John Kenneth Muir's Blog, page 903
May 1, 2012
The Horror Lexicon #12: Are You Ready for Your Close-up? (The Video Camera)
One
of my favorite lines in all of horror cinema comes from The Blair Witch Project
(1999). Josh (Joshua Leonard) gazes
through a video camera view-finder at Heather (Heather Donohue) and trenchantly
notes that the picture isn’t “quite
reality.”
He’s
right, of course. And that’s part of the
reasons we love movies so much. For ninety minutes or two hours, the
camera becomes our eyes, and what we see through that camera isn’t quite
reality. It’s heightened reality. It’s
manipulated reality. It’s shaped and
edited reality.
Given
how crucially important film grammar is in constructing an effective horror
film, in crafting a sense of escalating unease and terror, it’s only natural,
perhaps, that the camera itself has become an important player and topic of debate
within the texts of many popular horror films.
Thanks
in part to technological improvements, the portable home video camera became
affordable and lightweight in the mid-1980s.
Accordingly, a revolution in home movies began, and very shortly, this
trend “trickled down” into horror movie narratives. Videographers or amateur movie makers started
out by appearing in the “victim pool” of mid-1980s horror films ( April
Fool’s Day [1986], Friday the 13th VIII: Jason
Takes Manhattan [1989]), but more than that the camera soon became a player itself in the longstanding social
argument about the value of horror as a genre.
Consider
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1989), and the notorious scene in
which Otis (Tom Towles) and Henry (Michael Rooker) go out “hunting” and kill a
randomly-selected suburban family. They
record the horrific murder and rape spree on their camcorder and later -- while
drinking a few beers -- kick back and watch their blood-thirsty escapades. Otis even rewinds the tape, thoroughly
entertained: “I want to see it again.”
The
issue here is quite simply this: do we, as human beings, actually revel in the
suffering of other people? Does the video
camera actually transform another person’s suffering into our entertainment? This isn’t
just a horror movie question, either. This is a
real life question. Consider how often the grotesque footage of Saddam Hussein’s dead, bloody sons was replayed on cable television. Or think how often the terror of the 9/11
attacks on the WTC were rerun in the days following the horrific event. Do we, by watching recorded events, become complicit in a
news event? That’s certainly the
territory of such films as Ringu (1998) and The Ring (2002).
A
similar was developed in Flatliners (1990). There, a yuppie
doctor-in-training, Joe Hurley (William Baldwin) secretly filmed all of his
sexual conquests, and then watched and relived them later. He had taken a liberty with his “lovers” and
would have to pay for that moral trespass. His actions had consequences. The video camera could be used to commit a crime, an invasion of personal space and privacy.
In
the aforementioned Blair Witch Project (1999), the video-camera, as Josh notes,
functions as a shield, distancing the
viewer from unpleasant reality. Josh
notes that the camera offers a “filtered
reality” in which one can “pretend
everything isn’t quite the way it is.”
In
other words, the act of perceiving reality through a camera lens distances
oneself from the objects and situations perceived. In a non-horror setting, this was actually
the subtext for the final episode of the popular sitcom Seinfeld in 1998. Jerry and his friends watched a crime being
conducted (a car-jacking) through a video camera, but did not intervene to actually stop the
crime as it was occurring. The apparently-passive act of
gazing through the camera enabled George, Elaine, Kramer and Jerry to see
themselves as being somehow apart from reality, and apart from community, even
from the law itself. There was no need to help
the victim of a crime. They were merely…watching,
as they would a TV show.
With
the heyday of found footage films upon us (including [REC], Cloverfield,
Paranormal Activity, Apollo 18 and the like) we as viewers are asked
again and again to reckon with the role of the camera in our lives, and in
horrific scenarios.
