Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 59

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Here's the thing: There's no way that Don't Be Afraid of the Dark could have been as good as I hoped it would be. I sort of hoped it would be the best movie ever. I mean, the haunted house genre might be my favorite genre, and you know what's better than that? A house haunted by monsters. Add in del Toro's name, the chance to see Troy Nixey's directing chops, and the fact that it got an R rating for being too scary, and you've got expectations that cannot realistically be met.

So was it everything I'd hoped? No, not really. Was it everything I should've reasonably hoped? Yeah, or close enough. I liked it a lot, and, if I'd stumbled upon it without any expectations to weigh it down, if it'd been some surprise thing that I came across somehow without prior knowledge, I'd probably have loved it.

The first question of course is, "Was it really that scary?" And, no, I didn't think so. Probably the most awful thing in the whole movie for me happens before the opening credits. But it was pretty creepy, and it definitely deserved its R-rating, and, honestly, I don't see how it could've been rated anything else, not realistically, even though it's a much more old school creepy dark house movie, rather than a gore film, and its body count is pretty much non-existent. It's not that kind of movie.

It does have a lot in common with del Toro's other films. (And he does love evil tooth fairies. This is the third time he's used them, including a short story he did for the second Hellboy short story collection Odder Jobs, along with the same co-writer who worked with him on this movie.) Mainly, though, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a more straight-up horror movie than anything else del Toro's ever done. As such, it's probably a closer sibling to The Orphanage, which del Toro also produced, and while it's not as good as The Orphanage it has the advantage of monsters.

And the monsters are pretty cool. They're just spidery and awful enough, and the film does a good job of making them a credible threat, even though they're so tiny.

The house was amazing, too. While it never quite felt like it was a character in the story, like it really came alive the way the best haunted houses sometimes do, it was beautifully designed, with wonderful carvings and doors and paintings, and some of that soft golden lighting that you see in the artwork from the film that really plays nicely against the dark and the shadows.

There's really not much wrong with Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. It's keeping it simple, it doesn't have a lot of lofty goals, just wants to be a scary movie about an old, dark house full of awful little monsters. It does that.

The best part, though, about the whole experience for me. Better than the movie. Better, really, than the movie probably could have been, was that I got to sit in a theatre and watch a completely straight-faced, Hollywood horror movie make direct references to Blackwood and Machen. That's the good stuff, right there.

Gothic!

I've mentioned before that I'm going to have a story in Candle in the Attic Window, coming September 20th from Innsmouth Free Press (20% off pre-sale starting September 5th), but I wanted to talk about it again. I'm really excited about this anthology, and not just because the story in it is one of the best I've done, in my opinion. I'm excited about it because it's a theme that's nearer and dearer to my heart than just about any other anthology I've done so far. That theme, of course, is Gothic fiction.

What makes something Gothic can be a difficult thing to define or pin down, and one of the reasons I'm excited about Candle in the Attic Window is that I'm excited to see how all the other contributors defined Gothic for themselves. For me, my story is an homage to those great Vincent Price/Roger Corman Poe adaptations, and all the movies like them. But there's a million different ways that the Gothic sensibility can find its way into a story, without just resorting to women in nightgowns holding candlesticks on the lawns of English manors. (Not that I don't have a soft spot for those, too.)

One of the movies that I'm most looking forward to this year is the remake of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, produced and co-written by Guillermo del Toro and directed by former comic artist Troy Nixey. And one of the reasons that I'm looking so forward to it (besides the obvious, plus monsters) is that it looks so delightfully Gothic. A few years ago del Toro helped shepherd onto American shores another incredible, incredibly Gothic film in the form of The Orphanage. And now the recently revived Hammer films have unveiled the teaser trailer for their forthcoming re-adaptation of The Woman in Black, and, well, see for yourself:

Between all those and some other stuff like, say, the recent version of Jane Eyre (was that any good? did anyone see it?) and I think I'll be excused for at least hoping that we're looking at something of a renaissance in Gothic horror films. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed on the subject, at least. Here's to hoping that those I haven't seen yet are as good as they look, and that, if they are, they do well enough that studios feel compelled to greenlight more.

