putting the hallow in halloween: a wes craven theory

To say that I'm a Wes Craven "fan" is a bit disingenuous. I grew up in the 90s and Freddy Kruger had already taken the road of Frankenstein, Dracula, the wolf-man and Godzilla before him -- that is to be rather domesticated and seen as more of an unruly pet than a force of pure evil. A lot like my cat actually: he might scratch up the molding but he's so damn entertaining. I'll get to this in a bit, but I missed the splash damage caused by the original Nightmare on Elm Street. The only pre-Nightmare Craven I've seen is Last House on the Left, and I didn't sit down to watch Scream with my thinking cap on until a few years ago -- even though I saw not long after it was in theaters and was just transferring into high school, slowly resembling its awkward and patch-bearded heroes and psychos more and more. I don't own any Craven on DVD (Ash is veritable Craven, particularly Scream, fanatic and I am the better for it).

In fact, I didn't spend much time thinking about Craven at all until the news of his apparently sudden death in August, and then, more so now, I realize that particular knife he wedged in pop culture's spinal column will be twisted no more.

As reviewers have noted before, Craven upped the ante for horror between two and four times, depending on how you score it. Formerly a humanities professor from extremely religious parentage, he fell in love with movies in college and, if Wikipedia is to believed, broke into the scene writing and editing porn. This comes across strongest in Last House on the Left, and his penchant for pushing actors to their physical and mental limits reverberated through all of Craven's films.

Last House was Craven's first horror and depending on how you see it, is either the reinvention of the grindhouse genre or the simply the best example of it. In it, two teenage girls head off to a rock concert. Their parents disagree but do little to stop them, and the girls are promptly raped and murdered by a gang of escaped convicts whose leader is called Krug. The gang moves on, but after their car breaks down, seek refuge with some kind older folks who just happen to be the girl's parents. After learning what the gang has done, the parents exact a bloody, and highly symbolic, revenge. Craven's second grindhouse film, The Hills Have Eyes, tracks hapless vacationers as they head off into the desert, guided to an inbred and highly deformed family of cannibals. And like Last House, the one survivor on the "good guys" team ends the film by tacking the hill people back to their lair and mercilessly slaughtering the lot of them: men, women, children and all.

Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, Craven was introduced to real-world horror through Vietnam footage, and both Massacre and Craven's films were logical responses. While Hooper went out of his way to make political statements in interviews, Craven the professor carefully hid the message that our suburban moms and dads and our happy good-willed Winnebago drivers turn into monsters when they've been in the jungle too long.

Deadly Blessing and a foray into camp with Swamp Thing, for which Craven was never too successful, followed, but when Nightmare on Elm Street hit the big screen in 1984 it hit hard.

So here's my theory about Wes Craven and why the guy was so damn smart: he just made the same movie over and over, carefully updating it to to dig the right fear-nerve of the time.

In '84, the U.S. was in the midst of  a massive counter-counter-culture swing. Reagan was president and he promised a return to good 'ol 'Merican values and more importantly, a shrug-off of Jimmy Carter: the presidential analog to Debbie Downer. One of Carter's most controversial moves as chief was pardoning the 'Nam draft dodgers, all but saying aloud the entire thing was a mistake and nobody should've been expected to go. A few short years later, and suddenly Vietnam was a noble effort -- a good college try, if you will -- and the nation let out a collective sigh of relief, realizing that the citizen him or herself was no longer expected to live it down.

Enter Freddie Kruger. The combined ideas that a thing you can't see or affect while waking, dreams, can kill you, and that despite your fearful begging and week-long caffeine binges, your parents tell you to take a sleeping pill and stop acting so nuts was a serious indictment of Reagan's "innocent America" ideal. Audiences knew it. Combine that with the relatively low budget, studio disagreements and the sheer amount of violence and its a wonder Nightmare got made at all.

Kruger, originally, was a child molester (this unsavory tidbit was sanitized from later sequels). The parents burned him alive in the school's boiler room and hid evidence of their crime, though it drives protagonist Nancy's mother to insanity and her father into a bottle. Looking backwards, Nightmare could almost be the direct sequel to Last House: the vengeful ghost of the conveniently named Krug come back to kill the next generation, finding a way to attack children who are now locked away in suburban fortresses of sheet rock, vinyl siding and denial.

