Matango

One of my loves and hobbies as an adult is horror movies. However, unlike most of my loves and hobbies, this has no root in my childhood. I never really watched horror movies as a kid. I remember staying home sick from church once and watching the Amazing Colossal Man on the afternoon movie offering with my Father. I remember loving Dracula and dressing as Dracula for Halloween, but I don't remember ever really seeing Dracula until I was in college. I remember the Drac Pack! I loved that cartoon. Does that count as a horror movie?


No. No it decidedly does not.

No, horror movies did not really play into my childhood. My love of horror movies would come in my teen years with a viewing of Aliens and those Friday nights in Clifton. Although, I do remember a television commercial for the Fog that scared the crap out of me.


Between summer of 1978 and summer of 1981 we lived in a small town called Rochester, New Hampshire. Not the famous Rochester, New York. This was different. Rochester, New Hampshire. It was small. And being a small town in the seventies, the streets were alive with kids who knew each other, rode bikes together, and visited each other's house with no formal permission. Therefore, it's under this setting that we'll find an elementary school-aged Chuck at the next door neighbor's house one Saturday afternoon.

I didn't especially like the kid next door. He was kind of a bully, and a year or so older. But I was bored and wanted to play cars and he was next door, so there I was. In his house. But he wouldn't get up off the couch. He lay there watching TV, and the afternoon horror matinee was about to come on. So I plopped down on the floor near him, half-heartedly pulled a few of my cars out of the carrying case, and planted in front of the TV.

The movie was called Matango. And it was strange. A foreign movie, although I really had no concept of what that meant back then. It was a Japanese movie, in color, and a quick IMDB search turns up the fact that it was released in 1963.

The movie followed the plight of a Japanese pleasure boat crew who get shipwrecked on a deserted island. They find an old ship, also shipwrecked, that seems to be in an advanced state of decay. The only thing to eat on the island is mushrooms. And as they try to survive, they slowly start to turn into mushrooms themselves.

....

What?

Yes. You read that right. The crew of the boat begins to turn into mushrooms.


This TERRIFIED me. I was shaken. I watched the entire movie in silence. I collected my cars into the box, nodded at my neighbor, and went back to my house. I still to this day think that neighbor boy knew that movie would scare the crap out of me. I went home, did NOT tell my mom what I had seen for fear of disapproval, and kept the frightening thought of MATANGO to myself for years.


Then... a few years later... I became a father. And as my son grew and grew, I bided my time. Collected the movie on DVD, watched Ashton carefully for the proper developmental cues, and then one day decided the time was ripe. I plunked his diapered butt down in front of the TV and we got our Matango on.

I don't actually remember how old Ashton was when I showed him the movie. I asked him recently if he remembered. His eyes went vacant, saw past me, and his face went cold. He just sat there whispering "Matango. Matango. Matango."

I might be exaggerating slightly.

At any rate, he's never really liked eating mushrooms. I share some blame there.


Y'know, it occurs to me that my youngest boy, Alex, and my daughter have never seen the movie. I think it might be time. Want to join us for movie night?


Thanks,
DCD

Clifton Horror Movie Nights

I’ve told you several times already about Matt Rusnak and his role in pulling a painfully nerdy Chuck out of the deep recesses of isolationism in the high school filled decade of the 1980’s. We’ve talked about music. We have yet to talk about the ideas of forming a tightly-knit group of friends, teenage male bonding, and the sense of belonging to a group larger than yourself. Those are topics I’d like to hit someday, as they are important aspects to anyone’s adolescent development. But today… I wanna talk about the horror movies of Clifton.

Today, I consider myself a legitimate fan of horror movies. But back then when I met Matt, not so much. They still gave me the heebie-jeebies back then. I remember clearly being nervous sitting in the theater next to my first real girlfriend to watch the Prince of Darkness. And I remember my friend and co-worker on the Burke Lake Maintenance crew telling me about this amazing new movie he saw called "Aliens" and how I really had to check it out. I did. My first R rated movie and horror movie that I ever saw alone. Snuck out without my Mom knowing what I was going to see. Movie scared the CRAP out of me.





I loved it.

One of the things that Matt did best was create an idyllic atmosphere for hanging out. His house was deep in the remote, woods-infested backwater of Clifton, VA. His house was old, maybe even turn of the century old. His parents were around, but not intrusive. His kitchen was warm and his TV room was perfect. Small TV, VCR, and comfortable chairs.

