Clive Barker's Director's cut of Nightbreed (1990/2014)

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.

Clive Barker's Nightbreed Director's cut

I was one of the first thousand to preorder it. I saw the movie back in 1990 and wasn't entirely pleased with it. Warners billed it as something like a slasher at the time, which is not. What Nightbreed was and now is again is the Citizen Kane of monster movies where the tables are turned--or that's what it was supposed to be, an epic tale, a metaphor for discrimination against LGBT people, and much more, a lost classic now found and restored to its former glory before the suits got their hands on it. 

A comparison is in order here: This is like the achievement of a full restoration of the first gay-positive movie ever made, Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919, starring Conrad Veidt, the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), it is historic.

I should receive the set by this weekend or early next week. A sprawling review and reflection on the new cut is coming. I'll also be doing a similar essay on Breaking Bad as a cultural and historical phenomenon in time now that the series has concluded and the dust has settled a bit. Expect the unexpected.

Postscript, 10.10.14: It's arrived! This is going to take some time to digest, but I should have my first observations up in about a week. The set is pretty amazing and the new artwork for the 3-BD set is better than the promotional art at the time. David Cronenberg should be pleased, he gets more screen time.

10.11.14: After watching the director's cut last night, I can say that we have a new classic.  What's most surprising is how what Barker intended most is a great, epic love story, a tale of universal love. Nightbreed has finally arrived to the audience it was intended for all along. There are so many things to say about it, and I will shortly. 

Audio and video quality are superb--it looks & sounds vastly better than its theatrical debut which is saying something. Yes, David Cronenberg has more screen time. I won't be printing any spoilers. 

"Assassinated" Arizona congressional Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is UNDEAD

She has become Ligeia, every simultaneously living and dead character straight out of Poe's short stories. The press disagrees all over the place: She's alive, she's dead, she's in critical condition--no, no, wait, she's dead, really, we mean it this time, really.

Welcome to the (mis)information age. One story has it that she's alive one moment, the next, that she is dead. No one needs to be told to jump to conclusions when the press has already done it for them in this era of instant gratification.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted--under copyright law. Welcome to the 19th century, it's back, and everyone's an expert on anything you can name, regardless of whether they have any credentials or not.

Breaking News: Gabrielle Giffords is undead, undead, undead, undead...

http://news.google.com/news/story?hl=en&q=Arizona+congresswoman+dead&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dyWPwW5FGhNgspMMUxFOa5u4-U5_M&ei=vMkoTZ6OOISq8AahufT8AQ&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQqgIwAA

Has the Poe Toaster called it quits?

Baltimore, Maryland--I think the Poe Toaster--whoever they were over the years--made the right choice in calling it quits. Why? It keeps the memory and the mystery intact and ends things on a good foot. There was good reason to. With the problems of nitwits trying to unmask the shadowy figure who each year made a toast of cognac to Poe, his aunt, and his wife, and left roses to their memory, or senile old men claiming they were that person, it was time to close the curtain. Why make any changes with a legend? Why let someone finally ruin it?

Just three years ago, a self-proclaimed "Poe scholar" named Sam Popora claimed that he was the Poe Toaster stating that he began in 1967, but forgetting that back issues of Baltimore papers record it as having begun around 1949. That's an incredibly bad lie, yet the press swallowed it, sending-out dozens of journalists and video crews to speak with him. A brief search of the Internet would have told them all they needed to know, that Popora was full of shit! Hit on the Poe-labels for more, I was thanked by the director of the Poe house at the time in my comments section during the Popora mishap.

The mystery is very much intact and I hope that the individual who began this journey in 1949 and his family take the facts to the grave. One of the points to life is that there should be mystery to it or it's boring. We need these symbols to feed our souls. Our souls will remain fed on this count, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't expect everyone who reads this to understand why all of this is important, but let sleeping dogs lie, and let the dead finally have their rest.

Mr. Poe's life was a troubled one, and fighting over his remains and trying to attach oneself to his legacy as his literary executors in the 19th century did; Popora in this one attempted to do and also failed; as well as Philadelphia and Boston have during this decade; is undignified. The great American writer is never leaving his resting place in Baltimore, it's never going to happen. Poe died in that city and belongs buried there. Richmond--perhaps--has some claim to him, but Poe lived in Baltimore and has been interred there for well over a century without contest. He is our national treasure, and the man who introduced many of us to mystery. Fitting then that this mystery related to him should remain one, hopefully for all time.

Halloween II (2009) review

Once again, Rob Zombie amazes, frightens, horrifies, and even enlightens us with another film which is being called the final installment of the new story-arc in the Halloween franchise. If you really love having the living crap scared out of you, this isn't going to disappoint at all. Zombie continues his theme of the horror of violence in American life and culture and its repercussions, giving us the best of both worlds: b-horror bliss fused with elements of high cinema and social criticism.

The original 1981 sequel was a terrible disappointment, even coming from writer/director John Carpenter and the late Debra Hill (a woman whose loss I'll always mourn, a great movie producer), it wasn't good at all and the direction was flat and uninspired, and we won't even go into how bad Halloween III (1983) was, it's unwatchable and literally has nothing to do with any of the series in any incarnation.

Part of this is because it took a good two years for the original Halloween to gain a following, and by that time, Carpenter was putting the finishing-touches on The Fog (1980) and beginning pre-production on the infamous remake of The Thing (1982). He and his production company were stretched too far, and it showed in that original sequel that can only be called a meaningless and gratuitous piece of drivel. But there's still no real reason for the existence of the original sequel to the legendary Halloween other than money, to keep a franchise going, and it would get unimaginably worse as time went on. That's not the case with Rob Zombie's sequel to his own reimagining of Carpenter's and Hill's original storyline, and that's why he felt the responsibility to have meaning and a message behind the violence of the film that is both unflinching and even self-accusatory, a very brave act for a filmmaker of almost any stature.

The basic story elements of the original sequel are in-place: Michael Myers somehow survives being shot and enigmatically disappears, returning to kill Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton). It's been established already in the first Zombie remake that Laurie is really Michael's sister, and he wants a family reunion. This was never handled with any real insight or imagination by the original sequel, but Zombie takes a page from expressionist film and also introduces us to Jung's concept of the "shadow self" and the archetype (deep psychological symbols common to all humanity), this time in the form of phantasms of the young Michael and his dead mother (Sherri Moon Zombie), sometimes accompanied by a white horse. There is a hinting that Michael and Laurie have some kind of psychic-link, but this is kept very ambiguous and there are no real answers, a nice touch. The 1981 version is almost entirely isolated to a hospital, not the case in Rob Zombie's version, which wisely dispenses with just about the entire plot of its original.

