Some people I'd like you to meet

Halloweeeeeeeeeeeen movies.  Monsters and that.  YEAH!

I love monsters, me.

From being terrified of Daleks at the age of five, to being terrified of Smash Martians at the age of five, to being terrified of Rainbow at the age of 42, monsters have kept me nervous and spellbound all my life.  The first dreams I had were about monsters.  Clown monsters.  Puppet monsters.  A man with a painted face called the Carrot Man (he ate carrots and sometimes people).  A thing like an egg with teeth.  I suffer from night terrors (yet another autism symptom, it turns out - possibly triggered by my hypersenses kicking in during deep sleep, apparently) and you'd think I'd run like bloody hell from looking at the wretched growling things in the real world.  But no.  I just can't keep away.

So lists; dated, everyone's done them five years ago.  Bugger off then.  I've got chronic toothache and I couldn't give a fuck what you think.  These are some monsters.  Perhaps not the best or the most famous.  But some of them are nicely obscure and may encourage you to watch a little further.

THIS IS THE LIST OF THE MOST GHOST TRANSMISSIONY MONSTERS THAT THERE EVER COULD BE, PROBABLY, WRITTEN USING WORDS IN SENTENCE USING MY MIND AND HANDS MAINLY

There is no order.  Neither in the list, nor in human existence.  There will be some spoilers.

10) The Thing in the Rocking Chair: Baby (part of the Beasts series)
Jesus.  Beasts was an anthology series written by Nigel Kneale, a man whose work I like a lot, even though he appears to despise humanity.  Seriously, about 90% of his protagonists are foul, violent, corrupt, broken, debauched, shallow, cruel or being controlled by alien meteor slugs.
Baby is an episode of this series.  I'm not going to spoil it, much.  It's all about the atmosphere.  There's this couple, renovating a remote country cottage.  The house has a History of Bad Stuff.  Spooky things happen, usually off screen.  Then at the end...well.  There's a Thing.  In a rocking chair.  I watched this as a cynical, media literate teacher of film, at the age of 38.  And pretty much shat myself.  It's fucking horrible.

9)  The Thing in the Corridor: The Stone Tape
Nigel Kneale again, I'm afraid.  The Stone Tape is legendary; if you read this blog regularly and you've never watched it, please seek it out.  You're in for an early 70s treat.  Short version; science team try to analyse a haunted house, convinced that they're onto a new form of technology and that ghosts are mainly just recordings impressed onto stone structures.  You will be unsurprised to learn that things go wrong.  Very wrong.  The theory is correct, but that recording of the ghosts?  It belonged to...something else.  Something we don't really see.  Something dark with what might be glowing eyes or what might be just little balls of bright light.  The Thing in the Corridor.  It needs a new recording now...

I'm aware that this isn't a corridor. The Thing is OUTSIDE, alright?  It hasn't got there yet.

8)  A big pile of entrails that kills you with swan puppets: Sapphire and Steel 
Sapphire and Steel had lots of great monsters; it's just that they tended to be abstract.  Little bits of light that bring nursery rhymes to life using dead Roundhead soldiers.  A cloud of darkness that makes you relive WW1 deaths.  Mr Shape, about whom I blogged long ago (he really should have his own entry here, but I don't want to spoil his papery horror any more - search the archives if you want to read about him).
So instead, I decided to lead with the aforementioned pile of entrails.  It's not a subtle story.  The last, agonised, vivisected fragments of animal life on earth hijack a time machine and wreak unsettling havoc on their tormentors.  They bring things to life and fuck with time and space generally.  I could cope with all this at 7pm on a weeknight, but not the creature's manifestation as a big pile of guts, intercut with slaughterhouse footage.

And yes.  It turns a pillow into a swan puppet and tries to peck Steel to death.  It also wins at the end, to my great delight.

A swan puppet monster, yesterday.

7) Smash Martians.  Metal.  Knives.

6) The Space Ghost Monster: Look and Read
Look and Read is a schools' TV show.  The Boy from Space is a serial it ran.  They showed it once in 1973 and again in 1981; rather brilliantly, the repeat was framed with the now adult actors playing the same parts and remembering that long ago summer when they met aliens in the woods.  This premise has haunted my imagination for years.  Firstly, it speaks to me about the power of childhood memory.  If you were part of a kids' TV adventure, would you believe it when you grew up?  Or would you try to forget it? For what it's worth, that's a tiny aspect of the plot of Alan Garner's astonishing and beautiful novel Boneland.

