Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 32

Not Wheels But Wings: or, Thoughts on the Passage of Time

Halloween is a time when adults shamelessly revisit childhood, and I am all for it. Every year I string up orange lights, carve an albino pumpkin the shape of a hockey mask, attend horror-movie festivals, and revisit all my favorite horror classics. If I am very lucky I am invited to one of those Hollywood Make-up Effects parties where the costumes, having been constructed by people who do it for a living, are off-the-chart amazing. I tend to hold on fairly hard to Halloween, because once I let go of it, the inevitable slide into the end of the year begins -- Thanksgiving, Christmas New Year's Eve, each one arriving seemingly on the heels of the other.

It's a cliche that time moves more swiftly as you get older, but cliches are in use for a reason, and this one happens to be truer than most. When I was fifteen, a year may as well have been a decade. Now, at 44, it goes by what seems like a single season. If the progression continues, by the time I'm in my 50s each year will feel like about six weeks.

It is said that there are two types of time, mechanical and human. For a clock, every unit of time -- seconds, minutes, hours -- are all precisely the same. For a human, the speed with which time moves is literally subjective -- not only does it vary from person to person, it varies from mood to mood. "Pain passes slowly, and pleasure's gone too soon," as one song lyric put it, and this is true. Thirty seconds is an eyeblink when you are trying to say goodbye to someone you love, and it feels like three hours when stuck on an elevator with someone you hate. However, the overall trend remains the same -- with each passing year, the years feel shorter.

I am fairly certain I know almost precisely when I realized this. I was 29 years of age, and working as a supervising investigator for the District Attorney's Office in a small town in Pennsylvania. The day in question I was visiting my mom in Maryland for the weekend, and taking a walk on the streets where I had grown up. As you know by now, my career choice was a mistake. I had neither the passion nor the patience for criminal justice and I knew that by sticking to an unsuitable profession I was not only making myself unhappy, I was, as Orwell put it, "outraging my true nature." From a very young age I knew I was supposed to be a writer, I had won awards for it in school, been published in a literary magazine at 17, and at the age of 20 had famous novelists like Reynolds Price and E.L. Doctorow reading my work on the contest circuit.
Yet here I was, nearly thirty, living in a dismal little town doing a tedious job, surrounded by co-workers that, generally speaking, I distrusted and slightly disliked, writing nothing. Time ought to have been dragging; instead it seemed to be flying by. As I walked down a shallow hill, a sentence came into my head: "He was at the end of my twenties when he realized time had not grown wheels but wings."

I'm a writer, so thoughts like that -- snatches of dialogue, chunks of description, outbursts of lyric poetry, parts of scenes or fragments of story ideas -- are not unusual. Stephen King once said the entire idea for Pet Sematary came to him while crossing the road in front of his house. This particular thought, however, struck deeper than most, because my job had never been intended as a career. I had entered the world of law enforcement strictly as a means of garnering life experience which I thought would add substance to my writing. Also, to pay the bills while I composed my first novel. Yet after five years in the trade, I was no closer to beginning that novel than the day I had been handed my badge. The pressures of work had sapped my creative drive...and time was passing more and more quickly. The dismay I was feeling had begun to graduate to fear. Though I was young and fit and vital, it was as though I could feel the cold shadow of death over me -- though perhaps not so much physical death as the death of possibility, the death of dreams. There are periods in life when one is fully conscious of the full range of opportunities and possibilities open to them: we call this period youth, and when it begins to curdle into the earliest part of middle age -- roughly speaking, the thirties -- we become just as conscious that many of those possibilities have faded away. Of course the very act of choosing one course in life eliminates the others, at least temporarily; but as we age some of those losses become permanent. At a certain point it is no longer possible to become, for example, a professional athlete or a fighter pilot. I was 29, and while many courses remained at least theoretically open to me, they seemed to be sliding shut in unison before my disbelieving eyes.

The human sense of time -- the way we measure our lives by the clock -- makes us unique among the species on this planet. Other animals move with time; we, being more conscious of its passage and what that passage represents, fight against it. We are conscious of our own mortality even when we are not threatened by external danger, and this consciousness drives us in different directions. In my case it drove me out of my job. Having resigned, for six months I did almost nothing but write, and though what I was writing was raw, overdrawn and without much structure, the pleasure of tapping into my neglected abilities more than made up for the knowledge that sooner or later I would have to go back to work.

I am not writing a biography here and don't want to bog down in my life story, details of which are already scattered throughout these blogs. Suffice to say (again) that a few years later, having resumed work in my hated field and once again found it intolerable, I decided for the final time that criminal justice was not the answer -- not even to the problem of paying my rent. The time had come to find a new trade while I sharpened my skills and learned the minutia of my craft. So, at the age of 32, I went back to school, to get a second undergraduate degree. I know, I know -- I just said I wasn't writing a biography, but this detail is crucial, because it was during this period, especially the first of my two school years, that I once again experienced a difference in the way I perceived time. For the first time since my middle twenties, it was slowing down.

I can still recall the feeling of surprised joy this realization gave me. It was just five or six weeks into my "freshman" year, and it felt as if I had been in school for six months or more. Not because I was miserable, either: on the contrary, the decision to become a student again -- but this time having my own, rather luxurious apartment, a car, and the life experience of a grown man -- was probably the only stroke of authentic genius I've ever had in my life. I was happy for the first time in probably seven years, and my only fear was that time would somehow find the accelerator again and begin to pass in its familiar, unwanted blur.

Of course this is precisely what happened. My second semester passed a little faster than my first, and my third considerably faster than my second. Before I knew it I was facing graduation and the necessity of getting into graduate school. That was in 2004, and I do believe that each year since has passed slightly with greater perceived speed than the one before, until the last few -- the last two or three in particular -- were gone as soon as glimpsed. When I began keeping a daily journal, in 2006, the time period between writing the January 1 and the December 31st entries seemed enormous. Now it seems like the elapsed time between a bullet leaving a gun and it hitting the goddamn target.

All this demands a question -- actually two questions. Why does time speed up as we age, and why was I able, if only briefly, to slow it down?

As I had absolutely no answers to this, and not even anything that could be described as a theory, I consulted the Scientific American, specifically an article by Jordan Gaines Lewis. Mr. Lewis writes as follows:

"Psychologist William James, in his 1890 text Principles of Psychology, wrote that as we age, time seems to speed up because adulthood is accompanied by fewer and fewer memorable events. When the passage of time is measured by “firsts” (first kiss, first day of school, first family vacation), the lack of new experiences in adulthood, James morosely argues, causes “the days and weeks [to] smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

In the early 1960s, Wallach and Green studied this phenomenon in groups of younger (18-20 years) and older (median age 71 years) subjects through the use of metaphors. Young people were more likely to select static metaphors to describe the passage of time (such as “time is a quiet, motionless ocean”). Older folks, on the other hand, described time with swift metaphors (“time is a speeding train”). In research by Joubert (1990), young subjects, when asked, said that they expect time to pass more rapidly when they become older."

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but Gaines concludes that there are five reasons why time, which begins for us as a crawling infant, develops first wheels and then wings. The reasons are:

1. We gauge time by memorable events, and memorable events are more common to youth, when our lives are by definition full of new experiences: with age comes routine.

2. The amount of time passed relative to one's age varies. High school seemed endless to me in part because the four years involved were, at the time of their completion, about one quarter of my life. Four years today would represent less than 10% of my life.

3. Our biological clock slows with age. This is theory, but Gaines allows for the possibility of an "internal pacemaker" which, as we age, does not keep pace with mechanical time, creating a false perception of time acceleration.

4. Children pay more attention to time than adults, because they are constantly counting down the minutes until things like birthdays, Christmastime...and Halloween.

5. Stress. Stress increases with age, and evidently creates a perception that "there is not enough time to get things done."

It is really this last factor which is the crucial one in my mind, for while he may not have meant it this way, I believe Gaines is implying here that this feeling of not having enough time expands to encompass life itself -- that our time is running out, that the reaper will knock his bony fingers on our doors before we've worked our way through our respective bucket lists. It is a fear as old as mankind's ability to contemplate life, and was perhaps best summed up by John Keats 200 years ago in his poem, "When I Have Fears I May Cease To Be:"

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

This more or less answers the first question. What about the second?

It seems that leaving the work force and its attendant grind, for a school environment which offered a totally different set of (welcome) challenges, so disrupted my sense of time that it fell of its track entirely for as long as six months or more. It wasn't just the excitement or the intellectual stimulation; it was the varying nature of my days. Different days brought different classes, different faces, different areas of study. My routines were not routine; they varied even within themselves, giving me a sense that no two weeks were ever completely alike. What was more, the whole experience fell under the heading of "memorable event." Returning to the college, at 32, where you arrived as a newly-minted eighteen year-old, was a tremendous moment for me, a sort of full-circle moment where I realized I had given myself a chance to do what so few people ever do: start life over from scratch. It was only when I began to settle into the groove of my new life that time hit the gas once more.

Obviously the problem here is that one cannot constantly start life over from scratch. We only get so many pages to turn. And until recently I prided myself that I was more active and more diverse in my collection of experiences than most around me anyway. In the last few years I have made a point of trying to collect new experiences almost as another man might collect rare coins or stamps or butterflies, and Los Angeles is a pretty good place to do that. Yet my perception of time has not slowed; therefore I can only conclude that my addiction to everyday routine, which I use to give myself a feeling of security and comfort, is actually working against me. Individual experiences collected weekly or bi-weekly are not enough, it seems, to counteract the gravity created by the sameness of my days. I have to find a way to introduce an element of friendly instability into my life again. I have to keep myself off-balance in the most positive possible way, by taking risks, being impulsive, and going against my own grain whenever possible. Most importantly I must not rest on any imagined laurels in the experience department. Humans survive psychologically in an unstable world by adapting themselves rapidly to change; but as I have learned, this adaptability comes with a price. The quicker we achieve a sense of normalcy about something that was hitherto exciting, the quicker it becomes a bore. And the faster our lives go.

So on a holiday largely designed for children, my advice to you is to try to incorporate some of the lessons of childhood back into your own life. Try to make more memories. Try to pay more attention to time. Get excited about events in the future. Be a little daring, a little impulsive, a little faster to break away from your routines. And above all, allow yourself to be scared. After all...it's Halloween.

The Parental Wheel: or, Why Doing Chores Isn't Slavery, for Crissake

I recently read somewhere that only 28% of modern American children are required by their parents to perform chores around the house. This figure is down from something like 82% just a few decades ago. The decline is so steep, and has occurred so rapidly, that a number of parents have taken to posting pictures of their kids performing household tasks to show their commitment to teaching their little ones responsibility, and many of these images have gone viral. As is always the case nowadays however, the images have provoked a backlash.

"Are you raising a slave?" Wrote one of many irate trolls lurking in the comments section. "Did you have children to take care of the things that you don't want to do around the house?"

The idea that teaching children to do chores is selfish, or even abusive, is so patently ridiculous that it would seem to require no ridicule: the position makes fun of itself. And yet we live in an age where absurd and sub-moronic notions are not only taken seriously by large segments of our population, they are enforced by social pressure and even, in some cases, law. Now, I don't normally use this platform as a chance to weigh in on social issues. You'll notice that I haven't once mentioned politics here, despite the fact that we are presently engaged in an election race that may prove critical to the future of the country we all share. People need refuges from the ceaseless flood of criticism and vitriol that pours out of the Internet every day, and I flatter myself that some of the random topics I've discussed here -- everything from ghost stories to essays on writing techniques -- have provided a few people with moments of much-needed distraction from, well, all of that shit. But this is something I felt compelled to talk about, because it brings a much larger problem with our society into specific relief.