After a prologue that I don't want to give away, we're taken into Laurie's very sad life just one year after the horrific events of the first film, and another Halloween is approaching. While she's treated well living with Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif) and his daughter Annie (Danielle Harris), her life is tormented. This isn't the same girl we met in the first film at all. She's become very traumatized and cynical, and it shows. Her preoccupation with nihilistic youth culture makes that pretty loud and clear, and her nights are punctuated with nightmares of that night...but also of some very curious archetypes of Michael Myers as a child and his late mother, dressed in white, signifying a strange obverse of purity. Bizarrely, Laurie begins seeing archetypes from the mind of Michael Myers (starting with the dreams, very Jungian), and on one occasion, as he's disemboweling and eating an animal on his path to her and destiny, she connects with it and becomes nauseous and has a bout with vomiting.

In the mean time, Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm MacDowell) has become even more famous as a bestselling crime and psychology author, and it shows. He's become what he calls himself in one later scene when he views himself and his shadow self in the mirror: an "asshole." He couldn't be more correct. His new book on Michael Myers and his primadonna behavior at PR events and book-signings shows us that Dr. Loomis has become nothing more than an exploiter and an opportunist, and his new book exposes and damages the life of Laurie in telling the world that she's the sister of Michael Myers. The psychological effect on her is profound and permanent and there's no going back afterward.

Even Loomis's literary agent hates him for it, one of the movie's real shockers! As in the original 1978 Halloween and Zombie's reimagining, these lives will eventually converge with tragic results, but it all began back in the squalor of the Myers home during the 1970s, hence the occasional nod to past pop songs, a nice tip of the hat to Kenneth Anger whose style is also echoed in the visual style of the film. And so, after leaving a trail of dead bodies, things finally do converge once again in Haddonfield, Illinois, with "mother Myers" beckoning Michael and Laurie to an inevitable conclusion. To tell you any more would be to ruin it, but rest assured that there is a finality to it all, even with the ending that's right out of the original Psycho (1960).

Interestingly, the only moment of the film where John Carpenter's original score cues come are in the final scene and the credits. Welcome to the dark side of America and the products of abuse and neglect, coupled with a culture rife with violence cues and the actual thing itself. The shadow world is here, now, and Zombie's trying to show us the bloody-maw before it's too late. Family truly is forever in the world of the mind, the Platonic forms, and the realm of the archetype, birth imagery-and-all. A must see. Ignore the bad reviews, this is the real deal, real horror.

Edgar Allan Poe @ J to the Power of 7

WWW--Of all of the pieces, articles, and observations I've written on this site since August of 2006, I can say that this series written on Edgar Allan Poe comprises some of the very best of my writing. I have related very deeply to Poe almost my entire life for a host of reasons and consider him above Whitman and the New England "mystics." His only real peer in my opinion is Mark Twain, possibly Herman Melville, and Ambrose Bierce coming close on his heels.

Poe saw the horror that was the America of his time and the darkness of the human soul, while Melville, Twain, and Bierce saw where it was all heading, Melville even before the American Civil War in his prescient short story, "Bartelby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street" (1853). Read this story now and tell me with a straight face that the man wasn't brilliant, wasn't aware of the wrong-turn America began taking around that time, now culminating in what could very well be the endgame of the species.

For being the bearer of bad news, Melville's incredible popularity waned, and he died poor and all-but-forgotten. Edgar Allan Poe wasn't much luckier, yet the notion that he wasn't popular or famous during his short life is inaccurate--he was. The problem was that Poe's publishers were greedy scumbags who paid him poorly, just like most employers nowadays; he was literally the very first American to attempt making a living by writing alone, which should tell you something about the rest of his literary peers at the time.

At the very end of his life, things were looking up. I admire all of the aforementioned writers deeply, but with Poe--with Poe--I feel like one of many of his humble protectors. In the last few years, morons in various America cities have tried to claim him as their own, and without any merit. Philadelphia is perhaps the most egregious case in their claim to his remains, but Boston might be even more galling, the town he hated the most and called "frogpondia." What do these people want?

Publicity, of course, and God knows they don't have the moral courage Poe had to be himself, for better or for worse. What they want is to take the easy route: none of the suffering and poverty that the great writer had to endure, with some of the benefits he was barely able to have in life. The legend came after his death. Riding on the coattails of a dead man who suffered the tortures of the damned is immoral. Enjoy (or don't)...

A good place to start (follow the labels):http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/08/poe-toaster-is-not-mark-felt.html

The WWII-era mass grave in Malbork could have been a specific historical statement

Malbork, Poland--Polish workers digging in a WWII bomb crater at the base of the Teutonic Knights fortress last October have found what appears to be a mass grave containing the bodies of 1,800 ethnic Germans of the town that was once called "Marienberg" under German rule, now Malbork under the Polish. The discovery is both shocking, and raises more questions so far than it answers.

The original inhabitants of Marienberg from that era have been missing since those murky last days of WWII when Red Army troops shelled the town in their push to Berlin. After the war, the town was repopulated with Poles driven-out of areas of Poland claimed as Russian territory by the Soviet regime. Until recently, nobody has had any idea what happened to them. Millions of civilians went missing in the chaos of WWII and have never been found. The discovery was made on the site of a proposed luxury hotel where there had been some exploratory digging before construction.

It's unknown whether the construction of the proposed hotel will proceed or not, but more official excavations by Polish authorities are planned to continue until there's more certainty that these are the missing inhabitants of Marienberg from over sixty-years-ago. By all accounts, they are. Since the end of WWII, 1,840 German citizens of the town have gone missing, so the numbers are very closely matched at this writing.

There is every reason to believe that the victims were slaughtered by Red Army troops. More than a few of the bodies had been shot in the back of the head in an execution-style that echoes the victims of the 1940 Katyn forest massacre of the Polish officer corps, begging the question of whether Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) or the NKVD also had a hand in the killings. After April 6, 1918, the Red Army was accompanied by "political commissars," generally appointed by the Communist Party's hierarchy, separate from the military's. After 1942, political commissars were referred to as a "politruk"(политру́к).

Until 1991, every military leader in the Red Army's hierarchy had a political counterpart. Both officers would have to agree on an order or action for it to be "legally"expedited by troops on the ground. In other words, the Communist Party had to be part of the decision to execute the surviving citizens of Marienberg after the initial shelling of the town. According to Der Spiegel, one-in-ten of the bodies recovered so far had been shot in the head; all the dead were then buried naked without any belongings, not even shoes or identification papers.

There is the possibility that Stalin was indirectly or directly part of this decision--and many others of its kind--as he was intimately familiar with the political commissar structure. Stalin had been a political commissar during the Russian Civil War. The phantom of Katyn and other massacres of that era haunt the Marienberg event, the vagaries of war aside.

In the final days of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev revealed in 1989 that the NKVD had in fact expedited the slaughter at Katyn under Stalin's orders and that there were three killing-and-disposal sites located in the forest outside of Smolensk. Numbers of the murdered in this one instance hover at around 25,000. While the numbers slaughtered by totalitarian regimes during the 20th century were unprecedented, there is a long history of this kind of activity in the Baltic region, and there are clues in the historical record that point to the possibility that the killings in the then-Marienberg were symbolic and meant to send a message to ethnic Germans.

