Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 260

Cold in July

The trick in adapting a novel—or anything—for the screen, it’s not about being loyal to every line or faithful to each scene exactly as it happens on the page, it’s about identifying the beating heart of the novel, and then finding a way to get it on screen such that the final effect can feel the same. Jim Mickle’s Cold in July does exactly that with Joe R. Lansdale’s novel Cold in July, a book readers have been celebrating now for twenty-five years. After this movie, though, I imagine there’s going to be a whole new set of readers coming to this book, and then falling into the rest of the Lansdale shelves. And that’s plural on purpose, there. I envy them their fall, too. And, what’s surprising with this adaptation, it’s that, while it didn’t have to be faithful the novel, still, just about everything that happens on-screen, it’s lifted from the page. Sure, there’s some things condensed, some characters erased, but that’s just because the conventions of film and the conventions of fiction are different. That beating heart, though—let me get at it sideways, so as not to directly spoil: you know how the real pleasure of zombies, in both videogames and movies, it’s that they’re complete monsters, you can’t negotiate with them, there’s one and only one rational response to them looming over you? Shooting a zombie feels so righteous. That’s exactly what Cold in July is about. It’s about putting a normal, small-town guy in a situation where he questions his own  . . . → → →</a

Stage Fright

I can’t figure why exactly slashers and musicals are something that’s been tried now twice. Once here, and once in Don’t Go In the Woods. I mean, Nazis and zombies, that just makes sense. But I can’t figure out what slashers and musicals share, exactly. And, maybe it’s not slashers in particular, even. We’ve already had Cannibal: the Musical, haven’t we? Maybe horror is just something we like to see strained through the musical. If it is something particular to the slasher, though . . . what, right? Is it that they’re both pretty formulaic? Like, gleefully formulaic? Could be. Or—this is sounding more likely to me—I bet it’s the fact that each rely so heavily on set-pieces. Musicals have sing-alongs every X minutes, and a slasher’s guaranteed to deliver an over-the-top kill every X minutes. Which is different than ‘formula,’ of course. Formula is kind of like ‘recipe’: put these characters in that situation, and the same thing’ll cook up each time. And that’s not at all bad, either. A lot of people indict slashers for this very reason, whereas I see that as their strength, maybe even their saving grace. But, yes, I think that’s it: a slasher and a musical, no matter what else is going on, we’re getting a specific kind of scene ever few minutes. Their rhythm is the same. And they’re each exuberant, and unselfconscious. They’re not ashamed to let a person sing their inner thoughts, they see nothing wrong with going into unnecessarily graphic detail about how exactly  . . . → → →</a

Werewolf Class

My second or third year teaching, somebody caught me in a hallway, asked me my thoughts on how detective fiction’s put together. And, listening to myself answer—of course I’d been reading noir and p.i. and crime and thriller forever—I realized that I only knew detective fiction as a reader, not a writer. And, I say ‘only,’ but not to diminish. Rather, to highlight that how I, anyway, learn about a thing, it’s by doing it. So, dissatisfied with my answer in the hall that day, I sat down a couple weeks later, started writing the novel that became Not for Nothing. The way I learn about stuff, I mean, it’s to vivisect, sure. But it’s to vivesect with full knowledge that I’m just hollowing out that skin so I can try it on. And, man, I’ve been into werewolves so much longer than I’ve been into . . . I don’t know: detective fiction, sure. But also hamburgers, say. Yet, yes, I’ve been teaching a zombie course for a few years now. And it’s been a ball, and I’ll do it again, of course. The zombie’s far from dead. But now I’ve got a chance to bring things back to the heart, as it were: werewolves for a summer course. Four weeks of tooth and claw, paint-the-walls-red because they’re going to be anyway. As prep, last fall I started what I thought was going to be my monsterwork best-thing-ever werewolf novel, The Lord’s Highway. Kind of a start-over of a werewolf novel I wrote in  . . . → → →</a

Only Lovers Left Alive

Okay, I need to be writing chapters of a novel, but, to keep my brain from melting, I slip out from time to time for a movie. And I got zero time or fingerstrength for rigging a proper review together, but, man, I did dig this one. Also, the world may be lucky that Jim Jarmusch chose to drop this movie now, instead of twenty years ago, when Sandman was in full swing. I mean, Gaiman, he gothed the world up, and there’s still remants and vestiges of that, which is all cool and great. But, had Only Lovers Left Alive hit in the mid-nineties, well, it would have been all over for good old Planet Earth. An alternate  universe Captain Kirk would have fallen into orbit one day, transported down, and there would be raggy black cloth everywhere, and eyeliner would be heriditery by then, and all the babies would be named Robert Smith. Which is to say: both the style and the tone of this movie, it sucks you in completely, it makes you want to be these cool, mopey cats. I mean, sure, there’s a sense in which they’re kind of functioning as immortal commentators on the ills of humanity—nicely dubbed ‘zombies’—and, yes, since Ann Rice, vampires have pretty much been a class-fascination for the rest of us (we want to join that club . . .), but, who wouldn’t choose to live in a dilapidated, velvety Victorian mansion in abandoned Detroit and collect impossibly vintage guitars and then have the added  . . . → → →</a