Death is Not the End

I avoided talking about this for awhile, in order to avoid spoilers, but I think we're past that time now. It's been reported by major news outlets, it's plastered up all over the Internet, there's a big banner at Dark Horse.com, the comic has been out for a week now, and I've even seen a cake commemorating the event. Hellboy is dead.

The death of a major character has never carried much weight in comics. In comics, people die all the time, and everyone always makes a big fuss, and then they're back again before you know it. Even the death of Superman some years ago, which made the national news, was overturned in relatively short order. I remember when I was a kid there was a joke amongst comic fans that the only person who ever stayed dead in comics was Bucky, and last I knew he'd actually been dusted off recently and brought back as the Winter Soldier.

In the wake of the announcement of Hellboy's demise, I saw a lot of people reacting the way that they would in response to the deaths of one of these characters, the kind who are always back again shortly. But Mike Mignola's Hellboy has never been a normal comic. We've lost major characters in it before, so we have some idea of what to expect here. As Mignola himself says, when people die in his comics, they just get more interesting. Rasputin died at the end of Seed of Destruction, the first Hellboy mini-series, and he stuck around to bedevil Hellboy as a ghost for a long time to come.

But there's something else that Mignola always says about his comics, which is that when they break stuff in them, it stays broken. This isn't some kind of publicity stunt death, and it's not something some other writing is going to ret-con or overturn in a few months or even a few years. Hellboy is dead, yes. And he's not gone, no. But he is changed. That's what death is, in the Hellboy comics. It's a change. And once things change, the status quo is never restored.

But we don't really have to speculate too much on what this means for the future of Hellboy. We've already been told. It's right there in the title. "Hellboy in Hell, coming in 2012." There was never any illusion that this was The End. For some time, Mignola has been saying that he's going to be returning to regular art duties on Hellboy once this arc with Duncan Fegredo was done. Now we just have a little bit better idea what those drawing duties are going to entail.

So what is Hellboy in Hell going to be like? The best explanation I've seen from the horse's mouth is here, but really, even that tells us only a little. If I had to guess, I'd say we're looking at a somewhat more surreal, dreamlike series of Hellboy stories. I once said of The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects that the stories in it felt like "pure Mignola," unfiltered by the needs of an ongoing comic franchise. I think Hellboy in Hell will skew more toward that "pure Mignola" aesthetic. Mignola has called it his "semi-retirement" book, and says that it'll "drift him off into this Hellboy inside my head, just rattling through all the images I want to draw and all the stories that I've collected over the years that I want to do."

I've seen a lot of people worried, but I'm not. Mike Mignola is my favorite creator, full stop, and I trust him pretty implicitly by this point. Whatever he does, whatever direction he goes, I'm sure it's going to be cool, and I'm even more sure that it's going to be inspiring. And if what we've got in store is more "pure Mignola," well, that's even better.

So, Hellboy is dead, long live Hellboy!

Weird Horror Manga

I-don't-know-how-long ago, Jesse Bullington suggested to me that I check out some manga by Junji Ito. Much to my chagrin, it took me until now to do it. More's the pity, as it turns out that Jesse was (unsurprisingly) absolutely right: Junji Ito is a genius.

I started out with the third volume of Ito's Museum of Terror series, because I figured it was stand-alone stories, so I could get a feel for whether I liked them or not without getting plunked into the middle of something too big. I didn't just like them, though, I was addicted. I followed that up with the other two Museum of Terror volumes, which featured Ito's Tomie series, and then I couldn't stop. I wanted more. And when I couldn't find more Ito to read right away, I delved into the works of Kazuo Umezu, one of Ito's influences and the "godfather of horror manga."

Junji Ito

What is there to say about Junji Ito, really. As of the time I write this, I've read almost everything of his that's been officially translated into English (and a couple of things that were unofficially scanlated, I admit). I'm still waiting for the second volume of Gyo. And I already want more. I promise that I'm not engaging in my trademark hyperbole when I say that Junji Ito is one of the most consistently brilliant creators–in any medium–I've ever encountered.

