Memory, as they say, and assay, is a strange and curious thing: it has a plasticity that somehow still conveys the truth of something while generously protecting the mind from the horrors and chaos of an uncaring universe, the human condition reduced to its essentials. Any literature aspiring to greatness is going to explore our peculiar predicament of being sentient in what appears to be a mindless cosmos; Clive Barker's additions to the canon, Blakean in their imagery & themes, invoking love (an expression of divinity) alongside corruption (the material world), are what high art is made of. (And as with the highest forms, he takes some of his prima materia from the lower depths.)
From sex, to politics, and religion, it's all about bodies and who controls them, but some of this is about remembering.
I was twenty-two when I saw Nightbreed at the theater in 1990 and had come wondering what the hell it was about since 20th Century Fox insisted that it be marketed as a slasher.
When you're that young, you frankly don't know shit, yet paradoxically believe you know everything, you're molten, outside, unassimilated into society at that point--therefore, "dangerous." Obviously, I've changed a lot since then: now I know how little I know and knew then. At that time, romantic love meant everything to me, now, not so much, yet, life being circular, you tend to come back around to things. Experience leavens base innocence. Barker had a very ambitious agenda indeed when he attempted to foist his non-Manichean monster movie onto an unsuspecting American public used to a more black and white storytelling; what you had was a collision of "mindsets" (his term for it) about fictional monsters being fodder for militarized "heroes." In 1990, no one wanted to try to the understand the other whether they were human or a fictional monster. That should be a reminder that there are no others ultimately, and that the monsters we've conjured in storytelling are often mirrors of ourselves to get beyond that screen.
Context being everything, this all came to a head on the eve of the first Gulf War when the public was being whipped into another cycle (see?) of hating the other; additionally, the movie was released just weeks after the illegal invasion of Panama. The Soviet Union was busy collapsing; German reunification occurred just three days before its release, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, less than a week earlier. Old habits tend to continue on anyway, anachronistically.
The timing was bad on all fronts for Barker who was nobly spitting into the cultural trade winds with his film version of his 1988 novel Cabal: unfortunately, the suits at Morgan Creek wanted something more like Hellraiser, the idea of the monsters in a horror movie (really, a fantasy with elements of horror) being the good guys didn't sit well with them, and they rejected it as out of hand and demanded Barker make extensive cuts and reshoots. What it did was to place the psychotic psychiatrist character played by legendary cult director David Cronenberg more at the center of the story; they also demanded that there be more of an emphasis on the menacing qualities of the nightbreed. Not only did they miss the point of most classic monster movies, they just wouldn't listen to Barker, and so, what went out into the world was a confused fusion of his and their ideas. The good side is, they weren't able to remove the sympathy for the breed, outsiders all, but they did incredible harm to the love story between main characters Boone and Lori with all their meddling. A movie that cost $10 million--and a bargain for Morgan Creek at that--made less than nine, and that was that, it bombed, having an afterlife on cable and home video. Part of Barker's legend as a prodigy was that the total cost of Hellraiser had been under $1 million USD.
Say what you want, but he made an epic with his second film, and that's where the money people come in, and serendipitously perhaps, the themes in the original story material got underlined in real life. The failure haunted Barker for years.
The more jaded among us might see one reading the movie as a parable of the modern world crashing into the author's anachronistic fantasy world with sadly predictable results. Occasionally, the universe smiles and throws something unpredictable out there: a small but fundamental victory for the underdog. You could write an entire book on the themes in Nightbreed, from the content of the script, to the theatrical & final cuts, and the politics of the actual making (or, really, unmaking) of the movie itself. Nothing happens in a vacuum. In the end, the breed are history's losers, and conversely, winners, like the heretics of the world religions and every other kind of social rebel that ever lived under a repressive order. You cannot kill the truth. But in 1990, history seemed settled, that seemed to be that, the show was over, and there are very few second chances with motion pictures. Did I mention that homophobia was actually worse than it is today?
However, a lot of us out here felt that something was missing from the theatrical cut, as evinced in the opening titles of that showed scenes which were cut. (Some still are, but now we're fortunate enough to have access to the outtakes in pristine condition.) Beginning with some of Barker's public statements and various rumors over the last twenty-four years, considerable force has been gaining for a new cut. I direct the reader to search out the story of the "Cabal cut" which made a final reconstruction of Barker's original vision possible, a convoluted tale in itself. After years of searching, an announcement was made last year that the lost film elements had finally been found in a storage warehouse in Dayton, Ohio. What was once the detritus of a lost vision had become a global cause via Internet outreach and public showings of the Cabal cut. By 2013, the stage was set and cinematic history was about to be rewritten, and that's a rare occasion. Shout Factory! has made good on that promise and beyond. Its message of universal love is central, but I believe the restoration is also about fixing a work of LGBT filmmaking that advocates the same message of acceptance as Richard Oswald's Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919), the first pro-gay movie in cinematic history. Both movies were damaged for ideological reasons.