But
where The Blair Witch Project asks us to assemble a sense of order
out of grainy pixelized images that didn’t make sense in a conventional fashion
and didn’t reveal anything about the looming threat (the Blair Witch), these
later examples of the form strive more for certainty than uncertainty. The Demon in Paranormal Activity (2009),
for example, presents for a full-frame close-up at the end of the film, just so
the audience gets its money’s worth out of a “creature feature.” This (dumb...) ending belies the fact that more
people own cameras now than at any time in human history, and nobody has ever,
anywhere, recorded footage of a demon. Films like Paranormal Activity don’t
use the camera to reveal how our eyes can lie, only to assure that audience
expectations are met.
The
camera can also be a social good in the horror film.
It can be a tool of investigation and observation ( The Lost World: Jurassic Park,
Poltergeist ), but more often the point of many horror films is that you can’t
really hide from terror behind the eye-piece.
The camera may be a filter, but, in the final analysis, it’s a filter
that doesn’t protect you. Beyond the camera
lens, life is happening in all its unpredictable, horrific, and sometimes
wondrous forms.
The greatest terror associated with the video camera is that it could be all that survives a terrible event, a witness to death, and to your very end. Years later, your footage might be found...
The
video camera and videographer appear in (but are not limited to) such films as:
Dead
of Winter (1985), April Fool’s Day (1986), Slaughter
High (1986), Cellar Dweller (1988), Friday
the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), A
Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1989), Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer (1989), Flatliners (1990), Mr.
Frost (1990), Puppet Master 2 (1991), Basket
Case 3: Progeny (1992), Prom Night IV: Deliver us From Evil
(1992), Man’s Best Friend (1993) Brainscan (1994),
Scream (1996), Anaconda (1997), Lost
World: Jurassic Park (1997), Scream 2 (1997), Ringu
(1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Rage: Carrie 2
(1999), The Descent (2006), [REC]
(2007) Diary of the Dead (2007), Cloverfield (2008), Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), Apollo
18 (2011).
Cult Movie Review: Stake Land (2010)
The
world has gone straight to Hell in Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (2010), an
impressive post-apocalyptic horror film about a worldwide vampire plague. In this tale, America as we know it has
fallen, and our leaders in Washington D.C. have fled in a panic. The survivors of the plague who remain in the
U.S.A. attempt to eke out a nomadic existence but must contend with well-armed “cults”
-- like the skin-head Brotherhood -- that dominate large swaths of the South.
In
more personal terms, Stake Land follows the journey of a
sensitive young man named Martin (Connor Paolo) as he reckons with the new
world disorder. Martin’s family-- including a baby sibling -- were
murdered by a vampire, but he was unexpectedly rescued by a taciturn vampire
slayer called Mister (Nick Damici). Now,
Martin and Mister travel together towards New Eden in Canada, a locale where
some semblance of civilization is reputed to exist.
During their many travels through the heartland, Mister trains Martin how to kill
vampires. This section of the film
reminded me strongly of The Road (2009), another
post-apocalyptic, rite-of-passage-styled film that featured a similar brand of
father-son relationship. In both
instances, we get a harsh paternal figure, but we feel sympathy for him -- despite his roughness -- because we know
he is preparing his “son” for that tough time, inevitably, when he will no
longer be around to help the boy.
On
the long road to New Eden, Martin and Mister cross swords with the loathsome
Jebedia Loven (Michael Cerveris), leader of the Christianist Brotherhood cult,
and even form an ad-hoc family with a number of other survivors, some of whom
survive, and some don’t. Among these are
a Catholic Nun (Kelly McGillis), a young pregnant woman, Belle (Danielle
Harris), an African-American man, Willie (Sean Nelson), and, eventually, the
assertive Peggy (Bonnie Dennison). Each
of these characters is colorfully drawn, and every time we lose one to the
vampires (or the Brotherhood), it hurts.
If
George Romero had crafted a vampire film, it might look much like the
extraordinary Stake Land (2010). Given
Romero’s stature in the horror genre, that’s a compliment. And what I mean by it is that Stake
Land is a work of genius (yes, genius) because it is not merely a
horror movie about vampires, but a horror movie about how we, as human beings,
might react to vampires, or more accurately, to a world gone to hell because of
a vampire plague.
