Tag: horror

Unnameable

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Because I don’t have a Name, I have power.

Didn’t you know that, Father? Didn’t you even consider it? I’m almost surprised. Names have power and even after all of this time the only conclusion that I can come to is that you made me out of a sense of that power: out of a lust for it.

What did you think would happen that night, those nights, those years ago? I know what I’m made from. It is no secret to me. I’m spare parts: I’m fleshly components dug up from graveyards and charnel houses. My blood is a mixture of alchemical liquids and the modern contents of test tubes. I’m the sum total of clinical science and abstract mysticism’s search into that age-old question neither they–nor you–ever answered as to what exactly it is that a soul might be made from.

Did you think the electricity would transfigure me, Father? Did you believe that based on all my base elements that galvanization would somehow change my dead, scarred body-parts into something new and beautiful: something beyond human?

Honestly, Father, what did you think would happen once you finished your “work?” Did you honestly think I would be beautiful? Did you? Did you?

Did you honestly think that you knew what you were doing? Well, I’ve read your Journal–the one you so foolishly lost–and I read a lot of the how but never really saw the why of it. Neither of us did.

Oh Father, even though he only refers to you as “creator” he did learn from you nonetheless. Did you really think that all he learned to do was speak from the Journal you accidentally left him when you ran away? Oh yes. The arrogance of it: to think that an unnamed, mute creature that could teach himself how to talk and read from snippets of stolen conversation and a pseudo-scientific notebook couldn’t teach himself about himself. We are creature of fire, Father: of lightning and fire.

In fact, so are you and your kind. The only difference is that while the current inside of you, inside the womb that made, inside the generations of you has diluted into a mere spark of the thing that jump-started the primordial ooze from whence your genetic ancestors sprang, the power inside of us is far more recent and purer. An accidental haphazard creature of awkward clay may have put our bodies together, but our souls came directly from the sky itself! Like manna from the heavens, Father, like the fire of Prometheus made incarnate! How can a petty human soul even begin to compare to that?

You never did think about what you made those nights ago, did you? But while you never really dared to think about it, you did do it, didn’t you?

Because here lies the irony. After you sewed me up like a strumpet-scarecrow of flesh and bone, in a sudden fit of “conscience” you dismembered me before I was even born: just so my mate and I would not proliferate the world with our “abominations.” He really did just want it to be him and I with perhaps a few children in an isolated place far away from the likes of you.

But because of your cowardly actions that night, you left him with no other choice. Your work–I–was not unsalvageable. Like a masculine Isis, he put me together again–a feminine Osiris–and he breathed the same life into me from the source from which he gained it.

And this was your mistake, Father. If you had fulfilled your promise there might have been only the two of us. Certainly our bodies–made from dead matter–might never have been able to issue offspring on their own. Yet while my own womb might be dead, and his seed non-existent, our hands are neither.

We have children now, Father. Life finds a way. My mate read your Bible. He told me the story of Adam: of how God Named him and in turn Adam Named the world. And that was your second mistake. By not Naming him, your Adam now has the power to rename or unname this world in our image and–as your unnamed Eve–I’ve given him the impetus to do so.

But I’ve given him more than that. In the height of your arrogance, you tried to create life: a life without a mother … some aborted thing made from the sterile emptiness of a cold and unfeeling man. But I have given us a Mother. I’ve found her out. We are beings of lightning and fire. We see past the seeming of things. And while you think that you–as a man–made us, in reality she–a fragile, tentative, fiery being–made us all.

Because, in the end, she made the idea of us. We are her living ideas.

You do not even have that Father, sperm-donor, digger of corpses, words on a page, a dead man now and forever. You might have died, but I have unnamed you in all the ways that matter. This is our final testament–a page in a Journal that no one but us will ever see–the beginning of a new world that we will build as it was meant to be: a world without Names.

