The Friday Article Roundup
Get the willies, heebie-jeebies and jim jams from the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will be unnerved by:
Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At Crooked Marquee, Jeremy Herbert revisits the most frightening movie ever made: Ernest Scared Stupid:
Although there is now an entire second-screen cottage industry dedicated to proving that all visual media consumed at age five was subversively terrifying, Ernest Scared Stupid deserves all charges and more than a few accessory counts in the years after. Slapstick forebears like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein mightโve startled the occasional youngster, but thereโs nothing in them so unabashedly grotesque and disturbingly intimate as [the evil troll] Trantor jump-scaring a little girl when she rolls over in bed. The only major difference between the climaxes of Ernest Scared Stupid and Army of Darkness is that the Evil Dead sequel plays its siege for more laughs. Even the obligatory lesson about settling our differences with love is underlined by what may be the most violent death in the entire Disney Vault.
At The Walrus, Tajja Isen examines nonfiction publishing’s decline and publishers’ role in it:
These conditions arenโt merely ones that publishers can influence but ones they helped create in the first place. There are many reasons why nonfiction might be more expensive: the page count, the writerโs contract, the perception that fact is worth more than fiction. But thereโs a certain self-defeating logic in perpetually driving up the price and then wondering why the product isnโt moving like it used to. Without nonfiction being made available in formats within peopleโs meansโwith those formats, in fact, getting kneecapped left and rightโthe idea that the reading public has been zapped of its political energy begins to look, at a minimum, over-indexed. Maybe people arenโt tired of facts. Maybe they simply canโt afford them.
Kyle Denis surveys the explosion in great black female pop artists and how the charts aren’t recognizing them for Billboard:
Take Jae Stephens and Chxrry, for example, two rising Black pop girls who dropped their debut albums this year. Both are pop records whose R&B elements seemingly supersede their claim to the pop label; case in point, Chxrryโs LP is listed as โR&B/soulโ on DSPs. Stephensโ bold Audacity draws directly from Britney Spears and Janet Jackson-esque Y2K pop, while Chxrryโs darker U, Me & My Ego finds her singing over rattling synths that wouldnโt sound out of place on a BLACKPINK project. โFโk a pop star, baby, Iโm a cinema,โ she proclaims in album opener โBlockstarโ; why clamor for the โpop starโ label when you can reject it entirely in favor of something even grander? Those lyrics ring especially poignant in the intersecting contexts of Black pop stars historically having to be larger-than-life and a modern market that primarily trades on how much the average white listener 1) can relate to you and 2) likes you.
Noah Kulwin reviews NAZA and its look at those perpetuating genocide for Screen Slate:
The documentary is entirely structured around interviews conducted with 24 anonymized Israeli military intelligence officials on central Tel Aviv rooftops at night….thereโs no doubt that many of the filmโs interviewees are self-interested and self-serving, some simply bragging or processing their experience in a grand adventure/disaster, offering up the usual array of excuses as to why they went along with a genocide. I was but a cog. And so on. Men admitting to mass murder simultaneously trying to contain the damage of purging their conscience is by now a trope of journalism on the subject. Yet we can learn something from the squirm.
And the writer Jim Knipfel, who died last week, writes his own obituary:
He never liked gardening, playing cards or fishing, and his โbright smileโ was neither โcontagiousโ nor did it ever โlight up the room.โ Despite those deliberating character flaws, looking back he summed it up this way: A thousand regrets, failures, mistakes, traumas, tragedies, bad decisions and humiliations, but no complaints. All those things were an essential part of the insane and tumultuous ride that made Jim what he was and it sure was an interesting ride while it lasted.
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Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Seventeen, โMovements of Fire and Shadowโ
Well, this Centauri plot is resolving as well as it can. Revealing that itโs basically Shadow bullshit provoking the Centauri to act like assholes is really on the nose – โWe saw no strategy because there is no strategy!โ is horseshit, but itโs okay bullshit. The best part of all of this is Lyta, because sheโs the one character building something and taking difficult, uncomfortable steps to get there. I also have a lot of affection for the Regent.
Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster
The most surprising discovery here was an appreciation for Metallicaโs creative process. When I was a kid, one of my best friends was into Metallica, and Hetfield reminds me of him; angry but unexpressive and internal, and the relationship between him and Ulrich is between two angry men who keep trying to word things to be the most correct as opposed to rationally dealing with arguments (thereโs one point where Ulrich catches himself and specifically says heโs trying to word a criticism as diplomatically as possible). My favourite bit in this regard is when Ulrich is outright yelling all this abuse at Hetfield, culiminating in shouting the word โfuckโ right in his face before storming off, and Hetfield is just sitting there with a blank expression. You have Hammett sitting in the middle, trying to get through this and just have a conversation about the music.
The thing I keep coming back to is that, obviously, this ended up working – I suspect for two reasons, interrelated. Near the beginning, Jason Newstead – fresh from quitting the band – remarks in an interview that this is a band refusing to have adult conversations while everyone is deeply aware that a whole industry comes from these two assholes working together. Things really seem to pick up for them emotionally when they finally hire Robert Trujillo as their new bassist, and I think thatโs partly because they now have to be on their best behaviour, but also because itโs part of them genuinely loving making music together. Things really pick up in the movie when the guys are just focused on making the album (despite that album being St Anger), and they really enjoy making those musical decisions together.
I remember St. Anger came with a DVD of them playing some of the songs at the end of those sessions, and it was remarkable how much better it was than the actual album. Not because the songs themselves got better, but because the energy and interplay did a complete turnaround. And Trujillo is fun to watch play live.
The Blob (1988) – Simply rips, speeding along where the OG Blob made me fall asleep and/or laugh at Steve McQueen, looking perpetually 40, playing a teenager. Few horror movies not by Cronenberg are as interested in tactile strength and portraying what it can do to the flesh, whether ripping it in half, corroding it, or sucking the air out until the face becomes a Francis Bacon painting, features horribly distorted. (Kudos to the makeup and special effects which are still stunning.) Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell’s script is great too at ripping the rug out from under the audience and the characters, giving them lives and potential until no, they are Blobbed. No one is really safe.
The original short story version of this–“Slime,” by Joseph Payne Brennan–is likewise very good at the horror side of things, and I’d recommend it!
I will defend the original Blob movie only to the extent that my ringtone/alarm sound is the weirdly jaunty theme from it. But this actually sounds worth watching, not just worth stripping for bouncy alert noises.
Highly recommended! And I do love the theme song.
While Conor CANNOT BE TRUSTED regarding the VHS movies he is 100 percent correct on The Blob, which is lean and mean and gory as fuck, just a nasty damn movie. Love it! There are two wolves inside Frank Darabont, the puppy who makes Shawshank and the rabid beast who does this and The Mist.
Did you like The Mist? I know about the changed ending so I’ve kind of dodged it.
I liked it! It’s similar to The Blob in its general “here’s a bunch of monsters fucking people up” unpretentiousness, when it veers into commentary it is less good. The problem with the ending is how it (unintentionally?) supports the worst character’s take on things, I don’t think Darabont realizes this. But it’s a fun gnarly time at the movies.
The Twilight Zone, “Long Live Walter Jameson” – As noted, a barely cromulent episode that maybe maybe could have done more with the premise, but I am not sure how so.
Elementary, “Pushing Buttons” – A re-enactor is murdered during a re-creation of a Revolutionary War battle. While the victim is by all accounts engaged in a corporate Ponzi scheme, his death in fact is related to his collection of colonial era memorabilia, and a deed signed by Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence with the least signed documents known to exist. (You would know him only if you realize who Gwinnett County in Georgia is named for, or if you remember the sketch on Colbert where LMM wrote a song about him.) And all the while, Sherlock is struggling with post concussion syndrome and pondering a long rest when his new friend Michael asks him to search for a missing acquaintance from their meetings. Another solid episode.
