LITERAL REMAINS

A couple of years ago, after my grandmother passed away, my family and I were going through some of her belongings.  My grandmother was a shutterbug, she loved taking pictures.  And she kept almost any picture than happened to fall into her possession.  So it was kind of cool, despite the circumstances, to be going through all my grandmother’s photographs; she had photos from even before she was born, and I just love old photographs.

I was going through the stack of pictures before me when I happened upon a funeral photo, not too old, maybe from the eighties.  It was an elderly man in a coffin.  I didn’t recognize him, or at least it wasn’t a photo of someone that I knew.  I asked my mother and my aunts, and none of them knew who it was; they only concluded that it was someone granny must have known.

Now, this may seem a little odd, but I like old funeral photos.  Mourning portraits, post-mortem photography, momento mori, whatever you want to call it.  I like looking at them.  These keepsakes were quite something back in the day.  Families would sit and pose with their deceased loved ones, sometimes posing the deceased, sometimes propping them up, standing them up, sometimes painting eyes on their closed lids (in the first photo below, the girl’s eyes are painted on and if you look closely the base of the stand that holds her up can be seen behind her feet).  Sometimes a rosy tint was added to make them appear more lifelike as well.  It seems kind of morbid now, but way-back-when it was the bee’s knees; a lot of times it was one of the few photos a person would have taken.  It would was popular to photograph infants that died, it was the only thing to document that they had existed at all.

Anyway, I like them, the old ones, and thought I would share some with you guys.  If you have any you want to share, send them to me at durdenjay@gmail.com.

John
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Please visit the following sites for further info:  Paul Frecker, Antique Photo Album, Jack and Beverly, Petroila, Early Visual Media, and Wikipedia.

Jackie Earle Haley, who was the stand-out Rorschach in Watchmen, will be gracing the screen on April 16th, 2010, as the new Freddy Krueger.  I know, it’s going to be a challenge to accept anyone other than Robert Englund as Freddy.  At least it will be for me.  There’s not a lot to see in the photo, they’re most likely trying to keep it under wraps until it bows in theaters.

  

A study was conducted by California State University’s Media Psychology Lab, on the psychological appeal of movie monsters—Vampires, Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein’s monster, Jason Voorhees, Godzilla, Chucky, Hannibal Lecter, King Kong, and The Alien—which surveyed 1,166 people nationwide (United States), with ages ranging from 16 to 91. It was published in the Journal of Media Psychology. In the survey, Michael was considered to be the “embodiment of pure evil”; when compared to the other characters, Michael Myers was rated the highest. Michael was characterized lending to the understanding of insanity, being ranked second to Hannibal Lecter in this category; he also placed first as the character who shows audiences the “dark side of human nature”. He was rated second in the category “monster enjoys killing” by the participants, and believed to have “superhuman strength”. Michael was rated highest among the characters in the “monster is an outcast” category.

Born Michael Audrey Myers in 1957, the troubled child that would become known as The Shape began his decades long career of murder at the age of six on October 31st, 1963.  On that Halloween night, Michael’s parents arrived home to discover he had murdered his sister, Judith.  In the aftermath, with his mother and father seeking answers, Michael was institutionalized under the care of Dr. Sam Loomis.  His parents’ search for the reasons that fueled his murderous madness would, ultimately, be fruitless.  As Dr. Loomis stated, “I met this six year old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes; the devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply…evil.”

Young Michael Myers was held at the Smith’s Grove Sanitarium until he was twenty years old, at which point he was to be transferred and tried as an adult for his sister’s murder.  Upon attempting to transfer, the now adult, patient, Myers escaped.  Dr. Loomis, who had opposed the transfer, wanting simply to keep Michael locked away under the strictest security imaginable, was certain he knew his patient’s destination.  Loomis quickly headed to Haddonfield, Michael’s hometown, to sound the alarms.

In the years that Michael was locked away in Smith’s Grove, his parents her killed in a car accident.  His youngest sister, just an infant, was adopted by another Haddonfield family; they renamed her Laurie to protect her identity, and to guard her from the negativity now associated with the Myers name and its legacy.  But, after his escape and return, Michael sought and found his sister, knowing her by either instinct, family resemblance, or some other sixth sense.  Laurie Strode, a high school teen, would soon meet her brother on the night of Halloween, 1978, forever to be known as “The night he came home”.

Patiently, and systematically, stalking and killing all who stood between him and his sister, Michael Myers finally came face to face with Laurie.  Whatever drove Michael, whatever spurred him, whatever twisted and coiled in his mind and darkest of dark souls, brought him to Haddonfield, to his sister, to kill her.

