[Film Review] Insidious Chapter 2

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I'll be upfront with you, I genuinely had no idea how James Wan intended to continue his 2011 film, Insidious. With the seeming possession of the main protagonist, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), the death of the psychic hired to help his son, and the house in confusion following an astral travelling jaunt into the Further (a spiritual realm, akin to Limbo, that exists alongside our physical reality), I really didn't see how he could make a sequel. Reviews have certainly been mixed and the reception mostly lukewarm, but for my own part, I rather enjoyed it.

In the first film, Josh's son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) went astral travelling (apparently such a talent runs in families) but strayed too far from his body. Imprisoned by a demon that looked more like Darth Maul, Dalton couldn't get back in order to wake up, and he spent most of the film in a medically inexplicable coma. Hence the decision by Josh and wife Renai (Rose Byrne) to turn to Elise (Lin Shaye), a psychic who thought she could help by sending Josh (also capable of astral travel) into the Further after Dalton. Trouble is, Josh was haunted by a mysterious old woman, intent on possessing Josh's body, and it isn't Josh that comes back.

Fast forward to Chapter 2 and the Lamberts are now staying with Josh's mother, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey). Strange happenings are still going on, like the piano playing by itself in an empty room, or baby Kali's babywalker switching itself on. Lorraine begins to see a mysterious woman in white wandering through the house, a woman who physically attacks Renai when she's home alone. Indeed, these scenes of ghostliness are some of the best in the film, using taut suspense to unsettle the home. All is not at all well.

Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), the amusing ghost hunting nerds from the first film, are devastated at Elise's death, but accidentally discover footage shot in 1986 of Elise's first meeting with a teenaged Josh, during which he was made to forget his astral travel abilities to keep the old woman at bay. Along with Carl (Steve Coulter), a psychic present at the 1986 meeting, Specs, Tucker and Lorraine begin contacting Elise, and investigating exactly who this shadowy figure is.

The film is not without its flaws. There is a lot of explaining - no character can do or say anything without feeling the need to expound at length about the why and the what of almost everything. Wan, believe me, the audience gets it. The motivation of the old woman is to regain childhood...so why target Josh when he's an adult? Josh's gift is originally described as unique but given Dalton's ability, that's clearly not the case. Surely it stands to reason that others can do the same thing, and the old woman would be better off looking for someone else to persecute. There's also a time travel paradox, since apparently time does not function in the Further, meaning the present day Josh, trapped in the Further, can now influence the hauntings from the first film, and also the seance in 1986. Of course, time travel paradoxes only exist if you accept the premise that time is linear, and given the spectral construction of the Further it's entirely possible that time would not behave in a linear fashion, but I don't want to get into existential discussions here. The motivation of the woman in white is also unsatisfactory, and I felt the final denouement was just too 'neat', as if Wan realised he needed to keep running time down and simply tacked on an ending.

That said, there's much to admire. The set design of the Lambert house is far creepier than either of the houses in the first film, being more of a Victorian homage to claustrophobia. The character of Dalton is a revelation, given far more to do than in the first film, and he proves to be a resourceful, brave and intelligent character. Renai even surprises with sudden bursts of courage, despite her propensity to run around screaming, and Specs and Tucker balance the suspense with their 'bromance' bickering. Patrick Wilson is truly astonishing in his dual role as Possessed Josh and Trapped in the Further Josh. Possessed Josh is creepy and genuinely unsettling, and I hadn't thought Wilson capable of such dexterity. While I'd like to sit James Wan down and have a solid discussion about use of narrative in a Gothic horror film, I do think there is a lot to admire in his direction, and Insidious 2 veers closer to his recent success, The Conjuring, than the original film.

I wouldn't recommend Insidious 2 for anyone who hasn't seen the original film, but those who enjoyed the first film, and the eerie world it created, then I'd highly recommend Chapter 2.

Four blunt pencils!

[Film Review] The Conjuring

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Nearly every horror film that is released nowadays bills itself as "the scariest movie", either of all time, or that particular year. It's hardly surprising - after all, horror is one of the few genres that is focused on how they make the audience feel, as opposed to being clustered according to theme or iconography. The problem occurs because how scary a film is can be a difficult thing to judge - what terrifies me does not necessarily terrify you, and even if we're terrified by the same thing, there's no guarantee that we'll find it frightening when we see it on screen.

