THE EXORCIST.

This has been long-coming. I’ve run into it in a few of the past entries, most recently in my post on Ari Aster’s Hereditary, and I feel the need to confront it directly. The film represents a turning point in my appreciation of horror films, where things went from being fun and trope-heavy to disturbingly visceral and even threatening, having been raised in the Baptist church. The overall impact was not unlike those safety films you watch in wood shop class like this:

And yes, I was watching those around the same time I first encountered The Exorcist. I was in middle-school, already acquainted with the likes of Romero, Carpenter and Cronenberg (thanks to Fangoria magazine), but The Exorcist and I had been doing the Tallahassee Tango long before then.

Cut to late 1973. Late in the evening as well, with a five-year-old version of Your Humble Narrator curled up in bed as his mom turns on the AM radio and this plays:

Little me was immediately caught in a horror movie catch-22: If I had brought up the dreaded subject of “it’s giving me nightmares”, it would’ve become an obstacle to my seeing any more of the old Universal, Hammer and Amicus films that I loved then (and still do). So I kept it on the down-low, and often bothered my older sister about subletting space in her bed at night. I later monitored the movie from the latest issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, then the go-to guide for all things macabre and cool:

And no, I don’t still have that issue — the regrets of age. To me, each photo was like a portal into a black-and-white Hell, where the damned soul of poor Linda Blair was spinning, floating and puking forth with demonic glee. Even Billy Graham (who my grandmother was a fan of) cast his dissent of the The Exorcist, stating that ‘The Devil was in every frame of that film’. That dread sort of yen for The Exorcist had built up in little me, one that I thought might get me in trouble with The Big Man Upstairs. I had officially entered that new realm of modern horror film — one that cast aside the Gothic trappings and conventions of the past, and given the game modern stakes. You know, unlike the ones in the Hammer movies ;D

Of course, as we all know, The Exorcist was originally a novel by William Peter Blatty. Blatty had been a comedy writer, even collaborating with director Blake Edwards, who is best known for his Pink Panther films. The Exorcist was more of a personal project for the author, taking a story he had heard about while attending Georgetown University about a “haunted boy” in St. Louis, Missouri as inspiration. That story — which has since become familiar mainly by association to The Exorcist — is known (to Wikipedia, anyway) as the Exorcism of Roland Doe. The Roland Doe scenario is itself the subject of many adaptations, including Possessed by Thomas B. Allen and the releases of The Haunted Boy: The Secret Diary of the Exorcist and The Exorcist File — which appear to be the same film, although The Haunted Boy (released in 2010) gets an IMDb rating of 4.1 while The Exorcist File (2014) rates at 5.6. Go figure.

Back to the introduction, with middle-school me and the book. I managed to get it checked out at the local library (I figured they felt they let me off easy, since I spent most of their time trying to borrow reference books), and eagerly chewed through it in a week. Sure, I had done my tours with Stephen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell (the latter two King himself recommended in Danse Macabre), but this was different. While not much in the way of plot, the book more than makes up for it with its detail and characterization. It’s a Grand Guignol of the highest order, locking dread Pazuzu against the world-weary Father Merrin, while Detective William Kinderman looks on in befuddlement. Yes, it’s all very Catholic with a weird Jewish topspin, but I loved it. Again, having been raised in the Baptist church, the ultimate fate of Regan McNeil — the aforementioned stakes in this particular gambit — wasn’t lost on me. The black-and-white nightmare from Famous Monsters now had a scenario, and — as Masha from Videodrome puts it:

Needless to say, I had to see the movie at this point. As mentioned here, the advent of cable television brought me within a hairs-breadth of The Exorcist — curled up at the top of the stairs, anxiously listening to what was transpiring in the den, and my family’s reaction to it. This did nothing but fuel the little demonic furnace that had been playing out in my head.

The film was written for the screen by Blatty, but director William Friedkin, fresh off his Oscar-winning film The French Connection, was supposedly non-plussed. He wanted the screenplay to be more like the novel, substituting sections of Blatty’s script for what he had previously written in the book. While they may have disagreed about the approach to the material, one thing was apparently never discussed. According to Friedkin, “Bill [Blatty] identified ‘The Exorcist’ as being a work about the mystery of faith. People call it a horror film. Blatty and I never spoke about a horror film. We made a film about the mystery of faith, which was his concept, his idea, his belief system.”

While Blatty came from a comedy background, Friedkin came from that of a documentarian, who got his start working at Chicago’s WGN-TV (where little me watched The Bozo Show — possible Bozo/Captain Howdy connection?). He would apply that gritty realism developed in those early years to The French Connection and The Exorcist. While it works great in the former, the latter really stood-out, as most horror films up until then had been much more stylistic affairs. Friedkin kept a tight set — never more than one take per shot, and his stage direction was often punctuated with gunfire. Friedkin says he adapted the idea from George Stevens, the director of The Diary of Anne Frank — to heighten the actors’ response to Nazi threat.

Friedkin’s want for immediacy and intimacy during the shoot ultimately caused problems with the cast. In addition to gunfire, he slapped Fr. William O’Malley (as Father Dyer, the groovy, piano-playing priest in the film) to gage the actor’s response to tragedy (the death of Jason Miller’s Fr. Karras). Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair have both claimed to have been injured by harnesses designed by Marcel Vercoutere, the film’s special effects man, used aggressively at Friedkin’s urging. But all parties seemed to have conceded over the years, due more than likely to the film’s outrageous success.

Another outstanding factor of the production was Dick Smith. Like Friedkin, Smith got his start in television at WNBC in New York, and in his early career pioneered the use of multiple prosthetics (as opposed to masks) in makeup effects. He even literally wrote the book on do-it-yourself monster makeup back in 1965:

I never got my little hands on this book, but the likes of Rob Bottin (The Thing, Legend, Total Recall) and Greg Nicotero (Day of the Dead, Phantasm II, In the Mouth of Madness, The Walking Dead) did. According to his assistant on The Exorcist, Rick Baker (mentioned here, for brevity): “The Exorcist was really a turning point for make-up special effects. Dick showed that makeup wasn’t just about making people look scary or old, but had many applications. He figured out a way to make the welts swell up on Linda Blair’s stomach, to make her head spin around, and he created the vomit scenes.” Smith would later receive a well-deserved Academy Award (in 1984, for his work on Amadeus), but in my humble opinion, it was late in coming.

