Taste The Blood of My Halloween Movie Repertoire

Last year due to a Halloween cruise I fell a couple movies short of my 31 first time watch horror marathon, so we’ll see if I make the grade this time out. Again, no predetermined list, just watching whatever I can get my hands on.

#1 Belzebuth – Years after a Mexican policeman’s baby becomes one of several infant victims horrifically murdered in a hospital nursery by a crazed attendant, he is teamed with a US federal agent to investigate a series of attacks on school children around the Mexican border.  This started as a really intriguing concept, a murder investigation that gradually uncovers an occult conspiracy, but eventually all but abandoned its unique Mexican-Catholic viewpoint in favor of a staid, by-the-numbers good vs. evil/exorcism plot. One really kind of silly and poorly realized digital effect (please guys, just don’t do ’em) about midway through the movie in an abandoned church and it pretty much lost me. Joaquin Cosio (the odious General Madrano in Quantum of Solace) gives a great performance, and there’s a really interesting political angle that gets briefly touched on but thrown out right away. In the end, it just goes on too long.

#2 Tigers Are Not Afraid (Veulven) – When 11 year old Estrella’s school is caught in the crossfire between rival Mexican drug cartels, her teacher gives her three pieces of chalk, each imbued with a magic wish. After her mother is abducted by the cartel, she wishes to find her, and is inextricably drawn to a group of orphaned boys whose own fates are similarly linked to the violent gang. This was a haunting, lyrical ghost story, a dark fantasy superbly realized, which doubles as a sobering look at the lives of the children left behind in the wake of narco violence in Mexico. It made me think of Dante’s quote; “I found the original of my hell to be in the world which we inhabit.”

#3 Count Dracula (1977) This BBC miniseries does a lot with its 70s television constraints, establishing an appealingly dark mood while eschewing the expected Hammer horror look. It cleaves pretty closely to the novel with a few minor alterations in place and character (Quincey P. Morris and Arthur Holmwood become Quincey P. Holmwood, Mina and Lucy are actual sisters) that don’t upset the story. The camera and practical FX are pretty well done (Dracula’s influence is depicted by a superimposition of his red eyed face in negative. I liked that, and I applaud their daring in not skipping the wall crawling scene – the result is pretty creepy!), but the performances are the biggest draw. Jourdan is a pretty great Dracula, and Frank Finlay is probably one of my top three Van Helsings now, up there with Anthony Hopkins and Peter Cushing. It was neat to see the lovely Judi Bowker of Clash of The Titans again, and Jack Shepherd is a great Renfield. I have to single out Richard Barnes’ Quincey P. Holmwood though; his Texas accent doesn’t fare very well unfortunately.

#4 Are We Not Cats – Hard to talk about this one without giving it away. No spoilers. An aimless, chemical addled young man has a torrid impromptu encounter with a quirky musician whose compulsive fetish endangers her life. Kind of a romantic body horror picture, the central kink of this story elicited in me one of the strongest, repulsed emotional reactions I’ve had watching a movie since that one notorious scene in Pink Flamingos. I literally exclaimed aloud in my empty apartment. And yet, it’s not really a repulsive or exploitative movie. In fact, it’s a very well done slice of life. A fringe life to be sure, but in the end it actually has a pretty tenderhearted, positive message; that there may be someone for even the most isolated of us. As a side note, among a host of fully realized side characters, the excited Dr. Mooney played by Thoedore Bouloukos made me laugh out loud as his reaction to the events probably mirrored my own (and, I suspect some audience members).  The closing stinger image was equally hilarious. This was kind of a fun gem, all in all. Long after seeing it, I can’t stop thinking about it.
#5 Beast – An unbalanced young woman living in a rural English island community under the thumb of her domineering upper class family falls hard for a mysterious poacher who may be responsible for a series of murder/rape abductions occurring in the area. Jessie Buckley does great work here as a woman whose rebelliousness against her miserable family may be getting the better of her common sense. Maybe. Compelling, twisty little thriller, if not overly memorable in the end.
#6 Knife+Heart – A producer of gay porn films in 1979 Paris must deduce the identity of a masked killer stalking and murdering her performers, even as his crimes inspire her work. Yann Gonzalez perfectly captures the 70’s Italian giallo style, from its striking color palettes and compositions, to its excruciating kills and bizarre final reel plot twist. Rather than being a simple homage, the movie still manages to compel, and even at times, move the emotions. Great cast, lots of weirdo humor and memorable characters (A loveable, chubby fluffer named The Mouth of Gold was a crack up). Evocative musical scoring. Worth a watch.

#7 A Tale of Two Sisters – Inspired by a Korean folktale, a young woman returns from an extended stay in a mental institution to live in a big dark house with her distant father, beloved younger sister, and estranged stepmother. It’s apparent early on that some unspoken family trauma has occurred as the main character begins to experience horrific visions. This drips with commendably executed gothic mood. I guessed early on that the movie was telling one of two ‘twist’ stories. It turned out I was wrong; it was telling them both, and I feel that in doing that, it overextended itself. The result was kind of confusing and unfocused, unfortunately.
#8 One Cut of The Dead – In this comedy, a film crew sets out to make a low budget zombie movie and is set upon by actual zombies. The first twenty five to thirty minutes of this is kind of a sloppy low budget mess full of weird little inexplicable character choices, and had me checking the time (though I do believe it was all shot in one take, which is always an impressive achievement). Be advised that at that thirty minute mark it takes a really unique turn and becomes one of the most enjoyable watches I’ve had this season. I was smiling for the remainder of the run time. If you have any love for indie filmmaking or low budget horror in particular, you’ll get a kick out of it. Just stick with it.

#9 The Curse of La Llorona – A court-ordered social worker recommends the separation of a Mexican woman from her two children and unleashes the wrath of the titular folklore legend, a phantom woman who once drowned her own children and whose arrival is preceded by her ghostly sobbing. It’s pretty by the numbers jump scares. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, necessarily, just not a great one. The biggest surprise for me was that it apparently takes place in the Annabelle horror universe. I did like the curandero character (I’m a sucker for Van Helsing types) and the mythology invented to combat La Llorona (including wind chimes to alert you of her appearance!). It reminded me of Curt Siodmak’s contributions to werewolf lore, and I wonder if they’ll catch on in the oncoming years.

#10  – All The Colors Of The Dark – A woman flees a menacing blue-eyed stranger straight into the arms of a Satanic cult. She begins to question her sanity, as I questioned how I managed to sit through this underwhelming (though admittedly well shot) giallo to the end.

#11 – Ma – A group of teenagers avail themselves of a middle aged woman’s hospitality (and basement) to hold a bevy of underage drinking extravaganzas, blissfully unaware that she has a dark ulterior motive. I’m glad I was never so absolutely desperate to drink before I was eighteen to throw all common sense out the window when I was a kid. Seriously, these are some oblivious kids. This was an interesting, skeevy watch for the first half, but takes a sudden turn that isn’t quite warranted in the script about midway through, and never really rights itself. Most characters continually make inexplicable actions (returning to party again and again in the face of their patroness’ increasingly erratic behavior), while others just kind of drop out of the picture. Octavia Spencer is always watchable and manages to keep this flick afloat, but only just.

