SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK

Directed by Andre Ovredal to a screenplay by Guillermo del Toro. Based on the books by Alvin Schwartz.

Starring Zoe Colletti as Stella and Michael Garza as Ramone.

“The book reads you.”

In today’s parlance, this movie issues several “trigger warnings”—that is, don’t anger your local scarecrow; inspect your next bowl of soup for a dismembered big toe; and be careful what scary stories you read in the dark—they may appear on screen at your local theater.

That’s what happens in this exemplary collection of local legends, twice-told tales, and campfire frights. They've come to the screen. Based on stories by Alvin Schwartz whose publication in the 1990s occasioned trigger warnings of their own to cautious parents and young readers, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK delivers plenty of shocks and gross-outs. It’s just in time for a new generation of young adults (it’s rated PG-13) who’ve grown up on Stranger Things.

They understand. Just like readers in the ‘90s understood.

At the heart of the stories, both on stage and screen is a book. You don’t read the book, it reads you. Thus, five teenagers in the sleepy little town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania find themselves in possession of a book that “reads’ their respective traumas and produces them, “writ large,” tailor-made, as it were, to their real life. Stella, who is a young storyteller, finds this book during a raid she and her friends make on a local haunted house. Local legend has it that a wealthy family of industrialists named Bellows once lived there; and that they kept secluded from public view their disturbed and abused daughter, Sara, who eventually hung herself. After the family mysteriously disappeared, the house has been left to wrack and ruin. But Stella may yet walk there...

The book in Stella’s hand contains hand-written stories by Sara Bellows. They are written by a very angry young lady who is raging against her fate. The ink is fresh. That’s because Sara is writing scary stories even now, long after her death. The words crawl across the pages, line by line, even as they watch. And each of the stories is targeted to destroy Stella and her companions.

And so, heigh-ho, off we go, on with these deadly, twisty tales, as Sara and her friends try to find the secret behind Sara Bellows and her book before they all meet nasty ends. The stories nicely balance a delicious campfire thrill with a more substantial, gruesome impact. The monsters are very cool, especially the vengeful scarecrow and a decidedly creepy character called “the dangling man,” who assembles his body parts into a hideous parody of the human form. It’s pretty strong stuff; and I suspect some younger viewers prepared to laugh at the gross-out moments might find the laughter catching in their throats. The stories are writing them, too.

I see the intrusion of a Vietnam-era background—the movie is set in 1968 and one of the kids is dodging the draft—as ultimately irrelevant, unless you accept the fact that newsreel footage of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon present horrors of their own that are quite in keeping with the rest of the movie. Moreover, the addition of a backstory about the coverup of the poisoning of Mill Valley’s water supply may unnecessarily complicate the hard-wiring of the plot.

The direction and shock cuts deliver what young audiences come for. And the name of Guillermo del Toro serves as another lure to get them into the theaters. But viewers of a certain age—that’s me—may come away with how neatly the movie taps into those “phobic pressure points” that Stephen King writes about in his classic Danse Macabre (still one of the best overviews of horror we have). The mantra that “Books read us,” fits right in. That “danse” in search of our phobias is precisely the way words on the printed page and images on the movie screen seek us out—find us—and have their way with us.

SUSPIRIA

Directed by Luca Guadagnio and starring Dakota Johnson as Suzy Bannion, Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc (and two other roles). Mark Coulier is in charge of the prosthetic effects.

BODY HORROR

It’s not often that a movie review will lead off with the name of a “prosthetic effects” artist. But SUSPIRIA, a remake of a Dario Argento classic from 1977, demands it. His name is Mark Coulier, and his body-twisting prosthetic effects headlight the movie.

This story of the infernal doings at the Markos Dance Academy in West Berlin in 1977 is more than an exercise in the strenuous balletic physicality in the Martha Graham tradition. . . much more. The central image of the movie depicts dozens of dancers, endlessly grinding away on the floor, arms and legs contorted, torsos convulsing. There’s no balletic grace and beauty here, only self-inflicted pain and bone-cracking contortions.

