The Fractal Hall Journal

And we’ll finish the week with some films, listed by (and why the hell not) creature.

Aliens!

Well, let’s face it, it’s the obvious one in this slot. But I’m also going to acknowledge the pluralicious sequel for being the finest military SF film ever made, and the first really scary scary movie I ever saw. Not quite making the top spot is Signs. I like M. Night Shyamalan’s films a lot, and this one terrified the life out of me in the cinema, although I’ll have to own up to being easily terrified.

Alien

Best cast of any film on this list. Best creature design. Best director. And in all honesty, more a haunted house flick than anything else.

Ghosts!

No Patrick Swayze on this list. Going to have to acknowledge another M. Night one, as The Sixth Sense probably came closest to giving me a heart attack than a truckfull of doughnuts. Also, Below, a story about a haunted submarine. Directed by Pitch Black’s David Twohy and co-written by Darren Aronofsky, it’s a brilliantly creepy flick that didn’t get a wide release because, I think, the studio was put off by the proximity to the fucking dire Ghost Ship. The best horror film I ever picked up randomly at Blockbuster.

The Haunting

A close adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, legendary director Robert Wise proves without a doubt that the scariest things ever put on film are, well, not actually there at all. It’s the perfect Christmas Eve ghost story.

Sea Monsters!

Not an incredibly crowded category, really, so 1998’s Deep Rising doesn’t have much competition to make it on this list. It was a fun little creature feature in its time, but I suspect it’s dated a hell of a lot.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

And speaking of dated, while this film is undoubtably crude and somewhat tame compared to, well, practically every other horror film ever made, it’s fascinating, not least due to the influence it had on horror as a genre, the ground-breaking creature suit, and the creature’s status as a true horror icon. On an artistic level, the film does actually have an odd, engaging dream-like quality. Also, I remember watching the video of this loads when I was a kid.

Vampires!

Damn, there’s a lot in this category, not least the one reviewed earlier this week. In terms of overall significance, I’ve got to mention Nosferatu, Universal’s Dracula, and the Hammer stuff, all of which set the tone. Interview With The Vampire took a different perspective on the myth, and Steven Norrington’s Blade pumped the undead into an action flick. For a different take again, Willem Defoe is extraordinary in Shadow of the Vampire.

Near Dark

Oh, I can’t be doing with the erotic undertones of the romantic children of the night. Monstrous superhuman killing machines is more like it. And Lance Henriksen as the head of a redneck vampire clan? Hells yes. Action, gore, black humour; this is essentially an undead western, expanding considerably the explosive violence that characterised Hammer’s take on this kind of monster.

Werewolves!

Werewolves as teenage metaphor? Ginger Snaps. Werewolves as dark, gruesome comedy? An American Werewolf in London. Really shit werewolves? The sequel to the latter.

Dog Soldiers

Talk about a film that has it all. It’s a squad-on-a-mission action film, it’s a claustrophobic thriller, it’s a gore-fest, and on top of everything it’s very, very funny. Stupidly impressive for a debut film, with a great cast and creature effects. The disturbing, creepy movements of the wolves were achieved by sticking ballet dancers on stilts and in fur suits, which is just the kind of crazy we like round here.

Zombies!

Done to, erm, death in both fil-ums and comics recently, the living dead have always been of more interest to my buddies than to me. So take the following recommendations as coming from someone with only a passing interest in the genre, who’s only really seen the modern stuff, and as such is inevitably blasphemous.

28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead (the remake). Both on the list for being way, way better than I could’ve expected. While the connoiseur may like her zombies slow, I liked the frantic energy of speeding the suckers up.

Shaun of the Dead

Simon Pegg is one of the funniest writers alive, but the revelation of this film wasn’t just that it was hilarious, but that it was a really, really good horror film. Along with Spaced and Hot Fuzz, this film sets up Pegg, Wright and Frost as England’s greatest contribution to world culture.

