Vampyr (1932)

Germany / France, 75 minutes

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee

Music: Wolfgang Zeller

Editor: Tonka Taldy

Cast: Julian West, Sybille Schmitz, Maurice Schutz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gerard, Albert Bras, N. Babanini, Jane Mora

Danish director and cowriter Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet) based his vampire story on the Irish horror writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s essential 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, which includes “Carmilla,” the famous lesbian vampire story. It’s an important point of distinction from the more popular vampire source of the time, which, of course, was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published 25 years later in 1897. Stoker’s epistolary novel was responsible informally (later settled legally) for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and then, in 1931, for the kickoff of the Universal horror franchise, Dracula. In fact, Vampyr was required to wait for its release until after Dracula and then Frankenstein. These are all notably slow and very quiet dream movies, perhaps Vampyr more than any of them, which moves like thawing syrup. It often reminded me of Eraserhead, which makes me wonder how much influence it might have had on David Lynch.

The star, Julian West as Allan Grey, was the primary source of funding for the picture in exchange for the role. His real name was Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a French-born member of Russian nobility. In that way Vampyr is a kind of vanity project—in a way perhaps even more so for Dreyer than the baron. Pursuits into horror literature have traditionally not often won respect and admiration. Dreyer may have been taking a kind of calculated risk with his career, moving from Saint Joan of Arc only four years earlier to these creatures of the night.

“The End of the Garden” (1991)

I thought this short story by Czech author Michael Ajvaz was charming and fun. As the editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer say in their introduction to it in the anthology The Weird, “Ajvaz comes by the ‘weirdness’ in his fiction through dark humor and absurdity.” Some credit may also need to go to translator James Naughton. There’s a precise use here of “monitor lizards,” which are better known to us (or me) as “Komodo dragons”—a big lizard species (possibly multiple species). I don’t think about them much, but yes, now that my attention is drawn to them, they’re pretty weird. Something goes off in my own lizard brain. The repetition of the term “monitor lizard” does a lot of work here, and effectively. They are at once a dream element and a point of humor, used almost rhythmically. They are all over this story, starting with a cry for help our first-person narrator hears on the street. When he enters an apartment to respond he finds a woman wrestling on the floor with a monitor lizard. He rushes to assist her until he realizes it is the monitor lizard calling for help. In the dilemma facing him—which of them to help—he invokes the philosophers Kant and Hegel. I would probably be wondering how the monitor lizard could talk, but that’s me. Ajvaz’s voice puts the story over. The narrator is some kind of innocent, but also intellectual, a kind of affable absent-minded professor raconteur. His story is interesting and we want to hear more. He goes dithering off on questions of philosophy and always returns to monitor lizards. He separates the woman from the fight. She goes to her bookcase “holding neatly arranged rows of adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas pere and Paul Feval pere,” pulls out a volume—and it is At the End of the Garden, authored by the narrator. “I have never written a book in my life,” he says. Among other things this story is a great dream tale. Absurdity is handled remarkably well, with a light and playful touch. Too often it can be thunderingly obvious. So I really liked this story. Would I like more from Ajvaz? It’s hard to say but I’m inclined to think I would because his voice and the humor are so good here. Will I seek him out? Hey, I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’d certainly be interested if more fell my way.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

Kinks, “Lola” (1970)

[listen up!]

EDM artist Moby has earned a reputation in recent years for putting his foot in his mouth—just ask Natalie Portman. The latest came earlier this year when he named this song in an interview with the Guardian, responding to a question about music he can no longer listen to, calling it “gross,” “transphobic,” and “unevolved.” Predictably enough, Kinks main guitar man and occasional songwriter Dave Davies fired back, citing trans entertainer Jayne County’s endorsement of the top 10 hit song’s influence on her. Fair enough, but for context you only have to turn to David Reuben’s bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask), a middlebrow Q&A sex manual published the year before in 1969 which was tremendously popular—later a Woody Allen movie. Trans issues were so far beyond the horizon at the time that Reuben is basically silent on anything related to gender identity, reducing transsexuality to the rather different transvestism, or cross-dressing, which he argued was practiced mainly by married heterosexual men with families (see the Woody Allen movie for the idea, a strange one). That’s the world the Kinks, of all people, were stepping into on a concept album from 1970. Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One was intended among other things as the band’s return to their hard-rocking bona fides, after several years of turning out albums with twee pop masterpieces (and that, of course, after initially busting down the walls of rock ‘n’ roll and making the world safe for rock with “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” “Tired of Waiting for You,” etc., etc.).

