During the recent flap over Kelly Clarkson’s endorsement of Ron Paul (possibly a racist and homophobic conspiracy theorist; more likely just an unscrupulous opportunist like roughly 99% of politicians), Kelly responded to her detractors on Twitter by mentioning that she supports:

“gay rights, straight rights, women’s rights, men’s rights, white/black/purple/orange rights”

Dear Everybody in the World: Stop saying that shit.

When you throw out imaginary colors that human beings don’t naturally come in, it belies any notion that you’ve given serious thought to the subject of prejudice. I’m not concerned with the rights of purple people, primarily because I’m more concerned with giving them the Heimlich as they’re obviously choking to death. Likewise, an orange person’s rights to remain radioactive and / or continue using cheap ass spray-tans don’t really concern me.

I know the idea behind the statement is to come across as caring about all of God’s skittle-colored children equally, but it just makes you sound ridiculous. So stop saying that. Saying that you support “gay rights, straight rights, women’s rights, men’s rights, white/black/Asian/Latino/etc.” rights works much better and takes 0.5 seconds longer to type.

While we’re here…

Stop prefacing offensive phrases with “I don’t mean to sound racist / sexist / homophobic / xenophobic / but…”

Stop using the term “politcal correctness” in a derogatory fashion when what you’re really taking issue with is tact and civility, you asshole.

Stop referencing / bemoaning the degradation of the First Amendment in regard to things that actually have absolutely nothing to do with the First Amendment.

Stop hating on Tim Tebow. Stop over-praising Tim Tebow. Stop calling “kneeling down in reverence to something” Tebowing. It’s kneeling, aka genuflection, aka something that’s been around for thousands of years already.

Stop believing it when movies say that they are “based on true events.” It’s a meaningless phrase used for marketing purposes. The Devil Inside is based on some dude’s idea for a profitable horror movie. That is all.

I’ll be back with more at a later date, I’m sure. In the meantime… you know… just stop, already.

First and foremost, I’m not one of these people who thinks every horror flick has to be rated R. You can make a perfectly good horror flick with a PG-13 or even PG rating if you do it right. I’ve long stated that the original Halloweenwould be a PG-13 movie if you cut out a couple of entirely gratuitous and inessential breast shots.

But I do prefer that my blatant B-movie monster-rampage horror flicks have an R-rating. What’s the point of releasing a movie with an obviously corny title, a corny premise, a cast full of nubile young actors posing as vacationing teenagers out for summer fun, and then slapping it with a PG-13 rating? Unless this flick is about to uncork some extremely unexpected, high-quality writing, acting and filmmaking, then the entire reason this movie should exist is for blood, guts, ass and breasts. That’s it! That’s all I’m ordering with my Shark Night 3D, and that’s exactly what a PG-13 rating promises to deny.

It’s like opening a McDonalds franchise that exclusively serves salads. No thanks, if I want a salad, I’ll go someplace where I can trust that there are chefs in the kitchen who actually know how to make one with fresh, healthy ingredients. You go to fast food joints for fast food that’s awful for you but fills the inexplicable craving you have for it at 2:30am after you leave the club. You go to see Shark Night 3D for R-rated, unflinching shark-related violence and random, pointless nudity. This movie should feature so much gore that “Chewed Up Body Parts” ends up getting a screen credit and a SAG card. It should have more T&A than the sentence, “Tattle-tale attacked by tattooed acrobat.”

It’s like someone saw last year’s Piranha 3D and decided to make the same movie, minus everything that made that movie even remotely worth renting. This movie has an infinitesimal chance of having any redeeming qualities. It’s directed by the same guy who gave us Final Destination 2, Snakes on a Plane and Final Destination 4. The guys behind the script have VH1 recap shows and nothing for past credits. Pretty far cry from an Oscar-caliber résumé.

Who the hell gave this the green light? Were they trying to get fired? Is this an experiment in creating the Justin Bieber of gruesome, brainless horror movies? That lame ass ABC show “Shark Tank” is more horrifying than this is going to be. The inevitable Robot Chicken parody of this movie featuring Jabber Jaw as the man-eating shark is going to be scarier thanShark Night 3D.

In short, this movie gets my coveted ”Zero Faith” award. I can hardly wait to see it fade into obscurity.

