About Plutonian Press

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Interview: C.M. Muller

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Welcome to the Plutonian! Your yearly anthology series Nightscript has been a favorite of mine since issue one. For my money, it may be the best yearly weird horror anthology around. What was the genesis behind you creating Nightscript?

Its an honor to be here, and I am heartened by your kind words. Thank you. As to the genesis of the anthology, there are, oddly enough, two points-of-origin. Back in the late 80s, during my junior year of high school, I produced a staple-bound horror anthology called (yes, you guessed it) Nightscriptas a young kid, I was extremely proud to have fashioned this catchy compound word. The first issue contained half a dozen stories and was produced at the print shop where I worked. This was my last job before venturing off to college where my love of horror fiction and the anthology I had once been so proud of quickly washed down the academic drain. Flash forward to 2012, or thereabouts, and I found myself returning to horror fiction, though more so on the writing side of things. I worked hard for a couple of years, trying to improve my style and occasionally submitting pieces to prospective markets. There was zero success, but with a bit of persistence and luck I finally found a home for a short piece entitled Vrangr.And what a home it turned out to be: Michael Kellys Shadows & Tall Trees. I mention this because I dont believe Nightscript would have been reincarnated had not this seminal event in my writerly life occurredfor when the unfortunate news hit (about a year after my story acceptance) that S&TT would be entering a state of indefinite hiatus, I was saddened to imagine the possibility that such a unique and seminal publication might never again see the light of day. So, all of my old experience from that long-ago print shop anthology returned and I thought why not give it a go. I was confident I had the technical expertise, though remained skeptical about the publications reception, i.e. how to market it. But sometimes, as we all know, we just have to trust our intuition. To paraphrase the immortal words of Ray Bradbury: I threw myself, idea in hand, over the cliff and built my wings on the way down. And what a ride it has been!

Nightscript has this nice blend of different genres, like weird horror, dark fantasy, and ghostly fiction. What is the missionof Nightscript? What kind of impact do you wish it to have? What kind of work are you trying to champion?

I originally envisioned a much smaller publication that would have included no more than a dozen stories, all in the mode of Robert Aickman. My intent, from the outset, was to focus exclusively on quiet horror.After putting the call out for stories, however, my perspective on the enterprise shifted considerably. I realized that limiting the type and quantity of fiction I was looking to include was not really the route I wanted to take. Im not afraid to admit that for the entirety of the year that the first volume was in production, I was anxious to the Nth degree. While I knew there was enthusiasm in the community, I had no idea that the project would eventually be so well-received. Indeed, no less than Ellen Datlow called it a very promising debut anthologyin her Best Horror of the Year. Readers also seemed to like the aesthetics I was going for, and so I felt encouraged to expand the project outward. Hard to believe that I will soon be reading for Volume 5! I think my main goal of the anthology has always been to promote exceptional writing and stories that resonate. And just what is exceptionalwriting? Well, for Nightscript I would say that a potential entry needs first and foremost to be dreamlike, in the sense that the writing (the content and the style) must lull me into an experience that is both emotional and new. Sure, there is always the entertainment side of the reading experience, but there needs to be something more. Des Lewis, in his Real-Time Reviews, summed the anthology up best: Weirdness with truth at its heart.

Your Chthonic Matter Press was a huge influence on me to start my own little micro publishing press, Plutonian Press, and publish my own anthology, Phantasm/Chimera. What are your thoughts on the micro/small press publishing world?

You know, that is so fantastic to hear. It really is. One of my goals/hopes at the outset was to encourage/inspire others to step into the role of editor/anthologist. For me, there is no better feeling than knowing that Ive in some way inspired others to create. While there are many benefits to be had in regard to publishing an anthology, I would say that this, as well as the discovery of new talent, are the most rewarding. My thoughts on the micro/small press scene are simple to summarize: This is where its at, people. This is where some of the best writing can be found. Sturgeons Law, right? Ninety percent of everything is crap. Well, Id say that the majority of that exceptional ten percent can be found in the micro/small press sphere. I guess it all boils down to what excites and inspires you. For me, a lot of the work being published in this underground networkis the stuff that will be around for some time to come. Perhaps this is because we have for the most part distanced ourselves from the big business publishing model, where sales are more important than substance. Theres an energy and originality that exists here that I simply do not find in the upper echelons of the publishing biz. There are exceptions, of course, but overall I would say that I am inspired almost exclusively by the Davidsin this Goliath story.

You also are a masterful writer of quiet horror fiction. What is the seduction of the creepy and the unnerving to you?

Id ask that you redact masterfuland replace it with middling,but I sure do appreciate such a kind classification! You know, I wish I could give you a more proper explanation about the seductionthat this type of fiction affords, but it really is a difficult question to answer. I guess we all consume stories for different reasons and in different ways, whether we are a Writer, Reader, Anthologist, or a combination of all three. We draw forth technical things, emotional things, things which enlighten us, things which explicate the joys and horrors and mysteries of the human condition. Ah, the hell with itlets just keep the Mystery of it all intact and enjoy it while it lasts.

