Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 56

Ti West vs. the Unknown

Over the last couple of weeks I saw three of Ti West's horror films; House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, and The Roost.  (I'm interested in the man's work, obviously, but not enough so to get me to watch Cabin Fever 2, sorry.) All three had things to recommend them, though in The Roost those things were, well, fewer and farther between (Tom Noonan as a TV horror show host is a pretty huge one, though, admittedly), but I'm really not here to talk about their defects, or, for that matter, about more than one of their qualities.

One of the things that really struck me about seeing all three films so close together was that West left a similar ambiguity in his explorations of the phenomena (for lack of a better word) at the heart of each film. This sort of ambiguity is a subject that's near and dear to my heart, so I figured it would be worth talking about. While I'll try to be as coy as I can, this discussion will no doubt feature some significant spoilers about all three movies, so if you've not seen them, and are spoiler-phobic, I'd suggest turning back now.

Still with me? Okay, House of the Devil and The Innkeepers are the ones I saw first, and they're the ones whose similarities of approach are most striking. Each movie deals with a supernatural phenomenon (a Satanic cult in House of the Devil, ghosts in The Innkeepers), but in each movie there is a possible reading (however likely or unlikely) with a purely naturalistic explanation. In both movies, there is a striking lack of exposition, and the phenomenon is never really explained. In House of the Devil we're all familiar enough with Satanism movies to know what the cultists are trying to do, but they never sit down and explain it to us. In The Innkeepers, Claire just wants to find out if the ghost that's haunting the hotel is Madeline O'Malley and what she wants. The goal isn't even to lay the ghost to rest. But Claire never learns what the ghosts want, and neither do we. The ghosts are terrifying, especially in the last minutes, but their motives are never clear, and there is never any satisfying resolution for anyone. Furthermore, Luke keeps trying to tell Claire something (maybe that he is in love with her, but it could be anything), but we never get to hear what it is.

The Roost is far more of a B-movie than the others, though it is self-aware of its B-movie status. In it, four friends break down on their way to a wedding and end up taking shelter in a barn that happens to be filled with flesh-eating bats that turn their prey into the undead. (Are they zombies? Vampires? They behave like zombies, but they always seem to go for the throat, so…?) In most such movies, the presence of the bats would be explained, to the audience if not to the victims. We would see a government genetics lab or a black magic ritual or something. In The Roost there is no explanation. Certainly the couple that owns the barn aren't keeping the bats there on purpose, as they're the first victims, and there's never any explanation given for where the bats come from, or why their victims rise from the dead.

(None of that's even touching upon The Roost's weird framing device, featuring Tom Noonan as a TV horror show host who gets meta-textually involved in the film midway through. Unsurprisingly, that was my favorite part of the movie.)

Anyway, of these films, only The Innkeepers really elevated itself to a position of a favorite of mine, partly because of the subject matter, partly because of the smart injection of humor and character into the proceedings, but the approach to keeping some things unknown really elevated all of them, even the schlocky Roost above whatever level they would otherwise have attained, and means I will definitely be keeping an eye on Ti West's future endeavors, more Cabin Fever sequels notwithstanding.

A Week

Wow. Well, so, this week. It's been a week. Tempting as it is to blame the slush picking up, or my recent illness putting me behind at everything, I think it's been a week for pretty much everyone I know, so maybe there's just something in the air.

Anyway, I have been exhaustingly busy and, predictably enough, whenever I wasn't I was too exhausted to do anything, including post, hence why you haven't heard about, say, The Innkeepers or The Woman in Black yet, and why, now that you are going to hear about them, it'll necessarily be pithier shorter than I would have liked. So: I saw both of them last weekend, along with catching House of the Devil a second time. They were both quite good. Both were sort of quiet, simple ghost stories, unambitious in scale, but very effective in their own ways. The Woman in Black, I think, lost out a little bit by being in such close proximity with The Innkeepers, which I liked the best of the two, but it also wasn't helped by the theatre full of fourteen-year-old girls who had come to see Harry Potter square off against a ghost.

