Review: "The Witch"

 

EGGERS, Robert, “The Witch – A New England Folktale”, A24/Parts & Labor/RT Features/Rooks Nest Entertainment/Maiden Voyage & Motte Street Pictures/Code Red Productions/Scythia Films/Special Projects, 2015.

An ongoing complaint that I have with horror movies of late is that they don’t really say anything new. There’s a lot of pretty photography, some swell acting and interesting use of special effects (both digital and otherwise), but on the whole it’s all in support of material which is pretty lacklustre. The recent version of “The Colour Out of Space” springs to mind as does “Midsommar” – very nice to look at but nothing we haven’t seen before. Here too, we have the same notion – this is a very attractive piece of work but the story, the issues it wrestles with, the themes and subtext, are all tired old notions and tropes that offer nothing new to what has been done elewhere. It interests me to note that the production house A24 helped make this thing (along with a mind-boggling slew of other companies) and that they also had a hand in making “Midsommar” as well as Eggers’s next offering “The Lighthouse”. Is the creation of cinematic white bread fare (“Lighthouse” excepted) their raison d’être I wonder?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing from a certain point of view. Many old-time film staples are no longer available, in any kind of format. Old ground-breaking movies are referenced as seminal but aren’t screening anywhere, able to be purchased on disc or tape, or streaming on any platform, even YouTube (although what IS available on YouTube is pretty amazing). Taking these old horror stand-bys and putting them through a 21^st Century production routine is one way of ensuring that the old ideas don’t disappear into the haze of current blockbuster fare – there’s a reason we have radio stations that play Golden Oldies. However, it seems to me that these “new” films rarely take the time to acknowledge their roots and to tip their hats to the masters of yore. Memories are long however, and there are those of us who are simply left scratching our heads and saying “and…?”.

Basically, if you’ve seen “Children of the Corn” or “The Wicker Man”, you’ve seen “Midsommar”; if you’ve seen “Creepshow” or “The Thing from Another Planet”, you’ve seen “The Colour Out of Space”. Here, if you’ve seen “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, then you’ve seen “The Witch”. It’s not as if the storylines are necessarily the same – if fact they’re suitably different – but the issues, the tropes, the way the plots unfold, the issues which they dangle from, are all standard and well-thumbed. In fact, they’re expected, to such a degree that these films must only be considered pastiche versions of earlier material, with an unacknowledged fealty to what has gone before.

There’re are some caveats with this movie. The long list of production companies that starts the film is a clear indicator that this is a first feature from an upcoming director. When you’re new, you have to hustle a lot to get funds for your project, and here it’s clear that Eggers spent a long time schmoozing before his film got green lit. A common feature of this practice is that you don’t want to scare away the money by doing something that’s too ‘out there’, that’s untried and which may not induce a return on investment by attracting viewers. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Eggers’s first feature is somewhat comfortable; that it’s a safe option in many respects: we have to acknowledge that there would be no “Lighthouse” without the “Witch” paving the way.

That being said, Eggers does work hard to make his piece seem a little bit above the herd. He is a stickler for period detail and there’s plenty to enjoy here. The language especially rings true here, taken as it is from old journals and court case transcriptions: if you’re going to build characters from their dialogue you can do worse than use the actual words of those who lived when your story is set. The result is very satisfying and works better than just having the actors bung on a cod-Brit accent and tossing in handfuls of “thees” and “thous”. Of course, using actual Brits to portray your nascent Americans is a smart step also. There are nice period details outside of the language too – the wardrobe and set design has all been obviously well-researched and the functioning of this stuff is nicely established.

Eggers likes having animals act in his flicks and this caused me huge problems during “The Lightouse”. I had to stop the film at the point when Young Thomas thrashes the seagull to death and I spent a long time checking up whether or not they had actually killed a bird on film – thankfully they did not. Here in “The Witch” there are a lot of animals involved – several goats, a horse, a dog and some ravens – and I was bit leery of some of it. There are at the end, several goat carcases lying about which always gives me pause – the sophistry that “these are animals which will probably be killed anyway so let’s record it for posterity”, is a thin and nasty one as far as I’m concerned and needs to be stopped, otherwise we should just go all Michael Cimino on our movies and kill anything that moves for the sake of cinema verité (I don’t think). This is cinema people, not snuff video production. There are standards. There are actually moments in “the Witch” where it’s clear that no animals are involved in some of the scenes where they are crucial, and that their involvement is implied rather than shown. Black Phillip’s attack on William is revealed as a jump-cut and the resulting collapse of the burgeoning log pile is filmed so that neither the actor or the animal – it’s clear – are anywhere near the potential danger. It’s nowhere near as bad as the fact that Barry Lyndon’s leg is actually stuck through the bed he’s lying on at the end of the eponymous film, but it’s ballpark.

Along with this there’s a confusing moment after Thomasin and Caleb are lost in the forest and their horse – Bert – is scared off. Caleb tries to re-locate it and only finds a mutilated body fallen into a thicket at a later stage. I had to stop the film at his point because it wasn’t clear if the body was that of the horse or of the dog (which had also fled from the witch’s assault): it was far in the background, fuzzy and indistinct. Kudos for sparing us the trauma of a dying animal but points off for nebulosity.

The atmosphere of the film is suitably moody and dark, in line with the tempestuous emotions of the players. Eggers’s film crew, under the guidance of Jarin Blashcke, are top notch and really deliver the goods here, while offering a promise of what was to come in their next project. The supernatural elements are all nicely low-key, allowing an equivocal perspective on the events while also delivering some good shocks. The apple was a particularly nice touch, I thought. The ending felt a little twee to me – if the reveal that (*gasp!*) the witches are real was supposed to be startling, then it was killed at birth (much like the infant Samuel at the start, which was genuinely alarming and which actually de-bags the cats that the ending was relying upon). I was left wondering why we were being asked to be shocked by something which, from the beginning, was a fait accompli.

All of this aside, this is an entertaining work but, if you’re the sort of person who gets stressed by the tangles of bigoted religious distrust upon which “The Crucible” is built, then you might want to steel yourself. Eggers takes old cloth and makes new jackets from it – not as ineptly as in that despicable version of the “The Scarlet Letter” that starred Demi More and Gary Oldman (shudder!) – in fact, it’s quite an engaging piece. But nevertheless, it’s still old ground being covered.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Postscript: The marketing for this film is really annoying. If you look it up online you’ll see a cool image of a goat’s head (Black Phillip) and the standard title and tagline. But when I bought the DVD, the cover here in Australia is a cheesy shot of a naked chick walking through the woods under a full moon (as seen above). I mean, who makes these shit decisions? I’d rather have the goat’s head image than yet another cheesecake-y soft-porn shot that makes me uncomfortable when I front up to the cash register. All I can say is that marketing types have filthy, dirty little minds that inevitably run to lowest denominator thinking. This film is not about naked chicks walking through forests; it’s about something else. I refuse to even consider the possibility that the promoters of this DVD actually watched the thing – they just looked at some screen grabs and said, “that’ll do it – the shot with the naked chick”. Sheesh!

The other point that bothers me is the amount of flak the title gets for printing the word “witch” with two V’s rather than a W. Lots of commentators bitch about how, by the time this film is set, W’s were in common parlance and no longer cobbled together from unused V’s. Now, that might be true, but when you’re pilgrim settlers on uncharted shores, your available stocks of movable type are limited and, if you’ve lost your W, then two Vs will do it. Cut these guys some slack!

Hobo Signs...

In the aftermath of the Civil War in America, many displaced people – some the victims of war; some freed slaves, or those seeking freedom - took to the roads looking for places to live, to lay low, or to start new lives. Much of the movement of these displaced people coincided with the expansion of railroad networks and the growth of industry in the post-War era; the homeless wanderers made their way across the country by means of hopping illegally onto railcars and “riding the rails” to wherever the trains were headed. As a group, this itinerant underclass became known as “Hobos” and they were a feature of the American landscape right up until the end of the 1930s.

