SCREAM / HOMO HOMINI LUPUS

Scream/Homo Homini Lupus

© AJ Frena 

THE HORRIBLE MAN

I’d actually seen him on our way home from school. He looked dirty and disturbed, and stared straight at us as our bus went by. We even made jokes about him, probably as our way of pretending we weren’t afraid. He was incredibly out of place in our middle class suburb, so his mere presence felt threatening… thus our panic when the three of us got off at our stop and saw him at the corner, about to look in our direction.

He was between us and our houses, and the bus had already pulled away, so we bolted for the bushes of a nearby yard. We weren’t sure if he had seen us, but we peered through the leaves and saw him stalking our way, muttering randomly. Tim, my neighbor, insisted that he’d seen a large knife in the man’s ragged clothing. Danny, a kid I hardly knew who had just moved into the neighborhood, insisted that he was imagining it – that Tim’s glasses must have reflected the sun wrong or something. Still, we were terrified, and the sidewalk was going to bring him right by us.

It was Tim that broke and ran first, keeping low. I followed, my heart pounding, as we dove into the darkness underneath the porch of the unfamiliar house we’d been hiding near. As we squeezed our bodies against the dirt, the grimy wood pressed into our backs, barely giving us enough room to breathe. From our hiding place, we could see the disturbed man turn into the yard in front of us and begin searching around, hitting the bushes and muttering angrily.

I realized then that Danny wasn’t with us, but I hadn’t seen where he’d gone. Tim had lost his glasses back at the bushes, and he just huddled in the shadows next to me in near-blind terror. We stayed there in silence, waiting. Every so often, whenever I almost thought it was safe to come out, footsteps would creep across the wooden porch above us. Tim almost sneezed, once, but I covered his mouth and nose in stark fear.

We waited there so long that the tone of the sunlight began to change. We hadn’t heard the man searching about in awhile, and I was just getting ready to peek out, when footsteps clattered and a thud hit the wood directly above us. A split second later, Danny’s face appeared in front of us upside down, and he looked at us through the lattice. A look of shock and surprise crossed his features at finally finding us. He whispered something, but I couldn’t hear anything. He seemed to be saying “come closer,” so I figured the horrible man was still around and we had to be quiet, and I inched forward.

Danny’s features grew fearful, and he kept indicating something above us. Strangely, I still couldn’t hear him… his eyes seemed to dim then, and I inched forward a little bit more. I froze for a moment in horror, then backed up. Tim mouthed to me: “What did he say?” and I just shook my head, completely in shock. Danny hadn’t conveyed “come closer,” he had mimed “he’s up there.” The drifter was unknowingly sitting right above us, waiting, because he knew we had to be somewhere in that yard.

There was nothing to do but wait in silence, trying not to scream. I was glad Tim had lost his glasses. I lay there as darkness descended, waiting in unwavering terror and trying not to feel the glassy stare of Danny’s severed head as it rested in the grass a foot away.

Story source.

MUSIC FOR FILM: EXIT HUMANITY

Except to a cineaste, the musical score might be one of the most important aspects of film that is consistently taken for granted. Tasked with both complementing the action on-screen as well as manipulating your emotions, film scoring is essential to creating an effective tone and generating the appropriate response from its audience, whether that response is fear, melancholy, excitement, or jubilation. Regardless of the actual film’s quality – whether great or ghastly – the score is the only component of the film that will live on in perpetuity in a separate form. Some of these scores stand head and shoulders above others and deserve to be recognized. This is one of them. 

 

I can't shut the fuck up about Exit Humanity. I mean...I really can't. Sorry? (Although I'm not – I really really dug this film.) I can't help but heap praise on and enthusiasm for genre films that come completely out of nowhere and sucker-punch me with their awesome. Such is the case with this Canadian-lensed zombies-meet-the-Civil-War epic, narrated by Brian Cox and containing brief segments of hand-drawn animation. That's about where my review portion of the film ends – you can check out the above link for more on that.

I find that one of the major pitfalls of low-budget film-making is a supreme lack of resources when it comes to the musical score. Stuff composed on a synthesizer, and by someone who isn't quire ballsy enough to establish their own sound – you can hear that from a mile away. So when it comes to low-budget horror, I really only ask that the music just be serviceable. If I'm wanting for the actual film to be of decent quality – the story, the acting, and the directing – then I wouldn't allow myself to be so picky about the music. The way I figure: don't push your luck.

