I’ve found that in today’s fast-paced blogosphere, Tumblr presents a more reasonable approach for me. I may come back to my WordPress blog from time to time for longer rants and explorations of topical (or completely irrelevant) material, but for now, you can mostly find me here: http://holdthatthought.tumblr.com

See you on the other side!

- Andrew

I found Carl Laemmle’s 1931 production of  Frankenstein to be considerably more unsettling than I expected. In fact, before the film even begins, Edward Van Sloan steps out onto a stage from behind a curtain to warn the audience about the horrific nature of the film they are about to watch. This seemed like little more than a tongue-in-cheek attempt at comic relief when I first saw it, but as the film went on, I came to realize that perhaps this sort of warning was necessary for audiences in 1931, and that perhaps Laemmle was sincere and earnest in his warning.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The film is certainly tame by today’s horror standards, but throughout, I found the performances to be both human and horrific, and the general chaos and uncertainty of any given scene causes a sort of tinderbox effect, as anything could go wrong at any minute.

Boris Karloff as The Monster

A quick plot summary: The film opens with Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his hunchback assistant Fritz (a once again terrific Dwight Frye) awaiting the end of a funeral service so they can steal the body from its grave. Shortly thereafter, Frankenstein makes Fritz cut another body down from the gallows. The intention is to piece together a body from mismatched parts and to create life in the laboratory. Fritz is also sent to steal a brain from the local Medical College, where Frankenstein was once on faculty. Fritz, however, bungles the assignment and accidentally steals the brain of a career criminal and murderer. Lost in his research, Dr. Frankenstein (who is played here with much more humanity than I would have expected; he is not the stereotypical mad scientist, though he may well be the archetypal one) loses interest in his engagement to his fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), who continually pesters him at his secluded tower laboratory. Frankenstein’s Monster (Boris Karloff)  is brought to life by a lightning storm and imprisoned in Frankenstein’s lab, until he murders Fritz and escapes, to terrorize the countryside. Eventually, Dr. Frankenstein’s wedding to Elizabeth is cut short by news of the Monster’s rampage, and a group of torch-wielding villagers traps the monster in a windmill, killing (?) him in a fire, but not before Dr. Frankenstein comes dangerously close to being brutally murdered by his own creation.

Review: As I mentioned above, this film is much more unsettling than I would have expected. Boris Karloff brings such an intense humanity to the Monster, that it’s impossible to view him as only a horror, but it’s also impossible not to see him at least partially as such. His out-sized shoes and arms-too-short blazer have since been aped ad nauseum, most notably by the television show, The Munsters, but here, despite its now cliché status in popular culture, Karloff’s monster remains an enigma. For instance, the scene in which the little girl, Maria, Karloff portrays a sense of real joy at finding human connection, even in something as simple as watching daisies float in a pond, and when he finally throws Maria in the pond, it’s conveyed clearly that the monster immediately regrets his action, and that he had no intention of killing her.

The above caught me totally by surprise. In a later scene, as Maria’s father carries her limp body through the streets of the village, the horror comes around full circle (before this point, the audience does not realize that she is dead). Similarly, Karloff’s portrayal of the Monster’s outrage and confusion in the windmill is truly amazing and entrancing to watch.

The most gruesome moment in the film comes when the Monster hurls Dr. Frankenstein from the top of the windmill, and his seemingly lifeless body catches and hangs for a moment from the blade of the windmill, reversing its spin until he finally falls to the ground below. This is a scene that is even difficult to watch today; I cannot imagine how macabre it must have seemed in 1931.

Dwight Frye as Fritz, tormenting the Monster with fire

Dwight Frye is once again terrific as Fritz, the ambling, eager-to-please hunchback lab assistant. He equally earns sympathy (to watch him scramble up and down the spiral staircase in the laboratory is painful at best) and hatred (his brutal teasing and torturing of the Monster with fire) from the audience, much as he did as Renfield in Dracula. Similarly, Colin Clive brings unexpected humanity to the mad scientist, and though the audience never fully understands his obsession, we hope he’s able to get out of it long enough to marry Elizabeth (though, we don’t really understand why she’s so interested in such an obviously conflicted man).