It still sort of surprises me whenever I find out that any of my peers not only did not read the Scary Stories series in their youth, but never even heard of it. What the hell were you doing with your childhood? Sleeping well without having to fend off ghastly black-and-white illustrations that waited within the darkness of your dreams? Bah! No fun to be had in that…

Among the many things that the Scary Stories series has offered me is a reminder that personal experience is indeed personal and not necessarily universal. Based on my relationship with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series I would have believed every American child reared in the 80′s would have at least been aware of these tiny tomes of terror. I can still remember seeing the original cover to the first volume sitting on the shelf at the Book Fair, and can likewise remember every kid in my elementary school class being instantly fascinated and appalled all at once. Stephen Gammell’s infamously freaky illustrations made you feel anxious about even flipping through the pages.

This is from one of the "humorous" stories. Obviously...

Only a relative handful of my classmates actually purchased the books, and I could not count myself among their fortunate ranks. I hadn’t even bothered to ask my parents if I could buy it, in fact–I already knew how my folks would react to grim content. So instead I was one of those who borrowed the books to read during recess or whenever we had some free time towards the end of the school day. I remember the books staying in remarkable condition despite passing through many hands over the course of multiple school years. I would not say that we held the books with any particular reverence so much as we knew how precious they were to the owners. Accidentally rip part of the page to someone’s forgettable Spider-Man comic (“Aw man, this is the one where Spider-Man appears to have been killed by Magma–a villain and event that will surely remain relevant for years to come!”) and they might be mad at you for a week before you’re friends again.  Fold the corner of one of the appendix pages of someone’s Scary Stories book and they might not speak to you for the duration of the semester.

The books are, of course, remembered mostly for the remarkable, inexplicably nightmarish illustrations, but I hold Alvin Schwartz’s retellings of classic and modern ghost-lore dear as well. These were the first books I had ever encountered that not only told the reader a story, but also told the reader how to tell the story. Being written specifcally for recounting around campfires and at sleepovers gives the tales a fairly unique leanness that adds an invisible layer of perturbation to the stories. In “The Big Toe” we are spared any explanation as to why the boy’s parents would nonchalantly decide to cook and eat the giant toe he violently yanked from some unseen creature in a garden. Is the family that poor and desperate for food? Do they regularly forage for monstrous appendages?

"Another big toe growing in the garden? You'd think it was June already."

We’re not given so much as a sentence addressing these questions. The father just cuts the toe into thirds, the family dines, and then they do the dishes and go to bed. It’s treated as a perfectly normal evening and the setup to impending horror when it could stand on its own as a profoundly disturbing story.

My favorite story in the series, “The Drum,” also makes great (and perhaps more deliberate) use of creepy ambiguity and quiet peculiarity. In it, two young sisters living in a small village happen upon a toy drum owned by a gypsy girl. It’s a hell of a drum with animatronic figurines that come out of it, and the sisters ask the gypsy girl if they could have it. The gypsy girl promises to give it to them only if they misbehave their asses off, which they immediately agree to do, believing that temporarily transforming into a pair of mini-miscreants won’t lead to any dire consequences.

Instead of disciplining her children, their mother makes a sorrowful plea for the sisters to behave, while warning the girls that if they continue to misbehave she and their baby brother will have to leave them, and she will be replaced by a new mother with “glass eyes and a wooden tail.” Had my mom told me something like that when I was a kid I would have developed some sort of mannerly superpowers. I would have instantly turned into Behavior Boy.

The drum and even the gypsy girl are essentially MacGuffins as the short story briskly progresses to its inevitable conclusion. And again there are multiple questions that get brushed aside. Why do the girls feel they have to actually misbehave instead of just lying to the gypsy girl? Do they believe she can somehow see them when they get home? What is the gypsy girl’s motivation? Sport? Something more nefarious? Why does the mother say she does not want to leave but will have to if the girls continue raising hell at home? Is some outside force compelling her? And “glass eyes and a wooden tail”? Just… why?

I remember “The Drum” in particular as the story that most haunted me due to its unexplained elements. I’m pretty sure it’s the story that first made me conscious of the value of leaving some questions not only unanswered, but unasked. While most of the people I personally know never read these books–much less gleaned early storytelling lessons from them–the internet, as only it can, provides ample evidence that the books have a wealth of admirers. I’m tempted to make the bold, oddly specific declaration that this is the best and most beloved children’s horror anthology series ever. There really isn’t much more for me to say about it, at least for now, so in closing I’ll just leave you with this “scary-for-no-damn-reason” picture from the tale “Oh Susanna” that has absolutely nothing to do with the story.