I finally got to see The Exorcist firsthand back in ’82 or ’83, when I convinced my mom I could handle it during one of our Friday-afternoon excursions to Hollywood Video. I’m thinking she figured it would be inevitable in any case, seeing as how I had already been enjoying the heretofore secluded gems of premium cable. I was thrilled. At long last, I could meet my nightmare face-to-face, and stare into its rolled-up eye sockets. It was love at first sight.

I thrilled to the film’s almost bi-polar pacing, going from moments of shock and violence to those of calm introspection — for better or worse. The deep unfathomable blacks and brilliant colors, from the dramatic opening in Northern Iraq to the frigid walls of Regan’s bedroom, and the rapid-fire editing punctuating the action along with that amazing score (which introduced me to the likes of Krzysztof Penderecki and Hans Werner Henze, in addition Mike Oldfield’s amazing Tubular Bells). I likened it at the time to being not unlike Star Wars, a film that had recently redefined another genre in similar fashion.

The Exorcist remains one of my all-time favorite films. It not only changed the horror film genre, but they way people thought about it. Here was a horror film with no inclinations of hiding its evil and chaotic intent, but instead thrust it onto screens and into the faces of the record number of cinema goers who clamored to see it, and continue to today. While not nearly as shocking as it was back in 1973, the film still manages to hammer through even the toughest layers of disbelief to fashion not simply a horror movie, but what its creators intended — a film about belief itself.

RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH (CONT.)

Recently realized that although I initially posted about this movie (with its trailer here), I never gave any impressions of it after watching. Yeah, I’m a big goob. Also, I was contacted by someone involved in the production thanking me for support, and can’t find any copy of said contact. Bigger goob. Appreciate the feedback in any case, and am always wanting to support indie filmmaking, as it is fast becoming the only relevant venue.

While being an independent production (and obviously lower budget, the visual effects taking the brunt but adequate in the context), the movie was great. It’s overall a solid adaptation of this unusual story, which features the author as one of its supporting characters (side note: it always tickles me when people cite Charlie Kaufman’s pseudo-autobiographical films as being so defining when Dick was doing it back in ’85), and was ultimately revealed to have involved the author on a more personal level with his “VALIS Trilogy”. While the philosophies of “show don’t tell” and “arrive late, leave early” are not always observed in adapting a written work into a visual medium (to avoid too much exposition and pacing the moments in a film to more closely follow the plot), it mainly succeeds with the concepts of totalitarianism against a form of pseudo-Gnosticism, at the time (1985 in the film, which was actually after Dick’s passing) creating a very bleak but hopeful vision of the near-future.

The performances were uneven, but hit the right beats to move things along. I particularly liked Shea Wigham as Phil (of course), a world-weary cultural veteran who in the book provides the perfect acerbic introduction and conclusion for the story. Wigham, who I dug in the indie horror flick Splinter, is on point here, being one of the “backboards” for the ideas proposed by the film’s lead Nicholas Brady (Jonathan Scarfe — who I finally recognized from his appearances on the old Outer Limits revival in the late ’90s). The other is the pre-Lagertha Katherine Winnick, playing Brady’s wife Rachel.

That’s not her in the movie, by the way. Another side note: Would blog about Vikings, but quit watching after the third season. The goob strikes again, but who knows — it could happen at a later date.

Winnick does well with that little material she is given, which itself is a turn from the Dickian Plotting Female (with Hanna Hall playing a similar card as a representative of FAP, or “Friends of the American People” who manages to finagle hapless Phil) she is written as in the book. Rachel descends into her archetype later in the film, however, when Alanis Morrisette’s character Sylvia Aramchek is introduced. Morrisette, being a wonderful singer-songwriter (her dream sequenced song is one of my fave parts — more on that below) is admittedly the weak link in acting department, particularly as the character of Sylvia as the Mysterious Brunette (in Dick’s work these characters typically act as harbingers for plot development — usually bad news) is integral to the story.

As mentioned above, Scarfe plays the lead Nicholas Brady, an amiable guy who quickly finds himself on a spirit quest of sorts which leads him into the bureaucratic maw of President Ferris F. Freemont (who combines the best of McCarthyism of the ’50s and Watergate-era scandals of the ’70s), with the late great Scott Wilson (pictured at the top, and in The Ninth Configuration — will be blogging about this one soon) using his screen time to paint a Machiavellian politician as an earnest, caring overlord. My beef with Scarfe’s character and performance is honestly not his fault, but might be that of screenwriter/director John Alan Simon. It may have something to do with Scarfe being primarily a television actor, where the episodic format promotes the soft-pedalling of characters over the course of a show’s run, but his take on Brady is secondary compared with Wigham’s Phil. Kudos to Simon in any case, but guessing that him probably being a major Dick-head (like myself ;D) wanted the character of Phil to stand out more. He is quoted as saying, “Since Radio Free Albemuth is essentially the first draft of VALIS, we ended up with rights to both from the estate of Philip K. Dick. If Radio Free Albemuth is successful, VALIS the book would form the basis for the sequel to VALIS the movie. In other words, the story of VALIS would form the basis for VALIS 2.”

Like I said above, I like the movie, and any criticisms I give it are mainly based on familiarity with the book and its author. RFA as a work is oddly disjointed, seeing as the events of it were later incorporated into the later books of the VALIS Trilogy — VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer — as fictional speculation within its world-scheme. RFA was published posthumously, but was Dick’s first take on his real-life Exegesis experiences in 1974, which formed the inspiration for VALIS. Don’t know how exactly Simon would’ve dovetailed it into a second film, and as of the current date (the film was released in 2010) that remains to be seen.

