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 means demons are still a long way off from becoming defanged 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. Stop it right now. 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 was going 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 by a Vatican official of a “possessed” little girl. 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.

Technorati Tags: Beetlejuice, Beyond the Door, exorcism, exorcism movies, exorcist movies, horror films, horror movies, lists, psychological horror, REC, REC 2, religious horror, Requiem, Requiem film, Requiem movie, Stigmata, supernatural horror, supernatural thriller, The Exorcist, The Exorcist II, The Last Exorcism, The Last Exorcism film, The Last Exorcism movies, The Unborn

• 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 encompass 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. 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 radio 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 by giving off a steady stream of static. 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.

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.

Technorati Tags: Confessions of a Fear Junkie, fear junkie, horror fiction, horror games, horror gaming, horror stories, Pyramid Head, Silent Hill, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill 4, Silent Hill 8, survival horror

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 your 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.”

Technorati Tags: film, final Saw, final Saw movie, horror movies, I hate saw, last Saw movie, movies, no really I hate the saw flicks, ramblings, Saw, Saw 3D, Saw franchise, Saw movies, traps come alive - whatever that means

As I exited the theater this weekend, the thought that ran through my head was the quote from John Goodman’s character in the film Barton Fink. “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”

As a person, I’ve always been a bit afraid of the idea that your mind can essentially fool you and/or itself into believing you’re experiencing something that you are not. The idea, as presented in Inception, that their can be layers of unreality to navigate through as you try to exit your own imagination, is even more frightening. Anyone who’s ever had a dream with a false awakening, or multiple false awakenings, can understand how potentially unsettling that is.

In The Matrix, Morpheus presented the question of how a would a dreamer be able to distinguish from reality and imagination if they could never wake up? The greater implication then is, if they can’t distinguish between the two, is their “reality” is any less valid than someone else’s? I tend to fall into the “indeed it is less valid” camp, but it’s an interesting question, no? Of course, the movie then abandoned that idea for some nifty action, and then the series abandoned every other concept it could have explored in favor of a cumbersome techno-mythology that it couldn’t remotely sustain. Inception explores this a bit better, I think, but being a summer blockbuster it obviously can’t spend the entirety of its runtime delving into psychoanalysis. There have to be gunfights and ‘splosions and awesome bizzaro-gravity hand-to-hand combat and whatnot.

As a writer, I tend to see these sorts of things and think either of how I would work with the theme, or what ideas I might have stored away that explore similar territory. I once had an idea about a new form of “capital punishment” meant to address prison overpopulation where any person found guilty of murder is immediately sentenced to several hundred or even thousands of years in hell by way of a technologically induced dream and emotional tampering creating a nightmarish afterlife and thrusting guilt upon you. But, due to “dreamtime” being greatly accelerated (as explored in Inception) compared to “real time” the actual stint in prison is more like 1-2 years. The guilty are then released with the experience of having lived multiple lifetimes in excruciating torment imprinted in their subconscious. How would that effect them? How “real” would it still feel, even unremembered? Would it program their minds to be repulsed by the idea of any action that could send them back to prison? What is the short-term and long-term impact of living “the life of the mind”?

These aren’t themes that are new to fiction, obviously. More sci-fi authors than I can begin to name have covered this terrain again and again. But it’s pretty rare for a summer blockbuster to delve into waters deep enough to potentially challenge some casual moviegoers. For some audience members, this will be their introduction to the concept of falling asleep and entering an entirely different existence.

Technorati Tags: dreaming, dreams, Inception, Inception analysis, Inception dreams, Inception film, Inception review, life of the mind

“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’s eye from time to time. There’s nothing aesthetically remarkable about the above line. It’s not poetic. It’s doesn’t bear any signatures or hallmarks of a flourishing literary creativity. 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. There was a whole unexplored world formed between that relatively small collection of words. (Title drop!)

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.

Technorati Tags: books, Devil in a Blue Dress, Easy Rawlins, Mosley, mysteries, mystery, mystery novel, mystery novels, novels, reading, Walter Mosley, world between words, World War II

I tend to enjoy the sci-fi-horror hybrid when it’s executed properly. Alien. The Fly. Ample opportunity to blend gruesome elements with intelligent storytelling. A new way to explore primal fears.

