Alien: In space no one can hear you scream.

Alien continues the 1950’s obsession about contact with life from other planets and the mostly horrific effects it ends up having for humans.
HR Giger’s design for the xenomorph is what makes Alien a cut above the earlier films and the imitators that would try and use the same formula for success (and usually fail miserably.) You look at it and know that it might have burst from the chest of a human, but its origin was not earth. The creature plays into two big fears that a lot of people have: bugs and the unknown. It also has aspects of body horror, since the xenomorph gestates inside a human host. Though there are only hints of it in this film, later ones in the series delve deeply into the idea of a horror coming from inside your own body.
In this film, we don’t know what, beyond killing the crew, the xenomorph wants, if it wants anything at all. It might just be killing the crew because they’re there. While this lack of motivation only adds to the mystery of the monster, it does point out something as well. The alien is more like an animal than a truly malevolent creature, like say the Predator would be. It’s not overly smart or even very cunning, it just hides and when people find it, kills them. It’s a nicely done Lovecraftian monster in that humans can’t interact with it except as its exterminator or its prey. We don’t understand it, there’s no way to reason or talk with it, and if you don’t kill it, then you may end up as an incubator for more of them.
The life cycle of the creature is the only understandable thing about it. It kills people, but we can’t even be sure that it eats them. It’s entire ecology is a mystery, and we can’t even be sure where it’s from originally, except somewhere in the darkest reaches of space. While we see the Queen in the next one, Alien is just one monster versus a whole bunch of people who are unprepared for the assault and have to find ways to deal with it and each other. There’s lots of talk of shares and money and what the crew is going to do with it when they get home. Once the facehugger attaches itself to that unlucky bastard, all that kind of thinking goes out the window and it becomes a struggle for survival. Even then, the crew has more unknowns than just the xenomorph to worry about.
It’s difficult, having watched all the other movies and read a bunch of the novels and comics, to keep straight what the film tells us about the creature and what all the other movies and things add to the mythology. What’s cool is that you can kind of see where the seeds (or eggs?) of the future installments were planted in this film, even if it wasn’t exactly known whether there would be more or not.
There’s about a million imitators of this film, from the absolutely cheesy, like SYNGENOR, (which was filmed in a hotel) to fairly decent stuff like The Abyss and Leviathan, (which is one of my favorites. I love the last line, which is yelled as Peter Weller of Robocop lobs a grenade into the mouth of the creature, ala Jaws “Say hi Mother____.” All of these films try to tap into the central themes of Alien, either in the same way or with twists and turns in the plot and storylines. This isn’t a sub-genre that’s going away anytime soon.
And then there’s the actual Alien sequels and the books and the toys, (I still sort of want an original Alien figure, though I have a deluxe Alien Queen that’s pretty damn cool.) and their ill-fated meeting with the Yautja (or Hish), what non-geek folk call Predators. The first comic AVP series from Dark Horse is pretty amazing, it’s light on people and heavy on monster vs monster action. The first AVP movie, while filling in some interesting plot points from Alien (we meet the Weyland in Weyland-Yutani, or the Company) didn’t really deliver enough monster mayhem, because for whatever reason, the movie people thought we needed a total rehashing of how the xenomorphs spawned instead of just dropping all three species onto a planet and letting us watch the blood and acid and green blood fly.
In a rather strange coincidence, my current mentor, David Bischoff, wrote Hunter’s Planet, book two in the Alien vs Predator novel series.
While some people may turn up their noses at it, Species is another movie that uses Giger’s designs and has sort of a similar theme of aliens perpetuating their races by using humans as nurseries, or in the case of Sil, extra DNA to produce a true mate.

And then, there’s this:

