Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Halloween HorrorFest 2020 on Monday Morning Diary (September 21)

by Sam Juliano

America lost an irreplaceable cultural icon this past week and the timing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing at age 87 from cancer after a long illness spells trouble ahead for us Democrats and Biden supporters who are witnessing a Republican power play to fill her seat.  I admired her deeply and when I heard she passed I was like so many others, in tears.  I fondly recall reviewing the picture book on her in my Caldecott series back in 2017.

This past week Jim Clark reviewed The Touch in his masterful winding-down Ingmar Bergman series here at Wonders in the Dark.  Jamie Uhler’s epic Halloween Horror Fest 2020 continues with some seriously fascinating entries (below).  I am holding back my Night Gallery additions until next week.  Best wishes to all.  Stay safe!

Color Out of Space (R. Stanley… 2019) 

The Curse (D. Keith… 1987)

The Midnight Meat Train (R. Kitamura… 2008)

Horror, as a celluloid enterprise, grew almost wholly out of its literary origins; the greatest and most influential films in the genre for the first several decades had all previously found birth via the printed word. Shelley, Stoker and Poe unmistakably formulated much of what we see when we think of Horror, even as the genre grew out from their tales into wholly new and foreign ones. It’s a somewhat remarkable point to consider, given that only Bram Stoker even saw a day in the 20th century (12 years to be precise), i.e. the modern age that saw the birth of projected, flickering images. But nevertheless I think we take it for granted that where Horror has come from is a medium that seeks to burrow and twist language, hoping a reader can conjure the creativity of their mind to imagine ghastly ghouls, creaky floorboards, spider-web filled castles or unimaginable bloodshed (in a photographic medium like film this becomes even more ironic). H.P. Lovecraft would then be somewhat unique, he the great link from the past masters into the Horror of the cinematic age, penning most of his classic works after World War I had completed its untold misery. Like Poe, he was also a writer in the age of periodicals, so most of his Horror was birthed in short stories published in magazines or newspapers that the everyman could afford and collect, imbuing his (still sophisticated) work with more Pulpy leaning elements of fantasy and demons, all mixed together with new advances in the natural sciences to create quite the scary cocktail.

The work that he regularly listed as his favorite, ‘The Colour Out of Space’, is perfectly illustrative of his unique brilliance. A 1927 story about a mysterious meteorite that lands on the Gardner farm near their well that they use as their water source. The meteorite is unexplainable, alluding scientific analysis as it slowly recedes into the soil over a number of days. In the coming months, everything that has been near the absorbed soil, or drank from the well (this is much of their crops, all of their animals and every member of the family) changes; the plants and vegetation grow large, often in a wild array of kaleidoscopic colors, but is nevertheless sickly inedible. The animals—and this includes the humans—slowly turn into brittle grey forms and wither away to painfully horrific deaths (similarly after their colorful plumage, the plants recede, turn grey and brittle, and break off into ash). The auteurist trick is Lovecraft’s after the fact first-person perspective of a surveyor that comes to the Arkham area years later, only able to locate one person willing to recount the ghastly ordeal that had taken place there. As Horror, it’s tremendous; it’s all exposition and recounting, nothing happening in real time, thus, theoretically, nothing happening to keep the reader on the edge of his seat. Still, it manages to be a gripping read by exacting a strangeness and often dense maze of poetic, ever-twisting prose. As was Lovecraft’s trademark by this point: it reads calmly, like the dispassionate reading of a will, or police report to a grisly murder. For cinema to tackle such a story, changes would have to be made, minor plot points wholly embellished or invented from thin air to concoct the action so it appears in the present. But how do you explain a story working so hard to be mysterious? 

The first film to tackle it in the mainstream was Die, Monster, Die! (1965) but only tangentially so (it strays so far from Lovecraft that a few years ago, Annihilation, a meditative sci-fi thriller based on a trilogy of books from an altogether different author seems much closer). It was a later film that went at the material closer, 1987’s The Curse, a 1980’s concoction that tells it mostly straight, just imagining the story a century later. Thus, mostly what we have here as origin in the book and it’s spelled out note for note (meaning, everything that happens we easily understand that it came from the meteorite’s poisoning). The twist, as again this is the 1980’s, is that farms in 1880’s Massachusetts are considerably different than ones in the rural Tennessee of the 1980s. One of the central mysteries of Lovecraft’s story is just why the Gardner’s stayed on the farm consuming food and water they could see was poisonous, or at least causing an assortment of harm to everything around it. The Curse does this by the addition of a grandfather like figure, an evangelical fascist who sees everything in terms of biblical tests from God who forbids the family to defy his orders in continuing forward on the property; a nice tie in since from the heavens came the meteorite in the first place. Add in a townspeople unwilling to help solve the other mystery central to the story: scientific analysis of the space rock. In the 1880’s it’s easily written off as unexplainable and beyond the analysis of 1880’s tools, while in the 1980’s authorities get a handle on its classification and danger, but stopping it is to late because precious time has been lost due to a muckraking real-estate developer that wants to buy the farm as part of a land grab he sees as his lottery ticket. Eventually, everyone dies in horrific fashion, save the youngest boy (played by a just becoming famous Wil Weaton) who saw the glowing orb for the danger it was early and avoiding drinking or eating any fo the farm’s output. The last 20 minutes stray from the book nearly completely as our house is exploded, adding even more credence to the god/hellfire and brimstone overtones. Any adaptation is going to be of its era, and The Curse does mostly feel like 1980’s Horror cheese, and thus is mostly a middling, lacking film. The next American adaptation (as an Italian and German one have come inside the last 20 years) was Richard Stanley’s passion project Color Out of Space from 2019 that he worked for decades to get made. Here the film also seeks to deal with the central mysteries of the story, but unlike The Curse, it does so by turning everything to 11, ratcheting up vague plot points or threads to hyper surreal, drugged up terror. The idea of what the meteorite is is central, but up to now, every version (included Lovecraft’s I’d argue) sought scientific explanation, while here, Stanley offers that it’s just as easily seen as metaphorical, a unique attempt to impart on the film a sense of lyricism so easily found in print. Once the science catches up, it’s much too late, and this Pandora’s Box can’t be closed. 