Bonus: Much discussed elsewhere on the internet so you probably don’t need me to point them out to you, but nevertheless the Fractal Hall recommends the following zombie-related goodies:

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead

You may have noticed a whole lot of undead titles clogging up your comic shop like a shopping centre full of stinking, shuffling corpses. Well, this is the best of them, helped in no small way by a couple of crazy awesome artists working in black and white: Tony Moore on the early issues, Charlie Adlard more recently. Adlard, of course, worked on the excellent (and overlooked) first year of the X-Files tie-in comic about twelve years ago, fondly remembered at the Hall.

Jonathan Coulton’s Re: Your Brains

No comment. Just bask in the genius, people.

Honourable Mention:

The Hall’s No. 1 Spanish Civil War Based Dark Fantasy:

Pan’s Labyrinth

Doesn’t really fit into any of the other categories here, but I needed to put it somewhere. One of the best films of last year, never mind horror films. Guillermo Del Toro’s masterpiece (and yes, I took Blade II into consideration), there’s no way I could do it justice in a couple of sentences. If you only watch one film on this list, make it this one.

After talking about some films I enjoyed, I think I’ll go to the other end of the spectrum. Roll lightning, thunder, and ominous drums: prepare yourself for an overview of the Worst Film I’ve Ever Seen.

Jeebus Wept, have there been some shite Stephen King adaptations. The man’s a very good storyteller, but rarely does his particular style translate well. Dreamcatcher is a solid-enough novel. Not spectacular, but notable because the main character suffers a crippling car accident similar to the author’s infamous injury, the book being in part King’s reaction to it.

It’s an alien invasion plot, including an obsessive military commander, body snatching and grotesque alien spores that echo both 50s style B-movie invaders and the more modern creatures from the Alien series. It’s the latter that feature in the most memorable sequence. The aliens spores are like chestbursters, except their chosen delivery point is the arse. So the characters name them shit weasels. This leads to a scene where one of them keeps the weasel imprisoned in a toilet by sitting on the lid.

It is unbearable tense, horrific, gory and absolutely hilarious, and I thought it actually translated pretty well to the film. That, however, is the only good bit and I suspect that if you weren’t familiar with the black humour of the novel, the scene’s laughable for all the wrong reasons.

The film. My God, I’ve never seen a film so uniquely bad in its own way than this one. I’ve seen worse films in terms of acting, script, more boring, more outrageous, more offensive. Hell, I’ve seen technically worse King adaptations. But never one that unfolds like this, or with the calibre of the creators involved, writer William Goldman and director Lawrence Kasdan.

Though the novel is fairly run-of-the-mill, as with all his stuff it’s well written and well paced with a few typical King flashback scenes involving childhood in Maine, and you could practically shoot a decent flick just by following the book. The first third of the film stays close to the source, right through the fart jokes related to the shit weasel’s first victim’s bowels and fuck me if that isn’t the strangest sentence I’ve ever written.

The turning point is easy to point out. One of the main characters, played by Damian Lewis, gets possessed by the alien entity. He rides out of a shed on a snow-bike. And then throws a campy grin at the camera.

Suddenly, Lewis starts channelling a really bad version of Frank Gorshin’s Riddler and the whole film collapses into stupidity. Lewis has since alleged he was doing an impression of Malcolm McDowell. What he was actually doing was being shit.

So, up until the last fifteen minutes or so, the film’s played as a jokey piss-take. Now, the ending of the book involves a disabled man who was childhood friends with the main characters. He’s the ‘dreamcatcher’ of the title, the psychic who keeps the childhood group linked throughout their lives, and he’s the key to the defeat of the invasion.

I cannot describe the complete incomprehensible insanity of the ending. From what I can tell, the psychic disabled man is in fact a good alien made up of golden dust, and the bad alien is evil and made of red dust, and the two dust shapes fight and everything is wrapped up in really bad CGI.

None of that happens in the book. It would actually have been cheaper, and more understandable, to film the book’s ending. Not only does the film’s intepretation not make any sense, it isn’t foreshadowed anywhere, it’s completely random, and because of the special effects the sequence must have been slaved over for weeks, with no one pointing out it was utterly rubbish. How much money did they spend on this piece of crap? My God, it’s not even a rushed, badly cut bit they threw together when the budget ran out. They had to animate it.

