VCR HORRORS (1987)

Time capsules like these are always amusing and occasionally irritating to revisit. If you came of age in the late '80s and early '90s like I did and grew up watching the titles featured in this exposé, you'll note immediately how wrong-headed much of the talking points are, collected from alarmed parents and so-called experts who are clearly grasping at straws and making points after having seen, at best, five horror films. 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is specifically noted as being one of the first films to introduce the aspect of graphic violence to the horror genre, essentially putting to bed more chaste films like Psycho and Frankenstein. Of course, if you know a single thing about the genre, you'll know that Chain Saw Massacre is actually very low on violence, at least on-screen, and features exactly one chainsaw murder, most of which is left to the imagination. Though these parents admit in the same interview that they had "no idea" how graphic some horror films were until they sat down and watched them specifically for this report, they still managed to rattle off oversimplifications of horror's main thrust, which is "rape and torture," in which most of the victims are females, and that most of the kill scenes have a sexual connotation behind them. I dunno, you tell me: this was the '80s, after all, a time in which the majority of on-screen sexual trysts featured a girl and a boy. You mean to tell me the boyfriends escape the killer while the girlfriends fall victim? Have you seen a slasher movie before?

Though this report does feature notable pro-genre people like Linnea Quigley and critic Chas Balun, both of their collected soundbites are limited to out-of-context blurbs that only support the main thesis. Quigley rattles off every way in which her characters bit the dust in her past movies while Balun just sounds like a mimbo, telling the audience kids want faster and louder horror experiences because of MTV. Good grief.

Refreshingly, the report ends with a level-headed and rational argument for why horror films aren't the scourge of society that most of the talking heads argue and shouldn't be blamed for motivating real-world violence...which comes courtesy of a ten-year-old kid. Go figure.

TEASER: DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) ON NETWORK TELEVISION

 

I've been playing around with video editing during lockdown and this is my newest harebrained idea. 

File under fan edit - an opening to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) as it may have looked if it premiered on network television in the late '70s or early '80s, similar to NBC's premiere of Halloween and CBS's airing of The Exorcist. I'm planning on creating the entire broadcast using a VHS rip of the movie and "original" commercials and TV spots - kinda like a standard definition grindhouse experience.

One question remains, however: if I embark on assembling an entire broadcast, do I make it as genuine looking as I can by...gasp...editing it for content? Silencing the profanity and, more egregious...cutting out the gore effects? Could I really do that to something as majestically splatter-filled as Dawn of the Dead?

Questions like these plague my very existence.

BORN AGAIN, HOME AGAIN: THE RETURN OF ‘THE X-FILES’

I’m a ‘90s kid. I think a lot of us Internet dwellers are. It was during this magical decade where three gigantic pop-culture phenomena TV shows came into prominence; they entertained and captivated audiences, forever contributing strange references and expressions to the lexicon: Seinfeld gave us “master of our domain,” Friends offered “how you doin’?” and The X-Files, well...the one-hour paranormal drama gave us much, much more. It gave us intrigue, mystery, horror, humor, icky monsters, complicated love, and most importantly, it resurrected one of the biggest life lessons which flourished during the cinematic movement of the 1970s: trust no one.

For nine seasons and two feature films, Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) hunted the things that bumped in the dark, kept watching the skies, and slowly fell in love. And during this mostly '90s-set series, I literally grew up watching it all unfold. It was the first "grown up" show I followed with any regularity, and during my formative years, the impact of it all was that much greater. My boyhood peaked during the show's best seasons, and when the realization set in that said boyhood was nearly over and "grown up" things were soon coming, it just so happened to coincide with the series losing its luster. The magic was vanishing both in real life and the land of make believe. It made coming of age a little bit harder, and in a way, made having to say goodbye to the show something to dread, not anticipate with the usual amount of excitement.

1998's feature film The X-Files: Fight The Future was meant to be the first of many theatrical endeavors that were planned to transition the series from the small screen to the big, with the show's fifth season originally meant to be its TV series swan song—a move that would allow time to flesh out the alien mythology in a streamlined story while reaping the benefits of fans anticipating seeing Mulder and Scully reunite in their never-ending quest to find the truth, which, for all intents and purposes, was out there. (Somewhere.)

This didn't happen.

Fox wasn't about to let go of its largest viewership, even if they could have easily collected their X-revenue from the box office instead of TV advertisers, so The X-Files remained on the air far longer than it should have. It stayed on the air for so long that Duchovny (one of the leads) excused himself from the show’s stranglehold during the last couple seasons in an effort to do something—anything—different. This caused several complications, on top of ones previously caused by a show having already satisfied its main conflict several seasons ago. Obviously, a new new conflict would be needed, and in Duchovny’s absence, new characters, which are almost always a sign of a creatively bankrupt show.

After its disappointing finale in 2002, The X-Files, it appeared, had been permanently sealed.

Enter the series' second feature film I Want to Believe six years later, which picked up on our beloved agents in the next stages of their lives: Dr. Dana Scully was now a staff physician at a children’s hospital, and Fox Mulder was now an unemployed and bored as hell recluse treating his home office ceiling like a dartboard. Not nearly as bad as many fans claim it is, nor as good as some well-meaning but misguided articles might have you believe (how you doin’, AV Club?), The X-Files: I Want to Believe resurrected our beloved FBI agents in a way that felt more perfunctory than ceremonial, leapfrogging off a series finale that found them on the run and pursued by the FBI, but lazily neutralizing that conflict by stating, basically, “Good thing the FBI stopped trying to kill us!” The series finale saw attempts on their lives; their first appearances in I Want to Believe found them barely hiding out, with Mulder lazing around his house protected by a single gate, and Scully working as a prominent doctor under her real name, neither of them at all concerned about having a needle shoved into their medullae oblongatae by a man in black.

Still, The X-Files was back—in theaters!—so if their so-called wantedness by the FBI was the creative hurdle to overcome in order for that to happen, fine. And I Want to Believe presented what ultimately would have been an above-average adventure for our duo…had it been pared down and relegated to the small screen. But with it being a feature film, anticipation for something large in scale and teeming with aliens was expected, though not received, so the reception was not great and its box office haul was pitiful. (Note to Fox, who chose to open it one week after The Dark Knight: counter-programming doesn't work against the geek demographic.)

Ordinarily, I Want to Believe would have signaled the end of the franchise. A low-budget sequel produced to test the waters resulted in a resounding “no thanks” from fans, not helped by its marketing campaign which opted to eschew indication of its actual plot and instead drape its trailer in ambiguity that, hopefully, would be surmounted by the return of Mulder and Scully. Fox was banking on audiences saying, “They’re back? I’m in.” And it didn’t work.

Eight years later, and well into the trend of resurrecting established properties for the small screen, the The X-Files returned with mostly pitiful results. While it was an absolute delight to see Fox Mulder and Dana Scully once again calling each other by their surnames, checking in via cell phone, and doing that cool FBI thing where they point flashlights and guns as they charge into dark rooms, unfortunately, Seasons 10 and 11 made the same mistakes as its most immediate predecessor seasons.

To determine the worth of these new episodes, we need look no further than the book-ending episodes of each new season, "My Struggle" Parts 1 through 4.

With the first episode, the introduction of Mulder and Scully felt perfunctory. The first scene with A.D. Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) felt obligatory. Nothing about it felt big. And every moment should have been big. It was The X-Files back on television after fifteen years, people! Tepid second feature film aside, this was a big deal and should have been treated as such. But Duchovny looked bored, appearing as if he’d shown up late on set for the first day of filming without time to slip back into his character (including his wardrobe). Anderson still seemed to be in the process of shedding the cold disassociation with reality her Bedelia Du Maurier had exhibited during her run on the short-lived Hannibal. Neither of them seemed comfortable revisiting their most famous characters—not to mention the arduously stupid dialogue with which series creator Chris Carter had saddled them.