In line with the pioneering literature of the country – from dime store cowboy novels to the loftier heights of such works as Huckleberry Finn – the lifestyle of the hobos became suffused with romantic notions of freedom and of being footloose – not tied down by the tiresome exigencies of a tedious workaday lifestyle. Hobos took on the sheen and romance of the European Troubadours, becoming a gypsy race free to roam and do as they pleased, without having to answer to any higher power. Of course, there was the downside to this lifestyle, in that it was based on a certain level of illegality – flouting carriage laws as they pertained to rail networks, and some petty larceny in order to avoid starvation – and a degree of danger – of being run over by a train, or of being beaten up by zealous law enforcement agents – but this was considered a fair exchange for being free to do as one chose.

In cinematic circles, this romantic sheen was all too clear - performers such as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields, along with many others, created characters and made films glorifying the gleefully shambolic lifestyle of the hobo. In fact, the down-at-heel, hardscrabble homeless clown became an entertainment staple informing all kinds of media representation from blockbuster movies to Disney comics.

Hobos were said to have their own codes of governance – particular rail networks were jealously guarded by hobo factions who prevented others from using them – and to have their own argot in order to speak without the uninitiated overhearing what was being discussed. Such notions have been the tradition in many underworld societies across the planet from the earliest times and finding these associations within hobo lore is hardly surprising. Along with a vocabulary of jargonistic terms however, hobos are almost unique in having their own written form of secret communication, a system called “Hobo Signs”.

These signs were a collection of symbols that could be quickly and easily scrawled in chalk, or scratched, on walls, telegraph poles, fences and other community features so as to impart information about the locality to the initiated. A short search online will bring up many complex syllabaries of these signs collected from many sources and a facility in using them can be gained in fairly short order. Using the symbols, hobos could warn each other of the presence and temperament of dogs or other building occupants; could point the way to local campsites; and could identify good places where trains could be jumped, amongst other crucial information.

Some commentators claim that the system was merely a simple and useful means whereby wandering individuals - down on their luck and just looking to get by - could help keep each other from harm. However, as with most things of this nature, some factions could turn the benign system to dark ends and, as a result, many symbols arose which were of benefit to that subset of hobo-kind referred to as “yeggs”, or hobos who survived by means of breaking and entering buildings and from thievery. Ultimately, a dark tone of criminality suffused the code system.

The symbols were made available to young people through the American scouting movement who included the syllabary in their guide-books as a way of identifying local hobo activity: such codes were often thought to be educational to young minds who were also taught other code systems from semaphore, to Native American pictograms to Sherlock Holmes’s “Dancing Man” cipher. But here’s the kicker: the Hobo Sign code was not real.

*****

Many people in American history spent time on the road, living rootless lives and freewheeling their way across the country, illegally riding the trains. Among them were full-time hobos such as Jack Black (not THAT Jack Black), Joe Hill (not THAT Joe Hill), Bertha “Boxcar Bertha” Thompson and writer, Jim Tully; and other part-time hobos such as Woodie Guthrie, Jack London, Harry Partch, Louis l’Amour, Jack Kerouac and Robert Mitchum, among many others. None of these people mentioned, or recorded in their memoirs, ever having encountered a system of information transmission which helped them make their way across the country. In fact, the closest they come to it is Jack London’s memory about “monicas” (aka, monikers) being used:

“Water-tanks are tramp directories. Not all in idle wantonness do tramps carve their monicas, dates, and courses. Often and often have I met hoboes earnestly inquiring if I had seen anywhere such and such a ‘stiff’ or his monica. And more than once I have been able to give the monica of recent date, the water-tank, and the direction in which he was then bound. And promptly the hobo to whom I gave the information lit out after his pal. I have met hoboes who, in trying to catch a pal, had pursued clear across the continent and back again, and were still going.”

In this sense, the “monica” is the equivalent of the modern graffiti artists’ “tag”, but with the more prosaic function of simply letting others know about who had passed through, when, and to where they were headed.

From the 1890s (when the term “hobo” arose in California) through to the end of the 1930s, newspapers reported sightings of hobo signs in local communities and even printed photos of hobos drawing the signs on walls and telephone poles – these were invariably staged by journalists filling a slow news day. Oftentimes partial syllabaries were published along with such fare in an attempt to instill local fear of the homeless within the community.

Ultimately, this is why the notion of a hobo sign language arose: America is a place which prides itself on the idea of everyone having a fair go, of everyone being able to achieve their goals by means of determination and hard work; an underclass of freedom-loving iconoclasts who flip the bird to this notion of the American Dream is undesirable to the status quo. A sign language which reveals just how the hobo community supposedly dupes and cons the average householder in order to slack off from responsible productivity is an object lesson to the citizens. This false cipher gives license, on some level, to the average American to despise the homeless and unemployed outsiders amongst them and, with impunity and justification, treat them with harsh – even brutal - disrespect. As sinister as the Hobo Signs might seem themselves, their purpose in being made is far more sinister again. Protocols of the Elders of Zion, anyone?

The American Boy Scouts were given this information as a spur to keep them from dropping out and deciding to jump off the Capitalist treadmill, instead adopting a slacker lifestyle (as we would term it nowadays) forged by sponging off others in the glamorously cool way depicted by Chaplin and others in liberal Hollywood. It’s highly likely that the Hobo Signs were derived by their conservative creators from Native American pictogram forms that proliferated among the Plains and Pueblo Indians (and other nations): this is in itself ‘marginalization by association’ and adds extra layers of wickedness onto the whole process. In fact, since to create the symbols and their meanings their originators would have to have had a level of understanding about hobos, the homeless, and their lifestyle, the stunning lack of empathy towards this subsection of the community that they reveal is truly gob-smacking in its cruelty.

*****

So, what does this have to do with Call of Cthulhu and the idea of a world infested by the Lovecraft Mythos? Well, as much as tentacular horrors from outer space don’t really exist in the world (as far as we know), other unreal things might also inhabit our roleplaying worlds with impunity. In a fantasy world – or a fictional recreation of the factual one – such things as the Hobo Signs might be real, and function as their creators had intended. A tale of Mythos horror might well be revealed by the Investigators stumbling upon a cryptic communication being passed by itinerant drifters. The symbols indicate that there is “bad water” at a particular campsite: in what way is the water “bad” exactly? Investigators might follow directions given them by a dubious character only to encounter a hobo sign telling them to “run away!”: what do they do? A party might even adopt the symbols as a means of covertly discussing logistical or other issues in the course of their adventures. And what if the Hobo Signs were not in fact being used by hobos at all, but by some other, darker, malign and not-quite-human element of society…?

It’s a bit disillusioning to discover that something I read years ago in my Childcraft Encyclopedia - and which I took as gospel – turns out to be so much horse-pucky; however, the true nature of the phenomenon is illuminating and, on balance, hardly surprising. That being said, other aspects of the hobo lifestyle – their code of conduct and ethos, their jargon (much of which has passed into vernacular American English) and the lives of the famous among them – are true, and they throw illuminating spotlights onto the world in the times during which Lovecraft wrote and in which Lovecraftian stories are set. As usual, it’s an object lesson in learning to sift the evidence of history wisely…

Review: "The Lighthouse"

EGGERS, Robert, “The Lighthouse”, A24 Films LLC/Regency Enterprises/RT Features/Parts & Labor Productions, 2019.

Now, this is more like it.

I was beginning to think that the horror genre, at least in terms of cinema, was becoming a pre-chewed slab of James Wan-styled inconsequence. Everything was turning on sinister poppets and dead nuns set in pastiche previous decades trying too hard to be authentic. There didn’t seem to be a genuine vision out there, trying to find its own way through the morass. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there is a fair deal of interest out there in the genre and in taking it in new directions; none of it seems to be making it to the big screen, however. How good then, to discover something like this.

