Chadwick H. Saxelid's Blog: Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Long-Leggedy Beasties, page 56

More Story Boarding

It has been six working days since I started my Magical Myrioramas fueled short story writing exercises, time for an update.

I have written six stories. One of which I thought solid enough to try revising and polishing into an actual story. The other five have interesting ideas and images in them, but none of them have the kind of potential yesterday's story seems to have. The other five will probably be composted for parts in future stories.

The Mystery Mansion version of the game arrived yesterday. This is a good thing, as I did not want daily use of The Hollow Woods  wearing me into a creative rut.

While I love my visits to those haunted woods, filled with all manner of spooky threats and mysteries, I need to explore something outside of them, if I want to stretch and grow as a creative writer.

That is why I was quick to order The Mystery Mansion. This twenty card set is murder mystery focused. Think Agatha Christie.

A country home, where strange happenings are afoot. Maybe there's been a murder. Maybe somebody is being blackmailed and then there is a murder. Maybe someone plans to reveal a secret of some kind and is murdered before doing so.

Everyone at the house,  guests and house staff alike, is a suspect.

Seeing Death On The Nile, way back in 1978, kicked off an Agatha Christie reading binge that lasted years. This reading included the classic And Then There Were None, of course.

I'm of the opinion that Christie's And Then There Were None is more of an archetypal "Slasher Movie" prototype than the limelight hogging Psycho ever was. But that's just me. Your mileage will inevitably vary.

My plan is to alternate between the two each week, cycling them through Monday-Wednesday-Friday and Tuesday-Thursday usages. I will do this until The Shadow World, the company's science-fiction themed game, is released this August and gets added to my writing exercise rotation.

Right now, however, the Mystery Mansion awaits.

Story Boarding

Monday night is gaming night for me. I take a bag full of games, head down to my local gaming store, and play board games for three or so hours. The store charges a nominal fee to do so, but it is saved as a store credit I can use toward purchases.

I've been going to this particular store for several years, so I have been able to buy a few cost prohibitive games on an installment plan. I also indulge in some impulse buys. Which is what I did last Monday.

A storytelling game called The Hollow Woods caught my eye. I have a few storytelling games, but the group that I usually hang out with on Monday aren't all that into storytelling, which is fine.

Despite my knowing this probably would not be a game I would be playing with any kind of regularity, I could not give it a pass. I bought the thing, opened it up, and poured over the Edward Goreyesque artwork and instructions.

To play the game, you shuffle the cards, then begin turning them over and setting them side by side, building a story as you go. The artwork is designed in such a way the cards align smoothy, no matter the order in which they are dealt, so the story potential is almost endless.

I thought this was money very well wasted.

But my subconscious evidently had a better grasp on the game's potential for use than I did. After I looked at the cards and read the enclosed information packet, which gives names and concept descriptions for each card, something wondrous came together in my mind.

I could use the cards to create short stories.

Which is what I did this morning.

I shuffled the cards, then placed seven of them - face down - in a row in front of me. Why seven? Because I use the Seven Point Story Structure Dan Wells introduced me to during a Writing Excuses Retreat. First card: Hook. Second card: Plot Turn 1. Third card: Pinch 1. Fourth card: Midpoint. Fifth card: Pinch 2. Sixth card: Plot Turn 2. Seventh card: Resolution.

Why did I put the cards face down? So I can discover/create the story as I go. I am a discovery writer and know enough about my creative process that, if I were to allow myself to pick and choose the cards, I would construct a story I would not write.

I picked up a pen, flipped over the first card, and began writing. I wrote until I ran out of opening. That is when I flipped the next card over and went wherever the prompt took me. When I finished creating a connection between the two cards and felt it was time to move on, I flipped over the next card. I kept doing this until I reached the seventh card and finished the first draft of an all new short story.

The first drafts these cards generate do not need to be good, or even make sense. What I am really interested in doing is writing an all new short story every day, for the foreseeable future.

Some of these exercises might pan out into something publishable. Others are sure to get tossed into a trunk, never to be seen or shared. But pieces, parts, and ideas from those trunk stories will make their way into stories I have written, or have yet to write.

I had so much fun doing this, I have already made plans to add The Mystery Mansion to my morning story generating exercise equipment. 