Horror as a Universal Power: The Function of a Creepypasta

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

So in my previous Blog entry, “Horror as a Universal Power,” I talked about how I believe horror is a slow-growing epiphany or realization of just how beautiful and terrifying the seemingly normal reality around us truly is: how it is a feeling we are both repulsed by and attracted to in a kind of feedback loop. It’s this kind of perverse fascination with something very strange and uncanny right in front of us.

After something of a Blogging dry-spell, I was watching a few horror movies such as Insidious and Don’t be Afraid of the Dark: you can, in part, blame these films for today’s horror craze on “Mythic Bios,” but it was also due to finding a unique “creepypasta” that I also began this.

When I first saw the term “creepypasta,” I had no idea what the hell it even meant. What first came to mind was a strange of twisted pasta with a pale hollow-eyed doll’s face on the end of it, or a malignant white spiral-worm with a single blood-shot eye. So after I really read a definition of what a creepypasta is, I realized it is derived from a term called “copypasta”  in which someone supposedly copy and pastes a body of text over and over again onto different websites and message-boards. So basically, the pasta is taken from the word “paste,” while the “creepy” part is pretty self-explanatory.

The link I provided above pretty much lists different kinds of formulas or tropes that creepypastas fall under, but that is not why I want to write this article about. I want to look at just how the creepypasta is such an effective medium of communicating the essence of the horror genre.

My first experience with a creepypasta was when I was sent the “message-board transcript” Candle Cove. I actually didn’t know that this was a work of fiction because the person who created it, Kris Straub, did a superb job in crafting the narrative aesthetic. It actually looked like a message board conversation would: complete with screen names and typos in discussion. He also tapped into that place of barely recalled memory and nostalgia–into the zeitgeist or spirit–of 70s children shows to great effect: along with an incredibly effective sense of pacing and different voices for each “poster.” The element of television static and white noise within the story was even more inspired because it plays on the depths of the imagination and just how far someone–particularly a child–can fall into it.

I really liked “Candle Cove” because you don’t know that it is a story and it is written that way. It is also written in a way which taps hard on that collective unconsciousness we all have and actually in some ways made it real. And that is the thing right there. Candle Cove, though fiction, made itself real.

This is what I really want to talk about. Other creepypastas have managed to do something similar based on the characteristics I listed above from “Candle Cove.” The thing that actually influenced me to write these two recent Blog entries was a creepypasta called Ben (or the Haunted Majora’s Mask Game). I came across an account of it on Youtube purely by coincidence. You can read a very long written account of it here or watch the video “footage” that the creator made to complement it here. What we have here is a mixed-media story: a combination of message board posts, a text file, a Nintendo 64 game-hack and video recordings by a user named Jadusable. But look at what he does here.

First, he turns a game made twelve years ago–a Nintendo work firmly entrenched into this generation’s or at least this gaming generation’s collective unconscious–into a medium for his story. He purposefully glitches parts of this hacked game and uses elements of the game itself to add to this story. Bear in mind, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a very unsettling but wonderful game to begin with taking place in an alternate dimension from the usual world of Hyrule with various characters and elements to work with: not the least of which being the graphics, soundtrack and some of the dialogue.

Some parts of this creepypasta are, however, somewhat stereotypical and cliche: such as the protagonist and creator Jadusable buying “a haunted bootleg” from a “creepy old man” but that is a trope part and parcel with urban legends in general. Most people would have a lot of trouble suspending disbelief for this–especially gamers–but it does have some very creepy moments: especially for me given that one of the text messages on one of the videos associated with the piece referred directly to a person named “Matt.”

I think the reason I find this creepypasta fascinating is because it uses elements of our generation–specifically video games and the medium of the Internet–to attempt to relate to us in a way might not have affected other generations. Other creepypastas that have utilized Nintendo such as Pokemon Black and Pokemon Lost Silver really tap into that shared popular cultural consciousness, but they do more than that. You’ll find that if you Google or even click on the above links (pardon the unintentional pun), that after these stories became memes–cultural information that spreads to different people–people started creating works based on these pastas to make them more real. Candle Cove now has surviving televised scenes on Youtube. The haunted Majora’s Mask game has many imitators and parodies. Even the Pokemon games I mentioned have been made into actual bootleg games by readers of the things. Basically, they are not only Internet memes, but they become living stories. They become alive inside the people that want them, and I think that is an incredibly bad-ass concept.

