John Rozum's Blog, page 11

31 Days of Halloween - Day 23 - Book

The House of Mystery - The Bronze Age Omnibus - Volume 1 by various. DC Comics. 2018.

These stories from the 1970s, during the era of the Comics Code Authority are a lot more genteel than the type of horror stories published earlier by EC Comics (leading to the existence of the restrictive code in the first place). But that's okay. While you won't be reading tales of gruesomely drawn revenge, the tales within are still plenty entertaining. The individual issue covers, mostly by Neal Adams, evoke the same spooky chill that Halloween novelty records from the same era had. There are a multitude of talented writers and artist contained within the nearly 800 page of comic book tales of horror between the covers here. Among them, Bernie Wrightson, Alex Toth, Jack Kirby, Len Wein, Al Williamson, Sergio Aragones, Wally Wood, Marv Wolfman, Gray Morrow, Robert Kanigher, Joe Orlando, Nick Cardy and many others.

This huge volume is worth every penny.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 23

Here's the second part of my non-site specific images of the monstrous and horrific that I encountered in Paris, France in May 2019. For part one, scroll down to yesterday's midnight post.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 22 - Movie

Beneath lower New York City, around Lafayette Street, lives a group of homeless people who fear for their lives. Some of them have been disappearing. People from above ground have been diappearing in the same neighborhood. The only people who seem to care are a detective, whose wife is among the missing, a photographer, and a man who runs a soup kitchen. People start claiming to see monsters, and someone connected to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants everything covered up. It turns out he's been dumping hazardous waste and nuclear waste beneath the streets of Manhattan and its begun to mutate some of the homeless population.

C.H.U.D. (1984) was the first movie I saw about New York City right about when I moved there, and it took place not far from where I spent most of my time. This is the first time I've seen it since. Aside from the nostalgic soft spot I had for it, I'm conflicted about how I feel about it now. It has a really good skeleton to build a good movie on, and has aspirations to be more than just a monster movie. It also has a really fine cast of actors (John Heard, Daniel Stern, Christopher Curry, and Kim Griest as the leads, with John Goddman in one of his early roles). The monsters are well done, the make-up effects are also good. But for all of that C.H.U.D. is still a near miss.

It's problems lie in four crucial areas: Script, direction, editing, and score. Without having read the actual screenplay, I don't know how much fault belongs to the writer vs the director and editor. The movie was based on two news items from the time period. One was about the colonies of homeless people living beneath the streets of Manhattan. The other concerned a proposal to drive hazardous waste through Manhattan to a storage facility. The two items were combined for the scenario presented in the movie. When horror, or science fiction excel, it is often by shining a spotlight on the societal problems of the day in a fantastic manner. Obviously C.H.U.D. wants to do something with the homeless situation the people no one notices when they are there, nor cares about when they disappear. It also wants to deal with environmental and pollution issues. It does, but doesn't really dig into either. The story problems are more structural. Scenes stop abruptly and awkwardly transition to other scenes. There is no follow up to many of the events presented on the screen, and some scenes (such as a shower scene ending in a literal blood bath) don't have any purpose, or logical connection to the rest of the film. This could easily be the fault of the editor or director as well. The direction is lackluster and unsuspenseful, and I'm guessing the editor probably didn't have all the footage they needed to put these scenes together in a fluid manner. Then finally, there's the score. Most of the time is unobtrusive 80s synth score music, but there a number of cues, particular stings for suspense scenes that are really distracting and feel like they are for an entirely different movie.

I'm pretty torn on this one. I feel like this could easily be remade into a really good movie rather than the frustratingly just okay one that it is.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 22 - Book

A Beastly Business by John Blackburn. Valancourt Books. 1982.

When Bill Easter and his girlfriend become seriously overdrawn with their bank account he finds help from an unlikely source, the head of his bank. The banker hires him to discretely dispose of a dead lodger in his home. After Easter destroys the corpse he discovers it has a tremendous reward attached to it as it belongs to a serial killer. Easter then discovers that the killer may have hid an extremely valuable bit of treasure on a Scottish island where all of the local animals seem to have gone berserk. He's coerced into doing work for a British agent and a terrifying egotistical adventurer, and becomes involved in a plot involving possible Soviet intrigue, Nazi mad scientists, and a curse on the treasure he's trying to recover. There are also werewolves.

