Tag: Halloween

Some Poetry for Halloween

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Months ago, I announced that Moon Tide Press was putting out an anthology of poems inspired by horror films. Well, the anthology is out! It features 66 poets and has wicked cool cover art by Leslie White.

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If you’re interested in ordering a copy, you can do so through Moon Tide’s website here, or through Amazon here.

I have three pieces in the anthology, and as a little preview, here is one of the poems:

Imagining One More Romero Movie

 

I’d like to see Romero’s take on this moment,

a time as uncanny as the dead rising,

groaning, and slow-walking towards a meal.

The elite already live in towers,

like in Land of the Dead.

The president has a tower in NYC,

barricaded by police in all-black riot gear,

like the beginning of a movie

where everything is about to go wrong.

The working-class hustle below,

their hands hard and calloused, their clothes

rife with the smell of gasoline, oil, or dirt.

Sometimes, they crane their necks, stare

at those towers, maybe to imagine a gold nameplate,

a desk, leather chair, and air-conditioned office.

 

If Romero directed one more sequel,

I wonder where he’d place the survivors.

Shopping malls are too 1980s, but maybe Starbucks,

staring at their smartphones, plugging in

before the dead bust down the doors,

rip out espresso machines, gnaw on flesh,

or maybe he’d have a horde overtake DC,

while a few remaining politicians and lobbyists

flee down K Street under a harvest moon,

until the working-class, turned, drop the gas pumps,

hammers, or call center headsets and devour the living, fed up

with slumping and staggering from job to job.

 

Happy Halloween!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Halloween Trailer #2

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With a little over a month until its release, David Gordon Green’s Halloween has a brand new trailer, featuring a hulking, brutal Michael Myers and a well-prepared Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).
You can watch the new trailer by clicking here.
I first noticed the number of scenes that parallel scenes from the original film. For instance, in the first few seconds, we see that Michael Myers has returned to Haddonfield after escaping prison. He bumps into a trick-or-treater who is daunted by his size and shape, similar to the scene in the original Halloween when Tommy Doyle bumps into Michael and is taken aback. This happens early in the film, shortly after Michael escapes from the insane asylum and ends up in Haddonfield after stealing a car.
Another scene echoes a shot in the first film when Laurie Strode is babysitting and sees Michael standing in the yard behind sheets billowing on a laundry line. There is a similar scene in this new trailer, though it’s unclear whose house it is.
For the most part, this second trailer highlights Laurie Strode, specifically her ability to take charge. She screams at the costumed children and their parents to get off the streets and go home. In another scene, we see what I think is her house, fitted with flood lights and other high-wire alert systems. Clearly, she’s been planning for Michael’s return for decades. Additionally, the new trailer features Laurie’s voice-over. It’s probably safe to assume that the film will mostly focus on Laurie and Michael, as well as Laurie’s daughter and granddaughter. This is underscored by the new poster unveiled at the beginning of this month, featuring Michael and Laurie’s faces.
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Finally, director David Gordon Green mentioned in this interview with Bloody Disgusting  that there is a continuous shot fairly early in the film that is supposed to be quite brutal. I am guessing that scene is featured in the trailer, after the costumed child bumps into Michael and the boogeyman then picks up a hammer and enters the houses of random neighbors for a killing spree. It’s in that same continuous shot that he trades the hammer for his trademark butcher knife.
Overall, the trailer has me even more excited for the film. If you have any comments or thoughts about the trailer, feel free to drop a line.

Some Thoughts on The Halloween Trailer

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For horror fans, today’s the day. The new Halloween trailer has dropped.

There is quite a bit to digest in this nearly three minute trailer, but here are some of my general thoughts.

  • Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a badass. Much of the trailer shows Laurie Strode ready and eager to confront Michael Myers after her first encounter with him 40 years ago. She fires shotguns. She secures the house. She says, “I’ve been waiting for him.”‘
  • The film ignores all of the other Halloween movies, other than the original. This film is sort of a soft reboot, and it’s already been reported that it will be a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 film. At one point, a friend of Laurie’s granddaughter asks, “Wasn’t it her brother who murdered all of those babysitters?” The granddaughter counters, “No, that was something people made up.” So, there you have it. This film ignores the story-lines from all of the sequels, even the brother/sister story first introduced in Halloween II.
  • John Carpenter’s name is very present in the marketing. Early in the trailer, it is noted that the film was produced by John Carpenter. He also handled the score. It is likely they will continue to push and market his return to the franchise.
  • Several nods to the original. From the mental asylum story-line, to the scar on Laurie’s arm, to the closet scene at the end of the trailer, it is clear that this film will have  several nods to the original film.
  • Michael looks aged… but menacing. Just look at that mask! It is worn and tells its own story. Michael, meanwhile, looks hulking and menacing in every scene. It should be noted that Nick Castle, who played the original shape, has returned for this film.
  • Women, Laurie will face off with Michael again, but it’s clear her legacy/the plot of the first film will have a major impact on her daughter and granddaughter. At one point, her granddaughter says, “Everyone in my family turns into a nutcase during this time of year.” I hope this idea is explored, and I hope the other Strode women go toe to toe with the boogeyman.