America has forgotten how to deal with kids.

I'm not sure precisely when this began to happen, but I remember one particular incident, which took place during my second time in graduate school, when the problem asserted itself into my consciousness in a subtle yet very direct way. The class was discussing The Wizard of Oz (the novel, not the film), and I made a passing remark that I thought Dorothy was quite the uppity little snark for a girl of ten or so, raised on a farm at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the other students, a parent, took exception to this. She stated that children of Dorothy's age were very difficult; she exampled having to use the promise of chocolate cookies just to get her own young daughter to put on her shoes.

I started laughing. "That may be your parenting technique, and it may fit the era we live in, but I assure you that in 1900, on a farm in the Midwest, children did not get cookies for putting on their shoes."

This statement did not endear me to many people in the classroom but it was the stark and simple truth. The rule on American farms, going back to Colonial times, was, "You don't work, you don't eat." This applied especially to children. They were expected to aid in the farm work as soon as they could walk, and they were not rewarded for their aid. They were simply punished for slacking, and "punishment" was often ferocious.
There was neither negotiation nor bribery involved. You didn't work, you didn't eat, and in place of food you got a belt over the butt. Sometimes with the buckle still attached. I should add that this attitude was not limited to farms. Kids were walloped, starved and worked like stevedores as a matter of course almost everywhere. In many cases it was a habit brought over from the Old Country, in others it was simply a matter of survival. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was probably the most common maxim of the poor, working, and middle classes in America for 250 years or more.

When this began to change is a matter of some figuring.
Certainly if you look at the early-middle history of this country -- indeed, well into the 1900s -- our children were, if anything, treated with severity that often crossed the border into outright brutality. Child labor of the most bestial type was not formally ended in the U.S. until 1938, and as late as 1944, a 14 year-old boy was executed by the State of South Carolina for his alleged participation in a robbery. Federal laws to curtail child abuse did not exist prior to 1974, and the line between physical discipline, such as spanking, and physical abuse that left kids with black eyes, broken teeth and even internal injuries, was blurry and indistinct. As late as my college years I remember friends and fraternity brothers discussing the whuppings they'd taken from their dads -- some of which continued into their late teens. And while this sort of thing was hardly universal, it was common enough that no one regarded it with surprise.

At the same time, I think it fairly evident that two successive generations of parents, rather than newfound laws, put paid to the old, harsh, disciplinary model of raising children. Those raised in the 50s and 60s, who had their own children in the 70s and early 1980s, had a much different attitude toward kids than their own parents did. The standard of living in the United States was unprecedentedly high, America was no longer an agricultural nation, child labor had been abolished and mandatory schooling sucked up the now-unemployable kids, relieving the parents of the necessity of being with them all day. What's more, capitalism had begun to actively encourage the indulgence of children via the buying of toys and certain foodstuffs specifically designed to please children. The 60s -70s were in any case a time of social unrest, where traditional models of behavior were being rejected wholesale. The very notion of punishment in the criminal justice system was being replaced with "rehabilitation," and popular culture began to question even fundamental concepts, like patriotism, sexual morality and gender roles. A softening of attitudes on children was inevitable and probably beneficial in many ways, but the successive generation -- those who had children in the later 1980s and afterward -- continued this trend into an extreme which does not seem to have found its limit. How else can we explain the idea that forcing children to do something as harmless as household chores is exploitative, or even abusive? How else can we explain why prosaic pictures of kids mopping floors, doing dishes and taking out the trash are going viral?

When I was a kid I was regarded by many of my friends as having the easiest and most luxurious deal of anyone in my own little peer group, even though by economic standards my family was probably slightly less well-off than many of our neighbors. This was, in part, because the household chores I was expected to perform (in tandem with my brother) included only taking out the trash, shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, helping to unload the groceries, and periodic (and reluctant) assistance with other forms of house and yard work. I never had to do the laundry, and I was never called upon to perform the unholy grail of childhood chores -- the dishes. I'm pretty sure I wasn't even asked to make my own bed. Nevertheless I felt horribly oppressed and put-upon, a veritable martyr among suburban boys. Growing up just outside Washington, D.C., where we moved from Chicago when I was five, I experienced the extreme distinctiveness of the seasons as they exist in the Mid-Atlantic states. During three of those four seasons I was constantly at work (so it seemed at the time) battling the elements on behalf of my family. When I think of my childhood it cannot be separated from memories of shoveling endless amounts of snow from walkways and our horrifically steep driveway of rough-hewn concrete; mowing the lawn with a WW-2 era push-mower that had no engine; and raking enormities of leaves -- an especially odious task when they were soaked through by icy rains, which rendered each lawn bag as heavy as a human body. I also remember an especially Vietnam-like chore, scraping away incorrectly-applied wallpaper from about a third of the house, which took literally years to complete. And with all this, and much more, I was ridiculed as having it "soft" compared to many of my friends and schoolmates, many of whom were expected to handle all this, plus even the most minute household cleaning tasks -- vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, dish-duty, you name it. As for the kids who took part-time jobs at twelve, or helped out, unpaid, with their fathers' construction or painting businesses -- forget it. I was not even a joke to these guys. I was the sort of effeminate, weak, flabby-faced aristocrat that got beheaded in droves come the French Revolution.

Now, I hated doing chores, avoided them whenever possible and half-assed them at any opportunity. If I sweat blood dragging those 100-lb piles of leaves up the hill and over the yard to the curb, it was only because I neglected to rake the fucking things until after the rains had saturated them. If my shins stung for days after I used the weed-whacker on the crab grass around the front steps, it was only because I waited to trim said grass until it was a foot high. If I got poison ivy helping my father and brother do yard work, the faint spray of rash I got over part of my belly (which didn't even itch) was trifling compared to the hideous purple blotches that broke out over their entire bodies. I was lazy, I was selfish, and I saw little hypocrisy in dragging feet while unloading the groceries and then demanding to know why dinner wasn't ready on time. In short, I was a typical suburban baby-of-the-family, who would have most definitely benefited from a strict policy of "don't work, don't eat."
Yet the chores I was expected to do, which were regarded as extremely modest during the 70s and 80s, are evidently regarded by many today as a form of parental selfishness, even slavery.

I find this both incredible and disheartening in the extreme, for I know my parents weren't hard enough on me, nor I on myself, and indeed, I knew it at the time, especially when I saw the adult self-sufficiency of so many of my schoolmates. When I arrived at college, at the just-minted age of eighteen, and I discovered, in very short order, the things I could not do, it was appalling and humiliating. I could not use a hot pot. I did not know how long it took to cook macaroni or even precisely how to do it. I didn't understand the difference between bleach and detergent. I couldn't get dishes cleaned properly. I didn't know how to open a bank account or use an ATM card. I couldn't use any tools aside from a hammer or screwdriver, and those badly. I could not even pump my own gas. And to my surprise there were others even more helpless than I. Not many, but a few: guys that couldn't keep jobs on the grounds crew because they couldn't get a power-mower started, or replace the blade on a weed-whacker, or shovel snow without damaging the concrete beneath it. It didn't take the genius of Sherlock Holmes to deduce they had even softer upbringings than I did. And I noticed, too, that these types were just the sort to quit the fastest when the going -- any going -- got rough.

By the time I was twenty I had taught myself the basics of adult living, and even took pleasure (alas, so short-lived!) in grocery shopping and writing and mailing bills, because it made me feel so grown up. Then I went to work for a country club and discovered what children who have absolutely no sense of responsibility are like. I could write an entire blog on that experience, but I'll just say that the children of Columbia Country Club made a terrific argument for the retroactive abortion. They were monsters. The rudest, brattiest, nastiest, most selfish and entitled little shits I had ever come across. Not one of them had ever raked leaves, mowed a lawn, shoveled snow, washed dishes, done their own laundry, taken out the garbage or helped cook dinner. Not one of them was subjected to any meaningful form of discipline or had any sense of the value of money or hard work. They made me, at the same age, look like fucking Oliver Twist. And none of their parents were concerned by this or even necessarily aware of it. It doesn't take much imagination to see what kind of adults they became -- or what kind of children they bore. The results are all around us.

I freely admit that I learn life lessons with pathetic slowness, but over the course of time I began to understand to the fullest degree the value of having expectations set upon me at a young age. The old saw that chores "build character," which I ridiculed mercilessly when I was a boy, is in fact literally true. Unless you have sweat yourself, you do not know the price of sweat. Unless you have worked for your money, you won't know its value. And unless you have been taught to perform a task yourself, you will never know how hard it is nor enjoy the feeling of quiet pride that you can in fact perform it. Your expectations will be unrealistic and your ability to appreciate anything diminished. My only regret -- now -- about all that mowing, raking and shoveling is that I didn't do more of it.

The key word in that statement is "now." Probably no child enjoys doing chores. Probably no child actually appreciates the lessons they are being taught by doing them, either. This is entirely irrelevant, but somehow as a nation been conditioned to believe that if a kid is unhappy, if he is throwing a tantrum or crying or has a quivering underlip, that somehow his parents have failed -- as if their only duty was to appease, rather than to raise, their baby! God knows parenthood must be appallingly difficult, but the basic idea behind parenthood could not be simpler: raise your kids so that they become responsible adults. And the best way of doing this is inculcating them with the value of work and the necessity of personal accountability. I have never been a parent, but in addition to working at that wretched country club I have been a parole officer, and I can tell you emphatically what happens to those who do not understand that the world doesn't revolve around them. And this is precisely what our society has forgotten. We have gone to such ridiculous lengths to re-invent the parental wheel that we've abandoned the first order of parental business, which is that kids learn by example. Weak, indulgent parenting leads to weak, self-indulgent children. Tough love, in the form of chores and -- gasp! -- discipline, is a case of long-term benefit, of watering an acorn now so that years later it grows into an oak and not, as is so often the case nowadays, a pussy willow.

Halloween Horror from WW2: A Documented Ghost Story

What follows is quoted directly from the book FORK-TAILED DEVIL: THE P-38 by the respected aviation historian Martin Caiden. It was included as the epilogue to his very serious and thorough study of one of the most famous fighter planes of the Second World War, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It is clear that he did not feel it belonged in the main body of a scholarly work; yet he was just as clearly unwilling to let this bizarre and chilling story go untold. I have carried it with me for thirty years, and am sharing it with you know, because if ever there was a time to tell this tale, it is Halloween.

This is what he wrote exactly as he wrote it, down to the italics:

"This is something I have pursued for more than twenty-five years. The kind of story that raises the hackles on the back of your neck. There's an immediate urge to dismiss it as preposterous, impossible.

"Because it is preposterous and impossible. Yet the records are there. A document tells what happened in deliberately cold and official terms. A field in North Africa during the war. An event took place that was so impossible that the commanding officer at the airfield demanded, and got, the signatures of hundreds of witnesses who saw the whole impossible incident. The writer insists on nothing, makes no claim as to truth or impossibility. This is what happened. As it happened. As it was seen and sworn to by hundreds of ground crewmen, and pilots, enlisted men and officers.

