Watch What's in Front of You

It's no secret that the film industry is obsessed with remakes, especially in horror. From Psycho to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (And, for God's sake, it's "Chain Saw," not "Chainsaw." Though it may require a [sic], I'm tired of seeing professional editors miss this!), just about every classic of the mid-20th century has gotten a working-over. But the idea of a remake, and the drive to create one, is far from new.

As far back as the Renaissance, sonnets would often be rewritten with only slight modifications; imitatio was the term for this "remaking." The closer a writer could come to a poem's original words while changing the meaning, the more respect his work earned.

Back in the early 20th century, remakes were a plague. Frankenstein and Dracula were both adapted for the stage by numerous writers and directors, all imagining the monsters in slightly different ways. Horace Liveright, along with many other investors, tried to profit from stage adaptations of recent horror novels.

In the days of cinema's first steps, films would frequently be remade in successive years. The Unholy Three and London After Midnight were both remade within a few years of the originals. A horde of silent films were remade when sound became cheaply available; same with color. If a film experienced nationwide success, the studio would sometimes remake it just to have more versions to distribute. And as for novel adaptations, who doesn't remember Thomas Edison's famous one-reel version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame?

So why are we so averse to the idea today? For one thing, remakes are much less common than they were eighty tears ago. We might, quite simply, not be as used to them as audiences would have been in the 1920s. Then there's the problem of quality: as we all know, very few remakes live up to the brilliance of the originals. In a few cases, such as 2004's Dawn of the Dead, a radical reinterpretation of the material produces a quality film in its own right.

That's the argument presented in this article from Geeks of Doom. Could divergence be the secret to a worthwhile remake? After all, as that article points out, even translations often add or modify some phraseology of the original texts. The most literal faithfulness rarely lives up to an impassioned translation.

We might also add Roger Ebert's well-known maxim: judge each film on its own terms. Most critics, in my experience, complain that a film just wasn't what they wanted it to be; it didn't deliver the expected goods. This could be a valid argument, against, say, a comedy that fails to produce laughs, but can we really critique a remake for being too different from the original? In that case, the frequent fanboy outcry of "just watch the original!" would indeed be applicable. But some remakes aren't meant to be the original.

I believe we ought to watch each film on its own terms. Most remakes, it's true, are far worse than their predecessors. Some stand equal with the originals. And, in rare cases, a remake may outdo the film that inspired it. Whatever the case, adaptations and remakes aren't a newfangled product of modern stupidity. They've been with us for nearly as long as literature has. If anything, we're the first generation to be really upset by them.

Bound for Evil

So I finally got the ordering information for Bound for Evil, the anthology in which my story "Cormac's Mirror" is appearing.

It'll be released as a limited edition in early 2008. It's $50 for a pre-order, which I know is a steep price for a book, but this is going to be a 500-page hardbound volume, and I'm sharing space with some pretty prestigious authors (such as Ramsey Campbell!).

If you want to pre-order, the PayPal link is on the right-hand side of the page. Oh, and my name is on the third line from the bottom of the credits, if you care to see it.

I think my next few stories are going to be in paperback, so you'll be able to afford them more easily! Thank you all for your support!

Portrait of the Author as a Geek

This summer, the online horror/sci-fi community was making a huge ruckus about the whole "1982: Best Geek Year Ever" event. I myself partook in some of the jollification, and had a fun time introducing some of my friends to some rather lesser-known horror films, like Creepshow.

Fond memories, though, are more nebulous than just a list of favorite films. Orrin chose today to write about his childhood in general, and he paints a touching little portrait of what it's like to grow up obsessed with monsters. I thought I'd follow with a sort of verbal album of my own. If it triggers any of your own memories, I'd love to hear them.

