Consider
this a “Twelve Days of Christmas” deal. I don’t care if it’s November already.
Halloween isn’t over until I say it is. On with the highlights from October
2017 and some essentials. I’m trying not to lose my motivation here, so bear
with me.
Part 2 – Thoughts on a Few Classics
John Carpenter’s The Thing
Since
I’ll be covering John Carpenter a little bit more later, I’d better get to this
one first. Last Halloween, I hosted a livetweet double feature of both the 1951
and 1982 versions of The Thing with the #Filmistines. Since then, one of
my other fabulous co-hosts has featured it two more times, one of those during
this October. John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing is nearly a perfect
movie. I didn’t see this one in the theater, but I saw it perhaps a dozen times
shortly thereafter when it ran on one of the cable channels from around 1983
and upward. Like many movies I saw on cable at that age, however, no matter how
much I worshiped some of them, The Thing was among those that I didn’t
see again for many years afterward. I never forgot its magnificence, but I
never came back to it. I never rented it at the video store or bought it for my
collection, and I didn’t see it again for nearly fifteen years until it finally
turned up again on the Encore channel. I was an active kid, and I got
distracted by a lot of shiny things. From a visual standpoint, it had some of
the best horror effects I have ever seen, and it’s a movie I should have seen
more often than I have. Even fifteen times isn’t high enough, and it doesn’t
matter if it’s Halloween or not. Easily one of my top fifteen movies of all
time and maybe even higher on the list.
I Walked with a Zombie
Before
George Romero changed the face of popular culture’s definition of the zombie, I
already had some film experience with the traditional concept of a zombie. When
I wasn’t able to see a lot of horror movies on television or in theater, I
turned to the local library for books on movies. I can’t recall the titles of a
few of them, but I loved finding books filled with poster and lobby card images
from the classics as well as the history behind the casting and production. Two
images that stand out in my memory are the eerie appearance of the zombie
himself in I Walked with a Zombie and the famous still of him casting
his shadow on the wall of a woman’s bedroom. I had seen White Zombie on
local television as a kid (I wanted to watch this one again this year as well
but didn’t get around to it), but I didn’t get to see I Walked with a Zombie
until a few years after I learned about it in the book. To me, Romero’s
flesh-eating ghouls never were true “zombies” (Romero, of course, never used
the term to describe them, either, but popular culture decided otherwise). To
me, a zombie was something even more frightening. A ghoul was just a shell, but
a zombie still had your silent consciousness. You were dead, but you were not.
Your soul was trapped somewhere in between life and death, and your body walked
under some force beyond your control. Being eaten by a walking corpse is no
more frightening than being eaten by a bear, but walking the earth and
committing perhaps terrible deeds with a complete absence of will? Slavery of
the soul and the body through ancient magic. That is real horror.
Fallen and Diary of a Madman
Slavery of
the soul and body provide the perfect segue into this pair of classics. From a
plot standpoint, Fallen and Diary of a Madman are very close to
the same movie. An evil entity, as old as time itself, exists in the world
without its own face or form, and it passes from living soul to living soul to
sustain itself, forcing each of its hosts to do its absolute bidding. In the
classic Diary of a Madman, it is the Horla, a sentient force of evil
that feeds on the sanity of its victims and drives them to commit acts of
murder.
 |
| The green-eyed monster is real, and he's gonna getcha. |
In Fallen, it is the obvious hint of the title, one of many
fallen angels cursed to live without form, passing from one human host to the
next and typically disposing of their previous hosts in terrible ways to keep
their existence a secret. The cast makes the movie in both cases. We have the
essential Vincent Price and Nancy Kovack suffering under the power of the Horla
while Denzel Washington and John Goodman investigate the victims of the fallen
angel. Vincent Price and John Goodman generally are the only names I need to
hear to get me to watch a movie. Masters.
I hadn’t seen Fallen for
quite a few years, but Diary of a Madman is perhaps my second favorite
Vincent Price movie and one of my annual traditions. When I watch it, of course, I go with a horror host presentation from the great Dr. Paul Bearer, and I'll talk more about him later.
Teeth
I can get into it pretty hard with this one. It’s one of the best contemporary horror movies and social commentary I have ever seen. It sets itself up as a parody of B-movie horror, teenage sex comedy, and small town sexual repression, and the latter is a subject that I take so seriously at times from personal experience that it can make my enjoyment of this wonderful horror movie rather difficult. When I watched it this October, those angry feelings crept up in me again and pretty much took over my entire commentary as I watched it.