"A flight of P-38s had gone out on patrol. They left to cross the Mediterranean. They mixed it up with German fighters and there was a brief scrap. When the P-38s reformed one aircraft was missing. No one could recall, in the furious melee, watching him go down. They looked around, and then they started home.

"They arrived back at their field in North Africa. The one pilot who failed to return was listed as missing in action. Not yet, though. Not until his fuel ran out. Not until there wasn't even a glimmer of a chance.

"The clocked ticked slowly. Then, beyond the point of any fuel. Another two hours went by. They put his name on the list of the missing.

"It happens. That's war.

"Then the air raid alert sounded. Radar picked up a single aircraft, unknown, coming in toward the field at a fairly low altitude and high speed. Anti-aircraft guns started tracking. Some pilots ran for their planes.

"Then they saw the intruder. A P-38, alone. Coming in along a shallow dive, engines thundering. It failed to respond to radio calls. There was no response to flares fired hurriedly in the air.

"A strange approach; that flat and unwavering dive. The P-38 crossed to the center of the field.

"Suddenly the airplane seemed to stagger. It fell apart in midair, a tumble of wreckage falling toward the ground. No flash of fire, no explosion. Just that startling breakup of machinery.

"They saw a body fall clear of the wreckage. Pilots muttered, called aloud their thoughts without thinking. Then a parachute opened. Silk blossomed full. But the body hung limp in the harness.

"Close to the wreckage, the pilot collapsed. No one saw him move. Crash trucks raced to the scene.

"Those who came later saw their friends stunned, disbelieving, shaking their heads. They talked about it through the night. The next morning the light of dawn hadn't changed a thing.

"It was impossible.

"The fuel tanks of the P-38, the same airplane that was hours beyond any remaining fuel, were bone dry.

"They had been dry for several hours.

"The pilot whose parachute opened, that lowered him to his home field, had a bullet hole in his forehead. He had been dead for hours.

"Impossible.

"Yet it happened.

"And no one knows how."

The Sound of Halloween Horror

It occurred to me, as I was pondering the many facets of Halloween, that one of the most important aspects of the whole shenanigan is its music. It is, after all, sound which is the principal element of horror. Don't believe me? Watch the most terrifying sequence of any horror movie you care to name with the sound off. Now, turn the volume up and repeat it with your eyes closed. Which is the scarier experience?

As with films, there is a list of too-obvious-to mention choices in regards to fright-flick soundtracks. The first would be the original HALLOWEEN, which is arguably the most palpitating ever set to wax. PSYCHO is a serious candidate for top honors as well, and JAWS -- considered by many the scariest movie of all time -- is another that could easily make a claim for the throne. But it seems to me these selections are a bit too easy and obvious. So I'd like to give a shout out (scream out?) to some scores which are either somewhat obscure, or are attached to movies so famous that the music that powered them is often forgotten in all the shrieking.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Okay, so the film wasn't exactly bringing home Oscars by the wheelbarrow; but the score, by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, is a terrific exercise in down-the-spine creepiness. Showing a lot of the simple themes that mark Carpenter's music, it nevertheless manages a diversity of sound that is very impressive. And it is just ever so slightly reminiscent of the original HALLOWEEN theme, without seeming exploitative or derivative. (John Carpenter's talents as a composer and musician, as opposed to his writer-director chops, are only just now being fully appreciated.)

The Thing. Ennio Morricone penned this exercise in sinister minimalism, and it is just as nasty today as it was in 1982. Relying on slow, low-register double beats that resemble a dying heart that won't quite give up the ghost, it reinforces the classic film's atmosphere of isolation, mounting paranoia, and certain doom (not to mention bone-freezing cold). And yes, John Carpenter and Alan Howarth also contributed.

Hellraiser I & II. Christopher Young is not a household name, but his scores for HELLRAISER and HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II are classics. A perfect combination of creepy music-box simplicity and near-bombastic splendor, it precisely conveys the feelings aroused by the sight of the cursed Puzzle Box, as well as the diabolical Cenobites the box summons. The sequel score throws in the carnival-like nature of hell as it is depicted in the second film.

Night Sins - Okay, so this isn't a movie but a mini-series, and it's not horror but suspense. Whatever. The atmosphereof NIGHT SINS is pure horror -- horror meaning "the anticipation of a terrifying outcome" -- and composer Mark Snow, who is rightly famous for his wonderful work on THE X-FILES, brews up more magic here, with an elegiac score that demonstrates how important music is to setting a tone -- in this case, paranoia, delusions of religious and other kinds of grandeur, and (as with THE THING), isolation in the cold.

The Omen. Jerry Goldsmith's song "Ave Satani" alone would probably qualify him for this list, but the entire score -- as well as the score of the sequel, DAMIEN: OMEN II -- is a minor masterpiece. It's no easy thing to establish a theme for a character -- Satan -- who we never actually see in the film, but Goldsmith pulls it off: a few notes of sound are all we need to know the Prince of Darkness is about to pull the switch on somebody.

The Keep. Tangerine Dream was probably the seminal electronica band of the 70s and 80s, if such a distinction exists, and their work on Michael Mann's flawed but ultra-atmospheric movie is probably the best thing about it. The sound they provide is lush, lavish and occasionally awesome; hurling subtlety out the nearest window, it basically throws down a gauntlet and says, "We don't care if you like it, but if you're watching this flick, you can't escape it."

The Exorcist. This film is so iconic that mentioning it here might seem ridiculous, save for the fact that the score has been half-forgotten in the blaze of emotions summoned up by the movie itself. It's understandable, actually, because the ultimate product is quite minimalistic. But give Mike Oldfeld's Tubular Bells" a listen some dark and rainy night in the late fall when you're home alone with a Ouija board, and tell me it doesn't summon up images of possessed girls puking pea soup and priests going airborne down steps in Georgetown. The real story here, however, is that the original score for the film, penned by the iconic Lalo Schiffren, was actually rejected by the studio as being "too scary." Yup, you read that right -- too scary for a fucking horror movie.

A Nightmare on Elm Street. I'm mentioning this not because the movie needs exposure but because the score is one of the very, very few to be associated with a particular character as opposed to a film or a sequence. What I mean by this is that the theme to JAWS makes one think of the movie; the theme to PSYCHO makes one think of the shower scene; but the theme to NIGHTMARE evokes one thing and one thing alone: Freddy Krueger. A sadistic, psychopathic revenant who hunts children in their own dreams is a pretty gnarly idea, and Freddy's theme matches its master. Props to Charles Bernstein for dreaming this one up.

Friday the 13th. Harry Manfredini's legacy was complete the moment he finished his work on this terrifying soundtrack, which is slightly reminiscent of JAWS in its relentless use of deep, threatening basso notes, overlaid with shrieking, shrilling, knife-like sounds that harken images of PSYCHO. On top of this it delivers one of the most iconic six-noise signatures in the history of film: "ch-ch-ch, ha-ha-ha." Like NIGHTMARE, it is a signature theme that evokes the hockey-mask clad face of Jason Voorhees (and never mind that Jason didn't don his mask until Part 3). This music is relentless, exhausting, and designed to unsettle your ears.

Candyman. Some composers go for the jugular with the nearest thing handy; others prefer a subtler approach. In this case, Phillip Glass delivers a haunting melody with is well in keeping with the tragic nature of this film's villain, the vengeful ghost of a black man (Tony Todd) who was cruelly and savagely murdered by a white mob. Like all good horror music, it takes familiar-sounding notes and sharpens them just enough to give them a sinister edge, without once overdoing it.

There are a number of scores I could add to this list, but in keeping with my "rule of ten" I am going to leave them in their graves for the moment. Truth be told, I'm leaving for a Ghost concert at the Wiltern in about 45 minutes, and I need to adjust the scary-ass skull make up I am wearing so I can frighten the Uber driver.

More Halloween Horror

Fifteen days to Halloween leaves time for more contemplation of my favorite non-holiday holiday. Looking back at my earlier blog, I realized I'd only scratched the surface regarding lesser-known, lesser-appreciated or just plain cultic horror flicks. Throw in my appearance last Friday on a podcast whose topic was horror movies, and I arrive today freshly armed with ten more films that may add spice (or at least diversity) to your usual Halloween lineup of classic scare-fare. Here goes.

EUROPA REPORT (2013). I'm not normally a fan of "found footage" flicks but this well-designed, well-executed excursion in spacefright is definitely worth a look. EUROPA is the story of a mission to one of the supposedly life-capable moons of Jupiter, and how it goes very, very wrong. A variation on the "locked door" horror tale, which when handled by science-fiction (ALIEN, EVENT HORIZON, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) usually amounts to "people trapped on a claustrophobic ship getting picked off one by one," the movie takes the unusual course of having simple bad luck take the place of a conventional villain, and just when you're comfortable with misfortune, that's when the story switches gears. While hardly a classic, it does what it sets out to do, which more than I can say for many movies in this genre with much higher budgets.

RAVENOUS (1999). Like so many horror films, RAVENOUS came and went in theaters without a murmur, due in no small part to very stupid trailers that turned off many potential watchers (including myself); but it has gradually gathered a loyal following in the years since, and justly so. It opens during the Mexican War, with an American soldier (Guy Pierce) feted for an act of heroism he didn't precisely commit. His commanding officer suspects the truth and banishes him to a remote, snow-bound fort on the Western frontier. Shortly after his arrival the lone survivor of a Donner-party style disaster arrives, pleading for the garrison to come to the aid of his still-stranded friends. What follows is an offbeat, black-humorous, and occasionally touching horror film that puts deeply flawed characters up against an unusual foe -- the American Indian "wendigo" myth, which has only occasionally been tapped by American cinema.

JACK'S BACK (1988). An overlooked James Spader film from the later 80s, JACK'S BACK is much cleverer and more suspenseful than its modest budget would suggest. This is a tough movie to describe without spoiling some of its surprises, so I'll have to keep it brief and vague. Essentially it's the story of twin brothers (both portrayed by Spader) who are the usual estranged mirror-image of each other: one a do-gooding doctor, the other a sullen rebel. The brothers get unwillingly involved with a copycat Jack the Ripper killer terrorizing Los Angeles, and then more willingly with the same woman, who ultimately becomes the Ripper's next target. Throw in a psychic link between Spader and Spader, a huge plot twist about twenty minutes deep, and a pretty clever series of misdirections in re: the identity of the bad guy, and you have a surprisingly good flick that also plays on my built-in sense of 80s nostalgia.

SALVAGE (2009). I unearthed this low-budget semi-precious stone on Netflix, otherwise the source of so much petrified crap. It follows a small group of people who wake up to find their semi-suburban neighborhood on the English coast overrun with shoot-first, ask-questions-never British army commandos on the trail of...what? Well, it seems a shipping container has washed ashore nearby, one which contained a nasty something the British government wanted put away for safekeeping. Except now it's loose, and the poor neighborhood folk are trapped between the monster, which doesn't take prisoners, and the Army, which doesn't want witnesses. I enjoyed the super-ordinary quality of the characters in this story very much: a teenage daughter sent to spend an unhappy weekend with her estranged mother; the hot-mess mother herself, who is promptly caught in bed with some random guy she met at the pub; and the lover, a bumbler who provides both comedy and pathos. Though the social commentary is painfully obvious and the budget limitations weaken the horror, and while the narrative is too fractured for my liking, the sense of suspense this ugly situation generates is real, and the choice to make many of the most frightening moments occur in broad daylight on pleasant suburban streets, was genius.

