“The Phantom Riders” (1896)

This story by Ernest R. Suffling is not bad but leans very hard into its effects, which are not that interesting or effective. It’s in that style of horror which assumes just mentioning or describing ghostly sightings is enough. Maybe so for another age, or in other circumstances. I can see this working as a story told aloud after dark, when the mood is gullible, for example. It feels to me like an Anglo-Saxon type of story at its heart, with virtuous values. One man, who is a slothful local guy, takes for granted that a woman in the neighborhood is his to have when he’s ready to marry. But another man comes along and falls in love with her. She feels the same about him and they are engaged to marry within three weeks. The date set for the announcement is Christmas Eve. That’s about all it has to do with Christmas, incidentally. The local guy won’t hear of this union and murders his rival off-stage. Then it’s on to the ghost effects, which are quite explicit. The ghost of one and then the other appear at the Christmas Eve gathering for the announcement. Separately, they appear and go behind a curtain in an alcove. Everyone at the gathering is petrified. The next day the body of one is found and later the body of the other. The one is murder, the other an accidental death. The following year this same bunch (more or less) travels on Christmas Eve to the site where the first body was found, where they witness the murder reenacted by ghostly figures. This scares the hell out of them too. And the year after that, so two years on, an intrepid band of sleuths views the reenactment and gives chase to the ghost of the murderer to witness his fate (the accidental death) and also to learn where he hid some documents he stole from the victim. It finishes as a ridiculously rational story, losing most of what punch it had by trying to explain too many things. The documents are irretrievably ruined after two years in the elements—I kind of like the bleak note there, and in other places in this story. But mostly it feels like “comfort horror,” perhaps best related in campfire or similar situations. At Christmastime, sure, why not, sounds good for the ghost story hour after dark before putting the kids to bed, etc. I like the story pretty well on that level. Also, the ghost effects are pretty good—predictable and obvious, yes, but they can work.

Yuletide Frights, ed. William P. Simmons

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Read story online (scroll down).

The Batman (2022)

The Batman I grew up with was the cartoony version from the ‘50s and ‘60s, with Bob Kane’s name all over it and filled with gimmicky villains, which led inevitably to the Batman TV show starring Adam West. At the time (approximately age 11) I hated that show for revealing that this cartoony version was a joke. In the ‘70s, DC comics creators tried to evoke the original Batman I never knew—the vengeance-driven orphaned wraith of the night whose name was uttered with the definite article, the Batman—but I was never convinced by it until the Frank Miller version in the ‘80s. Obviously I wasn’t the only one impressed with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, as this dark knight Batman took hold, swelled up, and led a charge into the movies, where Tim Burton had the first crack at it, Christopher Nolan made a trilogy out of it, and earlier this year came The Batman from director and cowriter Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In, a couple of Planet of the Apes pictures in the 2010s). This mighty epic Batman is only five minutes short of three hours, though a 12-minute credit roll at the end cuts into the length a little. We’ve had Michael Keaton in the role, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and many more, and now we have Robert Pattinson (Twilight, The Childhood of a Leader, The Lighthouse, etc.), who somehow reminds us that maybe Adam West was the best idea in the first place. That TV show looks better all the time—I’m not 11 anymore and can enjoy the joke. Also, I keep hearing that some of the animated versions from the ’90s are the best Batmans. I should check them out.

Anyway, look, this version of the same old dark Batman story is fine, dotting i’s and crossing t’s as we get all the familiar elements rejiggered slightly: Bruce Wayne the orphan, his faithful servant and father figure Alfred, a police origin story for Commissioner Gordon, plus the Catwoman, the Riddler, and pretty sure that’s the Joker they’re teasing at the end. Which reminds me, like the 2019 Joker, The Batman basically wallows operatically in Batman tropes, with a particular fascination about Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s super-rich biological father that Bruce sees assassinated one way or another (it’s not a tragic stickup in this version and there’s some stuff new to me about his mother). The Batman is long, but clips along respectably. Pattinson seems more like a Robin than a Batman—a bit young when the mask comes off, looking maybe 24 years old? He was about 34 when the movie was made but it’s a young 34. He’s not burdened with the voice effects of Bale in the Nolan movies, thankfully. How was he supposed to make his voice do that anyway? As always for me, the costumes place it well beyond any believability. For the kind of impressive outdoors athletic stunts we see here, for example, a cape is obviously not just a hindrance but positively a danger to safety. The Batmobile makes an appearance—it’s reminiscent of the TV show with the rear jet propulsion but then reminiscent (to the point of homage?) of the spectacular chase scenes in The Dark Knight from 2008, still the best dark Batman movie of all. I like the treatment of the Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz) here and Paul Dano as the Riddler is as amazing as the notices have said, though we have seen this giggling madman shtick from him before and, truthfully, the Riddler is a shabby foe generally with his dumbass riddles. In short, The Batman has virtually no surprises, but it is so competent as a big-ticket movie—Michael Mann is another obvious inspiration—that people are likely to be looking at it in the holiday season for many years to come. May as well give in to it sooner rather than later.

“Remorseless Vengeance” (1902)

I like this story by Guy Boothby, though maybe not as much as the title, which is so grim it’s comical. It’s another horror story set at Christmastime that is hard to call Christmassy. Perhaps it’s more in the spirit if read aloud after dark. It has an exotic setting with a sailor’s story of being down and out in Batavia (now Jakarta), Indonesia. The juxtaposition with Christmas as we know it is much of what makes the story work (albeit in a somewhat colonialist frame). As you probably guessed from the title, it’s a story of betrayal and retribution, with lots of intrigue and shady motivations. Our first-person narrator is stranded by sickness. Now just recovering and in debt, he is approached by a Captain Berringer who is well known in the story. He wants help abducting a certain general because, as revealed later, this general executed Berringer’s brother by hanging him the year before on Christmas day. We’re not told why. Once the general has been taken and is aboard Berringer’s ship it turns out Berringer intends to hang him in revenge, also on Christmas. Our guy (the first-person narrator and stranded sailor) is part of it now and tries to talk Berringer out of the murder. But Berringer is set on it. That night the ghost of the dead brother appears to Berringer and tells him to back off—the revenge is his to take. Berringer disagrees. “I’ve passed my word, and I’ll not depart from it,” he says. “Ghost or no ghost, he hangs at sunrise.” The next morning, as preparation for the hanging goes forward, Berringer sees something that frightens him to death. Meanwhile the general has died in his bed. A witness says, “God help me—you never saw such a sight! It looked as if he were fighting with someone whom we could not see, and was being slowly strangled.” That’s pretty much the end of the story. Good night, children, sleep tight! Santa Claus comes tonight. And so forth. In fact, I’m a little surprised, now that I have figured out these things exist, that I could not find anyone reading it aloud for a youtube video. It works reasonably well, even if I prefer horror stories that feel at least a little Christmassy, if they’re going to use the holiday. I also like the untidiness of this story, with things left unexplained. Why was the brother hanged? Why wouldn’t the living brother, Captain Berringer, defer to his ghost brother? Why did Berringer die? Don’t know, don’t know—and that’s the way it should be, when you can pull it off, as I would say this story does. Balancing explanation and the lack of it is tricky business. Here it’s used to confuse us a little and throw us off just when the story, which requires a fair amount of setup, seems to be getting predictable. The ending does not feel predictable at all even though in many ways it is.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Eraserhead (1977)

USA, 89 minutes

Director/writer/editor: David Lynch

Photography: Herbert Cardwell, Frederick Elmes

Music: David Lynch, Peter Ivers, Fats Waller

Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates, Laurel Near, Judith Roberts

David Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, was a project connected to his time as a student at the American Film Institute and took him something like five years to complete. It came to attention commercially the only way it could have, basically. That is, as a “midnight movie” in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, winning accolades from Stanley Kubrick (who required the cast of The Shining to look at it to get in the mood), John Waters, and, most importantly, Mel Brooks, who gave everything-man David Lynch a shot at directing The Elephant Man. Eraserhead fits the bill for a midnight movie perfectly—it’s weird, never stops being weird, and has no explanations. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a man living in an industrial wasteland out of Pere Ubu album covers and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (although Eraserhead came out two years before Stalker). Come to find out, Henry previously had sexual intercourse with a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and she gave birth to an extremely deformed baby.