For my senior year of High School, this was my home for Friday nights. Matt's twin brother Ben made homemade pizza and extolled the virtues of his home darkroom and his photography passion. Matt had always gone to Errol's video before my arrival and almost always had a horror movie all picked out and ready to go. Good friends. Good eats. Great environment. The perfect 'safe' setting for male camaraderie at an age when usually the socialization was all about getting your hands on beer or drugs. We had no interest in that. We just wanted to watch a good movie, laugh our butts off, hopefully see some horror-movie boobs, and be together for a few hours. These memories of Clifton and those relationships will always hold up in my memory as the golden ideal.


Of course... there wasn't a girl in sight. And we ALL would've chucked it at the first hint of an actual girlfriend.

The problem with watching horror movies in Clifton on Friday nights, the main problem with being in Clifton at night at all, was the drive home. It was dark, with no street lights, and it was a long ways away from my home in Fairfax, VA.


I remember saying good night to Matt and Ben with smiles and laughter and turning around and letting the smile drop from my face like a ton of bricks when I realized I had to walk out to the car alone. Having just watched some gut wrenching, stress inducing, jump-fest of a horror movie. SURELY there would be some killer waiting for me in the back of my 1977 Vista Cruiser Station Wagon.


The worst of these nights was when Matt told me the Goat Man story for the first time. To my memory, he delivered it perfectly. I had never heard the story before and I'm not about to tell it to you now. I'll need a camp fire and a flashlight hovering under my jaw.

Matt topped off the legend of the Goat Man by telling me that the whole thing happened in Clifton, "some years ago". And that they had never found the killer. So I may have been grinny or I may have been gullible, I don't remember. But I do remember letting my mind race away from me and being TERRIFIED of the Goat Man on that long drive home from Clifton.


You know what's worse than driving home from dark-and-woodsy Clifton, VA late on a Friday night after an evening of entertaining horror? I'll tell you... it's sitting in your driveway back at home afraid to open the door of your nigh-impregnable Vista Cruiser Station Wagon. Absolutely sure that once you DO open that door, either the Goat Man will take you from above and rip you to pieces... or Matt and Ben will jump out from behind a nearby tree to scare you and laugh their butts off on what a frightened mess you are.

I have lots of regrets. I'm sure we all do. If I could, I would go back and re-live my entire college experience just so I could have the chance to actually get it right. BUT... but... those Clifton nights? With Matt and Bill and Jamie and Mike and Eric and Ricky and Mario.... those were perfect. I would go back and re-live those in a second. But not because I want to get it right. Because it was just perfect the first time around.

Thanks,
DCD

Horror Comics

For the most part, I’ve always kept my comic book interests narrowed down to the super-hero genre. Super heroes have largely dominated that particular medium, as it is the absolute best way to showcase their adventures. However, comics haven’t only just featured super heroes. There have been varying successes found in the genre’s of war, romance, humor, crime, and western. Much more so in the fifties and sixties than today, but there are modern day examples of these genres.

Aside from super-heroes, arguably the next most popular genre in the medium of comic books is horror.

As a kid in the seventies, I didn’t get a whole lot of horror comic books. In fact, only one comes to mind. Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery #65, with a cover date of December 1975. I was six.


I have no idea how this thing ended up in my collection. Even as a kid I had no idea how to file and classify it. As an adult, it took me forever to figure out what comic it was based solely on vague recollections of the cover. But I finally did locate it. And upon flipping through it, some of the imagery is memorable to me. Here are some examples:








Obviously, it wasn’t the kind of stories that strongly caught my attention.

As an adult, I grew to have a serious appreciation for horror movies and the horror genre. This appreciation led me to research any horror stories in my preferred medium of comic books. I found out all about EC comics and their headline title, Tales from the Crypt.


The EC comics have a strong role in the history of comics. Famous for quality and absorbing, gorey, gruesome stories, the comics themselves are absolute gems. They were hugely popular in the very early 1950’s, and they were the center of a storm surrounding comics and the idea that comic books were one of the primary causes of juvenile delinquency. The debates led to senate hearings, book burnings, self-regulation of the comic book industry, and the demise of EC comics. But I don’t want to get into all that here. It’s better covered elsewhere. If you’re interested, you can start here and here.

As great as the EC horror comics were, I never really found them all that scary. Maybe it’s because I was reading them as a jaded adult in the first decade of the 21st century and not as an eight-year-old in 1951. I heartily enjoyed them, but I didn’t find them scary.

In fact, I was under the impression that comic books couldn’t really scare me. I’ve recently learned different.

