where I felt like everyone who was watching it was talking about it online; though, whereas Girls has its bloggers (both fans and enemies), True Detective seemed to have lots of Twitterers. So even before I watched the show, I had heard bits and pieces. (Although, I will say this: even without assiduously avoiding spoilers, I didn't see a lot online. Are people/fans growing an aversion to spoiling works for people when those works are susceptible to time-shifting?)

And when I went to LA, it seemed like everyone was talking about it--either noting it was genius (most common) or noting that it was overhyped. I also heard that it was filmic; that it was potentially a work of weird/Lovecraftian fiction; that McConaughey and Harrelson were great; and so on. So I didn't watch as a complete blank slate; but I also wasn't completely prepared for what I saw.

If you haven't seen it, here's the short(ish) version: Texan and nihilist Rustin Cohle moves to Louisiana, where he partners with happily married and philandering detective Marty Hart. (Cohle is dark as coal, Hart is caught up in affairs of the heart, if you need a mnemonic to remember them by.) Their first case is a bizarre murder in 1995, where the victim seems to be murdered in ritualistic ways, without leaving lots of evidence.

Now, here's the twist to the format: in 2012, ex-cops Rust and Marty are being interviewed separately by two different cops, who seem to have some sort of agenda. Rust and Marty haven't talked for ten years, not since some unspecified falling out in 2002. But the story they tell the new detectives may not be the whole truth, as we see some things happen on screen that don't get talked about. So we get glimpses of 1995, 2012, and some commentary on the time between. Since Rust and Cohle already solved the murder, they can give us a flashforward to the solution.

The murder investigation prompts them on a tour of all sorts of underworld and fringe communities: tent revivals and burned out churches, prostitution-centered trailer parks, bayou fishermen communities, etc. As they follow leads and discover more possible murders, we get to hear both more about these guys--Rust isn't just a nihilist for fun and he spent a lot of time on drugs while he was doing undercover work--and also get some hints about the larger conspiracies of the world. Is there a secret cult to the King in Yellow? Is that cult connected to power and wealth in Louisiana?

And then, in the last two episodes of the eight episode season, the format changes slightly: the new cops have all but accused Rust of being a serial killer, which prompts him and Marty to get together, which leads to Rust sharing his evidence with Marty, which leads the two of them to try to crack this case in 2012, 17 years after they supposedly solved it.

These last two episodes also give us a bunch of scenes from other people's points-of-view, so we see the new cops getting lost in the wilderness and we see the killer in his wilderness mansion. And that change of format I think helps change the tone somewhat. The first part of the show is all about the mystery, with some of the anticipation of what's going to happen that we already have clues about. So someone comments on the shootout Rust and Marty had with the killers, building up suspense for when we actually see it/hear the full story. When we jump to 2012, we can't have the same sort of set-up/anticipation... unless we see the bad guy's POV. It's a very nice and minor switch, that preserves a lot of the dread, while changing the focus of that dread. I mean, in episodes one-through-six, we know Rust and Marty can't die. In seven and eight, that certainty is gone.

This is getting too long; I'll continue on Wednesday's post.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 220: Emma Frances Dawson, An Itinerant House (#220)

Emma Frances Dawson, "An Itinerant House" (1878) from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps:

OK, there is one super-important bit of historical information that the LoA page tells you that makes this story slightly less eerie, which is... ready? I don't want to spoil anything for you, so read on if you want a slightly less eerie story: some of the 19th-century houses in San Francisco were pre-made iron structures that were made to be portable. So when the title promises "An Itinerant House," the double meaning is both that this is a house for itinerants and that the house itself moves around. Which makes the story slightly less eerie, but slightly more historically weird: when the protagonist goes into a room and remembers the room where that Traumatic Event happened, we're meant to understand that this is actually the room where it happened, not merely the narrator's psychic slippage.

And "slippage" is going to be the word of the day for this piece: not only does the house move around, but all the characters move around abruptly, and history itself jumps. For instance, in one line we might be in San Francisco, and in the next everyone has moved on, then met up again on a ship in NY in the next line, and then, in the fourth sentence, the long sea voyage is over and we're back in San Francisco. And I haven't even mentioned the most serious slippage of all, which is the way these characters keep slipping in some artistic reference or quote. Seriously, if you took out all the references to pre-existing work, this story would be half as long.

There's some justification for that, since these characters are all artists, but it gives the whole piece an unreal vibe. I'm trying to think of a good movie comparison here--Whit Stillman's dialogue is very mannered--but there's nothing quite like this non-stop quote-fest. Of course, they are using these quotes to express their real feelings (not like those guys you went to high school with who use Simpsons and Monty Python quotes to hide their feelings), but it still gives the story an unreal atmosphere, especially with the jumps in time.

Which is why it's so disappointing to find that this sort of house really was portable and this isn't all in these people's minds. Because the story's style and tone is so heightened and strange that it's a bit of a let-down to find this bedrock of reality.

A review of Lovecraft: Nightmare Suite

This is a little late, as I'm still in Los Angeles, running around. But here's a review of a play I saw.

Lovecraft: Nightmare Suite; adapted and directed by Dan Spurgeon; performed by the Visceral Company at the Lex Theatre

Lovecraft may not be the obvious choice for theatrical adaptation, with his SAT-prepped narrators and the indescribable weirdness they face (or run gibbering from before being subsiding into restful oblivion). How can you represent cyclopean buildings and squamous horrors on the stage?

The answer, of course, is: with puppets or shadow projections. If it's weird, keep it weird. And rather than run from those wordy, occasionally logorrheic narrators, you could--as Dan Spurgeon does--highlight them by having them tell us the stories directly. As the playbill essay notes, though Lovecraft's narrators generally seem to be men, some of these adaptations are narrated by women; and I generally agree that this change does bring some interesting depth or at least a new slant to these stories.

Lovecraft: Nightmare Suite features several such full stories, with some interstitial pieces that either help the transitions or merely give the actors time to change costumes, depending on your tastes. It doesn't help that these interstitials are too quick to let their weirdness build into something dreadful; and that the recitation seems somewhat garbled.

In order, the scenes are

1) "Prologue: Dreams": A dapper, self-assured fellow frames the scenes to come with some scattered Lovecraft quotes--a little "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (mankind's oldest emotion is fear), a little "From Beyond" (we'll see what dogs and cats are always going on about), a little "Nietzcheism and Realism" (it would be better not to exist at all). Good mood setting, and probably better if you're not playing "catch the Lovecraft quote."

2) "The Statement of Randolph Carter": Nervous Randolph Carter tells the jury--us--what really happened the night that Harley Warren disappeared. At some point, Harley shows up on the stage and the recital turns into a reenactment. It's fairly faithful to the story, as near as I remember it: they go to a graveyard in a swamp, uncover stairs down, Harley uses a telephone on a long wire, and then tells Randolph to run. As the first full story, "Randolph Carter" nicely shows us the general format--a little narration, a little dramatization--and the nonchalant appearance of Harley is suitably creepy: already looking half-dead, he walks on stage while Randolph is telling the story and just stands there until the reenactment starts, when he pulls two shovels off one wall of the stage. That was an especially nice touch, I thought, since that wall featured a bunch of evocative tools--axe (I think), shovels, saws. And after this, I could never be sure what was just decoration and what would play a part in the scenes.

3) Interstitial: a short poem about a cat, with a puppet cat walking across the stage. Walking, gliding, whatever.

