scumbelievable posts
Posts: 886
Files: 1569
Deadlights: Fingernails
There is a wide range of physical sensations from the frustrating to the debilitating with which most of us are familiar. We've all stubbed a toe. We've all had a nosebleed, a hangnail, a cut in an inconvenient place. Given that horror seeks to elicit a physical response from its audience, it makes sense to build on this language of universal sensations. Clive Barker's Hellraiser is one of the best examples to be found, a primer for using these commonly held experiences to build up a more complex and grotesque lexicon of visceral te...
Deadlights: Oh, the Humanity!
Perhaps the most elementally upsetting concept in horror film is one human doing terrible things to another. Demons, zombies, vampires, and other creatures of the night prey on the living by nature, but human on human violence is outside the logical structure of the food chain and can force us into contact with a variety of uncomfortable truths about the ways we interact with one another. In Robin Hardy's seminal 1973 folk horror flick The Wicker Man a group of pagans living on a private island off the coast of England lure in and entrap an...
Deadlights: You Could Cut It With a Knife
Where does tension come from? How do movies manufacture it? As with most atmospheric effects the answer stems from no single source. Score, storytelling, acting, editing, blocking, and camera work all play a part in creating a feeling of suspense. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows relies heavily on suspense to imbue its action with immediacy and to bring viewers into the mindset of protagonist Jay, a young woman being hunted by a faceless and seemingly unstoppable entity. It's an ideal place to observe how movies incite and build suspe...
Valkyrie, Chapter V: Hinterberg
Heike watched the countryside go by outside the window of her compartment while its other occupants — a pair of goblin workmen who’d got on at Talfarde and a snoring human barrister whose spectacles were slipping down his nose — dozed in their seats. Green farmland burgeoning. Tidy farmhouses, whitewashed and trim No salt blight here. No orc hordes to strip the soil bare. No bombers soaring overhead. The front was two hundred miles distant and here, if nowhere else, Alkost was at peace.A tower of black storm clouds churned over the mounta...
Deadlights: In the Flesh
In horror a film's events and images unfold outward from a structuring violation. The death of a loved one. Domestic abuse. The mounting violence and/or wrongness of a horror film is in a way an expansion and exploration of this initial wound. In Rosemary's Baby everything that befalls Rosemary, infernal and mundane, stems from her impregnation via rape. The entirety of Twin Peaks occurs within the negative space left by Laura Palmer's murder. Each new supernatural or disordering development maps the foundational trauma in greater d...
Deadlights: Through the Looking Glass
There are deeper truths thanunderstanding a character's motivations, deducing what an object means, or tracking a story's progression from A to B. There are more elemental ways of understanding art and horror. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's famously elliptical, fragmentary movie about jealousy, self-destruction, and the desire for and fear of one's idealized self and the manifestations of one's dreams, is horror's greatest single piece of solution-proof storytelling. It presents not a puzzle box to be solved but a kind ...
In the Flesh: Ad Astra
Imagine if Terrence Malick had exactly the same level of ambition but no imagination whatsoever and you've got a pretty good idea what to expect from James Gray's Ad Astra, a movie about a grown-up boy learning that sometimes it's important to have exactly one feeling. Brad Pitt stars as Roy McBride, a misanthropic astronaut whose equally misanthropic father disappeared two decades ago on a deep space mission to discover intelligent life outside the solar system. McBride is considerate enough to tell us exactly how he thinks and fee...
Thanks, I Hate It: The Newsroom
It's rare that one can look at a man and know beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that he has done material damage to the psychological functioning of an entire nation. Aaron Sorkin is that man. His hit series The West Wing induced a kind of national delusion about the nature of politics while also fostering a bizarrely sunny outlook on the things big government could do and the ideals it stood for. His followup series, The Newsroom, which aired on HBO from 2012 to 2014, may lack The West Wing's pernicious social penetration, but what...
Deadlights: Do You See?
Manhunter is a movie about looking deep into the putrid innards of the worst humanity has to offer and examining that welter of gore and bile not with disgust, but with empathy. It's perhaps the single most important lesson horror has to teach: that to dismiss what repulses us out of hand is to foster its growth in our own hidden places, that the dangerous work of empathizing with the most degraded human beings alive is not merely some trendy criminologist strategy but a vital necessity to the maintenance of a caring personality.As FBI crim...
The Downton Aberration
CHAPTER ONE: A SPECIES OF WOOD TICK"You found him like this?" asked Doctor Clarkson, making a note in his little leather-bound book as he stood beside the sickbed of Mr. Carson in the former butler's bungalow. It was strange; the old man's blood pressure, heartbeat, and respiration were as regimented as the Northumberland Hussars on parade. So far as his instruments and training were concerned, there was nothing whatsoever the matter with Downton Abbey's retired majordomo."By the garden shed," fretted Mrs. Hughes, pa...