I found The Innkeepers to be a big improvement (for me, at least) over House of the Devil, though it had maybe fewer bravura scenes. It was still just as quiet and slow-burning, but instead of just feeling slow, it was charming and funny up until the last few minutes, which were, frankly, harrowing.

Anyway, both were good, though I don't think that either would be harmed by waiting for DVD. (And, assuming your audience was anything like ours, The Woman in Black might be improved.)

What else? After coming very late to the game with "Chelsea Dagger," I've been listening to a lot of stuff by The Fratellis, especially their second album Here We Stand, which I pretty much love from top to bottom. Call this my second big musical discovery of the year, after The Bird and the Bee.

Finally, thanks to Eric Orchard, I started up an account over on Pinterest. I can't vouch for how much I'll be using it or not, but so far I'm mostly sticking up Mike Mignola and Richard Sala drawings. So, y'know, if that sounds like your cup of tea, feel free to give it a look.

This weekend, my lovely wife and I are getting dolled up and going out to see Amelie at the Screenland and then going out to a fancy dinner. I bought a new hat for the occasion, and she bought some very nice shoes. With any luck, there will be pictures.

Notes from the Slush

Well, we're a little over halfway through the open reading period for Fungi, the anthology that I'm co-editing with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. If you've still got fungus stories to send in, you've got until February 15th to get them to us. (See the guidelines here.)

In the meantime, I'm going to talk a bit about what we've already seen in the slush so far, and what we'd like to see more of. Silvia already posted her take here, and I don't know that I have a ton to add, but I'm going to post anyway, because I'm editing an anthology, dammit, and I'm very professional!

This is my first time reading for an anthology, and so I wasn't really sure what to expect, and I don't know how what we've gotten stacks up against other anthologies, or slush piles for magazines, or what-have-you. A couple of things I can say is: Please, please, please put your word count in your cover letter? And put your cover letter in the body of your email? I don't know how other people feel about this, but those two things make life a lot easier on me, anyway.

I'd also like to second and reinforce Silvia's mention that we've been getting way too many then-I-turned-into-a-mushroom-the-end stories. I like mushroom people as much as the next guy (more, obviously), but at this point there definitely needs to be something more going on in the story if we're going to take it. I'll also agree that I would love to see a mushroom noir, if anyone's got it in them.

Anyway, I think it's shaping up to be a really exciting anthology so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what we get in the remaining days!

Fungal Infection

Fungi, the anthology of fungal fiction that I'm co-editing for Innsmouth Free Press, opened to submissions on Sunday, and on that very same day I came down with a bad cold. Coincidence? Probably, but it's pretty inconvenient all the same. Nevertheless, I don't think I've fallen too far behind on reading subs.

This is my first time reading slush, or editing an anthology for that matter, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but it seems to be going well enough so far. That said, while I don't want to fall any further behind, I definitely want to see fungus subs keep pouring into that inbox, so please, check out the full guidelines here, and if you've got something to submit, send it our way!

The Curse of the Forgotten Fedora

I forgot my hat when I left the house today, which was an unusual and discomfiting experience for me. As such, I of course posted about it to various social media, explaining how, if I were a character in a turn-of-the-century book, this would be indicative of panic or emergency of some kind. It was generally agreed upon by my commentors that even in this enlightened era, it could not be looked upon as anything less than a dire omen. So traumatic and far-reaching was the experience, that it was actually immortalized in art by the supremely talented Drazen Kozjan, as can be seen below:

More Fungus of Terror!

Less than a week to go before the start of the open reading period for Fungi, the anthology of weird fungal fiction (guidelines here) that I'll be co-editing with Silvia Moreno-Garcia for Innsmouth Free Press. (The open reading period is January 15th through February 15th, in case you missed it.) I've already talked a little bit about what I'm hoping to see in the slush, but I promised that you'd be hearing more from  me before the reading period began about some of my favorite fungus stories and creatures, so, without further ado, let me talk about a few of those in brief.