4) "The Cats of Ulthar": Although (3) wasn't very engaging, it did serve pretty well as a transition into this piece, which was all done with puppets and costumes. The people of Ulthar are all waist-high puppets with slightly grotesque papier-mache faces. The "acting" of the puppets may be a little broad, like a pantomime show, but was pretty effective all the same; extra points for giving the gory-silly story some humor through these puppets. The narration was all done from the side, where the actress sat in a sort of pseudo-Egyptian glory. (Did she actually have her face painted with the Eye of Horus or was that just my imagination?) That design, I could take or leave, though the narration did add to the pantomime quality. And when the grand caravan of strange people came, it was authentically odd to see full-sized, masked figures among the tiny, grotesque Ultharites. The back wall of the stage, which was the projection screen, first showed the town--with the cat-killing couple's house off to the side; and then, during the rite, showed a projection of a house surrounded by cats turning around it.

5) Interstitial: a puppet head pops out of a box on the side of the stage and tells us about a tower, which is projected on the back wall.

6) "The Outsider": was cancelled due to actor injury.

7) Interstitial: with a blacklight on, various glowing bits came together to form a house. Was it a witch house? I couldn't say for sure.

8) "The Picture in the House": A bicycling genealogist takes shelter from a storm in a seemingly-abandoned house, only to discover that the ancient and isolated inhabitant obsesses over a book featuring cannibals. I honestly can't remember this story; and the idea of a cannibal hick in a cabin in the woods may not surprise anyone today. But the execution was well done. The authentic frontier gibberish of the Yankee hick was very off-putting, though largely because he kept going on about how that picture of cannibalism gave him queer thoughts. The lighting for this story was very dark, except when the lightning effect played or the book's cannibal-shop image played on the back wall. As with many other full pieces, the narrator here addressed us directly, while the other character didn't, which added an extra tension here: "Stop telling us about your bicycle," I wanted to yell, "there's a guy with an axe behind you!"

9) Interstitial: something about Fungi from Yuggoth, with green, plant-like, pincer-tipped arms reaching in from off-stage to menace a guy.

10) "Cool Air": One of the pieces where the narrator's gender gets flipped, but otherwise keeping close to the story (as I remember it). A woman takes a room at a boarding house, befriends the doctor above her, who keeps his room surprisingly cool, and who mentions something about a terrible brush with death that he had. Surprise! He already died years ago and when his cooling apparatus fails, he deliquesces. Like many earlier pieces, the narrator addresses the audience directly; but what really set this piece apart was that the doctor never appears directly on the stage. Instead, he appears only as a shadow projected on the back wall and never talks out loud, with his dialogue explained in brief through the narrator. Not only does this help to speed up the story by summarizing, it keeps the literally shadowy doctor at one remove from us and from the other people in the scene (narrator, landlady, workmen). I've never found this story particularly scary, or even really creepy, and instead, this version seemed more sad than anything else.

11?) Interstitial: There was something about inner Egypt. My question mark here comes from the fact that this might really have been part of the next scene.

12) "Nyartlathotep": Seemingly based on the original prose poem, this piece starts with a narrator going with a crowd to see a magic show presented by the titular character. Here, Nyartlathotep, the Egyptian-looking sorcerer-god, is a pretty stiff shadow puppet projected on the back wall, and his magic is just a few lights on a dark stage. But when the narrator objects and Nyartlathotep drives the crowd (the rest of the cast) into the street, the scene becomes more interesting: each character has a flashlight and soon they are all in unison jumping at strange sounds and turning their flashlights first left, now right. Then they fall under a magical compulsion that sees them marching out into alien landscapes, until our narrator is left alone again, in a suddenly and totally black stage.

13) "Epilogue: The Thing in the Moonlight": The dapper man from the prologue returns, only this time he introduces himself as Howard Phillips and is almost comically nervous. And he has a lot to be nervous about since he's stuck in an endless nightmare that he can't wake up from, haunted by various shapes. This piece seems to owe as much to Lovecraft's letter (where he recounts a dream) as to the later story written by J. Chapman Miske, which seems like an odd choice. But it does give the actors a second chance to appear as their most interesting characters of the night--the cannibal hick, the Egyptian-style narrator of "Cats," the nervous narrator of "Cool Air," etc. all appear as the shapes that haunt the narrator.

Overall, Lovecraft: Nightmare Suite isn't completely successful and makes some odd choices that lead it into unforced errors--mostly around those interstitial pieces; but the longer stories are generally strong, featuring direct acting and a touch of weirdness and dread through the simple special effects of light and shadow.

Alien Raiders and A Film With Me In It: Good scripts and cheap sets

What are these movies?

Alien Raiders is a terribly-named movie, though I can kind of see what they're going for: a bunch of criminals takes over a supermarket and holds the people there hostage--because (twist!) they are trying to protect all of us from alien invasion. So the raiders are both the aliens doing the invading and the humans trying to raid the aliens. Cue waa-waa horn.

A Film With Me In It is a super-dark Irish comedy about two affable schlubs--a failed actor whose brother is locked-in, whose girlfriend is growing apart, whose landlord is mean, whose apartment is falling apart; and a drunk screenwriter who never writes--who then have to deal with an escalating farce of death. The deaths are ridiculous, but the real comedy here is in how these two guys try to deal with everything, which is so god-damn hard for them. (At every single moment: so when Dylan Moran--the drunk screenwriter--introduces himself at an AA meeting, he does so in the most awkward way possible.)

The good, the bad, the replicable
Alien Raiders has many characters--the raiders, the hostages, the cops--which kind of splits the attention and drains our identification with most of the characters. So, say, when something terrible happens to character X, it's easy to say, "oh well, what's character Y up to?" At the same time, many of those characters are given some interesting thing to work with.

It's also so perfectly self-contained--just in and around this one supermarket. Not only does that heighten some of the danger and suspense, it also probably does wonders in cutting down cost. Which they could then spend on bloody special effects and squibs, since the film sort of boils down to regular joes vs. aliens.

A Film With Me In It has a similarly constricted location/scope, mostly taking place in and around this one house. And, similarly, most of the special effects budget probably went into fake blood. But the characters are so well-defined through just one or two scenes--the actor failing to make an impression at an audition, the drunk writer making the wrong impression at an AA meeting--that we don't need to see much of their lives outside of this house to understand who they are. And once we have their characters outlined, almost every thing they do is hilarious since they keep being put into tense situations.

The only negative thing I have to say about A Film With Me In It is a warning about the dog in the film, who does die. For some reason, people dying in Looney Toons fashion is amusing, but when it happens to a dog, it seems less so.

What's right/wrong with Constantine (2005) and what can we learn?