#12 – Don’t Leave Home – An artist’s exhibit exploring mysterious disappearances receives a crushing review, but she’s invited by an ex-priest and his wife to stay in their palatial Irish estate while he cuts a check for one of her works, a diorama depicting the vanishing of a young girl he bore witness to decades ago. She starts seeing a hooded figure around the place at night, and weird shenanigans happen. Unique supernatural occurrence, but I was bored by the end.

#13 Brightburn – An awkward, outcast ten year old kid living on a farm in Kansas begins exhibiting superhuman talents, and soon learns the truth of his parentage; that he fell to earth in a spacecraft. With increasingly sociopathic fury, he begins flexing his newfound powers against the peers who have rejected him and eventually the adults who seek to control him. Basically, this is what would happen if Superboy went bad, and the end result is a very watchable horror movie with predictable, but entertaining results. Jackson Dunn really sells the flat affect of a sociopathic kid, and Elizabeth Banks does a great job as his self-delusional adopted mother. My one gripe; as my wife’s a family therapist, I know the aunt would never be assigned as the kid’s school therapist. They’d send him to somebody out of district. Still a fun watch.

#14 – Return of The Blind Dead – Tombs Of The Blind Dead was one of my top watches last year. The blind undead Templars return in the sequel, with some nifty sequences like an all-out attack on a raucous rural folk festival, the memorable fake out killing of an idiot lookout, and the requisite hunting of a terrified family by sound, but nothing quite tops that train sequence from its predecessor. There’s a bit too much dumb humor in this one too. Feels like a Godzilla movie cutting away to humans nobody really cares about. I did like the bit where the woman tried to escape on the stolen Templar horse. Worth a watch, but not as good as the original.

#15 – In The Tall Grass – A brother and his pregnant sister stop near a roadside chapel and answer the cries for help of a boy coming from a field of surrounding tall grass, only to find themselves lost in a time and space warping purgatory with a few other misplaced souls. An OK time waster, but nothing too memorable.

#16 – Room For Rent – A lonesome, elderly widow opens up a room in her house as a BNB to pay off her late husband’s debts and becomes infatuated with her tenant. This is a low budget endeavor that suffers from a pretty bad, inexplicable secondary character’s moral choice about midway through that really seems to exist solely to move the plot along, and the total abandonment of the tenant’s plot line (I really feel like there has to be a lot of excised footage concerning the contents of his trunk and the nature of his phone calls). And yet, the whole production is buoyed by winsome lead Lin Shaye’s stellar performance. I genuinely felt for the character of Joyce, a lonely hearted woman just out of a loveless marriage and desperate for affection and companionship. Shaye really makes Joyce breathe and that makes this worthwhile viewing.

#17 – The Lift – I occasionally develop an unabashed, inexplicable, unironic love for some inarguably bad movies (Night Of The Lepus, Gymkata, The Green Hornet). This preposterous Dutch film about a murderous elevator and the heroic repairman trying to stop its killing spree played dead serious is now one of them. FOR GOD’S SAKE, TAKE THE STAIRS!

#18 Black Moon – An executive sends his hilariously loyal secretary Fay Wray to accompany his wife Dorothy Burgess and curly headed little daughter back to her family’s old Haiti-adjacent island plantation house, where Burgess’ fixation on the local Voodoo cult which murdered her parents in front of her as a girl start to reawaken with disastrous results. This is an odd one, a pre-code Voodoo horror movie without any mention of zombies. Here, the monsters are basically the local natives, half-wild savages beholden to an unexplained need for regular sacrificial rituals (cause that’s what they do in Voodoo, don’t cha ya know?) and apparently unable to function without the leadership of their high priest or priestess. Twice a character blows away the officiant of a massive congregation of perhaps a hundred fervent worshipers and never once do they react in any way. Blacks have no agency in this movie. They react to the doings of the white characters, and you get the sense (with perhaps the exception of Clarence Muse, playing a ‘loyal’ and a least partially fleshed out black man from Georgia) that they just stand around like dolls waiting to be played with when there are no white people in the room. There is a great deal of white xenophobia and racism obfuscating what could be a decent story about the assumption of cultural identity by outsiders with just a little more effort and research somewhere in here, but it’s difficult to relate to the privileged, pompous main characters, who display all the depth of a patronizing bumper sticker on your racist uncle’s truck for much of the movie. Some surprising twists, good acting, and striking cinematography, but leave the 21^st century at the door if you sit down to watch. We’re talking blackface here.
#19 Seoul Station – Tense follow up to South Korea’s magnificent Train To Busan, the events of this animated feature run concurrently to its predecessor, following a prostitute, her no-good boyfriend, father, and a homeless man fleeing the zombie outbreak. Boasting some pretty nail biting sequences, great sound design and voice acting, it’s relentlessly more depressing than Train To Busan. I do have an issue with the big reveal. Without spoiling anything, I just don’t buy that a character like that would go to the lengths they did for such a mundane reason. Still a great diversion.

#20 – Amsterdamned – After The Lift I had to seek out more of Dick Maas’ oeuvre and watched this thriller I remembered seeing ads for on Cinemax as a kid. It’s a pretty solid murder mystery about a killer frogman (in SCUBA gear, not a Bullywug) stalking the canals of Amsterdam, but the reveal was a bit of a letdown and although competent, it never quite lives up to its memorable opening sequence.

#21 – Creature From Black Lake – A pair of anthropology students from Chicago head to the Louisiana bayou country to investigate reports of a hairy anthropoid attacking swampers. A likeable, talented cast including Dennis Fimple, Jack Elam, and Dub Taylor make this watchable, but it’s not enough. Pretty rudderless script and the monster is as low budget as it gets.

#22 – The Ghost Galleon – As part of a publicity stunt, a pair of supermodels stage a fake accident at sea at the behest of their boss and wind up lost in a mysterious fog, where they bump into a 16th century ghost ship that contains the coffins of some undead Templars who split off from the main group in this, the third installment of the Blind Dead series. After the models fail to check in, the employer leads a noisy expedition to find them. Chaos ensues. The first half is kind of a misery, but the climax is neat, especially when the ‘cleric’ successfully turns the Templars and the party does the smartest thing they could do….to no avail.

#23 – The Golem (2018) – When The Black Plague strikes a neighboring village of Gentiles, the Jewish inhabitants of an insular Lithuanian hamlet are given an ultimatum; reverse the ‘Hebrew curse’ that has been laid upon the Christian headman’s dying daughter, or be slaughtered. A headstrong woman who has been learning the Kabbalah in secret takes it upon herself to create a golem to defend the village, but the creature soon proves uncontrollably murderous. Readers of my Merkabah Rider series will know what delight I take in Jewish folklore, so I was ready be sold on this little tale of minyans and shofars from the get-go. It’s very well done, and doesn’t disappoint, though it does kind of inexplicably borrow some things from an unexpected source; Pumpkinhead. Bonus points for mentioning the Pulsa di Neura, but half a point off for not exactly depicting it. Good stuff!

