Essay: The Twilight of the Fools

I still don't get the apple.

November draws ever closer, and with it this year comes the theatrical release of New Moon, the second of the Twilight saga books to be adapted for the screen. Penned by Stephanie Meyer, the first book in the series, Twilight, came right out of nowhere and completely took over the young adult market. Releasing a book a year for four years, Meyer quickly reached J.K. Rowling-levels of fandom and made a huge impact on horror literature and television.

But Twilight is not horror. The Twilight saga is about vampires, but that’s where its connection with the genre begins and ends. Meyer herself admits to not liking horror movies, nor has she read any vampire books. Meyer has no interest in, nor is she familiar with, the horror genre, so how comes it that she’s written a horror story?

Women can't be trusted.

The answer is she hasn’t.

Twilight may be many things—a fantasy, a fairy tale, a romance—but it is not horror. Most interesting is the thing that would make Twilight horror, is the very thing that turns it against the genre. Meyer’s Cullen family of vampires are “vegetarian” meaning they don’t feed off humans—they are vampires divorced of their vampirism, living as humans live. They are, in the words of Zizek, “[the] Other deprived of its Otherness”, and it is for this reason that Twilight is not horror.

Horror brings our fears out of the dark. But Meyer’s neutered vampires prevent us from facing and overcoming those fears. Where vampirism once stood for disease, death, history, and transformation or mutation, all of which can be thwarted with an arsenal of Christian symbolism and a piece of wood, Meyer has stripped away the symbolism and weaknesses of the undead and replaced them with limitless perfection. You don’t fight against perfection, you strive for it.

Now that's a fucking werewolf!

In addition to tame vampires, the Twilight saga also features shapeshifters. Though the reading public and the media has generally labelled the shifters as werewolves, there is an important distinction to be made between the two. Shapeshifters change at will, werewolves do not. The original horror of the werewolf is an internal and ultimately futile struggle for control over the self. Meyer’s shifter, on the other hand, only struggles with his emotions and eventually becomes the best shapeshifter. So here again, the horror is eliminated, this time through the removal of the thing itself, and replaced with a coming-of-age tale of excellence.

A Mormon housewife and mother of three, who studied English Literature at BYU, Stephanie Meyer has gone on record saying that her religious values are partly reflected in her story. That’s not to say a Mormon, or any religious writer, can’t produce a horror story, but Meyer’s Twilight is not horror. The presence of vampires and “werewolves”, however, seems to be enough to make it so. The issue is one of identity and is not unlike the sex/gender dichotomy. Twilight looks like horror on the outside, but inside it’s all romance and suspense.

Google "vampire romance" and this is what you get.

Project: Do-Over Part 2 - Event Horizon

But only a finite number of ways that terror can manifest.

An event horizon is the edge of a black hole, where everything disappears into the dark; it is the point of no return.

Forty years after its disappearance, the spaceship Event Horizon has returned and is in high orbit around Neptune. Laurence Fishburne and his crew are dispatched to rescue the survivors. But there are no survivors. The ship is derelict, a ghost ship floating in space. With the rescue team is Sam Neil, the man who designed the ship's special engine. The Event Horizon can open a black hole and travel beyond the limits of known space. Unfortunately for the everyone, the ship traveled well beyond the limits of reality. As the team explores the ghost spaceship, they begin to hallucinate, seeing things that aren't there.

The first time I saw this movie I was more confused than anything else. Though I understood the plot, I didn't really get it. I thought it was stupid the way everyone just accepted their hallucinations as truth. And the revelation at the end, that the ship went to hell, was too much. I was a bit more forgiving the second time round. The hallucinations, I now understand, are brought on by the ship's ability to get inside people's heads and exploit their guilt and fears. And the very reason the ship can do that is because the Event Horizon is, in fact, alive. Possessed with a life force of it own, the ship uses the people on board to carry out its will. And its will is to inflict pain and suffering.

Space has no religion.