Constantine is not a terrible film, but it's very mixed. As it fits one of my favorite genres--urban fantasy, where magic is a small part of our real Earth--I think it's worthwhile looking at Constantine to see what it does right and what went wrong as a movie. There's probably more, but here's some loose thoughts. (And apologies for some of the cutesy names. I was looking at TV Tropes recently)

Right:

• Some of the exposition/background occurs in dialogue that overlaps with some plot-related moment
• Salvation by suicide: turning a lot of what we expect around, the movie delivers an ending where Satan saves the day and John's embrace of suicide turns out to be OK--since it was for right reasons--it's theologically shaky, but a good surprise/repay of the opening
• Casting: Peter Stormare makes an engaging and creepy Satan and Tilda Swinton should be in all the movies

Wrong:

• Much of the exposition/background is given with dialogue that is pretty bland or outright campy (as when Angela pushes aside info on "the Spear of Destiny" with "I know, I'm Catholic")
• Opening title card tells us, as boringly as possible, some backstory on that Spear: blah blah, lost since WWII--but how much cooler it would have been if some guy just found this old spear wrapped in a Nazi flag and we had that mystery about what it was rather than that answer?
• Too cool as a rule: there's a thin line between being a jaded demon-fighter and having the dry cool wit of an action hero (as the Simpsons parody of that style goes)--and John Constantine mostly comes off as a rote action hero
• A Q for every hero: So much of the battles here are purely super-weapon vs. demon, which decreases suspense--so that many of the battle scenes have no emotional tension (not even the suspense of "how will he get out of this?"--we know how he'll get out of this, we've seen the flamethrower)
• Scene without tension: when John faces a room full of half-demons, one of them helpfully says "Holy water" before they all start burning and then Constantine starts shooting, which looks OK, but has no emotional weight
• Repetition: Characters occasionally tell each other things that we the audience already know; once, John uses a magic means to watch the prologue of the movie that we already saw--which is important for him to know, but boring for us to watch
• Didn't we see that already?: In a climactic scene, two guys join forces to exorcise a woman. Sure, lots of exorcisms look the same, but why invite the comparison with The Exorcist?
• That final message from Constantine about god having a plan; and that post-credit scene where Chas is/was a half-angel--both overwrought
• Casting: Keanu Reeves does a nice "Zen blankness" (as one critic noted), but isn't quite right for the jerkiness of this character
• Occult inconsistency: We're told that God and Lucifer aren't allowed on Earth, but half-breeds can intervene, so then what is Tilda Swinton's Gabriel and Gavin Rossdale's Balthazar? And the end, when Satan shows up?
• Character motivation hard to connect to: Constantine has a clear, but odd goal: as a suicide, he's doomed to go to Hell, so he tries to please God by sending demons to Hell... which means that Hell would be full of people who hate him. Given that Constantine can be part of the battle, if his motivation is pure self-interest, why isn't he fighting for Satan, so that his arrival in Hell would be a home-coming? And while the movie has a fine arc for John of self-interest (get me to Heaven) to other-interest (save Angela and her twin sister), I feel like they try to get our interest in him by making him cool rather than making him human/identifiable.
• Do we need him here?: Constantine's ally Chas disappears for a good chunk of the movie. So why is he here--along with Constantine's other allies, Angela, Beeman, Hennessy, Midnite? (Alt question: who isn't on Constantine's side?)
• Sudden but inevitable betrayal: we hear that Mammon needs Godly help to get to Earth, which is one piece that sets up Gabriel's heel-turn (or reveal as a villain if you don't like wrestling lingo). But there's no real heft to that betrayal/position?

So, overall, I think Constantine's problems really have to do with the delivery of information about this strange world--it's at its best when it can dramatize that info; and with the strangeness of characters within that milieu (i.e., what does John Constantine want?).

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 206: Ralph Adams Cram, The Dead Valley (#206)

Ralph Adams Cram, "The Dead Valley" (1895) from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps:

You can say a lot about my "Story of the Week Read-Alongs," but one thing you can't say is that I'm usually lukewarm. Lovecraft? Love him. Cather? Pass her.

Ralph Adams Cram? Uh, well... hold on... it'll come to me.

The story here is one of a handful of ghost/horror stories he produced over a few years, though he's more famous for his religious-related architecture--often Gothic, like his stories. Lovecraft apparently liked the regional horror of "The Dead Valley," though we might question what that means. My general rule of thumb: Lovecraft is always right about quality, but not always right about analysis.

See, the story is told by a Swede about a horrible valley in Sweden, but it doesn't feel any more Swedish to me than it does New England--or Appalachian or Texan or etc. It's about two boys who go on a trip to buy a dog and find a valley that's full of poison gas and malevolence. Why isn't that a Texas story? OK--if it were a Texas story, the boys would probably ride horses across the valley.

Set aside the a-regionalism of this story--what about the story? The man tells this story of his boyhood, so we know he survives. As soon as they get a dog and meet the weird fog, you know the dog's going to get it. And when the post-brain fever boys get together and one completely denies the experience--well, that in itself isn't too surprising and it's not surprising that this denial leads the other boy to his own investigation.

So there's really very little reason I could point to and say, "that's why this is a good story." (Sure, sure, maybe all the weaknesses I'm pointing out are really strengths: it's so predictable and so non-regional that we can all easily sink into the dread. As an argument, that strikes me as blah.) And yet, for all that I don't know why I like this story... I like it.

Or rather, I like it in this very peculiar way where I want to write a comic book based on it; or write my own story based on it; or write an anthology movie of various death-fog stories. Maybe that's the secret: so little happens here that you want to fill in your own story.

Old Time Radio Review: Quiet, Please: The Thing on the Fourble Board

I recently listened to "The Thing on the Fourble Board," an episode of Quiet, Please from 1948 that some people have praised very highly as an excellent episode of that show and a fabulous bit of horror. Now, I'm a bit of a fan of old time radio, and I think it's worth a listen to. Have you listened to it? Great, because I'm going to spoil the plot and twist if you haven't.

The show starts with a direct address from an ex-roughneck (oil-field worker) Porky. He calls his wife "Mike" to come over, but she doesn't, so Porky tells a story from his old oil-field days--a story of terror. The story involves a core sample of million-year-old rock--which has a fancy ring and a finger in it. And that finger turns out to be--invisible! Once the mud is rubbed off, that is.

Now, all this time, the geologist who came out to do the examination is worried that there's something up on the derrick floor. This is called a "fourble board," and Porky explains why in another example of how he fills in information about oil-production work in between the horrific story. It's info-dumpy, but it makes total sense since Porky is telling us this story and responding to our questions or confusions (in a way that isn't that unusual in some shows).

So, after the geologist is--natch--horrifically murdered; and then after another death and the closing of this well; the roughneck comes back to the derrick and throws paint on the invisible creature that's clearly killing these guys. The creature has a horrible body but a very cute girl's face, so the ex-roughneck does the only logical thing: he "marries" it. And all this time, while he's been telling the story, we haven't been at a bar or party--we're tied to a chair or held at gunpoint, waiting for "Mike" to come eat us.

Now, that final twist that puts us in a different position is pretty effective as a moment of horror; as is the approach of "Mike," who has an awful, baby-ish but barely human voice.

But it also seems somewhat odd and a little silly in its way. For instance, he meets a monster with a girl's face and falls in love with it, which is both inter-species-weird and vaguely pedophiliac. Why give her a little girl's face? There's some talk about her being lost, which gives some reason why she gets associated with youth; but that just compounds the weirdness and discomfort of this grown man luring this subterranean monster child into this strange relationship.

And while the turn from "uninvolved listener" to "presumptive sacrifice" is appropriately scary, there's no real great tie between "invisible underground monster" and "you're in the story." It works great for kids, such as in the story of the old man's toe--"And you have it!" But besides the shock, there's not much else to make it specific to this story. It could be the story of a man searching for a will--and you have it!--or the story of a serial killer--and you're next! An invisible, subterranean spider-lady-turned wife doesn't scream "you're next" to me.