To this day, I have no idea what the story is with this film, but there has to be one. Goldman adapted Misery, for fuck’s sake. Either (i) an insane Hollywood producer interfered or (ii) the first third was written by Goldman, the rest was written by a really bad creative writing class, and the finale was found smeared across the door of a public toilet in runny excrement.

EDIT 21st March 08: In trying to stick this post on the Journal’s “About” page, I’ve managed to wipe it out. I think I’ve got a back-up version somewhere but I’m not particularly enclined to go digging around for it unless someone has a burning need to know about libel and slander under British law.

Having said that, I’ll go looking if someone does want it. If not, trust me: the post was really, really interesting.

As much as this is true of any film, I think whether or not you like this one will depend on your mindset going in. It’s an easy film to dislike, in particular if you’re not inclined to take this kind of overblown horror flick seriously. And it is very over the top.

Of interest to the comics readers amongst us, this is the adaptation of Steve Miles and Ben Templesmith’s IDW series that was originally a film pitch. The hook: a vampire clan’s assault on an Alaska town in the far north during the month of the year that the sun doesn’t rise.

What I found impressive was the way the film makers were able to translate the comic to the screen. And ‘translation’ is the correct word, here, as Templesmith’s very specific kind of art is adapted to suit live action imagery. Short of an animated film, there was no way his murky, exaggerated, surreal style could be faithfully represented. Instead, thanks to New Zealand’s now-legendary Weta Workshop, what appears on-screen is true to Templesmith’s vision, and though slightly more grounded still retains his fingerprints. The main antagonist’s two henchpires are perfect translations of characters in the comic, not slavishly accurate but taken certain visual ticks and porting them over to a different medium.

The story is tightened considerable as a screenplay, a much improved later draft if we take the comic as a flawed first pass at the story. Characters are added, a few superfluous ones removed (the vampire hunter from New Orleans who’s only somewhat jarring role is to set up future stories in the same universe), and relationships are defined differently for dramatic purposes. There’s a better sense of the passage of time in the movie, more of an insight into the agonising wait for the sun to appear at the end of the month, but also room for a few more hokey standard horror story situations. Where the film is most successful is in the creepy set-pieces, either taken from the source (the first sighting of the vampires, the fate of the town, the final fight) or unique to the film (the ship run aground at the very beginning).

It is incredibly violent. As it’s rated 15 instead of 18, I can only assume it’s impossible to get the higher rating in Britain on violence or swearing alone. There’s blood and gore all over the place, including the gruesome dispatching of a vampire child. In another perfect translation of Ben Templesmith’s work, the arterial spattering of dozens of decapitated corpses is something to see.

It gave me the willies more than once, but I’m a big scaredy cat with these things. As a violent shocker I thought it was a great piece of entertainment, but if it isn’t the kind of thing you buy into it may come off as a little silly.

A print of Hammer Film Productions’ Dracula has been on limited release in Blighty recently, and I managed to catch a Halloween showing. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know), its re-certification as a 12A was “controversial”. If so, what a load of bollocks. The world has moved on, and these days there are dodgier episodes of Doctor Who.

While later Hammer films are anything but subtle, and while this film was considered exploitation fare when it first came out (X-rated, incredibly, which means it was considered far more adult relative to its time than the film I’m going to review tomorrow), the conservative state of cinema in the 50s meant that even at the adult end of the film spectrum it couldn’t be a no-holds-barred gore fest. But that didn’t mean the director didn’t want to amp up the violence when necessary. As a result of particular social circumstances that are unlikely to occur again, the film is probably the best example of a Dracula adaptation portraying upper-class sexual repression exploding into violence. What gore there is must have been a revelation to contemporary audiences. Rather than the reserved black and white of the Universal monster flicks, now the blood was a bright technicolour red, spread over Dracula’s mouth and eyes, the make-up and performance making him not so much demonic as an alpha carnivore, the ravenous predator that our mousy little backbrain still fears.