If you were to publish an anthology of your all-time favorite horror short stories, what are some of the stories you would choose?

Well, I could certainly fill dozens of volumes, but I will limit myself to ten:

Lisa Tuttles Bug House
Jason A. Wyckoffs Knotts Letter
Shirley Jacksons The Summer People
Terry Lamsleys Walking the Dog
Jerome Bixbys Its a Good Life
Mike Conners Stillborn
Clive Barkers Coming to Grief
Flannery OConnors Good Country People
David J. Schows Not From Around Here
Brian Evensons Windeye

With Halloween just around the corner, I would be remiss to not ask you, what are you favorite go to horror films to watch in October?

The one which readily comes to mind (largely because I just acquired a VHS copy at Goodwill last week) is Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. This is always a fun one to immerse yourself in. (And, bonus, the storyline does not include that creep, Michael Myers!) Im also curious about the new Haunting of Hill House remake currently playing on Netflix. Another film I might mention is Philip Ridleys The Reflecting Skin. If there is a Nightscript story which could be said to have been translated to the silver screen, this might very well be it. Such a brilliant movie, on so many levels. One of my absolute favorites.

You have a new anthology coming out in 2019, Twice Told: A Collection of Doubles. I do believe that the book is themed around Doppelgangers? What drew you to this theme? And are we going to be seeing more stand-alone anthologies from Chthonic Matter Press?

Yes, I am extremely excited about this project. The contents (22 stories) are absolutely incredible, and I think readers will be pleased with the unique approaches each writer has taken in regards to the theme. As far as what drew me to such subject matter: Hey, whats not to like about coming face-to-face with a duplicate of yourself? Theres something unnerving and delightful about the idea. What I was hoping to achieve with this stand-alone anthology, however, was to avoid, as much as possible, the traditional route of the doppelgänger, and for the most part, I think I have succeeded. I will be curious to see how it is received. And, yes, I have a number of ideas for similar stand-alone anthologies in the coming years. I cant speak of anything definitive as yet, but if things go well with Twice-Told, Id say that there is a strong likelihood that other themed anthologies will be born. Ive also been tinkering with the idea of starting another non-themed anthology, a sort of sister publication to Nightscript, though something a bit more SF-oriented, à la Black Mirror. Given the current environment in which we live, this seems like a pertinent and exciting avenue to explore. I feel that there might be a good bit of crossover from the weird fiction community, and so perhaps the time is right to take yet another plunge from Bradbury Heights.

What can we expect next from C.M. Muller and Chthonic Matter Press?
First off, Id like to thank you for providing this platform, and for your unflagging encouragement these past few years. I have four stories that should see print relatively soon. They are slated to appear in Vasterian, Weirdbook, Gorgon: Stories of Emergence, and the Stefan Grabinski-inspired anthology In Stefans House edited by Jordan Krall. Im super excited to be included in these publications. Im also planning to release my debut story collection later this year, entitled Hidden Folk, which will contain twelve or so previously published tales. And, last but not least, there is the continuing dark saga that is Nightscript: Ill be open to submissions for Volume 5 this January. I have a feeling that 2019 is going to be an insanely busy but incredibly inspiring year. Onward!

Buy Nightscript 4 here:
https://chthonicmatter.wordpress.com/nightscript/

Guest Post: The Numinous in God, Nature, and Horror. By Christopher Slatsky





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  Caspar David Friedrich's painting, Woman Before the Rising Sun (alternatively titled Woman Before the Setting Sun) elicits a profound awe at the majesty of nature. The woman’s outstretched hands convey something like prayer or a supplication of wonder at the sight of dawn (or dusk). Friedrich's paintings, in general, demonstrate a transcendental realm where nature reigns. His art conjures astonishment at humanity’s tremulous presence on Earth.
Hiroshige’s Wind Blown Grass Across the Moon accomplishes something similar. While it would be a chauvinistic mistake to make a one-to-one comparison, Hiroshige’s portrayal of grass contrasted against a full moon is similar to Woman Before the Rising Sun; both evoke terror and wonder in the face of Nature.
Volumes could be written on African art alone. Take the Yoruba, for the,

...deft, luminous peace of Yoruba religious art blinds us therefore to the darker powers of the tragic art into which only the participant can truly enter. The grotesquerie of the terror cults misleads the unwary into equating fabricated fears with the exploration of the Yoruba mind into the mystery of his individual will and the intimations of divine suffering to which artistic man is prone.

There’s an ominous quality to these arts—in paintings, film, music, literature, the emphasis on nature occulted, yet also gloriously pious, conveys a sense of awe, of the universe’s scope and our infinitesimal place in it, of God, of beauty and mystery. There are so many fascinating examples amongst various cultures I can’t possibly do justice to the varieties of art that explore the connection between God, Nature, and fear.
Of course, we’re dealing with Rudolf Otto’s awful terror, his oft-discussed Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It’s the numinous reverence at the heart of religious, as well as artistic, and literary fervor. Rather than give my interpretation of Otto’s concept, I’ll let his own words clarify the idea,

We will take to represent this [absolute overpoweringness] the term majestas, majesty—the more readily because anyone with a feeling for language must detect a last faint trace of the numinous still clinging to the world. The tremendum may then be rendered more adequately tremenda majestas, or “aweful majesty”.
...there is the feeling of one’s own submergence, of being but “dust and ashes” and nothingness. And this forms the numinous raw material for the feeling of religious humility...