Vincenzo Natali, director of Splice also directed Cube. Not a bad sci-fi-horror flick. Not great, by any means, but not bad.

And yet, despite these combined elements, I have zero faith that I will enjoy Splice. Here’s why…

It looks like a movie where we’re expected to sympathize with stupid smart people who irresponsibly use their idiotic intelligence for pointlessly creative purposes.

I’m hardly anti-science. In fact I’m absolutely counting on some sort of nano-tech medical breakthrough to come about before I turn 50 that will allow me to age backwards and live forever. I’m all about science, but in a horror fiction format the scientist either needs to have a decent reason for executing his / her experiment that will inevitably go awry, or he / she needs to be the villain, not the protagonist.

I mentioned The Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum’s scientist was working on an instant teleportation device. Worthy enough cause. Event Horizon falls short of being a good movie, but it has its moments, and the premise of faster-than-light travel resulting in breaching the barrier between the universe as we know it and some sort of cosmic hell is undeniably intriguing. And that initial experiment that literally sends a vessel to hell and back? Worthy enough cause. Even the callous female scientist in Deep Blue Sea who was ultimately treated as a minor antagonist was specifically trying to cure Alzheimer’s.

With Splice, however, you seem to have an experiment almost specifically designed to go awry. How could splicing the genetic material of various animals with human DNA to create an ass-faced baby that grows up to look like the offspring of a tryst between Megan Fox and one of the “newcomers” from Alien Nation possibly benefit mankind, or do anything but go horribly wrong?

Doesn't she look precious?

“Oh no, our lab-grown humanoid genetic hybrid that has exhibited unpredictable evolutionary traits and potentially dangerous characteristics from the jump has developed into a  winged, chimeric killing machine. Who could have foreseen anything like this?”

Maybe the film will prove me wrong, but I have significant doubts. Vague allusions to “medical breakthroughs” aren’t going to cut it. As it stands, I expect to be wishing death upon dear Mr. Brody and Mrs. Polley no more than ten minutes into the film. Hell, the trailers alone have me feeling indifferent to whether or not their characters live or die. That can’t be right…

Technorati Tags: Adrien Brody, Adrien Brody Splice, horror films, pre-review, review, reviews, Sarah Polley, Sarah Polley Splice, Splice, Splice film, Splice movie, upcoming horror films, upcoming horror movies, upcoming movies, zero faith

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN9hY16Yg9M

Technorati Tags: horror film, horror movie, The Last Exorcism, The Last Exorcism film, The Last Exorcism movie, The Last Exorcism movie poster, The Last Exorcism poster, The Last Exorcism teaser poster, upcoming horror films, upcoming horror movie, upcoming horror movies

This is, to my recollection, my earliest encounter with a ghost story, antedating my ongoing, abusive, unhealthy love affair with horror.  It’s not the clearest memory, I was only five-years-old, but it’s less opaque than other memories from that age.

“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”

My kindergarten teacher’s name was Mrs. Nina (I can’t believe I remember that) and one day she decided to introduce the class to a classic tale about a chimeric spirit. I’m unsure if this was just a weird southern or Mississippi thing or if other parts of the country also had kindergarten teachers relate tales of terror to their classes. Granted, she wasn’t reading us Lovecraft or anything quite so dire and potentially scarring, but some part of me still wonders about the objective of letting us hear this story. For that matter, though, the same could be asked about the purpose of telling ghost stories around a campfire, or even writing the stories I write now as an adult. Ultimately, it’s about the thrill of scaring the audience, no matter what age, with a well-crafted creepy yarn. Telling a scary story for its own sake is never as much fun as telling one that successfully terrifies your audience.

Twenty-plus years later, this story still floats around in the back of my mind, so to Mrs. Nina, wherever you may be good madame, mission accomplished. As for the story itself, here is the briefest of synopses:

A man has a friend who has a prosthetic arm made of solid gold.  Said friend dies and the man decides to disinter his buddy, remove the 24-karat limb from the corpse and sell it.  The dead friend takes offense, crawls out of his grave with his one remaining arm, hunts down his buddy and then…

...he murders Dr. Richard Kimble's wife. Ha!