The opening episode is in such a hurry that it hits the ground running but doesn't know what to do when it lands. There's so much to do, and so little time in which to do it—not just in the 45 minutes of an episode, but in the six episodes of the new season. (What first sounded like a good idea—the six-episode thing—became a handicap. Two mythology episodes and four standalones that found subtle ways to move that mythology along, or reintroduce us to these characters and allow us to see how they've grown and changed, all sounded well and good, but so much it felt like "hurry up and wait" that the wind was taken out of its proverbial sails.) Thematically, where “My Struggle” failed the hardest was in Mulder’s complete willingness to shed his philosophy about the alien invasion that had served as his personal crusade for the entire run of the show, finding him too eager to believe it was all just a distraction from the "real" truth. Fans crucified the episode for this—"My Mulder would never sell out like that"—and they were right to do so.

As to why Carter would introduce such a revelation, there are two possible explanations. One: it was a graceless fumble to concoct yet another alien mythology to order to give The X-Files its purpose, this being the third alien conflict for our duo to investigate. Or two—and one that I’m more inclined to believe, given the endless developments that support it: this was his attempt to attract a whole new audience previously unfamiliar with The X-Files by saying, “What, that? Those previous nine seasons? Forget all that, don’t worry. All you need to know is: Mulder’s got a hard-on for alien conspiracies, Scully’s along for the ride, and they once had an alien baby." And the reasons to support this theory go on, from a statement on the pre-Season 11 greenlight potential for more episodes from Fox entertainment president David Madden where he referred to it as "Season 2” instead, to the befuddling announcement that a series of prequel books geared toward "young adults" are being written to explore Mulder and Scully in their teens—before they joined the FBI or even knew each other.

As for "My Struggle: Part II," Carter borrowed from another of his Fox television series, Millennium, by relying on a conspiratorial group of shadowy men attempting to mass produce a biological contagion as a means to decimate the world's population while leaving a "chosen" few behind. Likely shot following Part 1, Duchovny again looked awkward in the role, and Carter's dialogue—"There's talk all over the Internet!"—again sounded corny and unrealistic. However, not all was lost, and the episode was a remarkable improvement over Part 1. Anderson exhibited a better ease at finding Scully again after so many years, and this episode rode mostly on her shoulders. Carter, who pulled double duty as writer and director, managed to show some directorial flare that bordered on damn near cinematic (speed-ramping fight scenes notwithstanding). Devotees of the series might have felt a rush at certain moments—the returning Monica Reyes' (Annabeth Gish) phone call to Scully, for instance, or, finally, a significant amount of screen time for C.G.B. Spender (William B. Davis)—but they weren't enough to sail this episode, and by proxy the season, through to the finish line.

As for Season 11's mythology-"concluding" episodes, Chris Carter seems to have pursued a purposely dialed-down resolution to the Mulder vs. Cancer Man conflict, which became an organic backbone of the series throughout its run. After being hilariously and stupidly destroyed by a tomahawk missile fired directly into his face following the first ending to The X-Files waaay back in Season 9, Spender not only survived with some minor dents to the fender but he's still as dastardly as ever. But instead of the big, flashy, Hollywood ending Carter tried the first time, now, things for Spender ended with a whimper...and with a single gunshot. He survived a missile to the brain, but Mulder's gun finally does the trick, I guess, castrating this bigger than life conflict between them, relegating Spender to a simple monster of the week, as if he had never been hugely significant to Mulder's ongoing struggles with who he is and the real truth he's seeking.

Speaking of monsters, the new series' "monster of the week" episodes all did admirable jobs of trying to find that careful balance between satisfying the old fans, intriguing the new ones, and presenting episodes that appealed to the many diverse sensibilities of its audience. Different fans of old-school X-Files loved the different approaches to the episodes: the horrific, the silly, the pensive and quiet, and the mythological—all in equal measures. In order to give every faction their due, and within the confines of a six-episode season, they did as well as they could have. The problem, however, wasn’t the tone, but the actual writing. If nothing else, Season 10 has the dubious honor of unleashing upon its fanbase probably one of the worst—if not the worst—episode of the show’s existence. (Do I even have to say “Babylon”? Couldn’t you all have assumed that?)

Line-dancing! Gangsta rings! Cameos from dead dorks! What is happening! 

Amidst all of these disappointments, one stood head and shoulders above the rest. It wasn't the lackadaisical performances, the questionable story choices, and the wildly uneven tone. It's that with Season 10, The X-Files lost its intelligence. It sacrificed subtlety to satisfy how apparently angry with and saddened by his country Chris Carter has grown. What made the original run of The X-Files so thrilling and beloved was how American it was. And I don't mean Reagan's America, but the real America—history book America. The original series was socially relevant and mindfully political because it pertained to a certain bygone era of America's modern history, off which the show created a lot of mystique. The most political it ever got was by insinuating that J. Edgar Hoover had once been part of the conspiracies that ran rampant—and by implication, President Nixon, easily roping in that tangible sense of paranoia. This specificity to an era of American history is always going to be relevant because that aspect is so ingrained in/with American culture. It's vital to our culture in the same way baseball is our national pastime. There's no explaining why—it just is. This is what gives The X-Files strength and purpose: the paranoia of the blue-collar nobody attempting to circumvent the trials and tribulations of everyday life in order to find the truth. Is there a conspiracy? If so, who's in on it? Who can you trust? How high does it go? Equal parts The Manchurian Candidate, All the President's Men, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, The X-Files endeavored to embody that same spirit—American stories about American conflicts featuring American men and women standing up against invading threats. They were about us fighting corruption at the very top.

Carter's new X-Files was no longer interested in subtlety. Far more interested in broad strokes and empty meaningless gestures about how we can improve as a people (talking and love can fight terrorism! homelessness is bad; someone should do something!), the new X-Files didn’t skewer American culture as much as focus on the things that have hindered that culture. It's Carter's insistence on making the series socially relevant that forced it to stand out like a sore thumb when compared to everything that’s come before. With the introduction of right-wing TV host Tad O'Malley, Islamic extremism, and references to drones, constant surveillance, the Iraq War, anthrax, and Edward Snowden, it's tried so hard to feel current that it somehow already felt dated by the end of the episode. One day there will come a time when religious extremism and ISIS and suicide bombings become a thing that just was. Down the road, new fans will discover the show, and these new episodes, and think, "Was this ever part of your culture?" But the original conflicts that really gave The X-Files its power—Watergate, the JFK assassination, Roswell—aren't just pages of our history, but shapers of our culture. They're never going to dissipate, and they exemplify what Fox Mulder is trying to do: expose the shadowy government officials at the highest levels for what they are and prove to the American people they've been lied to.

Even if we want to take a step back from all the pseudo-philosophizing and examine the show for nothing more than a piece of entertainment, the rebirth still existed on shaky ground. Carter wasn’t able to overcome the recognition that The X-Files achieved pop-culture status. Even people who never watched a single episode in their lives know the names Mulder and Scully. They know "trust no one." And they know, without ever having seen a frame, that Mulder and Scully totally wanted to do it to each other. Carter was so aware of this pop-culture status that he seemed unable to refrain from elbowing his audience in the side, in every episode, to remind them of this. Too aware of its own legacy to just be a show, it tried to be a show at the same time it was reminding people, "Hey, this was a show before it was a show!" Scenes of Mulder being confused by iPhones are played for laughs, oddly suggesting that following I Want to Believe, he lived in a closet while culture continued to advance without him. The "mini" versions of our characters that appear in "Babylon"—down to Lauren Ambrose's red hair and her ultra-cynicism—have all the subtlety of a fireworks factory exploding. And the list goes on and on.