All the characters are so dry and Victorian that even subtle changes are highlighted, for example when Dracula brings out the sexuality of his female victims, or even in the grief that Michael Gough’s character displays in his sister’s tomb; grief he was unable to reveal after her (first) death, but surfaces when he realises she’s become a monster. This subtlety of subtext is non-existent in modern adaptations, where it’s all tits and syphilis and Lucy getting knobbed by a werewolf in the rose garden. And speaking of Michael Gough, I never realised that the screen’s finest Alfred the Butler had a history with Hammer, or rich men in cloaks. Suddenly Tim Burton’s casting motives are revealed.

The film has some interesting diversions from the original story. Lucy and Mina’s roles are switched around a bit, and as always a few members of the vampire hunting crew are dropped- although, for once, Arthur Holmwood is the main civilian. Most interestingly, Dracula’s nefarious scheme to move to Britain isn’t used in the plot, and the film’s setting appears to be Austria or Germany. This helps to give the film it’s own atmosphere and setting, and by tying it directly to continental Europe gives it a different vibe to the usual take on Victorian England. And note that even in the 50s, the idea of vampires turning into other creatures was considered old-fashioned. Even sixty years ago, the ‘classic’ interpretation of vampire fiction was being questioned and modernised.

Both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are perfect. Never have these two characters been better served by the men playing them. Lee is graceful and imposing, towering over the rest of the cast, dominating the film although he’s on screen for, what, fifteen minutes? And rather than his ice-cold villain persona, Cushing’s focused and logical vampire hunter is the perfect science-hero using reason as a weapon to combat the unknown.

Afterwards, all I wanted to do was talk about the film, a good indicator of its quality. And in an objective sense, I couldn’t have been the only person in the cinema exhilarated by the two most iconic scenes: Dracula, racing the dawn back to his castle, whipping the black coach’s horses into a frenzy; and Van Helsing tearing down the curtains in the castle, using two candlesticks held in the shape of a cross to drive the vampire into the sunlight and to his death.

A month too late for Halloween, and it’s horror week at the Hall. I’m writing this intro after drafting the rest of this week’s posts, so I’m going to mention a few things that got left out.

Tomorrow’s post is about Hammer Horror’s original Dracula. Even rubbish adaptations of the story are usually of interest insofar as it’s fun to see what gets chopped and changed this time round. I know I’ve never seen a film or television version that’s completely faithful to the novel, although a friend more knowledgable than I has told me that the BBC did an accurate one in the 70s.

The original film version, Nosferatu, had largely cosmetic changes due to copyright issues. Universal’s movie made the Count a Hollywood icon, but took as its source the cut-down stage play of the book. In more recent times, from the Langella/Olivier flick through Francis Ford Coppolla’s, to the BBC’s decidedly odd take last year (by odd, I mean crap), the tale has been edited out or added, in particular with regard to Dracula’s secret origin as Vlad Tepes.

Presumably due to the novel’s large cast the vampire hunters tend to find their numbers reduced, though rarely does either Mina or Lucy get the boot. While I can understand cutting down an unwieldy number of players, I have no idea why the women’s names and roles get switched so often. Perhaps the plot of the novel has become so familiar that the film makers are forever looking for a fresh take on the material. Whatever the motive, the most faithful film adaptation of Dracula would probably consist of a selection of various scenes taken from all the different variations.

At the end of the week, I’ll highlight some horror films according to type. One heading that’s conspicuously missing is Lovecraft-inspired movies. Here at the Hall, it’s fair to say, we’re huge Cthulhu Mythos junkies, from the sickly old bigot himself to his legion of emulators and torchbearers. There’s a real difficulty in creating effective Mythos spin-offs on celluloid (or, to drag ourselves into the Twenty-First, digital). While there are plenty of comics and written fiction that deal with HP’s themes effectively (I’m thinking of addressing some of these under the tentatively-titled Tentacled Tales of Terror banner, though that’s a little too much alliteration for a Monday morning), there are few other versions that merit attention. While many video games appropriate themes and iconography (Half-life springs to mind), the best in terms of atmosphere and accuracy has to be Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, a game so terrifying I had to stop playing it for fear of being driven mad.

Film wise, there’s a natural speed bump in the development process where the most effective Lovecraftian beasties are never truly on stage, but rather hinted at, because what the audience imagines is far more powerful blahblahblah etc. There’s low-budget Mythos film knocking around that I’d be very interested to see, one that takes A Shadow Over Innsmouth as its starting point, and using some of Lovecraft’s themes as a metaphor for society’s treatment of homosexuals.

