31 Days of Horror--Day 9 H.R. Giger Tribute

I have to admit, I am mesmerized by Swiss artist H.R. Giger's imagery.  His bio-mechanical creatures are equal parts primitive, almost dinosaur-like, and cyborg futuristic.  With penis-like heads, weird orifices, and dual layers of razor-sharp teeth nestled in wet, gooey, gaping maws, the Alien xenomorph introduced into visual culture in Ridley Scott's visionary Alien (1979) lives on, and on.  The creature's combination of delicacy and danger troubles any understanding of inside and outside, epitomizing what French theorist Julia Kristeva and cultural theorist Barbara Creed term "the abject."  While Creed invested a great deal of theoretical energy describing the Alien landscape, and its inhabitants, as examples of the "monstrous-feminine," I don't think Giger's world is so easily defined.  He constructs bodies and creatures that are both penetrated and penetrating, creating Escher-like fantasies that mess with your eyes.  ***Be prepared, these images may be NSFW!

Perhaps one can chalk all this stuff up to weird, twisted bondage imagery, but I don't think his images are that simply explained.  Sure, one can see body parts that are undeniably female, but where do they begin and end?  This image above recalls Egyptian imagery, mixed with perhaps some werewolf stuff, and there are breasts, balls, metal connecting wires and skeletal tubes. 

Is his stuff just weird tentacle porn dressed up as art?

Yes, there are plenty of phallic shapes and tubes penetrating bodies, but the scale of these landscapes are utterly wacko.  When I watch Alien, and see these Lilliputian "explorers" climbing into crazy, drippy holes and walking down dark, wet corridors, they are tiny compared to these vast spaces.  If you look at the above image, I can just picture some little people in space suits crawling all over this thing, clinging to all those sinuous lines.  Yet those lines also look like train tracks, part of some vast circulatory transit system.

For Giger, female bodies and sexual imagery are not easily traceable to common notions of "reproduction," as the Alien facehuggers and chestbursters both prove.  He tends to illustrate what one might call "baby machines" that are like a twisted mash-up of Donald Cammell's Demon Seed with The Matrix. 

Giger certainly has a thing for icky looking infant figures.  They kind of look like him.

What I really want to do is go to one of these Giger Bars in Switzerland, and actually sit in one of these creature chairs, like a whacked-out Alien space jockey that swills Martinis.

This bar puts all other bars to shame.  Now I just have to find a conference in Switzerland to get me there.

31 Days of Horror--Day 8 LOVELY MONSTER (2011)

Francesco Calabrese's Lovely Monster (2011) is a short little horror tale, told in the now ubiquitous but still effective "documentary" form.  I like the film's quiet moodiness, as one identifies with Sophia, even while wondering what on earth is wrong with her.  The first substantial hint occurs when we see a Doctor standing next to one of her X-rays.  Thankfully, Calabrese's film does not go the normal route of having Sophia abjectly transform because of puberty or some sort of sexual trigger.  She just is how she is, and does her best to protect others.  Still, documentary filmmakers are known for their curious, voyeuristic gaze.

Lionsgate is in negotiations with Calabrese to have his short made into a feature.  The style and the mood are unique for their relative understatement, and I would like to see that atmosphere spread over a longer time period.  Lionsgate also distributed Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard's  The Cabin in the Woods, although if they are responsible for the egregiously long time it took for that film to reach screens, we may not see Calabrese's feature for a long, long time.

31 Days of Horror--Day 7 WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011)

When I first saw Lynne Ramsay's harrowing We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) last spring, a mere 15 minutes into the movie I turned to my friend and said "that would be my kid...if I had one."  Ramsay's lyrical study of maternal ambivalence, based on Lionel Shriver's award winning novel, is a marvelous "evil kid"  monster tale.  Tilda Swinton's portrayal of the embattled Eva, mother of the malevolent, sociopath Kevin (played by several extraordinary young actors, including the mesmerizing Ezra Miller) is equal parts sympathetic and unlikeably passive.  The novel lessens the female protagonist's helplessness and passivity by structuring the tale in an epistolary format, as Eva writes to her husband, Franklin, in a strong and self-reflective voice.