Deadlights: On Dread
Carnival of Souls theatrical poster, artist unknownA primary way in which horror differs from other genres in that its characters are typically less able to resist or change the world around them. When a threat appears in a horror narrative it is far more likely to injure, derange, or kill the protagonists of that narrative than it would be in another genre. This sense of inevitability is key to horror. Consider the ending of John Carpenter's seminal slasher Halloween in which mere moments after being shot and falling from a window the kill...
In the Flesh: Downton Abbey
Downton Abbey is, like the show of which it is a continuation, best as a strictly sensual pleasure. The camera work seldom inspires, but the costuming and set dressing are beautiful and without a hint of artifice. The actors are charming and fascinating to look at. The dialogue, if not revolutionary, is quick and witty in a way that doesn't make me want to tear my hair out. Michelle Dockery is there. It's an entertaining movie, comforting and well-made, with few ambitions beyond giving its audience a nice time.Dig deeper than the surfac...
Deadlights: Come On In, The Water's Great
Poster art for Jaws by Roger KastelSpielberg's Jaws, as ruthlessly streamlined as its ocean-going antagonist, is the perfect entry point into the world of horror film. It includes a smattering of upsetting but not gratuitous gore, a small handful of jump scares, and enough suspense to hang a bridge -- sort of like a tasting menu of horror's key elements. It's also surpassingly easy to become invested in. Brody, Hooper, and Quint are one of film's great trios and the film's supporting cast are perfectly sketched, the most mun...
Deadlights: Why Am I Scared of That?
Cover art to Alien: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, N.C. WintersThe purpose of horror as a genre is to elicit a physical response of revulsion from its audience. There are many ways (some clearly recognizable, others more elliptical in concept or execution) in which horror film seeks to elicit this response. At one end of the spectrum lies the classic "jump scare", the sudden appearance of a violating figure or image at an unexpected moment (the specter of Pazuzu's face in The Exorcist) or after a period of mounting suspense engineer...
Don't Be Scared of Me: How Horror Brings Us Back Into Our Bodies
Dear Gretchen,Horror - particularly body horror - has always had a peculiarly healing effect on me. I have never truly understood why; I simply know that watching the protagonist of Revenge impaled upside down on a tree in the desert, blood globbing down her face to fall and crush ants into the sand, makes me feel far better when I'm struggling than any 'feel-good' movie could. In that vein, I'd love to know what your thoughts are on horror's capacity to help and heal those in need, and how it can connect audiences to their ...
Thanks, I Hate It: Donnie Darko
There are things to like about Donnie Darko. Much of the camera work is solid and patient. The science fiction plot is small and neatly executed, if conceptually thin. Jena Malone is there and punching well above the movie's weight class. The elements of a solid independent thriller are all present, including just-skilled-enough and adventurous direction, but the film's tone is insufferably self-satisfied, its protagonist, played by a young Jake Gylenhaal, mishandled by a script with too much investment in his half-baked teenage misanth...
In the Flesh: Rambo: Last Blood
First Blood, the 1982 action-thriller based on David Morrell's novel of the same name and directed by Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, Weekend at Bernie's), is the definitive post-Vietnam movie. It reckons with deep humanity with the government's abandonment of veterans, with the soul-scarring horrors of war, and with the inferiority complexes and violent dispositions endemic to American police officers. It's a deeply anti-social movie, pushing through suburban small-mindedness and into the life-ruining aftereffects of violence. In...
Thanks, I Hate It: The Office
I hate The Office with a pure frustration usually reserved for pop-up ads and those smug door-to-door evangelists who are just so insufferably certain they've got all the answers. I hate it like I hate having dry skin in the small of my back during the winter, or an itch on the bottom of my foot. Its chirpy, abrasive brand of humor is bad enough on its own, but its insistence on parlaying that sandpaper approach into endlessly prolonged sentimentality results in a show that rubs a cheese grater against your cheek before kissing it. It has n...
Thanks , I Hate It: Kingdom of Heaven
Like his earlier film Gladiator, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a period piece firmly entrenched in the values of the present. The film's characters are sharply divided between more or less mustache-twirling medieval brutes and a few benighted secular humanists struggling to overcome the world's barbarity. Much of its three-hour-plus running time is taken up by scenes of these enlightened characters lamenting the violence and inhumanity of the Holy Land, espousing reforms and programs of tolerance and clemency their real-world ...
