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spacetime coordinates: 1980’s Florida
No Man of God is a 2021 American crime mystery film directed by Amber Sealey and written by Kit Lesser. The film stars Elijah Wood, Luke Kirby, Aleksa Palladino and Robert Patrick. It is based on real life transcripts selected from conversations between serial killer Ted Bundy and FBI Special Agent Bill Hagmaier that happened between 1984 and 1989. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2005 small town of Wheelsy in South Carolina
Slither is a 2006 American science-fiction black comedy horror film written and directed by James Gunn in his directorial debut.The film stars Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Tania Saulnier, Gregg Henry, and Michael Rooker. (wiki)
Lovecraft Country is an American horror drama television series developed by Misha Green based on and serving as a continuation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff. Starring Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors, it premiered on August 16, 2020, on HBO.
The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales. (wiki)
I cannot add much the excellent review by Lauren Michele Jackson in the New Yorker. In spite of my own initial enthusiasm for the new takes on Lovecraft’s inheritance – I was dumbfounded by both what she aptly signals (the lack of melodrama, the lack of tension and of bi-dimensional characters), as well as the sensation (sensed by others as well it seems) that everything has to be spelled out, and that we are made an unwitting participant in a prestige piece that takes all historical struggles either as a clear given or that tries to dispel all ambiguity and supply all the answers. All the ideological problems are already marked as finished, explained or to be check-boxed. It is as if Lovecraft’s perverted sense of inchoate slimy materialism, both formless, as well as degenerative and racist, gushes out to over-write, over-describe, literally to suffocate and overload all that could be said or shown about power or class relations. It is as if the desire to actually finally film and remake black history in a more just way, and the urgency of this nowadays, ends up over-labeling and indexing all historical settings and severely limiting all outcomes, circumscribing all relationships of this series, beyond the actual segregation and racial apartheid into some sort of finished, vacuum proof product.
This said, I liked the portrayal of racist occult cop KKK cabal – and how the Lovecraftian monsters were turned against the racist cops, one thing that I badly miss happening in reality. The cabal of rich white immortalist Southerners is a good addition, but then again they all feel incredibly bi-dimensional and out of a right-wing Satanist plot proliferrated today by QAnon. That itself, might be a good lead, yet it remains undeveloped and rudimentary. A much better (comics this time) example I have in Saladin Ahmed’s and Sami Kivelä Abbot by Boom Comics – the villain being much more tangible upper class white old dude academic or even a dark web intellectual (IDW) that uses brutal occult forces to recruit and transformed the black characters into monsters. The battle over Lovecraftian Necronomicon manuscripts and the high seats of academia is much more engaging. I am not sure if flop is a good term, just because season 2 was cancelled in 2021, or because it definitely has somehow closed down some interesting and very important Lovecraftian – systemic-racism venues.
I speak thus with a certain deeper and bitter dissatisfaction, but who am I to say. Although there was so much production effort, good vfx, CGI galore, good action science, and ample classic era pulp exaggerations and body horror ontological excess – it still left a vacuum. Body swapping is an important feature of this series and it really shows the corpo-reality of it, the pain and difficulty of such a metamorphosis which I also found does not get representation in movies. The creature and monster design is just wow, and yet i am still left with the “Sundown” pilot episode as setting the scene, and being actually the best of the entire series (especially the Shoggoth design).
I feel it could well have stayed a long feature movie. There is also an attempt at K- and J-horror “Meet Me in Daegu”, with finally an impartial portrayal of the Communist side during the Korean War that is not being dehumanized or instantly relegated to the enemy side. There is also another intriguing eps with the multiverse branchings (“I am” eps), portal jumping trough a larger multiverse with various highlights of black history from Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturist imaginings, places and other times where black lives matter. This was finally one funky adventure with a black middle aged woman in the role of inter-dimensional Hippolyta – at its center!
I liked a lot of over the topness of it, the kitsch, the way everything is carnal as well as magical, the way racism is more horrific than the most horrific of Lovecraftian entities, at the same time like Michele in her review, felt actors skills and characters got reduced to just anti-racist Ghostbusters. I like the queering of it and the actors effort, yet I am left craving for something else, maybe miss a touch of that good weird fiction that has resulted in such good literary and aesthetically interesting materials (dunno why the prose of Sofia Samatar Monster Potraits comes to mind).
spacetime coordinates: New Orleans, Louisiana 2033 – 2035
The First is a drama television series portraying a team of astronauts who prepare to become the first humans to visit Mars, created by Beau Willimon and starring an ensemble cast including Sean Penn, Natascha McElhone, Anna Jacoby-Heron, LisaGay Hamilton, Hannah Ware, Keiko Agena, Rey Lucas, James Ransone, Brian Lee Franklin, Oded Fehr, Norbert Leo Butz, Annie Parisse, Melissa George, Jeannie Berlin, and Bill Camp. The series, a co-production between American streaming service Hulu and British television network Channel 4, debuted on September 14, 2018 in the United States and on November 1, 2018 in the United Kingdom. On January 18, 2019, Hulu canceled the series after one season. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2020, LA
How It Ends is a 2021 American comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Zoe Lister-Jones and her husband Daryl Wein. It stars Lister-Jones, Cailee Spaeny, Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Lamorne Morris and Nick Kroll. Filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1994 Shadyside / 1978 Camp Nightwing / 1666 Union
The Fear Street Trilogy is an American horror film series, with varying sub-genres of horror. Directed by Leigh Janiak, from scripts and stories she co-wrote with other contributors, the films are based on R. L. Stine‘s book series of the same name.
Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a 2021 American teen slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak. It is the first installment in the Fear Street trilogy and stars Kiana Madeira, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger, Ashley Zukerman, Darrell Britt-Gibson and Maya Hawke. The film follows a group of teenagers in Shadyside who are terrorized by an ancient evil responsible for a series of brutal murders that have plagued the town for centuries. imdb
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is a 2021 American teen slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak. It is the second installment in the Fear Street trilogy, and a sequel to Part One: 1994. Starring Sadie Sink, Emily Rudd, Ryan Simpkins, McCabe Slye, Ted Sutherland, Gillian Jacobs, Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr. and Olivia Scott Welch, the film centers on a group of teenagers in Camp Nightwing who must come together to survive a possessed counselor’s murder spree. imdb
Fear Street Part Three: 1666 is a 2021 American supernatural horror film, and the final installment of the Fear Street trilogy after Part One: 1994 and Part Two: 1978. The film follows the origins of Shadyside’s curse in the mid-17th century, Sarah Fier’s witch trial, and the survivors in 1994 who try to put an end to it. imdb
Actress/Director/Writer Gillian Wallace Horvat is starring as herself. I just felt that nothing escapes this movie – a movie made to kill all indie cinema pretense of the horror boom (Shudder production galore or the revival of Italo-horror). One can still make pitch black funny nihilist slashers without being impelled to quote Wes Craven quoting himself.
In the 1990s the male heteronormative serial killer was postmodern and making a career in cinema. Hollywood serial killers were making a living (or dying) out of franchising other infamous serial killers histories and organizing their own disaster detours. We always were dragged along a US of A, complicit in tracing out its topography of murder and mayhem (see Domiingnic Sena’s Kalifornia). Either this or triggering like David Fincher’s 7 – elaborate (scholastic even) domino effects, twisted moral plays, able to transfigure the meta criminal into the ultimate American symptom of procedural thinking turned inside out, decapitated and boxed. Like the last Mindhunter TV series – data gathering and profiling takes precedence, when it is not bogged down by its own particular attraction towards horrific details that is slow at allowing insights provided by newly recruited feminist and gender studies. New times are coming, yet FBI stale methodologies drag on. Finally there’s a hint that zooming in on patterns of misogyny, patriarchal & sexual abuse accompanies the rise of the serial killer in pop cultural mind. While everybody’s mind is on the oil crisis, the mind is the new nearly limitless resource, the ultimate frontier of both neuropolitics and neurobollocks. We see the psy ops for what it is – underfunded and then suddenly transformed into the posterchild of the new FBI reshufflings. Previous FBI COINTELPRO histories of infiltrating and destabilizing black liberation 1950s – 1970s movements and militant organizations such as the Black Panters is being pasted over. Hate against women and femicide cannot extricate itself from 1970s high weirdness that makes counterculture sociologists bedfellows with FBi agents, surfers of societal shifts, rapid & unsuspected technoscientific & economic upheavals that reverberate (Nixon shock for one). The beginning of the neoliberal turn is punctuated by events that cannot be put on hold or get closed down as solved cases, aberrant individuals or sensationalist fodder. One of the most important quips (that does not get developed) from Mindhunters is how profoundly germane are the captains of industry, the new CEOs, even Nixon himself (and other career politicians in general) to the caged sociopaths, in their contingency & non-empathy profiles vying with serial killers. They are no more monstrous – than your average HR layoff expert. Instead of being a scourge, such talents are put to use in capitalism and under specific (class) economic circumstance where they seem to thrive and go unpunished, by being constantly rewarded. Intelligence & smartness is being constantly re-defined after 1970s as impunity, because it became an ability to evade suspicion, face up to the direct consequences of your actions (smartness= an ability to evade taxes, or externalising risks etc); a skill set and job description of both hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs & corporate raiders.
With almost deadpan humour, something remniscening of Buster Keaton or a lot of early silent era comedy or even the beggings of cinema as avant-garde vaudeville medium, “I blame society” does not just offer relief, although nowadays relief is essential, but also full-on splatter spiralling (up or down, depending). A splatter run amok in front of the new wannabe audience, of thinly dressed bourgeois political correctness of the new bro mansplainers man-agers, the only good (if brutal) response to a society’s tolerance towards same old same old prejudice, arrogance, dismissive smirks, condescendence and self-entitlement of a barley camouflaged male-streaming.
It takes real courage to refuse the usual porn revenge male fantasies or even serial snuff stereotypes, by becoming both candid camera, selfie and stick killer and unsparing directors cut insider. Feel like it is impossible to disentangle the female protagonist from its milieu and not to subscribe to the way BF, hapless lovers or ex lovers, homeless people, celebs, even complete strangers are being poisoned, stalked, meticulously questioned and employed to assist and finally offered a helping (if poisoned) hand.
One can never decide if Gillian Wallace Horvat is really the same material as all these other nasty characters, but at least she trains herself, putting herself and us trough systematic even morbidly funny & increasingly ‘deviant’ behaviours, a majestic mockup of method acting and of finally using GOPRO cinema as a way to finally do things, not just talk about them! There is definitly a big step there, and there is also this incredible pull, when pretending one is on a vacuous outside, call it fiction, script etc is the perfect way, seemingly, to respond to the callousness of others in the movie or life.
Do not miss this movie!
imdb
TimeSpace Warps 