Secondly, the stilted "only use 50 basic words" script comes across as though it contains hidden esoteric meanings.  Strange looks to camera and stress on lines like "they'd think we were making it all up", in a way that suggests some comment on metafiction and childhood perceptions.  Or at least, it does if you're watching it on DVD in 2015 and you're an autistic English/Film teacher with a Grant Morrison obsession.

This week; opening the third eye to explore the higher realms.  Have your drills ready.

It's got two great monsters in it.  One's more of a villain: the Tall Spaceman (I like to think he's related to the Tall Man from Phantasm) and a cartoon ghost monster that crops up in the animated educations sequences.  The Tall Spaceman creeps around, hides in bushes, fires energy weapons at classic cars and generally does alien abduction stuff.  The cartoon ghost monster eats other cartoon characters in an attempt to teach tenses and so forth.
I was shit scared of the cartoon monster.  Thought the Tall Spaceman was kinda cool. Like a BBC Terminator.

5) Mr. Babadook: The Babadook
A recent film!  A modern text!
The Babadook is WONDERFUL.  It's one of the best, and most moving, horror films I've ever seen.  I don't want to tell you anything about it.  Mr. Babadook sneaks into your house in a pop up book.  He has his own special rhymes.  So he's a bloody great monster, in all his funny disguises.  But this is a film about class and gender and mental health and isolation.  And the ending...so much more than just another jump scare and cut to black.  So much deeper.  It made me cry, in an oddly happy way.  There's a metaphor in there and it spoke to me on a very primal and powerful level.  Like the film repeats, you can't get rid of the Babadook.  You really can't.  So maybe you need to think about that, and see beyond the essentially meaningless good/evil, sane/insane binary oppositions we fill our culture with.  WATCH THIS FILM.

Yes.  Watch the film.  So my fancy dress idea makes sense.

4) The Sheet: Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You
M.R. James.  You devil, you.  The stories are wonderful.  This 1960s adaptation is astonishing.  The 21st century version is shite.
However, this small, slow, monochrome story of a lonely, mumbling academic who unwittingly stirs up a horrid spectral force in a deserted, out-of-season seaside town leaves quite a few viewers with the desire to sleep with the light on.  It's all about the sleep.  And the way your bedclothes get all messed up.  And the word "dirty", and having alone time.  It's possible there may be a subtext.
The monster is a filthy bedsheet that groans and roars, except that we suddenly understand the sounds are the noises that our terrified, thumb-sucking protagonist is making.  Until a big man bursts in and saves him, causing the dirty sheets, which have risen up high, to lie back down again.
Like I say, I'm sure that there's some hidden agenda here, but I just can't spot it.

3) The Thing in the Map: Mr. Humphries and his Inheritance
More M.R. James.  This wasn't even a 'real' adaptation; it was a schools' TV job for ITV, designed to demonstrate the power of music in a film piece.  Presumably, they used this story as it was out of copyright.  Dude inherits big house, with spooky maze.  Dude investigates and finds evidence of dodgy ancestor doing dodgy magicy things in the maze.  Dude makes map of maze.  One night, map comes to life and horrible rotting face claymation zombie ghoul thing comes out of it.  Dude screams.  Your current author howls in terror at the age of six on a sick day from school and never, ever forgets it.
Please note: I use the word 'dude' in the correct sense of 'a city dweller unused to country ways', as in 'dude ranch' because I am ridiculous.

Just imagine what it could have been like.  Go on.

2) Everything on Dramarama ever: Dramarama
Possessed sailor dolls.  Evil reflections.  Malevolent invisible forces that mess with your Scrabble game to send threatening notes.  The voice of God on a radio phone in.  Thanks for fucking with us so much, Dramarama.  Because everyone expects a cheap version of Poltergeist to be on at 4:45 in the afternoon, don't they?

1)  The Greatest Monster of Them All:  but you'll have to watch from 1:29:20 in to find out.  Or watch the whole thing.  It's got VINCENT PRICE in it, you fools.  Why would you not watch Vincent Price at Halloween?
NB: it might not be a massive surprise.  I mean, they don't announce "It's...Dracula!" or anything like that. It would be good if they did.   But the don't.  However, this is The Monster Club and it needs watching like anything, because it's the most fantastic fusion of 40s/50s/60s/70s horror tropes and stars with the styles, fashions and dreadful music of the early 1980s.