My mom went out of her way to encourage the artist and writer in me. She taught me to identify fish, birds, and mammals from my dad's field guides, but most of my earliest line drawings depict huge beasts eating each other. The archetypal Ben subject, circa age four, is a gaping maw filled with ungainly teeth, strutting about on L-shaped legs. Needless to say, when I discovered "Calvin and Hobbes," I knew I'd found a kindred spirit.

I also made sure my monster field guides identified the habitats, diets, and social proclivities of each beast I illustrated. My mom dutifully copied down every detail, even quizzing me for more. Thanks to her, I always felt the worlds I created were legitimate and rich, and I grew more comfortable living in my imagination than in reality (much to my dad's chagrin). Before long, I was incorporating my creatures into elaborate storylines, and dictating those to my mom as well.

In first grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Warner, who was incapable of appreciating any talents other than sitting still and shutting up. When she got a whiff of my creative writing, she nearly blew her top, but my stories were, even she had to admit, not too shabby for a seven-year-old. One of my most distinct memories from elementary school is being forced to stay in during a recess to copy a ten-page epic...because my handwriting was too sloppy. I still got an "A."

I wasn't the most socially-inclined child. I never had more than one or two friends, who I usually chose on the basis of their own loner status. I spent a lot of my free time drawing, writing, and watching whatever sci-fi and horror movies my mom would let me watch. A few times, I had the pants scared off me; just because The Twilight Zone is unrated doesn't mean it's not frightening as hell--especially to a ten-year-old. And the ending of the Vincent Price version of The Fly had me hearing "help meee!" in my nightmares for weeks.

Out of that paradox of fascination and fright grew my obsessive love of horror movies. When my family moved to Texas, I discovered a video rental store called Hastings, which had a cyclopean warehouse full of obscure B-flicks, and a 2-for-1 deal that sent me home with a double dose of schlock almost every weekend. Luckily, I also happened to discover just about every genre classic that way--as long as it wasn't rated "R." Cast your net wide enough, as they say. At some point in the '90s, just about everything from Nosferatu to Lobster Man From Mars ended up in my VCR.

Aside from the movies I rented, my dad would usually rent some for us to watch on the weekends while my mom was out shopping. There was a pizza joint named Jolly Time near his office, but we called it "Greasy Time" because you could sop up about three paper towels' worth of lard from each slice. They also rented out some truly horrendous videos, as well as some pretty fun ones; it was over Jolly Time pizza that I first saw Tremors. Grease does not mix well with the sight of corpulent worms swallowing people whole, and my stomach disliked me that evening.

My dad and I also went to the theater quite a bit, usually outside my mom's demesne; I watched Starship Troopers and the horrid remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau by my dad's side, and remember thinking both movies were damned scary at the time. I was a teenager by then, but my imagination had done more than just get the better of me; at that point, it was me. And I regret that I've somewhat lost the ability to surrender my disbelief to the dark and the celluloid.

In those days, watching horror movies became a challenge to me. Even though most everything I saw terrified me, I never stopped renting and watching--for precisely that reason. There was no movie, I swore, that I couldn't sit through. As long as my mom let me rent it.

And what I couldn't watch, I read about; I drained the library dry, and dreamed of the day when I could watch the films of Carpenter, Hooper, and Cronenberg. I used to sit on the library floor, a gigantic encyclopedia of monsters or horror films in my lap, staring at photos of Leatherface, or the Alien, or Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, thinking the day might never come when I'd actually be allowed to see this or that notorious scene for myself. Like my wide net of video rentals, my afternoons spent poring over horror-theory tomes made me a genre buff by my early teens. Needless to say, social popularity was rather out of the question by then.

My reading ranged wider than nonfiction; I found Poe and Bierce through school assignments, and devoured their bibliographies. My best friend introduced me to Lovecraft in junior high, and I fell head-over-heels. Virtually everything I wrote between the ages of fifteen and eighteen is a shameless, flagrant attempt to create my own pantheon of elder gods, and use words like "squamous" with a straight face. I took The Lurker at the Threshold into my dad's study and read it in one sitting--on the floor for some reason. My main memory of that book is that my ass had fallen asleep by the time Yog-Sothoth showed up.

