Valentine's Day gift ideas you probably won't find at Hallmark.

The Holiday Gift guide you were hoping never to see?

1. Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. A cheerful, festive title! Happy Valentine's Day! Tell them that you bought the book on eBay and that it comes with a ghost! How come nobody ever gave me a vengeful ghost for Valentine's Day?

2. Let the Right One In. A vampire film that is really a love story between a boy and a girl who is "not really a girl." Romantic! Also it is a secret test to see if they realize how oh my god depressing the happy ending is.

3. The End of Alice by A. M. Holmes. The first story I ever read by A. M. Holmes was about a boy who was secretly dating his sister's Barbie doll. The story had weird overtones of the sister abusing Barbie, and it ended with the boy using Ken as a sex toy. Now imagine that writer writing a book about murderous pedophiles. This is the perfect gift.

4. Little tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith. Patricia Highsmith is one of my absolute favourite writers, and this book is not why. It is almost entirely hateful, to women in particular but also just to everyone. If Valentine's day is rolling around, and you haven't been able to break things off, give them this book and tell them it really speaks to you.

5. If, on the other hand, Valentine's day is rolling around and you are starting to think they might be the one, you could get them Highsmith's far superior The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder. A book of animals killing the people who mistreat them. It is just as nasty as the Misogyny book, but this is the kind of nasty anyone can get behind. And true love loves to hate together.

More screaming: The Others (2001)

The Others opens with a scream. Nicole Kidman screams herself awake. She sits up in bed, confused and off balance and we watch as she realizes where she is. We watch her come to the conclusion that it must have been a nightmare that woke her up. Without any other information, the audience is left believing it was a nightmare, too. It feels cheap at first, to open with a scream that doesn't mean anything, but as the movie goes on it becomes clear that this isn't a movie built on cheap scares. The scream is a clue, and it's the good kind of clue, where you don't realize what it is until you're looking back on the movie trying to make sense of things.

Later in the film there's another scream. One of the children is screaming, and Nicole Kidman has to unlock a series of doors in the house to get to them, scrambling and panicking as we hear the voice screaming for its mother. It's tense, sure, but it isn't scary until she opens that final door and the boy is just sitting there calmly. It wasn't him that screamed. The screaming starts again, and this time it sounds more like the girl, and so Nicole Kidman starts running again, and again her child is just sitting there with her homework. It takes the tense panic of a horror movie scream and at the last second it twists it into an unsettling quiet moment instead.

The Others is such a great ghost story. I'm going to give away the twist ending here, but this movie came out a decade ago, and there is a scene at the end that I have to mention. And, I think it should be said that the twist in this movie is anything but a gimmick. Watching it again, knowing the twist, only made the movie more satisfying.

At the end, when you learn that Nicole Kidman and her children are dead, there is an unexpectedly touching moment where they are leaning against the wall, hugging, and she tells them about their murders and her suicide. She tells them about how she put the gun to her forehead and pulled the trigger and then... nothing. And how suddenly she could hear their laughter in the next room! God had given her another chance! And then one of the children says, "are we in limbo?" and she says she doesn't know. She doesn't even know if limbo exists. It's a moment of honesty that is very satisfying from a character who has been trying to deny what she knows for the whole movie. This whole scene is such a satisfying conclusion to the relationship arcs between the characters that you almost forget this is a ghost story, but then she holds them tighter and says, "I do know one thing, though. This house is ours. Say it with me, children. This house is ours."

And their three voices repeat again and again, while the camera shows the empty rooms of the house, "This house is ours. This house is ours. This house is ours."

a couple short reviews for a couple bad movies

Jennifer's Body (2009) has dialogue that is sometimes painfully stupid and sometimes fun and clever. The characters talk in stylized slang that makes it clear the creators want us to see Jennifer's Body as the spiritual successor to Heathers, but slick visuals, one liners, pretty stars and a lack of any memorable substance establish this as the spiritual successor to I Know what you did last Summer. 

Final Destination (2000) looked so complicated and awesome in the trailer, and I remember having enjoyed it when it first came out. It's a fun premise - death coming for a group of teens who had avoided a plane crash. Like a gory game of mousetrap, with Rube Goldbergesque grisly deaths. But, like the actual game of mousetrap, it was cool on the commercial, but turned out to be kind of boring and stupid. I suspect this is a movie where the sequels might actually be more fun. There's a lot of potential in the premise.