SCREAM OF FEAR (1961). For decades, Hammer Studios was synonymous with lurid Technicolor horror movies starring (frequently, anyway) Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, set against backdrops of foggy English manors, and involving such iconic monsters as Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, as well as bevies of beautiful women in very low-cut gowns. SCREAM OF FEAR has almost none of this. It's in black and white, set in the decidedly non-threatening South of France, and its sole beautiful woman is in a wheelchair. It's true Christopher Lee is in the film, but he's neither a vampire nor a mummy: just a plain old doctor. The story involves a recently crippled young woman who arrives in France to spend time with her brand-new stepmother at the family's isolated home on the Mediterranean coast. When her father doesn't show up, the young lady gets suspicious that the new wife has perhaps done him in, and may now be gunning for her as well. SCREAM OF FEAR does a wonderful job of racheting up the suspense and robbing the audience of the comfort normally associated with beautiful scenery, and gives us a lovely heroine we both fear for and admire. A good bit of the film seems predictable, but there are twists-upon-twists in the last stages of the movie that I never saw coming, and the ending is savagely satisfying.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004). I'll be honest: I never actually liked the original DAWN OF THE DEAD, and I'm not a big fan of Zack Snyder, so I had less than zero expectations for this remake. It turned out to be a very pleasant surprise -- or unpleasant, since it's about flesh-eating zombies. The lovely Sarah Polley plays a married-with-kid nurse who goes to sleep in ordinary everyday Milwaukee and wakes up in a dystopian nightmare: zombies have overrun the city, law and order have broken down, and she finds herself holed up in a shopping mall with an unlikely group of ill-matched survivors, including a cop, a drug dealer, a pregnant woman and a yuppie snob. Between the zombie horde trying to break into the mall and the internal tensions which threaten to set the group at each other's throats, it's a rough ride, and it stays rough to the final credits -- and beyond! While I was annoyed by the narrative shifting away from Polley somewhat during the middle act of the film, I cared about the characters and enjoyed the pace, which is considerably faster than that of the lumbering original.

MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN (2008). Based on one of Clive Barker's nastier short stories from THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, this movie's rather outré title creates a distinct misimpression. This is not a mindless splatterfest or a tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy. It's a finely crafted, highly atmospheric and emotionally affecting film that takes an utterly outrageous premise and makes it seem horrifyingly real. A struggling photographer named Leon (a young Bradley Cooper) in New York City, looking to catch the darkest subject matter possible to attract the attention of a powerful gallery owner (Brooke Shields), stumbles upon a mystery much darker than he bargained for. People are vanishing on the subway after dark, ne'er to be heard from again, and Leon begins to suspect a mysterious man he has occasionally glimpsed in his photos (Vinnie Jones) as the culprit. This suspicion grows into an obsession, and takes Leon into the bowels of the subway system, where he is confronted by an evil much more monstrous than your average everyday serial killer. MEAT TRAIN was the victim of a very unfortunate feud between Clive Barker and a pissant studio executive who deliberately sabotaged its release, but it's quite a good exercise in horror, alternating brutal violence with mounting paranoia and a moving love story. It's got its flaws, most notably a plot hole or two (or three) and an unfortunate use of CGI where practical effects were warranted, but overall it's worth a shot.

DARK WAS THE NIGHT (2014). This is another of the semi-precious stones I dug up on Netflix. It's the tale of a rural cop in the Way Up North (Kevin Durand) who is reeling from a double tragedy -- the death of his son and a subsequent separation from his wife. Amidst this grief comes a series of bizarre and violent occurrences which he firsts suspects are a sophisticated and ugly prank, then perhaps the work of some kind of animal, but turn out to be something much worse than either. This film has some neat jump-scares and a very washed-out, brooding atmosphere redolent small-town, Pacific Northwest isolation, but the real joy is Kevin Durand. His thousand-yard stare and haunted face show a man suffering an enormity of grief in feverish silence; at the same time he has to juggle a new partner (Lukas Haas), a mob of terrified and angry townsfolk, his estranged wife and surviving child...and, oh yeah, deal with the mysterious monster in the woods.

SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT (1972). I wasn't sure if I should list this one, because in truth it isn't a great or even a particularly good movie, but it does have enough atmosphere to merit a look, especially if you care for 70s films and their particular visual aesthetic. This one revolves around an abandoned mansion with a troubled history which is about to be sold at Christmastime to a wealthy new owner -- trouble is, the mansion isn't really abandoned. In fact, it's home to a grudge-bearing, axe-wielding loony with a man's voice and a woman's name. Sound cliched? It isn't, because this is not your usual slasher story but a complex tale of revenge with a surprisingly deep, if somewhat improbable, backstory, and some definite mystery as to the identity of the killer. There is something about celluloid that makes horror films from the 60s - 70s particularly gritty on the screen, and this one is no exception.

THE BLOB (1988). No horror movie list is complete without a couple of outright monster movies, and since monster movies are becoming an increasingly rare sub- with the genre (and never mind DARK WAS THE NIGHT) I'm chucking this one in here. No, it's not the 50s original with Steve McQueen, it's the half-forgotten late-80s remake starring...Kevin Dillon. Sounds like a piece of shit? Well, it was co-written by Frank Darabont, who gave us the screenplay for THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and also directed THE MIST, which would have made this list except it's too well known. Basically the story of a meteor which crashes near a small town in the heartland and releases a mindless blob of protien-devouring goo that gets bigger the more protien (read: flesh) it consumes, the remake was much faster paced that the original, had some wickedly gruesome deaths, and gleefully violated a horror-movie taboo by having the blob devour an annoying child actor. It's true Kevin Dillon's leather jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding, SFW rebel is an exhausted cliche, but there are some enjoyable turns of plot in this film which, along with its speed and merciless treatment of its characters, keep everything blobbing along nicely.

WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971). Many consider this the best Australian film ever made; it is certainly one of the most unsettling, disturbing movies I've ever seen -- so much so I couldn't finish it the first time I tried watching. Set in the outback in the 1970s, it's the story of a snobbish, unhappy schoolteacher who, on the way to meet his girlfriend in Sydney, finds himself stuck in a remote town called Yabba where there is nothing to do but drink, gamble, fight, screw and kill things. Essentially the story of one man's spiral into total spiritual and physical degredation, it establishes a mood of impending doom which is almost unbearable. More than that, it is a harsh, even brutal expose of Australian life -- both the hypocritical snobbery of the middle class and the self-destructive and vicious ways of the rural poor. Many consider the kangaroo hunt scene, which was real, to be unwatchable, but to me the entire film is unwatchable -- and I mean it in the best possible way. This is a horror film which is all the more horrifying for being so completely real. (This film is also known as OUTBACK.)

Now, I'm not claiming most of these movies to be classics or horror heavyweights of the caliber, say, of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET; no, sir. Most of them don't, if you'll pardon the expression, come to within even screaming distance. But I've found that I get a little weary of dragging out the old faves every year, and like a vampire bored with gorgeous college girls who heads to a trailer park just for the variety, I'm trying to expand my horizons...dark though they may be.

Halloween Horror

It being Halloween month (yes, I celebrate Halloween all month), I was going to list my "greatest horror films of all time," but quickly realized that too many of them are universally popular: do you really need to be told that I think HALLOWEEN, THE THING, HELLRAISER, ALIEN, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET are great flicks, or that I take shameless, fear-filled joy in watching the FRIDAY THE 13TH series -- at least until the fourth or fifth installment? Let's face it: so much of movie-reviewing is simply restating the obvious, and trying to sound clever while you do it. So, to hell with that. Instead, I am going to give you a list of horror films which I consider either minor classics, overlooked gems, or films not normally thought of as belonging to this genre which I believe deserve honorable mention within it.

Here they are:

THE KEEP (1983). Michael Mann's least well-known movie, THE KEEP died a quick and quiet death at the box office when it was originally released, but has developed a loyal cult following since. The story of a troop of German soldiers who occupy a deserted castle in Rumania during WW2 and accidentally awaken its sole, supernatural occupant, this film is a positive feast of horror-movie atmosphere, making lush use of fog, shadow, and light, as well as a wonderfully atmospheric electronica score supplied by Tangerine Dream. Jürgen Prochnow is terrific as the decent, conscience-troubled German captain who cannot understand what is killing his men; Gabriel Byrne rocks as the terrifying SS officer sent to assist him; Ian McKellen and Eva Watson play Jewish folklore experts brought to the Keep against their will to aid the Germans, and Scott Glenn appears as a mysterious and very reluctant hero. The film suffers badly from terrible editing -- the original cut was three hours and the studio hacked it to about 1:45, causing Mann to largely disown the finish product -- and there are a host of other issues, including a barely comprehensible plot, but for me, this one is all about the atmosphere. Seldom has a horror movie lookedso much like a horror movie.

THE HIDDEN (1987). Okay, strictly speaking this isn't so much a horror film as a mad, mad mash of action and sci-fi, but it has enough elements of horror to get a pass. THE HIDDEN is the story of a quirky FBI agent named Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan) and a hard-bitten LAPD detective named Beck (Michael Nouri) who team up to investigate a series of hyper-violent crimes committed by ordinary people with no prior history of criminality. Twisting and turning through black comedy, buddy-buddy cop convention, science-fiction and outright horror, THE HIDDEN pits our ill-starred heroes against a bank-robbing accountant in a stolen black Ferrari, a hospital patient who won't take no for an answer from anyone, a stripper who carries a machine gun in her purse, and a dog that kills his owner. Yep, you read that right: in this film you never know who, or what, is going to flip its lid and go on a vicious spree of theft and violence, and the fun is in watching the unflappable Gallagher and the baffled Beck try to cope. It also features a host of familiar character actors and perhaps the best car chase in the history of cinema.

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974). Often credited as the first slasher film, this movie deserves a much stronger endorsement, for it is anything but a forgettable massacre of acting-school dropouts: in fact, it's one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen. Basically, it's about a lunatic who stalks a group of college girls who have elected to stay in their snowbound sorority house over the holidays -- but the story runs much, much deeper than that. Mingling psychological horror and unbearable suspense with outbursts of sudden violence, we are introduced to several subjects who might -- or might not -- be the killer, as well as well-formed characters we actually give a damn about (Margo Kidder is especially brilliant as a profane love-'em-and-leave-'em type with a lethal wit). A movie that is without gore or nudity and almost completely without blood, BLACK CHRISTMAS remains utterly relentless from the very first frame to the oh-God-anything-but-that ending, and invented a number of what would later become horror movie tropes. It also deeply influenced its better-known descendants, HALLOWEEN and WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. To be blunt, I watched this movie for the first time when I was 35 years old and spent the night propped up against the wall of my bedroom with a 9mm pistol on my nightstand, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat. It also features John Saxon, who later appeared in two of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films.

