About Plutonian Press

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Black Cats and Black Graves: The Films of Lucio Fulci.

                              


 Image result for the gates of hell fulci
 Image result for the gates of hell fulci

In any discussion of the great horror directors, the name of Lucio Fulci must be high on the list. His dark landscapes of fog-enshrouded cemeteries, plagues of rotting zombies, malevolent spider attacks, and obsessive ocular violence, are a must visit in the dismal night covered country of horror cinema. Fulci’s zombie trilogy, The Gates Hell, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery, were a formative viewing experience in my life. Seeing The Gates of Hell at around the age of 12 or 13 both scared me so much I ran out of the room around the halfway point of the movie, and fascinated me with its operatic violence against the body and it’s just overwhelming doom-laden gothic atmosphere. The Gates of Hell was the gateway drug that turned me into a horror film fanatic. His later zombie film The Beyond further pushed the envelope of surreal filmic transgression. The Beyond stands with toe to toe with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as the pillars of the zombie film. Fulci then hit us with The House by the Cemetery, which on first watch I have to admit I was kind of baffled and confused by. More a haunted house film than a zombie invasion film like The Gates of Hell and The Beyond. But on subsequent viewings, I have come to love the subtle deliriums and just bizarre plot twists of The House by the Cemetery. In all three films, there is this kind of unseen chaos, inflecting the film and the viewer. The characters move through the films like they are lost in some foggy haze, and the films end with a shocking bewilderment rather than any kind of finality. The human body is not the only thing on attack in these films, it’s as if the zombies are carriers of a primal chaos, attacking both reason and narrative. At the end any of these films, you are left in a place of dark confusion, slowly you realize that in fact, you the viewer, were the one that was under attack.

Related image

Fulci first burst onto the horror scene with what may be his most famous and influential film, Zombie. Fulci takes Romero’s undead apocalypse scenario from his Living Dead series and brings it back to the zombie’s genres roots by taking place on a secluded tropical island, paying subtle homage to films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie. Zombie is maybe the most ‘pure’ zombie film alongside Bianchi’s Burial Ground. You show up for outrageous gore and shambling corpses, and the film outright drowns you in bodily corruption and death. Zombie is an unimpeachable classic of the genre and not to be missed. Also, I must recommend a more obscure Fulci film that deserves a second look by horror fans. And that film would be The Black Cat. A clever homage to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat is a remarkably fast-paced, suspenseful murder mystery, which is a definite departure from the surreal zombie films he is more known for. To anyone who thinks Fulci is a hack who could not direct a mainstream horror film with a more recognizable plot and realistic characters, I urge them to watch The Black Cat. The film follows the general plot of Poe’s story, a man, who may or may not be a murderer, is under attack by a malefic black cat. The black cat may be some kind of demon or may just be the paranoid delusion of a tormented mind. And something that I found absolutely charming about this film is, the black cat that is featured in this, under a backdrop of sinister music and growling sound effects, is a delightfully beautiful cat who seems more interested in preening for the camera and looking gorgeous then actually trying to look like an evil cat. And the cat has a ton of screen time, every second outshining all else in the film.  While the film is a dead serious horror film, the cat is so damned cute that it steals the show. It’s so cute that you would be tempted to take it home, let it into your family, where it will haunt your every move, and trap you in its sinister manipulations. I think that may be the paramount thing to understanding why Fulci’s films work so well, he was a director who knew what the audience wanted, he knew who the real stars of his films were, whether black cats or undead zombies. He made horror films for horror fans, he would deliver exactly what you wanted, and leave you trapped in its nightmare.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