I can see it both ways on “Lola” now: it was a thrilling rock song at the time and that side of it holds up well. It’s a Ray Davies song—the guy can write them. But the nuance of the lyrical thrust, such as it is, was basically over my 15-year-old head. They seemed to be playing the scenario for laughs, as a farce, and that’s how I took it, though somewhat uneasily. I understood it was trucking in outrageous taboo sexual themes but I took that more as pose. It feels sleazy, I think that’s the main thing Moby is complaining about, where nowadays respect and dignity are what’s on the menu for the LGBT+ community. But the mysteries of sexuality often make respect and dignity kind of party poopers in the clinch, giving up sexual charge for social acceptance, and who can blame anyone for that? There’s still some sexual charge to “Lola,” but it definitely feels dated, on the wrong side of right behavior. The song now hits as less than liberatory in most ways, though I can believe it could sound that way in 1970 and echoes are still there. And it’s not a bad rocker at all, a worthy addition to the Kinks catalog and a stone classic by any metric. I just don’t put it on very often and it sounds strange in public settings. One last odd detail: I recall at the time that Coca-Cola was incensed by the use of their name in this song and took legal action. It was hastily patched over in the studio as “cherry cola.” The versions on my streaming service now, however, are all once again “Coca-Cola.” I wonder when that happened? P.S. I love the comic book “official music video” on youtube. Worth a look even if you are like Moby and can’t stand to hear the song anymore.

Bring Her Back (2025)

I thought I saw promising signs to this one going in. The cowriting and codirecting team of the Philippou twins from Australia, Danny and Michael, previously gave us the raucous Talk to Me (and both incidentally were associated as crew with the revelatory Babadook). Sally Hawkins is a featured player, an actor who has worked well with Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, the amazing Happy-Go-Lucky), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), and others. And the reviews I saw were favorable, if not enthusiastic, with a 7.1 ranking on IMDb from 128,000 viewers (I generally handicap rankings on IMDb for horror movies a full point, meaning Bring Her Back had the potential for 8.1 quality). Its reputation, in fact, made me a little afraid of what was increasingly a mandatory viewing. You can see I put it off awhile. Indeed, it’s not a picture to be looked at during dinnertime, as it has many gross and harrowing scenes of extreme violence and abuse. I should have remembered that Talk to Me bore themes of grief, depression, and trauma in its plot, because once again, in Bring Her Back, contemporary horror has rooted itself in grief, depression, and trauma. In this case, Laura (Hawkins) has become deranged by the death of her daughter Cathy, who was blind and drowned in their swimming pool (which has been drained during this movie, making it a dangerous concrete hole in the backyard). Laura was a social worker before Cathy’s death. Now she is a foster mother. In many ways this is a movie about the importance of the vetting process of foster parents. Laura takes in a blind Asian girl, Piper (Sora Wong), and, under some duress because Laura only wanted the girl, Piper’s older brother Andy (Billy Barratt), who looks like Mark Hamill in 1977. Laura also has another foster living with her, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is a certain model of creepy horror movie kid, Deliverance style. The rest is mostly tiresome working out of the grief. I can’t tell you any of the details because they would be spoilers. The Philippous can supercharge their scenes with lively, kinetic energy, but I kind of wish they’d lose the grief, depression, and trauma business. Nothing that way in this movie felt remotely real, only more like pink frosting.

