Tag Archives: horror

Playground of the Id – Musings on Horror

Oh hi there. I didn’t see you there. Come in, come in. It’s been some time, hasn’t it. Well take a seat. This place is just as comfortable as it always is. Everyone is welcome.

Pay the dust no mind.

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. And boy, have we had some big changes in that time. A new look and a new address, all of which we have Derek to thank. So, thank you Derek, your hard work is always appreciated!

A little bit of an update: I didn’t fall of the face of the earth for no good reason. I’m hard at work on the Clockwork Caterpillar sequel. We’ve got pre-order and previews in the works and hopefully we’ll be making more noise about that in no time. So keep an eye out for that.

But now that I have some breathing room from scribbling out draft after draft, it is high time that I go for a little bit of a ramble about just life and all the minute things that make it up.

The title of this article gives enough of the topic away but let’s add a dash of context. A friend of mine – let’s call her Rikki for no particular reason – and I really like to watch horror movies. Now, I’m not a horror fan. I’m not a true believer in the genre and I’ve certainly expressed my thoughts on its shortcomings in the past. No, specifically we like to watch bad horror movies. There’s some measure of joy to watch a work of art that utterly fails to achieve its goal. It’s another thing to watch such a trainwreck fail to reach any goal. This is essentially an endorsement of Wiseau’s The Room. Check it out!

So Rikki and I like to get together every month and just sit back and scroll through the movies that no one wants to see. We prefer the comfort of our own homes because we engage in the age old tradition of heckling while the flick is on. A meta-commentary of work is so popular it spawned its own long running series (Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – check it out as well!). I would never record and release this sort of thing, obviously. But it is immense fun.

Only, every now and then there’s a snag. Every now and then we screw up. Instead of putting on a real stinker we stumble into an actual good movie.

And this has lead into an interesting revelation for me.

Now, I’m well aware of the subgenres of horror. You have body horror, slasher films, cosmic horror, splatterhouse or even the oddly specific holiday horror. But one of the more interesting elements of this style of fiction is how telling it is of its creators. Many philosophers and artists allege that fear is the greatest emotion known to mankind. I’m sure Lovecraft has waxed poetically about it before diving into his strange fetish for scaly, long noses. But while fear is certainly a common experience for mankind, what scares us certainly is not.

In a way, if eyes are windows to the soul, horror films are the garage door to the director’s psyche. You get to see the shadowy shapes that wiggle just beneath the surface of the subconscious and see just what causes the bumps which keep them up at night.

For some, it is incredibly mundane witches, ghosts or witch ghosts that can’t stand you having more Facebook friends than them. But every now and then, a director is able to take their midnight terrors and do something extraordinary with them.

They make a message.

So here I list Rikki and mine’s worst failures. Here are two movies that, against our best intentions, actually turned out well.

The Babadook

Sure, anyone who follows the horror genre is probably rolling their eyes. Of course The Babadook is good. Anyone who doesn’t keep their head in the sand during 2014 would know this. Well, first, I like it there. The sand helps to regulate temperature really well.

Second, I don’t take critical consensus seriously after I was convinced to watch a horror movie about a lethargic walking STD despite everyone crowing about how brilliant it is.

Thus, I recommended the Babadook based on the fact that I wanted to see some silly Australians running around from a ridiculous looking person in a top hat.

And I have to admit, I was not prepared.

Now, the Babadook isn’t scary. I don’t really find horror movies scary. But the Babadook is good. And it’s because it managed something that I had not thought possible. It used our feelings of fear to peel back the layers of psychological defences the director had raised to reveal a very compelling story about the difficulties and shame surrounding grief.

Thus, the Babadook did two things I had not seen. One, it was a story very strongly feminine. As I’ve stated, I’m not a horror genre expert, but so often are we presented what scares men. Even when the protagonist is a woman, the films themselves are very… attuned for the male’s perspective. I mean, how many times do we have the female protagonist running through showers of blood or rolling around in the mud while wearing a shear blouse or, more often than not, just her panties and bra?

