House of Leaves.

So, a while back, I remember reading someone who was posting about Infinite Jest as they read through, half to encourage themselves not to abandon reading it (as they had before, and as everyone does I imagine) and half to try and make sense of it. Writing things down is often much more linear than thinking them. In your head you can go around and around, and when you write things down, you can progress. At least, this has been my experience.

So, I'm going to write about House of Leaves while I read it. I've known about it for a long time now, my friend Randy was the first person to recommend it to me. But lots of people have told me about it since then. And I think now is the time.

So, here's what I know about the book so far, prior to reading it.

- I know that there's a lot of trickery going on, and have heard that at times the book convinces you that as a reader you are in danger. I find this a very interesting idea!

- I know that in the book, the word House is always in blue. I have the "remastered full-color edition" and it seems ridiculous to me to go to so much trouble just to make one word blue - and always the same word. But, I have not read the book, and my mind is open to the possibility that this will be meaningful and effective.

- I know that the house changes shape, with hallways and rooms moving. To be honest, this is the biggest reason I finally decided to sit down and give this book a go. I love this sort of funhouse of horrors idea, like that serial killer at the Chicago World Fair, who had a house with corridors that shrunk down to nothing, and trapdoors hidden all around.

- I also know (and really like) that in the index the word house and haus are blue, but also, there is an entry for house (black) with the page DNE (which I assume means does not exist.) I am a sucker for fun indexes.

Anyway, we'll see. I bought it in paperback because buying the ebook version seemed foolish, though for all I know they went to incredible lengths to match the typographical trickery. But, in my experience with ebooks, they most likely didn't. Let me know if I'm wrong, but in the meantime I'll be reading hardcopy.

Fixing my own mistakes: Bible Camp Bloodbath (2010)

The movie Martyrs has made me question a few things about my own book, Bible Camp Bloodbath. I think Martyrs was smart, and even admirable in its clarity of vision, but it was so hopeless. It really didn't leave anything for the reader to hold on to. In my review of Martyrs I talk about this in more detail, but the point is that I didn't enjoy it. I appreciated its skill, but I won't ever sit down and watch it again, no matter how effective and focused it was.

When I wrote Bible Camp Bloodbath I think I had that same obsessive focus of vision in mind as a goal. I wanted to write a book that was the kind of slasher movie people were afraid to make, a movie where the children died, where a psychotic killer didn't get stopped at the end. He just runs out of people to kill.

And I had a good time writing the book. There was a perverse kind of fun to the murders, and a humour that I thought kept the book from being entirely hopeless. But now I think maybe that humour stopped being enough in the last chapters. The book became a single minded machine for killing every single child as horrifically as possible. The characters didn't have any agency in those final chapters, they could only react to this monster pursuing them. They could only think sad, hopeless things to themselves as they died. The murders took on the structure of jokes, with setups and inevitable punchlines.

And even writing this down, that sounds like something good to me. It sounds pure in a strange way, and conceptually clean. But I am not sure that I write books so that they can be this pure and clean. I want people to read them and to love them, and people don't fall in love with jokes. Actually, I can't speak for people in general. I don't fall in love with jokes. I enjoy them, and I will laugh at a joke, but a book like a joke will never be my favourite book. I fall in love with characters and imagination.

I want to write books that are filled with those things, and with hope, even if it is just the promise of hope. There are movies I love that have hopeless endings. Pan's Labyrinth. The Mist. But they have the promise of hope in them, too. Their characters fight to survive, and to escape. Rereading Bible Camp Bloodbath after watching Martyrs, it reads to me like a shooting gallery. There are characters and scenes that I think are great, that I am proud of, and that I think deserve a better book. Characters that deserve a book that I myself would love.

So I am going to make it into that book. You don't hear about writers rewriting their own books very often, but who cares? The original version will still exist, and will still be around for people who do appreciate that hopelessness and focus of vision. But I think I made a mistake, and so I am going to go back and fix it.

Are strong women allowed to wear panties? Alien (1979)

Alien is a classic. It is claustrophobic and excruciatingly well paced. This is a movie that has stood the test of time. And in some ways it is a very feminist movie. It has a strong and imperfect hero in Ellen Ripley. Even better - she's not defined by motherhood or a romantic relationship. But she's also significantly de-feminized. She's just one of the guys. 

