SICK OF VAMPIRES AND ZOMBIES YET? A QUICK LOOK AT HORROR AND A FEW OF THE STRANGE FOLK BEHIND IT

Filed under:Film,Vampires and Zombies — posted by I J Wilson on April 5, 2013 @ 2:41 pm

Last Man on Earth -- The Eyes of Vincent Price

Who knew vampires and zombies were ever going to become so popular?

Without going in too deep, there’s Twilight, the Annual Zombie Walk, TV series like True Blood and The Walking Dead, the addictive Plants vs Zombies game, not to mention the gimmicky Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Gone are the archetypal vampires of Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, or Max Schreck: the vampire via Anne Rice, and most recently, Stephanie Meyer, has become a romantic figure – an escapist fantasy for women of the dark and mysterious stranger who whisks them away into a forbidden world, keeping them safe from the harsh realities of this one.

As for zombies, they are no longer the mean and threatening graveyard crawlers they once were, but have become instead, nice and familiar like a not-too-distant relative on the family tree. In the wake of the GFC (a kind of apocalypse in itself) the term “zombie” has been co-opted to describe everything from zombie markets to zombie banks. It has also been used by journalists to describe creating new nouns by cannibalising old verbs.

Okay, so what’s my point, you might ask? Zombies and vampires have become too mainstream?

Cool, I should just get over it!

But what is there left for us to be afraid of, when everything about horror has been co-opted for the sake of social commentary? The problem is that in a post-scientific world, so many of our fears have become highly abstract: rather than worrying about getting savaged by wild animals, or wiped out by the black plague, we are mostly worried about things like losing our place in society; becoming poor; being alone; being left-behind; growing old; existential fears best left to art movie directors to explore.

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However, the evolution of horror as a genre has always been to look at the world, and think, “Okay, what am I afraid of?” Or, “What is frightening about the situation I am in? Can I make it more frightening?”

Richard Matheson, who wrote everything from war stories to Westerns, reinvigorated the horror genre after going to see a vampire film in a Brooklyn cinema in the mid-fifties. He came out of the cinema, thinking to himself, “If one vampire is scary, imagine what a whole world full of them would be like?”

He would go home and turn this idea into one of the top genre books of the twentieth century, the 1956 classic, I Am Legend.

This ground-breaking book with its ultra-modern “last-man-on-Earth” scenario, would not only influence Stephen King, but also filmmaker George A. Romero, who would come to write a short story that he would refer to as “Anubis” (after the Egyptian god of the afterlife), about the breakdown of American society, when corpses start coming back to life and attacking the living, forming the basis of Night of the Living Dead.

Although Romero and the other filmmakers involved in the project, would not refer to their creatures as “zombies,” but “flesh-eating ghouls,” this was definitely the beginning of all that leg-dragging and head-lolling we have become so familiar with over the last fifty years.

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There are a few good reasons why anyone would want to make a horror film; they are a great outlet for creative people with a dark and personal vision who can muster up the courage and technical ability to translate their ideas into film.

Don Coscarelli, who made Phantasm in the late seventies has spoken in interviews about how much of the plot came to him in a dream. Talking to Todd Doogan of the Digital Bits website, Coscarelli said: “I was in my teens, and what I can remember had mainly to do with my fleeing down endlessly long marble corridors, pursued by a chrome sphere intent on penetrating my skull with a wicked needle. There was a quite futuristic “sphere dispenser” out of which the orbs would emerge and begin chase. As far as I can remember, the spheres never caught up with me.”

Others like Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon had a love of the cosmic horror stories of author H. P. Lovecraft. Although his eighties films Re-Animator and From Beyond were only very loosely based on Lovecraft (there was no talking head in the original Herbert West: Reanimator) Gordon still made his mark as a horror director, introducing a whole new generation to this important American writer.