So, there you have it. Our first glimpse at the new Halloween film is here. I am curious to what others think and what observations they may have. What are you expecting and hoping for with this film?

Halloween 2018 (What We Know So Far)

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Without a doubt, one of the most anticipated horror films of 2018 is Halloween. Instead of another unnecessary sequel, Halloween 2018 is going to follow only John Carpenter’s original film, thus wiping the universe clean and placing us back to the beginning. With John Carpenter returning as executive producer and with Jamie Lee Curtis returning to play Laurie Strode 40 years after the original, there is reason to be excited. So far, some minor details about the film have leaked, after  Jamie Lee Curtis introduced the first trailer at CinemaCon in Las Vegas a few days ago. Based on reporting, the trailer begins with a true crime documentary team investigating Michael Myers’ murders from the first film. The investigators visit Myers, who’s been held in a facility for years; obviously, something goes wrong and Myers returns to Haddonfield. Curtis has said  that this time, Laurie Strode is ready for Michael, meaning she has stockpiled guns for the day he returns. This is quite a contrast to the 1978 Laurie Strode, who was a quiet, bookish teenager who outlived her friends by following the typical tropes of final girls in slasher films (innocence, being a virgin, etc). Seeing a more confident version of the character has peeked my interest as much as the description of the trailer.

It has also been reported that Carpenter will score the film, and Laurie’s daughter will be played by Judy Greer. Her granddaughter will be played by Andi Maticha. So far it is unclear what role they will play in the film, but let’s hope that the plot centers around the Strode family, specifically each generation of women, facing off against the Boogeyman.

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There is much to be said about the first poster of the film, too. It clearly shows a mask that is aged, perhaps one that Michael has worn while rotting away in a facility years after the first film. The mask is dominant on the poster, which may indicate that the film intends to make Michael the ever-present force that he was in Carpenter’s original story, a type of evil that can be present anywhere at anytime, behind a bush, in a yard, in a house. That is what truly made him the Boogeyman in the first place. Lastly, the text at the bottom of the poster somewhat reassembles the text from the first film, which is another indication that this film intends to have more in common with the original than the many sequels.

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Halloween is slated to be released on Oct. 19. It will be directed by David Gordon Green.

 

About The Thing/Body Horror

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I’ve had John Carpenter on my mind a lot lately, maybe because he’s returning to the Halloween universe he created nearly 30 year ago to produce another Halloween film that will star Jamie Lee Curtis and ignore all of the sequels that followed the original film.  It will be just Jamie and Michael, reunited at last, no bizarre stories about Michael Myers’ bloodline, or his cult, or those awful Rob Zombie remakes that tried to give a backstory that we didn’t need.

Michael Myers is so effective in that first film because he literally could be anyone, and Haddonfield could be any tree-lined suburbia. There is one brief scene in the original film where Michael takes off his mask, after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee) stabs him with a clothes hanger. When he unmasks, he looks rather…normal.  The boogeyman isn’t some supernatural entity, and the only thing thing that’s uncanny about him is the fact he gets up after Laurie Strode thinks she’s defeated him, and he gets up a second time after Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) shoots him off a balcony.

As much as I love Halloween and will always have a soft spot for Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, I’ve been more intrigued lately by Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing. On a few levels, I find it to be a more interesting film. It has stunning, guttural visual effects that still hold up, for one, but lately, I’ve been more intrigued by the idea of body horror. Few films represent that better than The Thing and the idea that the monster could be inside everyone and will spread from person to person, host to host. On a deeper level, the film was a perfect metaphor for the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s,  and today, in a very divided America, the sweeping paranoia/don’t trust thy neighbor arc  feel even more relevant.  For anyone that ever felt different, off, or an outsider, The Thing is the perfect body horror film. Anyone that appears slightly unusual is tied to the chair, blood tested, and blowtorched if the monster is inside of them.

A few years ago, there was  remake of The Thing that I didn’t bother to see. For me, Carpenter’s remake of the 1950s The Thing from Outerspace holds up too well, especially the non-CGI effects, the pulsating soundtrack, and the acting. If the new Halloween is indeed going to  follow the original film and no sequels, then there is more story to tell. I don’t think that is true about The Thing, despite its ambiguous ending.

