HYPNOGORIA 133 - Terror in the 2010s Part I

In the first of a two part experiment in pop culture time travel, Mr Jim Moon charts the assorted manifestations of horror in the 2010s, in this show looking at the new franchises spawned and various televisual terrors! Hence we are talking about the Saw series, Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Conjuring Universe,  Supernatural, The Walking Dead, True Blood, Dexter, American Horror Story and even bloody Twilight! 

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TWILIGHT ON THE SNOW by Clark Ashton Smith

Twilight on the Snow, a poem by Clark Ashton Smith read by Mr Jim Moon. First published in the collection Ebony and Crystal (1922)

listen to ‘Twilight on the Snow’ on Audioboo

Twilight on the Snow
by Clark Ashton Smith

Before the hill's high altar bowed,
The trees are Druids, weird and white,
Facing the vision of the light
With ancient lips to silence vowed.

No certain sound the woods aver,
Nor motion save of formless wings—
Filled with phantasmal flutterings,
With thronging gloom and shadow-stir.

Unseen, unheard, amid the dell
Lie all the winds that mantic trees
Have lulled with crystal warlockries
And bound about with Merlin-spell.


Photograph by Mr Jim Moon

TWIHARD PART IV - Total Eclipse of the Heart

As a companion piece to The Black Dog Podcast Twihard marathon (episodes #62 to #64), I too took up the challenge to watch all three Twilight movies...

So then, while I had gone into New Moon feeling fairly positive, after that dragging, and to be honest, fairly tedious flick, it was with a heavy heart that I slapped Eclipse into the player. And after New Moon the various claims bandied around that the franchise improves with each instalment did not so much as ring hollow but sounded like the cracking chimes of doom.

Nor did I gain much comfort from knowing that in the director’s chair this time around was David Slade. Yes he’d made a big splash with his debut Hard Candy and followed it up with 30 Days of Night, one of the better vampire films to emerge in recent years. Just as I could understand why Hardwicke seemed as a safe pair of hands to bring Stephenie Meyer’s novel to the screen, in giving the reins of Eclipse to Slade it seemed like Summit Entertainment were keen to have a director onboard with a proven track record for handling horror, something that this franchise dealing with creatures of the night had been oddly lacking so far.

But then on the other hand, I had been impressed by previous flicks by Catherine Hardwicke, but we all know how well Twilight turned out, and while I’d still defend that movie as not being as bad as it’s made out to be, it still falls far short of Lords of Dogtown. Would the same fate befall Mr Slade’s entry in the Twilight Saga?

Most troubling of all though was that that this instalment of the saga of Bella and Edward rocked up to the theatres less than six months after its predecessor. Now that’s one hell of a production schedule for an el cheapo Z-grade slasher sequel never mind a healthily budgeted blockbuster franchise. And while I could appreciate that shooting had begun a little before the release of New Moon, the fact it still seems like this sequel appeared awfully fast. Were Paramount and Summit rush releasing these films because they feared that their target audience would be growing up faster than they could make them? It certainly looks that way which doesn’t foster much hope for the quality of Eclipse or indeed the supposed deep reverence for the source material that their publicity department bangs on about at every given opportunity. Because if they are rushing these films to market before the bubble bursts, either it shows a contempt for their core audience or a lack of belief in the merits of Meyer’s novels. And in the spirit of compare and contrast, it should be noted that Warners Bros. have no such worries about Harry Potter – they have frequently delayed releases and many of the children that comprised audience for their first adaptation are now old enough to have kids of their own. So whichever way you cut it, it doesn’t reflect well.

Further signs of this production being the product of undue haste arise when one consults the cast list. Recurring villain Victoria in this outing is played by Bryce Dallas Howard as apparently Rachelle Lefevre, who had played the role in the first movies, was unable to sign on due to alleged scheduling difficulties. I say “alleged”, because Ms. Lefevre was none to pleased by the decision. As she notes here, there was an overlap of ten days between her commitments, but for a supporting character to be unavailable for just over a week in a three month shoot surely wouldn’t be that much of a problem. Well, unless you are Summit Entertainment who apparently thinks that the entire fanbase is going to disintegrate into dust overnight… Deep respect for the source material and its fans my eye!