Sleep well!

Confessions of a Fear Junkie is a series of reflections on the books, stories, movies, images, and lore that have managed to creep me right the hell out.

Here’s a very, very short list of stories I’ve had published that are currently available, in order of the most recently published.

“Giving Grounds” – Arkham Tales issue #8

I know some writers who hate the question of “where do you get your ideas?” I love it, even though sometimes the answer is uninteresting, bizarre or embarrassing. The idea for “Giving Grounds” sprouted (pun unintended, probably) from a throwaway joke from an episode of Family Guy of all things. I know, it’s trendy to hate Family Guy on the internets, so let me preemptively apologize for having seen a minute of the show at all, and with that out the way, it was the episode where the family is sent to live in the south in the Witness Protection program. Inside their new home, Chris finds a hand inside a jar and says he’s going to plant it outside to see if a human grows. Because I’m a horror writer, my mind immediately latched onto the interesting, grotesque idea of growing a human beings by means of traditional agriculture. And so from a lowbrow animated sitcom, a grim, serious short story was born. Available in Arkham Tales issue #8.

“Miss Branson Calling” – Pseudopod

The first story I ever sold that was based on a nightmare. I actually used to work with the lady Miss Branson was based on. An eccentric chain smoking, overall harmless elderly woman who coughed like she had a lagoon in her lungs and had skin that seemed like it might disintegrate at any second. Based on the comments, many of the Pseudopod fans didn’t care much for this one, but I think it’s a solid effort at trying to draw fear from something that’s more melancholy than aggressively terrifying.

“Thanks For Using Forced Honesty Assassinations“  – From the Asylum

Damn shame that From the Asylum is closed, because they housed some excellent stories during the years that they were open. I had been trying to break into their ranks for quite a while before they finally accepted this flash fiction piece. I really like this story, short as it is. I can’t remember where the idea came from, but I love the slight ambiguity of the ending.

“Civilized Monsters” – Pseudopod

I received a lot of comments about how graphic this story was, which sort of surprised me. I actually tend to think myself a bit squeamish and didn’t think I lingered on any exceedingly gruesome parts here. Could it be that I’m mistaken? Me? Perish the thought. Can’t remember where I got this idea from. If I could go back and touch up some parts here and there I would, but I still like this story, particularly the ending.

I was astonished… astonished I declare… to find out that some folks I know not only have no love for October, but actively dislike this splendid month. Granted, I live in Texas and have lived in south for virtually all of my life, so the coming of colder months has always been a bit of a welcome reprieve from the heat at best and a nice change up at worst. I imagine that if I lived further north the cooler weather would be an harbinger of months of gloom and snow-shoveling and ice-scraping to come. So to my brethren above the Mason Dixon I say… too bad! October is fantastic!

Kidding about the “too bad.” But really, here’s a quick list of reasons why I don’t just enjoy October, but feel invigorated by this time of year.

5. It is the Nexus of Major American Sports

The NFL is in full swing. Baseball enters the postseason (admittedly, the one time a year that I really pay attention to the sport), the NHL regular season starts (I became a bit of a fan after last year’s Olympic magnificence) and finally, just before October closes out, the NBA season begins. The entire month of October is a long Thanksgiving for sports fans. Feast and be merry, there is no other time quite like this all year.

4. Autumn is Awesome (From What I Hear)

I might need verification that this is as cool as I think it is...

Reiterating what I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I’ve lived in the south for almost my entire life. I’ve lived in San Antonio since 1994 and before that I spent most of my childhood in Mississippi, which is where I saw my last “real” Autumn. The leaves changed color and fell, the cool-but-not-cold days breezed through and… as a kid… the countdown to Christmas was pretty much on. After a month of being in school, autumn was a welcome sign that the seasons do indeed change, time does indeed progress and the days of being stuck in the classroom would not in fact last forever.

In San Antonio, autumn basically doesn’t exist. The weather gets slightly cooler, so highs drop from the upper nineties to the upper 80′s and dip just below 60 overnight. It’s basically the second coming of spring which probably sounds lovely to a lot of people, but after the soul-sapping hell that is a South Texas summer you’re hoping for a bit more a drop in the temperature. Almost without fail, when the weather gets genuinely cool here it is accompanied by a storm, which dampens the mood. Pun unintended… (or was it?)

