“The Stranger” is a 2014 Chilean film directed by Guillermo Amoedo and produced by Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez.
Writing at Hasting’s Hardback Café, October, 2015
Although most critics gave this low ratings in spite of citing some good aspects, I found this movie to be much better than average because of its thoughtful, understated style which is a relief from so many vampire films in which the violence hides the subtler qualities. This film does have its violent moments (I thought the death of Caleb was one of the more interesting ways I have seen one vampire kill another), but they support the storyline instead of overwhelming it.
The best quality I found in “The Stranger” was its way of continually maintaining a haunting, eerie suspense without letting it flag. I never knew exactly what was going to happen next or to where the film was leading me, although this is easier to see in hindsight of course. I also thought its minimalist approach to the portrayal of vampires as average people afflicted with a horrific, contagious disease was a refreshing relief from the clichéd motif of vampires as hyper-erotic, ultraviolent superhumans. The vampires here are average people tormented by an ailment that forces them to kill for blood while constantly threatened by incineration by the sun. The vampires here do not revel in evil and, other than being able to heal very quickly from mortal wounds, do not have supernatural abilities. This allows the viewer to become more sympathetic to their plight and to root for them when threatened by the antagonists.
The plot is not overly innovative, but it manages to be a decent vehicle for the suspense.
Source: The Hallow (2015) Check out David Sharp’s review of the The Hallow at Beneaththeunderground. Here’s a quick summary of the movie from the review:
The Hallow (2015)
IFC Midnight
Director: Corin Hardy
In this British and Irish co-production, a British conservationist moves his family to a small town in Ireland, a town that borders a forest that the man is tasked with surveying for land prospectors. In a very Straw Dogs or Wicker Man sort of way, after ignoring the warnings of locals, the family finds themselves in a battle of survival with a group of ancient creatures that reside in the old forest.
Here is a brief review of a long-forgotten Peter Lorre movie that sounds very interesting based upon critiques of the time and the modern-day reviews. I will probably be seeking this one out.
The reviewer’s concise description of the plot is at the best inadequate. He doesn’t mention what relation Stephen Orlac is to Yvonne Orlac (brother? husband?) and he doesn’t even allude to what Orlac does with his new-found ability with knives, though I suppose we are to guess that he uses them against Dr. Gogol in some fashion. He probably could have done better.
Follow the link above to the David J. Sharp article from Horrorunderground.org.
Romulus, MI (October 20, 2015) – Michigan-based Synapse Films, one of the most acclaimed and longest-lasting independent DVD and Blu-ray labels in the home video industry, is pleased to announce their new association with the innovative NYC-based streaming service VHX.TV, to now bring a selection of some of Synapse’s most popular films to the service for both streaming and download. [From the article].
(Hollywood, CA) – November 2nd, 2015 – Multi award-winning short film, Night of the Slasher, written and directed by , competes for Best Narrative Short at two Oscar® qualifying festivals; the St. Louis International Film Festival in Missouri, USA and the Foyle Film Festival in Ireland. If it wins, it becomes eligible for an Oscar® nomination.
Henry Selick (Director of Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline) saw the film at the Telluride Horror Show and said, “I really loved ‘Night of the Slasher’! It’s smart, clever, and funny!”
“Drafthouse Films will release Tetsuya Nakashima’s acclaimed thriller The World of Kanako in select theaters on December 4th, as well as making it available on multiple digital VOD platforms including Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vimeo, and VHX. A home video release on Blu-ray and DVD is slated for early 2016.
“An uncompromising revenge thriller of operatic scope, The World of Kanako is a non-stop visual and emotional assault to the senses as it follows troubled ex-detective Akikazu (Kôji Yakusho, 13 Assassins, Babel) on the hunt for his missing teenage daughter, Kanako. What he discovers in his search is an unsettling and harrowing web of depravity––surrounding both Kanako and himself. As Akizaku stumbles along a shocking trail of drugs, sex and violence, he finds himself woefully unprepared for the revelations that affect all he holds dear.” (Description from horrorunderground.org)
Drop over to horrorunderground.org and check out what promises to be first-rate Japanese horror.