Thanks to Supernatural Horror in Literature I discovered Machen, Dunsany, and the rest of the weird-tale greats. The library at Texas Tech was well-stocked with first editions of many of their books, and was within driving distance of my house; I spent untold hours pretending to be a gentleman occultist, secreted away in some corner of the library with a stack of leather-bound tomes. High school probably passed at some point, but I never really noticed.

In college, I was introduced to the realms of transgressive cinema, goresploitation, and all the rest, but I think the relevant stories all lie before those days. I don't really reminisce about the first time I threw up after a movie (Se7en) or the way I felt after sitting through The Shining alone (scared shitless). Anyway, it's not that different from the way I felt watching The Abominable Dr. Phibes on my mom's glitchy 27" TV in the guest bedroom. Pizza, monsters, and the dark are still a potent combination.

Cultural Freakouts

Having just finished The Monster Show this weekend, I've been in a superb mood to speculate on the varying effectiveness of horror movies throughout cultural climates.

At the risk of sounding outrageously pompous, I think I gain a greater appreciation for monsters the more I understand the fears that spawn them. If nothing else, it helps me get at the core reasons why some monsters "work" today as well as they did in the 1930s, while others, even when portrayed by talented filmmakers, fall flat.

The Phantom of the Opera, Freaks, and Nosferatu all retain much of their deeply horrifying effectiveness, but James Whale's Frankenstein and Tod Browning's Dracula seem to evoke appreciation much more than fright these days. When they premiered, however, both of the latter films sent audience members into faints.

Even if we can't precisely understand the mechanics of how some older films are scarier than others, we can speculate about the fears they played on, and how some of them (like ugliness, the dark, etc.) will always be with us, while others tend to fade or change shape as the decades roll on. The scares that survive are those that play on fears that last. As in any genre, we value the ability of a writer to maker us feel as though he's addressing us one-on-one.

But this leads us to my main point: how much of this is intentional? Obviously both James Whale and Tod Browning set out to make scary movies, but was Whale aware of the Depression-era angst that accompanied the threat of outsider status? Did Browning guess that people would be as horrified by sideshow freaks today as they were in the thirties? Furthermore, how much of the subtextual commentary offered by movies can be seen as deliberate?

This article by Ranylt Richildis poses the question, but doesn't really answer it. Her subject is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its current incarnation, The Invasion. The original story and its various film adaptations have been perceived as pro-McCarthyist, anti-McCarthyist, anti-conformity, and anti-communist, among other labels.

Don Siegel, director of the 1950s adaptation, says he never intended for the film to choose sides in the McCarthy debate, and besides, he was an avowed conservative, and would thus seem to have been shooting down his own beliefs. At any rate, it would seem foolhardy to attach any hope of serious cultural influence to a sci-fi suspense flick, so it's unlikely that Siegel had any such designs. In all probability, he was just adapting a movie from a book.

Obviously, that argument can't be applied to all directors, and some horror movies are obvious reflections of crises, and are made with intent to influence culture. After all, it's the artists, not the statesmen, who really rule a nation. And it would definitely seem that writers and directors who are aware of their place in the genre tend to make films that frighten audiences the most. Witness the transition of Frankenstein's monster, who was played increasingly for laughs as he failed to garner screams throughout the 1940s.

So we arrive at a sort of ideal; an optimum balance between specific subtext and overall effectiveness. We should all hope to write something as culturally resonant as Depression-era Frankenstein, but we should also hope to conceive of something as transcendent as Nosferatu. An author cannot write a specific horror story for each individual reader (though one might argue that that was precisely King's aim when he wrote It). Instead, the best we can aim for is a tale that taps into as many frightened hindbrains as possible.

