Carpenter Carpet Capsules: HALLOWEEN III, YOU'RE NEXT, MACHETE KILLS, THE OCTAGON

"For me it's simply an exercise in improvisation, since I can't read or write music - I just make it up as I go along. I think of the orchestral stuff as 'carpet' music - I lay a "carpet" under the scenes - it doesn't get in the way," -- John Carpenter (on scoring his own movies)

Horror has never been about moving forward, or being in the present, it's about the past reaching back up from the unclaimed freight basement to pull us back down, and so it's always the simple, insistent, slightly-off scores that wow us. A simple repeating riff can send chills down a nation's spine; a harmonica and single sustained twang of an electric guitar can blow our minds during a climactic western showdown. Alas, most filmmakers hire 'real musicians' for their scores, which means complicated strings micro-managing our emotional responses. As Carpenter's quote above makes clear, knowing too much about writing music and composing complex melodics can be a drawback. Less is more, a single crazy squiggling synth line or sustained Morricone guitar note is worth most full-bodied orchestral John Williams pomp. Showing off all the stuff you learned in Juliard doesn't make your work 'better' than self-taught savants like Carpenter. Let's look at these four films I've seen the last few days, united by badass music scores if nothing else.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH

1982 - Written and Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace

**1/2

Halloween III: Season of the Witch's score is one of those great John Carpenter-Alan Howarth percolators, rich with the same kind of 303 cyclic rumblings and unease-producing synth drones that are so mind-blowing and ingeniously simple in Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York. Thought there are some shrill notes here that are less fun and less carpet-like and more like nails on a blackboard, liable to aggravate your tooth fillings, including the diegetic TV commercial jingle for the Silver Shamrock mask collection (a "London Bridge is Falling Down" if remade by Raymond Scott in his "Music for Baby" phase). Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace (Carpenter's Christian Nyby) makes some really misguided choices, including an unscary bouncy headache music plays over some otherwise superlatively unsettling trick-or-treating shots as the sun goes down in an array of Los Angeles suburbs (onscreen text declares they are other cities but they're clearly all the same L.A. neighborhood); elsewhere it sounds like a five year-old trying to duet with a car alarm on a triangle.

Supposedly Nigel Kneale, the British sci fi writer genius behind Quartermass and the Pit, started the script for this but wound up taking his name off. It's clear whomever came up with the concept didn't understand Halloween or how we in the USA consider a shamrock anachronistic in any month but March. Maybe Silver Shamrock could have sold Guy Fawkes masks and have this be set in Britain? That might make more sense (Britain doesn't have Halloween). The jingle could have been "always remember / the fifth of November / because you'll be dead / just five days earlier" --I just made that up.

A lot of this film's detractors glide over all that to focus on the lack of Michael Myers. I have no problem with it, but I do have a problem with being expected to believe anyone would want a giant shamrock button affixed on the back of their Halloween mask like they were just down at the St. Patrick's Day parade, and neither would they want to be one of only three mask options. "Don't you have any Halloween spirit?" a bar patron asks when the proprietor changes the channel from the awful commercial. What the hell does "London Bridges" with a bouncing shamrock have to do with goddamned Halloween spirit?

I hadn't deigned to see this since first hating on it back in the 80s when it premiered on TV, and even then, as a kid, the illogic of the plot made it hard to follow, but I've been reading good things on the internet --ooh you should give it a second chance blah blah ---well, I'm glad I did, for the most part BUT there's a lot of dumb decision-making involved with the central gimmick besides the shamrock and song: the villain's plans hinge on every kid in America sitting around the house at nine PM, wearing a stifling latex mask while watching TV to wait for the 'big giveaway' --there's no clear reason why or how the masks would help one get a prize for watching, and no kid is going to sweat it out in a hot latex mask watching TV for more than a minute at a time; and it gets worse, Silver Shamrock makes only three mask types for Halloween--skull, pumpkin, and a witch (for the girls)--and no kid is going to see a selection of three lame masks and think, gee- I'd love to look exactly like a third of my class. One of the frustrated buyers at the motel complains that her four year-old was playing with the mask and the shamrock design logo chip fell off -- who the freak cares? Will people not get scared if the label falls off your ghostly bed sheet?

Ho ho Ho! Merry Xmas! 

I wish there were more great early John Carpenter films; I wish this was one of them and parts are, such as the typically refreshing and Carptenter-ish no-nonsense hotel hook-up between mystified Dr. Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin, the daughter of an early victim of killer automaton-like agents of Silver Shamrock, and there's some good use of tick-tock momentum, the sense of the hotel room as a base of operations where the pair hook up and plan their attack but another demerit for the tiresome cliche of his ex-wife Linda, who we most often hear badgering him on the phone about missing junior's recital or whatever the hell- it's shrill and unneeded, generating the kind of rote bad vibes lesser directors feel they need, but Hawks and usually Carpenter avoid such nonsense; also the cheap shock of the penultimate robot attack that rolls against most all logic and whatever affection may have come over us for this cute, easygoing and Hawksian chick. And our respect for the way Atkins handles himself on the tour is lost when he thinks he should go use the Santa Mira hotel phone to call the cops, after learning from the bum he met that the Shamrock controls everything via cameras and bugged phones!  He seems surprised when the call doesn't go through. Come on, dude! You're throwing my good faith right out the window.

