Horror Movie Romances

Posted on February 13, 2015 by admin

In anticipation of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, I bring you my favorite horror romances. I often scoff at Valentine’s Day, but, admittedly, I don’t mind the occasional chocolate treat. I also love the horror genre so why not combine the two? Maybe my love for the one will color my meh for the other. (This coming from a romance writer 🙂

Nightbreed and Candyman. Two Clive Barker stories made into movies.

Clive Barker does an amazing job touching upon a human’s relationship with his or her own flesh and how that toes the line between pain and pleasure. He did it brilliantly in Hellraiser (which could also be included here). Nightbreed and Candyman are especially gothic tales, dealing with so-called demons and or boogeymen. I’ve written before in my blog or somewhere I can no longer find, how Nightbreed is an underappreciated, misconstrued movie. It was marketed as straight horror by the studio, but it’s more a tale of the island of lost misfits except these misfits are demonic in nature. Anyway, I loved the romance between Boone and Lori. She sought him out in Midian and was not repelled by his demon nature. Personally, Nightbreed would make a great urban fantasy romance!

Candyman was a slave’s son, raised among the gentry as an artist. He fell in love with a white woman and impregnated her. His lover’s father hired a lynch mob, who cut off his hand and replaced it with a hook, covered him in honey, and left him to be stung to death by bees. Helen, a student researching urban legends, comes across the Candyman urban legend, but it’s not, and through her obsession with him, becomes his new love and her own urban legend. Candyman has a knack for horror seduction. He says to Helen: The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite. As for our deaths, there is nothing to fear. Our names will be written on a thousand walls. Our crimes told and retold by our faithful believers. We shall die together in front of their very eyes and give them something to be haunted by. Come with me and be immortal.

Warm Bodies. While the premise was a bit hokey, this movie was funny, surprisingly heart-felt (especially loved Rob Cordry’s zombie). I wrote a brief review a while back: http://wp.me/p3aUdm-2V

The Fly. Tragic. Sad. If, instead of seeing Jeff Goldblum transforming into a fly, you view him as someone being ravaged by a disease and watch Geena Davis look on in horror and sadness knowing she can do nothing but watch him waste away, it’s truly a traumatic movie-going experience.

The Crow. It’s even more tragic to watch this movie, knowing what happened to Brandon Lee, and his father before him. The cinematography is eerie, fever dream-ish, dark, and wet; the soundtrack is fantastic with songs from The Cure, Violent Femmes, and Rollins Band; but it’s the story of how Eric Draven comes back from the dead to avenge the death of the woman he loved that is classic, oh, and the crow is cool.

Let the Right One In. The end of this movie damaged me, oh, who am I kidding? The entire movie damaged me. When we discover that Eli’s human protector, the old guy, was, well, maybe we don’t want to go there, but Oskar ends up taking his place. I wanted to both cry and cringe at the same time. Not many movies inspire such contradictory emotions. If you read a little bit about the book, it tells you that Eli was supposed to be an androgynous boy, and the movie kind of plays on this some. There are definitely themes the movies touches upon that make it horrifying in a very sublime way.

Lastly, my ode to the bromance:

Shaun of the Dead. Sadly Shaun’s best bro succumbed to the hordes, but that didn’t keep them from enjoying their favorite past-time: video games. Have a wonderful day and eats lots of luscious chocolate!

Ghoulish Tens: Masters of Horror

Posted on October 31, 2014 by admin

Happy Halloween!! Love this!

For my final entry in my Ghoulish Tens, I tackle the Masters of Horror television series. Airing for two seasons in 2005 to 2006 on Showtime, each episode was directed by a notable horror director. Of the two seasons, these ten episodes are my favorite. If you like horror, you must check this series out. Some of the best horror broadcast on television. Unlike my other ten lists, I have listed these episodes in order with the first being my favorite and so on.

Cigarette Burns by John Carpenter. So John Carpenter, you know, that guy who directed Halloween and The Thing. There’s a subtle beauty to some of John Carpenter’s movies. There are no gory scenes in Halloween, yet when I think of that movie, I seem to remember lots of gore. The entire hour of Cigarette Burns, Carpenter builds the tension with some crazy horrifying shit while a guy searches for a movie called “Le Fin Absolue du Monde” (Absolute End of the World) that’s supposed to drive people insane after watching it. A weird deformed man, an act of slasher brutality and you’re just wondering, what the hey! Kind of like the Ring, but I must say when you actually see images from Le Fin Absolue du Monde, well, suffice it to say, unlike the Ring, I had to remind myself this is a friggin tv show and I’m not going to go crazy.