In a fight for her life, which she narrowly escaped with, Laurie strode survived her battle with her criminally insane brother, thanks in no small part to Dr. Loomis, and his, albeit limited, understanding of Michael’s psychology.  Their relief and reprieve was short lived.  Michael Myers was not dead, merely injured, and escaped to try his hand at finishing his sister at the local hospital.  Once again, Laurie and Dr. Loomis narrowly survived.

Sam Loomis was physically scarred with his last confrontation with Michael Myers.  Michael was left comatose and Laurie disappeared.  Loomis watched, waited, and saw to the care and detainment of Myers at the maximum security Ridgemont Federal Sanitarium.  The administrator of Ridgemont deemed the comatose Myers a non-threat in 1988 and arranged for his transfer back to Smith’s Grove.  Myers once again escaped, his ten years coma being a waiting game for him.

Free once more, Michael once more returned to Haddonfield.  Again he was drawn to a relative, Jamie Lloyd.  Jamie was his niece, the daughter of Laurie who had died in a car crash, the same fate as her parents.  It was Dr. Loomis, thanks to the help of the people of Haddonfield, who stopped Michael once more.  Michael once more escaped, and slipped into a coma to awaken a year later in the shack of a hermit.

Michael was stopped by Jamie and Dr. Loomis, but he was not killed.  He went into hiding for the next several years only to emerge after the death of Dr. Loomis.  Rummaging through Loomis’s old case notes, he discovered that his sister, Laurie, was in fact a live and he tracked her down to the secluded private school where she now taught.  That confrontation ended with Laurie, seemingly, beheading Michael.  The truth was that Michael switched places with a paramedic, and Laurie killed an innocent man.  Laurie suffered a breakdown and she herself was institutionalized.

It was during Laurie’s institutionalisation that Michael found her and finally succeeded in her murder.

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*This profile follows the timeline set forth by the original Halloween film series.

*In “reporting” this profile of Michael Myers I thank the assistance of Wikipedia and Horror Film Wiki

I like a good ghost story.  Old dark houses, apparitions, spectral bangs and chains clanging on stormy nights.  William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist and Legion, has delivered a ghostly, twisty, tidy little tale in the form of his new short novel Elsewhere.

Joan Freeboard, realtor extraordinaire, has been called upon to do what many in the realty business thinks is impossible:  sell Elsewhere.  The mansion of Elsewhere sits on a little island off of Manhattan, and the Quandt family has been trying to unload it for years.  The deal breaker is that Elsewhere is haunted by deceased Quandts.  Joan thinks she is more than up to the challenge.

To change the image of the house, Joan enlists her friend Terry, a Pulitzer Prize winning author who has recently turned to painting, to write a magazine article about the house.  The catch is that Joan, Terry,  the psychic Anna Trawley, and the paranormal investigator Dr. Gabriel Case, stay the weekend at Elsewhere.  Trawley and Case will investigate, Terry will report the findings.  Sounds simple and fun.  Elsewhere, and whatever inhabits the house, makes the weekend anything but simple and fun.

Blatty doesn’t raise the bar of horror fiction with Elsewhere, what he does is simply tell a good story.  He drops clues along the way, making the revelations at the end of the book not too revelatory, or original for that matter, but engaging nonetheless.  Elsewhereis supernatural and psychological, by the end Blatty has given us a tender, and rather uplifting and promising, tale.

Elsewhere treads the waters of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Richard Matheson’s Hell House, and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.  Blatty’s latest isn’t in the same league as those, and Elsewhere may go down as a minor note in his career, but it’s worth taking down off the shelf on a rainy day and reading it once or twice, or more.

4 out of 5
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The tagline for The Haunting In Connecticut is, “Some things cannot be explained.”  The main problem with this movie is it tries to explain.

Sara Campbell drives her cancer stricken son, Matt, eight hours from home every day to the hospital for trial treatments.  The treatments are bad enough, and the drive only adds to the pain.  Sara and her husband, Peter, decide to rent a house closer to the hospital.  Sara finally finds a house that is perfect: big, spacious, plenty of room for them and their other two children and niece, and the rent is cheap.  To explain the cheap rent, the landlord only says that the house has a history.  While moving in and tidying up the place, Sara discovers the house was a former funeral home.

Soon enough, Matt begins to see things.  Are they real, or are they side effects brought on by his medicines?  Matt enlists the help of a minister, a fellow cancer patient, and they discover that more than funerals occured at the home.  The owner conducted seances, and one seance flew out of control, killing five and causing one to simply just vanish.  Further investigating reveals that numerous bodies were not buried, but stowed away somewhere on the property.