That being said, I do think The Conjuring can lay some sort of claim toward being one of the creepiest films of recent years. Director James Wan might be responsible for Saw, and thus the tedious succession of torture-porn-lite sequels, but having begun to explore the supernatural side of horror with Insidious in 2010, he now has a go at a period piece horror. The Conjuring is set in the 1970s, and based upon a true story surrounding Ed and Lorraine Warren, prominent ghost hunters and demonologists who also investigated the Amityville case. Patrick Wilson plays Ed, while Vera Farmiga plays Lorraine. Despite their scientific and methodical approach, the couple's brand of ghost busting relies heavily on their Catholic backgrounds, as well as upon Lorraine's clairvoyancy. This is not a film that wants to leave any ambiguity as to whether these things are real - as far as The Conjuring goes, this might as well be a documentary. 

The Perron family buy a house in Rhode Island at auction, and promptly move in, excited by their spacious new home. This being a horror film, settling in is not destined to be easy, and after discovering a boarded-up basement, things start going wrong in the house. Carolyn, played by Lili Taylor, finds herself covered in mysterious bruises, while the five daughters are either pulled out of bed by an invisible force or speak to people that no one else can see. Carolyn realises something is afoot, and contacts the Warrens for their help. The couple investigate, and must tell the family the grim truth, that their house isn't haunted by a ghost, but rather an inhuman spirit. In order to qualify for an exorcism, evidence must be gathered, and the family must wait it out while the spirits do enough damage to persuade the authorities that this isn't just a pesky poltergeist. 

Just as Paranormal Activity purported to be about ghosts but instead went with the demonic, so The Conjuring eschews ghostly goings on in favour of diabolical intervention. It essentially takes the worst parts of Poltergeist and combines them with The Exorcist, all while reminding you that this actually happened. It would be incredibly easy to dismiss it as cinematic fluff, but in all honesty, I found some of the scenes quite harrowing, not necessarily because of the phenomena depicted, but because I actually cared about the characters. I've done paranormal investigations myself and I've never been thrown across a room or seen mysterious figures in mirrors, but that doesn't mean I can't feel for a mother who's been locked in her own basement by someone she can't even see. I'm also uncomfortable with the insistence that all of this activity is the result of demons - naturally a belief in demons requires a belief in God - but I'll go with it for the sake of the film.

A lot of the reviews of the film keep picking flaws based on how 'true' the film is, but I think that's to miss the point. Even if the entire thing is made up, it doesn't follow that it'll be a bad film. Mary Shelley dreamed Frankenstein and it hasn't stopped the story from being a success, has it? James Wan has proven he can direct a film with little/no gore, and very few special effects, although the insertion of the Warrens' famous Annabelle case just seemed like an excuse to shoehorn yet another weird doll into one of his films. The performances all round help to make The Conjuring feel like a real family drama, as opposed to the usual melodrama that accompanies modern hauntings. It's not scary in the slightest, but it's downright creepy - and in my book, that's harder to manage.

5 blunt pencils out of 5

Bloody Parchment II submissions open

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Anyone who reads this blog will know I have something of a fondness for horror. Therefore it won't come as a surprise to learn that I'm working on a short story for an anthology competition in the Victorian horror vein! Why am I doing this? Well, I want to submit to the second volume of Bloody Parchment, and I want to share the details so you can too. So if you have a horror or dark fantasy story of 3,500 words or less and you want to try your luck, click HERE to check out the guidelines. Submissions close on October 31. So get writing!

I should also note that the first volume, Bloody Parchment: Hidden Things, Lost Things and Other Stories, is available now, and features stories by the likes of Stacey Larner and Benjamin Knox. You can pick up your copy here.

Inspiration behind Population, One

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I haven't done an 'inspiration' post for a while, so I thought I'd do one about my most recent Friday Flash, Population, One. (If you haven't read it, do so now, for there are 'spoilers' ahead!) Now, my dad happened to tell me about a photo he'd seen online for a town whose population was just one, but he couldn't remember what it was called. A Google search later and I discovered he meant Buford, in Wyoming. The photo I used for the flash is the 'town' itself, although I chose to change the name on the sign, as well as changing the names of the people concerned and the circumstances surrounding the town.

It was strange, the moment my dad told me about Buford, I instantly wondered what would happen to the number on the town sign when the sole inhabitant died. Who would change it? I think the seed of wonder was sown by an old anecdote I heard about the last man on earth being so tormented by loneliness that he threw himself off a building, only to hear a telephone ringing as he falls to his death. On top of that, I came across the first two lines to a short story by Frederic Brown, called 'Knock', which simply read "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door." This idea of 'The Last Man' intrigued me. The population sign came from the film, Population 436. If you get the chance to watch it, do so - don't let the fact it stars Fred Durst put you off, he's actually really good.)