Ellen Ripley is strong and competent. She acts to improve her own chances of survival while many of the supporting characters simply react. But to play a normally male role, it seems like Ripley has to be less of a woman. No makeup. No hint of a woman's body underneath that jumpsuit. 

And on one level, I appreciate this blending of gender roles. I am drawn to her as a character because of this appealing mix of androgyny and competence. But I worry that the intention behind these characteristics might not be in line with why I like them. Do the creators think she has to be masculine in order to be competent? Is this the only way the movie-going public will believe a woman can kick an alien's ass? But then again, women like this really exist. Masculine women and feminine men from all along the spectrum are very real, and often underrepresented in film. 

And then, to make the question even more confusing, they put Ripley in the skimpiest panties I've ever seen for the climactic showdown. It strikes me every time as an insane and jarring choice that seems to be a calculated attempt to up the sex appeal of a movie that didn't want or need it. A woman in panties is certainly not uncommon in the horror genre. But then again, maybe it also feminizes her. Very suddenly and VERY clearly we can see that she is a woman. And, in this new form, she carries on being strong and decisive. 

So is this a scene put in to add sex appeal, or does it more fully flesh out a strong female character to allow us to see that femininity need not be distinct from strength? Or is it both? Maybe I am being weirdly prudish by dismissing calculated sex appeal as un-feminist. 

Clarity of vision: Martyrs (2008)

Martyrs is very nearly a perfect movie, but I'm not sure it is a movie I'm glad to have seen. The first half of it is violent and twisting and a lot of grisly fun. There's even a strange bloody ghost that is used so sparingly that you sometimes forget about it before it shows up again. That's a neat trick, and for the first half of Martyrs, I loved it. It was gross, but so clever and sharp, too. But then it twists again, and becomes something a little more single minded.

And, let's be clear, I think this is a very smart movie. I think the idea behind the last half of the movie is interesting, and the film's sudden dedication to demonstrating that idea is wholehearted and strangely admirable. But at the halfway point, this movie starts taking away hope. Not just from the main character, but from the viewer as well. There is a solid half an hour of the main character being tortured and beaten. It is horrible but it is also repetitive. It goes on and on so long that it numbs you to the violence. You get to the point where you are simply enduring it, even though you know that there is no light at the end of the tunnel for the main character. There's no way she'll live. You are enduring it the same way she is. The viewer's instinct to watch to the end of the movie is the same as her instinct to live, even though both she and I would have suffered less if I just turned it off right there.

By the last ten minutes of the film, I didn't want to be watching anymore. There was no way out, and it had been made very clear that the only possibility was more torture. More torture and hopelessness.

And I know this was on purpose, and it was done so very well, but jesus fuck. This movie just emptied me out. It messed me up for days afterward. It was ugly and empty and so effective. And yes, I think it might be brilliant. I wish I hadn't watched it.

Horror Movie Recommendations: Part 1/3 (The Important movies.)

These are movies that I think everyone has to see. Most of these are on every best horror movie list, and I think maybe because they're so omnipresent and old, it's easy for people to ignore them. A lot of movies on those "best horror movie" lists are boring as hell. These might not be the best horror movies ever made, but they are an important part of what *I* love about horror, and I think the horror genre would be much lesser without them. A lot has been written about these movies already, so I will try to focus on how they affected me personally.

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1. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) This is one of my favourite films. I wrote an essay about it earlier this year, but here I will simply say that it is one of the most visually imaginative and creepy movies of the eighties. Despite the 80s cheese, it has some amazingly creepy scenes that still stick with me. A scene where there's a lamb braying in a hallway for no reason, with a wail like a baby. And a scene where a girl is in a clear body bag, opening and closing her mouth like a fish. This is a movie that takes nightmares seriously and understands what makes them scary.

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2. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)  The original TCM is not a perfect movie by any means, but it is devastating. There's a briefness to the violence that makes me more sick to my stomach than any of the extended torture scenes in the remake could. Someone will be alive, walking, talking, and then BAM. He's not a person anymore. He's a convulsing, twitching piece of meat. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has other amazing parts too, the weird animal confusion and frustration of Leatherface when he first finds someone in his house for instance. But first and foremost this is a movie where the horror comes from realizing that you are just meat.