Without a doubt the finest concept for a Mythos film is 2005’s Call of Cthulhu, a modern take on a silent film and a must-see for anyone who likes their horror, the hook being what if the fledgling film industry had made a contemporary Lovecraft adaptation, complete with Cabinet of Dr Calgari style lighting effects and a truly spectacular stop-motion Elder God…?

So, to follow on from last time, the main thing that got me to buy a recent Vertigo title was (i) a previously established character and (ii) a creator I really like. Interesting, because I’m sure I was reading somewhere that it’s this formula that contributes to Vertigo’s hits, i.e. a creator or a character with a strong fanbase. I’m not sure how true this is, mind, and certainly wouldn’t account for Fables‘ success.

Essentially, there is nothing that engages me in Vertigo’s recent crop of new titles. There have been a few other titles recently that I could see fitting in very well at Vertigo, ones that I’ve really enjoyed and started picking up after buying the first issue to try, but actually get published by Image: Phonogram, The Nightly News and The Walking Dead.

Un-Men, another Swamp Thing spin-off, recently hobbled out into the world. I didn’t get this one because I wasn’t interested in the theme-park freak premise, wasn’t familiar with the talent involved, and thought the sample pages in Hellblazer were unengaging. Crossing Midnight: Like some of Mike Carey’s work, dislike some. Not particularly interested in the Japanese/fantasy setting, so I passed.

Next, two Brian Wood titles: DMZ and Northlanders. I’ve heard good things about DMZ, but not to the point that I want to buy the first collection to see if I like it. I think I saw the first issue online somewhere, but the interface was so shitty I gave up. I’ll probably give this a try sooner or later. The viking-based story of the latter title, however, doesn’t interest me, so I’ll pass on that.

100 Bullets: Read a couple of collections, and a few individual issues, and just cannot get into it. Not for me. American Virgin: Really not interested in right-wing American teenagers. Army@Love: I think Rick Veitch is a very good writer, but at this point I’m too sickened by the Iraq occupation to be entertained by it.

In fact, the Vertigo titles I rate the highest that I’m in the process of buying regularly are actually in collection form: Absolute Sandman, Y: The Last Man and Fables. The latter title actually confirms something Christopher Butcher mentions in his article: I was happy to pay a chunk of money for the first collection off the back of exceptionally good word-of-mouth, as well as a first impression that this was the kind of thing that would interest me. What’s even more significant is that the first and second volumes aren’t even incredibly strong: they’re good, but it’s only with the third volume that I felt it started to justify the hype. So I must have spent almost £20 before I got well and truly hooked.

The best thing Vertigo ever did was offer up the first issue of Y: The Last Man for free online. Both my cohort Marcel and I were immediately engaged, and I know a number of people who had the same reaction. From my friendship group alone, that one free issue has guaranteed Vertigo around £180 worth of business (probably more) once all the collections have been published. I can’t imagine our experience has been unique. Of course, what helps is an incredibly intriguing premise and probably the best premier issue of any series I’ve ever read; certainly the most striking. How can you not want to find out what happens next? Not everything works out as well, of course. Their free first issue of Testament also convinced me to get the title, but before I could I found out it had been cancelled and decided against picking it up.

Whatever happens, next year will be an interesting one for the imprint.

This quote from a recent post on Christopher Butcher’s Comics212 has prompted me to brew up a post I’ve been mulling over for a while:

Oh, and I outright don’t buy the argument that readers won’t sample a new IP (intellectual property) when it’s $20 rather than $3… They do it in every popular medium including dvds, cds, video games, movies, oh and BOOKS, like from bookstores. Between internet previews, magazine previews, advance reader copies, POP material and more, there’s plenty of ways to get the customer interested in your project well before it arrives in stores…

The article resonated with two things I’ve seen being talked about online recently, the apparent drop in circulation on comics from DC’s Vertigo imprint, and the big drop in sales between the first issue of a comic and the second. I’ll try and avoid confusing the general with the specific by commenting on my own buying habits rather than that of comics buyers as a group, and by leaving out the retailer’s side of things.