I was surfing the Internet just now, looking for websites where I can comment, and came across The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section filtered down to their comments on horror movies (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/commentisfree+film/horror). They seem to produce an article on horror films about every 5-10 months, but the articles are interesting and are worth checking out for a different perspective than what one usually encounters (at least in the articles I read). The two articles I read today from The Guardian are “Why Zombies are the Coldest Comfort” by Catherine Shoard and “Why the Human Centipede II bugs me” by Sarah Ditum. Unfortunately, the replies for both were closed, so I will state my opinions here.
As a novice writer of horror and as someone who has read a considerable amount of what might be termed “classic horror tales” back to its beginnings as a genre, Shoard’s article puzzles me. She seems to take the viewpoint that what makes a horror movie enjoyable is that we can feel safe while watching it. She states near the beginning of her article:
Zombies are a threat it’s easy to rationalise. They are unlikely. For this reason, plus issues with speed and intelligence, they are not especially scary. They are essentially a pest control problem with metaphor potential. Even squirrels run quicker… So their presence as a backdrop in a soap such as The Walking Dead provides just the right boost in tension for viewers to convince themselves they’re a long way from Emmerdale (or whatever the Mexican equivalent might be). The Walking Dead is a show that – like Pret a Manger – innovates exactly the right amount within a set formula.
Later, she adds:
More even than with comedy, the director encourages the audience into a specific response; if they don’t elicit it, they have failed. So those who are best at scaring us also make us feel we’re in a safe pair of hands.
And then there’s her conclusion:
Life is frightening. Horror works because it gives us something quantifiable to battle: you know where you are with a zombie.
It seems that Ms. Shoard is saying that the reason we can enjoy zombie movies is because we can feel safe in watching them, because zombies obviously don’t exist and are therefore not a threat and because we are so far removed from them. The second statement is perplexing as well when she states “that those who are best at scaring us also make us feel we’re in a safe pair of hands.”
Ms. Shoard doesn’t seem to understand that one of the basic principles of horror according to H.P. Lovecraft, a universally recognized master of horror of the last 200 years is “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” This is a consistent theme in the horror genre since the days Horace Walpole and the beginnings of the gothic novel. What makes for great horror is a blending of suspense and fear. A writer of horror, be it short story or novel or a movie, does not want his audience to feel safe. He wants them to feel that if they put down the book and walk out of the building, they may be snatched up by Cthulhu or encounter their former neighbors rising from their graves with a ravenous hunger for the living. It’s been a long time since I have read an article this inane. I hope it is a long time before I read another.
I will agree with her on one point: more than with comedy, the director does encourage the audience into a specific response and if they don’t elicit it, they have failed. However, Ms. Shoard doesn’t seem to know what that response is or how to go about achieving it.
I could go on deconstructing this article ad nauseum and reducing it ad absurdam, but I have better things to do with my morning than to antagonize Ms. Shoard. I have nothing against her personally; I just find her opinion in this instance to be off-base and out of touch with the basics of the horror genre.
The second article I read was Sarah Ditum’s “Why the Human Centipede II bugs me”. The teaser to this article sums up the paradox Ms. Ditums explores nicely:
The horror-porn sequel dampens my anti-censorship urges, but banning such films risks losing more intelligent offerings.
I could go into an extensive examination of this article line by line, but, as much as I would love to do that, as I said earlier I have other things I have to accomplish today. However, I encourage everyone with an interest in or an opinion on the extremes of gore and bad taste in horror films today to read this article. It is quite well-written and it does a good job of getting to the essence of the problem: yes, there are films out there today that are so vile and repulsive that we would be better off to ban them for the good of society, but by limiting what is available to the public, we run the risk of losing more intelligent fare that has to deal with these issues.