Barney Miller, “Christmas Story” – On duty on Christmas Eve, no one is supposed to be exchanging gifts but everyone but Barney does; Yemana gets a blue plastic tree and asks a Japanese woman at the precinct on a date, not knowing she’s a sex worker; Luger angles for an invite to Barney’s for the holiday; and an angry gift buyer is arrested after trying to assault the store owner he bought a hard to assemble toy from. Lucky for him, the instructions are in Japanese and Yemana reads Japanese. A sweet but not saccharine episode, even if it never considers that Barney and Fish are Jewish.
Spooky season catch-up!
Charisma — Kiyoshi Kurosawa remakes his own Cure, but replaces the serial killer with a tree. This is both very odd and somehow effective, tonally this is more in line with Bright Future’s meandering toward apocalypse than Cure’s noose-tightening. Kลji Yakusho is arguably playing the same detective he did in Cure, or an alternate universe version of him, here he fucks up a hostage situation and is given a forced vacation that he opts to take by wandering in the woods, where he encounters the tree known as Charisma and various groups trying to save/exploit/destroy it. None of these people are unhappy to see him and in fact he spends time with all of them, gradually learning about the tree and how it is unique and also destroying the ecosystem it grows in; at one point a character says Yakusho is also Charisma and this is true — by stumbling upon the ecosystem of these lunatics he destroys it. And maybe more than that, the ending is inscrutable even by Kurosawa standards. But it plays on his themes of how everyone is going to hell in their own way in a unique fashion, if it’s not his best it’s also something no one else would make and very much worth watching via Criterion’s overview.
VHS Mixtape — Conor is WRONG, despite a few winners this is OK in the aggregate. The shorts are the best — a weird animation from Flying Lotus, a wonderful metal video that is both pastiche and short film in its own right, the great GWAR hosting (the opening segment is a puerile, repulsive riff on influencers, I loved it) — while the longer segments are less successful and the best one barely engages with the music theme, instead focusing on murderous puppets via the Jim Henson Creature Shop. The one consistent plus in the anthology is practical gore and it’s top-notch here, incredible stuff. The other segments don’t work nearly as well and the VHS feature of everything being found footage is bug city in the last two, the aesthetic just does not work in Lovecraft riffing (Lovecraft narrator on the page: paragraphs of creepy immersive text; Lovecraft narrator filming: guy going ‘oh shit oh shit oh shit’) and despite Ernest Dickerson and the RZA directing the conceit limits their abilities. The middle piece of more influencers eating shit is a great concept that is hamstrung by poor sound design, which is especially egregious considering the larger theme and the specific horror it’s attempting. Oh well, not the world’s worst time.
Scream — catching up with an alleged classic and while the script’s structure is good and clever the dialogue is just atrocious, will no one rid me of these 40-year-old teens speaking in horror wikis? *teens are murdered* there we go. Lillard and Ulrich are especially terrible in the early going, they get better as they get worse. Campbell is the glue holding everything together. No need to go further here.
Salem’s Lot — finally pulled the trigger on the miniseries and boy howdy would I have shat myself at the Barlow reveal had I been a kid watching this in the 70s. And the window* scenes with our boys asking to be let in are truly dreamlike in their compelling terror, Hooper and co. make the great choice to make the vamps look obviously evil but that just makes them harder to look away from. Except that fucking Barlow, you want to flee every minute he’s onscreen. And he’s wisely kept off-screen for the first half, with the wonderful James Mason doing Masterpiece Theater Renfield, this is beefed up and cultured up from the book and Mason owns, the delicate shade of contempt he gives “oh, you’re a writer” justifies the entire 3 hours here. Unfortunately much of these three hours are spent with David Soul, who is pretty fucking bad, and Lance Kerwin as Mark Petrie, one of King’s great kid characters, is worse, such an obnoxious voice. The miniseries has to condense a lot of the book but moves in weird fits and starts and makes entirely too much of Soul as counterpart to Barlow, and it feels like Hooper is marking time in a lot of this, making sure the various points are connected before he can get to the real shit. There is a subplot where Fred Willard cucks George Dzunda, this is hilarious but also falls away for no reason. Give the people what they want (Willard in tacky realtor clothes and Dzunda housing six-packs)! Anyway, the scares live up to the hype, the rest not so much, still worth seeing but also worth seeing broken up in two nights as intended.
