With that said, let’s turn our attention to this underappreciated Halloween-vibes film, shall we?

The Monster Club, from 1981, is a fun little anthology film that was a critical and commercial flop, but has found a bit of a cult following because of its very specific blend of monsters, British horror aesthetics and fantastic soundtrack. Is it the best horror anthology film out there? Not really, but it was certainly a much better and more cohesive anthology than V/H/S/Mixtape. I don’t think it is a movie for everyone and it’s not really all that frightening, but it’s a movie I tend to watch in October just because the vibes are immaculate.

Monsters!

One of my favorite things about the look of the film is that there is a very low-budget feeling to all of it. With the exception of a handful of “hero” monsters, most of the costuming and make-up effects on the assembled monsters are very simple consisting of fangs or very stiff masks. Every monster looks overly humanoid and the whole crowd looks like they raided a Spirit of Halloween and took every weird mask they could find. Barring a decent Wolfman-style look for the club secretary, most monsters tend to look like awkward extras trying to emote through masks they cannot see through.

Vincent Price, appearing as a vampire, looks virtually unchanged from his normal appearance in 1981. The man’s aura just gives vampire, so no need for much in the way of prosthetic fangs either.

The look of the film is cheap, or more to the point, budget-friendly, but that has its own charm. The club segments, depicting the author R. Chetwynd-Hayes (John Carradine), an adaptation of the real author, and Erasmus (Vincent Price) skirt the line between family-friendly and having just enough edge that The Monster Club comfortably earns a PG rating. Nothing is too gruesome in the anthology’s framing device, though the shorter films within vary wildly. But, to the point of budget, the film establishes a world of wacky monsters only for the feature segments to focus on very human-looking creatures. The film sets this up in a rather interesting way, but the movie is at its most fun with the punk-rock haunted house energy of the wraparound segments.

Music!

Speaking of punk rock, the soundtrack of The Monster Club is one of the things most readily appreciated by fans. With that said, none of the music is technically punk, aligning more with new wave (which is a derivation of punk, but don’t tell the punks that). The punk attitude of it all comes from a kind of carefree and goofy vibe in the club scenes that matches that mad monster-party on the screen. Among some of the bands involved were BA Robertson, The Viewers, UB40, Night, and The Pretty Things. A number of the musical sequences also turn out to be some standout, memorable scenes.

The film’s main theme, The Viewers’ “Monsters Rule, OK!” is an addictive little earworm that should be included on more Halloween party playlists if it is not already. It’s campy, upbeat, and fun, and has a joyful quality that sounds like Halloween in my head.

In one of the less family-friendly moments that whips around back to camp, Night’s track “Stripper” features an electric little strip-tease that transitions into an animated segment where the stripper, down to a black silhouette against the stage, proceeds to strip off her own flesh, leaving a seductively gyrating skeleton. There’s nothing particularly graphic about any of it, but then again, I’ve never watched a stripper with my parents or any children, so your mileage may vary.

The induction of R. Chetwynd-Hayes into The Monster Club at the end of the film, because after all, humans are the real monsters, also is accompanied by The Pretty Things’ “Welcome to the Monster Club” – a mellow, reggae-tinged jam about being accepted by the other monsters.

Again, I cannot stress enough just how fun this soundtrack is. It also happens to be the aspect of the film most frequently documented and written about. In fact, there are more songs on the soundtrack that did not make it into the film, as covered by Perfect Sound Forever in a write-up.

Maybe subconsciously I am just trying to get people to see the movie to expand their music playlists at home. I used to play a lot of these tracks back when I was doing my radio show, The Mutant Hours.

Monster Genealogy!

In one of the weirdest conceits of the film, Erasmus takes time to explain the genealogy of monsters to R. Chetwynd-Hayes through a convenient genealogy chart inside Erasmus’ booth in this club. Does it make sense why this chart is there? Absolutely not. Do these distinctions between these monsters make sense? No, they do not. But is it goofy and fun? Absolutely.

The film’s three central anthology stories are all based on exploring traits of these different monsters, including shadmocks, vampires, ghouls, and humgoos. Maybe it’s just best to let Erasmus explain it:

So as Erasmus lays out, monsters have a distinct genealogy, and different monster breeding results in  further branches. For example, a vampire and werewolf breeding results in a werevamp. Whereas werewolf and ghoul would produce a weregoo. A vampire and ghoul gets you a vamgoo, and so on. The variations get even more specific there, but as Erasmus lays out, one just needs to remember the “basic rules of monsterdom” which is pretty simple: “vampires suck, werewolves hunt, and ghouls tear. Shaddies lick, maddies yawn, and mocks blow. But shadmocks only whistle.”

Of course you may be wondering what a shadmock is. It’s simple, again, you fool: If a mock were to mate with any of the other hybrids, you get a shadmock, who can’t mate and only whistles, but doesn’t do it very often due to melting people’s flesh off their bones when they do.

It’s not complicated at all.

This is one of the elements of the film I adore the most. It fully commits to this odd worldbuilding and features Vincent Price rattling off these variations of monsters completely straight-faced like it’s common knowledge. The film’s central segments focus specifically on the shadmock, vampire, and humgoo – the humgoo being the offspring of a human and ghoul.

And humans do not get left out, the film culminates with an impassioned and adoring speech by Erasmus, arguing that humans deserve their place among the kingdom of monsters. The case is made, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, much against his will, is inducted as a member of the monster club and they all dance. The genealogical determinism here is sharply pointed and lends the film a satirical edge at its end that doesn’t quite land. You get it, yes, but it feels a little undercooked in the film as a whole.

Even then, if R. Chetwynd-Hayes doesn’t want admission, I’ll gladly take his place. Those shadmocks know how to party.

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It’s fun to write about a movie I have never seen before. You might notice I do tend to write about a lot of horror films I have seen multiple times because I know them well and have had time to really think about them. In cases like The Gate, having never seen it, I have to think quickly and find some sort of hook that works well enough for me to get started.

Turned out pretty decent today, at least, though it is on the shorter side. I spent about an hour on this one, full disclosure.

Anyway, feel free to read on.

Today was the first time watching The Gate (1987) – a film recommended for this series by SuperNat Discord members AllyBear and Lenora. In a lot of ways, this film might make for a decent addition to a triple feature of “kids confront horror,” including Phantasm and Monster Squad. There isn’t a whole lot to The Gate, though, as a horror film as far as my tastes go. The plot feels like a “yes and” situation as things pile up with little explanation or justification other than “demons,” but it does have its charms. If you lack time for triple features, pairing it with Monster Squad, released the same year, is a good choice for a PG-13 horror night. It’s good for kids! It just barely squeaks by with a PG rating, but it’s close enough to fit that PG-13 label to lump it with Monster Squad, I’d argue.

Speaking of kids – when and how is the right way to get them into horror? As a child who grew up watching these films far too young (explaining a lot about me), I think exposure to horror has been a positive thing, but I am not a parent. I have no interest in being a parent, but I have pages to fill here and want to write about why horror can be good for children and how to make it work.

I think films like Monster Squad and The Gate offer a valuable service for introducing children to horror, which is, of course, the best genre of entertainment out there. Horror tends to be a controlled way to introduce scarier themes and real-world ideas that can be controlled by remote. The ability to stop, pause, and reflect or clarify what is going on provides an ability for context. Fear is a good thing to embrace because it makes you feel alive and conquering fears can be a good thing for psychological development. In many ways, a kid introduced to horror films at a relatively young age might be better prepared for inevitable, darker aspects of life.

Again, I am not a parent. But I do know how to browse the web and these are things parents think about. Case in point, a user-made IMDB list for “Horror movies for kids” includes 40 items, meaning there are options. I don’t know if my list would be the same, but I am glad to see The Gate included. Obviously, parents, do your due diligence as you know your kids and what they can handle. With that said, though, The Gate is a pretty solid entry point for a few reasons. The film is a creature feature that features a child protagonist achieving something through ingenuity while also delivering on Lovecraftian elements – and Lovecraft is essential to 20th century horror.