#24 Drácula (1931  – Spanish) – The Great Pumpkin smiled on me this year, in the form of Facebook buddy Eric Dietz who caught me lamenting that I’d never been able to see the legendary 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, and suggested I see if the library had it. They did, as a bonus feature on the Lugosi Dracula set from Universal, and I finally managed to sit down and view this nearly lost film (it was only rediscovered in the 1970s in a vault) after years of hunting it up in vain. For those who don’t know, Universal allotted the sets, props, and costumes of its 1931 production to a Spanish speaking cast under director George Melford and the two films were shot simultaneously. As production wrapped each day on the Todd Browning/Lugosi picture, the Spanish cast would come in and reuse everything, shooting long into the night. The result was a movie that, although it reused some of the establishing and FX shots, music, and only altered the script a little, is admittedly superior to its English counterpart in most respects in terms of tone and presentation.  Melford’s Drácula benefits from a longer run time, is more vibrant and robust, with Lupita Tovar oozing sensuality as Eva (Mina), and Pablo Alvarez Rubio (as much as it pains me to say) giving my beloved Dwight Frye a run for his money as an absolutely maniacal Renfield. The comedy works better, the FX are more innovative and explicit, and there is overall more passion to the production. I have to say though, I still prefer Lugosi’s reserved menace to Carlos Villar’s occasionally for-the-back-row theatrics, and Edward Van Sloan is a better Van Helsing than Eduardo Arozamena. A top watch for this marathon.

#25 Dracula’s Daughter – This sequel to Todd Browning’s Dracula picks up immediately where the previous installment left off, with Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan! Yay!) standing over the body of poor Renfield as the London police bust in and arrest him for Dracula’s murder (I guess the lovestruck Harkers don’t stick around to defend him, but apparently go right off on their honeymoon). Van Helsing sticks to his story about vampires and calls up a favor from an old student, a prominent psychiatrist, to come to his defense. As the urbane Dr. Garth and his plucky assistant head to London, a mysterious woman, the Countess Zaleska, drifts into the police station and hypnotizes the coppers, making off with the body of Dracula, which she burns and consigns to the hell that awaits him, thinking her own curse, as his vampiric daughter, has ended. She’s wrong though, and soon returns to the business of bloodsucking, luring men (and memorably, in one scene dripping with homoeroticism, a young woman) all the while coaxing the stricken Dr. Garth further under her power. This was a neat find. Gloria Holden and Irving Pichel (as her grim, wannabe vampire assistant Sandor) are fun to watch, with Holden exuding an austere, tortured self-loathing. Is this the first reluctant vampire on screen? I think so. I even enjoyed the bickering 30’s Thin Man-style rapport between Otto Kruger and the assistant, Marguerite Churchill. I wish Edward Van Sloan had a bigger part, but you can’t have everything.

#26 Son of Dracula – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr – possibly a descendent of Count Dracula, or else Dracula himself under an assumed name) arrives at New Orleans plantation house Dark Oaks, invited by Katherine Caldwell, the supernaturally inclined daughter of the wealthy patriarch. He soon sets out to seize hold of the Caldwell lands and fortune, intent on feasting on the ‘young, virile race’ (Americans?), but, his plans soon go awry when his victim attempts a doublecross! A really fun, twisty, turny plot. The FX of this one are also a big draw. They’re done by John Fulton, who made Claude Rains into The Invisible Man. Here, we see Dracula’s classic powers on full display; he turns to mist, transforms onscreen to and from his bat form, and in one memorable scene, bullets pass through him, killing a character hiding behind him!

#27 St. Agatha – A young expectant mother in the 1950s submits herself to the care of an isolated convent for wayward girls officially divorced from the Catholic Church, who follow a strict regimen of self-denial and servitude with daily doses of excruciating physical and psychological torture from the mother superior and her nuns. All is not as it seems. A compelling thriller horror with an odious antagonist played by Carolyn Hennesy. Worth watching, but not really a must-watch.

#28 House of Dracula – Count Dracula arrives in the night and requests a cure for vampirism from the brilliant Dr. Edelmann. Soon Larry Talbot shows up wanting a remedy for lycanthropy and Frankenstein’s Monster is discovered in a cave beneath the doctor’s estate. Practically a sanitarium for monsters now, Edelmann sets out to cure Dracula with blood transfusions and the Wolfman with some kind of spore found in the cave. Things go awry when Dracula takes a hankering to Edelmann’s assistant Milizia and tries to nip her. Dracula pulls a switcheroo during one of his transfusion treatments and pumps Edelmann full of his corrupt blood. Edelmann destroys the vampire, but it’s too late….Dracula’s blood infects him, influencing him to do evil (and of course, to wake up Frakenstein’s Monster). This was a passable monster-buffet legitimized by John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, and Lon Chaney Jr returning as Larry Talbot, and the interesting casting of the lovely Jane Adams as a sympathetic hunchback. Plus, I LOVED the concept of Dracula’s blood corrupting the doctor. A fun time.

#29 3 From Hell – It turns out Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding, the three unrepentant sadistic psychopaths who rampaged through The Devil’s Rejects, managed to survive that movie’s bullet-riddled climax (which is kind of a ‘they never got out of the COCK-A-DOODIE CAR’ moment, but OK, we didn’t actually see them die, so fair enough) and have been incarcerated since. Captain Spaulding is executed by lethal injection (and we bid a heartfelt adieu to the great Sid Haig here and in a later reminiscence), but before the same can happen to the brother and sister duo, a heretofore unseen Firefly family member, namely Otis’ younger half-brother, Winslow ‘Foxy’ Coltrane, busts them out and they flee for Mexico. The Devil’s Reject was a masterful recreation of amoral 70’s exploitation horror whose main characters repelled and fascinated me. In this sequel, I find myself liking the killers a little more. They show some heart and sentimentality towards each other and some of the people they meet (like Pancho Moller’s appealing, diminutive Sebastian), and they’re more akin to outlaw anti-heroes here than how they were portrayed before, as if the testimonials of the obsessed fans in the beginning have bled over into the reality of the movie. I guess near death mellowed them a little? I mean, yes, they still slaughter a couple innocent people, but in the main their victims themselves display moral failings (a corrupt warden who cheats on his wife and/or sexually harasses a guard for example), making their deaths almost cathartic. There’s a playfulness in this one that the previous movie didn’t have too, with an army of masked Mexican killers making a show. It’s fine, but mainly for Zombie completists. Rob Zombie still clearly loves his wife Sheri Moon-Z, a fact I find charming in all his movies.

#30 The Monolith Monsters – A strange, black glass meteor crashes in the California desert and shatters, spreading out radioactive shards which induce a slow, black petrification in any living thing that touches it. When a rare rainfall occurs, the H2O makes the shards grow to gigantic proportions, which then waver, topple, and fall, smashing into yet more fragments, which then repeat the process. Soon a mass of deadly black crystal monoliths is drawing up the accumulated moisture from the rain soaked soil and advancing over the mountains toward a sleepy town. The inhabitants rush to find a way to stop it as another round of precipitation looms. The absolutely bonkers and unique concept combined with the truly unsettling sight of tottering black spires wavering over the mountaintops in a thundering rainstorm made this a really welcome find this Halloween. There’s some sharp writing in it as well. Recommended!

#31 Crawl – A young competitive swimmer drives to a rural Florida town to check on her estranged and recently divorced father in the face of a category five hurricane. She finds him hurt and bleeding in the crawl space cellar, and is soon trapped by a gaggle of ravenous alligators blown in by the storm. Father and daughter must make their escape as the water level begins to rise. A deceptively simple setup allows for some nice character moments in a lean, mean script that reminded me somehow of Die Hard. There’s no fat on this. Everything feels entirely logical and every setup leads nicely to the next payoff. Genuinely thrilling in points. Easily one of my favorite watches this month.