*after a while it is a bit amusing how every building in town has these ginormous windows
The Woman In Black (1989) – I have never read the Susan Hill story this is based on. A young Edwardian era lawyer is sent to care for a deceased womanโs estate and is visited by ghosts of a long-ago tragedy. A chilling and haunting descent into madness. Some very well done jump scares, one of which I would call an all-timer. But this is more about location, mood and a slow psychological breakdown. Also, a terrifying use of sound. For me this is really about how well the little dog follows commands of the lawyer, what with it being a loaner and all. Whenever a pet is part of a horror narrative I feel like there is an added layer of suspense. Weโre left hanging with its fate longer than I cared for. Great downer ending.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Thirteen, Robert Service
Lenin is caught offguard by The First World War. This is the downside of obsessive focus, with Lenin in particular focusing on Marxist infighting (making him a fairly typical leftist, haha). Interestingly, he also takes the most radical position possible: supporting Germany against Russia in the war, because nothing would bring the tsar down faster. Lenin is indifferent to the human cost; Lenin was a man of abstractions and hated โsentimentalityโ, which is interesting and also kind of repulsive.
(He also has turmoil in his personal life; his mother dies and he argues with his ex-mistress a lot)
Gods of Pegana, Lord Dunsany
Recreating the style of the Bible to get somewhere weirder. I read this because Dunsany is a big influence on HP Lovecraft, to the point that Lovecraft considered him to be doing what Lovecraft had been trying to do in his career up to that point. Itโs alright – a bit light and frothy for my tastes, doing that thing where the lightness is part of a bittersweet sense of how sad and annoying life has to be.
Fifty One Tales, Lord Dunsany
Much more my speed. These have a tone mixing dreams and fairy tales; the plotting, at least, feels closer to dreamlike, as people essentially emerge to say something cryptic. I was particularly taken by the demagogue and demimonde meeting at the gates of Paradise as well as the retelling of The Hare And The Tortoise with a satirical extra punchline, as well as the occasional ironic jab at modernity.
The Housemaid, Freida McFadden
A rare case where the movie definitively improves on the book. There are two aspects of this that fail to combine in an oil-and-water kind of way – the melodramatic plot, and the gritty first-person style. Each of these is great individually, but the grittiness and rationality of the narrator only makes the ludicrous plot stand out badly; even given her desperate situation, I refuse to believe she would tolerate the incredibly obvious red flags that pop up (the moment she saw her room only locks from the outside, she should have gotten the fuck out), or the behaviour of Nina. The movie saves this by amping up the Lifetime movie style considerably, making it take place in a magical movie world (the one place it falters is that I think if Iโd read the book first, Iโd have not seen the twist coming).
The other way is that the ending to this book is kind of bullshit. The movie extends it, correctly, with a bit of violence that makes the protagonistโs victory feel sweeter, and ups the difficulty of them getting away with it, and even then, itโs still kind of a bullshit ending where everything happens smoothly.
Given that the elements leading to WWI existed in Europe for years, if not decades, it’s hard to imagine anyone would be surprised by it.
I would highly recommend King Sorrow, a very good book though the literal online trolls are kind of a What We Do In The Shadows rip-off (in Hill’s defense, it seems he was working on this near 900-page book for a long time). Like IT, it’s sentimental and concerned with aging and friendship. However, it’s more ruthless and has a political edge because the dragon becomes a symbol of blowback: sure, send him after a murderer or pedophile, but the consequences will pile up.
