Review: The Dark Tower

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific Books, Horrific fiction, Horrific moviesLeave a comment

First, let me confirm that the new film The Dark Tower differs significantly with the sprawling series written by Stephen King. Major plot points are truncated, and key characters are left out entirely. Rolan’s ka-tet doesn’t exist. The story is told primarily from Jake’s perspective, not Roland’s. Purists may be driven crazy by these omissions and changes. As someone who has read the entire series, I think that aspects of the film adaptation may not be friendly to outsiders, perhaps not relatable.

That said, I don’t understand the negative reviews this film is getting.  Again, I’m glad that I don’t allow such reviews to influence my decision to see movies. The Dark Tower has a mere 18% positive meta-critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, yet has a 63% positive rating from audience members. This is a big discrepancy. But more importantly, Stephen King liked the adaptation. Keep in mind that King disliked the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of The Shining, which earned near-universal praise from critics. The Dark Tower is true to the spirit of King’s work while The Shining was not.

In the linked article above, King also discusses his approval of casting Idris Elba as Roland. predictably, some fans in the dark corners of the internet disapproved of casting a black actor as a character who is understood to be white. In the book illustrations, Roland is portrayed as white, and this is further reinforced in dialogue in which Detta Walker calls Roland a “honky” and other racist slurs (The Drawing of the Three). However, Roland’s race really isn’t an important factor. The fact is that Idris Elba did a phenomenal job in this film, and I hope he will be in the TV series as rumored.

Roland as portrayed in The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands

Matthew McConaughey is also terrific as the Man in Black. I remember when McConaughey used to be considered conventionally sexy, but gradually transitioned into creepy. I like it.  He’s perfectly cruel in this role.

Matthew McConaughey torments Roland as the Man in Black

Although I had hoped that there would be a film adaptation for each novel, similar to the Harry Potter film series, The Dark Tower included the most essential concepts from the series. If there is to be a TV series, I hope it includes Eddie Dean and Susannah (a.k.a. Detta/Odetta Walker), because the the relationship between Roland and his ka-tet really is the soul of the series.

So yes, I do recommend the movie to anyone with an open mind.

And since we are reviewing “meta” works this month, I have to recommend the Dark Tower novels as well. The film adaptation is not truly meta (although it does give a nod to Pennywise from IT), but the books became increasingly so. In The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands,  we learn that fictional works are windows into very real worlds. One such work is an unsettling children’s book called Charlie the Choo Choo by Beryl Evans, featuring nightmare-fuel illustrations and a story about a sentient train. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah takes things further by having Roland as his friends meet Stephen King himself. In an especially self-deprecating touch, King gives Roland a copy of his novel Insomnia and Roland promptly throws it in the trash.

Until next time, long days and pleasant nights…

The Final Girls (2015)

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Today we wrap up Final Girls Week with my favorite meta-horror film about the subject, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls, starring Taissa Farmiga, Malin Ackerman, and Adam DeVine. I had the pleasure of seeing this movie in early 2015 at the Stanley Film Festival, where it won the audience choice award for best film. The Final Girls surprised the audience because it was so unexpectedly funny and sweet, and actually left many viewers openly weepy.

The film is about Max Cartwright, a young woman who lost her mother, Amanda, in a car accident. Amanda Cartwright was an actress best known for her appearance in a Friday the 13th-style slasher film called Camp Bloodbath. As bad as that film was, it’s a primary way for Max to feel connected to to her late mother. When Max agrees to be the guest of honor at a Camp Bloodbath screening, a strange turn of events causes Max and her school friends to be sucked into the film itself. Max relives her grief when she meets the doomed character played by her mother. Other tear-jerking moments occur when that character realizes she is a fictional character and that she will never accomplish her dreams because she will be “written out.”

Another commendable thing about The Final Girls is that it acknowledges the inherent awfulness of 1980’s slasher films without displaying the typical snarky contempt common of most meta-horror films, which tend to show disgust for both the films they parody and for the fans who watch them. Instead, the filmmakers of The Final Girls just get it. As a good friend of mine observed, some films (especially campy horror films) are so bad that they transcend their badness and become something else entirely. In The Final Girls, fans are portrayed as intelligent cinephiles, and the bad writing and acting in Camp Bloodbath are simply more reasons to love it. 

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

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Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon  (2006) was possibly the first slasher films to engage with Carol Clover’s theories. I actually do not view the Scream series as having this honor. The Scream films were savvy about the “rules” of surviving  slasher films, but these rules amounted to acknowledging what Thomas Ligotti called the “kindergarten moral code” of such films in his excellent essay “The Consolations of Horror” (as published in The Nightmare Factory) Everyone who watches slasher films knows that kids who drink, do drugs, or have premarital sex are going to die.