At least that’s what dance mistress Madame Bland tells her new protégé, a young American named Suzy Bannion, who has just come to the Academy in search of a career. What Madame Blanc has in mind and what young Suzy achieves is nothing less than a ritualistic worship of something else, something dark, even Satanic.

Indeed, the Markos Academy is a witches’ coven. There are Three Mothers in charge. And Suzy is the newest recruit into the coven.

I use the term “Body Horror” to describe SUSPIRIA as dark fantasy historian John Clute defines the term. In his book, The Darkening Garden (2006), he describes “body horror” as the indulgence of the visceral affect, “the atrocity of the thing itself”—the subjection of the body to tortures and dislocations—in the service of a new aesthetic of horror. Well, not so new. The pain and dismemberment of Jacobean Theater, the French Grand Guignol tradition, the flayed-body images of painter Francis Bacon, and the monstrous entities of H.P. Lovecraft are old hat. But the more recent revelations of Abu Ghraib have brought these perversions to a newly disturbing reality.

No, the horrors of SUSPIRIA are not comfortable. They’re not supposed to be. And the camera’s unblinking gaze into ripped bodies spilling out their entrails is not incidental. It is front and center. It ventures into self-parody, by no means incidentally bordering on laughter.

A defense of this, if one is needed at all, is that gruesome displays like these are a needed revelation of the savagery of the human soul. Nothing less will do.

SUSPIRIA and its close relation on the distaff side, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, suggest that pain and pleasure are closely joined, not opposed, but as integrated extremes that approach a dark purity of its own. It’s a chthonic ideal that rips out our own innards. It turns our eyes away from the upper air and plunges our gaze downward into the earth.

We might violently reject it this excess. But it’s too late.

THE BLACKWELL GHOST (2017)

THE BLACKWELL GHOST delivers the best scare I’ve had in a long time.

It is a perfect demonstration of those occasional delights (in this case, scares) you sometimes encounter upon coming across a film with absolutely no prior knowledge of it. I was absently cruising Amazon Prime late one night when I came across this title. It was only 59 minutes, so despite the hour I impulsively gave it a look. It was billed as a documentary about a ghost hunter. Ordinarily I find things like this laughably absurd, because in spite of all the technology employed no ghosts ever have the courtesy to present themselves.

But here, although no spectral figures materialized, I was left at the end with one of the most hair-raising shocks I have ever suffered.

Since then, I’ve told many friends about this, but cautioned them: Watch the film first, and only after that check out its backstory.

At any rate, at the outset, THE BLACKWELL GHOST, seemed different from your ordinary store-bought paranormal investigation. This ghost hunter was no professional camera geek but merely a back-porch hack making a living by making clunky “zombie” video quickies. On a whim, he launched a one-man investigation into a purportedly haunted house in a Pennsylvanian suburban town. His inquiry picks up steam when he is invited by the occupant to visit the house and hear its story: It is a tale of thumps and bumps in the night, of doors and lights that click on and off, and, most intriguing, of a cellar with an underground well into which a previous occupant, one “Ruth Blackwell,” had dispatched the dismembered bodies of her victims.

Some research at the local library reveals that in 1941 a woman named Ruth Blackwell had indeed lived in that house and murdered and dismembered several victims and discarded them into the well in the cellar. A photo exists of Ruth, a decidedly sinister character about which nothing more is known.

The rest of THE BLACKWELL GHOST is an on-camera, first-person documentary that depicts our investigator and his wife spending three days and nights in the house. Armed with some makeshift cameras and microphones, they settle in. The first night is disappointingly bereft of spooks. The second night brings on a few strange sounds but little else. Determined to leave after one more night, they encounter during a thunderstorm a whole new battery of incidents that leaves them fleeing the house.

And left me shaken, baffled, and, above all, curious about what I had just seen.