Different intellectual properties have been explored on television in various ways, whether they be the resurrection of previous series or film properties being explored in inventive reboots. But none of them ever felt the need to remind their audiences, "Hey, we've done this already." It caused The X-Files' return to feel obligatory, exhibiting a seeming "Oh, is it our turn?" mentality. As if they didn’t really want to be back.

And that sucks.

Though Seasons 10 and 11 seem to be the final word on The X-Files in terms of television (and Anderson, who has been enjoying one celebrated role after another since then, has made it very clear she wouldn’t do another season), Carter has been claiming for years that he's written a film script for The X-Files 3, and his comments on that script suggest the events of these new seasons don't really complicate what he's already concocted. The problem is he already had a long break between Season 9 and I Want to Believe, and then another long break between that and Season 10, to focus on the story he wanted to tell and how he wanted to tell it. Hence why Season 11 didn't fare much better.

If Chris Carter loves The X-Files as much as I believe he does, the best thing he can do for it is close the lid of his laptop and hand over all future writing responsibilities to someone else – either to the staff he’s assembled over the years which includes Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, or to the dreaded ‘new class’ of writers who could take that concept of The X-Files and re-create it as something new while giving it a clean slate.

Regardless of what form in which it returns, The X-Files could be great again. After seeing how low it can go, any eventual returns would have to serve as some kind of marginal improvement. Or maybe that's the fan boy in me holding out hope that such a thing is possible. Maybe, at this stage, after so many disappointing seasons, it's simply not possible.

But, let's just say I want to believe it is.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE (2019): THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

This newest iteration of The Twilight Zone marks the third attempt at resurrecting the infamous science-fiction/horror brand in a short-form format since the original and still highly celebrated run from the 1950s-60s. Confined to CBS’ All Access streaming service instead of network television, the Jordan Peele-produced version is also the most adult, heaping doses of profanity and slightly graphic violence into the proceedings. For some reason, The Twilight Zone has been a tricky brand to keep going, and besides for HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, its initial run and its 1980s revival were the only horror anthologies to enjoy a successful run on television. The second revival of The Twilight Zone lasted only two seasons. It’s interesting why that would be, because, as any horror writer or director will tell you, there are no limits in the sci-fi/horror/fantasy genre. There are no rules or boundaries. Write the wackiest story you want, and so long as it has a “point”—something that ties back into the human condition or puts society under the microscope—then it’s already a success. The genre offers an infinite number of opportunities to tell an engaging story and yet so many of these short-form programs fail to catch fire. This newest version of the brand has been greenlit for a second season, so CBS definitely sees the potential, but so far this relaunch is off to a rocky start.

The nature of anthologies leads to pitting the one-off stories against each other. Which one was the best, the worst, the funniest, the scariest? Which one had the best twist, the best cast, the best special effects? Similar titles like Creepshow or Tales from the Darkside can attest to this—ask a horror fan, and everyone has their favorite segment. Me? I’ve always been more of a Creepshow 2 person, and I pretty much get @-punched in the face every time I say that. The Twilight Zone 2019 is no different, offering a very different collection of episodes made with different sensibilities and all vying for a different experience. Some of them, like the show’s opener, “The Comedian” starring Kumail Nanjiani, in which a comedian makes your classic deal with the devil (an understated Tracy Morgan), is your simple monkey’s paw morality tale (and the strongest episode of the series). Some of the other episodes, however, like “Replay,” about a black mother and son using a magical video camera to keep going back in time to avoid being harassed and killed by a racist cop, or “Not All Men,” in which a meteor crashes to earth and turns the world’s men into violent, sex-crazed assholes, obviously have something to say about the dangers of living in the modern age if you’re an underrepresented demographic. 

Many fans have been vocal about the overly political agendas of this new series revival, and I agree with them, but only to a certain extent. As confirmed by Rod Serling himself and those who knew him in the supplements included on the home video release, The Twilight Zone’s mission was to tackle issues like these and present them as allegories as a means of deconstructing the human experience. The original run dealt very much with issues that were prevalent during the 1950s, like the McCarthy communist hearings and the constant fears of nuclear war. Still, this new revival is intent on making nearly every episode political or societal in at least some way, and more than one episode is a thinly veiled stab at Trump (which should surprise exactly no one). “The Wunderkind,” starring John Cho and everyone’s favorite little boy Jacob Tremblay, is an update on one of The Twilight Zone’s most famous stories, “It’s a Good Life,” about a godlike six-year-old boy with the power to create anything he wants. Resurrecting that concept, “The Wunderkind” is about an eleven-year-old who mounts a successful run for the presidency, becoming corrupted by power and turning into a jerk, and surrounding himself by yes men who do whatever he wants. (Tremblay even wears the fat red tie and everything. It’s not exactly subtle.)

This newest revival isn’t a total lost cause, as a handful of episodes manage to evoke that classic Twilight Zone feeling (I’ll come back to “The Comedian” again, because that episode nails it). Having said that, if CBS want this series to enjoy a lasting run, showrunners Peele and Simon Kinberg should consider dialing down the political and societal natures of the episodes at least to tolerable levels. The best episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, of course, had something to say about the human condition and that should in no way stop, but they also didn’t have to beat their audience with a hammer to make their point. The aforementioned “Replay” is one of the least subtle allegories I’ve seen in the horror genre since Joe Dante’s Iraq War satire “Homecoming” for Showtime’s first season of Masters of Horror, and even though it ends in an obviously unreal landscape, it still feels too much like real life and not like the escapism the audience was hoping to lose themselves in.

The supplements included on the home video release are thankfully rich in content, especially the featurette on the first disc entitled “Remembering Rod Serling,” which is not just the best supplement on this release, but essential viewing for all aspiring and seasoned writers. Intimate footage of Serling talking about his approach to writing, both for the show and in his everyday life, gets at the heart of what the best writers can do and what their responsibilities are as people with the ability to tell a story. (He also very clearly states that the competitive nature of writing during his era ensured that only the best stories made it to the limelight, so I have a feeling he’d run screaming from Amazon’s e-book search results.) During this segment, Serling’s daughter shares a haunting story in which her father witnessed the decapitation of a fellow solder during World War II after he was struck by a care parcel thrown from a helicopter, which would eerily foretell the tragedy experienced during the shooting of John Landis’ segment in 1983’s The Twilight Zone: The Movie. This five-disc release also includes all ten episodes in alternate black and white versions to amp up that classic Twilight Zone feeling.