The location of the mass grave was certainly convenient, but it's placement before a Teutonic Knights fortress could be very telling.

700 years before the slaughter in Marienberg, the Teutonic Knights had invaded Russia at Novgorod, then were defeated by Russian Prince Alexander Nevsky and his troops at the "Battle of the Ice" ( Ледовое побоище) on April 5, 1242 at Lake Peipus. The Teutonic Knights were part of a coalition of Swedish, German Livonian and Teutonic orders, and Danish forces sent under the auspicies of the Vatican (Pope Gregory the IX) to subdue pagans and Eastern Orthodox ruling structures throughout the Baltic region in the "Northern Crusades." Outside of the expected killing incurred during warfare, liquidations occurred in the name of spreading the Catholic faith and monarchial influence, while extinguishing the pagan and Eastern Orthodox ones. The Iron Cross comes from the Teutonic Knights.

Was the Red Army contingent sending a historically-tinged message to Germans? Perhaps. German resistance in Marienberg had been especially vicious, so any vengeance message pointing-out a historical-parallel might have been accidental on the part of the Red Army contingent: Marienberg had been founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1274 when it was part of conquered pagan Prussia, just a little over thirty years after the Battle of the Ice. After its founding the town was the seat of the Teutonic Order, and it controlled access to the Baltic, levying tolls on the merchant shipping of various nationalities. Similar ambitions arose during the 20th century.

It was well known during WWII that Himmler's SS had consciously patterned themselves after the Teutonic Knights, with their own racialist and anti-communist rhetoric of "godless" Slavic enemies being barely distinguishable from their Medieval Catholic counterparts. The parallels between the SS system and the Teutonic Knights' expansionist feudalism, enslavement, their network of castles, and their own purges of civilian populations, are eerily similar.

Stalin and his NKVD (later, the KGB, now the FSB) had similar aims and utilized the same terror tactics, and on a comparable scale. Soviet troops had plenty of reasons to want payback that had nothing to do with crimes committed 700 years earlier, but it might have been a factor in their actions. Soviet archives could answer most of these questions. The Teutonic Knights still exist, with their seat in Vienna since 1809. History has a way of repeating itself, negating the necessity for reincarnation.

"Katyn Forst Massacre-Polish Deaths at Soviet Hands": http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/

"Malbork Massacre: World War II Mass Grave Unearthed in Poland," Der Spiegel, 01.08.2008: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,600216,00.html

Boston joins Philadelphia in the stupidity of claiming Southerner Edgar Allan Poe as their own

Boston, Massachusetts--He hated the city. He hated the Trancendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau, accused Longfellow of plagiarism, and referred to the literary community of Boston during his lifetime as "Frogpondium." If there was a city that Poe hated more than Philadelphia, it was Boston. I agree with him, both towns are vile filth-holes of human iniquity that show no signs of ever changing.

Not that that's stopping the same kind of silver spoon people that Poe would have loathed from claiming him--an avowed Southerner--as one of their own.

Poe was merely born in Boston to his actor parents who had lived a gypsy-like vagabond existence that he was tragically destined to repeat. Yet, "Poe is a Bostonian." He was? The reality is that he was born in Boston--at best--on accident, and it could have been in Trenton, New Jersey depending on the day he arrived into the world.

Never mind that his readings in the town were meant to insult everyone there, or that he was generally loathed by the well-heeled writers that populated Boston and its environs--he's "ours," according to a jackass Professor, Dr. Paul Lewis, some misguided grad students who want a good grade, and Boston College officials who should know better but smell the tourist dollars along with the city council. At least they weren't as stupid as Philadelphia and its own literary scion, Edward Pettit--they wanted Poe's body disinterred and ferried "Back" to the city that he hated the most.

As if in some perverse parody of one of Poe's tales, Pettit enjoined his fellow Pennsylvanians to grab a shovel and follow him there. Boston was a close second in the writer's mind as a cesspool.

Quit fooling yourselves, he hated Boston. At least Dr. Lewis and the rest of them got to ride Poe's coattails like Sam Popora last year. I used to wonder why Poe railed so viciously against people like Emerson, Thoreau, his step-father, and his main nemesis, the awful poet and compiler Rufus Griswold: they had the easy road in life without matching talent. Poe was the first American writer to attempt making-a-living at writing, and the first to die in poverty.

It's easy to claim him today, but a living Poe would get the same reaction, he wouldn't be pleasant to these people. Twenty-twenty hindsight doesn't count. He would rightly belittle them, revile them, and tell them how empty and irrelevant they all are. He could be expected to point-out how poor their own writing likely is, and how pampered and hypocritical they are. Poe wouldn't have kind words for these people at all, they're the same kinds of little pricks that he hated so much during his short lifetime. Eventually, they would begin to ignore him as his own contemporaries did, just as they're ignoring the living-talent right under their bourgeois noses in the Boston of today. Celebrate the living, remember the dead, but let the man rest in peace.

He is not yours, he is everyone's, but he was a son of the South first. I hope you enjoyed your fifteen minutes at his expense, Boston, because it's all you're likely to get. We're all going to be forgotten, while Poe will go on, eternal, because he was the real thing. He meant what he said and what he wrote and wasn't a bringer of "good news," but an observer of human frailty, of madness and despair. He wasn't a bringer of "good news" about America.

All this smacks of disrespect to his memory by today's inhabitants of "Frogpondium," that comfy world of the trust fund and a meaningless bourgeois existence, the living death that Poe and others wrote about. Why wouldn't they want to attach themselves barnacle-like to something so great, so tortured, and so sincere when they have nothing to offer? All these fools claiming Poe as their own are part of the horrible new order that writers like Blake, Mary Shelly, Poe, Melville wrote of, where man is wolf to man.

They watched the emergence of our modern world in terror, and they were right to be alarmed. Blake reacted in horror to the smashing of "Albion," his agricultural England, and saw the rise of a "demonic" industrialized one dominated by soulless businessmen and clerks, where people were truly enslaved. Poe also watched his Albion--the Antebellum South--crumble in the same manner, and he found city life disagreeable and fearful. As wrong-headed as he was about so many things, he at least treasured an aristocratic set-of-values where honor and principle matter.

It takes a kind of greatness to recognize the horror of one's time, and you have to be at the ground level to really apprehend its qualities. But why would someone want to do something as silly as to claim Poe when that claim is tenuous? Easy.

Because those are characteristics none of the advocates display or have inherently, they lack the inspiration of a Poe or a Melville in their dour careerist paths. Say what you want about Poe's bad behaviors during his lifetime--the drinking, the mania and obsessiveness, the literary quarreling, his constant begging for money, his personal affronts against well-heeled writers, and so on--but at least he had the excuse of being poor. Greatness requires a modicum of genuine suffering, something alien to today's bourgeois viper. Zum kotzen!