But if you can forget all the ridiculous nonsense, whole chunks of the film have the groovy Carpenter vibe, especially when it's just Atkins and Nelkin driving and hanging out in their room, bluffing their way into tours of the factory with the aplomb of a pair of Hitchcockian lovers-on-the-run. Even freaked out and scared as they might be, they're cool, rational, adult, and no drama. Atkins' shaggy Nick Nolte-ish charm in full effect, "It's getting late, I could go for a drink," how often do you hear a shaggy dog hero of a horror movie say that and have it not be a sign he's an alcoholic? I like that even after they shag he's going out late to score a bottle of booze, just like I would have done, and remembering the ice bucket on his way back too, too, --that's the kind of shit Carpenter probably added --and the cute hook-up where even the nudity and showering is emotionally grounding and nice rather than just merely exploitative and I love the cool dead isolation the Northern California town in the setting sun and utter stillness at night--a lowdown town recalling the wastelands of Assault on Precinct 13, They Live and Prince of Darkness, and near no interesting park or lake; I've driven through--as that awesome music plays, that shit's all primo gold. As the evil genius mastermind Cochran, Dan O'Herlihy exudes great Celtic charm that can oscillate to reptilian evil so that his whole countenance seems to shape-shift and the cheery paternal charm in his voice drops away to reveal a base line of unperturbed malevolence -- he does after all plan to kill almost all the children in the USA. "It's a joke, you see, on the children!" He even gets in a great creepy monologue about the 'real' Halloween and the last time such a large sacrifice occurred, and "the streets ran red with the blood of animals and children... In the end, we don't decide these things, you know..."

I suppose it's wishful thinking to hope for a 'producer's cut' that replaces the anachronistic elements and makes the penultimate anticlimax less dispiriting (by which I hope you understand I do NOT mean less apocalyptic and 'horrifying,' just nicer to the spirit of the Hawks-Carpenterian feminine and less a kind of last minute abandoning of originality to just homage in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and hope for the best). Alas - fans of the first Halloween--and even the second-- still hated it, even so. The problems run deep: a guy with a mask and kinfe chasing an unmasked kid with a knife is scary but kids wearing masks watching a demon TV signal is not --it's too abstract --we have to see their faces, know their names, see them scared but brave. The kids here are all pretty one-dimensional cliches, and once the masks are on, they more or less cease to matter. It could have been terrifying but the mask kills it.

Luckily, there's that carpet.

Dig the subliminal VHS box retro vibe (the carpet lip almost a spine crease)

YOU'RE NEXT (2011)

****

Getting back to the idea of the right, simple but strong carpet being so integral to horror, You're Next has one of the best in recent memory-- a vaguely retro synth 303 burbling, eerie drones that are unnerving but never annoying-- it's enough to give one hope for horror's future-past, not that You're Next is exactly horror as opposed to a 'thriller'--there's no repressed to return--but it's certainly creepy, not least for the way we don't know whom to trust or root for and everyone is characterized in a way that's both sympathetic and the reverse, like real people, a family who can devolve into shouting matches at the drop of a pin and be calm a minute later- like my family! The cast is great and I can't really tell you anything else without spoiling it. AJ Bowen, whom I did not care for in Ti West's otherwise nearly sublime House of the Devil, is pitch perfect here, and Ti West himself shows up as one of the heirs. Also appearing is Calvin Reeder who made the genuinely nightmarish and surreal near-sublime The Oregonian (review here), and Larry Fessenden, whom I did not care for as the smug hipster hotelier, chickenshit ghost-hunter, and lame wooer in West's The Innkeepers. But I hear good things about his horror film, Habit. As long as he combs and occasionally washes his hair in future outings, we should be fine.

My brother Fred had that same brass rubbing (far right)

I haven't seen any of Missouri filmmaker Adam Wingard's other films either, but they look like a grim lot. You're Next was completed in 2011 but wasn't released here 'til last year, which is a goddamned shame as this is a future classic. Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption and I love that none of the characters are entirely sympathetic or unsympathetic; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. What else can I tell you that wouldn't spoil what may be the best thriller-chiller since The Descent? Or at least, Cabin in the Woods? What a treat having 80s cult horror favorite Barbabara Campton as the mom - you may remember her as the badass dominatrix from From Beyond! She still looks damn good.

Barbrara Crampton - top - You're Next (2011), bottom: From Beyond (1986)

MACHETE KILLS!!
2013 - ***1/2

Hard to believe now, but there was a time I found Sofia Vargara shrill and grating --her deafening voice and exaggerated English enunciation brought back memories of my Argentine ex-wife making fun of Yankee accents -- but in Machete Kills! Vagara tones it down as a violent madame of a high end Mexican brothel, able modulating a playful dominatrix simmer into a vengeful cannibal trash cinema boil without ever waking the frog, as it were, or hurting my ears, thus earning my devotion now and forever. Even the sophomoric breastplate machine gun couldn't dampen my awe.