The Unearthly Beauty of the Cinematic Other



Related image

After watching Alien: Covenant with a friend, we got into the usual conversation people have following film viewing, what was good and what was bad about it. He hated it, thought it was full of bad acting and nonsensical plot driven decisions. Which it is. But then I argued that the film had merit. It did contain some rather startling and brilliant imagery. My positive review was pretty much based solely on the scene down in the underground chambers, where David summons one of his alien offspring to come forth. It stands straight up, a disturbingly blank white face dripping with crimson blood. And David looks at it like a father or a mother would, with pride and maybe even a bit of tenderness, and whispers about how you must blow on its nose, to earn its trust. It is just such a strange and bizarrely intimate scene. That is a scene that will live forever in my mind. The rest of the film may not be that great, but what do you do with a bad film that contains a moment of absolute beauty and perfection, that many great films try for but just miss? Similarly, I also love Alien: Resurrection for the scene where Ripley is carried, coming in and out of consciousness, in the arms of a Xenomorph, like a sleeping lover, into that pit of flesh, tentacles, and other biomechanical protuberances. There she is swallowed ever so slowly into the maw, her face enraptured as in a dream, as if her cosmic destiny had finally revealed itself. The rest of the film is barely watchable. But that scene stands with the first 40 minutes of the original Alien as filmic masterpieces of cosmic mystery and perverseness.

Related image

This kind of beautiful imagery trapped within a low-rent film is not limited to the Alien series. It seems to be almost a tradition in the science fiction film. Who can forget the hairy long-tongued monster from The Brainiac carrying out his foretold doom? The invasion of evil crawling brains from Fiend without a Face? The hypnotic alien with a vaginal face bringing the end of the world from Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell? All those films have these scenes that seem lifted from some odd fever dream. I would say that the Alien franchise certainly contains less campy fun and offbeat imagination then films like It Came From Outer Space or The Mysterians. But even in big-budget science fiction, the bizarre and dreamlike image can still be found.

Image result for alien covenant david xenomorph

Monday, September 4, 2017

Review: Burial Ground


Image result for burial ground film poster


Severin Films recently released a Blu-Ray of one of my favorite horror films. The all mighty Burial Ground! A film basically about upper-class sex perverts trapped in a mansion while under siege from weapon wielding undead hordes. Gut eating, incestuous perversion, and strange atmospherics are on the menu in this Italian classic from 1981, directed by Andrea Bianchi. To me, Burial Ground is the most “pure” Zombie film. It does not waste time with subplots or attempted social commentary. Its focus is on the body, decay, desire, and an all pervasive strangeness.


Zombie films, at their best, shine a perverse light on social norms. The walking dead, devouring the living, is both an inversion ( the dead eating the living ), and an examination, of how we as humans live on a day to day basis but tend to sublimate for our own comfort. We eat what once was living tissue to survive, we eye each other's fleshy bodies with lustful and malicious desire. We don’t want to be confronted with the facts of our own mortality, so the Zombie, literally busting down the door to kill us, taps into these really primal fears we have about our brief and tenuous lives. The whole idea of a walking corpse is just surreal and disturbing. The realization that the Zombie is this looking glass version of us, rotting and dead, but still driven with this all consuming hunger, is where the Zombie film gets its power to disturb. Burial Ground, in its pulpy straightforwardness, is, in fact, one of the more interesting and transgressive films to come out of the 1980’s.

For my money, Burial Ground may have the best looking Zombies ever put to celluloid. Special effects master Gino de Rossi delivers these skeletal, maggot ridden, shambling, walking corpses that are the stuff of nightmares. The musical score is fantastic, a combination of 80’s synth and odd jazzy numbers, and is one of the weirdest scores for a film I have ever heard. It perfectly sets the mood with this unsettling morose and doom laden synthy dirge. And you can’t talk about Burial Ground without mentioning one of the all time weirdest performances. Peter Bark as the young Michael, with his much-quoted line, “ This cloth smells of death “, and his constant groping of his mother is just amazing perverse. Peter Bark has developed quite the cult following and has earned a place in horror film infamy. Severin Films did an amazing job with their Blu-Ray, I never realized how colorful and beautifully shot Burial Ground really is, having seen it mainly on bad washed out and drab VHS copies. I think Burial Ground tends to be overlooked by the Fulci and Argento films of that era, and think it’s long overdue for Burial Ground to get another look. Highly recommended.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

New release! Phantasm/Chimera!





