With the departure of Dr. Welch's tormented and denying spirit, other and gentler ghosts gradually began to show up, probably drawn by Cyrene's mediumistic powers.
That perpetual six-year-old D'White David was a thoroughly exasperating brat. Albion had to lock up his mother's good china—presumably D'White could pass through the walls of the china cabinet, but he couldn't get the plates and cups out—and keep buying new Wal-Mart dishware to eat from, as D'White broke one set after another.
Other spirits were much more agreeable. From time to time around midnight Albion's mother appeared in his bedroom to check and make sure he was properly tucked in. His father was sometimes to be seen gazing longingly at the wine rack, for spirits had been his problem long before he became one. A mysterious Blue Lady took to floating down the hall; she resembled the only woman Albion had ever seriously considered marrying—considered so seriously and long that she married somebody else, in fact three somebody elses in succession, before dying. But the image was faint, the ID dubious, and the Journal of Psychical Research rejected an article he did on her as “unproven."
Most mournful of all the ghosts was a mysterious flickering blue creature that Mrs. DeFlores positively identified as Powderhorn. He frequently trotted over from Cottonwood (or whatever gait dead dogs use to go visiting), favoring autumn nights when the dry leaves rustled like passing spirits and the huge brilliant harvest moon sucked the starlight out of the sky.
Then, with Miss Scarlett watching him, fur bristling on her nape, he sat and pointed his muzzle upward and in long, moaning, sobbing howls expressed his yearning for the life of the flesh that was, sadly, forever beyond his reach. Eternity, he seemed to be telling Albion, wasn't all gravy either.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: Films: Bloody Hell On Lake Neuchatel by Lucius Shepard
Once upon a time there was a little boy who dreamed of being on a film-festival jury ... naw, not really. When I was a kid I dreamed about the usual stuff, looting and pillaging and so on, but once I reached my majority and got into movies, I'd watch the juries at Cannes and think how cool it would be to sit on one. Well, as it happens, this past summer I finally got my chance. The Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) isn't Cannes, but it's a pretty classy event. They put the jury up in a five-star hotel (my room came equipped with a Mite scooter that I occasionally rode around the halls late at night like little Danny in The Shining) and gave us expensive Swiss watches as door prizes, and Neuchâtel is a lovely medieval town on a gorgeous lake with lots of spectacular venues for the cocktail parties (of which there were many), including a castle. The festival was light on actors, but there were a number of interesting directors in attendance: Jaume Balagueró ([Rec]); George Romero (you know); Lamberto Bava and Jess Franco, both responsible for dozens of Italian giallo, and many more. So that part of the jury experience lived up to expectations. The rest of it, the actual judging part of things ... not so much.
There were twelve films in competition at the NIFFF, entries from Korea, Japan, Norway, Sweden, France, Macedonia, the U.S.A. and elsewhere. Twelve films, you'd think, would be a snap to watch over four days, but it turned out to be fairly arduous, because our schedules were so packed and also because the majority of the movies were horror films and having to sit through munching and bleeding and splattering for approximately seven hours a day took a toll on one's sensibilities. The jury consisted of myself and three directors: Joe Dante (Gremlins; The Howling), Xavier Gens (Hitman, Frontiers), and Jens Lien (The Bothersome Man). Neil Marshall (The Descent) was supposed to participate, but was forced to withdraw due to an emergency. From my perspective, about half the films were eliminated early on, beginning with the crushingly awful slasher film Manhunt, a retelling of Deliverance wherein two young couples are hunted and horribly slaughtered by Norwegian rednecks. This movie received a good deal of hype, mainly because it was the first such picture produced in Norway and the director was only twenty-five ... doubtless the explanation for the film's lack of depth and originality.
