I just watched The Deaths of Ian Stone. But I’m going to have to back up a bit, at least once.
I have an annual project of sorts: to take a field of which I know nothing and find initially off-putting and try to immerse myself therein to try to “see it from the inside” and discern the figures of merit that aficionados appreciate. Some Christians use a metaphor of stained glass windows to explain Christianity itself: you can see a stained glass window from the outside, they say, but you only really see it from the inside, and it is a powerful image (for the record, I spent 18 years seeing it from the inside, thank you very much, and I’ll still pass on it. But that’s been covered in more and bitterer depth on this site before.) But it’s a useful image, and I’ll appropriate: I want to see the sun shining through from within.
So, a couple of years ago my project was “horror movies”. Some of my annual projects I am happy to fold up and tuck away after the year is over (they usually run summer-to-summer.) I don’t feel the need to listen to “gangsta” rap any longer, for instance. Some stick with me: I’m now a huge football (read: soccer) nut after a year of immersion, and I really now enjoy horror movies.
Like many (initially) difficult genres, horror movies rely very heavily on conventions and tropes. They are, even if they are not self-consciously acting it out (as in the Scream franchise, for instance) addressing everything that’s come before. And the moments one remembers — at least that I remember — from horror movies are the scenes in which the tropes are upended. A (sonic) sting is just not scary — it works on me less than 4% of the time, I would estimate — but when something takes me really by surprise, as does one moment in the first Final Destination and three in the (fantastic and underrated) quasi-UK-government-funded Creep, the impact (ha) is breathtaking (ha). But they are less meaningful and impacting if one isn’t completely familiar with what exactly is being upended.
I’m going to dwell on the last two movies I mentioned. Final Destination is “For the love of God Montresor” fun-scary. Creep is “Man’s Inhumanity to Man makes countless thousands mourn” egads-scary — even more so than Creep, The Wicker Man (fuck Nick Cage, I’m talking about the real The Wicker Man) epitomizes this. But — and this is utterly baffling — no one seems to recognize that these are different genres. I remember when I was a Netflix early-adopter. These days their recommendations are almost comically precise; I was, for instance, offered “More dark Showtime TV series” after I had queued Dexter. But in Netflix 1.0 days, I’d get things like “Other things you might like in foreign.” WTF? I like a movie in a different language, and therefore would like every movie in a different language? And the horror cross-indexing — to this day, as far as I can tell — jumps this dichotomized genre. Or should I say multi-somethinged genre now? Two other genres are lumped in: the “torture porn” of Hostel and its ilk (I avoid those on principle) — and “Extreme Horror”.
What is “Extreme Horror”? I wondered that, too. One likely place to find out seemed Greencine, a Netflix clone that knows it cannot compete on level ground, so fills two niche markets that Netflix ignores: XXX films and “Extreme Horror”. I didn’t really have any desire to see any (the full cut of Ôdishon was quite enough for me, thanks) but I was really curious what sort of things were in this realm. I read some of the plot descriptions, and one — I really wish I were making this up for emphasis — was a Freedom of Information Act-retrieved amateur videotape of an actual motherfucking murder spree. What the fucking hell?! This is not horror. Or, if it is, this is horror, and the cinematic efforts need to give up the pretense of claiming that title. I didn’t see it — never would — but my pulserate has doubled just writing this paragraph. What is wrong with some people? This is like, to modify someone else’s joke, finding Jeffrey Dahmer’s diaries in the cookbook section at Borders.
Calm. Deep breath. Let it out slowly.
So, The Deaths of Ian Stone. It’s the “Montresor” fun-scary. It was produced by the late (and terribly mourned) Stan Winston, and therefore (I think the causality is justified) featured impeccable special effects. This is relevant because: it was an After Dark Horrorfest selection from the festival’s second year.