If you recast your series’ villain just to rush your property into the theatres, then it’s fairly clear that you see this as a fad, a bubble that is going to imminently pop, and furthermore you think your audience is too vapid to care about the casting change. Whether you love or loathe the Twilight saga, if you’ve ever been a fan of anything this sort of needlessly hasty recasting seems to signify a shoddy attitude towards the material.

Although in all fairness, the upside of this cynically swift production meant that Chris Weitz was replaced with David Slade. Indeed after the plodding endurance test that was New Moon, if Weitz was back in the director’s chair for this third outing I may well have abandoned this entire review project. And thankfully Slade is a vast improvement on his predecessors.

To begin with, this is easily the best looking Twilight movie so far. After Hardwicke’s too blue opening feature, Weitz’s too golden sequel, Slade finally gets the colour balance just right, cooking up the Baby Bear porridge of chromatic scales. The locations of Eclipse looks believably overcast enough for vampires to thrive but there’s enough incidental colour to avoid the overly washed out look to irritated many in the first movie.

Secondly Slade is equally at home with both the emotional and action content, unlike Hardwicke who had the dramatic chops but couldn’t seem to handle the SFX sequences or Weitz who could grasp neither. Here we have a movie that, at last gets closer to the right balance, doing justice to both the romantic and the horror tropes. Obviously he has an advantage here with the particular novel he is bringing to the screen, which sees the storyline picking up its pace. But even so, any director worth their salt should be able to inject some dynamism into the most low-key of scenes.

But for all the flourishes and flair Slade brings to the Twilight table, Eclipse still isn’t as satisfying as a film as it should be. While Slade pulls out all the stops, the script sadly still tends to stroll where it should be loping. Now this is a problem all three movies have had and one which can be firmly laid at the door to Melissa Rosenberg who drafted all three screenplays. While I appreciate the effort to remain faithful to the source material, there are clearly pacing problems with the versions up there on the screen. Now I’ve not read Meyer’s original novels and therefore I can’t comment on their structural qualities, but I do wonder whether some creative editing was needed to bring these books to the screen; some reshuffling of the timelines akin to what Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers in particular.

Admittedly Eclipse doesn’t dawdle across the screen as like an empty headed clothes horse like New Moon did but it doesn’t feel as quite as exciting as a movie about vampire and werewolves should be, nor does the love triangle between Bella, Edward and Jacob crackle with all the emotional energy it should. And in fairness to Slade, I think a large factor in not quite exploiting the potential for action and drama in this chapter is that he is coming in at the third instalment and his style simply doesn’t match the preceding films. And more to the point, the thrust of the narrative has been completely lost as each movie has had a different look, tone and directorial approach and these differences prevent the story line building up any head of steam. When the first two entries in the franchise had both missed their marks, it’s near impossible for any director, no matter how talented, to deliver a rousing third part as the foundations for ramping up the action just aren’t solid enough. Eclipse may be the best house constructed for the Twilight saga so far but unfortunately it’s been built upon shifting sands.

Now throughout this marathon I’ve argued that, contrary to popular opinion, Twilight having a romantic focus, or even that its vampires sparkle, isn’t the problem. And I would still assert that all three films are nowhere as bad as they are painted in certain vociferous quarters. And although admittedly the mediocrity of New Moon comes close to the realm of truly awful film-making, I’d still argue that both Twilight and Eclipse have their merits. But the trouble is they don’t match up – Hardwicke’s film looks and feels like an indie offering whereas Slade delivers a movie with all the traits of a typical fantasy blockbuster.

And I don’t necessarily blame either director for this – ironically for a paranormal romance series, the trouble with the Twilight saga is the heartless way Summit and Paramount have constructed the franchise, cynically rushing them out to milk the faithful and chopping and changing the approach at every turn. Admittedly in the history of genre cinema, we’ve seen various franchises mutate in different ways between instalments but usually this is due to the makers tacking on sequel after sequel without any plan of where the overall story is going.

However in the case of Twilight, all the sequels were already there as novels, and so to deliver three movies that are so inconsistent in their tone and focus smacks of laziness if not outright contempt in their attitude to bringing Meyer’s novels to the screen. And even if the haters are right and the novels are badly written bobbins, the concepts could still be made into a rewarding and enthralling film saga.