BONUS:

Now, since, as I said above, I fell three movies short of my thirty one first time watch goal last year, I decided to push through and watch a few extra:

#32  Orphan – A troubled married couple, having suffered the loss of an infant, decide to add to their family by adopting a precocious young Russian girl, who soon turns out to be not at all what she appears. What seems at first like an evil child movie in the vein of The Bad Seed or The Good Son soon escalates into something unexpected (well, if you’ve never heard of it. It’s been out awhile and I already knew the big reveal – I actually watched this because of a recent court case in Indiana that was close to the movie’s events). Worth watching, with believable, mainly grounded characters and an out of the park performance by Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular orphan.

#33 Wounds – A New Orleans bartender finds a cell phone left behind by a group of college kids after closing. On the phone are horrific images and videos which slowly begin to affect his mind and seemingly, the behavior of those around him. Armie Hammer does a fine job descending into obsessive, paranoid madness in this compelling bit of Lovecraftian occult body horror, which nonetheless, might leave you a little bit wanting in the very end.

#34 Count Yorga, Vampire – Bulgarian mystic Count Yorga preys upon the daughter of his ex-girlfriend and her yuppie friends, in a pretty straightforward, but well done modern (well, in 1970) vampire tale. The strength of this is in the dialogue and the performances of the cast of unknowns, who play everything completely straight. Good flick, believable characters. Some genuinely chilling sequences and a good shock ending.

#35 Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers – Angela (played with charming glee by Pamela Springsteen), the killer of Sleepaway Camp is at it again, this time on the counseling side of things, setting her sights on correcting the naughty behavior of a bevy of swearing, smoking, fornicating campers. This doesn’t have the stinger of its predecessor, and goes the tongue-in-cheek route. Fine as a schlocky time waster, but not as enjoyable as the original.

#36 The Trollenberg Terror (AKA The Crawling Eye) – A Swiss mountaintop is consistently shrouded by a mysterious cloud into which mountain climbers enter but don’t come out. A psychic has bad feelings about the cloud and a group of scientists detect an alarming amount of latent radioactive activity. Then one of the climbers wanders down from the mountain, and things swiftly get really hairy. This was a real gem; a very Lovecraftian mystery with some ingenious effects, and a surprising amount of violence for movie from 1958.

And there we have it! A happy and rewarding Halloween season was had. My top ten horror watches for October 2019 (in no particular order):

Tigers Are Not Afraid, The Lift, The Monolith Monsters, Are We Not Cats, The Trollenberg Terror, Crawl, Knife+Heart, Dracula (Spanish), House Of Dracula, One Cut Of The Dead.

 

 

DT Moviehouse Review: The Cabin In The Woods

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, and a perfect fit for the Halloween season, I review Drew Goddard and Josh Whedon’s The Cabin In The Woods.

Directed by Drew Goddard

Screenplay by Drew Goddard and Josh Whedon

Tagline: You think you know the story.

What It’s About:

College students Dana (Kristen Connolly), Holden (Jesse Williams), Marty (Franz Kranz), Jules (Anna Hutchinson), and Curt (Chris Hemsworth) depart for a secluded weekend at a remote forest cabin and ‘accidentally’ summon up an undead clan of pain worshipping murderers who begin to stalk and kill them one at a time. But is all as it seems, or are they being manipulated for some mindbending, sinister purpose by office managers Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford)?

Why I Bought It:

After a premature run-in (in a dark room no less) with the head twisting scene in The Exorcist when I was six or seven years old, I actively avoided watching horror movies for about nine years, finally breaking the ‘fast’ with, ironically enough, Exorcist III.

I’m really lucky that Exorcist III was such a great flick, or I never would have backtracked and sought out all the scary movies I’d missed.

And I never would have ‘got’ The Cabin In The Woods.

I never actually realized what a horror hound I had become until I saw this.

This is probably one of the greatest horror movies ever made, period. It’s so enjoyable it almost seems like every single horror movie that has gone before was created specifically so this could come into being.

Make no mistake, to fully appreciate the greatness of this movie you have to have at least a passing familiarity with Hellraiser, The Shining, Dracula, An American Werewolf In London, The Mummy, HP Lovecraft, It, The Ring, Suspiria, Evil Dead, Halloween, Juh On, David Cronenberg, George Romero, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Troll, Poltergeist, Alien, and Friday The 13^th.

This is really a movie that benefits in a huge way from going in entirely blind. What a hard movie to cut a trailer for! Being kind of jaded about the summer slasher movie genre, the very title The Cabin In The Woods was a turnoff for me. I’m not into the torture porn genre made popular by stuff like Hostel and Saw and assumed this was going to be more of the same. It looked like yet another vanilla cookie cutter teens in peril flick. There would be some topless scenes, some beer drinking and pot smoking, and in the end, the smartest guy (or more likely, girl) would go through hell at the hands or claws of some inbred hillbilly stereotype or a zombie or plague crazy gutmuncher and maybe get away in the end, maybe not.

Then a couple people whose opinion I trusted started sounding off that this was great, but wisely (and I thank them) refused to give details as to what was so great about it.

Just watch it, they said.

So after a long time of not thinking about it, I finally rented it.

Little did I know that Cabin In The Woods would contain just about every clichéd trope in my aforementioned laundry list….and yet still somehow manage to be entirely original. Thrillingly, awesomely original, and more, a hilarious, subversive in-joke directed solely at horror fans.

This is not to say that you have to be a horror junkie with an all-encompassing knowledge of everything the genre has to offer. It’s just that it offers so much more if you’re a nerd.

Surface-wise, the plot alone is entertaining and the tag line says it all. Going into it, you think you know what’s going to happen. The very title evokes a paint by numbers scenario. Early on though, you realize something weird is going on, when the movie opens not with the teens gearing up for their weekend, but a couple of middle-aged salarymen in suits preparing for some big to-do at their white, sterile workplace.

Of course, then we get the obligatory scenes where get to know who’s who and who’s with who, which is the jock, which the brain, which the burnout. Yet there’s still something just a little off. Our football hero has in-depth knowledge of socio-economic theory. Our stoner and his wild conspiracy theories make more and more sense as the movie progresses. The boy’s aren’t slavering pussy hounds – when one discovers a two-way mirror looking into the object of his desire’s room and she starts to undress, we don’t get the voyeuristic topless scene. He knocks on the wall and lets her know what’s going on (does she do the same for him later on?).

As we go deeper down the rabbit hole of Cabin In The Woods, our expectations start unraveling. A bird hits an invisible force field. The office guys are shown to be having some effect on the behavior of the kids. There are tantalizing hints toward some greater purpose being fulfilled. And when the kids start acting like we expect them to, it’s unexpected.

W.T.F! Yeah, Cabin In The Woods is kinda like this.

By the time a character we thought was dead returns, we know this same drama is being enacted all over the world for some strange reason and I doubt anybody who hasn’t seen this movie or read about it beforehand can guess what the heck is happening. Yet it’s not all some fly-by-night-pull-it-out-of-your-ass-make-it-up-as-you-go-along thing. By the time Sigourney Weaver shows up to explain it all, it’s like the last piece of a puzzle is fitting into place and you think to yourself, “Ahhhh that’s perfect.”

