“The Voice in the Night” (1907)

[spoilers] I like this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well—certainly my favorite of his many seagoing stories I’ve read. It may be more squarely in the traditions of “weird” than horror but it’s still creepy and unsettling. In a way it’s kind of a “lost world” story. But what a horrible lost world. More than anything it’s a seagoing tale, specifically within that a “fog” or “doldrums” story, a Hodgson staple. There’s a ship, and it is stuck in still waters and haze, with no wind. In the night, after some time there, a voice is heard calling out of the darkness, begging for food. The man calling refuses to let himself be seen. It’s annoying behavior that makes it hard to hand off food. But they manage. Some time later, the next night or maybe a few more, the voice returns to explain himself and his partner. The story involves shipwreck and struggling to survive on an island infested with a gray fungus and nothing to eat. The story is just well done. I had a bad feeling about that fungus from the first it’s seen, but it’s mostly innocuous for quite a while. Then it’s a nuisance and finally a fearsome force. It’s all over everything and if you scrub it away it returns the next day. Then it starts infecting the castaways themselves, with the gray fungus appearing on patches of their skin. As food stores dwindle, however, they find that not only is the fungus edible but it’s also quite tasty, though it hastens the infection. Late in the story a humanoid shape is seen in the fungus, moving like a living person. Details like this reminded me of the movie Annihilation and were particularly effective. For once one of these old-fashioned framing devices works. There’s a fair amount of setup but the payoff is this amazing story related by a voice calling out of the darkness. Hodgson gives us a glimpse of the terror near the end, the lumbering humanoid mass of gray fungus, but otherwise keeps a light hand. It’s also a good idea to make the voice a married man. He and his wife are alone together in this, trying to keep each other alive. So it’s also an affecting love story. I don’t know that you can call this gray fungus supernatural—it’s plausible enough, in 1907, that such things could exist. It may be a stretch to make it delicious, and also that it may have psychic powers of attraction, but I’m even willing to accept those things here. Hodgson makes it all work.

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Evil Dead Rise (2023)

I finally caught up with the late installments in the Evil Dead franchise. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy worked itself into an inspired Three Stooges mode that remains utterly original and worth seeking out. But a lot of people forget how actually terrifying as a horror movie the first one was, even with the low-budget trappings, or that’s how it hit for me anyway in the early ‘80s one weekend with rented VCR and movies. The 2013 remake and this, what? sequel?—are true to the essentials of the 1981 original. The roving demon spirit is represented by impossibly fast tracking through landscape, there’s an evil book made of blood and human body parts, and the possessions begin when the field recording made by some anonymous paranormal researcher scientist is played. On the recording he says the words that summon the demon spirit to take possession and from then on it’s chaos. Also there’s usually a scene of an animated tree raping one of the young woman victims, in usually a mixed group of five. There to honor the original apparently. You never know where a tradition is going to come from. The 2013 remake, directed by Fede Alvarez (Alien: Romulus; Don’t Breathe), is perfectly competent but has few surprises and became a little monotonous for me in the last third. Evil Dead Rise switches things up while remaining true to the essentials. Perhaps its boldest move is to change the setting from the famous “cabin in the woods” to an urban landscape in Los Angeles. An earthquake unearths the Naturom Demonto (updated from the trilogy’s Necronomicon Ex-Mortis for reasons unclear, perhaps an effort to leave behind any suggestion of the H.P. Lovecraft universe). The cracked vault also yields up field recordings by the researcher. The kid making the discovery is a wannabe DJ. He knows what to do with recordings, which look like 78s but play differently. The possession target is a single mother with three kids. Her sister is visiting. They have a tense relationship. As usual in this franchise, it gets bloody and gruesome. Check all content warnings. The tree thing is replicated inside an elevator. True to the trope! Yes, there were scenes of grotesque violence that were hard to watch, usually short. But director and writer Lee Cronin also has a lot of nifty tricks up his sleeve and there are a surprising number of surprises. Definitely worth running down if you’re into the franchise.