Phantasmal: adjective
pertaining to or of the nature of a phantasm; unreal; illusory; spectral:
phantasmal creatures of nightmare.

Chimerical: adjective
she-goat or monster; a hybrid
an unusual creature; fanciful, imaginary:
it came toward us, shifting forms, one thing then another, chimerical in aspect.

What is it? The first publication from Plutonian Press! Released August 1st. The title? Phantasm/Chimera. It is an anthology featuring some of, what I feel to be, best writers of the weird and fantastic working today. Phantasm/Chimera is a collection of all horror, some weird, some creepy, some erotic, some surreal. It has been a lifelong dream of mine to publish a horror anthology. I had a lot of fun creating this, and I hope all The Plutonian readers enjoy this book! Here is the table of contents:

Lost in Strange Shadow: An Appreciation of Nightmare Horror - Scott Dwyer
The Wind, The Dust - Adam Golaski
Provisions for a Journey - Matthew M. Bartlett
The Bruised Veil - Christopher Slatsky
The Last of Liquid Sleep - Thana Niveau
The Hole - Brian Evenson
The Hotel Pelagornis, 1899 - Livia Llewellyn
Binding - Mike Allen
The Great, Grey Bulk - Jon Padgett
Chrysalis - John Claude Smith
Fiending Apophenia - Clint Smith
The Last American Lion Pelt - Jason A. Wyckoff      

All of the authors contributed amazing stories, from strange alien imposters to ghostly invasions, from demonic perversions to drug fueled hallucinations. I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who submitted a story, thank you so much for giving a first-time publisher a chance. I want to give a special thanks to two people who really jumped in and gave me incredible help and advice. Amanda Rejman for all her support. And Adam Golaski for going above and beyond in making sure the end product was something special.

Anyway, again I hope everyone digs the book. If you feel like it, reviews on Goodreads and Amazon is always a good thing. Please let me know what you think! If people like Phantasm/Chimera… there may be a vol 2…..
Here is the link to buy a copy, available now. It also will be available later on Amazon around the middle of August.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Review: Twin Peaks: The Return




I have been a lifelong fan of David Lynch. It would not be far fetched to say my first viewing of Eraserhead at the age of 17 completely and irrevocably changed my perceptions on what film can accomplish and how deep into the swampy waters of the subconscious it was possible to dive into. So after hearing that Lynch was breaking his nearly decade long silence and releasing a new television series Twin Peaks: The Return, I was pretty damn excited.


Lynch’s work, like any filmmaker, has different periods of subject matter and overall execution. To me, his first 3 films are his masterpieces and will stand the test of time as American classics. Eraserhead with its shadowy nightmare of biology and desire, a movie that defines what a Midnight Movie should be. The Elephant Man is this smog cloaked industrial gothic melodrama, and maybe his most optimistic film, it has a genuine hope for love and redemption for the tragic Joseph Merrick, a truly heartbreaking film. And lastly Blue Velvet, which shines a bright spotlight on the perversity and strangeness of American society.

Then after those early triumphs, Lynch seems to get a bit lost on what he is trying to accomplish and maybe reads a bit to many of his own reviews. Mid-era Lynch almost seems like Lynch trying to create works that he thinks the public expects of him. I include in this period Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, and Wild at Heart. They just don’t feel genuine to me. They are overly humorous, randomly surreal, and seemingly no real intent behind them besides to offer a product to his fans. I am not saying these works do not have their charms or that they are not entertaining, I am saying however that they are beneath what Lynch is capable of.

And now we are in the third phase of Lynch’s filmography. After stepping back from films for a while Lynch unleashed Lost Highway, a flawed masterpiece. The first 30 minutes are some of the most dread filled minutes in cinema history. And the Mystery Man is a genuine nightmare encased in human flesh. The second half of Lost Highway has many great scenes, but falls to the randomness that has plagued a lot of his films. Then he hit us with two absolute masterpieces, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. These are both films more about holes in logic and dreams and reality sliding and overlapping into each other until you can not where one ends and one begins. Both of these films are set in LA and Hollywood, and take the slippery nature of films to reality and exposes how nebulous the divide between them really is. Lynch really attacks the viewer's preconceived notions of perception versus imagination and leaves the film viewer in a state of unease and confusion as they leave the movie theater.