No discussion about modern day horror comics can be had without mentioning the Walking Dead. It’s a comic that my wife and I both enjoy immensely. Strongly adult, very engrossing, high quality stories told in the medium of a black-and-white comic book. The comic spurred a hit television show and is still being published monthly.


The thing that gets me about the Walking Dead is that I find a genuine surprise in every issue. Writer Robert Kirkman legitimately catches me off guard with at least one page-turn surprise per issue. The whole series is very disturbing for someone who’s most comfortable with super-hero comics of the seventies. At one stage in the series, it got to the point that I was afraid to turn the page for fear of what would happen next.

But this is a fear born of tension and anticipation, rather than legitimate fear. I was starting to feel a little jaded. It was like I was too old or exposed to find any true fear in horror comic books. I felt as if I had missed out. Is it possible for an adult who watches horror movies regularly to be scared by reading a comic book?

Recently I had heard about a series called Locke & Key from comic book publisher IDW. The series is written by a dude named Joe Hill. Hill writes both books and comics, and he absolutely deserves credit in his own right, so I won’t mention who his father is. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill_(writer)) The Locke & Key series had been recommended to me by a few different sources. So I finally broke down and bought the first collection.

It was a winter afternoon, I sat in the quiet sun room while the kids were off playing in another room and Lorie was working on her projects. Maybe it was a combination of focus, solitude, and the quality of the material. But reading this I found myself to be downright scared. Hill crafts a tale involving an old New England haunted house, a family recently devastated by a serial killer, and mystical keys that open doors in ways that no key on my keychain is capable of. The series deserves every inch of reputation it has and I intend to buy the rest of the collections. There was one image in particular that I can’t shake. And I’m very glad that I was able to put down the colorful adventures of my favorite super heroes for an afternoon and absorb myself in this horror story without distraction. It was quite the experience.


And now, unfortunately, I’m thinking.

I’m thinking that maybe that’s why I don’t seem to enjoy entertainment that much anymore. The focus. Between my ever-present To Do list, and the needs of my very active family I have very little opportunity to carve out a time for focused reading. I hope that particular state of being is temporary. I enjoy the way things are now and live in the moment. But I very rarely sit through a modern TV show or a modern comic without thinking about all the many, many things that I could be doing instead. It’s only the movies and comics of yesteryear, the stuff I’m already familiar with, that can distract me to the level of actually enjoying my entertainment.

Or… y’know… maybe I just think too much. That’s Lorie’s theory.

Thanks,
DCD

Nightmare Before Christmas

Here it is October and my iPod has gotten very depressing. According to my spreadsheets, there are very specific things I must listen to during the month of October. First and foremost is Wojciech Kilar’s soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Spooky and haunting. Another one is the soundtrack to Sweeney Todd, wonderfully dark and hateful. There’s the soundtrack to the Addams Family movie. The soundtracks to Aliens and Predator and the Wolfman and Sherlock Holmes. And there’s the Nightmare Before Christmas.



Nightmare Before Christmas has always proven a difficult problem for me. An annual problem. The root question here is, how do you classify the movie? Is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas one? The question has been driving me crazy ever since I saw it in the theater in 1993.

Halloween entertainment isn’t necessarily as distinct as Christmas entertainment. Any horror movie can be considered Halloween entertainment just as it can be up for movie-watching fun at any time of the year. The elements that make a good Halloween movie are atmosphere and character. Does it have a creepy, gothic atmosphere? Does it have outrageous characters that you can model a costume on? Okay… you’re good!



Christmas movies are very specific. They must take place at Christmas. The enjoyment of the holiday must be in jeopardy in some manner. And Christmas must be either ‘saved’ or ‘understood’ at the climax of the movie. There are many, many, MANY movie that fall under these tight guidelines.



My favorite Christmas movie is Die Hard. It takes place at Christmas. And it’s Die Hard, which is awesome.

Nightmare Before Christmas is… sigh. Nightmare Before Christmas has both.



It’s gothic. Most of the action happens at Halloween Town, which answers the need for a spooky setting. The main character is Jack Skellington, the King of Halloween, and almost everyone he interacts with is a spooky horror character that would make a great Halloween costume. So…. Right? Halloween. Right?


But the movie STARTS at the very end of Halloween. And ends on Christmas Even with a save-the-Christmas moment! The movie even has a Christmas message. Santa Claus is in the movie! Santa Claus gets kidnapped in the movie!! It has elves! Ugh. It’s a Christmas movie. Impossible.


I think this method of breaking all the rules by adhering to all the rules is why the movie has burned itself into my brain as a timeless classic.

