Film Spotlight: An interview with experimental horror filmmaker James Quinn.

                                       

           Today we have an interview with experimental horror filmmaker James Quinn. He is making a film called Sodom and Chimera ( trailer above ) and it looks amazing. To finish his film he is trying kickstarter to try to raise the cash. So we are going to have a talk with him and if you are able and want to support the indie horror film scene please think about helping him out. Information on how to contribute will follow the interview.

1. Can you tell us about your film Sodom & Chimera?

Sodom & Chimera is an experimental horror film that visualizes the experience of schizophrenia. I believe it is the first film that tries to do this that is created by an actual schizophrenic. The film is not like other schizophrenia films, it focuses more on delivering the actual feeling of madness and going crazy, instead of telling a story that is built on human interaction. The film will have different chapters, with every single one showing a different side of the illness. For instance, Chapter III is going to be one big psychedelic trip, while Chapter IV will be less psychotic, but more subtle, with elements of a classic horror film. It will focus on the paranoia and delusions, providing a feel like reality is losing it's structure, which will intensify as the happenings become more and more bizarre and frightening. So basically, there will be very few moments in the film where you can relax, it's going to be very intense almost all the way through.

2. Love the title. How did you come up with it?

The title is something that I put much thought into. It was only after a significant amount of scenes were already done and I decided to split everything in chapters, that I started thinking about a name. I had previously started reading The 120 Days of Sodom, and the word “Sodom” just got stuck in my head. First, I decided to use it in the title of Chapter III, which is now called The Law of Sodom/The Eviscerated Mind. Sodom of course referring to the actual Sodom and Gomorrah. One day, the word chimera came to my ears. I had never really thought about it much before, but it instantly hit me. In the end, it was the perfect metaphor. Sodom stands for the downfall, in this case the downfall of the mind, and Chimera for the figments, the insanity, the madness, and, as a chimera is also a very dark mythical figure, for the evil and vicious. Besides that, it's an obvious play of words on Sodom & Gomorrah, which I also really liked.

3. Is this your first film and if not what other work have you done?

This my first feature film. I have finished another project earlier this year, an eight minute short film. This month, I will get information on whether it is going to be premiered at a certain film festival or not, then I will release more information about it, the title and some images of the film. All you need to know about it for now is the following: It's about a man trying to deal with his awful past by dedicating his life to god, only to face a horrible truth. It is completely different than Sodom & Chimera. While S&C is a film that is full of noises, loud music and grotesque imagery, this film is very nihilistic, quiet and completely in black and white.

4. Do you prefer film or digital?

Well, up until now I have only shot digital, as it was the easiest way so far, and it enabled new ways to shoot scenes for Sodom & Chimera. But I am very neutral on this subject, I think both options have it's positive and negative aspects. What I'm going to use for my next projects, I don't know yet. Time and budget will tell.

5. What are some of your favorite weird/experimental/horror films?

I have lots and lots of films from these genres that I like. Some major influences were David Lynch's Eraserhead and Inland Empire, even though my film is very different from these. But those are the two films that got me into surreal and strange cinema. I also got heavily inspired by the imagery of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, a film I absolutely love. It has these beautifully looking shots that look like moving paintings, and I tried a similar approach in my film. You can even see it in the trailers, there are several shots of woods, which are all very dark and thick looking. Other films I love in this genre are Karim Hussain's Subconscious Cruelty and The Abandoned, also two films that inspired me a lot, Taxidermia, Enter the Void, Tetsuo, a very important film to me that influenced some of the fast black and white shots, Begotten, Donnie Darko, the short film Haze, I also love french films very much, not only classic stuff like Martyrs, Irreversible and I Stand Alone, but also more subtle and weirdly disturbing flicks like À ma soeur! (Fat Girl) and Dans ma peau (In My Skin). Also I like lots of classic films, like the ones from Jodorowsky or Luis Buñuel. I could go on endlessly here, I have so many favorites as I've seen so much already. I'm really into abstract cinema and those I listed are only the tip of what I've seen. Some more classic and less weird horror films that heavily influenced S&C are The Shining and the newer The Canal. Also partly very surreal, but most importantly very creepy and atmospheric films, and atmosphere is what I'm going for.