Or, as Mary cries out in some distress when her mother confronts Henry about the situation, “Mother, they’re still not sure it is a baby!” In fact, the prop used to memorably represent it (which never gets a name) was reportedly an embalmed cow’s calf carcass, animated by techniques Lynch has still not revealed. Nance later played Pete Martell in Lynch’s Twin Peaks franchise and it’s interesting to see the friendly figure so much younger and alienating. It’s the baby thing that is the star of the show, however, a kind of rorschach special effect for which we develop tender feelings in spite of revulsion. In appearance it reminds me of the rabbit carcass in Repulsion. By the time it is sick and Henry is taking its temperature we simply care for it. It cries a lot like a baby, which is one of the ways it gets under our skin. By way of the narrative, or perhaps the special effects, this terrible thing comes to have all the pathos for us of a human baby or any mammal infant. It is grotesque but somehow cute at the same time, and its health can become even more a cause of concern for us than for anyone in the movie. By this time, the movie is so weird it almost feels like it is consuming us as we watch.

Main Street (1920)

I like a lot of things about the social realism of Sinclair Lewis and enjoyed rereading what is probably his single most famous novel. He wrote quite a bit, nearly two dozen novels, and there are a few others that may or may not be worth chasing down—Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth. I’ve had different reactions. Lewis is also from Minnesota and very good on Upper Midwestern ways. I like the characters and situations of Main Street but a lot of it is dated, potentially boring, and even just weirdly improbable. The main character, Carol Kennicott (nee Milford), is from Minneapolis, the daughter of a judge. She marries a small-town doctor, moves to the town (Gopher Prairie aka Sauk Centre), and confronts its narrow, constricted ways. Of course she is a bit of a snob but she comes by it honestly, in pursuit of her city-bred ideals of art and bohemianism. At heart, though she barely comes to realize it even at the end, she is merely a privileged upper-middle-class woman of her times. She hates class distinctions and claims to despise them, but for the most part she conforms. But she is always testing the limits, often with an amazing amount of naivete. There are relevant points all through the novel: hostility toward immigrants (here mostly Swedes, now accepted as white), blind fealty to capitalism, and refreshingly candid views of marriage and wives and husbands. More often it is strangely irrelevant, silent on the influenza pandemic, which was still ongoing at the time of publication (and one main character is a doctor!), with little to say about suffrage or prohibition, and completely blind to LGBTQ issues. There’s a significant character here who is likely gay, but I’m not sure even Lewis knows it. That’s quite a taboo. But Lewis was always good on at least a couple of things, which are seen here. He has a good ear for American salesman chatter. That’s practically all Babbitt is (and worth looking into) and it’s here too. And then I also think he’s really good—and underrated—on domestic scenes, marriage and particularly women. Carol Kennicott is at the center of Main Street. She is complex and done well. It’s true that much of it is dated and has not aged well. But a good deal of it is easily recognized as merely the ins and outs of any relationship. Lewis would get better at this too, but even putting Carol Kennicott front and center and establishing her as realistic works for me on the most basic terms. Lewis has spent nearly a century now falling out of favor after his unlikely Nobel award in 1930. But I like his open-hearted easygoing style quite a bit, a kind of Dreiser-lite that is a pleasure to read. Or maybe that’s a Minnesota connection.

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

Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959)

I’ve long been a fan of Marty Robbins’s hit story-song “El Paso” whenever it comes up on oldies radio, but I did not know there was a whole album of such fare. Then I ran across this strange gem in that fat tome The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time, where it is part of the relatively skimpy offering for the 1950s. Mojo calls it “the first successful C&W concept album.” It’s 12 songs (or more now, depending on the edition), all of them virtual narratives about shooting big guns, roping wild horses, getting hanged in the town square, so on so forth, all recorded in one night. Robbins wrote a third of them, two are traditional (“Billy the Kid” and “Utah Carol”), and a motley of songwriters provide the rest. There’s nothing that feels particularly authentic about any of these songs—they are a kind of Brill Building project, overproduced and shining with studio gloss—but they are peculiarly listenable and even affecting, if “El Paso” has ever reached you. I tend to like the hanging and/or jail songs best (“They’re Hanging Me Tonight,” “The Hanging Tree,” the latter from a 1999 reissue) but they’re all pretty good if you’re in the mood. “Big Iron” and a cover of “Cool Water,” which open the original album, are reasonably effective for putting you in the mood. It occurred to me recently, getting to know it, that Gunfighter Ballads came out the same year as the movie Rio Bravo. It was perhaps a moment, in 1959, when movies and TV and pop music were colliding at will and why not get the western genre into it as well? Therefore, clap Marty Robbins—whose biggest hit to that point was “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation”)—into a Lash LaRue outfit for the album cover, wearing a funny flattop cowboy hat and a big iron on his hip, and meanwhile stick Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin into your shoot-‘em-up. The results, by acclamation, are one of the greatest albums ever made and one of the greatest movies ever made. Robbins sings tunefully, like a deep-throated songbird with a tender warble in his voice, while Nelson, as the Colorado kid, lets his trembling chin provide the visual counterpart. A handful of songs in the vein would follow in the ‘60s, such as “Big Bad John” (1961, by Jimmy Dean, not that Jimmy Dean) and “Ringo” (1964, by Lorne Green, then star of the TV western Bonanza), not to mention more authentic business from Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Tammy Wynette, etc. Truth be told, Robbins is much closer to the Lorne Green end of that spectrum (and Ricky Nelson if we must, but there’s more musically to Nelson or his taste). But “El Paso,” as always, is the benchmark here. If you can get into that one, you can get into this whole album. But you may want to take it slow as these songs can produce unruly sugar highs taken in such massive doses as a whole album.

“A Strange Christmas Game” (1868)

This story by Mrs. J.H. Riddell (aka Charlotte Riddell) was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. It’s the last story in a Lamplight magazine I have—I liked this story but alas none of the others. They didn’t even give Mrs. Riddell an author bio! And they also misspelled her name, which took some time to straighten out with google searches. While reading it I had been impressed by what a remarkably good facsimile of a Victorian gothic it seemed to be. There’s nothing that special about it as a ghost story except it’s just quietly effective. Not so much scary, but an interesting and absorbing anecdote, a kind of tale of spirit manners. An impoverished brother and sister unexpectedly inherit an estate but things about it are not right. First they learn of a mystery—one of their ancestors who lived there suddenly disappeared after last being seen on a Christmas Eve. Since then, nobody has wanted to stay overnight in the mansion. It’s all whispers and innuendo, but the general idea abroad in the region is that it’s haunted, two rooms specifically, a poltergeist variation that takes the form of unruly stomping noises at night. There may be visions too for those brave enough to pass a night in those rooms, but few are. The brother and sister are that brave, however, and they are even able to expel the presence. But it takes its toll on them. They solve the mystery of the disappearance while they’re at it. Afterward, the sister moves away and marries and refuses even to visit the place again. It’s hard to know what I would think of this story if I’d known more about it beforehand, like that it is actually old. Thinking it was more contemporary I took it as someone trying to “do” an old-fashioned ghost story. And I thought they did a good job of it too—better than others I’ve seen. Ironically, I did take some of it as trying too hard to be old-fashioned. It’s possible I would not have liked it as much knowing it was actually old. But in the context of thinking it was a contemporary I was really taken by it. It also has a Christmas setting that works very well, even though it’s mostly incidental. It’s still good atmospherics.