Vincent!

And yeah, I could have said the Tall Man (who's actually my personal favourite) or Dracula (Lugosi?  Lee?) or any of the classic Universal monsters, or the Daleks.  But the thing is; I find all those monsters oddly re-assuring.  The ones above?  They're the ones that got to me, just a bit.  Writing about them gave me a little, genuine chill.  Just a flicker of unease that's going to stay with me for a while tonight.

Well, apart from the last one, that is.

Morningside: if you lived here, you'd be dead by now

When we're small, we feel powerless.  And yet, we have the freedom to imagine, to create our own worlds and live in them, something that a lot of people sadly lose as they grow older.  The downside to that mental freedom is that we tend to populate our worlds with monsters.

Movie monsters and threats tend to reflect adolescent and adult fears.  The fear of invasion, home or the body itself; the fear of disease, of loss.  Many horror texts touch on the fear of the poor, of the working class; when this is done well (Night of the Living Dead), a good film-maker can explore the nature of class conflict.  When it's done badly, you end up with Eden Lake or Them, revolting films about how horrible all poor children are.

But few films really touch on the deep fears of children in a way that strikes a chord with our memories and experiences.  The Babadook is one; I'll be writing about that example soon.  Wes Craven's New Nightmare is another.  These are texts that present childhood terror as being about something more than just the monster in the closet, which is ironic as they both feature some of the best screen monsters of all time.

Tonight, the Celluloid Screams festival is showing one of the greatest horror movies to examine this theme: Phantasm.  Tragically,it's on at 2:30AM and I don't see myself being able to make that, especially given the state of my car at the moment; it seems a little too metafictional to go to a horror movie event with a car that might break down at any moment, miles from anywhere (which is entirely possible, if I take a long and inexplicable detour over the moors, rather than just driving the five minutes direct route home).  Also, 2:30 AM.

Naturally, spoilers will follow.

Phantasm is the story of Michael, a troubled child with a tragic backstory.  It appears that his parents died in car accident.  His older brother Jody has to return from living a rather vague travelling party lifestyle to look after him in small town America.  And this is the quietest small town ever; it seems to be an eternal summer's day when everyone else is on holiday, the schools and shops are closed, a distinctly unsettling 1979 early closing Thursday for ever and ever.  Jody's frustration at being imprisoned here radiates from the screen; he spends all his time working on a very fast car, riding his bike, or drinking at what looks like the only bar in town.  Michael isn't oblivious to this and spends much of the early part of the movie in a state of anxiety that his only relative is about to leave without him; the terror of abandonment runs through every scene.  I've read some reports that suggest that this was the original focus of the film and that the supernatural elements fell into place almost accidentally.

Everything so far in the movie has the texture of a dream; the kind where you run to meet your friends but they've long gone and you're left alone.  Everyone has that dream, right?  Everyone?  Um?

And this is where it gets really good.  This is where one of the great (under-rated) cinematic monsters shows up.

Best.  Eyebrow.  Ever.

See, Michael becomes convinced that there's something weird in the local cemetery.  He starts spying on the mausoleum there and discovers the chief undertaker is (a) ridiculously tall and (b) inhumanly strong.  Oh, and the bodies are vanishing from the graves.  And peculiar little hooded figures keep running through there at night.  And someone's stabbing young men to death during late night graveyard sex.

So then it all goes wild and I'll leave you to discover more for yourself; I'll not even mention the spheres.   You'll know them when you see them.  They are FANTASTIC.  Or the old witch lady who seems to control reality.  Or the tuning fork gateway.  Or what's in the barrels.  Or the Lavender Lady.  Or the Wasp Finger.

But I will mention Reggie.  He's the ice-cream man.  He's balding and puzzled and resolutely normal, a working class hero who refuses to give in.  He stoically accepts all the crazy stuff and joins with Mike and Jody to defeat...well what?  The Tall Man?  Really?  Is that REALLY what this movie is about?

No more spoilers, but towards the end, the action starts to follow the logic of a dream rather than the logic of cinematic narrative.  Each terror Mike must face seems symbolic; the sexually alluring Lavender Lady, the clawing hands of the earth, the Tall Man himself, waiting at the end of the journey.  Possibly.  The terrors we face as we move from childhood are all waiting in the forest at the end of this story.