The Fair-Haired Child by William Malone. Malone hasn’t directed any films I’ve liked: House on Haunted Hill remake and Feardotcom, but OMG. Can he please make a movie like this short? I loved this one. Once again, some great pathos. Tragic, horror. And awful (in a good way), wonderful performance by Lori Petty as the mom.

Incident On and Off a Mountain Road by Don Cascorelli (Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep). I didn’t think I’d like this one. I’m not so much into the slasher chase through the woods. But Cascorelli definitely grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Not even when I was squirming on the couch at what the slasher dude did with his victims did Cascorelli lessen his grip. I’ve seen movies with captured victims, agonizingly awaiting their fate like Saw, but unlike Saw, this one got to me. Maybe it was the freaky old dude imprisoned with our protagonist in the basement of horrors or the bits of her compelling back story sprinkled in to great effect. The ending provided a neat twist that I did not see coming, which is refreshing because I often figure out horror movie twists. (I figured out The Sixth Sense in the first five minutes.)

Haeckel’s Tale directed by John McNaughton. Here we have American Werew mastersofhorrorhaeckelstaleposter olf in London werewolf (John McNaughton) directing an episode based off a Clive Barker story. Clive Barker is a sick dude who I am morbidly fascinated with. Haekel’s Tale has zombies, creepy babies, sensual horror, gothic horror and I’ll let your imagination go to work. And really, when weird shit is going down, just do not go into a cemetery at night. Do. Not.

Dario Argento is another sick dude. (I say this, like with Clive Barker, with the utmost respect.) If you haven’t seen Suspira…what can I say. Argento builds these beautiful horror glam rock tableaus with his movies. His entries, Jenifer and Pelts, are horror absurd. Jenifer is a weird blend of camp, beautiful gruesomeness. Here we have men who become obsessed with a horribly disfigured woman (or whatever the heck she is!) who has a taste for entrails. Pelts is also Argento-wonderful starring Meatloaf and vengeful raccoons, but I liked Jenifer better.

Family by John Landis. I love that the guy who directed Animal House also directed one of the best horror movies ever, American Werewolf in London. But you get it because he uses his humor sensibilities to great effect in his horror movies. Here he takes his quirky voice to a tale about George Wendt as a completely psycho dude who, unlike the rest of us who marry and have kids, builds his family a bit differently. Really, he’s just a big teddy bear. The ending is also a karma-pleasing surprise.

The Black Cat by Stuart Gordon who also did Re-Animator. Based off the Black Cat, this entry is just a great Edgar Allen Poe homage in which Poe himself succumbs to the insanity of his own tale. Great gothic portrayal with a wonderful performance by Jeffrey Combs as Poe. Gordon also directed the entry, Dreams in the Witch House, a nice H.P. Lovecraft adaptation with a phantasmagoric rat and a truly sad, horrific ending, which really kind of freaked me out.

Sounds Like directed by Brad Anderson who directed Session 9 and The Machinist. If you’ve seen the Machinist, you can get an idea of the human degradation focused on the body theme in Sounds Like. Anderson’s movies are not outright horror, but build up to horrifying endings, although I’d have to say the entirety of Session 9 creeped me out. In Sounds Like, Sheriff Andy Bellefleur, (Chris Bauer of True Blood), plays, Larry Pearce, a man going crazy because he can hear everything, every little thing. What I like is, despite Pearce’s tragic back story, he isn’t someone we route for. I think he was pretty messed up even before the tragedy hit his family.

Sick Girl by Lucky McKee. Horror and bugs are truly a bad (in the good sense) combination. Sick Girl is about Ida, an entomologist, and what happens when one of her bugs bites her girlfriend. I always find transformation movies interesting a la The Fly or Altered States. Not as “buggy” as The Fly, yet the psychological horror will creep you out.

Pick Me Up by Larry Cohen. The Freddie vs Jason and Predator vs Alien movies became popular. Now we have a more “grounded” approach when two serial killers fight it out over who gets to kill someone in a seedy motel. Fairuza Balk, who can turn on the freaky camp (see her in The Craft) is the “hapless” victim caught in the middle of the competitive serial killers, who each have their own methods of stalking their victims. Michael Moriarty does a delightful turn as one of the killers. Forget, Law and Order!!

Ghoulish Tens: Movie Monsters

Posted on October 17, 2014 by admin

Awww, ain’t he cute? Tooth fairy from Hellboy II.