His two most famous series–Tomie and Uzumaki–are both actually sequences of short stories that stand variously well on their own. The majority of the Tomie stories could probably be read entirely out of context and enjoyed just fine, though there's the occasional continuity between a couple of tales, but when they're read all together (as they're currently collected in the first two volumes of the Museum of Terror) they create a kind of mythology, a building sense of dread that's at once claustrophobic and yet immense (yes, even cosmic) in scope. It's an approach that he'd perfect in his Uzumaki saga.

To describe the plots of any of Junji Ito's stories are to miss the point of them, largely. He's a creator whose work succeeds mostly on the level of atmosphere, of pacing, of sudden reveals and potent images. Uzumaki, for instance, tells the story of a town obsessed with spirals, but it's so much more than that.

Junji Ito cites Lovecraft as one of his influences, and Uzumaki is often credited as a Lovecraftian work, but, again, it's much more than that. Like Laird Barron or Thomas Ligotti (to name a couple), Junji Ito starts from a position of Lovecraftian cosmic terror, but uses that influence to create something wholly and uniquely his own. Viewed in the context of Ito's other works, Uzumaki feels less like an homage to Lovecraft, and more simply the culmination of Ito's own unique vision. Whatever it is, it's a true modern masterpiece of weird fiction, of a type and scale that's rare and breathtaking. As I said near the beginning of this post, Junji Ito is a genius, and Uzumaki is his masterpiece. I'd recommend all of his work about as highly as I can recommend anything, but Uzumaki is pretty much required reading for anyone with an interest in weird horror.

Kazuo Umezu

As I said before, Kazuo Umezu is one of Junji Ito's claimed influences, and is considered the "godfather of horror manga," according to the Internet. Unlike with Ito, I haven't read nearly all of Umezu's output, but I've read quite a bit, starting with the first volume of his Cat-Eyed Boy series (the second volume is waiting for me as I type this) and moving on to the first volume of his Scary Book series, and all of his epic The Drifting Classroom.

Umezu's work is mostly from the 60s and 70s, and his art style is reminiscent of older anime/manga work like Astro Boy. This, and the child-age protagonists, make his occasionally incredibly gruesome stories seem all the stranger. While the Cat-Eyed Boy stuff is a lot of fun, Umezu's masterpiece is widely considered to be The Drifting Classroom, and I've certainly never read anything else quite like it. I initially compared it to a cross between Lost and The Mist, but with elementary school kids. Certainly there's more to it than that, but it gives you an idea. There's more than a little Lord of the Flies thrown in as well, and the violence by and against children is as unflinching and gruesome as any you'll ever see, but it never feels exploitative. It really is a truly amazing series, especially considering it was initially published in the early-to-mid 70s.

Further Reading Viewing

There's a particular kind of weirdness in these manga. It's most prominent in Junji Ito's stuff, but you can see it a little bit in Kazuo Umezu's work as well. It's uniquely Japanese (and to some extent uniquely their own), but it seems to come from the same well as the great weird and cosmic horror of folks like Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc. (I can definitely see a bit of Hodgson's House on the Borderland in The Drifting Classroom, for example.) If, like me, this unique weirdness is something that you kind of can't get enough of, you'll appreciate knowing that I've found a couple of movies that I think kind of capture it.

Matango (1963)

Pre-dating much of the stuff I've mentioned here, Matango is a Toho-era adaptation of Hodgson's weird fungus classic "The Voice in the Night," complete with amazing rubber-suit mushroom people. It's remarkably better than you could ever imagine, and has an almost perfect tone of spiraling madness and increasingly psychadelic, otherworldy weirdness. I've posted a longer review of it as part of my old column on international horror cinema, which you can read here.

Uzumaki (2000)

Obviously an adaptation of Junji Ito's manga of the same name, Uzumaki fails to deliver on the same level of genius as its source material, but it comes surprisingly close. Cherry-picking events from across the Uzumaki series, and changing many of them around, it nonetheless gets the very unusual tone of the story down almost perfectly, and is as good a cinematic channeling of Ito's unique weird energy as I've ever seen. Things definitely don't get nearly as big as they do in the manga here, but the atmosphere is almost exactly right, and the sense of something much bigger than what you've seen at the end is very nice.