Ultimately, the movie makes me love Halloween and I can’t think of a single time I’ve watched it at Christmas time. So it’s a Halloween movie.

…right?



This movie caught me off guard this year with a facet of our family development I wasn’t entirely aware of: Holiday traditions. As kids, holiday traditions are extremely fun and important. As adult daddies and mommies, they’re a pain in the butt. Unless you’re my ridiculous sister. (http://www.3peasinbrooklyn.com/) What caught me off guard is the traditions I’m creating for the kids without even realizing it.

My youngest son, Alex, is six. And when it came to his attention that it was even slightly close to October, he wanted to watch Nightmare Before Christmas. I laughed at the request, and asked him why. He said, very plainly, “it’s tradition”.



I have a love/hate thing with traditions. For me, they’re a tool to invoke nostalgia. But logically speaking, if you do the same thing every year there’s nothing to mark that year in your memory as unique. So do traditions actually hurt the lasting memories of the holidays? My oldest kid is thirteen, and we’ve already built a lot of traditions surrounding Christmas. My mother, however, has so many traditions surrounding Christmas that they start on November first and fill a calendar with red and green ink.



And the fact that this is not in my control is a little upsetting. The kids are forming traditions of their own based on whatever we ended up doing last year. Ugh. I have to be extremely careful about every activity I plan in the December time frame. It’s why I’ve avoided devoting a blog to anyone’s birthday or anniversary. I don’t want it to get caught up in an expected, traditional cliché.

Some things seem to grow to be entirely not within my control. Like the holiday traditions we follow in the minds of my family. Or whether or not the Nightmare Before Christmas is a clearly-classifiable movie. For the most part, that seems to really bother me. But every once in awhile I relax, put things in perspective, and I’m comforted by the fact that such issues just really don’t matter.

Thanks,
DCD

…

…

… it’s a Christmas movie.

Disco Dracula

Earlier this month I wrote about the Hammer film Horror of Dracula and Christopher Lee’s interpretation of the king of the vampires. In that post, I bashed the 1979 Dracula film starring Frank Langella and called it “Disco Dracula”.

Then I felt guilty.

Then my head wouldn’t leave it alone.



I am not a fan of loudly expressed, drastically uninformed opinions. I feel like the internet has plenty of that already covered. So why add to it? I rented the 1979 Dracula movie from Netflix and, almost apologetically, watched it with Lorie and my two older kids. And yes… I ended up loving it.



The settings were lavishly beautiful and spooky. The re-telling was faithful and yet still had twists. There were definitely some scary scenes, as my daughter can profess. And the hair… was magnificent. The soundtrack really had me, so much so that I had to look up the composer. John Williams. It was John Williams, of course. In the year between Superman (1978) and Empire Strikes Back (1980).






I’m much more familiar with Frank Langella’s work today. So seeing him on screen as Dracula was a little unsettling. His hair is magnificent. Langella’s performance is perfect and he crafts Dracula to be the type of flawless movie character in the same vein as James Bond. You just can’t picture them doing normal, everyday things. Langella’s take on Dracula is deadly serious and brings a lot of weight to the role. He’s extremely charismatic and very controlled. He’s obviously very comfortable with the character, as I just learned he was famous during the time for playing Dracula in a lengthy Broadway performance.

That being said, there are still moments like this:





As with all forms of entertainment, there are certain elements of the film that will forever mark it as something produced in the 1970’s, for audiences of the 1970’s. As much as I’ve come to love and respect this movie, it’s still Disco Dracula. Your mileage may vary. At this point in my life I’m very aware that I’m unable to remove myself from my assessment of movies, comics or books and I’ll never have the completely impartial judgment.





See? This is Jonathon Harker? Secondary hero of the film! He’s sporting the part down the middle and 70’s porn ‘stache.



My favorite scene of the movie, one of many favorite scenes, is when Professor Van Helsing is searching for his daughter, Mina. A character that at this point in the film has been turned into a vampire. He and Dr. Seward find an entrance to a series of underground tunnels while digging up Mina’s coffin, which gives us one of the truly spine-tingling scary scenes of the movie.


I was chasing my daughter around the house quoting this scene and doing vampire fingers.