Regardless the art or time, there’s this difficult to define liminal (as opposed to liminoid) stage where ecstatic fear and religious ecstasy in the face of one’s faith, or the natural World, coincide. That groveling submission before something so beloved it intimidates and inspires is paramount. What are its origins? Why this submissive dread, this overwhelming fascination with the ineffable that invariably informs so much art, so many religions, and horror fiction specifically? Most importantly, does the numinous reside within the believer and non-believer; the deist, polytheist, monotheist, atheist, and the secularist throughout human history? As Almond states, “...the numinous experience may be conceptualized in theistic, trans-theistic, and non-theistic terms”.

I have a distinct memory of when I was 5 and we’d just moved from Southern California to Oregon, to our new home, a house hidden away in the woods on an isolated 32-acre forest-covered mountain. I remember the first night there, standing by myself outside, looking into the dark woods free of any light pollution in such a distant place. I was dumbstruck by the majesty and mystery of it all. Like Sanderson in Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”, I too was consumed by what I can only describe as a pantheistic fervor and raw atavistic fear at what I could not comprehend lurking within the darkest depths of the forest. I experienced that pious terror in the grandeur and power where nature, religion, and horror embrace.
The vastness of the natural world may invoke reactions similar to those moved by pious revelations, and this is of great relevance to the terrifying grandeur of weird storytelling. The uncanny is omnipresent and seems to be an innate aspect of being human, of how we view the world and how the irrational, surreal, and disturbing distortion of the physical world invokes unease.
As a species we’re captivated by infinite expanses—it informs our concepts of an afterlife, religions, our gods, inviting fear and wonder. This reaction to never-ending spaces and concepts is likely innate. Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt write in their groundbreaking study,
...two features form the heart of prototypical cases of awe: vastness, and accommodation. Vastness refers to anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self's ordinary level of experience or frame of reference. Vastness is often a matter of simple physical size, but it can also involve social sizes such as fame, authority, or prestige. Signs of vastness such as loud sounds or shaking ground, and symbolic markers of vast size such as a lavish office can also trigger the sense that one is in the presence of something vast. In most cases vastness and power are highly correlated so we could have chosen to focus on power, but we have chosen the more perceptually oriented term “vastness” to capture the many aesthetic cases of awe in which power does not seem to be at work.

I’m reminded of the brilliant writings of R.H. Benson, whose Catholicism informed his ghost stories as sage warnings against spiritualism, a heartfelt condemnation or offense at the intrusion of the supernatural. In his novel The Necromancers, a “Thing” has traveled from “a spiritual distance so unthinkable and immeasurable, that the very word distance meant little.”
Vastness. Light years. Parsecs. Immeasurable gulfs. There’s a tattoo of the numinous inked in our brains, and so this indescribable dread in the face of the supernatural or Nature’s majesty is unavoidable. Few writers captured this so passionately as Benson.
John Gatta points out that the poet William Cullen Bryant makes an interesting point relevant to the numinous in Nature (referring to Bryant’s poem, The Prairies),
Only by looking beyond this vacancy, and beyond the current vitality of insects, birds, and ‘gentle quadrupeds,’ can [Bryant] imagine the prehistory of human races that once inhabited this land. He then finds the landscape haunted by ghostly powers.

Gatta goes on to refer to Thoreau with a similar observation,

And insofar as the sacred corresponds most broadly to an experience of the numinous—that is, to an encounter with something “wholly other,” beyond the usual bounds of human culture, the nonhuman world of nature is evidently allied to the numinous. Confirming nature’s “wildness” has at least a potential religious value then, insofar as it helps us, in Thoreau’s words, “to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