Originally, the stranger was just going to be a regular chap who happened to drop by and wonder the same thing, and it was only when I was reading Carlos Claren's An Illustrated History of the Horror Film and he was talking about Death Takes A Holiday from 1934, in which the Grim Reaper goes on holiday, only to find that no one can die while he's not working (this was parodied in an episode of Family Guy when Death hurts his leg and Peter has to take over his job). Thus the idea came into my head to cast Death as the stranger - I know my version of Death is usually a black-lipped young woman with a voice like buzzing flies, but I think she likes to play dress-up from time to time, and in this instance, the man in the pinstripe suit seemed a better fit.

If you take all of these seemingly disparate elements and let them marinade for a while in the unconscious, they spring forth with an idea of their own. Once the idea of the stranger as being Death popped into my head, I wrote the story in about ten minutes - previously, I'd found it too hard to put it on paper, not knowing where to start or how to end it. I think my ultimate point is that inspiration can and does come from many different places, and a writer shouldn't be afraid to expose themselves to film and non-fiction as well as novels when hunting for ideas.

In what way has inspiration suddenly struck you when writing?

Am I really a horror writer?

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Since the beginning of January, I have posted a Friday Flash for each week of 2012, which is a total of eleven stories. However, of those eleven, only three have been non-horror related (one fantasy comedy, one slice of life, and one historical). The other eight have encompassed zombies, mummies, vampires, Gothic horror, evil puppets and as-yet-unnamed creatures who wear human skins. Is anyone else as surprised by that as me?

Back in the day, I called myself a horror writer. We're talking back when I was about sixteen and didn't know any better. I read Stephen King and Clive Barker, and I wanted to write like that too. Problem was, I didn't really enjoy writing "gore". It just didn't seem to work for me very well. I stuck to my "weird fantasy" stories, writing about games of chess between celestial beings, or jewellery boxes that turned their contents into gold, and eventually put out my Checkmate & Other Stories collection, composed of those stories I'd had published online. Definitely not 'slice of life' or realistic, but not really horror either.

So time went by, and I branched out. I wrote historical stories, and ventured into steampunk, and wound up writing a pulp Western last year. I'm damned proud of The Guns of Retribution, but there's always been a little tug back towards my roots - to the extent that its sequel, To Kill A Dead Man, sees Grey O'Donnell pitted against villains of a more supernatural nature. I hardly think it's a surprise that I'd find myself back within the horror genre, considering I spend my spare time hunting ghosts, and studying haunted house films for my PhD - and that's when I'm not reading about the psychological theories that underpin the horror genre as a whole. My life is pretty well steeped in Bizarro at the moment.

Or is it something deeper? I like to think my "craft" has improved since those first stories were published back in 2008, and I'm in a better place to write horror stories that get under the skin. Perhaps spending so long writing weekly flashes, and working on longer stories or novels, has honed my idea-generating skills to the point that I feel I'm better able to work with horror. Maybe my experiences with strange events, and my research into them, has given me better insights into what ideas will work, and what won't. Or maybe the stressful nature of my life at the moment means that the stress has to come out somewhere - and it's choosing to birth weird ideas from my imagination.

Either way, I want to ask a question. My work seems to fall into two major categories, and then a whole bunch of little ones beyond that. So what would people rather see from me - horror stories, or my historical tales?

Here be monsters

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In the wake of the hysteria surrounding vampires and the never-ending obsession with zombies in popular culture, and to a lesser extent werewolves, I've been rather fascinated by the other monsters that I feel have been somewhat ignored. While the rest of the world tries to decide whether it prefers blood-sucking, lycanthropy or good old fashioned flesh-eating, I've been sat here championing the cause of mummies. Look at the all-powerful Imhotep when he's been fully revived at the end of The Mummy. Who would you rather have, a sparkly disco vamp with possessiveness issues, a moody werewolf who has a worse time of the month than you, a shambling rotting corpse who is truly more interested in your brains than your beauty, or an immortal sorceror from Ancient Egypt? Ooh toughie. (N.B. I feel compelled to exempt Carrie Clevenger's Xan Marcelles and Sam Adamson's Northern Vampire from my comments, as they're both ace)

I actually wrote a mummy story a while ago. True, No Flash is more of a vehicle for my pent-up rage regarding tourists and the fancy cameras they don't even know how to work, but it still stars a mummy. Naturally my fascination with ghosts and spectres knows no bounds, particularly due to my fondness for a particularly dashing Cavalier known as Fowlis Westerby, but I'm not averse to writing corpse brides either. A few weeks ago I decided to resurrect the skeleton from the B-Movie Monster graveyard, while changelings got in on the act soon after. I finally dipped my toe in the waters of science fiction with Evolution, and I think it was at this point that I suddenly realised what I was doing. I was exploring the idea of monsters.