Let me isolate one incident from the events depicted: One strategy our ghost hunter employs to trap any trickster ghosts is to place a soccer-ball-sized sphere on a table in the living room, an open invitation for a ghost to move it. Later, during that last, terrible night, alarmed by the noises downstairs and the appearance of veils of smoke triggering the smoke alarm, he ventures below. He discovers that every faucet in the house is on and that the power has been switched off. Down in the cellar, with only weak illumination from his light stand, he gropes for the breaker switch. No luck. But he can’t help noticing one new detail about the cellar: The sphere that had been placed on a table upstairs is now sitting atop the heavy grate covering the well opening.

Hours later he and his wife quit the house.

The film ends with no explanation or end credits. We have yet to learn the identity of our intrepid investigator.

Okay. That’s it. I must admit I swallowed this whole thing, hook, line, and cellar. All the paranormal, found-footage movies out there notwithstanding, I bought it all.

I later learned that THE BLACKWELL GHOST is, in all probability, a hoax of exceedingly clever achievement. No such house, no Ruth Blackwell, no account of the crimes exist. The clumsiness of its narrative structure, its amateurish execution, the goofy tactics of its unnamed narrator, the failure to deliver any spooks of substance—all contribute to its apparent veracity. You can go back and review it and detect all kinds of telltale evidence to the contrary—where is the camera for that scene, why are the characters not named, why are there no credits, for example. . . ? We don’t even know who the filmmaker is. Yet, the very fragmentariness of it all, as if a length of video film had been ripped off a larger reel and hastily abandoned, contributes to it strangeness. Calculation, if it is here, is superbly planned and executed in a manner that conceals its artistry.

I am left with that glimpse in the flickering light of the cellar of that blasted ball sitting on top of the well grate. What it signified, what it suggests, is with me still.

NEW BOOK BY JOHN C. TIBBETTS

In THE GOTHIC WORLDS OF PETER STRAUB University of Kansas professor John C. Tibbetts presents the first serious study linking Peter Straub to the evolving contexts of the Gothic Tale, including the fairy-tale tradition of the Brothers Grimm, the ghostly shivers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, the Weird monstrosities of H.P. Lovecraft, and today’s postmodernist trends in transgressive body horror. In addition to close looks at the celebrated novels, like Ghost Story and The Talisman (co-written with Stephen King), and the challenging short stories in Houses without Doors and Interior Darkness, Tibbetts examines for the first time Straub’s archives, working papers and correspondence. Several “close-up” interviews reveal the private and idiosyncratic sides of Straub, at work and at home. In short, continues Gary K. Wolfe in his Preface, “The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub provides an invaluable road map to the complex, multileveled novels and stories that will eventually come to define Straub's legacy.”

Peter Straub with the bust of H.P. Lovecraft (photo by John C. Tibbetts)

In his Foreword to the book, cultural and literary historian Gary K. Wolfe writes that “perhaps more than any author of his generation—Stephen King included—Peter Straub has extended the literary possibilities of horror fiction.” Winner of every award and accolade in the field of horror, including the World Fantasy, World Horror, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild Lifetime Achievement awards, Straub’s standing in contemporary Gothic horror is indisputable.

John Tibbetts (left) and Peter Straub, Providence, Rhode Island

“[He is] the premier stylist of the modern supernatural novel,” writes historian Douglas Winter, “a writer of rare wit and intelligence.”

In an interview with Straub’s occasional collaborator, Stephen King, conducted especially for this book, King observes that Straub brings "a poet’s sensibility to the field of dark fantasy and creates a synthesis of horror and beauty.”

DON’T BREATHE: INSIDE OUT

Spoiler alert!

Filmmaker Fede Alvarez has crafted a neat reversal on burglary movies: Instead of the thieves secretly contriving to enter a house, here they are desperately seeking to exit the house. It’s not the going-in that matters, it’s the going-OUT. And Alvarez does something much more disturbing. He delivers a piece of relentless, savage horror with an artful panache that is just this side of the movie it most resembles: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

The three would-be robbers, played by Jane levy, Dylan Minnette, and Daniel Zovatto, have targeted a blind and reclusive Gulf War veteran (Stephen Lang), who lives alone in a blighted neighborhood. Legend has it that the accidental death of his daughter has left him with a stack of money secreted away in his dark old house. So off they go, confident they can get in, find the money, and get out, before waking the sleeping man. But no. The man’s preternatural senses wake him and enable him to stalk the very people stalking him.