So perhaps I am romanticizing the fall. I haven’t raked leaves since I was a kid, and while the Mississippi autumn at least exists, I’m sure it isn’t comparable to what people deal with up north. But until I actually experience a miserable autumn, I’m going to keep on clutching to my nostalgia and presumptions that it is a magical time when nature gives itself a new paint job.

3. Cold Weather Fashion

I like clothes. You know what you don’t get to wear in the summer? Layers. Layers = more clothes. And, in case you missed that first sentence of this section, I like clothes. So you can see how it all relates.

While t-shirt weather is nice and enjoyable and has its perks, I’m a fan of sweater season. No Cosby or Coogi, thank you. Classy, cool colors and patterns. Button downs, zip-ups, light jackets, vests, scarves, gloves, mixing and matching different items to create a perfect ensemble.

Now when it gets really, really cold and the coolest thing you can wear is a Triple Fat Goose parka, I’m not so big on that. But in the meantime, I go out at night just so I can sport the new stuff I bought.

2. It’s Kind of Romantic, No?

I’ve long been a proponent of the the idea that the summer is the perfect time to meet someone, while the fall / winter is the perfect time to be with someone. Summer holidays are festive celebrations with fireworks and barbecue and beer. Fall and winter holidays are about togetherness, giving gifts and designating some alone time with someone close to you. I solemnly swear, a woman’s perfume smells better in the cool weather. I do not know why, I do not suspect that there is a verifiable scientific explanation for this, but I swear it is so.

So yeah, I look forward to this time of year as a reason to get close with a lady-friend. October is ideal for this because the Christmas fever has yet to strike. There’s no reason to rush anywhere or be concerned about things you haven’t done yet. Also, it’s cool enough to make you want to nestle up next to someone, but not so cold it makes you want to sprint inside the nearest heated building before you turn into a block of ice. It’s a perfect time to go downtown, take a walk, go to that restaurant you’ve been meaning to try, catch a play, go to the symphony… do something a little different from what you’ve been doing, and do it with someone who you’ve been meaning to spend more time with.

1. Halloween, Of Course

It’s never as fun as it was when you were a kid, but really, whose fault is that? It only seemed that joy randomly fell into your lap this time of year when you were young. You get to wear a costume, consume all kinds of candy and talk to strangers. It’s like you’re being allowed to playfully misbehave. But it was all set up for you, right? So now you’re left to buy yourself the candy and the costume and you start taking it too seriously, or you forgo the whole experience to spare yourself the hassle.

Well I am damn determined to have a Happy Halloween this year because it’s such an inherently fun little holiday you sort of have to take the scenic route to not enjoy it. I encourage anyone who likes Halloween but hasn’t really enjoyed it the past few years to go make the most of it. Do something scary: visit a haunted house (a real one), take a ghost tour, invite friends over to tell ghost stories over dinner, watch some good scary movies, go to some parties, attend a festival, attend an event, watch a Halloween themed production, go someplace where people really cut loose for Halloween. Treat yourself. And hell, if you can pull it off, maybe even trick yourself too.

In a blatant, shameless attempt to garner more hits, I’m  making a topical post referencing the recently released film The Last Exorcism. And so I present to you an entirely subjective list of 4 good (and 4 terrible) movies featuring exorcisms.

Exorcisms would seem to be a pretty popular topic in the horror genre, and yet it’s not explored  as frequently as other common horror tropes such as vampires, haunted houses or zombies. I think it’s a bit harder to make demonic possession fun or sexy–too many people take it quite seriously. I’ve never met anyone who believes in the walking dead, but I have met a couple of ardently religious folk who swear they know someone who was possessed and think any fictional “entertainment” employing the subject is appalling. The good news is that this means demons are still a long way off from becoming de-fanged and romanticized. You won’t be seeing “Team Pazuzu” t-shirts in Walmart anytime soon, I’d wager.

On to the lists…

I could easily overpopulate the entire “Terrible” list with Exorcist knock-offs from the 70′s and no-budget DTV flicks, but what’s the fun in that? At the same time, it would be remiss of me to completely ignore these movies, so we’ll kick off the list with…

4. Beyond the Door

A common complaint leveled at Hollywood in the 21st Century is that they’re constantly producing inferior remakes of great foreign flicks–often horror movies. But there was a time when foreign directors were the primary purveyors of hot, steamy cash-in remake action. And they often didn’t even bother with little details like “rights” and “permission” when making pseudo-sequels and Asylum studio style knock-offs. Beyond the Door was the movie that got sued by the creators of The Exorcist for jacking such signature signs of demonic possession as projectile vomiting and head-spinning. It’s about as bad as you’d expect it to be, but it’s also a 70′s Italian horror flick, so at least it has ridiculous audacity going for it.