 

Behind the Mask is smarter and goes deeper, delving into the psychoanalytic elements of the genre as outlined by Clover. To some extent, it does examine the “rules” of slasher films as they apply to the killer. For example, the killer cannot kill a person while they are hiding in a closet, because the closet is a symbolic womb and therefore a sacred space. (To which the protagonist quips, “Does that mean you’re pro-life?”) He has to allow the “survivor girl” access to an appropriately phallic weapon. As he puts it, “she’s arming herself with cock.” The discussion isn’t limited to Freudian concepts as discussed in Clover’s book. There’s also discussion of the practical aspects of being an effective killer. One needs to do a lot of cardio and be insanely fit to make it look like he’s walking while everyone else is running.

We are privy to this information because the soon-to-be killer Leslie Vernon allows a crew of documentary filmmakers observe stalk his intended victims for months. This film occurs in a universe in which the events of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street are all entirely true. The lead filmmaker wants to understand the perspective of the next infamous killer. As an added bonus, Robert Englund has a small role as Dr. Halloran,  filling the role of the “Ahab” archetype.

 

Leslie himself is a likeable, funny guy. Perhaps even a Nice Guy. This makes things more difficult for the filmmakers to decide whether or not to intervene when he finally tries to kill people. Of course, Leslie may have already planned for such an event.

Come back tomorrow for the final entry in Final Girls Week, in which I save my favorite for last.

Final Girl (2015): not your typical slasher film

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Tyler Shields’ 2015 meta-horror film Final Girl seems to be rather divisive among horror fans, likely because it does not follow the typical slasher film narrative at all. In some ways, it inverts it. What it does is offer a fresh interpretation of the “final girl” character as described by Carol Clover.

Whereas the classic slasher film features a masked misfit who dispatches several disposable victims before being vanquished by the final girl, this movie has four well-dressed Nice Guys who make a sport of hunting and killing young women as a sport. The setup is a lot more like The Most Dangerous Game than Friday the 13th, for instance.

Unlike the typical slasher film final girl who discovers her inner strength under duress and then and fights back, protagonist Veronica was always strong. She was trained as an assassin from childhood by a mysterious shadow organization, and assigned to kill the four murderers. Much of the film becomes her stalking them, not the other way around. As a nice touch, she doses each of the men with hallucinogenic drugs so that they can experience their own worst fears before they die.

The look of the film is also very different from that of the classic slasher film. The lighting and color scheme is deliberately artificial and stylized, and the characters dress and behave as though they were transported from the 1950s.

This is not a film for those who want a conventional slasher film, but I will recommend it to fans of women’s revenge films.

Review: The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific Books, Horrific fictionLeave a comment

 

Today, I am covering the Stephen Graham Jones novel, The Last Final Girl, which bears some resemblance to the new Riley Sager novel Final Girls, but is just plain weird.

What both novels have in common is that several “final girls” are thrown together and have to respond to a new series of murders, and perhaps one or more final girl is a murderer or collaborating with the killer.

Beyond that they are very different books. The Last Final Girl is just plain bonkers, and is written in an equally bonkers style. Stephen Graham Jones wrote the entire novel in screenplay format, and this is something that readers will either love or hate. I find it a bit distracting at times, but does help one imagine the story in a cinematic way and almost begs someone to adapt the novel into an actual film.

The story itself is even weirder. The final girls all have names that reference real slasher movies, such as Crystal Blake and Mandy Kane. Jones even invents new genre-savvy verbs, such as the killer “Hoddering” after an intended victim. The fact that the killer is named Billy Jean and wears a Michael Jackson mask is a nice, absurd touch. The plot itself takes place in that strange liminal space between a film and its sequel. What happens to a final girl and her community after the killer is vanquished but before he miraculously recovers and kills again. Hint: one of the final girls nurses him back to health by feeding him burritos.

Slasher film fans will appreciate film references and jokes, but everyone else risks being left in the dark.

 

Review: Riley Sager's The Final Girls

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific fictionLeave a comment

We are kicking off Final Girls Week with a review of Final Girls: A Novel by Riley Sager.

Final Girls caught my attention because Stephen King praised the novel as “the first great thriller of 2017” and compared it favorably to Gone Girl. Riley Sager is actually a pseudonym for an author previously published under a different name, Todd Ritter. The name “Riley Sager” seems like a perfect final girl name.

