Tag: horror

I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Weren’t For Those Meddling Squids! A Review of Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I played this game for one day–just one day–and I hate green Squids.

Not the luminous blue ones, or the black ones. Not even the exploding fiery orange ones. The Greens. Just the Greens.

So I made an unexpected trip to Canzine 2012 this past Sunday: where I was reintroduced to the Comics Vs. Games-premiered The Yawhg, given a paper ninja-star, and talked with a few artists and game creators before finding The Hand Eye Society’s Torontron game cabinet arcade machines outside. I always loved arcade games when I was younger and I never got to play with enough of them. So finding these there was just an added bonus.

My friends and I started to play this game that I later found out was called Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence by Spooky Squid Games. At the time, however, I found myself controlling a 16-bit sprite with a shotgun in a house along with my hammer-wielding friend as we were being surrounded by floating Octopi.

I didn’t have time to admire the Lovecraftian settings of the house’s interior: such as the book with the Squid imagery or the almost Victorian laboratory feel. I also didn’t realize that the hammer-wielding sprite–that the character was a female scientist–nor that her clearly non-human shot-gun wielding companion was a clockwork automaton of her own creation. All of these revelations came later when I looked at them online.

No, instead I was either killing mass-Squids that electrocuted and devoured heads, or hurriedly knocking Squids unconscious with my hammer as I was trying to repair the walls of the house to offer us protection against these tentacle-armed hordes.

This game was fun. I admit, I really liked killing those Squids. I also felt some satisfaction in repairing the walls and seeing those plus numbers come up: which probably represented how much time or durability it had before it fell again. There was another quality to the game in that, aside from the two-player cooperation that is utterly necessary to your survival, you also need a certain amount of coordination as well. Essentially, it is integral that your gun-shooting companion fires as the most of the Squids while you repair the most isolated of the walls: such as the walls that are not being massed by tentacles of doom coming to suck your face in the middle of the night.

However, there is also the option of exchanging tools: throwing your gun or hammer to your friend. It takes timing and coordination and, sadly, we did not manage this. Sometimes the sprite’s maneuverability was a little awkward and stiff. I remember at least a few times I tried repairing a plank and not realizing I had to get very close to it to do anything with it. Apparently, according to the Game Over text, we had something to the effect of having as much coordination and teamwork as a bunch of “golden weasels.” Suffice to say, it wasn’t complimentary, but certainly made us laugh.

But then, as the game went on (after each time we died I mean), it began to occur to me that something was very … eerily familiar about it. It was the Squids that obviously made me start to think this. And I knew I had seen them somewhere before: these 16-bit luminous deceptively cartoonish tentacled monstrosities. I knew it was from some research I did before but I didn’t know the name of the thing. Then much later I realized they were related to this:

Night of the Cephalopods was something I had read about when I was looking at Spooky Squid Games (god I love this studio’s name) for my article Dreams of Lost Pixels and if this is anything like the game I played tonight–and the voice-over narrative actually happens in this game–I may well download it. This is a big thing for me because, like I have said many times before, I don’t often play games. I watch them being played sometimes, and I play a lot of selective games on older Nintendo consoles, but this game makes me happy. In fact, Spooky Squid Games seems to really love H.P. Lovecraft as a thematic influence of theirs and it is one of those influences that makes me want to write a Lovecraftian story tribute of some kind.

My friend today was talking about going to some Indie (Independent artist) Jams sometime: to make ad hoc independent creative collaborations together. I remember Comics Vs. Games and I’d love to collaborate as a writer with a video game artist. I would really love to do a Game Jam sometime. Just as long as it is not a slime. If Cephalopods has taught me anything, it’s that I hate being stuck in slime … and Green Squids.

Oh, and even though I only played the game today and for a little while, I want to give it a five out of five.

Art Consumes Life: The Shadow of the Vampire

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I wrote this review in 2009 or 2010 in another Journal while I still lived on campus. I’ll just warn you now that I liked to use big words then: especially back in those days. When I use the word intertexuality, what I’m referring to how different sources and references–like quotations and characters being mentioned in a film, or even how different media–can actually overlap in some really cool ways. I also really love meta-narratives and stories within stories. The metaphor of Achilles’ Shield and its little moving world comes to mind again. Also, it’s the season of Halloween and I feel evil. So enjoy, fellow horror-watchers and blood-drinkers. 🙂

So two days ago I watched the whole of Nosferatu for the very first time. Then yesterday night, I watched Shadow of the Vampire. And then I watched it again in the same night with the Director’s commentary.

There is a lot to be said about this film, and I’m still trying to absorb a lot of what I got out of it. First of all, the blending between Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film and E. Elias Merhige’s creation is almost seamless. Certainly, the scene towards the end of the film where Max Schreck transitions from a black and white scene into the subdued glowing light of colour is nothing short of awesome. I also liked how when they were originally filming Greta Schroeder’s scene as Emma playing with her cat, they mentioned how they had to put it on laudanum to get it to be still in front of the camera.

But that in some ways misses the point of what I really do want to talk about. When I first saw the film without the commentary, I wondered why it was that they had the diagrams at the film’s introduction, and what they possibly meant. The images displayed there made very little sense to me, while at the same time there was a strange … familiarity about them and their arrangements as well. It was only really when Merhige gave his commentary that I started to understand what he meant by making the introduction like this, and what he was attempting to do with this film.