“Eve’s Diary” (1905)

I must say I am mystified by Mark Twain’s relationship with religion. I understand he despised it. Perhaps that’s too strong. He returns to Bible themes all the time, sometimes mockingly, sometimes piously. He’s fascinated by Joan of Arc. Satan is a wonderful character in his unfinished Mysterious Stranger. Whole sections of the travel books are devoted, in hushed spiritual tones, to “the Holy Land.” Et cetera. Then there’s the question of comedy. Is it even funny? I’m not sure. I read “Eve’s Diary” somewhat under duress, also known as being in a bad mood for no particular reason. It did not change my mood. It seems to have feminist sympathies more than not, or at least Adam is something of a surly caveman lout. Eve is part flower child, part curious intelligent interesting person. The problem is more the situation itself. For example, they are naming things: “fire,” “smoke,” etc. It just seemed dumb, not funny. Dinosaurs are around—I liked that, it felt like one place where he is thumbing his nose at religion. I didn’t get the idea from nowhere that he’s hostile to religion. Adam and Eve have no sense of perspective, apparently. Eve thinks she can knock stars out of the sky by hitting them with clods of dirt. I don’t know what to make of some of it: “I found some tigers and nestled in among them and was most adorably comfortable, and their breath was sweet and pleasant, because they live on strawberries.” Say what? Most of all it feels like Twain is just not trying very hard, or worse—trying too hard plagued by writer’s block, which was possible. There’s a clumsy insertion of an Adam passage and a no-warning transition back to Eve. It hops about in time, though at least it is always moving forward and I guess a diary gives him license. I generally like Twain’s folksy voice, but it can grate. At least no racism I could detect here! That was a surprise for me in his earlier work. Racism is rarely a main feature but it's usually there. Here we have dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, a comic point that does wear well I must admit. Adam at Eve’s funeral acting like Dick Nixon at Pat’s was a jarring shift in tone, but I understand Twain lost his own wife the year before this story was written and published so that probably accounts for it. I wouldn’t call this one of his best.

Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary” (Library of America)
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The King of Comedy (1982)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman

Photography: Fred Schuler

Music: Robbie Robertson, Ray Charles

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Ed Herlihy, Shelley Hack, Tony Randall, Martin Scorsese, Margo Winkler, Dr. Joyce Brothers

Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.

Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (2016)

The best part of Paula Mejia’s 33-1/3 volume has to be her enthusiasm for the band and album. That’s always there in these little books to some degree, but often it is kind of sublimated into the research or something. She had no luck getting one of the Reid brothers (William) to talk to her at all. She may not have cast the interview net very wide, or gotten a lot of good quotes, because that stuff is minimal here. It’s organized by song titles from the album, not in sequencing order but riffing on the ideas associated with them. Like Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, it is more discursive and (free-) associational. There are fewer personal details too. It might be dense—she cites a lot of academic sources along the way. Or it may have been my mood. I was reading it slowly, a chapter or two at a time, and thinking it might be one of the weaker ones. But then something kind of strange and perhaps alchemical happened. I played the album and it sounded fabulous. Better than ever. Now Psychocandy is an album I’ve had my infatuations with. I didn’t really catch up to it until the 1990s but I had an intense few months with it when I did. But returning to it later—even preparing to read this—was often disappointing. Too much noise, not enough sweets (more or less the shoegaze formula, which more or less the Jesus and Mary Chain may have invented) (although don’t forget Husker Du). A couple points by Mejia definitely helped. How, for one thing, did I miss those girl group drum patterns? Anyway, I don’t think an album under consideration has ever sounded so good while reading one of these 33-1/3 books. One of the regular blurbs that shows up with them talks about liner notes, which, full disclosure, I rarely read. But that’s what the experience of this book came to feel like for me. I’d read some of the text and return to the glorious album. I did learn about the literal riots of their shows in the ‘80s, which I hadn’t known. I think comparisons to the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols go too far in a general way, though of course they’re not entirely overstated. And the riffing on psychopathy and candy seemed more obvious than insightful. I mean, you can find something to complain about in anything. I’m just a little shocked she somehow found a way to make the album sound better than ever.