Lastly, let’s talk about the soundtrack. While songs such as the Good Listeners’ “Let’s Party” (the pivotal song from the book and film’s plot) and the aforementioned Alanis Morrissette song “Professional Torturer” (which oddly sounds like the Beatles’ “Hey Prudence” at the beginning) are standouts, the majority of the film’s sonic grist is beautifully milled by Robyn Hitchcock and the Soft Boys. The band was prevalent in the late ’70s, but broke up in 1981, with the latter-day Soft Boys performing this well-known anthem about “Feelin’ Good”:

Hitchcock went his own way, and fashioned a prolific career (which included a cameo role in Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate), but his music takes center stage here. Admittedly, I was never into him or the Soft Boys, but the movie has turned my head with “Satellite” and “To Be Human” — the song which plays over the end credits:

It’s a perfect theme song for all things Dick, I think — a man who spent his entire career reminding us of the value of our own singular identities outside of whatever reality we may inhabit. A noble cause in these current days of endless diatribe and #groupthink, and a necessary one.

ZAPPA.

Okay. Annoying autobiographical pause incoming (and I’ll make it brief): I was in high school when I got slipped a cassette of Them or Us back in ’84, and it changed my life. No shit, kids — everything I had thought of as music — or even “aural entertainment” in general — had been transmogrified. Like Schrödinger’s Cat — something else I was into at the time — all of Zappa’s work is immediately in and outside its own Project/Object (more on that below), and even with that first album I noted a weird surreal depth to both the music and words. And I couldn’t tell if he wrote the words or the music for “Truck Driver Divorce” first. Still not sure. In any case, I was a fan from then and have been ever since. Anyone familiar with my sparse output over the years and those close know this to be true — shit, the name of the blog is due to Zappa and this guy:

Fast forward to last year, and the aftermath of FZ’s death getting worse after the passing of his wife Gail. The Zappa Family Trust appeared to be playing the home version of Family Feud, with teams of his children posed against each other, locked in conflict over what could and could not be released/shown/performed/whatever. The Moon Zappa-produced Eat That Question, based entirely on interviews FZ gave over the years, had been released in 2016. While I enjoyed it, it was mostly the same sort of thing I’d already seen — Frank behind the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke, looking dour and being laconic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great movie for the casual Zappa fan (if there are actually any of those), but I had seen Zappa Plays Zappa live (they performed the entire One Size Fits All album, and it was fantastic) and read The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, for God’s sake — I wanted more.

.Then Alex Winter finally released his FZ documentary (produced with Ahmet Zappa, who had conjured this disturbing electric ghost and took him on tour), one which promised to draw from the hundreds of hours of unreleased material locked away in the Zappa vault.

What I wanted is, if we’re to be honest, what Zappa himself could only talk around (even in The Real Frank Zappa Book) because he was Frank Zappa. Outside his “chartreuse sphere”, as he might’ve called it, opinions about the man were decided, to say the least. The “Zappa Crapper” photo had set him on the same precarious shelf as Ozzy Osbourne with his taste for bat, and was seen as a burnt-out 60’s relic trotted out to combat the PMRC back in ’85 (Autobiographical urge: rising). However, Zappa actually got people to register for the vote and thrilled with them to the downfall of television evangelists throughout the tour, to boot. Next thing you know (in 1990, actually), he’s in Prague, being awarded the position of Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism. Outside the aforementioned sphere, and even as a fan, watching this unfold only made me more curious: What the fuck is it with this guy, really?

ZAPPA finally scratches that itch — or at least digs a fingernail in at times. One begins to learn that because (or in spite) of the confusion as to who he was, everyone surrounding Zappa were resolute in their opinions of him. Not pulling any punches, Winter paints an unfavorable portrait of FZ — a man who treated his band members like “trained monkeys” (his words, as recalled by the amazing Ruth Underwood), his family members like strangers (his one hit single “Valley Girl” was initiated when a teenaged Moon slipped a note under Frank’s studio door reminding him of her existence), and his wife being treated like a doorstop, taking care of the children while Frank slept around on the road. “Miss” Pamela Zarubica, who lived with the Zappas in New York and was also involved in Frank and the Mothers as well (that’s her onstage in this video):

denied she knew anything about this. Et tu, Suzy Creamcheese? Gail herself defends Frank as well, stating she knew who his true mistress was — as per this credo from Joe’s Garage:

To quote Mrs. Zappa, “I married a composer“.

This is the part of the blog where the Thing-Fish would pop in, flap its Mammy-napkin and proclaim to the “good peoples” of the audience that we have finally arrived at “the crux of the biscuit”.

Zappa, after his childhood hero Edgar Varèse, took on the role of composer at a young age, and wore it proudly for the rest of his life. The Project/Object came into being, a multi-tentacled beast that surely had its origin in Frank’s head. Simply stated (as per wikipedia), the Project/Object was a web of reference that Zappa named his “conceptual continuity”, a virtual appendix of all things (even the sofa God sat on when creating the Earth) in Zappa’s oeuvre. Any character, line or lyric, musical motif, style or meter could be recalled at any moment either in the studio or live on stage — all guided by Zappa’s baleful glare. A pre-internet version of the very hypertext of this blog, in other words. My fave example in this case would be “Sam With The Showing Scalp Flat Top”, a live piece performed with longtime friend and collaborator Don Van Vliet, otherwise known as Captain Beefheart:

These would be combined, compared and contrasted, and sometimes being performed simultaneously (not unlike another composer hero, Charles Ives), even before a live audience. Another tentacle was represented by his invention of xenochrony, a method of mixing recordings that were originally taken at different times and places, and sometimes completely regardless of each other. One of my fave tracks from the album Sheik Yerbouti for example, “Rubber Shirt”, was created by Zappa’s recordings of bassist Patrick O’Hearn and drummer Terry Bozzio, who both were on tour for the album, which were made on separate instances.