Freddie himself got the double-whammy of being a wholly owned creature of New Line and shooting to mega-stardom -- flames the studio only sought to fan. Craven had little to do with Kruger afterward and was probably glad about it, content to let his creation run free and observe the damage from afar. He directed Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, where the children turn Kruger's malleable dream world against him, and a criminally-underrated gem called Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

New Nightmare deserves all the attention it gets simply because it's a movie clearly written 100% by Craven the former teacher, starring Nightmare heroine Heather Langenkamp, Freddy actor Robert Englund, longtime producer Bob Shaye and even Craven himself as themselves. In New Nightmare's world, when a story has been told enough, it comes to life. In this case, the subject is the actual Nightmare on Elm Street movies. So to recap, it's a Wes Craven movie where the bad guy is a Wes Craven movie. Nightmare made lots of people rich, but Craven appears content to almost give a lesson on the dangers of fame and the detachment from one's own creation that the Hollywood remake machine can cause.

All this before they made 4 Transformers movies!

New Nightmare also serves as the jumping-off point for Scream, arguably the most successful of Craven's movies and either the second, third or fourth time he set a new standard for low-budget terror, featuring the second enduring Craven character Ghostface. The ending line, "Horror movies don't create psychos: they make the psychos more creative!" is just story-come-to-life with the supernatural distilled out. Now in the 90s and in the full-swing of Clinton's neo-liberalism and wholly a generation into the self-esteem movement, there was no need for monsters to frighten kids because the kids were empowered to be monsters, parents and adults in general be damned. It's no mistake that protagonist Sidney saves her father from two insane classmates who've watched Halloween one too many times. Scream is not so much a genre movie as it is a movie about genre, breaking down horror movie rules and then reminding the victims that it doesn't matter if you know you're in a horror movie or not.

I haven't seen any of Scream sequels but I hear it is the almost expected downhill slide into repetition and eventual self-parody.

The late 90s was also the last time the cinema landscape would prove fertile ground for Craven. Not that he didn't have continued personal success -- taking Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination with Music of the Heart and attempting to tackle post 9/11 flight anxiety with Red Eye are no small things. But that evolving idea birthed with Krug, nurtured with Kruger and brought to its logical conclusion with Scream never seemed to come up again. Craven produced Scream: The Series with original screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and while the show's inaugural season was not exactly bad, it lacked a certain intelligence and fell into too many modern TV show pits (because a show isn't a show without a creepy high school student-teacher relationship, apparently).

* * * *

In interviews, when Craven described the feeling that pushed him into writing and directing horror, he used the word "anger." It's an interesting choice of diction, and if one looks at his movies as both stories and scholarly examinations of present times, Craven certainly had a lot of anger at the world. I mentioned before that he grew up in a strict, religious family, and parents figure strongly as either foils or outright villains: parents who send their children off to die (there's a particularly nasty scene in Last House that more than adequately illustrates this); parents who don't believe their children; parents so inept the children need to save them.

Ironically, the only time we see a "good" parent in a Craven movie is New Nightmare, where fictional Heather battles fictional-but-real Freddy for the soul of her child. Whether this is intentional or not, or whether he dialed down the effect so as not to hurt real Heather's reputation as a parent is unknown, but such nuance and brainy-ness and self-confrontation is now lost to the world.

I guess we're all going to have to pay attention to our scariest dreams a little more now.

Happy Halloween.

downton abbey has a baby with castlevania

New movie, so, spoilers.

Short version: Crimson Peak kinda sucked. What was supposed to be an afternoon at the moo-vees turned into getting mugged by a ghost in the parking lot and then waking up two-and-a-half hours later in a dumpster with $12 missing and a giant hole in the memory.

This is disappointing because del Toro is usually much better than this. Exhibit A is The Orphanage, a very sad tale that features very creative ghosts that tell an otherwise uncomplicated, humanistic story. Crimson Peak is also sad, simple and humanistic, but covered so much mud the big reveal at the end turns into a colossal letdown.

I've since forgotten all of the character's names so we're going to call our protagonist Flopsy. Flopsy is the daughter of an American steel tycoon in the vein of Andrew Carnegie, and a dreamer, writer, and while the movie alludes to her supposed feminism, the writers clearly didn't research it or wait for The Suffragette to come out and just watch that. Flopsy sees her mom's ghost from a young age that cryptically warns her to "beware of Crimson Peak."

Okay, let's stop here a second. How cryptic is "beware of Crimson Peak" anyway? I know geography wasn't the best in nineteen-oh-whatever but a clearly educated daughter of wealth like Flopsy would've at least figured there can't be too many red goddamned mountains in the world. We'll get back to this in a minute, but, right? Seriously.