Problematic and awesome: Piranha (2010)

The final half hour of Alexandre Aja's Piranha is the most entertaining thirty minute stretch of film I have seen in a long time. It took me completely by surprise. Piranha is so stupid and so over the top that it's impossible to tell whether this is meant to be a satire of excess or just an exercise in it. It ramps the nudity and gore up to ludicrous levels, but is that just because it genuinely loves tits and gore? Or is it holding those breasts up like a mirror so that we can see how ridiculous we ourselves are, as the consumers of these films? Probably not that second one, to be honest.



I don't understand the sexual politics of this movie at all. It has a maniacal embrace of the grindhouse philosophy that more naked breasts make a better movie, and it objectifies the college girls from beginning to end. But then it throws in a character for the express purpose of mocking the creator of those Girls Gone Wild videos. He's a complete slimeball who we're clearly meant to hate. And, more confusingly, we're clearly meant to hate him because he objectifies women. When one of his porn actresses is trying to pull him out of the water and to safety, he yells, "Help me you bitch." And then they give us Elizabeth Shue as the Sheriff, a no-nonsense 47 year old mom who isn't objectified but who hasn't been desexualized either, which is refreshing. But there are so many lingering wet t-shirt shots. So many ass shots. There is a naked underwater lesbian make out that is set to new age earth goddess style music and that goes on for so long that you start to worry the director forgot he wasn't actually making a porn movie himself. An insane mermaid slow motion porn movie.

And it's such a crazy aesthetic. The last half hour of this movie mixes gore with T&A so indiscriminately that it hurts to think about it too hard. A woman in a bikini gets sliced from her shoulder down diagonally to her opposite hip. She has that stunned, "I just got cut in half" look on her face, and then the bra falls open, showing off her breasts. After a moment of breast exposure, the two halves of her body slide apart with a sick wet sound, and then the top half falls lifeless toward the camera. Tit first. In slow motion 3D. A woman is para-sailing topless, and they keep her in the water too long, only to speed the boat up so that she hangs bloody and naked from the parachute. Another character is eaten from the waist down and then the Piranhas fight over his penis. Then one of them throws it up.

It's like an emotionally stunted imaginative twelve year old boy directed huge chunks of the movie. I couldn't figure it out, but I think I loved it.

is there a place for rape in horror? The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

In 2006 Alexandre Aja remade Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, and I hated it. It consistently shows up on "Best Horror Remakes" lists, and so it is pretty safe to say that the film has its fans, but I cannot understand why. It is torture porn, through and through. There are no genuine scares - instead there are cheap shocks. There's no tension - instead there are long scenes of intense onscreen violence and mutilation. That's nothing new. The same things could be said for the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I simply disliked. It was the rape scene that made me hate The Hills Have Eyes.

Rape is a difficult topic for discussion, because there are people for whom it is never acceptable in a film. On horror message boards you often come across arguments about whether a rape scene was gratuitous or unnecessary. And one of the defences for inclusion is that, "murder is worse than rape, and murder is shown all the time." Which is a bit of a cop-out answer. While there may not be many people who have lived through an attack by nuclear waste mutated hill mutants, there are millions of survivors of rape.

There is an equally graphic rape scene in the original version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. When I saw it in theatres, two women got up and walked out, stopping at the exit to yell, "Enjoy your rape porn," at the audience. At the time my response was anger and indignation. This was my second time seeing the film, and I thought the scene was anything but gratuitous. It was graphic and painful to watch, but the focus was on the victim, and the effects the attack had on the character. It is a horrible depiction of a horrible act, but it was trying to say something and show something rather than just horrify and titillate. But while it is possible that the two women who yelled the accusation at the audience were being judgemental and harsh, it is just as possible that the rape scene took them by surprise and shocked and hurt them.

So when I say that the scene in Hills Have Eyes is gratuitous and over the line, I am not saying that there is no place in movies for uncomfortable depictions of rape. But in Hills Have Eyes, the rape is just as shallow as the murders. The murders are brutal and protracted because being brutal is easier than being imaginative - because showing torture is an easier way to put a knot in people's stomachs than building tension or suspense. The difference is that the murders are lazy and stupid and cruel to the characters while the rape is lazy and stupid and cruel to the characters and the huge chunk of the audience that has had sexual violence in their lives.