Movie Analysis: The Sixth Sense (or, Sixth Sense's Lessons)

Scriptshadow (the website and the book) offers several lessons from The Sixth Sense, such as "avoid dual-column dialogue" and "don't hang your story on a twist ending" and "hide your plot points." Which are fine comments and some of the lessons are even technically useful, such as "if your scene takes place in a generic location, like a church, don't waste time describing it, just say INT. CHURCH."

But there's several other lessons we can take from The Sixth Sense--and at least one way that we can see Scriptshadow's reading as a little off, if not exactly wrong.

1. Start with stakes: the movie's opening shows 
• a troubled marriage (with his wife telling Dr. Crowe how work is first and everything--even her--comes second for him); 
• the consequence of Crowe messing up, with Donnie Wahlberg shooting Crowe and then himself.
• Which sets up an unsolvable conflict: if he concentrates on work more, he'll lose his wife, but if he concentrates on her instead of work, he'll end up getting shot again.
• And we see how the situation with Cole mirrors the situation with Wahlberg from the opening. Can the doctor fix this kid in time to avoid getting hurt again?
• Though the film doesn't make much of this, we can squint and kind of see how Cole could turn out to be a school shooter or other "villain," just like Wahlberg in the beginning. In a later scene, Shyamalan shows how Cole doesn't do so good at school when he uses info from the dead to answer a question, which leads to a confrontation with his teacher where the teacher calls him a "freak." Which is, we're led to believe, the worst thing you could call someone. BUT! Leading up to that climax, Cole has been yelling at his teacher about his (the teacher's) childhood nickname and bullying issue. Though Cole seems like the victim here, he also comes off like a monster-in-the-making.
2. Increasing weirdness and delay: considering that the trailers had "I see dead people" and it has become something to be parodies, it's interesting to watch the movie and see how late this admission comes and how long the movie plays with weirdness.
• Weirdness: A little kid speaking Latin.
• Weirdness: All the cabinets opened in a second when mom is out of the room, with Cole not moving from his chair.
• Weirdness: In photos, Cole is accompanied by a strange distortion.
• Weirdness: The thermostat can't keep the room warm.
• Weirdness: Cole is forced into a closet that cannot be opened--until it can.
• Reveal: "I see dead people" comes around 48 minute mark.
• Weirdness: He has bruises on his body--which adds to the stakes of the ghosts.
• Weirdness: The dog runs away from a ghost (old cliche).
• Weirdness: Strange sound on the tape of an interview with a disturbed child and Crowe noting how cold it is (which we know the meaning).
3. More delay: Shyamalan sets up lots of questions and makes us wait for the answer.
• We see the outside of Cole's secret fortress tent, which looks like a normal kid tent--and only much later do we see that the inside is covered in sacred objects and images of saints.
• Similarly, we see how the tent protects him from a ghost, so when the tent starts to fall apart and a ghost gets in, it comes as a nice shock.
• And we don't get to hear what that ghost tells him, as the movie jumps forward to the funeral where Cole unmasks the killer mother.
• Bonus cinematography: at the funeral, Cole walks through a sea of adults who are taller, their dialogue reduced to moody whispering--until he sees the dad, who is sitting down and therefore more at Cole's level. When Crowe comes into the frame, the three of them make a perfect diagonal line with their heads.
• Cole tells his mom what his grandmother says, which is an answer to a question, and only after mom breaks down crying do we hear the question.
4. The family drama: if you take out the ghost angle, this story still would have some power as a conventional drama. You have the single mother trying to deal with her strange child; and the strange child trying to deal with his social alienation.
• Shyamalan emphasizes how good things can be between Cole and his mom, showing her physical support (cleaning his clothes, feeding him) and emotional support.
• It's especially nice to see them in just playful moments, like when she races a shopping cart that he's in--a scene that does nothing to advance the plot, but emphasizes their warmth.
• But then we also see their hardships and troubles, often in contrast; so, for instance, mom asks Cole if he took this precious pennant and he says no--and he can't admit to his mom that it was a ghost.
• Bonus cinematography: the happy cart-race scene shows both of them in one shot; the dinner argument over the pennant has the camera pan from one to the other, reminding us that they are separate.
• When Cole tells his mom that his grandmother loves her, we see how this affects Toni Collette, which shows us how important this is to her.
5. Characters discuss themselves: though Scriptshadow says that the plot points are hidden (well, sort of), the characters explicitly discuss all their character issues. Which makes it a really easy film to watch since we're not usually uncertain about people's motivations or reasons.
• So Crowe's wife reads him his award for being a Super Child Psychologist.
• In their first interview, Crowe and Cole discuss Cole's story--how the divorce affected him, how he does in school, etc.
• Crowe specifically asks Cole what he wants to get out of this therapy.
• While Crowe, to get closer to Cole, confesses to his own fears and worries about growing apart from his wife.
• Cole starts a conversation with his mom with "I'm ready to talk now."
6. Scenes that turn: there are a couple of scenes that start out one way and end up another, which is a nice way to twist the knife a little. 
• For instance, Crowe comes home to find his wedding video on the TV--and then to find his wife in the shower--and then... then he finds her Zoloft. So what looked like it might be a reconciliation is just a reminder that we need a reconciliation.
• Similarly, Shyamalan will show us a happy scene between Cole and his mom before an unhappy scene.
• The video that Cole gives the dad starts off with the dead girl playing with marionettes, which gives him a warm feeling--and then the video shows the mom poisoning her food.
• Note: This whole sequence doesn't involve Cole (or Crowe) and he's probably not even there, but we watch it all, which is one break of the film's deal--we follow Cole, Crowe, or Cole's mom. But by this time, the movie may have earned one break.
7. Repetition of theme: so much of the movie is about communication, so it's no wonder that:
• The school play is The Jungle Book, introduced as a story of a boy who can talk to the animals.
• Crowe's wife in the antique store talks about how objects talk to people.
8. Repetition of theme, part 2: so much of the movie is about parents and kids, so 
• even the stupid cough syrup commercial is about that;
• and the killer mom poisoning her daughter is clearly about that (and in contrast with the suspicion that Cole's mom is abusing him).
9. Helpful revision: if you look at the script, you'll see that Shyamalan streamlined the second talk in a church: it's shorter, has more natural dialogue, and doesn't put any emphasis on the danger of the ghosts (which would be a red herring here, which is kind of late). 
10. Laying it on a bit thick: when Cole has figured out how to use his gift, EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL. This is a bit much, with Cole
• getting the lead in the play;
• being friendly with the teacher he bullied before;
• beating out the kid who got the cough syrup commercial (Merlin says to this bully, "Silence, village idiot");
• and leading all the kids in a funny moment.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 197: Francis Stevens, Unseen—Unfeared (#199)

Francis Stevens, "Unseen—Unfeared" (1919) from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps:

Warning: Super-sappy interpretation.

In Woody Allen's lesser Everyone Says I Love You (stay with me now), the son of two liberal Democrats has become a staunch Republican--which is later revealed to be the product of a brain clot cutting off oxygen to part of his brain. There's almost something of that nature in Francis Stevens's story here, where a guy has all these fears about Italians and blacks and Jews--and it's eventually revealed that his brain has been poisoned. It's a fun reversal of what many readers of 1900s weird tales would take as the unfortunate status quo of racism and xenophobia.