Movie Reviews: The Blind Dead series (1971 - 1975)

The Blind Dead, the creation of series writer/director Amando De Ossorio, are the ambulatory remains of the Templars, knights that practiced black magic and human sacrifice, in order to live forever. They cannot see, but they can still hear and that is how they hunt, by sound. Potential victims can try to keep from being heard, but the pounding of their terrified hearts can be deafening in the silence they are trying so hard not to break...

The how and why of the Templars becoming the Blind Dead varies from film to film.

In Tombs of the Blind Dead, the first of the series, the Templars are hung and left hanging, so that birds can peck the eyes out of their carcasses, prior to burial.

The second film, Return Of The Evil Dead, has a mob of angry villagers kill them. When the lead Templar promises they will return to seek revenge, the villagers blind them, so they will be unable to find their way back to town.

The Ghost Galleon, the third film, has the Blind Dead commandeer the titular sea vessel, turning it into a fogbound Flying Dutchman, so they can hunt the sea for fresh prey. The discovery of a captain's log allows for an info dump explanation of who the Templars are and how they wound up on the ship. Why were the Templars being shipped overseas? No idea. This is also the only film in the series that does not feature a flashback, or prologue, with living Templars.

The final film, Night of the Seagulls, finds the Templars showing up once every year, for seven nights, to claim a sacrifice from a cursed town. The dubbed version I watched gave no explanation for the Blind Dead being the way they are.

Considering how much I adore atmospheric horror and creepy monsters, it's baffling to me that I have not gotten around to watching any of the Blind Dead movies until now. Somehow they slipped, unseen, through my childhood. (No pun intended.)

Tombs of the Blind Dead, released in 1971, was a huge hit. One that helped jumpstart the Spanish horror boom of the early-to-mid seventies. It seems to considered by many to the best and scariest of the series. I disagree about it being the best, but agree with it being the scariest.

While the film gets off to a brisk start, it bogs down in the middle and the story takes a digression into what seems to be a different movie. One that could have been directed by John Carpenter.

Two scenes in particular got me wondering if John Carpenter was a fan of the films and if they had influenced him.

The first was in a morgue. A corpse's hand slides out from under a sheet. Then the corpse sits up, climbs off the table, and begins walking (slowly) toward a morgue attendant that has his back to the corpse. I thought this sequence bore an incredibly strong resemblance to one in The Fog, where a (blinded) corpse gets up and walks up behind Jamie Lee Curtis, who has her back to it.

A short time later, that same ambulatory corpse attacks a woman inside a mannequin factory. The woman runs up to a door, only to find it locked. There is a moment where the panicked woman yanks on and pounds against the door, calling for help, while the corpse walks toward her with inexorable slowness, from across the length of the factory. I thought this moment bore a passing resemble to a similar one in Carpenter's Halloween, when Laurie Strode (Jame Lee Curtis, again) pounds on a locked door. screaming for Tommy to come open the door, while the Shape walks towards her, from across the street.

If Tombs of the Blind Dead had been made after Halloween and The Fog, I would hold the opinion that Carpenter's films had influenced De Ossorio, it seems that obvious.

Tombs might be the scariest of the series, but I think Return of the Evil Dead, the second, is the best. The production values are higher, the movie looks more polished, and the story and characterizations are not just stronger, but coherent. (In defense of Tombs story problems, the film was cut and re-edited prior to its release in the United States, which explains its choppiness and incoherence.)

On the quincentennial (500 year) anniversary of a town celebrating its defeat and destruction of the evil Templars, the Blind Dead arise to wreak their promised vengeance.

They come riding into town, after making a brief stop to attack some lovers having a clandestine tryst, and begin slaughtering the villagers. A few townsfolk manage to barricade themselves inside the local church, where they hide and try to figure out how to escape and survive the horrifying attack.

Amando De Ossorio was forthright  about Return being influenced heavily by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. I am unaware of John Carpenter, or anyone, offering any comment on how Return might have influenced The Fog. But the surface similarities between the films got an ear-to-ear grin spreading across my face.

The Fog is my favorite Carpenter movie (I have the soundtrack playing as I write this section of my recap and review) and the similarities, intentional or not, that it shares with Return of the Evil Dead might be one of the reasons I enjoyed it the most.

When the Blind Dead first arrive at the location of the lovers secret tryst, do they burst through the doors or windows? No, they walk up to the door and pound on it with their weapons.

Dare I mention how The Ghost Galleon's fogbound cursed ship seemed to resemble the Elizabeth Dane's fogbound appearance just before the ghosts launch their attack on the Sea Grass?