Well, you could Google “Golden Arm” and find a number of variations to the tale.  Some give you a formal, Victorian rendition making abundant use of the word “thou”; others give you the chitlin’ circuit interpretation.  Its central characters are alternatively friends, brothers, or man and wife.

In most portrayals the returned friend/brother/wife stalks through the thief’s house, crying out repeatedly, “Who’s Got my Golden Arm?!” until finally they happen upon the terrified thief, cowering in his/her bedroom, and then the ghost screams “You’ve Got it!!!”  That’s where the story abruptly ends, but it’s intimated that some grievous demise awaits the one who stole the arm.   I’m sure that the ghost didn’t just say “You’ve got it!  And I just wanted to say, not cool bro.  Stealing my golden arm, that’s messed up, I thought we were boys.” To which the thief could then reply, “Nah, you know what really wasn’t cool? Not leaving me the golden arm in your will. I’m broke, man! They turned my lights off the day before I stole your arm. I was eating ramen, sardines and Peanut Butter brand peanut butter three meals a day, and you’re underground with a damn fortune attached to your shoulder. C’mon, son!”

Despite the story’s obvious intent, it wasn’t the vengeful spirit’s return from death that disturbed me most. As the end of the above paragraph might indicate, it was more disturbing to me that someone had a golden arm in the first place.  The surrealistic, abominable image of this character still stands in my mind the same as when I first heard the story and imagined his appearance.  This is a greedy, selfish, maniacal, loathsome person.  One with jaundiced, spoiled eyes and skin the color of the ocean at night.

Today I can apply some semblance of logic to the conclusion I’d drawn as a kid. Even setting aside the callousness of getting buried with an appendage that could be donated to your friend, or wife, or charity or something, a golden arm would be terribly heavy and cumbersome. Only a severely troubled mind would dream of grafting such a gaudy, useless artificiality to their body.  In short, you’d have to be crazy to want a golden arm, and not the good, comedic kind of crazy, or the tolerable, fearless-when-it’s-not-necessary kind of crazy, but the seething, malignant kind. That special brand of crazy potent enough to wake the dead.

Technorati Tags: confessions, Confessions of a Fear Junkie, ghost, ghost story, Golden Arm ghost story, Golden Arm horror story, Golden Arm story, horror, horror story, The Golden Arm

Lo and behold, Justified works as a sort of modern crime drama / old school western amalgam. Olyphant’s character, Marshall Raylan Givens, inhabits familiar post-modern western thematic territory; his sensibilities reside in a bygone era. He is a reincarnation of a noble gunslinger, who is both more and less like 21st century anti-heroes than people may initially realize. He has no compunctions about killing bad guys, so long as it’s justified, but he’s far from being as corrupt, destructive and unscrupulous as Vic Mackey. Probably wouldn’t be all that cool with Jack Bauer interrogation techniques either.

In short, he’s got the smooth, semi-noir composure even in the face of violence and death that many of Leonard’s more memorable characters possess. And that leads me to part of the reason why Justified works for me, but somehow not quite as much as I think it should. Raylan is a great, charismatic and pretty well-rounded character with some “everyman” aspects and relatable flaws. But even so, he represents a somewhat unrealistic ideality. He is, for the most part, master of his vices. Questions are raised as to whether or not he can continue to wrest his simmering volatility, but–whether it’s Timothy Olyphant’s inherent cool or the writing–you don’t get much sense that he’s really liable to lose control and do something truly reckless. Rightly or wrongly, characters like Mackey or McNulty from The Wire have set a new benchmark for “realistic” and troubled law officers. Raylan, conversely, is less of an “officer” and more of a “lawman.” Handsome, charming, funny, lives by a code…

Ladies, tell me you wouldn't bring him home to meet the folks...