It’s a real treat to be surprised by a movie, and it’s even better to be totally delighted by it as a genre fan.

For me, the movie really takes off when they go down into that cellar and find it packed to the gills with thinly disguised items from other movies. The puzzle ‘ball,’ referencing both Hellraiser and perhaps Phantasm. The diary with the incantations right out of Evil Dead. It’s all intercut with that wonderful whiteboard the office workers are all betting over, crammed with achingly great references to threats from across the horror spectrum. When that scene passes and you realize what’s about to happen, you love it, but a small part of you thinks in the back of your head, “Aw man, it would’ve been so great if they’d gone with the BLANK instead.”

And then, maybe twenty or thirty minutes later, they hit the Purge button and it’s Christmas morning, as every monster and beast, every ghost and murderer on that board floods your screen.

Cabin In The Woods that does the impossible. It’s a flick with a one off plot twist so great you can’t possibly expect it to be rewatchable once you know it’s coming. But you do watch it again. And you rewind and pause and slow mo it to death to see all those white board monsters tear their way through the complex. Geez there’s even a 50 foot woman in one of those cages.

One of the most supremely satisfying movies I’ve ever seen.

And, like the complexity of the plot itself, it’s smart. You can still delve a level deeper beyond the monsters and uncover a rich examination of the movie fan himself. There’s a great scene when Hemsworth and Hutchinson are being manipulated via hormone gasses, temperature, and lighting to have sex in the woods, and the team of manipulators are shown hanging on the scene from their viewing room, waiting for Hutchinson to show her breasts and groaning when she initially defers. How many guys have sat together watching a horror movie at home or in a theater and experienced the same audience reaction? It’s a funny scene, and yet the makers bring it back a step when Hadley and Sitterson dismiss the greater portion of the crew and put their full resources toward getting Hutchinson to disrobe, ostensibly for the viewing pleasure of the Old One (is the band of randy office drones a stand in for the moviegoing audience, which is funny, or is it the Old One, which suggests something more unseemly). Their expressions completely change. They’re almost sad to do it. But the Old One must be appeased. The tropes of the ritual must be adhered to.

When Marty says early on that the world needs to crumble, but everybody’s afraid to let it crumble, he speaks of the loss of privacy, the invasion of nebulous government watchers and dropping of sanctions on private life. This foreshadows the situation of the kids in the cabin, but doesn’t it also reflect on the fears of modern life in America?

What is the change Mary is calling for if we apply it to ourselves? Should the Old One rise up to completely tear down the system? Is popular entertainment an opiate used to keep that giant from waking up and breaking out? Maybe this is ham-handed political commentary to some, but then again how many of the general movie going audience came away with this message from something as innocuous seeming as a summer horror movie?

It also cleverly breaks the horror movie cliché down into a thematic, seemingly ancient codification. The athlete, the fool, the whore, the virgin. These are mystical concepts that really do occur throughout the history of human storytelling, and are most clearly represented in the cards of the Waite Tarot. The fool is often considered the stand-in for the questioner in a card divination. In Arthurian literature it’s the fool, often Sir Dagonet (as in Tennyson), Percivale (Perfect Fool) or in some cases (TH White) Merlin, who can look beyond the confines of his own story to comment on the greater meaning. The fool sees the strings, and can follow them to the storyteller. The fool attains the Grail, the greater, hidden knowledge, often to his detriment, as is the case with Marty here.

One wonders what cultural tropes the Old Ones in Japan need to see to keep them sleeping.

A thing I’ve said this in other reviews, but a good movie is entertaining. A great movie ‘moves’ the watcher, either moving their heart to experience some emotion, or moving the mind into a previously unconsidered mode of thought.

I would say The Cabin In The Wood is a great movie.

Best Dialogue/Line:

Marty’s weirdly funny and cryptic (and ultimately prophetic):

Cops will never pull over a man with a huge bong in his car. Why? They fear this man. They know he sees further than they and he will bind them with ancient logics.

Best Scene:

Without a doubt the best scene is the monster Purge I’ve already described above. This flick has a lot of funny moments amid all the horror. Mordecai on speakerphone comes to mind.

But if I had to pick a scene that never fails to make me laugh because it’s totally indicative of the multilevel enjoyment I get out of this movie, is when Hemsworth’s Curt tries to escape the area by jumping the gorge on his motorbike.

After their camper is blocked from escaping through the tunnel by an unexpected explosion which results in a cave-in, Curt devises a plan to jump the gorge and escape on his motorbike, vowing to return with the police, the national guard, the ghost of Steve McQueen the LA Raiders, and ten thousand Roman gladiators to get his friends out, and especially to avenge the horrifying death and post mortem beheading of his girlfriend.

He assures them he can easily make the jump, and cuts a heroic, Thor-like figure for a moment, revving his bike and nodding to them his assurance.

“You can’t hold back,” his friend Holden warns him. He has to achieve maximum velocity to make this leap to freedom.

“I never do,” Curt growls.

He cuts loose, leaps the bike into the air, and it looks like he’s going to make it, until he smashes head on into the invisible honeycomb field enclosing the area. His bike explodes in a fiery ball and we sees his lifeless body tumble down the long length of the shield wall, bouncing as it goes, giving us a glimpse as to how deep it really goes (perhaps it’s there to keep the Old One penned in?).

For the victims in the story, it’s a horrible, hope-smashing moment.

For the guys in the control center, it’s a sigh inducing close call, which if you think of the movie in the terms that they are actually the ones trying to preserve the world and all human life on it, is kind of a time bomb cut the blue wire hero moment for them.

And for me, I just burst out laughing. Is it a guilty laugh? Maybe upon multiple viewings, but the first time, no. I just found the failure of Curt’s heroics unintentionally hilarious, like a somebody calling their shot in a game and then fumbling utterly, or Jack Burton exuberantly shooting in his gun in the air before the big fight in Big Trouble In Little China and then getting knocked out by the falling plaster.

I wonder if this made the Old One chuckle in his bed too?

Next In The Queue: The Call Of Cthulhu

DT Moviehouse Review: Blade

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today I review Marvel’s first ever comic book movie hit, Blade.

(1998) Directed by Stephen Norrington

Screenplay by David S. Goyer

Tagline:

The power of an immortal. The soul of a human. The heart of a hero.

What It’s About:

“You better wake up! The world you live in is just a sugar coated topping. There is another world beneath it – the real world.” In the real world, immortal vampires enjoy a parasitic relationship with mortal man, controlling the population through their puppet police force and world governments. Standing against the bloodsuckers is Eric “Blade” Brooks (Wesley Snipes). After his mother was attacked by a vampire while he was in the womb, Blade was born with superhuman vampiric abilities, but none of the selfsame weaknesses, aside from a growing hunger to consume blood, which he suppresses with the help of his grizzled partner, weapons designer and serum synthesizer, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). When Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorf) an ambitious young vampire revolutionary, sets out to overthrow the elder hierarchy and call up La Magra, an ancient vampire deity to throw back the curtain and rule humanity outright, Blade enlists the help of Dr. Karen Jensen (N’Bushe Wright), a blood expert unwillingly thrust into the action.

Why I Bought It:

It’s fitting that the first comic book movie to show up on the review list is Blade. Without the success of Blade, there would be no Spider-Man, no X-Men, no Iron Man, no Avengers franchises.