"The pendulum swings: Boston urged to reclaim Poe," The Boston Globe, 11.14.2008: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/11/14/the_pendulum_swings_boston_urged_to_reclaim_poe/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed5

The Questionable Business Practices at Alticor/Amway/Quixtar™

MLMs (Multi-Level Marketing companies)--I knew a neighborhood family some 30-years-ago who were very odd. The parents had been in the Air Force and raised their son to be a military-drone (he thankfully escaped this fate of being an officer as far as I can tell and has a family now), indoctrinating him in some extremely wacky right-wing, militaristic and over-the-top marketplace ideologies.

That's right, I'm talking about that bizarre triangulation of Amway, the Air Force, and the "prosperity gospel" (and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fans for good measure). And yet, it's worse than that...

The father was a forensic-pathologist who did blood-analysis (and could've been Jeffrey Dahmer's pa'), and had the personality of a cod. He and "the wife" had met each other while serving in the U.S. Air Force, that domain of religious, fanatical theocratic Christians, patriotic kookdom, and Moonies. What attracts these kind of sick people to that particular branch of the military deserves extensive studies by social scientists everywhere, though there are some statistics out there.

But, these people never made any money on Amway,™ they just bought the stupid--and by-all-appearances--overpriced and lousy products, and they were stuck with them. That was alright, but I was concerned for their son, and he was a friend whom I cared about.

One time, the Air Force mother came to our door and attempted to sell my mother some of the lousy products, and used the standard sell that Amway's™ known so well for (known so well for that they changed their name to "Quixtar,™" then back to Amway™: they try to make you feel inferior if you don't buy their products.

Yes, it's that sick, and as far as I can tell, nothing has changed since that now-distant time, but my mother's a smart cookie and she didn't respond well to it. There would be no sell, not ever.

Why do I bring this particular subject up? For a variety of reasons: I'm uncertain, but I believe my co-researcher on the Palfrey "defense team" (for want of a better term), Monique Rawlings, might work for Alticor.™ It might mean nothing-at-all, but it's strange someone working for them would be involved in such endeavors. Make of it what-you-will, because I don't know what to.

So, I was doing a lot of searching on Alticor™ today, and found some very interesting articles that partly-corroborated my childhood experiences with Amway and whatnot. According to a growing number of CPAs, institutions, and watchdogs, Amway™ is little more than a "pyramid scheme." This has been my own impression since childhood, yet somehow they continue to exist and do whatever it is they're doing these days, which appears to be the same as it was around 1978. Great.

One site really was spot-on in what I've learned from experience: Forensic CPA Tracy Coenen's http://www.sequence-inc.com/, which covers a range of similar subjects, an impressive site by an impressive woman. She does a pretty good job of expressing why these kind of firms are a "scam" that preys on the desperate and the troubled, a contention I tend to agree with. These links are to articles that aren't that new, but strike me as still being relevant, like my anecdotes on the subject.

I'm unsurprised, frankly, that Palfrey would surround herself with people from the corporate world. She was a small-business (depending on what you would call "small," though she decidedly petit-bourgeois in her attitudes) employer in her own way, and shared many of the same attitudes.

Palfrey's courting of the "legitimate press" speaks-volumes to such attitudes, as well as a cursory examination of what we know about how she ran her escort service (check Intelwire.com for more). It was all about the money, sad, and it probably brought about her death by her own hand. She wanted the "big time," the big money. Maybe that's why it's easier for those like her to claim she was murdered, and that she was "innocent." Neither case appears to be true at all, further revelations notwithstanding.

The "prosperity gospel," and other lies: http://quixtarisacultintervention.blogspot.com/2008/03/quixtaramway-perversion-of-faith.html

Forensic CPA Tracy Coenen on Amway/Quixtar/Alticor: http://www.sequence-inc.com/fraudfiles/2008/07/21/amway-sucks-quixtar-sucks-alticor-sucks/

Lucio Fulci's The Eroticist (1972) review

Cardinal Maravigli: "You can make the presidential palace a brothel as far as I'm concerned, just do it once you're president!"

Most movie fans cringe when they hear the name Lucio Fulci. They think of rotting zombies and guts spilling everywhere in a lake of gore and putrescence. Fulci made around 58 individual motion pictures from 1959 to 1991, and it's only in the final quarter of this body of work that he made the horror films he's known for throughout the world. But what about the earlier ones? Few ever made it out of Italy at the time.

What's surprising--or not considering one's take on comedy and horror--is that the great majority of Fulci's output were comedies. He also directed a number of spaghetti westerns, a Jack London story (White Fang with Franco Nero, and some of the best giallos ever lensed like A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, The Manhattan Ripper, and Don't Torture a Duckling.

The truth is, there were many sides to Lucio Fulci.

"The Eroticist" is one of those movies whose images never leave you, which is quite an achievement for a social and political satire wrapped in a sexual farce! But it's not that difficult in the hands of such a skilled director as Fulci and the flesh parade of Laura Antonelli, Anita Stringdberg, the handsome and hilarious Lando Buzzanco (as the senator), Agostina Belli, and a gaggle of nunsploitation sex-pots. It doesn't need to be repeated that the 1970s were that "decade of violence" in Italy, but the Eroticist is a good reminder of how absurd and explosive Italian politics were at that time.

Fulci created this story and co-wrote the screenplay with two other writers, Alessandro Continenza and Ottavio Jemma. Making this film in Italy in 1972 took guts, something Fulci had plenty of, he was unflappable. The Eroticist is a film that's both blasphemous and sexually redemptive besides being a very pointed political satire. You don't have to be familiar with Italian politics to understand it.

The story is fairly simple: an Italian Christian Democrat (as in Germany, the party the fascists joined after the war) senator named Gianni Puppis (the square-jawed Lando Buzzanco) is heading for the "highest office in the land," the presidency of Italy. Puppis has been so caught-up in his rise in politics that he's never had sex--and yet he's still Italian. This being a slam on Italian politics and politics in general, viewers might think that senator Puppis might seem demonically possessed as part of this delicious sexual farce, but he's not, and that's what makes this a movie that speaks loudly to our own scandal-ridden era or any other modern era. Hypocrisy is universal.

Senator Puppis is, simply-put, just a very horny man in a profession that doesn't allow for it. His only alternative is to head towards life, leaving the old one behind. This is something he struggles with, and the results are uproariously funny. Fulci even patterned Buzzanco's appearance after a real Christian Democrat senator!

Yet, the senator isn't possessed by anything unnatural--we find--it's just that he needs to get laid. He begins by subconsciously engaging in some grabb-ass at public events he has to preside over! On one occasion, he grabs the ass of the president of India! Enter Fulci's favorite target: the Vatican. For anyone even mildly acquainted with Italian politics, one knows that the Church is that constant irritant blocking as much progress as possible and that they still meddle in the elections and the ways of life and government of a nation.