However Summit seemingly care little for consistency and their approach to adapting Meyer’s series of novels reminds me of an inept vampire hunter jabbing away at a fresh disinterred corpse and managing to hammer the stake in anywhere but the heart, resulting a bloody mess full of holes. Frankly this story deserves better, and furthermore I sincerely believe that the fans of the Twilight saga deserve better too.

Earlier parts of this saga can be found here I , II and III. And don’t forget, you can hear The Black Dog podcast marathon that inspired these articles here

TWIHARD PART III - Bad Moon Rising

As a companion piece to The Black Dog Podcast Twihard marathon (episodes #62 to #64), I too took up the challenge to watch all three Twilight movies. In Twihard Part I, we examined the brouhaha surrounding this franchise, and in Part II dissected the first screen instalment of the saga of Bella and Edward. A dubious claims hangs heavily in the air like a leading man reduced to a yellow smoke cameo… Oh, do not ask “what is it?”, let us go and make our visit…

New Moon (2009)

So despite a somewhat mixed critical reaction, Twilight had managed to pull into a very healthy profit (over ten times its budget), and so the second adaption was quickly rushed into production. In fact New Moon was announced the day after the first flicks opening – one presumes that it had already made its money back in first night sales alone. However what’s more unusual than this record breaking green-lighting time, well at least for fans of the Star Trek and Friday 13th sagas, is that this time around Paramount actually increased the budget for the sequel.

The original cast were secured and Melissa Rosenberg was back too to handle the script. However Hardwicke was not to return to the director’s chair, claiming the time restrictions of the production were not to her taste, and so Chris Weitz was brought in to bring Meyer’s second novel to the screen. Whereas Hardwicke had seemed a canny choice to helm a Twilight adaptation, Weitz’s looks a bit of an odd fit; while co writing and directing About A Boy showed he had the chops to handle emotional themes and literary adaptations, his earlier foray American Pie was a very different take to American teenagers and his most recent directing job was the box office failure The Golden Compass, another translation of a book for younger readers to the screen, which looked pretty but made mincemeat of the original novel. Even considering the long and trouble production of this film, which somehow managed to annoy both religious zealots and rabid atheists at the same freaking time, it’s still surprising Paramount gave the reins to a director who had so recently failed to launch a successful franchise aimed at the same cash-in market dominated by Harry Potter that Twilight is aiming for. Often such a debacle would land you in Director’s Jail quicker than you could say ‘Alan Smithee’. Then again the detractors of Twilight may well say that getting the job of helming New Moon amounts to the same…

So then, I came to this movie literally minutes after the credits of the first had rolled. I had intended doing this marathon on a one movie per night basis, however the first Twilight had charmed enough to slap the next disc into the machine straight away. But tellingly, after watching New Moon I was in no mood to plunge into Eclipse. Now I can understand why some folk rate this entry in the series higher than the first but personally I found it to be something of an ordeal.

Partly this may be due to the source material. Firstly plot-wise the meat of this movie; the blooming and subsequent wilting of the romance between Jacob and Bella, plays far too closely like a retread of Twilight with werewolves replacing the vampires. To certain extent I can let this slide; after all, a great many sagas and franchises often are guilty of just delivering more of the same.

But what I have real trouble forgiving is the somewhat dubious about the whole plot thread which has Bella recklessly putting herself in danger just to catch a glimpse of a foggy phantom Edward. Perhaps I’m showing my age here – I’m at that stage in life when if I see scantily clad young ladies on the street I tend to think “they’ll catch their death of cold dressed like that!” rather than breaking into a Sid James leer – but I really couldn’t help fretting about what kind of role model Bella is providing here, and I pray that Meyer’s novel handles this better than Weitz does on screen, because what we actually see is reckless and extremely stupid and I dread to think that some impressionable teens may get the idea that putting themselves at risk is a great way of reconnecting with their former beaus.

But the wider implications aside, none this actually does much to endear us to Kirstin Stewart’s Bella. Now technically Stewart was somewhat less of an irritant in this flick – for much of it she is supposed to be heart broken and depressed which actually suits the ultra-moody perma-frown performance she’s reprising from the first film – but any sympathy this matching of the narrative tone and her face-like-a-smacked-arse delivery might have elicited is totally undercut by the courting death routine. In Twilight Bella generally annoyed me through Stewart’s reading of the role, and while she was better in this outing, in New Moon it’s the character herself and her scripted actions than wound me up.