Lamplight, Vol. 9, No. 2 (December 2020)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Barbarian (2022)

As many ecstatically raving fans and critics have noted, Barbarian is a movie best seen knowing as little about it beforehand as possible. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly difficult as its highly warranted reputation swells up and it starts making best-of lists. People are going to talk about it. I’m going to talk about it. Better get to it—streaming prices are within reach. One reviewer (at spooky astronauts on youtube) noticed the way it triggers fear responses, based on a reading by director and writer Zach Cregger of Gavin de Becker’s nonfiction self-help book for women, The Gift of Fear, which identifies the subtle warning signs when confronting dangerous men. Cregger exploits these cues over and over, switching them up and ratcheting them constantly, notably in the first third. Everything seems wrong in this movie, always, but it never leaves you time to take a sober second look. Some of its tricks may include the following. The premise: a young educated professional woman, Tess (Georgina Campbell), is traveling to Detroit for a job interview. The Airbnb she booked has been double-booked and someone is already there, a young man who seems safe but is not easy to read. Outside it is night and storming with a heavy rain. The setting: the abandoned sections of Detroit, apparently shot on location. Tess arrives at night. The sight of the neighborhood by daylight the next morning is shocking. It looks dangerous even if we are seeing it in a movie. The irrational house interior: Barbarian features a house (on Barbary Street, source of the movie’s name by my best guess) that is much more than it seems, with a basement, unpleasant rooms, and even further subterranean levels cut from stone. The structure: after taking us on an insane 40-minute ride complete with horrifying climax, Barbarian shifts gears and becomes a kind of comedy featuring a boyish wannabe Hollywood bigshot producer, AJ (Justin Long). He is suddenly caught up in a sexual misconduct scandal that will ruin his brief career. It’s entertaining, and a nice breather, but what the hell it has to do with the house in Detroit is made clear only when it turns out he is the owner, and needs to liquidate his assets to cover legal expenses. The thing that lives there: I don’t want to talk about this part. You have to see it for yourself, but it is ingenious, outrageous, and terrifying all at once. Barbarian never stops being something other than what you expect. It is actually scary in multiple parts in multiple ways. I have no idea what it looks like on further review. But the first time through is a real trip.

The Horizontal Man (1946)

This somewhat awkwardly written suspense novel by Helen Eustis was slow going for me, but it had some interesting ideas. It’s a standard murder mystery in many ways. The murder occurs on the first page without revealing the killer and then a number of likely suspects start showing up. In the end, we learn who did it. All’s fair. The setting is an upscale college for women. The victim is a philandering poetry professor. The novel flashes across points of view in the short sections advancing the investigation. Two characters probably qualify as the main characters—a young journalist and a student who edits the college paper, Kate Innes. Kate is overweight, or big, and there is an untoward amount of fat-shaming here, one of the most obvious ways this novel is dated but not the only one. The journalist thinks of Kate as “Fatty” although at least he keeps that to himself. His strategy with her is shaming her when they eat. These two fall in love. The journalist is given as more or less normal and otherwise without malice. At least two other professors have strong potential to be gay (and no, it’s not a good thing) while a woman professor is considered over the hill and a slut. She’s 42. So lots of problems here, forgivable enough maybe “for the times,” but that’s compounded with a sluggish and overly busy plotline and a leaden style of writing. The action is pitched at hysterical levels but even so I was often bored with it and/or losing the thread from all the POV jumping around. It does have a surprise or twist ending that I did not see coming, a bizarre explanation that fits with the general pseudo-Freudian air here—hysteria, mental institutions, various transparent emotional complexes. This one’s got it all, or too much, which is to say it’s inevitably flawed. I think I could handle even the psychological mumbo jumbo at the end if the whole thing had a stronger through line. It’s a first novel for Eustis and won an Edgar in the first-novel category. Lots of people seem to like it a lot. I like the supercharged atmosphere, but it often bogs down even as a very short novel. It comes at a strange juncture for feminism. By 1946 women had won the vote and shown they could shoulder the labor of a nation during war. But this novel focuses on continuing preoccupations with femininity and marriage with men. Freda Cramm, the 42-year-old oversexed crone, is recognizably a feminist but her life is quite evidently unenviable even with her independence and self-reliance. Does Eustis the author buy into these views? That’s hard to say. She doesn’t seem to care much for any of her characters, male or female. As a sendup of life at a women’s college, The Horizontal Man might be pretty good, but unfortunately women’s colleges are more a thing of the past now too.

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

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

USA, 83 minutes

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Writers: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, Aladar Laszlo, Ernst Lubitsch

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: W. Franke Harling

Editor: unknown?

Cast: Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, Charles Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith, Leonid Kinskey

What a difference the Hays Code makes. Until those rules for Hollywood movie decorum came along in 1934, addressing problems that may or may not have existed, the idea in some outraged circles was apparently that anything goes on Hollywood movie sets. Come to find out, it’s “anything goes” for its time, most of it more like knowing and witty, not necessarily coarse. It’s not like there is nudity in Trouble in Paradise or anything like that, just lifelong criminals getting away with it and laughing about it, plus various jolts of sophisticated European adultery (most of it with perfectly conventional values). It’s the Lubitsch touch, more or less, the lightly cynical, lightly romantic take on human affairs of director and cowriter Ernst Lubitsch.

He remains a titan of his time, though sometimes it seems he is more like forgotten now. Billy Wilder reputedly had a sign in his office which read, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Even before Alfred Hitchcock, Lubitsch was one of the earliest examples of a Hollywood director famous for a uniquely recognizable style. “Lubitsch was always the least Germanic of German directors,” the critic Andrew Sarris wrote of him, “as Lang was the most Germanic.” There’s little question Trouble in Paradise could not have been made even three years later.

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Chinua Achebe’s novel has become a classic look at life in Nigeria before and after the coming of colonialists. More than half of it is focused on the time just before missionaries and other conquering Europeans show up. It was not a perfect idyll and it’s easy to see many problems in that society. Our main character, Okonkwo, is a proud self-made man among his people, a championship wrestler and a warrior renowned for his kills. He has three wives and several children. He is abusive and demanding, quick to knock people around when he loses his temper (including his wives). He seems to lose his temper a lot. Yet he is also widely respected by village elders. Okonkwo’s father was weak, passing down a shameful legacy which Okonkwo transcended. One area of particular non-enlightenment in this village is with gender, as usual. Women are not treated well and it is a devastating insult for a weak man to be called “a woman.” Just when you’re starting to wonder about colonialism, the second half comes along. At the end of the first part Okonkwo commits a serious offense, and though it is an accident he is exiled from the village for seven years. During that time missionaries appear and begin to convert tribe members. The missionaries appeal first to tribal outcasts and gather influence and momentum from there. Eventually Okonkwo’s son becomes a convert, which creates rifts and tensions across the larger family. Okonkwo practically disowns him as “a woman” but these colonialists knew what they were doing, dividing to conquer. It’s really hard to watch once it starts. Okonkwo is old school and ignorant of Europeans. His solution is to fight back and make war, but by then it’s too late and only causes him more and more problems. Achebe’s writing style is simple and straightforward, almost serene. Except for the novel’s reputation I wasn’t sure where it was headed in the first half, which is a portrait of that culture’s old ways—the things that will fall apart. Seeing the way colonialism works is moving and vivid in its clarity. But the story is not just about colonialism but also a powerful character study of Okonkwo—complex, imperfect, fascinating. Okonkwo and other village figures believe they have a good deal of power, and they do within their society. But that society is under attack—the missionaries are sent in first to soften the ground—and then we see Okonkwo’s whole world systematically destroyed. Achebe’s voice is placid but what he describes is enraging. He maintains a perfect balance between the two modes until the very end. Powerful novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Blind Man’s Hood” (1937)