In a tribute to the film, here is a poem I wrote about the body horror idea that  Rockvale Review recently published. I also have an essay coming out about the film in 2018 in the anthology My Body, My Words (Big Table Publishing). Not all of Carpenter’s films have aged well, but The Thing certainly has.

In the spirit of Halloween

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If you want to get yourself in the Halloween spirit, then check out these three poems that I have in the new issue of The Horror Zine. These will also appear in the print edition at the end of this year. The issue is also packed with horror fiction and interviews with other writers about the genre. Check it out!

Here is one of my favorite autumn/Halloween poems, “All Hallow’s Eve” by Louise Glück. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!

It Follows and Suburban Fears of the Other

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I’m straying a little bit from the usual poet-oriented posts to offer some criticism on the horror film It Follows, one of the best horror films I’ve seen in a few years. If you’ve seen the film, I hope that you enjoy this read.

John Carpenter, director of the original Halloween, The Thing, and other iconic horror movies, states in the documentary American Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue that American horror movies are very much about our fear of “the other,” something or someone different that will threaten our tribe. His own movies very much deal with this theme. In his remake of the The Thing, the monster is a shape shifter/parasite/alien that infects a group of scientists working in Alaska. In Halloween, Michael Myers terrorizes a quiet, sleepy suburban Illinois town and picks off teenagers one by one.

It Follows is very much a movie that plays with the trope that Carpenter mentioned, fears of “the other,” and like Halloween, it raises questions about where the other comes from. The opening shot establishes the setting and resembles some of the early shots in Halloween in that we see big houses and tree-lined streets, thus establishing the setting of what should be a safe suburban town. However, in both films that sense of security that suburbia should provide, specifically keeping bad things out, is shattered. In the opening scene of Halloween, the initial camera sequence is from Michael Myers’s point of view, as he roams through the rooms of his house, picks up a butcher knife and kills his sister as she’s having sex. In those first few moments of the film, however, the viewer has no idea that the killer is a child, a young Michael Myers, until a few shots later, when the camera angle shifts to third person, and we see him standing on the lawn, dressed in a clown costume, holding a bloody knife. Terror doesn’t come from the outside, but rather, it comes from the inside. About 20-30 minutes into the film, once Michael Myers is grown up and escapes from a mental hospital, he returns to his hometown to kill off teenagers.

After the opening shot of tree-lined streets and nice houses in It Follows, the viewer then sees a teenager, Annie, run out of her house, screaming, before she drives to a beach,where she leaves a panicked message for her father.  As the film progresses and moves towards the opening shot, we learn the source of her terror.

Early in the film, the protagonist, Jay, has sex in  a car with a boy older than her. He goes by the name of Hugh, but viewers later learn that his real name is Jeff. At first, little is known about him, but it can be assumes that he’s from the rougher side of the tracks, since he tells Jay that he doesn’t want to go back to his place because he doesn’t want to show her where he lives. After they have sex, he tells her that he passed on something to her, which he inherited from his last sexual partner. He then tells her that this thing can come in any form and can be someone she knows or someone she doesn’t know, but if it touches her, she’ll die.

During the rest of the film, Jay spends her time fleeing this creature in various forms, a creature that only she can see. She and her friends also visit Detroit, and in one scene, the friends chat about how their parents always told them to stay away from the city and stay in the suburbs. During their attempts to locate Jeff in the city, the viewer sees shots of bombed out buildings, which reinforces the idea of “the other,” that everything bad came from the city, including the man that Jay encountered and the sexual partner who passed down the evil to him.

However, the friends eventually learn that Jeff was not from the city, but rather, he attended high school in the suburbs, and they find him hiding out at his parents’s safe suburban home. He faked his name, though, and rented a house in the city to lure in a young woman and pass down the evil. His true identity is important, however, because it shows that the real terror lurks in the suburbs, not in the inner-city. It didn’t come from outside, but rather from within.

In this regard, the nameless, shape-shifting villain in It Follows is similar to other iconic horror movie villains, including Michael Myers, a boy from the suburbs, who, for seemingly no reason, kills his sister as a boy and returns to his hometown to commit additional murders. The evil is similar to Freddy Kreuger, a child molester who was burned to death by the townspeople and then returns as a supernatural entity to kill, in dreams, the children of the suburban parents who burned him alive. Even in Poltergeist, the evil does not come from outside, but from within. A family moves into a home in a development, and are terrorized by poltergeists. About mid-way through the film, the father learns that the development was built on an Indian burial ground, thus the cause of the haunting.