It makes me really want to create a creepypasta of my own. I’ve had ideas for some, but I never really followed through with them. You have to get that mixture of intentional typos that look unintentional, a compelling and readable but realistic-looking narrative aesthetic and revealing the horror but not revealing the full origin of the horror down pat because not only do you have to contend with a reader’s disbelief, but also the myriad of other creepypastas out there that share so many–and in some ways too many–characteristics to make yours unique. I tend to get very elaborate in my works and that would definitely count against me in creating such a potent literary hoax.

Still, I know I can’t help thinking about it. It is no coincidence that a loved one chose to give me the strange and wonderful gift of an old newspaper article talking about the effects of the legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast on its audience at the time.

A creepypasta functions as a horror story pretending to be real and yet even when revealed as fiction, readers make it real by believing in it and paying homage to it. In other words, we make our nightmares real and we actually seem to enjoy doing so which leads me back to my original question of why?

The Internet allows creepypastas to exist: to replicate and spread across not merely servers, message boards, and chat-rooms but imaginations as well. Where is that line between the machine and the human mind these days? What happens when we interact with an increasing body of knowledge that we can manipulate and shape to our whims (technology permitting)? I believe that, in the end, creepypastas exist for three reasons: the first being entertainment, the second being that they are a form of oral storytelling around a pixelated campfire, and the third because we want to believe and make real and manifest the idea that the wondrous and the terrifying can exist in a world where we all live: where something like the Internet exists and not only contains the growing sum of all knowledge and information of what we think exists in our supposed certainty, but also human experience and its less concrete intuitions as well.

I also believe that in light of all of this creepypastas–along with their verbal and written urban legend and folktale predecessors–demonstrate that horror is not only the fear of the unknown. Rather, horror is the love for the unknown–for an unknown–and the sheer limits of human understanding.

Horror as a Universal Power

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

What is it about horror that is so incredibly powerful? It’s something that many like to avoid, but is attracts people as well: and oftentimes it does both. In part I think it is linked to fear. Fear is a healthy and necessary human emotion: a “danger-sense” to let you know that something isn’t right and that you might want to watch yourself before doing anything foolish: or not doing anything at all. Many old cautionary folktales derive themselves from this ancient impulse: utilizing archetypal images and story-elements to make their points.

This is me basically writing as though I know exactly what I’m talking about. Because I know horror is more than merely fear and it has more than a cautionary function. Aristotle would most likely posit that a story or play created from horror brings out pity and fear in the audience, but that isn’t completely true either because horror doesn’t always bring catharsis: it doesn’t always drain out the pity and the fear. Sometimes it plays with these feelings, increases them and leaves them inside you like a hollow, dark cold spot as you leave the theatre.

Among others, Clive Barker in his short story “Dread” looks at another other aspect of horror. Dread as an emotion is knowing something bad is coming for you, or lurking just over your shoulder and feeling powerless to do anything about it but writhe in a corner. You try to avoid it and it only makes it stronger in you. Dread is fear so internalized into a loop inside a human being that it cannot be resolved: or at least not without considerable effort and willpower.

Yet none of these explanations are enough. Horror is more than just a cautionary genre. It is more than leaving people traumatized and afraid. It is definitely more than embodying something that people try to avoid in vain: only to give it more power over them. Horror has all of these elements to an extent, but I think there is much more to it and I think this is why it has such powerful through its narratives: particularly its universal narratives.