alienlovespredator.com/2010/06/02/cash-cab-time-machine/

alienlovespredator.com/2010/05/05/happy-smothers-day/

World War Z by Max Brooks

I heard Max Brooks speak at Wizard World Philly a few years ago, and of the first things he said to the assembled crowd was that “If zombies come in that door in the back of the room, it’s every man for himself. I’ve already got my plan for in here ready to go: I’m jumping off this stage, running through the door up here and barricading it so they can’t get me.” We all laughed, but kind of nervously, looking back over our shoulders to make sure there wasn’t a horde of undead flooding into the room.
There’s a great many things about this book that are interesting. It’s a lot like Romero’s films, in that there’s a social commentary element that can’t be missed (although purists would point out that technically, Romero’s “zombies” are actually ghouls, but who listens to purists? Incidentally, it was Return of the Living Dead that gave zombies their hunger for brains.) That’s what zombie stories, the good ones, anyway, are all about: holding a mirror up to the collective face of humanity and showing us what we may not want to see.
Brooks uses zombies as part of an apocalyptic scenario that he drew from historical accounts and extrapolated from his own research. Just like Zombie Survival Guide’s advice, the situations are realistic with or without zombies, though invading armies of people are less fun and maybe easier to deal with.
There were various responses to the outbreak in the book, but the two that interested me the most was the Redeker chapter and the one about the dogs, but for very different reasons.
The Redeker Plan chapter showed that sometimes when people need to go to extremes to survive the apocalypse, even if they save lives by doing something hard and cruel, there's still a high price to pay. This guy was so upset by the plan he'd come up with that it's execution actually drove him insane and made him want to be another person because he couldn't actually live with having come up with it. I was surprised when we learned at the end of the chapter that the person talking about Redeker was actually Redeker himself.
The chapter about the zombie sniffing dogs showed that despite the harshness of the new world that people lived in, some men and women would still value not only human but animal life as well. Despite how much the world had changed, some things didn't.
The zombies in this book serve more as a way to show the reader how the nations of the world and how individual characters will react to their threat, than a monster on their own terms. While I thought this was an effective use, it made them sort of boring as actual opponents, compared to a book like Monster Island by David Wellington, where the undead become much more than a mindless menace. Still, for what Brooks was attempting to do, I think the zombies as presented were effective.
There apparently, is supposed to be a movie coming out, though the script seems to be in rewrite limbo at the moment.
The audio book version is excellent, with many famous people doing the voices for various people in the book. Listening to it adds a level of authenticity that reading just doesn't generate. There's a graphic novel as well, but it only has select stories in it.

The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker

In the beginning of this story, I don’t know who I was rooting for, Jack, hapless inheritor of a dark pact from his mother, or Yattering, the one sent to collect the soul. I started out siding with Jack, after all, it wasn’t his fault that Hell wanted him, but by the end I was firmly on the side of the demon.
It’s all Barker’s fault. He makes the reader feel for Yattering by showing you how rough he has it and how frustrated he is that Jack will not fall for his tricks. I mean, a creature from Hell should have a gleeful time torturing his subject, not be more trapped than the victim is. It’s not as if Yattering is some sort of demon slacker, he genuinely wants to complete the task given him. He tries quite hard to make Jack’s life as miserable as possible.
The Yattering may not come from the same Hell as Pinhead and the Cenobites, but it follows the same model: order over chaos. (This idea is the basis of the graphic novel Jihad ‘Cenobites vs Nightbreed’, which has no connection the Yattering but is quite awesome if you can find it.) Yattering’s got a job to do and the Lord of the Flies isn’t going to let him out of it just because he’s not having any success. It’s a lovely example of corporate mentality. I know I’ve been there, given the impossible job and told “just do it” with no extra resources or help. So once we start seeing the demon’s side of things, then we can decide whether we’ll side with or against him. While I wasn’t sure Jack deserved to be consigned to Hell
What turned the tide in favor of the demon for me is finding out that Jack, humble gherkin importer, knows the entire time what’s going on. I think Barker overplays his hand here and lets the reader find out too early that Jack knows. But I’m wondering, if without knowing that, would I still feel sympathy for the little demon? Jack seems like a stand-up kind of guy before we know what he’s up to; afterwards, he seems just as diabolical as the Yattering.
If you look at some of the things Jack does in light of this fact, he actually comes out crueler. He keeps bringing in cats, knowing that they’ll probably get killed, he lets his daughters be terrorized on a holiday. Some would say, yeah, he’s got a good reason to do all this, but it kind of makes him monstrous as well.
The end of the story makes me wonder if perhaps Yattering won’t end up claiming jack’s soul after all. It was Faust’s familiar who drove him to lower and lower depths by egging him on and increasing his depravity. If Jack acts like that to make the demon blow his top, what kinds of things might he do now that he’s got one in his control? There probably are rules for that too, though we don’t really get any hint of that in the story.
There’s a Tales from the Darkside episode made of this story. Yattering is played by Phil Fondacaro (a little person who’s been in a ton of movies and tv shows.) The cheesy red makeup and bad devil horns make Yattering look that much more comic, rather than imposing. I also found a piece of the script for the episode on Barker’s website: http://www.clivebarker.info/yatteringtv.html
Epic produced a comic too, and John Bolton’s version of Yattering looks a bit like the imp from World of Warcraft (though it was out loooong before. Besides, both are a fairly classic lower demon type creature) It looks better than the Tales from the Darkside one: http://www.johnbolton.com/bolton/comics/yattering/yattering01.html
I’m thinking that once someone points this guy’s magazine out to Clive Barker’s lawyer, their totally getting sued: http://www.heofthehouse.com/yattering&jack.html