It’s time for another list, this time featuring our favorite, ghoulish movie monsters. I’m not including Godzilla, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, King Kong, Jaws, and wolf man. (I make one exception with regards to werewolves as noted below.) As much as I love these crazy guys, I wanted to take an eclectic look at some more modern yet still classic creatures. Once again, the list is in no particular order. Please sound off in the comments and add your own favorites and check out my Pinterest for some images of the monsters.

Pinhead from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Iconic. A creepy sadomasochist. “I will tear your soul apart.” “We have such sights to show you.” I’m morbidly fascinated. Pinhead is the leader of the Cenobites, Theologians of the Order of the Gash, “ageless experimenters in the higher reaches of pleasure.” Really messed up monks. Read Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart. It’s great and introduces aspects to the story not explored in the movie. I don’t know what it is about Clive Barker’s chilling ability to write about human’s relationship to their own flesh.

Alien Xenomorphs. Talk about awesome, ass-kicking design inspired by the surrealist H.R. Giger. (Google H.R. Giger alien lithograph for some awesome images.) Oh yeah, acid blood.

Guillermo del Toro gets two entries because he is just awesome that way. (When will we get At the Mountains of Madness? Pretty please?) First creature is Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. Eyeball hands. Eats children. Pan was also very creepy and dark, but to pick one truly hellish monster, hands down Pale Man. Did I mention he eats children?

And second are the teeth fairies from Hellboy II, pictured above. They are soooo cute, just keep them away from your teeth! I also love the Angel of Death pictured here from Hellboy II. Del Toro definitely has an eye fetish.

The flesh eating crawlers from the Descent. Have you seen this movie? Talk about claustrophobic horror. Must. See. Now. (I think you can stream on Netflix.) We don’t know the origin of the crawlers, how they evolved in the caves, but they are humanoid enough for my over-active and sometimes twisted mind to just go there…

Brundlefly from The Fly. Just uck. The wonderful special effects in transforming Jeff Goldblum into a vomiting insect. Horror and pathos. I’ve said it before, the best horror movies bring both together brilliantly. The way Cronenberg directed Jeff Goldblum’s transformation was like someone suffering from a terminal disease and mourning the loss of his relationship with Geena Davis. Sad, powerful stuff.

The thing from The Thing. This scene alone:

Man, I miss old school special effects.

Evil Dead‘s Naturon Demonto (Sumerian Book of the Dead) demons, most notably possessed tree. You can’t beat Sam Raimi for campy, no holds bared horror blood fest, but mostly I love how over the top his demon possessed people act.

David Naughton’s American werewolf from American Werewolf in London. My one exception to the werewolf exception. One of the best or just flat out the best transformations in movie special effects history.

The velociraptors from Jurassic Park. Spielberg made a great decision in featuring these guys in addition to the T Rex. The T Rex is a big brute, but the velociraptors are smart, pack hunters. Best quote from Robert Muldoon, Game Warden: “They show extraordinary intelligence, even problem-solving intelligence. Especially the big one. We bred eight originally, but when she came in she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one… when she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.”

Ghoulish Tens: Vampire Movies

Posted on October 2, 2014 by admin

Happy October!! It’s that time of year when I can indulge my predilection for creepiness and candy, and just chalk it up to Halloween 🙂 So to feed the inner ghoul, I’ll be posting Ghoulish Ten lists related to movies until Halloween. Next week I’ll cover the best movie monsters.

Vampire movies!

I’m really not covering the classics here (despite the great Bela Lugosi pictured to the right) because I wanted to feature some less well-known, some more well-known, amazing films with an interesting take on vampires, or films that just rocked 🙂 So I didn’t include the Bela Lugosi Dracula or the Francis Ford Coppola version, Interview with a Vampire, and Nosferatu. They are classics that belong on every best list. I also didn’t rank the movies so they are in no particular order. I included pictures from the movies on my Pinterest page so click on over.

Lost Boys. Youth rebellion and Jim Morrison, Keifer Sutherland and his glam-rock vampire crew, Michael Patrick, gramps, and the great inter-play between Cory Feldman and Cory Haim, some great one-liners, 80s soundtrack, awesome!

Fright Night. Not the remake. I saw the remake. It was okay. When you don’t have Chris Sarandon playing Jerry Dandridge or the late, great Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent or Evil Ed, what’s the point? The scene where Peter Vincent kills Evil Ed’s wolf creature was sublime. Perfect blend of horror and pathos. Possibly my favorite vampire movie.