If nothing else, this newest take on The Twilight Zone will expose newer audiences to the older series, which has aged beautifully (and which is available on Blu-ray from CBS). Top talent behind and in front of the camera has resulted in a very okay first season, and Peele admirably steps in for Serling as the new mysterious “Narrator”, but if this brand is to stick around, it needs to strive harder to nail that Twilight Zone feeling, dial down the agenda, and only bring the best possible stories into the limelight. As Serling himself said, if writing was easy, everyone would be doing it. I hope season two embraces that. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

REMEMBERING 'HANNIBAL' (2013-2015)

It feels dirty to use the word "reboot" when talking about NBC's short-lived but very beloved series Hannibal, but technically, that's exactly what it is. Iconic characters were plucked from Thomas Harris' celebrated novel series and reimagined, regendered, and reintroduced for newer audiences. But unlike Batman, Superman, or James Bond, the act of ever daring to think you could fill the shoes left behind by Anthony Hopkins, whose three separate performances as Dr. Hannibal Lecter earned one Academy Award and hundreds of millions at the box office, bordered on blasphemy. Props to Brian Cox for originating the on-screen version of the character in Michael Mann's underrated thriller Manhunter, but with that out of the way, Hopkins' iteration was always going to go down in history as the definitive take on the character. And that's because the character of Hannibal Lecter doesn't lend itself to semi-annual change-ups like the array of comic book heroes or international super-spies that by now have established the understanding that, yeah, every five to ten years, a new face is going to step up to play them. So when the Hannibal series was announced, everyone was very taken aback by the news, and rightfully so. You mean to say the same network that aired The Voice and America's Got Talent and, ugh, Grimm, had the gall to think they could not only do the Lecter series justice, but could sidestep TV standards and practices and include the grisly gore for which the novels and subsequent adaptations became known? It was one of those ideas that looked and sounded like a disaster, and it easily could have been, but Hannibal not only overcame everything stacked against it, and not only did it somehow out-gore HBO, it's likely to go down as one of the most beloved television series of all time, even if the audience wasn't there for it.

And it went off the air exactly four years ago today.

All the credit in the world goes to show-runner Bryan Fuller, who did the smartest thing anyone could have possibly done in his situation: kept the bare essentials of the series, maintained the most iconic and necessary aspects, and jettisoned the rest – enough to provide familiarity and keep the readers and film fans happy, but enough to create the distance needed so it didn't feel like holy ground was being desecrated. The casting also certainly didn't hurt, as it was impeccable nearly across the board (except for Scott Thompson, who, though lovable, was definitely miscast). Is it too early to predict that Mads Mikkelsen's take on Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter has become the new definitive version? Probably, although you'd likely have a legion of Twitter fans ready to preach that gospel. One thing is for certain, Fuller's Hannibal is the first visual medium to accurately portray the very damaged soul that is Will Graham, in keeping with his depiction in the first novel, Red Dragon. Though this was touched on with Manhunter, William Petersen's take was more distant and cold rather than haunted and broken. And gosh knows what Ed Norton was trying to do with Red Dragon besides cash a check to fund 25th Hour, but except for a moist brow and pit stains, his Will Graham seemed pretty all right. But this version of Will Graham is utterly damaged, and that's evident from his very first on-screen appearance during which he's walking through blood impossibly frozen in mid-air in the same way stars look plotted into the night sky – and this as he babbles to himself in the first person...as the serial killer responsible for the carnage.

Once you wipe away the serial killers, the violent art, the cheeky and recognizable mannerisms of Hannibal Lecter, and the touchstones of a post-CSI television landscape, what's revealed is what Hannibal was actually about the entire time – that two men from very opposite sides of the spectrum could develop mutual love for each other, and through their opposite natures struggle with this love and what it means. And this isn't to write off Hannibal as some underlying gay drama about two men in the closet, because that would just cheapen what Fuller intended. The love on display between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter can be anything you want it to be – friendship, romance, brotherhood, or other. The kind of love doesn't matter – it's window dressing – but just that it's there, and that it's challenging both of their respective natures, is what's made the show so compelling.

Hannibal was a critical favorite from its first episode, and what little audience tuned in did so with devotion. But, as some folks know and some don't, it doesn't matter how devoted the audience is, how beloved the characters are, and how much praise the show receives from critics. If no one's watching the show, then no one's watching the ads, and if no one's watching the ads, then companies aren't going to buy the ad time, and without that revenue, there is no show. That's the long and short of it, and it sucks, but that's business. So call it really misguided that NBC treated Hannibal like a ping pong ball, changing its air day three separate times, two of which occurred during the struggling final season, which saw it transition from a straightforward procedural/serial killer program to a European-set, esoteric, dreamlike quasi stage play filled with characters musings about their identities and natures and all kinds of heavy ideas that aren't going to grab newer audiences. (Not even scenes of kaleidoscopic lesbianism lured in the newbs.)

The third (and final?) season of Hannibal is disappointing only in the sense that, had it all gone according to plan, it would have instead served as the exact middle of the series' overall run. Seasons four through six were set to adapt all the other books, including the maligned Hannibal Rising, and conclude with a season of entirely original material, keeping both avid readers of the novels and viewers of the show entirely in the dark about how that would all end.

That didn't happen.

Instead we received a smidgen of Hannibal Rising married to a fleshed-out version of Hannibal and the third act of Red Dragon.  Though it was never part of the plan, Fuller and his show-runners did an excellent job of closing out all the lingering story lines, minus the somewhat abruptness of season three transitioning yet again halfway through – but only to include what was meant to come much later. Yes, it was certainly disappointing that the series never matured to the degree of reaching the story arc of The Silence of the Lambs – the most famous novel and adaptation of them all – but what's even more disappointing is never getting to experience how Fuller's version of that arc would have looked, or potentially seeing Will Graham and Clarice Starling on screen together. (Gasp! My nerd heart!)

Hannibal also liked to have its fun, and not just within Thomas Harris' Lecterverse. A fair number of homages and nods to other famous horror properties were sprinkled throughout. Some of these were very under-the-surface, including a brief moment during season three while Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) is shopping in a store filled with fine looking dinner table decor where a slight riff on selections from Goblin's score for George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead can be heard on the soundtrack. (Amusingly, Romero himself enjoyed a brief cameo in The Silence of the Lambs, along with famed producer Roger Corman, who gave Jonathan Demme his start in directing.) And then, of course, there's the cameo from the bathroom featured in The Shining:

Bryan Fuller has openly stated (lovingly) that he wanted Hannibal to maintain the certain level of pretension that was evident in the writing of Thomas Harris' series. Not only is that approach present in the philosophical and at-times poetic dialogue, but in the flawless production design and visual presentation – lots of slow motion, lots of reverse engineering, but never in a way that feels exploitative. The visual tricks serve the show's aesthetic and the minds of its characters. Even if the plot or characters of Hannibal do nothing for you, there's no denying it's a gorgeous show to look at. Colors are vivid, though they often depend on shades of gray. Shadows drape across nearly everything; even scenes set in the height of daylight maintain a certain darkness. Detail is as fine as Dr. Lecter's smashing wardrobe.

Sometimes it's the less showy audio presentation that makes for the most immersive experience – this is the show's design. Hannibal is a very intimately presented show, showing restraint and preferring the sound of moving air over garish and cheap Foley effects. The unorthodox and unusual musical score by composer Brian Reitzell (30 Days of Night), filled with clangs, bashes, and non-melodic ominous tones created a sound that would somehow define a show that was, itself, without definition. Working well in tandem with the show's quiet design, Reitzell's musical design – relying often on the pounding of drums with loosened drum heads and slamming metal – would shatter the perceived solitude induced by the art-like images to unnerve the audience with little effort.

To reiterate, NBC kept Hannibal going for as long as they could while remaining fiscally solvent. Unfortunately the viewership wasn't there to justify keeping the show on the air. In this age of Hulu and Amazon/Netflix Originals, everyone held out hope that the series would be picked up by another distributor. For a while, Fuller et al. were hopeful – and media websites were goodheartedly but irresponsibly muddying the waters by predicting the series would "likely" be picked up – but so far, there have been no firm developments in this regard. Maybe we can look at Lionsgate calling its home video release simply "Season Three" rather than "The Final Season," which has become the home video tradition for television swan songs, as a sign of hope that we haven't seen the end of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal.