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1995). John Carpenter gave us HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and THEY LIVE, so it can be forgiven if you've never heard of his somewhat less successful take on the H.P. Lovecraft mythos. MADNESS is the story of John Trent (Sam Neill), a cynical insurance investigator who has been hired by a publishing magnate to locate their most profitable author, a reclusive horror-writer named Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow, again!), who has vanished while writing his latest novel. Neill suspects the whole disappearance is a publicity stunt, but after reading Cane's Lovecraft-style novels he begins to be troubled by horrible nightmares, and at one point is even attacked by Cane's agent, who has evidently gone insane. Believing Cane has left him a "map" to his location hidden in the covers of his novels, Trent dutifully proceeds to rural New Hampshire to dig up Kane, but is shocked when he finds himself in the supposedly fictional town of Hobb's End, where Kane's novels are set. A series of bizarre incidents with the townspeople rattle Trent badly, but he's still convinced everything he's seeing is a show arranged by the publisher to promote sales..at least until people begin to die violent deaths right in front of him. Murder, however, is the least of Trent's problems, because it seems as if the terrible nightmares he's been having are actually coming to life. People are turning into monsters, time is shifting out of phase, and reality itself seems to be conforming to the events of Kane's latest novel. But can any of this actually be happening? And if it is, how can he prevent the demented author from "writing" the unhappiest ending of all? MADNESS, while by no means a great film, combines a few good jump-scares with a mind-bending plot and an oddly satisfying, tongue-in-cheek climax. Plus, it's got David Warner, too, who cut his horror-movie teeth on THE OMEN.

DAGON (2002). Another spin on Lovecraft, this time directed by Stuart (RE-ANIMATOR) Gordon, this is a surprisingly well-crafted lower-budget horror film. The story begins on a boat off the coast of rural Spain. A stock market tycoon played by Ezra Godden (evidently chosen for his resemblance to Jeffrey Combs) is vacationing with his hot Spanish girlfriend Barbara and their friends Vicki and Howard. Paul has been having weird dreams set underwater and featuring a mysterious but terrifying girl, which distract him and cause him to quarrel with Barbara. A sudden storm drives their boat onto some rocks and injures Vicki, forcing Paul and Barbara to head inland for help. Arriving at the desolate, run-down, storm-swept town of Imboca, they part ways and both rapidly discover that the inhabitants of the town are fishy...literally. Barbara is kidnapped by a mysterious priest while Paul escapes a mob of what appear to be only partially human townspeople and encounters an old drunk named Ezequiel. Ezequiel, the town's only completely human resident, knows the grisly secret behind the transformations of the townsfolk from peaceable, churchgoing fisherman into monsters who skin outsiders alive and perform gruesome sacrifices to appease a mysterious ocean god: but Paul is more interested in finding his lady love and getting away. When he encounters...literally...the girl of his dreams in town, however, he begins to wonder whether Barbara or the strange, half-human named Uxia is the woman is where his final destiny lies. DAGON is not a masterpeice, but it largely delivers the goods. The cast is small, the decayed, doomed, dark-and-stormy night atmosphere is right out of a Resident Evil video game, and it relies very heavily on innuendo and setup rather than gore for its scares...until it doesn't, whereupon it delivers some of the most gruesome moments I've ever seen in a horror film: a man literally flayed alive as he quotes scripture. The best horror films often amount to nothing more than "good people in a bad situation" and that is definitely the case here.

NEAR DARK (1987). "Bill, that's the worst idea I've ever heard!" So said Lance Henriksen to Bill Paxton when the latter tried to sell him on the idea of a "vampire Western." Fortunately, Henriksen agreed to read the script for NEAR DARK, and the rest is horror history. Granted, this movie flew well under the radar when it was released, but like THE KEEP it has grown a strong cult following; unlike THE KEEP, however, it really is a fine movie in its own right. DARK takes the familiar tale of a group of murderous drifters traveling the dusty backroads of the American heartland and gives it a vampire-shaped twist. Throw in romantic tension between a hot female vampire and a naive farm boy (Adrian Pasdar) she wants to initiate into the group, and you have the setting for entertaining, and occasionally jarring, mayhem. In addition to having the bonus of re-uniting three core members of ALIENS (Henricksen, Paxton and Jeanette Goldstein) as decidedly unglamorous vampires, it features assured direction by a then-unknown Kathryn Bigelow and a lot of snappy, and often very humorous, dialogue, such as when the Henriksen is questioned about how old he is and replies, in true Henriksen deadpan-fashion, "Well, let me put it this way. I fought for the South." After a brief pause he adds, as if revealing an important secret, "We lost." They may have, but you won't if you dig up this bloody little gem.

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010). I call this a "wash your brain" kind of movie, in that after you see it, you sort of want to...well, wash your brain. As a former member of law enforcement I know all the horrible things human beings can do to each other, and most of them happen in this shattering Korean film. A combination of suspense, horror and action, DEVIL pits a vengeance-obsessed cop (Byung-hun Lee) against the relentless serial killer (Min-sik Choi) who murdered his pregnant wife. Sound familiar? It is, until 45 minutes in, when the cop captures the murderer, leaving you to wonder where the hell the rest of the story can go. Basically, it goes to hell. Lee decides he is going to play a brutal game with his nemesis, letting Choi go only to hunt him down again and again, each time administering more sadistic punishments. The serial killer, who is no slouch in the sadism department (his best friend is a cannibal), retaliates by targeting Lee's nearest and dearest, until the tit-for-tat cycle of violence escalates to an apocalyptic degree. A terrifying look at what happens when a good man gives in to savage impulses, and a bad man refines his own to Satanic levels, I SAW THE DEVIL is not a movie you can easily forget -- even if you try. And Min-sik Choi is one of the most terrifying villains I have ever seen on screen.

THE WICKER MAN (1973). I freely admit that by the time I'd gotten an hour deep into this movie I very nearly turned it off. It was so bizarre, so deliberately weird, and so inexplicably filled with singing that I couldn't grasp what the hell was happening or why I should care. Only my affection for its stars -- Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee -- kept me going, and I'm damned glad it did. THE WICKER MAN is the story of a British policeman named Howie (Woodward) who flies out to the remote, clannish, half-forgotten Scottish island of Summerisle, to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. Almost immediately upon landing he begins to suspect the tight-lipped islanders aren't telling him everything, but his frustrated investigation rapidly yields one piece of very disconcerting information: on Summerisle, Christianity is dead and Celtic Paganism is the one true faith. Howie, a devout and somewhat self-righteous Christian, is revolted by this, and by the wanton sexuality of the island's female population. Encountering the island's de facto ruler, Lord Summerisle (Lee), Howie gradually begins to suspect that Rowan Morrison may not have been murdered as he first suspected, but may in fact have been kidnapped preparatory to some Celtic ritual of human sacrifice. Determined to save Rowan's life, he searches the island from one end to the other without success, before deciding on an even more radical plan of action: he will infiltrate the "cult" by masquerading as one of them. Only then will he discover the answer to the question that brought him to Summerisle and has now placed his life in jeopardy: what the devil happened to Rowan Morrison? The last half-hour of this movie is a gradual screw-turning of suspense, culminating in the most shocking end to a film since the original PLANET OF THE APES.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978). Whenever I get depressed about the spate of remakes, reboots and "re-imaginings" coming out of Hollywood, one of the films I can use to buck myself up is Philip Kaufman's 1970s take on the old 50s horror classic. INVASION begins with a lab inspector from the department of health in San Fransisco (Brooke Adams) beginning to notice some unpleasant changes in her live-in boyfriend. She's also noticed a weird new type of flower blossoming all over town, and has even taken a specimen to the lab for analysis. She confides in fellow health inspector (Donald Sutherland), who has an unrequited crush on her, but Donald simply recommends she go speak with his close friend, a glib Dr. Phil-type psychologist played by Leonard Nimoy. The doc remarks that a number of people have come to him in recent weeks expressing feelings that the people they know are NOT the people they know, but have changed in some inexpressible way. They look the same but appear emotionless and cold. When Sutherland's other friends (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) discover hard evidence that people are in fact being "substituted" via a weird and horrible process related to the mysterious plants springing up over town, the evidence vanishes and our gang of reluctant heroes tries to raise the alarm, only to discover that that the substitutes have already insinuated themselves in key positions all over town, and have identified the gang as threats to their nebulous agenda. Some of them just want to escape the city, but Sutherland realizes that unless these "plants" are cut off at the root, the invasion will soon spread its tendrils across the country...and the world. Although this movie suffers from needless exposition and some ragged plot holes, it's pretty damned gripping and works immensely hard -- and succeeds! -- in ramping up the paranoia that drives the story. "Horror" is defined as the anticipation of a terrifying outcome, and the outcome of this movie is pretty goddamned terrifying.

EVENT HORIZON (1997). Paul W.S. Anderson is probably nobody's favorite director, but then again, neither is Jack Shoulder, and he directed THE HIDDEN, so perhaps this was his Buster Douglas moment. In any event, Anderson hit an inside-the-park home run with this exercise in sci-fi horror that again gives us the pleasure of Sam Neill's company. Sam plays a recently widowed scientist who (just to add to his woes) designed the Event Horizon, a lightspeed-capable spaceship that disappeared on its maiden voyage seven years earlier. At the opening of the film, a signal has been received from the missing ship, and a rescue craft commanded by a flinty Lawrence Fishburne is dispatched to the furthest regions of the solar system to investigate, with Neill as his unwanted scientific advisor. Discovering the Horizon orbiting Neptune, they board the ship only to find it a sort of haunted house in space: the original crew is missing, and each member of the rescue ship begins to experience terrible hallucinations, which lead to gruesome consequences. When the rescue ship is damaged in an explosion, the now-stranded team begins to realize that the experimental drive Neill created to achieve faster than-light-travel has done a lot more that cheat the laws of physics: it's opened something...or awakened something...or pissed something off. And that something has elaborate and God-awful plans for the crew. EVENT HORIZON does with skill and a certain grim panache what hack and schlock directors try and fail to do with such numbing regularity: it disturbs the audience as opposed to merely disgusting them, by creating well-drawn characters we give a damn about and placing them in an unbearable mess.

There they are. Ten movies which, if nothing else, will serve to remind you of what bloody month it is. Oh, and if anyone has any under-the-radar horror films they've discovered over the years, please feel free to let me know.

This Life Lesson Brought To You By the Police

In January of 2002, just a few months before I resigned my position as a parole officer for the 19th Judicial District of Pennsylvania, I arrested a hooker with the improbable name of Moonbeam Riddlemoser. I initially thought the first part of her handle was a street tag, but no, not a bit of it, her parents had actually named her Moonbeam. Perhaps this small act of artistic cruelty contributed to her addiction to crack and the prostitution she engaged in to pay for it; I never knew. What I did know was that I had promised her mother that, before I left to take an investigative position in the District Attorney's Office, I would get her daughter off the street.

This proved to be a little easier said than done, for though the town I worked in was not very large, it seems as big as Manhattan when you are trying to serve a parole warrant on someone with no fixed address, who has no particular desire to be found. Nevertheless, it came to pass that one bright cold day in January, with snow laying thick on the ice that lay even thicker on the potholed streets and shattered pavements of what passed for downtown, I found myself standing outside a motel room which reliable sources informed me contained the bundle of joy known as Moonbeam Riddlemoser.

Accompanying me -- and this is actually the crucial part of the story -- was a city detective named Ashley White. If there is a prototypical police detective in film and fiction -- the cynical, vulgar cigar-chewer in the stained and crumpled suit and worn-out brogans -- Ashley White was the precise opposite. He was a friendly, soft-spoken man in his late 30s who dressed casually, doted on his family, brewed his own beer and tended to avoid profanity. If memory serves, it was Ashley who had tracked Moonbeam down; allowing me to take the collar was an act of professional courtesy, mingled with charity, on his part, for he knew about the corny but reasonably sincere promise I'd made to Moonbeam's mom.