Accordingly,
Jim Mickle’s film gazes squarely at human nature, and finds it (mostly)
wanting. The film studies how some of us
(the worst of us?) pinpoint in disaster and pain only the opportunity to
exploit others, to seize power, dominate our brothers, and radically re-engineer
society along certain lines, with religion and religious faith as the explicit excuses to do so.
Or
as one character astutely notes in the film, “Where’d all the hate come from?”
And
isn’t that, really, the question of the day in America now, and in our contemporary
national discourse?
In
answering that question, Stake Land looks at what real evil
is in this world. Evil is not, necessarily, a disease that turns folks into
vampires. Vampires, after all, do what
they must do; what they are driven to do.
They’re monsters who feed on human blood because they are compelled,
physiologically, to drink.
Instead,
the real evil in this world arises from the sort of people who would drop
vampires out of helicopters -- as living
weapons -- upon a peaceful small town. They do so simply because the innocent people
dwelling there don’t share their beliefs, or accept their rule. These are
members of the supremacist Brotherhood, a group of religious fanatics that the
film explicitly terms “Christian crazies.”
Now
before anybody gets in an uproar about that derogatory moniker, I wouldn’t necessarily
interpret Stake Land as an attack on Christianity, in part because there’s
a sympathetic Catholic nun in the film. In addition, there are at least two interesting moments in the film involving a representation of Mary that speak to what some folks see as God's ability to protect us from harm. Rather, the film is an attack on one extreme and very dangerous end of the
religious spectrum; namely the angry and violent eliminationalists who live by
the sentiment seen on a sign in the film: “God Bless Right America.” For these people it
isn’t really about being Americans at all, but being of the right religious club, and
believing the right things.
These
are the folks who loudly proclaim a love of Jesus – the Prince of Peace -- but then want to bomb countries with Muslims
living in them, or kill members of a political party with whom they have policy
and ideological disagreements (Ted Nugent,
j’accuse). These nutcases thus forget
some very important Christian words (from Romans, if I remember my Scripture
right): “Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil
by doing good.”
Thus the villains in Stake Land are the people
who just know that their
self-righteous religious beliefs sanction their violence; that Jesus and God absolutely
approve of their destructive impulses and actions. These Holy Rollers – another slang term featured in the film –
reveal to the audience how “in desperate
times, false Gods abound.” The attack on a small, peaceful, town in the film reeks of a military invasion by a
leader who believes God spoke in his ear and told him to kill the infidels. But those infidels are, in some cases, the
elderly, or children. Should they die
just because they aren’t part of the “club?”
Like Kevin Smith’s brilliant Red
State (2011), Stake Land understands this twisted
dynamic in modern America, and in one of the film’s most wicked jokes, Canada
is viewed as the place of civilization and sanctuary, just as Canada has often been
the destination for those folks disillusioned with America’s lurches towards
the religious right in the last several years.
Additionally, one can see how the heroes of
the film form what is, essentially, a modern and inclusive American family. We have white folks, ethnic minorities,
women, and people of religious belief all living together working for the
common good, accepting each other so long as everyone takes responsibility for
themselves and for the safety of the community.
This is a strong contrast to the Brotherhood, which believes that
vampires are but weapons to be used against “the unfaithful.” The
unfaithful must convert
or die.
In asking where all the hate came from, Stake
Land lives up to the social commentary tradition of some of the
greatest horror films in history, but especially those created by George
Romero, who utilized zombies to say something not about movie monsters, but about
us, the viewing audience.
How has religion been hijacked, and become a force on the
eliminationalist right that encourages violence against our fellow countrymen?
What’s even more impressive about Stake
Land, perhaps is that it adopts the almost-mythological
trappings of
the classic Western (location shooting, cowboy-like heroes, frontier towns), to
make its “live free or die trying”
point. Here the government failed, yes,
but it is the Brotherhood that stands in the way of freedom and liberty. There is no individual freedom in a
theocracy, after all.