Supernatural & Occult Fiction

I've talked before about the uncertainties I have when it comes to genre designations. What I write is horror, almost certainly, but horror is a big country, and I'm far from the first person to wonder where exactly my flag is planted in that dark territory. This isn't really a post about that, not exactly, but it provides an interesting segue.

I recently read Spook Stories by E.F. Benson, about as charming a collection of ghost stories as you're likely to encounter. I got it from the library, and the edition I got was a hardcover put out by Arno Press as part of a book line called Supernatural & Occult Fiction. There's a list of all the books in the series here. I've heard of several of them, of course, and others are completely new to me. I'm definitely going to start doing some research, and adding some of these volumes to my to-read queue. Based on the titles alone, if nothing else.

But, I dunno, something about the name of the book line really struck me. Supernatural and Occult Fiction. It's so simple and scholarly-sounding, almost antiquarian, as befits most of the recognizable titles in their stable. Yet it's also evocative. The minute I see those words, it makes me want to read those books on a gray rainy day, or on the proverbial dark and stormy night. So, is this a useful subgenre distinction? Supernatural and Occult Fiction? Probably not. But it does sum up most of what I write decently well, and it's definitely got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Cover!

Those of you who were around this weekend may've already seen this, but it deserves a good big post of its very own. The pre-production (so not necessarily final, but probably close) front cover of my forthcoming collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings has been revealed:

You can go to the publisher's site to read a little about the background that went into the cover, but for now I can tell you that the cover art is by the fabulous Bernie Gonzalez, who also did illustrations for every story in the collection (more on that later). There'll be a lot more news and details about the collection coming down the road, but for now I wanted to share the cover with everyone.

In other news, I believe I can safely announce that I sold my story "The Labyrinth of Sleep" to the fine folks at Innsmouth Free Press for inclusion in their forthcoming Future Lovecraft anthology. Stay tuned and you'll be hearing more about that in the near future, as well!

Suspiria & Others

I recently watched Dario Argento's Suspiria for the first time (right before it got pulled from Netflix's Watch Instantly) and I've been a little obsessed with it ever since. I'm somewhat (rightly) famous for my hyperbole and my enthusiasm for the things I like, but it's been awhile since I saw anything that galvanized me in quite the way that Suspiria did. Anytime I watch something I usually want to talk about it afterward, but with Suspiria, I still want to talk about it, even though it's been something like a week. (Does anyone reading this actually need me to tell them about Suspiria, though? If you haven't seen it, by some chance, consider this my recommendation.)

Moreover, only after watching it I realized the connection between it and Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which prompted me to go back and re-read the latter, and has also prompted me to track down the thing that inspired them both, Thomas de Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis, which has dutifully taken its place in my reading queue. I've been thinking a lot about the connections between these things (and their connections to some other works). I don't know yet if anything'll come of it, but it's been fun to muse about, anyway.

I've actually watched quite a bit of new (or, new to me, anyway) stuff lately, some of which is worth mentioning. Black Death is another surprisingly good one (though it shouldn't be too surprising, as several people had recommended it to me). And I caught the Anthony Hopkins exorcism flick The Rite, which was mostly just OK, but it had at least one scene of great atmospheric creepiness. Also, Rutger Hauer in a surprisingly restrained role as the protagonist's undertaker father which, my unhealthy love for Rutger Hauer notwithstanding, was still pretty great.

My wife and I also caught The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was really good, but very intense. Parts of it definitely reminded me of Zodiac, mostly in the "making sorting through papers and looking at old photographs exciting somehow" department, so I'm still eager to see David Fincher tackle the remake. I'll be curious to see if they action-movie up Daniel Craig's Blomkvist, though.

And I re-watched Mimic for something like the third or fourth time. Sadly, it's still a bit of a disappointment in del Toro's canon, but it's got some interesting moments, and looking at it from this point in his career you can definitely see the building blocks of several things he'd do later (there are especially a lot of echoes of it in The Strain). The big surprise this time, I think, was that Josh Brolin had a supporting role. I guess I probably didn't know who he was the last time I saw the movie.