On to subtext. My theory is that many of the more astute writers are quite aware of the cultural climate in which they write, but that the fears themselves can only fully develop if the writer feels them (or has felt them) as acutely as his target audience. Thus, they are both a product of the culture, and a product of the writer's mind. If the writer is lucky, those two ranges of fears will happen to coincide.

Much of a book's success, after all, can be chalked up to being written in the right place at the right time. As Mel Brooks said in Dracula: Dead and Loving It, "Everything in life is location, location, location."

The Levee

My short story "The Levee" is featured in Issue #2 of Fantastic Horror! Go give it a read, and make sure you let them know of my transcendent genius on their forum. Oh, and check out my slick author page.

Seriously, thanks to those of you who read my work and support me. Without your enthusiasm,I probably would've quit writing and editing a long time ago. I have a few other projects being released throughout autumn, and I'll keep you all updated.

Making Horror Work

This article from Dirty Writer takes an interesting approach to horror analysis: the author lists a few horror movies (I'll skip the bit where I whine about Saw not really being horror) and offers his opinions on what exactly makes their formulas effective. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing; the more I can figure out about the psychological basis for fear, the better horror writer I can be.

Let's run down Dirty Writer's list briefly:

Cujo
Transforming a dog from a faithful companion to a vicious killer corrupts the idea of safety.

The Hills Have Eyes
Killing a main character early-on adds unpredictability.

Saw
Threatening worse punishment for an attempted escape removes hope of an exit.

Dawn of the Dead
Zombies blur the line between living and dead (fancy meeting you here, Noel Carroll!)

Jaws
Remorseless, bestial monsters play on the fear of an enemy with no care for your values.

These are valid points, though not as well-expounded as I'd like. The omnipresent theme of loss of control is represented here in various guises, so I'd say Dirty Writer is on the right track.

I'd like to try with a few analyses of the scariest and most disturbing stories I know.

Hellraiser
The Cenobites are not intruders; like a vampire, they must be invited across the threshold by one who wants to see their work. This story is de Sade in the guise of a slasher; it holds a mirror up to the violent voyeur in all our hearts, and, in prime Barker fashion, reveals that the real monster is Man.

The Island of Dr. Moreau
What could be more atrocious than torturing animals? Torturing them in order to transcend the line between man and beast. And the doctor may be evil, but his creations are just victims of their own animal nature. Of course, by the novel's bleak ending, the narrator has shown that very little difference exists between us and them anyway.

Freaks
Nothing is ordinary in this story; all bets are off. The protagonists are oddballs, assembled from the fringes of society, and it remains unclear who's really "good" at all. In an entire world filled with oddities, no act is comfortably normal, and the strangeness of their culture only magnifies the sense of continual dread we feel.

I'd love to hear what analyses any of my readers can offer.

Questionnaire de Proust

May I be permitted to start a meme? Maybe "continue" would be more accurate, since Buffy filled out her own. But first, a little background.

Marcel Proust was a French author and critic, best known for In Search of Lost Time. A precocious child, he was asked to answer the questions below at his friend's birthday party (his answers can be found here). This questionnaire now appears at the end of each issue of Vanity Fair, where celebrities answer the questions. The second questionnaire is longer, and was posed to Proust later in his life.

While my own replies would vary depending on my mood, I'll do my best to provide a worthwhile summation of my thoughts.

The First Questionnaire

• What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
  To lack a goal.
  
• Where would you like to live?
  In a lucid dream.
  
• What is your idea of earthly happiness?
  To be surrounded by a family who loves me.
  
• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
  In myself, pride. In others, shyness.
  
• Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
  Antiheroes.
  
• Who are your favorite characters in history?
  Those who think ahead of their time.
  
• Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
  My girlfriend.
  
• Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
  Ones who outwit the heroes.
  
• Your favorite painter?
  Van Gogh.
  
• Your favorite musician?
  Jimmy Page.
  
• The quality you most admire in a man?
  Humility.
  