“The Lighthouse” is Eggers’s second full-length feature and is also (as was his first film) set in the New England area of America’s East Coast (I feel I need to be specific about this – most places where the British established colonies have regions named ‘New England’; Americans seem to think they are unique in this regard when they quite patently are not - the southern coastal region of New South Wales, for example, is also called “New England”). The scene is a lonely lighthouse on a rugged shoreline and the characters consist of two dour and weathered men both named Thomas (although initially, we are introduced to the younger of them as “Ephraim”). This set-up is hugely claustrophobic and lends itself immediately to all kinds of psychological distortion, since it turns out that at least one - or both - of them go quite loopy.

Adding to this closed-in feeling, the entire film is shot in monochrome, in a ratio of 1.19:1 (making each shot almost square) and using special lenses which modify red tones, causing them to darken significantly. This means that all imperfections in the actors’ skins are highlighted, giving them a craggy, beaten and slovenly look – perfect for two blokes living in hard weather on the far backside of the world. Every frame of this film feels like an old-time photograph come to life and this is a revelation. Adding to this, the dialogue is all taken from original sources, patterned after actual logs and accounts written by people of the period. It sounds a bit cod-pirate initially, but once you’re in the swing of it, it works beautifully.

In terms of casting, two better actors couldn’t have been chosen. “Old” Thomas is played by Willem Defoe who inhabits the role of the Ancient Mariner to perfection, while “Young” Thomas is portrayed by Robert Pattinson. Now, Pattinson is not my go-to guy for anything, really - he irritates the be-jeezus out of me more often than he doesn’t – but here, he’s perfect. He looks right; he sounds right; he’s just right for the part, as much as it pains me to say it. Of course, I watched all of the special features on the disc and the interviews with him talking about the role were just as I imagined they would be – affected; bored; self-obsessed – so it just goes to show that, when pressed, he’s a better actor than he claims not to be (he’s spent a bunch of time in the media recently claiming that he “doesn’t know how to act” – he’s lying, folks, and here’s the proof).

Defoe has that tried and tested ability to go from disdainful patriarch to grinning maniac in a heartbeat which has worked for him time and again across his career and here it not only works a treat but it feels real; multi-dimensional. Nothing rings false and both of these guys pitch to the back row in terms of their performances. Just watching them both chew up the gorgeous, weather-beaten scenery is worth the price of admission.

The narrative arc of this film is taken from a real historical event which happened in Pembrokeshire in Wales, in 1800-1801. Two lighthouse-keepers (or “wickies” as they called themselves), both named Thomas – Howell and Griffith - began a four-week stint at the Smalls Lighthouse situated 32 kilometres off the coast. The two were known to harbour animosity towards each other, inevitably falling to violent argument whenever they found themselves in each other’s company. A short illness affected the older Thomas after their arrival and, in the teeth of a rising gale, forced him to succumb. The younger man, fearing that investigation would mark him as the man’s murderer, kept the body in a box and lit the emergency beacon, signaling for help. Unfortunately, a savage storm prevented all boats from mounting such a rescue and, after the rotting body became unbearable to co-habit with, the remaining wickie lashed the box to the companionway railing surrounding the light and the elements took their toll upon it. At one point, the dead man’s arm protruded from its makeshift coffin, flailing around in the wind and causing a nearby ship to halt its rescue attempt – despite the emergency beacon – because they interpreted the waving arm as a sign that all, in fact, was well. The pounding of this same dead hand against the lighthouse window drove the remaining Thomas to the brink of madness and he was later rescued, after the storm abated, white-haired and gibbering. The event altered lighthouse-keeping policy from that point forward, ensuring that three men, rather than two, were assigned to each beacon from then on.

Much of this scenario has made its way into this film: the embittered and angry Thomases; the paired wickies; the monumental storm preventing rescue – it’s all here. Added to this is the almost unbearable confinement suffered by both men as they try to navigate the enclosed space which houses them. The Older Thomas is high-handed and imperious, citing his longer period of employment as evidence of his higher status, and careless about his personal habits and their effect upon the Younger Thomas (there is much farting and other noxious forms of scatology on offer here). Young Thomas has a dark secret which is slowly revealed as things progress and with which he wrestles guiltily, eventually coming to a kind of confession which seals the older man’s doom (Old Thomas treats the issue trivially and uses it rather rashly against the younger man). Young Thomas becomes obsessed with the light, access to which is denied him by the older man as a symbol of his experience and privilege, and his usurpation of power and claiming of ownership forms the bulk of the second half of the tale. There is some playing around with the notion that Older Thomas represents Proteus, the sea god, from Greek mythology, while Younger Thomas symbolizes Prometheus, the notorious stealer of holy fire: there are nods to all of this, but none of it is heavy-handed. Most of the more outré elements can be interpreted as Younger Thomas simply losing his mind and the carefully orchestrated equivocation of this material gives the piece extra strength and punch.

In the lead-up to this film’s launch I was hearing all sorts of Lovecraftian whispers that it was tied-in somehow to the Mythos. Sure, there are some tentacles and a pelagean creature (again, probably only in Young Thomas’s head) but, along with the New English association, much of this turned out to be – thankfully! – just some eager fan-boy’s hopefulness. If there’s a bit of this film to which I took exception, it’s the killing of the seagull, which is horrific, and I was truly thankful to learn that it was done using special effects – despite there being no “No Animals Were Harmed…” disclaimers in the credits, which was a bit disturbing to note.

In the final analysis, this is an excellent and stylish piece of work that is very much worth your time in checking out. It has nothing to do with Lovecraft and the Mythos - despite what the breathless hordes are panting - but don’t let that put you off: it's its own beast and a deliciously horrid one at that.

Five Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "Midsommar"

 

ASTER, Ari (Dir.), “Midsommar”, A24/BR.F/Square Peg/Lionsgate, 2019.

Have you ever heard an instance of glossolalia? The so called “speaking in tongues” has quite a musical quality to it, with rising and falling intonations and cadences and mild interweaving musical themes. Some people find it strangely thrilling and soothing – either because of its mysterious origin (as an instance of supposedly divine inspiration and contact), or because its mere presence is interpreted as a manifestation of The Beyond. Personally, I find it quite grating to listen to. It wanders; it never seems to know where it’s headed; it’s endlessly reiterative and tentative-sounding – like someone trying half-heartedly to pick out a Philip Glass piece on a piano. It sounds as though each individual performer is not totally committing to it and is sure that, at any moment, the whole thing might suddenly stop and so they’re trying their damnedest to not be the last one left crooning when that happens.

I bring this up because most of the soundtrack in this movie resembles glossolalia, albeit it is mostly instrumental, not vocal. At various points there are fiddles and flutes making endless glissandi and arpeggios in the background and – while at times it’s quite lovely to hear – it eventually becomes fairly drone-like and annoying. I think this is intentional. The people in this story are, for the most part, quite mad, and this soundtrack is certainly emblematic of what must be passing through their heads.

Horror fare, especially in the UK, has taken a sharp turn toward the Folk Department of late and these kinds of narratives – of bloodthirsty rural traditions irrupting out into the modern sunshine – are definitely seeing a revival. Magazines such as “The Ghastling” and “Hellebore” are attempting to breathe new life into the concept that was crystallized by such movies as “The Wicker Man” and “Witch-Finder General”; Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”; almost anything by Alan Garner; and 80s slasher flicks like “Children of the Corn”. The focus of this material is upon long-standing – supposedly, millennially-old – traditions linked to nature and the surrounding environment and the accompanying ritual behaviour designed to appease, or entice, natural forces, or to bring the community closer to some perceived natural, cyclical way of being. Sometimes, there is an actual supernatural entity in the background of all this activity; other times, it’s just crazy people who should know better.