Creature features are fantastic horror movies and often appeal to kids. The Gate features some fantastic creature designs by Randall William Cook, who combines forced perspective and stop-motion for various creatures. The little demons are more charming than terrifying, and the multi-armed demon lord comes off as very cool-looking rather than overly intimidating. As intimidating as monsters can be, they are also beloved – kids find monsters cool. Show an eight-year-old Jurassic Park, and you’ve just created a new obsession for years. Some of the first characters children tend to fall in love with on a wide scale? Sesame Street’s collection of muppet monsters and Pokémon. A good horror introduction for children would be a creature feature.

Having a child as a protagonist who succeeds through ingenuity is also a great element in kid-friendly horror. The child in the film may be chased or frightened by the monster, but the child is never a victim because they get one up on the thing that pursues them. The Gate is very much of that vibe, as is Monster Squad, and yes, Phantasm too. These child protagonists might help foster a sense of independence and confidence.

Lastly, The Gate is very Lovecraftian, and while I don’t recommend young children read Lovecraft early on due to the more problematic elements of who he was, he was the single most influential author on the horror we see today. Lovecraft’s cosmic focus on the unexplainable and mysterious offers two things, I feel. First, some things in the world just do not make sense. In Lovecraft’s stories, there are always things on the periphery of our perceptions that we cannot explain but carry tremendous weight in our existence. In his works this is through the metaphor of otherworldly Old Gods. In our world, it may be forces the child cannot understand at the time: social structures, governments, biased systems, and the like. Establishing there are things we cannot control or sometimes even understand can offer a way to cope with unfairness in the world. Lovecraft’s narrators go mad with the impossibilities, but parents can provide a context and support system to help their children deal with these difficulties.

The second element is the concept of the mystery or the analysis – Lovecraftian horror promotes investigation and critical thinking about what these unknowns are and how they may have an effect on us. There are rarely easy solutions, but the journey is what is important. Guided by a parent through the metaphorical lens of a horror film, confronting the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of these things promotes the recognition of patterns and breaks from patterns. It’s about building a critical eye.

I think The Gate is very much a good “first horror” film for a lot of younger kids, because it allows them to see monsters safely, features a good child protagonist, and also provokes questions about some darker, more unexplainable things in human existence that may be confronted as they age. Case in point, the concept of death itself. As for when to introduce a film like The Gate to a child, that is ultimately up to the parent. I am not a great judge of that as I started watching Child’s Play (1988) at around 4 years old. With that said, I think around 7 or 8 is a good age to introduce a kid to a film like The Gate; the film isn’t too extreme and the monsters might be more appealing than frightening. I certainly wouldn’t suggest Monster Squad that early, not because it’s that scary, but one would need to provide a lot of context to some of the 1980s gay-panic slurs and dialogue present in certain scenes – which is an entirely other horror.

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In any case, I process my mood through writing, and I gotta say I feel a bit better now. So check this out and let me know your thoughts.

I was not particularly thrilled with V/H/S/Mixtape, the latest in the long-running anthology series that has become a Shudder staple. I don’t want to dwell on my dislikes and my disappointments, though. My biggest concern is that it seems the franchise is willing to abandon the found footage angle so casually that I am not exactly optimistic about their announced SCP edition. 

One short, the visually interesting “Another House,” by Flying Lotus, did not fit the concept of the overall franchise, despite a rather impressive stop-motion style. Additionally, as fun as real-life action figures GWAR can be, their wraparound segments did not match the found footage aesthetics of previous installments and ultimately did little to actually serve as a throughline like wraparounds in previous editions of V/H/S/. The theme, also, was loose – with “mixtape” evoking music, one may expect music to play a larger role than it did. One of the shorts was more about an absence of sound creating madness.

With all of this said, there was a bright spot in this edition, and maybe one of the better segments of the series as a whole. While I may have some quibbles with it, “The Music of Mr. Sze” ended up being a pretty faithful modernization of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann.” But one aspect of the short film challenges me in a way that I am unsure if I agree with the choice or not. Specifically, it relates to the interpretation of found footage.

On “Erich Zann”

If you have never read “The Music of Erich Zann” it is one of Lovecraft’s better short pieces that evokes all of the cosmic horror you may want and leaves more questions than answers. It is available to read for free through the H.P. Lovecraft Society.

In a very broad summary, our narrator, a young man, moves into a cheap room in a dilapidated boarding house where he begins to hear music from the attic. In the attic is a tenant named Erich Zann, a mute musician who plays the viol in a local orchestra. When he returns home, he continues to play at night, including some strange, unearthly melodies.

The narrator eventually befriends the man, fascinated by the music. However, the man panics when the narrator hums the strange music that he had heard. The musician eventually asks the man to move to a lower floor. However, that doesn’t stop the narrator from hearing a particularly frenzied session, which he investigates. It is revealed that the music is meant to hold something back. The narrator sees an encroaching void, Zann is dead and still playing, and the narrator flees the home, never able to find this run-down house again.

It’s a good short story by Lovecraft. It is good material for a short film, and “The Music of Mr. Sze” delivers, though my thoughts on it are complicated. This was most definitely among the better adaptations of his work I’ve seen.

“The Music of Mr. Sze”

The short film, directed by veteran cinematographer and director Ernest Dickerson, is well done. Dickerson is very well regarded as a television director these days, though he was also heavily involved in 90s films, such as his cinematographer role in Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, and directing Demon Knight. I can say a lot about his career as it is impressive as hell. With all that said, his style works very well in this short. The performances are a little more mixed. 

Jihad Brent as Phillip Howard (get it?) is a capable actor, but sometimes the performance feels a little like he is putting on a performance rather than feeling naturalistic, but it could just be that the character’s more talented behind the camera than in front of it, being a film student. I get that sense from a lot of the cast who feel heightened in a way that makes the short feel a little more artificial than I would like. The exception is Alex Hsu as Mr. Sze, who plays the unknowable nature of his Erich Zann character quite well. His deterioration is handled quite well and feels uncanny.

One element of the short that I believe works really well is the depiction of the musician as a Chinese man. It may be a bit of an Orientalist trope, but Chinese culture is ancient, and positioning the musician in a lineage of an ancient defense against a cosmic horror works here. Is it a little too “ancient Chinese secret?” Perhaps, but it does expand the scope of Lovecraft’s original story even further, plus it is a direct rejection of the more racist nature of his work. It also strangely aligns with his own tropes.

The film does the “found footage” thing quite well, with our narrator and point-of-view character, Philip Howard, being a film student who is making a documentary about his life, and becomes obsessed with the strange man in the attic and his otherworldly music. The film also leverages the use of Meta-style glasses to provide a second POV by which Howard records everything without consent. In any case, the film uses a standard digital video camera and these glasses quite well and maintains the found-footage experience.

That is until it doesn’t, and that is where I find myself stuck.

At the climax of this short, Philip uncovers a strange crystal covered by a cloth and as a cosmic horror protagonist must, touches it. The Palantír-like crystal provides visions of a cosmic history, revealing otherworldly beings, apocalyptic danger, and the role men like Mr. Sze play in staving off this otherworldly presence through music.

It is visually stunning, and also completely destroys my immersion in the story and the film never quite recovers from it. We have been firmly in the POV of Philip until this point, channeled through technology. With this moment, that is no longer the case, and we are now in his head; verisimilitude sacrificed for narrative convenience, and it disappointed me. Even as the film returns to the camera-perspective, the frame is now distorted, altered into a wider form. That makes for a good metaphor for Philip’s altered view upon acquiring cosmic insight – I have no issue there.

None of what we see in Philip’s visions upon encountering the crystal makes sense as “on-camera” elements. I suppose you could make the argument that it is cosmic and otherworldly; maybe it somehow works. Somehow. But for me, it just does not. The film hooked me with how it uses the camera and jettisoning that angle for narrative convenience feels like a problem that could have had a more inventive solution.

It didn’t ruin the short film, but it did break the immersion that it had so wonderfully developed until that point. And the thing is, I think if that scene were removed, the film would work just as well: Philip encounters the crystal, there is visual distortion, we get him seizing behind the camera and then suddenly and mysteriously, the film’s dimensions change as Mr. Sze bursts into the attic as the otherworldly presence begins to enter the world.

Overall, I will say that “The Music of Mr. Sze” is the best of the crop of shorts in V/H/S/Mixtape, but even here, I can’t help but find something about it I can be critical of. I sometimes worry that I ruin these experiences for myself. But that is what comes with the foundations of this franchise, doesn’t it? If you establish fidelity to the camera and casually disregard that fidelity, you lose what makes the franchise work best. But regardless, “Mr. Sze” is still the brightest spot in perhaps the dullest and least-committed entry into the anthology series yet. Maybe the only track worth repeating in this mixtape.