It Follows also gives a nod to another horror trope: sex and consequence. In the Friday the 13th movies, any teenagers who have sex are murdered by Jason. In American Dreams in Red, White, and Blue, Jason is even compared to a vicious, Old Testament kind of figure, eager to butcher anyone who strays from the straight and moral path. It is indeed significant that the creature in It Follows is passed down through sex. However, It Follows is a little more liberal in its treatment of teenage sex, or perhaps it lies somewhere in the middle of Friday the 13th and David Cronenberg’s 1970s film Shivers, which is about blood parasites that make their hosts hyper-sexual. There are some scenes of It Follows that resemble Shivers. In one of the final scenes, Jay and her friends hide out at a public, indoor pool. They hope to trap the creature in water and electrocute it, using lamps, TVs, and other appliances they lugged from their suburban homes. The pool itself and the colors in the shot, especially all of the yellow, resemble the closing scene in Shivers, when the creature/parasite infects the last person who doesn’t have it, and essentially, the film ends in an orgy, thus making a statement that sexual desires are impossible to avoid.

That scene in It Follows is different, however. Jay doesn’t succumb to the shape-shifting creature. Instead, she resists it, fights it, and flees from it yet again. Furthermore, throughout the film, Jay’s childhood friend, Paul, pleads with her to have sex with him to pass it on. She refuses, however, especially after she has sex with another character and the creature kills him. Ultimately, though, Jay does have sex with Paul, and the closing shot shows them walking down their suburban street, holding hands, while someone walks feet behind them. It’s not clear, however, if the person following them is the creature in yet another form, or someone normal. The viewer is left to guess.

It Follows makes a middle-ground statement regarding sex. Jay and Paul have sex and aren’t killed off Jason-style. Even Jeff doesn’t die, despite his confession that he contracted the evil after a one-night stand with a woman he met in the bar. However, it can be interpreted that only once Jay has sex that is meaningful, with someone who cares about her, is she safe. She survives and is no longer running by the closing shot.

In many ways, It Follows is about the old classic horror trope of the other. In the film, the other takes the shape of the inner-city creeping into the suburbs, an American fear that stems back to the great white flight of the 1950s and 1960s and has returned in the age of Occupy, a bankrupt Detroit, and class inequality/racial tensions. But the other also takes the shape of teenage sex. The creature literally stalks characters because it is passed down through sex. Yet, in the end, Jay has sex, and survives. So sex becomes less threatening.

There are other aspects of the film to note. Its music and even some of its set design/displays, such as the lamps, station wagons, and even a typewriter, resemble 1960s/1970s America, a time period that was iconic for American horror film. Yet, the film is supposed to be set in present day Detroit ‘burbs. There is a wonderful scene too, when Jay is sitting in a college classroom, listening to a professor read Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem all about “the cry of the occasion,” sex, the consequences of sex, and death. Prufrock ponders sex, women, and fears that he is getting old. Like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” It Follows is a film that analyzes the consequences of sex and how our past partners shape us and carry us to the present. We can’t run from it or avoid it. It follows.

Celebrating Halloween

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Every October, I try to make the most of Halloween because it’s my favorite holiday. This weekend, I plan to purchase pumpkin ale and watch some horror movies on NetFlix that I have yet to see, including Lovely Molly and Insidious, both of which are contemporary films that have gotten positive reviews. If you are looking for horror movies to watch on Netflix, there are several to choose from. If you want something classic, Netflix offers a slew of Vincent Price films, including The Masque of Red Death, House on Haunted Hill, and others. They also have some of the universal monster horror movies, including The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Out of all the horror options on Netflix, I recommend Masters of Horror, a series that features 45-minute films by several well-known horror directors, including John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Dario Argento, Tobe Hopper, and others. Both seasons are available for streaming. Check out “Cigarette Burns,” “Jennifer,” and “Imprint.” Those  were my favorite in the series.

If you want to watch something from the 1970s/1980s (the best era in American horror cinema, in my opinion), check out AMC’s 24-hour horror movie marathon that runs from now until Halloween. They’ll be playing The Exorcist, Friday the 13th, and a lot of the Halloween movies, as well as reruns of The Walking Dead, with a new episode to debut Sunday night.

If you want something spooky to read, check out this column in  Electric City. I mentioned in the column “cemetary Nights V” by Stephen Dobyns as a good read for this time of year, but I also recommend Charles Simic and Mark Strand as some other poets to check out. They have plenty of work with unsettling, eerie, deep images.

As we await for the Frankstorm to hit the East Coast, there’s plenty of movies to watch and books to read to celebrate Halloween.