This story by John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson) is mainly a ghost story, though for some reason it also has elements of a locked-room mystery—possibly Carr’s market instinct for detective fiction kicking in. He was more generally a mystery writer. But the most effective moments in this story, which are usually matters of precise detail, make it a reasonably unsettling spook story. It’s set at Christmastime, with a young couple arriving late on Christmas Eve for a visit with the family of friends at an isolated mansion in the countryside. All the lights in the house are on and the door is ajar (in December!), but no one appears to be home. They bang on the door, then gather up their things and enter. A young woman appears who claims she didn’t hear them knocking. They don’t know her. It was immediately evident to me this was a ghost, and further small details confirm it. The corner of her eye is gray rather than pink, for example. She has a convoluted story to tell them—about why the house is empty, about the things that happened there, about betrayal and revenge of a sort. It really doesn’t make much sense but often feels ominous. This story tends to telegraph its basic plot twists and is basically a straightforward ghost story, the kind of tale told around campfires and designed chiefly to produce feelings of unease. Making sense is not a requirement of these things. The young woman ghost is toting around a kind of opaque pillowcase she says is more effective than a handkerchief for a blindfold in games of blind man’s buff (here called blind man’s bluff). She says the way to do it is by draping it over the player’s head and cinching it closed at the neck. She says it’s too easy to cheat and peek out from under a handkerchief. The game is key to the story’s climax, which is why this is all explained so early and in such detail. Actually, the whole locked-room mystery side of this story was a little bit of a hindrance to me. Things don't necessarily have to add up in a ghost story. In the best of them, blatantly impossible things with no explanation at all often make the story better. On the other hand, the best of them often work toward some kind of smash-bang surprise at the end. This one just sort of peters out. But it has the holiday spirit about it and some effective moments.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Finding Nemo (2003)

For once the celebrity voice talent in a modern animated feature—Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney, some others—worked pretty well for me in Finding Nemo, although I kept hearing DeGeneres as Kristen Wiig for some reason, which may or may not speak to cross-influences there. I don’t know. Director Andrew Stanton is also surprisingly good as the voice of a surfer dude sea turtle named Crush. As with Up (or the Pixar flagship Toy Story for that matter), the main story in Finding Nemo is built to contain a lot of natural resonance and emotional touchpoints: after a family tragedy has left the fish named Marlin (Brooks) with only his son Nemo (Alexander Gould) he is unnaturally protective of Nemo, but then in another accident they are separated. The movie is about their search to reunite. Marlin is joined in his quest by Dory (DeGeneres), who has a short-term memory disorder. Nemo in turn is also disabled, with an underdeveloped fin on one side. Representation of disability is thus another strength of this picture. But also like Up for me, I was ultimately more entertained, surprised, and cheered by the comedy. The chemistry between Marlin and Dory, between Brooks and DeGeneres, is rich, sharp, funny, and executed well. Another good gag is the depiction of those airborne bottom-feeders, the seagulls, whose relentless drilling screeching is reduced here to calls of “Mine! Mine!” So Finding Nemo has a lot of good laughs and that should not be missed about it. Still, with that said, it also made me cry so mission accomplished on that front too. It is working pretty well on all its intended emotional levels. I missed Finding Nemo when it was new and by the time I was more aware of it and Pixar (let’s say around the time of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up) it looked a little too sicky-sweet sentimental for me. Yes, even for me, or so I told myself. But while Finding Nemo is indeed guilty of all these feel-good elements it is never particularly cringey. And it can also be very funny. And you know the animation is going to be first-rate. Plus the story is tender in many nice ways. Now I’m taking the position that I’m officially dubious about the 2016 sequel, Finding Dory. If that’s a good one too, somebody please let me know so I don’t have to spend the next 13 or whatever years avoiding it.

“How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery” (1911)

This ghost story by E.F. Benson is somewhat unusual in that it ends on a happy note—uplifting even. At first, I admit I was a little disappointed somehow—E.F. is one of my favorites of his time—and I was certainly surprised. Benson is very good at ghost effects, and in a way this story is a clinic. It starts on a whimsical note with a mansion overrun by mostly friendly ghosts, all past relations of the Peveril family: the Blue Lady (Aunt Barbara), Master Anthony, Great-Great-Grandmamma Bridget. Their stories are briefly given, along with a profile of the family, which is a happy one, comfortable with their ghosts, and prone to playing pranks on guests. “But there is one ghost,” Benson writes, “at which the family never laughs.” And so to the horrendous 17th-century story of a fight for an inheritance, when brother killed brother and then burned a pair of 5-year-old twins alive in a fireplace in the long gallery of the mansion. Shortly after, a servant saw their ghosts and died 24 hours later in a horrible way. It’s like the video in the movie The Ring. If you see these ghosts of the twins, you die, often horribly. Sometimes it takes a while. Examples follow. Benson is just one of the best I’ve seen at this. One cruel relation, Mrs. Canning, a free-thinker, nonbeliever, and friend of Voltaire (excellent detail), makes a point of going to the long gallery at night until she sees them. As it happens, it’s safe while the sun is up. Then “she thought it good, poor wretch, to mock at them, telling them it was time to get back in the fire.” Her death is suitably awful. Benson is also really good at setting a pace—it’s not a fast one, generally, but it’s steady. He spends about two-thirds of this story setting up the scene promised in the title, which naturally takes place in December during the Christmas season. If it all errs too much on the side of cute—I don’t think so myself—it’s properly a gem with unstinted ghoulish details by the time we get to the story of the twins. Then it becomes a story about a guest who accidentally oversleeps her afternoon nap in the long gallery. Ruh-roh, as they say. But it all comes to a lovely ending. Kudos to everyone involved except the bad folks here, who get their just deserts.

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Dekalog (1989)

Poland / West Germany, 572 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski, Witold Adamek, Jacek Blawut, Slawomir Idziak, Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz, Edward Klosinski, Dariusz Kuc, Krzysztof Pakulski, Wieslaw Zdort

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Ewa Smal
Cast: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Machalica, Jan Tesarz, Stanislaw Gawlik, Krzysztof Kumor, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, Maciej Szary

Maybe the best thing director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski ever did—though admittedly it has stiff competition—Dekalog is more properly a TV miniseries, which aired in Poland in 1989. It consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each. Each one riffs on one of the 10 Commandments, in order. But don’t dwell too much on the biblical side of this, because apparently there are versioning problems even with the freaking 10 Commandments. In fact, most of their representations here are knotty oblique stories of moral imperatives and moral difficulties. They move slow and meditative, like a lot of European art cinema, but these characters and their situations tend to stick. The relation of each plotline to its likely respective Commandment is not always easy to make out. Though these dramas arguably weaken toward the later episodes, they are all the stuff of after-viewing pie and coffee discussion.

I should note that the cast list above only shows people who were in more than one episode, many in very minor parts, rather than the numerous stars of each, who are uniformly excellent. Among other things, Dekalog is an actor’s showcase with a lot of Polish players who are more familiar the more Polish cinema you’ve seen. I don’t have the space for them all—there are literally at least two or three great performances in each episode. Most of the people I listed above are more like the connective tissue of Dekalog, which frankly is not that strong. Glancing plot points resurface in other episodes, but they are scattered and often very slight. All the characters live in the same brutalist-style apartment complex in Warsaw. Occasionally others from another episode wander by or their story is directly if briefly retold. These stories, each one, are richly dense and it’s not hard to spend 10 days or two weeks or longer on Dekalog.