Whenever you see a zombie in a later Lucio Fulci horror, it's a reference to the "dead hand" of the Church, the Italian curse. Fulci--to his credit--hated the Vatican as most reasonable people do, and they get special treatment here. Puppis is the Vatican's and the Sicilian Mafia's man. The Vatican is represented by Cardinal Maravigli (played by American actor Lionel Stander, the guy with the croaky-voice from tv's 'Hart to Hart'--he was also in Polanski's forgotten "Cul-de-Sac" and Spielberg's "1941").

And so, we get one sexual escapade after another, a kind of "what's he going to do next?" comedy. Will the senator be able to control himself? Will his handler, Cardinal Maravigli be able to watch him and keep him out of trouble until after Puppis has won the presidential elections? Sending Puppis to a convent filled with German nuns doesn't work--he has sex with all 21 of them, and why not? Far from being the sexless "fag" that his political rivals thought he was, il senatore is making up for lost time in a big way. Embarrassing? Si! Better for the body and the body politic? Si!

There are so many hilarious and embarrassing moments of sexual humor here, and as usual, the photography and composition are as luscious as they are in even the goriest of Fulci's work. Will senator Puppis win the presidential election, or will he decide to be a normal man with a normal and healthy sex life? He cannot have both. Fulci seems to be saying that one cannot truly live when one focuses their life purely on the pursuit of power and influence. Sinning, then, is normal and human, a better path.

Regardless of religious repression, the forces of life prevail. The Eroticist also says a lot about why we think our politicians shouldn't have a good sex life (considering how they behave, it could be a torture that is earned ), but attitudes towards this have changed substantially in Europe, and certainly in France. Still, the Church has its undying influence...

Why Edgar Allan Poe Belongs in Baltimore

Baltimore, Maryland/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania--As a disinterested party living in Indiana, this whole affair seems somewhat concocted and at the primary instigation of one Edward Pettit, who wrote a provocative piece on October 2nd in the Philadelphia City Paper (a cover article) calling for the disinterment of the writer from Baltimore to the city of brotherly love.

Pettit is a literary scholar and critic living in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and has a good pedigree as as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. That said, his own piece contains elements that undermine his argument on a number of key-points.

Overall, the reasoning by Mr. Pettit for why Poe belongs buried in Philadelphia is flatly wrong: Edgar Allan Poe always considered himself a Southerner first, and was raised primarily in Richmond, Virginia. This is a frequently overlooked fact, perhaps more than his time in Philadelphia is. Beyond this obvious fact is what we all know--that Poe died in Baltimore, and that he wrote his very first horror short story 'Berenice' while in the city.

The story was published in 1835, in the Southern Literary Messenger. This has been astutely noted by the Poe House and Museum's curator Jeff Jerome, in an October 10th issue of the Baltimore Sun, but is widely known, and certainly known to Mr. Pettit. But it appears a number of individuals with selfish interests would like to hijack the legacy of our greatest writer for the sake of local prestige and those coveted tourism dollars. Remember back to August when the doddering Sam Porpora claimed to be the Poe toaster, an obvious and bald lie. Yet, the press ate the story up with undue credulity. The call by Pettit is begging-the-question of where Poe's body belongs, and engages in some very peculiar logic. While the writer and critic has uncovered some very interesting details on Poe's time in Philadelphia, he makes the peculiar assertion that the great writer somehow felt in his element there and would have had a large funeral in the city of brotherly love at the time of his death...had he died there. As we all know, he did not.

As historians--and Pettit himself--have pointed-out, dying at an early age in Philadelphia during the time Poe resided there (1838-1844) would have been fairly easy. The city was riven with ghastly official corruption, labor violence and strikes, race riots, rampant and unsolved crime, poor hygiene, runaway disease, and squalid poverty. Appropriately, it all sounds a bit like Poe's own life (because it was), as well as a page from one of his own short stories.

All of these factors were typical of conditions in the city centers at the time, but Philadelphia was one of the worst examples (and still is), along with New York City at the bottom for its inhumanity and modern indifference. Another city had the same conditions: Baltimore, a fact made clear by the very few facts that we know surrounding Poe's mysterious death. Note this passage from Pettit's op-ed from October 2nd:

Poe, if we define him by his macabre works, felt right at home. Could he have experienced all of this in other cities? [Ed.-As a matter of fact, he could have.] He most certainly could have, but it was in Philadelphia that he wrote most about these kinds of experiences. Before living in Philadelphia, his horror tales were more grounded in a European Gothicism. Post-Philadelphia, Poe's personal problems — erratic behavior, sporadic drunkenness, poverty, his wife's illness and death — take over his life, diminishing his creative output until his own early death a mere five years later. (Philadelphia City Paper, 10.02.2007, http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/10/04/were-taking-poe-back )

The problem with Pettit's so-called 'logic' should be obvious even on casual inspection--he notes that Poe's writing tails-off after Philadelphia, and he makes a bald move to separate the writer's life from his work while simultaneously saying they are one. This reveals the self-serving component of a Pennsylvania son. To say it has an element of the tedious and the banal would be too fair.

For Poe to return to Philadelphia would have been some kind of nightmare for Poe, and it still is to many living there today. While living in Philly during the late-1960s, director David Lynch witnessed a murder in front of his own flat. This has proven to be the genesis of his own confrontations with the darkness throughout his own original body of work in film. Should the Montanan David Lynch be interred in Philadelphia when he dies? He's lived in Los Angeles since 1970. Abraham Lincoln lived in Indiana for over ten years of his life--should he buried here? There are equally serious questions.

Poe didn't need Philadelphia in any exclusive sense to find horror along the American landscape of his time. Like many fallen Southern aristocrats, he feared 'the mob,' or 'the crowd' of 'rabble.' Crime, rioting and strife were everywhere, punctuated by the occasional slave rebellion. Poe was not enamored with democracy. To his eyes--rightly--chaos was everywhere. Labor conditions were so horrible that they spawned violence, rioting, strikes, and the birth of organized unions. Flight to the frontier offered little respite from misery. Just two years before his untimely death, we would see the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears, while the year before brought us the horrors of the Mexican-American war under that forerunner of George W. Bush, President James K. Polk. Slave rebellions occurred during Poe's life as well, and poverty and rioting were a common part of life.