The novel’s protagonist, Quincy Carpenter, is the sole survivor of a massacre in a cabin. She suffers from amnesia regarding the events of that night, and is later mentored by another “final girl,” Lisa Milner, a survivor of a sorority house massacre. When Lisa is found dead with her wrists slit, Quincy is approached by a third final girl named Sam, who goads Quincy into vigilante justice and other problematic behaviors. 

I won’t spoil any major plot points on a novel this recent. I will say that some plot twists are fully expected. It’s fairly obvious early on that one or more of the Final Girls is a murderer. That’s also become a typical device in several postmodern or meta slasher films, such as Scream 4, High Tension, and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. That said, there are several, fully unexpected twists. Sager’s prose is straightforward, and some reviewers have complained about his writing style. However, he’s definitely an engaging storyteller. He uses an interesting narrative device of telling most of the story from Quincey’s point of view, and other sections in a detached third-person style. The audiobook version even uses two different narrators for these passages. In part, this format serves the purpose of filling in gaps in Quincy’s memory.  The other reason is…rather surprising.

This is great beach read  as summer winds down.

Final Girls Week: The slasher film is dead; long live the slasher film!

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific Books, Horrific fiction, Horrific movies, Scary ScholarshipLeave a comment

We kick off Meta-Horror Month with Final Girls week, or technically films and novels which  deliberately reference Carol Clover’s concept of the Final Girl.

Clover’s 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws is considered a landmark work in film criticism and is largely responsible for rehabilitating the reputation of the horror genre as more than an expression of misogyny. Naturally, horror writers and directors love her for it. S&Man (2006), a faux documentary on faux snuff films, features extensive interviews with Clover regarding the popularity of the subgenre. Another film, the horror-comedy Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), repeatedly refers to her theories. Slam poet Daphne Gottlieb converted Clover’s theory into poetry in her Final Girl collection. 

And yet, there has been a virtual explosion of films and novels in the last two years that use the phrase “final girl” or a close variant in the title. With Clover’s book being 25 years old, why did this take so long?

Perhaps more writers and filmmakers are familiar with Clover’s work now than when it was fresh and timely. Let’s face it, post 9-11 horror, and torture films in particular, blew most of the tropes discussed by Clover out of the water. 

Another reason for this resurgence is that the classic 1980’s-style slasher film is dead. The story has been mined from every angle, until is has absolutely nothing new to offer. Sure, people in my age bracket have a certain nostalgia for the slasher film. But these films just aren’t scary anymore. While many people saw Wes Craven’s Scream series as a revitalization of the genre, I saw it as a sign that the genre was in serious trouble. As smart as that series was, it chose to parody and mock the slasher film rather than add something new to it. We are now at a point in time in which Clover’s theories are more interesting than the films themselves. So why play with the remains of a dead genre in an act of cinematic necrophilia when one can make a film about the genre’s analysis instead?

Come back soon for a review of the new Riley Sager novel, Final GIrls. In the meantime, read my review of Clover’s book here.

August is Meta Month!

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific Books, Horrific fiction, Horrific movies, Scary ScholarshipLeave a comment

 

This month, Todd and I celebrate our birthdays. It is also the birth month of one of our horror heroes, H.P. Lovecraft! 

What better way to celebrate our birth month than to make it all about ourselves, and by extension, celebrate meta horror films and novels, and a bit of Lovecraftian horror too!

“Meta” is a term that is thrown around a lot, but many people don’t know the proper definition. Dictionary.com helpfully offers the following definitions:

“meta-

1.

a prefix appearing in loanwords from Greek, with the meanings“after,” “along with,” “beyond,” “among,” “behind,” and productive inEnglish on the Greek model:

metacarpus; metagenesis.
 

2.

a prefix added to the name of a subject and designating another subject that analyzes the original one but at a more abstract, higher level:

metaphilosophy; metalinguistics.
 

3.

a prefix added to the name of something that consciously referencesor comments upon its own subject or features:

a meta-painting of an artist painting a canvas.”
 
 
Urban Dictionary offers other helpful examples as how “meta” pertains to the arts. For instance, a footnote that contains its own explanatory footnote, or a film about filmmakers making a movie which itself is about the film industry, or anything with so many layers of abstraction as to become mid-bending.
 
Image from tvtropes.org
 
It’s a common misconception that meta-horror originated in the 1990s, but I’m here to set the record straight, my little cephalopods. The 1990s may have popularized the narrative style in our lifetime, but it has existed for centuries, popping up cyclically when a genre is seemingly in its death throes.
 
From Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
 
This is a big problem with horror, which tends to use the same tropes and core narratives over and over. When a genre recycles its own ideas so relentlessly, and overtly pays homage to the films and stories that came before, much of it is arguably meta. 
 
 
So for my purposes, I’m going to limit my discussion of meta-horror to those works which self-consciously reference academic works about the horror genre, and those works which are determined to rupture reality itself. We are talking about works that make real people into fictional characters, postmodern arguments that fiction is as real as reality, and narratives that cause readers to be lost in a hall of mirrors.
 
John Trent reads between the lines in In the Mouth of Madness

Join the Horror Amino community!

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific HobbiesLeave a comment

I have a quick announcement and endorsement! For the past several months, I have been a member of Horror Amino. And I’m proud to announce that I have recently been added as a verified member representing My Horrific Life.

What is Horror Amino, you ask?

Horror Amino is a social media platform connecting over 100,000 horror fans from across the globe. If you want to connect with people who love horror, or read posts about horror without having to sift through a ton of unrelated material (as you would on Facebook, for instance), this is the place for you. Best yet, the admins do a great job at keeping the community troll free and DRAMA FREE.

What Horror Amino is not: It is no longer a place for roleplay and posts about Creepypasta. If you dig Creepypasta, there are other Amino communities for that. In fact, there seem to be Amino communities for everything under the sun.

It is not a dating app. It is definitely not a sexting app. I am beyond happy to say that there is a strict “no creep” policy in which people who send or request nude selfies , dick pics, etc. will have screenshots of their creepy messages posted for the whole community to see. After 24 hours of public shaming, they will be banned entirely from the community. Even though some idiot tried to argue with me about this policy (which I did not create), saying that it was a conspiracy on the part of the MAN HATERS and THE GAYS to keep straight people from finding “love,” Horror Amino members who want to engage in sexting can move that action to Snapchat. 

In short, the community is set up to limit discussions ONLY to horror. No B.S. attention-seeking. No selfie’s (except for FX work). No weed memes. No posts about depression or suicide. No illegal or just gross “dark web” images. And best yet, no political arguments. It’s like an oasis for horror lovers.

You can download the Horror Amino app on iTunes or Google Play.

Wish Upon (2017): Mainstream critics can go rot…

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific moviesLeave a comment

 

With a 19% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the new teen horror-thriller Wish Upon is one many theatrically-released horror films to get (unfairly) trounced by critics. I rather enjoyed Apollo 18 and Sinister 2, both of which had abysmal meta-critic scores. Even the severely reviled The Bye Bye Man had a lot of effective scenes. I’m not even counting the 2017 reboot of The Mummy (2017), b ecause it was more of an action film/ superhero movie in disguise than a true horror film. Even that was admittedly shallow, but more fun than expected. I’m glad I don’t let these scores dissuade me from watching films. I’ve learned to take critics’ opinions with a grain of salt because the movie reviewer at my hometown’s newspaper gave one-star ratings to virtually every horror film.

“I wish Darcie Chapman would just go rot”

While Wish Upon may not be destined to become a classic, I found it enjoyable. There’s a good concept, the performances are solid, and there are some genuinely creepy moments–even if the PG-13 rating doesn’t allow it to become the gorefest it ought to be. There’s even a bit of well-placed humor, particularly in the film’s references to image-crafting on social media. One of the best bits is when mean girl Darcie Chapman gets a bad case of necrotizing fasciitis, and her supposed best friend snaps a photo of her rotting skin before helping her.

WU_01951_R(l-r.) Joey King stars as Claire, Alice Lee as Gina and Ki Hong Lee as Ryan in WISH UPON, a Broad Green Pictures release.Credit: Steve Wilkie / Broad Green Pictures

Spoilers ahead here…

As is apparent from the trailer, unpopular teen Joey is gifted a magic box that grants seven wishes, but with a price. It doesn’t twist the wish-maker’s intent as in the W.W. Jacobs short story The Monkey’s Paw , or the Wishmaster franchise, or the comedy Bedazzled and its remake. Instead, it grants the wishes perfectly (even if the wish is poorly-worded), but the current owner of the box loses a loved one as a “blood price” after each wish is granted. These scenes play about a bit like the death scenes in the Final Destination films, minus the excessive gore. The price of the final wish is that the wish-maker will lose his/her own soul. Joey ends up in a bind and uses her seventh wish in a manner that borrows heavily from the original Wishmaster film in that it would create a time paradox. Let’s just say it ultimately doesn’t have the effect she wanted.