With ingredients like that, how can you go wrong? Blackburn is also the author of numerous notable books including the classic, A Scent of New, Mown Hay. This book seemed to be right up my alley. It was fun, but ultimately disappointing. The book is a slight 159 pages, and is also told from the first person point of view of Bill easter, so we only know what he knows, except for the first the last chapter anyway. This means that a lot of those very intriguing ingredients only come into play for a few pages. There's not enough suspense to make it an exciting adventure novel, not enough fright to make it a horror novel, and too many questions and scenarios without answers to make it a satisfying mystery novel. J. Moldon Mott, the arrogant adventurer is possibly the most intriguing character, and certainly makes a dramatic first appearance. I couldn't wait for more of him later on, but he only returns as a figure in the distance in one sentence and then done away with in an off the page incident.  This is the problem overall, things are introduced and dropped without any follow through all throughout the story. If Will Easter wasn't directly involved, we often didn't get the information we craved. The werewolves? About one page. This book told in a semi omniscient style with about two hundred more pages added to it would probably have made for a gripping novel. As it is, it was a quick, well written, frustrating, and ultimately unsatisfactory read.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 22

There will be one more sire specific post from my May 2019 trip to Paris, France. In the meantime here are some of the more scattered monstrous things that I came across while there. The following is the painting, Le Grand Escalier de l'Opera by Victor Navalet followed by an incredible scale model of the Paris Opera House. I did not get to visit the actual Opera House, but the Pahantom of the Opera (1925) is one of my favorite horror films, and I'd hoped to tour it's catacombs and the sewers below. Alas, there i s only so much that can be fit into a ten day visit. The following are from an exhibit on aquatic cryptozoology. I will be posting the entire exhibit in November. Here are just some of the more relevent bits that pertain to this post. More to come tomorrow.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 21 - Movie

A small squad of American soldiers parachutes into France in order to blow up a Nazi communications tower in order to aid the troops about to storm the beaches at Normandy on D Day. They discover that in a lab beneath that tower, sinister experiments are being conducted which could give the Nazis a terrible advantage.

Overlord (2018) would be a good war movie even if it dropped the mad science aspect. The opening scenes of the troops flying towards their landing site are harrowing, and there's plenty of suspense once they hit the ground. The cast is really good, especially Mathilde Olivier, who brings a quiet stillness to her role that is mesmerizing and creates the human core to all of the violence and strange stuff that surrounds her. The nazi experiments aren't really anything we haven't seen before, but they serve the story well, and even provide something of a monster super villain to pit against the American soldiers. This film caught my interest right away and held on to it all the way through. It was a fun time.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 21 - Book

The Monster Theory Reader edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press. 2020.

Monsters have been a passion of mine since I was a toddler, and part of my professional life for over thirty years. I've watched a lot of movies, I've read a lot of books including novels, folklore, fairy tales, occult histories and cryptozoological studies not to mention hundreds of books on horror films. Occasionally I'd come across some book that set out to explain peoples fascination with monsters. I never touched those. I've never seriously analyzed my own fascination, and had no intention of tainting it with some academic psychiatric explanation. I just wanted to appreciate monsters the way I always had and to deal with them intuitively in my own work.

Likewise, I was aware that there was an academic arena called Monster Theory. I didn't know anything about it and wasn't really curious. So, what got me to pick up a copy of The Monster Theory Reader? I'm not really sure, but it may simply have been to see if there was something I was missing out on that might inspire me in new directions. With some hesitation I figured I'd give it a shot, hoping it wasn't going to be 500 plus pages of academic writing.

I can't imagine that people who write academic papers actually enjoy reading them, and I'm pretty certain they don't speak that way when they lecture, or converse with a collegue. Why this style of writing is so embraced bewilders me. It's sole purpose seems to be to obfuscate flimsy arguments by repetitively circling around an idea with as much self referential academic jargon that the obtuse vocabulary masks the emptiness of the article itself.

