“For the sake of your sanity, pray it isn’t true.”

March 31, 2020
cinema, friends, on writing, thoughts
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Tonight, I recorded an episode of the Horror Pod Class with Tyler (my usual co-host) and Adam Roberts, owner of the Screenland, which you’ve no doubt seen me talk about a lot. I’ll edit this to put up a link when the episode goes live later this week. (The current most recent episode talks about Noroi, another of my favorite films.)

[ETA: Here’s the link to the Legend of Hell House episode!]

As we always do on the Horror Pod Class, we discussed a horror movie. Because he was the guest, Adam got to pick, and so we talked about The Legend of Hell House*, which is one of my favorite haunted house movies, and the adaptation of literally my top number one favorite haunted house novel, Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

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If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, please stop reading this right now and go do so. Both are really quite good, and if you like my work, or if you and I share relatively similar tastes in horror, you are unlikely to regret heeding my advice on this, even if the tale doesn’t hit you where you live quite like it does for me.

For those of you who have read it or seen it and are familiar with my work, you may be unsurprised to know that Hell House had a huge influence on me, and on a lot of my stories. Like Clive Barker, the sadistic and psychosexual themes of the novel aren’t what hooked me or what were reproduced in my fiction, even though they are certainly what’s laying around on the surface.

You can find echoes of Hell House in the figure in the chair in “The Granfalloon,” in the history of the house in “Nearly Human,” and countless stories featuring hauntings that aren’t what they appear to be.

Matheson had a keen scholarly interest in spiritualist beliefs, and his fictionalized depictions of those beliefs factor into just about every story I’ve ever written that features spiritualism or seances or anything of the sort. His uncompleted novel Come Fygures, Come Shadowes, about a family of mediums, was the keystone to my as-yet-unpublished short story “On Blueberry Hill.”

I’ve read plenty of other Matheson novels and short stories. I Am Legend is, of course, a classic, and I remember being quite fond of his locked-room magician mystery Now You See It…

And, of course, Matheson was responsible for the screenplays of many of my favorite films. Not just adaptations of his own work, but movies like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Devil Rides Out, and so on.

But it was Hell House with its matter-of-fact treatment of the supernatural that nevertheless stripped it of none of its gothic grandeur that left the biggest imprint on my own fiction, and continues to do so to this day. Re-watching and talking about Legend of Hell House just reminded me of how much that was true.

* Not to be confused with The Haunting of Hill House or The Haunting or House on Haunted Hill.

To Beyond

March 25, 2020
cinema, guignol
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Today, I learned that Stuart Gordon has passed into the Beyond at the age of 72. In a recent (and, as yet, unpublished) interview, Marta Oliehoek-Samitowska asked me about Stuart Gordon, his influence on my work, and why “anyone interested in horror” should see his films. I think I said it as well there as I ever could here, so I’m just going to give you a sneak peek at the (extensive and wide-ranging) interview:

Probably the best thing about Stuart Gordon’s films is the energy of them. Anyone who pays attention to me for very long will discover that I love theatricality; I love it when things brush up against—or stumble all the way over into—camp, and I think some of the best horror out there uses camp, uses familiarity and clichés, like we talked about up above, to put you at ease so that it can sneak in something more subversive or strange than it would otherwise be able to get away with.

Plus, Gordon’s films are just so delightfully lurid and weird. So many horror paperbacks, movie posters, and VHS covers promise this gonzo experience, and so few of them can actually deliver it. Gordon’s films usually can.

If you’re intrigued, you can read the whole interview in Marta’s forthcoming book of interviews and pencil portraits, Horror in the Eye of the Beholder, which is coming out soon, albeit possibly only in digital form.

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Gordon was a visionary, for better or (sometimes, maybe) worse. His films informed the early fabric of my understanding of horror cinema, of my tastes, of my aesthetic, easily every bit as much as someone like John Carpenter.

I joked on social media that “he had so many more uncomfortably horny Lovecraftian movies to show us,” but I honestly don’t know how much of the horny-on-main-ness of Gordon’s films was him and how much was his frequent collaborator, Brian Yuzna. I’m sure it was a little of both.

Gordon (and Yuzna) may have been known for the uncomfortable horniness of their flicks, but I think even that aspect served a purpose besides “the writer’s barely-disguised fetish.” They made the films feel like outsider art – lurid and unsanitized and occasionally problematic, as Lovecraft adaptations probably should be, at least a bit.

If you’re looking for something of Gordon’s to watch today, to mark his passing, you may be surprised to learn that my favorite of his films is neither Lovecraftian nor particularly horny. It’s actually his oddball take on the old dark house genre Dolls, which inspired the title story of my third collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales and which is currently streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

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Scary Times

March 17, 2020
cinema, friends, secret identity
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So, I guess I posted yesterday’s update a day too soon. No, none of us are sick, still, but last night the Kansas City metro area enacted a mandate to shut down all restaurants (except for take-out and delivery), bars, and movie theaters.