So hell yeah Roberto Rodriguez is still in the game. Getting younger as he ages, he's at the point now where Carpenter hasn't been since Ghosts of Mars. Planet Terror isn't only the better of the two Grindhouse films, it's up there with Spider Baby, Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, and City of the Living Dead. I liked Machete, too, but Kills! is even ballsier; it has less to prove, throwing aside even the usual revenge boilerplate plot and going for a Machete in Space Part Part I angle (the second part being advertised in the opening trailer) having Machete recruited by the president (Emilio Estevez's brother Carlos); Amber Heard is tight like a noose as Miss San Antonio; Lady Gaga is top shelf as the assassin El Camaleón --with Cuba Gooding Jr., Antonio Banderas, and Walton Goggins some of her thousand faces. Perhaps the coolest and most original angle is that the premiero uno (Damien Bashiro) of the first batch of bad guys has a split personality, only one of which is a suicidal psychotic killer, and has a missile launch activator button attached to his heart, triggered to fire missiles at the White House and Russia if he should die or try to defuse it; so Machete ends up going to ludicrous extremes to keep him alive, which all leads to high hilarity and ballsy greatness culminating with Mel Gibson as a light saber-wielding hybrid of Steve Jobs and Drax from Moonraker.

Like the marvelous Planet Terror (which had a great 'carpet' score reminiscent of both the best Carpenter and Fabio Frizzi) there's a great score by Rodriguez and collaborator Carl Thiel here, and countless nods to great trash films old and new. I counted, among others: They Call Her One Eye, Skyfall, Live and Let Die, Rolling Thunder, High Risk, Escape from LA, The Professionals, Drive, Coffy, Switchblade Sisters, The Warriors, Enter the Dragon, The Five Deadly Venoms, and even Lucha Libre, Fantastic Four (the John Byrne-era comics, not the movies) and of course Star Wars, which Gibson's Drax-Jobs loves so much he even has a working X-34 Landspeeder. It's all here, all Mexicanized and, like Planet Terror, stacked with a hot girl cast rocking nice midriffs.

Hold up, you say, that sounds sexist. Yes, but the liberal arts-feminist squirmer like myself found nothing offensive, for Rodriguez loves strong women the way Jack Hill, or Hawks, or Russ Meyer does, i.e. free of corny John Ford sentiment, children, bossy buzzkill safety-first harridanism, sleazy objectification, or last minute bad faith dependence. I bet, for example, Pauline Kael would have loved Machete Kills, and Molly Haskell still might. Rodriguez's women get whole monologues to assert their power and independence and the actresses relish every syllable. Like the casts in Hawks, Hill, and Carpenter films, everyone seems to be having a grand time on set, and very little looks like CGI or Hollywood pasteurized. The great Tom Savini makes sure blood splatters the old fashioned way, and every head is on straight before it's sliced off. Explosions are often rendered through ye olde drive-in trailer superimposition variety, and RR leaves the blue outlines in, as the nature of non-digital superimposition demands, and that we fans love, and the color is rich and vivid like a restored Corbucci. It ends on a cliffhanger ala The Street Fighter, Kill Bill, or Nymphomaniac, but by then I felt pretty sated, bloodlust-wise. You should too. 'lessen you're a Commie. 'Cuz the film's only made back half it's budget so far --will the trilogy be unbroken? 

THE OCTAGON

(1980) - **1/2

There was a time when Chuck Norris was every kid's friend, instead of merely liberalism's enemy and a hipster objet d'curiosity. We'd all seen him jump up as a car is trying to run him down and kick the driver through the windshield on a TV commercial that played constantly during our cartoons in 1978 for Good Guys Wear Black. We all wanted to see it, and could -- it was PG. But it sucked - the cool parts were all in the commercial. So then came The Octagon, this time rate R and with more fights. It has a certain cedar sauna charm and is on Netflix streaming and looks reasonably remastered for HD - and it's dorky fun enough for a low key rainy Saturday afternoon or day off from work, while you clean your guns.

And best of all, it's deadpan funny-paranoid. The ominous lack of music, weird looks, close-ups of keys all portend some dire action is about to erupt any moment, but is it just that Norris is a terrible actor, unable to convey any emotion, or say anything of interest, and the car keys exchanged are the best he can do in his delicate fighting condition by way of Hawksian cigarettes and drinks with the Patty Hearst-ish composite heiress love interest, Justine (Karen Carlson, with more than a faint air of Ellen Burstyn)? The mercs working for Lee Van Cleef (hired as her bodyguards), an old buddy of Chuck's, are all great rugged cowboy character actors--they probably tied up Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch a dozen times each, but I can't remember their names--and there's romance blooming as Norris looks out for Justine, too, but since Norris can't smoke or drink he pays for it in jumpiness: a mop handle looming into the foreground rattles him like it's a bo staff in some yet unseen assassins gloved hands; a car backfiring rattles Justine and therefore him. And he has a problem of stuttering echo within his inner thoughts. How do I know? Because we get to hear them-em-em-em. Here's a sample:

"A.J.-j-j-, Justine-ne-ne, you wouldn't even know each other-r-r-r if not for me-me-me- I'm the bridge-ge-ge..."