The Monster Theory Reader is pretty well balanced where such articles only represent a small number of the articles contained, though one of them is the longest article in the book.  Half of those articles, didn't seem to have anything to say. As for the rest of the book, while it was interesting to see Freud's Essay on The Uncanny, which gets referenced in lots of books pertaining to monsters, and Masahiro Mori's short essay which introduced the concept of the Uncanny Valley to the world, the takeaway was that monsters can represent whatever you want them to;  an oppressed minority group, whether it's the poor, black people, women, Jews, the LGBT community, immigrants, foreigners, you name it, and there are several essays here devoted to one group of another. My response is, duh! You don't need to have a Phd to figure that out.

There was an interesting essay on how a group of movies from 2012-2014 dealing with giant monsters from the Pacific Ocean that observed that human representatives from that part of the planet were woefully non represented in those films, nor were their cultures. There were also a couple other interesting articles including one on conjoined twins. While the lack of cultural diversity in Hollywood movies is nothing new, and should always be food for thought until it's no longer an issue,  I'm not sure how it forwards the academic study of monsters. The latter mentioned article, and another here on the Japanese Tanuki and how the introduction of the train into Japan essentailly brought to end the tales of travelers harassed by spirits on their journeys, were more what I was hoping for. I wanted to see more about how folktales from around the world tied into the cultures that produced them. If someone wants to introduce me to books that have more of that kind of content, I'd like to read them. If the arena of Monster Theory is an endless stream of articles on monsterizing the Jew, or the Muslim, or Women, or equating monsters with capitalism and the KKK, then I feel like this field is already done and over with.

I'm not sorry that I picked up this book. About half of it made for interesting reading. If nothing more, it reminded me of what I loved about the subject, and what I had absolutely no use for.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 21

Here's my latest cut paper Halloween piece. It will be available sometime today at my store.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 20 - Movie

Ghost Stories (2020) is an anthology film from India that consists of four stories directed by four different directors and containing no interlinking narrative device. The first story involves Sameera, a nurse caring for a bedridden old woman who has moments of intense lucidity and possible small precognitive powers. There also appears be a hidden person in the apartment who can be heard shuffling along at night. The second story is about a young boy jealous of his Aunt's unborn baby, while she tries nurturing a nest of birds in her attic. The third story features a young man whose job takes him to a small town in shambles. He comes across two young children who claim that everyone in town has either been eaten, or has eaten the others, and that the eaters are still there. The forth story  is about a new bride who has concerns about her new husband and his family and their staff, when her husband exhibits a strong ongoing relationship with his dead grandmother.

Each of the stories is about half an hour long, and while I am a fan of the slow build, most of these tales were simply slow and could have benefitted from some swifter storytelling. Only two of the stories, the first and the last are really ghosts stories. The first one is really nothing new and provides zero scares, mood, or intensity. The second story has its moments of creepiness when the nephew is coloring, but the nightmare scenes with the aunt are more ridiculous than frightening, and overall its just a bit of a mess. The third story was the best one, and was really riveting. The ending cheapened it a bit, but it had great use of sound, rules for dealing with the threat, one intensely ruthless scene, and gets kudos for taking what looked to be yet another zombie story and not turning out to be a zombie story. The creatures were pretty cool. The last story was just ridiculous. On the plus side Mrunal Thakur is so gorgeous that it made the final half hour tolerable to watch.

If you decide to watch it, Skip to about an hour in and watch the segment directed by Dibakar Banerjee. It's really the only segment you need to watch.

Ghost Stories is streaming on Netflix

31 Days of Halloween - Day 20 - Book

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? by Caitlin Doughty. W.W. Norton and Company. 2019.

Halloween and death go hand in hand, as it's a night when the veil between our world and the world of the dead is thinnest. Caitlyn Doughty, a mortician by trade with her own funeral home, has made a career out of death education and making the notions of death more understandable and commonplace and less fearsome and mysterious.

In this, her third book (I highly recommend the previous two), she tackles questions asked about death by children. While this book is aimed right back at the questioners, it doesn't talk down to them in any way. The answers, while playful in part, are serious in content. Each chapter addresses a single question. Aside from the title question, there are chapters dealing with what happens to an astronaut's body in space, whether or not you can keep the skull of a loved one, cannibalism, what happens when someone dies on a plane, oversized coffins, post mortem pooping, etc. I have an entire shelf on books pertaining to death, and I still learned quite a bit from this book, and I had a great time reading it, too.

This is definitely recommended.