On the downside: I didn’t believe for a second that the film took place in Germany. Midway through, the sudden use of “herr” and “fraulein” and the entrance of a character named “The Burgomaster” just confused me. The actors mostly used modified British accents, or spoke in obviously American English. I’m not implying that a) the film should have been entirely subtitled, or b) the actors should have used German accents, but it did cause some moderate confusion at times. The best thing, I think, is just to accept these inconsistencies as what they are, and to enjoy the film despite them.

Also, I found the whole marriage side-plot to be cumbersome, unbelievable, and ultimately pointless, as the threads never come together in the end.

On the whole, though, the film is another example of a much more complex entry in the Universal Horror catalog than I would have expected.

*Poster borrowed from wikipedia.org. Trailer borrowed from YouTube.com member sciencemonster. Fritz photo borrowed from Frankensteinia. Frankenstein photo borrowed from inhaps.com.

A quick plot summary (in case you didn’t already know): A businessman named Renfield (Dwight Frye) travels to the Transylvania castle of Count Dracula (Béla Lugosi), who is a vampire, to discuss the purchase of a home in London. Along the way, Renfield is warned about vampires, and their propensity for taking various shapes, most often bats and wolves. Despite his disbelief, Renfield is indeed attacked by Dracula, and transformed into a raving lunatic. We next see Renfield and Dracula on board a ship from Transylvania to London, on which Dracula slays the entire crew. At port, Renfield is discovered as the only survivor, and is quickly incarcerated in a sanatorium. Dracula meets some local Londoners, namely his new main squeeze, Mina (Helen Chandler) and her pesky, nosy fiancé John Harker (David Manners). When Mina starts having bad dreams,  her family solicits the help of Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), who discovers that a) Dracula is a vampire, and b) he’s transformed Mina into some sort of vampire hybrid. Van Helsing leads Harker into Dracula’s basement to drive a stake through his heart, and rescue Mina from the clutches of eternal damnation. Meanwhile, Renfield eats flies and various bugs, all the while doing Dracula’s bidding and continually escaping from his seemingly inescapable cell at the sanatorium.

Review: It’s difficult to discuss this film (as I’m sure it will prove difficult to discuss any of these 70-or-more-year-old films) through the lens of time. Béla Lugosi is, in fact, quite creepy as Count Dracula, but I find the overall story to move quite slowly, and the creepiness and tension to stop escalating exactly when they need just a bit more oommph to push the audience over the edge.

Dwight Frye as Renfield

One aspect that of the film that I did find particularly disturbing (and an aspect that I’ve never heard mention of in any discussion of the film, or the Dracula mythos), is Dwight Frye’s genuinely manic portrayal of Renfield. Every moment Frye is onscreen is unsettling, and he steals every scene he’s in (in a good way).

Lugosi is delightfully creepy as Dracula, and I must say I much prefer this earlier incarnation to any lesser (and almost not worth mentioning) future revamp (pun intended), particularly the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman-driven Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The way the camera lingers on Lugosi as he stares maliciously at his prey reaches its desired hypnotic effect, though, these moments tend to lose their punch as the film goes on. I also found myself enthralled with the first scene to feature the Count, as his hand slides back the lid of his coffin, and his brides congregate in the tunnels beneath the castle. This scene, I’m sure has lodged itself in the collective unconscious, at least where it intersects with my own unconscious. Really, though, the film’s overall impact tends to stop after the first fifteen minutes or so, in Dracula’s castle. The rest (including Frye’s fantastic turn as Renfield) is extra, all fantastic bits of cinema I didn’t know were coming.

On the downside: I found that the ending came much too easily. The final shot fades on Mina and Harker walking up the stairs from Dracula’s basement, and though Dr. Van Helsing has stayed behind, we know nothing of what happens to him (perhaps this is explored in one of the multitude of sequels?). Also, I understand the censorship restraints of the time, but the off-camera nature of the violence in the film is difficult to get past. At some points, the audience is left with so little visual stimulation to go on that the necessary conclusions can’t be drawn. I found myself scratching my head at times, thinking, I know he did something there, but what?
Overall, Dracula definitely deserves its place in the canon of classic horror movies, if only for its opening Transylvania scenes, Frye’s take on Renfield, and the hypnotic creepiness Lugosi brings to the title character. Despite its shortcomings, I would recommend this one to anyone looking to understand the roots of the modern horror genre.