Does season three mark the end of Hannibal, or is there life in this new universe yet? Fuller et al. are optimistic about completing the arc in movie form, which is a nice idea but seems unlikely. How does one adapt a series that was cancelled due to low viewership into one or several films if funding has proven to be an issue? If anything, Fuller has established he's full of surprises, so never say never. The final moments of season three work well as both a season finale and a series finale, so should this, indeed, be the end of the strangest courting ever made, let it not be said that Hannibal didn't go out in style. 

#HALLOWEEN: RECOMMENDED VIEWING: CURSE OF THE BLAIR WITCH

 

As I explain (and later lament) in this semi-editorial from several years ago, The Blair Witch Project was a summer 2001 phenomenon following its release upon the unsuspecting world. With the Internet as we know it still in its infancy, the idea of pulling the wool over the eyes of its users was barely an idea. Fifty years prior, Orson Welles had gotten on the radio and insisted that aliens were landing and it was the end of everything as we knew it. Listeners fell for it. Twenty years ago, the BBC aired a program called Ghostwatch, in which a fiction narrative shot to look like live television convinced people that ghosts were not only real, but were soon coming for them. Viewers fell for it, one of whom would eventually commit suicide once he became convinced the ghost featured in the program was haunting his house.

From radio, to television, and now, to the Internet. 

The Blair Witch Project was the first to seize that opportunity to make a lot of people look like gullible jackasses. (I don’t blame people for falling for it – it was very genuine.)

While far less theatrical and dramatic, and far more subtle, The Blair Witch Project was not bolstered by a marketing campaign that highlighted the newbie filmmakers behind the camera and the casts of unknowns – no, the marketing campaign was in actuality a national search for the truth. The Blair Witch Project website was a genius hodgepodge of missing person fliers, tearful interviews with alleged family and friends, and creepy black and white photographs of the items recovered at a rather strange location in the woods where it was believed this three-person film crew had dispatched to investigate the legends of the so-called Blair Witch of Burkittsville, Maryland.

Then audiences found out they’d been duped. Lied to. Made “the fool.”

And they didn’t like that. Not at all.

While some decried the film’s use of imagination (what a concept!) instead of the kind of stupid CGI that same summer’s redux of The Haunting was shoving into people’s faces, there was a kind of unsettling revelation that a lot of people were slamming the film because they thought they were there to see a genuine snuff film; not, it turns out, a well-executed descent into horror and madness that, except for some cold nights and hunger pangs, did not place its cast into any immediate danger.

Following the strange and disturbing viewpoints of people upset that the footage of kids being systematically stalked, haunted, and killed by a witch wasn’t genuine, soon came the next stage of the hype machine: the backlash — people enthusiastically exclaiming their hate for the film simply because so many others were so into it. Such unrelated mind-boggling campaigns of spite still exist to day, but more vitriol has been hurled at The Blair Witch Project than any other film of which I’m aware. Tell someone a film is scary, and it's a natural reaction for that person to find ways and explain ways in which it is not. Tell someone you think something of questionable legitimacy might be true; that someone will explain why you're a fucking fool for ever falling for it. We're human beings and by our nature we're pompous, arrogant, and we think we know everything. And we like to think we're above and beyond something new that comes down the pike if too many people, news media, or pop-culture bon vivants tell us we should.

I am a massive and devoted fan of The Blair Witch Project, and no amount of spite-hate will ever make me feel differently. And the dozens of proclamations that allegedly bolstered the haters’ arguments for why the film was bad – “You don’t even SEE the witch!” – actually works against those shouting it. Essentially, those people are saying, “I have no imagination! I need to have everything spoon-fed to me!”

What dorks.

Granted, I at no point thought any of it was real, and not because I'm a genius, but because I was an avid reader of Fangoria Magazine. Yet that didn't diminish my enthusiasm for what I had just witnessed on-screen.

People are quick to point out that The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first found-footage format film, and people threw out titles like Cannibal Holocaust, or Ghostwatch, or Man Bites Dog as examples. Some went back as far as 1922’s Häxan, for which the Blair Witch filmmakers named their production company.

And yeah, these people are right. The format had been around for years, decades, centuries. But The Blair Witch Project was the first cultural phenomenon in many ways. It was made by a bunch of first-timers with no actual script. Its cast and crew suffered the harsh elements of a Maryland winter just to get the thing on film. Famously, the crew was so broke during filming that, once the film was completed, they returned the camera equipment to Radio Shack for a full refund. And yet these broke filmmakers’ film, with its meager little budget, would go on to make back its budget three times. Wait, did I say three times? I meant THREE HUNDRED TIMES. It bested the previous record for most money made by an independent film – Halloween – and that record wasn’t for an independent horror film, but independent film in general. It inspired a wealth of imitators, all of whom would rip-off the infamous tagline. ("In October of 1994, three student filmmakers..."). It was a middle finger to studios making nonsense like The Haunting and The Mummy and other CGI extravaganzas that you didn’t need million-dollar special effects to put asses in seats. You needed ingenuity, passion, and a clever way to sell it all.

Having said all this, and as much as I love The Blair Witch Project, I love “Curse of the Blair Witch” that much more.

In the weeks leading up to The Blair Witch Project’s release, its filmmakers wrote and directed a television special that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it was still called, ya know, the Sci-Fi Channel). A companion piece to the feature film soon to terrify audiences to death, “Curse of the Blair Witch” was an extraordinarily well realized and well-written and even well-acted piece that surely would have been the last piece of convincing anyone skeptical about the coming film’s legitimacy would have needed to full-on believe it was all 100% true. Though peppered with scenes from The Blair Witch Project, “Curse of the Blair Witch” is largely as fake a “documentary” as they come – something that would have aired on The History Channel during the month of October, alongside their investigations into actual vampirism that occurred (and still occurs) in Romania, the Salem witch trials, or the origins of lycanthropy. Actors chosen to play doctors, historians, friends and family of the missing, accused murderers, news reporters, members of law enforcement, eye-witnesses, and the list goes on and on, all come together to paint a very convincing myth about the Blair Witch of Burkittsville. At no point does it feel fake, hammy, or over the top. At no point, since the documentary doesn’t offer up anything in-your-face fantastic or too ridiculous to believe, would you ever doubt its contents, if perhaps you’d stumbled upon it while channel surfing and were totally unaware of what this thing was called The Blair Witch Project. And this is the doc’s greatest strength. There’s no newly-created shaky footage of something creepy occurring before you. There’s nothing contained within purported to be actual anything of the witch. What we have are a collection of talking heads discussing myths and legends, history and hearsay collected from journals, newspaper articles, and everything else entrenched in the town of Burkittsville’s past. We have voice-over actors reading from testimonies and diaries, we have members of Burkittsville with tenuous ties to the conflict that are still made to feel important, and my favorite part, you’ve got one interviewee contradicting another participant’s claims – a typical opposing viewpoint taken out of real life.

 

So what the fuck does this have to do with Halloween? Well, let’s start with the witch aspect, which should be the most obvious. Witch iconography has been synonymous with Halloween for a very long time, and the town of Salem in Massachusetts has since embraced this association, going as far as hosting hordes and hordes of people who descend upon them every October for all kinds of witchy and ghoulish activities. Like a lot of other aspects of Halloween, much of its association was never part of its truest roots, but over time began to adopt certain other portions of history as its own, creating one big orange and black hybrid. (For instance, did you know that the idea of death had nothing to do with Halloween until the Catholic Church butted in and insisted people celebrate All Soul’s Day on November 2 as a way to cancel out the “evil” of the pagans who observed Halloween’s original traditions? Halloween’s sudden proximity to All Soul’s Day for the dead would be just one of many times in which something that had nothing to do with it suddenly became part of its traditions. For serious, yo – Wiki that.)