Dick Halligan's loping score, when it does show up, pilfers from Ennio Morricone but at least he's stealing from the best. Still, it's kind of a bummer watching Norris spending the bulk of the movie refusing to help various women who beseech his aid in killing a terrorist ninja trainer, just because said trainer just happens to be his own brother. It's cool that the mercs being trained by the ninjas finally get weary of the abuse on their own, and when they see their supposed leader being a coward in a one-on-one with Chuck, needing four ninjas on his side plus unfair weapon advantage, they turn on the guards and start kicking ass, led by the hot furry Palestinian trainee named Aura (Carol Bagdasarian). Damn right.

For all the hype, Norris is a slow fighter. We have to take his word, roundhouse kicks aside, that he's actually a black belt in anything, but that's okay. Maybe he doesn't want to accidentally hurt any of his stunt men, or is just way too used to demonstrating moves to classes of grasshoppers rather than fighting, and most of the fights take place on sand or in carpeted domiciles so no one seems to get hurt when they fall either, but it's diverting to see the ninjas pop up out of the torch-lit outer darkness from sandy holes under freshly laid corpses and so forth, compelling me to wonder if they just hang out in there all night in case a Chuck happens by. Sounds rather dull. The Octagon itself is just a space where ninjas are trained in some deleted scene; its sandy floor and wooden beams  are varnished by the time of the final fight, giving everything a dusky woodsy look like the clinic in Cronenberg's The Brood. If you like rustic wood finish and cozy exteriors, see them as a double feature, and spray some bleach and patchouli in the air, and you'll think you're soaking in it in a cedar sauna. And isn't that what good bad trash movies are all about-out-out?

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Tick-Tock Momentum: PHANTASM (1979)

Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing, originally created in westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks and used first in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter. The ideal tick-tockalism begins anywhere from 24 hours to the late afternoon before the climactic anticipatory moment that night, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness. (Named from the Silence of the Lambs quote, "Pity about poor Catherine, though. Tick-Tock")

Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the age of drive-in 70s-80s to resonate to the setting sun's weird power, the anticipation of scares, and of being able to say you'd seen it. Parents opening their coolers of beer and lawn chairs as the sun's last rays streaked away over head; shaky summaries of other horror movies whispered about by the swing set; the unsurmountable escape wall of white screen overhead, a magnet for the white of our eyes; the booming dim echo of the speakerboxes. A child's imagination can be more real, more vivid, than an adult's reality, especially if that child grows up before cell phones or VCRs. The films of the drive-in era seemed to understand this, to know their stories would be embellished a thousandfold as recess gossip, so the special effects needed only suggest things. We filled in the blanks and in the process merged them into our own nightmares. Such a movie was Phantasm; no one had seen it, but none of us could stop talking about how scary it was.

Ruscha gets it

Anyway, we had seen the trailer.


I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci fi fan reproabates -- the ones like me, who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at E.T. 

Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli made his own tale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls. Rated R as Phantasm may be, it's clearly a kid's nightmare, macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine Grimm Brothers menace and garage lab goo and gore than either. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. Here children run, hide, and fire shotguns through the sun roof of their older brother's Barracuda, and wonder about where the adults are. The weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement makes a fine metaphor for not just where people go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low. We dread having to get a job out there in that mysterious void, the way an old person dreads death, a slow but inexorable escalator into the abyss. And in its way, death is no more or less permanent or terrifying in its uncertainty than the first day of employment.

In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility and being faced with inescapable due dates with destiny. But in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, and felt exposed to the dangers around us, but it made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns the way priests clutch crosses in the thick of an exorcism. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares! Kids are already scared, if they have any brains. Shit is scary out there. Spooky movies just remind them to stay on their guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick them into slackening their grip.  Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details, and we knew nothing was ever as safe as it seems.

Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air.

In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states. 

A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people

"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."

"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)

I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does achieve all on his own is the way he removes any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' He's not just sticking this references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments; Coscarelli's mythos is more paranormally cohesive than any of his predecessors' and more brave. They don't dare answer the big, final curtain question, the one children ask and adults never answer.

Coscarelli answers it, and he goes all the way.

Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after kills foes of various sizes. Quips were stale by the later films, but Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV

Phantasm would be too wild and weird to truly scare like Halloween were it not for Coscarelli's absorption of Carpenter's method as opposed to his madness. They both are auteurs able to understand what 95% of horror filmmakers never do, how to create the sense of something being at stake, which most filmmakers presume means flashbacks, boring breakfasts with the cliche collection of family, etc. Coscarelli and Carpenter know that we need to see whole uninterrupted minutes elapse in their presence, to synchronize ourselves with their rhythms, rather than jumping around in eight different directions like so many horror movies today. No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens. Carpenter and co-screenwriter Debra Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house once it's free free of parents (with Hill taking the time to provide accurate, real life girl dialogue) at which time, checking in on the phone with each other-- that's the tick-tock momentum. Imagine how much less scary it would be if they showed other random people getting knocked off, stressing the blood and body count over character... then you'd have crap like Halloweens 2-21.

Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need one since nature has menstruation to traumatize them with, tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, hazing. But in the 70s our archaic need for initiation was gratified by the dread associated with our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for us to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Nowadays nothing can scare kids except absence.