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Anyway, more writing about horror movies – I do it because I care (send help).

I have not read Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, so I cannot weigh in on the accuracy of Other Mommy as a film adaptation; I can only really discuss the film on its own merits. I’m not really wanting to write a review of the film, as I have a much different topic in mind, but I’ll say this much: I found my mind wandering a lot during the runtime. I genuinely have great focus when it comes to watching films I am planning on evaluating or writing about, but I found myself struggling with this one. 

I’d have moments of tangential thoughts not so much related to the film, but adjacent to it. “Boy, they did a good job making Jessica Chastain terrifying-looking,” or “Hey, it’s Karen Allen, she’s great!” I saw wargame miniatures in an early scene and tried to identify if they were Warhammer or not. I started thinking about Succession when Stewie (Arian Moayed) from Succession popped up.

It didn’t help that the film’s twist was pretty obvious right away, so I didn’t really have much to keep myself invested in the story. It’s a film with some fun scenes and ideas that doesn’t quite stick the landing.

So instead, I am going to play “Will It Deadite” with the Other Mommy from Other Mommy. Also, I felt my soul die a little bit asking for a ticket to Other Mommy; it’s just awkward as hell to hear the word “mommy” from a man on the cusp of 40 years old.

Will It Deadite?

I’ve brought this idea up a couple of times throughout the course of these 31 Days of Halloween essays, where I draw comparisons between certain monsters and the Deadites of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films (and, to a larger degree, the larger franchise). This is also a way for me to write about Other Mommy by trying to connect to a better film overall. I’ll do anything to get these daily essays done. 

I don’t think we really acknowledge just how influential the Deadites are as monsters enough because I have been seeing them everywhere. Movies following Evil Dead’s 1981 release will borrow characteristics that are quite similar to Deadites, which are an entirely distinct sort of entity from demons. The Deadites are corrupted human souls, usually ancient – they are not demons but can be controlled by them, or invoked through magical ritual. They are spirits driven mad from Hell and seek to corrupt and infect humanity. Thankfully, there is an entire wiki entry that goes into more detail about it.

Now, this isn’t to say that similar entities in other media are actually Deadites, but they could be highly influenced by Evil Dead. When I covered Evil Dead in 2024, I had narrowed the characteristics of Deadites to three things:

A Deadite is three things:

1. Cruel

2. Ingenious

3. Manipulative

By applying these characteristics to any possession-based entity we see in a horror movie, we might be able to classify the creature as a Deadite. Or at least Deadite-inspired. But I also think there are other characteristics to consider, so we are going to need to tweak the list a bit.

Raimi’s Deadites are funny. They are ironic. Often we can lump that into the category of cruelty, but I think it is important enough to be considered something distinct. Deadites have their own strange sort of charisma through their choices of souls to possess or the types of comments they make when committing their atrocities.

Another characteristic of Deadites is the usage of bodily disfigurement. Once they hijack a soul, the body becomes grotesque under their influence. It is almost as if the body of the victim begins to rot in rejection of the unclean soul within them. Deadites have also varied in appearance in the two different branches of the Evil Dead franchise as well, so there is a lot of room for interpretation here.

So, a more accurate list now might be: cruelty, ingenuity, manipulation, humor, and disfigurement. If you manage to hit all five of these categories you probably have a Deadite.

So… how about Other Mommy?

Deadite Test: Other Mommy

 Let’s look at each characteristic of a Deadite and see if Other Mommy matches up in her film. I suppose you might consider these light spoilers for a current theatrical release, but I will not provide overly specific details in case you wish to see the movie yourself.

Cruelty: Pass

The figure of Other Mommy in the film does have a vicious streak and murders several people. Part of her proposal to Bela, the child at the heart of the film, is that her parents will hurt her. All Other Mommy wants to do is protect Bela, if only Bela would let her into her heart (literally). Other Mommy tries to curry favor by granting Bela wishes, in a sense, but with a cruel logic. She says she wants to save Bela from a broken family, but does her best to break it herself.

Ingenuity: Pass

Other Mommy is a shapeshifter-like figure, a trickster entity. She does take other forms in the film to further her goals and get closer to Bela and interact with her in new ways as she grows more desperate. Other Mommy is smart enough to recognize the cracks in the family and works to wedge herself into them for her goal.

Manipulation: Pass

Other Mommy plays the “mother figure” but it is all a front in service to her goal of a sort of escape through the child. She is particularly keen on communicating ideas in child-like terms to manipulate Bela. She uses Bela’s understanding to frame the lies of her parents as a darkness that threatens Bela herself, while Other Mommy is the real threat here.

Humor: Fail

This is where Other Mommy doesn’t quite evoke the Deadite spirit, or the comparison is stretched. While the film has plenty of funny moments, Other Mommy herself doesn’t have that Deadite quality of laughter and jokes that make them so delightfully evil. Other Mommy is cloyingly sweet and co-dependent to the point of it flipping into terrifying obsession and desire for Bela’s acceptance. There is humor in the film, but it is about the monster’s role in the events. There is some comedy in bodily distortion because of how odd and uncanny it looks, but that’s not quite the same as a Deadite making a terrible, gross pun at the expense of a victim.

With that, if leaning into irony there could be a slight argument in the favor of Other Mommy in how she uses childlike imagery to sow terror, inverting comforting objects of childhood into horrific tools of haunting. But it is, admittedly, a stretch.

Disfigurement: Pass

Other Mommy as a film certainly delivers on body disfigurement as the entity ends up taking on all sorts of horrific bodily distortions, even changing sizes and proportions several times. Her body twists and contorts in unusual ways that are quite unnerving. A scene involving a toilet is maybe the best example of being terrifying and comical in equal measure.

Other Mommy: Close Enough to Be a Deadite

Looking at these results, Other Mommy comes very close at 4 out of 5 characteristics. If only she was funnier. She’s not quite a Deadite, but there is a very Deadite feeling to her, with some visual characteristics evoking the recent Evil Dead Rise. Considering Other Mommy director Rob Savage is a primarily horror director, I would not be surprised to learn he is a fan of Evil Dead; the allusions to it are there in Other Mommy. 

Oh, but it turns out, Evil Dead 2 is one of his top three films. From an interview in Far Out Magazine, he says of Raimi’s film: “Sam Raimi is a big one, Raimi and his Evil Dead movies are huge to me.”

Shame he couldn’t commit to the wackiness in Other Mommy. He was very close and the film would have benefited greatly from it.

This has been an installment of Graphic Content; support my writing by joining me on Ko-fi.

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Anyway, here is more writing about horror. Please comment with your thoughts if you’d like, or send it to someone who might enjoy it.

When I last tackled Halloween (1978) back in the first 31 Days of Halloween collection, I saved it for my final film of the project. In that essay, I looked at the concept of “The Shape” and the Bogeyman and how Carpenter and Hill’s film created a modern manifestation of a Bogeyman concept. Halloween: a modern fairy tale that utilizes the uncanny to convey a lesson. But Myers, as a folkloric derivation, works best the less you know about him. Case in point, from the essay: “Yet, we can never truly understand Michael; that is what is most terrifyingly effective in the first film and why successive films actively work against this representation of unknowable evil.”

So this time, I wanted to write about evil, again. This time not regarding folklore or the supernatural, but rather the mundane nature of Michael Myers in that first film.

He is only a man, and a man can commit great evil.

An Avatar of Evil?

As much as Dr. Loomis personifies Michael as true evil (“The devil’s eyes.”), he is still very much a man and the film frequently shows this.  So many people sometimes see Michael as supernatural in the first film when really that is because they have been conditioned to think that. Dr. Loomis’ framing of Michael as a near-supernatural avatar of darkness colors much of how viewers see Michael’s actions and seemingly supernatural swiftness. Michael is a large, fit man upon his escape from the asylum and very quiet with occasional exceptions. It could be that Michael Myers is just naturally stealthy, can’t it? In this case, Loomis’ paranoia infects the audience, coloring their perspective on Michael’s actions when there are perfectly human reasons for his perceived ability to disappear in the dark of a poorly lit suburban neighborhood or in the chaos of a nocturnal asylum breakout in pouring rain.