Yet another Son of Project/Object was one Steve Vai, who joined Zappa’s retinue in 1980, after spending two years as FZ’s transcriptionist. Zappa was infamous for exploiting any of the quirks or hidden talents of his employees and integrating them into whatever recording or touring he had going on at the time, and Vai was tailor-made for the occasion. His “perfect pitch” hearing and redoubtable guitar skills were put to good use by Frank in tracks like “The Jazz Discharge Party Hats” from the album The Man from Utopia:

As could be discerned, the Project/Object had already grown out of its petri dish of black powder quickly, extending its tendrils out into world. The most significant excerpt from ZAPPA is a comment from John Leon Guarnera, better known as Mother of Invention “Bunk” Gardner: “I just accepted everything, rather than questioning ‘why are you like you are’?”

Frank Zappa, like his many compositions, was a strange and complicated man. According to Ruth Underwood, he was “a man of contradictions, but he was always consistent with his contradictions”. In many ways he was the Compleat American — self-made and financed, and, against his best intentions, successful. Fame and glory, the composer craves not these things. The only reason he even toured or recorded the majority of his albums was to finance performances of his compositions, which, until he got his hands on a Synclavier in 1983, was the only way he could hear his music outside of his head. For better or worse, everything else was secondary — call him “driven” or a “workaholic”, Zappa lived with no regrets. Even when ill with prostate cancer, (which would claim him in 1993), Zappa rued having a legacy such as that of Ronald Reagan — he had naught a fuck to give. The tentacles of the Project/Object had shrunk away and withered, but he remained indignant.

Like stated above, Zappa had a huge impact on me. As a creative (furtive, at best), I was in awe of the sheer amount of his work, and more importantly the depth and complexity of the Project/Object. Frank Zappa changed the way people thought about music and even entertainment in general. He stepped out of the era of Timothy Leary and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (against drugs the entire time) and into that of Reaganomics and televised salvation, and ended up in Prague with James Baker III warning their government that could either deal with the United States of America or with Frank Zappa. He was a genius and artist of the highest order, in my opinion, fully worthy of monument and regalia.

Alex Winter’s documentary ultimately salves the aforementioned itch quite well, often taking on the parameters of a Zappaesque composition in telling FZ’s story, with rapid-fire editing and “putting on of the eyebrows” as Frank would’ve called it. If I have one complaint about the movie, it’s that there’s simply not enough music in it. This is a film which had access to Frank Zappa’s vault about Frank Zappa that has “original music”. Unnecessary in my opinion, and more importantly, Frank would’ve been chiefed. Other than that, I wholly recommend to all of you if you haven’t seen it, if anything to get why I’m constantly continuing the Project/Object in my own little way. While his music is certainly not to everyone’s taste, his dedication to it, while unfortunate in many ways, is inspiring to any creative who wants to firsthand watch the perils of commerce and reputation overcome. But heed always the advice of the Central Scrutinizer from Joe’s Garage: “As you can see, music can get you pretty fucked up. Take a tip from Joe, do like he did. Hock your imaginary guitar and get a good job.”

A Futile and Stupid Gesture.

Hold on to yer bootstraps, kids. We’re gonna slip off the sheer cliff of Reason and Sanity into the deep goodniss of comedy gold. I know that allusion is in bad taste concerning the subject’s death, for obvious reasons that are obvious. See how I hold the fly alive between my chopsticks, Grasshopper…

In a past post about Harold Ramis, I mentioned that for me personally, the Golden Age of Comedy began around the time of my birth, in the early 1970s. From that era, I think a great deal of what has essentially evolved into the more biting, “edgy” and political commentary seen in media and certainly here on the interwebs had its beginnings. And one of it’s greatest proponents was the co-founder of National Lampoon magazine and eventual co-scripter of both comedy classics Animal House and Caddyshack, the pride of Chagrin Falls, Ohio — Douglas Kenney.

Even more than Ramis, Kenney was one of the modern era of comedy’s founding fathers. With the Lampoon and beyond, he gleefully played with social, political and sexual taboos as the typical seven-year-old would a set of Legos: build them up to ridiculous heights, only to see them crash in often unexpected but always hilarious ways. Unfortunately, this model was also paralleled in his personal life, which often ended not so hilariously. After accumulating a great deal of money for his successes, he also was saddled with a massive cocaine addiction, which only magnified his bouts with severe depression. Doug Kenney left this world on August 27, 1980, at the age of 33, having either fallen or leapt (according to Ramis, he “fell looking for a good spot to jump”) from a cliff in Kauai, Hawaii.

Personal tragedies aside, I grew up with Kenney as one of my heroes. His subversive, intelligent and often surreal sense of humor appealed to me from the first time I saw it in print, with Bored of the Rings, a parody of Tolkien co-written with Henry Beard (who would go on to found National Lampoon with Kenney). I have re-read the slim novella many times since, and it never fails to delight with its casual sardonicism. Although I was too young to read his work in the magazine at the time it was published, I’ve managed to find old back issues and reprints of his articles over the years, with time well spent.

Nearly a decade ago a couple of books came out related to Kenney, his career and personal turmoil. I have read neither one, so honestly can’t tell you much other than both were successful and well-reviewed — but we’re digressing, here. One of them was A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, by Josh Karp, a writer presumably occupied with sports (not to fetter the man, I simply know little about him), including golf, which might explain his connection with Kenney. Do want to read both in the future (the other book, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, is written and illustrated by former NatLamp staffer (and all-over excellent artist) Rick Meyerowitz, who also did the below illustration for our (sort of) given subject:

Another thing different about either take on Kenney, his tenure at the Lampoon and beyond is how they were developed for television. While Meyerowitz’s book got the documentary treatment, but Karp’s was almost immediately turned into a Netflix feature. Directed by The State member David Wain (and also stars fellow Staters Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kinney), who mostly recently is known for the Wet Hot American Summer series, also on Netflix.