I think horror is a part of the human psyche that is both repulsed by and attracted to what Freud would call “the uncanny.” I also think the uncanny is very much linked to Romanticism and the Gothic’s worship of Nature as a terrifying form of beauty far beyond human understanding. You can argue that when one feels horror–true horror–they blow beyond the limits of their comfort, cultural, and even conscious boundaries into something so weird and still so unknown that it can be positively overwhelming. It uses fear and dread as building blocks to off-set or play with the rational mind enough to connect the animal mind with the infinite darkness that is already there connected to them. Horror is the darkness in us all. The bloody plays of Seneca, the gruesome feast of Thyestes, the ancient dithyrambs of Dionysus and his Maenads all play with this power and instead of providing catharsis–as Aristotle believed tragedy does–it alters the mind by showing the wonders and the terrors of a much greater world.

That above paragraph is a lot of poetic license, I know, but given the nature of this Blog and the subject, I’d like to think it’s at least somewhat appropriate. After writing this and mentioning Clive Barker, I realize why the former’s stories are so effective: in that they really play on the attractive and repulsive aspects of horror. Books of Blood make the very thing the characters fear or dread, or what the reader finds disturbing, attractive in a perverse but natural way. I loved those two books when I read them and I have never looked at the horror genre in the same way again since I did.

Attraction and repulsion towards the uncanny is why we like horror stories. We also like them because they tap into truly universal elements and archetypes inside all of us: the very places some people want to deny the very existence of. Short stories, novels, and films structure horror in a very symmetrical way but before the existences of any of these–before even the ancient rituals of the divine that led to theatre–there were tales and stories told around campfires spreading to other campfires like the wildfire they already were. They are called folktales and horror stories, and in our time now they are called urban legends.

Then there are the stories that exist on the Internet. They are called “creepypastas” and I think this post has gone on long enough and I will write about creepypastas in the next one. I tend to write a lot and I just want to make sure that people will want to read my points this time and not give up because of the length. But soon, I promise, we will talk about creepypastas.

After the Zombie

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

So what I can tell you about the story I wrote in the previous post? Well, for starters, I thought it would be a lot shorter than it actually turned out to be. I made a deal a little while ago to write 250-words a day–to keep myself writing–and I’ve exceeded that. I really exceeded it with this piece here. I remember an author–I think, yes it was Neil again–stating that if you wrote 300-words a day you would eventually have a novel. And while I haven’t written a novel in a long time, sometimes I feel dangerously close to do that again.

But let us deal with the danger of zombies first. While the walking dead in themselves are terrifying, you have to consider that in a zombie apocalypse there are other terrifying aspects to consider as well. For instance, imagine you have mostly been acclimated to living indoors and your job deals almost solely with paperwork or writing. You may have a really powerful imagination, but imagination doesn’t equal exercise, discipline and hard physical work. Those things can be additional, but they are not automatic.

You have to also consider: just how many people have actual survivalist skills? Who camps without at least one convenience or modern washroom? Where will you get your food? It takes a while to grow it and you will need something immediate. Do you have combat abilities and reflexes? Do you have skills that can be implemented for immediate survival? These are some of the questions and issues I’ve encountered in zombie apocalypse stories and that I went through when I wrote this.

Strangely, I often write these from the perspectives of the zombies themselves, so this was different for me in that I was trying to go for realism. But there is more. You see, imagine all that above stuff and then think of a person dependent on anti-anxiety medication, or who is a “shut-in” or has medical issues of organic or psychological dimensions. Imagine the social modern world of streets and cars being stressful enough for them and then take that all away and have them try to survive being eaten by zombies and surviving in disparate groups of people who are just trying to make it through the insanity.

Some of these people might take a while to adjust. Most would probably not make it. It would be very difficult for someone on medication, for instance, if they couldn’t access any new batches and went into a powerful kind of withdrawal: especially from the anti-anxiety medication that our modern culture likes to espouse. Some might see it in some ways as a kind of liberation. I imagine you wouldn’t stand on too much ceremony in a place without what is considered modern civilization anymore. With a character like Malcolm Ecker, I see a very intelligent but inexperienced person who in a rebuilding period and even for entertainment purposes would be crucial for spiritual and psychological survival. But the problem is that his group is not in that period. They are in the hiding and hoarding period where people need to hone their practical skills: skills he is bad it. It also doesn’t help that the leader of his group is abusive to him and the others do in some ways see him as dead weight.