Thanks, I Hate It: Split
If you'd told me in 2000 that Unbreakable would have two sequels constituting its own little bizarro-world MCU, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet for better or for worse, here we are, Shyamalan's Bruce Willis-starring superhero yarn about an invincible, super-strong security guard and his brittle-boned nemesis now three films deep into a gonzo story of suffering-as-superpower. For all their idiosyncratic weirdness, though,in some ways Shyamalan's movies are as square as any mainstream blockbuster. Nowhere is this ...
Ghost Stories
Art by @horstmannart for an upcoming zine of short illustrated ghost stories.
In the Flesh: IT Chapter Two
This movie prominently features digitally de-aged fifteen-year-olds, which should give you an idea of how much thought its creators put into the process of adapting and filming Stephen King's gargantuan 1986 horror novel. The child actors look like polished plastic cherubs, their faces stiff and uncanny, their voices sped up to an obnoxious pitch to conceal puberty's effects. The Foley work remains indifferent at best, a lot of scary whispering and indistinct children's voices doing sing-song ghostly lullaby crap. Director Andrés M...
Dear Gretchen: Can Art Be Evil?
Dear Gretchen,Are there any movies you consider morally irredeemable? If so, do you still think that there’s something to be gained from watching them?-Christian__________________________________________________________________________________Thanks for your question, Christian!The short answer is that no, I don't really think of any art as irredeemable. The exceptions would be propaganda and corporate art, which exists solely to prey on insecurities and frustrations for financial gain. That, to me, is a perversion of the purpose of art a...
Thanks, I Hate It Directory
A complete directory of every Thanks, I Hate It for the reader's convenience.2019January 6th: HeatJanuary 7th: Requiem for a DreamJanuary 11th: Mad Max: Fury RoadJanuary 18th: Wonder WomanJanuary 26th: InterstellarFebruary 1st: Man of SteelFebruary 8th: GladiatorFebruary 16th: The Haunting of Hill HouseFebruary 18th: Pacific RimFebruary 19th: Blade RunnerFebruary 20th: ThorFebruary 21st: Wall-EFebruary 22nd: AvatarMarch 1st: The King's SpeechMarch 8th: ZodiacMarch 15th: InceptionMarch 29th: Jessica Jones, The West WingApril 5th: Mission...
Thanks, I Hate It: Godzilla
2014's Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Max Borenstein, is a disaster movie. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Titanic is a good disaster movie. So's Force Majeure. Where both diverge from Edwards' film is in their understanding that it's human connection and psychology which make disaster interesting, not the other way around. Godzilla simply shows us disaster and trusts that it'll be enough to keep us entertained. Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston both die before the one hour mark, Binoch...
Valkyrie, Chapter IV: Coffins
Vampires, Saskia forced herself to remember as she stood by the mountain road’s drainage ditch, staring at the coffin, could be killed. Stanislav had shown her how to do it. Silver garrots, sunlight or, at night, white phosphorus, garlic concentrate delivered by bullet or bolt — it could all be brought off with no more than a steady hand and the element of surprise, or sufficient weight of numbers. Even overfeeding could be fatal to them. She’d seen photographs of bloodsuckers that had burst like mosquitoes held in place while feeding on ...
Thanks, I Hate It: Goodnight Mommy
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's Goodnight Mommy owes a lot to the new French extremity, a school of film making primarily occupied with the boundaries of the human body and their violation. Think the waking c-section from L'interieur, or Climax's endless drug-fueled dance scenes in which stroking and gyrating leads inevitably to violent penetration. The problem with Goodnight Mommy is that its viciousness is never successfully married to its characters or narrative. Instead the film reads as a collection of sadistic vignettes wit...
You Only Come to Girls
He ran through the forest with the other boys close behind him. The boughs were greening. The sun shone through them. He crashed through brakes of fiddleheads curled tight in dreams of summer. Blackberry brambles caught at his hose and the hem of his tunic and drew red lines of blood across his shins. Pheasants burst from the undergrowth in whirring coveys somewhere to his left and he nearly slammed headlong into the moss-furred trunk of an ancient pine. The shouts of his pursuers echoed through the trees.He tried not to think of the sweat that...
SKIN OF IRON, TEETH OF GLASS
I compiled every D&D snippet I've ever written on twitter over the past three years into a single document! Download it here anytime, and consider it a small thank-you for your generosity toward me.
Dear Gretchen: What's the Point of D&D?
Dear Gretchen,Given your penchant for generating D&D characters for people, I presume you have some affinity or affection for the game. What are your thoughts on D&D's surging popularity and the prevalence of streamed games/shows?-Paul__________________________________________________________________________________Thanks for your question, Paul!I've been playing D&D for almost two decades now, beginning in early high school when I had to hide the books from my parents (they thought the game was Satanic) and didn't really understand...