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Ten years after Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain went ahead and wrote another novel with Tom Sawyer and Jim the slave, narrated by Huck. I didn’t even know this existed until recently. It’s very short, under 200 pages, and another parody of European romantic literature. This time the target is specifically Jules Verne, who was only seven years older than Twain and alive at the time. Full disclosure, I have never read Verne, not even when I was a kid and slogging through Robert Louis Stevenson adventure books for kids, so I can’t speak to how well Tom Sawyer Abroad works that way. It looks more to me like Twain put his favorite characters in a balloon and that was supposed to be enough. They step into the thing in a carnival passing through Missouri, it breaks loose, and here we are. It is reminiscent to me in many ways of the Wizard of Oz story too, but that came later. Twain’s balloon is a finely tuned machine, much like a steamboat. It ranges up high for cooler temperatures and can practically scud along at ground level. But it takes even Tom Sawyer some time to figure out all the controls. There’s also a mad scientist on the scene, and food and water to last for months. That’s handy, because they’re crossing the Atlantic before Tom figures out how to control the balloon. They end up over the Sahara Desert for retellings of stories from Arabian Nights along with raft loads of American innocence. It’s supposed to be funny but it’s not really, and the treatment of Jim is at least as bad as in Huck Finn. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer Abroad more than I expected but I didn’t expect much. It’s certainly for completists only. I like Huck’s voice, which is more or less Twain but with more dialect. Are we seeing Twain run out of ideas as he approaches the age of 60? Or was this the only thing he could get publishers and/or the reading public to go for? It’s his second book with “Tom Sawyer” in the title, his third book with “Abroad,” and the umpteenth parodying European literature. At least there is no plot point about babies being switched at birth. Tom Sawyer Abroad does have the virtue of being short and quick and who knows? Maybe some will like the chance to hang out more with Tom, Huck, and Jim. I’ll admit it was probably what I liked most about it. But then there’s the problem of Jim’s continuing mistreatment, which is unfortunate enough to torpedo the whole fragile vessel. File under I read it so you don’t have to.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Armchair Theatre (1990)

In the ‘70s, I must say I liked Fleetwood Mac a lot more than the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO for those with no time for the syllables). But playing through Armchair Theatre lately, ELO principal Jeff Lynne’s first solo album, I kept thinking of the parallels with Lindsey Buckingham I never noticed before: Lynne is a natural pop tunesmith, with a fearlessness about going for open-hearted and unabashed heartstring sentiments, and actually a pretty good guitar-player too. He was also good in the studio, responsible for most of the ELO product and collaborating with the Move, Dave Edmunds, and others. But the Traveling Wilburys in the late ‘80s and all that followed—including this album—were a certain zenith. I’m not sure this work has ever got its full due. Not only did Lynne have a hand in producing that exquisite first Wilburys album, The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, but in the aftermath he also worked with Roy Orbison on Orbison’s much-lauded comeback album (Mystery Girl) and with Tom Petty on Petty’s best album (Full Moon Fever), plus Armchair Theatre. I thus declare Jeff Lynne, aka Otis Wilbury (or Clayton Wilbury?!), to be the most underrated Traveling Wilbury of them all. (I also know who’s the most overrated, but I won’t say.) Exhibit A is this album, which followed two years on from the frisson of that first Wilburys album. It’s a solid set and better than you probably think. The sound is fat and saturated, sweet and sauntering, with thrilling musical effects. Every track has the goods. I pulled it out of an office slush pile in 1990 and listened to it a lot, thinking it couldn’t possibly be so good. Couldn’t get anyone to bite on a review anyway. (Now that I think of it I had a lot of luck with office slush piles in that period: Full Moon Fever, Green, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, The Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Rose, etc.) Those inclined to complain may note that three of the 11 tracks on Armchair Theatre are covers: “Don’t Let Go,” a rock ‘n’ roll standard first recorded by Roy Hamilton in 1958, Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” and the Tin Pan Alley standard “Stormy Weather.” But all three are worthy additions to much-covered material. Armchair Theatre is an essential part of any Wilburys collection.

Pitfall (1948)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: Andre de Toth

Writers: Jay Dratler, Karl Kamb, William Bowers, Andre de Toth

Photography: Harry J. Wild

Music: Louis Forbes

Editor: Walter Thompson

Cast: Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr, Byron Barr, Ann Doran, Jimmy Hunt, John Litel

Pitfall does not rate even one star in my Halliwell’s film guide (“Modest suspenser, quite efficiently made,” it notes). But elsewhere film critic Andrew Sarris alphabetizes director Andre de Toth into his “Expressive Esoterica” list and specifically calls out Pitfall as one of his most interesting pictures. As a film noir, Pitfall assembles a lot of the basic familiar elements: a woman of undeserved reputation, her jailhouse boyfriend, a cynical insurance agent and the sinister private detective he uses, and an impossibly wholesome family out of midcentury movies and TV, featuring Jane Wyatt who would become more famous as the Mom in Father Knows Best.

Many are primarily fascinated in this movie by Lizabeth Scott, who plays Mona Stevens, the woman of reputation. Scott is a bit of a Hollywood cult figure at this point and it’s not hard to see why. She made sporadic appearances on TV shows like Burke’s Law, but her most famous roles are film noir or adjacent—Dead Reckoning with Humphrey Bogart, Too Late for Tears with Dan Duryea, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck, etc. And I like her here too—a calculated woman of mystery, Scott brings a nice girl-next-door way about her while also somehow being sultry and inviting. But what tends to keep me coming back to Pitfall is the strange, unsettling, and simmering relationship between insurance agent John Forbes (Dick Powell) and the detective he throws work to, J.B. MacDonald, or “Mac” (Raymond Burr).

“Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Very Important American horror story gets my goat in a way. The language can be deadly stultifying—well, I always seem to have that problem with Hawthorne, as with Dickens—and the plot points are more like blunt force objects having an allegorical go at your skull. In the end, it was all a dream but was it. With the publication date you have to wonder if it isn’t among the first to use this it-was-all-a-dream-but-was-it stunt (acknowledging I know squat about ancient literature). Obviously, first, “Young Goodman Brown” is a take on the hypocrisies of puritanism and a forthright one too. It sets up as no less than the titanic battle between Calvinism and Satanism (otherwise known as human appetite). But for all the window dressing—and, yes, it’s nice window dressing, in the American style, with macabre bonfire scenes in the autumn night of a deep New England woods. But for all that, ultimately it’s more on the order of an allegory to be ciphered than a horror story as such. All these devilish doings, the serpentine staffs and disappearing acts, etc., are just production design for a community theater story about American hypocrisy. A lot of the horror anthologies snapping it up are maybe more trying to class up their joints with a Great Author. I mean it’s a pure staple of American literature just sitting there. That’s the only way to understand it. The special effects can be delightful but also thuddingly obvious and they are patently not to be believed. That would be superstitious, the story somehow implies. Hawthorne’s wilderness is not as cool and fascinating as Algernon Blackwood’s, say, but has its own tang. There are witches with broomsticks, for example. And these names: Brown, the young good man, is married to Faith. Then there’s Satan himself, done nicely as a shape-shifter but it always feels stagy. And then, I’m cynical, but I had a hard time believing the whole blinking town including most notably church leaders would turn out to be part of a nighttime carousing mob. Beyond the credibility problem (I KNOW IT'S AN ALLEGORY) it seems to be turning cynicism unpleasantly into bitterness, next stop nihilism. If it is all a dream, Young Goodman Brown is scarred for life by it. “Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” That’s how the story ends and it always annoys me and then haunts me.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
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Monsters, Inc. (2001)