The production seems to have spent the majority of its budget on the massive cast, which includes both Will Forte and Martin Mull playing Kenney (as the lead of the story and an alternate who never died but lived to narrate the tale, respectively), since otherwise the feature has a severe “TV movie” feel to it. The approach seems to be treating Kenney’s life as if he himself had written it, but while one might expect the stylish detachment and timing of a John Landis, Ivan Reitman, or the late aforementioned Harold Ramis, there instead is a more glossy and heavy-handed treatment. Not really a criticism, since I did enjoy the film but the above was always apparent to me. I may be something of a film snob, but really it’s the Kenney fan talking. A proper take on the story should’ve gotten a bigger budget, maybe Adam McKay or David Gordon Green behind the helm, with Chris Pratt as Kenney. I would’ve loved for John Landis in particular to be involved, as he really set the tone with Animal House that was followed closely by latter films like The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack and the Ghostbusters films. My opinion, subjected because that’s what I do here.

Doug Kenney was a clearly troubled guy whose success only magnified those troubles. But he helped lay the groundwork for an era when comedy broke new ground and openly challenged culture, society and political affairs. I’ve gone on about this before, but Kenney was a crucial piece of the mechanism. With Henry Beard, Chris Miller, Harold Ramis and P.J. O’Rourke, Kenney successfully transplanted Lampoon‘s skewed world-view from print to film, and changed humor forever. Not bad for a kid from Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE.

I’ve referred to this several times before, but a watershed moment in my childhood and appreciating the forms of media that I blog about now was discovering Stephen King’s marvelous nonfiction book Danse Macabre back in 1981. I was 13 years old then, and already an avid devotee of all things weird, fantastic and sinister. By interpreting his own reactions and the inspiration he found within the many selected books, radio programs, motion pictures, and television programs (it handles an awful lot, even for a 400-page paperback) King literally laid a groundwork for me to follow; a course of study that eventually led me to further interpretations of why humans are drawn to such sometimes inhuman things in the works of Nietzsche and Jung. No bullshit. I recommend the book (which recently got an update, need to pick up a new hardback version to replace my tired, old paperback one of these days) yet again, to all students of the bizarre.

Anyways, one of the most quoted and referred-to works in the book was Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, which would eventually inspire King’s own Bad Places, such as the Marston House in Salem’s Lot, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and especially the subject of his 2002 television mini-series Rose Red. While I have never read the novel (I know, I know, it’s not unlike my strange antagonism about Neil Gaiman noted here), I was an immediate fan of Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting, which is, in my opinion, is up there with Hitchcock’s Psycho and Polanski’s Repulsion for supplying that first turn of the screw (to borrow a fitting phrase) that issued in the era of modern cinematic horror. And yeah, The Haunting was remade in 1999, but the less said about it the better, right?

Now for the other major part of the equation: Mike Flanagan. From Absentia, a desperate tale of a woman coming to terms with the circumstances surrounding her husband’s mysterious disappearance, Oculus (which structurally has many similarities with his take on The Haunting of Hill House), about a family and their doomed relationship with a malefic mirror that twists their lives to horrific ends, Hush, with a secluded deaf writer stuck in a white-knuckled cat-and-mouse with an intruder, to the wonderfully retro Ouija: Origin of Evil, which features a false medium and her family dealing with a very real supernatural presence, Flanagan has simply been knocking them out of the park, one by one. He is certainly overdue a mention here, but I aim to rectify the situation now if I can. Most recently, with his adaptation of the aforementioned King’s novel Gerald’s Game, he has cemented himself as one of the mainstays of current horror films. And I bet ninety-to-nothing he’s got a similarly worn-out copy of Danse Macabre in his back pocket.

To the subject, finally. Needless to say, I was really excited when I first heard Flanagan was taking on Hill House, especially after Gerald’s Game. I didn’t expect it to take on Robert Wise’s 1963 version, which I would equate with Eric Clapton’s opinion of the guitar work of B.B. King: “He can do more with one string that anyone else can with an entire guitar”. Similarly, it was Wise’s use of restraint that made his Haunting all the more horrific. What I did expect was what has made Flanagan’s work stand out all along: well-drawn characters with believable motivations and arcs, and solid plotting with plenty of tension in all the right parts. And some freaky faces. He really digs those freaky faces.

All of this is present in The Haunting of Hill House, and a lot more. Instead of introducing an investigative group of outsiders to the titular house, we have the Crain family, who were the builders and first owners in the novel and previous film adaptations. In Flanagan’s version, Hugh Crain is a regular Fix-It Felix, initially seeking to “flip” or renovate Hill House for a profit. Alongside him is his lovely wife Olivia, and their children, Steven, Shirley, Theodora, Luke, and Eleanor. Note that three of the children (Theo, Luke, and Nell) have names from the novel, and one of its author (Shirley). As for Steven — maybe Stephen is a more appropriate spelling? You see where I’m going here, right folks?

As for the cast, there really are three of them: The younger Crain family, the present-day Crain family, and the remnants of the Hill family that still haunt the place. Among them are many Flanagan regulars, like the lovely Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Lulu Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Kate Siegel (also known as Mrs. Flanagan), Samantha Sloyan, James Lafferty, and Catherine Parker. Performances are solid across the board, with Gugino and Victoria Pedretti (as the adult Nell) being the stand-outs from my viewing. I was also taken by the child actor performances, the insanely adorable Violet McGraw and Julian Hilliard as the younger versions of the twins Nell and Luke, especially. They seemed to effortlessly portray the way children are able to take horrific events and integrate them into the more imaginative landscape of their interior lives, albeit in Hill House those events lay the foundation for darker developments.

The series (I really want to call it a film — it’s more like a 10-hour film to me, given its solidity) glides from past to present, deeply into the psyches of each member of the Crain family and widely at their reluctantly tethered relationships with each other. Instead of valued and cherished moments, their encounters are painful and mechanical, due to their poisoning from the influence of Hill House. Each character carries their own considerable encumbrance, only learning too late how to lighten the loads by bearing them together. Of course, I will not spoiler here, but the layers of secrets and deceptions put upon the Crains by the House’s evil influence slowly creep at them from the beyond, ultimately driving them back to the genesis of their doom.

Stylistically, Flanagan manages to bridge the gap between what I would term current and classic horror motives. While the overall story itself is a gradual, gothic tale which takes time to fully detail the characters involved with increasing tension, he punctuates the proceedings with several jump-scares (and those freaky faces) to drive each paralyzing moment home. Imagine it as a spider’s web woven between a series of rusted iron nails, and I think you’ll get the idea. Or nails driven into the lid of a bottomless casket? I’m saying too much, I think.

