I’ve been seeing a lot of on-line ads for the new Nosferatu movie directed by Dave Eggers. It looks like a pretty good movie, although, judging by the trailers, it seems to be emphasizing the horror (e.g., slasher) elements of the classic Nosferatu/Dracula story over the erotic angle (which most film adaptations have veered toward).
Or does it? Looking at the poster, the hook line poster reads “Succumb to the Darkness.” It’s a seductive line, which doesn’t quite seem to go with the image portrayed—that of a beautiful young woman in a nightgown lying on her back with her mouth open, while a skeletal, monstrously taloned hand reaches for her face.
Erotic? Not really. Gross? Yeah, kinda. This thematic confusion between the film’s trailer and its poster reflects, I think, the difficulty in adapting the Dracula story to the screen. (Yes, I know that Nosferatu is not the same as Dracula, but close enough.) The difficulty is made worse in our present time, the 21st Century, when porn is only a few clicks away and the idea of truly transgressive sexual activity is more and more difficult to imagine.
Last month, I reran an old post about how much I love the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet. Then, just over a week later in a striking and somewhat sad example of synchroncity, the last suriving cast member of that film, Earl Holliman, passed away at the age of 94.
Holliman’s brief performance as the boozing, womanizing cook in Forbidden Planet was a highlight of the movie. This is not surprising; Holliman was one of the best character actors of his generation, performing in countless movies and TV shows. These ran the gamut from Westerns, cop dramas, thrillers, and (of course) science fiction.
Physically, Holliman had the kind of rugged, Southern-style good looks that were a requirement for tough-guy roles back in the day. Actually, he looked a bit like another great TV actor, James Garner (not to mention my dad). The picture above shows him in all his 1970s-era glory.
Forbes Magazine has a nice tribute article about him here.
Like all great rock bands, U2 has always has always had the ability to reinvent itself. Just when you think it’s completely washed out and finished, the members come up with another great album. They did it in 1991 withAchtung Baby and again in 1994 with How to Assemble an Atomic Bomb. The best song off that latter album is “Vertigo,” which also has one of the cooler music videos the band has ever appeared in.
I have a theory about horror novels. The secret to a good horror novel, I think, is not gore, or violence, or even suspense. The secret is empathy. The empathy we, as readers, form for the main characters, and the empathy the main characters feel for each other.
This should be obvious, but it’s not. I have read (well, started) many celebrated horror novels, some of them very well written, only to set them aside after a chapter two because I didn’t care about any of the characters. Contrast this with the very best horror fiction from masters like Stephen King. King is famous for creating main characters who are kind, decent, spirited people with whom the reader instantly connects (and worries about). King’s characters also tend to be underdogs and outcasts. Nerds. Geeks. Handicapped kids. Fat kids. Gay kids. Such types are the most vulnerable in our society, and therefore most vulnerable to whatever monster Kings pits them against. Their underdog status makes them even more sypathetic to readers, and makes their courage even more admirable.
This is not to say that protagonists of horror novels should be all good. Far from it. In fact, King often presents the reader with deeply flawed, erratic main characters who must discover their own inner resilience and courage to face the evil that confronts them.
Recently, I found myself thinking about such matters as I read Lois Murphy’s excellent novel Soon from 2019. Like many great horror books (or many great books of any kind), Soon stays with you long after you finish the last page. It’s got some genuinely creepy stuff in it. Most of all, though, it has a likable, sympathetic, and funny main character named Pete.
Pete is a retired cop who lives in the tiny town of Nebulah in rural Australia. Nebulah is a new twist on the concept of a “ghost town” in that its inhabitants are literally tormented by ghosts. Rather, by a strange, evil entity called The Mist that descends upon the town every evening. From this vapor, a hellish gallery of semi-corporeal spirits attacks any person foolish or unlucky enough to be caught outside after sundown. The victims suffer grisly, violent deaths, but their bodies are never found. (Their remains dissolve mysteriously in the mist soon after being discovered.)
Not surprisingly, the town’s population rapidly dwindles from a few hundred to a few dozen, and then down to just eleven. Most people leave. The rest are picked off one by one. Pete is one of the de facto leaders of this tiny remnant of hard-core town folk, most of whom are too poor or feckless or otherwise attached to the place to ever leave. Pete is neither poor, nor attached, nor feckless, but he stays anyway, mainly to protect his friends. These survivors meet each night at one of their homes and spend the night together, trying to hear the demonic wailings and thrashings coming from outside the windows and doors. (The Mist, rather like vampires, can’t cross the solid threshold of a home unless there is some gap that would let it in.)
I find myself admiring much of Ms. Murphy’s writing, especially in the way she renders the character of Pete. The plot also has some genuinely surprising twists and interludes, such as when Pete goes to visit his estranged daughter in a distant city.
Most of all, I liked the psychological realism of the book. Everyone left in Nebulah has some damned good, practical reasons for not leaving (just ask them), but none of these seems greater than what we suspect is a fundamental weakness in their character. Some are afraid of being poor in a new place. Others are reluctant to give up the homesteads they have labored to improve over the years. Some are just too tired.
Others, like Pete himself, have some secret sin to atone for, and a guilt that keeps them from leaving.
If you were to ask a music lover to name the most iconic pop band of the 1970s, their answer would probably be The Bee Gees. And they’d be right–mostly. For about three years, The Bee Gees bestrode the world like a collosus, leading the musical and cultural era that was disco.
But, for my money, it was the Electric Light Orchestra that most defined 70s pop. The creation of musical genius Jeff Lynne, E.L.O. was hit machine that cranked out gold records with regularity. Their songs were all over the radio here Gainesville, and their records were coveted.