That last one, naturally, is the one that I’m here to talk about, though I have friends and loved ones who work at restaurants and bars who will be directly and irrevocably affected by this.

Please note that I’m not saying that it’s not the right thing to do. I’m not an epidemiologist, and I’m not sure anyone knows what the right thing to do is right now. But I do know that local businesses – as well as those who are employed by them and non-local businesses alike – are going to have a tough time in the coming weeks. Hell, we all might.

The Screenland is more than a movie theater for me. It’s a home-away-from-home; a place where found family congregates. The relationships that I’ve made at the Screenland are some of the best ones in my life right now, and the Screenland is one of the best things about living in Kansas City.

Last night, they closed their doors, and right now we’re not sure when they’ll be able to open them again. If you’re local, help out one of the best theaters I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a movie at by buying a gift card that you can use when this thing blows over. If you’re not, consider donating to help them through a hard time.

We’re all in this together, and hopefully we’ll all pull through together. The Screenland and its people mean a lot to me, so please consider helping them out in this difficult moment.

Epidemiology

March 16, 2020
appearances, secret identity
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Hey, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a pandemic on. About the only thing I can really say for it is that at least it has a name that sounds suitably like something that would have killed us all in a post-apocalyptic movie.

You, dear reader, haven’t heard much from me since it all started – I haven’t even been posting much on social media – but it’s not due to any sinister reasons.

My health is fine. The cough that has been malingering since October is even continuing to clear up at the most incremental pace you could possibly imagine. I wasn’t trampled in some kind of toilet paper-related stampede. Everything is going as well as can be expected, given the circumstances.

I just haven’t been online much, and when I have been, I’ve been working. There are much worse things.

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No one in my immediate orbit is sick. I’ve checked in with most at-risk friends and family members. I haven’t even had to practice much social distancing because, let’s face it, I’m a boring freelance writer who works from home – I usually go out about once or twice a month anyway, and that’s to the movies.

Even for people like me, though, I know that times have been rough. I was supposed to be at the Outer Dark Symposium in a couple of weeks, but that can has now been kicked down the road, thanks to the wisdom of the event organizers. The airline let me credit the cost of my ticket toward a future flight.

Small businesses are already struggling. My favorite local theatre, my home-away-from-home, the Screenland Armour is having a tough time, as all the big movie releases for the next few weeks and even months have been pulled. The people who work there are going to suffer, and there’s precious little that I can do to help.

So far, my work has continued to come in steadily, but who knows what the future holds, at this point? Pretty much everyone I know who can work from home is working from home. Schools are closing. The other day, I posted a photo of an entirely empty bread aisle at the grocery store.

I know that every few years there’s something for everyone to panic over, but I also know that we’ve never encountered anything quite like this in my lifetime. For the most part, I’m not fretting about it any more than I can help, but there’s a lot of free-floating stress in the world right now.

So, if you’re reading this, stay safe and take care of each other.

“Awaken for a moment from your dark night.”

February 28, 2020
cinema, never bet the devil, on writing, painted monsters
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I missed the official 100th anniversary of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by a couple of days – it was apparently February 26 – but it seemed wrong to let the occasion pass by completely without at least marking it in some way.

Caligari was a film that I became obsessed with years before I ever saw it. Two decades ago, when Mezco Toys was still called Aztech, they released a line of figures based on classic silent horror films, including one of Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, looking a bit like Robert Smith of The Cure.

Cesare was the only one of the so-called Silent Screamers toys I ever bought – a decision I regret to this day, when I would love to get my hands on a Graf Orlok or a Golem. But I also still have the Cesare figure by my desk.

The long, sharp shadows of German expressionism and early silent films have long had a major influence on my own aesthetic, even before I had ever actually seen most of them. Caligari, which I first saw in college, not long after buying that toy, remains a movie that I’ve watched only a few times, and yet one that sticks with me in everything I do.

In part, this is because Caligari is a film that can be enjoyed in still frames almost as much as it can be as a movie. I’ve said before that most entire films aren’t as gorgeous or potent as any given frame of Caligari, and I stand by that.

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A few years ago, I was asked to contribute a story to The Madness of Dr. Caligari, a deluxe anthology of stories inspired by the silent classic, edited by Joe Pulver. The story I turned in, “Blackstone: A Hollywood Gothic,” concerns an ill-fated Poverty Row production of a 1946 movie called The Corpse Walks, which features some familiar figures.