The film plays upon our sympathies like a demented pianist attacking a keyboard. On the one hand, of course, there’s this poor old guy, alone, blind, the victim of these vicious robbers. On the other, we have three hapless thieves falling prey to a half-crazed guy who not only brutally attacks them with blazing guns and heavy hammers, but, it turns out, is hiding a nasty secret in his old dark house: He is holding captive the young woman who killed his daughter in a traffic accident. He will release her only after she delivers the baby that will replace the daughter she killed.

The second half of the movie is a nightmarish flight and pursuit through every room, attic, basement, trap door, and corridor. When the lights are on, the robbers have the advantage; when they are off, the power play reverses. And there is something especially creepy in the moments when pursuer and pursued—who is who continually shifts about—stand together in the same space, motionless, lights on or off, each waiting for the other to betray himself with the slightest sound or breath. Balancing the sheer audacity of the brutalities is the artful mise-en-scene. DON’T BREATHE is a miracle of canny camera placement and scene composition, almost elegant in its calculation and execution. Pursuer and pursued are constantly kept in the frame in every possible kind of shot composition. In other words, while we are repelled, sometimes disgusted at the atrocities depicted, we can appreciate the beauty of the film’s design. Here is the supreme paradox. How do we deal with unspeakable horrors when they are delivered with great artistry? Perhaps the former is all the more effective due to the latter.

AMERICAN PSYCHOS: ELLIS AND STRAUB ON SERIAL KILLERS

Although the master of Gothic horror, PETER STRAUB, is as responsible as anyone for the popularization (if that is the word) of narratives about serial killers, his name is conspicuously absent in a recent New York Times article heralding Brett Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, AMERICAN PSYCHO. Now that Ellis’s story reaches Broadway in April this year, is profile of an amoral Wall Street serial killer is back in the headlines. Yet, it was Straub’s trilogy, MYSTERY, KOKO, and THE THROAT, published 1988-1993, that definitively put such stories on the map. No one, before or since, has investigated more thoroughly, even sensitively, the predatory species.

Photo courtesy of John C. Tibbetts

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, PETER STRAUB: PICTURES IN THE FIRE, is in order:

“‘Unlike you and me,’” says serial killer Till Hayward to his “protégé,” Keith, in Straub’s short story,“A Special Place,” most [serial killers] “hide their real motives from themselves:

They have no idea why they do the things they do. Oh, they talk all day long about what made them do this and that, but what they tell you isn’t even close to the truth. Because they don’t know the truth. And why is that? They can’t let themselves know it. The truth is unacceptable. Every human being on earth tells millions of lies in the course of his life, but most of those lies are to himself about himself.”

More than one reader has flinched at Straub’s gruesomely detailed accounts of these visceral horrors. Yet Straub insists his preoccupation with the serial killer, in particular, provides the writer opportunities to measure the stark confrontation of life and death, to relish “the passage into death [which] is an immense transition from the temporal into the eternal.”

They conduct their lives as a Great Secret, Straub continues, “of daylight anonymity and nocturnal evil: “If you run your life that way, the most important part of your life must be secret; everything else is a sort of code.” A key to that code may be, as in Straub’s other stories, “Bunny Is Good Bread” and “The Juniper Tree,” the formative influences on serial killers of childhood trauma and abuse:

I always went back to that same conception that some people are made out of other people who have a great potential for good that was by cruelty and ignorance pounded out of them , so their lives turn into retribution. Unfortunately, the retribution is wreaked upon the innocent. 

Further, “[Their] whole childhoods are composed of such cruelties I feel empathy for them. What I feel for the man who grew up from that child—I feel a kind of extremity of pity. I think, ‘You shouldn’t be that way. Somebody made you that way. . . For much of my work, when I look at the serial killer, in a way he’s the most beloved character in the book. This surely must give my work an odd taste, but it’s worth thinking about.”