Such it is with this present example. We meet Dani, a university-level psychology student who has just suffered the loss of her entire family at the hands of her schizophrenic sister, who gassed herself to death along with her parents. Dani’s grief and outrage is barely handled by her oxygen-thief boyfriend, Christian, who is meandering through an anthropology degree – mainly because of the opportunities for sex and drugs – along with his best buddies, Josh and Mark, a useless crowd who feel that Christian is being ‘pussy-whipped’ by his ‘frigid’ girlfriend and her ‘baggage’. A visiting student from Sweden named Pelle offers to take the guys away to his home country to see the high summer festivals of his home town: the guys decide that this is the moment that they can shake Christian free of Dani and have a sex-and-drug-filled holiday together; however, due to Christian’s mealy-mouthed attitude and general incompetence, Dani winds up learning of the plan and going to Sweden with them.

From here on in, we are introduced to the rural community from which Pelle originates and we see the outwardly friendly and welcoming attitude of the community’s denizens which throws into stark relief the bitchiness, shallowness and craven attitudes of entitlement displayed by Christian and his friends. This is a truly abhorrent bunch of people, driven by narrow impulses and expectations and firmly reliant on a belief that – being American – everyone will cut them some slack; even our heroine Dani has elements of this in her character. Well, the local villagers certainly cut them, I’ll give them that.

After showing up at the village, our crew is combined with an engaged British couple – Simon and Connie – brought to the festivities by Pelle’s brother Ingeborg. We don’t see much of them, but, on the whole, they are far better behaved and more perceptive than our Yanks, who fail repeatedly to see beyond themselves and their own desires. Consequently, these are the first two to ‘disappear’. After this, as the nine-days’ Summer festival rolls on its course, our group of visitors gets picked off one-by-one in an escalating series of horrific, brutal encounters, which our self-involved victims fail to see coming or deflect, so far up their own arses have they shoved their heads.

I was a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, as a viewer of the movie, you can see the enfolding net of the villagers slowly enmeshing our party of adventurers, and it is truly calculated and chilling in its ramifications and effects. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine it happening to a more deserving group of people. My sympathies were nowhere: I disliked Pelle and Ingeborg for being the mendacious procurers that they become rewarded for being; I disliked the Elders with their casual brutality and twisted rationales; but I was also furiously annoyed with Mark for his hide-bound cultural insensitivity, and also the petty pissing match that takes place between Josh – who came to the village specifically to study its traditions for his thesis – and Christian who decides after that fact that he wants to write about the place as well. No-one is likable in this film; there’s no-one really to relate to. Dani is given our sympathy due to her horrific family troubles and the fact that she’s roped to a thoroughly despicable partner, but she gets railroaded along with everyone else and even her ‘shocking’ decision at the end has very little sting. It’s like the world just made a little garbage can for a select group of nasty humans to go and die in. Go planet!

Like a lot of these types of narratives, it’s not so much what happens to our victims but how. The village in this film is entirely constructed as a map into which our story falls, once we’ve left America and the populated bits of Sweden behind. Much of the village’s architecture is covered with drawing and murals which give hints to the viewer (certainly, none of our victims ever pick up on these tidbits) as to what might be coming next. The gateway into the village is a huge circular representation of the Sun; standing directly opposite this at the other end of the settlement is a yellow triangular house which, we’re told, is “off limits”: our narrative winds its way inevitably from one to the other. The villagers deflect curiosity and nosiness, and set up the demises of our characters with studied ease; in fact with an ease that is immediately apparent to the viewer and which has them yelling at the screen (in my case, at least) for these useless boneheads to wake up and smell the goddam coffee. Subtle, it ain’t. The two Brits are the only ones who sense that something is definitely stinky in Denmark and who make efforts to escape: their captures and deaths are the only moments when the villagers have to take extreme steps to avoid complete exposure. Our Americans, on the other hand, are completely fooled and grab what’s offered with both hands and little regard. Irritating.

Given the architectural and cultural detailing on display in this film, it’s clear that the director wanted to capture as much of it as possible for posterity. The sets and costumes, the set dressing, the landscape – it’s all lush and wonderful and the camerawork is just amazing to see. That being said, Aster treats it all like it’s a doll’s house, tiny figures moving in a constructed world, and this might be a deliberate choice. What it does though, is it puts all the characters into the middle- or far distance in each scene. There are close-up moments – mainly of Dani, and certainly ‘hero shots’ of each village Elder as they take their evil moment to shine – but the cast is mainly viewed as diminutive players on a vast stage, to the point where they become unidentifiable. As a particular case, Simon is only ever seen close up after he’s been horribly killed; for most of the proceedings otherwise, he’s a distant brown figure and an accent. Even dead, he’s had his lungs ripped out through his back and his eyes masked by flowers, so it wasn’t even initially clear that this was him. The same with Connie: at the finale a grey corpse on a wheelbarrow turns out to be hers but it’s not immediately obvious that it is, and it has to be inferred from context. (You will suffer if you don’t pay attention with this, folks!)

Finally, there’s the violence. This is harsh. The R-rating here is for the gruesome detail of bodily injuries and the lingering camera shots that display them. If hyper-realistic trauma damage is something that you’re not capable of easily withstanding, you might want to look elsewhere. The brutality here is casual and grotesque: no-one gets whacked on the head with a mallet where two or three well-aimed thumps will make sure. It’s all in stark contrast to the pretty white blouses and sunny countryside, which definitely ramps up the impact and drives the ugliness of it home. For the keen-eyed however, there are warnings in the wall murals and embroidered decorations, so you’ll at least have a slight chance to anticipate the worst of it.

For Mythos devotees, especially those with a yen for Ramsey Campbell’s works in that regard, there’s a nice nod to The Revelations of Gla’aki – the holy book of the Village Elders is a stream of consciousness rambling by a deliberately-generated inbred savant, created to keep the volume going into the future. It’s one of very many moments of extreme ickiness in this movie.

In the final analysis, what’s to like? This is a very well made and put together movie; the photography, the casting, the locations – it’s all a treat. The characters are all vibrant and well-realised, and their interactions and individual arcs – while not surprising – are believable and well-portrayed. It’s a very attractive vehicle. It will hardly surprise the viewer, however; there are no challenges to expectation at all: we know, going in, what to expect, and all of those things happen. It’s murky too (despite all of the bright sunshine): everything is shot too far away from the screen and we never really get a visual sense of the characters as anything other than distant puppets, highlighted by variations in colour. No-one here is a sympathetic person and I wasn’t even left wondering what might happen to Dani afterwards. This is a very long film that leaves no firm impression, apart from its stark gore and idiosyncratic soundtrack.

If folk horror is your bag, there are lots of interesting things happening online and in the world of print media at the moment. I suspect that, as far as cinematic versions of the form go, what's been done already will stand up as well, or even better, against what might turn up in the next few years. If you've seen "The Wicker Man" (the 1973 version with Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt and Christopher Lee; not the 2006 dreck with Nicolas Cage), or "Blood on Satan's Claw", then you've seen this film; it's definitely a love-note to those movies. It doesn't really add much that's new to the genre though.

Three-and-a-Half Tentacled Horrors (with flowers in their hair) from me.

Player Handouts: Spawn of Azathoth, Part 1 – “A Ghostly Presence”

I was going to be concluding my series of module handouts from the CoC version 6 rulebook by doing the resources for “Dead Man’s Stomp”; however, they have proven to be fairly tricky and time-consuming, so I thought I would jump into the “Spawn of Azathoth” campaign in the interim. “Stomp” has handouts which are vastly more interpretive than the usual scenario – the information is left largely in the hands of the Keeper - whereas “Spawn” has information which is more-or-less cut and dried… although the sheer quantity is terrifying! This is a beast of an undertaking, but it has the virtue of being able to be broken down into bite-sized chunks, making my workload a little less Sisyphean. The clear parallels between these two projects is that they are both incredibly well-written – the first by Mark Morrison and the second by Keith Herber – and I don’t want to get them wrong.