In terms of genre techniques, Stake
Land works so ably in part because it garners credibility in its
inaugural scene. In particular, a vampire massacres Martin’s family in a barn,
and it’s an incredibly violent and bloody sequence.
But it’s more than that too.
The vampire kills a baby, and on-screen we
see the infant in its monstrous arms.
The vampire drops the child – dead
– to the floor and we aren’t spared the sights or sounds. Most horror movies tend to observe some sense
of decorum in terms of babies, but Stake Land shatters that
long-standing taboo right off the bat, and disturbingly so. This early and egregious act of on-screen
violence unsettles the audience, and makes it aware that the film means
business. After that, there are many
bloody vampire attacks and scenes of incredible violence, but the film’s
mission is already accomplished by then: we are anxious because we don’t know
what the film will show us next.
Stake Land
is buttressed by an understated piano score from Jeff Grace ( The
House of the Devil, The Innkeepers ) and some great location photography
from cinematographer Ryan Samul. The
film’s script by Damici and Mickle is strong on action and characterization,
and covers much thematic territory without relying on exposition or too much
dialogue. I should probably state too,
that it’s nice to see a film treat vampires as “monsters” and not as glamorous,
Byronic-heroes, as is the trend these days.
Even if you don’t really dig horror, you’ll appreciate
Stake
Land for its visual beauty, intelligence and strong moral
underpinnings. It asks us to reckon
which kind of vampire is worse, the one that feeds off blood, or the one that
feeds off hate.
April 30, 2012
And Even More Purple Rain: Music on Film Reviews
My latest book, Purple Rain: Music on Film, is still bringing in some nice reviews. Here's the latest batch, in case you're still planning to order the book, and need a little push...
From Cinema Sentries:
"This book is not just for fans of Prince or Purple Rain. It is a great companion to a film that changed music and the film industry. Reading it makes you want to watch Purple Rain with a new set of eyes. One in a series, this book is one to keep and read over again. It had so many great little facts as well as bigger ones, that you won't get them all in the first read through."
And from Monique Blog:
"Muir expounds not only on the behind-the-scenes machinations of the film, but also on how The Kid shares many positive and negative personality traits as Prince himself. Overall, the book is an indispensable book for anyone who is a fan of Prince, his music and his films."
Don't forget, Purple Rain: Music on Film is available at here, at Amazon.com.
Cult-TV Theme Watch: Sports and Fitness
Throughout
cult-tv history, we have witnessed our colorful heroes indulging in team sports
and individual acts of fitness. The primary idea here is one of staying fit, of
keeping in good shape. In Star
Trek’s future, the healthy officer of Starfleet don’t give short shrift
to physical exercise, and we’ve witnessed on more than one ship how the
officers utilize the ship’s gymnasium (“Charlie X”) or conduct their daily work-out
routine (“The Price.”)
In terms of training and fitness,
the universe of Gerry Anderson was much the same. The pilots of S.H.A.D.O. were
seen to work-out rigorously in exmples of physical readiness (“Ordeal”) in UFO. And on Space: 1999’s Moonbase Alpha, a weight room was depicted in one
episode (“Testament of Arkadia”) though it was really a light redressing of
Commander Koenig’s office.
In other programs, alien versions of sports have
appeared. The Colonial Warriors of the
original Battlestar Galactica (1978) doubled as athletes, for instance,
in a basketball-styled game called Triad that appeared in episodes such as “War
of the Gods” and “Murder on the Rising Star.” In the re-made Battlestar Galactica of the last decade, "Triad" became "Pyramid" instead.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century ( 1979
– 1981) likewise revealed a veritable panoply of alien and futuristic sports in
the first season episode, “Olympiad.” In
truth, this story was a Cold War allegory about an athlete attempting to defect from a
repressive alien civilization, a stand-in for our then-rival, the Soviet
Union.