Basically, he explains that the illustrations in the beginning of the movie represent a hybridization of ancient and medieval art along with 1920s cubism. In this way, he attempts to show how humanity has depicted itself and the world around it throughout the millennia, incorporating time all the way to the point of the 1920s and its new expressive medium — namely, film. By the very end of the film, Merhige explains how we have always tried to capture what is around us, what is magical and timeless, on our “cave” — in our cave drawings. We are all mortal, and the materials that we have used to try to capture these moments and life itself are just as frail and brittle.

Enter the camera.

The camera, as Merhige explains, is the new “cave” — the new mechanized interior where we can record these moments for posterity. All moments. It sets a new tone in the world. At the very beginning of Shadow of the Vampire, you see first Murnau’s eye, then the dark lens of a 1920s camera recording Greta’s domestic scene with the cat, and then the crew in the very cool vintage white lab coats and film goggles of that time. From this point onward, this is the entire tone of the movie — this need to capture something in the gaze forever. Once, in a third year University class I watched part of a movie called Ulysses’ Gaze, which I barely even understood. But what I do remember was our professor explaining the idea that through the gaze one attempts to capture everything — to understand and preserve it, and to some extent even possess and control it.

It is, arguably, a visceral and in some ways very patriarchal need. Enter Murnau. As this film would have it, Murnau — played by John Malkovich — is a film pioneer in a medium that is not being taken quite seriously yet. It is still in many ways a novelty. But in his own obsessive and very tightly controlled way, Murnau sees the potential in film and what can be done with it.

Enter the 1920s, a time that I’ve been told I could have fit into rather well. It is 1922, and the first WWI is not that far behind the world, especially not Germany and its humiliating Treaty of Versailles verdict. However, at the same time a whole new decadence and vitality has filled this world, and in this case Berlin. From the culmination of twisted Victorian nationalisms, and the peak of the Industrial Age’s penultimate achievements in creating mechanized death come more advanced pain-numbing drugs, along with looser morals, and social inhibitions.

Society loosens up, but the shadow of death — of the figurative vampire, if you will still lingers. It is a demon that has to be exorcised from Europe and particularly Germany. This much is something you can understand without this film or the director’s guidance. But this is the backdrop of Murnau’s world, and Murnau himself (who was actually a fighter in WWI and needed his laudanum to deal with the physical and possibly psychological pain of his injuries). So there is already this dichotomy between innovation and a new pioneering spirit of the age, of new ideologies and ideas breaking out of social stratification and, at the same time, there is still the dark spirit of the chaos not long left behind. In all of this, a few films are being created to express both principles.

In the film, Greta Schroeder, very much more sassy and sultry than her character Emma Hutter tells Murnau about how much she dislikes film — that while Theatre gives her life, Film seems to steal it away from her. Like a vampire would. But as Murnau very ominously tells her, she will get her chance at fame, and immortality. This is something that can best be expressed from the words of Murnau himself when he says:

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; and our music will linger and finally overwhelm, because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory… but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

In essence, Malkovich’s Murnau wants to create an ever-present, something that all people can see happening forever and all be a part of. Of course, there is a price to be paid for this innovation — this enlightenment. The Industrial Age has already cost many lives, and the camera — this neutral dispassionate lens that can supposedly capture everything (including, as some societies would have it, the soul) is but a child of this process. As Merhige attempts to explain again, the old is always replaced or supplanted by the new. And what is the old? The old is nature. It is mystery and magic. It is power, and immortality. It is fear, and it is the unknown.

This is where, finally, the Vampire fits into this structure.

Enter the Vampire. It is difficult to describe all of this without talking about Nosferatu and the novel that loosely inspired it — Dracula. Nosferatu was an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s story that his widow did not grant the rights to. She, like many of that time believed that the Theatre was more professional and hallowed than film. This in fact cost Murnau’s company a lot of money in terms of lawsuits, and Nosferatu itself was very nearly destroyed. At the same time, even Dracula is the child of older, much older sources. This is one context of intertextuality that is very interesting to this regard.

In Dracula, the Count is portrayed as a foreign alien menace, something beyond England and “the civilized” world. He is powerful and seductive and almost “Orientalized.” Whereas in Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire, the less attractive figures of Count Orlock and Max Schreck respectively live much closer to Germany, and while they do embody something “primitive, ancient and horrible,” they are not so much a foreign terror as much as an old familiar horror just below the collective unconscious of the people living in, or close to the land that they come from. These narratives neither have the luxury of thinking that their monsters come completely from elsewhere, nor that they do not have any role in the human world.

The fact of the matter is that there have always been stories about vampires or things like them — about immortal creatures that feed off of the blood and energies of the living. The analogy between the vampire and the camera can be very apparently seen here. Both feed off of the present and life. Traditionally, a vampire can even preserve a life form in a parody or imitation of the life they once had.

Willem Dafoe’s Max Schreck cannot create other vampires. He is alone and awkward, and twisted. He barely remembers how he became what he is, or what he used to be. He is a monster that unapologetically and unrepentantly feeds off of blood. It is his nature and what he is. At the same time, he is sad, and lonely. This vampire has lived too long, misses the light of the sun, and he reads the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson about immortality at the price of always aging. He above everyone in this movie knows how beauty can truly fade and has paid the price for this knowledge just by existing. Of course, every thinks that Max Schreck is merely a character-actor and is always in his role for professional reasons.