God, Nature, and horror are inexorable aspects of our being.
Our brains assume the persistence of our thoughts, emotions, personalities, and minds after death. Studies have proposed that children implicitly support belief in an afterlife, as it is impossible for the human brain to comprehend non-existence.
There is tantalizing research on humans being “implicit”, or “intuitive” theists—that is, primates programmed to interpret design in disorder, patterns in nothingness, order in ambiguity. We are set to attribute intention to natural objects.
We are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. The world revolves around Homo sapiens, and any perceived design is surely the consequence of supernatural forces choosing to single out humanity. Horror taps into this atavistic theism in that it may fill the reader with a form of awe that allows one to contemplate whether there’s something beyond this physical world, an order, an ineffable truth that sets us to gape at the majesty of chaos. The conceit of an ineffable cosmos caring about us is a seductive thought, and even permeates secular humanist ideologies in exemplifying the virtues of our accomplishments through art, science and such, as if we’ve achieved some pinnacle on the Great Chain of Being.
Even if we’re born with the assumption of agency, and the glories of the numinous may be part and parcel of that genetic bundle, theism isn’t universal. Otto assumed Christianity when proposing his mysterium, tremendum et fascinans. The concept of the numinous is still important despite Otto’s monotheistic default. Humanity’s insignificance in the face of storms, the ocean and its depths, vistas, massive mountain ranges, the vastness of the cosmos, in the complexity of the infinite, of numbers, Fibonacci patterns, fractals, infinite repetitions in the natural world, is universal and doesn’t require theism to inspire and thrill. Nature is awe-inspiring. Nature is terrifying. We’re all the product of the same evolutionary processes; we have a numinous seed planted in our heads regardless of the culture or era we were born into.
The numinous remains relevant to non-theistic expressions. There’s something more, if not universal, applicable across a wide swath of humanity, Theistic cognition is so deeply ingrained that even atheists, agnostics, and less religious people display implicit responses consistent with religious beliefs.

Of course, much of this may run the risk of putting too much credence in sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, as explanations for human behaviors. All too often the rather tenuous findings of sociobiology are cherry-picked and shoehorned into specific political opinions. But when it comes to the numinous, I think an acknowledgment of its persuasive influence across cultures, among various faiths and philosophies, in wildly different artistic expressions, merits some consideration. This humbling, frightening astonishment occurs whether contemplating one’s place in the universe, the nature of the gods, or peering into the dark recesses of a vast unexplored forest.
Nature and pious wonder are inexorably bound. The mystery and beauty of the natural world inspire a breathless admiration comparable to religious mania. This universe is awesome in its scope and impenetrable depths; this existence is awesome in the terror it invokes at our inability to fully comprehend its secrets.
All we can do is wallow in our venal imperfections. We’re all gazing out upon the abandoned, dead universe with something like jealous admiration and fear, dreaming of no longer being alone. We tremble before the majestic realization that we will never know anything with certainty.

Bibliography

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford University Press, 1958.
Almond, Phillip C. Mystical Experience and Religious Doctrine: An Investigation of the Study of Mysticism in World Religions. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014.
Keltner, Dacher and Haidt, Jonathan. “Approaching awe, a moral spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.” Cognition and Emotion, 17, no. 2, (2003).
Benson, R.H. The Necromancers. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909.
Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. Oxford University Press, 2004.8. Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D. F. “The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity.” Developmental Psychology, 2004:40.
Kelemen, D., & DiYanni, C. “Intuitions about origins: purpose and intelligence in children’s reasoning about nature.” Journal of Cognition and Development, 6, (2005).
Uhlman, Eric Luis, Poehlman, Andrew, and Bargh, John A. “Implicit Theism.” In Handbook of Motivation and Cognition Across Cultures, edited by Richard Sorrentino, Susumu Yamaguchi, Cambridge: Academic Press, 2008.




Saturday, October 20, 2018

Clint Smith: Poet of the Weird Underbelly of America


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Clint Smith, in my opinion, is one of the most exciting horror writers working in the field today. He writes in the best pulp horror tradition, and what I mean by that is that his stories are simultaneously great fun to read and also deeply disturbing to think about after you have put the book down. He has an infectious love of monsters and a fascination with the nonhuman. Some of his stories are understated and reflective, and some are all out with the weird and the monstrous. If I had to try to compare his work in the horror field, I would say that Clint Smith follows in the tradition of Karl Edward Wagner and Fritz Leiber in terms of the technique of artistic pulp horror, while intertwining that with the mind-twisting surreal nightmares of Adam Golaski and Brian Evenson. He has numerous stories published, you can find his work in Nightscript 3, Weird Fiction Review, my own anthology Phantasm/Chimera, among other publications. He has one collection currently available, Ghouljaw and Other Stories, published by Hippocampus Press. I highly recommend anyone with an interest in the next generation of horror writers to definitely give that one a purchase. In 2019, also from Hippocampus Press, he has a new collection coming out called The Skeleton Melodies, and I can't even express how excited I am for that one to be released. It may be the book I am most looking forward to in 2019. Clint Smith is a name to watch, and his work is only getting better. His themes and narratives are only getting richer and more complex, and for me, every new story from his is a must read. If there really is a 'weird renaissance' going on in the world of weird horror fiction, Clint Smith is a name that must be at the top of the list.

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Like Hemingway writing of soldiers in World War 1 era Spain and Italy, Clint Smith writes with this deep awareness and understanding of the lower echelons of American society. Whether writing about single-parent families in The Undertow, and They That Dwell Therein, young adults with no bright future ahead of them in Fiending Apophenia, or a young man trying to find a night of escapist sex and drugs in Benthos, he brings this relatability and familiarity that makes you feel that you actually know people just like the ones he is writing about. These are people you have drank with, these are people you have seen arguing in retail stores, these are people you have crossed the street to avoid. He puts you straight into their everyday lives. Going along on drug-fueled drives with nihilistic partiers, sitting in hotel rooms with your children wondering anxiously what your next move should be, these are real people. People who have history, people who have been damaged in their lives, people who keep going in spite of the bleakness of their day to day existence. He writes about them with a surgical precision. Clint Smith is the poet of the weird underbelly of lower-class America.