That the kids in the film go “missing” during the month of October, and that their footage contains them walking across a cemetery or dark foreboding woods where trees stand naked like sentries and the ground is blanketed with browning-over leaves certainly helps to add to the ambiance.

As I’ve explained before, when I think Halloween, I don’t think big cities of suburbia. I think small-town rural America – main streets, farm land, and isolated ramshackle houses in the middle of the woods…much like the one the kids stumble upon in the last ten minutes of the film. Burkittsville embodies much of that, from the beginning of the film in which the kids walk around interviewing townspeople, to the end, where they are stumbling around the woods and discovering a creepy abandoned house covered in children’s hand prints.

Most importantly, something has to feel like Halloween to me. I’ve seen films set on Halloween that don’t feel a goddamn thing like it, but I’ve also seen films, on their surface, not Halloween-related whatsoever, but which still become essential October viewing.

 “Curse of the Blair Witch” is definitely one of them.

RUGRASCALS

Remember "Rugrats," that show on Nickelodeon? What you probably don't know is that the creator of the show, Gabor Csupo, originally planned a late night version of "Rugrats" called "Rugrascals," to be played at night, with more adult humor.

Because every major channel thought the pilot was too disturbing, they refused to air the show, and as a result no-one has really heard about it. However, one station in Wellington, New Zealand mistakenly played it in the morning, thinking it was a regular "Rugrats" episode.

The pilot and only episode of the show that was seen was called "Chuckie's Mom." The intro played like normal, but at the end when Tommy shoots the milk at the screen, the sound effect is much louder, and the milk simply stays there for about 10 seconds, then the name of the episode appears. The episode played out like normal, with the babies playing in the playpen. They are all talking about their moms when Chuckie has a flashback.

It had Chuckie in hospital standing next to his mother in bed, who was dying from an unknown illness. She was singing "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine" to Chuckie in a very weak voice, as if she were about to die, but when she sang the second verse the song started playing in reverse. A shot of Chuckie appeared in front of a live action footage of a toad being dissected, said to represent death by fans. Chuckie turns around and screams, and when he looks back at his mother, her face has a live action man's mouth pasted on it saying, "Don't worry, Chuckie, it's time for me to move on," in a man's voice. A flurry of random live action clips were shown, said to represent death, like a cow walking into a box with "slaughterhouse" crudely drawn on the side, and actual footage of a man suffering AIDS being killed. You can hear Chuckie screaming the entire time. A shot of Chuckie's mom appears again, this time with a chickens beak crudely pasted onto her face, saying, "Don't you remember where it all started?"

The episode then cuts to live-action footage of childbirth mammograms. After about one minute of these mammograms, you hear Chuckie's mom say, "Arent you a lucky ducky, Chuckie?" A harlequin fetus appear. At this time, you see Chuckie come out of the flashback, having a seizure. Tommy, Phil, and Lil are crying, and an ambulance worker calms him down, saying, "Chuckie? Chuckie? Can you hear me?" in a stern voice. Eventually after coughing up blood and vomiting, Chuckie comes to his senses. We then see a point of view shot of Chuckie, seeing Tommy, Phil, Lil, and the ambulance worker as having live-action chicken beaks on their faces, clucking away. A photo of a kid that looks just like Chuckie screaming appears, and the camera zooms into it.

After this, the regular credits played, followed by 15 minutes of static as the station had nothing else to play. Surprisingly, although the episode was watched by many children, only one adult who was watching (me) has spoken about it until now. I was confused to find out that children suicide rates went through the roof in New Zealand that year.

 

Story source.

REACTION: BATES MOTEL

Like it or not, Bates Motel is back in business. Based on the four-film Psycho series beginning with Alfred Hitchcock's legendary original, itself based on the novel by Robert Bloch, Norman Bates is about to go off his rocker...again.

"Bates Motel" explores the early years with Norman (Freddie Highmore) and his domineering, over-protective mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga). After the untimely death of his father, mother and son pack up their car and head to the prime piece of California real estate Norma was able to buy at a steal. It's not long before the Bates begin to meet the locals...including one Keith Summers (W. Earl Brown), whose family had built and then subsequently owned the Bates' new property for generations, and is none too happy to see it under the care of outsiders. Couple this with the girls at school showing Norman a sudden interest, and Norma begins to feel like she is losing control. Her plan for a fresh start is threatened by the unhinged Keith and her control over Norman looks as if it's slipping.

This being a prequel to the prequel to the original Psycho, naturally the blood starts flowing...before Bates Motel checks in its first guest.

This was tried once before...in 1987 (between the third and fourth Psycho entries.) Starring Bud Cort and Tank Girl from Tank Girl, Bates Motel tried its hand as a pilot but ended up being a one-off TV movie due to audiences' sheer disinterest in the subject matter. In the movie, a fellow inmate from Norman's insane asylum (Cort) apparently inherits the former Bates Motel and accompanying house from his crazy friend and attempts to re-open it for business. Who knows why. Murders happen. Blood flows. Moses Gunn is there, having an awesome name. I guess other stuff. Attempts to watch the 58th generation VHS rip posted on Youtube is a Herculean task of patience, so I can't say I was ever able to sit through the whole thing.

But that's all moot, seeing as how "Bates Motel" is being tried again...only we're going back in time...to the present(?).

I chose to call this a "reaction" rather than a review because it's tough to review the very first chapter of what has been planned as an ongoing series. Not a miniseries, mind you, but an honest-to-gosh television show. We've barely scratched the surface of where the show-runners plan to go, so it's tough to pass judgment on what's essentially a nugget of an idea soon to materialize.

So, what was my reaction?

I was hesitant upon realizing the show was being set in modern times. It's strange to see a modern-day prequel to a film made - and which very much reeks of its year - in 1960. But already I can see what the show-runners are attempting: with Norma's collection of somewhat antiquated dresses, Norman's rather drab ensemble and outdated puffy haircut, and with all the very old house furnishings that came with the house, and which Norma claims they'll toss as soon as they can afford to get some other things (but will likely be sticking around), there is going to be more to this show than a fish-out-of-water, the boy-next-door-is-a-killer pulp tale. It's going to be the old culture clashing with the new. Hitchcock's original film played up the isolation of Norman and his mother, especially after "they moved away the highway." So since we're technically not at that point yet, we need to find another way to isolate the Bates - and if not geographically, than culturally. Oh, sure, Norman already has an iPhone upon moving to their new home (a mistake, if you ask me), but beyond his own mother, who also has one, who do you think he ever called with it? Because of this culture clash, I find the modern updating a little more forgivable  The Bates exist in the modern world, but in their own time. It's too early to tell how this will play out, but it's an interesting choice.

Vera Farmiga is one of her generation's most unfairly uncelebrated actresses. The Departed likely put her on the map, as well it should have, because she's great in the Boston-set crime piece, but she's been holding her own since and struggling somewhat to be re-recognized. She's certainly not a stranger to playing the mother of a somewhat...aloof child (see Joshua and Orphan), but this time she gets to show off her own brand of crazy. Not that we've yet to see any of this craziness per se - this is, after all, only the pilot episode - but something is there, simmering just under the surface. It's handled perfectly subtly, and Farmiga seems to be doing a good job of playing her role right down the middle - she's not all there, and you can somewhat tell, but we're not rooting against her yet (if we're ever meant to.)