To me, in this situation the vampire represents something dark and ugly, but also mystical and incredibly truthful. He does not lie about what he is, or how he feels about what he is. If anyone is the liar, it is Murnau who is willing to risk and throw away all life in order to use this actual vampire in his film — a truth that isn’t revealed until it is all too late. He is the power that Murnau wants to capture, to use a figure of actual immortality to make his film even more timeless. But as I said, there is a tradition to be followed here. Like Grimm’s fairy-tales, like the Germanic folktales before it there is a price for mortals to pay for achieving any form of immortality, for dealing with any kind of it.

A sacrifice. A human sacrifice.

I will not say anything more on that matter, save that despite the theme of the modern overtaking the ancient, there is still a sacrifice — and if anything the modern makes it more clinical, and even more chilling. And the camera lens captures it all. Even as mortal life fades, and immortality ends, and all sanity is lost, the camera continues to take everything in — cold, detached, dispassionate, and hungry. It creates a story for all people to experience for ages to come. Merhige tells us that originally he wasn’t even going to name this film after a vampire: that his film was not about a vampire at all. A vampire is in it, but so are a lot of other people and in many ways they are all equal in how they captured in this narrative. No one escapes it. Not even the vampire. Especially not him.

But after viewing both movies, I felt this deep calm that I haven’t felt in ages. Like it all made sense and something was now gone from me. Perhaps it was catharsis: a powerful combination of pity and fear that are both the essential components of awe. But I wonder — was this ever-present Shadow and all it represented really purged through pity and fear? Was it in fact exorcised or dealt with?

Somehow … I doubt it. Not in the 1920s. Not here. Not now. Perhaps it will never be. But maybe … just maybe, as Merhige stated, through understanding that such living stories could last generations, this is something that can be encountered both consciously and responsibly — through film or any other medium.

Horror as Collaboration: A Multimedia Nightmare

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

Just as the creature from Edison’s 1910 film version of Frankenstein formed, as seen in the picture above, I have been thinking about the best way to go about doing a viral creepypasta.

Then I came across this link from a friend of mine to the story of The Dionea House. It has a very epistolary format: in which a story is narrative constructed through what seems to be correspondence or journal entries. In the case of the above story, they even use online journal links and phone texts.

I was so impressed with Candle Cove, that I wanted to do something like that. In fact, it is the model which I want to create a viral creepypasta: a horror story or account that will be posted throughout the Internet. But now I realize how some of the challenges I proposed in my other posts on Horror as a Universal Power: The Function of a Creepypasta and especially Making a Receipe For a Creepypasta With Uncanny Filling can finally be addressed.

Essentially, I need collaborators. I need to engineer a situation where we can go to a board and have a correspondence discussion: an exchange of posts talking about an event that we create. It is kind of like role-playing and also collaborating on a story together. By writing it like this, we can have all the natural typos, grammatical errors, and some natural energies and improvisation come through. We can begin it through talking about fact, and then slowly getting to the emotional creepy parts.

Of course, we would have some challenges. For instance, what Message Board could we take? Should we make our own? And if so, how do we deal with others posting? Or, rather, would be excellent to get them in on it too? At the very least it can add to the legitimacy of it and make it look like a spontaneous thing if other people who don’t know about this potential Project got in on it. If we can make this a great participatory writing project turned creepy meme, that would be excellent: but it has to be unified and coherent while at the same time have an element of the unexplained and horrific in there as well.

All I need is an idea for a story and I have a few. My list might have something or perhaps even one of my dreams from my dream journal beside my bed. If I can get some people to create photographs, graphics, and artwork as well that would just be an added bonus.

Tis the season of Halloween. This might just be interesting.

The Man That Makes Horror into a Science-Fiction of the Ridiculously Sublime

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

H.P. Lovecraft envisioned a universe where humanity is a small minuscule particle of sanity in a vast morass of evil and madness. In this kind of universe normalcy is an exception and not the commonality: where humanity is either ignored by vast alien intelligences, or horrifically used by malign entities.

Even trying to understand this vastly liquid and alien universe beyond human understanding is dangerous because the person that tries will go utterly insane … or cease to be human entirely. This is a view of the universe created by Lovecraft in his works and you can see how difficult it would be to make a television program out of such a thing or even a movie.

And what’s worse is that Lovecraft was born before the time of Gene Roddenberry: the latter who decreed in his Star Trek science fiction universe that all aliens have to be portrayed as humanoid in order to convey similar human expressions of emotion. Lovecraft’s creatures aren’t even that, and the most polite things you can say about them–when you can envision what they are from how they are described–is that they are the stuff of nightmares. We don’t even have the monster to relate to in this strange place just behind our own existence.

So how can a viewer relate to a universe that is terrifying beyond human comprehension?

I believe that a human answer to a Lovecraftian universe is Doctor Who.

The Doctor is basically Christmas-incarnate with nonsensical wonderfulness, ingenious bluffing skills, and a bad-ass core of fire and ice. And when I say he is Christmas-incarnate, I don’t mean that he’s Christian but that he is just the embodiment of an event that you look forward to at least once a year.

He is a renegade Time Lord on the run that understands time and existence far differently than we do but is light-hearted enough, and wise enough, to appreciate the little things that the grandiose horror of such inhuman non-humanoid horrors like the Daleks miss every time. The Doctor lives in and adapts to an intrinsically frightening, potentially nihilistic universe by being as ridiculous and as tangential as possible: while unifying everything into a haphazard way that–quite miraculously and somehow–works.