Sure he makes you sympathize with these people and their lives, but the author is not done yet. He has other plans for his readers. Darker plans. Towards the end of one of his horror tales, a slow rot starts to creep into the carefully constructed reality. Some sort of unexpected aberration has leaked into the narrative. The life we thought we knew becomes corrupted. A seething madness is revealed. Clint Smith shows us our everyday disappointing and banal lives, and then shows the cancer lurking underneath, the cancer that has been seeping into you all along. Our existences, our passions, our bodies, all are unreal diseases of the mind. Human existence is just another form of the rotting flesh creeping across the cold Earth. In the end, we realize our lives were just some sort of feverish delirium. These diseased deliriums are the poetry Clint Smith weaves in his tales.

There are so many unsettling moments in Clint Smith’s fiction. In his masterful story The Undertow, and They That Dwell Therein, there is a disturbing image that will linger in your mind, a strange melding of parts that should never go together, out in the deep currents of the ocean. In Fiending Apophenia, some... thing, comes along to deliver a dark revelation to the wasted and doomed youth of the story. And in Benthos, your own desires and even your own flesh come into question as you undergo a strange metamorphosis. But this is just a small sampling of Clint Smith’s wide range of stories. I strongly urge the adventurous horror reader to pick up one of his books. I just worry about what kind of end he may have in store for you.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

H.V. Hyche's Film Review: Don't Go In The House.


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While most people would suggest THE SHINING or THE THING as the most effectively chilly winter-set horror films, I would instead offer 1980's DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE, not only because its authentically dead-of-winter Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey settings more chillingly capture the desolation of the season, but because it's an icy film down to its core, a portrait of isolation and loneliness where human warmth is as impossible to imagine as any kind of sunny seasonal relief.
Even though DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE was marketed as just another late '70s/early '80s slasher film, there is no vicarious thrill involved in the gory effects, which are largely limited to an absolutely horrific burning sequence that is bound to be seared in your memory forever. However, the film - which was co-written by husband and wife team Joseph Ellison (also the film's director) and Ellen Hammill (a producer of the project) - is more of a character study of a TAXI DRIVER-like loner named Donald "Donny" Kohler (played by the brilliant Dan Grimaldi). This makes DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE one in a series of ultra-downbeat NYC-area horror films of the period such as 1979's DRILLER KILLER (Abel Ferrara), 1980's MANIAC (William Lustig), and 1982's THE NEW YORK RIPPER (Lucio Fulci) that are studies of urban alienation.
Throughout his childhood (and more than likely, adulthood, as well) Donny was physically abused by his mother. In the recently discovered director's cut of the film (released on Blu-ray in 2016 by Scorpion), there is a scene in which Donny goes into great detail about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, as well as how her domineering actions lead to the departure of his father. This trauma made him unable to relate to the rest of society, and as a result, Donny begins hearing voices after his mother's sudden death and is driven to brutally murder a number of female victims by burning them to death. As with films like 1978's MARTIN (George Romero), 1979's DRILLER KILLER (Abel Ferrara), and 1986's HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (John McNaughton), empathy for the murderous protagonists' plight (and in some cases, their histories of abuse) does not encourage identification with their violent ways of "coping" with their traumas, and the films - contrary to assertion by feminist critics of slasher films of the era - don't encourage viewer identification with their murderous and sometimes misogynistic actions.
During the span of the film, the audience experiences Donny's extremely brief encounters with his victims, but we are never truly familiarized with most of the film's supporting characters. The only exception is a character named Bobby Tuttle, played by Robert Carnegie (who has been Dan Grimaldi's best friend since working together on the movie). Bobby is a co-worker of Donny's and the only person who truly cares about his well being. While their other co-workers at the incinerator regard Donny as a bonafide weirdo, Bobby accepts the role as his protector (he even covers for Donny when their boss questions his absences). It becomes obvious that Bobby is the only person with whom Donny could form a genuine connection. Unfortunately, our protagonist lacks the tools to form a real friendship or to function in society. In one of the film's most famous scenes, Bobby witnesses Donny completely unravel at a popular discotheque when Donny catches his date's hair on fire. To no avail, poor, oblivious Bobby spends the rest of the film trying to help his friend.
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There are a few unforgettable key elements that contribute to the cold, alienating feel of the film.  One of the most important is composer Richard Einhorn's minimalist synth score that adds suspense while Donny's psychosis begins (and continues) to take hold (DON'T GO INTO THE HOUSE was the second film he scored, and he has since become a composer that is in high demand). Another of these elements is the film's use of a sparse aesthetic that frames its characters in almost total isolation. The eerie location shooting makes it similar to other classic horror films like 1973's MESSIAH OF EVIL (William Hyuck) and DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT (S.F. Brownrigg).
Interestingly, despite the obvious similarities with William Lustig's MANIAC (a harrowingly claustrophobic portrait of a misogynist serial killer operating in the dead of winter in the NYC area), DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE also has a surprisingly identical climax, with the mutilated corpses of both men's crimes coming back from the dead to wreak their deserved vengeance. Given that MANIAC is the more popular film, one might be inclined to think that Ellison and Hammill appropriated their denouement from the Lustig splatter landmark...if it wasn't for the fact that DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE was actually released almost a year earlier (shot in 1979, HOUSE hit theaters in March of 1980, whereas the Lustig film didn't hit grindhouses until January of 1981). And the approaches adopted by the films also differ strongly: HOUSE and MANIAC are two of the late-70s/early-80s' strongest, most brutal and unsparing horror film portraits of unraveling urban psychosis, and as far removed from the reassuringly "safe" territory of monsters and the supernatural as imaginable. Yet while MANIAC suggests that the uprising of cadavers that tear apart Joe Spinell's murderer are indeed a hallucinatory figment of his damaged psyche -- a coda reveals police finding his body intact, an apparent victim of suicide -- HOUSE leaves the actual nature of Donny's climactic demise more ambiguous. There is no epilogue to suggest that the undead uprising is all in Donny's mind -- and, more tellingly, there is a brief shot just prior to the attack that even privileges the viewer by allowing them to view a reanimated cadaver lurking in the background, that -- notably -- is entirely unseen by Donny. For a "slasher" film of the era that represents one of the most grimly realistic of the genre, it's a fascinating choice to close on an enigmatic note that leaves the viewer as uncertain about reality as Donny himself.
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DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE is not a "fun" horror film filled with outrageous gore FX and campy humor, suitable for viewing in a social atmosphere with friends and malt liquor options. Like Donny and the environment in which it's set, the film is bitterly cold and uncomfortable viewing. But for those horror fans who like their evening's entertainment to be pitch black and grim, it's a haunting and unforgettable gem.