We could speculate that Francis Stevens, née Gertrude Mabel Barrows (mariée Bennett), might have brought this slightly askew view to this dark fantasy because of her position: a widowed woman, taking care of an invalid mother and daughter, might have different ideas about the world than your Lord Dunsanys or your John Colliers--or, yes, your H. P. Lovecrafts. But that's just speculation; and while we have a bunch of Francis Stevens stories fro, 1917 to 1923, we know very little about her--like why she stopped writing.

That speculation and history to the side, today's story actually starts out rather like other weird tales of the time, both in tropes and in construction. This sentence--

Bodiless, inexplicable horror had me as in a net, whose strands, being intangible, without reason for existence, I could by no means throw off.

--could really have been written by just about any of the weird writers of the time. Once you get used to lines like that, the story here is

• narrator Blaisdell meets a close-lipped detective friend of his, Mark Jenkins who is following a poisoning case and who believes the weird Doctor Holt is innocent; (Jenkins gives Blaisdell a cigar); 
• Blaisdell wanders through an immigrant community, seeing horror and monstrousness all around him, a teeming world of malice and horror (which is not all that unusual in many depictions of poverty, where "teeming" seems like the usual situation); (Blaisdell partially smokes the cigar);
• he wanders into Holt's lecture, which shows how the world is covered with human's thoughts-given-life--and since humans are terrible, these thought-forms are monstrous: centipedes and amoeboid creatures, all with sinister human faces, which causes Blaisdell to faint;
• Blaisdell considers suicide, but is stopped by Mark Jenkins, who comes to tell us the real story:
• the cigar was poisoned (and Jenkins mixed up his good cigars with the cigars he took from the poisoner);
• Dr. Holt was dead the whole time, which means that Blaisdell hallucinated everything, including the malice of the immigrant community;
• but there is something odd about this particular filter-paper that Holt used in his lecture--so they destroy it.

So we have tropes of the invisible all around us, which connects with the idea of the microscopic monster (which we saw in David H. Keller's "The Jelly-Fish"); we have a human-hating scientist; we have apparitions beyond death's door; we have the reasonable but perhaps not accurate explanation of the weird; we have the destruction of the disquieting object--all fairly standard for fantastic fiction. (Which is not a bad thing. I just heard an interview with a comic book author who seemed to feel that identifying tropes was the same thing as criticizing a work.)

But then we have the detective story: the poisoned cigar, the switcheroo, the ongoing investigation.

And on top of that we have the moral switcheroos that I talked about at the top. For the first few sections, this seems like a typical representation of early weird fiction, but with that strange opening about a normal crime and the detective who know but won't speak, I think Francis Stevens is cluing us in that things aren't going to go totally as we expect. And so the ending isn't just "monsters are all around us" or "people are monsters" or "we live on a thin skin of sanity"--though there's a large touch of that as well. There's something almost hopeful about the detective coming back to save his friend, first from the poisoned cigar that the detective idiotically gave, then from the friend's own attempts at suicide, and lastly, from the knowledge of the terrible things that might be around us.

And since those terrible things are caused by our thoughts, then these good thoughts of friendship may well cause good things to live around us--unseen, yes, but unfeared because they are on our side.

Movie Analysis (but not really): Lost Boys

I've been watching a bunch of vampire films lately, for a project that Sarah's doing for work. We watched the Korean melodrama Thirst, the cowboy vampire film Near Dark, and this, the height of Joel Schumacher's oeuvre.

I don't remember the last time I saw this film, but I remember liking it; and watching it this time around, I found a lot to enjoy:

• the theme of teenagers as monsters--that then gets subverted in the third act with the pillar of the community being the head vampire; 
• the fearless vampire killers getting their vampire lore from new comic books, not dusty old tomes in libraries (another example of youth culture being positive.

But most all, Lost Boys does a great job with its weird, slightly off-kilter settings:

There's the whole town of Santa Carla, which is a sun-drenched sea-side California small town with a strong hippie and punk rock vibes. But instead of a paradise of fun--even with its all-time carnival and video store and comic book store--the whole place is curdled. And this notion is gotten across quickly, mostly through images of the town played under the credits.

Then there's the individual locations, like grandpa's house, which is this big, rustic house full of dead things and dangerous objects. That is, if you had a condo with an axe, it might look out of place. But in grandpa's place, we could find just about anything. This can be used for plot convenience, for scares, or--as in the case of the constantly appearing pieces of taxidermy--for laughs.

The sea-side carnival isn't very original, but the vampires' den is a nice touch: it's a luxury resort that has fallen into a crack in the earth during a big earthquake. So the teen vampires are living it up in a place that was for adults only, which nicely ties in with the theme--look out, teenagers are overturning all of our values and the world we built!--and also gives them a fun new place to run around in, full of gothic touches: fountain, fallen chandeliers, ruins. We're not in some Transylvanian castle, but this is as close as California gets.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 193: H. P. Lovecraft, The Music of Erich Zann (#189)

H. P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann" (1922) from H. P. Lovecraft: Tales:

On one hand, "The Music of Erich Zann" is classic Lovecraft Mythos story: (1) a narrator who starts out by telling us that he has a fractured memory and other mental health issues; (2) the narrator gets involved in something mysterious--an expedition to the Antarctic, a strange inheritance from a quirky uncle, or, in this case, a strange house on a strange street where a strange viol player plays strange music late at night; (3) a final revelation of cosmic depth that is horrifying and alienating, involving some sense of Things beyond that are more basic to the universe than we are, puny humans.

But on the other hand, "The Music of Erich Zann" is considered something of an outlier by such a great Lovecraft scholar and enthusiast as S. T. Joshi, who writes that “it reveals a restraint in its supernatural manifestations (bordering, for one of the few times in his entire work, on obscurity), a pathos in its depiction of its protagonist, and a general polish in its language that Lovecraft rarely achieved in later years.”

Admittedly, the story doesn't end with the sea parting for Cthulhu--who gets described as something like a dragon, squid, and man--but with a sense of limitless dark beyond the window of Erich Zann's garret room, the highest spot on the mysterious Rue d'Auseil; and also with the wind whipping away the pages of Erich Zann's story--which we never learn. So I understand why Joshi says this story shows restraint. In that same vein, Lovecraft wrote of this story, "I like it for what it hasn’t more than for what it has.”

That said, this story does fit easily with Lovecraft's other works. A man who creates otherworldly art through some scary contact with the unknown. Isn't that almost "Pickman's Model"? A man who survives beyond the limit of death--well, can I introduce you to "Herbert West--Reanimator" and the man in the cold room of "Cool Air"? Even that limitless darkness with some whistling sound isn't entirely unknown in Lovecraft's other works; I would argue that this could be Azathoth.

I also think that we need to read "The Music of Erich Zann" alongside Lovecraft's Dreamland tales, which are pilfered liberally from Lord Dunsany's stories. That is, the whole set-up is more dreamlike than horrific: a man takes a room in a house on a street that doesn't exist in the city--where even the river smells weird. Instead of the horror invading our everyday worlds or of some lingering terror being unearthed where we live, the horrific here starts with the person wandering into some dream-world.