Well, not quite the end.  The final terror, the one Mike has to face at the very conclusion; that's something worse than a supernatural undertaker.  Much worse.  I suppose some people might find the revelations dull or predictable or just plain silly; personally, I think the ending is moving and powerful.  Look at the way the characters are filmed at the conclusion of the last fight scene.  The camera is telling you something about the story, the distance between the brothers.  It's quite beautiful and I never get tired of watching it.

Some of the movie may seem cliched; I reckon that this is where many of those cliches were actually born, the final shot in particular (which is VERY similar to a much more famous final moment from another much more popular film, made a couple of years later).

I love this film, so much.  It doesn't bother with explanations.  This is happening.  Deal with it.  All these years later, there are still questions; who's the old Witch Lady and how does she make things vanish into thin air?  What is the Tall Man, exactly?  Where's the Red World (you'll see)?  And what exactly was happening all along?

Don Coscarelli, the mind behind this movie, abruptly altered the VERY end moments in order to dilute the emotional charge.  We'd originally have ended with a return to reality.  The dream would have ended.  Forget that!  Coscarelli went with diving further into the nightmare and as a result, we got four sequels.  They aren't quite as great as the original, but they're imaginative, gory, silly, entertaining and they uphold the tradition of ditching narrative sense, cause/effect and exposition (except when the script deliberately starts contradicting itself).  They have largely the same cast from the original and the story continues in real time.  Phantasm 5 was completed a few months ago; it's rumoured to be the final conclusion to the sequence.

I am unrealistically excited about this.  You've been warned.

The fourth movie brilliantly used unseen footage from the original to create a peculiar sense of doubt about the narrative; how much of this is "happening" and how much is the traumatised night terrors of a small boy in 1979?  I've always thought that the best interpretation is a simple one; remember how confusing and nightmarish the adult world sometimes seemed when you were young?

Oh, those final lines:

Ice-cream man...it's all in his head.

and

It's just the wind.

Gives me the chills every time.  Van drives off into the small town 1970s night, red tail lights the last thing we see.  Minimalist theme kicks in.  Turn the lights on.






ERRATA: last time I talked about John Carpenter directing Halloween 3.  He didn't.  He was the producer.  Tommy Lee Wallace directed the movie.  I doubt he'll ever read this, so I think we got away with it.  Don't tell the horror film police.

Octoberish 1

Everything's just the walking dead.  Look at Halloween and notice that every last little aspect of it, right back to theoretical Samhain celebrations is about the dead coming back to pester the living.

Many writers have tried to establish a connection between handing out sweets/putting lanterns out and the ancient offerings we conjecture might have been offered to the spirits on dark autumn nights long ago.  The drive behind these narratives is to validate Halloween, to authenticate it as an echo of ancient religious activity.

Which is missing the point on a huge scale.  The emotional force that drives dressing up scary/transgressive and wandering around in the dark and the cold is not an echo or a memory of anything; it's precisely the same function.  We can't know what went through the head of anyone who may have hypothetically followed similar ritual patterns 1500 years ago (or whenever).  Who are we to say that they believed fervently, evangelically in the power of the spirits of the dark, in the cold days when the leaves change?  Might they not have just been enjoying a night in that liminal half state, when ghost stories might just come true and it feels like a celebration is all the more needed?

RuPaul Charles once said that he disliked Halloween; he felt that it was marginalising and reducing the power of dressing up.  To paraphrase, we're born naked and everything else is drag.  Therefore, to just have one night when it's OK to assume another form is to diminish the importance of costume, of drama.  Or, as one might say, every night should be Halloween.

He could well have a point; looking at the average Halloween night out, there seems to be precious little in the way of scares.  Likewise, the costumes aren't always as frightening or transgressive as they might be; they allow a certain degree of illusionary freedom, to dress as a different gender to that which the individual does not always identify with, or to dress in a manner that mainstream society might view as unusually sexually provocative.  In other words, a certain licence is granted, albeit an illusionary one; it should go without saying that, as RuPaul might argue, anyone who needs to wait to Halloween to express their sexuality (or any interpretation or exploration thereof) in a manner of their choosing is deeply unfortunate (again, I might add a caveat that many people are restrained in this by other social factors around them and that occasions like Halloween could allow a freedom denied by forces outside the control of the individual.  In other words, you can drag up without getting beaten up).

Might Halloween become truly transgressive?  I don't have the time or the academic might to explore the concept of the masked, transgressive, frightening, healing shaman figure in enough detail, but, all the arguments above notwithstanding, there is something to be said for the idea of the night where everyone becomes a masked shaman.  It just needs to be a little scarier, is all.