So in September I decided to subscribe to Disney because all signs were that a movie I wanted to look at was there (Amelie), but then when I did subscribe in October it was already gone. Why do streaming services do this peekaboo thing? Sometimes I feel like I could waste the rest of my life running down Criterion Channel “Leaving Soon” titles and still would never catch up. Attempting to make lemonade, I decided to spend my month of Disney looking at Pixar pictures I still hadn’t seen. The first and main thing about Monsters, Inc., not surprisingly, is the excellence of the animation, which is stylish and always fun. Then I noticed for once I could recognize the voices of the main characters without having to look them up. John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Billy Crystal—well, Crystal was merely vexingly familiar, and I did have to look that one up. The Monsters, Inc. premise is all pro forma but reasonably clever. There’s a place where monsters live, called Monstropolis, and the energy there is powered by children’s screams. A whole factory system has been worked up for monsters to get jobs going into children’s bedrooms at night by way of their closets, do scary things, and collect the screams. It turns out the monsters are as afraid of children as children are of them. Ultimately one little girl makes it into Monstropolis and various hijinks ensue. Among other things our main monster, Sullivan (Goodman), finds that she is too adorable to destroy (admittedly, she is quite adorable) and he works to protect her. Sullivan is a pretty good character overall, furry and blue with purple highlights, but I have to say he reminded me of Shrek from another animated movie that also came out in 2001—both the kindly affection and the ogre-like oversized body. I know animated pictures have long lead times, so I doubt anyone was copping anything off anybody else. Monsters, Inc. is the better picture if the IMDb Top 250 Movies list is anything to go by—it’s on it whereas Shrek is not, at least when I looked just now (in October). Monsters, Inc. reminded me again how starved we were for sophisticated animated pictures like this in the ‘70s, where the hardest-core among us lived off the old Disney features and Fleischer cartoons in revival houses with folding chairs. Those old Disneys are masterfully done, I can admit now, but I had a beef with Disney back then that lingers on. I prefer what came in the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with the animation fully funded (unlike, say, Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo, Where Are You! TV series, which is charming and everything, maybe even culturally revolutionary, but cheap). I also like scripts that are full of sly jokes for the grownups. But that is something someone who loves Daffy Duck and Bullwinkle would think. Monsters, Inc.? Yes, absolutely, if you like a cartoon show don’t miss it if you can.

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (2005)

Jim Fusilli’s little 33-1/3 book raised the bar for me in terms of these authors liking, appreciating, respecting, and/or loving their albums under consideration. I assumed they all liked them but here is where I have felt it the most yet. Fusilli, who also writes detective fiction and used to be a house rock critic at the Wall Street Journal, is an unapologetic boomer. I am more of an apologetic one, but it may be the generational affinities that are reaching me here. My experience with the Beach Boys (and inevitably the Beatles) is different from Fusilli’s, certainly, but he’s only two years older than me and I always feel like I know where he’s coming from. He was raised in New Jersey, for example, and me in the Midwest, but I know very well his version of California as the perfect place. I was up on all the Beach Boys hits starting with “California Girls,” a little later than Fusilli. I had no sense of Pet Sounds really until the ’80s, aside from the many hits, and then I had mixed feelings about it. It took me a long time to come to really love it. It came to Fusilli a lot more quickly but he understands it basically the way I do, which meant some of his assessments felt so true they almost hurt. It reminded me all over again of the album’s uncanny strengths, now evocative even by title alone: “Sloop John B.,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No.” Fusilli does spend a good deal of time discussing technical aspects such as chord changes, which as usual are mostly lost on me, but in this case confirm my sense of how carefully constructed and rendered these songs are. The movie Love & Mercy, which came out nine years after publication of this book, is another good place to go for exciting portraits of Brian Wilson the studio original in action. Fusilli also talks about the hits and albums before and after Pet Sounds and has some interesting thoughts. He seems to have a good deal of loathing for “Barbara Ann,” a song I have come to like less and less myself over the years. But I must say I adored it when I was 12, even then understanding in the Beach Boys catalog it was one of those things not like the others. I suspect the taint of boomer may be on Fusilli for many readers. When he compares Mike Love to Eddie Haskell it feels as true as a poem, but perhaps too highly specific. So caveats. Also, Pet Sounds haters are unlikely to be convinced by Fusilli, technical points and all. That’s my hunch. For me, somehow—since approximately Love & Mercy—all encounters with the Beach Boys tend to make me insanely happy. This was just another one.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Conversation (1974)

USA, 113 minutes

Director/writer: Francis Ford Coppola

Photography: Bill Butler, Haskell Wexler

Music: David Shire

Editor: Richard Chew

Cast: Gene Hackman, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Elizabeth MacRae

“Masterpiece” is always a loaded, fuzzy term to use. But in the case of director and writer Francis Ford Coppola it’s probably fair to say it about the four movies he released in the ‘70s, even if by reputation alone: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. It’s also fair to say he never came close again after that, though some of his pictures have their partisans: The Cotton Club, Dracula, Tetro, others. I’ve always liked One From the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the S.E. Hinton adaptations, but they’re not really within shouting distance of the big four.

The Conversation is the quietest and most compact of them and was also the least successful commercially on its release. The cast today looks absolutely star-studded, featuring the versatile Gene Hackman who is excellent as always. It’s a certain representation of prime ‘70s American cinema, shot by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler and with a soundtrack (a good one) by David Shire. John Cazale and Allen Garfield are stellar, and the small but indelible appearances by Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall are fun and impressive too. Ford is impossibly young. Cazale, as you may have heard, died young and thus gave us only a handful of performances, but they are uniformly knockouts (both of the Godfather movies, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation). He was the Anton Yelchin of his time. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as anonymous surveillance targets are also impossibly young. In one way they are barely in the movie at all. In another, they are at the center of it.

Top 40

1. Miles Davis, “All Blues” (11:32, 1959)
2. Black Sabbath, “Children of the Grave” (5:17, 1971)
3. Jeff Buckley, “Forget Her” (5:12, 1994)
4. Gipsy Kings, “Hotel California (Spanish Mix)” (5:46, 1998)
5. Ratt, “I’m Insane” (2:56, 1984)
6. Otis Rush, “Double Trouble” (2:44, 1958)
7. Jack Harlow, “First Class” (2:53)
8. Harry Styles, “As It Was” (2:47)
9. Lizzo, “About Damn Time” (3:11)
10. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “Tere Bin Nahin Lagda (Remix)” (5:43, 2018)
11. Clash, “Know Your Rights” (3:40, 1982)
12. Omni of Halos, “You Suck” (3:54)
13. Binker and Moses, “Accelerometer Overdose” (9:51)
14. Stromae, “L’enfer” (3:09)
15. Range, “Urethane” (2:58)
16. Denzel Curry, “Walkin” (4:40)
17. Wet Leg, “Ur Mom” (3:21)
18. Lalalar, “Abla Deme Lazim Olur” (3:09)
19. Soulglo, “Spiritual Level of Gang Shit” (4:53)
20. The Weeknd, “Sacrifice” (3:08)
21. Lucky Daye, “Candy Drip” (4:40)
22. Momma, “Speeding 72” (3:58)
23. Smile, “The Smoke” (3:39)
24. Confidence Man, “Catch My Breath” (3:58, 2018)
25. Chuck Berry, “I Want to Be Your Driver” (2:13, 1965)
26. Ray Charles, “It Makes No Difference Now” (3:35, 1962)
27. Ray Charles, “Greenbacks” (2:51, 1955)
28. Elliott Smith, “No Name #3” (3:13, 1994)
29. James Brown, “Super Bad (pts. 1, 2, & 3)” (9:16, 1971)
30. Ultramagnetic MC’s, “Traveling at the Speed of Thought (Hip House Club Mix)” (4:22, 1988)
31. Miles Davis, “Maiysha” (14:55, 1974)
32. Curtis Mayfield, “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” (6:05, 1970)
33. Jimmy Reed, “Bright Lights, Big City” (2:36, 1961)
34. Albert King, “Crosscut Saw” (2:33, 1966)
35. Sun Ra, “Where Pathways Meet” (6:32, 1978)
36. Bo Diddley, “Bring It to Jerome” (2:29, 1958)
37. Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley (Single Version)” (2:46, 1955)
38. King Curtis, “Memphis Soul Stew” (2:59, 1967)
39. Brian Eno, “Sombre Reptiles” (2:21, 1975)
40. Champaign, “How ‘Bout Us” (4:34, 1981)

THANKS: rockcritics.com, Billboard, Spin, Skip, unusual suspects

“The Preserving Machine” (1953)