In 1833--just two years before Poe wrote 'Berenice'--the Nat Turner slave rebellion occurred, nearly touching-off civil war decades before the real thing exploded in 1861. The heads of the rebellious slaves were fitted onto posts as a warning to other rebels. There were other economic woes. Mr. Pettit mentions the economic depression of 1842 (occurring while Poe was in Philly) in his sprawling piece, which is really more a testament to typing than a valid attempt at proving a thesis. This fitting example should prove the point:

Between his reputation for writing imaginative fiction and withering reviews, his writings were sought after by many other periodicals around the nation." Poe's initial successes in the city diminished by 1844. Poe's irascibility and drinking problems, exacerbated by his wife's tuberculosis, began to alienate the editors whom Poe needed to court for work. (ibid)

Yet:

Had Poe died in Philadelphia, there would have been a huge funeral. The penny press would have trumpeted the announcement for a solid week. Philadelphia has always had a way of celebrating its disasters, its ne'er-do-wells. Poe, found delirious, possibly drunk, in a tavern, taken to a hospital where he dies raving like a lunatic? ...True enough, while newspapers around the country were maligning Poe's name, Philadelphia's Quaker City Weekly was blasting a clarion to defend it: "As an author, his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night." Poe still had friends in Philadelphia. (ibid)

Pettit waxes faux-nostalgic on how there would have been parades in the city of Philadelphia had Poe died there...but history isn't about 'what ifs,' as any credible historiographer will tell you. What seems most likely is to be found in his own article--that Poe hated the city and its squalor, its crime, its indifference, and that he feared the people of the city who Pettit claims would have championed him. It's a ludicrous assertion.

The city of Philadelphia was not good for him or his young wife who was dying from tuberculosis the entire time. Poe found the dark city to be a slice of hell. Had the support for him been so ubiquitous as Pettit implies, why did he have to leave to find work elsewhere? All he had were the 'editors,' and his friends were few in the city of brotherly love. Poe earned much of this animus due to a very unstable nature made worse by his alcoholism. Very few people attended his funeral in 1849, as he likely would have had it.

What is well known is that Poe contributed greatly to the indifference and animosity--if not outright hatred--he was frequently greeted with, and like most writers of his time, he was treated very poorly indeed by his publishers and 'editors.' Note also in Pettit's piece that he willfully ignores the fact that Poe wanted to be known as a poet, and that the horror stories were a way of paying the bills to his mind.

'The Raven' was a new step in his writing career that melded both together in way that was probably more pleasing to a very troubled man with a very miserable and unsatisfying life, but a good part of the misery was of his own making. That life, and his works, are inseparable, and Mr. Pettit knows better. It's unlikely Mr. Poe would have wanted to continue his vagabond life on-the-move in death as he had in life. Lastly, in what is already an unwarranted piece overall, Mr. Pettit enjoins his fellow members of the crowd to break the law and disinter Mr. Poe's remains by traveling down I-95 to Baltimore, echoing the lawless attitudes of 160 years ago that the writer so feared.

You're not taking anything back, Mr. Pettit, he was never yours. What's likely is Poe will never leave Maryland, lawsuits will drag-on well after all of our insignificant lifetimes, and that an armed guard will be indefinitely posted at the Westminster Burying Grounds if it's necessary. You can bank on it.

The response from 'Balmer,' 10.10.2007: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.vozzella10oct10,0,3325218.column?coll=bal_news_local_util

Ed Gein (2000) review

Modern American horror began on November 16th, 1957 in a little farming community named Plainfield, Wisconsin: This movie gets a lot more criticism than it generally deserves. Indeed, it is extremely low-budget, but it basically nails the whole point of Ed Gein better than anyone ever has, or possibly ever will. What seems to disappoint most people is the fact that the film sticks so closely to the story of what actually happened, rather than the speculations and additions. Not that Eddie didn't kill anyone, mind you...

The reality is, Ed Gein was not a serial killer in any respect, and murdered only two women whom he may have felt resembled his dead mother. It's unknown factually beyond that, though he might have killed his brother in an argument when both men were hunting. The photograph to the right is of the body of his second victim, Bernice Worden. What he is most remembered for, in reality, are the ghoulish excavations he committed, and his "articulations" of dead bodies.

It's very difficult for us to imagine in our current era how much of a bombshell Ed Gein was in late-1950s America. People didn't talk about mental illness or domestic abuse in those days. In fact, it's my own humble opinion that we still haven't entirely coped with the knowledge of such aberrant-behavior.

Why do people do such things? There really are no answers here, which can a very disturbing reality in a modern world that appears to have explanations for nearly everything. But sometimes, there are no clear answers. The makers of "Ed Gein" have shed some much-needed light on what is really known about Gein's metamorphosis into a full-blown ghoul. Surprisingly, a great deal of the psychological subtext of his life has leaked-into films "based" on his "true story."

Most successful of all--naturally--is Hitchcock's "Psycho," but Steve Railsback and Chuck Parello have shown us a very clear scenario into why Ed Gein became the man we know-of today. Gein was basically bisexual and had a strong desire to BE a woman, like his domineering mother. Gein's real problem was being schizophrenic, however. The addition of the strident religious fanaticism of his mother probably didn't help, as many sufferers hold a fascination with the cosmological.

As stated in "Psycho" so well, he wanted to "...become his mother," in a sad-attempt to "bring her back to life." His father was a pathetic drunk, and as is well-known, his mother had a god-like dominance (coupled with religious-fanaticism and sociopathological attitudes) over the young boy. Ed was also deeply traumatized by an incident on the family farm where he saw his parents slaughtering a pig--Ed was unable to assist them, and was often called a "panty-waist" by his mother.

The incident, and a few others, are reenacted convincingly by Parello and company, and much of the film takes-place in Gein's head (where it belongs). Feeding his insanity with detective pulp-magazines, published accounts of cannibalism and head-hunting in the South seas, and a deep fascination with the Holocaust and war crimes committed under the Third Reich, it was clear that Ed Gein was obsessed with death. In time, he would attempt to embrace and control it, wearing the tanned-skins of cadavers that he had stolen from a nearby cemetery. Ed Gein was a ghoul, not a serial killer, and he sometimes wore the skins taken from these bodies so he could be a woman. Insofar as anyone can tell, all the "parts" came from deceased women.

Also interesting is the story behind Gein's brother Henry and his mysterious death. While it could be viewed as speculative, it's known that Henry was found dead (allegedly of a heart attack while hunting) with bruises to the back of his head. A fire had been started around his body, pointing-to Gein again, as he must have panicked after murdering his brother and either tried to dispose of the corpse or create a scenario that would explain-away his involvement.

The film also speculates on whether Gein fed human flesh to people he knew--this is unknown, but some of the stories around Plainfield attest that he did, and that hunting deer was repugnant to him. The detail is pretty amazing, with some incredible asides by Railsback that add to our understanding of Ed Gein. One scene has Gein at the local watering-hole mentioning how he'd like to have a sex-change, which was explosive news at that time, from Sweden.

This event --like nearly all others in the film--really happened, and Gein's comments were taken as they often were: a joke, that he was pulling everyone's leg. That's how Ed Gein was viewed--a leg-puller, an oddball flake and a shitter. He wasn't taken seriously, which is why it was so hard for people in Plainfield to comprehend what he was up to out at the farm.