However in fairness, we do get to see her actually look happy for a brief time. When she eventually succumbs to the charms of Jacob’s company, we even get to see her smile and have some fun with her childhood chum whose slowly morphing into boyfriend material. Now these are some of the best sequences in the movie; they are gently naturalistic, touchingly warm and not over played. And besides getting to witness the once a century breaking of the witch’s spell that locks Stewart’s face in glower mode, Taylor Lautner gets to step into the limelight.

Now in the first film, he had impressed me with his relaxed, likeable and subtle performance, and the promise showed in his brief appearance comes to full fruit in the courtship of Bella. However when his lycanthropic heritage come into play and we move out of the blossoming romance section and into the subsequenct saddening wilting that is the “I can’t be with you” heart break, his performance seems to go downhill. Some may say that this is a simple of case of a young actor who can excel in a supporting role but hasn’t yet the dramatic confidence to play centre stage, and there is probably an element of truth in that.

However I think the trouble is emanating from two behind the camera areas. Firstly there’s a distinct change in the lines he’s being asked to deliver once he becomes a werewolf – instead of well crafted and realistic dialogue, once the wolf is ascendant he mainly seems to get ponderous stilted speeches. However this is a minor problem, the real trouble is the way Weitz shoots the scenes. Basically he seems to stick the camera on a tripod then (presumably) fucks off for a coffee, leaving poor old Taylor just to stand there, metaphorically as well as literally shirtless, spouting exposition Rosenberg’s script has mistaken for high drama. If I hadn’t recognised Weitz’s name, I could have sworn that New Moon was made by someone with a lot of daytime TV soap on their CV, for this just propping up the camera and just calling action reeks of the kind of ‘quick get it in the can!’ direction you see on The Young & The Witless. I can only assume that Weitz thought that the sight of Jacob’s six pack was height of drama in itself.

And as a whole New Moon suffers from a tendency to concentrate on looking good rather telling the story, a failing that it shares with Weitz’s previous flick The Golden Compass. Now it’s true that one of the golden rules of cinema is show, not tell, however that’s not a license to leave your actors floundering in dull static shots in key dramatic scenes, or to expect pretty colours to distract from the fact that the pace of story telling is erratic and often flagging.

There’s a strong stench of style over substance throughout the entire film and while one may be charitable and blame the rapid production schedule for the film’s patchily substance and general lack of dramatic weight, Weitz’s directorial choices must also be held to account. For example, while the movie’s colour palette is lush and gorgeous, overflowing with opulent golds, vivid greens and striking reds. The trouble is though; this vision inspired by Italian art doesn’t make sense for the mood of the story line or its central location. Now this gold and crimson palette makes perfect sense for the final act in Volterra but not for Forks…

Whereas Catherine Hardwicke gave us a gloomy milieu for Twilight, present Forks as a town drenched in blues and almost perpetually overcast by slate coloured rainclouds. And hence you could easily suspend disbelief and buy that Carlisle and his brood of friendly bloodsuckers could blend into human society thanks to the endless rain haunted days. But in New Moon it’s dripping in honey hued tones and you wonder how on earth the vampires get by in this now sun-kissed clime. Presumably Dr Carlisle’s patients must be dying in droves during New Moon thanks to a string of sick days caused by the persistent appearances of what Gollum referred to as “evil yellow face” in Forks a la Weitz.

And I can only assume that casting Michael Sheen as Aro of the Volturi was more to do with having a credible big name that would look good on the poster than giving the story some dramatic gravitas with a highly respected actor. Now don’t get me wrong, I generally love Michael Sheen’s performances as much as the next film buff but in this outing I suspect he was extracting the urine because Weitz seems not to have noticed he was doing a Tony Blair impersonation. As cameos from high classy acts in low brow movies go, Bill Nighy fared far better with the whole vampire elder routine in Underworld than Sheen does in New Moon.

However in fairness, Weitz’s visual flair does mean that as a whole New Moon looks more like a blockbuster movie than the first film, which with Hardwicke at the wheel more resembled a low budget independent offering. And certainly Weitz seems more at home in serving up the special effects and action scenes but this seems to have come at a cost of the drama. But despite the vampire action looking far better in this outing than the previous one, I am honestly at a loss to explain why the werewolves are still on the ropey side.