And now we come to his newest work Twin Peaks: The Return. At the time of this writing, eight episodes have been released. I am happy to say this is some of the best work Lynch has done in years. In this stagnant artistic climate and troubling political landscape we find ourselves in, Lynch’s direct transgression and surrealism are both brave and much needed. Thankfully Lynch does not care about what the fan expectations of what a new Twin Peaks should be. From the first episode Lynch attacks the viewer and lets it be known, these are uncharted waters. From evil Cooper to the disturbing creatures appearing in the dark, this show is meant to be subversive and disturbing. In no way is this some fun nostalgia filled retread of the original series. And the last episode so far released, the now legendary episode 8, is certainly one of the greatest hours of television ever created. Episode 8 can stand on its own as a short film. It recalls the greats of cinema like Bergman and Cocteau with its sublime beauty of images and penetrating insight into the insanity of the universe we find ourselves trapped in. I can not wait to see what else Lynch has in store for us.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Announcing! Phantasm/Chimera!



I have exciting news for The Plutonian readers! I have been busy editing and getting ready to publish an anthology! I am pleased to announce, coming August 1st, 2017, Phantasm/Chimera! Here is the Table of Contents:


Lost in Strange Shadow: An Appreciation of Nightmare Horror - Scott Dwyer
The Wind, The Dust - Adam Golaski
Provisions for a Journey - Matthew M. Bartlett
The Bruised Veil - Christopher Slatsky
The Last of Liquid Sleep - Thana Niveau
The Hole - Brian Evenson
The Hotel Pelagornis, 1899 - Livia Llewellyn
Binding - Mike Allen
The Great, Grey Bulk - Jon Padgett
Chrysalis - John Claude Smith
Fiending Apophenia - Clint Smith
The Last American Lion Pelt - Jason A. Wyckoff

        This book will be sold on Amazon and info about ordering it direct will be found here on The Plutonian. Again August 1st is the date it hits. This one is dedicated to all the weird horror fans out there. 



Friday, April 14, 2017

An Appreciation of Livia Llewellyn


Image result for livia llewellyn the engines of desireImage result for livia llewellyn the engines of desire

An appreciation of Livia Llewellyn - Or, The Womb, Center of Mystery.


Livia Llewellyn burst on the Weird Horror scene in 2011 with her collection Engines of Desire. Critics and fans were all talking about this book and it’s heralding of an exciting new voice. And then a couple years later she returned in 2016 with her second collection Furnace, cementing her role as one of the most important writers in the field today. With each new collection it seems her powers as a writer strengthens. Her writing blends a sense of unease and ambiguity, a deep rooted joy in surrealism and perversity, and an existential need for an understanding of oneself. She writes in many modes: At The Edge of Ellensburg and The Unattainable are tales of obsession and self destruction, Stabilimentum and Allochthon are creeping tales of domestic surrealism, and Her Deepness and Cinereous are great exercises in dark fantasy world building. All of these from a very well defined and pointedly female point of view. All told with a sensuous prose style and a commitment to explore its themes as deep and as far as they need to go. She writes in the tradition, and furthers the tradition, of such groundbreaking authors as Clive Barker ( The Books of Blood, Imajica ) and Caitlin Kiernan ( The Ammonite Violin, Confessions of a Five Chambered Heart ). A style of writing that probes the inner thoughts of the writer, the secret things that turn them on and also disgust them, and brings into light subject matter that is normally not talked about in mainstream Horror literature. In a time where Weird Horror becomes formula and fashion, where every month a new Cthulhu Mythos inspired collection comes out to further flood the field with mediocre writing and stale ideas, Livia Llewellyn brings it back to its roots; the exploration of personal and social taboos, and the pleasurable erotics of a dark and pessimistic poetry.