Of course any discussion of weird fungal fiction pretty much has to start with William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night." If you haven't already read it, I'd definitely recommend giving it a look or, if you're so inclined, a listen, since the fine folks at Pseudopod recently did a production of it. I also recommend checking out the Toho movie adaptation Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, aka Fungus of Terror). It's surprisingly effective, wonderfully bizarre, and a major favorite of mine. Also, it has some of the best fungus creatures you're ever likely to find, especially in cinema, where fungus creatures experience a sad dearth.

Where is there not a dearth of fungus creatures, you might ask? Well, video games seem to boast a larger roster of them than just about anyplace else. One of my favorites of those are the "moldy corpse" enemies from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Described in the in-game bestiary as "A human consumed by evil after eating a cursed mushroom," the moldy corpses look like purple zombies with blue hair who stumble toward you and then keel over, dropping to their hands and knees as giant, vibrantly-colored mushrooms burst from their back and they crawl forward under their new fungal weight.

I'm certainly not the only person fascinated by Hodgson and "The Voice in the Night." I was actually turned on to Hodgson's work by Mike Mignola, who has mentioned Hodgson many times, and put a couple of homages to Hodgson's Sargasso Sea stories (and "Voice in the Night" specifically) in his comics. The first one was the Hellboy mini-series "The Island," which was originally supposed to be much more Hodgson-inspired than the final product turned out to be. See the back matter of the Strange Places collection, where you can see pages from the uncompleted original version of "The Island," which feature some really brilliant fungus people in all their Jack Kirby-by-way-of-Hanna-Barbera glory.

Mignola dipped back into the Hodgson fungus creature well with his first Baltimore comic mini-series, and from the looks of the covers we may be getting some more fungal horror from Mignola very soon in the forthcoming B.P.R.D. mini-series "The Pickens County Horror."

That's just a tiny sliver of the fungal stories and monsters I've enjoyed, without even dipping into things like myconids, the writings of Jeff VanderMeer, or short stories like Brian Lumley's "Fruiting Bodies," to name just a few, but hopefully it's a place to start. I plan to update throughout the open reading period, giving some insight into the process and what I'm seeing in the slush, and I can't wait to read as many fungal stories as possible, so if you're on the fence about submitting, please, pile them on!

Another Story

My story "Black Hill," which originally appeared earlier this year in Historical Lovecraft, has now been revived in audio form thanks to the fine folks at Pseudopod. Longtime readers may recall that Pseudopod previously did an audio version of my story "The Worm That Gnaws" and knocked it completely out of the park, so I'm very excited to have them produce another of my stories.

Check out "Black Hill" here, and if you previously missed "The Worm That Gnaws" it's still available here.

On Fungi

On the heels of the Fungi anthology guidelines, my co-editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia has made a post about what she'd like to see in the slush, and I figured it would behoove me to attempt something along similar lines. Mine will probably ramble more than hers, and be less immediately helpful and bullet-point-y, but hopefully it'll be at least a little informative if you're thinking of submitting to our little fungus anthology. (Please do!)

Silvia talked about wanting stories that straddle genre. (Steampunk, etc.) And yes, we definitely want those stories. But I also admit to having a soft spot for a good traditionally weird or supernatural tale, and I'd love to see some of those, too. There's a lot of good places you can go with a science fiction-ish angle on a fungus story, but my particular partiality is for supernatural tales, so I'm hoping to see a good mix of those in the slush, too. If in doubt, aim for menacing and atmospheric and creepy, as well as fun and inventive, and you'll probably hit my wheelhouse.