3. Exorcist II

Warner Bros. did not decide to sue themselves for screwing up their own film property after releasing a sequel to The Exorcist in 1977. It would have been stupid, bizarre and self-defeating… kind of like the plot to Exorcist II: The Heretic. For this sequel the filmmakers decided that what a movie about demonic possession needs to spice it up are subplots about ESP, pseudo-science, collective consciousness and psychically telling swarms of locusts to stop devouring crops. The film’s aspirations are somewhere between laudable and laughable. It has some moments of visual flair but the story makes zero sense. Anti-sense, even. I’m tempted to go so far as to say the plot of this movie is a hate crime against sense itself.

2. Stigmata

Nobody likes a preachy ass movie, but a preachy movie preaching against someone else’s preachings disguised as a horror flick… that’s the kind of movie that especially deserved to be punched right in the credits. Stigmata, released in 1999, is ostensibly a religious thriller but reveals itself to be one of those movies with a “message.” A message borrowed from an apocryphal scripture, the Gospel of Thomas. The basic gist is that you don’t need to go to church to get closer to God. I’m not here to disparage any such argument or speak on defense of any churches, but I am going to say that if you’re going to make a “serious” movie about how the Catholic church might be a less-than-holy organization with a sordid past that is more than willing to allow innocent people to be harmed or even killed if it serves their own agenda… make and market that movie. Don’t give me a “horror” flick that is actually a plodding bit of unconvincing propaganda interspersed with moments of supernatural hi-jinks to keep audiences awake.

1. The Unborn

Fabulous fanservice poster. Terrible movie...

“Do you think it’s possible to be haunted by someone whose never even been born?” In the deceptively promising trailer for The Unborn, that one bit of quoted dialogue told me that despite a reasonably impressive supporting cast (Goldman, Idris Elba), an okay premise and an ostensibly good screenwriter in the director’s chair, this movie would ultimately drown in its own stupidity. Why would you offer a qualifying addendum to a situation most people would already believe is impossible? No, I don’t believe you can be haunted by someone. Whether or not they were born is pretty much irrelevant. You might as well ask if you think it’s possible to move objects with your mind even if you have a mild headache, or if it’s possible to run faster than the speed of sound even if your shoelaces are untied.

Sure enough the movie is up to its crown in stupidity, with stereotypically bad dialogue (“The door is open…” Yeah kid, we just saw the door opening, thanks for blatantly pointing out the symbolism), predictable jump scares and PG-13 level pseudo-gore (“Hey, this dog’s head is upside down! This lady just bloodlessly bent in half! This corpse is gooey and has big teeth! Please tell us we’re being creepy… please?”). But at least the climax provides a decent set up for a joke: So a priest and a rabbi are trying to perform an exorcism…

Honorable Mention: Repossessed – the current crop of spoof movies are flat out horrible, but at least they’re not 17 years late in satirizing their primary target.

4. Beetlejuice

Ya know, it’s a bit difficult finding really good movies that prominently feature exorcisms. Beetlejuice on the surface is a bit of a stretch. So the titular ghost claims to be a “bio-exorcist” who gets rid of the living. Does that really qualify?

Yes. Yes it does. But even if it didn’t, there is also the film’s climax where the new homeowners are essentially exorcising the ghosts played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis not only out of the house, but clean out of existence. What’s interesting about this is that both forms of “exorcism” are played for screwball laughs but, if it had been given the “serious horror” treatment, they would be absolutely horrifying. A specter who makes it his business to remove living people from the premises by any means necessary (imagine if a flick like The Others had introduced that angle)? An exorcism that completely destroys the soul? Within the context of a grimmer film this could be a source of abject terror.

But it’s Beetlejuice, so instead we got Michael Keaton dancing toward some sort of brothel full of female ghouls. Not that I’m complaining. The movie is hilarious.

3. [REC]

Hmmm… ummm… spoiler alert?