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

I guess we can give Harlan Ellison some points for paranoia prescience with this very early vision of an AI dystopia. As such, it reminded me a lot of 19th-century horror, which often seems to believe that simply mentioning something uncanny, such as a ghost, is enough to set the mood. The idea of an AI takeover is barely developed here. It just happened somehow. Computers around the world have become sentient and they really hate people. They have allied into one thing—called “AM”—and wiped out all humanity except for the five featured in this story, who are being tortured and kept alive indefinitely. It’s been going on for 109 years at the time of the story—apparently the machines can somehow confer immortality or at least long life too. Lucky day. They seem to be able to do practically anything they want. The bad news is that the machines hate with molten rage (an Ellison specialty) even if specific reasons are not given here. They just do. The story is basically scenes of torture and terror alternating with world-building explanations and exposition. Ellison brings a lot of energy to his work, which has always been one of the main appeals about it. He may often feel like he’s making shit up, but at least it’s usually interesting shit. At this point I am beginning to think, however, that he might be more of a young person’s writer. He’s not impressive to me now the way he was when I read him in my 20s. I always intended to read more of him then but unfortunately never got around to it. Now his stuff too often feels made up, though certainly he goes deep into his themes and ideas. The thing about this one is that it never goes much further than its striking title and premise. It doesn’t have to, or didn’t. Now it has a lot of stiff competition in the realm of AI dystopia. Start with The Matrix and no doubt whole shelves of SF I don’t know at all. In fact, we might be living in that dystopia any day now. Still, I was glad to get to this story finally.

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Run-D.M.C. (1984)

I owned a copy of Run-DMC’s debut when it was new—blind squirrel finds a nut, OK sure, but I must admit it baffled me. It was so stripped down it seemed unfinished, and primitive, appealing to that side of my taste perhaps, a semi-mystifying pleasure when it played. But it didn’t play for long before I put it away. More than 40 years later it hits different. The groove is obviously in the beats and the beats are the hooks as the brain locks into them. It’s a blast to play. They were already on to the project of making room for a rock guitar, famously and influentially on the second track here, “Rock Box,” with Eddie Martinez playing the butt-simple but evocative electric guitar. What once puzzled me now thrills me. Time comes to all folks. The guitar is hard but the beats are harder and therein lies the greatness. That’s arguably the chief feature here—certainly it is already pointing the way to the Aerosmith collaboration—but there are other points of interest and pleasure as well, such as the fiercely swapping vocals. I try to pick one or the other and chant with it. It’s not easy. It’s nimble and surprising and would only get better (see “It’s Tricky” on their third album). The high-profile themes are hard life: “Hard Times” and “It’s Like That” were the first two singles, where their bitter poverty gibes are somewhat overplayed, viz., “Won’t you tell me the last time that love bought you clothes?” My riposte would be most (not all) of people’s childhoods, where providing clothes to children is considered at least a parental duty, more often than not performed out of love. Run-DMC would often traffic in less than inspired or muddled language, especially when trying to be sincere. I much prefer the playful braggadocio of “Jam-Master Jay,” “Jay’s Game,” and the Krush-Grooves, “Hollis Crew” and “Sucker M.C.’s” (note that I do not know any applicable backstories but may look into it). “Wake Up” and “30 Days” have interesting and fun (respectively) narrative conceits. But “Rock Box” along with the B-Boy Mix in the extras count as the continuing stars of this show, with a slow-but-sure deep synthesizer line counterpointing a wind-chime same in the upper registers plus the soaring, screaming guitar, fully under control, like a panther in a cage. But stick around for the whole album. It’s good stuff, and lately a reliable raver around here.

The Great Beauty (2013)

La grande bellezza, Italy / France, 141 minutes

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Photography: Luca Bigazzi

Music: Lele Marchitelli

Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli

Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Giovanna Vignola, Galatea Ranzi, Sonia Gessner, Anna Della Rosa, Luca Marinelli, Giusi Merli, Roberto Herlitzka

Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.

I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.

Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park” (1967)

[listen up!]

This top 20 hit by the Small Faces (who later became the Faces with Rod Stewart) was preceded in October 1967 by the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s smash #1 “Incense and Peppermints,” together defining a kind of deceptive wide-eyed teenybop style of bubblegum psychedelic. These songs could somehow parade around fearlessly on the AM radio, at least in my market when I was 12. They both, in fact, scared me a little because, if it was not entirely clear what is going on, the feeling is unmistakably illicit, outside the bounds of grownups, an exotic guided adventure. The mood was like little I had heard before and it appealed to me even before I got the sense of the words. The fictional Itchycoo Park in this one is a place you go to rest your eyes in shades of green. Wikipedia has the file on where the name “Itchycoo” might come from. It feels like a real place, this park. Implicitly the song is about a day of skipping school and it’s straightforward from there: “What did you do there? / I got high / What did you feel there? / Well, I cried / But why the tears there? / I’ll tell you why:” Chorus: “It’s all too beautiful” x4. Later the singer invites us to touch the sky with him. I knew “high” meant drugs, mostly likely LSD—I’d read all about it in Life magazine—but I was a kid remote from any scene that could connect me to that part of the song. I just more, like the ducks here, grooved about, was nice and had fun in the sunshine of this song, notably late at night, borne on the cool feelings it conveyed, buoyed by tunefulness and a great vocal performance from Steve Marriott.