But in the window right before then, just knowing  hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched a vertigo body drop dread in our spines.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind

The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much and our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange, and seeing the violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])

So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism to the arrival of video rentals. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation need that's stifling your soul; there's no ceremony to mark your courage. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of.

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust. 

Awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, Phantasm leaves us with the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, yet you feel your car is being followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and together you are grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countryside know, or people leaving a very scary movie as one quivering mass edging towards their cars.

To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any John Williams-ish overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything adulthood has to offer.

---------

NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up. 
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)

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It's here, it's mindbending, it's Acidemic #8

This issue: Brecht-Godard-Wood, linked circlets connecting the search for freedom through 'dislodging' cinematic signifiers and turning bare soundstages into ghost ships and surrealist basements. This year's stellar line-up batted down the plate and strewn orchids on the grave of logic.

If through the issue you notice very little Godard, know this: Godard is in all things whether we speak of him or no. There is no going straight from Brecht to Wood. I tried. But my own understanding of film studies comes roundabout through Godard's dedication to Monogram Pictures (whose Return of the Ape Man is discussed) at the start of Breathless. 

Ed Wood by Mick Baltes

Also in this mighty issue: Peter K. Tyson decodes the Brechtian intertexutality of Fassbinder's Lola; teenage Molly Marie Wright rages against the empty-headed CGI of the Total Recall remake vs. the paravegan grandeur of Troll 2. Intertextual frisson erupts as Thomas Duke challenges Roger Ebert's perception of 'flaws' in Edgar G. Ulmer's poverty row classic Detour; Chris Stengl exhumes Pauline Kael's 'lost' review of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and I lament the dryness of David Sterritt's Les Carabiniers commentary track. Film historian David Del Valle discusses the joys and inaccuracies of Tim Burton's Ed Wood while acclaimed Nuyorican poet Tracie Morris expresses her misgivings over Burton's Dark Shadows and praises the original 1,000+ episode TV show. We get insightful probes into the basement surrealism of both Val Letwon's The Ghost Ship (from Ethan Spigland), and Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (from Budd Wilkins). Gregory Cwik discusses metatextual threads in horror via Cabin in the Woods, and I through Halloween.... and through the valley of the shallows of Brecht, we shall find Woodsy depth.

And we learn how Godard's Prénom Carmen explains the truth about UFOs, for, as the great Eros would say, "you didn't actually think you were the only inhabited planet in the universe? How can any race be so stupid?"

And check out Memento Mori, the staggeringly detailed historical action figure comic by our cover artist, Mick Baltes.

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Are You Lonesome, Automaton: Terminator and Halloween vs. Hugo

I am a mechanical man
And I do the best I can
Because I have my Family
   -- Charles Manson ("Mechanical Man")

Was it chance I saw Hugo (2011) and The Terminator (1984) in the same day? Two tales of automatons... one amok and one clockwork, both about going into the past, as it were, to either repair or destroy icons. With amazing actors glassening up their eyes and amazing photographers capturing the play of light therein, you don't have much of a chance to stay unmoved on an emotional Sunday afternoon watching Hugo, but the clockwork momentum and awe and everything coming synchronicitly true was much more machine-like than the pre-CGI Terminator; in other words the science fiction film seems ancient and primitive while the nostalgic look back to the silent film era is futuristic slick --the true 'tech noir'.

Like Scorsese, I know there's no getting past the space-time conundrum of my own memories, and like any film critic / theorist love to dredge long lost gold from beneath the skittering heels of post-industrial society. The resurfaced and belatedly lauded (within the film) Méliès is just perhaps the latest/first example of a reflexive Cine-Lazarus resurrection. Alas such resurrections are subject an unspoken bourgeois law that says ahead-of-their-time 'underground' artists must lie buried for not less than one and ideally not more than seven decades. Then the wizard curator gives them something better than life, he gives them a retrospective! Hugo's tin man's heart-shaped key can't compete with its own clockwork orange-hued enshrinement in the perma-pantheon. Though the artist's work has not changed its essential form the world has tick-tocked so many times around the orb that old is new, quaint is revolutionary, whimsical antiquation is post-modern surrealism, cheap drive-in fodder and comic books are hundred million dollar box office business and night table films about film preservation are filled with enough clocks you'll never have to reach very far to smash the snooze button on the industrial age for another two hours of hand color-tinted dreams...

The problems in Hugo are the heart-shaped key (the brand-symbol on the poster) and the Méliès 'brand' of that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye (ever try to watch Trip to the Moon in one sitting? Sure it's imaginative but it's also boring, and all static long shots), and the douche-chilled bouts of bouncily orchestrated whimsey--Amelie's Triplets of Belville cutaways to the budding romance between old dude and the old lady who sits at the cafe, oui, monsieur, but she has, 'ow you say, a bitey dog? So he gets a dog of opposite gender for to woo said dog, and the evil stationmaster (Borat) has a flower girl (Emily Mortimer) who lost a brother the way the stationmaster lost his leg, and Méliès lost his negatives... in zee Great War!