Eva and the three Kevins

While the film's representation of Eva is riveting, the story falls into that special trap that society holds for filmic representations of troubled female subjectivity: the ordering of events renders Eva's view unreliable, and her subjective "visions" call into question her version of all of the film's calamitous events.  Is Kevin actually evil, or did he become that way because Eva's not a proper mother?  While the novel raises these issues as Eva battles constantly with guilt and self-blame, there's never any doubt that she is right, and Kevin's "bad to the bone."  The film strategically places doubt throughout in order to leave the final decision in the mind and experience of the viewer.  This strategy in some ways makes the film more fun to discuss, but it also creates a more forceful indictment of Eva as epitomizing an improper or abnormal mother and woman.

The fact that the film was not wildly successful at the U.S. box office, and did not garner the substantial awards that it deserved (Oscar and otherwise), suggests that the pervasive American cultural obsession with self-sacrificing, perfectionist mothering rendered Eva the true "monster" of the film.  Upon showing the film to one of my classes, I was surprised at how few of my students held any sympathy for Eva at all.  Sure, many of them are much closer in age (and life experience) to the older Kevin, and are actively in the process of accepting/demonizing/forgiving their parents for present disagreements and past sins.  Yet some of them were quick to tell me that Kevin's behavior is not beyond the realm of how "normal" or "average" kids might behave at various stages in their lives.  Really?  And Yikes!  I'll stick to my fervent motto, "No kids, only kittens."  With seven billion people on the planet, I figure I'm doing everyone a favor on this one.

A HORROR TALE IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

The film begins with some very abject imagery as Eva is wafted through the crowd covered in tomato splatterings while attending a festival in Spain.  She's a travel author, and this moment, riding high amongst a sea of revelers, is represented as simultaneously orgasmic and unsettling.  One of my students pointed out that she's emulating Christ here, and believe me, that's no accident.  Eva's punishes herself and is punished for all of her son's sins, and Ramsay illustrates this punishment through countless scenes where wet crimson fills the frame. 

In Kevin's early moments, Eva's home and car are splashed with red paint, and Eva spends the entire film meticulously scrubbing, scraping, and removing the scarlet hue.

Still, Eva's never able to fully expunge the guilt she feels toward her son's violent acts, and allows others to abuse her at every turn.  Beyond the aforementioned property splatter, she's violently slapped after exiting a job interview, harassed and menaced by a variety of Halloween revelers, has all of her eggs broken (symbolic!!) as she hides from a woman at the supermarket, and tolerates malicious sexual slurs from a co-worker that only escalate when she gently rejects his interest in dancing with her.  Her continual utterance of "it's my fault" or "I deserve it" in the face of these slights feels inevitable within a narrative that constantly absolves her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly) of any responsibility.

He's the loving Dad upon whom Kevin bestows his rare smiles.  He is also the patriarch who disbelieves Eva's concerns and suspicions toward Kevin at every turn.  Franklin's fate ultimately lets him off the hook (as fathers so often are left), for he never has to face what kind of monster his son actually is.  And what of Kevin?

Kevin's birth scene is shot through a refracted reflection off of one of the birthing room's cold metal surfaces, and the nurse intones "Eva, stop resisting" as she screams in agony.  No Hollywood smiles or tears of joy here.  Eva suffers from severe postpartum depression, as so many women do, and the film explicitly shows the struggles and strains of early parenting--ones only Eva appears to experience.

None of these early experiences are beyond the realm of ordinary.  Some babies sleep like blessed little lambs, while others emit ear shattering shrieks and refuse to sleep or settle.  Kevin's clearly in the latter camp.  So it's only when Kevin is old enough to be played by a bevy of dour, sullen, sinister actors that one starts to actually think that Kevin might not be your average "problem child."

Kevin, from a very early age, looks at Eva with a frothing combination of loathing and contempt, and the scene where she benignly tries to play ball with him is one of my favorites.  Of course, Franklin's absence from these early scenes makes Kevin's behavior toward Eva all the more fraught.  As a comment about "wishing she was in France" indicates, Eva's ambivalent about parenting and misses her life before she became defined as a mother.

Like some unstoppable malevolent force, Kevin controls Eva at every turn, stripping her of any life outside of him.  Whenever she takes a tentative step toward happiness, or even tries to make a connection with him, he makes sure she knows that those attempts are pointless.  He'll spray paint all over her lovely "room of one's own," just as he will boldly shit in his pants, glaring at her, as soon as she changes his diaper.  He defiantly resists potty training to well into his 6th or 7th year, and only "learns" after Eva hurls him across the room and inadvertently breaks his arm.  Now one might think--Child Abuse!--and in other films, I might wholeheartedly agree.  As a testament to Ramsay's filmmaking skills, Eva's violent reaction seems not only justified, but a relief.  She finally does what we all wish, but we also know in our hearts is absolutely wrong.  Now in The Omen, Gregory Peck's violence toward his son seems like the only possible move.  Well, times have changed!