Take a look.

Yes, one is an obvious toy boat in an obvious bathtub, while the other is an actual vessel that Carpenter and producer Debra Hill were able to rent for a quick reshoot of The Fog's first attack. But the similarities are easy to see.

I am sure that some of you are starting to think, "Chad, I think you're stretching to the point of being just the teeniest-tiniest bit silly about this." You might be right, but you could also be wrong.

There is an idea/theory I have heard discussed and/or referenced in numerous interviews and documentaries over the years. It is the concept that all art and artists (literary and commercial) are engaged in a creative conversation.

This conversation can be friendly, or it can be adversarial, but it is always happening. The artist(s) may or may not even be aware of being in conversation with their influences (both positive and negative) during the creative process, but it is still happening. Down, deep in the collective unconscious of us all.

The sea is filled with ghost ships. Legend, folklore, and myth are scattered with vengeance seeking revenants and ghosts. The connection I see between these three films and Halloween and The Fog could be entirely the creation of my pattern seeking brain.

Even if that turns out to be true, it does not mean I am wrong. De Ossorio and Carpenter both tapped into something potent and primal, with varying degrees of success.

Which brings me to Night Of The Seagulls, the not-so-grand finale to the Blind Dead series.

I could try and convince myself that my almost hostile reaction to the film was the result of watching all four films in close proximity and, no matter how much fun I had with the first three, I was beginning to tire of them by the end of the third entry.

But even with that admission, I have a difficult time convincing myself of its truth. Because, it seemed to me, it was obvious that De Ossorio himself seemed to be getting bored with the Blind Dead. The story feels perfunctory and the attacks seem as lifeless as the Blind Dead themselves. The film is still deliciously atmospheric, but the creepiness is nonexistent.

Then there is the film's almost robotic anti-climax. No spoilers, but Night of the Seagulls manages to surpass Return of the Evil Dead's "Wait, that's it!?!" ending. At least Return attempted an emotional catharsis of some kind. Seagulls did not. Tombs and Galleon have the best endings, respectively.

Movie Review: A Quiet Place (2018)

Lee Abbott (John Krasinski) and his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) struggle to protect their children (Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, and Cade Woodward, respectively) from ferocious creatures that hunt and kill anything making the slightest sound...

Logic is anathema to horror.

Plot does not matter. Nor does setting, time period, or even the nature of the horrifying threat.

While serial killers, mutated whatsis, and/or creatures of supernatural or alien origin can be, and are, metaphors for something, that something changes from story to story, person to person, and generation to generation.

Yet, at their very core, there is something in every horror story that does not seem to change, ever.

It is how all those above listed metaphors are presented and perceived, both within the context of the story being told and to the audience that is reading, watching, or listening to said story.

Be it ghoul, ghost, or long-legged beast, the core presentation and perception of the threat is of the irrational intruding upon the rational. Something, or someone, breaks the natural order, sending everything, and everyone, spinning horrifically out of control.

Which is my rather convoluted way of trying describe or explain how and why horror stories have, far more often than not, the narrative weirdness that is described as Dream Logic. Because nothing about what is happening in them is the slightest bit logical.

A Quiet Place, directed by and starring John Krasinski, is a textbook example of how dream logic serves to make a suspenseful and frightening thrill ride of a movie.

The film begins on day 89 of an unexplained disaster. Everybody struggles to stay as silent as possible, while trying to scrounge up medicine and supplies in a deserted city. But a sound is made and tragedy strikes. The movie then jumps forward to day 473, or thereabouts.

Because any sound could be a death sentence, everyone communicates via sign language. Board games have their noise making parts replaced with pieces of yarn and meals are served on lettuce leaves, not plates. When the slightest noise is made, everyone freezes and looks terrified. With good reason, the monsters that come charging at the source of the sound are something out of a nightmare.

Krasinski's use of silence is masterful. It both fuels the tension and drives the story. Whenever a sound is made, it seems just a bit louder than normal. Maybe it is, but it is also surrounded by silence and everyone is terrified by the unexpected accidental sound. Krasinski also puts the film's sound design to good use, so the audience experiences certain events from the perspective of daughter Regan, who is deaf.

But how does dream logic figure into this?

Well, as I said before, the situation itself is like something out of a familiar feeling nightmare. And, just like waking from a nightmare, as soon as I left the theatre and stepped into the bright afternoon sunlight, the surreal absurdities of A Quiet Place began to come into focus.