When the original crew of the Event Horizon fired up the singularity drive, they traveled to an alternate dimension where they tortured themselves and each other death. When the ship returned from the "hell dimension" it brought that anima back. I either wasn't paying attention or didn't care to register this information when I first saw the movie. Now that I have a better handle on the actual story, I can say that it really isn't as stupid as I first thought.

What is stupid is that no one does anything about it until it's way too late. As the film progresses, as the rescue team slowly tries to piece together what happened to the Event Horizon, Sam Neil grows ever more unstable, but no one takes any action. They just continue to let him wander around. Additionally, other crew members are unforthcoming about their own tenuous grip on reality, which only furthers the danger they pose to themselves and everyone else. So though I find the heart of the story compelling in itself, the execution is just irritating. I won't go so far to say these people deserve to die, but they certainly don't help themselves any to survive.

Don't go toward the light!

What's more is that the mystery of the hell dimension is wholly underexploited. It's only toward the end of the movie that it's made clear to the audience what happened forty years ago, and this is done through the briefest of montages. The hell dimension is good stuff, but we're only treated to a few seconds of torment. If the film were to evenly distribute the mystery and the torture throughout, rather than pile it all on at the end, then we would have a more thorough blend of horror and sci-fi. The creeping atmosphere of the haunted ghost ship is good stuff, but it fails to carry the film.

Additionally, those few moments of torture show Laurence Fishburne's crew. This fleeting detail raises a question about the very nature of the reality of events on screen. Are people really wandering about the ship, or do they just think they are when in fact they're being tortured? What are people really seeing and doing when they hallucinate? Frustratingly, the film provides no answers, just explosions.

Be that as it may, I didn't hate Event Horizon the second time. It's certainly a lot creepier than I remembered, and the gore effects were pretty good. Also, the engine room that houses the singularity drive has this dark steampunk quality to it that appeals to me, and which is offset by the white-tiled liquid sleep camber and the stainless steel sick bay. Overall, the film's look and feel are effective, combining utilitarianism and art to create a place that is at once threatening and sterile. The CGI has aged poorly, but that's not really anyone's fault.

Given the opportunity, I'd probably watch this film again.

I'm not saying I like this kind of thing, but I could have seen more of it.

Book Report: The Girl Next Door

Not porn.

This was one of the harder books I've read. Not because of the writing, but because the content is so, I don't know. Objectionable? Horrifying? I can't think of a suitable word to sum up my emotional reaction to the story. Normally I rate the books I read on a sliding scale from "god awful" to "goddamn brilliant". But to call The Girl Next Door "good" seems kind of disingenuous to me. Don't get me wrong, it is good, but not in an emotionally fulfilling kind of way. Good, in an unrelenting emotionally tormenting way.

It is the late fifties and David is twelve years old. He's best friends with Donny Chandler, who lives next door, and spends most of his summer days hanging out with Donny and his brothers. Then recently orphaned Meg and Susan arrive on the block and move in with Donny's family. Ruth, Donny's mother, doesn't take to Meg and seems to resent having to care for her and her crippled sister. Over the course of the summer, Ruth's treatment of Meg and Susan grows ever more abusive but David is either incapable of or unwilling to make any moral judgements. Eventually, Ruth coerces her sons to participate in Meg's humiliation and soon most of the boys on the block are taking turns raining abuses on Meg. David passively watches the horrors unfold in the Chandler's basement until he is finally polarized into action.

The story leans heavily on themes of sex, gender, and authority. David, the book's narrator, is just a boy, but he experiences a sexual awakening--brought on by Meg's arrival--and he muses on his newfound sexual desires and curiosities. David's friends, too, are aroused by Meg and as the abuse escalates, it grows increasingly sexual in nature. Most of the atrocities are overseen and directed by Ruth. Ruth is the single mother of three boys and though she's a natural authority figure, she's also the cool mom and the neighbourhood boys follow her without question. Ruth's abuse--or better yet, perversion--of her power and authority over her sons gives depth to the abuse hurled at Meg.

I haven't yet decided if I'll read more of him.