I might as
well get this little story over with. I lived in Florida during my middle
school years, and it was there that I endured my first round of sex education
in science class. It was all rather clinical, and, despite puberty, I had no
real interest in sex. I don’t know if I would call myself asexual, but I still
don’t find any urge to engage with anyone else intimately beyond a hug. People
found me easy to like, and I was a good listener and friend who could be
trusted to be just that: a friend, not looking for anything more. This led to
me becoming the confidant for several of my friends who were beginning to
engage in sex as early as the age of 12. I couldn’t begin to tell any of those
stories here, not because I was sworn to secrecy but because I couldn’t wrap my
head around many of these stories. It wasn’t the sort of hormonal tension I
suffered from, and perhaps that was in part because I suffered from a hormonal
imbalance in the first place due to antidepressant medication. I was mistaken
for a girl a lot, and my experiences with bullies left me feeling less inclined
than ever to think about any human contact on an intimate level. So I listened
and tried to be a good friend to the people who treated me with kindness in my
life. I heard tales of some of my friends suffering from complete upheaval of
their lives, and I learned very quickly just how sleazy young men could be from
the moment they reached puberty. I had many close friends who were girls and
trusted me with their stories, and I went on to hear bragging from their
boyfriends in the locker room to confirm those stories. It took all I had not
to beat the living shit out of a few of those guys. This was WITH the benefit of
sex education in school, and it was a difficult time for many young people I knew.
When I hit
the ninth grade, my family moved back to Texas, all of this went away. It was
difficult to adjust to returning to my childhood home, and I became more
withdrawn. It wasn’t until I was a senior that I began to establish a few
similar relationships with people, but my grade school life was nearly over by
then. The important point, however, is what happened in the ninth grade in
Texas. When sex education rolled around again, it seemed just as normal and
matter-of-fact as it did in Florida, but there were some new details. Condoms
and STDs had become part of the discussion, and I didn’t know that something
was going off the rails behind the scenes. The only concern I had about the
whole situation was that my biology class was my most difficult class upon my
return to Texas and the source of the most stress for me. Despite having known
a lot of classmates since elementary school, I still felt like the new kid, and
the biggest stress for me in sex education was that we had a group assignment.
I hated group assignments. I usually ended up doing all the work. Additionally,
this assignment was to take place mostly as homework outside of class. We were
intended to get together as our groups and talk about these subjects amongst
ourselves and to talk to other people about it, and this was to be a decent
chunk of our grade.
One day in
biology class, we watched the video Time Out featuring Magic Johnson and
Arsenio Hall. It was big news at the time when Johnson discovered he had HIV,
and this was the early 1990s. AIDS was the biggest scare going, and it had
become more accepted that this was not just a homosexually transmitted disease
and never truly was at all. The NEXT DAY, my teacher came into class with a
sour look on her face. Sex education was over. Done. Out of the curriculum
completely, and she wouldn’t (couldn’t) discuss it further. All of the material
and assignments she had given us in the few days prior to that were canceled.
We were to throw them away and forget about them, and that was the last thing
she said about it. That was it, like the last few days never happened. At the
time, I was relieved because of how much displeasure I had in the amount of
human interaction I was supposed to have in these assignments, but I still
remember the look on my teacher’s face. I didn’t realize the truth of the
situation. The school had gone abstinence-only, and “don’t do it” became the
new topic of auditorium presentations. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me
because I didn’t really care about sex. I only cared about myself and getting
out of those assignments, but I started to remember some of those past friends
who trusted me with their stories. I tried to imagine how much more difficult
it would have been for some of them in a more conservative environment, and, as
an adult seeking certification for teaching, I began to see some of those
effects from the other side of the desk. I won’t tell those stories, either.
Teeth is a perfect example
of the negative impact of repression with a horror twist. Don’t think about it.
Don’t do it. Make promises to each other and to God that you won’t do it until
you’re married. Suppress everything. Suppress everything so deeply that a young
girl has no idea how her own vagina is supposed to look or behave. This sort of
education has never worked, and it never will. As shown in the movie, some
imaginary monster like The Black Scorpion is the fearful response to
masturbation curiosity. You’re taught to fear reprisal from unseen forces for
even the attempt to understand self-pleasure. You’re supposed to feel guilty
about it. Abstinence-only is simply teaching deliberate ignorance, and the
confusion of that hormonal repression leads to increases in rape and teen
pregnancy because kids are unable to approach it normally. There needs to be a
dialogue, or we’re just animals. Teeth is an evolutionary response to
these negative effects of abstinence-only environments. If someone can’t depend
upon that environment for safety from predators, then that someone has to adapt
to survive, and we see the gender separation of sex on full display as men are
supposed to hunt and conquer while women are supposed to be pure and chaste.
The contradiction is mind-boggling. Rape and abuse shouldn’t have to be things
to bring about these adaptations, but they are reality. If you can’t respect
someone else’s body with regard to your own hormonal urges, then you should be
prepared to lose a finger… or more. Of course, this is science fiction, and we
see the nuclear power plant towers from almost every outdoor shot. The audience
knows that a radioactive mutation has taken place, but it’s never given the
focus of the story. The focus is on social views of sex, and it’s one of the best
examples I’ve seen of it yet.
Troll
Teeth is a difficult subject for me even though I love the movie so much, so let’s dial it back to a simpler pleasure. Troll is one of my all-time favorite movies. Michael Moriarty was my Harry Potter, and he gave one of my favorite horror performances of all time in Q The Winged Serpent. |
| Now THIS is a sorting hat. |
Stay tuned for part three, which I'll be dedicating mostly to the horror greatness of James Karen and Tom Atkins, and I'll talk, perhaps at great length, about Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
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