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

4. Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979)

[2007 review here, 2011 review of “Cities” here, 2012 review of “Animals” here, 2014 review of Jonathan Lethem 33-1/3 book here]

I was stoked to see that Wikipedia classifies this album as “psychedelic funk”—only after “new wave, postpunk, and art-rock,” but still. I thought I might be out on a limb stanning one of my all-time favorites since the day it was released, whatever category you want to put it in. But songs like “Mind,” “Memories Can’t Wait,” and of course “Drugs” make the sonic and lyrical case (and the band finishes the thought with supreme funk). What often confuses me about Fear of Music is the unexpected layer of humor wrapped into it. It may be most obvious in the hilariously bizarre “Animals,” which the raging singer cries “are laughing at us” when they “don’t even know what a joke is.” Yes, he’s talking about the extant nonhuman fauna on the planet at large. “They think they know what’s best,” he says. “They’re making a fool of us.” Further sins: “Shit on the ground ... see in the dark.” Other songs continue in similar veins, often named for nouns (“Mind,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Electric Guitar”). We hear that “Air can hurt you too,” that heaven is a place where nothing happens, and that members of a jury at trial have rendered verdict. “Never listen to electric guitar,” they solemnly chant. “Someone controls electric guitar.” David Byrne’s lamentable inclinations to mock people he considers ignorant and/or beneath him can be discerned developing here. His main character, who wavers in some detail from song to song, remains recognizably a type of political crank prone to conspiracy theorizing. No doubt he is as worried about fluoridation as he is about the conspiracy of the air when the weather turns cold. Byrne’s impulse would continue with the album he made with Brian Eno in 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, where a lot of the vocals are screeds tape-recorded from late-night religious stations on the AM band. It would be worse and most fully on display in the 1986 album and related movie True Stories. But these things are still more indeterminate on Fear of Music.

The most famous song from the album is likely “Life During Wartime,” which is more dystopic than psychedelic and seemed uniquely suited to the Cold War moment in the late ‘70s, on the eve of the conservatism that continues to metastasize into fascism, a hit in the UK but not the US. “Cities” is another song that’s not particularly mind-altering by intention, but I hope it remains relevant to people in their 20s and 30s trying to figure out where they want to live. Implicitly it recognizes that a better life can be consciously sought by starting with this vital choice. Preach. Most of the rest of the album is trippy one way or another. “Mind” reminds me a little of P.M. Dawn’s “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” in that the lyrical concerns are more on the order of pedestrian love troubles. “I need something to change your mind,” the singer wails plaintively. Then a walloping “MMMMMIIIIINNND,” reminds us where we got the idea this music is psychedelic. The strange, unlikely views of air, heaven, animals, and the electric guitar infect us with new ways of looking at them. The longest song on the album, at 5:10, is also the last. Called “Drugs” here, and “Electricity” in earlier versions, it presents a guy (likely the same paranoid-delusional we’ve seen in many of these songs) obviously tripping out on hallucinogens. Byrne reportedly got the unusual intensity of his vocal in this song by going outside and running around the block a few times at top speed, and then recording while he was still out of breath. The effect is stunningly accurate, full of the strange sights and sounds and feelings, the coincidences and the social anxieties, of the hallucinogenic at full effect. “I'm charged up ... I'm kinda wooden / I'm barely moving ... I study motion.” You know it when you hear it. Play loud.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832)

This story by Nathaniel Hawthorne is more of a literary affair than horror, as the Wikipedia article I looked up can attest. “Hawthorne writes the story in an allegorical format, using a didactic tone,” etc. I should note the subtitle, “A Parable,” but it’s not an easy parable (or allegory) to understand. I think that’s what I like about it. One day the New England town Puritan minister shows up wearing a veil, two pieces of semitranslucent black cloth “[s]wathed about his forehead and hanging down over his face.” That’s it, basically, the whole story. He wears the veil for the rest of his life and never explains. Not even his fiancée can get a word out of him about it, and she’s the only person who can approach him. She breaks off the engagement. There are certain tantalizing clues. On the day he first appears wearing it, he conducts a funeral for a “young lady” in town. We don’t learn very much about her either. The minister is 30 when he begins wearing the veil, and he gets the usual threescore and 10 or so. It does seem profoundly symbolic, practically obliterating his face for others and occluding his own vision as well. Hawthorne notes more than once how it moves like curtains with his breath. The minister’s stoic absurd stubbornness is reminiscent of the scrivener Bartleby’s perverse refusal to work, in the story by Herman Melville, never explaining himself beyond that wonderful “I prefer not to.” Here the minister responds to queries much the same, though they are more simple demurrals. The story says he gets better at his job over the years, but that could also be just growing into it. So I guess I like this story the way I like “Bartleby.” There’s something powerful about the secrets these timid men keep—why they do what they do. What’s asked of them is not greatly inconveniencing in either case, the responses more like exasperating little character traits, which grow into more. I take the death of the young woman as significant, some kind of warmup for, or variation on, The Scarlet Letter. In that light, the black veil is cowardly in a way reminiscent of our old friend Arthur Dimmesdale but at the same time more forthright, if cryptic, in declaring his status as a sinner, if that’s what he’s doing. Of course, there may not be enough about the young woman to build even that much out of it. You could sit in a hundred classroom discussions or reading groups and probably still never get to the bottom of it. If horror is a grasp of the empty abyss, then maybe this is horror.