Also off the list in the early going were George Romero's Diary of the Dead (too much “been there, done that” for my tastes) and Gregg Bishop's Dance of the Dead, another zombie film. Though the latter had a few nice touches and a leading lady (Greyson Chadwick) with real star potential, its mix of Romero-esque grue, Prom Night, and cheap yucks ultimately came to nothing. Another easy scratch was Takashi Miike's Spaghetti western with Japanese gunslingers, Sukiyaki Western Django. Featuring Quentin Tarantino in a minor yet crucial role (always a bad sign), the movie is a parody of a genre that has already parodied itself to better effect, and watching it to the end was a chore. Gunnar B. Gudmundsson's Astrópía, the story of a beautiful blond airhead who finds work at a geek video store when her boyfriend is sent to prison, opens promisingly, but then falls flat when our heroine finds both herself and true love through role-playing—the role-playing scenes (done as live-action fantasy sequences in ridiculous costumed regalia) may remind many of just how dull their lives were in younger years. In-ho Yun's The Devil's Game tells of a young man lured into a sucker bet by a dying old billionaire. The stakes? If he loses, he switches bodies with the septuagenarian. The film goes on far too long and has perhaps the most confusing ending in cinematic history. I'm still unclear as to its resolution.
Among the contenders, Milcho Manchevski's Shadows, a ghost story set in modern-day Macedonia, also was too long (a half-hour at least) and suffered from its director's apparent obsession with his busty leading lady—he seemed to be looking for opportunities to have her remove her blouse. Depending on your point of view, this tendency either got in the way of the narrative, or else the narrative interfered with the softcore porn. One way or the other, if you took out the extraneous material, there would probably be a decent (or indecent) movie left over. The Cottage is a brisk horror comedy reminiscent of early Peter Jackson by British director Paul Andrew Williams. It relates the misadventures of two bungling kidnappers (Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith), who repair to a rural cottage with their blond victim. The ensuing mayhem is carried out with humor and energy, but the film wasn't sufficiently different from its many antecedents to win over the jury. Eskalofrío, Isidro Ortiz's tale about a feral child, beautifully shot amid the gloomy forests of the Spanish Pyrenees, began well and appeared to be going somewhere new, but fell prey to the Hollywood penchant for laying on climax after climax after climax. Tokyo!, a trilogy of short films about that city, featured good but slight work in the surrealist vein by Joon-ho Bong and Michel Gondry, and was centered by an amazing piece of film by Leos Carax entitled “Merde.” It tells of an eccentric, Dada-style terrorist, a man named Merde, who lives in the Tokyo sewers, his crimes, his trial, and eventual end. As the title character, Denis Lavant creates a portrait that's hard to forget.
The winner of the jury prize was Sleep Dealer, a science fiction movie about the effects of globalization, by a young Mexican-American director, Alex Rivera, here making his feature debut. “Five minutes from now,” as Rivera puts it, a militarized barrier has been built along the Mexican border with the United States, effectively stopping all immigration, illegal and otherwise. To satisfy their need for cost-effective labor, U.S.-based companies hire third-worlders to operate machinery in twelve-hour shifts, shipping their consciousnesses across the border via a sort of virtual reality that requires the implantation of nodes in one's arms, neck, and back. This enables them to work themselves to death without ever entering the States—the nodes drain them of their vital energies and power surges frequently fry their brains. It's cheap labor with no social responsibility: the American Dream.
Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) is a young hacker trapped on his family's milpa (corn plantation) near Oaxaca, longing to be anywhere else. Because a U.S. corporation has dammed their river, the family is forced to buy water at exorbitant prices under the scrutiny of armed guards. One night Memo hacks into a security transmission, and is detected and mistakenly identified
as an “aqua-terrorist.” A robot plane (operated by a node-wearing American soldier of Mexican descent) is deployed and attacks their house and kills Memo's father. To support the family, Memo travels to Tijuana, now a sprawling, festering megalopolis, gets a black market node job, and begins working for a sleep dealer, an illegal job shop. Along the way he becomes involved with Luz (Leonor Varela), a young woman who sells her node-transmitted memories online. She begins to use his experiences and their relationship as fodder, selling the story, along with his feelings of culpability and remorse ... to one very interested customer in particular.
