Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 267

Halloween 2012

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ten in the morning, just after comic book class: and. the close-up: and, will be something different tonight, I suspect. Jason Voorhees, Ghostface, a horse-head dude, I don’t know. I do know this night’s never long enough.

Ten Scariest Scenes from Horror Movies

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This was the easiest list to make. These are the images and jump-scares I think of first thing each night at two or three in the morning when I wake up. Take last night for example: I’m gonesville when I hear something crash downstairs. Or, I hear the end of it. So of course I have to investigate. By degrees. And, instead of anything understandable, what it is that fell is this skeleton hand we keep perched on an antique typewriter. Why it would fall at three in the morning, I have not a clue. But, going back up the stairs, these are all the scenes that assault me.                                                                                           So, now the job for me, it’s to somehow get back upstairs when the house is all empty. One trick I’ve learned is to pretend for the dogs that I’ve got some kind of treat for them. They follow and follow, not meaning to use their ears and noses, not meaning to give me the company I need. And then, a few minutes later, we’re upstairs, and all’s well. Unless this is the time they’ve grown weary of this game. Which is to say, yes, I looked for a picture of that dog from The Omen, but couldn’t find it framed  . . . → → →

The New Neighbors SUCK: Paranormal Activity 4

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When Katie from Paranormal Activity moves in across the street, it’s a pretty sure bet things are going to get demon-y, and fast. And, we’ve seen the other three, so we know all the rules: demons love to move furniture adults never notice anything there’s always some reason to have a camera rolling 24/7 something in the background will move, if you watch long enough witches aren’t scary. What this fourth installment adds is: nobody closes laptops a certain in-jokiness (is that the big wheel from The Shining, or the tricycle from The Omen?) a movie can be made from jump scares. And of course by now you’ve seen the trailer, know that this is the Skype/Kinect version of the Paranormal story. And we also know that Matt Shively (Ryan Laserbeam from True Jackson, VP, for those who, you know, know True Jackson) is providing the comedy. Which, according to the rules of horror, of course means he’s doomed. And we know that, much like the Saw franchise, every narrative crack is being not just mined for story, but pillaged. So, because everybody is dead by now, we’re following Katie, after walking away with Hunter in 2, I think it was. Which was a pretty revolutionary sequel, even if it wasn’t quite as scary. It folded together so well with the first. Not in that Halloween/Halloween II way, either (which rocked), but in a filling-in-the-gaps way. However, remember how the first Matrix pulled the rug out from under us so completely that the second and  . . . → → →

Sinister

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We all live in Stephen King’s house. I mean, all of us who hope to write the scary stuff. Case in point: Sinister. Is there any way to move a writer into a new house and not conjure Jack Torrance? And, going back a touch farther—as King, I assume (going by Danse Macabre) would do himself—what’s Jack Torrance if not a more dangerous Eleanor, from The Haunting of Hill House? I mean, what you’ve got is somebody made vulnerable by their character flaws and/or past, and you’re plugging them into some haunting where that can be used against them, with other people very much at stake. That pretty much works as a synopsis for Sinister, which is meant to be Insidious’ cousin, and have Paranormal Activity bleedover as well, and, maybe more important, some crossover star-power: Ethan Hawke, troping around in the attic of the haunted house, maybe his first horror outing ever, not counting Daybreakers (or’s he got some horror? IMDb’s so far away . . .). And it’s got all the conventions we expect and love and keep paying for: kids who see the ghosts; ghosts who flit through the bac kground but are never there when the character’s actually looking; a lingering ‘crime’; some Samara-type visuals; ‘haunted’ media, which we know and love, starting about with The Omen but of course cycling through horror with pretty terrifying regularity; authorities who aren’t much help; scary drawings on the walls; and on and on. None of which is in any way bad, please understand.  . . . → → →

The Last Final Girl

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Life in a slasher film is easy. You just have to know when to die. Aerial View: A suburban town in Texas. Everyone’s got an automatic garage door opener. All the kids jump off a perilous cliff into a shallow river as a rite of passage. The sheriff is a local celebrity. You know this town. You’re from this town. Zoom In: Homecoming princess, Lindsay. She’s just barely escaped death at the hands of a brutal, sadistic murderer in a Michael Jackson mask. Up on the cliff, she was rescued by a horse and bravely defeated the killer, alone, bra-less. Her story is already a legend. She’s this town’s heroic final girl, their virgin angel. Monster Vision: Halloween masks floating down that same river the kids jump into.But just as one slaughter is not enough for Billie Jean, our masked killer, one victory is not enough for Lindsay. Her high school is full of final girls, and she’s not the only one who knows the rules of the game. When Lindsay chooses a host of virgins, misfits, and former final girls to replace the slaughtered members of her original homecoming court, it’s not just a fight for survival—it’s a fight to become The Last Final Girl. reviews : Manarchy links :

Hit & Run

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Some movies give me hope. Just, generally. I mean, that you can still mix a movie up from just fast, bad cars and a bunch of happy-go-lucky characters who can’t really ever die. But maybe I should preface this by saying I’m  much more of a Cannonball Run/Smokey and the Bandit/Deathproof kind of fan than I am of all the Fast and the Furiouses. Just because those cute little cars in F&tF, I’m sure they’re fast and somehow desirable, but they’re just not bad. Want to know one of the reasons I finally cashed in my smart phone? Because the gallery part was just way, way too full of pictures of cars. Especially El Caminos. Like, every parking lot I cruis, there’s another car I need to have on my phone to study later. It got to where I was looping back around five miles, so, yeah, I get along better with no smartphone these days. But, this movie, Hit and Run. I don’t even remember the trailer anymore, but I do remember that when I saw it, I was sold, that I knew I was going to be there opening day. And I’m so glad it was. The last time I fell out of my seat in a theater from laughing? It was What About Bob?, I’m pretty sure. And the last time I nearly threw up from laughing? Whichever Austin Powers had the (non-)fecal matter coffee. For Hit and Run, I nearly threw up from laughing. And I did slump out of my  . . . → → →