Friday, August 10, 2018

Guest Post: The Blurred Role of The Main Character in Horror Cinema by Sean M. Thompson



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Horror films have often been filled with complex, morally ambiguous characters. You have the parents from Last House on The Left, so distraught with the murder of their daughter they decide to take justice into their own hands. Or look at An American Werewolf in London, in which our main character transforms and rips through innocent flesh. Indeed, the blurring of the line between protagonist and antagonist isn’t new in horror cinema or film in general. However, it has been a narrative pattern in recent break out horror films, such as The Witch, Hereditary, The Babadook, and It Comes At Night. And there will be many spoilers ahead, so please do not read this article if you don’t want the endings of these films revealed.

In The Witch we’re introduced to a Calvinist family recently exiled from their community into the wilderness. At first, we aren’t sure who is the protagonist, but as the film progresses we get the sense our protagonist is Thomasin, the teenage daughter of the family. While playing peekaboo with the newborn of the family, Samuel the baby goes missing right out from under Thomasin’s nose. Thus begins the turning of the family against the protagonist, Thomasin. One could argue the witch who took baby Samuel knew the event would lead to the family going against Thomasin, treating her as the main antagonist. One by one misfortune and death befalls the rest of this colonial family until Thomasin is asked by Black Phillip if she “wants to live deliciously.” Thomasin of course agrees.

Thomasin is a sympathetic character, and we the viewer know she isn’t to blame for all that happens to her family. And this, perhaps more than any other narrative device in the film speaks to a modern sensibility of morality, and a very secular view of cosmic responsibility. From the outside, in the present, looking into the past of The Witch, shrouded in religious fear, we side with Thomasin as the rational one. Thomasin the poor family scapegoat. Yet, by the end of the film, when Thomasin goes off with the rest of the coven, after signing Black Phillip’s book, she’s a clear antagonist, siding with evil, and casting off civilized society as she literally casts off her clothes.  

In Hereditary, we are introduced to the Graham family (no relation to Will from Hannibal) a somewhat typical nuclear family in much the same way as the family from The Witch. Except, of course, the Graham family is modern, of the 2018 variety. We have mother Annie, a miniature artist, and daughter to Ellen, whose funeral we observe at the beginning of the film. We meet teenage son Peter, younger daughter Charlie, and father Steve. Unlike The Witch, Hereditary seems to switch protagonists near the end. Through a series of terrible decisions and accidents, Peter ends up killing his sister Charlie in a car accident, and a previously mildly grieving Annie is suddenly deep depths of grief over her daughter. Annie attempts to go back to a support group for those who’ve lost loved ones, yet she can’t bring herself to go in. As Annie is about to drive off, she’s stopped by Joan. Joan gives Annie her number and tells her to stop by if she ever needs to. And of course she does, and eventually we hear Joan talking about a seance she had, magic words to speak, one thing leads to another, and some real demony happenings occur within the Graham household. This is where Annie’s role as protagonist flips, as she sets in motion events which lead a demon king, Paimon, to possess her son Peter’s body.