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3. The Exorcist  (1973) I didn't see the Exorcist until I was in my early twenties. I had seen parodies on the Simpsons and a dozen other places, and I didn't think I was missing much. This was a movie people had found frightening in the seventies. There was no way it could compare to modern horror movies, I thought. When I did see it, finally, it blew my mind. It seemed dangerous and over the line, and I honestly couldn't believe that a major studio had made the film. The acting is great and the special effects are mostly great too. But the defilement of the little girl in this movie is truly shocking. Her head twisting around is funny on the Simpsons, but visceral on the screen. And the Simpsons never once had anyone stabbing themselves bloody in the vagina with a crucifix and then smearing their own mother's face in the blood.

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4. The Others (2001) The Others is another movie I recently posted about. It is perfect in almost every way, and builds atmosphere and tension as much through character as through setting and circumstance. It is creepy as fuck, and has a twist at the end that not only makes perfect sense, but which only makes the movie more interesting and satisfying to watch. I watch this movie at least once a year. It is a haunted house movie that understands why haunted house movies are scary. And it understands that sadness can be so much more chilling than gore.

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5. Slither (2006) Slither is a strange, strange movie. I was tempted to save this for the next section of recommendations (Interesting, rather than Important) but Slither is important to me, if not necessarily to Horror as a genre. Slither is about an invasion of slug creatures that take over people's brains, and it does everything just a little bit differently. The characters are well developed and compelling, especially the first victim of the slugs - the main character's rich, controlling husband. He's painted as a jerk right away, but then the film undercuts this at almost every turn, showing us moments of caring and compassion. On characterization and hilarious dialogue alone, Slither would be one of my favourite horror movies, but it is also constantly one-upping itself with disgusting biological nonsense and some unsettlingly dark humour. It has a great B-Movie mentality about the creatures and the gore, especially when people start getting pregnant.

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6. The Evil Dead (1981)  Evil Dead was the first horror movie I ever LOVED. Right down to the weird sound design, I think this movie is great. It doesn't get as much respect as its sequel/sort-of-remake, Evil Dead II but I enjoy it much more. Evil Dead II is a comedy. It sets out to be campy right from the start, but the original Evil Dead is genuinely trying to be scary. It often fails and is often unintentionally hilarious (or, as with the tree rape scene, offensive) but there are some great scares in Evil Dead. The woman in the cellar, and the possessed friend who just sits there giggling are great. Because why wouldn't evil taunt and tease you before killing you? Why wouldn't it try to drive you mad?

Part 2 of this recommendation list will be "Interesting" movies, movies that aren't exactly successful, but which try something original or different and are definitely worth watching.

Part 3 of the recommendations will be "Fun" movies. Horror movies that are just great gory ridiculous fun. Maybe not so scary, but definitely awesome.

Is there a place for friendship in horror movies? (The Exorcist III)

There's a scene in the Exorcist III where Father Dyer and Detective Kinderman are out at the movies to watch It's a Wonderful Life. It's a movie they've both seen dozens of times, but they keep going. After the movie they're standing in the lobby, and Detective Kinderman says,

"Well, I suppose you have all sorts of rosary biz, and the like."

"Nope," Father Dyer says, "Loose as a goose. Maybe you should go home and get some rest."

"I can't go home yet," Kinderman says. 

"Why?"

"The carp."

"You know, I thought you said..." 

Then Kinderman puts his hand on his friend's shoulder, his face deadly serious.

"My wife's mother is visiting, father," he says. "And tuesday night she's cooking us a carp. It's a tasty fish - I have nothing against it. But because it's supposedly filled with impurities, she buys it live. And for three days it's been swimming up and down in my bathtub." He pauses, and Father Dyer is trying to keep from laughing. "Up. And down," Kinderman says, "and I hate it."

The best parts of the Exorcist III are these quiet conversations between Father Dyer and Detective Kinderman. There's so much care put into these scenes, so much understanding of the tangential affection of friendships. They talk about murders and movies and fish and Women's Wear Daily, and every single conversation seems to be an expression of their friendship. You see it in the way they smile at one another's jokes even though they've clearly heard the same joke a dozen times before. I didn't expect this kind of warm banter in a sequel to the Exorcist.

The horror in the movie ranges from the cheesy to the brilliantly surreal. The movie is all over the place, and you can clearly tell where the studio tried to force the director to change the movie so it was more like the original Exorcist. But it wasn't the demon howling serial killer scenes that were the most effective. It was the scene where you realize that Father Dyer has been killed. And it was the scenes following this, where you see Detective Kinderman's pain at losing his friend. 