Again, it is Dr. Loomis who puts the supernatural evil concept into the audience’s mind, continually warning Sheriff Leigh Brackett of the evil that comes to Haddonfield. Michael does not become supernatural until the “Thorn trilogy” of Halloween films, though, through an ancient Celtic curse. The reality is much more frightening than the idea of Michael being a supernaturally tinged avatar of evil; Michael Myers is just a disturbed, strong man with no remorse and a grim sense of humor. He is human after all.

The Human Nature of Michael Myers

One element of Michael Myers presented in Halloween is that he appears durable. People interpret this as being supernatural, but nothing in the film really suggests that beyond how viewers interpret him recovering quickly from some pretty rough blows. By the time Michael Myers starts taking on some real damage, the audience has already been indoctrinated by Dr. Loomis. As for the injuries themselves, Michael receives about ten of them. Laurie handles the first three, while Dr. Loomis is responsible for the other seven:

• Stabbed in the neck by a knitting needle
• Wire coat hanger to the eye
• Knife wound to the chest
• Six revolver shots to the chest and torso
• A two-story fall from the blunt force of the revolver shots

Michael never expresses real pain from any of these beyond a grunt or groan. Compare Michael’s lack of reaction to the terror and shrieking of each of his victims. Michael’s durability is not supernatural, but it is extreme. That does not make him inhuman, though. Though one cannot be blamed for believing Michael is supernatural, his uncanny rising from the ground, simply sitting up from being on his back, does a lot of heavy lifting here. Nick Castle’s intense core strength creates such a shocking moment, often duplicated in numerous slashers later on.

One of the humanizing elements of Michael Myers that makes his evil acts all the more chilling is a simple practicality. Michael is stealthy and has a good sense for survival. Consider Michael’s escape from the asylum, where he takes advantage of the breakout to steal a car. Loomis later finds a mechanic’s truck abandoned with signs that Michael has taken the man’s clothes. Of course, Michael isn’t all there; he is a madman after all, and continues to use the asylum’s car he stole as he stalks Haddonfield during the day.

Speaking of the car and practicality, though, it is quite funny in one particular scene to see Michael practice safe driving. As Dr. Loomis is speaking with Sheriff Brackett in front of the hardware store that Michael broke into, the escaped killer can be seen in the car at an intersection in the background, with the mask on and looking both ways for oncoming traffic before making his turn. It is a small moment that many people miss, but is hilarious if you think about. The avatar of evil practices road safety. It also reflects one of the funniest lines in the film: at the asylum, when Loomis is told that Michael cannot drive a car, Loomis responds, “He was doing very well last night! Maybe someone around here gave him lessons!”

Of course, there is also the case of little Lonnie Elam, the bully of Tommy Doyle. Lonnie, having bullied Tommy as the school day ends, darts into the foreground only to collide with Michael, who does nothing beyond letting the kid go on his way. Why does Michael let him live? Because it is not practical to murder a child in daylight. It is as simple as that.

Michael’s stalking is another curiously humanizing element to the killer, as in many ways it feels like Michael is playing a game with people. Famously, Laurie catches glimpses of him throughout the afternoon – behind shrubs, down the road, in front of a laundry line. It is so childlike you could almost be convinced that Michael Myers is a disturbed child who never grew up. Of course, to err is human, and Michael’s playing around does cause him to slip up. As he watches Annie in the kitchen, his hand rests on a hanging planter on the back patio. He puts a little too much pressure on it, though, and it crashes to the ground, giving away his position. In that moment, you get to see Michael perform his disappearing trick, confirming it is not supernatural at all. He’s just quick to react and hide himself in the darkness.

Michael’s inquisitiveness is one of the more interesting touches in the film. He sets his sights on Laurie because she is a random person who came to his door. He does not know this girl, but he stalks her and sets his sights on her and her friends just because of his inquisitive nature. Later, as the body count continues to grow, Michael kills Bob, the boyfriend of Laurie’s friend Linda, and something very curious happens. Michael holds Bob aloft and jams a knife into his chest; it is apparently the world’s strongest knife because it can anchor Bob to the cabinet door a few inches off the ground. In any case, Michael stops and stares at his handiwork, seemingly studying what he has done; filmed in distant profile, you can make out his head tilting. What can we make of this? Could it be pride? It is one of the stranger and most human elements Michael Myers presents in the original Halloween.

Lastly, one of the more interesting human touches that complicates the reading of Michael Myers is his sense of humor. While his evil is not meant to be funny, there is a gallows humor aspect to his methods. Specifically in two scenes, Michael’s creativity has a cruel, humorous edge. The first one is Michael’s “ghost costume,” where he approaches Linda wearing a bedsheet with an eyehole cut out. But what makes this even more bleakly funny is that he also has Bob’s glasses, over the sheet, on his head. This is enough to convince Linda that it is Bob having a goof.

It is not Bob having a goof, though.

Of course, the other major dark joke is Michael constructing a house of horror with the remains of his victims that Laurie stumbles into, including gags such as Bob hanging from a closet and Linda shoved into a linen closet that was ajar enough to open. The centerpiece, however, is the cruelest joke of all: Annie’s corpse propped up against the tombstone of Judith Myers, his sister, stolen from a cemetery earlier that day.

Michael understands the grim irony of all of this and chooses to comment on it through a disturbing art installation. He’s not completely incapable of understanding his actions like Loomis supposes. Michael is smart enough to know what he did and find a meaning in it, and he cunningly makes a statement in mockery of it.

Banality of Evil

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann in 1963. It was in her coverage that she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Eichmann was just a man whose unsettling complicity in one of the most monstrous systematic eradications in world history did not carry a supernatural influence of the cruel cackles of a demonic evil. Eichmann was a quiet, detached figure who efficiently plotted and administered a system of horrors to eradicate an entire ethnic and religious group.

Loomis’s rants about the unholy evil he sees in Michael Myers in the first film largely become literalized in popular culture. Michael has the “devil’s eyes,” as described by his doctor, a man who is meant to treat Michael, but according to Loomis, Michael cannot be saved. There is nothing to save. Loomis’ failure becomes a cosmic mythology to explain away the doctor’s inability to fix a disturbed man. Instead, Loomis intends to radicalize anyone he speaks to about Michael, partially to remove a dangerous man, just a man, from Earth, while also emotionally coping with his own inadequacies and doubt.

But the truth is that Michael is just a human being. Granted, he is a violent and disturbed human being, but not a supernatural avatar of any devil or demon. Loomis is broken by this and makes it everyone’s problem.

Evil isn’t always a curse, demon, or shadow. Evil sometimes is a murderous child who waits patiently to kill again, shrewd and childlike. Evil does not have to be supernatural, but the concept of an otherworldly influence sure helps us to handle the anxiety created by the simple truth: some people are just born bad.

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One of the reasons screening it was so fun was that I have always been an appreciator of this film, even as a nerdy high school kid. I have a memory of trying to have some friends over to watch it on my birthday, and nobody was into it (it is a slow film, so it makes sense), and I recall feeling rejected for my appreciation of it at the time. These days, it feels like the discourse has shifted and this film is more appreciated. In a lot of ways, maybe I am preaching to the converted here.

Also, a shoutout to Michael Grover on Threads for guessing the film. Follow me on all the socials where I periodically post hints about the upcoming essays.

In any case, today the focus is on objects and how The Changeling uses them to establish horrific moments. Enjoy.

I will never stop singing the praises of 1980’s The Changeling, directed by Peter Medak. For a long time, I considered the film underrated by a lot of horror fans, but that seems to have shifted over time. I think there is a lot of love for the movie now, and recognition of it as a wonderfully moody ghost story. I’d say it is my absolute favorite ghost film out there and in my top five horror films ever. I love this slow-burn Canadian horror film with all my heart.

It is also one of the few films that genuinely scares me. Given how much I write about horror, I feel I have been largely desensitized to it. Or maybe, more to the point, I just am not as affected by modern horror conventions. The power of The Changeling, to me, is that it is a perfect ghost story evoking centuries of tradition. If you told me that The Changeling was an adaptation of a Henry James story, I’d buy it, because it has the quality of care and verisimilitude of James’ work.