There seems to be a lack of critical writing on this author, and on Weird Horror as a literary scene in general. So I will highlight two of my favorite Livia Llewellyn fictions and hopefully encourage others to give a read of this, seemingly to me, criminally overlooked writer. Each of her collections are named after a story in their respective collection, and for good reason, these are arguably the best stories in their collections, and those are the ones I will focus on here.

The Engine of Desire

The Engine of Desire was first published in 2008 the anthology Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, and is a true rarity in the strangely usually too conservative field of Weird Horror, a transgressive homoerotic tale of lust and obsession among young teenage girls just blossoming into puberty, stumbling into forces bigger than them and how to deal with the unleashed sexuality threatening to overtake them. The story focuses on Megan, a housewife, dissatisfied with her life, and is haunted by a secret regret and fixation. When Megan was a young teen, a mysterious girl from “ the far end of the cul-de-sac “, already smoking cigarettes and arousing the interest of the local neighborhood girls, the girl named Kelly, came into Megan’s life as one of her sister Lisa’s friends. She watches, jealous, as Lisa is seduced and taken away, never to be seen again, by the tenebrous creature named Kelly. Many of the town’s girls have been disappearing. And Kelly was around for, and ultimately is responsible for, their disappearing, taking them into some unreal corner of town, forever. The story takes place as Megan looks back and recalls her life and how Kelly has seeped into and taken over her dreams and her inner life. She longs, she aches, to have been chosen and stole away by Kelly, and hurts from knowing that she never wanted her. Kelly had taken all the pretty girls. “All the cream has been skimmed, youth and desire siphoned away, leaving only human husks. Not enough left for the engine to feed on, and so it’s gone, along with the mystery girl who charmed its prey and fed them bit by bit into its maw.” So Megan schemes to have a daughter, a attractive daughter, to draw Kelly back to her house, and force her to take Megan with her instead of her daughter Sophie. “Megan runs her nose over her daughter’s skin, breathes the scent in deep. She smells the girl on Sophie, that sharp undertone of fuel mixed with lemons and cigarettes. And under that, the smell of the engine. Hot burning blood and smoking bone, dismembered limbs whirling in a gasoline gyre.”

Kelly is kind of an unearthly figure, a vampiric creature of seduction and damnation. At the conclusion of the story Kelly brings Megan to an old house to show Megan where she had took Lisa and the other girls. Kelly had brought them to a basement and shows them the secret heart of the world, a vast engine of flesh and hunger, made of all the girls Kelly has seduced away, where they get absorbed into the infernal machine. Megan runs away screaming, not wanting to be a part of something that involves everyone, only wanting something unique between her and Kelly.  Megan wants Kelly all to herself, but partnership is not what Kelly brings. What Kelly offers is an escape from the drudgery and lies of everyday life, to be lost in an eternal erotics of the flesh, to become one with the flesh machine that drives us, to give in to our most primal of urges, the perverse drive to mutate and corrupt forever and without end. Kelly shows us, unveils for us, the driving code written in our DNA, our real reason to exist, the life urge. Millions of years ago there came into being a thing, a primal urge that awoke, that gave consciousness and movement to insentient matter. Across a landscape of unfathomable oceans and shores of molten rock it arose. Against a cold, barren universe it clinged to life. And kept moving, and evolving, and changing. Microbes to fungus to monkeys it fought to survive. And it still exists, hidden in our modern lives, still pushing us, still at the center of our passions and our ruin. You can hear the engine in shopping centers and apartment buildings, colleges and prisons. Where this force came from or why it exists is unknown to us. We are puppets in a eons old drama. This striving, this desiring in the dark, is at the bedrock of Livia Llewellyn’s exploration of self, and in her story The Engine of Desire, she shows us the perverse combustion at the core of our hungers.