Another good reason is that horror films are also cheap to make: they don’t need big name actors, or expensive sets like other genre films, science fiction and fantasy; they have a captive audience – thrill-seeking teenage males and their dragged-along girlfriends; and they usually do reasonably well in the box-office. They are often seen as a way of making a quick buck, or as a stepping stone to greater things (the Weinsteins made The Burning on the success of slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th). Even those who we would consider to be the “great” directors of horror were initially talked into it. Both George Romero and Sam Raimi (who directed The Evil Dead) were advised to make a horror film by people in the industry, the wisdom being that as first time directors they would find it easier to get their film picked up and distributed – even though their main interests lay somewhere else (Romero was a big fan of drama, and Raimi, slapstick comedy).

However, the nature of the genre, with its reliance on graphic violence, and its openness to commercial exploitation, is historically a large part of the reason why it has often been made a scapegoat when things go wrong in society. Sometimes for good reason: although not a horror film, Stephen King was horrified to discover that a teenager planning a school massacre was found to have a copy of his novel Rage (about the same topic) in his locker, prompting King and his publisher to withdraw it from sale.

But sometimes the criticism has been unfair: Romero and the Image Ten group who worked with him, were publicly shredded by the film critic Roger Ebert (who was only 24 at the time) for the gruesome scenes of Night of the Living Dead, even though the fault of what Ebert was most unhappy with – that the film had been shown to children as a Saturday afternoon matinee session – lay with the distributor for not properly advising cinema owners, and the cinema owners for not properly scheduling it (they only needed to have a look at the naked woman on the lobby poster to know that it wasn’t suitable for children!).¹

Even with a proper ratings system in place by the 1980s, John Carpenter was still called a “pornographer of violence” for the special effects of The Thing; and a young Sam Raimi was dragged off to a UK court to answer obscenity charges for The Evil Dead, for which the charges were later dropped.

But this low-opinion of horror has also meant that thoughtful and well-meaning directors like Romero have been able to fly under the radar with what would otherwise be considered controversial ideas. It wasn’t until the French began to look at Night of the Living Dead that its other qualities began to emerge: here was an independently made film that had cast an African-American as its lead, the most sane and rational character of the story; and although he was to be killed off at the end of the film, this was without a doubt, a landmark in American filmmaking.²

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Despite these public skirmishes, horror, at the end of the day, has always occupied a pretty small niche. It may have had some incredible high points like the Universal monster movies of the thirties and the Stephen King-led siege of the late seventies, early eighties; but really, when you scratch the surface and look behind it, there are only a few lasting names, and very few people who have dedicated their lives to it – to writing about it critically, and supporting it through publishing.

When literary people have turned their attention to it and tried to do something within the genre, they’ve always seemed to miss the point. Horror is one of those things that is a mood and an emotion, and usually a preoccupation with someone who has chosen to write in that particular field. H. P. Lovecraft understood this of Edgar Allan Poe, when Lovecraft wrote in his Supernatural Horror in Literature that Poe “saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, [he] decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings.”

Horror might seem to be something “less-than-literary”, but it is impossible to just alight on it, and create something of lasting value, without first caring about it in some way.

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But for the general public, there are good reasons why they still enjoy horror films, and in particular, zombies. Everybody of a certain age is nostalgic about films like Return of the Living Dead that they had watched as teenagers at parties – for others, it might be the whole Saturday morning Thriller experience of trying to nail that zombie arm sway in one of the great film clips of last century. Either way, it’s nice to watch a horror film that taps into some part of your childhood, and this was a large part of the success of Shaun of the Dead.

But the problem now with zombies in particular, is that they have been devalued through overuse, and rather than satirising elements of society, like they once did, they are now only capable of sending up themselves and the clichés of the genre; and a monster losing its fearsomeness is as bad as the Mona Lisa losing her smile.

But this seems to be the fate and curse of all monsters: it happened to the original Universal Studio monsters – Frankie, Count Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man, when in the 1960s, American TV networks, searching for cheap content, snapped up all these original films from the thirties to repackage and show them as the Saturday Night “Creature Feature.” Fortunately for the parents of the kids watching these movies, the old world settings of Transylvanian castles, black and white monsters, and gypsy curses seemed a bit too silly to be frightening, and in its place, a kind of warmth and nostalgia built up around the monsters in the form of model-kits and later seventies cartoons like Scooby Doo and Groovy Goolies.