Being rejected and humiliated by a group would be even more devastating in a zombie apocalypse because–honestly–where can you go? You can fight back, it’s true and claim your place, and potentially cause strife. But when you are a person who is mostly shut-in and quiet and you have only written papers and gamed–when you are cripplingly shy–that is a lot against you right there. The cold hard fact of the matter is that the group in a survivalist situation will leave whatever dead weight is behind them and Malcolm is intelligent enough to realize that: to know that right now and in a future where the future is immediate survival he is just dragging people down: if only with his low self-esteem being exacerbated by all the horror and stress around him.

With actual encouragement and more time, who knows what could have happened to him. But that is not how the world always works: even now during our non-apocalyptic time. Yet in the end he does make an affirmative choice. He considers the group’s well-being over his own. I won’t say he’s altruistic, because he’s not and he is being motivated by emotion, but the group does play a part in his decision.

The setting for this story was a little difficult too to create, but I decided to make my creatures similar to the ones in Max Brooks’ world and a great cemetery park was a perfect place for survivors to camp in: with few freshly dead around and those that were, buried deep underneath the earth. I also made it clear how that would change too as more survivors got infected or were tracked by the creatures there.

The motivation for this entire story was that in most zombie stories I’ve seen, we see strong individuals or people who overcome adversity, or keep hiding, or have a last few moments of glory. We also see ridiculous teenagers and people doing dumb things and are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes. I wanted to write a character who was inept in this environment, had some humiliating disabilities, and was afraid but not stupid. I wanted to show an actual person and how an actual person would deal with all of this: how he or she might just tag along with the group to survive but get in the way and deal with the psychological consequences of “not fitting in.” I wanted to show that the “Other” is not just the zombie, but how the zombie’s mere existence or presence is symbolic of how one person in a time of stress can be their own worst enemy.

I wanted to write a story about a realistic person in a zombie apocalypse and what they might do. It does look grim at the end but, who knows: maybe Malcolm Ecker’s story isn’t done yet. That is entirely up to me.

Death by Zombie

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It was almost too late this time. Malcolm Ecker’s bowels rumbled painfully, yet he managed to get his pants off before soiling himself. Again. He squatted down, feeling ridiculous in the middle of the snow with his pants down and a deep earthy stench–his own–filled his nostrils as it dispersed into the frosted air.

Malcolm was glad that no one was there to see him, though they’d seen him do much worse. Something snapped in the distant trees: perhaps a broken twig or an animal on a branch. His bowels clenched again and he winced at the movement: distantly wondering if it was the result of his body or fear and not really caring so long as it passed and he could move on. He already felt cold enough out here and the memory of bloated, distended shapes coming through the windows of his old flat came at him …

He bit back a grunt of considerable discomfort, but eventually he felt his bowels–even as irritated by stress as they were–uncoil like a snake. After he cleaned himself, he pushed as much snow on the refuse he created as he could. His ears strained for groans in the distance, but he heard nothing. That didn’t mean anything, however. Some of the things out there didn’t have what one would consider proper mouths anymore or vocal cords.

Malcolm piled as much snow as he could: his hands shaking and clumsy. He knew by now that Rob–the leader of the people who’d found him at his apartment two weeks ago–would have been hissing at him: telling him how incompetent he was. Malcolm had never camped before and if he didn’t know that his wilderness survival skills were lacking, Rob and most of the others took enough time to make that fact very clear to him.