If Barker's Cabal and Nightbreed remind us of anyone in literature, it's Arthur Machen. Machen was a Welsh Catholic who, ironically enough, had an intense fear of forbidden sex, a kind of ritual sex he was made aware of by fellow occultist and American expatriate A. E. Waite, co-author of what is still the most popular version of the Tarot. To be a Catholic in Britain at that time was considered a little eccentric. After Cornelius Agrippa, Waite was also the first to systematically catalog and study the Western inner tradition and was a sworn enemy of Aleister Crowley. When it comes to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there's plenty of subversive sexuality, inside and outside of the magic circles. I'm not suggesting that Barker based Nightbreed on the politics of esoteric lodges, no, albeit a lodge of that sort could be considered a "cabal" of another kind. Here, we really could go on forever, because that's how the occult works, it's a rabbit hole. Similarly, the Gnostics and other religious minorities and sects were once smeared as sexual deviants; the pagan has been equated with homosexuality; accused witches were blamed for male impotency, and so on. Being different can be dangerous in human society.
The reason I mention Machen is that he wrote similarly weird tales that dealt with shunned races who fled underground from human society. That sounds just like the tale of any human outsider. But is it really metaphor when faced with the incredible fact that everyone who isn't African has a percentage of Neanderthal coursing through their veins? And not so long ago, the bones of "Hobbits" ("homo floresiensis") have been found in caves on an Indonesian island, suggesting that the human story and what constitutes human beings is plastic, always changing, and open to wide interpretation and revision, if not correction. The results of some of that pondering have been catastrophic, such as in the application of eugenics philosophy to social problems, first, in North America, and not much later, Shark Island and in Nazi Germany. Artistic truth can be funny in the way that it naturally draws our attention to these truths of the human experience. A lot of what happens in Nightbreed in its final cut has a lot to do with the first half of the 20th century and the legacy of a long history of genocide.
Machen wrote most of his incredible weird tales about "little people" (and worse) living underground--"where the monsters live."
"This folk," I translated to myself, "dwells in remote and secret places, and celebrates foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing they have in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. ... But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain? (from "The Black Seal," 1895)
The Basques have been found to have an unusual genetic connection to the Neanderthal. Who are the monsters, and who are the humans? Only action and love as will can tell us.
And now, my memory of Nightbreed is changed forever, and base metal has been transmuted to gold. Being human is to be in the process of remembering and forgetting. Nightbreed is about remembering where we've been.
WWW--Manners are for a police state, not a democracy. But it's good to stay well-manicured, yes. How about growing a pair and finally growing-up?
Postscript, 08.06.2009: "Unity" is for totalitarian societies. Those who yearn for this are of a similar mindset to those people who want to march-in-line. Democracy is contentious and bitter with plenty of flinging-of-bile. There will be no great moment of unity beyond the shared expression that we all want liberty and that we all yearn for freedom. There's your real "unity," but it doesn't mean things are suddenly going to nice and neat. Democracy means getting in their and arguing, disagreeing. If you don't get that, you don't understand democracy and are probably authoritarian-minded, which is un-American.
This was an interview conducted through the mail with Dr. Chomsky while I was finishing my degree in American History at Ball State University. Just two-months after I received his answers in the mail, we all witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing, and the first stirrings of the war on terror (really a domestic one against all of us). It's been a long road from the Spring of 1995. At that time, the internet was just starting to become accessible, and its impact on the political and cultural discourse is only now being realized. 1995 was a year when the "zine revolution" was occurring, and it was quickly-supplanted by the high-price of paper and the internet.
This interview was done for one of those little zines--my own--called "Interpol." I actually got copies of it in zine-central, the legendary Quimby's Queer Store in Chicago. It was pretty surreal going up to the Windy City and seeing those copies in the store (I never got paid, incidentally), it felt pretty good.
All that said, I would never trade the blog format, it's superior in every respect to that old digest format, and it's getting better all the time. Dr. Chomsky is a very friendly and encouraging person, and when he passes from this world, we will have lost a wonderful human being. Appreciate the flowers in life, they are fleeting. Try to be that person you admire, and strive to make a better world for all. That's the meaning of life.