Likewise, the show is not entirely what I expected when the commercials first caught my eye months before the first episode debuted. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact might be a great thing, but that remains to be seen. The “problem” here probably lies more so in the expectations I had set as opposed to the show itself. Justified has larger story arcs that run through different episodes, but that’s not the basis of the show’s format. It is not The Wire, a slow-burning novel come to life through television with season-long chapters. Justified‘s episodes are often more self-contained, with “crime-of-the-week” aspects often dominating individual episodes, while larger story-arcs are pushed to the background.

Initially I was wrongly inclined to fault the show for this, as if it were of the same quality as your typical lousy TNT “We Know Drama, We Went to School With It, Haven’t Seen It In Years Though, Next Time You See Drama Tell It to Call  Us and We Can Go Get Some Drinks and Catch Up” show. It’s not as nonsensical as Dark Blue or as cheesy as Leverage by any stretch (The Closer gets a pass because Kera Sedgwick is pretty dope). Even among the glorious ranks of outstanding F/X programming, it’s more grounded than Nip / Tuck and at least gives you some likable “heroes,” unlike The Shield. Both of those were great shows, mind you, and Justified is probably on course to be one as well, but right now it’s about a step above USA Network shows on the “edginess” scale.

(Not the worst thing in the world, by the way. USA has mastered “fun, accessible and smart enough to not make you feel guilty for watching” the way TNT has mastered “Promote the hell out of it, make you think it’s really that good, then serve you faux-gourmet stupidity on a platter” and F/X and AMC have mastered “Wow, this is really good, but I can’t believe they’re getting away with half of this.”)

Really, how much should “edginess” matter, anyway? Certain expectations are set because the networks that air these shows have created a sort of identity, but just because Justified isn’t in step with Sons of Anarchy on the hardcore scale that doesn’t mean it’s a lesser show. Perhaps the opposite. Maybe, joined with its wit and respect for viewer intelligence, Justified‘s slightly more congenial mood is a blessing and welcome change of pace. My favorite dramatic television series of all time is The Wire, and I have to say that as brilliant as it was, it was also exhausting. There’s only so much “gritty and unflinching” television a brother can handle. I don’t want idiocy-driven stories, obviously, but Raylan Givens offers a nice change of pace in that he leaves you feeling hopeful. Characters like Vic Mackey or McNulty were too compelling for you not to watch, but from the moment you met them you knew that they were destined to destroy their careers, families and anyone else careless enough to get to close to them. Raylan Givens may not be as “realistic” as those guys, but he at least lets you believe that a character with some self-destructive habits does not necessarily have to self-destruct and take a few innocent bystanders with him.

Maybe Justified not the latest, greatest, hardest-hitting, most gut-wrenching hour on television. Perhaps it’s not Breaking Bad, Mad Men or Treme (which I hear is excellent, but haven’t seen). It doesn’t have to be, because it’s very good being what it already is.

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*picks up phone – dials – waits for two rings before someone answers*

“Hello?”

“Hello, have I reached Shenanigans?”

“Yes you have.”

“Outstanding. I wanted to call you guys about this new movie Kick-Ass, which claims to not have super-powered characters.”

“Go ahead, my man.”

“Well, I’m willing to grant that the lead actor and the cat who played McLovin and maybe even Nic Cage’s character may not have powers, but you’re not going to tell me that the Hit-Girl character didn’t get bit by a radioactive ninja-gymnast or something. She’s 11-years-old and she’s running up walls, throwing knives like an impalement artist and swinging swords like a Ghostface Killah verse came to life.”

“Does that last simile even make sense?”

“Does a grade-schooler killing a room full of gangsters with her deft martial-arts skills make any kind of sense unless she’s super-powered? Even in an action-comedy written by the master of faux-edgy puerile fiction, Mark Millar?”

“Ssss… I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that slight shot at Mr. Millar.”

“She’s got powers! Even it’s just the power of ‘ass-kicking,’ which doesn’t sound quite so ridiculous when you consider that the villain-protagonist character in Millar’s Wanted had a superpower that was just killing.”

“Sir, I can hear the italicization in your voice, and it concerns me. I’m hanging up now. Don’t call here again.”

“This isn’t ov–!”

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