It may be that he is insane: and by our human standards he might be. Hell, even by his former fellow Time Lords’ standards, he is probably considered crazy. It doesn’t hurt that he Regenerates into different people each time when he dies, refuses to fight with a gun, and that he travels through time and space, or that he is over eight or nine hundred years old his time. He is the weird. He is the strange. But he is also the laughable: the person the viewer laughs with but also sympathizes with.

The Doctor is the Other with a very humanoid face: but he is still the Other. I appreciate the irony of this statement on at least two levels in that I use the Other as someone who is other than human, and that there is a possible back-story to the Doctor’s character in that he was once an older Time Lord and founder Time Lord society called The Other. But more than that, The Doctor–whose real name we never know and we fear the unknown–is portrayed as the champion of normalcy and sanity against the more destructive and twisted elements of the universe that humanity doesn’t understand.

At the same time though, he challenges normalcy and sanity through his mostly human Companions: changing their lives forever in what they see with him. He shows them that the alien universe, for all it challenges human preconceptions, still has wonders and isn’t always evil. Sometimes, it is quite relatable–the other aliens, worlds, and stars–and although not humanocentric, humanity is definitely a part of the strange and entertaining mosaic.

I’m sure that there have been other articles and essays about The Doctor and the Lovecraftian. Certainly, some older series of books put them both in the same universe: including run ins with the Great Old Ones and so forth. But even if you look at The Doctor’s universe and the villains within as influenced by Lovecraftian literature, I think the thing that really hits home for me–when I look out at how large and terrifying and insensible the world can be–is the image of The Doctor as a hero: armed against all that strangeness and eldritch horror with only his telephone box-fixed TARDIS, his sonic screwdriver, some strange suit, a new face, daring, and a whole lot of curiosity.

And somehow, when I think about it like that, he is one of the few heroes that can make me smile–make me glad to see him–each and every time.

Now, I wonder who or what will be the answer to a Vonnegut universe …

Taking Back My Workshop a Bit and After-Bites

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Although you could conceivably title this post “Over-Bite” as well.

I’ve had The Sleepwalker and A Natural Selection in my written notebook for quite sometime now and I’d been meaning to transfer them onto this online version of my Mythic Bios.

It’s been strange making separate Pages for the stories that I want seen on here: mostly because they do not show up as unique posts (since they are Pages) and as such there isn’t that much traffic that goes to them. I think the extra effort of linking to these Pages to comment on the stories is something that takes a little bit of getting used to for me as well. As I keep working on this Blog and certain patterns and structure begin to arise, all of this does force me to go about things a little differently than when I first started here. That may be some of the reason why I have been making more reviews and articles than a lot of the more original things I used to make: though you can probably count some of my articles as “alternative perspectives” on subjects in any case.

But now that we’ve seen my penchant for making tangents to be alive and well, I just want to talk about the stories I made. “The Sleepwalker” was the result of me reading up on my Dracula and Kim Newman’s alternate vampire-ruled Victorian England in Anno Dracula: making me further ponder the physiological interpretations and possibilities of vampires and the question of, “What about Lucy?” I could have easily been a total smart-ass and titled this story “I Love Lucy,” but I made one popular culture reference in there already and I like the simple title I gave it.

One challenge I definitely had was that I didn’t even know what she physically looked like. So I had to make some inferences along the way based on some things that I read in passing. I always thought she had red hair, while some sources say she was blonde. Dracula was less than forthcoming on the matter, so I improvised.

I also improvised some more. In the vein (pardon the pun) of “What about Lucy,” I always wondered why she was such a different vampire from the other women in Dracula’s entourage. After a few years reading Anne Rice and the Old World of Darkness’ Vampire the Masquerade, I came up with this interesting gem. What if the amount of blood and the environmental situation of a person affects what kind of vampire they might become? For instance, Lucy was a sleepwalker and Dracula apparently took advantage of this with his hypnotic capabilities. Yet we never know why he chose her.

“A Natural Selection” was a possible answer to that last question. I always saw Dracula as far more intelligent and evil than even Van Helsing gave him credit for. If I were a centuries old vampire with some financial means and intelligence, I know I’d slowly put measures into place and watch the development of said technological innovations before doing anything. I would also be thinking about the future. I wanted the Dracula I portrayed in this story to be a monster not just because he is a vampire, but because of just how his mind works.

I suppose I also wanted readers to feel sympathy for Vampire Lucy and realize that she never had a chance. I originally contemplated giving her some Journal entries in the epistolary form: making a narrative as told from a private diary or something to that effect. I wanted to tell a story from the vampire Lucy’s perspective but then I realized that perhaps she was too … insane to write anything down. Then I thought to myself: she was turned and she died while she was sleepwalking and dreaming, so wouldn’t it follow that she would continue to perpetually dream in undeath as well?

I saw her new existence as a broken lens that reflected the culture in which she grew up in all its literature. Her child-like nature reflects the patronizing pampered sheltered life she has had to live in her society as well as essentially being reborn as a vampire’s plaything. To be honest, I enjoyed writing “The Sleepwalker” more because I really got to be innovative and it was fun to write a character in a constant stream of unconsciousness as it were. It was also really fun to write Vampire Lucy’s story in a way that complemented the original novel more than took away from it. The same can be said for “A Natural Selection”–a title I actually love because Dracula would have been very familiar with the theory of evolution going around at this time and might have even attributed it to vampires and their role with humanity.

Like I said, they are supposed to be short stories or vignettes made to complement Bram Stoker’s novel more than anything else.

I think whenever I write about my Stories on here, I will classify them under Creative Writing and link them to the appropriate Pages. So anyway, this is me: taking back my Blog from too many reviews and opinion pieces and attempting to make it a little more like the mad scientist’s workshop I intended it to be …. or something like that.