Matt Janovic: Is "Leftism", as defined by the mainstream culture, more a problem of semantics, rather than a cohesive movement? It seems that throughout much of the 20th century, when groups worked and protested and acted for honest political change, the press and various "populist" elements resorted to labeling them "anarchists," "reds," "communists/commies," "pinkos," etc. . Do you agree with the analysis that often mob actions are stimulated from above, or are there complex social and economic reasons behind scapegoating and vigilantism?
Noam Chomsky: If I were a PR specialist trying to indoctrinate and marginalize people(as they do, quite consciously), I'd try to deprive all words of meaning, so that it's impossible even to think and talk coherently about things that matter (the powerful will continue in their own ways). To a large extent, that's happened. Personally, I keep away from words like "left," "liberal," "conservative," etc.
They have been so deprived of meaning as to become useless. Take "conservatism." The Reaganites were called "conservative." In fact, they were statist reactionaries; a genuine conservative would have turned over in his grave to hear the way the term is used today. There's also been a massive falsification of the "sacred texts." Take Adam Smith. We are supposed to worship at his shrine, but if anyone takes the trouble to read him, they'll find a very different picture from the official version handed down in the doctrinal system.
As for "mob action," it has so many different causes and sources that one can't generalize. CIO organizing and the civil rights movement were "mob action" from one point of view; the rampages of Hitler's organizations were too. Usually, when destructive mob action is stimulated from above, as it often is, it appeals to genuine social and economic concerns, manipulated for that purpose. Those are the tools in trade of demagogues, of every stripe. We've got plenty of experience with it throughout US history, dramatically right now.
Matt Janovic: What can the average person learn from the fall of the Soviet Union?
Noam Chomsky: The simplest lesson is a familiar one: in a conflict, the more powerful adversary tends to win. Europe began to separate into two parts in the 15th century, the West beginning to develop, the East becoming its "third world." That continued right to the early years of this century--for much of Eastern Europe, until 1945. There are some rules of the international game: (!) service areas have to fulfill their function, not get uppity about following an independent path; (2) if they do take off on their own and turn out to be successful in terms that appeal to others in the same boat, they really have to be crushed--in official rhetoric, they are a "virus" that might "infect others," a "rotten apple" that might "spoil the barrel."
If it's a speck in the Caribbean, it takes a weekend. If it's 1/6 of the world, it takes 70 years. But the logic is rather similar; and not surprisingly, much of Eastern Europe is returning to its earlier origins. Sectors that were part of the industrial West, like the Czech Republic, are returning to that status; parts that were basically service areas are returning to the typical third world model. There are all sorts of nuances and complications, but that's a fair approximation.
It's worth stressing that despite much pretense, Western leaders had no serious objections to Stalin's awesome crimes, any more than they had fundamental objections to Hitler or Mussolini, or to Saddam Hussein, or to a host of similar and lesser monsters. On that, the documentary record is very clear, and one can learn about it in arcane monographs (or the marginalised dissident literature). In a really free society, it would be on the front pages and in the school texts, along with much else that is consigned to the memory hole, as Politically Incorrect (in the operative sense of this ridiculous term).
Matt Janovic: Dr. Chomsky, what kind of direct improvements would you envision for the American worker in the workplace, if there was more democracy in most institutions of our society? How do you think that could be brought about?
Noam Chomsky: Right now [1995] one can't look for any improvements; the immediate problem is to preserve the rights that were finally achieved at least in part in the 1930s, after a century of bitter struggle, and have been eroding ever since. They are now under very sever and cruel assault, not just for working people: the same is true of family values, as I mentioned. A traditional stance within the US labor movement and intellectual life, as American as apple pie, is that industrial democracy must be a central component of operative democracy.
If the central decision-making institutions of a society--in production, commerce, finance, ideology, etc.--are in the hands of unaccountable private power, then democracy is a thin reed at best. That's traditional and mainstream. Today it sounds exotic, but that's because the American tradition has largely been demolished, also being "Politically Incorrect." How can democratic practices be extended to the central institutions of the society? There's only one answer, always: the same way they were slowly extended to governmental functions. That was never a gift; it was the result of committed popular organization and action.
Matt Janovic: In a truly democratic society, what do you think our educational system would be like?