But it’s far from the only story I ever wrote that had Caligari‘s long shadow over it. “Night’s Foul Bird” in Painted Monsters may be more concerned with Nosferatu and Faust and London After Midnight, but there’s no denying that Cesare is in there somewhere, or that the plot of Caligari (and its successors) runs like a dark vein through “Stygian Chambers,” the story I wrote for Pluto in Furs which, when I first started writing it, was going to be named for a line from the Robert Bloch-penned 1962 remake Cabinet of Caligari.

Even early stories like “The Mysterious Flame,” which anchors my first collection, are filled with the shadows of German expressionist cinema in general, with Caligari as maybe its most striking exemplar.

Nor am I likely to extricate myself from those painted-on shadows anytime soon. A hundred years gone by, and they’ve still never made another movie quite like Caligari – and it may be that they never will.

Local Crab in Great Mood

February 13, 2020
comics, freelancing, friends, secret identity
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February has been extremely busy for me so far, and I’m still behind on lots of things from the cough that has kept me a prisoner since the end of October (it’s still here, by the way, but it is gradually weakening). Which is why you haven’t heard from me much in the last couple of weeks.

But last Saturday I went thrifting with Eli (of Analog Sunday fame) for his birthday, then back to his place to watch some weird tapes, as we are wont to do. Thrifting was a huge success, and I’ve been posting some of my loot over on Instagram, if you wanna go be jealous.

I’ve made a few other stops various places while I was out running this or that errand lately, and had similarly great luck, as has Grace in her efforts to track down rare and unusual dice. So, while February has still been extremely busy, it has also been nice.

I’ll take busy and nice. And today, I got an email from a client telling me that I was getting an unasked-for raise on my regular freelance rates from them due to the “consistent positive feedback from our editors in regards to your work.” Which is always a nice thing to hear.

So, not every day is great, but today is pretty good. I’ll take it.

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The Extra Ordinary Disappearance of the Fever Out of Space: On VHS

January 31, 2020
appearances, cinema, panic fest
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That’s one more Panic Fest in the rear view. A few days ago I wrote about what Panic Fest means to me, but at the time I was only about a day in, so I hadn’t seen very many movies. I’ve since rectified that situation.

This year, I saw thirteen films at Panic Fest, which, if I’m counting correctly, marks the most films I’ve ever watched at one of these in the five or so years that I’ve been going. Of those, I liked all but a couple.

Measuring purely in terms of cinematic quality, this year may have been the best year I’ve ever attended. There weren’t any “killer apps” this year; obvious standouts that left their competition in the dust. Things like One Cut of the Dead, Tigers Are Not Afraid, Lowlife, and so on from previous Fests. But there were lots of films that I really liked, and hardly any duds.

Of the thirteen films that I saw, my favorites were Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space, Extra Ordinary, VHYes, Sea Fever, and Disappearance at Clifton Hill. That’s a … very broad cross-section of different kinds of movies.

Clifton Hill is a deliciously low-fi Niagara Falls noir with an unreliable protagonist and David Cronenberg as a retired rescue diver who hosts a podcast from the basement of a UFO-shaped diner. Purely naturalistic and perhaps frustratingly ambiguous at times, but possessed of a real ambiance and genius deployment of its compulsive liar of a main character.

Sea Fever is a straight-faced “The Thing on a boat” movie, only not really and also done remarkably well. The underwater photography is so breathtaking that I might not have minded if there hadn’t been a creature. But fortunately there is, and a big, weird, bio luminescent one at that. Plus, a not-so-subtle message about climate change, before all is said and done.

Extra Ordinary is the British What We Do in the Shadows, if you need me to boil it down to an elevator pitch. Part of what makes it so delightful, though, is how genuine the British ghost story elements it draws from feel.

VHYes, well, I wrote that up for Signal Horizon.

And Color Out of Space, as you’ve probably already heard from people who aren’t me, is one of the best “straight” Lovecraft adaptations we’ve ever gotten, even if it would have been better if someone had put their hand on Nic Cage’s shoulder a few times.

As for the rest, Artik, Porno, The Cleansing Hour, and Synchronic all fared well enough. Really, the only one I’m kicking myself for having seen was The Lodge, which it’s tempting to say got saved for the last night of the Fest so that word of mouth couldn’t poison it, but other people in the theater got more out of it than I did. Anyway, I wrote more about it for Signal Horizon, too, and it should go live on Monday.

I also saw Nightmare Radio, which was a mixed bag with a few really good segments, and The Perished, which tried to tackle a tough subject with seriousness and some strong performances and creature work, but ultimately … I’m not sure what the takeaway was supposed to be.

Now that the Fest is over for another year, it’s time to recover and play catch-up for a few days. I’ll see you all on the other side.

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