*Poster borrowed from wikipedia.org. Trailer borrowed from YouTube.com member RoboJapan. Renfield photo borrowed from DVD Outsider.

As the fall season begins (and, I know, here in Florida, it is probably still a few months off), I always undergo a sort of horror-movie renaissance. In previous years, I’ve worked through the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, and I generally take a few nights to peruse Hitchock’s films (particularly those starring James Stewart, and, of course, Psycho).This fall, though, I’m hoping to do something a little different.

This fall, I intend to spend some time watching the classic Universal Monster movies. I’m a self-proclaimed horror hound, but I’ll admit I’ve never really given these classics more than a cursory glance. I hope to watch at least the films from the 1930s, perhaps venturing into the ’40s (particularly out of my interest in The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney). I’ve got a few memories of these movies, from late-night features I may have caught on television as a kid. But, I’m sure a lot of my memories are just things that I’ve grabbed out of the universal archetype, that swirling mass of unconscious dreams and memories we all seem to share. My impressions of The Mummy, for instance, involve a stumbling thin-man, wrapped in bandages, arms outstretched to catch whoever he’s chasing slowly through a maze of pyramid corridors. However, I have never seen Boris Karloff’s mummy film; I just have a feeling I know what to expect from it.

I’m hoping, though, that as I delve into these classic films, I’ll be pleasantly surprised by the subtle nuances of all they have to offer.

*Posters borrowed from wikipedia.org.

As my current cell phone contract came to an end, I decided it was time to take advantage of my carrier’s (we’ll call them Schmerizon, to avoid unpaid advertising) new-every-two plan. After much deliberation, I decided on a BlackBerry Curve (although this name is a misnomer, as the “Curve” is not really all that curvy).

And, let me tell you, this thing is complicated. Initially, all I wanted in a phone was the numbers zero through nine and a “send” button. But my new BlackBerry does far more than that, and I think that’s where the machine and I get into disagreements.

For instance, I get updates every time anything happens on Facebook, and any time I receive an email, not to mention the usual alerts for text messages (the most loathsome form of modern communication) or phone calls (few and far between, truth be told). So, if some meaningless company who’s mailing list I’ve accidentally stumbled onto emails me in the middle of the night, my phone buzzes. If Dwayne Kitzmiller comments on Harvey Epstein’s Facebook status update after me at three a.m., I’m awoken to find out about it.

Now, I know, I know there are ways to turn this stuff off, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. Here’s the thing: I’m connected at all times to everything going on around me. I no longer have the excuse, “I was away from the office, so I just got your email today,” or “I haven’t been at the computer all day.” Now, I carry everyone I know with me at all times. Is this a good thing? My verdict is no, and I’ll explain.

Life used to be simpler, and I don’t mean to get overly nostalgic here. I vividly remember the days when you wouldn’t know if you had messages until you got home at the end of the day to check your machine. I remember when USPS mail was the preferred way to get in touch with someone in writing (I’ve always regarded the fax as being unwieldy and impractical, so we’ll skip that technological advance). How about when you graduated from high school and had to wait ten years to catch up with what everyone’s been doing? Now, (my ten-year reunion being just around the corner) we won’t have anything to talk about. Me talking to an ex-girlfriend: “So, I heard you went to the dentist last week…”  What about looking up numbers in the phone book, or going to the library to do research among the reference stacks? What about only finding out about news in the morning paper or the six p.m. local news broadcast?

My BlackBerry gives the same importance to a breaking news story, or a drastic and catastrophic change in the weather as it does to a forgotten friend commenting on what he had for lunch, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle becomes more and more congested, but also more and more personalized (and, seemingly in contrast, depersonalized).

Certainly, all of this isn’t the BlackBerry’s fault, but it’s led me to think about this stuff (in fact, as I write this, my BlackBerry has buzzed three times with genuinely unimportant updates).

On the flipside, I can listen to Pandora in my car (a far cry from the dubbed cassette tapes of my youth). I’ve only had this thing for two days, but I still don’t know how to change the ring tone, or calculate the sales price of something that’s 33% off… but I’m sure, tech-savvy as I am (or claim to be) I’ll eventually figure it out.