This is a movie I watch again and again, though I often turn it off before the end. It is one of the best movie friendships I've ever seen, and I wish more horror movies had this kind of understanding of relationships. It's not as easy to come up with characters who work well together as it is to come up with grisly ways to kill them off, but it sure does make a difference when they do. Characters that we care about, and who care about one another can make horror so much more harrowing. I've been trying to think of other horror movies with relationships that have made an impression on me the way this one has.

The two that come to mind are Let the Right One In, and Red Dragon. Let the Right One In is built entirely on the relationship between the two children. Their friendship is largely unspoken and yet it's the heart of the movie. The same is true of Red Dragon, a movie I think has been underrated. Anthony Hopkins is entertaining as Hannibal Lecter, sure, but it is the unexpectedly beautiful relationship between serial killer Ralph Fiennes and his blind girlfriend Emily Watson that provides the emotional impact of the movie. It made Fiennes so much more full and exciting as a villain than the cartoonish Buffalo Bill from the original Silence of the Lambs. 

Villains are scarier if we understand them more. 

The Last Exorcism is an intelligent and ambitious mess.

The Last Exorcism is another handy-cam horror movie, though one that has an interesting premise. 

It takes the form of a documentary about a preacher who has been preaching since he was a boy, and who has performed dozens of exorcisms. They're just an extension of his act, as far as he's concerned. It's undeniably fun watching someone poke fun at the church from inside, but it's not really all that inventive or interesting. The pastor is very charming. He gives a sermon where he throws in a banana bread recipe, and nobody seems to notice, and that's funny. But when the movie starts looking at the danger involved when people with real problems turn to religion for help, that's when it caught my attention.

The pastor admits to the camera that he knows these are troubled people, psychologically, but he justified this to himself by saying that often the exorcisms actually help them, even if it's just the idea of being healed that helps them heal. But he's started to have second thoughts after he reads about a boy being killed in the process of an exorcism. The boy was not possessed, he was autistic, which hits close to home. This preacher's own son has disabilities. That's why he's agreed to this documentary. He wants to expose exorcism as a scam. He doesn't want anyone else hurt.

But what starts as a documentary exposing himself and exorcism as a sham, turns into something else entirely. And I don't just mean that it turns out the victim is really possessed. Because the interesting twists take place while that is still unclear. 

The documentary follows the preacher as he reads his mail and emails and selects someone who claims to need an exorcism. He makes a glib show of skimming the letter he chooses to respond to, "blah blah blah livestock mutilations. blah blah blah demonic possession," and so it isn't until after they arrive at the Louisiana farm where the family lives that he realizes it's a young girl named Nell who is supposedly possessed. "I don't like dealing with children," he confides to the camera.

Nell is very innocent and timid. She's home schooled, and is thrilled just to be around people from the real world. She's also possibly murdering her father's cattle.

When the fake exorcism doesn't work, the movie spirals through a series of revelations, the whole time showing Nell in creepier and creepier situations. She distorts and climbs furniture, and badly slashes her brothers face, but the whole time it only becomes less clear whether she is possessed or not. When they learn that Nell is pregnant, the camera crew falls apart, yelling at each other, unable to agree how to deal with sexual abuse. This isn't what they're here for, but they can't just pretend it isn't their problem now, especially not after they've convinced the alcoholic and possibly violent father that his daughter's soul is in danger.

Female sexuality is always treated in horror movies as a part of the horrifying possession, as is the sexuality of the young, so it is creepy, for instance, when Linda Blair (in the movie The Exorcist) is saying filthy sexual things. There's a demon saying these things through a little kid. But it's different here. When the possession isn't certain, this explicit vulgarity and sexual agression could just as easily be a frustrated and confused girl who has no idea how to deal with or understand the abuse and repression she's suffered. It becomes terrifying in a different way.

This is a movie that built slowly and subtly, and got more and more difficult to peg as it progressed. But it ends on a simplistic, unsatisfying note. I was so frustrated by the end of this movie. But I think it would be a mistake to dismiss the movie because of that. Everything up til the end is more than worth your time. The actress who plays Nell is amazing, as is her brother. And the preacher is every bit as charming as he thinks he is. This is a movie that will satisfy and engage right up until the end. 

The end itself is dog garbage.