Halloween not scary enough?  Samhain night?  Two rhetorical questions designed to provoke a cinematic answer.

Took my time, didn't I?  Watch the Magic Pumpkin.

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.  Oh, what could have been!  John Carpenter is an unfairly maligned figure in cinema.  There's a much repeated line of argument that his best work was done by the mid 1980s and the rest has just been a sad decline.  Nonsense.  There's something interesting, or disturbing, or original in every film he's ever made.  Ghosts of Mars is a space western with zombie Martian demon monsters.  The Mouth of Madness is genius metafiction for Stephen King obsessives.  If you've not seen Cigarette Burns, go and find a copy now, it's only an hour long.

Anyway, having made Halloween and defined the slasher film forever, Carpenter wanted, not unreasonably, to move on.  He returned to what was beginning to look like a franchise, but had no interest in Michael Myers stabbing people up anymore; his idea was a truly fantastic one.  Every year, make another Halloween film.  Release it around Halloween (duh).  Every film to have a completely different plot and, somewhere in the movie, you can catch a glimpse of the previous Halloween film playing on TV or something.

(It just occurred to me that having to write "every movie to have a different plot" as though that's a wild and unusual idea says something rather dull about the movie industry, but, self-referentially enough, making that point is in itself a cliche, so this paragraph is now infinitely regressing and you will never finish reading it.)

So, Halloween 3 is a fine tale which I will not spoil more than is necessary.  Suffice to say, we have a man who is very angry at the commercialisation of his favourite celebration and plots a horrible revenge on American consumer society.  Now, again without spoiling too much, let's not pull our punches; his planned revenge really, really is horrible.  Perhaps it's because this is the first horror film I ever saw, but this film crosses that boundary into a quite astonishingly dark place, if you let yourself think about it too much.  Admittedly, some of the execution (of the executions, heh) leaves a little to be desired, but many of the sequences have a shocking edge that gets right under the skin.

As it were.

Interestingly, it's one of the films where everything isn't the walking dead; the monsters here are truly monstrous, but they're in disguise, in suits and ties and smiles and the glad-hand.  Underneath is a seething mass of corruption.  When you watch the Magic Pumpkin, it's all going to come to the surface.  The surface of you.


What's the point of this entry, beyond weird rants about dressing up, clockwork murderers (seriously, watch it, you'll see) and trying to avoid the word "I" as much as possible?

October is my favourite month of the year.  No surprise.  Probably said it before.  This year, the world seems a bit oppressive, both figuratively and literally.  The savage removal of the rights of the individual, piece by piece; I'm watching as the trade union freedoms that generations of my family fought for are being ripped away.  The schools system that I pretty much live for is dying right in front of me.  The poor are being told that no-one cares and it's their duty to sweat and die, so that the world can carry on exactly the same as it did last year.

It all got a bit much.  Alongside lots of other things, some of which were a bit Autism related.  I just hit the point of figuring out "aha!  I've actually got a really fucking serious disability and, oh, by the way, lots of those issues you have that you've always thought you might be able to deal with and get over?  Nah, that's just your brain doing what it's always going to.  Enjoy those team meetings when you not only want to scream, but you have to bite into your lip and clench your fists to stop yourself 'cause that feeling's never going away".

In the light of all that, you know what made me feel better?  What gave me back some fighting strength?  What's putting me back on track?

I watched Night of the Living Dead.  And realised something.

I'm not normal.
I'm transgressive in so many ways.
People are offended by me, for lots of reasons that I'm still feeling a bit sensitive about, so we'll leave it at that for now.  Let anyone else be whatever they want to be, but I'm the zombie, I'm Halloween.  I've got a pumpkin for a head and I'm the living dead, I'm Ghoulhardi and Ivy Rorschach.

Not bowing down to gods and spirits but acting like we're both, because we're all so much better than we think we are.  And the scare stories won't get us to behave, won't get us to follow the dress code and the gender code and the keep your head down code, no, they'll be real scare stories about ghosts and skeletons that remind us that this is a very short life indeed and we intend to make it merry.  For EVERYONE.

And this is Halloween and I'm going to celebrate it so much that Halloween runs right through until September 2016.

So Ghost Transmissions: next time, I'm unpicking one of the real greats of horror cinema, and a movie that's got a lot more to say than you might think: tune in next time for PHANTASM!


Pleasant screams, monsters.