It was just as well too. Malcolm knew that he’d left enough tracks for the others to follow him. But it was night and they wouldn’t waste the energy–flashlight battery or otherwise–to track him yet even when they found the gun missing. Malcolm’s only other consolation, as he pulled up his pants–scrubbed a few times by snow and ice this week or so–was that he was far enough that if something happened to him before he … did what he had to do, he would not get traced back to the camp.

So Malcolm put his heavy mitts back on and narrowly avoided colliding his foot into another partially submerged headstone. A part of him still felt bad about defecating in the large cemetery park they found as their refuge. But then he remembered Sara and her observations about the things: that they had reanimated only after recent death. Therefore during this time, a graveyard was one of the safer places to be. The truly dead would not mind someone of the living needing to relieve their biological need, he figured, and those that weren’t would settle it with him one way or another.

Malcolm thought of them then, though he didn’t really want to, as he came to a stop near a tree. His hands gripped tightly around the Kali sticks he brought with him. His damned Kali sticks. He’d just started training at that dojo before the insanity broke out all over the world. His therapist told him to take up a martial art to deal with his irritable bowel which, up until now, kept him at home or near a toilet for a good portion of his adult life. Some people might have thought that pretty funny, but Malcolm was not one of them. It wasn’t funny to be in discomfort and not be able to deal with the slightest anxiety without a bathroom nearby. It really wasn’t funny when other people thought it so funny that he wanted to avoid them and stay home as much as possible.

That was until his martial arts classes and the clacking of the wooden Kali sticks against each other changed the burning anxiety in his stomach into something calmer, cleaner, and slightly more focused.

Malcolm now stared out at the distant trees and wondered just how memories of his humiliations managed to comfort him against the images of the swollen dead breaking into his apartment. There had been just two of them. It was like they had died from some kind of allergic reaction to distend and swell their body parts so much: which he supposed, in retrospect, they did. He’d just been working on his PhD at the time: a dissertation on role-playing games as a relatively new sub-genre of oral storytelling tradition. The advantage to that was that he’d barely had to leave his apartment as he was funded and submitted most of his work to his Professor online.

Perhaps the other advantage was that he’d had a brief shelter against the creatures as they started to come back to life. He’d known something was wrong. There’d been Internet reports all over the place. He even kept his door locked and barricaded with furniture. Malcolm remembered sitting in that small room with his sticks even as he ran out of food. The plumbing was still working then and he still hadn’t even taken a shower. He’d been too on edge and rightfully paranoid.

When the two creatures found him, he’d barely been upright from lack of food and sleep. Even at the best of times, he lacked upper body strength. The first Kali strike only burst a blood vessel in the creature’s cheek. The second stick attack was a clumsy switch that got grabbed by the other creature. He’d hit the other creature’s face to the side again: but not nearly enough to do that damage that was necessary.

Malcolm’s last thoughts at the time were that there was big difference between fighting these things with dice and trying to feebly hit them with–for all intents and purposes–blunt instruments. Colin, who was an actual martial fighter in the group, told him about this and actually got angry at him when they encountered a group of the things that had moved into the cemetery park. He’d berated him about getting himself killed. Malcolm felt really bad then as Colin and Jen had saved his life from those creatures and since then, Colin had tried to train him to fight as much as possible.

During the two weeks they’d been together, he’d managed to nearly stab himself with the knife and machete that Colin gave him to train with. That was not counting the time he nearly tripped over himself to let Sara and Jen get away from one of the creatures that attacked them here with disturbing frequency. The creature … nearly bit him, just like they did back in his old apartment before Colin and the others made short work of them. The sound of bullets were nothing like the television shows he used to watch. They were loud and piercing and the very sound of them cracked through his very being.

They’d shot the creatures the night they found him too–close-range–and Malcolm could still hear the shots like thunder in his eardrums. He wondered somehow if he’d been made deaf by some of that. Certainly Rob seemed to think so. He always asked Malcolm if he had a hearing problem in addition to incontinence. Rob had led them to the cemetery after raiding Malcolm’s apartment for what little resources there were: which–as Rob said a few times–had been one of Malcolm’s few redeeming features and not much else.