There are a few continuity errors: the headlights of a car are clearly from the 1990s in one insert-shot, and there are a few moments where the production design could have been closer to what 1950s America looked like. But, all-in-all, what you have here is the definitive film on Ed Gein. It's all here, in all its pathetic glory. This is what happens when someone is neglected by family and society, both spiritually and medically; this was simply a sick man who needed help. Nobody did so until it was too late, leaving just another example of how we are not a very proactive culture.

It's telling that Augusta never had her son taken to get help, and one has to assume she was also deranged in a way that found expression in the sickest, darkest pages of the Bible--especially her fixation on the Book of Revelations, a tome that should be read as metaphor only. None of this is sexy and exciting to gorehounds and thrill-seekers who come to a film like this, not to learn something, but merely to stimulate their hunger for viscera. Grow-up.

An excellent film! How can you lose with ole' Steve Railsback, anyway? He bankrolled this one, and it was a wise move, they got a lot of bang for their buck. If the movie says anything, it's how insensitive we were as a culture at that time. Hardly anyone thought it that strange that Ed Gein had shrunken-heads hanging from his bedroom walls. His excuse was taken at-face-vaule: he'd gotten them from a relative who had fought in the Pacific during WWII.

Trophies of this sort were common, but should have been taken as a good example of the sickness and psychopathology of their owners. During the late-1950s, people might have thought it odd, but rarely would have blinked over it. That's how sick a culture we were at that time, and we aren't out of the woods surrounding Plainfield yet. We haven't coped entirely with Ed Gein as a culture yet, let alone Jeffrey Dahmer. Pity poor Ed, he's earned it.

Postscript: It seems possible Mr. Railsback was a target-for-death of Robert Blake at one time!

Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) review

In 1978, I tried to see the original John Carpenter film, but I was only ten-years-old. Interestingly, the local theater played it again in 1980, as the word-of-mouth on the film had spread and it had become a major independent hit.

For a long time it was the most successful independent film ever made, though the lousy Blair Witch Project ended that record. What can I write about the original that hasn't already been written? It's incredible, and very atmospheric, a favorite, and still pretty plausible and creepy. It could happen. The same could be said for the new version.

Rob Zombie has given genuine horror fans a wonderful gift: we don't have to feel bad about missing the original when it came out anymore. This is equally good and pays incredible respect to the original, and Zombie discussed the project and his take on it with John Carpenter beforehand, something that wasn't done with the so-so 'Dawn of the Dead' remake.

Shot in the same widescreen Panavision (2.35:1), we get a familiar story with some significant changes: gone is the possible supernatural quality of Michael Myers, a phantasm who becomes something non-human, a part of the holiday itself. He's just 'the shape' emerging fully-formed in the 1978 version. In Zombie's recasting of the original screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill (RIP), the focus isn't on the mystery surrounding the killer, but offers some explanations as to why he is what he is.

This version makes the killer and his victims human, and this is where a number of so-called horror fans are going to be split. To make his point clear, the director begins the film before the prologue killings of the original, and paints a more contemporary and honest view of American family life, while setting it as a period piece in the late-1970s (the time of the original film's release).

It's a very vivid recreation of the decade that was my childhood, and it has an aspect of social realism to it, regardless of the stylization of the film itself. It's an awfully realistic depiction of squalid American working-class family life during that era, which I bore witness to in other families around my neighborhood. These are the people nobody cares about. Little has changed, as the movie makes clear, and the seeds are now bearing their fruit.

Rather than the brief glimpses of a straight-laced 1963 Myers family, we see a disaster of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. This wouldn't have been possible in 1978 to the degree it's depicted by Zombie and his collaborators (if you wanted an 'R-rating' then), and actor William Forsythe (Patty Hearst, Dick Tracy, The Devil's Rejects, and much more) does a fine job playing an abusive step-father to Sheri Moon's stripper mother. It's not a healthy home environment.

What I found mind-blowing, however, was just how well Rob Zombie remembers the cultural landscape of late-1970s America, it was jaw-dropping. From the expletive-laden, sexually humiliating slang of the kids bullying young Michael in a school bathroom, to the music, the kitsch (t-shirts and joke-stickers abound), and the attitudes, he's brought the 1970s to gasping, breathing life again. It's an incredible time-capsule, and it made for what is a great way to adapt the story to a contemporary culture and setting: NOW.

As one would expect, there is a lot of movie history and homage to be found in this film, and it's a real joy, but the director decided to take-up the aesthetic of Kubrick and Peckinpah in his depictions of violence and murder. What's that you say? Read on.

If you've ever watched a Sam Peckinpah film, you already know what I mean. If you've ever watched--truly watched--Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971-72--cut and re-released due to an early 'X-rating'), you understand what an anti-violence movie must do in order to get its message across: it has to show mayhem for what it is, which is drawn-out, ugly, and something that has consequences for the perpetrators and society. You're not supposed to get-off on the violence, you're supposed to be repulsed and fearful of it.

Insofar as violence and murder are concerned, it's well-established that once the door has been opened, it's rare that it ever gets shut until all the players are dead or neutralized in some fashion. Will gore hounds love Zombie's 'Halloween'? Yes and no. They'll enjoy the brutality and grimness--there's plenty of that on-offer here--but they're not going to find the violence entirely enjoyable or even tolerable...that is, if they're normal.

From "The Wild Bunch" (1969), to "Straw Dogs" (1971), and even to "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974) and his final film, "The Osterman Weekend" (1983), Sam Peckinpah wanted to show us that violence has consequences and that it is something ugly and to be feared. His message was cautionary, and that same message is apparent in Rob Zombie's take on Halloween. It's not meant to replace the original at all, but to compliment it.

The story-jump of fifteen-to-twenty-years is covered more here--the time that Michael Myers is locked-away in the mental institution, and his time with Dr. Sam Loomis. As most fans of the original remember, it was the late Donald Pleasance who played this part, and exceptionally well. Cult legend Malcolm MacDowell lends the same authority to the role, we well as cementing the anti-violence message of the film by his mere presence, and his performance is of a more caring Loomis. He pities Michael Myers, and in a nice touch, his relationship with the killer is extended back further as a school counselor.

As in the last two Rob Zombie movies, we get a gaggle of b-movie legends: the great Ken Foree (1978's Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond, and much more), the incredible Bill Moseley (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, House of 1,000 Corpses, etc.), Joe Pilato (The Matrix, and almost everything else), the great Udo Kier (Andy Warhol's Dracula, Shadow of the Vampire), Brad Dourif (Blue Velvet, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dune), Clint Howard (everything), Danny Trejo (Grindhouse, Maniac Cop 2, Whore, From Dusk Till Dawn, etc.), Richard Lynch (God Told Me To, The Sword & the Sorcerer, Deathsport, Vampire, and more), and several others who will please most movie buffs.