And expensive. I remember looking at Out of Blue in the record store and was shocked to see that it was priced at $14.99. (This was back when ten bucks would get you a decent dinner in a real restaurant.)
My favorite E.L.O. song is, of course, “Turn to Stone”, which is the perfect fusion of pop and rock. Cinemaphiles will note that it was this song that P.T. Anderson ended his great film Boogie Nights with.
When I was teenager (ahem, some years ago) I had the good fortune to see Robin Williams perform. He was the lead entertainment for that year’s Gator Growl, the annual pep rally thrown by the University of Florida. At the time, Williams was mainly known as the odd but extremely funny star of TV’s Mork & Mindy. Few were aware that he was first and foremost a stand-up comedian, and even fewer knew just how brilliant—not to mention obscene—his style of comedy could be. So, you can imagine the surprise (and shock) that ensued when he walked out on stage and did his first joke, miming the cocking action of a shotgun as well as the sound: KA-CHICK. “Down here in the South,” he said, “if you hear that sound, you’d better be one fast motherfucker!”
The ensuing performance became a local legend. I remember it as being as incredibly manic and astoundingly creative. William’s comedy was like nothing else around at that time. It wasn’t long before he emerged as the premier comedian of his generation. And, since his suicide in 2014, he has become firmly embedded in our national consciousness as the Greatest Comedian of All Time.
This is a justifiable opinion. For my money, though, there was one comic who surpassed even Williams in his intellect, inventiveness, and sheer genius. This was Richard Pryor.
Back in the late 1990s, every guy I knew under the age of thirty had a copy of The Prodigy‘s Fat of the Land album. This was the case even though there was nothing particularly new about the record itself; Big Beat had been around for years, and some of the songs on the album itself had come out on previous albums. Nevertheless, each song is more than the sum of its parts. Each one comes together into a delierously wicked electro-dance mash-up that remains unrivaled.
Back in the day, my favorite song off the album was the problematically entitled “Smack My Bitch Up”. (As far as I’m concerned, the title is camp, if not actual satire in the Spinal Tap mode.) But these days, my favorite The Prodigy song is probably this little gem, “Firestarter”.
Back in the dot.com boom of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work for an IT company based in New York City. I was a remote worker, writing software eight hours a day in my spare bedroom in Gainesville, Florida. It was a win-win situation. I got to work from home, and my bosses got a good developer for country-boy wages (and I was still in the same time zone).
Occasionally they would fly me to the city for a meeting and I would spend my evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, which is surely the most beautiful and bewitching cities of the earth. My favorite spot is the Met. Like a lot of introverts, I love museums, and the Met is the greatest of them all. I mean, how many museums have their own Egyptian Temple? Indoors?
Once I spent an entire weekend roaming its halls, barely scratching the surface of its vast collections. I tend to gravitate toward the Modern period from the early- and mid-twentieth century. From guys like Matisse and Picasso all the way to Hopper and O’Keefe.
From a historical perspective, my interest stopped after that. I never much got the whole Post-Modern thing—Abstract Expressionism and all that. It seemed too theoretical. A joke that high-brow art critics had played on the rest of us, as Tom Wolfe wrote so wittily in The Painted Word.
I recently found myself in the so-called “green room” of a TV studio in Biloxi, Mississippi, waiting to be interviewed about a book-reading I was doing that week. The interview was to air live on a local current events show, and another guest waiting for his spot was a musician for a band called The Molly Ringwalds. He was friendly and very smart, and we began to chat (I did so to relieve my nervousness; he was just being nice).
In the course of conversation, he explained that The Molly Ringwalds (as I should have guessed, but didn’t) is an 1980s tribute band that covers all kinds of hits from that by-gone era, which I also love. I asked him if they did any songs by The Smiths, and he said they did.
“Which one?” I asked.
“‘How Soon is Now?’ What else?”
What else, indeed. “How Soon is Now?” is not only The Smiths’ greatest song, it’s one of the greatest rock songs ever. It’s also one of the most complicated. From its famous guitar overture, warbling and full of dark menace, to its anguished lyrics by the brilliant Morrisey, “How Soon is Now?” is both a dance song and a dirge. It’s also a cry of rebellion against conformity, prejudice, and alienation.
Since it first hit the clubs in 1985, the song has been taken up as an anthem by the LGBTQ community, and rightly so. But I think it resonates equally well with any introvert, outcast, or general freak who just, well…needs to be loved.
People love tag-teams. It’s in our nature. Have you noticed that almost every work of epic literature across the world has not one but two main heroes. The Gilgamesh epic has Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The Iliad has Achilles and Odysseus. The Authurian legends have Arthur and Lancelot. DC has Superman and Batman.
In all of these examples, the two heroes have much in common, but they are also different in some fundamental and defining way. They not only compliment each other, they contrast each other.
More importantly, they make the story a lot more fun.
I think of this dynamic whenever I hear “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. Together, the band and the singer represented a group of pop titans of the 1980s. But there were huge functional and artistic differences between them. Bowie was probably the greatest musical artist of his generation, known for inventive and experimental works that never failed to surprise or thrill his fans. Queen was a great rock band, constructed around the epic voice of Freddie Mercury and the epic guitar skills of Brian May. The idea of bringing these two forces together might have been disastrous. That is, they might have canceled each other out.
But no. Instead, their talents together to create one of the best rock songs ever recorded. From the amazing bass riff (whose author is disputed) to the colossal bridge near the end, it’s still one of my favorites.
Enjoy…!
BONUS: Here is a great live performance of the song by Bowie and Annie Lennox.
Ash Clifton, Writer 