How is it nobody sneezes? Our cries out in their sleep? Or snores? Or has food or water go down the wrong pipe and has a coughing fit? Then there is the last minute discovery of a weakness in the creatures, which I had a hard time believing would not have been figured before day 89 came rolling around.

None of this bothered me during the movie, however. My attention stayed focused on the screen and the plight of the characters on it. That's how I know a movie works. I don't notice the wonkiness of its dream logic until the movie is over and I have an undistracted moment in which to think about it.

Movie Trailer(s): The Meg (2018)

United States (Official Trailer #1):

International (Official Trailer #2):

Movie Trailer: Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

Deep Blue Sea 2 trailer

Book Review: The Devil With You! (The Lost Bloch, Volume 1) by Robert Bloch, edited by David J. Schow

Four rough gems from Bloch's prolific pulp era.

The Devil With You!: Bill Dawson takes a two-week vacation and heads to New York City. Roped into playing a dice game, Dawson wins the hotel he is staying in. Just in time to witness the otherworldly chaos unleashed by the Magician's Convention being held in the very same hotel...

Strictly from Mars: Pulp writer Dan Kenny staggers home from a booze soaked meeting with an editor and falls into one of his own science fiction stories. Mars is calling and they want help conquering the Earth...

It Happened Tomorrow: Dick Sheldon is jarred from an alcohol induced slumber by his alarm clock, which will not stop ringing. Sheldon soon learns that it is not just his alarm clock. Every machine in the city seems to have gone haywire...

The Big Binge: Elmer Klopp just wanted to drown his just below average sorrows. Instead he becomes the guinea pig for the latest breakthrough in psychiatric treatment...

Although justifiably famous for his novel Psycho, and countless other tales of psychological terror, there was more to Robert Bloch than his ability to curdle a reader's blood. He could also get the reader laughing, if he were to choose to do so. Those who were lucky enough to know Bloch all spoke glowingly of the late Grandmaster's ability with puns and jokes.

Two of the four pulp stories collected in this volume give the reader an idea of just how funny Robert Bloch could be.

The first comedic story, and first of the collection, is The Devil With You! A chaotic, Keystone Kops style romp through a dizzying amount of plot twists and zaniness. If there is a down side to the story, is that it is so breathlessly paced it almost becomes exhausting. Almost.

The second comedic offering is The Big Binge, a novel length delight that ends the anthology on a high note. It is a much stronger work than The Devil With You! As Bloch allows for a few down moments between the comedic shenanigans. Doing this allows both the story's characters and its readers a moment to catch their breath, before he shoots them off into another hilarious debacle. 

Between these two comedic escapades are two tales that play things a tad more straight.

Strictly from Mars is an almost Philip K. Dick level mind game. I could not tell, until the very end, whether or not the Martian threat was all in Dan Kenny's mind, or if it were real.

In his foreword, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz describes It Happened Tomorrow as beating to the punch the kind of dark, pessimistic end of the world style scenarios detailed in Richard Matheson's Mad House, Stephen King's short story Trucks, and even The Twilight Zone episode A Thing About Machines. King's maligned cinematic misfire Maximum Overdrive is quite conspicuous in its absence, despite Bloch's tale reading as what the film might have been like if King and jettisoned his over the top humor and "moron movie" approach and played the scenario as dead serious. Bloch did and the story is a deliciously chilling work of gradually escalating horror.

Long out of print, I hope that The Lost Bloch can become available again. The genre would be richer for it.

Book Review: The Hammer Vault - Treasures from the Archive of Hammer Films by Marcus Hearn (Revised and Updated Edition)

With The Hammer Vault: Treasures From the Archive of Hammer Films official Hammer Films historian Marcus Hearn compiles a delicious sampling of glorious goodies from Hammer Productions famous run of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and suspense movies. Hearn also covers some of the company's adventure and historical films, too.

In its brisk 183 pages, The Hammer Vault gives the reader samplings of production art, promotional material, actor's personally annotated scripts, lobby cards, stills, behind the scenes photos, props, and more. Much more. 

Hammer had been in business for years by the time it made The Quatermass Xperiment, its film version of Nigel Kneale's popular TV serial of the same name. But it was The Quatermass Xperiment that gave the production company its first monster hit and changed its production style forever.

The overwhelming success of The Quatermass Xperiment served as a both a springboard and blueprint for the production company's future projects. It was responsible for Hammer creating a distinctive production and story telling style. This style would become known and loved by audiences, and reviled by critics of the day, as Hammer Horror.

