The Disquieting Guest — On Leonard Nimoy and the Anti-Spock
Like almost everyone else, my first encounter with Leonard Nimoy was in his Spock role. But as I watched endless reruns of Star Trek in my elementary school years, I did not have much awareness of the actor behind the character. The names in the credit sequence meant little. They were less real than the characters themselves. I knew that Spock wasn’t real, of course, but imaginatively and emotionally he was. The real person behind the character barely registered in my consciousness.
Partial Book Review: Dangerous Games edited by Jonathan Oliver
(This is a partial review, as I did not read the entire anthology for Reasons*.) Dangerous Games, edited by Jonathan Oliver, is a 2014 horror and dark fantasy anthology whose stories are united by gaming. The games featured are pretty diverse; I initially thought (for some weird reason) it’d be all western gambling, which I find pretty boring, but not so much. There are games from all over the world, as well as several stories revolving around RPG’s (of course, silly me). I found three stories conceptually very interesting. “The Yellow Door” by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia is a Lovecraftian story. While it ended a little abruptly, it does what only great horror writers can do in rendering the completely innocuous — things you cannot fathom being creepy — frightening. In this case, it’s the generic westernized Chinese restaurant — and component parts thereof. This I found more interesting than the Cthulhian element, not being a Lovecraft person. Though I must say, shoggoth soup. Ahem.
The Disquieting Guest: On “As Above, As Below” (2014) and Theatrical Horror in 2014
I didn’t get the chance to read as many books or watch as many films as I would like this year, and so any ruminations on my part about what might or might not constitute the best of the year should be taken with a Dead Sea’s worth of salt. My impression is that by and large, this has not been a stellar year for horror movies in the theatres. The box office returns tend to confirm that perception, which leads to Scott Mendelson’s gloomy appraisal of the situation here. But what needs to be factored in, regarding horror’s relatively poor showing in terms of numbers, is how few of this year’s films are actually any good. Compounding the problem is the fact that the two recent movies receiving the most glowing acclaim — Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook — have received criminally minimal distribution. Last I heard, The Babadook, which by all accounts is absolutely terrifying and would be leading my Best-Of list had I been able to see it, has only played in a single theatre in all of Canada. I hope to catch both of these films in 2015, but as I have yet to see them, I can’t say anything else about them in the context of this column other than express my anticipation. And here, have a trailer.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
Snuff is a loyal and faithful watchdog* — preternaturally intelligent. He helps Saucy Jack, a good and kind master. In Victorian London in October 1887, there will be a full moon on Halloween. A full moon on Halloween is a special event (which occurs about every 15-20 years on average), for then the Door can be opened and the Elder Gods let back into the world. Jack is a group of one of the individuals, Openers and Closers, striving during this October to gather the tools to decide whether the Door will finally be opened this time and change the world for all. The Great Game is afoot! Snuff’s master, though, is not any friendly guy named Jack, but rather he is a certain famous Jack best known to history for killing prostitutes in Whitechapel. And he is a Closer.
Indy Genre: Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
Nazi zombies. If those two words don’t make you perk up your ears like a great dane that just heard the treat bag rattle, then this movie is not going to be for you. But if you feel as if your life could be immeasurably improved by the application of the aforementioned Nazi zombies plus copious amounts of gore and a not inconsiderable amount of vomit? Welcome home, my friends. (Warning, this review will contain spoilers for the original Dead Snow.)
The Disquieting Guest — Bracing for the Universal Monsterverse
In 2012, we witnessed an unusual (to put it mildly) phenomenon: The Avengers was simultaneously the start of a new franchise, and a sequel to four other franchises: Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk. There was, however, a precedent. Almost 60 years earlier, in 1943, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was a sequel to both The Ghost of Frankenstein (and thus the fourth Frankenstein film) and The Wolf Man. The two series merged into one, and Dracula would be added to the mix in the films that followed. The continuity was very loose, but it was there all the same. Now, Universal has announced that it is rebooting (yet again) its monster titles with the purpose of aping the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All the icons from the 30s and 40s will be present: the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, and the Invisible Man. Also present is the late arrival from the 50s, Universal’s last classic monster: the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Though the official start to the Monsterverse is the Mummy reboot in 2016, it appears that Dracula Untold has been rejigged slightly to act as a prologue (assuming it isn’t a miserable failure).