• The quality you most admire in a woman?
  Genuineness.
  
• Your favorite virtue?
  Tenacity.
  
• Your favorite occupation?
  Reading, writing, and daydreaming.
  
• Who would you have liked to be?
  An English country squire with a large library and a penchant for solving mysteries.

The Second Questionnaire
with questions from the first omitted

• Your most marked characteristic?
  A gaze that offends politeness.
  
• What do you most value in your friends?
  Honestly. Nothing else is worth half as much.
  
• What is your principle defect?
  Lack of empathy.
  
• What is your dream of happiness?
  A roomy house in the country, with my family never too far away, but never close enough to breathe down my neck.
  
• What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
  To learn that God is real, but that he has no interest in us.
  
• What would you like to be?
  A swarm of wasps.
  
• What is your favorite color?
  By day, cerulean. By night, black.
  
• What is your favorite flower?
  Star jasmine.
  
• What is your favorite bird?
  The crow.
  
• Who are your favorite prose writers?
  Nick Tosches, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Arthur Machen.
  
• Who are your favoite poets?
  Baudelaire and Stephen Crane.
  
• What are your favorite names?
  Mordaunt, Aidan, Octavius, and Benvolio.
  
• What is it you most dislike?
  Prideful ignorance.
  
• What historical figures do you most despise?
  Those who exalted their own gain above the progress of knowledge and the arts.
  
• What event in military history do you most admire?
  The battle of Thermopylae.
  
• What reform do you most admire?
  I'd admire any reform that was genuine, progressive, and permanent.
  
• What natural gift would you most like to possess?
  Serenity.
  
• How would you like to die?
  Much later than expected.
  
• What is your present state of mind?
  Frustration at my writer's block.
  
• What is your motto?
  If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. --Sun Tzu

If all goes well, I'll get to read some of your answers too.

Crying for Monsters

Lately I've been obsessing over carnivals--not so much the Bradbury style of ancient evil lurking beneath the veneer of clownish fun, but Depression-era sideshow stories, a la Tod Browning, bred with the Southern Gothic aesthetic of Flannery O'Connor.

So, imagine my delight when I discovered David Skal's The Monster Show this weekend. While it's ostensibly a history of horror memes throughout the 20th century, the book's early chapters are primarily a biography of Browning, peppered liberally with little-known anecdotes about such personages as Carl Laemmle, Sr. and Bela Lugosi.

But the real meat (which, ironically, isn't fleshed out as much as it could be) is Skal's speculation about specific monster memes, and why they appealed to early-twentieth-century American culture. Rather than tracing horror's roots through the Gothic romance, the weird tale, etc., Skal addresses the monsters themselves, beginning with the cabinet of curiosities, and later, the circus sideshow. He draws what I believe to be a legitimate lineage between our fascination with such human oddities as Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy, and with monsters of stage (and later, screen) such as Mr. Hyde.

I won't recite Skal's history of monsters in full, mainly because I think anyone who's serious about writing or studying horror ought to read his book. The essential argument goes something like this: throughout literature, an undercurrent of fascination with the grotesque lurks beneath the niceties of nearly every other genre. The Romantic Gothic was a more overt manifestation of this tendency, as were the Southern Gothic, the weird tale, and a myriad of other genres. But it's present, under the surface, in nearly every genre.

The circus is a microcosm of this fascination: parents would pay to drag their kids to the big-top, so they can sneak off to see the ten-in-one, and stare at exotic women, human oddities, and savage artifacts. Of course, most of these attractions have been maligned as politically incorrect, and subsequently shut down, but the interest they command cannot be banished.

We are taught to ignore the horrific; it's not acceptable in polite society to frankly discuss the armless, the stunted, the hirsute, or the mentally deficient. In fact, we're taught not to address these issues at all, but to pretend they don't exist. We need a release valve, but it must exist under the windfall of family entertainment or high literature. By clothing our objects of fascination in culturally acceptable garments, we hope to overcome the guilt associated with staring them down, which is an essential part of our humanity.