The jury’s still out on whether my new BlackBerry makes my hectic (post)modern life more or less hectic.

So, it’s been a long time since I posted anything here…

This has been an absolute whirlwind of a summer, so in addition to trying to explain what I’ve done, I’ll post some photos of my adventures.

First up, I spent a week traveling the across the USA in the Race Across America, which is billed as the toughest cycling race in the world. I drove the van for a group of Type 2 diabetics, and let me tell you, these guys are an ispiration. They rode hard all the way, and our crew (Curt and I in the front seat, Bob, Cleve, Bill, and Pete) got the race down to a science, and somewhere around Arizona, everything started feeling very organic and cool.

After RAAM, I was home for a few days, and then I jet-setted my way across the Atlantic Ocean to spend a little more than a week in Switzerland for a friend’s wedding. The beauty of the Swiss countryside really took me by surprise, and the hospitality of the Swiss people (at least the handful of them that I met) certainly rivals that storied and largely absent architypal “southern hospitality.” We spent some time seeing the sites (and drinking the beer and eating all the bratwurst mit roshti we could handle) of Appenzellerland, and then a couple of us drove across to Munich, Germany for a night. The trip ended with me spending a couple of nights wandering around Zurich by myself. It was an adventure: jumping trains, carrying my backpack, and having no idea where I was going. I kept a journal during the trip, and soon enough, I’ll try transcribing, or even scanning some of it in here.

At some point, my brother and I spent an afternoon splatter-painting a couple of canvasses (we were aiming to recreate the style of Jackson Pollock, but we just ended up making a mess). This was a great day, and the paintings hang proudly in my living room.

Also, my band Dead Letters has been playing shows around Tallahassee. We’re really starting to write some exciting stuff, and I look forward to recording some stuff this Fall.

This has been an admittedly rudimentary and unflourished recounting of my summer, but I wanted to get it down before I forgot too much of it. I’m starting to get itchy feet again, though, looking for the next plane to catch, or the next road to drive.

Here are a few photos:

I’ve recently been doing some comparisons between the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, and the Friday the 13th series. After hours of intensive work, I’ve watched every film (and in some cases, I use the term “film” loosely) in each of these landmark series, and I’ve come to a conclusion. More on that later, though, as getting there is half the fun.

The Nightmare movies feature that classic sweater-clad  villain, Freddy Kreuger (pictured, right). I had always thought of Freddy as a terrifying ruler of some distant and lawless dream landscape, where your greatest fears became your undoing. But then I actually sat down and watched the movies for myself, and I realized that as portrayed by Robert Englund, Freddy is just a wise-cracking maniac with a razor-fingered glove. His jokes, twisted as they may be, fall flat, and ultimately any scariness he possesses is only what has built up in the collective archetype over the years. The second film in the series, Freddy’s Revenge, certainly had some potential, as the idea of becoming possessed by a maniac, and of unknowingly committing horrible crimes in your dreams has a lot of emotional weight. But, execution here (as throughout the series) is heavy-handed and leaning too far toward slapstick. Certainly, a low point in the series is the cameo appearance of stuck-firmly-in-the-early-nineties-mythology couple Tom and Roseanne Arnold. By this point, the series had run its course, and it seemed that the filmmakers knew this; even a ham-handed application of 3D dream-fish couldn’t save this one.

The Friday the 13th movies, however, with the terrifying Jason Vorhees (pictured, left), will always have a special place in my heart. First, Jason is a silent killer; he has no sense of humor, and he never cracks wise. He doesn’t resort to over-the-top methods when a blunt instrument will do the trick. And even scarier, he exists in the real world (despite the zombie-like status he achieved in the later entries in the series). Most notable for me is Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, in which a young Corey Feldman plays Tommy Jarvis, who kills Jason violently and finds himself scarred for life. There are real-world consequences for surviving a run-in with Jason Vorhees, and while the Nightmare films tried to show this in continuing characters (who almost always fall off in the beginning of the subsequent film), the mythology varies too wildly from film to film for the audience to establish any sort of connection. Not so with Friday’s Tommy Jarvis, who makes it through three entries in the series, and who’s mental health obviously deteriorates throughout.