The jury is still out on Freddie Highmore as Norman. He seems, at best, adequate for the time being. This might be the most high-profile project he's been a part of since 2005's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That coupled with the jump to television has made the struggling thespian a little too willing to show off his chops. Some of it works, but some of it borders on embarrassment. Not helping him any is the sometimes awkward dialogue (ie, "There's a man on the floor lying in a lake of blood! What do we do, mother? We have no idea what to do!") 

Confessing my ignorance on details of the actual production, the show creators have either opted to film exteriors on the original Universal black lot to include the infamous house and motel, or they have done an admirable job of recreating it - including the house and motel interiors. Either way, good on them. The mere idea of updating the Bates house, forever sitting atop its perch, is blasphemous, and I'll definitely cop to some movie geek chills seeing the Bates house and motel again after all these years.

Oh, and for the record, does Norman seriously meet five gorgeous girls and is taken out for a night on the town by simply sitting on a bench and listening to classical music? The fuck?

Only in the world of make-believe...

Surprisingly, A&E seems to be going ahead with the suggestive incestuous undertones that were only alluded to in the original film, and which became more and more direct in each successive sequel. Nothing too obnoxious - at least so far - just a mixture of slightly unnatural mother/son closeness and a couple suggestive glances... although the soliloquy Norman delivers to his mother to close out the episode might blow the lid off my usage of "nothing too obnoxious."

And that is where my main point of contention comes into play: The relationship between Norman and his mother is essential - it is the driving force to both of their madnesses, and it will make or break how the show plays out moving forward. All during this pilot episode, Norman has made it a point to act out, defy his mother's wishes (and orders), and attempt to forge his own identity. He meets new people rather easily considering the show wants us to buy he is an outcast, and for the most part, the girls swoon to him like crazy (which will likely rile up the "jealous and angry boyfriend" character trope we've seen so many times before). And yet...after Norman experiences a taste of this new life, in which gorgeous girls give him the time of day and he effortlessly makes friends and nothing remotely traumatic happens to him...why does he just opt to leave it all behind for his mother? There's no catalyst - no clear reason why he does so. There's no reason present why this new life just isn't for him. Arcs like this hinge on a moment for a character to realize they were wrong to think they could leave it all behind, but we just never understand why Norman does, and it was a rather weak way for the episode to end.

So what would Alfred Hitchcock think?

Hitch, who is back in a big way recently with this, his titular bio pic, and his less than flattering portrayal as a misogynistic prick in HBO/BBC's The Girl, would appreciate the casting of Highmore - at least in theory. Like Anthony Perkins in the original, Highmore is a handsome if somewhat awkward looking kid; rather unassuming and harmless...at least on the surface. For anyone familiar with Robert Bloch's original novel (it's been ten years since I last read it), Norman Bates was not a primp, skinny, and handsome fellow, but rather described as fat and hideous - a man who no woman would ever consider a feasible partner in any sense. It was Hitch who decided to cast the handsome but plain Tony Perkins in the role, changing not just the character's face, but his dynamism and his drawing power. (As an aside, while the novel does contain a motel room shower murder, it's not dozens of stabs as depicted in the film's iconic scene, but just the one - in which Marion Crane is decapitated by Norman's blade.)

Additionally, citing one particular scene featuring a urinating cop, let's just say Hitch would appreciate the black humor as well, of which he was a master. From a director's standpoint, however, he would appreciate nothing. (Granted, we're in television, here - not film - but even "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" showed a little creative flair from time to time.) Nor would he appreciate the pilot hitting the ground running without taking time to build the Bates' madness. If anyone could milk the inevitable, it was him, and he would call the show's attempt to get right into it cheap and unsatisfying.

As a show free from its lineage and judged on its own merits, it's a decent first trek into scripted narrative for A&E. There's already enough ongoing drama to engage viewers not looking for growth to a previously established character, and there's enough grue to keep horror fans satiated, along with some not-so-subtle shout-outs (Coach Carpenter! Sheriff Romero!), and, of course, plenty of pretty faces. As for me, I'll tune in from time to time to see what's going on with Norman and his mother, but regardless of where they take this show, and regardless of how realistic or fantastic they make it, there's one thought that will always be looming in the back of my mind: Norman Bates' monologue to Marion Crane in the original film is all the back story we ever really needed - summed up neatly and effectively in just a matter of minutes. Because of that, I fear that "Bates Motel" was already irrelevant before the opening credits ever rolled.

Make up your own mind when "Bates Motel" premieres this Monday on A&E. 

LEVITY

DAY 21: TRICK-R-TREAT

"When I was growing up Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays. Trick or treat we use to say. Of course back then we always expected a treat and if we did play a trick, it was always funny and harmless. But tonight there were no treats, there were no tricks, there was only death."

DAY 17: TRICK-R-TREAT

"I love Halloween. The one time of year when everyone wears a mask... not just me. People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster. Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not. Brother, friend, boyfriend - All part of my costume collection. Some people might call me a fraud. Let's see if it will fit. I prefer to think of myself as a master of disguise."

GONE SONNIN'

Taking a break to catch up with the latest from Sam Crow.

Are you watching S.O.A.? If not...why not?

ON A PALE HORSE

Click.

 

Oh, Death, оh Death, oh Death;
Won't you spare me over til another year?

But what is this, that I can't see
with ice cold hands taking hold of me?

When God is gone and the Devil takes hold,
who will have mercy on your soul?

Oh, Death, оh Death, oh Death;
No wealth, no ruin, no silver, no gold;
Nothing satisfies me but your soul.

Oh, Death;
Well I am Death, none can excel,
I'll open the door to heaven or hell.

Oh, Death, оh Death;
my name is Death and the end is here...

If you are not watching Supernatural, I pity you.

DUDE, BRO! GHOSTS!

Possessions. Voodoo. Ghost sex.

It's all in a day's work for the hosts of Ghost Adventures, a highly entertaining ghost hunting show enigmatically featured on the Travel Channel.

While I am immensely interested in the paranormal, I consider myself a skeptic. I've never seen a ghost, nor ever personally encountered any strong evidence that would convince me of their existence. I have listened to several EVPs captured by someone very close I absolutely trust, and the voices caught on them certainly made me raise an eyebrow. But at the same time...that's not enough. Still, I remain open-minded to the possibility. To so assuredly proclaim that ghosts don't exist reeks of arrogance to me, because really, how do you know? Science unearths discoveries every day that sometimes contradict earlier findings. It's the nature of the thing. Who is to say what doesn't exist today will become otherwise tomorrow? But that's best saved for another debate between folks far more brained than I.

Ghost Adventures is a ghost hunting show like no other. It is not hosted by a drab old British man, or a couple of plumbers. It is hosted by three of the most entertaining frat guys you have ever met.

Your main host is Zak Bagans. His impetuous dynamism and intensity would almost be contagious if it weren't almost constantly teetering on absurdity. He religiously performs over the top monologues and speaks with HALTING. TONES. RIGHT. AT. YOU. Regularly dressed in paint-splatter crest t-shirts and black jeans, and with his hair seemingly its own living entity, one gets the feeling that his penchant for ghost hunting just about overshadows his penchant for male modeling. I once asked a fellow paranormal enthusiast what they thought of Ghost Adventures. They replied, "It's decent - but that main guy is kind of a tool." That's a pretty accurate summation of Zak Bagans, what with his macho-ism and bulging tattooed biceps. While an official label for Zak would be metro-sexual, I prefer the term Baganism. He truly is in a class by himself.

Zak Bagans.
Leader. Macho. Moe.