In contrast, The Babadook is positively mormon. Here, Amelia Vanek is a single mother attempting to raise her precocious and not-entirely-all-there son Sam. The story is, largely, a slow boil wherein Sam’s awkwardness and social failings cause ever growing stress and grief for Amelia. Sam is convinced that he must protect his mother from a monster only he can see. And Amelia, as a single working mother with strained relations to her sister, is stretched to her wits end.

It’s an excellent story which, handled by any other, would surely have looked simply through Sam’s eyes and watched as his mother turned into a raving, murderous creature which the son must slay in order to save. But, instead, despite Amelie’s inability to address this mysterious Babadook (which is so thinly veiled to be the representation of her grief towards the death of her husband – I mean it manifests as him at one point when it demands that Sam be brought to him!) the story never really abandons Amelie. This is her tale, even as she does unspeakable things in her attempts to calm her child and hold to the fraying threads of her unravelling life.

But even more impressive is the finale. It’s a staple in horror films that even when the supernatural threat is banished, there’s always that last minute shot of it coming back or having ultimately succeeded. This is represented with a happy Sam collecting worms for Amelie and presenting her the dented dog dish with the earthy insect laden mess. Sam then asks if he can “take care of it” and Amelie’s answer has stayed with me ever since:

“You will when you’re older.”

Accessed from https://nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Babadook-e1497018439248.png — The Babadook is more a story about responsible parenting: Don’t let others buy your kid children’s stories.

It’s such a sucker punch reveal that the grief we carry isn’t just our own. Sam, who had no hand in the creation of this devastation in his mother, will later inherit this morbid manifestation once he’s fully capable of understanding the loss of a father he’s never known. Then he too will have to learn to take his own bowl of worms down to a monster that he will never live without.

I had not signed on to learn something about life.

Await Further Instructions

Accessed from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4971408/mediaviewer/rm109279232 — Await Further Instructions belongs to Johnny Kevorkian and Dark Sky Films.

This one is entirely on Rikki. To be fair to her, however, not only does this movie have a ridiculous title, it’s also got a really cheap film look to it that just screams “unintentional comedy.”

And I’ll readily admit that there’s a distinct difference in quality between Await Further Instructions and The Babadook. But this movie is still way better than it has any right to be. I don’t know what it is with foreign films but somehow they seem to churn out more thought provoking horror than their North American counterparts.

I wonder if there’s a thesis topic in there.

Await Further Instructions takes the opposite approach to The Babadook. While it focuses on a family Christmas dinner in what I can only assume are the suburbs of Britain, it’s subject matter branches far afield from the intensely personal tale of Amelie. Instead of commenting on the human condition, Await Further Instructions is leveraging its critical eye to society.

And there’s just something about fascism that simply does not gel well with British artists. Well, fascism doesn’t gel well with any artists but certainly its a topic that the British are far more willing to address their ire.

Await targets what I can only assume is the very British response of clamping down during an emergency and being as obedient as possible to authority. Not a necessarily inappropriate response in many circumstances. Certainly if a building is madly aflame, most would encourage trapped persons to obey the fire marshal.

But what happens if the fire marshal starts giving questionable directives?

Await follows the Milgram (heh) family as they awake Christmas Day to discover their house has been sealed by a mysterious black synthetic barrier. Concern spreads quickly, especially since Nick wanted to depart early given that his Indian girlfriend Annji was not going over well with his slightly racist family.

Then the television flickers on and an otherworldly green message flashes its instructions to the family. This cements in the mind of the patriarch Tony that this is a government quarantine and they must wait out the catastrophe following good old daddy parliament’s directives. Course, this quickly turns into a question of blind obedience to authority once the television begins flashing highly suspect orders and Tony puts his entire family’s life in danger while trying to maintain his quickly unravelling order.

Now, Await struggles in presenting a well written and well performed piece. But its theme is certainly far stronger than most the ghoulies and goblins are offered in the genre. Someone really hates Fox Nows. Or, more precisely, whatever form Fox News takes in Great Britain. All the family’s bad decisions are preceded by obeying the ever growing ridiculous demands of the television which mostly seems to want to torture the Milgrams. This is obviously contrasted with the seemingly normal Christmas Eve were dear old Granddad is watching the news and commenting on how the world is going to shit because of the immigrants and they need to kick them all out while staring hard at the doctor-in-training Annji.