I've also been reading a fair bit of good stuff of late. Besides the aforementioned Our Lady of Darkness, I picked up Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol, an artist I've liked for awhile. I also checked out some stuff by Junji Ito, finally, which someone (I think Jesse Bullington) had suggested I do long ago. Both were really great, though also kind of as different as two comics about supernatural stuff could possibly be, with the Brosgol angling toward the charming and the Ito keeping to the creepy and disturbing as shit.

And last but not least I finally got around to reading Laird Barron's newest collection, Occultation, which delivered on all the promise of his first collection, and then some. Laird's been one of the top practitioners of the weird horror story from the word go, but this collection is a massive jump up in awesomeness from the first one, and that's from someone who thought the first one was pretty great. My favorite stories in it often deal with some kind of fringe occult activities in a way that feels totally real and new and ominous and creepy. I'd already read "Catch Hell," but "Mysterium Tremendum," "Six Six Six," and the title story are all original to the collection, I believe, and are all major favorites of mine. I think "Six Six Six" is probably my favorite Laird Barron story to date. Good stuff.

The Burning Maiden and the Book Club

The website and table of contents for the first volume of The Burning Maiden, which will feature my story "Count Brass," is up here. I'm in a really just jaw-dropping table of contents. I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing here this time, though I should, but we're talking about the likes of Cullen Bunn, Matthew Pearl, Tim Lebbon, Mike Oliveri, Jeremy Shipp, Sarah Langan, Mort Castle, and Joe Lansdale, among others! So yeah, wow!

It's coming out this October from Evileye Books, the same folks who're going to be publishing Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings (my collection). "Count Brass" will also be in my collection, though I sold it to them for The Burning Maiden before we'd ever started talking about the collection. Still, this means October is going to be a big, big month for me, for lots of reasons.

While I'm on the subject, you should check out the Evileye book club. It's the only way to get the limited-edition hardcovers of their various books, including Never Bet the Devil, The Burning Maiden, Cullen Bunn's Crooked Hills, and Mike Oliveri's The Pack: Winter Kill, among others. There's no commitment involved, and it also gets you access to various other special deals. Plus, even though it looks like you do, you don't have to have a Twitter handle to sign up. Just, if you do, they do updates and stuff via Twitter.

Out of Town

Heading out of town for the weekend. Not much in the way of Internet access until I get back. See you guys next week, and try not to burn the place down while I'm away.

What've I Been Doing?

A lot has been going on, which, as usual, means I've been posting less. Honestly, while I'll always keep updating my site here, the best place to keep up with me these days is probably over on my Facebook (I know, I know).

So what's up? Well, my ninth anniversary came and went on June 2nd. Nine years I've been married to my very favorite person in the world, which is pretty good, I think. We didn't do much to mark the date this year, but next year we're planning to go to Hawaii.

I've seen a lot of movies lately. I re-watched Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time in many years, and the very first time all the way through. It was still good. Then we watched the movie, which was flat crazy. I also caught X-Men: First Class, which was better than I could've reasonably expected. I would've liked more Magneto/Xavier/Mystique/Shaw, and less weird Z-list mutant supporting characters, but it was mostly pretty great.

Besides that, I watched a bunch of stuff for my column over at Innsmouth Free Press, and I also caught a weird anthology horror flick on Watch Instantly called Trapped Ashes. I watched it because Joe Dante directed the framing sequence, but I actually found it to be a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting, in spite of a pretty stupid ending. The framing sequence had a great Mario Bava/Dario Argento homage house setting, and while the rest of the movies had the (sometimes uncomfortable) eroticism of a late-night cable show, I found that almost all of them had something going on that I could enjoy. I think my favorite was probably "Stanley's Girlfriend," which, though it didn't really bring anything new to the table, had a tone of lingering regret, rather than horror, that I found interesting.

Those who follow me on Goodreads will note that I've not been reading much. That's not actually strictly true, but I've been working my way through a massive pair of tomes collecting the macabre short fiction of Basil Copper from PS Publishing. I'll post reviews eventually, but I'm still getting through them. I've also been going back through in an effort to thin out my comic collection, which means reading a lot of my old comic books. And, by and large, they're terrible. Man. But I still love some of them anyway.

Tonight I'm going to Tessa Gratton's book launch at Rainy Day Books, so I'm looking forward to that.

I think that's about it for me, though. What've you guys been up to?