Salem’s Lot, 1979 version. Beyond being one of the most terrifying television movies made, earns a spot simply for keeping me awake for at least a week after watching the scene where newly formed vampire Danny comes knocking on Mark Petrie’s window at night. Therapy. Lots.

Side notes. Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame directed Salem’s Lot. I read the Stephen King short story Jerusalem’s Lot, set in the same town as Salem’s Lot. Great short story! Just the line…”there are spiritually noxious places, buildings where the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid.” Thanks Stephen! I think.

Near Dark. The dark matter Twilight? Brutal. Biker western. Teen romance. Kathryn Bigelow directed. Bill Paxton as a blood-sucking sociopathic. ‘Nuff said.

Vampire’s Kiss. This was one of the Raising Arizona-Moonstruck-Wild at Heart-Nicholas Cage performances as opposed to the Ghost Rider-Season of the Witch-I’ll act in anything for money-Nicholas Cage. In it, Cage believes he is turning into a vampire. He even buys a pair of fake, plastic teeth and bites someone in a scene that perfectly straddles the line between horror and pathos, like Fright Night. (I find a certain level of perfection in scary movies that can strike those chords.) It’s billed as a dark comedy horror and it does have some great comedic moments but once again, just tragic, especially the ending, despite the fact that Cage’s character is pretty repulsive.

Let the Right One In. I heard Let Me In is really good in its own right with its own take so I’m adding it to my must see list. What stood out for me with Let the Right One In was the “realistic” take, the vampire being a young girl, and the focus on the relationship between her and her chosen male companions. She was both a ferocious vampire and lonely young girl, looking for companionship.

Cronos. Guillermo del Toro. Guillermo del Toro. The concept is unique and cool, about an alchemist who invents a scarab device that injects its victim with a solution granting eternal life and a thirst for blood. Guillermo has such a stylistic approach to his gore and monsters. He’s still trying to get his adaption of At the Mountains of Madness off the ground, and I, for one, have my fingers doubly crossed.

The Addiction. I love Lili Taylor. In The Addiction, she plays a philosophy student attacked and bitten by a female vampire. The movie explores her gradual transformation into a vampire and moral degradation. It explores philosophy as espoused by Nietzche and Decartes and whether the fault lies in the vampires being themselves and true to their addiction or in the weakness of their prey.

Shadow of the Vampire. A fictionalized account of the making of the Nosferatu classic with Willem DaFoe as Nosferatu and John Malkovich as the director, F.W. Murau. The premise plays out brilliantly. F.W. Murau hired a character actor, Max Schreck, a.k.a. our fiendish Nosferatu, to play said blood sucker and, because he’s so dedicated to his craft, while filming, he stays in character. The interactions between “Schreck” and the cast are sometimes funny with dark undertones. In one scene, a bat flies by and Schreck catches it and sucks its blood. The other actors are impressed by his dedication to his character. The filming harkens back to silent films. I cannot stress how amazing Willem DaFoe was as Nosferatu.

Blade. He rocks. And one of the first comic book movies released, after the atrocious Joel Shumacher Batman ones, to take comic books heroes down a darker path.

Movies I haven’t seen that sound intriguing: Kiss of the Damned (looks very sexy), John Carpenter’s Vampires (I was initially turned off by this movie, but am hearing good things about it and I do love John Carpenter.) 30 Days of Night. I know, what am I waiting for?

What are some of your favorites and why?

And don’t forget to check out my Pinterest site for pictures of these movies and some others I didn’t cover in the post!

Freaks

Posted on August 29, 2014 by admin

The upcoming fourth season of American Horror Story is called FreakShow and, as the title intones, will involve circus sideshow performers. Immediately, I thought of the Tod Browning movie, Freaks, and wondered how/if the old movie will influence the tone and feel of American Horror Story. Just the teaser trailer, linked below, hints at a homage to Freaks.

I don’t want to reveal what that image makes me think of in relation to Freaks because it might give too much away about Freaks and I don’t want to, because for all horror aficionados, Freaks deserves a watch.

Tod Browning’s Freaks came out in 1932. That fact in of itself is shocking because the movie, even by today’s standards, is terrifying. This movie did not need gory special effects to make its horror felt by viewers. Bravo ranked it number 15 in its 100 scariest movies of all time. The original version of the movie was never released, considered too shocking, and no longer exists or so they say. One of the cut scenes concerns a man singing in falsetto and that is all I’ll say about that! Tod Browning’s career apparently suffered from making the movie and never recovered. This is the man who directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. For Freaks, Browning derived his inspiration from actual experience, having joined a traveling circus at sixteen.