Here’s a link to some Clive Barker comics: http://www.clivebarker.com/html/visions/bib/comics/index.html

In honor of the Yattering, this post is 666 words long.

12 months days of lycanthropy: Cycle of the werewolf by Stephen King

The orange harvest moon is full, or just past it as I write this review, hiding up in the clouds and peeking out occasionally, only to go back under cover soon after.
It’s hard to call this a modern werewolf story, even when it was first published it was a throwback to older ways of looking at the creature. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, because having Reverend Lowe change only at the full moon allows King to limit his destruction to one night, or at least the few nights where the moon is truly full.
The werewolf has less rules to obey than the vampire. He doesn’t need to hide from the general population all the time, and on the nights he does, well, the public is better off hiding from him. There’s no feeding restrictions or things it has to avoid, except for silver and sometimes wolfsbane. So the only real “curses” a werewolf works under are the pull of the moon and the fact that in the beginning they don’t remember what they’ve done, though that changes as time goes on.
That’s why the Reverend is truly a monster and not just someone cursed. He chooses to continue his rampage when he could at least try to stop himself. He’s no Lawrence Talbot, fighting against the curse instead of giving in to it. He enjoys the power; it seduces him, though maybe it doesn’t have to try very hard to do so. The werewolf starts out as the monster, but under its influence, Reverend Lowe becomes one, even going so far as to plan Marty’s murder to keep his secret safe.
It’s even in his name: Lowe. Being cursed brings him down to a ‘low’ state where he enjoys killing and doesn’t want ever to have to stop. Plotting Marty’s murder, something that should be anathema to a “man of God” is done for the simple reason that he knows what Lowe is. There’s no real moral consideration. It’s not wrong for Lowe, it’s just something that needs to be done.
The Reverend in Cycle isn’t as well drawn as, say, Father Callahan from King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, though there are similarities between the two. We’re never sure how much he believes in his God, though we can assume that before his cursing he was a man of some faith. While faith and its failure are the crux of the struggle for Father Callahan, for Reverend Lowe, they’re not even an issue. Maybe because werewolves aren’t subject to the demands of faith, as say a vampire would be, so that internal struggle is somewhat cut short. This might be due to space considerations on King’s part, but I think it was a conscious choice to make Reverend Lowe stick by his choice to be the monster.
Lowe echoes Mother Abigail from The Stand, though probably not as accurately, when he says that “all things serve the will of God.” What to her is an expression of faith is a rationalization he uses so he can keep on killing. I think he gives in very easily to the curse with no real kind of struggle. He wants to be the monster, as it frees him from all the societal constraints that are put on him.
There’s another connection with ‘Salem’s Lot, and that’s Clyde Corliss. He runs away from that town and settles in Tarker’s Mill, only to be killed by the werewolf.
The movie of this story is called Silver Bullet and it starred, among others, Gary Busey and Corey Haim. They took a bit more of an empathic track with Lowe. He’s the perfect minister most of the time, but as the moon gets closer, the Beast gets stronger. Once he figures out it’s Marty sending the letters, he terrorizes him a little, which makes him less likeable, but overall movie Lowe comes out as a more sympathetic character than the one in the book. This could be due to the added characterization given in the film, but I think it’s more the fact that while he’s a monster, he doesn’t actively choose to embrace the Beast like the Reverend in the book.
King follows a fairly classic reveal for who the werewolf is, and that’s the missing body part. The first time this occurred in a werewolf tale was in the 1500’s. A nobleman hears the tale of a hunter who fought off a marauding wolf the night before, managing to drive the creature away after cutting off a paw, which is in a pouch that the hunter presents to the noble. Instead of a paw inside, there’s a severed hand with a ring worn by the nobleman’s wife. Going to her room, they find the woman in bed with a bloody cloth wrapped around her hand. She eventually confesses to being a werewolf and is burned at the stake for her crimes.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