Teacher Needs to See Me After School: Detention

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I’ve usually got my tongue di-rectly on the pulse of anything slasher, but somehow — two months of book tour? — Detention slipped past. In April, yes, when Growing Up Dead in Texas was just advance copies. And just a couple of days ago I was having a big talk with a good friend about slashers that are probing the edges of the genre, feeling out the limits, poking the necessary fun: Cabin Fever, Leslie Vernon, Tucker & Dale, Scream, Severance. The Killage. Then stuff like Mandy Lane or Cry_Wolf or The Hole, that are taking a less funsy angle into that particular interrogation. And, for me, of course, all these are in the coming context of my The Last Final Girl, in October (from Lazy Fascist, but I don’t think we’ve officially announced yet). You know that feeling when you have something coming out, and you get all sensitized to everything even remotely like it, suddenly certain that you’re going to get undercut? I wouldn’t know anything about that. And I consider myself to always be huddled over the slasher radar, anyway. I’ll sit through twenty Tamaras for just one of these. Or fifteen Darkness Fallses. Before I talk Detention, though, first, the caveats — why I’m already conditioned to fall for this: all the Demon Theory fun. How could I both write that novel and not swoon in the general area of a movie that also uses Anthony Michael Hall’s ‘who we think we are‘ voiced-over essay? And, that guy who shows up at  . . . → → →

Shine Shine Shine

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I knew from the first time I saw the title of this book that I was going to have to consume it, and then I lucked onto an ARC, meaning all I had to do was steal some time from myself. Which, I can be particularly unwatchful when the reading’s good enough. And, here, it is, it was, it would be again. And, like me, I’d guess a lot of you are getting Amazon emails with Lydia Netzer’s Shine Shine Shine at the top of their lists. Deservedly so. There’s a wit here, a lightness of touch, and a continual mulling-over of story that’s compelling. And, rather than excising all my favorite passages, let me just show you how many of those favorite passages there are: That many stars, for me, it’s very unusual. Usually my endpaper notes are littered with question marks and ellipses (these being the ellipses of dissatisfaction . . .) and just plain old X’s. Here, it’s like I’m trying to draw the night sky Sunny’s looking up into, trying to find her Maxon: it’s all stars. Too, the good books, you learn from them, don’t you? You see the tricks going on and you try to steal them. And there’s a lot of stuff here to steal. Not just the way Lydia can flip a line the instant it starts to get sentimental, either. More the way she’s keeping the whole scope of the story in mind, with each scene. It’s good stuff, I’m saying. Also, the good books, you  . . . → → →

Dead Man’s Curve

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Man, I know: last week I hit Prometheus, and just did a status update somewhere saying it was decent, it was cool, and now here I am with a non-review of a movie fourteen years old already. Still. This one I want to talk about it for a short bit: 1998. Dan Rosen’s Dead Man’s Curve (on Netflix Instant as The Curve). This is two years after Scream changed the horror scene once and forever. One year after Scream 2 made the sequel legit again. One year after I Know What You Did Last Summer revived a nearly twenty-year-old YA novel, just to cash in on Scream’s success. The same year as The Faculty (Williamson again) and Urban Legend and IKWYDLS’s second installment. All of which is to say that the horror landscape post-Scream, you couldn’t even stand up, there were so many clones. And that’s not at all a bad thing. This makes slasher kind of stuff easy to ramp into production. Pretty soon we’d have Final Destination and its own clone, Soul Survivors. When the box office gets packed with gore like that, then competition breeds desperate escalations, each new film trying to outdo the last, and once the big budgets tail off, then you get true innovation. Stuff like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. And then a Cabin in the Woods comes along to reset everything, in much the same way Scream did. Near as I can tell, though, by 1998, Dead Man’s Curve (I call it that because of the excellent song, included — all the  . . . → → →

Cage Match II: Fiction & Non-fiction

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Just went to the most excellent lecture-discussion led by David Ulin, with Matthew Zapruder and Rob Roberge and Elizabeth Crane Brandt and Mark Haskell Smith and Tod Godberg chiming in—more people as well, but, you know, you lose track. Not of the talk, though. It was about John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, and the kind-of follow-up/undercut The Lifespan of a Fact, neither of which I’ve hit (so lost in Song of Ice and Fire). But I’m going to now. And, to ramp right off of the actual discussion into where and how it hit me: that other post, where I was talking about why I wrote Growing Up Dead in Texas? None of those were lies. But I realized, during this panel, that that wasn’t quite complete, either. To back up, I’ve had a lot of students and various unsorted people kind of shuffle up to me, and lead in their question or request or whatever with some version of “I know you hate non-fiction, but . . . ” Which is fair. I mean, I wouldn’t say I hate non-fiction, but it’s not what I do, and, starting about ten years ago, I got all highly sensitized to and more than slightly defensive about how non-fiction was encroaching on fiction. But, at the same time, I’ve read some really good non-fiction, and know there’s some great stuff out there waiting to change my life, and, yeah, I’m finally coming around to agree with David Ulin, that calling one thing ‘fiction’ and another ‘non-fiction’ is  . . . → → →