Lastly, I initially laughed when the narrator--a philosophy student--state that "my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness." Metaphysics doesn't really sound like the kind of philosophy to make one kind. Ethics, maybe, but metaphysics? But on reflection, I think this works in with this story and the cosmicism we find in Lovecraft's other stories: if the universe really is a cold and uncaring place, where the limitless dark is just outside our window--barely held back by our aesthetic attempts to combat it--then it follows that human kindness to one another is even more precious, no matter how unhelpful it ultimately is. Which puts in new light his unstoppable letter-writing and friend-gathering career, which dwarfs his fiction output tremendously.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 185: Celia Thaxter, A Memorable Murder (#13)

Celia Thaxter, "A Memorable Murder" (1875) from True Crime: An American Anthology:

Two years after the "Memorable Murder" of the title, poet Celia Thaxter records the story of this double (almost-triple) homicide that took place on the Isles of Shoals, off New Hampshire. As she says in the first paragraph,

The sickening details of the double murder are well known; the news papers teemed with them for months: but the pathos of the story is not realized...

Which is a pretty good sign that she's going to fill her 25-page account with pathos. Since today's readers don't usually agree with what the 19th-century considered acceptable levels of sentimentality, I thought this piece was going to be a painful slog, notable more for the story and for the historical tangents that come off this story.

In those regards, Thaxter does not disappoint. The story of the murder is very interesting, with Louis Wagner invading this island home when he knows the men will be away, but failing to kill the third woman, who escapes into the cold with her dog; though she at first has trouble getting the attention of workmen on another island. (Moral: don't live on islands.) Thaxter doesn't dwell on it, but it's chilling to read of Louis Wagner eating some food in the dead women's kitchen, all so he has energy to row back to the mainland.

The historical asides are also a lot of fun, with Thaxter praising Norwegians and Swedes; and even quoting a newspaper article noting that Louis Wagner seemed very calm, even for a German.

And Thaxter has a heavy hand when it comes to the sentimentality, giving a picture of this house's happiness before it was struck by the bolt of "ruin and desolation." The 19th-century style even allows Thaxter to name this quality, talking about the sentiment of this or the pathos of that ("Ah me, what pathos is in that longing look of women's eyes for far-off sails"). I just about reached my limit when I read that the light coming from a lighthouse was like arms reaching out to succor the travelers at sea.

And yet, for all that there's some (to our taste) overlarded sentimentality here, Thaxter keeps up the atmosphere of dread with the recurring mention of what is coming to this house. Sure, when she notes that nature itself seems to be on the murderer's side, this has a certain overdone quality... but it still effectively carries that notion of the unavoidable bad end that's coming. Thaxter's steady (and omniscient-like) recounting of every step of Louis Wagner's journey--of death!--is pretty riveting, even when that "of death!" sentimentality interrupts.

Thaxter's end to this long piece seems a fitting conclusion, a mix of sentimentality and horror, with her imagining--in that same omniscient voice--the ghosts of the dead women watching forever as the ghost of their killer searches the house for the third victim, whose evidence condemned him.

In it's way, this piece reminds me both of Jewett's Country of Pointed Firs and of Angela Carver's "The Fall River Axe Murders."

Movie Analysis: Pan's Labyrinth

In some ways, Pan's Labyrinth really is very close to The Devil's Backbone (as I noted when I talked about that movie). It shows all of the strengths of a Del Toro movie, particularly the multiple and interesting side characters, each of whom has their own story. After watching these two films, I want to go back and watch Pacific Rim and see how he sketches in the minor characters there: the heavy metal Russians walking slowly away from a potential explosion, the Chinese basketball triad's subtle blend of competition and cooperation, etc. This is one reason why I love Del Toro movies: no one acts like they know they're a minor character.

But that multi-character split focus doesn't lead Del Toro into a morass of subplots and loose, baggy structure. ("Loose baggy" here is a reference to Henry James, who similarly has an interest in both depicting minor characters as full characters; and keeping the structure tight, no matter how loose his sentences are. Admit it: Henry James could have written some awesome Cthulhu stories.) For all that Del Toro throws several characters into the mix--the semi-orphan Ofelia, the rebellious house-keeper Mercedes, the Good Doctor (a character type he used before in Devil's Backbone), the violent Captain Vidal--he keeps their stories intertwining and advancing.

He also always keeps the story going back to Ofelia, our tragic protagonist. (How tragic? Her name is Ofelia! Has anyone in literature/movies ever had a happy story with that name?) And we can trace her story through a pretty traditional Campbellian hero's journey (though again, I like the slightly more abstract Dan Harmon version that avoids the fiddly bits of "Refusal of the Call"):

1. You: Ofelia's ordinary world, the last gasp: her mother and fairy tales. This ordinary world is already compromised since she's surrounded by Franco's fascist Falangists and on her way to the fascist stronghold in the mountains. 
1. Note the weirdness here: the fairy world is both a trace of her past life--her childhood--and part of the weirdness to come.
2. Note also that the story begins in three parts: the fairy tale of the lost princess; an image of the dead girl (Ofelia); and Ofelia on the way to her new life. Ofelia's story may be a Hero's Journey, but Del Toro doesn't have to tell that story so linearly.
2. Need: We already see some of the problems in Ofelia's world: her mom telling her to grow up (i.e., I cannot be your protective mother anymore) and the Captain's ticking watch.
1. We could also see this as what Orson Scott Card calls a "Milieu" story: it begins with Ofelia entering the strange world of the fascists and can end only with her exit from that world.
1. But note: Del Toro will let Ofelia exit that world only by dying and blowing up the Fascist world.
3. Go: Ofelia passes two thresholds into two different magic worlds/underworlds: 
1. the fascist-run mill where the Captain is the king (as he says later, there is "no one above me" here); here, the mothers are subordinate to the cruel father, who gives commands to both Carmen (mom) and Mercedes (caretaker)--which also shows what Captain Vidal thinks of women's worth;
2. and the faun's labyrinth, which similarly casts him as a strange parental figure: there may be a king above the faun (just as there is Franco above Captain Vidal), but here the faun is the gatekeeper and land owner--this is, after all, his labyrinth.
3. Note: as in Devil's Backbone, the fantasy element is creepy, but seems like an escape from the more awful real world of tyrannical adults and their betrayals.
4. Search: You could argue that Ofelia's "searching" leads her to the faun, that he represents a classic mentor and ally. That's fair. So we can see how hard it may be to draw distinct lines between some of these stages. ("You" and "need" often overlap.) What's important is just that one follows the other: she enters the strange world and THEN she searches for what she needs. Here, what she needs is to fulfill three fairy tasks; the first of which is to save the land by killing the poison toad with a cure.
1. As I said before, one way that Del Toro keeps us interested in the different worlds is to intertwine them, either with certain stakes and dread: here, Ofelia gets her dress dirty by fulfilling the fairy task, which puts her on the outs with her mom and her mom's new world.
2. There's also the thematic connections: while Ofelia is feeding the poison toad the cure to "clean" the land, Captain Vidal is discussing "cleaning the land" from rebels; stealing (back) antibiotic cure from the rebels; and preparing to hand out ration cards to the villager. And the idea behind the ration cards (you can only get your food here from the Fascists) gets inverted in Ofelia's next fairy task, where she can't eat from the Pale Man's feast (you can only NOT get your food here). Cure and food and obedience are central issues to this section.
5. Find: Phase Five is usually a moment of respite and also a moment where death is flirted with (in some form). And here we get mom's pregnancy being problematic and Ofelia being exiled from her mother's room to a dark room elsewhere. But we also get that moment of respite where Ofelia's biological but unsuccessful mother (Carmen) gets replaced by the more successful and rebellious mother-figure Mercedes, who sings her a lullaby.
1. Here also we get Death averted: Ofelia finds a magic cure to help her mom (the mandrake root) and the Good Doctor goes to help the rebels. Now, the rebel Frenchie may be saved, but he'll lose his leg, which is a foreshadowing of the price to be paid.
2. Note: Del Toro may be good as a storyteller, but he seems most comfortable with filmmaking, where he can make connections with words, images, or sounds. So here, Mercedes's lullaby has already been and will remain an important through-line in the music.
6. Take: In Five, we find some possible cure; in Six, we pay some price. So in the magical world, Ofelia accidentally sacrifices a few fairies to escape the Pale Man; and the faun abandons her. In the real world, while the rebels make a good showing, the Captain's fascists kill and capture them. 
1. This will lead to the torture of the stuttering rebel; 
2. the exposure of the doctor as a rebel and his subsequent sacrifice--he dies after helping the tortured rebel to die; 
3. and Carmen's pregnancy killing her after refuses to believe in Ofelia's magic (and after the good doctor is no longer around to help her)--which is implicitly a sacrifice of her life for her son's, as the Captain wanted.
7. Return: Just as Three was the descent into the underworld, Seven is often the "magic flight" attempt to flee the underworld. So Mercedes attempts to flee with Ofelia, but they are recaptured in a great little scare. But this moment is also finally the break with that underworld order: Mercedes is no longer the caretaker for the Captain, she's an explicit prisoner and then also an attempted murderer. Which allows Mercedes to escape into the woods; and Ofelia gets another chance to escape--if she brings her half-brother to the faun's labyrinth.
8. Change: Traditionally, the final climax can include a few standard tropes: the last gasp of the enemy (the Alien crawling aboard the escape pod); the protagonist putting into play the skills they learned previously (especially from Stage Four); and the protagonist's final stand and decisions. So what do we have here?
1. The Captain from the mill-world follows Ofelia into the faun's labyrinth, his one last gasp to take his son from the rebels.
2. Having poisoned the poison toad in Stage Four, Ofelia now poisons the Captain with the doctor's medicine. (Medicine is deadly poison to the already poisonous.)
3. Given the choice to give up her brother's blood in order to reach the fairy kingdom, Ofelia reconsiders her obedience: no obedience is worth the pain of the innocent.