Blade was Marvel’s first big hit. The first of its characters to successfully transition to the big screen and the first Marvel film to earn a theatrical release. Prior attempts at getting Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and The Punisher to audiences resulted in direct to video US releases, mainly forgettable.

What’s so unlikely, is that Marvel took an obscure character from the 70’s (Blade was created by Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman to be part of the crew that hunts Dracula in the Tomb of Dracula title), made him a headliner in an R-rated action horror movie, and came away with a pretty sizable success. This wasn’t Spider-Man or The Punisher, this was Blade. Blade!  It’s like making a Robin movie without ever having a Batman flick, or putting out a picture about The Wonder Twins.

OK, not that unlikely, but pretty unlikely.

But Blade, despite all its got going against it, remains one of the coolest comic book movies of all time.

Every time I rewatch Blade I’m giddy with how much I still enjoy it. I didn’t see it in the theater. It looked like a rental to me. But it grabs you right from the beginning with its super rain slicked visuals and frenetic Hong Kong style action, its nifty CGI (I was really wowed by the disintegrating vampires when I first caught this) and driving, ultra-cool soundtrack.

Wesley Snipes looks like he’s having a great time in this one. Before Blade, I only knew him from Jungle Fever, Sugar Hill, Mo Better Blues, and New Jack City, and even though I was aware of Passenger 57, I thought it was a bump in the road in the career of a mainly serious actor. But watching this, I can see Snipes’ fondness for this role in his performance, a barely contained nerdiness that escapes now and then in his impromptu fist pumps and certain comic book-y expressions. Blade is an extremely physical role. He barely has any lines, but he arrests your attention whenever he’s on screen.

I can picture Snipes as a wide-eyed kid haunting Chinese video stores for those awesome blurry videos with the barely readable white subtitles and the too large clamshell cases in a carefully ironed coolie shirt.  The guy loves kung fu movies, loves martial arts (became a practitioner at age 12), and it shows in his performance, in the little physical homages he does. Several of Blade’s dismissive, sort of “bitch, please” expressions remind me of Bruce Lee, and there are moments during the fight sequences where I see Jackie Chan in his reactions, Jet Li, Jim Kelly and the Run Run Shaw gang in his stances and poses. I read somewhere that it was Snipes’ great ambition to star in a movie with Jackie Chan, and I wish now he’d got his chance. I’ll bet he was ready to roundhouse kick his TV over when the Rush Hour movies were announced.

Add to that the fact that Snipes is breaking ground portraying the world’s first cinematic African American superhero (Spawn doesn’t count for me – he was masked most of the time, and please don’t try to bring up Meteor Man), and yeah, there’s a barely perceptible but definite kid in a candy store vibe to Snipes in Blade.

But make no mistake, Blade is a total badass, so monumentally skilled and high powered that his swagger is totally deserved (“Quinn. I’m gettin’ real tired of cuttin’ you up.”), and instead of dropping a lot of dumb one-liners, when the chips are down, he speaks with his actions. I love the scene where Quinn (Donal Logue), wearing Blade’s sunglasses, giddily announces the latest regrowth of his hand (Blade has chopped them both off at various times) and dances in place with a knife. “I got two new hands, Blade, and I don’t know which one I’m gonna kill you with!” He lunges forward and Blade’s only answer is to spin, neatly decapitating him with a length of concealed razor wire, and reclaim his sunglasses as they fall.  Maybe there’s something of the alternate definition of blade in his name, that of the dashing youth with implied panache and style, I don’t know – but he’s got it in spades. The ending is off the chain ridiculous, with Blade performing several unbelievably timed and executed tricks, throwing his booby trapped sword into a stone crack, catching the coagulant stuff behind his back, and not being content to just toss them with proven deadly accuracy at Frost, he actually tosses one in the air and roundhouse kicks it into Frost’s forehead. But screw it, this is Blade, and more, it’s blood supercharged Blade. You can believe he’s capable of it.

Kris Kristofferson as Whistler, Blade’s limping, unshaven mentor and right hand guy behind the guy is great, delivering macho lines like “Catch you fuckers at a bad time?” in this great Harley ridin’ gravelly growl that I love to imitate (and am only capable of aping) when I’m struck with a chest cold.  He spends most of the movie like a frowning old spider in the center of this sparking machine shop web of workbenches and toolkits, metal shelving and jury rigged weaponry. Yet there are cool moments between him and Blade that elevate him above a hollow stereotype.  There’s an unspoken fatherliness and mutual respect, when he injects Blade with his serum and grips his hand as he convulses, yet looks away, allowing Blade his dignity. And when Frost leaves Whistler a bloody, dying mess, Blade betrays no emotion, yet mops at the copious blood bootlessly and with the tenderness of a son attending his father’s death bed as Whistler groans his last words.

The gorgeous N’Bushe Wright (who I first had a crush on in Zebrahead) provides a little more than eye candy in her portrayal of Dr. Jensen, who is early on bitten by the vampire Quinn and nursed back from the edge of turning by a combination of Blade and Whistler and her own ingenuity. She’s a cool, nominally romantic foil to Blade, doesn’t really swoon overly, and gets herself out of a jam now and then, dispatching the wonderfully otherworldly and decadent Mercury (Arly Jover).  She even provides Blade with the impetus to beat the bad guys in the end, offering her own blood. There is some weird Oedipal stuff going on, admittedly. When Blade first decides to try and save her, she is interposed with a shot of Blade’s mother (the stunning Sanaa Lathan) reaching out to him from the delivery room table, and Jensen’s offering of blood and Blade’s ravenous partaking is almost filmed psychosexually. He thrusts his hungry mouth at her, devouring her, and it almost looks like breastfeeding gone horribly wrong. Her interplay with her ex-boyfriend Webb (Tim Guinee) is great, and I absolutely love the abrupt tonal shift when Webb is attacked by the burned to a crisp and presumed dead Quinn on the autopsy table. It’s very indicative of the film’s tone that as these two characters begin to have a believable romantic tiff and the plot starts to sag a bit into familiar expository territory, suddenly a corpse sits up and takes a bite out of one of them.

Stephen Dorff’s antagonist Deacon Frost is a cool counterpoint in physicality and attitude to Blade. He looks like some posing clubgoer, and even the vampire elders dismiss him (gotta mention Udo Kier and Judson – Joaquin from Star Trek II – Scott appear as old money purebloods). He talks a lotta smack and appears to party a lot, but in fact he’s got this cold, reptilian demeanor that betrays his ambition. As his minions cavort and dance, he’s shown obsessing over the computer translation of the vampire bible, burning the candle at both ends. Stephen Dorff has nothing on Wesley Snipes in terms of physique, but he’s still deadly in the climactic duel, and when he’s infused with La Magra it’s like watching a cobra and a mongoose go at it.  Though he walks around in the daylight under heavy skin crème and looks like something out of Twilight, make no mistake, Frost is totally gangster, proving his monsterhood in a cool scene when he executes Udo Kier with the dawn and tosses his fangs on the board room table to make his point to the rest of the elders.