Flopsy's heart goes aflutter when a handsome stranger of English old money blows into town and solicits old dad for some startup cash. This goes on for far too long before dad dies under mysterious circumstances and Flopsy marries, uh, well, now his name is Gonad.

And we'll stop here again just to say that I have no problem with a long introduction or extended periods of quiet punctuated with crash-bang action. The original silent Phantom of the Opera is probably the best example of this. But the shift in gears from Downton Abbey turn o' the century baron's drama to full-blown supernatural horror is so jarring that Crimson Peak actually feels like two different movies smashed into one.

Gonad, of course, takes his new bride to his home of Crimson Peak -- the audience doesn't find out about the name until later, but for Christ's sake it's a mountain peak with special blood-red clay oozing out of every one of it's earthy pores. For an aspiring writer Flopsy lets that little bit of foreshadowing whiz right on by. And that isn't the end of what amounts to a long string of increasingly poor decisions on her part.

Gonad lives with is creepy-ass sister, a turn of bat shit loco brought to the screen wonderfully by Jessica Chastain, and since I've forgotten her character's name as well she is now called Nutso. Gonad and Nutso live alone in an isolated mansion with large swaths of caved in roof with no cleaning staff and did I mention it's sinking? Flopsy is seen at turns taking these revelations with something between bemusement and tacit acceptance as Nutso follows her around the house pushing nasty tea and Gonad seemingly refuses to sleep with her. Flopsy sees ghosts of course, but the siblings sans sanity tell her she's crazy and to drink more tea.

Another really disappointing aspect of Crimson Peak are the ghosts themselves, somewhere between Sadako of Ring-fame and animated to look like video game monsters ripe for the chopping. And despite del Toro's penchant for design and insane detailed (Exhibits B and C: Pacific Rim and the Hellboy movies), the ghosts are just people sans skin. For crap's sake, even the Crimson in the movie's title is a gimmick. The remake of Poltergeist did this too: subbing some genuinely terrifying monsters for a bunch of blurry human shapes, betraying that mix of laziness, budget constraints and not wanting to animate anything that's going to look like absolute crap in six months.

Anyway, the totally-not-scary-at-all ghosts point Flopsy to some unsavory tips about her new hubby (as if the fact that he comes from wealth and can't afford keep the goddamned snow out of the living room isn't enough). And one night she follows the spirit's lead to the movie's dramatic denumont and...

Nope, can't even finish that sentence with any degree of seriousness because it's just Flowers in the Attic. What the fuck guys?

Flopsy walks into Nutso going all nutso over Gonad's gonads and it all falls together in declarative exposition: Nutso murdered Dad so her brosband could sap her inheritance while wifey dies slowly of poisoning. Talk about jumping on a bandwagon five years after it left the station. Damn.

The throwdown between Flopsy and Nutso as the house sinks and the coveted clay stains the snow rouge is full-on fun, but does something I very much dislike in that it makes Gonad the ultimate hero. He predictably has a change of heart and sides with Flopsy over his wifester, prompting her stab-laden freak-out in the first place. In the end, it's Gonad's ghost (a ghostnad!?) that distracts Nutso long enough for Flopsy to land the killing blow, complete with cheeky one-liner.

I said before that Flopsy gets introduced as a sort of proto-feminist but the writers clearly had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Having her take out Nutso with her own feminine fists of fury would've been a nice return to form after her adventures in incestuous polygamy. But because, or at least as I infer, she cannot kill Nutso alone and needs Gonad's help, the message is that his redemption is complete because he orchestrates his evil sister's death.

Before I forget, Charlie Hunnmann is also in the movie, is the only other person who can see or is interested in ghosts and shows up for the final showdown and holy crap does that character arc go nowhere fast.

As a Primus album once said, they can't all be zingers, and this one doesn't so much zing as it slowly buzzes on a descending scale, as though one was blowing a kazoo at his bosses birthday party the day he got fired. If a studio is going to toss money away incorrectly using a talent and vision like del Toro's on overused and insensitive incest shockers, they might as well just freaking fund At the Mountains of Madness already.

was child's play ever scary?

Before getting into this, I am beginning this post on Oct. 21, 2015 a.k.a Back to the Future Part 2 day. By time of posting that day will have passed and the following observation will be late (or is it early? Maybe it's on time in ways we can't possibly comprehend!) Pretty much everything that you could want to read about the BTTF movies is out there already, but I figure I'd mention, briefly, why it is one of the few franchises where the sequels are so goddamned good. Simple really: the writers realized the most interesting thing about the fictional world they created was time travel, and they used it to great effect in the first as a way of understanding how Marty & Co. got to where they were in the future by showing off the past. They essentially made the same movie with the same kind of meta-commentary in Part 2, but instead had them go forward to, well, today. It's literally the mirror image of its predecessor. If Marty and Doc had gone back to another point in history -- say to change Marty's destiny as a child or something -- it would've been A) exactly the same movie as its predecessor and B) utter crap. In the age of sequels, that's how you do one right. It would help if many of the movie franchises out there now used some interesting material to begin with...