Then there's The Terminator, a film that makes me want to rescue from obscurity James Cameron, not the Titanic control freak, the Pirhana 2 Corman protege.  I remember seeing the preview for The Terminator at the Montgomeryville Drive-In (the main feature was C.H.U.D!) Shuffled in with about six other similar-looking  (i.e. Italian American Gigolo) indie sci fi-ish titles, The Terminator looked cheap, sleazy and we in the car, all Conan fans, loudly mourned how far Arnold had fallen since 1982. The preview showed the Tech Noir bar, with its tacky neon and Arnold dressed like  the kind of guy who usually has fake breasts or knives or Rutger Hauer reflecting in his Gucci sunglasses.

Of course that's not the way it panned out; the reviews glowed and the box office soared, and my jaw dropped in pleased amazement. I remember seeing Terminator by myself in the cinema to get away from my family Thanksgiving day in 1984 and lord knows I felt pretty wowed. The trouble was that it became too popular. Overnight Cameron became an auteur, the most recognized newly minted wunderkind to emerge from the exploitation genre since John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. And if you meshed Hugo and Halloween together, wouldn't you have The Terminator? Look at the resemblance of the 'shape' and the mechanical man in the below shots:

 

1. Automaton!: The idea of the automaton goes back to the 1890s (see below) and was forgotten in the 1920s, but the automaton killer thing began actually with Halloween (or maybe the 1940s Mummy sequels). Of course I'm talking about the slow moving but unstoppable variety, the shambling shapes who can't be killed yet are not alive, and are already slowed yet won't be stopped. And like The Terminator, Halloween was a scrappy independent low budget ($6 million; Halloween was $320K) thriller that wound up being iconic and inspiring many much bigger-budgeted imitations, all of which corresponds to the figure of the undiscovered auteur and his lost gem 'automaton.' The filmmaker's own alienation from the actual machinations of projection, of the mechanism of screening and seeing the film with an audience (aside from the premiere), anxiety about the cross-country marketing and promotion, and the obsessive need to tinker, to keep taking things in and out of the final cut until the last possible moment. What does it all deconstruct to?

"Draughtsman-Writer" by Henri Maillardet c. 1800

The surrealist concept of 'automatic writing' is probably at the farthest extreme of big budget Hollywood moviemaking: the first is unadulterated raw unconscious streaming, the second has been tooled by a tem to wring maximum suspense and greatness, with dozens of unionized voices pitching in and every creative decision having to eventually boil down to entries in a budget ledger. The whole mission becomes capturing the blazing brilliance of the automatic writing session inside the carefully constructed and staggeringly complicated mechanism of filmmaking. It's what occurred to me watching the mechanical man in Hugo start to draw... we don't know what the metal hand will write or create, but neither do we know what our own hand will write during automatic writing... it becomes the opposite end of the Hugo spectrum, the mechanical voice, SKYNET's distant cousin, reaching from beyond the well-guarded door to hopefully scribble something accessible and profound: "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that." or "we think of the key, each in his prison / thinking of the key, each confirms a prison."

2. Women are the fathers of robots - And now, gender controversy comes into the mix, because creating mechanical people is a man thing. The mad scientist is classic Apollonian archetype, attempting to replace the chthonic madness of woman's birth canal with living tissue over titanium endoskeleton... or big fat cogs. The man rejects reality and creates his own, either a shape, a tower, an automaton, a poem, a science fiction or horror film...

So wouldn't it follow that women, then, are perhaps the 'fathers' of automatons, and science fiction and horror films?

Consider yet another Halloween-Terminator similarity: in both films the target of the monster is a normal, good-hearted girl who locates her true heroic self in the course of events, and both films transcend cheap boy's club sexuality and feel more assured about gender than a genre picture had seemed capable of prior to. And a look at the credits reveals why: women were actively involved, as writers and/or producers, in both productions: Debra Hill in Halloween and Gale Ann Hurd in Terminator, and though their contributions tend to go unrecognized in the rush to canonize directors like Carpenter and Cameron, looking at the later works of each lady you see a lot of the same wit and charm that made both these early films so successful (Hill also worked with Carpenter on The Fog and Escape from New York and Hurd on Cameron's Terminator 2, Aliens, and The Abyss), and can feel the absence of same in later work by said auteurs. The trick of course is to have a woman creative voice who understands the masculine psyche without being contemptuous of it (the genius of this being Katheryn Bigelow, below w/ Oscars).

Debra Hill, left

 Within the context of Hugo we have the female character played by Chloe Grace-Moritz who, in the end, finds her own groove by deciding to write the book whose adaptation you have just seen. So in a way she's also a female 'producer' helping a male's vision make it to the screen, filtering the material through feminine perspective, watching from on high as a man expresses through art his own weird gender-fucked issues with self-procreation. Like Hurd and Hill, Moritz is participating in the rearing of a film--through support and input the way a husband would in the rearing of the child. Just as a dad helped conceive the actual child, and may help raise it, he will never get the auteur credit for the child's existence, that credit belongs to the mom, no matter what part dad had in it. So it is that great sci fi and horror films seem to depends on women like Hurd and Hill, who become, in a way, the fathers of these movies (about automatons) birthed by men (Scorsese of course has genius editor Thelma Schoonmaker).