I’ve got a fair few Issue Ones bloating up the long boxes at the moment. While I’m loathe to bin comics on the grounds that I’m sure someone would like them, I suspect that on the next round of weeding there’s a lot of stuff due to meet its destiny either in a charity shop or a recycling facility. And while a lot of these first issues aren’t bad, but there are usually a variety of reasons why I didn’t get any others.

Take the recent Booster Gold series. I really, really enjoyed the first issue, in particular the way it seemed like a better continuation of 52 (a series I loved) than Countdown is. Any other time it would’ve gone on the pull list, but I just happened to be taking some other titles off at the time, so I didn’t carry on with it. I may well end up getting it in trade form at some point. And after all, it’s easy to pick up a single issue for, say, two quid than it is to make a £24 commitment over a year. Other first issues just stink, of course, or for one reason or another just don’t click with me. I can appreciate why people like Marvel Adventures: Iron Man, but it just isn’t for me. Now, with the recent Vertigo stuff, I haven’t even been picking up the first issues. I’m not saying the following reasons are true of everyone who buys comics, or the reason why Vertigo seems to be in decline, but they’re definitely why I haven’t been picking up any of their new stuff.

Let’s start with a recent Vertigo launch I have been buying. Significantly, this isn’t a new title, but a change in writing staff. Not long ago, I read that Scottish author Ian Rankin would be doing an arc on Hellblazer. Immediately, I was geared up to buy the comic. Rankin is high on my list of living writers, his Rebus books not just excellent crime novels, but extraordinary works full stop. As it turns out, I don’t know when (if ever) his Hellblazer stuff is due, but around the time I started to keep an eye on the title Andy Diggle came on.

I bought Andy Diggle’s run on Adam Strange completely randomly for bugger-all on eBay, and fucking loved it to the point that I was happy to pick up anything I see with his name on the cover. Having him come on Hellblazer at the same time I’d finished reading some of the early Jamie Delano stuff, along with Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run, was just good timing. So on the list it went.

More on this next time.

On a recent trip to Edinburgh, I was somewhat surprised to come across this graffiti on the side of the Hilton Hotel:

I don’t know what the new Scottish Parliamentary Government is playing at. This seems an odd way to announce what I assume to be a British Initiative. I shall be watching with interest how they choose to implement the new ASBOs (Anti-social Superhuman Behaviour Orders). Of course, if you were to set up your secret base in Scotland, there’s nowhere better than beneath the Scott Monument, presumably built as a Victorian gothic ICBM.

I have two Elder Gods by my keyboard. A dichotomy of good and evil, of chaos and order. A big plastic robot and a mis-shapen squiddy-face that scares the cats.

PRIMUS v. CTHULHU: Fanfiction that Writes Itself.

Simon Furman’s tale of the Transformer God and Lord of Light, sealed for eons inside a metallic prison gradually reshaped into Cybertron, blew my mind when I was eleven. Many (many, many. Many.) people dismiss the recent Transformers revival because of its nature as, well, a toy advertisment. But I grew up with the things, and as well as warm fuzzy nostalgia, I also remember the epic scope of the old UK Transformers title, where Furman was given huge licence to do what he wanted with his run.

The particularly hefty chunk of plastic above originated from the Japanese cartoon continuity. I don’t know whether Furman ever got credit (or more importantly payment) for creating Primus during the character’s recent use, and I forgot to ask at the last Bristol Expo.

Meanwhile, in the black-beyond-the-shade-of-everlasting-night corner, Dread Cthulhu, dark and smelly God of Pustulence. True story: the week I ordered Him, I found out I hadn’t got a job I’d recently been interviewed for. The very morning He arrived, I found out the succesful applicant had dropped out and the job was mine. Freaked me out, and no mistake. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t take it.

One of this toy’s unique attributes is a not-unpleasant but certainly distinctive plasticky aroma. One that can cometimes be detected wafting through different parts of the house, regardless of where Dread Cthulhu is himself currently residing. Consumer notice: Please check the exact details of the deal you are making when you buy this item, in particular with regard to your immortal soul.