The slow, deliberate, and meditative nature of the film works because the haunting at the center of the story is so deliberately paced and feels almost tangible. The film is a series of small allowances and escalations, allowing viewers to buy into the haunting, going from innocuous coincidences and noises to direct spirit contact, culminating with a dead child’s fiery revenge from beyond the grave.

This tangibility of the haunting is presented in three key set pieces, all very frightening, though maybe less so in today’s modern horror aesthetic. But for me, personally, as one who delights in the tension of the journey, these scenes still give me a good scare to this day. These scenes focus on procedure, sound-mixing, and frequent reminders of the objects before their true, frightening payoffs.

The Ball

John Russell (George C. Scott) is a man in mourning over the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter. As he is packing up his home in New York to move to Seattle to try to move on, he has a moment where he recalls his daughter and her red rubber ball, a favorite toy. The ball, in the scene, bounces out of a box meant to be taken to Seattle. At this point, the film will return to the ball several times to remind us of its presence and a focus for grief and the haunting to come.

Hauntings in narratives are often of a double purpose. They are meant to create tension and suggest complexity in how we view death. The premise of ghosts questions finality and begs the question of a form of immortality, a desire that has haunted humanity since the first shaman existed.

Hauntings are also metaphors for trauma and grief that haunt the protagonist of the story – the haunting may at first not be related to their crisis coming into the story but becomes intertwined with it. To come to terms with what haunts them, they must also come to terms with the spiritual chaos that has engulfed their lives. 

The Changeling is a perfect distillation of these two purposes in the ghost narrative form. The ball that is introduced so early into the film, part of one of the most frightening sequences of the film, is a tangible object of haunting. It becomes a hybrid object of psychological trauma for the character of John, as well as a tool to motivate him to help the ghost of Joseph Carmichael in the manor.

The payoff to the numerous instances of the ball is the moment Joseph, whose hauntings until this point were subtle, is now interacting with a tangible object, directly contacting John. John discovers the ball bouncing down the stairs in his foyer and then proceeds to check where he stored it – an earlier scene with Claire (Trish Van Devere) is the reminder of the ball’s importance. John is the skeptical man, a great protagonist for ghost stories. He confirms this is the same ball that, now in his hand, was not where he’d placed it in that scene with Claire.

The physicality of holding this ball, a child’s toy he knows intimately, and still checking to see if it is the ball is brilliant writing and characterization. In this moment, Joseph, the unknown ghost, has rattled John. John lies to himself in response and drives out to a river to abandon the ball to dark waters below a bridge. John is telling himself he wants to move on here, but that is too easy for the narrative. He drops it into the water, but we all know what is coming. We all know in our hearts what this story is.

Instead, he returns to the manor, enters the foyer, and watches the red rubber ball come bouncing back down the stairs, still wet from the river. John Russell has been initiated into the spiritual world, and his personal haunting is now intertwined with the spiritual haunting represented by the ghost of Joseph Carmichael. Their grief is now enjoined.

The Reel-to-Reel

Another object of importance to the effectiveness of The Changeling is John’s reel-to-reel recorder. As a composer, the man knows the technology intimately and is a steady hand with it. Much like the red rubber ball, the importance of the reel-to-reel is quickly established, and periodic reminders set it up for a shocking reveal. John utilizes it in his compositions. There is a later scene, after the discovery of a music box in the attic, where the reel-to-reel recorder appears again, revealing that the composition John has been working on is the same tune that plays from this old music box.

The subtlety of this is excellent. The ritual of using the reel-to-reel and evoking it repeatedly establishes it as an important object in John’s life and a connection to a reality that is tangible to him. The intrusion of the mysterious melody in his recorded work is one of the more direct manifestations of Joseph’s will on John’s new life in Seattle. But this is all in favor of setting up yet another frightening scene – the séance.

The séance scene is quite intense and one of the most effectively chilling séances put into any film. The medium, played by Helen Burns, is chilling in her intensity. As she stares at nothing, her hand hurriedly scribbles across sheets of paper as her husband tries to keep up with the flurry of automatic writing. The whole time, she asks questions of the unknown ghost, who finally makes himself known in this scene. At first, it is through the spirit writing. But the reel-to-reel looms in the scene, almost an individual, seated at the table where the séance occurs.

Following the séance, John sits alone in the room, trying to grapple with what he experienced, and nearly leaves the room before turning to the familiar tangible reel-to-reel. He puts his trust in the rational, in an object of objective reality, and here again Joseph uses this to force his will upon John, to intertwine their haunts. The playback of the séance now covers the missing half of the conversation between medium and spirit. Joseph’s ghostly voice answers every question, and John must commit to solving a mystery. The audio is wonderfully done and iconic in how creepy it is. Procedure and auditory evidence play masterfully in creating tension.

The Medal

The final object to discuss in a film filled with haunted objects is Joseph’s christening medal. The medal becomes not only a marker for John’s experiences as a tangible reality, but also a marker of societal and family trauma. Joseph, the ghost, was a sickly child murdered by a powerful father who couldn’t risk his empire on a weak child. The titular “Changeling” of the film is Senator Joseph Carmichael (Melvyn Douglas), an adopted child who replaced the murdered Joseph, inheriting an empire that is not his. His success is built on death, fear, and greed. The medal is treated as a form of proof in the narrative, but is also dismissed as easily faked as well. Instead, the medal serves as evidence specifically for the Changeling Joseph – Ghost Joseph seeks acknowledgement of his replacement’s inherited sins.

The medal is mostly introduced through Ghost Joseph’s wailing and seen in a vision of the horrific murder. The medal only becomes real when John – searching for Joseph’s corpse in an abandoned well, paved over for the sake of progress as a parcel of the estate – is presented with the medal by the ghost. The scene depicting the medal rising from the soil is a trick of reverse photography, with a chilling and unnatural feeling, much like the situation.

Of course, the medal is the third object in this mystery to force John to walk into the spiritual world, and he keeps it on him. He tries to confront the senator about this murder, with the evidence in hand. A police detective comes to get the medal and is killed by the ghost of Joseph in a freak accident as the ghost grows more hostile. The Ghost of Joseph is so close to a resolution that he lashes out at each delay. John feels exhausted and trapped. And soon, Senator Joseph Carmichael must confront the presence of a second christening medal, indelible proof of the events – his medal being a duplicate.

In the film’s fiery climax, after John gets a meeting with the senator and lays out everything, the senator finally acknowledges the truth of his situation – he is a changeling, and his life has been a lie to maintain a father’s greed. In this moment, his spirit, channeled through Joseph’s will and the medal, is seen by John as the mansion burns down around him. Senator Carmichael’s manifestation climbs the stairs to the attic bedroom of the child he replaced and witnesses the horror of his father’s crime. The senator dies back in his own senatorial home, miles away, of a heart attack. Ghost Joseph has had his revenge and lets the mansion burn.

Trauma Never Vanishes, You Just Get Used to It

But what of the haunting itself? The film suggests maybe that Joseph is not done. We see John escape the mourning mansion with Claire but see him later at the Senator’s home, exhausted, looking on as the man’s body is wheeled out. The final moment of the film shows the music box in the burned wreckage. It opens and begins to play that haunting melody all on its own.

The film’s ending, as I see it, is dark. There is no real catharsis present – the changeling is a victim in all of this, too. John Russell will never be able to heal entirely from his loss, and Joseph, a scorned and vengeful child, has seen to that. John is strangely somewhat culpable for the senator’s death and will carry that burden, as it is now entwined with his own loss. Much like how a composer uses instruments as tools to manifest art, John is a tool to manifest revenge. Another tragedy for the psyche to endure. His life is forever altered by a spirit from 1909, and in the ashes of the burned manor, another haunted object awaits the unwitting. The trauma does not vanish but merely changes hands.

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This one is a bit of an interesting variation on what I’ve done before. This is me working from a prompt that I assign to my students, and this week we are covering Godzilla in class. The prompt in question: “Using this week’s readings, lecture, and an outside source, explain your theory as to why the Godzilla franchise has achieved the longevity it has over the decades and what role the tone shift between eras suggests about the monster.”

I decided I would tackle it to share with my students later as a demonstration of how such a prompt can be addressed. Of course, I will be providing them with an MLA-formatted version, with a dedicated Works Cited page. Readers of the blog get the blog version.