The stories that got me interested in this theme in the first place were William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night" and the Japanese film adaptation of same Matango. So while we obviously can't do an anthology of nothing but mushroom people (and wouldn't if we could), I'll be very sad if we don't get at least a few stories along those lines. (Probably no danger of that.) I'll also be talking sometime in the coming days about some of my favorite fungus monsters from books, movies, video games, etc.

But your fungus monsters certainly don't have to fit the Hodgson mold (no pun intended) to pique my interest. Feel free to go nuts making the weirdest fungus creatures you can come up with. One of the world's largest organisms is a fungus, just to give you an idea. Nor are we only looking for stories of fungus monsters. As long as fungus plays a prominent role, then odds are we're interested in taking a look.

Okay, so that's some of what I'm looking for. How about what I'm not looking for? I don't want to go into that too much, because there's no rule I can make that won't find an exception if the right author is doing it, but here's a couple of caveats:

Not necessarily Lovecraftian. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Lovecraft, but this being an Innsmouth Free Press book and Lovecraft's work being as associated as it is with fungus, I don't want to give the impression that this is Fungal Lovecraft that we're doing here. Lovecraftian fungus stories certainly won't be turned away at the door, and I'm expecting and even hoping to get a few, but don't feel constrained to that. We're looking for a wide range of weird fungal spookiness, so go to town.

Think twice about Cordyceps zombies. Again, I'm not saying don't do them, but they've been all over the Internet lately, and I've already heard several people talking about them in relation to this anthology, so I have a feeling we're going to get inundated with them. So if you've got a really killer Cordyceps zombie story, by all means, we want to see it, but just be warned that you'll probably be part of a pretty big crowd.

Like Silvia, I won't really know what I want until I see it, but this will hopefully help give an idea of where I'm coming from. Like I said, I'll be posting in the coming days some more about some fungus creatures and stories of which I am particularly fond, and I'll also try to give updates once the slush starts rolling in. As I've said before, this anthology is literally the culmination of a dream I've had for many years now, and so I'm very, very excited to see it come together. And if you have any questions or just want to talk fungi, please feel free to contact me here or at any of my various social networking whatevers.

Free Story!

My story "The Reading Room" was originally published in Bound for Evil, edited by Tom English. It went on to get me my first-ever honorable mention from Ellen Datlow, and the anthology itself was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, so it's a story I'm pretty proud of. It's also going to be one of the stories in my forthcoming collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, and as a preview my publishers have made it available as a stand-alone story on Kindle (and Kindle apps). What's better, it's free for a limited time!

If you pick up this release, you not only get a sneak peek at the title illustration that the fabulous Bernie Gonzalez did for the story, but you'll also get access to some special "bonus content" that I wrote especially for this release. All for the low, low price of $0. So, please, check it out!

Fungus Anthology Guidelines!

It was a couple of years ago at Readercon when I first pitched the idea of a weird fungus anthology. Not to a publisher or anything, just to the writers around one of the tables in the bar. But even before that, I'd been thinking about it for a long time.

There's a rich vein of fungal stories that runs through weird fiction, from Hodgson's "Voice in the Night" through Lovecraft's "Fungi from Yuggoth" all the way up to Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris books and others, but, to the best of my knowledge, it's never been mined into an anthology gathered around that theme. Until now.

When I first started writing columns for Innsmouth Free Press, one of the first movies I mentioned to Silvia was the Japanese mushroom-person classic Matango, which she said traumatized her for life. The rest, as they say, is history.

Which is all an incredibly long-winded way of saying that, after talking about it and thinking about it for years, I'm finally going to be co-editing an anthology of weird fungus stories, alongside Silvia, for Innsmouth Free Press. To say that I'm excited about this project would be the worst kind of understatement. We've solicited some exciting authors, the official guidelines have gone up as of yesterday, and I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing lots and lots of awesome fungus stories come pouring in once the reading period begins. Between now and then–and throughout as well, I'm sure–I'll be posting more about the anthology, about what I'm looking for as an editor, about some of my favorite fungus monsters, and so on, so stay tuned!