Nick’s rebelliousness uncovers the horrible truth that the television hosts some strange alien synthetic organism which wants nothing more than the adulation and worship of its viewers. A goal that is easily achieved with the highly susceptible Tony who keeps appealing to the cross hanging above the television anytime he’s about to carry out the next unimaginable order against his children. There’s a lot of good ideas wrapped up in here that, given a skilled hand, would have really taken off.

Course, in the end, it’s a bit heavy handed. But the horror is far more ambitious than the ghost of a little girl trying to get revenge on her sisters thirty years after they accidentally contributed to her drowning. It’s a fear with a message and elevates a work that would otherwise have been ripe for parodying and mockery. Course, it’s elevated to more a position of awkward mediocrity wherein it’s a flawed but somewhat valuable work.

Accessed from https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/05/arts/05await1/05await1-jumbo-v2.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp — I have to say the weird green glow did get a little tiresome.

But it has done more than a lot of other films better crafted than it: It showed that horror can be more than dopamine for the id. It can provoke thought and conversation over difficult matters of both personal and societal importance.

And these movies demonstrate that not all our fears are unfounded. Its how we address what we fear that matters, and whether we can turn that terror into a better solution.

Trumpeting the Eighth Seal

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For those not in the know, I have suffered a rather embarrassing potential concussion. I mention that this is embarrassing because of both its production and my handling of it. Suffice to say, strenuous activity while under the effects of a potential concussion are generally ill-advised least this potential injury get potentially exacerbated. So I haven’t done much of anything save finish writing a novel in a month. A full fledged novel with distinct beginning, middle and end and of appropriate length for trade fiction.

Not a bad accomplishment for being a little funny in the head. That is, regardless of the Schroedinger’s head trauma. But no one logs onto this blog to hear me natter about my health so let’s discuss… something!

My illustrious and highly industrious friend has let slip a rather terrible secret. There is this shared world we’ve created. A world of mystery and horror, and its perfect for discussing horror and players. It is a world not unlike our own but those striking similarities serve to only make its differences all the more terrible. It is a world about great eldritch monsters, the frailty of the human spirit, the boundless power of man’s imagination and the unimaginable depths of greed and self sacrifice. It is a world that has been percolating in the back of my mind since my first years of university as I wrestled with concepts underpinning the foundations of belief and faith that support our understanding of the universe.

This is shamelessly stolen from Google. I apologize to the original artist.

You can already see the old horror elements beginning to weave through. I love some H.P. Lovecraft, a confession that may startle those who see me as only the ‘man who hates everything.’ I really enjoy that sense of dread for the unknown. It’s a hard emotion to invoke in our modern world with our understanding and grasp so widespread. Each day some new discovery or invention seems to bring ever more pieces of reality into greater focus. But how often have we heard this tale before? It seems that just before a great paradigm shift, our concepts and views were at their strongest. All it took was one little piece to plunge us over the edge and shatter the structures we’d created and had felt so secure within.

So, I needed that tipping point. I needed that soft crack against the glass that could widen and swallow my poor travelers in. It always has to start off small and seemingly inconsequential. The true horror is the slow peeling of all the comfortable layers of our old lives and beliefs, revealing the strange and bizarre one section at a time until the realization dawns upon us and we see that the universe we thought we knew is more alien and strange than it is familiar and safe. In this manner, I’ve always admired the White Wolf series of games. Almost all of them take place in modern times with the character’s journey starting rather mundane at first. Perhaps it is something as simple as a chance encounter late one night at that fancy new bar that’s opened down the street. You meet some enchanting woman who seems to captivate all that view her. You don’t remember seeing her before and the word on everyone’s lips is a name as inviting as it is exotic. You drink it in like a new wine. It’s a thick ambrosia that leaves you longing – no, aching – for more and you know you must have it. She beckons with a languid finger and you follow even if something at the back of your mind is scratching and screaming to escape.

Then, before you know it, BAM! You’re a vampire needing to subside on the blood and life of the people you once held dear.