I wish this Rembramdt picture was my desk, but it does reflect my working process somewhat. If that makes sense.

Film Review: The Innkeepers

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I’ve been meaning to make this particular review for a while now. I first saw Ti West’s The Innkeepers at the Toronto After-Dark last summer as the last film of the entire festival. It was also the best film to end it off.

I actually didn’t know what to expect from this film and I only got it because it was the last feature. The title of the thing itself along with the little bit of information provided didn’t really say anything. I will say that I knew it was a ghost story or a “ghost film”: about two employees at a hotel wanting to find evidence of a haunting before it closes.

It didn’t start the way that I thought it would. In fact, the film started off with Claire and Luke–the two employees–ribbing and scaring each other. Claire herself–the protagonist of the film–was energetic, positive and very likable. Luke himself had more of a weary, somewhat laconic personality but you could tell he loved what he did: which was managing his paranormal site online. In their spare time they were both ghost hunting enthusiasts. There is something really effective in a horror movie about making protagonists that are so relatable and likable people.

I like the fact that you look at both characters and how they are dealing with their lives. For me, I really felt invested in them and their relationship with each other and they were the kind of people I would like to be friends with. I especially liked Claire and every moment in which she would ring the bell on the front desk just to annoy Luke and just do … do it. Those little touches gave a lot of nuance to the film right there. They almost make you forget that this is a horror film. Almost.

The tone changes from light-hearted interactions and antics to something very creepy and disturbing and then … sad: ultimately so very sad. You see these very human characters pursue something in a very playful way and watch as this something seemingly becomes very serious, very dangerous and very real fast. And I am not just talking about the ghost-hunting either: but rather a divergence between these two characters that costs them. I find at the end that I really wish that didn’t happen to them. That was one of the strengths of Chernobyl Diaries–to have sympathetic characters–except unlike the stupidity in them, these two were really intelligent, if only somewhat more tragically curious and naive.

What the film lacks in blood and gore, it possesses in slow-mounting psychological terror and unexplained creepiness. The Innkeepers reminds me of the ambiance in Are You Afraid of the Dark? with finer tuning, three-dimensional characters and a plausible background made all the more terrifying by hints and moments of building paranormal activity: things made all the more disturbing in that you don’t know whether they exist outside the characters or in their minds. Either way, this film is both scary and tragic.

The Innkeepers gets a five out of five for an excellent story, pacing and brilliant character depictions and interactions. I could not recommend this film more highly than this.

Comics Review: Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum

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The first time I’d ever heard of this game was in reference to the video game that exists out there. But I’m not talking about that. No, I am talking about this.

https://matthewkirshenblatt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/arkham.jpg?w=194

I’m specifically talking about Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth the 15th Anniversary Edition. Considering that it has existed since 1989, the book has no doubt had many reviews at this point, but I feel that I have a few things to say about it: things that have been on my mind since I last read it.

What I find very unique about this comic is not what it is about, but who. You might think to yourself it is obviously about Batman, but while he is obviously a main protagonist in this work and it deals with him facing his own fears and psychological issues the story is not purely about him. The story is not about the villains that he has incarcerated there either: though they have lured him into the asylum to face said fears and the torments that they have waiting for him. It isn’t even about Amadeus Arkham: the tragic founder of the mental hospital that was supposed to save and repair criminally insane minds.

No, Arkham Asylum‘s main character is Arkham Asylum. Character as place is not a new idea. Certainly, I had to face something similar when I was writing part of my Master’s Thesis on Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire: where the protagonist of that work was actually Moore’s hometown of Northampton. But unlike Northampton that has many layers of different gritty and earthy human activity, Arkham Asylum is many nuances of madness.

Morrison doesn’t pull his punches here. He draws on Jungian psychology and archetypes, the Tarot and mysticism, and poetry and crazy itself as he depicts Batman’s essential descent into the underworld or the demented collective unconscious that Arkham has become. He also has an Alice and Wonderland reference or two. Morrison seemed to really like using those, just like Alan Moore in his Miracleman comics. Then there is the name Arkham itself to consider. From what I understand, it is derived from H.P. Lovecraft’s creation of the fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts: the seat of the strange and eldritch Miskatonic University. It has been used as a name for various fictional places, but it really has a nice and eerie parallel with Gotham’s most terrifying asylum.

The fact that it was once a house–a very Jungian archetype for the makeup of an individual’s consciousness–and the person who once lived in it failed to turn it into a place of healing and ended being locked away inside of it speaks some major volumes right there. The atmosphere of this comic is distorted and schizophrenic to the point of making even Batman seem disturbing and this is in no small part thanks to Dave McKean’s drawing style and painting.

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Do not misunderstand though. The piece has its weaknesses and, ironically enough, those weaknesses are can also be construed as its strengths. For instance, I really like the broken mirror-reality that Dave McKean has depicted with his twisted nightmarish images and the different kinds of dialogue font, but at the same time they are very distracting and it is hard to make out key details that may have actually made all the difference in understanding the plot. The reason I like the 15th Anniversary version of this book is because of the detailed comic book script at the end of it.

You know, in some ways I liked the script a lot more than I liked the comic that came from it. If Arkham Asylum is of any indication of how Morrison writes comics scripts, it represents something easy to follow and enjoyable to read. In the script the mythological and archetypal references and many more uncanny details are much more apparent. It is also an added bonus to be able to understand what it is going on and what the characters are saying. At the same time, I will be honest: I respect his interpretation for Batman in this story, but I don’t agree with it.