“Olympiad” aired in 1980, the
same year that President Carter oversaw the boycott of the Summer Olympics in
Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Buck Rogers allegory not only spoke
of the political climate of the day, it introduced the world to futuristic
variations of boxing, the high jump, and even the luge competition. In this
case, the luge -- or astro-slalom - was a spaceship navigating a corridor of space force fields! Although the episode dealt with freedom, and
a culture that did not value freedom, it also offered hope since all the
planets of the galaxy still came together every four years to celebrate the
Olympiad.
In the more horror-oriented cult-tv
programs, sports and fitness have often been entry points into terrifying story
possibilities. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s
second season installment, “Go Fish,” members of the Sunnydale High swim team
were (under their coach’s guidance…) inhaling a chemical to improve speed and
endurance in the water. However, the
substance was actually transforming the boys (including Prison Break' s Wentworth Miller...) into reptilian creatures from the
black lagoon. Once more, a metaphor was
at work under the surface, only here it concerned performance-enhancing
steroids and school athletic programs.
Smallville’s early episode “Hothead” charted
a similar path. When Clark (Tom Welling)
joined the football team over his father’s objections, he discovered that the
athletes were relaxing in a sauna that utilized the green meteor rocks, or Kryptonite.
Sometimes instances of sports and
fitness on cult television are meant only as informative expressions of a
character’s off-duty hobbies or pursuits. Involvements in sports and exercise provide a little sideways peek at
familiar characters, in new venues. We saw Fox Mulder play basketball frequently on The
X-Files . Captain Picard practiced fencing (“We’ll Always Have Paris”) and
rode horses (“Starship Mine,” “Pen Pals”) on Star Trek: The Next Generation ,
while Commander Koenig seemed to favor Kendo in Space: 1999 .
Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) on Deep Space Nine was a Starfleet officer who had made sports an important part of his life. A lifelong fan of baseball, Sisko viewed the sport not just as a hobby...but as a passion and a guiding philosophy. He kept a prized baseball (signed by Buck Bokai of the London King) on his desk outside Ops, and in one episode, "Take Me out the Holosuite," put together a team -- the Niners -- to compete against Captain Solok and a team of Vulcans.
The Cult-TV Faces of: Sports and Fitness
Identified by Brian: One Step Beyond: "Front Runner."
Identified by Chris G: The Twilight Zone: "Steel."
Identified by Chris G: Star Trek: "Charlie X."
Identified by Chris G: The Prisoner: "The Schizoid Man."
Identified by SGB: UFO: "Ordeal."
Identified by SGB: Space:1999: "Testament of Arkadia."
Identified by Chris G: Battlestar Galactica: "Murder on the Rising Star."
Identified by SGB: Buck Rogers: "Olympiad."
Identified by Chris G: Doctor Who: "Black Orchid."
Identified by Brian: Otherworld (1985): "Paradise Lost."
Identified by Randal Graves: Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Suddenly Human."
Identified by Randal Graves: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Go Fish."
Identified by Randal Graves: Deep Space Nine: "Take Me Out to the Holosuite."
Identified by Chris G: Smallville: "Hothead."
April 29, 2012
Television and Cinema Verities #17
"All we basically say in any fantasy film is that good triumphs over evil and there's hope for the future. And I think that's basically what we need because there have been too many people saying there's no hope for the future and you should look down in the garbage can rather than up in the sky."
- Ray Harryhausen discusses his fantasy films in an interview for Starlog # 10, December 1977, by Richard Meyers, page 56.
Cult-TV Blogging: Otherworld: "Rock and Roll Suicide" (February 16, 1985)
“Rock
and Roll Suicide” may not be the absolute best ever episode of the short-lived
Roderick Taylor series, Otherworld (1985), but it sure as
hell is the most fun.
In
this amusing and satirical tale, the Sterlings have taken up residence in
Centrex, a large province with a population of approximately five million. Centrex is a buttoned down, boring town, at least
until Trace (Tony O'Dell) and Gina (Jonna Lee) introduce the province’s teenage inhabitants to rock-and-roll music. So yes, this is, essentially, Footloose (1984) only done as a cult-tv, science-fiction story.