This hasn’t quite happened to zombies yet, but it is on the way. They are still popular: – if anything, there has been more TV series and films about them in the last ten years than at any other time; but without anyone really innovating or subverting the mythology in any great way (including Romero himself), outside of a few minor tweaks.

And maybe this has become an impossible task, anyway, with all the variations – friendly zombies, Nazi zombies, zombie animals, zombies that run, slow-poke zombies, zombies that ask for brains, zombies that don’t – having been explored.

Because lets face it, they’ve been through the mill – from poor, spell-bound slaves laboring in Haitian fields, to the harbingers of an all out apocalypse. Maybe its time that their spell be broken, and they be released from their fright duties, so they can finally have that well-deserved rest they’ve been hankering for.

1. Coincidentally, the modern rating system that we are familiar with today came out a month after Night of the Living Dead was released. Romero has acknowledging in interviews that had his film come out after the introduction of the rating system, Night of the Living Dead might not have attained the success that it did.

2. The French have always been an ally to the offbeat side of American culture. They were the first to appreciate the literary talents of Edgar Allan Poe, and the first to formally recognise the artistic value of “film noir” movies, coining the term for it.

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SCALES OF JUSTICE: HARDBOILED AUSTRALIA

Filed under:Australian Films,Film — posted by I J Wilson on December 8, 2009 @ 6:38 pm

Back in 1983, a trilogy of feature-length telemovies were made by the ABC called Scales of Justice. Written by Robert Caswell, and directed by Michael Carson, each story was a fictional examination of corruption at three levels of the Australian legal system.

The first story The Job started at the ground level of the legal system, the police force, with a new rookie Constable Leonard Webber (Simon Burke) joining an inner-city Sydney police station. Fresh out of the Police Academy, with the police ethos of right and wrong and what it means to be perceived in the community as a police officer – the blue uniform representing the conscience of society – he is gradually exposed to age-old corruption.

It starts out small, while out on duty with his senior officer, Constable Borland (John Hargreaves). Although an efficient teacher, showing him how to carry himself while saving a mentally ill lady from committing suicide, he also teaches him the first of what could be a series of lifelong bad habits: drinking on the job, ignoring small misdemeanours in order to avoid excessive paperwork; as well as the dubious difference between a “bribe” and a “gift”. He also describes the police uniform as an unofficial “discount card” for making purchases.

But at a much deeper level, he is also being taught the importance of looking after your friends, which is more of a social code of not dobbing in co-workers. When some money in the station goes missing, the evidence of a bribe, all the on-duty officers are forced to chip in a few dollars to make it back up, rather than report it missing and bring in outside scrutiny on their policing.

The rookie takes on some of the habits, and reacts against others; but his own dilemma begins when a friend in his football team who has been charged with petty-theft, asks him to put in a friendly word with the investigating officer on his behalf. After thinking about it for a while, the rookie mentions it to Constable Borland, who tells him to go see the detective; which he does. The detective he visits describes how the system of favours work, not explicitly; but lets the rookie know that his friend now owes him a favour, and suggests that he could help the rookie by becoming an informer.

But crunch time comes for Constable Webber when he is out on night-patrol with Sergeant O’Rourke (played by veteran Australian actor, Bill Hunter) and they investigate a robbery of a fur coat store. The sergeant tells the rookie to check around the back, and in the meantime, steals some of the coats. The rookie comes back out just as the seargeant is closing the boot of his car. He quickly works out what has happened.

The sergeant leaves him to guard the broken door to prevent any passerbys from helping themselves to the merchandise, while he returns to the station. Two detectives then show up who also help themselves to some of the coats. The rookie ignores it, but the next day, he finds that someone has put one of the coats in his locker as a “present” for his fiance.

He takes the coat home with him, and wonders what to do about it. He then asks the advice of a female officer who has just found out she is to be transferred to a remote police station for investigating a rape case that Sergeant O’Rourke had wanted her to ignore. She advises the rookie to get rid of it, throw it away, and don’t say anything.