The trouble with deciding on the antagonist in Hereditary becomes the issue of control. As it could be argued Thomasin from The Witch may not be in control, subject to dark magic, so to could it be argued Annie falls victim to dark magic, and she is outright possessed by the end of Hereditary. Still, before her possession, Annie seems to have free will, and many chances to avoid the wrong path. One glaringly obvious aspect of Annie’s character is that she is not always mentally stable. She even admits to sleepwalking and almost killing her children in this state by setting them on fire. Annie sleepwalks and ends up by her son Peter’s bed at one point in the film. And this moment is very telling. Were Annie to admit she needed help and talk to a mental health professional, or begin medication, perhaps she would not have been so receptive to Joan asking her over to her place to see a séance, or at the very least might not feel like performing the ceremony herself.  

In The Babadook, the Vanek family, mother Amilia and six-year-old son, Samuel, live in Australia and are trying to move on with life. Amelia’s husband and Samuel’s father, Oskar, has died in a car crash. This film is similar to Hereditary in that our protagonist could be argued to flip halfway through the film, but for the sake of argument let’s say our protagonist is Samuel, as he stays more consistent in tone throughout the film. In the case of The Babadook, it’s almost an inversion of the type of flips we’ve seen in the previously listed films. Samuel starts as a problem child, a seeming antagonist, and as the film progresses we begin to side with him and realize he’s acting out because there is a literal monster in his house, a presence that possesses his mother and nearly leads to his death. Ultimately the family defeats The Babadook and makes it their pet, so in this film, the monster may even hop from antagonist to protagonist.

Yet again we get into issues with control. Samuel never appears to be possessed, but then the rules of The Babadook’s possession are never overtly explained. Perhaps he is possessed at the beginning of the film. In any case, no one can argue his behavior in public and at school is atrocious, and for this alone he stays, in my mind, an obvious antagonist at the start of The Babadook.   

In It Comes At Night a family has isolated themselves in a house in the wilderness, to escape an unexplained plague. Our protagonist appears to be either the teenaged son, Travis, or Paul, the husband. We also have the grandfather, Bud, and Sarah, Paul’s wife and Travis’ mother. Much like Hereditary, It Comes at Night begins with the death of a grandparent, in this case, Bud. The death of Bud is far more dramatic than in Hereditary, however, because Bud comes down with the nameless plague which has infected the world, and as such we see his death. Paul takes Bud to a ditch and kills him, then burns his body to keep the contagion from spreading. I should add, he does all this in front of his son, Travis. Needless to say, Travis, much like Peter from Hereditary, is very traumatized by this death in the family, seeing it firsthand. Travis has nightmares of his grandfather coming back, infected. An intruder breaks into the family’s cabin, and Paul catches him and demands he explain himself. Initially, Paul ties this intruder to a tree outside with a bag over his head, to be sure he isn’t infected. Eventually, they let Will, the intruder inside to explain himself. Will explains he was searching for water and food for his wife and son, Kim and Andrew. Paul and Travis go to find Will’s family and are attacked on the way. Paul thinks Will set them up, but Will assures him he did not. Seeds of doubt are sown. Finally, Paul, Will, and Travis come to find Will’s family and bring them back to the cabin. From here, the film becomes an exercise in paranoia, as slowly Paul and the rest of his family come to suspect Will’s small son Andrew is infected. Things come to a head, and Paul ends up killing Will when he tries to flee with his family, their son Andrew clearly infected. Will is killed, and Paul chases after and fires at Kim and Andrew as they flee. He ends up killing Andrew with his shot. Kim begs Paul to kill her, which he does. The end of the film sees Travis die from the unnamed disease, and Paul and Sarah become infected as well, sitting at the table, looking forlorn.


Travis’ role in It Comes At Night is much more morally gray than in any of the other films in question. On the one hand, he does accuse the little boy, Andrew, of being infected, which ultimately leads to the boy’s execution by his father Paul. On the other hand, Travis is only acting in his family's best interest and trying to keep them free from infection. Yet, it could be argued that Travis knows he’s infected at the same time as little Andrew, and though a terrifying prospect if Travis really cared about his family’s safety he would agree to sacrifice himself to keep them free from infection. Again, we have a teenager who appears to be the root of evil, much like Tomasin and Peter. Teenagers, am I right?


So what is the overall takeaway from these protagonists turned antagonists in so many popular horror films? It could be that filmmakers are reflecting an ever-evolving secular view of good and evil in the modern world, more or less divorced from traditional religious moralism. The days of black and white, and good and evil on the silver screen are still around with modern blockbusters, but appear to be waning in popular horror films. Even when the monster of the film comes from a traditionally evil place from a religious perspective, the protagonist's role in relation to said evil is much more nuanced than ever before. Now, audiences appear to expect to be challenged with their heroes, and their villains in horror cinema.