Apparently the special effects crew handling the lycanthropes spent a good deal of time studying the real lupines and going on jollies to Wolf Mountain Sanctuary. All of which came as something of surprise as the first appearance of a transformed werewolf is simply ghastly. The CGI in bear in The Wolf Man remake got a great deal of flack, but in comparison to this… this abomination that digital bruin looks nearly convincing. This wolf looks like its bulging in random places and the fur is rippling and changing more than a chameleon crossing a tartan rug – honestly how this passed the grade for the final cut is beyond me.

Admittedly the rest of the wolf effects aren’t nearly as bad, but still you don’t want the audience’s first look at your lead creatures to be so shoddily done. rather than thrilling or frightening, having such a ghastly debut has the effect of destroying any belief in the beasts right from the outset. And while the rest of the movie doesn’t have any shots of werewolves looking like they’ve got the parasites from Cronenberg’s Shivers squirming under their pelts, it appeared to me that throughout the flick their size seemed to vary somewhat; sometimes as big as ponies but at other seemingly more like young rhinos. A minor quibble maybe but firstly I may not have noticed if their first appearance wasn’t so botched and secondly Weitz should really be paying attention to such details.

So then to wrap up, in some regards New Moon is superior to Twilight but only in superficial ways. While it closer to the horror heartlands than its predecessor, exploring and expanding the mythology of the novels, and plays more like a Hollywood popcorn flick than an indie teen angst movie, it still largely failing in the same areas and that is simply that it’s fumbling the dramatics of the central relationships: again it’s a case of the problem not being a watering down of horror tropes but not delivering the emotional punch the romance should have.

And while New Moon expands the sense of the fantastic and takes us further into the secret world of the supernatural; the heart of the film is lost beneath the gloss and flashy tricks. And all the emphasis on the gaudy visuals made me appreciate the first film’s low key atmospherics a whole lot more. Now I can understand why for some viewers this may make this second adaptation superior to the first, however this reviewer much preferred the gothic mood and quiet realism of the first. Ideally I’d have liked to see this move equally weight the supernatural and the emotions, because I still feel that the core story line has a lot of cinematic potential. Perhaps Eclipse can get the balance right…

Don’t forget, you can hear The Black Dog podcast marathon that inspired these articles here

TWIHARD! Part 1 – The Twilight Saga Examined

Currently, the vampire, that glamorous creature of the night, is in rude health; if you are at all interested in genre material or even just an avid consumer of pop culture, at the moment everywhere you turn, you’ll find a bloodsucker or two. Of course their present ubiquity is largely down to the series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, the Twilight Saga.

Now these hugely successful books and the subsequent movie franchise have spawned a massive and rabidly devoted fanbase, boasting numbers that go beyond a mere cult following and can legitimately be called a phenomenon. However not everyone is as enamoured by Meyer’s sparkly vampires and indeed many unaffected by the spell of the Cullens have been very dismissive of the books, films and their devoted fans.

Of course, decrying such a phenomenon, rubbishing the material and poking fun at the fans, is nothing new, particularly if it’s emanating from one of the fantasy-based genres. And much like the Harry Potter whirlwind – arguable the parent phenomenon for Twilight - there’s been no shortage of armchair critics keen to proclaim to the world that it’s a vast morass of badly written tosh and poorly made movies, and that generally getting very, very annoyed that the whole shebang is so popular.

However there’s a key difference in the reaction to the ascendency of Meyer’s creations to JK Rowling’s, and that is while the latter has been mostly defended in geek circles, in the case of the former, usually fantasy-friendly types have waded in, tooled up with critical stakes and hammers, alongside with the mainstream pundits. Indeed that usually staunch ally of the undead, the horror world, has generally sported the same nose wrinkling disdain and disgust one sees when a serious rock fan encounters Justin Bieber, or when the average man in the street steps in what my uncle used to call a ‘dog egg’.

Is this hostility justified? Is the Twilight Saga really something to scrapped off the soles of the sneakers of pop culture? Or is a case of artistic snobbery, that old story that goes if a certain work proves to be insanely popular with the young and/or wins a legion of female fans, then it’s automatically empty, vacuous and fully deserving of the torrents of contempt vomited upon it by the ‘serious’ devotees of the art?