So when I hear music that's as beautiful as the score to Exit Humanity, composed by Nate Kreiswirth, Jeff Graville, and Ben Nudds, I just can't help but love it all the more. And I really do love this score – it might just be up there with Phantasm and The Fog as my most played. And that's pretty surprising, because so much of this score would sound right at home in a dramatic sweeping epic about war-torn lovers or some such mother movies, not a film in which faces get bitten off and zombs are shot full of holes. Naturally, since Exit Humanity does feature scenes of zombie attacks and other undead carnage, there are some tracks in there to jar and unsettle you, but the majority of these are something well beyond that. In a way, the score is genre-less – you can place any one track against any one scene in any one movie and they would work – and elevate – the actions and/or emotions on screen.

Listen carefully to "A Fresh Grave." You will hear this theme occur throughout the entirety of the score; a mixture of strings and harp get things going before it all takes a backseat to a pretty and sad piano melody. That pretty much sums up Exit Humanity the film and Exit Humanity the score: pretty and sad. (Plus ghouls.)

"Searching for Answers" is a foreboding track pulsing with heavy low piano that soon meshes with distorted and shrieking pulls on an instrument that I couldn't even decipher. Hands on cat-skin tom-toms back everything up and keep things moving while electronic warbling in the background fill in the eerie gaps. It's a pretty appropriate track to play alongside the film's protagonist waking up to discover his wife is dead and his son is missing.

"Seeking Family" dials down the horror and ups that gorgeous harp, which will drive this particular track, along with those sustained strings. With 45 seconds left in the track, it all falls silent, allowing the harp to solo before bringing it all back together again. (I sincerely hope that is a harp I am hearing, or else I am going to feel like an asshole every time I bring it up.)

With "Bitter Reunion," I hope by now you're noticing the vast collection of instruments that comprise this score, with a flute leading the charge this go-round. Unless you're writing background music for a fairy tale, or you're the feature film Titanic, the flute is very rarely relied on front-and-center when it comes to film music, and yet, here it is all the same. Once again, it's pretty, but also somewhat feverish at the same time.

Both "Looking Back" and "Moving On" revisit those same stirring strings and harp established in "A Fresh Grave." Once again, we're nowhere near horror territory here. The score exists not to give you the creeps or get your pulse going, but instead make you feel. I know! It's crazy! And in a zombie movie!

"Edward and Isaac Bond" is a superb fucking track, and the filmmakers must know it, because it appears mid-way through the film as well as a reprise during the cut-to-black end credits. This track sounds like no other in the film, driven by a banjo, of all fucking things, and it's one that builds and builds, layering in more and more instruments. It's a damn shame it's under two minutes, as I'd listen to an entire score based just on what's going on here. You can tell the second it begins that it's going in a direction completely opposite to where we'd been heading up to this point. If I were to listen to any one track on repeat, it's this one. Simply awesome.

The score takes a darker turn with "Enter the General," "Emma's Escape," and "The Witch." At this point, we're now facing our antagonists for the first time – a sort of Day of the Dead-ish band of military outlaws kidnapping the uninfected and exposing each of them to the zombie virus in hopes of finding a bloodline immune to the "scourge." Since we're in unfamiliar territory here, not only does the score get darker, but it adds some unorthodox approaches. Small trap instruments rattle in the background and make you think of small, scurrying rodents in the corners behind you. In fact, this is largely a percussive-driven series of tracks, along with those screeching strings, and all of it comes together to sound nightmarish and unnerving.

"Looking Forward" – there's nothing I can even say. To even try would make me sound like some kind of douche bag, and since I've been kind of straddling that line with this entire post, I guess I'll have to refrain. But...just gorgeous. A chorus of voices, those strings, the harp, the piano. Beauty personified. It's the stuff happy tears are made of.

Parts One and Two of "Ashes on Waterfall" bring back that melancholy feeling in a big way. I suppose that's inevitable, since this sequence has our hero traveling to Ellis Falls to disperse his son's ashes, after remembering a promise to him that he would take him there...while he was still alive, that is. Still, this father wanted to make good on that promise, and so off he goes. This track and the next are likely the most beautiful, because it's here where the narration by Brian Cox is at its most poignant and uplifting. And you take all that and marry it to the pink and purple sun-skewed sky and the billowing landscapes filled with green trees and brown wheat, and yeah: film boner.

After a few more tracks that lend themselves to the dark and deranged, our heroes break free from their prison and take back to the zombie-infested forest. "Chase" sounds like something nearly out of Batman Begins. It's relentless, though it does break every so often for what could only be described as film-score improvisation. Great stuff, and yes, perfect chase music.

"Reunion/Ending" revisits all the themes previously established, and is again bolstered by the powerfully affecting voice of your narrator Brian Cox. I even have this track ripped from the blu-ray and it appears dead last in the album. The music by itself is amazing enough, but the "farewell" of sorts using Mr. Cox's voice-over transforms it into something else entirely. I actually wish they'd release a version of the score that contains the film's voice-over. Even without the visual components of the film, the voice-over tells one complete story – like listening to an audiobook that happens to have exceptional music.