Furnace

Furnace was first published in 2013 in a tribute anthology to one of the masters of Weird Horror, Thomas Ligotti, in Grimscribe’s Puppets. Livia used this opportunity to write a story that is a modern day classic and can stand up to the best of Ligotti’s work. Furnace centers on an unnamed young girl who helplessly watches as her family and her unnamed hometown spiral downward into an unreal and hellish mockery of what seems to be normal small town life. Like how the young girl in The Engine of Desire wanted, and was trapped, by an all consuming life urge, in Furnace the young girl is trapped by the all annihilating force of breakdown and entropy, nightmare made real. The town is falling from order and into chaos, insane outbursts of strange deaths and mutilations are spreading like a plague throughout town and everyone carries on like nothing is happening, except her grandfather, who has sensed something was amiss for a long time, works on a map highlighting the bizarre incidents that are increasing in frequency everyday, trying to make some kind of sense to it, to put some kind of pattern to it. The story begins with the girl and her mother driving through town looking to do some shopping, but whole parts of town are now deserted, a bunch of stores have all of a sudden closed down and locked their doors. A smell of old moth balls permeates the air, a chill in the air signals the coming of the dark months. They see a figure standing by one of the darkened shops, the young shop owner that the girl used to have a crush on, and they approach him to ask him what has happened, only to find him holding a strange bundle, “ I started in shock to realize it was not a bolt of fabric, but a length of thick grey wool wrapped around the stiff body of a large bird with two beaks twisted into a hideous spiral and a spider-like cluster of lidless coal-colored eyes.” He stands there warning them to not look too deep into that is happening, not to look into the blackened windows of the shops, but of course they look, and the girls starts to sense, too grasp, the nightmare behind everything seeping out and penetrating into the world. But maybe the nightmare has always been there,is in fact the true face of reality? Like a cancer it always lurked under the surface of things, silently corrupting everything until it took over the body and sent it into one final horrific death throe. To be born is to exist in a world of strange creatures that both desire and decay, parents that created you and try to mold you into their own failed and desperate dreams. “ This, this is my mother’s suffocating desire, slowing time down around us, winding it back, back, until it becomes the amber-boned river in which I am always and only her little girl, eternal and alone.” The nightmare of life is a curse put onto children by their parents, as the girl figures out, a slow decent into sickness and madness. “And I ran to the edges of my northern town and past it and slipped beyond into the world, as all the bright skeletons of who I could have been swarmed behind me, plunging into the quivering moist mountains of putrescent flesh that had birthed us all, sinking into the road where she lost me, all of them dying within her desire like little miscarried dreams.” But the protagonist of Furnace comes to learn there is a way out. A breaking of her Mother’s wishes and dreams for her, that in fact, doom her. A saving act of self destruction, a breaking of ties that bind her to the biological horror we call existence on Earth, the willful taking of her own life.

Livia Llewellyn writes about the deep fear that we may not actually own our bodies and their strange cravings may be beyond our control. Like bodies adrift on a ocean of darkness, we are tossed here and there by forces that were here millennia before us and we have no chance at ever understanding. Mysteries of deep time and the ennui of meaningless existence, the desire to escape, to be free of the eternal cycle of all of our most precious perversions and fantasies falling into the annihilating black void that lurks, unheeded, under the everyday world. Unseen, nebulous forces try to control and dominate our passions and our reasons for existence in Livia’s prose. Her characters try to break free of these systems of control by either giving in to the erotic thrill, by submitting, to the engine of desire, or by turning away from it, by turning away from the system and letting it all burn away in the slow decay of the cosmic furnace. Livia is one of the strongest prose stylists and a true poet of the weird and erotic. Every time I see a new story from her in a collection or online I consider it a must read. I can’t wait to see where Livia goes from here and what strange and beautiful sights she has to show us. Watching her grow and develop as an author is exciting and I have no doubt that her work will be read for as long as Weird Horror is read. I strongly urge anyone who enjoys walking down the more shadowy and sensual paths of Horror literature to give Livia a try.