Unfortunately, Kevin's not dead

Things take a turn for the hopeful when Kevin comes down with a cold and actually allows Eva to care for him.  They have a momentary bonding moment that seems to offer the possibility of Kevin's transformation through the power of a mother's love.  I believe that this scene is just a smokescreen meant to undermine Eva (and the spectator's) belief that Kevin is a bad seed.  The connection Kevin makes with her also hinges on her reading him The Adventures of Robin Hood, which certainly comes back to bite her in the ass.

Some of my students were surprised and shocked that Eva decides to have another child, and the film discursively suggests that this new arrival (who turns out to be a girl) is unwanted by both father and son.  Celia (Ashley Gurasimovich) is a warm, friendly, and sweet kid, which proves in many ways to Eva that her eggs are not actually "broken," and that Kevin is just bad "luck of the draw" or a losing ticket in the genetic lottery.

Kevin the teenager, as embodied by Ezra Miller, is simply fascinating and horrifying.  He plays games with his little sister where he ties her up and gags her, he clearly puts her guinea pig in the garbage disposal, he somehow gets her to pour drain cleaner in her eye, and then sadistically eats some crazy eyeball-like fruit at the dinner table with obvious gusto.

The day that Franklin decides to gift him with a bow and arrow for Christmas is the proverbial "writing on the wall" for the rest of the family, and Kevin's school mates as well.  Every year brings an ever more violent and powerful bow and arrow gift!  The film implies that our thirst for violent entertainment, and our turning killers into "celebrities" spurs Kevin to make his violent moves....but really.  C'mon.  One only has to recall that all of this mess started when Eva read Kevin Robin Hood.

Events finally crystallize from their hazy first representations, as the spectator sees, with Eva, what Kevin has wrought.  On returning home in shock and horror from the high school, Eva finds her home empty, only the sounds of her suburban sprinkler marring the dead quiet that surrounds her.  When she re-emerges from the backyard, covered in blood and stumbling through the french doors, one thinks that she cannot survive any more horrors.  Yet she does, seemingly waiting for Kevin's release from prison, interested in taking up the mantle of motherhood once more.  Maybe this time she'll get it right.

We Need to Talk about Kevin, like George Ratliff's Joshua (2007), is a fierce cautionary tale, situated in a world in which one must love one's children at any cost.  In this same world, Mothers still shoulder the majority of blame for their kid's actions, even if it's uncertain how much "nature" or "nurture" is involved.  Eva cannot win either way.

"No Kids, Only Kittens."  And honestly, do we need to talk about kittens?

31 Days of Horror--Day 6 CAT NIGHTMARES

One might think that I'm getting a touch lazy here, and maybe that's my guilt talking, but I had to choose: write about We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynn Ramsey 2011) or show a crazy cat nightmare video.  The choice I made is evident. 

If my head was shaped like bread, I too would be scared.  But nothing comes close to a profoundly terrifying encounter with...APPLES!

Cats are an essential part of the horror film genre, as this site attests.  I also found this cool post on black cat auditions for "The Black Cat" part of the anthology film Tales of Terror (1962).  Meow!

31 Days of Horror--Day 5 COMA (1978) and its Remake (2012)

Looking at this image, one might think that this woman is experiencing a truly relaxing new-fangled spa treatment!  Her spangly skinsuit is pretty and shiny, albeit a little snug.  Alas, she is someone's "Girlfriend in a Coma," hanging in a storage facility/organ factory where she's experimented on by a gaggle of mad scientists.  This image is from A & E's totally unnecessary, far too long, but still moderately entertaining remake of Michael Crichton's 1978 film Coma, based on Robin Cook's medical thriller (a book I read when I was ten years old).  The book, and the original film, are rife with extraordinary images of the Jefferson Institute--the place where they store the bodies after the nefarious healthcare professionals put perfectly healthy people into comas.

Formerly owned by Xerox, the building is now Stride Rite's HQ in Lexington Mass.