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors of The Weird and other highly recommended anthologies, really talked up this story by Philip K. Dick somewhere. It’s not widely included in collections—the VanderMeers’ point, if I recall correctly, was that they had not been able to license it, for whatever reason. Maybe the estate thinks the story is too weird. It does have an interesting premise that is very weird even for Dick. The hero is an academic, Doc Labyrinth, who is worried about nuclear extinction and saddened most by the idea that music would be lost. So he draws up plans for a machine that will save music by converting printed sheet music into animal life forms. The idea is staggering in its way yet also a great example of Dick’s willful soft science fiction. This is creating life that we’re talking about, which is only an incidental function in Doc Labyrinth’s mind. He can’t even build the machine himself. He only draws up the plans and ships them off to a manufacturer. There is not a single theoretical basis for any of this. Take at face value—take it or leave it. I like the cheek, the confidence, but wish for a little more science. The manufacturer at any rate is excited about the project and promptly assembles the machine and ships it to Labyrinth. A sort of charming Holmes-and-Watson scene follows, with Labyrinth and the story’s first-person narrator sitting around trying it out. First they convert the Mozart G Minor Quintet, dropping the score into the machine. Out comes a bird, apparently of heretofore unknown species: “pretty, small and slender, with the flowing plumage of a peacock.” They call it a “mozart bird.” Later they produce a “beethoven beetle” (note that this story was written before the Beatles and even before Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”) and then a “schubert animal.” The ones that are described merely as “animal” are far and away the creepiest but lowercasing the proper noun has its effect too. Doc Labyrinth is kind of disappointed and lets them loose in the woods behind his house. He doesn’t think about them for some time. When he finally checks on them, they have evolved and changed. Some have died. He tries running a bach bug through the machine—evidently reverse-processing these animals is how the preserved music is obtained again—but the music he gets back is mere cacophony when he plays it. More disappointment. So weird!

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
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“Dickon the Devil” (1872)

I liked this story by Sheridan Le Fanu pretty well—it’s quick and to the point and comes with surprises. ISFDB has it as part of a Martin Hesselius series by Le Fanu featuring a psychic investigator. The series includes some of Le Fanu’s best stories, such as “The Familiar” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle.” But the first-person narrator in “Dickon the Devil” is more by way of an estate lawyer and we don’t hear much from Hesselius. Apparently this is a case from his files? Two elderly sisters have hired the estate lawyer to assess and possibly sell (“make partition of”) a property that includes a house. Well, it’s a mansion, more like, which has been uninhabited for 20 years. Of course it’s haunted. What did you think? Our narrator knows it was the source of rumors in the past, but he doesn’t know or can’t remember the details, and none of the locals are talking. At one point, early in the story, the village idiot goes racing by—it’s Dickon the Devil, whose story is told along with the former owner’s and the two old ladies too. It’s a ghost story but this is a ghost with strange powers—visible from afar, recognizable as the former owner, and somehow able to blight and kill cattle. It turns out to be a dispute about the will. Apparently the two old ladies are more rapacious than we suspect at first. Or perhaps not, because the narrator doesn’t seem to see anything off in them. But the eternal fury of the ghost of the former owner must be coming from somewhere. He was well enough liked when he was alive, and good for the community too, basically. The narrator encounters the ghost in his overnight stay, on which basically the whole (incomplete) story turns. Le Fanu skillfully foreshadows and holds off on telling the backstory, making it more effective when he does. There are gaps but I like how they are just sort of left to sit there. Who, if anyone, is at fault in the dispute about the will? The former owner intended to rewrite it before he died—but why? Did the sisters know he intended to change it? Did they have something to do with his death? We never learn, and it seems to work that way, as Le Fanu distracts us with the terrible story of Dickon, who was not always as he is in the present of this story and now has been for 20 years. He was good with the cattle the sisters invested in and put there. But the former owner, as ghost, objected to this plan with the cattle for some reason. When blighting the cattle grows tiresome, he drives the hired man insane. Dickon’s insanity is better than anything like it by H.P. Lovecraft, for example, although credible insanity may be a low bar there.

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The Wailing (2016)

The Wailing is a pretty good example of a Korean horror picture that simply piles on. See also I Saw the Devil. It’s long, at over two and a half hours, and more of a slow burn for the first hour. You have to be a little patient with it—and forgive some of its impulses toward broad humor, in the style of Jong Boon Ho. Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a police officer in a small village, investigates a number of strange and brutal murders along with some kind of epidemic that is turning locals mad in a rabid kind of way. Nothing is right and everything is wrong. The chief suspect is a Japanese man no one knows (Jun Kunimura), who moved to the village shortly before the incidents started. Then the behavior of the police officer’s young daughter changes. Hyo-jin (Hwan-hee Kim), perhaps 10 years old, grows moody, disrespectful, violent. The mother in this family, Jong-goo’s wife with no name (Jang So-yeon), gets on the case and decides calling in a shaman is what’s needed here. In short order this shaman (Hwang-Jung-min) finds a dead crow in the family’s barrel of soy sauce brewing in the backyard and even he is impressed with what they’re up against. Folk horror. Exorcism rituals are called for, which may be the best part of The Wailing. As with so many movies over two and a half hours there’s an argument that 30 or 40 minutes could be trimmed away here. The counterargument would be trying to figure out what to cut from a very busy, complicated script with lots of twists and turns. You would basically have to simplify the story and I think the complexity has a lot to do with what makes The Wailing work as well as it does. It’s immersive, with all its many plot points developed organically—again reminiscent of I Saw the Devil, continually overtopping itself. I counted at least two points where The Wailing felt like it was ending only to turn a corner into wider vistas and deeper complications. It has some pretty scary moments too, I must say, although I often wondered if I needed to fiddle with the contrast and brightness of my monitor because a lot of these scenes are too dark to pick out meaningful detail. I’m willing to take that as a device to keep us off balance as viewers—or maybe you can see it better on a big screen—but I don’t have to like it. It’s also another story that leans into its family beats and looks for a lot of dramatic juice there. Normally I think horror should shock and it should be scary and it is necessarily a little antidramatic, which is why it tends to work best in shorter movies and short stories. But horror can obviously be done at great length too, pivoting toward melodrama and/or high style. I like The Wailing even if ultimately it feels like two or three other movies stitched together. At least they have been stitched together artfully.

“Browdean Farm” (1927)

This is the first story I’ve read by A.M. Burrage and it’s a pretty good one. Some is a bit unlikely, and some is dated, but the ghost effects are good and it’s always engaging, told well. A couple of young bachelors, one a writer about to be married soon, find a house in the country no one has lived in for years. They look at it, like it, and take it right away—it’s too good a deal to pass up. The rent is “astonishingly low.” The first-person narrator, by the way, is not the writer but the other guy. He goes fishing during the day a lot while the other writes. Of course the place is haunted. Later they learn the terrible history of it—a woman found hanged in the kitchen, her husband tried and executed for murder. He had a mistress, and the presumption is that he killed to be free of his wife. Actually, the wife committed suicide. But that’s because the husband is, as one of the townspeople tells it, “what we would call in common parlance a dirty dog.” So there’s an argument he drove his wife to suicide and deserved to be executed for it. Anyway, he’s a ghost now. And all the ghost wants is to get your attention and show you the scene in a way that convinces you it is innocent of the murder. The bachelors actually feel some sympathy for it at the end. This is an aspect that doesn’t make much sense and feels dated. In life the husband never wanted to marry the woman. He was forced into it because she was pregnant and he was responsible—the dirty dog. Right away he found a mistress and was “in love” with her. Why not? The way the ghost gets attention is by tapping its fingertips on the window while it peers in, which is scary as you read and another indication it’s creepy. It conjures the wife’s suicide only to speak for itself. It still has no regard for the wife’s suffering, which the husband caused in life. Its only concern is for its own suffering, which it brought on itself. I prefer to think the husband is now in some kind of hell, doomed to eternally pleading his innocence, which is hard to credit all things considered, even though, yes, the wife took her own life. God have mercy! Overall, “Browdean Farm” is a really good ghost story and I hope I run across some more of this Burrage, who M.R. James also liked.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

[●REC] (2007)

Spain, 78 minutes

Directors: Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza

Writers: Jaume Balaguero, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza

Photography: Pablo Rosso

Editor: David Gallart

Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Carlos Lasarte, David Vert, Maria Lanau

I am dutybound to report first that [●REC] is not immune from at least two of the problems people complain about with found footage films: 1) shaky confusing handheld camera scenes, and 2) there reaches a point where you wonder why the camera keeps rolling. If it makes a difference, I don’t notice these problems until well into the picture, when things have become quite strange and I am already a nervous wreck anyway—I’ve seen [●REC] a few times and it always works. You might be so caught up in it too that you don’t even notice. But whole classes of people avoid these ever more numerous found footage projects for those reasons, so that’s in the spirit of fair warning.