Painting of Straub by John C. Tibbetts

As renewed attention focuses on Ellis’s 1991 novel (and Broadway play), it would be well to investigate what Peter Straub, THE master of serial-killer narratives, has to say in his books!

HANNIBAL LECTER LOVES BACH

The music of Bach’s Goldberg Variations acquires for some viewers of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) a perhaps unwelcome significance. . . More on that in a moment.

First, there’s news of the recent release on Blu-ray of Albert Lewin’s 1945 horror classic, Picture of Dorian Gray, based on Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel. This is welcome, indeed. But the new release of this underrated MGM film is guilty of one glaring omission. Nothing is said about the music by Chopin that literally underscores the disturbed mind and divided soul of the eponymous Dorian Gray. I refer to the 24th Prelude from the Opus 28 set, which evokes the hammer blows of Jove’s thunderbolts. Heard throughout both diagetically and extra-digetically, and in a variety of instrumentations, the brief piano piece undergoes shape-shifting variants, some languid and dreamy, others brutal and sinister, like the inner confusions of Gray himself.

The use of classical music in the aural depiction of all manner of cinematic villains, rascals, and homicidal maniacs has been going on since the so-called “silent” days, when pianists dutifully quoted from their catalogues of classical pieces.

For now, however, I restrict myself to the sound cinema. When Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake theme is heard under the opening credits of Lugosi’s Dracula, the die (as it were) was cast. And just a few years later, Lugosi and film composer Heinz Roemheld worked together in another horror film, The Black Cat, which featured a non-stop compendium of classical allusions to music by Liszt, Schumann, Schubert and virtually every other composer of a romantic stamp. The Black Cat still holds the trophy for the sheer clever audacity of its exuberant catalogue of musical horrors.

I pass by the references beyond counting to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and the traditional Dies Irae. Needless to say every fiend incarnate sitting at the Wurlitzer has belted out one or the other.

Specifically, I note here a few examples of how certain classical tunes have been used as themes, or “signatures” for some of the great monsters in movie history. In Fritz Lang’s M, for example, Peter Lorre’s child molester whistles Edvard Grieg’s ”In the Hall of the Mountain King as his musical calling card. Gangster Tony Camonte is another whistler, whose rendition of the ”Sextet” from Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermore, is heard several times in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). More recently, Julia Robert's abuse at the hands of her deranged husband in Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) is accompanied by Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Every time he puts a record on the turntable, you want to scream out warnings to his hapless bride. The same year of the film’s release turned out to be a banner year for sinister music. Joseph Ruben’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle features the aria “Poor Wand’ring One” from Gilbert and Sulllivan’s Pirates of Penzance as the musical analogue for the pathological nanny, portrayed by Rebecca DeMornay.

We observe that this last music is hardly sinister at all; rather, its sweet plaintive strains impart a disturbingly poignant quality to DeMornay’s horrific acts. Which is the point. Indeed, classical music is frequently deployed as a counterpoint to the villains depicted on screen. Take a look again at the main title sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, where the graceful measures of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” from Cavalleria Rusticana counterpoint De Niro’s slow-motion shadow-boxing in the ring.

Which brings us back to Hannibal Lecter and the music of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations. Why did Jonathan Demme have Lecter select a recording of the opening “Aria” as he chewed the face off a prison guard? You would think a more brutal, even savage choice would have been more appropriate. In response, pianist Jeremy Denk offers this insight: “Cunning, evil directors almost always use classical music as an ironic foil, a tool for dissociation. This perpetuates a stereotype: classical music is unnatural. It is not the music for normal events.”

Such an unfortunate stereotype undoubtedly exists, and it has been proven over and over again, for better and worse, in the movies, to the er, delectation of us viewers.

Now pardon me a moment, those ambivalent opening measures of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor are going ‘round and ‘round in my head. . . waiting for some sinister image to ground it in some horrible reality. . .