Anyway, feel free to share your thoughts.

I am going to reveal something that seems obvious, but I feel we don’t talk enough about: part of the appeal of monsters is that they often look cool. Horrifying and disgusting sometimes, but for a sizable portion of people, I would wager that “looking cool” is a major factor in a monster’s appeal. And no monster out there exemplifies that more than Godzilla, first introduced in the classic 1954 film by Ishiro Honda. Here is a monster evoking horrid trauma while representing childhood fantasy – what could be cooler?

While by today’s standards of CGI and an entire industry of creature design, his original look can be seen as quaint, at his atomically enlarged core, the existing design concept is incredible. Even though the creature, conceptually, is rooted in deep, national trauma, there is still something inherently appealing about the look. Much of the appeal of the original design, elements of which survive and thrive today, comes down to contrast. As Peter H. Brothers wrote in “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called Godzilla,” Toho Studios Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka saw the production as a way to cash in on special effects films, but director Ishirō Honda had far darker thoughts, later reflecting, “I wanted to make radiation visible.” 1954’s Godzilla is at once a dark visual metaphor for atomic disaster while being a mass-market-appealing icon.

As a mass-market icon, it’s hard not to take notice of the importance of the kaiju’s design in the promotion of Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956) in the United States. As Gregory Pflugfelder writes in “Godzilla: A Monster in Midtown Manhattan,” “Amid the kaleidoscopic array of American cultural icons lining Times Square in 1956, a four-story green monster (Godzilla is conventionally gray in Japan) fit in with perfect ease” (116). This is one of the first elements of design that has allowed Godzilla to remain a timeless and persistent monster in film: scale.

While different takes on Godzilla have varied wildly in height, the kaiju is consistently dominant in scale compared to the world around it. In horror, there is a frequent concept of awe, from which the sensation of horror derives. The Horror genre’s three dominant aesthetics are terror, horror (sensation), and revulsion. Godzilla’s size is directly connected to the concept of horror as a sensation. Terror is the expectation of something, horror is the awe of the reveal, and revulsion is the reaction. Smelling death, seeing the corpse, and finally vomiting. Imagine the first sailors to see a whale at sea. Think of the awe and the horror of it. How can a creature be so large? Extreme scale is scary. Buildings, canyons, seas, and the cosmos – all create unease in most. Every version of Godzilla taps into that – often the marketing. Godzilla is larger than life and demands notice. The size of Godzilla is the first design hook that makes a statement.

Godzilla’s atomic edge comes in many forms that prove adaptable for different tones. His skin is crackled and burned, almost charred, even in 1954. It’s unclear where keloid scars begin and reptile scaling ends. Godzilla’s head evokes the atomic cloud in some shots, and early design concepts emphasized this very look. Godzilla’s dorsal spines jut from the beast’s back like hostile architecture and glow with ionization. All these design elements evoke an atomic anxiety. Combined with scale, there is an inherent horror applied to the monster.

Another thing that needs to be acknowledged for understanding Godzilla’s design appeal is that the creature is a variation of the beloved theme of the dinosaur. Godzilla, in many respects, is the platonic ideal of a dinosaur. A Tyrannosaurid body, the limbs and neck of an Iguanodon, and the plates of a Stegosaurus, a fusion of popular dinosaur species that children obsess over. Ask a child to draw a dinosaur, and more than likely the end result is Godzilla-esque. If it were possible to find someone who had never seen a Godzilla film and asked what they were looking at, the answer would almost certainly be: ‘a dinosaur.’ After all, dinosaur obsession is a phase in the lives of many youths; “Many children develop a love of dinosaurs at an early age, but most of the time, they don’t become world-renowned paleontologists” (Marples). That dinosaur appeal is nearly universal and taps into something, forgive the pun, primal in the human mind. Yet, Godzilla’s silhouette is complicated by deliberate non-reptilian features – a hybrid monstrosity of Tyrannosaurus and an upright humanoid. There is a complexity to the organism on a conceptual level that varies from project to project. Inherently a technical issue due to the suitmation process to depict the kaiju, it lends Godzilla at times a clumsy and sometimes unnerving human quality.

But just as Godzilla can inspire horror, the beast is a mass marketing miracle, and the beast can be adorable, too. Godzilla’s “humanity” from the suitmation process permits a level of expression one might not expect from an atomic dinosaur. Much of this also comes down to the design of the kaiju’s expressive face, with surprising details and influences.

Godzilla’s cute appeal, or kawaii-ness, can and has been emphasized frequently as a marketing tactic. But even his 1954 appearance has several cute elements that lend the design to easy adaptation to mascotification. One feature that can escape notice is adorable, tiny ears. Further, Godzilla’s face and demeanor do have some cat-like elements that have been pushed in various features. One fun example is in Legendary Studios’ Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024), where a resting Godzilla turns the Colosseum in Rome into a makeshift cat bed, curled up just like a feline.

Godzilla’s present-day film immortality is a combination of launching with a powerful, influential debut film and the inherent “cool factor” of the kaiju’s design. Godzilla’s awe-inspiring scale, combined with the nostalgic, dinosaur-adjacent silhouette, provided the monster with an instantly recognizable and appealing profile. Meanwhile, the subtle mammalian traits of Godzilla provide an expressive range that filmmakers would readily incorporate in different ways; Godzilla, an atomic chameleon, could play the world-ender, the clown, the mascot, and the hero. Godzilla’s visual design, all the way back in 1954, is almost a perfectly engineered canvas that allowed the monster to outlive the atomic era that birthed it.

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I am a sucker for Zak Bagans’ Ghost Adventures. Is it a good show? Not really, in many ways. It is competently made and entertaining enough, but for a show about exploring the paranormal, it is often pretty laughable and better for memes than any serious investigation into the world of spirits and spooks.

Before Warner Bros. and Discovery rolled into a unified service, I delighted in Discovery+’s “Ghostober” for a couple of years. It was a 24-hour stream of Ghost Adventures and other paranormal shows, but mostly Ghost Adventures. I would have it on for background noise and would take breaks between tasks to watch Zak and his crew lose their minds over some coincidences, or to listen to Zak wax overly poetic about the cosmic consequences of a bunch of bro-dudes locked in a house with cameras. By Zak’s estimation, he and his crew are really piercing the veil between the living and the dead.

Are they? Not really. There is some evidence here and there, on an episode once in a while, that can be creepy and alarming. But rarely is there much. This is the same man who, being scalded by a potsticker, was jolted back to the task at hand, after all.

Zak’s propensity for exaggeration is a delight and part of why I think I enjoy the show so much. But what if Ghost Adventures actually managed to capture on film some real evidence? Also, I guess, what if they all died in the process?

Enter Grave Encounters, circa 2011.

Your Next Destination: Hell

The Vicious Brothers’ 2011 found-footage horror, Grave Encounters, has a simple enough premise: Get a Ghost Adventures-style documentary crew into a situation where the ghosts are very real and inject as much death and terror as possible. The cast of characters is certainly a lot more diverse than the Ghost Adventures team, but all retain the scrappy, bros in lock-down vibe of the show, down to the film’s lead, Lance (Sean Rogerson), who has a very Zak Baganesque look. 

Anyone into this ghost show genre has heard stories and opinions on Bagans. There are those who suggest that the Ghost Adventures team often leaves locations worse than how they found them, intentionally antagonizing spirits. People who have hosted them have had negative experiences. As the years have gone on, I have found Zak’s demeanour problematic in how he treats his crew (on camera, no less!) and his propensity for evoking demons as much as he can. I think he is a believer, but I don’t think he is above tilting things in his favor as far as “evidence” goes in investigations. Former Ghost Adventures crew member Nick Groff, essentially the co-founder of Ghost Adventures along with Zak, has been accused of manipulating evidence before. The controversy of his own show, Ghosts of Shepherdstown, notwithstanding.

I am not necessarily accusing Zak Bagans of faking things on Ghost Adventures, but I wouldn’t necessarily be shocked if it happened. Ghost Hunters lost one of their hosts, Grant Wilson, possibly due to controversy surrounding evidence manipulation – his leaving the show due to burnout smells more like saving the brand than anything. There is a whole library of tricks that can be used for these shows.