One of the things that I don’t like about modern storytelling is the feeling that the creators are embarrassed by the original source material. It’s the feeling I get when I see science fiction stories done with a gritty, realistic take. I’ve talked about this before, with posts on Falling Skies and my comparison of modern werewolves with Curse of the Werewolf (http://www.doabarneyoldfield.blogspot.com/2012/10/curse-of-werewolf.html). I absolutely feel this way when I find vampire stories that shy away from the traditional weakness and strengths of the vampire. Things such as vulnerability to religious expression like crosses and Holy Water, vulnerability to sunlight, the ability to change shape into a mist or a wolf. There are several modern day examples of creators who shy away from these elements of the vampire mythology. I’m not a fan of that. Maybe this is my OCD overruling me and getting in the way, but if you’re going to tell a story about vampires please embrace the source material. Be inspired by our past, not embarrassed by it. I feel that Dracula does this. In the 1970’s, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula had been around for forty years and was a tired old cliché. Lugosi himself played Dracula in Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein. The vampire lord had strayed into a parody of himself and our culture at the time had a hard time taking the character seriously anymore. Indeed, the movie Love at First Bite with George Hamilton was also released in 1979, parodying the vampire.



Even though this movie has scenes where it comes off as ‘Disco Dracula’, I think one of its greatest strengths is that it takes the source material very seriously.





Thanks,
DCD

Curse of the Werewolf

I recently wrote about the Hammer Films classic Horror of Dracula, comparing that film to its much earlier Universal Studios equivalent. And as original as Hammer’s interpretation was, it just didn’t have that feel of originality to it. The Dracula character is too well known, the story the character comes from has been told too many times.

One Hammer film that does not suffer from this problem is the Curse of the Werewolf, a 1961 Hammer films offering starring Oliver Reed.



This werewolf movie is strikingly original. Where Dracula and Frankenstein both spring from famous novels, the werewolf not so much. Because of this, many more liberties can be taken with the character. So for fans of the 1941 Wolf Man film starring Lon Chaney Jr, rest assured that there is absolutely no similarity here. Well… except for basic furryness of the monster.

In the 1941 Wolfman movie, Larry Talbot becomes the Wolf Man by being bitten but not killed by another Wolf Man. Almost every villager he talks to chants to him the following:

Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.


And so it goes for most origins of werewolves. Being bitten means you turn, right? Not in Curse of the Werewolf.

One of the things that makes Curse of the Werewolf feel so unique is the origin of the monster, which we don't learn until quite a ways into the movie. In fact, the movie spends quite a segment of time setting up the history and backstory of the character. Showing a beggar being toyed with and eventually imprisoned by a nobleman. Showing that beggar being forgotten about in the dungeon, where he eventually attacks and rapes a young, mute girl. She escapes and is found by the kindly couple of the movie. She dies giving birth to Leon Corledo, our main character, on Christmas Day. And the token superstitious older woman of the movie warns that Leon is cursed, both by the evil circumstances of his conception and being an unwanted child born on Christmas Day.


And that's it. It's the curse. Those factors somehow mixed together to make Leon a werewolf during a full moon.


OH! There's one other thing that sets Hammer's werewolf apart from the others. It's not just a silver bullet that will kill him, but a silver bullet made from a melted down crucifix.


I've heard people say that they feel the removal of the more superstitious elements from these classic monsters are making them more cool. Vampires don't burn in sunlight and don't care about crucifix's and stuff like that. I feel quite the opposite, feeling that these elements add a much needed dash of superstition to firmly plant these monsters into fantasy. Again... I don't care for my entertainment to be gritty and realistic, I want it to be entertaining. I'm often told I'm in the minority.


In terms of appearance, Wolf Man and Curse of the Werewolf share the idea of a flat faced monster who looks more like a man turned into a wolf than a wolf that can walk. Shying away from the full snout sported by werewolves of today.


Today's werewolves largely obey the idea of being cursed once your bitten. But the interesting thing to me is how different modern day werewolf depictions in movies are from older stuff. It seems like werewolves are just growling, ripping killing machines today. Or armies of furry beasts cultivated to fight vampires, or some such nonsense. The most interesting parts of Wolf Man and Curse of the Werewolf, at least in my opinion, are the parts where the main character is trying to restrain himself, resist the curse, and protect those around them. They generally don't want to BE werewolves. They want to be civilized men, not lost to the beast-like unpredictability of their curse. Which I think is the core meaning of the character. And if we're losing that point with modern storytelling and caving in to the idea that we want to be werewolves because werewolves are cool.... well what does that say about modern society.

I'm reminded of the most memorable werewolf moment in the movie Monster Squad from 1987. The moment when the man, frantically worried about the monster within him, starts to attack a station full of police and yells "LOCK ME UP!"


They just shoot him instead.

Thanks,
DCD