Personally, I have never seen any of the human centipede films, because the concept is so obscene that I cannot bring myself to watch them and I cannot see any reward or point in forcing myself to do so. As anyone who reads my blog with any regularity knows, I am not a fan of gore for its own sake and I am not a fan of anything tasteless. A lot of people would probably see a vague hypocrisy in this, but those people are ones who perceive horror only as sensationalist, teenage slasher films and do not have a profound knowledge of its history and of its breadth or of the underlying, eternal principles of great horror as in the quotation above from Lovecraft. But that is my taste in what I feed to my mind via my eyes. I will not apologize for it, because I have nothing for which to apologize.
Contemplating what I said in the previous paragraph brings me to another interesting perspective. Perhaps examining the wide range of opinions and viewpoints on this controversial topic reveals something about human psychology. I am not sure of what that would be, but I am sure it would make for an interesting thesis for someone’s Master’s degree. A line and motif from one of my favorite TV shows of all time, “Millennium” (starring Lance Henriksen, ran from about 1998-2000) is “This is who we are.” Somehow, thinking about the ongoing discussion on this controversial topic, I get a subjective feeling that, for better or worse, this is who we are.
The bottom line for this portion of today’s blog is that I find myself of the same viewpoint as Ms. Ditum and I encourage everyone to read her article, whatever your viewpoint on gore in modern cinema (whether of the horror genre or not). It may just broaden your perspective.
Herman Webster Mudgett a.k.a. H.H. Holmes. From Wikipedia.
I am having troubling sleeping tonight and thought I would continue with our tour of the world’s horror locales. [I am not having nightmares about H.H. Holmes, if that is what you are thinking or even about any other horror topic.]
One of America’s first and most prolific serial killers was Herman Webster Mudgett, who went by his now better known alias of H.H. Holmes (1861-1896). Although his life has been recently documented in a few films and books, Holmes is still perhaps one of America’s lesser known serial killers. Most of the following information is taken from the Wikipedia article on Holmes, which supports my previous readings on Holmes in several sources. Please go to Wikipedia for more details than my brief synopsis provides. It is a well-written article and I rely on it here, only because I wish to provide a brief introduction to Holmes to support the photos and visual record I am providing.
Holmes started his criminal career while attending the University of Michigan Medical School, where he would steal cadavers from the laboratory, disfigure them, and then try to collect on insurance policies he had taken out on them after claiming they had been killed in accidents. After graduation, Mudgett moved to Chicago to pursue a career in pharmaceuticals, but also began conducting many shady business deals while being a bigamist and philanderer in his private life.
After moving to Chicago in 1886, Holmes took a job at Dr. Elizabeth Holton’s drugstore. After her husband’s death, Holmes
Holmes’s Castle from Wikipedia
bought the business and the lot across the street at 601-603 West 63rd Street. [I had not noticed this before, but if one takes the first digit in each number of the address and combines them, the result is 666.] In the lot he built what would become known as his murder castle.
Wikipedia provides a nice synopsis of what happened there:
“Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore where he built his three-story, block-long “castle” as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. The address of the Castle was 601-603 W. 63rd St.[16] It was called the World’s Fair Hotel and opened as a hostelry for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure devoted to commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes’ own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over 100 windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly-angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully understood the design of the house.[3]
A diagram of Holmes’s Castle from weirdchicago.com (originally from the Chicago Tribune)
“During the period of building construction in 1889, Holmes met Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter with a past of lawbreaking, whom Holmes exploited as a stooge for his criminal schemes. A district attorney later described Pitezel as Holmes’ “tool… his creature.”[17]
“After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies, for which Holmes would pay the premiums but was also the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests, whom he would later kill.[14] Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Other victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office, where they were left to suffocate.[8] The victims’ bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement,[3] where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack.[3] Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.”