Another reason for this protagonist to antagonist change becoming so popular could be that as society turns inward and examines mental illness in the cold light of day the traditional view of the baddie born evil has been thrown on its head. Yes, film still depicts the sociopath, the closest we have to a clinical definition of “born evil.” But more often than not the one-note horror film hero or villain of the past has morphed into one person. Take the titular Babadook of The Babadook. The end of The Babadook sees our monster being fed and cared for, almost like a pet, by the Vanek family. Even with our literal monsters we demand nuance and to try to understand the motivations of the creature. In The Witch, the role of the evil witch is played with, as obviously good Tomasin slowly morphs into what is traditionally seen as a harbinger of evil, begging us to question our very perception of what evil is.

A through line with all of these films, a theme that ties them all together, is the perception of the unraveling of the traditional nuclear family from within. Perhaps this is because the traditional view of what a family should be nowadays has, rightly so, morphed. Gone are the days when if a family didn’t consist of 2.5 children and a husband and wife it was viewed as aberrant. Families are so many different things in our present day it’s no wonder the archaic view of the family is being deconstructed, albeit through metaphor. Take Hereditary: we see the film begin with the passing of the oldest matriarch, representing the death of the old view of the family. Then we have the rest of the Graham’s valiantly attempting to keep their more or less traditional family together, free from outside forces, i.e. modern society and its current perception of what family is. Yet, the teenager can’t help but tear the traditional family apart, the youngest living family member literally destroying the traditional family. The same is true in The Witch with Tomasin. Never mind that the film is set in the past, it was still made only a few years ago and is still a product of its time. Tomasin is a stand-in for the young woman of today fighting against traditional gender roles and stereotypes, deciding to make her own decisions based on her will rather than the expectations of her family. Again we the destruction of the traditional family from within. And the same is true of The Babadook with Samuel, and Travis from It Comes at Night; they can not help but dismantle the traditional family from within, the evil outside forces perhaps representing the old guard desperately clawing its way in to try to rigidly maintain the status quo.  

 Perhaps the answer is far simpler than anything I’ve previously posited. Perhaps the real reason we are seeing more protagonists as antagonists, and in particular protagonists turned antagonists as members of a family, speaks to a universal fear we all have of hurting the ones that raised us; the ones that we love. In each of the films I’ve discussed a family member often unwittingly brings about the destruction of the rest of the family; brings about the death of their loved ones. And this fear of being the spark to set the fire that burns the family to ash speaks to a very modern sensibility of individual responsibility and the individual’s role in society at large. In each of the films discussed we see a family isolated from society, and ultimately see the destruction of said family from outside forces affecting the protagonist, changing them into the antagonist. Our protagonist can’t help but be affected by outside forces, maybe representing society at large, and can’t help but have their roles change as they themselves change in reaction to outside stimulus. Maybe we’re just more afraid than ever that the world will cause us to hurt the ones we love.

Audiences demand fully formed characters in their films, or at the very least in the horror films I’ve mentioned the characters are more or less fully formed. They have realistic psychology and react to things in ways we can relate to. We cringe when we see Peter accidentally kill his sister not just because it’s a horrifying way for a child to die, but because we can remember a time when we were a teen and did something stupid, and can’t help but wonder what it would be like to fuck up in such a monumental way. And we fear for Tomasin because again, we remember being a teen, feeling like our entire family was out to get us. We are annoyed by Samuel because we remember a younger sibling, or a niece or nephew, or a classmate who acted out and couldn’t seem to behave. Or maybe we were like Samuel and can relate to wanting attention and being seen as a problem child. And then we fear for Samuel because maybe we can remember a time one of our own parents acted out of turn, which caused us to question the logic of said parent; caused us to wonder if maybe our parents were winging it much more than we thought. We cry for Travis because we remember a time we hurt our family, and we wonder what we would do when faced with the choice of revealing a devastating illness; if we would have the courage to come forward if it meant our own death but the safety of our family.

We require nuance in our protagonists in these films because the world is less clear than ever before. Between the political climate, and the rise of social media we are bombarded with stories of politicians and people, often behaving badly. We have access to more information than ever before, so we get to see and hear behind the curtain; a curtain which in decades past, remained shut. We get to see the various facets of people when in the past there was a deal more distance. Our protagonists reflect this new age, and as such we get to delve deeper into their psyche than ever before. And this casual acceptance of seeing deep into nearly anyone’s life understandably transfers to our fictional characters, to our protagonists. We require complex characters able to flip at any given moment from hero to villain because in this new age of celebrities outed as monsters, and the ever-evolving collective consciousness, the rapidly changing acceptance of mental illness, and the sheer fact we have a lot more characters to choose from, without a fully realized and engaging character the suspension of disbelief required for supernatural horror becomes a great challenge. In short, we need to see all the angles of our characters, and this leads to the realization that anyone can, in the proper circumstances, be a hero or a villain.
           

Sean M. Thompson is a writer from Boston. He has a B.A. in English from The University of Massachusetts. He loves horror and anything weird. You can find him on twitter @spookyseanT and his fiction at https://www.amazon.com/Sean-M.-Thompson/e/B01LZPYY4W