But what I found really smart was casting the Laurie Strode character (originally played by Jamie Lee Curtis) with someone with a low-profile as an actress--Scout Taylor-Compton. Little Daeg Faerch as '10-year-old Michael Myers' is the real eye opener here, and he makes the movie very unsettling. Imagine watching a child descend into insanity--I cannot think of anything more disturbing, but that's what Zombie depicts. It's like a slice of Poe, it's the essence of horror. We get to see the process unfold, even after the initial murders, and it's not exactly entertaining. It's truly horrifying to watch a little boy transform into a killer.

Very few films--to my knowledge--have ever depicted a child murdering another child in a drawn-out fashion (think Hitchcock's "Topaz"). The Loomis character adds to the 'whys' of how Michael Myers became a murderer--that he was a 'perfect storm' of 'internal and external influences,' someone with pre-existing tendencies who was pushed too-far by his environment. It might have went in another direction in another home, another community...another life. But it didn't. Rob Zombie's Halloween, then, can only be a classic tragedy that is almost mythic in its examinations of violence and the family.

Wisely utilizing an original score with the original Carpenter themes (albeit adapted) and a bulk of new musical-cues , as well as that same William Shatner Halloween mask, Zombie has scored a classic study in what makes a serial killer while retaining what made the original so good. One could find comparisons to Richard Speck or even Henry Lee Lucas and Ted Bundy. The parallels are there for the curious to examine. A must-see for those concerned about the roots of violence, and a solid addition to the canon of horror. Evil has a destiny alright--constructing its own demise. Rob Zombie has nothing to prove after this film, good job.

Masters of Horror: The Black Cat DVD (2006) review

"I've read two or three biographies of his, and one of the things that really interested me is that he's a Southerner. A lot of people don't think of him that way. He wasn't even from Baltimore. I mean, there's a football team named after him and he spent some time in Baltimore, but his formative years were spent in Richmond, Virginia, and in England. Richmond, Virginia is where he came from. During his entire literary career, he had to go where the work was, which was Philadelphia and New York. At the time, this was ten years before the Civil War, all that tension between the North and South didn't come out of nowhere." --Jeffrey Combs (UGO.com, 2006?)

I cannot fathom it, but somehow, some way, Stuart Gordon just improves as a director with each film. This is the atypical view of movie making, which usually tells us that a director does their best work when they're in their 30s-40s. It's being trashed here, in what is the best translation-to-screen of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat" to date.

Gordon and his frequent co-writer Dennis Paoli have given us a wonderful gift: the finest version of a Poe tale, and an illuminating look at the misery that was his life (though tinged with a little joy). Besides his screenwriting work with Gordon, Paoli is a noted Poe scholar, and even star Jeffrey Combs did an enormous amount of research into our greatest writer's peculiar life. This is evident in the use of Poe's favorite song throughout the film, as well as the little details such as his continued wearing of his West Point jacket (its silken-lining worn inside-out--he was expelled from the academy for gambling).

By now, most Americans understand how horrific the 1840s were, largely-thanks to Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York." A good dose of Poe's horror springs from his own specific time-and-place, and his constant displacements weren't uncommon. The vast-majority of Americans were impoverished at this time, slavery was still firmly in-place, the frontier was still young and dangerous, the Indian wars were still raging (with the trail of tears coming during Poe's last years), there was rampant criminality and banditry, rampant corruption, rigged elections, labor violence, unhygienic conditions, an impending war with Mexico, extreme contentions over immigration, and much more. It was a bloody time that echoes our own.

Therefore, it should be unsurprising that horror is popular again, as it would be by the end of Poe's lifetime. America is horror. Contrary to popular belief, Edgar Allan Poe was experiencing reasonable success as a writer at the time of his mysterious disappearance--and reappearance--in Baltimore during October of 1849. He was the only show in town who wrote tales of horror and of the fantastic.

If you've read the short story, you'll know that it's rarely been done well. There are a number of them that literally have nothing to do with the original, and several elements are generally left-out due to how graphic the original short story still is, even today. Edgar J. Ulmer's 1934 version is great, but it's not the same story at all. The same can be said for Lucio Fulci's 1981 film. Roger Corman's take is much closer, but couldn't show us a number of crucial actions (the removal of the cat's eye with a penknife, as well as the protagonist burying an axe in his wife's brain).

The Argento version in "Two Evil Eyes" (1990) has been one of the best until this version. Simply doing the story proud would have been enough, but Gordon and Paoli did-one-better--they fused the facts of Poe's tortured life with the tale itself! This elevates this film to that of a timeless classic, and it's unlikely to be outdone anytime soon, if ever. Coupled with this, cinematographer Jon Joffin's photography is just breathtaking, with a sepia-tone look of an old 19th century tintype. The only tinges of color we see are scant, usually being blood & alcohol, as well as a cat's eye. The effect is dramatic, and the end-result is genuine horror.

Poe's life with Virginia Clemm--his first cousin--was only troubled by their poverty and her tuberculosis, and their love for each other was uninterrupted by her untimely death. She is the muse of "The Raven," and "Annabel Lee," the ghost that would haunt him until the day he died. One could imagine that even in his last moments of delirium, he was thinking of her. Death would not part them, even after Poe remarried and continued to write. The cat in his short story is the guilt and the specter of death (hence, the name "Pluto," the lord of the underworld and death) that haunted he and Virginia throughout their poverty-stricken years together, and she was one of his great champions.

Their love was unconditional, a rarity in this life, but also a part of that romantic "Southern gentility" of the time that would be felled by the Civil War. Poe, after all, was a Southern "gentleman," and part of a fallen aristocracy (like Lovecraft, though he was of Rhode Island extraction) that didn't understand the new industrial order arising in the Northern and Eastern states. He was of a dying feudal order, a pre-capitalist romantic watching his world die. No tears should be shed for the ending of slavery, but other great things were lost in the destruction of the Antebellum South.

This is probably part of why we got such stories of decline and decay from Poe. He was seeing a lot of it during his lifetime, and the beginnings of what he would have rightly seen as a horrible new order in America (you don't have to be a Marxist to dislike bourgeois capitalism). Poe had other problems--mental ones. Jeffrey Combs captures Poe's self-destructive perversity well, and it's going to be a surprise to many how truly Southern his portrayal of the writer's dialect is. But what may come as the greatest surprise is just how tortured his imagination was, and we get some great references to "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Telltale Heart," and more, woven throughout the biographical details and The Black Cat's plot.

Poe had an interesting insight into the minds of killers, and The Black Cat seems very prescient today, considering the link between animal torture that has been found in the biographies of serial killers. Viewers will meet an Edgar Allan Poe that they never knew existed, and hopefully, they will grow to empathize with his difficult life (and those of the living). This isn't one for the squeamish. It's pretty bloody, and filled with madness and obsession--it is Poe in all his glory, and our ongoing American nightmare. Bravo.