At the end of [REC] comes the revelation that the catalyst for all of the mayhem that has transpired is the apparently botched exorcism of a “possessed” little girl by a Vatican official . In a relatively clever twist on the subject matter, the “demonic possession” is actually the result of a virus which has spread to everyone else in the apartment building and turned them into ravenous “zombies.” The sequel (seriously people, there are spoilers about) shows that the “virus” is some sort of demonic, sentient organism and while the execution is a bit clumsy, the idea is intriguing. A second sequel and prequel promise to expand on the idea and more than likely ruin the hell out of it with some half-assed explanation of what’s going on shrouded by pseudo-scientific / pseudo-theological technobabble.

2. The Exorcist

I’ll readily admit, I’m probably getting cute here by not putting this at number one. Then again, I’m not really assigning much value to these “rankings” anyway. Besides, if I made The Exorcist the number one flick featuring exorcisms what could I write about it that hasn’t already been covered more than The Beatles? The Exorcist is the grandaddy of ‘em all, the Rose Bowl of supernatural horror flicks. So what other movie could I possibly have listed ahead of it?

1. Requiem

“Oh for the love of… really Compton? Really? You’re putting some foreign mocku-drama 99% of the people reading this haven’t heard of at the top of your list? You are such a hipster, elitist d-bag.”

Woah, woah, hipster? I just made a college football reference and quoted Keith Jackson a couple of paragraphs ago. Pretty sure that absolves me of any hipster accusations at least through the rest of the year.

Requiem is based on the same true events that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Whereas Emily Rose played up the supernatural bits to make it ambiguous as to whether or not the possession was real, Requiem emphasizes the mental illness that the actual victim was probably suffering from. As the most–nay, only–realistic film on this list it provides the most unique approach to the topic, and its exorcism scenes manage to be unsettling without special effects. The possibility of a foreign, nigh-invulnerable force of super-nature taking over your body and mind is indeed disturbing, but in my view, not quite as scary as the reality that your mind can up and betray you to obsession and insanity.

At the risk of sounding a bit crude, allow me to propose that horror falls within (or roughly around) two general categories: “Oh Crap!” horror, and “What the hell?” horror. The former would be likened to more visceral or “primal” fears, the kind of horror that, when experienced in real life, makes you want to take off running immediately. The latter is more about uneasiness; the nagging sensation that something is wrong. It leaves you puzzled—at least initially—instead of triggering your “fight or flight” response.

Examples:

• You’re home alone and you hear an angry voice coming from another room and you think, “Oh crap! Somebody broke in, I’ve got to get out of here!”
• You’re home alone and you hear an odd but unidentifiable noise coming from another room, you wonder, “What the hell was that?” but probably don’t take off running just yet.

Now that I’ve gone through the brief trouble of setting up these two somewhat narrowly defined categories to encapsulate all horror, I’d like to immediately undermine my proposal by stating that the Silent Hill series falls into a third category: “Oh hell, what the crap!” horror.

• You’re home alone and you hear the unmistakable  sound of your own voice coming from the other room. And you just distinctly heard yourself threatening to kill you. You’re too thoroughly discombobulated to even remember how to form a proper sentence, much less figure out what you should do.

I'd run away, but my mind is too busy eating itself to give my legs instructions...

This is the kind of horror the Silent Hill series has frequently succeeded in delivering since its first installment. People tend to say that Silent Hill is “psychological horror” but that doesn’t quite describe it. There are indeed elements that are designed to worm their way into your brain that would be fine on their own, but most of the psychological horror elements are coupled with brutally effective, tangible horror elements. The air raid siren could be unnerving by itself. That it portends the town’s transformation from (the already creepy) setting of “foggy, deserted and inescapable town” to “sunless, decaying, rust-infected industrial nightmare” makes it so, so much scarier. If your character’s radio just randomly produced “white noise” it could also be alarming. It is, instead, panic-inducing by being an inexact radar that announces the presence of unseen, violently aggressive monsters. How many monsters are waiting / coming for you? What the hell kind of monster is it this time? By the time you find out, you’re already under attack, and almost glad for it since it at least gives you some answers to your questions.

A giant blob of living cancer? *Whew* For a second I thought I'd never find out what wasGAAHHHH!