The fact has less to do with Morrison’s choices and more to do with the popular idea that Batman is as mentally-imbalanced as his enemies. Do I think he was influenced by a trauma into a cycle of behaviour? Obviously. Do I think he saves people’s lives just out of a compulsion? Not completely. Perhaps each time he does do it to save himself or to save the lost innocence of the child he once was. I also think he saves peoples’ lives and doesn’t use a gun because he has principles and he has a certain sense of honour influenced by his own experiences like anyone else.

But there definitely were a lot of things I liked about this book: about reading the story of Arkham Asylum and the progression of the horrifying ritual and gathering of insanity over the decades that made it into the nexus of insanity that we all know and love. I also like how it makes you look at what precisely madness is and just where that fine line may–or may not–be. It was a psychological horror story and I loved it.

I do wish that I could have gotten more out of it without having to read the script, and I could be very mean and say that there is something wrong when you like a script more than the comic it is supposed to help create: but I do love McKean’s work here and the script is a nice complement with some scenes that didn’t make it into the finished artistic product. I’d definitely give this work a five out of five.

And that is it for now. Tune in next time, my friends. Same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel.

ETA: It would be interesting to see someone compare and contrast Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s use of Alice imagery as well as how they use the ideas of “reason” and “madness or intuition” or the “Dragon” and “the hero” in Miracleman, From Hell, Arkham Asylum and Red King Rising respectively.

Making a Receipe for a Creepy-Pasta: With Uncanny Filling

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

Now, I haven’t tried to make any of these yet–not seriously anyway–but I have been thinking about how to make one a lot. Consider this a follow-up to my “Horror as a Universal Power: The Function of a Creepypasta” only with more emphasis on how to potentially write an effective creepypasta.

Since I wrote my last post on that matter, I’ve been reading a lot more of these stories and coming to a few of my own conclusions. Honestly, some of them are … just not that good. I mean, some of the writing is just awkward and some of it really contrived. At worst, I’ve been confused by a lot of the stuff: with their events and details. In this case, writing something as if it is an urban legend or word of mouth situation–as though it’s the product of a distorted broken telephone–takes away from the story’s readability or worse: eliminates even some of a fun suspension of disbelief.

Then you have the other hand. If you write the story too well, then that suspension of disbelief is all but gone. What I mean by that is if you have precise sentence and even images that you can just tell a writer created, and everything is nice and orderly than you have an excellent story but not always a believable one.

Even as I write this, I’m trying to wrap my head around the entire issue: which is a hilarious image given that these stories are being called “creepypastas.” But like some pastas, there is a certain hollowness inside them as well: a darkness and mystery that can’t always be revealed or it will become something else. Of course, you can say that about the horror genre in general.

So I have been thinking of how I can make one of these. I have a few options actually. One of them is that I bastardize something from my childhood, or use enough elements from to make something reminiscent of Candle Cove. Another option is to do something with a video game: to make a game where actions in it actually have consequences like a few of the stories I’ve already read. I can actually play with a place I actually know–a restaurant in the dark–for another one and make something new from it. Then there is just that perception of something watching you from the side of your vision, or behind you, or hidden in the back of your laptop and one night having the ill-fortune to see the actual thing looking right at you all misshapen and horrible. I could do something with that.

I could even be a total smart-ass and write a story where Jeff the Killer and the Slender Man are playing haunted Pokemon games or talking to Ben online (I can imagine him saying, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” when one of them loses a game) while Candle Cove and the Dead Bart Simpson episode are playing in the background on the television and computer respectively. And one of them, maybe Jeff, eats a My Little Pony Cupcake. If you type some of these on Creepypasta Wiki, you will know what I’m talking about: including the cupcake. But beware: they will be disturbing … especially the cupcake.

I am not responsible for what you might find. Remember the age-old at least Lovecraftian saying: “Do not call up that which you cannot put down.” You have been warned.

As such the thing is, in my mind, there are two kinds of creepypastas. The first is one that is clearly a story and simply there for one’s enjoyment. The second is a meme that goes around and places doubt as to whether or not this happened or someone thinks it did. Of course there is a third type where an idea just keeps getting passed around and changed by several people.

But I would definitely love to make at least some of the first two types: send them out and see if they would catch on somehow. It will be a project to put in the far corner of the dark back-burner.

So remember, if you take nothing else from these musings, “the uncanny” is the centre of a creepypasta … or a My Little Pony confection: though really that would actually be just a whole lot of “disturbing” filling.

Book Review: Stephen Andrew Lee’s Tales from Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 17 Comments

I’m trying to figure out how to begin this. Originally, I was going to talk about this book on Amazon but–back in the day–it had no entry to make a review about. This book is out-of-print. Its publisher Spitfire Books doesn’t seem to exist anymore and the author didn’t seem to have written any other books after this one.

For a book I didn’t even know existed up until four summers ago, it impacted me a lot and carries more resonance than I think most people in Toronto realize. First, before I go on let me give you some background. Sanctuary The Vampire Sex Bar is, as the name of an old Goth nightclub, a misnomer. From what I could tell, no sex happened in the club at all: though it was one of the first Goth nightclubs in Toronto. It was opened by Lance Goth in 1992 and it closed in 2000. The Club itself divided into the Bar above and the Catacombs, fittingly and sensibly enough, in the basement where it was apparently an all-ages space.