Stephen King, a well-known fan of Jackson’s original novel, recently tweeted to say that “I don’t usually care for this kind of revisionism, but this is great. Close to a work of genius, really.” I’m inclined to agree. It’s a rare moment when a work of such significance can be reworked in such a way that brings forth a new, but true interpretation of the aspects of the original story. But Flanagan has, and this is just a moment. The Haunting of Hill House is a marvelous example of a committed filmmaker taking on the limited series format to craft a classic tale for a modern age.  Let’s hope it sets an example for years to come.

Hereditary.

Oh, where to begin. As with the film It Follows (mentioned here), Hereditary was yet again one of those films which slipped into the festival circuit and clearly took all who encountered it unawares, prompting them to declare it The Next Big Thing in Horror, even having the cojones to compare it to mine and British film critic Mark Kermode’s cinematic holy grail, The Exorcist. I recently found out via Kermode’s YouTube channel Kermode Uncut that he and I had a similar experience with the film, first delving into the novel by William Peter Blatty (this being many years after the world had already taken this path, albeit without the gift of hindsight) after first being denied viewing it, ultimately delivering a more informed and highly anticipated experience once the film itself was finally seen. He regards the film as a perfect specimen of cinema, and I am inclined to agree with him. Both Blatty and director William Friedkin set the bar so high in 1973 that a handful of films could deign tread upon its coattails. While not necessarily on the same level, Hereditary is damn close behind.

Oh, Ari Aster. You delightful complete nutjob of a filmmaker. Even with your early short films, particularly The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen (both of which are available to view on YouTube), you clearly had it in for the whole family dynamic. Leave it to Aster to take that place where we all feel most safe, supported and free to be who we really are, and turn it into a violent and caustic minefield of harrowing fear and trepidation. I wholly encourage anyone who has not seen Hereditary to see these shorts before witnessing his first feature film, for thematically it is the latest product of his grim Darwinian urge. Like David Cronenberg and his early obsession with the individual human body as the seat of all evils, Aster sees the cult of familial relationships as a hotbed of festering fears.

The family of lambs for eventual slaughter in this case are the Grahams, with mother Annie (spec-fucking-tacularly portrayed by Toni Collette, who wholly deserves any and all awards thrown in her general direction for her performance), dealing with the emotional debris (yes, I went there) left behind after her own mother’s death, which sets up the tableau for the film. Along for the grisly ride are Gabriel Byrne (who to me will always be that dastardly Nazi bastard Kaempffer in Michael Mann’s The Keep, hopefully more on that one later), as her dutiful psychologist husband Steve, Alex Wolff (who turns in another remarkable performance) as their son Peter, and the adorably disturbing Milly Shapiro, making her film debut as their daughter Charlie. To go any further would be to spoil the proceedings, which I honestly avoided myself before seeing the film (once the initial trailer had more than piqued my interest), but throw in the always-amazing Ann Dowd into the mix, and we’ve got one hell of a capable cast.

Now, how to spew and squeal about this wonderful film without divulging its contents (not that at this point in time a number of videos and articles already have — bad, bad movie nerds). First, a bit of a forewarning is in order. Hereditary is clearly modeled after the “slow burn” films of the late ’60s and early ’70s. This means it hasn’t leaped into the current fashion of horror films, which typically begin with hinting at the Damned Thing that lies at the center of the story before chucking in the handful of its future fodder for a series of quirky “character moments” before meeting an inevitable demise. As I mentioned above, the family itself is at peril in this film, and Aster first gives us a good deal of time to get to know them all (not to mention subtly clue us into how they may be fodder-ized later on), as well as painting a lovely patina of intangible dread over the proceedings. The difference is not unlike the immediate burger and fries from your typical fast-food restaurant as opposed to the staging of courses in finer dining. We are allowed to sink into the Graham’s particular kind of misery and wholly identify with them in the process — not unlike the compared The Exorcist, where we first get to know the rosy-cheeked and innocent Regan McNeil before her descent into the bowels of deviltry. But, again, as mentioned above, the Grahams are not so innocent, and in fact are generationally the products of familial ills that have become the dark mechanisms of their current existence, which truly adds a great deal of kindling to a fire which takes to blazing glory by Hereditary‘s finale.

Another important point about the appreciation of this film is something that has been brought up in reviews, even the one by the aforementioned Mr. Kermode. While I also am pressed to acknowledge it as a weakness (not necessarily a flaw, since I don’t think it’s fair to make a criticism without providing an alternative that would benefit the argument — and like I’ve mentioned on this blog, I have intentionally removed myself from being a film “reviewer” into the role of a film “appreciator”, since movies like all forms of art are truly subjective). The point is that Hereditary is a film with two distinct halves. Without spoilering the plot, let me say that the film escalates in intensity considerably in its second half (if I had to be more precise, it’s really the end of its second act and the entirety of the third) and the underpinning required to provide a smooth transition to it from the beginning is less than would be expected. I know this is incredibly vague, but bear with me. Many have made the criticism that the events of the second half of the film were unnecessary, and that the film would be all the better for it. While I personally do not agree, I can certainly see why this has often been brought up. But as I said above, I honestly don’t know how Aster could’ve lashed together a stronger bridge between the former and latter ends of the film (that is, without obvious exposition which he tries to avoid, for the most part), so I cannot join in on this as a valid criticism. The truth is he leaves several subtle clues (well, some not so subtle) and does what he can to resolve the issue within the thematic framework of what he has constructed. Like the best of films, Hereditary bears up considerably upon repeat viewings (although so far, I have only seen it twice), and most of these clues are more apparent upon returning to them. One could relate this and the above-mentioned pace of the film as the result of this being Aster’s first stab at a feature film runtime, but I could not blame him for choices he has made. Overall, Hereditary is an absolutely enthralling experience, for those able to be patient and open-minded enough to allow its pace and accept its weaker points.