Humans have had monsters for thousands of years. True, those of the cavemen were probably not as imaginative as the Minotaur or the Hydra, but they would be monsters nonetheless. Classical mythology is rife with monster stories, and when you think about it, Lucifer has provided an entire religion with a boogeyman for centuries. We have monsters to justify our fears, but also to create a sense of control. Abandoned buildings can be unsafe, particularly at night, so what better way to keep people out than to install a wandering ghoul who will eat your soul if you venture inside? And how many children have been told that a monster (usually of their parents invention) will get them if they don't do what they're told?

Monsters make excellent metaphors, too. Vampires are often made to stand in for the dangers of illicit passion, while zombies represent the power and threat of the mindless mass. An entire sub-genre grew up around the fear of Communism in 1950s Hollywood, with the best example by far being the 1954 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. No one watching the film can possibly forget what sector of society the Pod People are intended to represent. It says a lot about the engulfing fear of the time that later versions feel neutered and sterile by comparison - indeed, the fear has not been successfully transposed onto another enemy.

In a lot of ways, monsters represent a particular facet of Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny. Freud talks about many principles which engender uncanny feelings in a person, but the one relevant to monsters is that of the so-called "return of the repressed". Rather, a person forces their fears, guilt and doubts into their unconscious through repeated acts of repression, but rather than staying there, these feelings return to plague the person. In many ways it is a form of paranoia, in that the person projects these feelings into the space around them (see Robert Wise's The Haunting for a masterclass in this) but in the case of the monster film or story, these feelings take corporeal form in the shape of the monster that plagues them. I took that incredibly literally in Calling All Skeletons, when the past actions of an aspiring politician come back to bite him in the ass, but writers and artists have been dealing with this for years. Some call it karma - I call it uncanny.

Over to you. What kinds of monsters do you enjoy writing, or reading about? And more importantly...why?

Friday Flash - The Promise

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This story has been taken down as it is now out for submission!

Friday Flash - A Black Night in the Churchyard

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A small rock scuttled across the medieval stones. A fox looked up from his foraging near the gate. His amber eyes saw the Black Knight sitting on a low tomb. The knight kicked his feet against the faded inscription, and fiddled with his gauntlets. He cast his gaze around the lurching gravestones. He no longer saw the names; he knew each and every one of them. He knew their dates of birth, and their dates of death. He occasionally invented stories for them to keep himself amused.

Drunken chatter drifted across the still air. He looked up, but watched in dismay as the four shrill girls continued past the gate. The churchyard used to be a popular thoroughfare between two busy streets. An office block now blocked the way at the northern end, its car park butted up against the graveyard wall. The neglected church sat as if invisible while the city grew up around it, a medieval island in a sea of modernity.

The knight knew what it was to be forgotten. He hauled himself off the tomb to roam the small churchyard. Years of local building development altered the yard, changing its boundaries and disturbing graves. He hoped a developer might find his grave by accident. Caught in limbo, he was confined to the churchyard until he knew where his body was buried.

The Black Knight had guarded the churchyard for eight centuries. In earlier times, grave robbers, murderers, rapists, gangsters, and thieves all tried to ply their trade in his yard. The oath he swore to punish the evildoer held as much sway in death as it did in life. He consumed their souls and left their bodies as shambling walking corpses. His reputation even prevented crime as tales of clanking armour and dark shadows carried far and wide across the region.

Times changed. No one believed in ghosts or justice any more. He patrolled his abandoned corner of the city centre, forgotten and lonely. Not to mention hungry. What was it, forty, or fifty, years since his last meal? The sun rose and set, and still he wandered among the graves. The wind whistled through the dilapidated church, while weeds grew rampant. In his earlier years, he tried knocking on the coffins. He got no answer. Their occupants had already sailed across the Styx, but Charon would not take him. Without his body, he had no payment for the ferry.

Glass smashed near the gate. The knight looked up. A fat youth threw a second bottle over the wall. Green glass shattered against a moss-covered gravestone. The knight's sacred duty to protect swelled in his chest as the youth pushed open the gate. The hinges squealed in protest. The youth staggered along the overgrown path. He lurched behind Mrs Martha Eddowes’ gravestone to relieve himself. The knight drew his sword.

The youth zipped up his trousers. He turned around to face the church. Only one window remained intact. The stained glass told the story of the Annunciation. The Black Knight guarded it with a possessive zealotry. Besides the church, that single window was the only thing on this ground older than him. Twelfth century glass, and still perfect.

The youth picked up a large stone. He tested the weight in his hand. The Black Knight growled. He didn’t like where this was going, but he could do nothing until the youth did something wrong.