We found the Beam in bed with a john (a "trick" in street parlance), a still-warm crack pipe lying on the nightstand next to them. The john was only too happy to take the pass we gave him and hustle out the door into the freezing cold winter air while still half-dressed -- I will never forget the sight of his very black skin contrasting absurdly with his white cotton tube socks, which he had worn with him to bed -- but the girl was going with us. In handcuffs.

I ought to note here that, outside of my training and various refresher courses, I handcuffed very few people in my brief (26 month) career as a parole officer. It was almost never necessary. Parole violators, on my caseload anyway, were a remarkably placid, docile lot, content to turn themselves in on command or surrender meekly to the deputy sheriffs I sometimes brought with me as muscle when taking the field. Though I carried handcuffs as part of my field equipment, they were really more ornamental than useful, like my acrylic raid jacket or the soft body armor I wore beneath it. Today, however, I had to use them to restrain Moonbeam before her ride to County Jail, and it was not as easy a task as it sounds. People tend to think of crackheads as cadaverous and weak, lacking the strength even to lift the pipe to their cracked and blistered lips; in my experience most of them were, if anything, overweight. Perhaps I caught them in the earlier stages of addiction. In any case, Moonbeam must have weighed a good, well-fleshed 150 lbs, and she still had the strength and sass of youth. Wrangling her, even after the cuffs were in place, was not an easy task. I can vividly remember how she kept trying to twist away from my guiding hand as we marched down the icy steps of the motel's exterior stairwell to the parking lot below: I was terrified that she would slip, crack her head open, and sue the city for everything in its coffers, including my next 20 paychecks.

I didn't start to relax until we had her loaded into the Arrestmobile -- an almost unbelievably old sedan with a shitty radio hanging from the dash, an iron grille separating the front from the back seats, and an enormous whip antenna, rather like the mast of a ship, which nodded on the trunk, threatening to put someone's eye out. I drove; Ashley rode shotgun, and Moonbeam glared at both of us from the rear passenger seat. With the roads a fusion of snow and ice, we proceeded to the jail at a sluggish pace, which gave Moonbeam plenty of time to vent her spleen at both of us. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

MOONBEAM: What I want to know is who gave me up? Who the fuck told you I was at that hotel? 'Cause I know you didn't find me your damn self.

ME: There are people who care about you that want you off the street. Leave it at that.

MOONBEAM: Awwww, shit! You don't mean Moms, do you? Fuck! My Moms told you? I can't fuckin' believe it! Fuckin' bitch! Fuckin' selling me out!

ME: Maybe she thinks jail is better for you than smoking crack and sucking cock for a living.

MOONBEAM: Who the fuck is she to tell me to do anything?

ME: She's your mother.

MOONBEAM: Fucking snitch is what she is! Bitch snitch! Piece of shit slut!

ME: You're the one that lets complete strangers fuck you for money so you can buy crack. Maybe you ought to ease up on the judgements. Your mother loves you. She doesn't want you getting AIDS, or gang-raped, or murdered, which is exactly what is going to happen to you if you stay on the street. Is that so wrong?

MOONBEAM: Bitch. Slut. Fink. Slut. Cunt.

This went on for the rest of the journey. I kept trying to get Moonbeam to grasp the fact that behind "Moms" seeming act of betrayal lay the purest of motives -- a mother's love. I also tried to get her to understand that a life of hard drugs and peddling ass had no future at all, and not much of a present, either.
She was having exactly none point none of it, and I grew extremely angry at her obstinacy, possibly because in my own way I, too, am a very obstinate son of a bitch. Truth be told, the time I shoved her into the hands of the corrections officers at County, I could scarcely fill out the paperwork, so badly was my hand shaking from the desire to close around her windpipe. But the paperwork was eventually finished, Moonbeam disappeared into the Women's Wing of the jail, and Ashley and I climbed back into the Arrestmobile to make the long, slippery trip home.

As I've said, the detective was a gentle sort, and not prone to cartoon cop behavior such as browbeating less experienced officers for stupidity. After waiting a decent interval, he simply said, in a calm, relaxed voice -- as if he were commenting on a more efficient way to sharpen a pencil:

"Miles, you can't fix in a half an hour what took twenty-five years to break."

I don't remember another thing about the day in question. A few vague images, perhaps; a sort-of memory of closing the file on Moonbeam Riddlemoser and informing Moms that her daughter was safely in the iron bosom of the County Jail. What Detective Ashley White told me, however, I remember as vividly now, fourteen years later, as on the day he said it, not just because it is one of life's harshest and most fundamental truths, but because it is a truth which runs contrary to everything I had been previously taught.

You see, like most Americans, I was deeply if subconsciously influenced by the morals and structure of the television shows I watched while growing up. And on television, everything, even the stories with unhappy endings, came in a neat 25 to 53 minute package. Problems were introduced, quantified, grappled with, and resolved, all in a series of short, commercially-punctuated acts. Processes which in real life might take days, weeks or months, ran their course in the space of a single hour or half-hour, with the neat and slightly brutal efficiency of an oven or an assembly line. The heroes on TV, whether comedic or dramatic, could and did fix what was broken within the tight parameters of a script, and even when they failed to fix it per se, they always obtained closure. By sheer repetition I had inculcated the belief that the quick fix was not only possible, but actually standard operating procedure. My frustration with Moonbeam stemmed largely from the fact that the tactics of television had not worked in the real world. I could not and did not "fix" Moonbeam with a half an hour of tough love, impassioned speeches and cold logic. In fact I made no impression at all. Whatever had led her to the crack pipe and the condom had taken years; it could not be reversed in the time allotted to an episode of Three's Company.

This might seem pathetically obvious to you, but to me it came as a cold and nasty shock, for it also exposed a second and much larger lie to my naive eyes: belief in the climactic ending.

Have you ever noticed that in most epic stories, whether penned by George Lucas or J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien, there is at the climax a final and enormous battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil? This apocalyptic fight, in which both sides throw in all their chips and commit their last reserves, may be many years in the making, but when it finally occurs it is reasonably swift and the very definition of decisive. One side is completely triumphant, the other utterly defeated, and the war comes to an unambiguous and final end. And I do believe that there resided in my mind, until I was at least 29 yeas old, a belief that this sort of denouement was actually possible in real-life situations. It was the logical extension of the other belief, that complex problems of long standing could be knocked down with a solid half-hour of intelligent effort.

It's worth noting that in real life struggles, there are certainly decisive moments, but they almost never bring the conflict to an immediate close. The outcome of the American Civil War was almost certainly decided at Gettysburg, but the war dragged on two more bloody years, with the majority of the killing and dying coming after, and not before, those terrible three days in Pennsylvania. Likewise, the decisive battles of WW2 did not bring that conflict to a close; indeed, the majority of the killing lay on the other side of Midway and Stalingrad. It's like that in our everyday lives, too. We may win decisive battles, but those decisions do not necessarily bring an end to the fighting. Sometimes, in fact, they simply signal the beginning of it. Had my words somehow reached Moonbeam Riddlemoser, had I somehow found the right phrase to shock her into the realization that she had to change her ways if she wanted to survive, all the heavy lifting would have lay in her future -- kicking the cocaine habit, shedding her "friends" on the street, repairing relationships within her family, learning to live within the law. That journey would have taken months, years, possibly a lifetime. And television shows, like illusions, don't last a lifetime. After the lights are switched off and the cast and crew go home, the basic struggle continues, off camera, in the dark, where nobody but you and God can see it. It's ugly and inglorious, and neither Rowling nor Lucas nor Tolkien will write much about it, but it's where the war is won.

Or lost.

Movie Mistakes that Drive Me Nuts (They're in Books, too).

Not long ago I was watching an old Clint Eastwood movie at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. A strange film, mainly remembered now as the flick which introduced both Michael Cimino and Jeff Bridges to the world. Anyway, there is a sequence rather early in the story, in which Eastwood and Bridges and confronted by two hit men wielding revolvers with silencers screwed to their barrels. As I sat there, stuffing fistfuls of popcorn into my mouth, I rolled my eyes to the extremely ornate ceiling of the movie theater (it looks like an ancient Egyptian tomb) in disgust. Why? You cannot attach a silencer to a revolver. That is to say, you can, but the act is pointless. The noise of a revolver is emitted from area around the cylinder, in other words out the sides of the weapon, and not through the barrel, as in, say a 9mm or .45 pistol. So, in effect, you are silencing the wrong part of the pistol. Silencers on revolvers, though common on television and seen even in a couple of old James Bond movies, are simply an example of lazy-ass production design by people who couldn't be bothered to do research, or whose idea of research was watching, well, old James Bond movies. When you consider how much money goes into making a film, how many people are employed on them, and how many of those well-paid employees have no other job than to get the little details right, it's aggravating as hell. To me, anyway.

This got me thinking, as I drove home, queasy from the trash bag of popcorn I had just washed down with a bucket of Coke, about how there are, in fact, no such things as silencers. Not, at any rate, in the way they are depicted by Hollywood. A silencer's true name in the trade (by which I mean the intelligence community, the military and law enforcement) is a "suppressor." The reason for this is that guns are so goddamned loud that to actually silence them would require a device about the size of a fire hydrant, which also weigh nearly as much. (It must be remembered that even a small-caliber pistol is essentially a miniature cannon.) A suppressor, as the name suggests, reduces the amount of noise a gun makes when it goes off; it does not eliminate it completely. That "thwit!" noise you always hear in movies when somebody plugs somebody else with a "silenced" pistol is pure fantasy. A suppressed pistol is at least as loud as balloon bursting and possibly as loud as a small firecracker. Maybe the CIA has a super-duper grade of suppressor that is no louder than a handclap in an enclosed space, but even this device suffers from a shortcoming which exposes yet another aggravating mistake encountered in film. The bottomless silencer.

Assault on Precinct 13 is an early John Carpenter movie in which the bad guys wield submachineguns fitted with suppressors that hardly make a sound. Since this plot element, is key to the story, it can and should be forgiven; however, in the flick the baddies use their guns like water cannons, and at the end of the film they are just as eerily quiet as at the beginning. In real life, even the highest-grade military-level suppressors lose their efficacy with increasing speed as each bullet moves through the device. This is because the baffles which absorb the sound decompress further with each explosion, which means after just a few shots the suppressor is so much dead weight. Put another way, "silencers" get noisier the more they are used, which means using them like squirt guns is not an option.

Hollywood is replete with technical advisers of every sort, so it crazes me still further how often detective shows and cop movies blunder on other details of this kind. For example, not too long ago I saw a forensics show in which the techs were dusting a doorknob for fingerprints. Doubtless a few cases have been cracked in this manner, but for the most part, in my day anyway, crime scene techs didn't bother dusting doorknobs. By the very nature of what they are, knobs are so smeared by thousands upon thousands of overlapping prints that getting usable ones impossible, or damned near. (Ditto the button panels in elevators) In the same show, which is to say the same series, a guy gets knocked unconscious and, after waking up, shakes his head and recounts all the events leading up to the moment he was kayoed. In reality, nobody hit hard enough to get sent into dreamland will be able to remember anything for about a half an hour before the lights went out. In fact, in real life, people who claim to have been knocked out who tell police they can remember every detail beforehand usually become suspects from that moment forward, because the cops knowthey are lying.