So Clive Barker, in an interview, once said that this story was about “A twelve foot tall phallus that is defeated by a symbol of womanhood. Monster on a rampage stories are about the phallic principle. Large males run around terrorizing women.”
I’ll admit that when I read the name of the story, I did kind of wonder about it, and there are some descriptions of Rawhead that enhance that impression.
But we’re going to ignore that for the moment and talk about the monster. Barker didn’t invent the word ‘Rawhead’, it’s half the name of a creature that’s referred to as Rawhead and Bloody Bones, an English monster that sits in the under the cellar stairs or in the cupboards under the stairs (Watch out Harry Potter!).
When an unsuspecting child would go down into the cellar, the creature would reach through the gaps between the risers and grab the kid by the ankle and pull them through the gap and have a little snack.
Barker takes this idea of child snatching and adds a level of last monster alive to the story. Rawhead Rex is the last of his kind, a throwback to an earlier age when his race owned the land the town of the humans is now built on. He reminds me a bit of Grendel from Beowulf, though Rawhead has no mother to mourn his death, he’s alone.
While I’m not sure I feel sympathy for a creature that eats children and baptizes people by urinating on them (I can only imagine what Communion or Confirmation would be for his worshippers) there is a feeling of melancholy when the villagers smash in his pumpkin-looking head.
The crazy thing is, if this story had been set in medieval times, there never would have been an ounce of sympathy for the marauding beast. But because the story is set in a modern era, it adds a sense of being out of place to Rawhead. Like we say of people who have inappropriate thinking for 2010, Rawhead Rex is a “product of his time,” and somehow that makes the reader feel a bit sad for him. Maybe not when he’s eating children, but he’s just trying to survive the only way he knows how. I feel like he’s also taking revenge for his own slaughtered people too, and that’s an understandable motivation.
One of the easiest ways to stop your enemy is to destroy their young. In Rawhead’s case, this might have worked better if he’d been more than just one lone monster, but I guess in some situations you just have to go with what you know. Child eating does sort of bring me back to Barker’s quote in the beginning of this post, because in most cases, threatening a child causes more fear for parents than actually threatening them does. In nature this is mostly done by the males.
Does all this add up to Rawhead Rex being an effective monster? I think so.
But I have a bit of pity for him as well. In a time before cars and TV and guns and modernity, Rawhead Rex was enough of a terror that they sealed him away instead of killing him. They feared him so much that they didn’t even consider destroying him as an option. When he’s let loose in this world, it doesn’t take long before the villagers band together and take him down. You have to wonder if he was sorry he ever climbed out of that hole in the field in the first place.
Rawhead “Rex” is a king with no subjects or kingdom. Everything he used to have has been stripped away. Now there might have been good reason (the whole child devouring thing), but I still can’t help but feel a bit sad for him.
There’s a really terrible movie made of this story, but if you’re a Clive Barker fan, then it must receive a lot of love despite its awfulness. It was the hatchet job they did on this story that made Barker decide to direct his own movies, and the firstborn child of that decision was ‘Hellraiser.’
All hail Rawhead Rex!

Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground starts off with a fabulous premise of monsters that come from the wombs of the women that men love. The origin of the creatures preys on the paternal and maternal fear of something being wrong with their baby, as well as the feeling in a man that since they can’t get pregnant they don’t know what it’s like. All the baby books and fake pregnancy bellies in the world can’t give the feeling of another person being born from you. There’s a wonderful element of body horror in the story, and the fact that probably all the characters will at some point birth creatures of their own, despite surviving is chilling.
Matt attributes Chloe’s changes in mood and attitude to her being pregnant, until everything starts to go horribly wrong. The horror is compounded when the doctor that Matt takes Chloe to see says that it’s happening all over the country, there’s no way to stop it, and it’s better if she just doesn’t know.
Once the creature’s loose, and it’s a big, nasty spiderish thing, the horror kind of takes a downturn. While I’m not opposed to spider-monsters in particular, Pinborough doesn’t really give them a lot to do beyond terrorizing people for a little while and breaking up cars. It’s as if the creatures just ran out of motivation to kill anyone after a while. They also could have benefitted from some kind of intelligence beyond a normal spider’s. While there may be some incidents, such as the car smashing, that point to their being more than normal creatures, they don’t really get to do much.
The story becomes a zombie movie in some way, because the creatures don’t act with any malevolence. That’s where the book’s main failing came from. Pinborough created a monster, that while not wholly original, was creepy and interesting enough to carry an entire story, but somehow one just never developed. The Widows did have some interesting qualities to them. I particularly like the web creation effect of their bites, and the fact that the males eventually started to birth monsters as well.
I wanted to see the Widows do something! Sure, they didn’t necessarily have to, since they “win” in the end, but there could’ve been a lot more horror if Chloe’s consciousness had stayed in the Widow and followed Matt for a final confrontation.
Every good monster story has an explanation of where the creature comes from, even if that answer is “Somewhere Out There.” The only “answer” for the Widows is genetically altered food, and even that is a guess. I’d have liked to see Matt decide that he wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Chloe and look for some damn answers. I was excited when the scientist guy mentioned capturing a live Widow for study. I wanted to see what they’d discover about the creatures and get perhaps another idea of where they might be from.
The fact that they were harmed by deaf people’s blood was kind of an odd thing, but I was willing to go along with it for the sake of the story and to see what Pinborough would make out of it. And then she really did nothing with it, though I did wonder where exactly those men were getting enough blood to paint the streets red.
The environmental changes were a nice touch, but I really wanted the creatures to have some sort of overriding motivation. It hurt the story that nothing ever materialized along that vein.
I’m kind of wondering if another POV might have helped explain the widows more. If we had an idea of what was going through Chloe’s mind as the thing developed within her, would that have made a difference to our understanding of the Widow by the end of the story?

The Funeral by Richard Matheson

Matheson, along with Robert Bloch and the Twilight Zone really ruined it for us later writers: the twisty, unexpected ending. Unless you’re M. Night Shyamalan, the twist is something to stay away from, because of stories like Matheson’s The Funeral.
There’s a fascination with death in this story, and of the “proper” rites needed for a soul to attain peace, even if that soul is still up and walking around. Ludwig may be outside of normal human society, but he still feels compelled to observe the rituals of it. Partly because that’s where the punchline of the story comes from, but also because it humanizes him a bit and makes the reader feel they can be on his side.
If this story reads to you, like an episode of the Twilight Zone, well it’s not. It’s a Night Gallery, and one very typical of the sorts of stories that ended up on that series. It almost makes a better teleplay than it does a story, the actors add a dimension that not everyone’s imagination can live up to.
The story is full of little gags, from the funeral director’s last name, Silkline, to the hairy handed man running off into the night and the strange baying noise accompanied by the sound of four running feet across the carpet.
So what does the story specifically say about monsters? Well, Ludwig Asper, despite being already dead, wants what every living person dreads: A funeral. And it doesn’t even go that well, at the end, the witch and the Count start fighting and ruin everything, but Ludwig is happy anyway that at least now he can say he’s done it. Matheson manages to humanize Asper with his crazy need to be eulogized. He gives him a recognizable human quality, that of wanting something, beyond blood or flesh or killing. And not only does he want it, he demands it be perfect. While Asper’s friends don’t seem to understand the importance of it to him, the reader cringes with Silkline as things start to take a turn for the worse.
The clues presented in the beginning that lead the reader to believe that Ludwig is something more than human are subtle. Him wanting the mirror gone, the references to never having done the funeral right the first time. It becomes sort of a parody of weddings. Ludwig could become something of a FuneralZilla if things don’t go his way.
That everything goes right up to a certain point and then falls apart is another way to make Asper and his crew more like real people.
A “special day” no matter what it is, is never entirely free of bad or wrong things happening, and that’s where the humor comes in. Matheson also plays up the monster tropes to add humor to an already odd situation.
The great thing about this story is that there’s no mention of the words ‘vampire’ ‘witch’ ‘werewolf’ or any kind of identifier, though most of the types are clear from the description of the characters and their actions.
There are other really good stories in this particular collection. ‘In Shadowed Places’ is my favorite, though the other, much shorter, funeral story is excellent as well.