The stone flew through the air, and crashed into the ancient window. The glass imploded inwards, raining down on the pitted stone floor inside. The Black Knight howled. The youth whirled around, startled by the sudden noise. He saw a black shadow, and heard metal sing as it split the air.

The youth’s body staggered backwards. The Black Knight stood tall and furious in the churchyard. He held his sword in one hand, the youth’s soul in the other. It writhed in his grasp, a roiling mass of deceit, violence and malice. The Black Knight took one last look at the gaping wound in the wall of the church. As the youth’s body stumbled toward the gate, the Knight sat down to devour the soul. Such a satisfying meal, but at such a price.

* * *

The image for this story is actually the abandoned chapel at the centre of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, London, although the flash was inspired by the legend of the Black Knight, who is reputed to haunt the small churchyard attached to St Nicolas' Cathedral in Newcastle upon Tyne. The St Nicolas churchyard is not overgrown and the Cathedral is one of the most beautiful ecclesiastical buildings in the country, but it suited the flash better that the church be neglected, so I've taken a bit of artistic license. I'm also not sure why the Knight is stuck in the churchyard, but this made the most sense to me. It is true that someone threw a brick through the oldest window in the Cathedral, though what happened to the hooligan is anybody's guess...

Paranormal Activity

Tweet After much hype in the press, I finally went to see Paranormal Activity today. I'd heard mixed reviews in the UK, but I have to say that despite its tediously slow start, I actually enjoyed it. By the end of the film, I was aware that my heart was attempting to crawl up into my mouth - the last film to have that effect upon me was Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes. I do think in part that Paranormal Activity relies too heavily upon jump-scares, although its utilisation of sound to achieve these, instead of the CGI equivalent of a ghost train rubber skeleton, lets it wriggle somewhat off its hook.

It brought to mind the more 'Gothic' tradition of horror, as opposed to the gore-soaked franchises courting controversy that we have become used to of late. A slow burner in many senses, it scatters clues about the pasts of our protagonists thought the narrative, foregoing the typical chunk of backstory exposition that many filmmakers feel is necessary. The film piles weird occurrence onto weird occurrence until the suspense is pulled so taut that you could probably pick out a tune on it. Maybe Danse Macabre?

Anyway. It's nice to see a film that never actually shows you its 'monster'. It never manages to come quite as close to the pure genius of Robert Wise's 1963 classic The Haunting, and it's not quite as creepy as Poltergeist (incidentally the only horror film to actually scare me) but its low budget, limited location and restricted point of view serve well to ramp up the claustrophobia felt by the couple. We only know as much as they know, although we do clearly benefit from some awareness of cinematic conventions, i.e. ouija boards rarely spell out good news and broken pictures are often bad omens.

Still, I'm glad to see that people are still making ghost movies, and telling ghost stories. I am personally a bit of a believer in ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties having had a few very peculiar experiences myself, and there's something a lot more unsettling about a thud during the night with no obvious source, as opposed to a zombie lurching toward you clutching the scabby remains of a human arm. I was beginning to worry that ghost stories had become a dying art, but I think there's life in the old dog yet...

The Final Destination

Tweet So I'm back from the cinema again. A friend and I originally intended to see Dorian Gray (despite the fact that The Picture of Dorian Gray is my favourite book and it shall no doubt have been utterly butchered in its translation to the big screen) but it wasn't on at either of the Cineworlds in the West End so we went to see Final Destination 3D instead.

Now, for those unfamiliar with the franchise, each film essentially begins with a big disaster sequence, which is in fact a premonition had by one of the characters. Their subsequent freak out leads several people who should have expired in said disaster to avoid their impending doom, although Death then stalks throughout the rest of the plot, offing them in the order they should have died in increasingly implausible and ridiculous ways. Its fundamental message is that you just can't cheat Death...though one would wonder why on earth one of them would have the premonition, and then the subsequent visions which hold clues to how each of the survivors will die, if they were just going to die anyway. Does the Grim Reaper get a bit bored with his/her endlessly mundane task, and seek ways to spice things up a bit? I'm surprised - humans can usually think of enough inventive and creative ways to kill each other, without Death having to step in and start squashing people with plate glass or garotting them with a shower cord.

Anyway. The film wasn't entirely bad, even if it was entirely formulaic, but it did feel a tad too much like an extended health & safety video. The moral of the story is...always store your tools safely, don't leave containers of flammable liquid open and near anything which could cause them to topple, look both ways before you cross the street, and basically watch what you're doing. There. Now you don't need to see it, and I've probably ruined business for all of those godawful companies that get you compensation when you've done something idiotic at work.