This was a time when Goth Nights and indeed the whole subculture was at its peak in Toronto: specifically in the Queen Street West area. There was a very interesting Goth fashion store in that area called Siren and a whole other series of clubs, but Sanctuary lasted for a very long time until its last location became a Starbucks. Sanctuary’s time was also a time of Buffy, the Toronto-based Forever Night series and the old World of Darkness’ Vampire the Masquerade: which I mention to create a little more ambiance before I go on.

Now, as for Tales From Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar the book, it was created in 1997 by Lance Goth: also known as Stephen Andrew Lee. Like I said, I had no idea who he even was or what this book was up until four years ago. I only periodically went downtown in my teen years–to places like the Vatikan or Velvet Underground, even the Bovine Sex Club (another aptly named place, I wonder if anyone will or has written a book on that)–and when I moved out to live on York residence I went to the Neutral Lounge about once a week every Friday for their Goth Night.

So I came into all of this at the remnants of the tail-end of this whole time. Then one day a friend let me read her copy of this book. Apparently, during the late 90s when it came out it was easy to get copies of the thing but now it has become very difficult to do so. So here is my challenge: I want to talk about this book and not give away spoilers on the off-chance that someone can access a copy, yet I also want to give people enough information as to what I’m actually talking about and I feel kind of foolish reviewing a book that people most likely haven’t–or will never–read. But I will do my best.

Tales from Sanctuary is a collection of stories. Each story starts off with a quote of some kind that fits its tone. There is no Table of Contents so you just have to read through them really. I read most of the first story, “The Wind-Walkers” at my friend’s place before I actually ordered my own copy of the book from Alibris.

“Wind-Walkers” is the story of two last remaining members of a long-lived winged humanoid race that fed off of human blood and flesh. They once ruled a kingdom of human worshipers which was betrayed to the Roman Empire by someone they trusted. After being violated, and one of them also mutilated, the two hide for millennia until one day they find Sanctuary and learn to trust again. This story dominates a good seventy-eight pages of the book and it is not without its flaws. The grammar is atrocious. I recall there even being a few spelling mistakes as well. In addition–in the long scene where you see a flashback into the Wind Walkers’ past–they speak far too anachronistically. At the very least, some attempt to make the speech sound more formal or archaic could have gone a long way to suspend that portion of the necessary disbelief I needed to think I was looking at ancient vampiric rulers of Nabatea.

Yet we begin to see here an interesting concept: that beings with monstrous appetites can be sympathetic, even pitied, or emphasized with. Lee actually makes thinking and feeling characters of these Wind-Walkers and I know I wanted to be happy for them. It made me think that they weren’t human and it was not completely fair to hold them to human standards, but at the same time it showed that there was some pain and some compassion and understanding that transcended all of that. It was a bit awkward even there, but through them you begin to experience the club of Sanctuary: that strange dark place of mysteries and humanity where you feel with them as they actually feel like they fit in somewhere in human society after millennia on the run.

At the very back of the book, Lee explains all of his inspirations and some of his methods in crafting these stories. What is fascinating for me is how he crafts a mythological Sanctuary. It is obviously based off of his Club–under his persona of Lance Goth–and perhaps even people he knew or knew of. He plays with the idea of someone from the Goth subculture not feeling like they belong and that Sanctuary is not only a place for them, but also a place for supernatural beings–sometimes understated ones–that feel the exact same way. Lee mentions that when crafting the scenes that lead up to each character going to Sanctuary in each story, he actually amalgamates places from other cities into the background: adding to Toronto’s geography in that way. I don’t know how I feel about that because I hadn’t lived in Toronto city that long and I was–and am–still discovering a lot about it. But he does begin to capture a certain kind of spirit, if you will in that first story and in how he writes this.

So then I got my own copy of the book and proceeded to read through the rest at a relentless pace. In “The Cold Ones,” we see a story about another vampiric group: specifically three sisters that seem to frequent a dark corner of the club and come from a mysterious place with a cab fare of $14.95. Now, this story is from the point of a view of an ordinary person and apparent-staff member of the Bar who gets drawn into the world of these sisters’ and actually is called upon to help them. Again, there was something awkward about this story and while I know that revealing all of “the monster’s” background might be considered “info-dumping,” there were references made such as “the Weir” that in retrospect I kind of get (a thing that traps something) but I wasn’t sure at the time. Also, I’m not a geographical expert but I would assume that Mount Pleasant Cemetery is much farther from Queen Street West than the book portrayed. Still, there was something very compelling in this story in how something can be horrifying, and beautiful, and relatable while still very much a mystery.

I really liked the story “Lillith” which actually has references and a list to various kinds of plants … some of them potentially poisonous. It is about a young woman living downtown who feels awkward in her skin and is terrified of physical and emotional danger. Then something really bad happens to her and she eventually finds she has a problem: a very real and human problem. It’s only at Sanctuary: at a place of seemingly strange people and monsters that she finds a place where she actually feels like she actually belongs and feels safe. There is a bit of a crossover here with characters from an earlier story too and I was glad she got to meet them under those circumstances: and that it let me know what happened to those characters in the meantime.