Now, for the fun part. Hereditary is a tour-de-force of unrelenting emotion, disturbing visuals (all of which amazingly captured by cinematographer Pawel Pogozelski), and superb sound design, spurred on Colin Stenson’s wonderfully weird and amorphous score. Aster, unlike the majority of filmmakers working in the genre, seems to truly grasp what horror is all about — creating a genuine sense of dread where almost anything could occur, all of it with impact (and without the use of jump-scares or blaring musical stings) and guaranteed to make even the most dyed-in-the-wool horror fan a quivering mass of exposed nerve endings by its conclusion. There are moments in the film that truly took me surprise,  and I admittedly jumped an inch or two out of my chair while watching — a delayed jump-scare, if you will. The aforementioned revelatory ending seems to create an eerie calm over the proceedings, and gosh thanks so much Mr. Aster for creeping me the fuck out from now on every time I hear Judy Collins sing Both Sides Now.

To wrap up this monster of a post, I can only say that while it has yet to be seen as any sort of classic or iconic entry in the annals of modern horror cinema, Hereditary has without a doubt made its mark on the current order, and is a great achievement for a first-time feature filmmaker. I loved the two times I’ve gotten to see it and look forward to more, as well as whatever the awesome Ari Aster has in store for us next.

Benson & Moorhead.

First of all — as always — I have to explain the dearth of posts. I know, I am the absent father of bloggers, but I’ve been somewhat productive, working on a cosmology and early history for my ongoing world setting (detailed from here), and rabidly replaying Fallout 4 with the (finally) growing list of mods available on the PS4 in excitement over the upcoming Fallout 76, in addition to working on a number of Quake texture wads which I’ve been attempting to work into maps I’ve been fiddling with (more on that to come), and writing out a script for my first serious attempt at a graphic novel, but I know that’s no excuse. “Damn you, Mister Blog Author, it’s not like you’re right there on the goddamned laptop the whole time…” Sigh. One of the things you begin to notice as you get older is that time gets sucked through the cracks so quickly you don’t even notice. To quote the great philosopher Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look every once in a while, you could miss it.” So very true, and by the way, I hope you feel better soon, Ferris.

But let us sally forth to the meat of this post. About a year ago, I stumbled across a little film on Amazon Prime titled Resolution. I had it for 48 hours on a rental and ended up watching it five times. Why? Because I found it was itching parts of my brain that a film hadn’t done in some time. It was this wonderful combination of buddy movie (the film’s main characters are longtime friends who are brought together when one tries to save the other from drug addiction) and existential horror (the desolate area where the two friends are during this rehabilitation is eventually revealed to be a source of many unexplained tragedies), leading to an ending which forces the viewer to make some kind of judgement about what they’ve just witnessed, for better or worse (hence the title). Yes, it’s a mindfuck movie, and a wonderfully enjoyable one. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but broadly if that sort of film doesn’t appeal to you (I would think anyone drawn to this blog would not be in that number, but instead interested in films that actually encourage you to participate with them on some level), you may not want to take it on. But it’s filmmakers, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, took a small budget and a bold concept and made a considerable mark on me.

Amazon Prime continued to light the way for me with their recommendation of Spring, the next film by these two madmen. Starring Lou Taylor Pucci (who I finally figured out was the teacher dude in Fede Alvarez’s killer Evil Dead remake) as a young American who leaves his turgid life behind for the romance of Italy, and meets a mysterious, beautiful woman — I know, I know — it sounds like the reverse of the usual romantic chick-flick, but believe me — you ain’t seen nothing yet. Albeit not as jarring, it’s not all that different from Miike’s Audition, with Benson and Moorhead craftily turning the whole expected model on its head. I will say no more, other than the filmmakers’ take on the rom-com genre would really get me watching Lifetime if it were the Movie of the Week.

Finally, we come to the pair’s latest offering, one saw previews for shortly after viewing Resolution — The Endless. In a wonderfully strange way (hope to hell I’m not spoilering, here), The Endless is the first film’s sequel, taking on the bizarre concepts first explored in Resolution, but with curiously mythological detail, as we have more characters to compare our own interpretations with. Benson and Moorhead (using their own first names, Justin and Aaron) portray the main characters of this entry, actually reprising their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Resolution. They have since taken a sabbatical from the cult, making a furtive stab at a life for themselves in the outside world; but eventually, it becomes obvious to them that in order to move forward in their lives, they must first confront their past. They return to the cult, and oddly find much of it and its inhabitants unchanged since their leaving, the reasons for this becoming abundantly (and horrifyingly) clear.

It’s fair to say these two have something on the ball, in my opinion. Like a small number of upcoming filmmakers (some of which I plan on detailing soon), they have a unique take on conventional genres, imbued with a solid combination of technical skill and invention. I eagerly await what more they plan on showing us.

The Void.

I’ve often trumpeted my love of films from the late ’70s and early to mid-’80s on this blog –particularly those of the horror genre — but have never taken a moment to discuss just why I find them so uniquely appealing. If I had to guess, I’d have to say that it is a combination of factors. For one, the majority of them were independently produced, and as such were free from big studio expectations. These productions were lean and mean, and not a bit afraid to tell stories that were far beyond the usual tropes. Couple this with quickly advancing filmmaking technology, not to mention a burgeoning industry of visual and makeup effects talent, and you’ve got the makings for a great deal of inspired and entertaining cinema. Also, in retrospect, I grew up on the stuff. What most folks revile as low-budget schlock and surreal storytelling I welcome like a warm and familiar blanket, temporarily distracting me from the horribly normal world.

Luckily for me, I have compatriots out there — filmmakers who were truly inspired by that long-gone golden era. Unlike the droves of direct-to-video hacks who now blatantly reproduce the same tired scenarios and cardboard characters (cue the radio music as the car filled with nubile ignoramuses flies down the backroads of Nowhere, USA, where folks tell of a killer on the loose…), these guys have got it down. They know how to tell a tale filled with tension and atmosphere, and more importantly, just how much of the Damned Thing to show beyond the shadows. In particular, I speak of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, and their fine little gem of a time capsule entitled The Void.