And, after all, what’s scarier than being out in the woods, and realizing there’s a hockey-mask wearing maniac after you? Jason can’t be thwarted by caffeine pills, and in that respect, I declare him the winner of this horror-hound showdown (despite what the 2003 film, Freddy vs. Jason has to say, declaring the match a sort of double-knockout draw). Jason wins, friends.

It’s been a while, so lets see if we can get back into the story, scant as it is so far. Chuck is at an obvious low point here, and today we find him cold and alone, reflecting on what may have brought him here:

The Shifting Supercontinent: Part 4

Behind the Circle K, sitting on the curb, I can’t see the Gulf. The beers go as follows:

One—Karen behind the counter of Hawkins Market. Let this love never cease, peace. “Still Water” by The Four Tops plays overhead, and she brushes a stray hair from her forehead.

Two—We sit in the anonymous dark of the Rose Cinema, sharing a plastic water bottle of red wine. It’s a matinee revival showing of Saboteurs. We’re alone in the theater.

Three—A year later, I’m in the Hawkins parking lot. The floor-to-ceiling front window is smashed, glass everywhere. Blood from my cut palms, sticky and pooling around me. At some point, I pull the glass out and wrap them. Later I will find the cash in my backpack.

Four—I ran then, from the store to Karen’s mother’s house. Climbed the drainpipe, grated my palms, whispered through the open window. Karen is crying on the edge of her bed already. When she looks at me, the light catches the fist-sized bruise around her left eye.

Five—We take the cash, and her mother’s car, and we leave Dothan in the night. It falls away behind us like gums pulling away from a dead tooth.

Six—Long drive. Fighting. I think I’ll…

Tune in next time, when we catch up with Karen, and find out how she got that bruise.

Here, in Part 3 of our story, Chuck finds himself on his own. And what does he do? Let’s find out…

The Shifting Supercontinent: Part 3

I walk across the windswept street, waves at my back. Karen in the car asleep. The thing we can’t talk about, aren’t talking about. I can see for miles, and a quarter-mile or so off the beach, a gas-station sign glows hard against the night.

A replacement for the archetypal lighthouse: The Circle K.

Outdated newspapers flap against the windows, get caught in the gutters, wrapped around dead lampposts.

The gas station stays open for the handful of winter people, but it’s almost midnight, and I can see the guy sweeping up for the night. In the windowglass, my face in reflection—dark, sunken eyes, downturned mouth— lines up with his as he turns, maybe to check the time. I open the door, walk to the cooler at the back, knock over a few bags of chips on my way, reach to pick them up, the cash, rubberbanded falls from my hooded-sweatshirt pocket.

“Hey, guy,” he says, “we’re just about closed up here.”

I put the cash in my pocket, pulling out a twenty. Put the chips back on the shelf, think of Karen in the car, pull back a bag of french onion. Grab some cheap beer, pay, walk out.

Tune in next time to find out if we’ve seen the last of the nervous Circle K attendant…

In part two of our story, we find our characters at a sort of crossroads, a holding area for the lovelorn and long-forgotten. Let’s see what happens.

The Shifting Supercontinent: Part 2

This parking lot is liminal. Like living in the wooded median between directions on the interstate. I’m leaning on the still-warm hood, eating the last peanut-butter sandwich and stamping my feet against the cold and wind.

In the distance, I know there’s a lighthouse. But it doesn’t burn anymore, and its ghost shadow stands, a discoloration in the night sky, where it should be. A relic. Were there a ship out there, tossing in the cold, would it crash at the hands of a memory, a shell, an archetype that’s outlived its function?

Karen gets out of the car and empties her guts in the shells and sand of the deserted parking lot. “Oh my God, Chuck,” she says. “This is it?”

I turn to her in time to see her drag the sleeve of her sweatshirt across her mouth. Offer her a corner of my sandwich. The moon casts a halo around the public restrooms at the edge of the boardwalk. The whisper of the low waves slap-echoes against the brick wall of the boarded-up pizza place across the street.

“I don’t want that thing,” she says, gets back in the car.

Will the sun rise soon, a relic?

Tune in tomorrow to find out if the sun, indeed, will rise.