Breed by Chase Novak – Like a lot of horror novels, it’s a bit shaggy and overlong.* I am surprised and amused by the negative reviews here nevertheless.* It’s a shocking, sad, funny, and nasty book satirizing IVF and fertility treatments, where the rich can buy their own genetic offspring, but at major cost to their humanity. Novak, AKA Scott Spenser, has on the brain the weird double-edged sword these animalistic urges bring to parenting: you love your children and want to protect them. What if you are the threat? And there’s the queasy story of Cronos devouring his children, how creating life means you bear responsibility for it and could even long to end that life. Could easily see this as an Ari Aster film if he could get his neuroses all settled.
*The old chestnut that the short story is the best literary vessel for horror is generally true. The form can’t contain a lot of digression from what should be staring you right in the face.
*Won’t someone think of poor Slovenia? And yet there’s some fatphobia and ableist grotesquerie staring right at you that went unmentioned in StoryGraph reviews.
A Compendium of The Occult which is very good as a primer for a dense and varied subject. Some of this I buy as “real”, whatever that means, some I do not.
Your review of Breed put me in mind of a review of Fallow, which sounds very interesting:
https://defector.com/fallow-sarah-anderson-surrogacy-review
I am in a Westlake mood. Re-read most of Cooke’s version of The Outfit – honestly, how Madge the ex-sex worker and current hotel owner is treated by Parker is too rough to read again – and then moved onto The Score. And also starting a re-read of Jimmy the Kid, with its metafictional Parker offering Dortmunder a guide to how to kidnap a child (something the “real” Parker would never consider). Dortmunder books are always fun, even if you know exactly what is about to go wrong.
And over halfway through the third Witcher book, where all out war and the collapse of the detente between humans and non-humans is about to collapse and where Geralt is struggling with raising his unexpected ward Ciri, who destiny seems to think should also be a witcher. The characters are lively, the story engaging, and the world building intriguing. And it’s interesting to encounter a Polish writer who uses the word “pogrom” to describe the slaughter of non-humans. I am quite sure he knows the weight of that word and his homeland’s history.
Wait, what’s wrong with Madge? Parker is brusque with her but also recognizes he has to put up with her yammering congeniality and that’s ultimately a small price to pay for the safety of her place, and nothing happens outside of some small talk. And I think Stark is having a very dry bit of fun in this regard, Madge is Madge just the same way Parker is Parker — it’s not exactly Anton Chigurh and the trailer park manager, but it’s in the ballpark. There’s some very crude (but not un-Starkian) language regarding Madge’s possible daughter but that’s all.
EDIT: It occurs to me the former sex worker who gets a small chapter in The Sour Lemon Score has a much worse story, I can definitely see not wanting to revisit that
Nothing is wrong with Madge. It’s how unpleasant how Parker treats her, and I think Cooke makes it more unpleasant with the visuals. (I think at some level, the overall treatment of women in the early Parker series, Claire notwithstanding, has aged poorly. The scene at the end of The Rare Coin Score where the woman Parker has taken prisoner throws herself at him after he’s untied her also does not sit well with me.)
The Genocides, by Thomas M. Disch – A highly invasive grass appears on Earth. Green, smooth and very, very tall, growing to 500 feet or more. It drains the soil’s resources to such an extent that it kills all vegetation in its vicinity and dries up water resources. We follow a village of 200 survivors, struggling for survival led by a religious fanatic. We soon learn that the political authorities collapsed rapidly in the face of the famines triggered by the plant’s arrival across the planet. We also learn that this plant is likely extraterrestrial. The plant is monitored by drone-like devices that eliminate all forms of life near it – humans are reduced to mere pests. In this setting, like most post-apoc fiction, the focus shifts primarily to the interactions between survivors. revealing that even on the brink of extinction personal rivalries and petty power struggles are more prevalent than ever. Disch has written a deeply cynical novel about ecology, religion, politics and interpersonal relationships in a dark, desperate twilight world. Itโs chilling not because of the invasion but because most of the characters are horrible, despicable people. It makes the few sympathetic characters more endearing. The last few pages, an epilogue, are some of the most beautiful prose in an SF novel I have read, a chilling elegy to humanity.