The Haunting In Connecticut makes use of “boo” moments to full effect.  Its simple little scare tactics manage to create an air of creepiness and suspense; you never know when something is just going to pop out of nowhere.  Sadly, its when the movie moves into plot territory, trying to explain the haunting, that it loses direction.

This is a good movie, but it falls apart at the end.  It’s full of cliches and standard ghost story/haunted house moments, but manages to make them all entertaining.  The first two-thirds of the movie are the best, the last act needs work.

3.5 out of 5
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In 1966, sixteen year old Harriet Vanger goes missing from Hedeby Island, just a bridge over from the town of Hedestad.  Harriet is a member of the prominent Swedish industrialist Vanger family.  The day she disappeared, the Vangers were meeting for a family business council; she wanted to tell her Uncle Henrik, whom she lived with, something, but he had to put off their little meeting.  Not only was family business needing attending to, but a tanker wrecked on the bridge, closing Hedeby off from the mainland.  It wasn’t until the excitement had mellowed that any of the family noticed the following day that Harriet was missing.

Harriet is never found.  What little clues there are, lead nowhere.  The case goes cold.  Henrik obsesses over his niece’s disappearance, formulating his own ideas about what happened.  He believes someone in the family murdered Harriet.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.  And whoever did it torments him for the next forty years by sending him framed, pressed, flowers on his birthday every year.

After journalist Mikael Blomkvist is found guilty of libel, Henrik sees an opportunity.  He hires Blomkvist to not only write a family history, but to bring fresh eyes to Harriet’s murder case.  Blomkvist ultimately agrees, and soon finds himself teaming with Lisbeth Salander, whom Henrik had hired to investigate Blomkvist.

The back cover of the late Stieg Larsson’s book will tell you that this is a “murder mystery, family saga, love story, and tale of financial intrigue….”  That’s true.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is captivating from the first page, and only loses a little steam at the end.  It’s whopper of a novel, but devoting time to it is rewarding.

The plot is intricate, but it’s also a character driven.  Larsson created real people, and fleshes them out warts and all.  Bringing all this cast together is also some of its drawback, making the mystery at the heart of it almost a subplot to the players.  Despite that, this is a book that grabs hold and doesn’t let go.  Larsson makes it all work:  murder, family secrets, financial intrigue and all.  This is one is definitely going on the list of one of the best books I’ve read this year.

4.5 out of 5
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My problem with the first, and still only, Ghost Rider movie was that it was too jokey.  Correct if I’m wrong, it’s been years since I read the Ghost Rider comics, but wasn’t Ghost Rider a little bit darker than as portrayed by the film?  It’s that Ghost Rider I want to see.  I went to the movie expecting something on the gravity level of Underworld, but got Billy and Mandy instead.

I’ve got my fingers crossed for a sequel.  A Mark Steven Johnson-less sequel.

Is it ever too early to begin thinking of Halloween?  As I begin writing this, it is 107 days until Halloween.  Just a few days ago, a friend of mine said she wished it could be Fall all the time.  And I thought, Hells yeah!  Imagine it.  How awesome would that be?

I love Autumn, the Fall, whatever you want to call it.  Stuck here in the middle of July, I want it, I long for it, but it seems so close, yet so far away.  I love the leaves turning colors, and the sound of them crunching underfoot.  The world in general takes on a warm hue.  I love the smell of candles burning in jack o’ lanterns.  I love jack o’ lanterns.  I love Halloween, the costumes, the decor, the whole nine yards.  And hay rides and haunted houses.  When people discover that Halloween is my favorite holiday, they always ask “Why?”  I don’t know.  It’s like when people ask me, “Why do you like horror so much?”  I don’t know, I just do, why won’t all you people just leave me alone you’re as bad as the voices!

Sorry.  I’m okay.

Maybe it’s the mystery of it.  Maybe it’s just the atmosphere.  The aesthetics.  The freakin’ ambiance.  I don’t know.  It speaks to me.  It completes me.  I relate to it.  All the detractors can have their Christmas, and Easter, and (My Bloody) Valentine’s Day.  It could be some primal resonance, or my inner Pagan from a past life, I don’t know, I don’t care.  All I know is I love it, and that may be all I need to know.

So, it’s never too early start enjoying All Hallow’s Eve.  I look forward to it all year long; it’s never far from my mind.  And when it comes to October, to Autumn, to Fall, there are two books that pop instantly into my head– Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.  They are the perfect books for Fall.  Read Lot for the vampires and just an all out scary good horror show.  Read Something Wicked because it strikes a chord to that child in all of us; it’s beyond words how good it is.  It’s only one of Bradbury’s masterpieces.