Blue Meanies: (from top) Terminator, Halloween, Hugo

3. The Gears: In the end, our 'submission' to the process of entering a film 'dream state' is an interface with a machine, becoming clockwork. The turning reels of film, the gears and wattage of the projector --this is the end form of the experience. The actual movie may have cost millions to make; it may have been made by talented craftsman tinkering for months, years, but the final result is always just a machine spitting out encoded light and shadow out in some suburban multiplex, noise and voices electronically captured and mimetically reproduced for human ears that are eager to surrender all their human faculties to the machine, so long as their ears and eyes continue to be engages.

Man Ray - Rayograph

We repress or ignore all this mechanism when surrendering to a movie (unless it's out of focus, or too quiet, or the sound is out of sync, or the theater is too hot or cold) as easily as we forget our cell phone calls are beaming back and forth from space, or that we--personally and finally-- could become raw meat in the blink of an eye on the highway, or that 80% of the voices we hear tend to be electronically reproduced, we barely speak anymore except to order food. The automaton then comes as an eruption of the mechanism even further into consciousness, a black hole opening up in the center of the film, fixing to turn us all into mecha-aberrations, like Chaplin threading through the machne in Modern Times, or Sarah Connor in the crushing metal compactor in the Terminator climax.

To avoid this we like to keep a respectful distance from the mechanisms, to hide the wires behind the walls, but as we prepare for 2012 it becomes pretty terrifying to realize how hopelessly addicted we are to electricity. If it goes out, we will be totally lost. The Terminator and the mechanical man in Hugo are both examples of machines that don't use electricity - one just needs to be wound up, the other is nuclear-powered. Neither needs an outlet. They, alone, are truly independent.

4. False Nostalgia Syndrome - Like a suspicious number of films nominated for a 2011 Oscar Hugo bathes in nostalgia for pre-WW1 silent film whimsy, recalling Modern Times if it was remembered by the film scholar who managed to find its lost reel in a mislabeled can and won a prize, and Scorsese is certainly a major savior of film preservation, but is his nostalgia enough to warrant the 'greatness' label for Méliès? Is the subject even a worthy entry in the oeuvre of the man who made Raging Bull and Goodfellas? When dealing with the working class Italian neighborhood of Little Italy or Brooklyn, Scorsese gives us 'real' nostalgia, as in he 'really' witnessed it. For an escapist like myself Hugo seems as suspiciously bourgeois as its fellow 2011 nominee, Midnight in Paris. These are the fantasias of pampered rich kids who have been able to spend their lives tinkering with sound and image and now wonder if maybe, if they could travel back in time, then even Earnest Hemingway would call them geniuses, and they'd be able to recognize themselves in fictional disguises in work by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and get to drink absinthe. It works as their fantasy, but it can't work as ours because they've inhaled the fun out of it, and they've brought nothing but desire, they've shown us nothing but the act of showing us something that meant something to them when they were young and dumb like they think we are now.

The Terminator on the other hand is my experienced moment of childhood whimsy (well, late childhood, I was 17)--and revisiting the film in the light of so many CGI blockbusters it seems, at least on the surface, trashy. With its pouffy hair, pastel clothing, Italian rock synthesizers, rear screen-projected stop motion animation, neon, and casual sex roommates getting killed off first, slasher-style, this pre-digital futuristic film is the 'real' wake-up to nostalgia that Hugo can only catch from a fleeting Parisian postcard (that is, unless Scorsese remembers going to films at the turn of the century and pinning that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye image on their bedroom door to piss off his mama. Because without that genuine connection, only an egoist would think he could deliver any real meaning... unless he admitted Méliès sucked after all that fuss.

Depending on how long it's been since we saw our favorite childhood films our expectations are seldom met, but it's in not meeting them the actual magic occurs. It's the very gritty low budget tangibility, the tactile vividness, of the 1984 Terminator that somehow makes it seem more alive today than a CGI-sandblasted 2011 film like Hugo. No one knew at the time of its making that "I'll be back" would become such a catch phrase, if they did perhaps they would have taken it out to as avoid its embarrassing repetition in the sequels. The original Terminator is a movie free of that kind of presumption which is why it's so indelible. Hugo all but tells us we have to let its magic symbols -- the rocket-in-the-moon's-eye, the heart key--into our hall of future golden memories. But for me, even though I well-knew of Méliès beforehand, and I had his Trip to the Moon on super 8mm and we'd project it on the drummer in our band's light show in 1986-9, what that moon makes me think of all these decades later is "Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, another recreation that doesn't even bother with the rocket in the moon's eye shot... to its credit.


5. Pumpkins - The Pumpkins take the look and feel of Méliès' pre-modernist world's fair whimsicality and then update it to rock, speeding up the imagery and adding deep emotional hooks. Scorsese instead tries to slow us all down into Méliès' worship, to put the film in a shrine or museum and destroy its last link to the real world. If Hugo were truly to be worthy of the Scorsese canon it might end, for example, with the audience slowly realizing that the static long shots and endless flurries of spastic activity make Méliès' films kind of boring. The films only capture attention when used in a new context, a collage like the Pumpkins, or as an element of a multimedia fantastic plastic acid test with my own Mexican Mud Band, c. 1987. Scorsese instead captures the chaotic making of the films and does way better hand-tinting and covers up the dullness through just showing a long Academy-style montage of highlights from the found Méliès oeuvre.