*****

The introduction to “Spawn” is called “A Ghostly Presence” and embroils the party with questions surrounding the death of a former teacher and mentor, Dr. Philip A. Baxter. One party member receives a horrible visitation in the night prompting them to try and contact their old teacher: they are informed by the housekeeper that the Professor died just the day before. A death notice in the morning newspaper supports her statement, and provides details about the resulting funeral:

Azathoth Papers #1

Players attend the funeral and meet all of the NPCs pertinent to the ensuing saga. They respond with varying degrees of friendliness: Emmett Baxter, one of the professor’s two sons, is quite abrupt and offers the players only his marked business card and a request to “make an appointment”:

Azathoth Papers #3

After the funeral is over and everyone has gone their separate ways, the players arrive back at their base to find that a telegram has been delivered, inviting them to the reading of the Professor’s will, at the offices of Baxter’s lawyer, Judge Braddock:

Azathoth Papers #2

The will reading is a fraught session of grief, anger and recrimination – as is usual for these kinds of things – and many interesting nuggets of information can be found. During the proceedings, the party is given a manila envelope, prepared for them by Baxter. It is noteworthy that a second envelope is also present, for an un-named individual not able to be there.

Azathoth Papers #4A

Azathoth Papers #4B

In the original text, this dream journal is presented all as one document; however, for the purposes of adding colour and legibility, I have broken it up into several images. There is also a map:

Azathoth Papers #4C

*****

That’s all for the set-up – from here the players need to get to Providence in Rhode Island and start poking about in the dead Professor’s affairs. What they’ll discover might unnerve them completely… 

(All material presented here is copyright Chaosium Inc., Hayward CA., 1986, 2005.)

Review: “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”

 

ØVREDAL, André, “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”, CBS Films/Entertainment One, 2020.

The ongoing pandemic is clearly continuing to be a dumping-ground for film studios’ misbegotten creations which they seek to disavow. This horror is a prime example. This movie was released in the US in 2019 and got a fair reception; it’s obvious to me however, why it has been snuck into this country on DVD while everyone – it’s assumed – is looking the other way.

I wasn’t at all interested in this when I saw it at the supermarket; but I was buying something else and the deal of the day was “two for $20”, so I grabbed this to score the discount. The two things that clinched the deal for me were the picture of Dean Norris on the back of the packaging (I quite liked his work in “Breaking Bad”) and the fact that Guillermo del Toro was listed as the producer. Turns out, M. Norris is a trivial element of the tale and del Toro’s input was lacklustre at best… or farcical at worst.

As I started watching this, I had this weird sensation: something didn’t click. The further I got into it, the more I felt that I wasn’t working with all of the required information; that there was something going on I wasn’t privy to. This started to irk me but, before I could examine it, I got distracted by the scarecrow:

When I was a kid, I watched a Disney film about a guy called Dr. Syn who dressed up as a scarecrow and rode out into the night to do stuff. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, or why – I was only eight or so, so the intricacies of the plot eluded me - but there was this cool dude, dressed as a scarecrow and frightening the living daylights out of the bad guys! I was hooked. Later on, I discovered that the film was called “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” and was based on a series of novels by British actor and writer Russell Thorndyke, written from 1915 to 1944. Patrick McGoohan was the actor who played him in the Disney film (which you can watch on YouTube). Ever since that time, scarecrows have always ranked high in the creepy-cool stakes for me, even making me a little leery about “The Wizard of Oz” and those broomsticks in “Fantasia”. Here though, there was a problem:

Is this how scarecrows are made? I’ll admit, I’ve made several of these things in my lifetime and I’ve even dressed up as one for Hallowe’en, and this one looked wrong. As the main villain in the first story of this portmanteau film, he had a chilling enough face (with extra beetles) and the huge hole in his midriff was also cool: it was just his stance that threw me off. Slumping forward from his supporting stick, his arms hang loosely at his sides and his legs are splayed out wide to either side like he’s trying to mark each side of the mouth of a football (ie. soccer) goal. Weird. I was thinking that it’s a good thing that the hole in his tummy was there, otherwise it would look as though that pole he was hanging from had been rammed determinedly up his jacksy. Where I come from, scarecrows are positioned much as you would a person about to be crucified; given the director’s country of origin - or del Toro’s for that matter – is the position of this guy typical of Norwegian, or Mexican, scarecrows? I’m just saying, wherever this pose originates from, it’s got to be a minority expectation, surely.

So, being thrown for a loop by the ludicrous positioning of the straw man, I began to tune in once more to the plot. As stated, this is a collection of separate stories tied together with some tenuous connective thread. That’s fine; I’ve seen “Creepshow” and its associated ilk since back in the 80s – I’m down with that. This time however, it was the clunkiest stitching together of unconnected narratives I think I’ve ever seen. Three of the stories are based upon a clumsy info-dump issued by the targeted characters shortly before the horrors manifest to claim them and, to add insult to injury, make no sense, or fracture the exact logic that they try to create. In “The Big Toe” – why would anyone, having just discovered a human toe in their backyard, put that item into a stew that they were intending to serve to their family as an evening meal? And who, having been served such a meal, would eat it? I was bewildered. Then, another character claims to have been experiencing a bizarre dream about meeting a pale woman in a red room. He does meet said woman immediately thereafter, but in a series of white corridors under flashing red lights. So, no red room; not so much. And the Latino lad hears a nonsensical string of verbiage (“me tie dough-ty walker”) and immediately remembers – at length - a campfire story about another horrific entity and neither he nor the ensuing “Jangly-Man” explain, at all, what this piece of doggerel means. Deeply unsatisfying…

So, I watched while the film ran to the end of its train-ride. Nothing was unexpected and nothing was explained and certainly nothing was particularly horrifying. I was thinking: has del Toro completely lost his touch? I mean, this is what he’s coming to, off of winning an Oscar for “The Shape of Water”? This is a low bar, possibly even lower than “Crimson Peak”: a complete non-event B-grade waste of film stock with a hyper-inflated special effects budget. In desperation I turned to the special features on the DVD and finally received enlightenment: this is based on a book! In fact, it’s based on a three-book series of collected horror stories that apparently were a bit of a cause célèbre in the US in the 90s:

Collected and re-told by Alvin Schwartz starting in 1981, the books were a young adult publishing sensation in America, since they gathered together all of the campfire yarns and urban legends prevalent in youth culture at the time, beefing them up with some lesser known Poe trifles and other odds-and-ends of folklore. Highlighting the creepy stories were a series of gruesome monochrome images by Stephen Gammell which became integral to the overall tone of the books (a reprint in 2011 with art by Brett Helquist met with strong opposition and forced a further re-issue with the original art restored). In 1984, another collection – More Scary Stories to tell in the Dark – was released, and a third compilation – Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones – was produced in 1991. Other titles have appeared, but these were not written by Schwartz who had died by that time. In the background of the censorious rumblings that led to “Parental Advisory” stickers being stamped onto popular music of the time, these books were denounced and burned, banned and then liberated from banning, in repeated waves of attempted libricide by the morally self-appointed religious bigots of the US, seeking to “protect the youth” of that country, a collective youth who, like Charlton Heston, would only see their beloved scary stories prised from their cold, dead hands. From what I can tell (not being au fait with the books), the stories reproduced in this film are the following:

“Harold”

“The Big Toe”

“The Red Spot”

“The Dream”

“Me Tie Dough-ty Walker”

“The Haunted House”

…with other stories hinted at during the run-time. All of these tales come from either the first book by Schwartz or the last: did del Toro not like the second book, one wonders? It’s clear that what he does like is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which provides much of the framing device for these lacklustre re-tellings, along with the main character Stella. So, my reading experience was of some use after all...