That's one way I would map out Pan's Labyrinth onto the traditional hero's journey. But as we see, even with that map, there are lots of issues that aren't dictated by this archetypal story. Does the little girl have to die? Does the Captain have to signal his disordered mind with the order of the watch? Do we have to have intercuts between different scenes? 

So we need some more granular analysis, not just this big picture hero's journey stuff.

Movie Analysis: Drag Me to Hell

Sam Raimi wrote Drag Me to Hell (with his brother Ivan) before the Spider-Man movies took over his life, but made it later. And it seems a lot like a return to a simpler, more natural form for Raimi: it's horror, with some gross-out humor; but it also has a pretty simple storyline, with a woman getting a curse from a gypsy and trying to undo that curse. You can't get much simpler than that.

Right now I'm hip deep in thinking about the structure of horror movies; and one thing I noticed was how easily this movie fits into Dan Harmon's 8-point Campbellian story wheel (which you can read about here)--and how a few parts stick out.

1. You: We are introduced to Christine Brown, a woman trying to shed her past and to move up in the world (and at her job as a loan officer) despite the bullshit she gets from her male colleagues.
2. Need: Her serious boyfriend's mom reminds her that she still stinks of the farm--that past she's trying to get away from. To ensure that she gets the promotion to assistant manager, she takes a "hard" stand against a Gypsy woman named Ganush seeking a loan extension and Ganush reacts... poorly. This is our Act 1 decision/climax.
3. Go (entering the underworld, the chaos, the subconscious): That night, in an underground-seeming parking garage of all places, Ganush attacks Christine and curses her. This is the transition from the above-ground, conscious world that makes sense--the world of money, the world of upward mobility--to the below-ground, magic world. Now that Christine is on Ganush's turf, symbolically speaking, she is drawn to magicians, like the seer Rham Jas, and also experiences several nightmarish attacks. If only she had someone to help her!
4. Search (aka "the road of trials"): Now that the curse has almost entirely ruined her above-ground life--bleeding all over her boss and letting her rival at the bank steal her work--Christine searches for a way to break it. She tries to get Mrs. Ganush to remove it, but Ganush is already dead. So she goes back to Rham Jas who says that maybe a blood-sacrifice will help. Christine refuses that until she's attacked again and then makes the choice to sacrifice her kitten. It seems to work and she arrives at her boyfriend's parents house bearing a cake and ignoring the curse long enough to impress ...
5. Find ("meeting the Goddess"): ... her boyfriend's disapproving mother by being honest about her own mother's failings. If 1 and 2 were about how Christine was trying and failing to get away from her past and attach herself to these future in-laws, 5 is that momentary respite where she's accomplished the goal. And all it took for her to find this happiness in this beautiful house was, symbolically, taking away Ganush's house. Which comes back to bite her here in the form of the curse, which ruins the nice dinner. (Notice that 5--the midpoint--is also a stakes-raised moment: Christine isn't just haunted by the curse--she's haunted by the curse in front of people she needs to impress.)
6. Take: Having seen the life she could have, Christine is committed to paying the price, which sees her getting rid of all her stuff to pay the fee for a powerful medium, even when she knows that the medium is risking her life. She doesn't actually have enough money, but the skeptical boyfriend decides to pay it for her--which is a nice inversion of the loan that Christine refused to give in 2. Instead of a single medium (Ganush) being in the bank's territory, a single banker (Christine) is now on the spiritualist's territory. The ritual goes poorly, but it seems successful at the end, except for the medium's death--which is not unusual for the 6th step, which is all about paying the price for what you wanted/got in 5. But now Christine is left still in the magical world, without any way to get out, except...
7. Return: ... if she passes on the curse to someone else, she'll be free. She tests the idea of giving the curse to her rival at the bank, but his pathetic blubbering makes her reconsider for some reason. (He blubbers about what will happen if his dad finds out, but it doesn't seem to justify his earlier actions--stealing her work--or her decision not to give him it.) Then she gets the idea of giving the curse back to Ganush, which requires some grave-robbing and comedy-horror fighting with the corpse. But she does it and, as the new day dawns, Christine crawls out of the grave. She's back in the above-ground world of logic, order, and money. She's ready to face her future. 
8. Change: And that future looks bright: she's got the promotion, she's about to get proposed to, she even bought a new coat to replace the coat that was cursed. And, just as importantly, she's ready to face the truth that she was hiding: it wasn't her manager who refused the loan extension--it was all her decision. So she's learned her lesson about extending mercy to others and facing the truth? Well, sure, but it's still too late: she still has the cursed object, since what she actually gave to the corpse of Mrs. Ganush was a rare coin that she gave to her boyfriend. Oh, I like how the world of money/gifts gets confused with the world of magic/gifts; and theme is one of the ways that structure gets built and reinforced. And so Christine gets dragged to hell.

Pretty nice match, I'd say. But if you wanted a really simple map of this story, I'd say we could draw it as a single line: "Woman who tries to better herself keeps facing obstacles" and then we could list the obstacles and whether she gets out of them. Most of the obstacles follow the form of "yes, but" (she succeeds at some task, but it leads to further problems) or "no, and" (where she fails and some additional problem is presented). So, for instance, the "giving the cursed object to Ganush-corpse" is a series of trials, which can be summarized as:

• Does she dig up the body? Yes, BUT the stiff corpse won't accept the gift easily.
• Does she succeed in giving the gift to Ganush-corpse? Yes, BUT she has trouble crawling out of the grave.