Hugo's unthinking reverence for the great Méliès reminds me of the ending of Teacher's Pet: Clark Gable plays a scrappy self-taught city reporter going up against Doris Day as a journalism teacher whose father won a Pulitzer for his smalltown paper editorials. Love happens against their will, with Gable preferring to pick fights with Day's platonic pal Gig Young than make love. It's not until Gable finally reads Day's dad's old editorial clipping that he can proclaim "they stink" and come into his own as the confident uneducated lover of an educated gal. Call it reverence prior to investigation, or just bourgeois idolatry, but it takes him awhile for Clark to value his own opinion enough to make this claim, and until he does he's stranded behind this slab of journalistic integrity that he's expected to measure up to even though he's long since surpassed it. I wouldn't even bring it up if it wasn't Marty.... Marty, come back to the 'hood!

I'm not knocking Hugo; I cried and thought Asa Butterfield was eerily perfect, but while I normally love Moretz she seemed ungainly and confused... Super 8, which was released the same year as Hugo but not nominated for an Oscar, is nostalgic for the era that I too was a a young super 8mm filmmaker in (the Terminator era), but also proactive about actually making movies instead of revering the makers or cleaning the projector. There's no real salute to the creative energy of the moment in Hugo; it's all about preservation and repairmanship; it has to run all the way around the massive sets five times just to make us think the right hand doesn't know the left from a hole in the wall, through which it hopes to add some Amelie Rear-Window-Psycho touchstones without drawing attention to its own absurdly over-qualified self-awareness.

Eyes of Laura Mars

 Super 8 on the other hand is just as top heavy but it fights from its gut; it kicks and scratches and its orphans are only half-orphans and the pain and the bonding between Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney devastated me a lot more in a lot less time, and seems a more logical film to champion for a ballsy academy. But they weren't awake enough to realize Super 8 isn't about the alien or the adults but about kids carving their own sacred space out of the bellies of parents too dumb to know either their own beastliness or their kids' frail genius. The alien in Super 8 suggest what might have happened to ET if he'd not been able to phone home, or if we abducted the greys at the end of Close Encounters. In other words, he's pissed! He's the perfect reflection of the suburban teen forever denied any form of dangerous self-expression yet carrying through anyway, ala Over the Edge or Rise of the Planet of the Apes. No wonder, then, the old timer academy dismissed it, probably with the glint of fear in their eyes they usually reserve for passing carloads o' passing Crips.

Super 8

Final anecdote: I had my own Hugo moment in 1997 whilst out of my mind on acid up at a friend's big weekend party at her Swiss chalet in the Catskills; it was gorgeous night under the stars and everyone spread out under a massive blanket on the ground, facing the blank white side of the house. Behind them I set up my old super 8 projector on a picnic table bench and projected on the wall an old clip reel from 1931's Dracula, unintentionally at the wrong speed, and since I was tripping I had no way of knowing. An already deadly slow movie became dripping with poetry as that slowness was doubled into a total dream state. Is there a more indelible image of death at 24 frames an hour than black and white Mina Harker, her voice almost manlike in its druggy depths, slowly explaining her dream of the room becoming filled with mist? As I crouched hallucinating into the weird gears and mechanisms of the projector, wondering where the speed changer was and if I should bother changing it since no one noticed, threading the machine like some old Rumpelstilskin out of time, shut out by choice and inclination from the orgy of physical warmth going on in front of me with my friends, who lay in a row under a huge zipped together sleeping bag, watching the films of course, but all addled themselves and so beyond space and time they would be the last people to notice how... sloow David Manners was talking.

 

So I was alone, in front, threading my machine to dazzle them with slow motion vampires from 1931, and while most nights my feeling of disconnectedness would shatter me more than my constant drip of bourbon could repair, that night, under the stars I accepted my dwarfish lot and gave up my hunger for the golden hair and sleeping bag sense of belonging. It all came into focus for me in that moment, and though my friends were all making more money than I was via advertising, and were basking in their ability to create human warmth, I had Bela Lugosi... and he knew!

If that doesn't make a Hugo, I don't know what does, or a Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator, who is also in his way, an archivist, going back in time to preserve some imperiled damsel in mid-bloom. Don't we all hope some Hugo is going to dig up our little forgotten super 8mm films up when our time is ready? Or that some secret agent on a motorcycle will pull us out of class and whisk us off into the next world, and our friends will all whistle in envy? Or some collector of my old hand-drawn comic books look me up in hushed awe?

"A mistake is made."

I feel bad for those who truly died before they were re-discovered, like Bela Lugosi and like Ed Wood Jr. and I hope someone will come for me like that one day. We outsiders hope for this the way we hope our children will remember to call on Mother's Day, if we had them. This is what non-family man artists do instead of having real human children of our own: we make them out of clay and wire and words and weird machinations of mechanical whimsy, hoping some version of ourselves in a future generation will come along and figure out what we were trying to say to our unborn grandson. The Mechanical Man's reproductive organ is a metal welding tool but women don't need to have one since they can have real babies... since, like Manson, they have 'a family.' When will intelligent women stop writing about man's obsession with re-animating the dead and building robot children, as if it's she who should be jealous?!

Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley (Bride of Frankenstein)

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