This is what is missing from this film. For someone like me who, until I Googled all of this stuff, had no idea that any of these things had occurred, this film makes absolutely no sense. This is a love note to a treasured literary series that automatically alienates itself from everyone unfamiliar with its source material. I guess that CBS and Entertainment One were figuring on only distributing this film in the US and that everyone else could go jump up a rope. This is narrow thinking and piss-poor marketing, allowing lazy screen-writing and bad execution. Dumb.

As someone who never grew up with campfire tales (or the sort of camps at which they are a feature), I would have welcomed the opportunity to become familiar with the source code of this phenomenon; to be made aware of this cultural icon; to be welcomed into this fold of fandom. But no, I was simply told “if you don’t know, then screw you!” and fobbed of with this lazy, ill-conceived shit. Thanks for nothing; and you can take my $10 and add it to your Scrooge McDuck money bin.

As far as it goes (and it doesn’t strive to go that far, or with any effort) this will fill an empty night but will – for people in the same position as myself – be more annoying than satisfying. It relies on sloppy narrative tropes – because that’s what the books were highlighting: “have you checked the children?”; the killer’s hook hand is stuck to the car-door handle – and it doesn’t struggle very hard, or with any finesse, to work these into its narrative frame. The Hollywood Playbook ensures that all irritating characters get whacked so that only the attractive ones and the ones “in lerv!” survive, and it tries wa-a-a-a-ay too hard to convince us that it’s 1968 for no real reason whatsoever (seriously - what was the point?). And Dean "blink and you'll miss him" Norris is completely wasted.

My one heartfelt takeaway from this is that all the Americans who watch this will take one look at Harold the Scarecrow and go… WTF?

Two-and-a-Half Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Postscript: So here's a picture of "Harold" by Stephen Gammell from the book:

It seems that the makers of this flick were just being doggedly faithful to the source material. Still looks dumb. Maybe they should have just let it go...

Review: "Occult Detective Magazine" Issue 7

GRANT, John Linwood, & Dave BRZESKI, “Occult Detective Magazine #7, Spring/May 2020”, Cathaven Press, Peterborough UK, 2020.

Given that postal services across the planet are clogged at the moment, I sent off my order for this without really expecting to see it anytime in the short term. Consequently, it showed up unexpectedly and – even better – at a point when I really needed the time to just chill out and lose myself. A day spent picking slowly through a copy of Occult Detective Magazine (ODM) is definitely a day well spent. And this issue certainly doesn’t disappoint!

The first cab off the rank – “Uxmal” by Debra Blundell - was guaranteed to delight me. An agent of the shadowy “Smoke Throne” cabal, overseeing the Yucatecan dominion, goes to the city of Uxmal to investigate the overnight appearance of a strange pyramid in the heart of that conurbation along with its new, dwarfed king. He takes with him his adopted family of investigative agents in order to get to the bottom of things and mayhem (of course) ensues.

For various reasons, I have recently been devouring everything I can lay my hands on about the Maya civilization and reading this tale was like ticking off boxes in my newly-acquired knowledge set. Everything here resonated, everything rang true, in ways that the ‘Holmesian-Victorian pastiche’ form of occult detection often does not. There was no extensive ‘info-dumping’; there were no laborious descriptions of the obscure; there was no soap-box delivery of required knowledge: bliss! Even the difference between chultuns and cenotes as regional water-sources was effortlessly conveyed as an essential clue, without breaking the narrative. There was a moment when a prophecy was delivered – an injunction for our main character to do a specific thing when a certain set of circumstances occurred – and my heart sank a bit. Often whenever something like this happens, the remainder of the story becomes a simple train-ride to the inevitable; however, Ms. Blundell throws in a well-planted twist that saves the moment from being an ending with fizz and turns it into one with bang. This was a truly excellent piece – everything was handled with precision, knowledge and grace – and it was the perfect way to kick things off.

A more total change of pace could not be asked for in turning to the next story. With Paul St. John Mackintosh’s “Ghost in the Machine”, we encounter an insurance company investigator sent reluctantly to check out an instance of ghostly manifestation at an Edinburgh server farm, a circumstance that the computing firm involved most definitely bought insurance against. Here, corporate cynicism and wry Scots humour sits with nice contrast alongside the traditional notions of the Scottish ghost. Our detective discovers that the head programmer’s spirit spontaneously regenerates each night as a species of code within the operating system, continuing the work that he did before his untimely demise. Wrangling corporate lackeys and Scottish Society for Psychical Research boffins, our investigator is suddenly forced to acknowledge an actual haunting and to deal with it… without forcing his own company to pay out on the claim.

This is a well-executed story and remarkable for the way that it convinces the reader of the way in which an insurance agency might well suddenly be offering policies against spectral intrusion. If there was a criticism it lies with one character, the setting on whose Scots brogue increases from ‘barely noticeable’ to ‘almost incomprehensible’ by the tale’s end. A re-write might find the sweet spot between these two extremes but for now, this is a great yarn.

A common criticism of the occult detection story is that, often, they aren’t particularly scary. Yes, horrifying things happen, but the raison d’être of the detective is to explain, whereas fear lies in the unknown, so rarely does the emergence of a truly chilling narrative arise from the premise. This next story - “Pause for Station Identification” - is one time that it does.

I have heard a lot about Jonathan Raab’s Sheriff Kotto fiction but have never read anything of it myself – I think this pairing with Matthew Bartlett is an excellent introduction. Borrowing concepts from “The Blair Witch Project” and “The Ring”, this story has Kotto and his deputy Abraham Richards settle in at the Sheriff’s Office to watch some filmed footage. The imagery on the tape is raw and inexpertly spliced - allowing the writers to indulge in some experimental and edgy narrative techniques – and slowly winds its way towards a chilling conclusion. Our heroes are bent on learning the whereabouts of a bunch of missing students, following a strange circulating cassette tape, which leads them to Cold War numbers stations transmissions, the FCC, and finally to a remote radio broadcasting outfit in a hilly forest where an evil plot is uncovered. The creeping horror is revealed – not just by the terrifying imagery on the tape and its delivery – but by the fact that neither of the two men viewing the footage have experienced the events on display, and yet they are patently involved in the action. Is it a warning? A premonition? They both decide to contemplate things in the secure haven of insobriety…

I have read a few pieces by Aaron Vlek in the pages of Occult Detective Quarterly and Occult Detective Magazine (“Baron of Bourbon Street”, ODQ#1; “The Case of the Black Lodge”, ODQ#4) and, to be honest, I find them a bit bloodless. Ms. Vlek has a tendency to write her action off-stage, as it were, and is generally content to have it described by a character to others within the narrative frame, almost like watching a stage performance where the characters speak about world-shaking events happening elsewhere. Action is always at a distant remove in these stories, although the quality of the writing is generally quite high. Having gotten several of these stories under my belt, it feels a bit like standing on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral with a snifter of brandy and looking out across an Edwardian London peppered – not with gentlemen’s clubs – but with arcane, endlessly-battling, occult lodges. Flames burst upwards from Bloomsbury; strange lightning flickers over Mayfair… In this story, “The Case of the Signet Ring”, again, direct action takes a back seat to extended narration as Aleister Crowley (whom I loathe) has a little attempted fun at the expense of our occult sleuth, Geoffrey Sykes Vermillion.

The conceit here is that Crowley sets up a spooky story about the dead husband of a young widow and an arcane ring, trying to draw Vermillion into taking the case on board. We see the steps taken to establish the joke before an inevitable conclusion wherein Crowley explains the gag – saying, “I got you!” -  and Vermillion reveals how he saw through it all along and says, “oh no, you didn’t!”. Tiresome really, and the moreso because it involves that loathsome waste of good skin, Crowley. I was left wondering at the end why these events had happened at all? And to what purpose?