In addition to being depraved, Ruth is also self-loathing and unstable. Though her mental degradation is painfully obvious to the reader, David has no frame of reference or way of understanding what's happening to Ruth. This kind of narrative irony makes the book that much more difficult. A pall of moral ambiguity hangs over the characters, and their judgement is clouded by confusion in David's case, sociopathy in the case of the Chandler boys, and mental illness in the case of Ruth.

It should be noted these are not meant to be taken as excuses. In spite of the fact that there is little closure to the story (which again makes the whole thing hard to digest), Ketchum is careful to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of everyone involved, including David. As David wrestles with the injustice of it all, so too does the reader and it is here, at the very end of the text, where the two finally meet on common moral ground. Interestingly, that meeting takes place in one final act of violence.

The book's unrelenting pace and description of the abuse heaped upon Meg should in no way be interpreted as commentary on desensitization toward violence. Rather, David and his friends simply don't understand that what they're doing is wrong. Set in the suburbs with the backdrop of post-war conformity and civility, the events depicted are all the more terrible because modern readers understand that mid-century America was a different place where abused women and children had little or no recourse to the law. At one point in the story Meg herself approaches the police but they fail to help and protect her from harm. The officer involved returns later on, but only at the behest of David's father, and his intervention comes much too late.

To be fair, the only reason I picked up this book was to prepare myself for the movie. I don't normally do this kind of thing--reading the book before seeing the film--but I was intrigued by the "true" nature of the story, and an article detailing the movie's release made reference to the book as one of the more horrifying reads of recent years. I'm only slowly getting back into reading a lot of horror, and I was never much into this kind of human-on-human subgenre, so I can't comment on how The Girl Next Door stacks up against other similar types. What I can say is that, in spite of my mixed feelings about the book's quality, I'm glad I read it all the way to the end.

I'm not exaclty looking forward to watching the movie.

Essay: Dance Magic Dance

Let me get one thing out in the open: I don't know shit about dance. I like dance. I like to dance. But I can't speak with any authority, or even intelligence, on the subject.

About a year ago, I was having dinner at a friend's house when she and her mother both dropped their forks and turned their attention to the wall. On that wall was a huge ass TV, and on TV was So You Think You Can Dance. Exactly 30 seconds later I was staring in rapt attention at the most creepifying dance routine I'd ever seen. Up until this point, I loudly claimed the single greatest dance was Round The World. It was simply brilliant the way each group of dancers moved to a particular part of the music. Plus it had aliens and skeletons. But my mind was so blown away by the dark and haunting Hommage to the Rabbits, that Round The World moved down the short list to number 2.



And then I left town and promptly forgot about it.

Randomly I saw another few episodes of SYTYCD about a month ago and was treated to more dark fantasy- and horror-inspired dance. I've talked before about how horror is seeping into the mainstream; advertisers have produced genre TV ads for cars and beer, and half the books in the teen section at the bookstore are horror or horror related. And now to find that same darkness has successfully worked its way into contest-driven talent shows...



I think it speaks to the versatility of the genre, how it can be twisted to suit the needs of whomever. In the same way that horror movies can serve as allegorical or cautionary tales, the essence of horror, its look and feel, can be spread across multiple platforms. Interdisciplinary is one word for it, if we want to get really academic. In the specific example of SYTYCD (and one shining moment on Dancing with the Stars), the combined effects of movement, music, and costume transcend pop-cultural boundaries and gain mass-market TV audience appeal. I couldn't possibly imagine an evocative love-themed dance with 10+ dancers.

Oh wait, here's one:

The Horror!

I swear to God, I did not make this.

Here are links to my horror-related posts.

9 or 10 Greatest Horror Movies
The Girl Next Door Book Report
Dance of the Dead
Movie Poster Rip-Off
More Of The Same
Rob Zombie's Unfortunate Franchise
Sex and Drugs and Genre Film
Sex and Sex and Genre Film
Sid Haig
Twilight Book Report
Twilight Movie Review

And a terrifying picture of a dog.

Don't click on this link