And to answer the question in the headline: no. Child's Play is not scary, and I'm not really sure it ever was.

I was 6 in 1988 when the movie hit theaters, so I'm not sure about the initial reception, but was a little more than surprised to see that Roger Ebert gave it a good review. But I digress: it is a greatly enjoyable movie and the effects, particularly Chucky's face, have held up reasonably well (as practical effects do -- nothing ages faster than animation).

Plot-wise, with a little explanation of the cursed "Good Guy" doll in the opening, Child's Play is the Talky Tina episode of Twilight Zone fed growth-hormone beef and shot up with PCP. In the classic horror fable, we the audience never get an explanation as to why Talky Tina doesn't like Dad very much, and that adds to the intertwined senses of mystery and dread. Chucky comes about from a mix of serial killer/toy store/voodoo ritual right from the get-go, and it is more than a little telling that the only non-white character (briefly) in the movie is the voodoo priest who equips the Lakeshore Strangler with the power to reanimate himself.

It was filmed in Chicago but never identifies the city, and the cast of white victims suffering the albeit unintended wrath of Creole magic brings to mind such racially-loaded terms as "urban decay." This is a theme that runs through the core of a few 80s movies and skirts the edges of many more, from the Chinatown vision of LA critical to Blade Runner to the punks in the opening of Terminator or perhaps most egregiously, the Hispanic heroin-addicted homeless rapists in that shining banner of American cinematic achievement that is Jason Takes Manhattan. There's also a splash of the late-decade recession that reared it's ugly head towards the end of the Reagan presidency: the economy tanked, cities were a mess and many experts agree the sitting president was in the throws of Alzheimer's. Shit sucked, is what I'm getting at. Catherine Hicks's (who won a Saturn for best actress in a horror, believe it or not) character must work double-shifts at a department store to scrape by as a single mom in 80s-land, and still only manages to get a coveted Good Guy doll from a homeless shill.

At the heart of the plot is little Andy, Karen's son and seeker of the Good Guy doll, and at the heart of the movie is a comment on commercialism as it relates to kids. Good Guy himself was based on Hasbro's mega-popular My Buddy toy. I can still remember the commercials and that lurid, unblinking and deadened thousand-yard stare. Before My Buddy was Chatty Cathy -- the subject of the aforementioned Twilight Zone. And after, Cabbage Patch, Furby, Tickle-Me Elmo, each with their associated yarns of Christmas Eve Wal-Mart brawls.

Karen, of course, doesn't believe Andy when he tries to tell her Chucky offed the babysitter with a claw hammer. It's not until she learns that Chucky foregoes alkaloids for his juice and goes straight for the hard stuff -- pure evil serial killer soul -- that Karen moms the hell out and drafts a detective investigating the babysitter's demise to her cause. Not that she'd need to: Chucky's on a mission to whack his former partner who left his corpus to die in a toy store at the hands of the very same detective, at which point the horror movie shifts into crime-revenge as told by Jim Henson with a gut full of Wild Irish Rose. Chucky proves more resilient than Rasputin in the final battle over Andy's soul, and the toothy melted face is really the stuff of nightmares. He's slain in the end, but given the sheer amount of sequels, we know that the killer is never really dead.

The original question was whether the movie was scary or not, and I think that depends on how you define scary. It's got some good jump-scare moments that I'm sure were more terrifying in a dark theater at 130 decibels, and the bit where little Andy is locked in a hospital room as Chucky's pitter-patter of untimely doom inches closer is quite tense. But the entire thing is so out there, particularly Chucky's off-the-cuff "Stupid bitch!" and "I'll fucking gut you!" lines, it doesn't lend itself toward fear the way, say, Night of the Living Dead or even that Twilight Zone do.

Though it is a fantastic time capsule into the average person's anxiety over what the holiday rush for crappy toys does to kids and, ultimately, what it does to parents. I am not looking forward to the day two fully-formed adults hospitalize each other over four-year-old-friendly drones, but the revisit was certainly worth it.

(It's 11:22 p.m. at time of posting. Made it.)