(There’s also a classic problem here of the late-Victorian pastiche model falling over abruptly due to an incorrect piece of information. Our supposed widow comes to Vermillion’s home, bangs on the door, and demands entry; Vermillion’s butler tells him that she awaits without and is asked to admit her; she immediately confronts Vermillion and proffers her calling card. Boom! Wrong. Calling cards have an intricate and well-defined usage and this is way off-piste. While it’s believable under certain circumstances that the ‘widow’ would stand her ground at the front door and demand entry, in this situation she would have given her card to the butler for him to announce her presence to his master. Ordinarily, cards were left with servants who would place them on a tray to be brought in with the day’s mail so that the occupants of the house would know who had called and to whom they should address responses. Further, in this case, a widow would also have handed over her dead husband’s card – suitably marked, or re-printed, to indicate his demise – along with her own, if indeed she had her own cards; otherwise she would have written her name upon one of her dead husband’s. Under NO circumstances would a woman of any social standing give her card directly to a man not of the servant class! To do so implies that she’s not the lady she claims to be. I know I’m a ‘calling-card tragic’, but this kind of stuff is crucial to building realistic pastiche narratives. In contemporary fiction of the period, these niceties are often overlooked in order to facilitate the action – in this instance, for example, it would be understood that the card had been passed to the butler who then announces her - and the readers of the time would have factored this in as a fait accompli. Bringing up calling cards is deadly for the modern writer: yes, they had them back then, but if you don’t know how they worked, then don’t use them.)

Where were we? Oh yes – “Carry On Carnacki” aka. “The Thing in the Bedroom” by David Langford. This is the tale – told to a bibulous audience at a seedy pub - of a haunting at a grotty British seaside B&B, haunted by the separated member of a previous tenant lost in a slamming door accident, resolved by a cross-dressing occult detective (our narrator), all to facilitate a pithy comment by a beery listener, viz. “Well, bugger me!”. Have I mentioned before how tedious these shaggy-dog tales are? Oh yes, that’s right: I have.

At first I thought this might have been an offering by Rhys Hughes who gave us “The French Lieutenant’s Gurning” in issue 4 of ODQ, but the Benny Hill levels of humour stood against him in that regard (the actual author is the one provided – I’m guessing – on the publication details page). This has been written by someone with a solid and working knowledge of William Hope Hodgson’s oeuvre (especially the Carnacki stuff), but with the puerile sense of humour of a fifteen-year-old. It hits all the marks and lampoons them mercilessly. All that was needed was a smirking Kenneth Williams at the end to say “oo! You are naughty!”. It’s obviously someone’s idea of a good time; not mine, particularly.

After the African prose-poem of the previous issue (“Komolafe”, ODM #6) I went into this next piece – “The White Sickness” by D.J. Tyrer - with high expectations; sadly, they were not met. There’s a lot of flavour here and good local colour, exploring the nature of tribal witch-hunters in Africa – lots of the technical jargon is handled quite neatly in telling the reader what’s taking place. Unfortunately, the story runs on rails to an inevitable conclusion: at no point was I wondering if things might not turn out alright; it was always a done deal. There are several clunkily-inserted moments of self-doubt for our detective here and there, but they are almost immediately resolved by some deus ex machina moment that gets things rolling again. A couple more re-writes and this might polish up into something of real interest…

I confess, I’ve watched wa-a-a-ay too many episodes of “Arrow”. The moment I saw the name “Smoake” in the title of this next piece, I thought I was about to read an occult detective spin-off from the TV show starring the Green Arrow’s IT-partner, Felicity Smoak – but then there’s that extra ‘e’ in there… Turns out, I was wrong, and this story could have no other title but the punny one supplied. I rolled with it…

“Smoake and Mirrors” by Nancy A. Hansen is a story in the career of Chandra Smoake, an occult detective of mixed American/Sub-continental heritage, who drives a succubus from the home of a fretful housewife. The demon uses a wide array of mirrors – supplied by the home keeper’s husband, a furniture dealer who claims the pieces that his clients have defaulted upon in payment – as portals to move around the house, and our detective has her work cut out to isolate and purge the pest.

For the most part, this works very well. There is some powerful imagery, a good sense that the exorcist might not be up to the task at hand, and some suitably icky moments involving swarms of blowflies and oozing ectoplasm. My main issue was in trying to pin down exactly when this story was set. Establishing the fact that the housewife’s husband would be racially-intolerant of Chandra’s presence should he walk in upon the magical happenings didn’t help – that’s as true today, sadly, as at any time in US history. The slang terms used by Chandra’s erstwhile assistant didn’t help either (and only caused me to wonder if perhaps Chandra’s English was a second tongue), while the behaviours of the housewife and her demonically-obsessed daughter – given the generational-divide – only obscured things further. Even the clothing descriptions didn’t help. I spent too much time looking for clues on this matter rather than letting the story roll over me. If at some point Ms. Hansen had just said ‘it’s the 1950s’, say, or referenced a headline, or current event, I could have let the issue slide and gotten on with things; as it is, I was constantly distracted.

(Something as innocuous as this can absolutely kill a story. For a comparison, Kiwi crime fiction queen Dame Ngaio Marsh wrote the adventures of a sleuth named ‘Roderick Alleyn’. At no point in her life did she reveal how this name is pronounced – some thought it was ‘Allen’; others ‘AWL-en’; still others ‘a-LAIN’. She didn’t clarify things, and, after her death, her literary society announced, in their expert opinion, which pronunciation was ‘correct’, instantly dividing the readership into rancorous camps. Personally, I don’t read her books because, the moment I start, I also begin wondering which version is right – and I inevitably put the book aside in annoyance. And I’m sure I’m not the only one…)

In “The Spirits in the Air” by Aidan Hayes, we don’t have to worry about names at all. We meet an unnamed journalist who can see spirits in the world around him, not only of dead people but of animals whose flesh has been served up as food, or as leather clothing. He has arranged to meet a nameless young woman in a diner – magically enhanced to keep chicken spirits to a minimum – and to enlist her as his new student, learning how to negotiate a world overrun with the dead (pro-tip: don’t tell anyone your name, not even your prospective teacher of the arcane arts). There’s nothing dramatic about this piece: the two characters talk and swap observations, warily circling each other conversationally in order to avoid any lurking traps, or hidden agendas. Finally, the girl agrees to taking on her new mentor and the stage is set for shenanigans down the line in later narratives. It’s a good introduction to a fascinatingly nuanced, spirit-populated world, with possibly more instalments waiting in the wings. I wonder how long he can go before he has to reveal someone’s – anyone’s – name, however…

The next story is where things get GOOD (again!). “Mama G” by Tanya Warnakulasuriya is the bomb – a snappy, engaging, entertaining, supernatural romp with all the bells and whistles, cunningly plotted, pleasingly retailed, and full of colour and interest. I haven’t seen magic and mental illness conflated with this much skill or sensitivity since Simon Avery’s “Songs of Dwindled Gods” in ODQ#4 (also amazing) or in Matt Wagner’s “Mage” comics before that. This is the story of a homeless woman living in London around the time of the Brixton Riots and conversant with the West Indian folklore of the Windrush Generation. She acknowledges her mental issues and uses her medication to create a metaphoric light around her to keep demons at bay. These creatures emerge into the world through an internal “tear” in our heroine’s soul, crossing over to cause harm to others, and a particularly nasty one sneaks out to start killing children in the Brixton neighbourhood, taking the form of her recently-deceased guardian Mama G.