Much like the film itself, the score to Exit Humanity kinda comes out of nowhere. It's easy to read a one-sentence synopsis for the film and based on that, deduce what kind of garish death metal or keyboard-slamming music you're about to receive alongside it, but you'd be wrong. So pleasantly horribly wrong.

Grab the complete score (and how often does that happen?) for Exit Humanity right now from the composers' bandcamp page. And tell Nate I said, "hey, man."

SPIRITED

MISSING CAT

THE LAUGHING

I'd already been out there for about four days, doing some off trail hiking, and I had a great time. I used to love going out in the woods by myself; I liked the solitude. I must have gotten turned around; I didn't end up back where I wanted to be at what was supposed to be the end of my trip. I later found out that I had been going in the almost complete opposite direction of my car. It was about three days after I was supposed to be home. I was just trying to get out of there, when it started with seeing things.

Just on the edge of my vision; shadows. I'd look, but then there'd be nothing there. At night, I would hear noises outside my tent. At first I thought it was just animals, and I'm sure some of the sounds were, but others...I heard scratching, and sometimes late at night, I'd wake up and hear breathing, not like any animal. I'd call out, thinking maybe someone was there, but I'd never get an answer.

This went on for a few days; I thought maybe it was just the woods getting to me. You hear horror stories about hunters who get lost and start hallucinating, or who die of thirst with water in their packs. The forest can mess with you. But about a week after I got lost, I saw her off in the distance, maybe 200 ft. away, hands at her sides, and she was tall. Six or seven feet, with her head craned downward, like she was deformed or something. But she was still looking at me.

She wore this dirty dress that hung down to the ground. I called out, but she didn't do or say anything. I started running towards her. I was scared, but by then I was worried that I wasn't going to make it out of those woods. I got within maybe 100 ft, but she stepped behind a tree, and when I got up there, I was just alone. I don't know where she could have gone.

The next couple days I didn't see anything, and the nights were quiet. I just kept following this creek, hoping I'd find something, anything. I ran out of food on the tenth day, and that night I woke up, not sure what time it was, to this laughing from outside; a low giggling, it lasted for a few seconds. Had I dreamt it? I opened the flap of my tent and called out, but all I could hear was the sound of running water, which was strange. There should have been bugs, deer, wind, something...but it was just so quiet.

Then a loud snap from about twenty feet away I shined my flashlight and I saw her there, half-hidden, poking out from behind a tree, grinning at me. I got a better look at her than before. She was old, her hair done up in a bun. And her face was...distorted. Her nose was too long, crooked. Her eyes were too close together, too big. Black. We stared at each other for a long time, and when I called out to her, her grin just got wider. I just sat there, frozen, looking at her. I yelled again; I asked her what she wanted. And she just laughed, this scratchy, painful laugh. Then she stepped out of the light and I couldn't find her again.

The rest of the night, I heard...things outside. Even the constant bubbling of the creek scared me. I wanted out; I was hungry, exhausted, and scared for my life. I truly believed that I was going to die in those woods. At first light I set out, walking as fast as I could away from my campsite. Sometime in the late afternoon, I came across an old logging road. It didn't look like it had been used in years, and I knew that it didn't mean that I was safe yet, but still, seeing that sign of humanity was happiest moment of life.

It was getting dark and I felt like I was going to pass out, but I didn't want to stop. I don't think that I could have slept anyway. Somehow I found the energy to keep going. About two hours after I started following the road, it was pitch black out, and it started to rain. I'd been lucky enough to have good enough weather for my trip, but within a few minutes it was pouring. I was plodding along as fast as I could when I heard the footsteps behind me. I'd stop and listen, and they would stop, too. I'd start walking and I'd hear them again. A few times I thought that I could see her, stopped not too far behind me. And more than once I heard her laughing, that disgusting laugh.

It was almost dawn when I came to the top of a hill and saw lights. Lights! Mankind! Civilization! I practically fell down the hill, stumbling to the door of the small house, I must have looked like some kind of monster; dirty, wet, exhausted. They took me inl it was an old couple; they gave me some food and a bed to sleep in. I woke up and they told me that I slept for 15 hours. I told them about the woman I saw, and nice as they were, I could tell that I was making them uncomfortable. They told me it was just the hunger, but I know what I saw. Out there, deep in the woods. And I'll never forget the laughing.

Story source.

WATCHING ME

"Couple months ago, my parents had a problem with their gas water heater. Gas company sends a guy out, as they have some kind of warranty. He goes down the basement, comes up later and says to my parents, 'I fixed it and it works fine. If you have any problems just call and they'll send another tech out. It won't be me because there was an old guy standing down there watching me the whole time. Bye.'"