Noam Chomsky: Education in a democratic society would try to encourage the natural curiosity and independence of mind of children, instead of suppressing it and channelling them into obedience and conformity. It would celebrate the traditional values of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, which held that teaching should not be like filling a vessel with water, but helping a plant grow in its own way by allowing it to have proper food and light. These traditional conservative values are, of course, anathema to contemporary statist reactionaries.
Matt Janovic: Lastly, what is your idea of international humanism, and do you believe that to impose Western democratic and humanistic ideals (as the Chinese communists/nationalists loyal to the party argue) on non-Western nations is cultural imperialism?
Noam Chomsky: The idea that the West tries to impose "western democratic and humanistic ideals" on the rest of the world is one of the most ridiculous scams that the commissar class has indulged in. Western leaders, including intellectual elites, are dedicated to undermining these professed ideals at home, and centuries of brutal history show how they have "fostered" them elsewhere. Take simply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD).
The official line is that we courageously defend its universality, fighting off the "cultural relativists" of backward countries who say it doesn't fully extend to them. As even a moment's attention will show, the US flatly rejects about half of the UD even in principle, and grossly violates the rest. That's not controversial; the documentation is readily available. But for the doctrinal managers, it doesn't matter: what is important is ideological warfare, not truth or honesty--in fact, those are the values that have to be undermined.
Link to Part 1: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/05/interview-with-dr-noam-chomsky-from.html#links
End of Part 2 of 2 (and statement of intellectual ownership): This interview is the intellectual property of Dr. Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic, in toto. Permission to reprint, quote, or reproduce can be obtained through written permission from the authors. Quotes of up-to four lines are acceptable without permission. All rights reserved as of 2007, Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic.
This was just so much fun, not perfect, but a lot of fun. People are still expecting Tobe Hooper to direct another Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is too bad, because this is a really enjoyable horror movie. It has a lot of great B-movie atmosphere, hot chicks, small town punks and some original gore concepts that left me feeling repulsed and violated. In other words, it's a very successful low-budget horror movie.
The idea of a conscious fungus colony is pretty creepy, gross, and horrific! Living-ooze is definitely a Lovecraftian theme, and some parts of the small town's back story resemble "The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwich Horror", and a little bit of "The Outsider." Besides, what could be more primal than living-ooze? That's what we used to be, and where we'll eventually return (we appear obsessed in achieving this). Mortuary shares some similarities with Lucio Fulci's "The House By the Cemetery," one of the best "cursed house" films outside of the original "Haunting" (1963) or the "Legend of Hell House" (1973).
There are also a few nods to Hooper's "Poltergeist" (1982), and "Eaten Alive" (1976), and 1998's "Phantoms." This really is just a very funny and creepy ride that a normal family can watch together. It doesn't have any great statements to make and a lot of it isn't new, but the combinations in it are new. Let's be honest: sometimes it's just good to have some fun with the genre.
Denise Crosby was really great as the single mom who moves her poor family to a cruddy little California town for a job as the new mortician. They find a really rundown old mortuary that literally rests on an island of muck--we know we're in for some grim, dirty horror here, and Hooper and his collaborators deliver. Greg Travis returns from the Toolbox Murders (2003) as a shady local businessman who rents the accursed property to unsuspecting tenants. His foppish gimp character laughs all the time, creating a genuine sense of unease. All the characters are well-drawn and likable with a few notable-exceptions, so those characters "die" early-on as we hope for them to as horror fans.
What's impressive is howHooper's characters all seem to act as real people do, like Dan Byrd's as the son, he's very believable. "Normal" behavior and conformity are the targets of the film, and as is standard in a Tobe Hooper movie, they're the fodder for some spot-on social satire.
While the film is a light-horror with lots of black humor, the plot line is actually very grim. Many online reviewers have expressed anger at the climax of this film, calling it a "cheap ending," but I don't see this at all. Was it supposed to be a Spielberg ending where everyone's safe and happy? That would be a "cheap" ending. Did I mention the girl with the Kool-Aid hair looked pretty hot?
But, honestly, could the ending be any more unexpected? Horror has its conventions (no, not the merch ones), there are only so many, and the only options left are to mix-things-up. How is this movie any different from any 1970s-80s indie horror? Texas Chainsaw Massacre looks better with hindsight, but it was very cheaply done and only meant as entertainment. The same applies here. No, what many so-called "horror fans" expect is a predicatable, safe ending that doesn't go in new directions. Horror fans have been criticizing Hooper for revitalizing and redefining horror for a very long time. You can't please everyone. What angered many viewers was the fact that characters they liked and identified with died in a way that negated their identities.