But thinking he is doing the right thing - by the law at least, Constable Webber decides to report it to the head of the station, without naming his sergeant at first; but when pressured from an outside investigator, he does.

Sergeant O’Rourke is investigated by internal affairs by officers who are like him in age and attitude. The seargeant claims the reverse of what had really happened, that the rookie took the coats while the sergeant was out the back checking the store, and they accept it: it’s easier to write off a new rookie, who is disloyal, than indite a senior officer, and let it reflect badly on an organisation who, up until then, had not detected his corrupt ways.  

Thinking that it will all turn out in his favour, the rookie is stunned when he is asked to hand in his badge and leave the force; and although this ending is not explicit in terms of content, it is cold and brutal in a uniquely Australia way. 

If there is such a thing as a hardboiled Australian crime film, that bears a close relationship to reality without being sensational, then this it. This episode has elements of Serpico, but without a clearcut hero.

The series was shot in a documentary style, and had a big impact on Australian audiences when it was first shown; and over the years, it has become part of High School English curriculum for students sitting their final year exams.

This particular episode also contains some great night-time footage – the industrial areas, the harbour and shipping yards of Sydney (that are sadly disappearing). 

Here is a link to a short clip on the Australian Screen website, with some background information about the series.

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RKO WATCH: THE FILM NOIR FOUNDATION

Filed under:Film,Film Noir Foundation — posted by I J Wilson on November 20, 2009 @ 1:48 pm

Like film noir movies?

Then check out the Film Noir Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of film noir heritage. For a small donation you can receive their hardboiled bi-monthly electronic magazine The Noir City Sentinel and be kept up to date with articles, news, and events from the shadowy world of Noir City.

–Which is also the name of their annual film festival in San Francisco. Noir City 8 will take place in January next year and you can check out the movies on their program here. (You can also have a look at some of their fantastic past exhibition poster-art).

The Foundation also works in conjunction with Back Alley Noir, a movie site that has a weekly analysis of film noir movies and a higly active discussion board, the Foundation will also provide answers to any questions you might have for them about this dark underbelly of American Cinema.  

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RKO WATCH: LATE NIGHT TV IN AUSTRALIA

Filed under:Film,RKO — posted by I J Wilson on November 3, 2009 @ 6:01 pm

Late night shadows in RKO’s “I Walked With A Zombie” (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943) 

For those of you living in Australia, a great untapped resource for good films is the national broadcaster, the ABC.

Fluctuating between old British films from studios like Pathe and Rank - and what could almost be a complete collection of  RKO films (the now defunct American studio that created Citizen Kane, a truckload of film noir, and the classic Tourneur/Lewton cycle of psychological horror films) - the ABC after midnight is an almost requisite experience for film students, movie lovers, and anyone interested in the history of cinema alike.

Although RKO (1929–1960) sat on the outskirts of the Hollywood studio system, it contributed greatly to what is now regarded as the Golden Age of Hollywood. The majority of RKO films were made on a lower budget than the big studios like Warner Bros and Paramount, but still turned out quality films with great soundtracks from composers like Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman, and notable actors like Robert Mitchum and Loretta Young.

They made lots of genre films - Westerns, War stories, Detective dramas, and Gangster films — and helped to revitalise the horror genre, moving it away from the old world horrors of Frankenstein and Dracula, into a more modern and elegant form of horror, drawing on inroads made in the study of psychology, and techniques of suspense developed in thrillers and film noir. 

They also distributed Rashomon in the US, an early film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, a significant moment, signalling an American open-mindedness to foreign films (which is not always present today) at a very important time in film history - as well as world history (it was only five years after the close of WW2).

RKO now exists only as a small distribution and production company, and although its logo of a beaming broadcast tower is not as well known as the growling lion, the lady with the torch, or the roving spotlights, it occupies a significant place in movie history, one that’s worth having a look at. 

There is no need to subscribe to pay tv to watch classic and classy films; just stay up late with a cup of coffee, and you’ll have something good to think about while your boss is wondering whether to fire you for sleeping on the job the next day. 

ABC Program Guide 

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