Perhaps the thing I like best about this masterful film is its clear, loving embrace of the Lovecraft story—it confuses it, but out of supreme sincerity; to understand this movie completely you almost have to know the story, it working to fill in leaps or events via an ‘in theory’ way. If we don’t know why all this is happening on the farm in the story, the Stanley seems to say we shouldn’t understand anything then and posits numerous threads that render different readings and interpretations. If you follow one, it amounts to occult conspiracy theory, another you see a 1950’s drive-in camp classic, while another it’s a monster movie with a psychological twist (this reading is the most allusive, where the meteorite isn’t the source of the evil, but merely a new source in a land where anger and pain had taken up residence decades prior). That all are entirely plausible and uniquely horrific, you come away believing not only is this a modern Horror masterpiece, but one not unlike Kubrick’s The Shining, where countless watches will continually expose new interpretations and connections (plus, like Kubrick’s 2001, its construction implies watching on mild-altering hallucinogens, a thought I assumed after a trailer watch so I followed suit for the initial horrific and trippy experience on my first watch; an ASMR carrot-cutting sequence where sound moves in and out of the mix, only to return to sync a bloody kitchen accident coincided to the drugs fully kicking in). When you read that Stanley’s love of the story came from nighttime readings from his mother as a boy which he then returned the favor of as she was dying of cancer, the movie absorbs even more tremendous weight. I’d also be remiss to not specifically mention the gonzo performance of Nicholas Cage, who at times seems on another planet altogether only to return to show himself a loving father and husband with a crystal clear understanding of the glowing lightshow Horror taking over his farm. 

After Horror saw a growth in cinema and then TV, a whole slew of new writers proved successful in growing the genre (Robert Bloch, for example, excelled in TV, cinema and short and long form print). But the next titan would be Stephen King, who, like Lovecraft crafted a unique, New England style and setting to much of his works. Plus, because his amazing work rate, his output ensured that his stamp on Horror cinema (and television) would eventually become second to none. Under his shadow is where pretty much every Horror writer has had to live for nearly 40 years, a place where Clive Barker has been as long (and as famous) as anyone. Like King his work is tailor made for the grisly presentation of contemporary Horror, where sometimes the sole source of terror is copious amounts of blood spurted from severed aortas. This couldn’t be more different from the Horror of Lovecraft, but you could see something like ‘Midnight Meat Train’ (found in Books of Blood, Volume 1) as trying to link the styles. Its violent train ritualistic bloodbaths the necessary meat to feed the underground masters that have controlled New York City for millennia (you could easily seen the underground monsters of ‘Midnight Meat Train’ in something like Lovecraft’s ‘The Unnameable’). They’re grotesque monsters that, if not fed, will come above ground and swiftly kill and consume mankind. It’s a pretty short story, much of it about the reveal of the monster’s underground tunnel existence, so when turned into a film in 2008, the discovery of a murderous ‘butcher’ working to feed and appease the monster becomes the entirety of the plot for the most part. The additional plot of a street photographer who happens to catch a glimpse of the butcher leaving the subway the same night a women has gone missing begins an obsession at finding the answers just as the resulting photographs give him his first potential fame and artistic success. It was as if you took the Clive Barker story and inserted another short, ‘The Devil’s Ticket’ (from the aforementioned Robert Bloch that saw great adaptation in Boris Karloff’s Thriller episode #29 of the same name uses this similar concept where a painter finally experiences success within a horrific wager with the devil for his soul) to construct a complete film. What’s here isn’t terrible, my only slight reservations intentional stylistic choices from Kitamura: the blood—which in this film is a lot—is mostly CGI spurts, where my preference is in the old-school practical effects where blood has physical weight and ‘reality’ and the film grammar (his camera is similarly CGI laden, running through objects and spacing, appearing to argue that something like David Fincher’s trashiest, over-directed film, Panic Room, was merely an appetizer that hadn’t gone far enough). Still, as over-directed as it is, lower genre’s do need sprucing up, and I’ll gladly take this over humdrum presentations anyday. A slight recommend which ticks into a solid one if you’re the type that likes gore cinema (this needs to be seen just to understand this is about as far as CGI gore could go).  

What all these examples show is just how much one form that provided the skeleton to which all Horror has come from needs to be tweaked and embellished within the world of Horror cinema. Sometimes successful, sometimes not as much so, but a wonderful reminder that in a season where Horror reigns supreme that sometimes our imaginations should stray from merely only watching cinema, relishing in the abundance of horrific joys found in the other arts as well. Speaking of, where’d I put my vinyl copy of Scott Walker’s The Drift…