At the time of the first Silent Hill‘s release, the standard for “survival horror” video gaming had been set by two installments of Resident Evil. While Resident Evil had its share of puzzle-solving and moments where your best (or only) option was to run, it also put you in control of an armed member of a special task force. Additionally, your primary enemies were zombies who adhered to key archetypical traits of their fictional species (slow-moving and especially susceptible to headshots).  The first enemies you encounter in Silent Hill are knife-wielding monster-children who ambush you after you happen upon an almost unidentifiable corpse crucified to a fence in the “dark world” you ventured into without warning. From there the situations and enemies just get stranger, and instead of an action cop you’re a helpless father whose primary weapons are a kitchen knife and a pipe, because ammo for your handgun is ridiculously scarce and you’re always saving your bullets in case you happen upon a new, even more horrifying creature just ahead.

Silent Hill wasn’t just trying to scare you, it was deliberately trying to screw with your head. As the series went on this trend continued. The game’s most feared and recognized villain, the unfortunately-yet-aptly named Pyramid Head, introduces himself in the second game by standing perfectly still on the other side of a barred wall. He doesn’t move to attack you, doesn’t make a noise, and since you can’t see his face you don’t really know if he’s even awake, much less looking at you. But he does make your aforementioned radio give off its standard “static alert,” lest you get to thinking “maybe he isn’t an evil monster to be terrified of after all.” It isn’t until later encounters that you discover him to be a nigh-invulnerable killing machine who sexually abuses other monsters.

Despite the character’s popularity he doesn’t show up again until the fifth game in the series, where he makes a suitably menacing first appearance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVFBiFvTP00

Later games have suffered (many legitimate) criticisms over gameplay, and the franchise has had  some fan backlash for installments that have changed too much or weren’t innovative enough. The franchise also dumped a poorly plotted, poorly acted (save Sean Bean, God bless that dude) and poorly everything else’d film on the moviegoing populace back in 2006. Nonetheless, even the “misfires” feature some chilling moments. Hell, one of the most maligned titles in the series, Silent Hill 4: The Room, features my favorite premise: A man wakes up one day to find his door inexplicably locked from the inside. And not just ordinarily locked. We’re talking enough chains to make Jacob Marley say it’s a bit excessive…

"Oh hell, what the crap? But I'm out of milk, and I've got a hot date tonight, and if I no-show at work one more time I'm fired, and other reasons to go outside."

His neighbors can’t hear him screaming for help or beating on the door, even when they’re standing in the hallway right on the other side. He can’t open any windows or get anyone to notice him, even trying to use the phone to dial out is futile. It’s somewhat like the Stephen King story 1408 if the evil scary room came to your house. The only way out of his apartment is through a newly formed tunnel in the bathroom which deposits him in random, nightmarish parts of the town of Silent Hill and the surrounding area; full of ghosts and self-immolating cultists and serial killers and whatnot.

Other favorite moments include Silent Hill 3‘s freaky, screaming mannequin room, SH3‘s freaky, bleeding mirror room, SH3‘s freaky, disturbingly humorous haunted mansion and… yeah, pretty much the entirety of SH3. That game alone has earned the series a wealth of good faith that’s far from exhausted.

Quick, somebody give me a top to spin so I can verify that this is reality!

Even though it’s likely a lie, much like Friday the 13th’s blatantly false “Final Chapter,” the new teaser trailer for SAW 3D declares that this is the “Final Saw.” I won’t link to the teaser because f*** this movie and all of its predecessors, save the first one which was half-decent. (Ordinarily I wouldn’t censor my profanity, but I refuse to waste the first f-bomb on my site on this magnificently stupid franchise).

Producer Oren Koules told USA Today,”It’s time to stop. We have told the story we wanted to tell.”

Did you? Did you really?

You and your colleagues one day decided you wanted to tell the story of a ridiculously inefficient serial killer who makes up for his pointless extravagance by having inexplicably unlimited funding and resources. A killer who can get away with killing multiple cops and feds amongst normal civilians using shit as elaborate and conspicuous as bombs and houses that crush people? All while he indulges in such vapid faux-moralizing it would even make John Doe from Se7en say, “Shut the hell up you pretentious prick!” That’s the story you wanted to tell? Are you sure?

And yet, I can think of no other reason for the series to conclude. I’ve lambasted the Saw series as being every imaginable sort of awful, and even a few unimaginable sorts, but I’ve never denied that it’s a brilliant formula for profit. Make your movie on the cheap, employ the easily renewable gimmick of killer traps and plot twists unhindered by any need to make sense within the context of your own universe, release during the Halloween period when people feel the need to experience something “scary” so they attend your movie like it’s a local haunted house attraction, then rake in the dough. If I had the means I’d definitely invest on such a surefire money-making scheme–as a silent partner, of course. I wouldn’t want my name within 500 sentences of the project. But it makes dough, and I can’t hate on it for that.