As so often is the case in such critical spats, there’s been a deluge of venom from folk who have never even read the books or seen the films. But to readdress the balance and uphold the honourable maxim of “if you ain’t seen it, you can’t slag it”, the Boys from The Black Dog Podcast, Lee and Darren, those brave explorers of le cinéma merde, decided to chart a course into the shadowed realm of the Twilight movies. Having not seen any of these myself and being a loyal Black Dogger, I couldn’t let our heroes journey into the night alone…

And having watched all three movies produced so far, I discovered I had far more to say than could be encapsulated in the usual piece of audio feedback. So as a companion piece to the Black Dog marathon, here are my results of my own vampire autopsy in full...

The Anatomy of A Vampire

Vampires have been with us for a long time, indeed tales of predatory supernatural beings that drain life or suck blood abound in nearly every culture and stretch back to our earliest legends. And indeed Twilight is not the first time a craze for all things undead has swept the Western world. While many regions have their own tales of vampiric entities, many are somewhat different to the vampire we are familiar with, as you may see here. And it wasn’t until the 18th century, that the vampire as we now know him, became a cross-cultural figure. In the 1720s, many newspapers carried reports of vampire epidemics in Eastern Europe (for example this case) and soon the salons of Europe were a-buzz with discussions of these strange reports. Intellectuals of the day debated the possibility of beings rising from their graves to menace the living; with volumes and treatises with titles such as De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis Liber (‘The Book of The Chewing of the Dead in Their Tombs) appearing, and the likes of Rousseau and Voltaire weighing in on the debate.

But while the titans of the Age of Enlightenment found little in the accounts of vampires to detain them for long, the popular imagination thrilled to the tales of these nocturnal predators and soon the diverse folkloric beings such as the English Revenant, the Teutonic Alp and Irish Dearg-Due were being shuffled into the shade of the vampire umbrella. And it wasn’t too long before the vampire was beginning to appear in art and fiction.

And though it would take another century or so before the fictional vampire would begin to take on all the characteristics we know today – for the undead of folklore are markedly different from their print and screen cousins – the forebears of the Count and his undead brood are clearly recognisable is the first media they appeared in, poetry. And in the context of Twilight it’s worth noting that these vampiric verses, from the early The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder to the later Bride of Corinth by Goethe, featured a strong romantic angle rather than being poetic tales of terror.

The Vampire's Kiss by Max Ernst

Similarly when the vampire began to appear in dramas and in prose, they were often rising from the grave not just to drain life but to seduce their victims. And it’s not until the 19th century, do these fictional undead start blood sucking, breaking into bedrooms and generally becoming more Satanic than erotic. Indeed the turning point at which the vampire has fully metamorphosed from a fantastic romantic figure into a blood soaked horror is Stoker’s Dracula.

Now the point of this little (un)natural history of the vampire is to demonstrated that far from being a corruption or watering down of an iconic creature of the night, the treatment of vampires in Twilight is actually a return to their earliest fictional appearances. And let’s be frank here, a large proportion of the bile spewed in the direction of Meyer’s creations is down to the fact that many see her romantic focus as being just plain wrong for vampires.

But romance and eroticism has always had a place in vampire fiction, and lest we forget Twilight is next logic step on from two of the more popular recent entries in the undead genre; Edward Cullen is clearly the bastard son of the decadents found in Anne Rice and his tangled relationship with Bella has an obvious precedent in the romance of Buffy and Angel.

Indeed considering how long and strong this vein of romance runs in vampire fiction, I’m frankly amazed something like Twilight that places a relationship with a vampire in the milieu of teenagers, and emphasises love over horror, did not come along decades earlier.

So we can stake this major objection to Meyer’s franchise right here and now and leave it to die screaming in the light of dawn. There’s nothing wrong, heretical or blasphemous about the so called paranormal romance of Twilight - tenderness is as part of the vampire’s fictional make-up as is the Satanic evil of Count Dracula, or the inhuman brutality of Brian Lumley’s Wamphyri.

And with that stumbling block well and truly demolished we can proceed to the film with unprejudiced eyes…

NEXT TIME – Three films, one man, no hope!