The premise is simple, straightforward, and believable enough. A local TV station produces a show called While You’re Sleeping, which covers urban life after dark. In this particular episode, reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and a cameraman named Pablo (apparently the picture’s DP Pablo Rosso) are following a station of firemen on their night shift. We see the firemen eating dinner together, playing a game of pickup basketball, and talking about how many nights they receive no calls and only about a third are to actually put out fires. Then, of course, they get a call, and we are off.

“Sardonicus” (1961)

Ray Russell was an editor for Playboy in the ‘50s and ‘60s who specialized in acquiring horror and mystery stories, by which he kept a lot of bright lights going, including Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Henry Slesar, and others. That Playboy anthology below is remarkably good. Russell’s 1962 novel The Case Against Satan is considered an important forerunner to William Peter Blatty’s 1971 The Exorcist, but otherwise “Sardonicus” is probably his best-known story, the first part of an informal “gothic unholy trinity,” with two more long stories, “Sagittarius” and “Sanguinarius.” No continuing characters or plot threads, but they are all similarly filled with aristocrats, castles, and unspeakable cruelties. “Sardonicus” is the best of a very good bunch. In this long story, “Sardonicus” is the name taken by a strange and tormented reclusive rich guy suffering from the condition risus sardonicus, also called “rictus grin.” Inevitably it reminded me of Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, but not sure whether Russell was a comic book reader in the 1940s, when the original versions leaned toward the psychotic before going antiseptic prankster in the ‘50s. At any rate, risus sardonicus is real but normally associated with tetanus or strychnine poisoning. Here it is all abnormal psychology. The grotesque face and the backstory for how it got that way are inspired. Russell has selected his gothic details well—the very name, the “S” monogram used by Sardonicus, the castle where he lives in Bohemia, the grave that he disturbs, his cold manipulations involving his wife and a doctor he thinks can help him. This story was originally published in Playboy in January 1961 and Russell went on to write the screenplay for a William Castle movie based on it that same year, Mr. Sardonicus. The most familiar player in it now is probably the Igor-type sidekick Krull, played by hey-that-guy character actor Oskar Homolka (Ball of Fire, I Remember Mama, The Seven Year Itch). The picture suffers for its inability to create a realistic rictus grin, but makes up for it ingeniously with a pale mask Sardonicus wears in company that covers his whole face and makes his presence infinitely disturbing. I’ve seen a few Castles, The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, Rosemary’s Baby—not to mention the Joe Dante valentine from the ‘90s, Matinee—and typically enough Mr. Sardonicus appears to have an in-theater promotional gimmick attached to it, long gone of course since the original release, with only a strange artifact ending to remind us of what it might have been. The picture evidently learned some useful lessons from Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits in turn may have learned some useful lessons from them all. The era of horror stories transmuting into television episodes was well upon us by 1961. “Sardonicus” the story is a throwback way back all the way to 19th-century gothics, but with a kind of 1960s Madison Avenue sheen that makes it unique. Only other stories by Ray Russell are very much like Ray Russell stories, and here’s a great place to start.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
Story not available online.

The Argonauts (2015)

I really enjoyed this short book by Maggie Nelson, a memoir of brave life choices informed by feminist theory, queer theory, and authentic lived experience. Life, death, birth, change, commitment—she covers a lot of territory. I’m way behind on feminist / queer theory but found more to follow up here. Mostly I was fascinated by the memoir side, where she works on becoming pregnant and then bearing the child. At the same time her gender-fluid partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is making his own chemical and surgical changes to feel more comfortably male. I was fascinated by how strange it was and yet so familiar, just people dealing with life and the hands they were dealt, like all of us. Nelson sets her context broadly, drawing on the wide range of what she’s reading, art exhibits she is visiting, and more. I’m almost intimidated by these lives which are so widely kept out of sight, working through gender issues that have always confused me. Nelson’s accounts of her pregnancy and especially giving birth are open and detailed and also fascinating. It made me realize how little I know of such events. I feel like a curtain is drawn around them but also realize that could just be my experience as a single cis-gendered man (a term I’m almost comfortable using), which is my cultural position of privilege. I like the privilege, of course, but also of course hate that it isn’t the privilege of everyone. A stalking incident occurs during Nelson’s pregnancy, related to Nelson’s books about her aunt’s murder in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts. Her stalker had some kind of problem with her or her work and wanted to discuss it with her. Witnesses put him on the campus where Nelson taught and worked, and he was quite intense about his search for her. It’s a skillful way to ratchet the tensions, the anxieties, Nelson and Dodge live with as a queer couple, as transgressive public figures (even if not intentionally), and for Nelson as a woman. Nothing comes of the stalking, but we see clearly how women and other vulnerable minorities are forced to look at and live with their fears and reality. The title refers to the philosophical question of whether anything can ever remain the same. A sailing ship is the usual example, but a car or house or stereo system works the same. As you go along maintaining it and replacing parts of it that are wearing out, eventually you arrive at the point (in theory) where none of the original material remains, yet you still have the thing. I believe Nelson sees this in how we decide, consciously, formally, to carry on the species—love, marriage, birth, change, death. It keeps going and it keeps changing and yet, planet conditions permitting, it still remains humanity.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Heavy Set” (1964)

This Ray Bradbury story, first printed in Playboy magazine under Ray Russell’s editorial regime, comes with a few surprises. It is recognizably Bradbury’s Midwestern sing-song voice, but the details are quite dark, not science fiction or wistful or elegiac at all, which I normally associate with him. “Heavy Set” works on subterranean levels, like Robert Aickman or Dennis Etchison. The main character Leonard is nearly 31 and living with his mother. He’s a bodybuilder, working out constantly with weights and such. He hangs around with high school kids who admire him and call him “Heavy Set.” The girls want to go out with him, but he always seems to have excuses to get out of it. It’s Halloween and he’s having a party, dressed up like an English schoolboy, “the mean little boy,” carrying a giant lollipop. It reminded me of Herbie Popnecker from ACG Comics in the ‘60s. The story is set in California and Leonard is also a surfer, by the way. He’s having the party at “the beach,” not at his mother’s place. It seems strange for Leonard to be having a party. Some interpretations of this story have him as intellectually disabled. It doesn’t read that way to me, although something about him is definitely not right. He’s sullen, withdrawn—not the type to throw a party. And it turns out to be a disaster. Not even half the people invited show up and Leonard is the only one in costume. The center of this story is the relationship between Leonard and his mother, which is not healthy. They seem to be all each other has. Whether it’s incestuous is not clear but my guess is sadly yes. It definitely radiates an aura of needy and creepy impulses. While Leonard is away at his party his mother worries he will never come back, without a word, that she will just never see or hear from him again. This story feels deeply unpleasant on multiple levels. It plays with us, teases us, then shanks us with the worst suggestions when Leonard comes home from the party upset. He talks to his mother about it, but he's still upset. He spends hours on the punching bag, until after 3 in the morning. Then he comes into the house and gets into bed with her. It seems to be something new but possibly it’s happened before. She pretends to be asleep. He’s still working out with hand grip strengtheners which squeak in the dark. The last line notes it’s still “a long time before dawn.” But this scene that tremors with terrible potentiality is just the capper. All the details here are increasingly weird and disturbing. Nothing seems real but it’s not a dream. The phone rings at strange times. It’s that kind of story and it’s amazing.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
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