Aside about this festival: the first year of this festival, showcasing indie and low-budget horror flicks, some by first-time filmmakers, was extremely hyped. I didn’t go see them in the theaters, but I have seen all (of the canonical eight) from the first year on DVD, and they’re all fun-scary. I had by the time the second year of the festival, in fact. I bought in and was going to see all eight in the festival theater. And the first film I saw was Borderland, a hideous, brutal, and fantastically made based-on-a-true-story tale about cults, kidnapping, and murder in Mexico. It would not be sacrilege (ha) to name this as a worthy successor to The Wicker Man — in fact, it upped the stakes by putting three religious perspectives into the pileup, and it’s really based on a true story, not just sold as such for increased disturbance power. It is a really, really great movie, and disturbing as fuck-all (my pulse is racing again.) And it is profoundly ensconced in the egads-scary realm. As I said, it was the first of the crop I saw, and I didn’t see any of the rest in the theater. I said to myself that the festival had jumped genres — yes, not sub-genres — and if I were to see the rest of the films, I would be advised to do so in my own home with a remote control and a lightswitch. (It turns out, however, that Borderland is the odd one of the lot, and the rest are of the safer genre, with everyone commenting on how disturbing this one film is.)
The Deaths of Ian Stone. It’s not a great movie, and some things are really lousy, like the slate-flat dialogue audio (the special sound effects editing is much better.) It relies far too heavily on exposition, even in this exposition-saturated genre, for instance. But it has a subtle commentary that being a heroin user subjects the people one loves to a real-life horror movie. This could have been explored more, and the trite ending doesn’t pay this theme off, but really, it’s quite acceptable for the genre, and most of what I would expect from the After Dark festival. It also, in second billing, has Jaime Murray.
If you don’t want to delve into fetishes, here is a good place to stop reading this post.
Jaime Murray was in season 2 of Dexter, and as it happens, there is already a picture of her on the site, and may be deserving of another (hold on, I’m going to go check IMDB for her birth year. 1977 — just six or seven months out of placement in “Passing the Torch”.)
Jaime Murray is one of those people who doesn’t come off well in photo stills — she has a weird jaw thing going on, and her face is a bit weird — but she has a particular carriage, the sort of sexuality in which one kind of oozes from room to room rather than walks. In the two roles I’ve seen her in, she is preternaturally femme toxiques (not a real term). She is cadaver-pale, raven-haired, waify with improbable strategic fat deposits. She’s willing to be naked on screen. And she plays in those two roles such crazy characters that I will have great difficulty seeing her in anything else.
For several years — from when I left high school for college until, say, yesterday — having these features might have been a drawback in Hollywood. But — speculating on the causality — Twilight, True Blood, and to a lesser extent the Underworld movies, have put vampiric women back in the limelight. And she is fantastic in “For the love of God Montresor” horror (the fun kind). In fact, she is an archetypical Poe character (that’s what the “Montresor” bit is referencing). Poe had a “thing” about women like this — walking corpses — and he seemed to even prefer them as actual corpses, in a borderline-necrophiliac-but-mild-enough-that-you-still-get-a-postage-stamp kind of way.
The goth/corpse bit of 1995ish has come full circle, it appears: but I have wondered if any of it is to blame on CSI. There is something disturbing about CSI. It’s popular television, so they want hot women. It’s a dark (if at times somewhat inept) series, though, so there are corpses. Apparently someone at CBS said, “I know, we can have over-sexualized hot corpses!” Poe would be pleased, and I’ve privately wondered how many necrophilic stirrings it has caused in viewers, in marketing and mainstreaming this sort of thing.
Second chance to back out.
OK, so: the walking-corpse waify-crazy bit really works for me. It worked for me in Underworld, and it certainly works for me in the Murray roles. She really is ideal for this sort of thing. Someone (ahem) might suggest that she’s the sort of woman you wouldn’t especially mind cutting your throat in your sleep, as long as she did it slowly and nude.
Walking corpses, fictionally-actual corpses — mainstreamed now. But to turn this post back in a circle: at least it hasn’t looped to real-actual corpses, in the mold of the discussed “extreme horror” film. If it did, we’d have a merger of sex and murder — that’s “snuff”, right? What is wrong with some people?
We can be sure of one thing, however: if that ever comes to pass — if it, against all reason and hope, becomes mainstream — it may be a lot of things. But it won’t be horror.
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