Michael Crichton's film stars Genevieve Bujold as the inquisitive medical resident Susan Wheeler, a talented surgeon surreptitiously dating the cocky know-it-all Mark Bellows, played by Michael Douglas w/ the peacock strutting he would go on to perfect in Romancing the Stone and Fatal Attraction.  Susan is more interested in her career than a commitment, which causes Mark to whine a lot, and tell her she needs a "wife" more than a "lover."  He's upset because she tells him to "get your own beer" rather than running to serve him.  Project much??

Susan's friend Nancy is her closest confidante, as they both really get into their Jazzercise class.  After class, Nancy tells Susan that yes, she is pregnant, and she's going in for a top secret D & C (Abortion) at Susan's hospital, Boston Memorial.  Sounds like it may not be her husband's or she just might not want another child.  These modern women!  Either way, even though Susan reassures her that everything will be fine, Nancy ends up in an irreversible coma.  (See, she was the perfect coma candidate because of her loose morals).

Susan, confused as to how such a routine procedure could end in disaster, starts to investigate.  The men that surround her, including Mark, worry that she's isn't crying enough, but their sexist "concern" only propels her into further detective work.

Of course, no one believes her, especially Mark, who is asked by the head of the hospital, Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark) to distract her by taking her away for the weekend for some sexy time.  Then we're treated to scenes like these:

Douglas does the shifty-eyed ambiguously motivated boyfriend role proud, and one never knows whether he's in cahoots with the likes of Dr. Harris, who intermittently responds "Women! Christ!" just to remind us that all men are total dicks.  Mark has some cryptic conversations w/some of his co-workers that imply he's not to be trusted, especially when he points out over and over that Susan is merely being paranoid.

This film mirrors some similar women's film dystopias on hand in the 70s that feature intrepid female heroines who are talented and career-minded and struggling to succeed within a smothering sea of chauvinists.  Everyone tells them that they are paranoid, and yet, scene by scene, these women (along with viewers) uncover horrifying plots.  In The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes 1975), poor Katharine Ross is forced to move to the Connecticut suburbs where the area is overrun with creepy housewife robots intent on cooking, cleaning, and "servicing" their men; the Men's Association kill her and replace her with a robot in the end.  Brook Adams, as a talented scientist, also investigates the weirdness in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman 1978), but because Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum actually believe her, she seems a little less isolated (and crazy); she becomes a pod person too.  Since all of these films were directed by men, one might ask whether the anxieties these directors carried in relation to the 70's Women's Movement might have gotten displaced onto these frightening dehumanizing narratives.  Yet the women in these films are the active investigators with an inquisitive gaze (but they are all severely punished for possessing that look).  Both of the remakes of these films (Stepford Wives 2004 and The Invasion 2007) are beyond abysmal.

Coma places the spectator firmly with Susan, who never really seems crazy or unbelievable as she uncovers evidence that doctors at Boston Memorial are putting patients into comas if they are a match for their black market organ trafficking ring.  The film implies that the conspiracy goes all the way up through the hospital hierarchy to sympathetic parties in Washington D.C.  Susan is a kick-ass action heroine who can really investigate and fight back when threatened.  In one scene she even clings to the roof of an ambulance.  Take that James Bond!

I think that Ashley Judd was trying to channel her inner Bujold in Missing, but we know how that turned out.

The true Stepford creature in Coma is Elizabeth Ashley, who plays an amazing evil automaton/corporate tool with grace and elegance.  She runs the coma farm/Jefferson Institute, and I love how cutthroat she gets when the bidding on organs is underway.  Of course, she does it over archaic phones with big hold buttons, so her cold, steeliness comes off as extra absurd circa 2012.  Love her in this film!

Oh, Tom Selleck has an awesome cameo in this film, giant furry mustache and all!  I guess Tom wasn't famous yet, even though he starred in Daughters of Satan from 1971.  He plays a relatively healthy patient who also gets put into a coma by the evildoers.  One minute he's joshing with the doctors at the hospital; the next, Tom is lying on a slab at the Jefferson, flesh cut open as his organs are greedily harvested.

Susan's investigation gets too close to uncovering the truth, so she has to be punished.  She subsequently is poisoned in a way that mimics appendicitis, and the evil Dr. Harris rushes her into OR 8 in order to put her nosy ass in a damn coma where she belongs!  Mark/Michael Douglas ends up finally believing her, saving the day, and the cops are waiting outside the operating room door to nab the evil doctor.  Done and done.  Good thing her boyfriend saved her!