 
Next in the line-up is Nick Groff, certainly the least dynamic of the hosts, but probably the  bravest. He's usually the one getting locked into morgue drawers and sitting in rooms by himself. He is the Dean Martin of the duo, playing the straight man against Zak's Jerry Lewis. He comes across as fairly level-headed and not nearly as brutish as Zak. He is like a tabletop diner jukebox, or Vice-President Biden. He's just kind of there.

Nick Groff.
Zak's Number Two. Straight Man. Larry.

Last, but certainly not least, we have Aaron Goodwin. This lovable goofball is the heart of the show. He takes the most abuse and does whatever he is ordered to do, like sit in rooms by himself and ask taunting questions he really doesn't want to ask, or crawl under antique death wagons as Zak and Nick watch him on their monitors and snicker. If the Ghost Adventures crew were The Three Stooges, Aaron would be Curly. He has a charisma that goes beyond playing third fiddle on a reality television show. As tremendously entertaining as he is on the show, you just know the man is ten times as such off camera. He is definitely a guy with whom you wish you were friends. He also makes the best scared face in existence.

Aaron Goodwin.
Whipping Boy. Lovable. Curly.

The three men make for enormous entertainment - and the show is both intentionally and unintentionally funny. When each of them encounters something unexplainable, they are sure to shout, "Dude!", "Man!", or "Bro!" In one specific episode, Nick feels a cold burst pass through him, and he holds up his hands in surrender and shouts, "Whoa, dude!" It comes so close to bordering on self-parody that you have to wonder how aware the Ghost Adventure guys are of their own legacy.

While most of the intentional humor comes from Aaron, Zak manages to climb out from under his haze of self-serious theatre-delivery dialogue and make an occasional joke. Especially entertaining is when he demands a spirit to produce a sign of its presence, and when it does, he shrieks and hops out of the room in terror.

Because the investigations are shot entirely in full dark, there are many scenes of our hosts literally poking each other in the eye, walking into doors, stepping in puddles, and bonking their heads against something. They really, truly are The Three Stooges. But the real humor comes when the investigation begins...

The episodes are structured much like any other ghost hunting show: first, the story of the location; second, the eyewitness accounts; third, the plan; and then fourth, the investigation - your bread and butter of the episodes. This allows for Zak to practice his technique of literally pissing off the ghosts so that they will perform for him. And while this is essentially him wandering around empty rooms and demanding the entities make their presence known, the commands he delivers are often improvised (which at least lends credence to the notion that this show is definitely not scripted, and if it is, the guys are terrible at remembering their lines). They all literally stumble through phrases that are meant to incite a response from whatever entities may be around them, but instead, their output sounds awkward and instantly amusing. In the Scotland Edinburgh Vaults episode, a place in which the entities allegedly target pregnant women, Nick wanders around with his digital recorder and stutters, "Is it true... that you hate... pregnant... woman?" In the Ohio Reformatory episode, Aaron sits in the middle of the prison showers where one prisoner was once "gang-raped" to death. In an effort to reach out to the dead prisoner's spirit, Aaron states, "I'm sorry about how you were killed. That was a lousy thing for them to done." He then goes on to add, "No one should die naked."

The best line-flubs come from Zak, because he speaks with immense authority. He reaches Will Ferrell levels of unearned arrogance with some of the broken phrases he spits out. I wish I had an example for you, but they are just too numerous; however, there is one quirk of Zak's about which I can be specific, and one I find tremendously entertaining: his habit of going off on mini-tirades after having just witnessed something spooky, but then screaming at his counterparts to shut up the minute they open their mouths.

ZAK: Did you hear that? Did you hear that? I just heard something down that hallway! I swear, dudes, I heard it! I heard it!
AARON: I heard--
ZAK: SHUT UP SSHHH SHUT THE FUCK UP!!

It's something that never fails to bring me joy.

OMG!

Nine times out of ten (like any other ghost hunting show), the evidence the guys enthusiastically collect is not terribly interesting and is very inkblot-ish in nature. They'll record an EVP that they translate to be "I hate you" but in reality sounds like "...feh..." And while interviewees will describe eerie sightings of full-body entities in historical dress floating down hallways and beckoning to them; phantom dogs and children; the smell of nonexistent foods or perfumes; and the sounds of ghostly flute music or entire country songs, the evidence the guys collect with their arsenal of cameras never manage to reach these impressive levels. At most they capture garbled audio, wisps of something passing in front of the camera, or lights way off in the distance. They also show their arms to the camera so we can see their goosebumps or hair standing on end, something they attribute to the presence of spirits (but can also happen when your favorite song comes on the radio, or during Bill Pullman's riveting Independence Day monologue). Yes, in terms of evidence, the guys have never really caught something that is both entirely unexplainable and knock-your-socks-off insane (the thrown brick from their original documentary notwithstanding - I find that extremely suspicious).

But then in a complete 180, the guys will make some pretty outrageous claims: that they used the services of a witch to call forth a succubus (incubus? succubus? incubus?); that each of them have received scratches from angry spirits; that they used a voodoo priestess named Bloody Mary to call for spirits of slaves long dead; that both Zak and Nick were "possessed" at certain points during season two (the latter making what a friend has termed "the angry Facebook photo face").

And this is where I have issues with the show. As I stated earlier, I do not believe in ghosts, but I do believe their existence is a possibility. I want to watch a show like Ghost Adventures, or any of the other shows, and think, "This could be real." When the guys claim possession, or that voodoo and witchcraft calls forth spirits or demons at their own whim, or that ghosts of cowboys and prostitutes are fucking in an unseen netherworld - sorry guys, you've lost me.That's when the show strays into bullshit territory.

All of this makes me sound like I am picking on the guys - especially Zak - and the show itself, but that's really not my intention. I heart all three of these fellows, and I hope they never stop doing what they do. Their show has brought me immense entertainment - whether intentional or not - and I would never change a single thing about their investigations. Exaggerated - or even downright fake - the show is too entertaining to dismiss.

The show has many fans (1.7 million on Facebook), and they range from the casual, to the dedicated, to the fucking horrifying. Despite the subject matter of the show - ghosts, bloody murders, institutional abuse, child death - there is still one thing truly scarier than all of that put together, but yet still directly associated with Zak Bagans himself:

Fan fiction.

Yes, because of Zak's rippling muscles and shellacked hair, he has become a god amongst the Twilight teen crowd. Girls (and most assuredly some boys) dream of Zak holding them tightly in the night and protecting them from ghosts, all the while pointing directly into their faces and shouting that the kissing about to go down will be the MOST. EXTREME. KISSING. EVER.

GET. READY. FOR. MY. HUG.

This little bit, stolen from an online journal entitled "Zak Bagans - In the Flesh" gives me an extra dose of the willies:

“OOOHHHH ZAK…. OOOO YEA…. OOOO BABE, HARDER” i screamed.

“uuuuhhhhh” zak grunted as we both came.

an hour later we were cleaned up and sitting on the beach together.

“are you happy” zak asked.

“of course, more than ever” i smiled.

“me too babe” he said kissing me.

i apologize for how short the story is. i just got my daughter a puppy, and its been a lot of work, please forgive me, i promise you all i will post tomorrow and it will be a full chapter.

Dude...

I take great solace in the fact that somewhere out there, our three beloved frat brothers are wandering around an abandoned silo with flashlights, demanding in authoritative voices that the hiding ghost materialize in front of them...so when it does, they can shriek in the night and run for safety - tripping, falling, and saying, "why I oughta...."

Enter the world of Ghost Adventures. Your life will be all the better for it.

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