If the funhouse and the big-top are covers for the ten-in-one and the dark ride, what does that say about the roots of our other innocent entertainments? Do they all hide some desire to stare into the abyss? The answer is never black and white, but the idea that such tendencies are concealed in the woodwork of our politically-correct culture holds a strong attraction of its own.

To understand why these monsters were so prevalent in early horror, it's important to understand the fear of ostracism: Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf-Man, the Phantom of the Opera, and the rest of the monsters resurrected in the Depression era are, almost without exception, pitiful figures, exiled due to their repulsive natures. They are objects of fright, but their ugliness and filthy habits have kicked them to the fringes of society. For so many Americans wandering through the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, these fantasies were all too close to reality; the horrors acted as a safety valve--a displacement of cultural fears.

I'm not saying anything unique by tying those fears to 1930s monsters, but the question that remains is why these sorts of stories are hardly ever filmed today. Horror in the '00s involves beautiful people fleeing ugly situations, rather than sympathetic outcasts. What we're left with is a set of black-and-white horror archetypes that place "normal" people in horrific settings, entirely separate from the realities of everyday life.

This brings us full circle: we're as attracted as ever to the repulsive aspects of life, but we've been taught to no longer see ourselves in them. We cordon ourselves off from the physical reality of corpses, deformities, and other sights which would have been common in the streets a few century ago. These undercurrents in literature are there, I submit, because we need these things in our lives. Ignoring them does not make them go away, in reality or in fiction.

I don't mean to accuse my readers of being hypocrites, but it does seem that nobody's writing much horror (or literature of any type) full of sympathetic characters who are truly grotesque. And I emphasize the word "full;" I wish for worlds where the abnormality is the standard, and further horrors intrude into a world already populated by strange protagonists. It's easy to eroticize a vampire in today's culture; it's a bigger challenge to make readers cry for a monster.

What Influenced Me

Last week, a few authors initiated a meme in which they listed the 20 short horror stories that influenced them most, with the restriction that no author's name must be used more than once. This was difficult for me, as I could list at least five stories by Machen (for instance) that were life-changing for me--not to mention the fact that, as I realized, most of my most beloved tales are novels.

At any rate, I'm imitating Orrin, and putting up 13 for now; I'll probably add more later. Here's my list, in no particular order, with brief commentary:

1) Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Mad science, motif of harmful sensation, and wild primal paganism? Count me in!
2) H. P. Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness
This was the story that made me fall for him in junior high; it sums up everything I love about the mythos.
3) Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast
Body horror is one of my favorite sub-genres, and the theme of de-evolution never fails to horrify me.
4) Nathanael Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown
A well-written, atmospheric piece with a biting and fearful message.
5) Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo
More body horror; supernatural skin diseases frighten the hell out of me. And White is too often neglected in these lists.
6) Ambrose Bierce - The Damned Thing
It's not fair that Bierce can consistently be both so funny and so scary.
7) Algernon Blackwood - The Other Wing
Not exactly horror, but it captures what I love about Blackwood's obsession with childlike awe.
8) Clive Barker - The Midnight Meat Train
One of the few modern authors I adore. The scale of this one's plot just keeps growing--as does the horror.
9) Harlan Ellison - I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
The evil in this one is just beyond all reason; I wish I could write something so raw and moving.
10) A. Merritt - The People of the Pit
Maybe this story is more adventure than horror, but I wish the genres were interbred more.
11) Robert W. Chambers - The Yellow Sign
I had to include something from The King in Yellow; this one exemplifies all I love about the book.
12) W. H. Hodgson - The Voice in the Night
And still more body horror. Scott Smith, eat your heart out; this is the original.
13) Edgar Allen Poe - The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
Once again, more awe than horror, but this one stuck in my mind more than any other Poe story.