Police. Is there a profession, except for doctor or lawyer, which has more representation on television and in film? And yet the writers, or the production designers or the technical advisers on these shows, are always blundering on simple details. Like having detectives given the rank of "sergeant" (because it sounds tough) but having no supervisory responsibilities. Or having lieutenants and captains investigate cases personally, like Capt. Jim Brass on CSI. Lieutenants and captains don't investigate shit. They supervise others. And those others, those detectives, never just work one case. Every homicide detective in a big city has multiple outstanding unsolved murders on his caseload. They juggle all of them simultaneously.

But novelists are hardly exempt from these mistakes, either. In the horror novel The Relic, a New York cop working security detail at a museum on a Friday night finishes his shift, but is eaten by a monster on his way out the door. Nobody notices anything even happened to him until Monday morning, and even then, when he doesn't show up for work, nobody is particularly alarmed. What the fuck? Policemen don't go home when their shifts end; they return to their station house for roll call, inventory their squad cars, do any outstanding paperwork, change clothes. A cop leaves his detail and never shows up at the station house, the whole freaking NYPD would be out looking for him. In that same novel, an FBI agent is described as working alone and wearing a flashy red vest. In real life FBI agents almost never go anywhere alone; they work in pairs, like Mulder and Scully, and no FBI agent in the history of the Bureau has ever worn a red vest. Ever. Ever. J. Edgar Hoover once had a clerk fired for wearing a red vest; agents wear conservative gray or dark blue suits. And they refer to themselves as specialagents, not agents.

Some blunders in film and fiction, like the silencer on the revolver, have become so ingrained that they have acquired a certain legitimacy even though they are nonsense. Stories in which Mafia dons speak like Oxford dons are incredibly common. Again, what the actual fuck? Show me a Mafia boss in this country who can speak two sentences without betraying the fact he dropped out of 9th grade and I'll show you a penguin that can fly. Mobsters make a worse hash of the English language than tweenage girls Snap-chatting at the mall. Granted, one or two have been articulate in their own rough-spun way -- Paul Castellano comes to mind -- but none of them can refrain from saying "fuck" for more than half a sentence, which kind of spoils the intellectual effect.

Oh, and on the subject of the Mafia -- nobody uses the word "don" except journalists. The heads of crime families are called "boss" or, in the familiar, "bo." And the Families are not, as a rule, hereditary dynasties. Leadership is not passed from father to son, except in rare cases where the son is of high rank and viewed as capable of doing the job -- and even then such a move can cause resentment, which in Mafia circles is expressed with car bombs. As for the scene in The Godfather (both the book and the movie) where one of the bosses says he pays his people extra so they don't get involved in drugs -- huh? what? Mafia soldiers do not get paid by their bosses. Quite the opposite. The Mafia is a pyramid scheme. Money flows up, not down, and there are no exceptions to this rule.

Certain writers are repeat offenders in the category of sloppy research. The most notorious is probably Stephen King, who has freely (and cheerfully) admitted his failing in this area. But I can never read a book of his which features spooks, cops or soldiers without cringing. Referring to the butt of a pistol as a "handle" is egregious, as is calling a weapon a "carbine rifle" (sort of like calling a car a "sedan-coupe") or referring to a CIA agent as, well "a CIA agent." (CIA people are called "officers"; "agents" are the foreigners who work for them.) And no, "terminate with extreme prejudice" is not and never has been official terminology in the cloak-and-dagger set. When you hear this phrase in a movie or read it in a book, you can be damned sure the writer did his research on Netflix. As much as I have mocked Tom Clancy over the years for his personality failings, jingo patriotism and terrifyingly naive belief in the power of bombs to settle arguments, he was, by and large, a fucking trouper when it came to cracking the books.

As for war movies and war novels, man, I am not even going to touch that right now. I can't, or this blog would be longer than the Oscars.

Contrary to what you may think by this point, I don't want to come off self-righteous here, for I am certainly not without sins of my own in this area. The best short story I ever wrote, "Roadtrip," originally contained a sequence in which a woman shot a police officer with a silenced revolver. Only many years after I'd penned it did I realize my mistake. Likewise, in another short, "Shadows and Glory," which made the rounds on the literary prize circuit back in the early 1990s, made a cartoon blunder in regards to some historical details about Nazi Germany. And these mistakes were hardly unique. I can think of at least three more works of mine which make easily-avoidable errors, without even trying. But the embarrassment these errors caused did make me keener not to repeat my errors, and I wish to hell that movies with budgets large enough to finance small wars, and writers who can afford to hire entire universities to do research for them, would pay a little more attention to details. Because in my experience, it's the details that sell the story.

Otherwise, the next time I'm at a movie I might choke on my popcorn, and what an enormous loss that would be to us all.

Hitler's Hollywood: The Movies of Nazi Germany, Part 2

As promised -- or threatened -- I have returned for the first of my reviews of Nazi Cinema. I have decided to start with two sharply contrasting films, not in spite of their differences but because of them. I am hoping, with these analyses, to demonstrate the breadth of "Hitler's Hollywood" in terms of tone and subject matter. Also to settle the question of just what sort of popular entertainment was made for the German people during the Nazi years (1932 - 1945). After all, the issue of just what sort of art can be produced under censorship is a complex one: few people have broached the subject since George Orwell. Was Nazi cinema noisy and bombastic and full of militarism and overt propaganda, or was there a subtler approach, one which allowed for artistic merit?

Our first film is called ICH KLAGE AN. It was released in 1941 and directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner. The story begins with the effervescent and life-loving Hanna Heyt (Heidemarie Hatheyer) celebrating the appointment of her research-scientist husband Thomas (Paul Hartmann) to a professorship in Munich. When Hanna injures her arm slightly during their dinner celebration, however, the injuries don't heal, so Thomas calls in a former romantic rival of his, Dr. Bernhard Lang (Mathias Wieman) to perform an examination. To everyone's horror, Lang, who is still in love with Hanna, diagnoses her with multiple sclerosis. Thomas immediately throws himself into researching a treatment for the progressive and fatal disease, which is steadily robbing Hanna of all the quality of her life; but when his efforts come to nothing he begins to seriously contemplate granting her wish for euthanasia, even though the law forbids it. Lang is militantly opposed, and Thomas' decision to give his wife a fatal dose of morphine ultimately lands him before a court of inquiry (somewhat similar to a British police court or an American coroner's inquest). There Thomas' actions and motives are scrutinized and some evidence is presented that may exonerate him -- but without a clear decision as to the morality of assisted suicide. But Thomas isn't having it: refusing to grant anyone an easy way out, he demands to be tried solely on the basis of whether his actions were right or wrong, and its upon this verdict that his fate rests. The film ends ambiguously, with Thomas demanding directly of the audience that he answer the question raised in the inquiry: should he have killed his wife, or not?

IMDB's review of this ICH KLAGE AN calls it "morbid melodrama," but I no longer trust any official reviews of Nazi-era films, since the reviewers inevitably confuse enjoying a film produced by the Nazi government to mean the viewer is in sympathy with its ideology and methods. I myself found the film deeply moving and extremely dramatic. The direction by Wolfgang Liebeneiner is crisp and assured, the performances are absolutely first-rate and the script is tight and beautifully written. The lovely Heidemarie Hatheyer delivers an award-worthy performance full of charm and pathos. Hartmann and Weiman are also superb as the rival doctors. Margarete Haagen is also excellent as Hanna's housekeeper/surrogate mother, the loving Berta, as is the always-reliable Christian Kayssler as the judge. This film won the prestigious (at the time, anyway) cinematic award the Biennale Cup in 1941, and I believe deservedly so. It's at least as good, and probably considerably more gutsy in its subject matter, than most American and British films shot at the same time. The film was a commercial success and seems to have had an appreciable impact on the ordinary German's attitude toward euthanasia.

ICH KLAGE AN translates from German to English as "I Accuse" and it is an appropriate title for the film. On trial for his life, Thomas Heyt ultimately accuses his accusers of cowardice and hypocrisy for being willing to condemn fellow human being to indefinite physical suffering merely to spare themselves moral anguish, and he asks the audience to render its own judgement on his actions. In other words, this film was designed to open a dialogue as to its subject, and I believe it does just precisely that. What surprised me was the even-handedness with which the movie explores the idea of euthanasia itself. Religious, moral and ethical arguments against it are all brought to bear and given, I believe, at least the pretense of a fair hearing. There's little doubt where the movie itself lands, but it does not subject the anti-euthanasia crowd to ridicule. For a Nazi-sanctioned film, it's surprisingly fair.

Now, it would be remiss of me to ignore the fact that I ACCUSE is viewed today as a softening-up bombardment in the Nazi campaign to desensitize its population to the idea of state-sanctioned euthanasia. As the review of the film on the back of the DVD points out, the idea here is that the state ought to become involved in euthanasia, relieving individuals of the moral agony of killing their own loved ones. And in fact this is precisely what the Nazi state did with their hideous "T-4" mass euthanasia program, which saw 100,000 mentally ill Germans gassed or poisoned as an act of "racial hygiene" under Hitler's rule (though it ought to be mentioned here that "racial hygiene" was a concept the Nazis borrowed from us: the sterilization of the mentally ill was a common practice in the U.S. up until the 1940s; Hitler and his men simply took it the next logical step, as they did all the racial-biological theories they got from Britain, France and America).
This brings the greater question as to whether any artistic merit can be drawn from a film used in such a manner, but I should like to table that question until the end of this review series, when it can be answered in full. For the moment I will simply say that I ACCUSE is a remarkable and gripping drama, far superior to what I was expecting in every respect.

The second movie is WUNSCHKONZERT, directed by Eduard von Borsody and released in 1940. "Wunschkonzert" translates to "request concert" and it is worth noting at the start that the musical request show was actually a German invention, with the "Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht" (Armed Forces Request Show) being one of the most popular radio programs in Germany once the war began. It is also worth noting that this film, while containing some serious dramatic elements, is essentially a romantic comedy and markedly different from ICH KLAGE AN in every way. Finally, and in the tradition of other German films of this period, "Request Concert" is actually a number of stories which interweave around a single unifying idea, theme or incident. This style of film-making, called "fractured narrative," is common on today's television but less so in contemporary films, and takes a little getting used to.

Our story begins at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, where the lovely Ilse Werner (Inge Wagner) meets and falls in love with air force (Luftwaffe) lieutenant Herbert Koch (Carl Raddatz). After a whirlwind courtship they plan an engagement, but he soon receives orders to go to Spain, where the civil war is raging, as a military adviser to the Fascists. The mission is top secret, and thus Koch is forced to abandon his flame without explanation. Eventually she becomes close to another Luftwaffe pilot, Helmut Wilker (Joachim Brennecke), who also befriends Koch without realizing they are in love with the same woman. As war breaks out the pilots fly together in combat, neither knowing the other is in love with Ilse.
At the same time, there is an extensive sub-plot about a unit of German infantrymen going into battle in France, which involves not only their various loved ones at home, but two bumbling soldiers who are sent to Berlin to perform a ditty of their own composition for the Wunschkonzert. As the story goes on, each character's destiny is affected and to some degree decided by their decision to request songs.