6. What's next after Sodom and Chimera?

I have several projects in mind. I'm not sure which will come first, but I have tons of stories ready. One film that I've already started writing for instance is about misfortune. It tells different stories of people that have things happening to them that are emotionally crushing or just downright horrible. This is a film I really want to do, just not sure yet when exactly. Other projects include a story about a woman who is dying of cancer, when suddenly her husband reveals a shocking secret that completely changes their relationship until something horrible happens, a story about a man who, after witnessing several incidents of death, tries to actually “live” more, which takes a bizarre turn, and one that covers a subject that many people don't think about a lot, which is the private thoughts of people, showing different human beings and what's going on in their head, stuff that no one ever gets to know, focusing on the dark and sinister. There are several more, but I won't list all of them. I'm going to try to get them all made though, sooner or later. After the last chapters of Sodom & Chimera have been done writing, I will immediately start working on the next story. Hopefully, it will be easier to get the next one made, the process of creating Sodom & Chimera has already been a very long one with lots of obstacles. And it's still not done yet. It will most likely be released in 2016 though, if everything goes right of course. That is a date that I feel is very realistic and I'm hoping for it to be the first half of 2016. But in the end, as always, time will tell. 

Here is a link for his kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1314278794/sodom-and-chimera-an-experimental-horror-film

Review: The Infusorium by Jon Padgett

                                    

From Jon Padgett, creator of Thoman Ligotti Online comes The Infusorium. In the back woods an old factory still stands. Long abandoned but seething with a kind of unlife. Black fog chokes the nearby town. Strange skeletons are found in the soil. A dark mystery unfolds. The Infusorium is a lot of spooky pessimistic fun. A chapbook from Dunhams Manor Press, it’s a quick read full of surprising twists and turns and left this reader quite excited about Jon Padgett’s forthcoming short story collection from the same publisher, The Secret of Ventriloquism. These chapbooks sell fast and I recommend interested readers grab a copy before they sell out. The Infusorium is pure macabre pulp at its finest.

Review: After by Scott Nicolay

                                         

 

After is a new chapbook out from Dim Shores Press, one of the leading Weird Fiction publishers. In After, by author Scott Nicolay, we are presented with a woman whose life is in a kind of free fall and only getting worse. An abusive boyfriend, kids gone to live their own lives, the death of a close friend. And then Superstorm Sandy hits. The story centers around her going to check out the damage of her house while the town is still considered a disaster area and evacuated. She, maybe strangely, decides to stay in the deserted house to get away from her abusive boyfriend. The story then descends into a Ballardian exploration of psychological landscapes and unconscious fears and desires. The story examines cycles of abuse and how someone who is abused will seek out another abuser to get rid of the current abuser and just keep being trapped in that cycle. But at the same time After pays homage to pulpy monster stories and has a lot of fun with the “unknown creature” plot. NIcolay also uses some siege dramatics ala George Romero. And like in a Romero film… not everything ends in a happy ending. All in all another masterwork from one of the most interesting writers in the Weird Horror field. Definitely recommended.                 

Eclipse 2015

                         

Some thoughts on the eclipse of 2015. I traveled to a old hilly cemetery, full of old trees, serpentine trails and hidden grave sites. The moon was a sliver of light and darkening fast. I found a secluded spot I could comfortably watch the lunar show. After about a half hour the moon turned into a dark ashen burning cinder in the sky. The graveyard went black. The stars were more pronounced surrounding the dark orb. The sound of a chill wind blowing through the leaves. Wispy ghosts of clouds floating past. A sense of terror and awe came over the world. A autumnal excitement took me over. It was like for a short time I was living in a horror story. A pale red light fell upon the world. Any moment the dead could rise or alien things could filter down from the stars. As a ‘horror person’ I seek those moments in life and art. A mix of terror and awe. At that moment of the eclipse, the graveyard was my church, the moon my god. Some people like horror for the gore and the sense of pushing boundaries. Some for the jump scares like a roller coaster. These are not my people. My people are the ‘autumnal‘ people, the people who look for a dark transcendence. An encounter with the things that whisper from the shadows. People who find comfort in the darkening world. People who wait for the ashen moon. For about an hour, the dark world revealed its secret face, and we recognized it as our own.