I bring this all up because Grave Encounters, made in 2011, was released during some of the peak years of Ghost Adventures, and amid a boom of other paranormal investigation shows; the questioning of evidence and the oft-perceived scammy personalities behind media creation are firmly in mind in the film and inform the whole approach. The copious mid-2010s CGI and facial distortion evoke today’s YouTube shock video or analog horror scares – perhaps predicting the future in some ways, but definitely dragging down the effectiveness of the horror.

The film leans heavily on building up its crew of investigators as well-intentioned fakers, desperate for evidence and absolutely losing their shit and their lives when the dead actually communicate back. A scene that could be ripped from the B-roll of a Travel Channel show occurs when Lance, disappointed with the groundskeeper’s lack of experience with the location, hands the man a $20 bill to present a much more interesting story on camera. Later, the team’s “psychic,” Houston (Mackenzie Gray) is presented as a struggling actor who is filling time between other gigs on the show, putting in hammy psychic reactions to the locations. T.C. (Merwin Mondesir) isn’t really a believer but is apprehensive about tempting fate. Sasha (Ashleigh Gryzko) seems to be earnest enough and probably truly believes.

But Lance is the question mark here. A scene depicts him going over a production schedule, skeptical of capturing anything paranormal – yet as things happen, he is keen on documenting it all. His vibe in the film is like that of a lapsed adherent to a faith who has had a miraculous encounter and believes again, desperate to hold on to it, no matter how frightening it is. He’s the obsessive creator archetype here, but curiously practical and not to the overall detriment of the group. Lance is treated a bit too evenly to really work as a parody of Zak Bagans, but he is a pastiche.

I think it is the idea that Lance is a measured person in this situation, both intrigued and terrified, that allows him to “survive” in a relative sense. I won’t spoil the ending. I will say, in a more cynical film, the ending for him would be far more mean-spirited and a “take that” at Zak Bagans with a direct, embarrassing death. Here we get a grimly ironic fate, not the lesser punchline of hack work. I respect that.

Do I laugh frequently at Zak Bagans and his antics? How can I not? But I laugh at him because I like him; I respect that he seems to be a believer, and I respect that he is doing what he can to investigate the possibility of ghosts. Am I sure all of his tactics are above board? I don’t think so – I don’t think there is enough evidence in the world or the afterlife to help Ghost Adventures hit 20 seasons. Do I think he is our best advocate for contact with the spirit world? Absolutely not. But he’s made a career for himself doing it, and I can respect that.

But in Grave Encounters, in the film’s most chilling scene, when I see Lance puzzle and try to rationally explain the time anomaly they seem to have encountered in the location, I worry. He reveals he checked the time for sunrise for the lockdown’s production, and they’ve blown easily past that in the location, with windows showing it is still pitch black outside. I worry for him. Just as much as I occasionally worry for Zak Bagans in those rare episodes of Ghost Adventures that even make me question what I’ve seen.

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Today I want to set aside some time to write about Vincent Price, and since I recently watched The Last Man on Earth (1964), this felt like a great opportunity for that. Is it the best movie Vincent Price has ever been in? Absolutely not. It is still quite fun, and his performance is what keeps the film afloat, given that he’s the only character for about 70% of the runtime.

If you like this movie, you probably like it because of him. As an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel, I Am Legend (1954), there isn’t a lot going for The Last Man on Earth. Of course, as I covered a little bit of Italian dream logic yesterday, we get a solid dose of that in The Last Man on Earth as well, given it is an American/Italian co-production. Matheson was a co-screenwriter of the film, but ultimately washed his hands of it by taking the credit through a pseudonym, Logan Swanson.

The film’s central conceit is that an apocalyptic plague has wiped out most of humanity, converting most survivors into vampire-zombies. Vincent Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, an immune man who appears to be the last living human in his area. (Aside from mentions of the plague’s European origins, the film is far from worldly, encompassing only about a dozen blocks in a non-specific city, but shot in Rome with Mussolini’s fascist flair adding another layer of unease.) The film explicitly calls them vampires, yes, but watching it with the knowledge of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead releasing just a couple of years later, you can’t help but see the zombie parallels in how the vampires act – well, some vampires.

It turns out this rapidly mutating plague has also resulted in rapid mutation in the vampire populace, where enough vampires have wits among them to create a drug that can help mask their symptoms, at least to get close to Robert. Eventually, Robert meets his doom, learning that his daily hunts of nesting vampires, hammer and stake and all, amount to him being a genocidal murderer – he is the monster they fear, and in their fear they destroy him.

It’s a perfectly fine concept that has been around so long that it doesn’t really come off as a shock anymore. Part of that comes from the ubiquity of the film on television and being thrown into the public domain in the 1980s. That’s why I can embed the entire film right here, see?

Ultimately, The Last Man on Earth lacks the depth of Matheson’s original novel, but as a science-fiction horror film, it has the kind of B-range quality that makes it appealing. The film also feels much older than it actually is. If you were to tell me it was released in the mid-to-late 1950s, I would believe you. Part of that comes from some of the limitations of American-Italian film production. But part of it is just that the world presented does not feel specifically like the 1960s.

Other than Vincent Price being Vincent Price, a lot of the film feels disposable and hackneyed. Not necessarily the fault of the production, but the film’s twist has been done so many times that unless you knew the novelty of it at the time of release, you’re probably not gonna feel much of an impact from it. There are also all sorts of dream logic elements that can pull one out of the film. How is the garlic at the grocery store still so fresh after three years, even with refrigeration? How has Robert Morgan not found signs of the more evolved vampires earlier? All of these are things you can handwave away as you watch, but they’re inconsistencies regardless.

But at least we have Vincent Price.

Living Dead Man

Despite some of the creeping dream logic in The Last Man on Earth, Vincent Price carries the film. For major portions of the runtime, he is the only face we see and the only voice we hear. It takes real skill to remain compelling under such circumstances, but he is very up to that task.

I think the film is at its best in the beginning, before his flashback to the pre-plague days. The bleakness of the abandoned city and strewn bodies carries a lot of tension, and the juxtaposition of Price as Dr. Morgan going through the monotonous routines says so much. You could probably edit out his voiceover entirely and still get what is going on just from the weariness of his body and the bored look on his face. This is a man who is already dead. He’s mad, and undertaking his grand task is doing him no favors.

Of course, probably the scene people may most remember was him watching curiously edited home movies (again, this is a partially Italian film; there is going to be jank – you get the sense he didn’t actually shoot these things in-world) showing his life before the plague –  showing his daughter, wife, and his friend Ben. It’s made all the more eerie as the vampiric Ben is right outside the door of the house, banging on the walls and calling “Morgan! Morgan!”

In that moment, as Morgan watches these home movies, we really get a sense of the weight he carries alone, in this terrible wasteland. He laughs at circus performances and smiles at the sight of his wife and daughter – but enough time passes that his indulging in nostalgia drives him to madness yet again. Laughter becomes strained, exhausted sobbing – all the while, the vampires continue to bang on the walls and beckon him out.

No words are needed here. It’s just a tired, lonely man having a breakdown on the couch as the world outside wishes to consume him. It’s beautiful in its bleakness.

Nobody could do it quite like Vincent Price.

Vincent Price: Spooky Queer Horror Daddy

As a child, my first conscious memory of Vincent Price was the 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But as I found myself exploring movies, I started catching him in a lot of classic films and, colliding with my love of Poe, dove fully into his series of Poe adaptations with Roger Corman. And of course I saw Edward Scissorhands at a formative age, which was among his final roles.

Growing up as a weird and spooky kid, overweight, and socially toxic (self-inflicted, I assure you), there was something about Vincent Price as an individual that spoke to me. Around high school, I began to read more about him and his life and began to see him as an icon in so many ways.

The man was also sexy, very much in the sense of a Renaissance man with a worldly quality, delightful demeanor, and embracing many talents. My wife has mentioned that she had a crush on him as a kid. Thinking about it now, maybe I did too? I think many people might find him still quite sexy today, as he’s more than an actor but an icon that has come to represent so much. He was an outside figure on the inside – a successful actor who, in a lot of ways, fit the archetype of ‘weird outsider,’ refined and so beloved today. (Think about David Dastmalchian in the world now, who borrows from what Price had been up to.)