Alex Rivera is going to be a big deal someday, that much is clear. His movie is hugely imaginative, both funny and tragic, and his future is utterly believable. Limited by a minuscule budget, however, his special FX were (to be kind) not up to par, and his ending was much too facile. Sleep Dealer is a very enjoyable picture, one destined for cult status among science fiction fans, and not in the least undeserving of awards; but it was not the best film in the competition at NIFFF. That honor belongs to an elegant Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted for the screen by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his best-selling novel. Set in 1980s Sweden, in and around a drab apartment complex in a midsize town, the film focuses upon the relationship between a twelve-year-old boy and a girl of approximately the same age who moves into the apartment next door.
Quiet, poetic, sincere, and sweet are not words normally used to describe a vampire picture, but this—as Alfredson's nuanced and layered direction details—is that rarest of animals, an original vampire picture. It's also a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a discourse on marginality and exclusion leavened with touches of black humor. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is neglected by his single mom and bullied at school. He keeps a notebook of the things he'd like to do to his tormentors and is obsessed with newspaper articles on violent crimes. In the first scene, we see him—a blond, almost albino child standing in his bedroom in his underwear, thrusting a knife at the air and saying, “Squeal like a pig!” He keeps bumping into Eli (Lina Leandersson) outside their building at night and eventually she befriends him, urging him to strike back hard at the bullies. Eli is, of course, the vampire of the piece, “parented” by the bumbling Håkan, a middle-aged man who spends his nights collecting the blood that sustains her (though it is unstated, it becomes apparent that he does this in order to prevent the creation of new vampires). He poisons his victims with halthion, hangs them upside down in a snowy park, slashes their throats, and drains the blood into a jerry can. It's a testament to Alfredson's skill that he manages to make this all seem like drudgery, not Grand Guignol, and thus sustains our sympathy for the killer and his ward.
More typical cinematic violence occurs, to be sure, when Eli is forced to seek blood on her own; but these sequences are inventive and wonderfully staged, and contrast so greatly with the film's icy cinematography and deliberate, moody pacing, that when they arrive they impact the audience with a dreamlike intensity. The violence is further ameliorated by the trust and sweetness of the developing relationship between Oskar and Eli. They become each other's fantasy—I'm not speaking of vampire and potential victim, but of the soul mate one improbably finds next door. The two leads give stunning performances. The slow unspooling of the movie allows them to render their characters with a bright specificity—the sultry, watchful Lina and the slyly optimistic Oskar—and this in turn lends their unconsummated, almost otherworldy love a poignant reality. They're creepy and violent, yet compelling in their vulnerability. That's why I was flabbergasted when one member of our jury said he found the children “inexpressive,” and another said there was something wrong with the pacing. I was so taken aback, I don't think I managed a suitable response and I blame myself for not being more on the ball and putting up a better fight. I'm not sure what they wanted to see—perhaps they missed the jump cuts and histrionics that certainly will attend the American remake, due out in 2010.
The title, Let the Right One In, is lifted from a Morrissey song and refers to the myth that vampires can only enter a home into which they have been invited. It presages a key scene in the picture, and it might also be seen as an admonition to those who sat in judgment: Let the right one win. Yet I don't suppose I should feel too badly for Alfredson and Lindqvist. Let the Right One In has already won the award for best narrative feature at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival, a remarkable achievement for a genre film, and it has been awarded major prizes at festivals in Denmark, Sweden, and Edinburgh. Its failure to win at the NIFFF stands less as a comment on the filmmakers and their brilliant movie than on the shabby performance of the jury.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Novelet: How the Day Runs Down by John Langan
John Langan lives near New Paltz, New York, with his wife and son. His first novel, House of Windows, is slated for publication next Spring. Meantime, his collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is due soon. We're told that volume includes a previously unpublished story, but that is not the tale we bring you now. Instead, we are reprinting Mr. Langan's contribution to The Living Dead, an anthology assembled by our own Assistant Editor, John Joseph Adams. That book was originally going to consist entirely of reprints, but our schedule didn't allow us to publish this story before the book came out.