Who? (1958)

I’m tempted to make fun of Algis Budrys for the title of his short novel. If it were up to me I would have called it The Man With the Metal Head. I would have insisted on it. But all right. What we have is a somewhat dubious Cold War story, ripped from the pages of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy feature. For reasons that seems likely to be unreasonable, a top-secret weapons development program is doing its work near a border between the Allies and the Soviets. Something goes amiss in the calculations and there is an explosion. Soviet forces rush into the chaos and kidnap the top Allies scientist, Lucas Martino. He’s been seriously injured but they patch him up with evidently superior reconstructive technology, even as the Allies press for his return. Several months later the Soviets finally return him. His left arm and much of his head have been replaced in the fixups. The problem becomes confirming that he is actually Lucas Martino and not some Soviet replacement agent there to gather intel. The story is thus playing with ideas about the veracity of identity (as indicated in the title, to be fair). Everything the Soviets might have needed to know could have been pumped out of Martino. They had the time. The novel and its Lithuanian-American author refreshingly understand that torture works. The metal head obscures Martino’s most identifying feature, his face. Everything else, including fingerprints and maybe dental work (unmentioned), can evidently be fudged. DNA ID was of course unknown in 1958. I appreciated the brevity of this one, maybe 150 pages, because some characters were interesting but the big ideas about identity kind of fizzled and the ending was not very satisfying. But Martino, or his facsimile, was an interesting person, an outcast just from his Tin Man appearance. His long detention upon his return and the constant surveillance that followed make him sympathetic. The Cold War is deeply baked into all of it, a pervading reality imagined into the near future of the 1960s and beyond as never-ending. Which is much how it felt, even up to the time when it finally did end. This novel relies to a great extent on military spycraft, which makes it kind of ho-hum for me. But again, it’s over quickly and mostly enjoyable most of the way.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

So Tough (1993)

Saint Etienne’s second album is something of a disappointment after the impressive Foxbase Alpha debut. Insert the hoary rock critic term “sophomore slump.” The elements are largely the same, but the emphasis has shifted away from more pure pop aesthetics and toward maddeningly vaporous experimental realms with sound collages, witty skits and audio clips from movies and TV ads, and hushed little semi-grooves under influence of ambient house figures of the moment such as the Orb. Saint Etienne is perfectly capable of the popsmithery I love them most for, later albums like Good Humor prove that out, and for that matter there’s a couple of winners at the very end of So Tough, “Who Do You Think You Are” and “Join Our Club.” For those studying versions of things as a hobby, those songs were released separately as singles and apparently included only in some (not all) US versions. It’s all actually quite complicated and I don’t have the heart to go into it for something that misfires more than not in my version. Those last two songs save the album for me, to the extent it is saved and to the degree you consider them part of the album, but set that aside. “Mario’s Café” starts things well, then “Railway Jam” follows with a certain template for much of the album: a witty audio clip, a droning train-on-the-tracks sound collage that goes more than a minute, and finally wisps of a song that sounds like it could be pretty cool. “Calico” and “Avenue” (5:12 and 7:34, respectively) similarly start out strong but ultimately go dithering off into ... stuff. I find it’s actually hard to specifically focus on this album as it plays, which might give it some utility as background music for dinner parties and such. The witty skits and audio clips are sure to be sources of conversation. Mix and match them with the sources listed at Wikipedia: “Peeping Tom, Billy Liar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord of the Flies, and That'll Be the Day, as well as the television series The Family and the 1958 stereo demonstration album A Journey into Stereophonic Sound.” When I think of myself and witty skits and audio clips I think of Lou Grant from Mary Tyler Moore and spunk. I hate witty skits and audio clips. YMMV