I already mentioned Arly Jover. Mercury’s a white clad skinny as a rail vampire with an untraceable accent, vaguely eastern European, vaguely Irish, and comes across as a White Queen on heroin, visually fascinating to watch and scary as hell.  I maintain that more comic actors should be cast as villains, because Donal Togue’s Quinn is a great character. He loves being a vampire, but is a bon vivant and a coattail rider. He and Dorf have their own brand of fun, ad-libbing some great exchanges like “I’m gonna be naughty. I’m gonna be a naughty vampire god.” And that whole bit where Frost pretends he’s going to cut off Quinn’s hand. Clearly Quinn amuses Frost, as I can’t see why else he’d be allowed to stick around.

The soundtrack for Blade was a big hit, if I remember, the blazing hip hop and electronica complimenting the crazily stylized story perfectly. Particular standouts for me were the opening number, heard in the trailers, the Japanese schoolgirl rap at the vampire club, and that end track that kicks in after Blade catches the sunglasses. It gives the furious action a video game feel that gets me grinning.  I also like the simple pulsing track that plays when Blade and Jensen trail Officer Krieger (Kevin Patrick Walls) through the night time streets in their cars, a sequence Norrington shoots in fast motion, lending it a cool, nightmarish quality.

Best Dialogue/Line:

“Some motherfucker’s always tryin’ to ice skate uphill.”

Best Scene:

The initial scene, the one that pulls you right into the world of Blade.  A dopey clubgoer (Elliot James) rides in a hot car with an even hotter chick (Traci Lords), who takes him (and the audience) to this super secret club located behind a meat packing company (were those bodies in the plastic?). She throws the dork her coat and leaves him standing there, and he drops it and tries to get in on the party, but the beautiful but slightly weird dancers reject him at every turn and eye him with all the disdain of a bunch of Hamptonites whose party’s just been crashed by ‘Ol Dirty Bastard. He wanders through the strobing lights, ogling the dancing bodies and finally reunites with his ride, who is dancing seductively with Mercury. When he tries to cut in, he’s shoved away.

This sucks he thinks, and as the music reaches a fever pitch, he mutters something about needing a drink. Suddenly the house lights go up, the DJ roars in front of a banner reading BLOODBATH! and after wiping a spot of red from his cheek, the guy looks up in time to see the overhead emergency sprinklers douse the crowd and him in human blood.

Horrified, he recoils, desperate to find the exit, and each of the partiers starts popping fangs and vamping out. Stumbling away from horrors at every turn, he tries to run, but is laid out by a punch from some shirtless vampire and falls to the bloodsoaked floor, where he’s kicked and pummeled. The sprinklers drained, the music dies down and the crowd applauds and cheers, some holding up bottles to catch the drippings. Slipping to get away, the one lone human crawls towards some clean whiteness, an abbatoir shower or something for the slaughterers, and a big black boot comes into frame.

He looks up, and the entire crowd of suckheads crouches like wary dogs and backpedals, parting to reveal Blade standing motionless, uncaring of the crimson painted vampires creeping out of his wake, and only nominally concerned by the crowd of the undead milling behind him (“It’s him!” “Daywalker!”).

Blade waits for the inevitable as the music reaches a lull.

But as if on cue, when it starts back up again, somebody kicks it off, rushing forward, and what follows is a frantic one against many battle that perfectly introduces the character of Blade. His fearlessness, his weaponry, his attitude.

If you can watch this scene and want to turn this movie off, yeah, it’s not for you.

Would I Buy It Again?

Yes. But you won’t see the other Blade movies on here, unfortunately. Blade 2 couldn’t touch this movie with its screechy Predator-faced vamps, and besides Ryan Reynolds’ creative cursing in Blade Trinity, it’s a snoozer.

Next In The Queue: The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi

Beyond The Borgo Pass: The Van Helsing Papers

I, like most of the world, always understood Bram Stoker’s Dracula to be a work of fiction. Seminal in the horror genre, surely, but entirely the product of Stoker’s imagination. I stopped believing this in or around the summer of 1997, when, between jobs and trying to make the rent on a two‐bedroom apartment on Carmen Avenue in Uptown Chicago, I answered a classified ad placed by the University of Chicago in The Chicago Reader for a seasonal position.

This wasn’t academic work, but a reorganizational project of the reference stacks at the university’s Regenstein Library. This still makes it sound overly important though. In effect, I and about ten other part‐timers were carrying boxes to and from the basement under the direction of a perennially bored student intern. It was backbreaking work, and tedious, but ultimately not without its reward.

The Joseph Regenstein Library

In the course of the job, in one of the Reg’s two basements, I happened across a dust‐covered box of unopened packets postmarked from Purfleet, dated 1936, and addressed to the head of the archaeology department.

The label on the box had it earmarked for the library’s Ravenwood Collection, but it had somehow been physically separated and omitted from the catalog. It had sat forgotten on the back of a shelf of totally unrelated material for at least half a century.

I have a curious nature when it comes to old things, and a knack for staying out of the way of supervisors, which was easy in the maze of the Reg with only a disinterested intern to answer to. Though I knew it could possibly cost me my job, I managed to pop one of the manila packets open with my apartment key and shimmy the old yellow papers out for a look on my lunch break, a ritual I would repeat without fail innumerable times on that job.

What I read shook me to my core. I say this without exaggeration.

Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, that stalwart vampire hunter I had seen depicted in countless films and comic books, portrayed by everybody from Peter Cushing to Mel Brooks, was real.

It was like finding the logbook of the Pequod written in Ahab’s hand, or reading Joseph of Bethlehem’s name on a Roman census roll from the Augustan Age.

But the figure that emerged while studying these papers (and from fact checking later among the Reg’s microfilm collections and via long years of independent research), was no two dimensional crossbow wielding, fanatical monster hunter, but a substantial man of letters, a serious academic, a contemporary and associate of Flinders Petrie, T. E. Lawrence, Dr. Martin Hesselius, Madame Blavatsky, Max Muller, and a host of other scholars I (as a woefully undereducated liberal arts student) would only come to know later as I studied the man himself. He pitted his learning against the supernatural not by choice, but by chance,

though his name has become inseparable from that pseudo‐scientific offshoot, that embarrassing cousin of natural science now thought of as ‘paranormal investigation.’

Not only was Van Helsing real, but so was Dr. John Seward, Jonathan and Mina Harker, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey P. Morris (whose brother’s grave I once visited at the old Fairview Cemetery during a research trip to Bastrop, and whose Bowie knife, the very same one he sank into Count Dracula’s heart, was anonymously donated to, and is still innocuously displayed at, the Autry Museum here in Los Angeles).

It’s hard to prove this, of course, outside of the papers, as most of the major participants in the Dracula affair faded into intentional obscurity, with the exception of Quincey Morris (who died) and Van Helsing himself, whose total eradication from academic record is almost Egyptian in its totality.

But he did live. One of my prized possessions is a 1907 Dutch edition of Arminius Vembrey’s Western Cultures in Eastern Lands, one of Van Helsing’s rare translations, which I unfortunately can’t even read.

If I can confirm the existence of Van Helsing with a little research, then what about the things Van Helsing claimed to have encountered in his travels? Vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. There are things Van Helsing says he tangled with which would make cryptozoologists and theologians alike faint dead away.

Now you see why I say I was shaken up.

But, you might say, the man spent time in a lunatic asylum. Who’s to say he didn’t write all his memoirs as some kind of therapy while convalescing?

Well, mainly because of the corroborative writings by outside parties. The papers collected with Van Helsing’s journal entries (newspaper clippings, personal diaries, correspondences), some provided by the professor, some by Seward, and some gleaned from my own personal research into primary source documents, bear him out every time. It’s unlikely that Van Helsing’s writings are entirely fictional when they are substantiated by so many people from so many diverse backgrounds and stations.