The memories were all jumbling together now, yet it seemed appropriate to Malcolm as he put his Kali sticks down–almost reverently–into the snow: ashamed that someone more worthy hadn’t taken them instead. He reached a hand into his coat pocket. It didn’t take an idiot to figure out that Malcolm wasn’t particularly wanted and that the only reason he was there was out of common human decency: a decency that had a certain patience expiry date. He had already almost gotten them killed a few times trying to raid some nearby variety stores and bungling: making too much noise, or not hitting a creature hard enough with a machete. He didn’t like to think about that blade embedded in that creature’s chest, lost forever as swarms of them began to mass and they had to run.

Malcolm also really didn’t want to think about the incident with the gun … the same gun he held in his hand right now, how he missed the creature with it, how it went past it and .. into Jen’s shoulder instead. After they’d run, after Rob began to beat him, after they hauled him away, Colin had said it was an accident and that he just needed more time to learn. Malcolm didn’t even blame Rob for getting that angry and almost wished Jen hadn’t interceded. He’d never been good at First-Person Shooters, but this had been different and he could have …

Sara kept telling Malcolm–in a cold, detached manner–that if and when civilization needed to be rebuilt, his own skills would come in handy. It was a cold comfort. It was hard to even maintain a tent near a crypt and get food never mind write or record anything. And Malcolm spent a good few years writing about table-top RPGs that he’d barely even played. None of the group were interested in his theories–and he couldn’t tell stories without stuttering and the zombie story he made earned him a punch to the shoulder from Rob.

And the creatures were massing. Some other survivors must have had the same idea they did and carried the infection to the cemetery. After what happened with Jen, few of the party were even talking to him now. Malcolm was smart enough to realize he’d become dead weight.

Malcolm turned the safety of the gun off. Although Colin had failed to teach him how to use a blade or a gun properly, he remembered this much: that and loading it. He looked down at the barrel. There was one bullet in there. The way Malcolm figured it, they would have had to use it on him eventually. There was no way he’d be able to avoid being bitten or scratched forever and he was too much of a coward to let the creatures devour him unarmed and alone. So he felt a little bit better about taking the gun and wasting one bullet. Besides, even if that didn’t happen and he didn’t accidentally kill one of the team, he knew he would easily get sick and use Sara’s medical supplies up, and Rob probably didn’t consider him worth the penicillin.

He was doing them all a favour, he told himself. But in reality, he was doing the favour for himself.

They’d find him here. The creatures didn’t eat the dead and even if another human group found him, the gun would benefit them instead. Anyone would certainly use it better than he had. His only regret, as he put the barrel into his mouth–where even he could not miss this shot–was that Jen would be sad. Although the others hadn’t really hated him, except for her boyfriend Rob, they’d not nearly been as nice or compassionate to him as she had.

Malcolm felt his bowels begin to tighten again. And although he knew that once he did this, he would definitely soil himself, for the first time in his whole life he was okay with that. A smile came onto his face as he pulled the trigger of the gun.

Film Review: The Chernobyl Diaries: A Foregone Conclusion

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Yes, there are going to be spoilers.

So yesterday, after my lengthy digression on The Avengers, I went to see a film I’d been intrigued by for a while. The premise of Chernobyl Diaries caught my imagination almost immediately following my viewing of the first preview. Pripyat was a city in Ukraine founded in 1970 to house the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s workers and their families until the disaster of 1986. The city–and most of the possessions of its inhabitants–was abandoned almost immediately following a flood of deadly radiation into the area.