I own two of Vincent Price’s cookbooks. Did you know he could cook? Fans would, but I don’t know if it’s very common knowledge among people who know him as the guy in the spoken-word part of Thriller. I mean, of course the man could cook – he needed to eat. But that he had a particular culinary interest, enough to publish recipes – that’s fascinating. He had a cooking show in the U.K., Cooking Price-Wise, that I have never seen, but gosh do I want to see it.

He was an art historian as well, perhaps foreshadowing his later queer iconicity; quite the tastemaker. He appreciated art in all forms, and for many Americans in the 1960s and 1970s he contributed to the spread of art in the home. His partnership with Sears is a particularly interesting note of his long career in the arts. I live close enough to The Vincent Price Art Museum, but I have never gone. That is something I need to do at some point.

He was also a queer icon as well, and this aspect of his life has become more known as the years go on. Married to three women and having two children, Price would become a very public supporter of LGBT causes. Price himself was bisexual, and at least two of his marriages were lavender. Victoria Price, his daughter, recalls understanding something about her dad’s sexuality at nine years old, looking back at her father’s close company.

But Price is not a perfect man; any icon has their darker aspects. An icon is only a human we’ve collectively put on a pedestal, and all humans have their failings. The man was, at one time, antisemitic and a Nazi sympathizer. But this wasn’t lasting – by his late twenties, his political views grew greatly, and he shook off those problematic beliefs, going fully liberal. I think there is something to admire in that growth and that willingness to change. In fact, he ended up being greylisted as “Premature Anti-Fascist,”  part of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s whole communist witch-hunt. This is weird, right? He fell in with the goosesteppers as a young man, changed his views, and then was treated as a radical by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who harbored some anti-Semitic views of his own. Price had a brief Nazi-fling and then became anti-Nazi too early for McCarthy. Life moved very quickly back then, apparently.

Is it disappointing that Vincent Price held problematic views for a time? Yes, absolutely it is. But also, is it that surprising for a young man to be a shithead – even one who came off as beloved and refined as Vincent Price? We have young shitheads today who have fallen in with loud and hateful demagogues. With luck, they too will follow Vincent Price’s growth. 

Vincent Price outgrew his cringe. I can only hope one day we all can outgrow ours. Vincent Price is proof you can stay spooky, make some mistakes, but still be beloved.

But, what do you think? Are you a fan of Vincent Price? Any particular memories or outstanding roles? Let me know in the comments.

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The post Revenge of Graphic Content #17: The Last Man on Earth (1964) – Nobody Does It Like Vincent Price appeared first on hpkomics.com.

But the show must go on. Just be gentle with me this time around, okay?

There is a lot of stuff that came to mind when rewatching Demons (1985). This is probably my fourth time seeing it. A lot of what came up were questions.

For example, why is the movie theater’s wall made of peanut brittle? Why is the only employee dressed like a Christmas elf? Why is Tony the Pimp the best character? And also, why does the helicopter have a grappling hook and launcher on board?

Most importantly… are the titular demons actually just Deadites?

The first answer to all of these questions, and more, is that this is an Italian film. IF we want to put a little extra clarification in there, it is a Dario Argento-produced Italian film. If you know, if you don’t, I do want to talk about these two ideas: Italian film and Dario Argento, which are frequently associated in my mind with dream logic. 

There is actually so much I wanted to write about this film, but to maintain my 31 Days of Halloween pace, I’ll also need to briefly mention my obsession with the character Tony the Pimp. Maybe this can be something to come back to for a 31 Days of Halloween Vol. III? 

Dear God, I need help. Already thinking about doing this all over again.

Anyway, on to Demons (1985).

In Search of a Point of Entry

One of the concepts I had considered before settling on what I am going to write today is the strange nature of the characters in the film. Strange in the sense that they are not so much characters with arcs, but rather action figures meant to be kept in the events of the story to be used for whatever gory set piece Lamberto Bava, Dardando Sacchetti, and Dario Argento are capable of whipping up.

However, one character emerges to prominence, not through a compelling story, but through sheer presence. That, of course, is the character of Tony the Pimp, played by Bobby Rhodes. The actor imbues this rather flat character with such a presence you can’t help but be entertained. The movie also loses something when Tony is killed off – Urbano Barberini’s George is about as thrilling as a dinner roll, and Natasha Hovey’s Cheryl might as well just be a cardboard cutout with nothing to actually do in the film. Rhodes continues to portray the demon-zombie Tony, of course, chewing scenery along with scores of victims as a spotlight demon-zombie in several scenes.

A character so big and making so little sense, he is perfect – like out of the most badass dream you’ve ever had. How this stereotypical American pimp and his two employees gets wrangled into the events of Demons make no sense, but you just buy into it.

Legitimately, one of my first ideas when it came to deciding what to write about regarding Demons was a Crackedesque shitpost about the excellence that is Tony the Pimp. However, part of that standout success for Tony the Pimp, I think, gets to a much more significant element of the film – the Italian dream logic.

Dream Logic

Tony the Pimp is such a striking element of the story of Demons that he becomes one of the most memorable things – the edges around the film become fuzzy, but he is remembered with such vibrancy that he is an indelible image associated with the film. 

If you don’t dream very often, this may be a bit hard to take at face value. But dream logic functions well enough to get you through an abstract narrative as you are dreaming, but they don’t really hold up as details when you try to recount them; most often you find yourself focusing on the stuff that just doesn’t make sense, and that is what you pull from these dreamlike scenarios.

Case in point: I had a dream once that my old dog, Toby, was driving a car, trying to come with the family on a day trip. The whole premise of the dream is that we left him at home and piled into a truck. He did not like that, grabbed one of the other cars, and followed us onto the freeway, whereupon I freaked out because Toby was not supposed to drive on freeways – he’s just not allowed.

The next morning I woke up cross with my stepfather because I was so mad that Toby was driving a car on the freeway. It felt convincing enough. None of it makes sense, but that detail about Toby driving on the freeway – something he was forbidden to do in the context of the dream- was what I pulled most readily from the whole surreal narrative that emerged from my head.

A lot of Italian horror is like that, for me. There is a loose narrative to string together events, but I can’t help but get hung up on the details that don’t make sense in a sea of things that do not make sense. Why is the only employee of the theater dressed like a Christmas elf? Why did the blind man go to a movie? Why are two of the punks’ names Baby Pig and Hot Dog? Why does a helicopter that crashed through the roof of the theater have a grappling hook and launcher, which is exactly what is needed to escape the theater?

This isn’t about overthinking these things – we accept them and run with them during the duration of the movie to move us from one gory moment to the next. But they do stand out – like my dog driving on the freeway.

I made a particular note about the involvement of Dario Argento in this film: many of his films are like this, where dream logic pervades, and we are lulled into the film and just accept it. The strange thing exists because it must for the movie to work. Suspiria (1977) is a fantastic example of just this kind of thing. Why does the dance academy have a room full of barbed wire? Because it has too much in the moment. Why do all the doors feel so much bigger than they should? Because it puts us in a weird headspace for the rest of the events in the film.

It’s all a dreamlike structure meant to serve an aesthetic. Even if we can point it out, is there ultimately any real harm in that? If we wanted true coherence, we wouldn’t be watching a 1980s Italian horror film. That is why I found so much and so little to discuss here, because analyzing dream logic is ultimately more of an exercise in understanding what is going on in one’s own head than any greater insight into the film.

Or maybe, as I write all of this, I realize that the film is something better experienced than read about. Maybe the point here is an exercise of sorts – give in to the movie and see what oddities stand out to you. What do you make of them? I question the grappling hook, but I can logic my way into accepting its existence, and the movie is just fine. What sticks in your craw?

I haven’t even written a damn thing about the guy with the tinfoil mask or the prop mask in the theater that kicks off the whole demon invasion that results in the apocalypse. There is that much going on in the wonderful, strange movie. It’s a labyrinth of weird and you can become fixated on even the smallest of frictions far too easily.

So Are They Deadites?

One final thought I wanted to raise before moving on: are the Demons from this movie Deadites? Obviously they are not, as there is no official production crossover here, but their characterization, aesthetic, and vicious streak certainly remind me of Sam Raimi’s iconic undead bastards. However, this movie has a certain whack-a-doo gore aesthetic that feels cribbed from The Evil Dead, which predates this one by a couple of years. It’s not too outlandish to think there may be a little influence here.

What do you think?

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