The Quiet Ones

1.) There’s about fifty jokes to make with that title. None of which will be made in this list. 2.) Put The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity in a jar, let Carrie (also 1974 . . .) shake it while Samara watches, and you’ve pretty much got The Quiet Ones. 3.) There was me and two other dudes there on opening day for it. Which bums me out: it’s horror, world. Also, though, I said to a class a few years ago, “So you’re all there for the midnight FD3 tonight, aren’t you?” and got just blank stares in return, so, you know: at least I was there. 4) There’s a point in here where they pause the projector, freezing an image on their screen, and this is 1974 and the bulb doesn’t melt the film. But: I was two years old then. Am I missing something? 5) So glad I saw this, because, while watching it, I figured out the title to a book that’s been living in my head for about three months. It was nothing anybody said, just something I said to myself. 6) I really wanted the “quiet ones” in The Quiet Ones to be scary. But alas, even getting the character to say the title out loud for us took a shoehorn. 7) I dig how this takes conventions both from the haunted house and the possession/exorcism genres, and then mixes it with some cult-stuff as well. Keeps you guessing. And I so hope this isn’t due to American  . . . → → →</a

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

Got pages of mostly illegible notes re: Under the Skin, but not much time to collate. Rather, like Snowman and the Bandit, I got a long way to go and a short time to get there. So, some quick bulletpoint responses, anyway: 1) We all want to be David Bowie, of course. Or, we all want Walter Tevis to have written us, anyway. And, no, sadly, regrettably, unforgivably, I haven’t read the novel Under the Skin is working from. But what I imagine is some amalgamation of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer via Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box.” Though of course I want there be some Brother from Another Planet in there, as well. Eyeballs-as-spycams is where it’s at, alien-wise. 2) Species, Splice, Lifeforce, and all the many-many different kinds of women that apparently come from the moon: it’s never with good intentions, is it? Is this story tendency expressing some male insecurity? Is ‘space’ somehow coded ‘female’—this not unphallic ship penetrating it—but it’s so basically unknowable that it comes back, gives mankind a taste of its (his?) own medicine? I don’t know. I’ve never tried to write one of those stories. Maybe there’s something else making all these women so killer-mean. 3) All horror has a cautionary aspect. The warning here is that, if she looks too good to be picking you up off the side in the road in a giant cargo van, well, you’re probably already dead. 4) We earthlings are either endlessly fascinated by aliens who can ‘pass’ as us,  . . . → → →</a

Chapter Six

Short story going live at Tor.com the second week of June. It’s a story of how anthropologists might handle the apocalypse, how academics deal with zombies. Pretty short, and a pretty cool cover. Thanks to Ellen Datlow both for selecting it and then for editing it into a better form of itself. Will link when it’s live.

What April Was, and Is Still Being

Man, the links and updates get away from me. I can usually remember to stuff them to the right, here, under Interviews/Stories/Off-Site, but I don’t always remember to put them here. So, doing it now, here. What I can recall from the last two weeks or so (will try to make all the images links):              

Not all Births are Pretty

We need a new designation: there’s movies about the apocalypse, and all our valiant efforts to stop it from happening, from Armageddon to The Hunt for Red October, and then there’s the post-apocalyptic stories, from Mad Max to The Book of Eli and way beyond. There’s stories that are kind of both, too, like Twelve Monkeys and Terminator, where the apocalypse has ‘already’ happened but can still be undone. Adding time-travel to the mix kind of escapes these movies from the usual taxonomy, though. Then there’s movies like The Divide, which is a title I initially didn’t go for, as it seemed too thematic and portentious, and maybe not catchy enough. Now that I’ve seen The Divide, though, I get it: it’s a story that’s straddling that thin line between the apocalypse and what comes after. That thin, bloody line, I should say. That violent, dark, messy, inevitable place between the way it was and the way it is now. This is where The Divide lives. No, this is where it seethes. And, the odd thing is, for most of the first act, you’re pretty sure you’ve seen this movie: a screaming comes across the sky, resets civilization, and, like rats scurrying across the deck of a sinking ship, a ragged, random group of society’s leftovers dive for the last safe place. Like we see over and over in The Walking Dead, then, a group dynamic establishes itself, and power struggles cause that dynamic to crumble over and over again, Lord of the Flies style.  . . . → → →

Real or Memorex?

Ten Bulletpoints re: Oculus 1) This is probably from The Exorcist, but where I remember it from is Hysterical: one priest telling another not to listen, that the devil will lie to you. But then one of the Hudson brother’s pants are actually at his ankles. It wasn’t a lie, surprise. If you could turn that into a feature-length movie—and you can—then you’ve got Oculus, pretty much. 2) Horror lately is really getting good at making its ghost-women kind of legit-creepy, yes? I thought Mama made its ghost-woman about as scary as could be—just visually disturbing, and moving something like that ghost-girl from Stir of Echoes—but this Pennywise-eyed ghost-lady in Oculus, she’s Mama‘s cousin, I’d say. Or maybe they’re all taking from Legion, what with the CGI-jaws kind of dropping inhumanly low? Not sure. But it works, and in the same way the Grays from X-Files did: by stranding us between recognition and revulsion. That face has all the same features, but it’s wrong, too, isn’t it? Isn’t it? 3) Mirrors are to horror as peanut-butter is to chocolate. First time a mirror in  horror really got to me, I suppose, was Skeleton Key. But this mirror in Oculus, it’s more like the Erised Harry gets entranced by in The Sorceror’s Stone, yes? Or maybe a horror reference will be more on-point: Supernatural 1.19, the one with the haunted painting with a ba-ad history. But, tempting as it would be, Oculus never becomes an episode. It stays a feature—possibly a first installment, but still, the story’s  . . . → → →