Dream Collections

I have always been a huge fan of lists. Best 10 lists, best of the year list, etc. I also like to create imaginary fiction collections that I would publish myself.. if I was not broke. So anyway.. here's my current one:

Morella - Poe

Bianca's Hands - Sturgeon 

The Spider - Ewers 

Axolotl - Cortazar

The Faces at Pine Dunes - Campbell 

The Festival - Lovecraft 

Flowers of the Abyss - Ligotti 

Metamorphosis A - Kiernan 

Vrolyk - Samuels

The Voice in the Night - Hodgson

The Forest - Barron

The Metamorphosis - Kafka 

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Ellison

Cinematic Broodmothers

       There is a genre of horror referred to as ‘body horror’. It’s different from ‘gore horror’ and ‘erotic horror’ by its point of attack. Gore is about being visually assaulted by images of what's kept hidden inside the skin, and erotic horror is about teasing you with what lies in the shadow of eroticism without ever showing you. Body horror is the revelation that our own bodies are completely alien and unknowable to us. Life is an inescapable labyrinth of flesh and confusion. Two modern sages of this wisdom are David Lynch and David Cronenberg.

First Lesson: The Labyrinth of Flesh

David Lynch’s early cinematic work are poems of Body Horror. His first feature-length film Eraserhead details the adventures of Henry Spencer, a man who learns that his lover is about to birth them a baby, well at least they think it’s a baby. A fever dream of dark hallways, mutated bodies, infested landscapes and swamps of sexuality, Eraserhead is a nightmare of being caught in the procreation factory. Henry walks around in a state of perpetual confusion. Embryo’s in the bed, mysterious people appearing to him as in a dream, black planets, and black places. We live in a strange place. We were born into a drama of squirming flesh fighting to live on a barren rock in the nothingness of space. The purpose of life is to create more life. From microbes to things crawling unto ancient shores to things that fuck and think, the life urge overtakes all it sets its sights on. Contrary to its seemingly dark mood, Eraserhead takes pleasure in the flesh factory that is the Earth and shows all the dark delights of mutating flesh and lust in the night. Where did life originally erupt from and what is its natural home? Lynch’s films would answer, “ Somewhere in the unknowable darkness. “

                       

Second Lesson: A Tumor of the Mind

David Cronenberg’s early films like Shivers and Rabid are biological tragedies about the attempt to escape the life/death cycle of mortality and the dangers of trying to escape our physical destiny. His body horror films mainly focus on men and women of science trying to fundamentally alter what it means to be human by altering the body. In Shivers it's about trying to reduce consciousness through a parasite that takes over and transforms its host into a purely sexual being, ushering in a transformative sexual apocalypse. Rabid is about a plague that makes its hosts into mindless killers, with a hapless surgically mutated plague carrier caught up in an addiction to blood, using her sexuality to entrap victims and spread the disease. Both films show that the body politic rules over social politics. The origin of society is the human body. And its desires and obsessions form the structure of society.

The mutability of the flesh and how it can be rearranged. What we take to be ‘us’ changes over the years. And there is no stable boundary between ‘us’ and the outside world. We are made up of viruses and other intruders as much as we are made up of blood and skin. And Cronenberg casts a clinical look at human desires as a virus would look. Like how love is an organism's desire to change and be changed. “ Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other, that even dying is an act of eroticism. “ - Shivers. Human life is a day to day theatre of penetration. From bodies to other's emotions to advertising to media to bacteria to pharmaceutical drugs. We are penetrated by a thousand things every day. How do you reserve a sense of self? Is there a self? It seems that Cronenberg’s films answer, “ We are defined by what we desire to penetrate us. “  

Body Horror is crucial to our understanding of this world we are born into. Questions of why the human race acts like it does and why we exist are dealt with by Body Horror. Horror cinema acts like a soft voice in the night talking about things you don’t want to think about in the daylight hours. These films whisper to their audiences, “We humans are walking diseases. Born in the nothingness of space. We humans are meant to spread and infect. And it is both heartbreaking and beautiful. “

The Darkening Sky

Hello and welcome to my new blog! The Plutonian will be a weekly online blog dedicated to weird fiction, horror films and the darker side of philosophy. You will find book reviews, interviews, articles, and once in a while a rant or two. A little about myself.. My name is Scott Dwyer, life long weird horror fan, filmmaker, and writer. In the future I may post some of my work on here for you to check out. The autumn season is coming and hope you will allow me to take you on a tour of the outer rim of weird horror.