The
conservative Church of Artificial Intelligence almost immediately protests the
“sinful” music, and its leader, Baxter Dromo (Michael Ensign) sets out to destroy Trace and Gina, going so far as to burn
their albums. Even this opposition from the establishment,
however, cannot prevent Trace and Gina from becoming a pop culture sensation in Centrex,
one replete with its own merchandising blitz.
Hal (Sam Groom) worries that his kids are drawing too much attention tothemselves, but when the Church crosses the line from censorship to violence,
he realizes the battle being waged here is not about music, but “free speech." Unfortunately, the Praetor sends Commander
Kroll (Jonathan Banks) to Centrex, thus ending the promising rock careers of
the Sterling kids once and for all. With the help of Trace and Gina's agent, Billy Sunshine (Michael Callan), the Sterlings escape Centrex.
“Rock
and Roll Suicide” is such a terrific episode of Otherworld (and sci-fi tv, to
boot), because in just barely forty-five minutes it tells the whole, glorious, multi-decade story of
rock-and-roll in America. That story
begins with relatively innocuous music, by today’s standards. We see this epoch of history embodied in Gina
and Trace’s performances of The Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” But before the long, as the episode
progresses, the costumes, haircuts and music all grow more flamboyant and edgy,
drifting into the then-contemporary era of 80s punk, pop and hair metal.
All
the while, of course, the “establishment,” embodied by the Church of Artificial
Intelligence fears the growing rock movement. The form seems to encourage youngsters to "express themselves," for one thing. And in one especially amusing scene, the leader of the church, Dromo, listens to a
Trace and Gina song backwards, and becomes he’s convinced he’s hearing
subliminal, evil messages. In particular, he hears the word “inter-dimensional,”
he thinks.
Soon, the Church goes from protesting something it doesn’t like to squelching free speech, and this impulse too has been part of rock history. “You’ve
defied the order of things,” says Dromo, “You have disrupted the spiritual equilibrium
of this whole province.”
Indeed,
but only in his own tortured mind…
“Rock
and Roll Suicide” also showcases, amusingly, the marketing blitzkrieg that can
surround a musical phenomenon. Here, we
see Trace and Gina dolls (that look surprisingly authentic in terms of 1980s toys), but if you lived
through the 1970s as a kid, you remember Sonny and Cher dolls, Donnie and Marie dolls, and KISS dolls too. In a
consumer culture, a band ultimately becomes a commodity, as we see here.
Another
interesting subplot in this episode by Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor involves Trace’s new girlfriend. He realizes all too quickly that she’s only
into him for the fame and the money, not because she likes him. So this
episode meditates on the pitfalls of fame as well as the “guitar hero” aspects
of being a rock star. Once you're famous, you can never be sure that a person loves you for you, and not for the girth of your...wallet.
Even the final shot of "Rock and Roll Suicide" is a wondrous and funny put-on. Trace and Gina, together in concert, are superimposed and immortalized over a panoply of night stars. Yes, they are as timeless as the constellations themselves. I love it. It's a wonderful jab at music fans who consider their ephemeral favorites the greatest thing on Earth.
Taken in toto, “Rock
and Roll Suicide” is a pretty great rock-and-roll fantasy, but what makes
the episode so intriguing after all these decades is what it says about rock’s place in our
culture. “There’s something about these
lyrics that hate authority!” the Church Leader complains, and in real life, we’ve
all heard the same (stupid) argument for decades.
Why is it that every older generation must hate the younger generation’s
music? And not only hate it, but try to actively destroy it? We’ve seen this bad impulse in every era for
decades, and Otherworld reminds us that, as parents, we don’t always give the younger
generation the same leeway we wish we had been given by our folks.
Lesson
to be learned…in Otherworld.
Next
Week: “Village of the Motorpigs.”