Like I said, it's a linear story that pretty nicely breaks down into the eight-point story structure (descent into the underworld at 3, ascent into the over-world at 7, etc.).

Except I skipped the opening section: a prologue where we see the curse take a victim to Hell in the 1960s, despite the best effort of the powerful medium we meet again in 6. Although she fails to save the young boy (who stole something from Gypsies), the medium promises to face him again and dispel him then. Like many horror movies, this prologue serves to introduce us to the real danger of the curse. We see the same thing, more or less, in Ring and Scream and Jaws: someone we don't know or care about gets killed by the monster, proving that this monster means business.

I wonder now if horror movies are especially friendly to these sorts of prologues or if we see them as often in other genres?

Movie Analysis: The Ring

I've been intermittently interested in ghost/horror and haunted house stories, so I recently rewatched The Ring. I originally watched that with some friends in Chicago, thinking it would be a silly film--a remake of a Japanese horror film has to overcome my prejudice against remakes. (Even good directors, like Christopher Nolan, don't always improve films by remaking them. Original Insomnia forever!)

This time, while I found the film as creepy and atmospheric, I also thought it felt a little slow; and has some plot holes and issues that can't be ignored. To wit: I got a little scared watching it at night at the gym by myself at the beginning, but as it went on, I found myself getting less sucked into it. Perhaps that's partly because the ghost story has the structure of a mystery--as many ghost stories do:

• Something mysterious happens, possibly with a supernatural explanation--sometimes with some expendable secondary characters that can show that the ghost means business
• Examples (with some elasticity to their representativeness): Jaws, Scream, Ghostbusters--all start with some prologue
• Someone gets involved in the search for the answer to the mystery; since the rational response to a monster is to run the other way, this detective character should have some reason that they can't say no
• In Jaws, it's his job to deal with this monster; in Ring, the detective herself might be the next victim... and then it's her ex-boyfriend and son who might be the victims after her
• Often, the research portion of the ghost story involves calling in experts, whether that's shark-experts like in Jaws or ghost experts like in Poltergeist
• Research also involves old microfiche or newspapers, often asylums or scary hospitals
• The detective solves the mystery

Now, in many ways, The Ring is a pretty by-the-numbers ghost horror story:

• In the prologue, we hear the legend of the tape from two teenage girls, one of whom gets brutally killed by the ghost; 
• The detective has a family reason for solving the crime (the dead girl was her son's cousin and good friend) and a career reason (she's a reporter) and then a personal reason (she might be the next victim) and then a parenting reason (her son watched the cursed tape too); 
• We get hints of weirdness--the strange photographs of the victims-to-be, the horse that commits suicide on the way to the island, the fly coming off the screen of the video, the weird bruise, coughing up hair, the mysterious father standing around with a hay hook, the mentally-off child Darby repeating the scary things that Rachel says, etc.;
• There's lots of research--finding the tape, digging through old asylum records, going to talk to the dad, etc.

The Ring adds some nice touches to this formula, for instance, the thematics of bad parenting. So the detective is really more careerist than a mom, whereas the ghost's mom only ever wanted to be a mom--and neither of them does a really bang-up job. Sometimes, the film is a little broad in the way it brings this up, as in Naomi's kid always calling her by her first name. But at least there's a theme here and a warning, of sorts, which every horror film needs: listen to children... up to a point.

There's also some clever twists to the usual images of horror film; for instance, the crossed-out faces aren't just crossed-out faces, they're representations of evil Samara's long hair covering her face. Similarly, when the editor tries to fire reporter Rachel, she doesn't beg for her job or try to tempt him with this story--she just flat out says that she can't be fired because of this story. And while the film doesn't start with a countdown, once Rachel watches the video, we get a nice reminder of the ticking clock here by the days being announced as she runs out of time. Ring also nicely twists the usual ghost story that would end with the discovery of the solution; but here, after Samara's body is discovered and her story full told... she still kills because she's just an evil child. (Which is something that's pretty common in living child films, but comes as a twist to ghost child films.) There's also a real question about the mystery here: the basic facts of the story aren't clear until they're clear. Is Samara alive? Where is she? If she's dead, who killed her?

All that said, on re-watch there's a couple of plot issues that make re-watching a less enjoyable experience. Does that matter? I'm not so sure, since those issues only come up on rewatch. For instance, Rachel is haunted by memories of the film and by strange things happening to her... but if she's broken the curse by making a copy of the cursed tape, she shouldn't be experiencing these effects? Worst of all, Rachel's kid Aiden is a little psychic and knows that Samara is evil--so why doesn't he tell his mom that at some earlier time? I mean, you may be a kid who treats his mom like an equal, but you'd still maybe drop a hint about the evil child.

Also, while the cursed tape is suitably creepy and the distorted photographs are fun, the attempt to connect Samara to media seems forced.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 159: Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado (#122)

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales:

Oh, just a month too early for Halloween, we have one of my favorite creepy Poe stories. Actually, all Poe stories are my favorite, whether they depict obsession ("The Oblong Box"), cleverness ("The Gold-Bug"), feverish mistakes ("The Sphinx"), comedic misapprehension ("The Spectacles"), metaphysical fantasy ("The Island of the Fay"), or something else entirely ("The Philosophy of Furniture"). Here we have a story that seems pretty simple: a revenge fantasy about a guy who wants to come up with the perfect crime. (Not to be confused with "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," or his many other revenge-filled stories.)

The LoA page gives some possible background: it's about Poe feuding with his ex-friend Thomas Dunn English. That may be true, but Poe would make an excellent victim in an Agatha Christie novel precisely because his feuds were so large, numerous, and sometimes (to him) inexplicable. I wouldn't want to pathologize him as manic-depressive; much better to simply say that he was one weird dude, capable of publishing an essay deeply cutting some writer and then sending out a letter to that writer looking for a piece to publish in his magazine. (Some of this was due to the anonymous nature of some of these publications: Poe might publish a critique and then claim not to be the critiquer. But everyone knew how cutting he could be: one of his nicknames was "The Tomahawk Man." More likely he had that sort common sociopathy where he often thought people were being unfair to him when they critiqued him, but thought he was simply "telling it like it is.")

So I wouldn't jump to say that this piece is about his feud with T. D. English, though it's about getting revenge on someone, getting away with it, and making sure they know it was you who did it. Also, if we think about this as an attack on English, we might miss the usual Poe trope of doubling killer and victim. (Most clear use of that trope: "William Wilson.") Here, the to-be-killed Fortunato is a real whiz when it comes to wines--just like his to-be-killer, Montressor. There's also all the doubling where Montressor repeats Fortunato's lines, as in the famous "For the love of God."

We also see why Poe is considered one of the well-springs for the detective story, which here is given a noir edge: Montressor tricks Fortunato by making Fortunato think the idea to go to the vaults is his; while Montressor also shows how he can say one thing (telling his servants to stay) to mean another (making sure his servants will leave). We also see this irony when Montressor eventually agrees with Fortunato that he will not die from his cold.

But for all the buried, ironic, morbid humor of this piece, that ending is still a moment of great horror: Montressor hasn't been telling us this story while Fortunato has been dying, but many years after--when he's long dead.