After the World’s Columbian Exposition ended, Holmes moved out of Chicago to evade creditors and continued pursuing his
Plans of Floors 2 and 3 from steampunkchicago.com
various nefarious trades throughout the country. Eventually, he was arrested by the Pinkertons for an insurance scam. While Holmes was in prison awaiting trial, authorities interviewed the former janitor at Holmes’s castle and found out that he had never been allowed entry to the upper floors. Upon further investigation, the real purpose behind Holmes’s castle was discovered.
Estimates of the number of Holmes’s victims range from 20-200, with 27 being the only number verified by any means. Most of his victims were women, though a few were men and children. Holmes confessed to murdering thirty people in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto, though some of the people he claimed to have killed were later found to still be alive.
Holmes was put on trial for the murder of his partner-in-crime, Benjamin Pitezel, in October, 1895. He was hanged in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896, for Pitezel’s murder. Holmes’s castle was mysteriously gutted by fire in August, 1895, two months before his trial began. The building was finally razed in 1938.
Holmes being executed. From jesslb6.blogspot,com
The site is now the location of the US Post Office’s Englewood Branch.
I have included a few photos of the castle and the Englewood Post Office for your viewing pleasure.
By coincidence, while gathering photos for this article, I found a statement on Cragin Spring’s Flickr page that a movie on Holmes called “Devil in the White City” was due out in 2013 and was to star Leonardo DiCaprio. A Wikipedia article on it states that it is based on a 2003 book by Erik Larson and Leonardo DiCaprio bought the film rights in 2010. Imdb states only that it is in development.
The Englewood post office now at the site of Holmes’s Castle, November 5, 2011. Photo by Malcolm Logan from myamericanodyssey.com
I am just past the halfway point in Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, the novella upon which the orginal “Hellraiser” movie was based. This is one really terrific read. It is one of those that is hard to put down, even though you know what happens next, because the movie, which you saw twenty years ago and have seen periodically since then, so closely resembles the book.
Clive Barker, Seattle, 2007 by Steven Friederich
The prose is simple, but not Hemingway simple, and there are moments of actual narrative beauty (such as when Barker poignantly describes the passing of seasons in the beginning of one chapter) that seem to be glimpses of insight into a latent aspect of Barker’s immense talent: that he is able to write actually artistic prose that captures a moment, an emotion, or a sensation with a light touch that carries over to the reader. I have read the first two volumes (so far) of Barker’s Books of Blood and this quality seems to be lacking in them. In Books of Blood, he writes splendidly, but not beautifully, not poignantly.
I also love the way he keeps his characters to a minimum, so that seeing the complex relationships between them is easy.
Another fascinating aspect of Barker’s storytelling in this instance is that he can put his characters in horrifying situations, yet he does not try to be any more graphic than is necessary to invoke an emotional response in the ready. The few truly graphic scenes I have encountered so far are graphic, but not gratuitously graphic. An example would be when the recently-resurrected Frank starts to have sex with with brother’s wife Julia. He shows the act beginning and ends the chapter leaving what happens up to the reader’s imagination. Yes, this is an old trick straight out of made-for-TV movies, but do you really need to visualize every gory detail of a woman having sex with someone who is still half-corpse? I didn’t. And seeing that would not have helped the storytelling and if anything, it would have only detracted from it. Besides, if someone wants to visualize that unnerving scene for themselves, they are going to whether or not Barker describes it for them. All that is necessary to show the development of the characters and the plot is to show that they did have sex, because that act in itself shows something about them. About Frank it show how incredibly callous he is to Julia and how centered he is in the world of his own pleasure. About Julia, it shows her love for Frank is so self-sacrificing that she is willing to commit the most vile acts for him while taking obscene pleasure in them in her own way.
Anyway, those are just a few notes so far. I need to have dinner and do some housework and to read more of this fascinating work. Hopefully, I will be able to write more soon.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 