Usually, in an American horror movie, the characters who aren't sympathetic die quickly and the "good" characters survive for the most part. Yes, it is the much reviled American optimism. Not many American horror directors allow sympathetic characters to die-off completely or have their identities taken over or destroyed (like the original "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers"). It's in the indie productions or Asian and European horror that this occurs in the story if it does at all.
We remember John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982) because he breaks this rule again-and-again, even to the very end of the film. Knowing the rules helps! At the time, many people were angered by this but it's part of the original short story by John W. Campbell Jr. from 1938.
There is aboveground horror, and there is underground horror like Campbell and Lovecraft, Bloch, Derleth, etc. We know there are some things that you just don't do in a mainstream film, which is exactly why they should be done in horror. To do horror well, you have to betray the audience.
The only way for horror to progress is by a violation of contemporary taboos and a knowledge of what works in the genre. Killing the heroes certainly works, and that's too bad for those who feel emotionally betrayed by the authors of a movie. The ending of Mortuary was just a fun fake-out. There were two other scenes that stood-out: the infected mother robotically serving the kids dinner in a parody of domesticity and the scene in the subterranean well where the role of the "authority figure" gets deconstructed...literally.
As in "Funhouse" (1981), Hooper makes his infected completely mechanical and insane, replaying his own fear of the mechanistic nature of the universe. What could be more fearful than something that cannot be reasoned with?
The latter-scene was a nod to parts of his own "Invaders from Mars" (1986), his remake of the 1953 classic. If you hadn't noticed, most of Hooper's films center threats to a family unit in some way, or one family threatening another. He makes some pretty interesting comments on the family in his films and not all of them are sympathetic. This film just supports his countercultural credentials, and people get irritated by his jabs or when they simply don't get it. Sometimes, that's the whole point. Learning the horrible truths of our lives isn't supposed to be a pleasant experience.
The only major complaint I have with Mortuary is that some of the CGI effects could have been better. Some of sequences drew too much attention to themselves, but overall of they were pretty good considering the film cost less than $1 million when it was made. As much as it costs, why not do a few matte paintings and miniatures in the real world? It might look a lot better and could have even cost less. Another weak moment here was the scene in the mortuary where some accident victims "reanimate," and it could have been staged better, it looks hurried. Overall, the Mortuary looks great and has a very solid cinematography, it looks very assured. The real "star" of the film is the house, real location that was once the home to one of California's first senators. You can't replicate real decay and grime.
Nearly every small town has a local boogeyman story like the "Bobby Fowler" character, haunted places, and the cemetery surrounding the mortuary house was well-drawn: an accursed place of death where nothing grows...but something there feasts on the dead and the living underneath the earth. The townsfolk whisper rumors of the Fowler place and warn of its dangers after dark. Local folklore has it that the last family to live there vanished, perhaps devoured by the land itself. Even their cattle became sick and mysteriously wasted away. Time passed, and after the biggest rain in fifty years, something has reawakened to feast again on the town and its inhabitants. This is a portrait of a town that's literally decaying from the inside-out.
Hooper seems to enjoy portraying people in disintegrating social roles (cop, mother, punker, movie reviewer, skater, girlfriend, employee, businessman, sibling, goth, metal head, authoritarian, homosexual, criminal, judge, manager, wife, husband, etc.) portraying them all as a form of living-death, but who can complain when this is how we chose to "live"? The anarchist in me loves watching identities in free-fall, seeing conformity collapse abruptly beneath its own paradoxes.
All-in-all, Mortuary was just entertaining (I know, the end of the world!), with a few jolts and some effectively disgusting makeup that can only be achieved with almost no budget. The tone gets more-and-more hysterical and bizarre which is what I expect from Tobe Hooper. This is the same level of filmmaking he was at when he did Eaten Alive, and it's a low-budget attempt but very solid. The origins of the zombification were pretty original and there were some moments of greatness in the imagery. I'm a sucker for graveyards.
This is another great addition to the works of Tobe Hooper and he has nothing to be ashamed of here. The Echobridge entertainment DVD is excellent, with a 53 minute featurette, a great widescreen transfer, and even a commentary track and DTS-sound. Mortuary is a horror film for the family, and it's fun to watch. That's all it ever claimed to be: A decent B-movie horror with a some shocks. Nobody sets-out to make a masterpiece, they just do. Mortuary is a good reminder that everyone you've ever looked up to can be wrong, and that some people are just doomed from the start.
Revised, 12.01.2008