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Watcher (2022)

Watcher has a good premise and a good start, as our main character Julia (Maika Monroe) finds herself in Bucharest, Romania, with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman). Both were raised in the US and both have Romanian roots, but only Francis can speak the language, and he is there for a demanding job in marketing with long hours. Julia’s isolation is near complete, as she spends most of her time by herself in their excellent apartment, frustrated by the language every time she goes out. Then, actually almost right away, she notices a man in the building across the street, standing in his window. She gets the feeling he is looking at her. She gets the feeling he is following her. She thinks she sees him everywhere she goes. Maybe—we only catch glimpses of him if that. We see a couple of the events she reports to her husband and skeptical police. A man sits directly behind her in a movie theater in one, but we never get a good look at him. He might be some other creep. She might be overthinking the guy in the window (though we doubt that given that we know the chosen genre of our show). Her overworked husband starts to wonder about her. The police plainly think she’s a little kookoo. There are nice notes here of paranoid classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Rear Window. It’s never entirely clear whether it’s all not Julia’s imagination, though the movie gets noticeably more predetermined to an agenda as it goes, particularly in the last third. When Julia waves at the figure in the window and it waves back the picture is all in as a serial killer Psycho kind of show with some strange ins and outs and, ultimately, explaining every last blasted thing, complete with twists and turns that are not that unexpected. The first half is better, creepy and sneaky with uncertainty. We feel Julia’s isolation keenly. The language barrier is done really well. Director and cowriter Chloe Okuno never gives us subtitles for the Romanian and not many Romanians have even passing English. Monroe puts on a good show as someone who might be cracking up from culture shock. Then, well, you might as well stay for the end. It’s not a long movie.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)

I had a lot of fun with this account of the “New Hollywood” movie industry in the 1970s. Author Peter Biskind had access to dozens of main players and people who knew them. There are so many characters quoted, in fact, that it can get to be hard sorting them out. Some, including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg, later claimed indignantly that Biskind got it all wrong, which is possible. But I’m pretty sure a lot of these characters are fabulists themselves so take it all with due caution. It took me so long to get to the highly entertaining (and, yes, gossipy) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that I found myself wondering which came first—the cemented-in legends of the New Hollywood, or this book. At any rate, the ‘70s was approximately my coming-of-age time and, from, say, 1968 on, I was a dedicated moviegoer. I had no idea I was living through such exciting times, though I noticed later how anemic Hollywood fare seemed to become in the ‘80s and later. I still think it’s fair to blame that on Jaws and Star Wars, but Biskind is not blind to that. The most puzzling story for me remains Francis Ford Coppola—responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made, and just as suddenly a nonfactor after the ‘70s. Go figure. I had forgotten about Peter Bogdanovich who, according to Biskind’s portrait, made a couple of good movies and then became as insufferable as the memorable character he played on The Sopranos. Biskind’s treatment of Dennis Hopper is hilarious—this utter incompetent who somehow drew the director credit for Easy Rider. I already knew the general history under consideration, but Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is packed with delicious details and anecdotes. There are some weird gaps. Biskind uses Oscars results as one of his metrics along with revenue figures, reviews, and general consensus. But Woody Allen is barely mentioned. That’s likely because Biskind couldn’t get him or his tribe to talk. But Woody Allen, however reprehensible he appears now (certainly no worse than Paul Schrader and other notable rats here!), is an obvious model of a film auteur, plus he won big in Hollywood for Annie Hall. Strange omission. But an always interesting and entertaining book.

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

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, France, 193 minutes

Director: Jacques Rivette

Writers: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Henry James

Photography: Jacques Renard

Music: Jean-Marie Senia

Editor: Nicole Lubtchansky
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.

Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.