I think there is a place for all kinds of violence in good horror. It doesn't even have to be trying to make a broad societal point. And I don't think horror has an obligation to be more than a scary movie. But if rape is going to be involved, it should be for the real reasons that rape is horrifying - because the woman is a human being and she is not being treated like one.

There are no new ideas?

A lot of people complain about modern remakes of horror movies, but nobody offers a solution! Well. If you are thinking about remaking a classic horror movie, please consider making one of these instead:


1. Dig Yourself Out: Following an earthquake, a young woman who lives alone in LA is crushed under the huge stacks of self-help books she buys and never reads. We watch the whole movie through the camcorder that fell off her shelf and turned itself on. She can't reach her cellphone, or laptop, or move, so she begins to actually read the books, eventually bettering both herself and her understanding of a person's place in this world before getting attacked and killed by an ancient Mummy that was sealed in one of the walls until the quake.

2. Endgame: A young boy is a chess prodigy, and his parents are very involved with his career, pushing him to be a big chess star. But just because you are good at something doesn't mean you love it. He puts on a brave face and tries to make his parents happy, all the while sneaking off to murder neighbours. He uses his strategic mind to orchestrate elaborate and grisly death traps. But in the end he's going to have to stand up to his parents… in beautiful and deadly mother Russia!

Oh god the screaming: REC (2007)

The appeal of handy-cam horror movies is the realism. REC is one of the best horror movies I've seen in years, it is fucked up and awesome. But even in a movie as smart and scary as REC, the realism winds up being a problem, too. 

Aside from the danger of nausea, the biggest flaw with these movies is the constant screaming. And yes, it might be realistic that characters would just go screaming from one horrible scene to the next, but oh my god it gets grating. Sometimes realism just isn't interesting. In actual speech people spend a lot of time saying, "um" and "like," but those things make for boring and awkward movie dialogue. Good dialogue conveys realism without actually being as dull as real language. Why can't this be done with screaming, too? 

REC knows that it is a problem. This is a film made by people who know what they're doing. They know the limitations of the form, and they do their best to minimize the problem. There are sections where the sound cuts out of the camera, or where the volume drops like the audio is malfunctioning. These moments provide a welcome break from the screams, but aren't the solution we need. 

Why can't screaming be scary in horror movies again? It is just the default response to shit going foul. There's no need for acting, people just scream and run around flailing their arms. Watching people screaming isn't scary. And I never remember anything from these scenes. The scenes that stick with me are the few moments where the movie surprises me, or chills me. In REC there is only one memorable screaming scene.  

The camera crew arrive at the building with firemen, and are led to the apartment of an old woman by police. The old woman is covered in blood and attacks one of the cops, and everyone freaks out, screaming, yelling, and they carry the bleeding cop back downstairs. Downstairs they find the doors they just entered are blocked off, and there are health authorities outside. They are quarantined. Nobody knows what is going on, and the characters start fighting with one another. It is a hectic series of revelations that changes our focus again and again. First we're focused on the old woman, then escape, then the cop's injuries, then the quarantine, then who is in charge. It's like a regular survival horror movie on fast forward. And then a body drops screaming from nowhere and lands right in the middle of their argument with a sickening wet crunch.

THAT scream stuck with me. It started quiet and grew faster than I could understand, at first I couldn't even figure out what the sound was. And then the body hit. It was unexpected and it was horrific and it was over before I realized exactly what was going on. It loomed larger in my imagination than it lasted in the film, and it stuck with me. When I describe the movie to friends, that's the scene I always describe first. 

REC begins with a long section introducing the main character and creating a feeling of normalcy and calm. We don't really grow to like the main character, or understand her particularly well, but it is an effective opening in any case. She's established as real. And when the fucked up shit happens, it happens fast. This is REC's biggest strength, I think. The violence isn't on screen for very long in the jumble of the camera. We don't have enough time to judge whether it's real or not, like the violence in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It happens and then we're left with a brief memory while we try to understand what we saw and what it means. Less isn't more, exactly. But it's better.