I related to “The Elixir of Love” in a somewhat different way. It actually comes after “Pins and Needles,” but I wanted to mention it because it was a nice contrast to “Lillith.” It was a story about a young man who thinks he finds love and gets introduced to an eerie and then rather heart-breaking reality: where even if you support the idea that there are different rules for different beings, it isn’t just humans that can be shallow “douchey” people. The last is rather banal, but makes it no less painful for it. In this story, Sanctuary is less of a place where he belongs, and more the site of a humiliation and that sense of cognitive dissonance where you think you have found happiness but it is really the loneliness of a gritty past 4 am downtown night. It was somewhat unsettling, but captured what a friend of mine calls “moments of painful clarity” rather well. Both Lillith and Jayson are very self-conscious characters full of real fear and desire–that do not feel like they fit in–and when they find Sanctuary they meet two entirely different ends.

“Pins and Needles” was a disturbing story, but the build-up of the main character’s development into a self-proclaimed “doctor of bad blood,” is well done and is a nice study into morbidity and “a certain point of view.” Finally, there is “Ricky Las Vegas”: a story about a talented musician that only vaguely wonders why his bands keep disbanding, his friends disappearing, and why Lance won’t let him sing at his Club. It is only towards the end of this really short story that Ricky realizes what he is and what he will do from there. I really liked this story in particular because it deals with psychic vampirism and creativity and how they can be related.

Throughout all of these stories is the presence of a fictional Lance Goth who seems to have some mysteries abilities to sense people in his Club and even come on them without being detected. He is usually the catalyst for the characters wanting to tell their stories or find some information that is integral to us for the plot in some of the stories. He usually takes some small mementos from each person he tells things to, or has told to him. It took me a while to realize that Lance actually existed, and that he was actually Stephen Andrew Lee because I can be dim like that.

All and all, Tales from Sanctuary was not the best-written book or series of stories I’ve ever read. I had immense trouble suspending disbelief for “Wind-Walkers,” no matter how fascinating an idea it was. However, this book did something to me. It is hard to explain, but if I had to put it in writing I would say that it showed me the spirit of the Toronto Goth Nights that once existed or wanted to exist: a night that once flourished until morning came yet still existing somewhere in the city’s cracks. It showed me magic in an urban place that I lived in and in that way it did change me.

For one thing, it made me begin to write about Toronto. I confess I actually wrote three stories based on Tales from Sanctuary–The Wrong Club, To the New Millennium, and Another Time–and I wish I could locate Lee to thank him for making these. I bought a copy of the book for a friend that lost her own years before and it was worth it too to share even some of that understanding. If you are keen on reading a copy and you don’t have a friend with access to it, there are some that were being sold as Used on Alibris and Abebooks. Amazon itself is even advertising a seller that will sell a copy for $998.00, but personally I would check those other Used Book Places first or wait.

For all of its idiosyncrasies, I think that Tales from Sanctuary is an important part of Toronto’s subcultural history that now lost place where as the back cover tells you, “You can hunt, but you cannot feed.”

I give this strange book a three out of five.

Naming the Unnameable and a Tangent about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

So despite what it looks like, this story was not inspired by my “The Tragedy of Kishuna” entry: or at least not directly. I will admit it is convenient that way though and I do think that there is some kind of theme forming and uniting this entire Writing Blog as I keep going at it.

A night or so before I wrote “Unnameable,” I had an idea about Frankenstein’s creature and how–because he had his creator’s Journal–he had the potential to make more of his own kind. To be honest, aside from that thought I didn’t give the matter much more thought beyond that and went on to other things. Then the next morning I found myself compelled for the first time in a while to write the story down in my actual Mythic Bios notebook and as I was writing it more chains of ideas continued to form. It’s funny how a half-awake, tired state can influence the creative process. Then I realized that my story was not completely about Frankenstein’s creature at all and went even further.

So there were two twists of the plot-knife as it were followed by a moment of attempted profoundity at the very end of the piece. I could almost make that into a formula in its own right and I have to say that I’ve also always been good at creating parodies of my own work. I parody myself well: though I’m always still learning more.

That said, I’m not sure if the ending works well. I did want to make something of a transcendent moment or even a catchy statement. I always thought that Victor Frankenstein was an irresponsible, dysfunctional, and stupid parent for making something and then abandoning it when it quite inevitably did not fulfill his unrealistic aesthetic expectations. Seriously, man, don’t expect something made out of dead body-parts to smell like roses after just a bit of galvanization!

And he’s an idiot too for not looking at the details, but I digress. I think in some ways this story and its end was also my response to something I read once which said that there was “no way” Mary Shelley could have written Frankenstein: that it was really her husband the poet Percy Shelley that did so. Well, I think I would be understating my response if I said I think that is total bullshit.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The end. Did she have critical and editorial help from her husband? I’m sure. Did she have access to her father’s library growing up, his tutelage, and then her own even without a university or college education? I’m also sure of that. Did she participate in intimate Victorian writing circles of friends and develop her craft? What do you think? And whose mother was Mary Wollenstonecraft: feminist writer and creator of A Vindication of the Rights of Women? Whose writing Percy Shelley even said he admired? Yes, that’s right and even if Mary Shelley hadn’t read her mother’s work, her influence was there.

So I guess in some creative way some of my opinions got in there, though that’s obviously not what my story is about. It’s really just a story about something that interests me. I also always wondered what the creature’s bride would have looked like if she had been completed: aside from the Hollywood image of the hysterical woman with the frizzy dark hair with the white streak that we all have of her now.

I’m also really fascinated with stories about how people try–and sometimes succeed–in creating life in an artificial way, and what that means. I know that I have and I will return to this theme in various ways. In any case, I notice I got somewhat ranty this time around, so I will just go back to rambling in my next post if that’s all the same to you. I make no promises though. 😉 I never do.