At the start of Freaks, a sideshow barker beckons customers to visit the sideshow. One woman looks into a box and screams at what she sees inside. The barker explains how the horror in the box was once a beautiful and talented trapeze artist, Cleopatra. The rest of the movie shows how Cleopatra and her lover (the future falsetto mentioned above) conspired for her to seduce and marry sideshow midget Hans after learning of his large inheritance.

Browning takes his time establishing the “normalcy” of the deformed “freaks” via vignettes, showing them eating, drinking, hanging laundry: normal acts shown in an odd light given they are done by people without arms, legs, etc. The “freaks” are kind to each other and pose no threat while the “normal” people plot to take poor Hans’ fortune.

Once Hans marries Cleopatra, the tone of the movie takes a sharp left turn into weirds-ville. No wonder the 1930s movie goers freaked out. We have Koo Koo the Bird Girl who shimmies her hips on the table in crude burlesque form. At one point, Cleopatra takes her midget hubby Hans on her back for a horsey ride. From here on out, tension builds as the sideshow performers suspect something’s up and keep a constant vigil on their friend Hans, peeking through windows, catching Cleopatra trying to poison Hans. The sideshow performers, discovering her plot, chase her and attack her in a gruesome, unseen confrontation, culminating in her becoming a sideshow “freak” herself.

The film has been criticized and praised. Some saw it as a commentary on Hollywood’s treatment of its talent like sideshow performers, as trashy exploitation of the actual sideshow performers, and as a grim morality tale. I like to think Browning, who had actually worked with sideshow performers wanted to portray them in a sympathetic light, demonstrate how you can’t judge a book by its cover, and that the sideshow performers aren’t freaks after all. Regardless, once seen, Freaks is never forgotten.

The actors in Freaks were actual side show performers with real deformities. Here’s a picture of some of the performers who played in the movie. When I was writing Necromancer’s Seduction, my merry trio, Ruby, the necromancer; Kara, the witch; and Adam, the revenant, went to a carnival and shared thoughts on whether supernaturals once maybe sought refuge in circus side shows. They repeat one of the famous lines from the movie, still referenced in pop culture today. Here’s the scene from Necromancer’s Seduction. At the end, Adam says the infamous line.

“The traveling carnivals in the early nineteen hundreds were cool, especially the sideshow freaks,” Kara said as we maneuvered through the throngs of families pushing strollers and teens yelling as they assessed their possibilities of hooking up. Hawkers called out, inviting us to play ring toss or Whack- A-Mole. The smell of cinnamon from frying churros warmed the cool night air around us.

“You looking for a new job?” I asked.

“You know, some of the old circus and carnival freaks were supernaturals,” she said.

“That’s kind of depressing. So was the hairy man a werewolf?”

“I don’t know, but maybe it wasn’t so depressing. The carnivals allowed them to come out of hiding, to a certain extent.”

She bumped into me to avoid being hit by a kid running to get on the Twist-O-Rama ride.

“Why would they like being gawked at? Treated like a freak for being themselves?” I asked.

“Did you ever see the old black and white movie Freaks about the circus sideshow freaks?” she asked. “The non-freak trapeze artist and her boyfriend schemed to kill one of the midgets because he was rich. She pretended to love him and married him.”

“Gobble, gobble, we accept her, one of us,” Adam said in a squeaky voice. “That’s one of the best movie lines ever. They cast real people with deformities as the sideshow freaks.”

“That movie was horrifying in ways horror directors today could never imitate,” I said, images from the movie vivid in my mind. When the sideshow freaks found out that the trapeze artist planned to kill their midget friend, they attacked her, turning her into a deformed freak. “They don’t make movies like that anymore.”

Monstrous

Posted on February 4, 2013 by admin

If you’re a fan of dark fantasy, Grimm type fairytales, or Guillermo del Toro, I highly recommend the movie Pan’s Labyrinth. One of the many things that has stuck with me in addition to the amazing visuals, haunting story, and Guillermo del Toro’s wonderful creepy creatures is an exploration of the monstrous.

In the movie, a woman marries a Captain in the Spanish army, under the new facist regime, after the Spanish Civil War in 1944. The woman is pregnant with the Captain’s child, and the Captain really only cares about his unborn child. As the mother becomes increasingly ill during her pregnancy, the young girl stumbles upon a magical labyrinth and encounters a faun-like creature, who send her on a series of trials to maintain her essence, as the faun believes she is the reincarnation of a princess of the underworld. Continue reading →

Mimi Sebastian

On the dark side of love

Category Archives: horror