I know not everyone shares this same romanticized vision but it was this starting point that I hoped to capture. Vampire the Masquerade, for me, had always been a story of resisting damnation and the eroding of one’s humanity. Most tales, however, were usually about bad ass nightstalkers able to pitch cars through the air or rip the throats of their enemies. I know the world had deadly horrors awaiting for the new converts, but in my experience those often fell to the wayside as conflicts basically remained entrenched and consumed with vampire politics and living out personal power fantasies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that but one element I loved about Lovecraft and his brand of horror was no matter how much you knew, no matter how prepared you were, the horrors you faced always remained horrors. They were abominations that even with the correct spells and incantations learned still threatened to rip you from limb and shred your very sanity. They were creatures you constantly had to keep asking yourself why you weren’t running away and questioning whether your life and soul were worth wagering against them.

And in most cases, they were not. But what sort of story is it if the most sensible course of action was to flee? The simple solution was to make it impossible. And to accomplish that, I made the player the monster.

In a sense. Much like a vampire passing its curse, I imagined infecting the player with a disease. They could be inhabited by something not quite their own, something that was not quite themselves. What it was, they couldn’t know. All they knew was that it changed them and in ways they couldn’t understand. Suddenly, they had a greater appetite. Simple food could not satiate them. They hungered for something more and if they couldn’t feed whatever it was inside of them then the player himself was up for the menu. It was, in a sense, the Curse of Cain with a twist. The player was still struggling for their immortal soul and humanity but not in a figurative sense that they resisted some biblical beast symbolizing infidelity to the Lord but from the very literal sense that they were being eaten from the inside out. The food to fill this need became a currency far more valuable than any dollar or yuan. And in discovering this heightened need, players discovered they weren’t alone in this startling new power structure. Suddenly, an entire orchestra seemed to emerge from behind the screens dabbling in a business and trade wholly unnoticed before.

There was an energy that permeated everything and that fueled the universe from the smallest organism to the most complex machines. No one truly understood it; no one ever really does. Many people have differing beliefs but the most suspicious were the ones who claimed to have undeniable proof. Everyone had a stake in this new market, and those quickest to help the new attendees with their affliction often had the most questionable motives. The players were forcibly introduced to the world behind the mirror and shown the real mechanisms even if they didn’t understand them. The height of fidelity and faith and the worst depravity and debauchery all produced the same results and results were all that mattered. It was a world where the question of humanity could really be asked as great beings manipulated beliefs and reality to further their own goals.

But just because I wanted to involve the players in this struggle between the ‘Daemonkin’ I had my own desire to fill out the edges. I want to test and strain the concept as much as I could and see exactly where I could take it. Though the initial idea was to create this sort of ‘demon infection’ the end results were rather surprising. Suddenly, I had secret organizations of techno-magi controlling vast communicative networks and airwaves, tapping into an unknown and potentially exhaustive energy to ‘download’ their spells. I had beings born in the combined collective dreams of humanity, populating a rich and vast new plane of existence fueled by the wandering unconsciousness of the world’s asleep peoples. Even more intriguing was the vast new expanse of reality crafted from the emergence of the modern technological era – a whole new, untamed wilderness of cyber-realities taking form beneath the nose of ancient beings and rapidly cultivated by the young.

Perhaps some of that old Lovecraftian vision had been lost but an entire world with its own unique rules had come into being. Each new expansion and idea was exciting and startling as the last and truly the impossible seemed possible.

Hard to imagine the name of this thing started because Derek is dyslexic.

And that’s where my confession comes in. So encompassing and engrossing was this setting that I had no idea what to do with it. I had too many elements. I had too many stories. What could, for one person, be a tale of nightmare and terror could be the run of the mill daily grind for another. I was lost within my own world without a clue of how I was going to use any of it. And so it’s sat, unused and unseen in the back of my mind and across a dozen or so different word documents. I hope to one day create something from it. Perhaps, once Derek finishes ironing out the mechanics… if he ever gets around to sending me them.

Perhaps then, Plemora will see the light of day. Until then, I’ll see about posting some of my coherent ruminations and ideas in creating this world.