Last year was the first time a Saw flick didn’t dominate the Halloween season, courtesy of the release of Paranormal Activity. Say what you will about the latter film, but at least it derailed the herald of sub-competent horror story-telling that is the Saw franchise. If this is truly the death knell for the series, then I may owe a debt of gratitude to Paranormal Activity that I will not even be able to properly calculate, much less repay.

Then again, given how 3-D ticket sales tend to boost numbers even for movies that don’t perform all that well at the box office otherwise, and the fact that the creators are touting how much more violent and trap-laden this “last” installment is (“11 TRAPS! 6 Submissions to the MPAA to not get an NC-17 rating!” That might as well be part of the ad campaign…) I have an inkling that this “last” entry will only be a doorway to an eventual “new beginning.”

I recently finished Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley’s excellent hard-boiled mystery novel. Within the first third of the book there was a line that struck me like a solid swing of baseball bat to the abdomen. Mosley’s lead, World War II veteran Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, describes the fear that seized him during his introduction to combat.

“The first time I fought a German hand-to-hand I screamed for help the whole time I was killing him.”

As I made it through the rest of the novel, that line would to flash across my mind from time to time. There’s nothing aesthetically remarkable about the above line. It’s not meant to be poetic. It has no intention of showing off any metaphors or similes. But that one sentence captures the character’s experience with violence and presents a scene worthy of its own short story. Even with the novel done, questions born from reading that sentence persisted.

How did Easy find himself in the situation where he was fighting an enemy hand-to-hand? Where were his allies? Was he alone, in a building perhaps (the scene of Adam Goldberg fighting for his life in Saving Private Ryan comes to mind), or out in an open space surrounded by fellow soldiers all to busy fighting their own individual battles to hear or heed his cries for help? What was going through the German soldier’s mind as this black American soldier cried out during the attack? Was he able to understand anything that Easy was saying? Could he understand the meaning of the words without knowing the language, just by reading the panic in Easy’s eyes and soaking in the terror in his voice? Was the German soldier crying out for help as well, suffering a crisis of faith in the Nazi Übermensch concept he may not have believed in in the first place?

The next line, “His dead eyes stared at me a full five minutes before I let go of his throat,” almost seems redundant to me, but I recognize that this may just be on account of what I extrapolated from the preceding sentence. Not everyone reading the novel likely pictured Easy continuing to scream for help well after he had already killed his enemy; stabbing, punching, kicking and strangling a corpse.

I haven’t yet read the rest of the novels featuring Easy Rawlins. I don’t know if the conflict with the German soldier is referenced again or expanded upon. I do know that the image conjured by that single line is powerful enough to make me want for further explanation, but effective enough on its own to make me hope that it isn’t explored any further. I like to wonder about that other story, more perhaps than I would enjoy having its details revealed to me.

With the release of a teaser poster, The Last Exorcism has gone from being completely off my radar to squarely within my cross hairs.

As my boy over at The Brand New Cool points out, this poster is so creepy it almost makes watching the film pointless. Color me cynical or impressed, perhaps a bit of both, but some part of me thinks this is probably going to be the film’s signature moment of horror, or will at least be related to it.

I can’t exactly pinpoint what quite makes this poster so eerie. The girl bent backwards with the bloodstained dress is obviously a frightening image on its own, but any horror fan has seen much, much worse. Something about the starkness magnifies it beautifully, though. No excessive effects in play to distract from the central image. Washed out gray color scheme. It’s cold and distant and bold and startling all at once. I’m torn on whether or not the crucifix adds anything to the poster, or if it distracts, or if it’s harmless, but otherwise, this is damn near perfect.

I’m unfamiliar with the work of any direct contributors to the film. Eli Roth is apparently producing, but his level of involvement is unknown as yet. This might be awesome, or it might disappoint, but for the moment it certainly has wrested my attention. Well played, Last Exorcism.

EDIT: The trailer was released a few weeks back. Decided I might as well add it here instead of creating an entirely new post. The “mockumentary” approach is a bit of a turnoff, but I’m still willing to give it a chance to impress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN9hY16Yg9M