From the initial trailer shown online, I was ready for this one. Like It Follows before it, The Void showed a great deal of promise from the get-go: I immediately imagined John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and The Thing had a baby with good old Howard Phillips Lovecraft acting as midwife, and soon realized I wasn’t far off the mark. Thanks to the glories of modern digital technology, I was able to see the film on opening night with video-on-demand — otherwise, I would’ve probably had to wait until it was released on Blu-ray or DVD.

The Void doesn’t waste a bit of time getting the viewer into the story. Before we know it, Officer Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) is delivering a mysteriously injured man to a nearby hospital — one which, due to an upcoming move to a newer building, is currently functioning in a limited capacity. Here a number of other characters are thrown into the mix, including Allison (Kathleen Monroe), the head nurse on staff, not to mention Carter’s wife, and Sheriff Mitchell, played by none other than Art Hindle, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Brood fame. Pretty soon afterward things begin to go awry, as a number of creepy cultists (pictured above) encircle the building — not to enter but to keep anyone from getting out. Needless to say, but things don’t get any better for them from here.

The film continues along a disjointed and surreal path, filled with spectacular visions and horrific monstrosities. Major kudos as always from me for filmmakers who dare to simply show a story instead of telling it, awkwardly using characters to spew narrative instead of having the confidence to let the viewers sort out the goings-on for themselves. Gillespie and Kostanski have that confidence, and only allow what little information the audience needs to advance, and even then leaves a great deal to their interpretation. The practical effects are low-budget but beautifully applied, and create moments of abject horror and confoundment. Overall, the acting is serviceable but more than enough to carry the narrative, and amid the hypnagogic visuals and an atmospheric soundtrack including the work of personal fave Brian “Lustmord” Williams give a proper commentary while presenting a world gone horribly — and wonderfully — weird.

While not a direct throwback to past films per se, The Void takes its influences and hammers out a solid homage to the genre jewels of my youth and still manages to charter bold new territory. No spoilers here, but I would be very pleased if the success of this film granted the filmmakers with more opportunities to continue telling such ambitiously torrid tales. If you agree with any of the reasons listed above and The Void is playing in your area, I wholeheartedly encourage you to go see it. If not, do like I did and seek it out via video-on-demand. But to paraphrase Nietzsche, if you gaze long into The Void, it will inevitably gaze into you.

Arrival.

Before Star Wars leaped into our media consciousness in 1977, science fiction films were considerably different. After being a schlock stock of trade in the 1950’s and early 1960’s with a tirade of films featuring someone or something either becoming significantly larger, mutated or both (Zappa’s Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch pops into mind: “All of them HORRIBLY LARGE from RADIATION”), the genre was brought into more slower-paced, thought-provoking territory. With Godard’s Alphaville in 1965, and continuing three years later with Kubrick’s 2001, the science fiction film became a format for more mature concepts. While the giant whatever sub-genre continued into the 1970’s (due mainly to the efforts of schlockmeister Bert I. Gordon — don’t get me wrong, I love his films), they were countered with the likes of The Andromeda Strain, Solaris, not to mention Steven Spielberg’s entry the same year Star Wars premiered — Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Over the past few decades, a scant few other fruits have dropped from the “serious sci-fi” tree, which include Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking Blade Runner in 1982, Terry Gilliam’s visionary 12 Monkeys in 1995, Ron Howard’s moving take on the Carl Sagan novel Contact in 1997 and most recently 2004’s Primer and Moon in 2009. Most recently, in the vein of all of the above and more, comes Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

Arrival is the tale of Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist who is thrust from a life of bland academia into the forefront of an alien invasion. Paired with Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a mathematician, they are tasked with trying to communicate with the inhabitants of an alien craft, one of twelve that have appeared above different countries on Earth. Colonel Weber (Forrest Whitaker), makes them aware of the global situation, albeit from a military point of view. The rest of the film is about how they not only manage to communicate with the visitors but also with each other.

While avoiding spoilers (believe me, I hate them much more than you do), that last sentence bears more review. As I have stressed throughout this writing, this is no Independence Day. It is slower paced, logical and heady, but not without a wealth of surprising ideas and intimate emotion. A bit of patience is required for those used to more action-oriented fare, but for fans of the movies mentioned above, it is a revelation. Communication is the main theme of the film, and, like my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, it is about the struggle to surmount the differences to find the greater good of what we all share. Cue the music:

Adams is incredible (as always), and Renner, who basically plays to the audience’s emotional state throughout the film, more than fills the role. Whitaker makes a credibly crusty Colonel, although I’m much more looking forward to him in the upcoming Rogue One. While the effects are seamless and awe-inspiring, the cinematography spot-on and the music successfully reflecting both alien and human themes, the real stars of the show are Eric Heisserer’s screenplay and Villeneuve’s direction. Going into detail about how they are would truly spoil the fun for anyone who hasn’t seen Arrival, but needless to say, if you’re a fan of “old school” science fiction with genuinely thought-provoking and emotionally moving themes, this film is definitely for you.

Gene Wilder (1933 -2016).

To some, he’s Willy Wonka (not that chirpy, bubble-headed nebbish Johnny Depp played in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory), the wary misanthrope who wielded sly surrealism and biting humor to his advantage in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. It’s entirely possible you’ve seen him in this role on the interwebs:

To others, he’s the Waco Kid, that gunfighter with impossibly fast hands and an equally impressive constitution for alcohol in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. But to me, he’ll always be Victor von Frankenstein (that’s FRAHN-ken-STEEN) in one of my all-time favorite movies, Young Frankenstein. From “Walk this way” (which actually inspired the classic Aerosmith hit), to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (not to mention the dreaded name of Frau Blücher!), the movie never fails to entertain — a good part due to Wilder’s writing and performance in the lead role. He went on and starred in several films with his consummate co-star, the brilliant Richard Pryor. He was also accepted the Old Vic, studied acting under Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg, and was a champion fencer. Later in life, he took up writing and released several novels, as well as promoting awareness to ovarian cancer, which took both his mother and wife Gilda Radner. Not bad for a kid from Milwaukee named Jerome Silberman.