Got all that? Well, no matter. What matters is that you've got before you a fine new tale of horror from the pen of John Langan. Enjoy.
(The stage dark with the almost-blue light of the late, late night, when you've been up well past the third ranks of late-night talk shows, into the land of the infomercial, the late show movies whose soundtrack is out of sync with its characters’ mouths and which may break for commercial without regard for the action on the screen, the rebroadcast of the news you couldn't bear to watch the first time. It is possible—just—to discern rows of smallish, rectangular shapes running across the stage, as well as the bulk of a more substantial, though irregular, shape to the rear. The sky is dark: no moon, no stars.
(When the STAGE MANAGER snaps on his flashlight—a large one whose bright beam he sweeps back and forth over the audience once, twice, three times—the effect of the sudden light, the twirl of shadows around the theater, is emphasized by brushes rushing over drums, which give the sound of leaves, and a rainstick, which conjures the image of bones clicking against one another more than it does rain.
(Having surveyed the audience to his apparent satisfaction, the Stage Manager trains his light closer to home. This allows the audience to see the rows of tombstones that stretch the width of the stage, two deep in most places, three in a couple. Even from his quick inspection of them, it is clear that these are old tombstones, most of them chipped, worn smooth. The Stage Manager spares a moment for the gnarled shape behind the tombstones, a squat willow, before positioning the flashlight on the ground to his left, bottom down, so that its white light draws a cone in the air. He settles himself down beside it, his back leaning for and finding a tombstone, his legs gradually crossing in front of him.
(It has to be said, even with the light shining right beside him, the Stage Manager is not easy to see. A reasonable guess would locate him somewhere in his late forties, but estimates a decade to either side would not be unreasonable. His eyes are deep set, sheltered under heavy brows and the bill of the worn baseball cap on his head. His nose is thick, and may have been broken in some distant confrontation; the shadows from the light spilling across his face make it difficult to decide if his broad upper lip sports a mustache; although his solid chin is clear of any hair. His ethnicity is uncertain; he could put in an appearance at most audience members’ family reunions as a cousin twice-removed and not look out of place. He is dressed warmly, for late fall, in a bomber jacket, flannel shirt, jeans, and heavy boots.)
Stage Manager: Zombies. As with most things in life, the reality, when compared to the high-tech, Hollywood gloss of the movies, comes as something of a surprise. For one t
hing, there's the smell, a stench that combines all the worst elements of raw sewage and rotted meat, together with the faint tang of formaldehyde. Folks used to think that last was from the funeral homes—whatever they'd used to pickle dear Aunt Myrtle—but as it turned out, this wasn't the case. It's just part of the smell they bring with them. Some people—scientists, doctors—have speculated that it's the particular odor of whatever is causing the dead to rise up and stagger around; although I gather other scientists and doctors have disagreed with that theory. But you don't have to understand the chemistry of it to know that it's theirs.
For another thing, when it comes to zombies, no one anticipated how persistent the damned things would be. You shoot them in the chest, they keep on coming. You shoot them in the leg—hell, you blow their leg clean off with your shotgun at point-blank range, they fall on their side, flop around for a minute or two, then figure out how to get themselves on their front so they can pull themselves forward with their hands, while they push with their remaining leg. And all the time, the leg you shot off is twitching like mad, as if, if it had a few more nerve cells at its disposal, it would find a way to continue after you itself. There is shooting in the head—it's true, that works, destroy enough brain matter and they drop—but do you have any idea what it's like to try to hit a moving target, even a slow-moving one, in the head at any kind of distance? Especially if you aren't using a state-of-the-art sniper rifle, but the snub-nosed thirty-eight you bought ten years ago when the house next door was burglarized and haven't given a thought to since—and the face you're aiming at belongs to your pastor, who just last Saturday was exhorting the members of your diminished congregation not to lose hope, the Lord was testing you.
FSF, December 2008 Page 13