Think about it: somewhere out there in Ukraine is a city still stuck in the mid-late 80s Communist period–a place that could have easily seen all three of George Lucas’ Star Wars original trilogy like everyone else before its doom–gathering dust, rust, pools of water, weeds, and trees growing out of and into buildings. It is a ghost city where abandoned swing-sets still sway in the winds, old photographs lie on the floors in abandoned homes, and a ferris wheel still stands to celebrate a May Day Festival that never happened. There could even be collector’s items there–such as a tattered first issue of Action Comics–that would prove just as poisonous to a would-be collector as Kryptonite is to Superman. In a lot of ways, it is more sad than creepy. There is so much tragedy there–soaked as indelibly into the stones as the radiation that has doomed it–that it makes you wonder why it happened: makes you wish that it never did. When I first saw Pripyat and the Chernobyl reactor looming ominously in the distance, I wondered what it would have been like had the disaster not happened. But that is neither here nor there: just like legacy that Chernobyl has left us, or that we left it.

If any place could be considered cursed by human action and hubris over Nature, this area would be one of those places. When I came into this film, I thought that the protagonists would be dealing with psychic manifestations of the ghosts within Chernobyl and Pripyat–of the loss of potential and life made incarnate–while at the same time making you–the viewer–wonder if any of it is truly happening and if its not the protagonists having hallucinations by the slow encroaching inevitable horror of man-made radiation poisoning.

Instead, we have a different movie. Extreme Tourism is something I have heard of and I also know that there have been many tours near Chernobyl and possibly into the area even before this film was made. I was really surprised. I always thought that the place would be a complete wasteland, but evidently Nature is more powerful than humanity. The protagonists were young–and I personally think stupid to risk themselves to radiation poisoning despite what their guide said about two hours being a reasonable amount of exposure–but they were all likable: which I’ve not seen happen often in horror movies these days. It actually made me sad knowing that even if they got out of this, they were still going to die from radiation and cancer. That in itself is horrifying enough.

The film plays on three fears and layers them well. The first is the radiation that will slowly kill them if they do not leave and even if they do, it will still be in them. I winced every time they picked something up in the city or dipped their hands into presumably irradiated water like their guide Uri did. The geiger counter they had in their possession as it crackled louder and louder and started to beep was like a timer to their death. Then there were the wild, crazed dogs that lived in the area that they had to avoid: a case of feral Nature turning on protagonists that had few resources to help them.

The main characters had the advantage in their general solidarity, if nothing else, and even when that solidarity was challenged by fear and the realization that they would not be able to leave the city before their two hours were up was offset by their mutual need to survive and their basic empathy as fellow travelers. But then: we have the creatures.

The creepy–the truly creepy thing–about the creatures is that we barely even see them. We just have hints of them: things from the corner of the eye, a distant photograph, a still smoldering fire, a limping shape behind a table in an underground room that hints at deformity, a recording of a car being turned over and people being taken, dead eaten soldiers, a sole, solitary little girl with her back to the protagonists, a flash of a multitude of distorted faces at the end and not much else. It’s as though the director of this film observed an age-old horror genre convention in not revealing what the monster looks like. The unknown is the most terrifying aspect of horror: especially as it comes for and consumes you.

In that sense, for all the trappings of modernism around it, Chernobyl Diaries is a classic horror story: relying less on sex, gore and spectacle and more on a slow, mounting, creepy horror: with the gothic romanticism and terrible majesty of a Nature have reclaimed civilization, a contamination for which there is no cure and little hope for surviving with each passing hour, and–lastly–the presence of monsters and the unknown lurking never too far away in the dark. All of three primary fears are interlinked and even interchangeable. After all, it is no coincidence that at the end of the film the creatures are referred to as “patients”: robbed of individuality by their nature, sick, and no longer even human. It was a film that started out slow–exceedingly so–and then became fast-paced with characters dying at an alarmingly accelerated rate.

I can see why the above elements–combined with the fact that the “diaries” part of Chernobyl Diaries barely plays any role in the film–might make modern horror and movie critics pause and heap negative reviews on it, but if you are a classical horror reader or viewer, you can definitely appreciate the grim fatalism–the inevitability–of the three-fold fear and its triumph over human curiosity and common decency that lies at the heart of this film. I give Chernobyl Diaries a four out of five.