So popular and lucrative was the Hammer Horror formula, it bled over into its more mainstream productions. The most infamous of which being the notorious war film The Camp On Blood Island.

Hammer perfected this formula and, until the company's output began to struggle with the changing tastes and times ushered in during the 1970s, it churned out a great many classic, and near classic, movies. Hearn devotes two pages of text and photos to each film, from The Quatermass Xperiment all the way to the original company's final film production, The Lady Vanishes.

Hearn does not stop there, though. He also shares promotional and production art for the many films that Hammer was not able to make. He also details its brief, albeit memorable, foray into television, and - in this revised and updated edition - Hammer's glorious (and hopefully not short lived) return to active production.

The Hammer Vault is a delicious must have for any and all fans of Hammer Films.

Book Review: Horror Movies by Alan Frank

As I age, the decade of my childhood (the 70s) and the decade I began as a teenager and ended as a "new adult" (the 80s) grow more magical and otherworldly.

One reason, I am sure, is nostalgia for that mythical "simpler" time that never existed. That time when my parents seemed invincible and omniscient. When summer vacation(s) felt like a vast period of time where I could devote as much time to reading comics and books, watching television, and seeing movies as I was capable, which was a lot.

Another reason, and one I think is closer to the truth, is how times were different back then.

My family didn't have cable television, for one. So there were only a few VHF channels and a smattering of UHF channels for me to choose from. We did not have a VCR until 1982, I think. So, if I wanted to record something, I had to use an audio cassette and then listen to it as if it were a radio drama. The tapes I remember most vividly, and wore out my recordings of, were the broadcast premiere of Jaws, recordings of John Carpenter's The Fog and Escape from New York made off of HBO, and several episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (The Ripper, The Vampire, and The Spanish Moss Murders, respectively) during its run on the CBS Late Movie.

News and information about movies could be sparse to non-existent in those days. There were the occasional Behind the Scenes documentary, fifteen-minute to half an hour studio puff pieces that hyped an upcoming "event" movie. These shorts would usually air on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, as filler. There was also That's Hollywood, the Tom Bosley narrated Behind the Scenes series, and... not much else that comes to mind.

Except for newspaper articles, magazines (Famous Monsters, Cinefantastique, Starlog, and Fangoria, et al) and books. These were the Wikipedia and websites of my youth. The only places to find information, pictures, and summaries of movies that aired infrequently on our local stations, or so it seemed at the time. Films such as Quatermass and the Pit and Island Of Terror proved elusive, while others, like Horror Express, Deep Red, and The Birds, to name a few, were broadcasting mainstays.

There were several books I remember pouring over, trying to get a glimpse of the tantalizing horrors that were so frustratingly out of my reach. One of these of might have been Alan Frank's Horror Films.

Might have been because Frank wrote several books detailing the history of cinematic horror and, while I can remember the photos contained in those books, their titles and text, until recently, were a mystery. Because, back in 1976 and 1977, all my attention was focused on the pages and pages of movie stills (most in black and white, but some in glorious and gruesome color) and none whatsoever to the titles or their text.

A few years ago, I found and read Frank's Horror Movies: Tales of Terror in the Cinema. That book contains far more photos I recall studying than Horror Films does, but I am no less appreciative of being able to have both in my collection, and hope to ad Frank's The Horror Film Handbook at some point in the future.

Horror Films offers a fairly detailed chronological listing of the major and minor moments in horror cinema. Frank starts with the advent of motion pictures and, decade by decade, works his way up to the (first) remake of King Kong, which was released at the end of 1976. Horror Films was published in 1977.

While the amount of information and detail Frank is able to share is admirable, I found some of his criticism to be... suspect.

He dismisses Night of the Living Dead as minor, excoriates Peter Sellars performance(s) in Dr. Strangelove, is contemptuous of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and, in a laugh out loud moment, even dares to praise Night of the Lepus as "a pleasant reminder of the way movies used to be." I do agree wholeheartedly with the adulation he gives director Terence Fisher, though.

Actually reading the book, instead of just leaving it in the bookcase and taking it out for the infrequent thumbing through, was an entertaining look back at a time when movies weren't as ubiquitous and accessible as they are today. When the best you could do was read something like Horror Films or, even better, a novelization, while you waited (most often impatiently) for a movie to show up on TV.