Helping her in her quest to vanquish this entity are assorted angels – particularly the multi-faceted Jacob - and a steadfast companion dog named Tom, once owned by Mama G. Along the way we meet Rasta boys and street cops, earnest priests and effusive coffee shop proprietors, who all engage with our heroine in pursuit of her quest. I don’t want to say too much about this story – I don’t want to spoil it for anybody – but I urge you to read it!

“…And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.”

-Matthew 4:6

“Dash Thy Foot” by Julie Frost takes us back to the Chandleresque gumshoe narrative tropes that are a regular hallmark of the occult detective world. The title of this story bugged me so I looked it up – it’s from  that point in the Bible when Satan is tempting Jesus and he effectively says, ‘don’t worry about anything that I might do while talking to you - no angel will ever let you come to any harm’. The story involves a trademark private detective, down on his luck as usual, who is hired by a mysterious ‘bombshell dame’ to serve Satan with a legal summons. He, of course, thinks it’s a joke, but after being supplied with a mystical GPS device to get him where he needs to be, he realizes, at the point where he enters Hell and confronts the demon Gaap, that it’s all legit.

Of course, the moment he walks into Hell is the also the moment when his guardian angel appears beside him to ensure that he receives safe passage. This fellow – Khatuliel – is there ready to bear our hero up lest he dash his foot against any Hell-formed stones.

This is a good romp that has some interesting moral quandaries at its heart – it turns out that Gaap arranges to confront our hero with the soul of the killer who mutilated and murdered his mother, and offers to let him torture the name of his accomplice out of the revenant. With Khatuliel warning him of the possible damage of his own soul in doing this, the private eye weighs the situation up and makes a crucial choice... The private dick tropes fly thick and fast in this tale – even the dame with the legal papers was named “Jessica” just to short-cut the Jessica Rabbit stereotype – but it never overshadows what this story is trying to achieve; it’s a case of the author using the format rather than being in slavish devotion to it.  A solid tale.

In “Beyond the Faded Shrine Gates” we meet Brandon Barrows’ dogged Japanese demon-hunter, Azuma Kuromori, at an early stage prior to his career and before he was aware of the supernatural influences that affect the world around him. A rebellious and angry child, he defies his father’s wishes and enters an abandoned temple near his home village only to encounter Things Better Left Alone.

I’ve read a couple of Mr. Barrows things in the past (“The Arcana of the Alleys”, in ODQ#2, and “Shadow’s Angle” in ODQ#5) and I’ve found them somewhat wanting. The first story is a faux-Carnacki tale which completely fails to resemble the work of William Hope Hodgson while the second one – an Azuma story – I found totally unconvincing in its essentials. This present story is a little better – it at least sets itself in a reasonably definite Japanese setting – but in no way does it read like it was written by, or about, Japanese people. There is a complete lack of cultural identification – be it Victorian English or Modern-day Japanese – in any of these tales. They all read like the action-movie inspired stylings of an American guy in his 20s or early 30s as much as they read like anything. That being said, the writing is polished, the plotting is solid and the stakes convincing; they just don’t seem real. If this isn’t an argument to support the “Write What You Know” chestnut I don’t know what is…

The last story in this issue is “A Night in Gorakhpur – A Tale of the Occultress” by Colin Fisher. In it, retired military man Makepeace Sinclair tells a late-night colleague about a strange event that took place in his youth when he was the Governor of East Punjab. He offers a story about a séance that took place there, to entertain a coterie of visiting Brits and Yanks, and of a strange woman who defied protocol mid-way through the event to unmask a supernaturally evil undertaking.

This story is loaded with myriad tiny details – of place, of time, of culture – that quickly consolidate as an entertaining whole. The point-of-view of the clueless Sinclair is perfect for relaying the seemingly sinister machinations of the Occultress as she moves to unearth the villains before they do harm. There is palpable menace in the action and in the framing device of the older Sinclair talking to his visitor. I was left wondering somewhat at the end as to why the Occultress appears in the modern setting and just who it could be that she had come to vanquish – Sinclair or the listener – and it left me a little unsatisfied. That, however, is my only quibble: an excellent story, else.

I should also take time to salute the artists while I’m here. From the front cover to the back, there’s a wealth of good quality visuals all resonating nicely with the accompanying writing.

The reviews and articles have a lot to offer as well. There’s Steven Philip Jones’ evaluation of Dirk Pitt – a character created by the action/thriller writer Clive Cussler, who died earlier this year – as an occult investigator and, in a similar vein, Dave Brzeski sums up the shortcomings of Grimm: Ghost Spotter/Doctor a character from the Golden Age of American comics. Then Bobby Derie muses upon whether Robert E. Howard might have ever read a William Hope Hodgson story and what the likelihood of that might have been by trawling through his extensive correspondence with other members of the Lovecraft Circle. Finally, there are as usual a slew of entertaining reviews on current works available in the sub-genre: I definitely pore through this stuff – a lot of my stock purchasing for the bookshop where I work has benefited from the finds I’ve made here!

*****

The term “Occult Detective” is a surprisingly broad umbrella that can cover a huge amount of genre and literary territory. There are common tropes and mainstays to which writers can turn their hands for various effects and a huge scope to transform a narrative into something that can transcend the Genre Fiction tar-brushing. Every issue of this magazine contains works that are pure magic in terms of range and execution and that trend doesn’t seem likely to stop. There is the occasional dud, or story that just needs a bit more polish, but that’s inevitable with these kinds of efforts.

Of note, now that we’re at issue number seven, is the notion that many characters in these stories seem to be part of a greater whole and that what we’re seeing is just a fraction of the potential that can be found in a collection of stories focusing on these players and the stages upon which they strut. I mentioned above that Ms. Vlek’s world, in which she sets her Geoffrey Vermillion narratives, is a case where the whole seems greater than the sum of its parts; that might also hold true for Mr. Hayes' unnamed characters from this issue, or of Mr. Fisher’s daring Occultress. It’s certainly been the case in earlier issues with Melanie Atherton Allen’s Simon Wake stories, Tim Waggoner’s Ismael Carter adventures against the encroaching Shadow, or Edward M. Erdelac’s John Conquer series. Other stories here are perfect as they are – “as an orange is final; as an orange is something that nature has made just right”, which is how Truman Capote would have it – such as “Uxmal”, “Mama G” and “Dash Thy Foot”. The great thing about a journal such as this one is that it showcases talent emerging out there in the wild and lets avid readers seek out more of the same.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Stories:

“Uxmal”, Debra Blundell

“Ghost in the Machine”, Paul St. John Mackintosh

“Pause for Station Identification”, Jonathan Raab & Matthew M. Bartlett

“The Case of the Signet Ring”, Aaron Vlek

“The Thing in the Bedroom”, “W*ll**m H*pe H*dgs*n” (David Langford)

“The White Sickness”, D.J. Tyrer

“Smoake and Mirrors”, Nancy A. Hansen

“The Spirits in the Air”, Aidan Hayes

“Mama G”, Tanya Warnakulasuriya

“Dash Thy Foot”, Julie Frost

“Beyond the Faded Shrine Gates”, Brandon Barrows

“A Night in Gorakhpur – A Tale of the Occultress”, Colin Fisher

Art:

Sebastian Cabrol, Mutartis Boswell, Luke Spooner, Bob Freeman, Autumn Barlow, and Russell Smeaton

Non-Fiction:

“Dirk Pitt: Occult Detective?”, Steven Philip Jones

“Conan and Carnacki: Robert E. Howard and William Hope Hodgson”, Bobby Derie

Cold Cases: “Grimm: Ghost Spotter/Doctor”, Dave Brzeski

Reviews:

“Soul Breaker”, Clara Coulson by Dave Brzeski

“Vigil (Verity Fassbender, Book 1)”, Angela Slatter by Julia Morgan

“Wicked Innocents”, S.H. Livernois by Dave Brzeski

“Punk Mambo, #0-#5”, Cullen Bunn, et.al, by Dave Brzeski