For me, the world became an exponentially bigger place in 1997, squinting in the dim light at old typeface with the musty smell of antiquity in my nostrils.

I knew I had to continue Dr. Seward’s work, see his ambition fulfilled, and tell the world about Van Helsing. As the forward to this book points out, Abraham Van Helsing’s longtime friend and colleague Seward first intended the initial volume of the late professor’s writing to see the light of day in 1935, seventy seven years ago.

For whatever reason (Seward suggests active resistance by the academic community, though by this time he was himself embittered toward the establishment), he failed to secure a publisher, possibly in the eleventh hour.

Seward continued to pursue the book’s publication for the next five years, soliciting literary agents on both sides of the pond and mailing facsimiles to many of Van Helsing’s former academic associates in the hopes of gaining professional support.

Battersea Park Railway Crash 1937

A succession of personal tragedies hindered his efforts, however. His wife of thirty‐five years was sadly killed in the Battersea Park railway crash of 1937. Then, in 1938, the asylum in Purfleet he had co-founded and administered for close to fifty years closed its

doors, forcing him into a retirement he had long resisted.

You have to admire the dedication of Dr. Seward, who from his writings and personal correspondences seemed to really feel he owed Van Helsing a debt. Seward was one of the parties who willingly provided personal records (in his case, phonographic recordings, mostly pertaining to his patient, R.M. Renfield) to Bram Stoker, which Stoker then used in the publication of his ‘novel’ Dracula in 1897.

Excerpts from Van Helsing’s personal journal were included in that book (translated from Dutch, as are the ones that appear in these papers, by Seward), but among the descendants of Lord Godalming, there is still some question as to whether these pages were obtained with the professor’s consent, or at least with his full understanding that they would be made public. Holmwood himself believed the account compiled by Stoker under the direction of the Harkers was solely intended for the edification of their young son Quincey.

 The Holmwood family, in point of fact, assert that the fragments from Van Helsing’s journal of the 1890 period are believed by them to have been copied by Seward himself during the professor’s stay at Purfleet Asylum, or else by one of Seward’s staff. The reason for this, the Holmwoods claim, was monetary. It is known that the asylum was in dire straits financially at the outset, and that it experienced a substantial economic turnaround in 1898, a year after the publication of Dracula.

As Seward wrote, Van Helsing had been ostracized by the academic world for appearing in Dracula. Even some colleagues who had previously shared in his adventures turned their backs on him publicly when their own reputations were endangered.

Everyone suffered a small degree of embarrassment at the hands of Stoker, of course. Lord Godalming was branded an eccentric, which was sort of inconsequential to an English lord. The Harkers were a private people, not well known in the first place. Being that publication was mainly their idea, and they shared in Stoker’s profits and raised their son comfortably on residuals (under a new surname, legally petitioned for by Jonathan), it was little to them. Dr. Seward, by his own admission, deflected any criticism from his peers by pointing out the fact that Dracula was labeled as fiction, and claimed in private circles at the time to have nominally participated in it as a favor to Stoker, or as a lark. He wasn’t known much outside the psychiatric community, and not well regarded outside of London, at that.

But Abraham Van Helsing, when confronted by his detractors, out of personal honor or perhaps naivety, denied nothing (note these events will be better understood and brought to light in a subsequent collection).

And that wasn’t the end of his exploits, nor even, as I found, the beginning.

Van Helsing, by his own assertion (records are scant), was born in 1834 in Natal, South Africa to Voortrekker Arjen Van Helsing and his German wife, Konstanze Gottschalk. He died in Holysloot, North Holland in 1934 (This can be confirmed. I’ve seen his death certificate.)

In between that time he was a seminarian, a husband and father, a Boer farmer, a scientist, a field scout and interpreter, a medical doctor, a philosopher, an amateur archaeologist, a mystic, a respected lecturer, instructor, and a world traveler.

It took me nearly thirteen years of fact checking and emailing, meeting and compiling (to say nothing of legal wrangling over the authenticity and ownership of the papers themselves) to release the first installment of the Van Helsing papers in accordance with the late professor’s initial wishes.

In the end I was reluctant to do so. My own career after all, has been in novels, and in doing this I risk consigning the professor’s true history to the realm of speculative fiction, just as Bram Stoker did (albeit unwittingly – Stoker believed the papers he transcribed and polished to be works of amateur fiction).

Yet I can only humbly submit the first collection of these documents and ask that the reader overlook the presenter and see the truth within. We are obliged to put out the stories that come to us.

Dr. John Seward’s own efforts at vindicating his friend were cut short on September 7, 1940, when the German Luftwaffe initiated operation Loge and he was killed in the first strike of the London Blitz.

It is my hope that I, in accidentally uncovering these documents and laboring to continue Seward’s work, have been passed his torch, and that in publishing them, I have at last done right by both men.

Terovolas, culled from The Van Helsing Papers (1891) will be out from JournalStone Publishing November 16th. You can get the ebook version right now. An excerpt can be read here.

The book can be purchased on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.

http://journal-store.com/fiction/terovolas/

A FINAL NOTE: I’d like to apologize to readers, but due to an unfortunate mishap on my part, paperback editions of Terovolas will be shipped without a footnote which explains a recurring reference Van Helsing makes to Lucy Westenra’s having wed Arthur Holmwood a day before her death. This in itself, is not a mistake. Yet to be published accounts among Van Helsing’s papers do in fact bear this out, though the event was deliberately excised from Bram Stoker’s novel, for reasons which will become clear when the relevant papers see the light of day.  The blame lies solely with myself, a fiction writer’s first foray into non-fiction.

Mea culpa,

EME

Van Helsing In Texas Places Third In JournalStone’s $2,000 Advance Contest

http://journalstone.com/contest/journalstones-2000-advance-in-2012/

Van Helsing In Texas has placed third in the JournalStone Advance Contest for 2012, which means you’ll likely see it coming your way by the end of the year.

The premise is based around a series of found historical documents, personal papers written by Professor Abraham Van Helsing himself.

Following the events of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Professor Van Helsing checks himself into Jack Seward’s aslyum in Purfleet, suffering from violent recurring phantasies centering around his destruction of the Count’s vampiric brides and involving Mina Harker.  Seward diagnoses the professor with melancholic lycanthropea and treats him. Upon his release, Van Helsing visits with Arthur Holmwood and learns the cremated remains and personal affects of Quincey P. Morris (who died at the hand of Dracula’s gypsies) have not yet been returned to his family ranch in Sorefoot, Texas. He immediately volunteers to do so, thinking a holiday will do him good.

In Texas he finds Quincey’s brother Coleman embroiled in an escalating land dispute with a neighboring outfit of Norwegian cattlemen led by the enigmatic Sig Skoll.  To exacerbate things, a rabid mountain lion is slaughtering livestock. When the sheriff and one of Cole’s hired hands turns up murdered, Van Helsing suspects a supernatural culprit.

Is as real life shapechanger on the loose? Or a bizarre murder cult? Or are these signs but the product of Van Helsing’s own previously disordered mind? The professor must sort out the truth soon, for the life of Skoll’s beauteous new bride may be in danger….

Look for it in November from JournalStone….