Thirty-four years later, the mini-series loving A & E network (who brought us the terrible Bag of Bones) decides to remake Coma with an all star cast including Ellen Burstyn, Geena Davis, Richard Dreyfus, James Woods, and Lauren Ambrose as the super-curious Susan Wheeler.  Steven Pasquale plays Mark Bellows, and after perusing IMDB I know that I've never seen him in anything he's been in, ever; after this show, I'm still not a fan.

I believe without the slightest doubt that this mini-series did not need to be made, and that some of the remake's "improvements" now make the original film look like a serious FEMINIST CLASSIC.  Burstyn and Davis's N.O.W. memberships need to be rescinded because their roles take one giant leap back for womankind.  What did they put in their kool-aid?

The Good

Lauren Ambrose makes a pretty good female action investigator, and you are rooting for her throughout.  In this incarnation, she's only a lowly medical student rather than a surgeon, and the only reason she's perceived as competent at all is through nepotism.  Turns out grandpa was a world famous doctor/surgeon type who became super-rich and put his name on an entire hospital wing.  Susan is curious about all the comas because it's in her blood.  Old farts like Dreyfus and Woods knew her grandpappy and are eager to remind her.

Also, the series sports great images of the Jefferson Institute, which has only become more scarily high-tech and sinister.

The Bad

The romance between Susan and Mark is so-o-o boring.

The chemistry between these two actors is non-existent, and I found myself more interested in the crazy psycho that stalks Susan in a near identical scene to one in the original film.  The back story for the stalker with some weird tree fetish introduces some truly stunning visuals, but the guy's a serial killer who tortures and kills women, so he's not good boyfriend material.  Mark appears to be not only interested in Susan but genuinely concerned for her welfare, which makes the stupid twist at the end even more stupid.  **Spoiler, he tells Susan "it was all just a bad dream" and then gets a text from the Dragon Lady, which proves he was working for the bad guys all along.  Sigh.

and The Ugly

Exhibit A: The Dragon Lady, aka Dr. Agnetta Lindquist, aka Geena Davis

Dr. Lindquist is an evil cougar who sets her sights on cute younger male doctors or residents and helps them climb up the Hospital ladder if they will sleep with her.  She not only is fiercely jealous of Susan, but sics the evil psycho on her in order to get her competition (for Mark's bed) out of the way.  She gives the evil psycho guy bad therapy and bad drugs so that he'll become completely unhinged and go after Susan.  She also seems to orchestrate (behind the scenes) Dr. Howard Stark's near fatal car accident so that she can use his body as a test subject for her nefarious Alzheimer's experiments.  And no, she's not in any way nuanced or even morally concerned about the consequences of her actions.

Exhibit B: The Psycho Baby Lover, aka Mrs. Emerson, aka Ellen Burstyn

Burstyn takes the crazy psycho portrayal way past eleven as she cackles non-stop during her interactions with other actors, and utters some amazing lines when she's not chomping on the scenery.  Turns out that she couldn't have babies, and it has something to do with God's will, and now she has plenty of babies because the Jefferson is not only a human experiment facility and an illegal organ warehouse, but they now also hatch babies from pregnant women in comas!  Yes indeed.  Well, if you liberals keep insisting on stem cell research then this is what you get!!  Ugh, the horror.

Still, my all time favorite moment in the whole mini-series is when Mrs. Emerson pulls some frozen rods out of storage--the better to skewer Susan with--and quibbles about the size saying, "I'll have to use number eights.  These tens might shatter her pelvis.  She's quite petite."  Nice.  All the other people working at the Jefferson Institute are nowhere near as scary as this lady.  Or Davis's Dr. Lindquist.  Even after Richard Dreyfus turns out to be the King of all the Villains, in cahoots with Susan's saintly granddad, and shouting about "culling the herd," he still comes off as not so bad.  I'm shaking my head at the folly of it all.

Scary Hallways!

So I highly recommend a double or triple feature of the original Coma with maybe the original The Stepford Wives and the original Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (John Newland 1973) as a potent cocktail of women-in-peril thrillers where the evil firmly lies in the hands of Men.  Stay away from the remakes, for these days, if women are victimized, they only have themselves to blame.