As the title implies, WUNSCHKONZERT is not so much about the individual characters in the film per se as the way their lives are tied into, and ultimately effected by, the popular request show. The fate of the two star-crossed lovers, Herbert and Ilse, actually turns on the Olympic fanfare he requests of the program; and in another sequence, the fate of a German infantry squad is decided by one soldier's rendition of a Beethoven song on an organ he finds in a burning French church. There are also performances by real-life celebrities of the day, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Marika Rökk, arguably THE pin-up girl of the Nazi era next to Lale Anderson. The film is also strong on the theme of men performing their duties in wartime while their women (moms, wives, sweethearts, sisters) wait anxiously at home, and how the music unites them. If all this seems a bit corny, one must remember that this film was released in 1940, and is not measurably sappier or more contrived than British or American romantic war movies of the same era. In fact, I would unhesitatingly say that WUNSCHKONZERT is one of the best WW2-era movies I've yet seen, featuring a skillful balance of romance, propaganda, music, history, and war-movie action, which give the modern viewer a fascinating, if idealized, view of popular culture in Nazi Germany. The acting is good, there are an unusual number of obstacles for the young lovers to face in their quest to be together, a splash of intrigue with the Spanish Civil War angle, a certain amount of pathos, and some entertaining Laurel & Hardy-style moments involving the two bumbling soldiers and a captured pig. Like all movies of this type, it tends to blur its focus on the main element of the story towards the end in favor of a grand, all-inclusive climax, but aside from that I had no major complaints. I was also especially impressed by the brief battle sequences which take place in a ruined French town. German audiences were impressed, too: the film was seen by 20 million people in the Third Reich (population: 80 million) and made a fortune for the UFA Film studio.

Believe it or not, though hundreds of feature films were released in Germany during WW2, only twenty or so actually dealt with the war which was taking place at the time, following Goebbels' undoubtedly wise decision that what the people of Germany needed was distraction from the war and not reminders of it. This stands in fascinating contrast to Britain and America, who cranked out war movies nonstop and kept them going long after the war itself had ended (I would argue we are still doing this today). And because of this, WUNSCHKONZERT is just as valuable as historical evidence as it is an entertaining flick in its own right. Like all Americans I grew up on a steady diet of WW2 movies which seldom, if ever, gave even the slightest thought of what the enemy was like -- what he wanted, what he was feeling, why he was fighting, and what was waiting for him when he put away his rifle and went home. WUNSCHKONZERT puts faces and names and hopes and dreams on the dreaded, faceless Nazi soldiers, and it's perhaps no big surprise that these things weren't a helluva lot different for guys named Gotthard, Wolfgang and Johannes than they were for the Joes, Mikes and Bobs of the war. And one of those things was entertainment. As a German song of the pre-war period refrained: "All I want is music! I don't need anything else!"

In closing I will say that my initial impression of Nazi-era cinema was much more favorable than I expected. I ACCUSE is a fine, well-crafted drama whose propaganda, to quote on reviewer, was "virtually subliminal." REQUEST CONCERT, while more overtly patriotic (it was shot during the war), was also an enjoyable movie, blending romance, comedy, music and battle -- though it succumbed, at the end, to the urge to become a full-on propaganda piece, and abandoned its characters in the process.

I will return next week to examine two more movies. And please keep in mind I intend to discuss the greater, contextual morality of these films when this review series is finished. Auf Wiedersehen.

My 30 Day Week

I have just completed experience of having worked thirty days in a row on a production gig, and it worth noting the progression of my mental and physical state during that time, if only as a laboratory example of the old scientific principle that All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy.

The following is composed of quotes taken from my journal during the month of August. I have removed all details which would infringe on my nondisclosure agreements, redacted the names of individuals, and deleted a few of my more, uh, colorful comments. Everything else is as it was written.

The first five days passed more or less normally, being, of course, a normal work-week.

Day 6: "Working on Saturdays has a slightly surreal feel to it. The knowledge of obligation is there, but not the psychological weight that makes an ordinary workday so oppressive."

Day 8: (my birthday) "Forty-four wheels around the sun. Isn't that what I always say this time of year? Yet today I can't say as I feel anything at all. When you wake early, exercise, and work all day, every day, one more day of it doesn't feel like anything out of the ordinary. And it wasn't."

Day 9: "Ten hours in the tinpan, and very dull and exhausting hours at that. I slept poorly because of the birthday drinks, struggled out of bed a little after seven, and somehow managed to get to the pool by ten of eight. A gruff-voiced lesbian coach, like a bad stereotype out of an episode of The Simpsons
was giving instruction to five lanes full of students, and none too happy to see me, but I still managed 26 minutes of very hard swimming before I had to leave. I felt tired the moment I walked in, and as the day wore on, bored, fat, flatulent and fed up. When I say 'fed up' I don't mean disgruntled or angry or ungrateful or even irritable, just physically sick of sitting and playing monotonous games in front of a camera all goddamn day. I forgot my phone, too, and my ass was asleep half the day, or so it seemed."

Day 10: "When is this going to stop? That was all my tired, bored, numb brain could think at some point around the tenth or eleventh hour of work today. How much is enough? When do we get to go home? All my earnest and heartfelt prayers to 'give me work, dammit!' have been answered with such resounding force that I can barely lift my face to the storm, so to speak. This is another way of saying I was fourteen hours in the tinpan and have the numb ass to prove it."

Day 18: "Life has become a monotonous blur, a sort of Groundhog Day in which any detail which variates on the theme becomes outstanding simply by virtue of being different, and never mind if it is intrinsically interesting."

Day 19: "What a lousy day. Not lousy for me personally; just a shamefully lousy performance by the crew of bumbling fuck-ups my employer has hired to serve as foot soldiers for this interminable project.
I swam for a good solid half-hour this morning, trying to concentrate on my surroundings -- the blue skies, the palm trees, the cool clean feeling of the water, even the sound of my own labored breathing as I paddled along laboriously behind my kickboard. (It isn't easy, when you live as deep in your head as I do, to be aware of your surroundings, or to appreciate them.) After the swim, I ate a quick meal in the kitchen and sank into the first available chair. Unfortunately this chair was next to E., a fat, long-haired, drawling-voiced idiot who loves the sound of his own voice and rakes my nerves raw every time he speaks. I was made further uncomfortable by M., who hates E. even more than I do and seemed to be on the verge of beating him senseless, so at the first opportunity I slunk away so I wouldn't have to witness an assault -- or participate in in it! The day passed very quietly until about dinnertime. Unfortunately it took us two and a half hours to get the shot afterwards because the cretinous, submoronic lackwits hired by Casting cannot take direction. The director, who is normally very polite and even-tempered, was growing more and more frustrated and, I think, embarrassed by his inability to get any of them to do what they were told. My temper was sorely tried, and I'm not even directing the fucking scene! T. shares my low opinion of these poltroons, and supposedly they will not be returning after this weekend -- which, of course, I am now scheduled to work. At this point I have recovered from the near-breakdown I had on the Sixteenth; my emotional needle has ascended from the pits of despair to a sort of hardened plateau where I feel neither lows nor highs. I know that my next check, which I will get just before the end of the month, will be a hefty one, but I'm also too flattened mentally to appreciate it just now. When all the smoke clears and all dust is settled, I know I will be supremely grateful for the opportunity to make 20% of my normal yearly income in the span of three weeks: but for now I am incapable of anything except putting one foot in front of the other."

Day 20: "Christ and Christ and Christ. Not sure I can take much more of this, and yet I must. It's not the work, which is easy in itself: it's the bloody goddamned grind. The sameness, the monotony. The Möbius loop. I wake up. I piss. I feed Spike. I let Spike outside. I cook and eat breakfast. I pack. I bring Spike inside. I turn on Classical KUSC and double-check the locks. I drive to Park La Brea by way of Avon Street and Burbank Boulevard and Hollywood Way and Olive Street and Barham and Cahuenga (West) and Mulholland Drive and the Outpost Road and Franklin and La Brea all the way to Sixth Street and then to the entrance of Park La Brea. The fat security guard hands me another pass and I park. I get two towels and a locker and change and shower. I swim with one eye on the clock -- a lap of freestyle, a lap of breast-stroke, a lap of kickboard, repeat. Chlorine stings my eyes. I try to appreciate where I am and what I am doing. The last minute strikes: ten-thirty antemeridian. Out of the pool. Into the shower, again. Into my clothes. Hair fixed. To the car, down Sixth Street, up Fairfax to Sunset to the studio garage. Into the studio. The bathroom. Then the cap room. Then the kitchen. And then it begins: make the coffee, eat the pear, drink the water, sit down in the chair. Choreograph, rehearse, crash, shoot, crash, rehearse, shoot, shoot. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Same faces, same smells, same routines, same conversations, same fantasies and daydreams and distractions. All the same, right down to the frustrations with the laptop (new) and the internet (slow). I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Tomorrow is Sunday, and another day in the tinpan. Forever in the bloody tinpan. I can't stand it for much longer. The nerds are on my nerves x10 x10: it takes so much restraint not to get ugly. But somehow I have to hold on and endure the prosaic dullness of it all."

Day 21: "Something joyous happened today at work, something quite wonderful enough to mitigate the harassed morning I had, and the nausea I suffered in the evening as a result of some bad food I ate for lunch. E. the Mouth got fired. I haven't written much about him in here; indeed, I haven't had time to write much about anyone in here. E. was the fattish, pale, dead-eyed, long-haired jackanapes whose droning, whining voice resounded all over the set lo, these last five or ten days and who raked my nerves interminably during that time --and not just mine. Evidently his bullshit accumulated to the point where even the long-suffering production staff had had enough. When M. told me this, I was dazed with joy, because goddamnit, I really was dreading being around him for another five days -- worried I'd snap and say something that would get me canned. The fucker is just intolerable. And now I don't have to tolerate him anymore. It's remarkable how little things like this -- the surgical removal of assholes, to use some rather unpleasant imagery -- happens in life. Normally the single spoiled apple spoils the bunch, and keeps spoiling it. But not this time."

Day 22: "Thirteen hours in the tinpan. What can one say about it? In spite of everything -- every trick and device I could muster to pass the time at hand -- I reached levels of boredom that tested the mettle of my soul. Iit was just a sevencourse serving of the same old shit. Ernst Jünger said that boredom was "pain diffused over time" and he was correct. It is painful to be bored for the course of a whole day -- miserably, interminably bored, and on top of bored, frustrated."

Day 26: "The last few hours were very dull, with tempers getting short and voices getting loud, and I've been informed that they want me to work the weekend and be on standby Monday as well. Will it never end?"

August 29 (morning): "'Today ought to be the last real day of shooting.' So they tell us. I know, I know; we've heard this song before, right? Think I know the sheet music at this point."

August 29 (night): "I've seldom been so vocally disgruntled in my life around people whose opinion of me has a direct bearing on my economic future, but when I get in that mood there is no shutting me off."

August 30: "We wrapped tonight at 10:48 pm, bringing the Siege -- the longest in my experience -- to its climactic end. I fled the building, said goodbye to the crew, drove to the bank and deposited a fat check in my account, and then came home to a disgruntled cat. No parades, no speeches, no tickertape: just a sink full of dirty dishes, a hamper full of dirty laundry, and silence."

And that, folks, is why I'm running behind on this blog, which is supposed to appear at least once a week. I have worked some gnarly production gigs in my day but this was the gnarliest, at least in terms of the sheer endurance required. And yes, I am using "gnarly" in a sentence. The Valley Girl slang popularized by Fast Times At Ridgemont High and just as quickly ridiculed and forgotten, has never died here. I on the other hand probably will, if I ever have to do this shit again.