I also recommend two other books, these are works of non-fiction.  Witch’s Halloween: A Complete Guide to the Magick, Incantations, Recipes, Spells, and Lore by Gerina Dunwich.  Dunwich is a Wiccan High Priestess and she dispels a lot of the myths surrounding Halloween.  She sheds light on the history of Halloween and its folklore.  Included are spells to the Sabbat rituals, recipes, and lots of interesting facts and customs of yore.

The second book of non-fiction that I highly recommend is Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History.  It also gives some background to Halloween’s origins, but, as the title suggests, it sticks mainly to the holiday’s history here in the USA.  Between these two books, I learned a lot, and was corrected in some of what I thought I knew.

I think there’s been a rumored feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Cell ever since the book came out a few years ago.  The last that I had read was that Eli Roth, of Cabin Fever fame (I didn’t like the movie), was set to adapt and direct.  But that seemed to be pretty much on the fast track to nowhere.

Now it seems Cell has landed in the hands of John Harrison.  Harrison’s latest film is the Clive Barker adaptation Book of Blood, which will be released this September, if I’m not mistaken.  The plan is to make Cell into a TV miniseries.

It’s official.  Ryan Reynolds, who most recently portrayed Deadpool in the Wolverine movie, is set to play Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern.  I hope they don’t screw this up.  I’ve always loved the Green Lantern, and I’ve always thought Hal Jordan was the best Green Lantern.  If Warner Bros. can keep this more like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and less like Superman Returns, we may have a winner on our hands.

And I think Reynolds is an excellent choice.  He was the only good thing about Blade Trinity (sorry, Jessica Biel was only eye candy, everything else sucked).  I’m even a fan of 2 Guys, a Girl, and Pizza Place.  So far, the Green Lantern motion picture is looking promising.

Life is a highway

In 1880 a riverboat captain is delivering a shipment to the Jewish town of Lowensport.  His Jewish Czech crew of two discover they are carrying barrels of clay from their native Czechoslovakia.  They kill the captain, an earthquake hits, the river is rerouted, and the boat is swallowed by the mud and lost.

Before that happens though, the Conner clan of Somner’s Cover (I think) is fighting with the prosperous Jews of Lowensport.  Gavriel Lowen, leader of the Jewish settlers, owns the sawmill and is raking the bucks.  Conner and his men hatch a plan to kill Lowen and the other Jews.  They do; they blow Lowen up in his own sawmill.  But then something kills Conner and every other man, woman, and child in Somner’s Cove.

Jump to the present and successful game designer Seth Kohn and his freakishly smart girlfriend Judy move to Lowensport.  They are fresh from rehab; he is a recovering alcoholic, she is a former crack addict.  They have bought the house that once belonged to Gavriel Lowen.  They meet the rabbi Asher Lowen from Lowensport and his weird wife, and the other strange citizens.  State workers find the buried riverboat on Seth’s land, so he gets to keep the barrels of clay.  He stores them in the basement, naturally, and soon discovers a secret room in the basement containing ritualistic items and decayed human remains.

Now there are also two crooked cops, Rosh and Stein, from Somner’s Cover who use two crooks, D-Man and Nutjob, to handle some hits for them.  The cops are drug dealers and get their product from D-Man and Nutjob who get it from Mr. Mysterious, who is eventually revealed to be Asher Lowen.  It seems the Jews form Lowensport are the bad, black magic, kind of Jews and they also make crack.  Now this comes in handy when they want the skull of Asher’s great-great-great-grandfather Gavriel that is buried in Seth and Judy’s dirt floor basement.

Oh, and the bad guys use a golem to kill people.

Somehow all these things tie together, but most of these people are needless within the story.  The Golem isn’t that good, but I suggest you read the last half of the story when the bad guys get Judy hooked on crack again by forcing her to smoke it.  The entire book is filled with atrocious, unintenionally funny, dialogue throughout, but it’s when Judy starts sucking the glass dick again that we are given winners such as the following lines:

Sooner or later he’ll know I’ve got something more than a cold.

I’ll get it all out of my system while he’s gone….I’ll crack it up, then quit when he comes home.

“I’m not going to smoke crack.”

Middle-aged crackheads die from sudden heart attacks and strokes all the time.

“I need more crack!”

The Golem needs more crack, cowbell, thought, or something.

1 out of 5
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On July 30th Wolfenstein hits store shelves.  Are you ready?  If you haven’t played any of the Wolfenstein games, you don’t know what you’re missing.  There’s nothing like shooting Nazi zombies and all other manners of creatures of the night.  Come on, mad scientists?  Who doesn’t like evil mad scientists?